The Matrix - Pushing the Metaphor

Many of the "Matrix" ideas can be seen as just a slightly different angle on ideas presented elsewhere in this blog - especially here, where I summarize "progress to date".

Art is a useful species of simulation. It allows us to imagine different worlds using no more hardware than our senses and our brains. The result can go beyond what we usually think of as "metaphor" - even extending into the realms of myth and religion.

The Matrix movie series provides a challenging dramatization of metaphors that are so commonplace that they have become tropes for empty speculation and dead-end philosophy. The movie updates some old ideas in dramatic new ways:

• Many religions, including the "Abrahamic" and Hindu traditions, regard reality as some kind of dream, with the "real", important reality being the realm of the gods. The "soul" is separable from the body and travels on after death into the more important realms of the gods. In such traditions, little attention is paid to the actual details of the "real world". It's Turkmenistan*.
• Certain philosophies, most notably "idealism", claim that the there is nothing but our experience - the "real world" is either non-existent or unknowable. This comes close to how I regard the "matrix" to work, but, in my view, the matrix is built on the real world and assumes the existence of the real world.
• Antonio Damasio teaches that complex animals, such as mammals, "model" the real world by means of states of their central nervous system. However, somehow the word "model" doesn't convey the fullness of our experience - how totally comprehensive and all-embracing these models can be. We live inside the models.
• In his best-selling novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Pirsig presents the concept that a motorcycle, in spite of being made of hard physical metal, is really an idea. While Pirsig later claimed that the novel has nothing to do with either Zen or Motorcycles, his motorcycle-as-idea formed the basis of what was "Zen" for me and allowed my concept of the "Matrix" to encompass more than "mere" mental phenomena. All "artificial" objects are also ideas and therefore part of the "matrix" for both their creators and users.
• In the Knowledge Illusion, Sloman shows how the world surrounding us and the world of our ideas is really constructed by society. Our own contribution to our thoughts is easy to overestimate (the illusion). Our ability to navigate the physical world is the result of an illusion that we know more than we actually do - actual knowledge coming, for example, from the designer and builder of the car we thoughtlessly drive around.
• In Thinking Fast and Slow, one of the most influential books of the 20th century, Kahneman shows how we go through life on auto-pilot most of the time, living in a sea of assumptions that are questioned only when we run up against surprising challenges. This calls to mind the throngs of people in the matrix, who go about their lives without a thought about what is really going on (in this case, they are living in a computer simulation).

All this combines to produce my vision of the "matrix" as being more than a product of the individual mind and more than something "merely" mental. Like any good work of art, it invites us to go beyond the obvious and ask for deeper connections. The matrix is what Hoffstader would call an "Essential" metaphor. We are invited to take the "red pill" to learn our true nature. Within the constraints of movie fiction, our "true nature" is something simple, dramatic and (let's face it) implausible. Outside of fiction, discovery of our "true nature" is perhaps the most important quest of all.

* Turkmenistan is my short-hand for aspects of the world that you know are real but, other than that, we know little about them and you are not overly curious to know more.

Now What?

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. 

T. S. Eliot - Little Gidding

I have been writing for a long time about the concept of "supermind" and the "dragon". Groups of humans - armies, governments - have a life of their own and thrive at the expense of the humans that oppose them - even their own members.  These groups steal our identity and prevent us from thinking for ourselves. It's all true, of course, but what is new is the total acceptance of the situation. Comfort almost. This is the human condition. Our "minds" function as part of a whole. It may be a mistake to "analyze" - to break things down into pieces, but indulge me for a moment while I describe things that make up our "minds" that are usually regarded as something happening between our ears.

• The brain, especially considered as part of the body (Damasio). The function of the brain is primarily to support the organism - the efforts of that organism to thrive. 
• "Reality" - what "scientists" observe and explore. Quantum mechanics has taught us to think of "reality" as a set of shared observations and models - strictly speaking, that is what we "know". Actual "reality" (apart from what we can measure) always seems to be just out of reach.
• "Society" - from birth, we are knit into a human milieu. We parse reality in words we learn as children, we grasp and learn tools that reflect hundreds of thousands of years of invention and ingenuity.  

It is not wise to separate these three except for the purposes of discussion. The brain is "hard-wired" into the body and the body is a real thing - an object in reality. We cannot speak of any of this or learn the simplest task of existence without drawing on what we are told and shown by the people around us.

