The Language Based Interface (LamBDA) as a Communication Medium

 In this post, I summarize some of the conclusions that come out of the LamBDA issue controversy. To find out what LamBDA actually is, check here.  This post deals with the current controversy, which is whether "LamBDA" or any similar creation can be "sentient." Spoiler alert: noting we are doing now places us on the road to creating a sentient machine.

A sentient computer would be like a sentient book.

Computers talk to us like books, TV, and phones talk to us. 

Talking computers descend from centuries of effort that have given us talking parrots.

When we see intelligent words coming out of a computer, our natural instinct is to attribute sentience to the computer. We will get over it, just as we got over our amazement at words coming from the first telephone.  Or a parrot.

Under normal circumstances, I use words to cause mental events in your mind. This depends on both understanding the language and having a reasonably similar experience of life. In this way, language is a means of communication between two sentient beings.

If I use a megaphone or a telephone to communicate with you, this has not changed.  Here, I use an incredibly sophisticated suite of technologies to communicate with you.  Here, it will not occur to you to think that these words are coming from some element of that technology, such as a word processor AI. For example, you will assume there is some kind of conscious intent behind all this, and likewise, I assume that you are a sentient being.

Google developed LamBDA for an automated way to summarize what you get when you submit a Google query.   That would be part of "many-to-many" communication that originates with human beings who have the intention of communicating something in perhaps many ways to many human other beings. Yet, the technical "bucket brigade" between them and you is still no more "sentient" than your TV set.  And, again, the "information" under the system matters more than the presentation. One might argue that wrapping it in a "conversation" may make the whole thing more credible than it should be.

LamBDA is not only an "intelligent" speaker but also an "intelligent" "listener" and "learner."  The ability of LamBDA to "listens" and "learn" represents the current state of the art in natural language processing that is half a century old. "Training" consists of tweaking a vast array of parameters until the machine starts getting the right answers (or talking) in the desired way. Apple's SIRI and Amazon's Alexa are products of this engineering effort. This would be fairy magic in 1970. It is now routine.

Our family tree includes leaves. The computer's family tree includes door knobs*.

The building blocks of sentience are a special case of what happens everywhere in our bodies--electro-chemical reactions and large molecules like proteins. This is the same "took kit" we see in photosynthesis. 

What happens in a brain does not, as commonly imagined, resemble what happens in a computer. 

Our brain has more in common with a tree than with a computer. To put it yet another way, the simulation of a single protein reaction, let alone a cell or a tree, is far beyond the current state of the art. The problem is that "calculation" and "life" are fundamentally different things.

A computer belongs to a family of objects we regard as "tools" - useful for some human purpose. A simple example of an ancient "computer" is a doorknob. It is locked or not--a switch. The diagram at right shows how transistors implement a "gate." This is what a computer "means" by "yes or no." The Internet is a vast collection of electronic doorknobs.

It is only a human's understanding of a doorknob that makes it a doorknob. A doorknob doesn't "know" it's a doorknob.

LamBDA - A Stochastic Parrot

The more you know about LamBDA, the less impressive it becomes. 

LamBDA is the "front end" of a system cobbled together by Lemoine.  Blake Lemoine, one of Google's most skilled engineers, used years of effort and hundreds of interactions to create what should really be called something like a "Lemoine Machine."It is wrong to think of Blake's LamBDA as a single "thing" or entity. It is a setup that includes a LamBDA instance (version). Let me call it LM - Lemboines machine.  LamBDA itself is an experimental technology that implements a natural language interaction with a body of knowledge. The "body of knowledge" is what we are "talking to." It is equally important to know how Lemoine trained LM to talk the way we hear in the only public conversation available.  He has "cherry-picked" just one of many hundreds of "chats." Nobody will ever see more samples of these chats, nor will anyone ever see a new sample. LM, like Blake, no longer works for Google. 

LM is an instance of a long series of LM's, each tweaked by Lemoine to talk about an unspecified of knowledge that is interesting to Lemoine, who is a bit of a mystic. As an engineer, Lemoine tweaks not only what his creation says but how it says it. Lemoine deeply resents the fact that Google, as an organization, is hostile to his "religious" convictions.

Blake made himself famous by claiming to create a "sentient" machine. What Lemoine says about "LamBdA" comes from Blake, wearing his "preacher hat." We must remember that Blake is a professional mystic, trained in what we might call "leaps of faith."

What LamBDA itself "says" is what other people have said that Blanke finds "interesting" and spoken in a way that satisfies Blake's engineering goals. The result is impressive but, to say the least, open to interpretation. 

"Training" of an AI is a sophisticated process, but we all know how we can use patient training to produce interesting results. Parrot training is the best-known example.

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*AI. The term "Artificial Intelligence" is unfortunate. Originally, it meant a computer program that did something that would, in a human, require "intelligence." The computer program is acting as if it had intelligence (but it really doesn't).  "An AI" has come to mean a computer application that is specifically NOT "intelligent" in how a human is intelligent. In fact, "intelligent" computers arrive at "intelligent" behavior that is notably NOT analogous to the way humans "think." This has been the core insight of the effort from the start.

"Intelligence" itself is a slippery idea, but in this context, many people take it to mean "conscious" or "sentient," terms that are confidently applied only to a living creature. When we speak of "intelligent" machines, we refer to an engineering concept that never pretends to be anything else. In that sense, the "artificial" in AI can always be omitted. An "AI" is just a product of clever engineerings like a camera or a drone. Perhaps we should use "Intelligent Door Knob" - IDK. We should at least stop using "artificial" to mean its opposite.

Voice Recording - "Zen ..."

 Misuse of language

• Law
• Belief
• Signaling that I am a member of the group
• Do Biologists "believe" in evolution like Fundamentalists don't?

Ordinary "belief" depends on a structure of related inferences - "evidence" as opposed to motivated reasoning - totally linguistic. Scientific "evidence" refers to real experience. Religious "evidence" is based on philosophical reasoning (at best).

"Survival of the fittest" is a circular concept. "Variation" is the mechanism of evolution. Hard to refute that variation exists...

What does it mean to "believe" in God? At its base, it's a system of appeasing spirits through traditional ceremonies. If you don't believe in prayer, what kind of "God" remains? If you don't think God is active in history, are you misusing the "God" concept? Do you mean God=physics?

The ground of all Being - Tillich. Video here. Is "ground of all being" analogous to the "Tao"?

Hard to find a clearer example of wordy religion than the three-volume "Systematic Theology" - by Tillich. There is a strong hint that Tillich suspects the futility of language.

