Whatever Happened to the Meme?

The idea of the meme was invented by Richard Dawkins and hammered into its most robust form by Daniel Dennett. It is an extended analogy that claims that human ideas are somehow like genes and have their own process of evolution independent of the evolution going on in their "hosts", the human race.

It's an attractive idea and it works well as a rhetorical device, especially the way that Dawkins and Dennett use it to attack religion as an infection of the brain. True believers in "memetics" claim that all of human thought is "infection" by memes - a strong claim that memetics is a fundamental explanation of mind. Memeticists claim that the brain is a "meme machine".

The problem comes when you try to apply memes outside of the examples trotted out by the "founders". Personally, I can't figure out what a "meme" is. The old words of ideas, doctrines, theories and especially paradigm seem perfectly serviceable and don't easily translate themselves into "meme talk".

It is worth noting that respected investigators of "mind", such as Hofstadter, bypass the idea of "meme" entirely in spite of being on cordial terms with the founders of the idea. For them, it's not just a wrong idea but one not worth mentioning. "It's not even wrong".

It looks like the basic "atom" of thought, especially linguistic thought (the inner voice), is the analogy, as worked out in "Surfaces and Essences". If we start with this idea, memes must be some kind of "extended analogy" or complex of analogies. However, our mental "analogy computers" process the tangle of analogies in language at lightening speed and mostly below our level of awareness. This doesn't line up well with the "meme" idea, where it seems to be assumed that people can be "talked out" of memes (disinfected) by conscious, logical argument.

In fact, analogy processing is buried in language itself and not the "memes" that have somehow "infected" our minds. If the infection is to be found at all, it is to be found in the language, not the brain. But the analogy of infection breaks down when we study language in general, not the cherry-picked poster children of memetics. For the most part, the analogies that underlie language are benign and somewhat inevitable, given the need to "boot strap" our language from almost zero. The example of "under-stand" comes to mind. How is standing under related to "understand". If you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Maybe it's a "meme" but do we need the "meme" idea to make sense of it? Does it make sense to think of this analogy as "surviving" on its own according to some pseudo-Darwinian principles, rather than its roots in human experience? What does "memetics" add to our understanding?

Hofstadter's concept is that some analogies are better than others. They are the "essential" analogies, the ones that come closest to isomorphic mappings between one situation and another. This would seem to claim that is the truth or at least "usefulness", not "survival of the fittest" that makes some ideas prevail over others in the long term. I'd go further and claim that it is our hard-wired preference for symmetry that makes one idea seem better than another. This comes pretty close to common sense about the matter. Is memetics providing a meaningful challenge to common sense?

There is a human tendency to regard people who disagree with us as being "infected", insane and impervious to logic. We are the logical ones. They are ignoring the evidence. Especially when seen in its early forms (attack against religious thinking), memetics is simply a put-down of of stupid people who fail to appreciate the majestic logic and superior mind of Richard Dawkins. Dennett smoothed over the rough edges and gave us some real insight about where "memes" come from, such as the idea that no person needs to "have" an idea, such as the great idea of evolution. But in defending the meme, Dennett has basically moved beyond it. Dennett's memetics doesn't need memetics.

Is there anything we can understand using memetics that can't be understood without it? As it has been said of Freud: "What  is true isn't new and what is new isn't true".

Wrong theories provide special insight by providing us with a new perspective on the problem, like footholds as we climb the mountain, to be used for a moment then discarded.

Mind and Machine - An Outline

The project draws an extensive parallel between computer technology, specifically computer programming languages and the open-ended aspect of culture that includes language but also the wider methods, especially those aspects of technology that are used to explain or communicate culture. Humans interact with computers in many other ways, including paying for them and using them to "make money" (computers become actors in the "real economy" with huge impact on the "economy", which is right-wing word for "society").You can't entirely ignore the broad issue of "automation", which is perhaps the topic of most interest to the average reader. Seen from this angle, Part 1 (below) is a primer on the nature of automation, especially "computerization". Most primers on computers ignore the way computers actually "work" in the world and focus on aspects that most people do not need to know (such as CPU's, disks, RAM etc.)

This project drills down to the history of computation before "computers". Many of the problems we blame on computers are thousands of years old.

I'd like to make some approximate distinction between language and art as means of communicating culture, but there is an overlap and a lot of cross-talk, which should provide material for a chapter. These are not distinct capabilities that you see in discussions of "bicameral" brain (left and right brain). In fact, this project may be seen as documenting the complex relationship between "logic" and "art".

"Intelligence" is embedded in the language and only appears in the individual through a process of assimilation. The parallel to this in the machine world is virtualization, where some part of the class library is loaded into a specific hardware platform for a specific purpose. This "purpose" is ultimately a bridge between the machine and the mind - a "User Interface" in some cases or in others, simply the purpose that a human designer has "baked in" to the program. An important topic is therefore to describe how the machine "mind" maps to the human mind in specific situations. Interesting special cases can be described as a specific human interacts with a specific device, such as a smart phone.