In short, our minds are not "our own", nor does it make much sense to insist that we "think for ourselves". Our minds are constrained by what they are - or, if you want, the fact that they are embedded in reality in a certain manner - a manner that is inescapable.

So what is new (and perhaps an echo of thoughts I have had for half a century) is to see all this at once.  This leads to experiences that are somehow kissed with new insight. For example, I see scenes of happy congregations hugging and greeting each other in a new way. I would normally harrumph in the background about how silly their beliefs are and shake my head at how amazing it is that so many people can all be so deluded about the core nature of reality. But now I see this as a whole and don't separate what is supposedly going in between the ears of the believer. What is going on is happening to everyone in the room and has roots that go back centuries. The "mind" at work is what I used to call "supermind", but what I have been missing is that the individual experience of mind is just what goes on in our own minds. We are mostly unaware that we are not "thinking" our own thoughts, not being motivated by our own motives, not intending what we individually intend. The process works so smoothly and so naturally that we know as little about it as do bees in a hive.

This perspective puts an end to the "supermind" blog. It is an error to think of mind and supermind separately, just as the behavior of bees makes no sense without reference to the "goals and intentions" of the hive. This insight also marks a new direction for this blog, which started out trying to find a rational, skeptical way forward in a sea of myth and misdirection. In a way, I see the name of this blog (The Christian Skeptic) as a theme to which I must now return, knowing that we are all in a state of tension between our "heritage" and what comes next. Skeptics, like Christians, don't "think for themselves".

Of course there are many, many layers involved in this process.  You can go on splitting and analyzing to your heart's content. For example, in "Behave", Sapolsky analyzes our reasons for doing what we do, going up the ladder of detail from the way nerves move our limbs to the way society tells us what is "right" and "wrong'. If nothing else, Sapolsky ties human behavior into the physical structure of the brain - everything from the chemistry of enzymes to the modular structure of brain "systems". The brain is a thing - an object in reality.

Drilling Down to Motivations

Sapolsky reluctantly concludes that there is no place for "free will" in his analysis. Perhaps that is because he, like others, is stuck with the image of the "self" as being some kind of puppet master between the ears of the individual. The truth is that the borders of "self" are extremely fuzzy, both in time and space. What happens in our heads is the result of an astronomically complex calculation whose inputs go back to the swamps when life first emerged - a point that structures Damasio's story of who we are - the Strange Order of Things. We have motives - feelings - that Damasio sees at the very root of being and Sapolsky confirms are rooted in biology - the term "computation" for this process is misleading. We are not computers.

In Damasio's account, to live is to thrive, which means that living things don't just "try" to continue their existence, the "try" to push themselves further into the future (persist). They reproduce, grow and grab all the resources they can to do it. In corporate turns (which Damasio hates), living things don't just break even, they make a profit. Damasio walks right up to considering human groups to be alive in their own right (since they satisfy his criteria for being alive), but balks at the conclusion since human groups overlap. For some reason, he feels that a single organism can't be part of two superorganisms at once. There is no particular reason for this criterion, which seems to emerge out of the blue - unconnected to any of his other arguments. In any case, as pointed out by one very early reader of the "Dragon" blog, it's mainly a matter of terminology. What is important is to recognize the actual relationship between the individual human and society, whether you call society "alive" or not.

Strangely, Damasio is quite willing to consider a beehive as alive (and even conscious) in its own right.  His arguments for this are convincing and I really don't see why they would not apply to human society, which is quite happy to "brainwash" its citizens so that they throw their lives away for the sake of their country or even corporate profits - profits that they themselves never see.

But the trick is to see that we are all brainwashed all the time. Otherwise, we could not speak, find our way around or feed ourselves. This is who we are, what we are.

Great sections of our brains are devoted to fitting our individual existence into the group. We have "speech centers" in the (normally) left brain devoted to generating and understanding speech. We have forebrain modules that are constantly doing "social" calculations to determine what is the socially appropriate thing to do (Sapolsky). On a more subtle level, our brains seem to work in such a way as to parse the world in terms of "objects" and "events" that lend themselves to verbal communication.  In other words, "language" is deeply embedded in the way our brains actually work - an insight spelled out in great detail in "Surfaces and Essences" - Hofstadter.

What is often overlooked is the fact that all this functions according to the laws of physics, chemistry, and geometry. We are embedded in a real world. It is commonplace to remark that we only see part of what is "out there". What is overlooked is that what we do see is actually "out there". One image I have in my head is the way our brains are packed into a finite volume but fold the surface to maximize the amount of cortical area. One imagines that we would have had big, spherical brains except that they would be unwieldy. It's just the way I see geometry placing constraints on what and how we think - who we are.