Problems with Zen ...

What is the point? Many presentations imply that "Zen" is being a nice person.

Is this the Theology of Wonder? But I hate anything that smacks of "theology". 

I seek certain experiences and avoid others. Mindfulness and Zen provide a way to find the "sweet spot" - a base for everything else. Selflessness but total awareness of "self". The way the moment is so much richer than our fantasies and shades of the past.

Is it time to avoid terminology, as I did with Christianity? By using such terminology, I drag myself into association with individuals who understand the terminology in a radically different way, especially since a core principle of Zen (from Taoism) is that terminology is ultimately futile.

Is Artificial Intelligence Stuck in the Language Bubble?

"Artifical Intelligence" raises more questions far outside the field of technology.

As one who has spent a full career in "Information Technology", I can testify that "IT" is directly or indirectly about language. New languages and new development environments come and go, but they all boil down to the interpretation of text.

As Mitchell's book teaches us, even "deep learning" models that "recognize" faces ultimately depend on masses of text - even "languages" whose vocabulary is nothing but ones and zeros.

This touches on a problem that has been recognized for thousands of years, most notably by Buddha and Lao Tsu (founders of Buddhism and Taoism respectively) and recently by Ludwig Wittgenstein, that "language", no matter how clever or deep, only stands for reality. It is about reality but it is not reality itself. You may say that this points to a fundamental problem that we may share with machines - "software" can never be more than a "description" of reality. However, unlike machines, our knowledge of the world relies on the fact that we are flesh and blood participants in the world. Billions of years of evolution have made us objects in the world that react and learn in ways that go far beyond knowledge. To cite a simple example, our hearts beat perfectly well for millions of years before we discovered the circulation of blood. The same goes for our "understanding" of the world, which seems to mostly take place "under the surface".

Mitchell gives us a snapshot history of the futile effort to make a list of everything a human "knows" by "common sense". The effort mostly shows the sad fact that computer programmers should read more philosophy. To mention just one example, Hofstader's "Surfaces and Essences" sketches out the way that virtually infinite bits of "knowledge" can be spun out from the sparse base of human experience by analogy - the engine of thought. Computers need to be "taught" to recognize analogies, such as whether there is a car in the picture. They are terrible at it. And what you get, in the end, is a clunky attempt of the computer to "learn" from thousands of people to "recognize" categories that it is utterly unable to recognize on its own.

It's even worse than that. As philosophers endlessly point out, human categories are somewhat arbitrary - suited for the unique situation that humans find themselves in the world. A chair is only a chair if you are a human that knows about sitting. 

Roots

I have lately become impressed with the what's going on in the brain. Learning more about the small details, I wind up asking myself about the "big picture" that these details reveal. I'm a visual kind of guy, so I'm thinking about a picture something like this:

Neural network in the brain

That picture is showing main connections only - myelinated "high speed" connections. The actual picture would be a packed tangle of axons and dendrites - for example, the massive wad of connections that make up the "white matter" in the brain, connecting (on average) each neuron in the neocortex with 1,000 other neurons.

White Matter in the Brain is a Wad of Connections

Where else do we see something like that?

Roots in the Forest Floor

There is a tangle of roots under our feet in the forest floor. We usually see the big ones that manage to break the surface and threaten to trip us up, but the network is much more extensive, especially in a thriving "old growth" forest. We have recently found that trees are not just sucking up water and nutrients. They are communicating with each other through their root system.

I'm a sucker for analogy. It's natural for me to ask: what is the brain "sucking up" through its "root" system. Obviously, the nervous system is in the business of conveying information from the world (and inside the organism) to other parts of the organism - especially the central nervous system. Information is also being conveyed in the opposite direction - not only to allow us to wiggle our fingers but also to modify how our eyes "see" the world (roughly helping the eyes see things that "matter").

We, as conscious beings, owe our consciousness to our roots in the real world. Our root system is designed on a very fine level to suck every bit of precious information from that world. To take the example of the ganglia* in the eye, we have 20 different ganglia types, extracting 20 different types of information from the raw information provided by the retina. It's easy to think of a few types of information that might be extracted, such as a 2-dimensional map of 3 different colors plus black and white (that's the 4 different types of photoreceptors--rods and cones--in the eye). We imagine that like the image going from our camera retina to the camera memory. What else? At this point, we can only guess. Maybe something like this:

• Day and night - time to sleep, time to wake
• Faces
• Weather
• Sun location - where am I? What time is it?
• Movement - comparison with one image with another a fraction of a second later
• Repeating shapes 
• Shapes of known objects
• Basic "camera" adjustments such as the need to increase or decrease exposure, image sharpness, saturation ...
• Compensation for the fact that the eyes are always moving 

We are all familiar with the experience that something we are looking for, perhaps our car keys, mysteriously seem to "pop out" from the jumble of other things in our field of view. Just two hops from raw data from the photoreceptors - a few centimeters -- our brains extend neurons that are hungrily extracting "meaning". "Upstream" from the visual system, we find brain systems looking for enemies, mating opportunities and chances to maintain status in the group.

Like a tree, we are sucking up what we need to survive. We have left it to the plants and the animals that eat plants to take care of our nutritional needs. We live or die on our ability to extract information from the world. Being "rooted" in the world is perhaps the best metaphor to help us think of our relationship to the world - the "mind-body problem".

Our "roots" analogy can be applied at another level: DNA and evolution.

We may regard the entire history of evolution as the story of life groping in "reality" to find a niche, a body plan and a pattern of reacting the environment that "works". 

Similarly, we can use the same concept with human languages.

We may think of languages as groping through the world of human experience (E) to find an effective way to share the matrix of experience within a culture. Shared experience is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for what we might call a scientific apprehension of "reality". In any case, this capability seems to be important enough for nature to devote significant parts of our central nervous system to communicate using language.

Of course, the idea applies to the worlds of imagination such as religion, where an entire culture gropes in vain for some kind of sensible, self-consistent way of speaking about a realm that is entirely fictitious.