The mapping of the human mind, especially "purposes" to machine design is a particularly interesting facet of the discussion. Russel's ideas are relevant, where he includes the goals of society as a whole along with ideas like "uncertainty" in his ideal AI implementation. A machine can't "learn" unless it knows what it doesn't know - a tricky proposition even for a human.

Part 1: From machine language to AI

• My summer as a computer
• Logic as the free-floating computer. The abacus. Logic as both human and computer language.
• Clay tablets - the first external memory. Written language first used to count and only gradually to "account" - slow acceptance of modern idea of money.
• From machine language to COBOL - surely we can just "talk" to the computer
• Structured programming and the Object model - the role of symmetry, elegance and aesthetics
• Virtual machines and the Cloud - Java. Software floats free from hardware platform.
• The shifting role of the computer - from the math department to sexting
• The emerging role of the computer as generic master of logic games, especially the logic game of money
• Rising anxiety 

Part 2: Models of Mind

• Descartes creates the "mind body problem" by a quaint machine analogy
• Dennett struggles to "explain" the mind as "kinda" like a computer
• Hofstadter and Jaynes hint at how the mind actually works 
• The "cloud" paradigm calls for a total re-think of what we mean by a "computer" and hints that a similar re-definition of "mind" is called for
• Common buried assumptions in language and computer applications
• Models of value. The rocky road to our current assumptions about money and the value of life itself.
• Models of human decision-making
• The bureaucracy as a machine (Dragon Theory)

Part 3: The User Interface

• Primitive user interfaces - switches, paper tape ...
• The smart phone as an example of a 2017 "User Interface". Who is the "user"?
• Who is the "designer"?
• How computers and people are embedded in the logic of money
• How are humans and machines embedded in the same culture, especially when it comes to economics and connectivity?
• Considering the total role of the computer and the individual, in what sense does a computer replace a human being?

Affordances, biology, physics and problems of interfacing logic with biology. A broader definition of the "user" of the machine, including the designer, the "end user", the end user's employer, the designer's boss, the marketing system that connects them all together and so on. Like the individual, the machine is embedded and assimilated into a specific culture with countless points of contact, many of which are deeply buried in long-forgotten assumptions and arbitrary decisions. Modern computers are part of the Internet of "hosts" which has been specifically used to visualize the corresponding network of human connections - the "social network". They are also embedded in the "economy" in a symbiotic relationship with humans - sometimes replacing humans in that role. Possible amusing anecdote about my job as a "computer" in an oil company circa 1967. Focus on the concept of "work" and how automation can "take jobs" from "real people". "jobs", "work" and "money" are all models of the real world where ruthless "logic" competes with art and "quality of life". Money is a language of its own and computers "speak" that language very well.

Part 3: Essential Analogies

• Logic and value
• The brain as a super fast "value computer"
• The Cloud and the Brain
• Is a neuron "like" a bit?
• What is it to "know" something?
• What is "attention"?
• Can value and beauty be computed?
• The problem of accountability

Part 4: Computing Value

We allow machines to make such judgments all the time with the effect that we can forget the assumptions and escape accountability for our errors. For centuries, philosophers have attempted to reduce ethics and value to logic. We must not pretend that this problem has been solved. Ethical and value judgments must be left to human beings, whatever the shortcomings of brains may be. The brain justifies such judgments using language (pseudo-logic) which is prone to rhetorical tricks, selective memory and hidden assumptions "baked in" to our way of talking about the world.

• Does automation tend to boil away value? 
• Does it make sense to sell life itself, one hour at a time? Is this perhaps the root "computation"? If a laborer costs $15 per hour, 100 cost $1,500. How much would 1,000 Paul McCartney's cost? Are we buying millions of cheap robot Pauls?
• Technology itself challenges human values and turns people into machines
• Can current technology reverse the long term trend and allow machines to be machines and people to be people?
• What are the fundamental challenges that face us as we "automate" human choices to maximize value? Whose value? 
• The ultimate role of the machine is to "disappear" and become an extension of human will. Optimizing "value" is the core issue.

This line of thought is continued here

Gary Kasparov and Stuart Russel on Machine Intelligence

This is a great talk by Kasparov, the chess master who "lost" to the Deep Blue computer.

Stuart Russel has more to say on the subject.

Stuart Russell is a professor (and formerly chair) of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at University of California at Berkeley. His book Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (with Peter Norvig) is the standard text in AI; it has been translated into 13 languages and is used in more than 1,300 universities in 118 countries. His research covers a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence including machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, real-time decision making, multitarget tracking, computer vision, computational physiology, global seismic monitoring and philosophical foundations.