Along these lines, I see "society" and culture as a way of escaping constraints that we inherited from millennia of evolution - the "design concept" of individual organisms, reproduction and all that. Human societies "thrive" by a new mechanism - one involving "information" breaking free of its DNA shackles to exist out in the open as the blood and bones of human society.

My First Introduction To Zen

Key to this insight is the analogy between DNA - the "program" that determines the physical shape and behavior of an organism - with "Information", the physical, real-world "tools" that society uses to thrive. In the latter category are not just what is usually seen as "information" (books and computer files etc) but the physical creations of society, like telescopes, automobiles and language itself. When you sit behind the wheel of a car, you are being absorbed into the skills and thought processes of tens of thousands of people who invented everything from the dash ornaments to the theory of internal combustion. This is an insight that goes back to "Zen and The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance", a book I read when it came out (1974). The book is not about Zen or Motorcycle Maintenance, but I did take away the idea that a motorcycle is an idea cast in metal. I come back to the same place and know the place for the first time ...

It is worth noting that I come back to this idea having absorbed many of the key ideas of Zen. I'd say "motorcycle" actually extends Zen in an exciting way. Perhaps Pirsig, like the rest of us, knew more about Zen than we thought at the time. Specifically, the insights here vastly expand what we think of as "mind", "attention" and "consciousness". These are the central concerns of Zen. There is no particular reason why those who follow the path of self-discovery should be stuck with the metaphors created thousands of years ago.

Back in 1974, I would frequently point out that a man with an ax is as different from a man without an ax as a zebra is from a horse. Our tools accelerate evolution in a new way. But back then I didn't quite grasp that the tool exists in its own "space" - the supermind - that is using the man as much as the man uses the ax.

So it is that today, in 2018, I have the unusual comfort of having a big insight that has been bubbling up from below for half a century. It makes sense.

But now what?

The Strange Order of Things

Strange Order Of Things

This is a hard review to write. In my opinion, Damasio is one of the greats when it comes to figuring out the secrets of "mind". I looked forward to this book. I reserved it from the library and when that was too slow, I bought the book.

Damasio's approach is original and profound Sadly this particular book is flawed in so many ways I doubt it will have the impact it deserves. 

The biggest problem is the "Fog Factor". Great stretches of this book would be virtually inaccessible to all but the most determined reader due to run-on sentences, big words and tiresome repetition. It's just abominably written.

The issue is compounded by the fact that Damasio seems to lose his thread of thought to ramble on in the final chapters about the sorry state of the world. Damasio is a brilliant brain scientist. As a commentator on world affairs, he has little of interest to offer. This is particularly disappointing since his general theory comes so close to shedding a powerful light on the very problems he laments. I will explain that once I tell you something about Damasio's unique perspective on life, mind, and consciousness. 

Damasio re-defines a couple of words or perhaps uses them in a way that may be misleading. In fact, I can't be 100% sure that I have grasped these ideas, but I will do my best to shed some light on them. These concepts are so central to the book that the reader may miss the places where Damasio explains them, buried in the fog of paragraph-long sentences.

Homeostasis is a behavior of a system that causes it to return to a "stable" state when perturbed.  The classic example is a thermostat, which cools the room when it is too warm and warms the room when it is too cold. Damasio points out that this example is misleading when applied to living things. Living things don't just maintain conditions suitable for survival. The maintain conditions suitable for thriving. They don't just break even. They grow. They reproduce. The invade new territory. They adapt to new conditions. It is important to see that this concept is more or less Damasio's definition of life itself. Non-living things don't behave this way. All living things do. Damasio makes the mistake of assuming the only systems we know of that behave like this are DNA-based organisms on planet Earth. There are others, as we will see.

Feeling. Damasio claims that consciousness, that feeling of being in the world,  is based on simpler feelings that go all the way back to the simplest of organisms. Well not quite. He distinguishes between simple interaction with the world and the inner state of the organism, due to a more or less chemical (metabolic) reaction, such as we see in bacteria. To count as a feeling, Damasio wants there to be a separate system (a nervous system) that responds to mere chemical and physical events and transmits this response to parts of the organism that can react to the situation. You might say that feelings are a result of an internal model of reality - not reality itself. So, for example, he would say that trees and flowers don't have feelings, but insects do. Certainly all mammals. 