The Chaotic Imaginary World of Christianity

* You can learn about ganglia in the visual system from Episode 39 of Rob Reid's "After On" Podcast "Restoring Sight to the Blind"

Questions Darwin Almost Asked

Darwin got a lot of miles out of noticing a few things and documenting them in excruciating detail:

• Tremendous natural variation among and within species and even "races" or varieties. This is the "engine" of change. That's just a fact. Today we know about DNA mutations, transcription errors and many other reasons for variation. Variation itself is "in your face" -- obvious.
• The mathematical fact that left to themselves, any species would reproduce to cover the Earth. There must be some reason this doesn't happen. Darwin mentioned a lot of reasons, including scarcity of resources, predators, environmental change and more.
• Descent with modification - the "family tree" of life that is the basis of modern biology.
• "Natural Selection", to Darwin, simply meant the fact that every animal is put to the test along with all other members of its species - indeed all occupants of its environment in the contest for survival. It's a brutal contest and survival is the exception rather than the rule. Many characterize this idea as "survival of the fittest", but that's a drastic simplification. In many minds, it "explained," the "survival" of the superior "white guy" over others who were unlucky enough to compete with whites over the ground they happened to be occupying. Triumph of the "whites" was evidence enough to "prove" the superiority of the white race. But Darwin's idea was much broader and powerful than this. It's best to think of it the way he thought of it: a ruthless competition with countless players resulting in constant change, including survival and extinction of entire species.

Of course, Darwin famously included human beings in his "family tree" and that resulted in a lot of controversy. What was overlooked in this controversy is that, yes, "Natural Selection" applies to humans and probably explains a lot about what we look like, but the kind of "selection" he was talking about still applies (especially to Englishmen) but not because of the individual superiority of design at the individual level. Englishmen were taking over the world because of superior technology*. 

Isn't the ability to apply "technology" in the struggle survival itself "evolved" in the classic Darwinian sense? Probably. I'd say this phase involved:

• Language (involving large, new brain structure) unique to humans
• The ability to cooperate, again involving new brain circuits unique to the great apes. This ability has, in the long run, allowed us to amass cooperative projects involving millions of individuals - usually to find clever ways to kill millions of "others".

More powerful innovations, such as writing or weapons design don't seem to have been the result of any change in the basic human "body plan", but simply new things that the improved human brain was good at learning.

So, for humans, the competition for survival boils down to the survival of a society or sometimes simple elements of technology such as the steamship, longbow, horseback riding or bronze weapons. And the competition is not simply "Darwinian" competition for resources: it is mainly competition against other humans. A hint of this fact is that we are the only species of "homo" to survive (out of dozens). Among species of homo, the competition is indeed brutal, in spite of supposedly superior evolutionary gifts, such as our big brains. For example, there is no particular reason why Neanderthal humans could not have survived perfectly well if it weren't for competition with "modern" humans. Certainly, there were other factors involved but the main one is probably competition with other species of homo with superior ability to organize in the lethal ways we still associate with gangs of humans.

Bottom line, humanity is a species of "last man standing" cultures competing with each other for survival as a culture. This competition is bad news for the "losers" in this competition and is even not great for individuals in the culture. "Successful" cultures in this competition burn up more resources, pollute more and become more dangerous to life on Earth.

"Cultural evolution" is not "Darwinian". "Classic" Evolutionary Theory applies to "fitness" of individual organisms, not cultures or groups of individuals. But Darwin's thinking leads us into some equally momentous conclusions (or at least theories) about our own situation. As with his original theories, the ideas are unsettling and controversial.

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* Evolution of the usual kind had blessed the European with relative immunity to diseases that devastated inhabitants of the Americas, but it was just dumb luck that the immunity advantage didn't work the other way around. The idea that some cultures (rather than races) are superior is shredded by Amartya Sen. Sen reaches the same dark conclusions as mine but through quite a different train of reasoning from a different set of facts.

The Challenge of Words

I encourage you to listen to the CBC Ideas segment:  Challenge of Words  about how language works according to those who use it expertly.  The discussion touches on several issues of interest for this blog:

• How we "think in words" and the language we think in makes a difference;
• How we use both pictures and words to express ideas. Pictures can be vague but words demand precision, even though precision is elusive;
• How words can be used to create a totally imaginary world;
• The importance to a writer to find at least one person who "gets it" - the need to write;
• Difficulty for the writer to meed the expectations of the reader for narrative and a story that "makes sense";
• How language is ultimately limited in its ability to express what we want to share.

Intelligibility and he Birth of Paradigm

"Paradigm" is a word that refers to the grand unifying ideas that underpin our understanding of a phenomenon - perhaps all phenomena. Paradigms shift slowly as the old "believers" die and a new generation is open to new ways of thinking.

"Understanding" in this case is mostly about language: about how we talk to each other. If two people  subscribe to the same paradigm what they say to each other is intelligible - it "makes sense". Challenges to the paradigm always come in the form of impertinent questions. Why impertinent? Because the question comes out of left field. It makes no sense.

A successful challenge to the paradigm expands and revises language itself, so that it becomes possible to speak in new ways that "make sense". In the new paradigm, the old language is no longer intelligible. For example, we don't expect to see references to "phlogiston" or the "luminous aether" in modern scientific journals because "we" no longer speak of fire as a substance and no longer think electromagnetic waves are waves in a substance.

Accordingly, we entertain a few "impertinent questions" in this blog, recognizing that, to many readers, such questions "make no sense". The challenge is not simply to convince the reader of a proposition that makes sense but doesn't seem "true", but to drag the reader into a new way of thinking and speaking. Extending language.

• One of the core questions asked in my blogs is "Assuming you need a brain to have a mind, is that all you need?" This challenges two paradigms - the religious claim that the "soul" is independent of the body and the skeptical one that claims that mind is an epiphenomenon of physical brain activity. For most readers, it's hard to imagine what a third alternative would look like.
• Another impertinent question asks if there is any reason to suspect that money measures value. The entire discipline of economics assumes that value is somehow measurable and that the best measure is money. I equate economics with astrology - a "science" based on fundamentally wrong assumptions about the way the world works. It's just a way for "economists" to talk to each other with words that they all agree "make sense". It's a paradigm.

Computers in Historial Context

Computer architecture represents the latest technology supporting some trends that go back a long, long way.

Whatever one might think of Jaynes' version of human history, he does get us thinking about the emergence of language. Obviously, there was a time when it was simpler and, if we don't blow ourselves up, it gets more rich and complex as we go along. I have a whole blog about "programming" the mind. Language plays a key part. Imagine language in software terms.