He also works for the United Nations, developing a new global seismic monitoring system for the nuclear-test-ban treaty.

Intelligent machines (or even dumb ones) are a model of the human mind, or, more exactly, a model of certain capabilities of the human mind. Russel's talk begins with the notion that "soon", intelligent machines will have read everything humans have ever written and understood it all. It would be hard to find a clearer statement of what computers are and what their capabilities might ultimately be. I'd say that the computer models human language - ultimately all human language, along with the complex structure of metaphor that underlies language. The question is, could a machine understand language? Or, to put it another way, what is it to understand?

In "Surfaces and Essences", Hofstader points out that our linguistic categories that underly language are ultimately rather arbitrary and based on situations encountered in human life. This would seem to be a problem for a machine that can obviously never encounter anything like human experience. If this problem is to be dealt with, perhaps Jaynes provides a clue as to the kind of "experience" that the computer must use as the basis for metaphorical "boot strapping". This would include things like the human perspective of being in a specific place at a specific time, along with a "narrative" about what is going on there and why. 

The biggest challenge for a computer will be to model the non-linguistic part of the human mind, including recognition of objects and general "situations" -- in other words, the context of the computer's actions. It seems like a stretch for us to model this in a computer, which is more and more "cloud based" (no location) and (with Russel's assumption) "aware" of all human history. How is this moment different? What is the "situation"?

Perhaps the trickiest thing to "model" (hinted at by Russel) is that the human experience always involves lack of knowledge and massive uncertainty. What would the computer need to "forget" in order to "understand" a human "situation"?

What is "Truth"?

Daniel Dennett likes to give Jaynes the benefit of the doubt: “There were a lot of really good ideas lurking among the completely wild junk.”

As Dennett hints (with typical subtly), there is a lot of "junk philosophy" around the subjects dear to Jaynes' heart. In this post, I'd like to extract one of Jayne's ideas and wipe a bit of "junk" off it to see where it gets me.

At the center of Jayne's theory is the "bicameral mind", which is firmly based on the idea that we have a "right brain" and a "left brain" with notably different capabilities, each capable of acting somewhat on their own. The "right brain" is good at seeing the "big picture" and sends its judgments to the left brain, where they are perceived as speech - sometimes the speech of the Gods. As things get historically more complicated, we evolve our present day "inner chatter", no longer attributed to the Gods (if we are sane), but now called "reason". Jaynes regards this as the emergence of consciousness itself, which is not what I want to take up in this post. What I like about Jaynes is that he sees language in a dynamic light, evolving and building up over time toward some critical point where the modern mind (along with "civilization") emerges.

There is no particular reason to locate these two faculties at some location in the brain and this is perhaps Jaynes main mistake - built in to his terminology. But we can understand his arguments very well without referring back to his neurological ideas. In fact, he rarely does so himself. You could go through his book and translate "Left Brain" as "Kidney" and "Right Brain" as "big toe" without impacting the meaning of what he's saying.

What we regard as "truth", at least in the Western traditions, is a linguistic concept. The "most" true statements are those of mathematics, which can be "proven". As Wittgenstein famously pointed out, such proofs are basically moves in a language game, where everyone agrees to the rules and agrees about what is "proven" in dialogue. As Hofstadter points out in Surfaces and Essences, the concept of language can be broadened to include the "models" of Physics - the underlying idea is metaphor and analogy.

Jaynes, Hofstadter and others point out that language is a huge labyrinth of metaphor. We "bootstrap" our store of metaphors as children (Jaynes is particularly good at describing how this bootstrap process works) and we proceed to produce the vast store in our heads - tens of thousands of words. It is in this language that our "inner voice" speaks. If our inner voice proclaims something to be true, it does so according to the impenetrable rules of the language that has been programmed into our brains. In the vast majority of cases, the beleivability of that inner voice comes from uncounted assumptions and analogies buried in the language it speaks. For example, if my inner voice calls someone a "nigger" in my head, that one word carries centuries if history and thousands of voices. It will make no sense to me to say to the inner voice: No, that person is not a "nigger". In fact, given the language that is being spoken, such a question makes no sense.

If you think that "1" is a solution to "x squared minus one equals zero", you speak the language of mathematics. If it seems sensible to say "I think, therefore I am", you have learned to talk like Descartes. Like him, you will regard that statement as self-evidently true. Those who fail to see the statement as self-evident are used to speaking a different language in a whole different culture which, for example, may regard the "self" as an illusion. Such a statement would make no sense to Descartes. It's not a matter of "truth" outside of the rules of the "language game". Descartes spoke the language of the religion of his time, which regarded the soul as the "self" -- the "self evident" starting point for any discussion of what is "real".

