The Past and Present of the Self

Notes on a conversation with a friend ...

The subject of time has fascinated me since I was a little kid. Time is a real thing - an aspect of the platform that reality is built on. But physics fails to put a finger on the moment we call "now". In one direction, the one we call "future', what will happen is fundamentally unknowable before it happens. That comes out of Chaos theory and Quantum Mechanics. On a more subtle level, we are also unable to know the past in detail. In my experience, philosophers and theology shine no light on these issues, but often claim ersatz credibility by dropping references, especially to Quantum Mechanics, hoping that most of their audience will not understand the reference.

On a psychological level, it is not clear why the "present" has any special status when it comes to "knowability". Neurologically speaking, there is no "now", only an experience of what I consider to be a dynamic change in the state of the brain - mostly the result of (unknowable) past influences on neurons and synapses in the "past" (going back years or more), plus the magical ability of the brain to factor in future events. Picture, for example, the state of consciousness of an outfielder as he tracks a fly ball.

The idea of "living in the present" (what most people think "Zen" is about) is certainly good advice. We should certainly train ourselves to do this as much as possible and to have that frame of mind available to offset our usual obsession with re-writing history or dreaming about the future. But I resist efforts to turn this advice into claims that there is some special, ultimate state of mind that is only available to special people after years of training. As you know, Buddhism has a "middle way". The essence of that is to do what you can and get on with life.

There is a related core idea we see gurus pushing, "no-self".  The self, like the "present', dissolves when you look at it too closely. Again, it's very useful to cultivate the ability to "stand back" and subtract your "self " from the way you experience the world. In some cases, we should be able to do this at the same time as we focus on the current moment, but we can do it in a wider sense when we make decisions and attempt to understand the world. The same is true of "time". It is useful to shake off our obsession with "now" and sit back to observe the sweep of history. This also applies to "here", where our "self" seems to be. We need to cut down the amount of time we spend on "current events". Perhaps I can coin a term to put up against the idea of "timelessness": we should seek to be "timeful" - aware of the richness of the past everywhere in the Universe as well as the possibilities the future holds. In such a state of mind, we see the individual "self" is nothing but a snowflake. I do like Wilber's that we have a "self" that extends beyond the individual. We can thus apprehend the past and future of our own culture, humanity itself, all life on Earth, and the Universe itself.

Complexity, Chaos and the Nature of Reality

(A note to Len)

Our mathematical models (or our ability, in general, to predict or "understand" a system) must always be bound by an artificial "carving out" of the application domain of understanding
specification of scale - including the applicability of our tools to the scale we are working with
recognition of the precision we expect or the precision that is even theoretically possible.

This visualizes a "fractal" nature of reality (or our models of reality) up to a point, where models at one scale fail at a different one. In "Road To Reality" Penrose attempted to construct a framework for a smooth transition from one model to another (Relativity to Quantum Mechanics, for example). I'm afraid I remained unconvinced but partly because I'm too lazy or too stupid to follow his arguments in detail.

In a hypothetical University curriculum in this field (which still needs to be named), I think that scale, chaos, non-linear systems and complexity would form the core. I think it's time for us to abandon the idea that we can "understand" reality by drilling down to more and more "fundamental" aspects of it. We also need to abandon the idea that the world behaves according to neat mathematical "laws".

Sorry, Mr. Newton ...

Milestones - Mind, Time, Society

I've been doing a lot of thinking and reading lately. Things seem to be coming together in a way that demands a bit of summarization.

THE PROBLEM OF "MIND

I think Dennet's reductionist approach is wrong. He seems to think that everything important about "mind" can be learned from studies of the way the physical brain works (neurology) plus experiments with subjects to correlate what is known about the brain with what subjects reveal about their "first person" experience of the world. This is a "bottom up" approach.

I would say that for, humans at least, the brain is almost certainly necessary but not sufficient to create a "mind". The first person experience of the world is infinite, open-ended and individual. It can't be "averaged" and will resist creation of general "laws" of much interest. The mind is, to a first approximation, identical with the first person experience of the Universe.

At first, there would seem to be a conflict between "I=Universe" and he Zen contention that "I" am an illusion. However, Zen meditation practices are precisely aimed to foster awareness of the Universe (taken as a "given") and the Mind as "nothing more than" a reflection of that Universe. The goal is to make the Mind a perfect mirror of the Universe, which amounts to either the elimination of the Mind or the absorption of the Mind in the (real) Universe, depending how you look at it. This contrasts with the reductionist view that the Mind is "nothing more" than firing of neurons in the skull.