There are about 180,000 words in the English language. On the "back of a napkin", allowing for 10 bytes (characters) per word, that's 1.8 megabytes. If we imagine the Oxford English Dictionary to be equivalent to the "database software", it's 22,000 pages. allowing 1000 characters per page, that's 22 megabytes. In a very rough way, we could say that the "software" of the English Language is implemented in less than 50 megabytes - far less in any particular brain (but any particular brain can "install" a word from the base of 180,000 if that word is needed). Some claim that he human brain has a capacity in the petabyte (million megabyte) range, so 50 megabytes is negligible. Language represents a stunning amount of information compression. It's can also be seen as an impressive feat of information storage, even in the old form where "storage" was spread over hundreds or thousands of individual brains. The more brains used to store language "software" and database, the more information can be stored reliably (redundantly), leading to a further increase in the power of language to store and process information.

Writing things down improved our ability to standardize and stabilize language as a data storage mechanism.

We are close to the point where everything humans have ever written will be stored "online" in computers. The ability to process and "understand" all this information is steadily growing. It is fashionable to worry that computers are growing in their ability to "understand" all this information, but it's also true that humans are getting better at it too, with the help of computers.

The computer excels in some areas and falls flat in others. Whatever the "state of the art", it's obvious that computers have added another order of magnitude or three to our ability to store and process information. The importance of this leap is certainly similar to the invention of language or writing, both of which produced massive changes in the way humans lived their lives. For example, written language is more or less identical to what we call "civilization", the most recent 10,000 years of our 200,000 year history as Homo Sapiens.

Our ability to process information runs in parallel with two other trends: the invention of money and the emergence of "technology" - specifically our ability to build increasingly sophisticated real things. In both cases, the underlying trend is to standardize of things and the work that creates them. This can be seen as another example of information compression. Computers love standardization, but so does the human mind. This is why we seem to live in a world of "objects" governed by a set of laws that strive to regard everything as a special case of a set of "templates" - as few templates as possible.

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.

From Bacteria to Bach and Back

From Bacteria to Bach and Back

"Brains .. are composed of billions of idiosyncratic neurons that developed to fend for themselves, the brain's functional architecture is more like a fee market than a politburo hierarchy where all tasks are assigned from on high. The fundamental architecture of animal brains (including human brains) is probably composed of Bayesian networks that are highly competent expectation-generators that don't have to comprehend what they are doing. Comprehension - our kind of comprehension - is only made possible by thee arrival on the scene quite recently of a new kind of evolutionary replicator - culturally transmitted information entities: memes." - page 176

Among many implications flowing from this statement is the idea that our "minds" float in a sea of "culture". They are a virtual machine running the memes installed in the brain, simulating a small part of the affordances on offer in the culture we are born into. To put it another way, you cannot speak of "mind" without "culture".

Roughly speaking, this means that the "I" Domain (Working memory) can be thought of as interfacing with the "M" world without needing to get into the details of how the brain works. The first 175 pages "Bacteria to Bach" make this case in detail.

We can still make meaningful distinctions between memes - those that are readily accessed or even "installed" in the brain, those that are fresh, those almost forgotten, those available with a bit of casual research, those beyond the natural capability of the brain in question (IQ), those that don't make sense in a language "installed" in the brain and so on. The M-Domain is richly structured and complex but we don't need to muddy the waters by getting bogged down in the equally rich and complex structure of our brains: the statement above explains brains well enough for our purposes. We can make a lot of progress simply by talking about the memes we "know" or, to put it another way, memes that can be called into working memory and used as "things" or executed as "subroutines".

Other quotable quotes:

• words are the DNA of cultural evolution" (p. 179)
• Don't be afraid of a little metaphor; it won't bite you, but you should always make sure you know how to cash it in for unvarnished fact when you feel the urge (p. 189)

Virtualization and Understanding Consciousness

Virtualization is a huge topic, worthy of a dozen posts, but let me sketch it out here in the hope of making some details clear later.

ARCHITECTURE

I'm no fan of using computers as models of "mind". Our minds are not computers, nor do I expect that the AI dream of making a mind out of computer chips will happen any time soon. However, it is clear that both computers and minds process "information" in some broad sense of the term and we should not be surprised to find that designers of computers and "mother nature", the "designer" of our minds, have face similar problems and come up with similar solutions.

COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE

If you know a bit about computers, you know a bit about "virtualization" in computer design. The Central Processing Unit (CPU) of a computer manipulates a very small amount of information very quickly. This information is swapped in and out of the CPU from "on board" memory - Random Access Memory or RAM. RAM has always been relatively expensive, so computers have been swapping RAM in and out of memory to some version of the "hard disk" since the 1960's. So there is a kind of "bucket brigade" or hierarchy of storage, that makes huge amounts of information accessible to the CPU in a fairly painless way. A lot of this swapping takes place more or less invisibly or "under the hood" and does not concern the computer programmer.

THE CLOUD

Most recently, with the advent of languages like JAVA and object-oriented design (which cares not where the object "lives") location of the information (data or program) has become irrelevant as chunks are swapped in and out of the "cloud" and between "hosts" with all the "plumbing" functioning automatically. We wind up with our CPU's manipulating information from all over the world, selected automatically from a vast amount of information made available on hosts all over the planet.

That's virtualization.

VIRTUAL MINDS

Something similar goes on in our minds.

What we call "working memory" is very similar to what we call "attention" or "consciousness". It is what it feels like when a portion of our brain activates a very small subset of what the brain "knows". This process is powerful and mysterious - quite unlike what goes on in a computer - but it works in a similar way to address similar problems that we see in computer design. For example, we can "pay attention" to about half a dozen "things" at once. We can switch things in and out of attention a few times per second, producing the continuing experience we call "consciousness" - the flow of "things" through our CPU of working memory. What's more a "thing" can be as simple as pressing the "E" key on a keyboard of the idea of representative democracy. Our minds are perfectly capable of flipping around "things" very quickly as we type away furiously on the keyboard thinking and writing about political philosophy while trying to remember how to spell "philosophy". Almost magically, "ideas" that we have packed away in our brains pop in and out by means of their connections to ideas held in attention a fraction of a second earlier.

LANGUAGE AS THE GREAT VIRTUALIZER

Language is a great virtualizer.  A word like "Canada" can be used to reference a vast amount of information stored away in the brain awaiting unpacking, resorting and repacking. What's more, such a word can be transmitted via speech to another brain, whereupon it proceeds to unpack "meaning" in the second brain. The equivalent of the "cloud" is what we call "culture". Those plugged in to "culture" have access to a vast ocean of information shared among members of that culture. Most of us belong to more than one culture - for example there is an international culture of Scientists and Intellectuals for whom language differences are a mere inconvenience to sharing of ideas.

Without getting too spooky or mystical, I think it's not entirely wrong to see the cultural equivalent of the "cloud" as a group mind - something that is alive and purposeful and not a mere information store.