Is there any other way we can reach the "truth"? Jaynes says there is: that "right brain" which sees the truth but speaks it to the "left brain". It's better to characterize this source of perception as some kind of holistic or aesthetic sense that goes beyond language and perhaps precedes language historically. It is an open question whether this "right brain" (or big toe) processing works according to analogy. I think it's better to say it works by hard wired recognition of symmetry, but that is another topic.

For example, this "right brain" truth pops up when we say a certain combination of notes "sounds right" or a scene is breathtakingly beautiful. It certainly shouts loudly at us when we judge another human being to be beautiful, honest or friendly.

This simple observation leads me to some wide-ranging conclusions.

• By definition, we cannot expect language to reach into non-linguistic "truth". Western philosophy, including that of Dennett, even when purged of "wild junk", has nothing to say about "truth" revealed by our innate mental capacity to judge certain experiences as special and valuable.
• Zen, emphasizes direct aesthetic perception and takes pains to isolate and ignore the "inner voice". There is no reason to prefer one path over the other. In fact, I'm perfectly happy to leave the whole idea of "truth" to the language experts and seek for other words that reflect the judgement of my "right brain". This consideration is a much needed justification for being open to Zen.
• Our "right brains" have a shared language, a culture and a history of their own, referred to as "art". I would also contend that they have a built-in "language" of their own - perhaps reaching back far into the past, perhaps part of the very definition of life itself. Even when the "art" in question is expressed in language (the novel for example), quality judgement are made by standards that are difficult to express in the language of logic, although critics struggle endlessly to do so.
• We need to distinguish between what is "real" and what is "true". Truth is the umpire's call in the language game. Reality is what remains after all alternatives are ruled out.

There is another road to "truth", described in our language as "Science". Advances in Scientific knowledge are made chiefly through language - vigorously expanding our vocabulary. There are maybe 180,000 words in the English language (give or take). Scientific journals add a few more with every published article. Moreover, Science is constantly adding new models of reality. The first of these was "Euclidean Space". More recently, Feynman Diagrams have added to our ability to "picture" and discuss quantum reactions. Many things are easily "said" with pictures but almost impossible to "say" with words. However, these pictures ("maps") obey the same principles as language as discussed by Hofstadter and Jaynes. All lovers of maps and models will agree that there is a strong element of aesthetic beauty in a good map. 

There is also a strong aesthetic motive in Science as a whole, most eloquently described in "The Beautiful Question" by Frank Wilczek. Wilczek makes a strong case that the universe really is governed by symmetric principles, which also appeal strongly to our sense of what "looks right" (this is a right-brain kind of "looking right"). In other words, our taste for symmetry is a reliable guide to what is real.

So, in Science all three roads to the truth come together. 

Julian Jaynes - The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Daniel Dennett likes to give Jaynes the benefit of the doubt: “There were a lot of really good ideas lurking among the completely wild junk.”

(one might say the same of Dennett, but that is another essay ...)

"Origin" is an important book. It inspires more notes than will fit in a single post. A sympathetic portrait of the rather quirky Julian James can be found here. Jaynes was somewhat obsessed loner -- a "one book wonder" -- who spent his life chasing a rather off-beat idea of what it is to be conscious.

As his title indicates, Jaynes tackles the issue of consciousness. The "Hard" problem of Consciousness is, Why does it feel the way it does? How can a lump of "stuff", no matter how complex its structure and function feel anything?

I agree with the general consensus that Jaynes doesn't solve or even address the hard problem but, like the others, comes closer by helping to understand what consciousness is in the first place. His book is full of remarkable insight into the way his mind works, along with the results of a massive research project conducted mostly on his own, involving sources one suspects are "cherry picked" to support his thesis.

Jaynes' theories are complex, deep, well-documented and surprising. A summary can be found here.

For the moment, I'd like to focus on one of his central ideas, that consciousness (for most of us) consists of a constant chatter "in our heads". Who is the speaker? Who is the listener? Jaynes was a clinical psychologist and suspects that there is a relationship between the hallucinatory voices heard in schizophrenia and these voices that chatter endlessly in the heads of ordinary people. He refers extensively to left brain/right brain ideas that were current at the time, but there is no strong reason for preferring his neurological "explanation" of the voices - the voices are undoubtedly there and undoubtedly have some neurological underpinning - the exact nature of this underpinning can await modern FMRI studies which typically don't shed a great deal of light on the "big picture". I should parenthetically mention Hofstadter's "I Am  A Strange Loop", which has something to say about the ability of the mind to host or "boot up" virtual people. Hofstadter's insights are valuable but make no reference to brain structure.