Images. In "higher" animals with complex nervous systems, various sensations are combined to form a system state Damasio calls an "image". Physically, we would imagine this to correspond to a specific pattern of neurons firing in the brain. There is a steady stream of these images and, in humans at least, it is possible to react or reflect to the images themselves. This is what we have seen in Hofstader's "Strange Loop". Damasio insists that all such "images" include the emotional state of the organism, the felt state of the internal world of the organism and the image the organism has of itself and its place in the world. They are private - belonging uniquely to the organism that creates them. This flow of images is plausibly identified with consciousness itself. Damasio is at his best in explaining how the brain builds on these images to produce the rich phenomenon of consciousness. What is unique in his argument is that all these images have affect. They matter to the organism. 

Damasio's vision of the working brain is built on a foundation of feeling. The organism is not a neutral computer running some algorithm that computes whether what is going on is "good" or "bad" (the prevailing view of virtually all modern philosophers of mind). The "information" that the brain works with is already "painted" with affect. This puts Damasio in a position to describe the crucial phenomena that mistake the "computer" analogy - specifically motivations. You can program a computer to play championship chess but you can't program a computer to want to play chess.

Damasio's view of things is supported by other work, especially where the investigator is working with real brains and real people. It appears that the brain/computer analogy may give us some hints about how to perform cortex functions (associations, pattern recognition) but it will not help us build a robot that has experiences. To have experiences, you need to feel and to feel you need to have a nervous system and nervous systems are intimately woven into the fabric of a living human body with hard-wired determination to survive and thrive right down to the cellular level. 

So far, so good. The book is worth plowing through to make this point sink in. 

There is one problem I might mention in passing, which is the so-called "hard" problem of consciousness. Damasio, like many before him, feels so good about his own progress that he declares that he has solved the problem. He claims that he has told us what consciousness is, therefore "why" we feel present in the world. In my view, scientists and philosophers who claim this don't quite get the problem. This is worth an essay of its own so I won't get into why I don't think Damasio has cracked the problem. To make a long story short, I take the Zen attitude: that consciousness is a given - a brute fact. "Explanation" of brute facts reflects a misunderstanding of what it means to "explain" anything.

In my opinion, Damasio drops the ball when it comes to examining human organizations. It is a sad fact that countries, companies, armies and all organizations do not act in the best interests of their member human beings. We are cannon fodder. Nation-states act to thrive for their own sake. In fact, they are, by Damasio's definition, alive. It's mystifying to me that Damasio doesn't get into the nature of human organizations when he devotes so much attention to cooperative behavior. For example, he comes close to attributing a kind of mind to a beehive. But not, say, the United States of America. In most countries, corporations are legal persons. This is not just a figment of our imagination. The business of a corporation is to thrive. Or, to put it the way they do, to make a profit. You will not find a corporate prospectus that mentions the goal of assisting its employees to thrive.

To be sure, Damasio has his reasons for rejecting the group as "alive" or analogous to DNA-based organism. He points out that individuals may belong to numerous overlapping groups. DNA-based organisms don't divide their loyalties in this way. This argument is stuck in seeing the issue from the individual human perspective. It's not about the individual human "thriving", it's about the group thriving - if necessary over the dead body of one or more of its members. History is full of examples of countries being willing to sacrifice millions of their own citizen in an effort to make the nation thrive. It is very clear that any group large enough to be of interest has goals and behavior that cannot be seen merely as a sum of the goals and behaviors of the humans that make up the group.

But is it true that DNA-based organisms don't overlap? Going back to bacteria, where Damasio's story starts, bacteria are able to swap genes. They are so promiscuous about this that analysis of a sample's bacterial content is often done simply by detecting the presence or absence of certain genes in the sample with no attempt to identify "species" of bacteria (in fact, the idea of "species" may not apply to bacteria). This is analogous to human organizations that pass around cultural artifacts such as language and technology. Each culture is, in effect, the sum of the "ideas" that it has managed to accumulate. This is quite close to Dawkin's idea of the "meme" which would seem to be a good analogy to the way genes fight for survival in a bacterial world (the analogy breaks down in more complex organisms). In the same way, "ideas" fight for survival in a world of competing and overlapping cultures and organizations. This may be a rather fuzzy view of the situation, but failing to credit the group with all the characteristics of life, as defined by Damasio himself, seems to be a mistake. If we are stuck with seeing the world in terms of individual human "thriving", we will fail to understand the world that is right in front of us.