BEES

Consider the bees ...

An individual bee is an incredible product of evolutionary engineering. Its ability for controlled flight would be the envy of a veteran helicopter pilot. With a microscopic brain, it is capable of navigation and able to communicate the location of promising flower beds to its hive mates.

But it doesn't know it's a bee. 

Everything the bee does is in the service of the hive. It lives and dies to ensure that the hive will survive through the winter. The hive as a whole seems to "know what it's doing", yet the hive has no mind of its own. Hive "behavour" and hive "knowledge" somehow emerge from the collective, individual behavour of bees. I won't go wandering off into abstract speculation to speculate on how this happens. My point is simply that it does happen. The hive mind is distributed among the minds of tens of thousands of bees, each with a lifetime measured in months at most, each with a remarkable ability to sense the world and act in it, but each totally "unaware" of what it is doing.

It is also important to note that the "hive mind" has been shaped (and is being shaped) over millions of years in a wonderful dance with the flowers, who "use" the bees to reproduce sexually and thereby maximize the chance of evolutionary variation. And of course, a rose doesn't know it's a rose.

DO WE KNOW WE ARE HUMAN?

So we are tempted to ask, do we know we are human beings? Is there a level of reality in human history that is forever beyond our ability to understand, just as a bee will never understand the hive it dies for and a rose doesn't know it smells sweet? This is hardly an original question. Religions pretend to answer it by somehow uncovering the secret thoughts of "God", along with the heavenly "big picture". I don't think I'm alone in thinking these efforts result in little more than childish fairy tales, much smaller than the phenomena they attempt to "explain".

NOT SURE WHAT IT IS, BUT HOW DOES IT WORK?

I think we can step back from telling ourselves mystical stories and learn a lot simply by looking at the architecture. There is a hierarchy of information processing that goes all the way from individual "attention" to cultural knowledge. Indeed, since cultural knowledge relies at least in part on experience of the real world, we can regard physical reality as our ultimate "cloud" storage, just as the story of the bees is incomplete without accounting for the role of the flowers. However, like bees, we are restricted by this architecture from experiencing any of it except through a tiny window of "working memory" - less than a dozen "chunks" at a time. Language itself is our "operating system", providing reasonably efficient ways to "download" chunks from our "cloud", process them and store them back in the form of new "mash ups" of old ideas. Human language plays a similar role in our minds as Java plays in the computer you are looking at now. Ideas are popping into your head through words and it makes no difference where these ideas came from. The only requirement is that both the author (me) and the reader (you) are both human - running the basic operating system, capable of turning ideas into words and vice versa.

Of course, this insight applies far beyond the realm of language and "words", but that's a topic for another essay ...

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)

Surfaces & Essences - Questions

Questions:

• Is thought based on "nothing but" analogies?
• Prevailing theories of "attention" (the "pointy end" of consciousness) focus on "working memory", which has a limited ability to juggle "things". Working memory therefore tries to "cheat" by making "chunks" of percepts. For example, not four lines -- a square. In general, some kind of pattern. What is the relationship between "pattern" and "analogy". Are there not patterns that are not clearly analogies? It would seem that, once recognized, a pattern can be the source of a new analogy, but perhaps analogy is a special case of pattern and it's pattern seeking that's the "fuel" of idea creation.
• "Pattern recognition" is the mental model behind modern efforts at machine perception
• What is meant by "our" concepts? Do the insights of S&E apply to "the" mind or the mechanism of a cultural mind - the zeitgeist? 
• Is there evidence that analogy is the "fuel" of perception in the brain?
• What about the idea that the brain builds a "model" of reality? That's a rather static idea compared to the dynamic image of constant analogy making. However, the "model" idea is implicit in what philosophers call the problem of "representation" - How are ideas and memories "represented" in the brain? Along the same lines, how are analogies "represented"?

Can we compare S&E to Darwin's "Origin of Species"? Both volumes include extensive quantities of data to build support for an original insight. In the case of a new insight, it's hard to simply say what it is. You need to "walk around it" so it becomes visible against the background. Jung used the same method to explain what he meant by "archetype".

Assuming that S&E reveals some kind of valid insight, it's also true that the book will endure for quite awhile. Since the only "data" used in the book is language, it could theoretically be written 100 years ago or 100 years from now. The same can't be said about most current books on how the mind works.

Oddly, defenders of "memetics" (the pseudoscience of "memes") and Chomsky -- the defender of "Linguistics" -- agree that the capacity for language (or the "infection" by memes) was a sudden event in the history of human evolution and cannot be explained by gradual evolution from something simpler. You understand language (or memes) or you don't. It seems that S&E challenges this unnecessary and implausible claim by putting forward analogy making as the basis of thought, with speech emerging as a means of communicating analogy. Even a dog can make analogies. Many brain processes can be seen as primitive versions of analogy.

Similarly, memeticists like Susan Blackmore "explain" the sudden increase in brain capacity in terms of their own theory. Any change "must" be driven by evolutionary "pressure" and that pressure "must" come from something new, which happens to be the subject of the author's study. It could be argued that brain capacity (or actually cortical surface area) is correlated with the ability to form analogies or at least recognize patterns. In view of the high cost of this innovation and the violent nature of humans, it's easy to see that an "arms race" could result in strong pressure in favour of intelligence - especially when it comes to surviving attacks from other humans. Chimpanzee lifestyle provides a model for this. You could see a secondary pressure in this arms race that would favour communication and teamwork - especially language. Academic discussion of evolutionary pressure tends to ignore the violent nature of human beings. After a certain point, avoiding being murdered by another human and/or stealing the wives of your enemy becomes the #1 "evolutionary pressure". Such "pressure" could produce big changes in a short time - a few thousand years - an eye-blink in deep time. This is a "tipping point" argument.

Many genes control the expression of other genes. The mutation we are looking for might simply be for the cerebral cortex to continue to grow and fold itself up inside the brain case. We would have no evidence of this continuous change, nor evidence that it continues to operate. However, such a change would produce increased energy demands along with increased capability to meet those demands and increased competition over resources and mates. All this seems a bit less fanciful than the convoluted evolutionary stories told by Blackmore and company. As an aside, it's worth noting that this supposed "mutation" may or may not ultimately fail for any number of reasons. It is not certain, for example, that being smarter will actually allow us to find the energy we need to be smarter, nor that we can survive the implied strategy of dominating the entire ecosystem for resources needed for our big brains.

Authority: The Core of Religion

There are many reasons why humans are attracted to the idea of a spirit-filled Universe.