Jaynes has a deep appreciation for metaphor and how language is "boot strapped" from analogy. This insight is worked out in detail in Hofstadter's "Surfaces and Essences". Strangely, Hofstadter makes no references to Jaynes in his otherwise massive index and notes, but if there is credit to be allocated for this fundamental insight, it would seem to go to Jaynes. Jaynes makes a serious effort to dig into the evolution of language based on metaphor, showing how our common language has roots that go back thousands of years to language that was, in many ways, simpler and more literal. We see the modern perception of "self" as, for example, as being in a space behind the eyes, as something that emerged over time. As with Jaynes' excursions into neurophysiology, the details are not as important as the insight itself. These metaphors didn't come from nowhere. They evolved over time. The language that we now take for granted has vast and deep roots in the past. The fascinating corollary is that there must have been a time when language lacked such vast and deep roots. Jaynes asks, What would it be like to be a primitive human when these "voices" started to talk in your head? It is a classic example of an "impertinent question" that leads to some surprising perspective. As the title hints, it provides a way to reconstruct the history of consciousness, or at least the history of a very important component of consciousness - that inner voice. Along the way, Jaynes develops a radically original theory of the history of religion. He believes that the "inner voices" were originally perceived as very intimate personal or tribal "gods" - the voice of the dead "king". This is what he calls the "bicameral" mind - one consisting of the "voice" (perceived as external and independent) and the "listener". This mode of perception broke down as societies became larger and more complex (the "breakdown"), leading to the gods becoming more remote - their "voices" being heard only by special individuals (the priesthood). For students of religion, this is a valuable addition to the way we think of how religions come to be. Anyone who studies religion sees historical evolution as an important aspect of the subject.

It is possible to challenge Jaynes' insight or at least to ask if our modern dialogue with this "inner voice" is "consciousness". Mindfulness meditation is specifically aimed to distance the "mind" (whatever that is) from that inner chatter. It does so not by silencing the chatter, but by creating a state of mind that observes the chatter dispassionately, in effect recovering the ability to "be" the listener and simply be aware of the chatter coming from the internal "speaker". This results in a state of consciousness that is aware of all the other "contents" of the mind - sensations and observations that are stripped of the judgement inherent in the chatter of the inner voice. All this means that Mindfulness has something to say about Jaynes' theories and vice versa.

Jaynes claims that humans were not conscious prior to the appearance of primitive language. Before consciousness could emerge (defined by Janyes as identical to our dialogue with the "inner voice"), there was a period where the "inner voice" simply told the person what to do. The listener simply obeyed the inner voice without question. That was the period of "the bicameral mind". However, it would seem that Jaynes has made the error that philosophers often do: identifying
"thinking" with language and thinking with consciousness. Once the philosopher can think of a few hundred pages of detailed things to say about language, he feels he has "solved" the problem of consciousness. We see the same problem in Dennett's efforts (Dennett actually does reference Jaynes). But this begs the  question, Is consciousness more than language? Does it provide the answer to the question, what is it like to be a dog? Jaynes would seem to say that dog and a paleolithic human would have pretty much the same experience of "consciousness", namely none. Philosophers have a blind spot similar to those who imagine that all of us have an "inner eye", in which we can call up a picture of an imagined scene. Most of us do, many of us don't. The same goes with the centrality of language to "thinking" and consciousness itself.

Jaynes provides unique and valuable insight into what is, for humans at least, an important component of consciousness and the mind in general. The language component of consciousness (the inner voice) makes human consciousness a societal, cultural phenomenon. The inner voice is "programmed" with millennia of deep, convoluted metaphors - many totally lost to history.. When  "think" or speak, I do so with a language that has embedded housands of metaphors reflecting the insight of generations that went before me. This is an important reason - perhaps the reason - why the human mind is so remarkable - it's not just one mind but many. We can also see why it was necessary for the "many mind" effect to take root in a large and relatively stable population before it could become as deep and powerful as what we now regard as a "language". There was a critical mass that may have been reached (as Jaynes would claim) about the time humans invented agriculture. Before that, what we see in archaeology is a very slow progress in technology presumably reflecting a slow progress in the effectiveness of the human mind, quite possibly a symptom of a primitive, limited language. Before that, for a long time, humans were learning from each other the way Chimpanzees so - by imitation ("instrumental" learning)./ I imagine that a relatively small tribe could develop rudimentary language only to be wiped out by any number of factors, breaking the continuity of metaphor-building so essential in deep language.

We see the same effect in computer software, where each generation of programmers can access the "subroutines" developed by others to solve new problems without being concerned with how or why the details are being worked out "under the surface". This leads to an exponential growth in the expressiveness and power of computer programming. :"Critical mass" is achieved when the vast number of programmers are working with a common "class library" that embodies the continuous efforts of thousands of forgotten individuals who solved the basic problems that "stay solved".

Bottom line, Although taken seriously in Jaynes' lifetime and still popular in pop psychology, "bicameralism" is no longer taken seriously in professional circles. But I think that Jaynes opened up the dialogue about "mind" in very promising directions. Perhaps he will eventually be seen like Freud and Columbus - wrong about most details but right in setting off in new directions.