Data coming in from the reductionists can therefore be regarded with interest but it's not fundamental. You will learn more about "minds" in general by reading great novels (or appreciating the wonder of your own experience of the world) than neurology or laboratory experiments will ever reveal. One might almost say that the idea that "I" am a brain is just a more sophisticated way of saying "I" am something inside my brain (like a homunculus). What is actually gained by trading the homunculus for the brain in our model of the mind?

Why do I say the brain is "almost certainly" necessary? I consider the example of an ant colony. If the colony has anything like a "mind", it belongs to the whole colony. It's in an organizing principle that is unknown to the individual ants. So, the question is, how much of my "mind" is shared with other aspects of my environment? If I'm looking for subtle features of the mind (as Dennet's experiments pretend to do), am I barred from considering subtle influences of society or even mathematical limitations on the kind of things minds can contain? Do these influences depend on the brain of an individual person or are they shared to such an extent that it makes sense to talk about a shared mind? If that makes sense, the individual brain is not the end of the story. The individual mind is always, to some extent, assimilated into a larger entity which I regard as a living thing. This assimilation is somewhat subtle (Freud thought of it as part of the unconscious mind), but it is real enough and quite close to the surface: easily discovered and analyzed.

TIME, FREE WILL

The "arrow of time" undeniably exists at the human scale, where we live. The idea that all natural phenomena look the same when time is reversed is simply wrong at our scale. The idea that time is reversible at the quantum scale depends on the kind of thing physicists do when inferring "laws" about any system. They neglect "unimportant" details (like gravity). When examined closely, there is no reason to expect that the future is somehow determined by initial conditions at any scale. The problem of free will is seen to rely on assumptions about the physical universe that turn out to be false. This was revealed even in Newton's lifetime, yet Newton's "clockwork" universe somehow survived in the popular mind.

NONLINEAR DYNAMICS, CHAOS, PHASE CHANGES, SCALING

A detailed study of these fields is necessary to get a "feel" of how the world really works. In general, it's about how "things" evolve over time and how we make approximations, especially when it comes to scale. Without this understanding, it is not possible to understand the "basics", such as what space is and what life is. Unfortunately, such understanding is beyond the grasp of almost everyone. Most people choke when a few symbols or graphs are introduced into an argument. Philosophy (a fancy word for "talk") is left in the dust when serious questions need to be answered. Fortunately, my education allows me to "speak the language" of serious physics, but it means that the ideas hat emerge will not make much sense to my friends or the readers of this blog.

The founders of modern science, from Galileo to Einstein have pointed out that mathematics is the language of the Universe. Nothing deep or profound can be learned about the Universe by those who don't speak its language.

Emergence - A Different Universe - Robert B. Laughlin

Laughlin's "A Different Universe" provides a sweeping re-examination of the idea of "emergence", along with a telling criticism of the doctrine of reductionism.  Although I'm not sure Daniel Dennett would admit it, he's a poster child of reductionism. He basically claims that the "mind" can be completely understood by examining a subject (i.e., the brain of the subject) from the "outside". The mind is "nothing more" than the activity of neurons in the brain.

Opposed to this view is the idea of emergence: that a system of "simple" components can spontaneously reorganize itself into something new, specifically something with properties and behavour that cannot be derived, even in principal, from laws governing the components. That's Laughlin.

Laughlin's book is a bit of a disorganized mess, but it's possible to glean some very important ideas from it. He makes some powerful general observations about the nature of emergence, along with a host of examples (most of which require a post-doctoral understanding of physics to understand). Let's assume we have a system S (quantum mechanics for example) and an "emergent" system E (classical physics, for example).

• What we know about S will shed little light or no light on phase transitions in E. For example, quantum physics cannot explain why water freezes into 11 different crystal configurations.
• Attempts to "explain" emergent phenomena in E using the laws of S are often wild goose chases. They tend to absorb huge amounts of time and money, yielding nothing useful. Laughlin uses the example of DNA transcription in the ribozom, where the "alphabet" of DNA is magically transcribed into actual proteins, the building blocks of life. This can be seen as an emergent boundary, where admittedly complex but straightforward DNA chemistry is translated into the domain of biochemistry. Laughlin claims that nobody has the foggiest idea how this works and it's such a huge problem that nobody wants to go near it.
• The boundaries between S and E tend to be chaotic, in the sense that, using what we know about S, we can't predict behavour in E. Characteristically, such efforts produce, at best, multiple "explanations" or "explanations" that could equally well describe behavior other than the one observed.
• Laughlin goes further to guess that this "chaotic" boundary is the doorway to the "higher" state. For example, he thinks that the ribozom depends on chaos to work.