"Theory of mind", which gives he brain a perception (not just a "theory") that other beings are conscious and act with intent just as we do. These days, we see this as a brain function that does not reflect reality, just as the illusion that things get smaller as they move away from us. Even our modern, scientifically-trained minds make us see life where there is movement.

Another consequence of they way we are built is a survival strategy that involves manipulation of the environment (tool use being the most obvious aspect of it). We expect to control the world around us and we are frustrated at the limitation of our power to do so. It is easy to imagine that the world can be (or actually is) controlled by a mind and a mind can be persuaded to help us do things we can't do for ourselves.

The illusion of time is strong in the human brain. We don't remember the past as well as we think but we're pretty good at using what we do remember to sharpen our survival skills. Almost by accident, in combination with our language skills, this gives us a "racial memory" that we fill with a mythical past that stretches beyond what we remember as individuals.

We are also dimly aware of the future, which is full of peril, especially to our own lives, which seem to be pre-ordained to end as mysteriously as they began. Quite naturally, we think about this a lot and wrap our thoughts with myths and stories.

Finally, language us a curse as well as a blessing. Language is unable to effectively describe its own limitations. We are always susceptible to the fallacy of confusing words with the things they stand for or, in the big picture, confusing stories with life itself.

But all this doesn't explain the role of what we refer to as a "religion". It doesn't explain the idea of "heresy" or our willingness to kill those who tell different stories, perceive different spirits behind reality and expect a different future. What I have said about human psychology is far from controversial, yet "religion" uniquely sets itself against Science, vigorously and sometimes violently defending the view that the alternate reality it constructs is not a mere product of human creativity but an account of reality itself. To the "believer", the world we live in is the illusion.

Religion is a byproduct of "civilization". We generally date the rise of civilization (literally, people living in cities) from the approximately 4000 BC, where we start to see fortified towns, kings, armies and writing to tell us what was going on. For thousands of years, the story of civilization is a chronicle of endless war and destruction as the number of "civilizations" dwindled and their power grew, along with the destructive power of their armies. People started dying in these wars by the tens of thousands. Hereditary Kings started to loot their neighbors to increase the wealth and power of their families.

But still, the people in these city-states had the same psychological needs as they had had for at last 30,000 years. They still saw their fortunes controlled by spirits, often the local god of a city or town. Sometimes the spirit behind natural forces (such as the storm or the sea).  Reading the Old Testament, perhaps the oldest volume of ancient history in popular use, we see a new role of God: He is responsible for victory in war (along with the slaughter of the enemy) and, conversely, defeat in war is when we fail to please God by following priestly law. This is a neat equation that keeps the priests in business no matter what happens.

In this context, what was going on in the mind of the citizen - a mind that has not changed since the days when "philosophy" was stories you shared with close relatives around a fire?

"Theory of Mind" has evolved into a complex system of theology.  The alternate universe is populated with an "official" pantheon, including gods who need to be flattered into sponsoring human activity by paying a new class of citizen: the priesthood. Vocabulary expands, the stories are written down and assume the status of what we would now call "history" and "Science". Cultural "memory" is collapsed and simplified, creating the illusion that current mythology is what it has been "forever", obscuring the role of human creativity.

Ability to control the world has expanded in some ways but narrowed in others. Weapons of war have improved to the point where they are more of a threat to the average citizen than a guarantee of survival. While agriculture has provided more calories per person, it has also made the city-state far more vulnerable to natural forces, such as drought and flood. Concentration of wealth has made the city-state attractive plunder for neighbors. Plundering neighbors has become an attractive alternative to finding new "raw" agricultural land. And yet, the illusion of control along with the expectation of control has grown. The fortunes of the city state seem to be in the hands of Kings and Priests. Compared to the freedom of the hunter-gatherer, the control of the individual over his own life has been reduced to the vanishing point.

In these civilizations, we begin to see an alliance between the priesthood and the Kings, which ties the political fortunes of the ruling class to the mythology of the culture. Failure to observe religious rites becomes treason. Acceptance of priestly authority becomes equivalent to acceptance of Kingly authority. For dissenters, it is no longer possible to just pack up and leave, since the whole world is chopped up into territory controlled by Kings.  Challenge to this arrangement is relatively recent. It dominated world politics for the last 2,000 years at least, but the system is still with us. A visit to 21st century Saudi Arabia will provide a modern experience of this kind of culture. No time machine is required.

But the strange thing is that the ordinary citizen has lost his natural relationship with the "spirit world". He still craves some measure of control. He still has a deep urge to influence the future and is still in full possession of the illusion that the spirits may be bribed or flattered into bending he normal course of history. How can this urge be satisfied? Well, you go to the experts: those who claim to know the mind of God. Those who know the rituals that are effective to bend the sympathy of God your way. Why just one God? The reason is simple. More than one God would imply competition for the priests. Even so, minor competition is allowed through the proliferation of thousands of local "saints", who stand in for the ancient Gods who ruled the territory of a single city. You can pick your Saint to make your case before the "one" God. If you can't shake your instinct to plead your case before an idol, you can still get your "fix" by praying to the saint of your choice. Donations appreciated of course.

But how does this work? Why do people accept the dry formulae and wordy constructions as substitutes for their in-bred passion for spiritual experience? The simple answer is "authority". They go to someone who is guaranteed to have the right answer. Not surprisingly, this authority will make sure that you distrust your own judgment, even convincing you that following your own mind is a mortal sin. Priesthood is not a good choice for a small business start-up.

Where does the priest get his authority? The answer (ludicrous as it may seem) is that he got it by "laying on of hands" by priests who had the authority, who got it from other priests, going all the way back to Peter, who got is authority from Jesus. Assuming that "being right" can be passed on like a virus this way, we are left with the obvious question of why we should think Jesus was definitely right about everything.

For Jesus to be right about everything, he needs to be "divine", a God. For this to work, you need to believe in gods, specifically this god and particularly not other gods. That's a huge leap and, historically, it has been opposed literally as soon as it arose. It was heresy punishable by death in Judea (it's why Jesus was crucified) and the "Christians" were being put to death for treason and/or heresy for centuries. Eventually, the divine status of Jesus was decided by committee and enforced by the time-old alliance between the priesthood and the King (Roman Emperor Constantine in this case).

It is important to understand that Jesus needs to be divine so He can claim ultimate authority, not the other way around (i.e. Jesus is not "right" because he's God). Before the era of political religion, the Gods were much more fun. "Infallibility" was not among their powers.