Where Is The Mind?

I must apologize to the reader in advance for what will seem to be a rather difficult set of ideas laid out in this post. At the outset, I want to lay out some ideas that are basic to me but strange to many. These ideas are developed more fully in other posts in the series and specifically in Zen philosophy an the Western version of it (Mindfulness). I am deeply influenced by Hofstadter and Dennett, whose ideas are strange, radically new and far from obvious.

• I take it that "mind" and "soul" both refer to the experience we all have of being "something". An essential idea of all religions is that this "something" survives death and is therefore separable from the body. I believe this to be mistaken, but I am left with the problem of "locating" the mind.
• Skeptics who reject the religious view tend to take it for granted that the mind is an "epiphenomenon" of the brain - somehow arising from the interaction of billions of neurons in our heads. I think this is also mistaken. You need a brain to have a mind but that is not all you need. In fact, we can learn a great deal about "mind" without reference to the brain at all.

Our theories about reality "bootstrap" themselves by searching for appropriate analogy. Very often, we forget that we are dealing with an analogy and we confuse the phenomenon itself with what we think it is "like". For example, electromagnetic waves are "like" waves in water - an analogy that lead people to postulate the luminous ether, the "something" that "waves". In fact, waves such as the electromagnetic fields are not "in" anything, but it took a great deal of experiment and intellectual struggle to figure out that these fields area a new "thing", quite unlike anything else.

Ideas about mind and soul depend on an analogy. We seem to wear our bodies like we wear our clothes, or ride around in our heads just behind our eyes. If we treat this analogy as fact, not metaphor, it is a short step to picture ourselves shedding the clothing of the body or stepping out from behind our eyes into a life beyond death.

The "epiphenomenon" idea seems more sophisticated but it's also an analogy - most recently treating the brain as a kind of computer. We know that computer logic can be amazingly sophisticated but it's ultimately built on zeros and ones. The analogy proceeds by painting the picture of neurons as being "like" bits in a computer, even though the neuron is totally unlike a memory bit in a computer. In fact, the neuron is an analog device and a living thing in its own right. A massively complex computer program can simulate the behaviour of a neuron, but only so far as we understand how neurons work (which is a work in progress). There is no evidence that neurons work together to produce mental phenomena in anything "like" the way computers "compute". The fact is that our brains are not "like" computers at all but we are hard pressed to say what they are like, so the computer analogy is better than nothing.

Even if we don't have a computer in mind, the "epiphenomenon" idea is also an analogy. We know that properties of matter "emerge" mysteriously as complexity grows. For example, we can't explain even simple properties of water using quantum physics that "explains" behaviour of sub-atomic particles. Nor can we "explain" the weather knowing all about water. But this is basically an argument from ignorance. Saying that the mind somehow "emerges" from the complex behaviour of neurons is simply saying we don't know where this behavior comes from but it "must" come from the brain somehow-therefore it does. But there are lots of other things around for the mind to emerge from. Why just the brain?

We can't really escape the need to explain one set of phenomena using an analogy with other things. This is simply he way our minds work - it is the structure of our ideas. Fortunately for us, reality itself seems to somehow "prefer" ideas we also find beautiful and attractive - we find fruitful new ideas by the close examination of reality itself, ultimately saving us from building our picture of the world out of pure fantasy. One task of the modern intellectual is to build up a store of phenomena that are unique in themselves - not "like" anything else. Quantum mechanics bristles with phenomena like this and can be used in new analogies as long as we don't forget these are analogies. I will soon get around to sketching an idea that consciousness itself is "like" a quantum field but I am not saying it is a quantum field. The mind is something quite different - it's a thing of its own. Paradoxically, it is the "thing" we know best but we are like fish who cannot discover water.

How can we escape the assumption that our minds are in our heads? I claim, along with Douglas Hofstadter that language is the royal road to the mind. If we want to know about how the mind works and where the mind lives, we can learn a lot by studying how language works. Hofstadter claims that language is a tapestry of analogies.  These analogies are "like" the classes that build computer logic or the categories of formal logic. But Hofstadter exposes the limitation of this analogy. To put it simply: language is not logic. Language is a "thing" in its own right. In fact, language turns out to be an important special case of powerful analogy-making which includes the powerful analogies behind totally new ideas like Relativity. It is important to remember that language is about something. It is not "floating free": it is anchored in shared human experience in the world.

I don't think analogy is the whole story. Daniel Dennett has pursued a parallel hunt for the essence of thought and his most recent vision is outline in  From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds. Dennett and Hofstadter together have provided us with a new "toolkit" of "things" that the mind might be "like". In Dennett's case, the Richard Dawkin's vague analogy that ideas might be "like" genes (the "meme") has been sharpened down to the point where we can see that "ideas" exist in the world without anyone "having" them. You might cautiously say that they have a "life of their own",  quite independent of the human minds that "hold" them. This echoes the fundamental Zen idea that the mind is nothing but ideas and sensations - the mind doesn't have ideas and sensations: the mind is ideas and sensations. 