Laughlin's theme is to cast doubt on our idea that there are "fundamental" laws in the universe, such as the "Theory of Everything". This is a serious issue since some scientists and a few science writers think we are on the verge of closing the book on new discoveries. To sustain this view, one must arbitrarily classify some discoveries (usually the laws of quantum mechanics) as "fundamental" and the rest as "derived". This ignores the fact that actual derivation of laws describing behavour of emergent systems famously resist "explanation" in terms of more "fundamental" law.

In fact, Laughlin gives many examples of the fact that "fundamental" law is inferred from experiments at the classical, "human" scale (how could it be otherwise?). Strictly speaking, the world of quantum mechanics does not exist except for the effects it supposedly has on systems of vastly greater scale.

I was particularly interested in Laughlin's offhand dismissal of Evolution as a "law" in the emergent world of biology. It's not that he thinks evolution is not real. He's saying that evolution doesn't explain everything and that biologist tend to regard it as the basis for their entire discipline. This is not so far from the teachings of Stephen J. Gould, a Darwinian fundamentalist, who nonetheless insists that there are many reasons other than evolution to "explain" the morphology and behavior of actual animals.  This is to say that evolution is always at work but it's not the only thing at work.

Another one of Laughlin's one-sentence dismissals refers to "socialism". Laughlin treats human society as a system emergent from the nature of individual human beings. Obviously, many different societies can "emerge" from the same group of humans. Just which society emerges is almost impossible to predict (it can depend on one charismatic person, for example). It's also obvious that the form that emerges is insensitive to a vast array of factors, such as the lives and wishes if most of the people involved. This is typical of an emergent system. What Lauglin is claiming is that "socialism" is not one of these possible arrangements of society. He does so without offering the slightest evidence, but he leaves us with the interesting idea that society is, in fact, an emergent system and that some systems will be "stable" and others not. The "laws" governing an emergent society will depend on exactly which society emerges. Interestingly, the "phase change" - the change from one form to another in the same group of people - is bound to be chaotic. For example, the French revolution flipped around through many configurations, eventually returning to a monarchy. Millions died in the process.

Laughlin has few kind words to say about undergraduate education in his own field. He views the common perception of quantum mechanics as a hoax, leading to apparent paradoxes such as Shrodinger's Cat and collapse of the wave function.  Bottom line, matter is not a "wave" and a "particle". It's just a wave.  Particles lack most of the properties we associate with matter, most notably a specific position.His discussion of how quantum events are detected at the human level is instructive, but leaves the reader hungry for more detail.

Do things happen for a reason

[From Yabberz Greatest Hits]

Perhaps right at the core of most religious thought is the idea that "things happen for a reason". In the Biblical tradition, this reason is in the Mind of God. His plan has a fundamentally moral aspect (it's good and merciful). Everyone outside of mental hospitals agrees that the "plan" is completely inscrutable.

Even when stripped of all the particulars of theology, many people cling to the last vestiges of this idea. They ask "why" a person is "taken away" in the prime of life or "why" innocent, good people are destroyed by random events like hurricanes and earthquakes. The question is always rhetorical. It's rude to attempt an answer. Even those who think there is no reason feel in their bones that there ought to be one.

I've often encountered people who earnestly believe in "fate", which is (to me) the silly idea that whatever happened was what somehow had to happen. This pulls away even the "moral" nature of the process but leaves its inevitability. Such beliefs are, of course "not even wrong". How could you disagree?

Well actually, you can.

Since the early 20th century, Science (specifically Quantum Mechanics) has been showing that things "just happen" for "reasons" that are fundamentally probabilistic. To put it another way, if you know everything there is to know about a system, there are things you cannot predict about what happens next. This has been reinforced by the advent of Chaos theory, which says pretty much the same thing but at a more familiar scale - the scale of the weather, for example.

To put it simply, there is no such thing as the "future". The Universe does not "unfold" according to any "plan", whether decreed by God or not. On a more subtle level, there isn't even such a thing as the "past", in the sense that the current state of affairs is not entirely due to a knowable state of affairs that existed at some previous time.