A similar story can be told about Islam, where the authority of Mohammed comes directly from Allah, but requires frequent slaughter of dissenters to this very day.

What about Buddha, who is so innocently portrayed to Western readers as "just a man". Anyone serious about Buddhism will quickly discover that a "real" Buddhist or Zen master traces his authority all the way back to Buddha by a process that's not very different from laying on of hands. The "Dharma", the teachings of Buddha have been elaborated and expanded by these hereditary authorities to create enough variation to fit just about any lifestyle. The Dharma itself is claimed to be eternally true (i.e., not subject to discussion or verification), very much like the "Word" of the Gospel of John, which effectively claimed he teachings of Jesus to be on par with, say, the law of gravity. Buddhist masters don't tend to go around making war on dissenters, but they don't spare scorn for "Westernized" versions of Buddhism that sell books in the West. At least according to the Buddhist masters, heresy is still possible in Buddhism, even though Buddha himself told his followers to be skeptical of everything, including his own teachings.

But what if we reject "religion" wholesale? Are we then able to jettison the workings of our brains that make us see spirits behind every tree and impose "meaning" on every experience.

No.

Our propensity for religion is primary. We invented Gods to satisfy our need to make sense of the world and feel some slight measure of control. Especially for those not blessed with a creative mind, nation states, political leaders and political philosophy will do as well. Even Science can be twisted into a source of authority by those who say things like "the majority of Scientists agree ..." or "Science says ...".

In fact, "Science" only tells us what is not true. Science is perpetually in the business of overturning authority. Attempts to co-opt Science for political reasons tend to come to a bad end, as do political movements that systematically deny Science.

What Science has done is to shoot down all support for any particular version of "God" put up by endless defenders of the concept.  Beginning with the Greeks, philosophy has provided us with an impressive tool kit to defend ourselves against fallacy. We are now able to use language more carefully than ever before if we chose to do so. World Religions, based as they are on a vast tissue of fallacy, cannot survive logical analysis, let alone "real world" verification.

Perhaps for the first time in human history, we can enjoy a complete divorce between what we know about the real world and what is claimed by human authority, especially what is claimed by political authority. We are also more aware than ever about the difference between what we "know" and what is actually happening in the Universe. Paradoxically, this can free our creativity, enjoy our lives and deal with our fears without paying a tax to priests for the privilege. There is no longer a need to judge the fantasies of other people as "false" or worthy of suppression.

In spite of the official claim of Science to provide only negative information, it turns out that we know an incredible amount about the world. So much, in fact, that we are amused by the world view of the "ancients" who, somehow, are regarded as authorities on everything except what turned out to be observably false. What is noticeably different about what we know now is that our knowledge is so impersonal. It's not as useful or apparently relevant as what, for example, the authors of the Bible thought they knew about creation (Genesis is a moral fable. The Big Bang is disturbingly impersonal). For example, astrology pretends to tell us about ourselves and our future but astronomy is almost entirely irrelevant. This illustrates my point that we have divorced knowledge from human fantasy. We are no longer in a position to determine truth by decree or authority.

Truth is now discovered "out there", not in the mind of some creative theologian. But there is also a uniquely human "truth" about our shared hopes and experience. It's important to know and appreciate the difference.

What, if anything, is the "self"?

What is the "self"?

Among proponents of mindfulness and Zen, it is common to say that the "self" is an illusion - that the "self" does not really exist. Such talk leads us immediately into paradox, but Zen loves paradox. Vast amounts of ink are spilled in discussions about how, if the self doesn't exist, who or what it is that knows it doesn't exist. The self seems to be a matter of daily experience. Saying it's an illusion is little more than an attention-getting opinion or a device to sell books.

To me, the problem seems to be a shortcoming of language.

I just read a treatment of this issue that purported to solve it all by claiming that the self is a verb not a noun. This poor individual was trying to tackle one of the hardest problems in the world using his tenuous grip on the grammar he learned in school. He dimly perceives that the "self" is not an ordinary "thing", so he concludes it must be the only other kind of grammatical entity he remembers: a verb. As an amateur philosopher, he imagined that the problem can be solved by re-defining a few terms and then solving the whole issue by talking about it.

If he had been awake in High School physics, he might have heard about other types of "thing" - such as force fields and processes. Since the "self" is obviously connected in some way with living human beings, and life itself is clearly a process, it makes sense that the mind (the self) must be come kind of process. The problem with that is that there are millions of types of process and probably billions more awaiting discovery. Calling the "self" a process doesn't do much for us, but it does free us from "thing think", such as the image that "we" are a "soul" that somehow drives our bodies around durning life and migrates to another plane of existence when our body dies.

My own personal experience is with the "process" described by a computer program. Since very few people are aware of the power of modern computer languages. Let me briefly digress to describe how they work:

• "things" are described as "objects" which can be totally abstract or perhaps an abstract representation of a "thing", such as a person or a bank account. To control an ICBM, the missile would be represented and controlled as a "thing".
• Objects have behaviours that can be as simple as adding numbers together or or as complex as driving down the road without hitting anything
• Objects have a "state", which can be thought of as a kind of memory that influences behaviour. For example, a bank account with zero balance will respond with an "insufficient funds" message if asked to transmit money to another account.
• Objects send messages to each other, which can be instructions, "inputs", "outputs" etc.

While these ideas are almost childishly simple, the elements of object oriented architecture can be used to describe a stunning range of "things" in the world, especially the "things" we build. There are architectural rules and "best practices" that describe how to create design objects that are fairly robust descriptions of "things" that are likely to exist in the "real world" or at least ideas that are "orthogonal" (describing the world with a minimum of non-overlapping concepts).  The idea is to extend the language in a way that the "words" have a meaning outside of the context that lead to them being invented in the first place. This creates such things as the vast zoo of objects underlying the Java language - the language of the Internet. But I digress ...

When you send a line of text (object) to Google, thousands of messages are sent between objects in Google computers, chatting back and forth, to assemble a big long list of links (another type of object) that are displayed on your computer (another object). You can click on one of them (a message), to trigger a server somewhere (another object) to send a message back to you (a web page object).

The underlying language and architecture we are dealing with is incredibly powerful - far more powerful in some ways that any human language. It can, for example, completely describe the operation of a machine that will land on Mars and proceed to explore the place.

On the other hand, we must not slip into thinking that "object oriented" computer languages can describe anything that the human mind can conceive. But we can go a long way to describe the operation of the brain in object oriented terms. For example, neurons are "stacked" in a pattern endlessly repeated in the grey matter of the brain. At least to the first approximation, these "stacks" can be simulated using object-oriented architecture. 