So where does Quantum Mechanics come in to it? Once you get past "undergraduate" physics, you are let in on the dirty secret that particles don't exist. There are only "fields". Particles such as quarks are a useful fiction. The equations of Quantum Mechanics refer only to fields. A field is something that has a value in every point in space. So the analogy goes like this: culture (especially language) is "out there" with a life of its own. We perceive it by virtue of its effect on our brains. Loosely speaking, our minds are the "collapse" of the culture wave, just as particles are the "collapse" of the Shrodinger wave equation.

This leaves us on the brink of making the luminous ether error: wondering what the "culture field" is "in". Of course, the Shrodinger wave is not "in" anything, but is the "culture field" "in" our brains? If so, this almost brings us back to thinking our minds are in our brains - or perhaps in lots of brains operating in loose cooperation. This is where Dennett comes in. Ideas exist without anyone "having" them. This is a totally new insight and hard to grasp without actually checking in with Dennett in the talk cited above (or better yet the book).

Or is it new? I'm reminded of Plato's world of "ideals". To Plato, the world of ideas (especially geometry) was what was "real" and the rest was illusion - an illusion made necessary by he limitations of minds of mere mortals. The idea is tempting. Where does mathematics "live" in the Universe? The Universe seems to "obey" mathematical rules. Are these rules part of the universe or do they have a home of their own? It's quite clear that mathematics can dream up worlds that are perfectly consistent but don't happen to correspond to the Universe we inhabit. Is mathematics a figment of the human mind (the brain)? It seems intuitively clear that mathematics is somehow "discovered" and not simply "invented". It is "out there" somehow but not in our heads and not in the physical Universe. Physicists have no trouble imagining a universe where he "laws" are different, but they don't imagine a universe in which 1+1 is not 2.

Perhaps language, culture and the mind are "like" mathematics. They have a structure and a reality of their own, without a "medium" in space and time.

Let me bring it all together with a question. Obviously I need a brain to think - to "have" a mind. But what is it that I "have"? Is it nothing but the sensations of the world, plus the ideas "floating around" in the sea of culture into which the mind is born? Is it possible that the ultimate reality of mind lies not between my ears but "out there" in the world of ideas, ultimately grounded in realty itself? Or maybe grounded in physical reality but not entirely dependent on physical reality. Do our minds have an independent existence like the facts of mathematics?

Bootstraps

I can never tell if my "hits" are from robots or human beings. Please do me a huge favor and leave a comment, however short, to tell me someone is out there reading this stuff ...

I owe Hofstadter a huge debt of gratitude for his "Surfaces and Essences" and, to a lesser extent "I Am a Strange Loop". He points out the central role that analogy plays in our thinking and, in Strange Loop, the fact that we "bootstrap" our idea of what it is to be human through an analogy between our own experience and that of others.  Our conviction that the world is full of folks like us and that we are a person such as those around us is ultimately based on analogy.

We then proceed to endlessly refine this most fundamental of analogies. What is it like to be somebody else? Let me explain what it is like to be me. I wonder what it would be like to be James Bond? Or Superman? Or God?

Such curiosity leads us quickly into deep trouble.

By analogy, we ask ourselves how the world came about and why things happen in it. By analogy we imagine a person or persons "behind the scenes" controlling everything. Like us, "he" has plans, a will, and who knows what abilities. Like us, he can be persuaded, flattered, angered. Like us, he has a strong sense of what is right and wrong - rules that are often beyond the ken of his "children".

It is hard for us to imagine an alternative source of all the phenomena in the universe. We have no choice but to build on what we know - to extend our analogies into realms where they become less and less apt. Or, in the words of Hofstadter, farther and farther from the "essence" of the matter.

I saw this in High School, where we were told that the atom is "like" a little Solar System, with electrons whizzing around the nucleus. This is impossible, as we soon learned in University Physics, but what is actually happening is hard to grasp (some say impossible) since the atom is not like anything in our experience.

We find the same problem with issues in astronomy and cosmology, where we leave the world of everyday experience behind. We cannot wrap our minds around the "Big Bang" theory, because it requires something to begin without anything at all happening before that. What category of phenomena does that belong to? And what about dark matter? What we see is gravitation without any kind of "stuff" like anything we know.

In a way, Science is all about discovering totally new categories: things, events, relationships that have no parallel in our previous experience. One subtle pleasure I have experienced since my High School days is to sit in on lectures by people who are comfortable with what the atom really is. Each new example like this opens so many doors ...