It takes time to get comfortable with the absence of purpose or even predictability in the Universe. For me, it comes back frequently in the realization that I am personally astronomically improbable. I can sit down and calculate the probability that I would be born and make the number come out as small as you like. Those of us who have taken Calculus means that this means the probability is equal to zero. I am impossible.

Even so, I'm happy to accept this. Is it then so hard that I will exit the world as a result of events that are equally improbable and meaningless?

This is not to say that life itself lacks meaning. It's just to say that the meaning, if any, must be found in our own lives, from the "inside" and not within the mysterious workings of the Universe.

Human welfare and the four economies

My thoughts about the four economies have emerged from thinking about money and debt. Some writers, especially Graeber do a great job of sketching what money is (debt) and prying the concept away from "value". Graeber makes dire predictions about the fate of the world based solely on the nature of money. Graeber seems to think that, by the very nature of money, debt expands to choke the "real" economy - a phenomenon he calls "debt deflation".

I think that Graeber's misunderstands the way that money works and its relationship to the other economies we live in, most obviously value (which is constantly being created and destroyed) and information (which mostly grows at an exponential rate, contributing to a growing percentage of the value of everything we buy). However, Graeber's analysis is helpful in pointing out that many transactions involving money and the creation of debt take place entirely in the "money universe" without increasing value. In the big picture, this seems to increase debt relative to value, in effect, reducing the amount of value available to ordinary people. I'm not sure this analysis holds water when you realize that value doesn't obey the same rules as money. We usually acquire debt in order to obtain ownership (directly or indirectly) of something of value (other than money). "Net" value can dramatically change with ownership. The classic example is when the thing of value is a "plant" that can be used to manufacture things of value - value that exceeds the cost of production.

Graeber takes us on the intellectual journey of Marx and explains why things don't work the way Marx thought or even the way Marx wanted things to work. Borrowing money to "make" money is, as he says, a drag on the "real" economy and does little more than manufacture debt. The business of entire "finance" industry is based on the value of money for its own sake, resulting in the byproduct of growing debt floating around in the economy.

An example, dear to Graeber's heart, is real estate. One might argue that changing ownership of a house does not, as a rule, change its value. In practice, real estate prices (not values) tend to inflate and a lot of debt is generated in the process. Banks manufacture money for mortgages. For this reason, Graeber lumps real estate in with Finance as the bad guys. The insurance industry gets tossed in with the others for reasons I won't discuss (FIRE = Finance, Insurance, Real Estate).

I have my doubts about Graeber's analysis of a real estate transition.  Real Estate is a market like any other. The amazing thing about a market is that it matches every buyer who thinks something is worth X with someone who thinks that something is worth getting rid of and is, therefore, it's worth less than X. In other words, the basic mechanism of any market is based on fundamental disagreement over the value of the goods being traded. Both opinions are subject to feedback (what people think other people think things are worth and what other people think about what other people think ...), resulting in a classic example of a chaotic system. You get a mass movement of investment into real estate when people think it can't possibly lose money and massive losses (crash) when real estate does, in fact, lose value.*

Mandelbrot has convincingly argued that markets are inherently chaotic According to this line of thinking, price "inflation" is just part of a truly chaotic pattern, where collapse of "bubbles' is inevitable. Chaos is guaranteed by the "math" underlying the system. If true, this refutes Graeber's thesis, not just about real estate, but about finance, which is the core market that Maldelbrot uses an example. If Mandelbrot is right, the amount of money (and therefore debt) in the "system" can be expected to fluctuate wildly to the degree that a market for money itself exists. That's not what Graeber is predicting and the difference is hardly trivial. Sadly, Mandelbrot and Graeber give us two different pictures of Hell: A long strangulation of the real economy (Graeber) versus an endless sequence of fundamentally unpredictable crashes and booms (Mandelbrot).

The fundamental point of contact between the two theories seems to be in the mind of the "players". Graeber's theory is that debt is non-negotiable, collectable under any circumstance and independent of what people think. If true, this would tend to remove (damp) chaos from the system. In 2008, we learned that some opinions about some forms of debt can change overnight, resulting in the sudden disappearance of trillions of dollars of financial "assets" and the corresponding trillions in debt. I think Mandelbrot is closer to the truth than Graeber. The crash occurs when the "system" suddenly realizes that vast sums of "money" are based on uncollectable debt.