The Miracle of Language

Surfaces and Essences

I have known my wife for almost 50 years. I'm still only vaguely aware of what it is "like" to be her. But language is a big help. I know what it is like when her back hurts and how she feels when the neighbors block our driveway. But some things I will never understand, such as the way she intercepts everything on its way to the recycle bin and thinks of ways to use it in her Kindergarten class. But here, language comes to the rescue. We invent a word. A private word that is known only to her and me.

KINDERGARBAGE. 

We have invented a new name for a situation, thus creating a bridge between her mind and mine. We both know what kindergarbage is. It's a new category. We both recognize when any particular object is in this category, although she is much more inclusive than I am.

"Surfaces and Essences" is about the magic of language - specifically our ability to instantly form  new categories and instantly recognize them by analogy.

If you want to know what I'm thinking, you don't need to stick my head into an fMRI machine. No amount of wiggly lines on an EEG will tell you. If you want to know what I'm thinking, I'll tell you.

And to plant an idea in your mind, I don't need to stick your head in some kind of Science Fiction contraption. Just listen. I'll tell you.

The ultimate question, the hard question of consciousness is, What is this thing peering out from my eyes? How do I explain what it is like to be me? How is it that it makes sense for me to ask what it is like to be you, but not to ask what it is like to be a chair?

If we are to approach the issue scientifically, we need to look at data. Lots of it. Language is uniquely generated by minds and uniquely able to change minds. We all have access to tons of it and can generate more examples without limit.

Hofstadter and Sander have collected and analyzed a vast selection of language examples that reveal its deepest secrets: it's Essence. In so doing, they have arrived at the audacious claim:

"The human ability to make analogies lies at the root of all our concepts, and how concepts are selectively evoked by analogies. In a word, we wish to show that analogy is the fuel and fire of thinking" (page 4)

The Ravenous Brain - Daniel Bor

The Ravenous Brain

Bor loves the "Prefrontal parietal cortex" PPC, which he identifies as the seat of "working memory". In turn, the concept of awareness, consciousness and working memory a so closely intertwined that research in any of these subjects is, by default, research in all the others.

In this book, he makes a strong case. It turns out that we can be conscious while missing big chunks of our brain. Evidence from such sad situations, along with EEG and fMRI studies, allow us to zero in on the brain functions that are necessary and sufficient for consciousness. Bor provides extensive examples of experiments that reveal the limits of consciousness and how it can be "taken apart" in various ways.

One of is central ideas is "chunking". He visualizes working memory has having a limited capability to handle "chunks" - perhaps just 4 at a time (whatever "chunks" are). To deal with this limit, the brain (mainly the PPC), detects patterns (chunks) that can be manipulated as one. For example, 4 lines may be lumped together as a rectangle. In his sense, Bor's "chunks" are what we'd call "patterns". Once formed, such chunks can be stored (somehow) in the rest of the brain and re-used in subsequent tasks performed in working memory. Thus, General Relativity can become just one "thing" in some situations.

Other examples in the book invite a different analogy. The "chunk" can be a "subroutine", such as an algorithm for muscle movements that form a good tennis swing. Once formed, the whole swing can be "packed away" and executed as a single "chunk'.

As I understand it, the theory is that the prefrontal lobes (what's usually though of as the seat of "executive function" or decision making) get involved only if we need to puzzle out a new way of "chunking" current experience. On the other hand, it seems like Bor is claiming that this part of the brain is always active when a person is conscious.

Comparing to Hofstader's claim that analogy is the fuel of thought, it would appear that the formation and application of categories by analogy would be compatible with Bor's theory, although Bor would quite reasonably regard categories (as chunks) and analogy (as the process that creates chunks) as special cases. Bor claims words as "chunks" but makes no extensive claims about language in general.

Interestingly, Bor is a big fan of meditation as a way to "flex our consciousness muscle" and improve general mental health. He ties many mental illnesses to problems with working memory and discusses the effect that various drugs have on these conditions.

Bor's theories are necessarily confined to his experimental tools, meaning that his core theories are about brain regions that "light up" in fMRI studies. This gives a relatively static picture of the brain and leads to a lot of talk about brain regions such as the PPC. More recent methods allow Susan Greenfield to watch "chunks"(active neural assemblies) fly around in the cortex in real time, hinting at somewhat different ways to visualize what Bor talks about mainly in broad generalizations about hypothetical communication between neurons. The resulting picture gets away from regions "lighting up" to something more akin to a huge fireworks display with "chunks" flying all over the brain, igniting other "chunks" in a spectacular chain reaction. Susan Greenfield's work also ties in closely with Bor's ideas about the effects of neurotransmitters, since a closer look at "chunk" activation shows that certain neurotransmitters are elevated in physically nearby brain regions on a very short time scale. Brain regions "lighting up" on fMRI scans are blurry image resulting in a time exposure of several seconds, when the real events are a light show something like those revealed at microsecond intervals.