The response of the banking system to the 2008 crash is a separate issue, involving some fancy footwork by the world's central banks. This massively involves the "reserve" system, which doesn't seem to factor into Graeber's story about money (at least in his book on debt). "Reserve" money - what banks owe each other - is not connected to debt. It's more like a way of making sure that there are enough tokens in the right pockets to keep the whole thing running, especially a way of making sure that there is enough "cash" (IOU's from the Government) around to allow depositors to "withdraw" their money (transfer debt from the bank to the government) and pass it around between banks in a more or less frictionless way.

Putting it all together to understand the world we live in would seem to require an understanding of more than money and debt. In fact, it would seem to involve re-evaluating a lot of things. It's not surprising at all to find ourselves retracing the thoughts of Marx on the subject. He thought deeply about money, debt and value. But the role of information was completely ignored in his time and the universe itself seemed to be nothing but a passive store of raw materials. In our time, the universe is fighting back.

Money

Money is created in the modern economy precisely in the amounts of debt people (including governments) are willing to assume. Most people have no idea how "money" works, yet it can control their lives.

The physical form of money is hardly relevant. It may exist purely as information and it is, in a sense, pure information. A dollar is a fact. That fact is that a government (Canada, say) owes the bearer one dollar. That would seem to be a circular statement, except the "fact" is supported by the Government, which is not a figment of anybody's imagination. When a dollar is deposited in the bank, its factual nature changes slightly. Now it is the bank who owes the depositor one dollar.

As information, a dollar is a unit of debt. Somebody owes somebody a dollar. It's the "somebody's" that make it real.

Biology and Value - The "Real Economy"

Value relates to living things and makes no sense in the inanimate world. Value is always relative to a living thing. One animal's mother is another animal's food. Perception of value is not necessary for value to exist, although the domain of perceived value by humans is the case we will discuss here.

As humans, we constantly weigh up the value of things in our environment, creating an economy of made up of all the "stuff" that matters to us. In the value universe of humans, most stuff of value is owned by someone (or, as in the case of the "commons" by society) and the rules whereby ownership is changed are complex and interesting. Money can be involved and usually is, but when goods are exchanged for money, the amount of money in the system remains unchanged but the value can dramatically increase or decrease. One example among many is the purchase of mineral rights.

For example, when I buy a banana from the grocer, a bit of money moves from my hands to his and the ownership of the banana changes from him to me. As food, the banana has value to me. But if nobody buys it, the banana will rot and be without value to the anyone. Laying aside a few details, value is created when I buy a banana, even more obviously, when I pick it from a tree.

The biological forms we perceive and name can be somewhat arbitrary. It's important to identify the form you are talking about to make sense of the relative value. To illustrate this point, internal discipline is a value to a human organization - it contributes to the survival of that organization. However, it may not coincide with the welfare of individuals in the organization - in fact, it may be seen as a negative value by certain individuals. such as soldiers ordered into certain death.


Information

The information economy is increasingly important in the modern world. Information can be created from nothing, duplicated and shared. It is very similar to the "stuff" in the value economy in that its importance is solely in the eye of the beholder. But efforts to apply the concept of ownership to information reveal its slippery nature. If I share information with you, we both have it. In fact, the value of information often seems to grow the more people have it. It obeys its own unique rules.

Life itself is the transmission of information (DNA) to future generations. This all takes place in a physical world where one thing is not as relevant to that transmission as another (value) and the whole process is taking place in the real world, where the laws of physics cannot be circumvented.


Energy and the "Real World"

The entire natural world is all about the exchange of energy in countless forms. These exchanges take place according to rules and patterns of their own, irrespective of human value or even the presence of humans. Biology is a subset of this world, where information becomes important (DNA, evolution, stimulus and response).

"Stuff" - matter - participates in the energy economy. Stuff can be bought and sold as can energy itself, but the financial details do nothing to circumvent the rules of the energy economy, such as the laws of thermodynamics, conservation of matter etc.

We buy and sell energy as part of the "money" economy, often ignoring the physics and biology involved in these transactions. Underlying all such transactions is a loss, due to entropy, of the thing being traded. It's like a sales tax on every money transaction except that in this case, the tax is simply thrown away. "Production" of energy often involves irreversible destruction of value in the form of environmental destruction and other ways that the energy industry regards as "external" costs.

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* Of course, many real estate transactions are not based on such "disagreement". The buyer simply pays a "fair price" for what the seller has and no longer needs. There is something "real" underlying the transaction. This is unlike purely financial trades, where some form of security is being traded.