Think of it this way. Suppose the "self" is somehow "like" a giant conventional machine, like a jet aircraft. Now imagine that someone wants to explain this machine in a giant essay. It's easy to see that words will fall short of the task - you need blue prints, graphs, engineering diagrams, demonstrations and a lot of training just to understand any of it. Words will just not cut it. In fact, the more words you use, the less likely it is that the description will make any sense. The human mind is, by definition, exactly as complex as anything anyone can ever possibly know. Any non-trivial description of the operation of one mind, let alone the interactions between multiple minds can be expected require a few powerful descriptive conceptual tools that require specialized knowledge to use.

Chimpanzees can make tools out of twigs and have probably done so for a million years. They will continue to do so for another million years. But they will never make a telescope out of twigs. Philosophers pretend to discuss the most difficult problems of existence using ordinary words, the bluntest of descriptive tools and the oldest tools available to human beings. In fact, to me, their entire dialogue seems to be about re-defining and mis-using words. They are paid by the word and the more they add to the store of words, the less they describe anything in a useful way. But I digress ...

From the examples of twigs and jet transports, it should be noted that even sophisticated technical tools of description don't cover all we need to know or describe about our subject. For example, many of the aircraft components are made from special alloys using sophisticated manufacturing techniques. Awkwardly, we are not always sure why some alloys have the properties they do. They just do. We are quite sure that the same is true of the mind - it's not just a machine processing information. It's also a chemical reaction of nasty complexity and, of course, it's alive, meaning that its biological nature must be factored in to any useful description of its operation.

Having said that, allow me, for a moment, to imagine that the "self" is an "object" in the sense that a running computer program is an "object". I imagine the "self" as a "program" running in the brain, just like the operating system runs (most of the time) in your computer. It's a process, but a special kind of process. This is a way of thinking of the self as a kind of machine, but a very sophisticated machine. We can then ask a few things about what's going on a "self".

• It's easy to see that sensations are messages received by the senses of the body
• Memories are part of the "state" of the self
• Actions are output messages

That's all pretty obvious, but it gets interesting when you start to ask about what kinds of "things" are "ideas", "beliefs", "intentions", "regrets"  and "thoughts". Those are obviously coming into the mind and popping out of it and running around inside it without obvious external signs. There are very good reasons to suspect that "ideas" cannot be reduced to the kind of formalism that we'd like. The closest we have come so far is the meme, an interesting analogue of the gene. Since meme theory originated in 1976, progress in "memetics" has resembled philosophy more than physics.

In this little note, I don't intend to nail down exactly what it is that the mind "contains" or works on: only to suggest that this metaphor of the mind (the self) is much more productive and probably closer to reality than saying the self is an illusion or a "verb" or a "soul".

We are also free to ask about what aspects of the mind are not covered by this metaphor. For me, the most glaring omission is the fact that human minds work in huge assemblies called "societies" and all the "thoughts" running through individual human minds run through the entire society. It seems to me that interactions that add up to culture are not so easy to think of in object oriented terms. To begin with, machines don't hate, mate, have children, die and fear death.  They are not honest or dishonest, good or evil.

Come to think of it, they don't have theories about their own programming ...

Thoughts on Assimilation August 27, 2015

The original idea behind this blog (Dragon Theory) is that there is a dangerous tendency for human beings to be assimilated into machines, giving up their essentially human nature to serve the nature of the machine. By "machine", I mean a system that operates by impersonal inflexible rules, in contrast to the chaotic, creative behaviour of real human beings. We use "machine" in this way when we talk about an army as a "war machine".

I still love this idea. Like all good ideas, it raises more questions than it answers. Today, I'll consider some of these questions. In some cases, the questions are more interesting than the original thesis, which is a good thing. I have always thought that progress results from asking impertinent questions rather than from the answers we discover.

The theme of a recent issue of Scientific American (August, 2015) is "How we conquered the planet". Curtis W. Marean puts forward the thesis that the key to our world-conquering success is our ability to cooperate, especially on large scales, with individuals who are unrelated. Like any good thesis, it raises more questions than it answers--many of the same questions raised by "Dragon Theory".

Exactly what is meant by "cooperation"? Several threads of cooperation come to mind and all of them promote "assimilation" - surrender of individual human nature to an artificially created entity.

• Trade. There is plenty of evidence that humans are traders by nature, quite willing to barter with strange humans rather than simply stealing what they want. Trade is the mother of "economy" -- a slippery slope leading to the idea of money. The more a person depends on trade the more a person becomes defined by economic principals. A person becomes poor when he measures himself by the degree to which he participates and relies upon the money economy and that participation is slight (the famously large part of the human race that lives on less than a dollar a day).
• Conquest, loot and pillage. A very popular form of human cooperation which is made possible when individuals think and act as members of a gang or army. The degree of coherence and assimilation often determines the "success" of the conquering hoard. In many cases, it defeats enemies who are "weak" only because they are less organized, less assimilated. The Mongol "hoards" are my favourite example of a "war machine", which assimilated most of the civilized world by means of a very short list of operating rules - laws which explicitly overrule such human qualities such as mercy, fallibility and judgement. 

There are obviously many other forms of assimilation that humans are good at (religion comes to mind), but I will pass over these to focus on one that has, until today, escaped my notice: language.

It seems that language is the key to the unique degree of cooperation that Marean talks about. Today, I started to wonder if, by learning a language, we automatically become assimilated into something that has a life of its own. This is an idea that is hard to discuss using language itself, like fish discovering water. Do we surrender something of ourselves by learning to describe our experience in the same way as those around us? Without realizing it, do we learn to ignore every aspect of our experience that cannot be communicated and discussed with those around us who speak the same language?

Western philosophers assume that all truth is accessible to language. There are notable exceptions. Wittgenstein claimed that what cannot be said must be passed over in silence. Of course, we can't say just what is passed over. But we can ask if the same things will be passed over by speakers of different languages and whether there are important things that will be passed over by any speaker of any language.

I have been a computer programmer since there were computer programmers, I have seen the evolution of computer languages over half a century. "Languages" like FORTRAN and COBOL barely deserve the name of language. Modern languages, like Java, make it possible to express ideas that could never be expressed in COBOL or FORTRAN - ideas that are, in many cases, very difficult to express in "human" languages. For me, it's quite natural to see that language defines a world of ideas that can be expressed and also a (presumably larger) world of ideas that cannot be expressed. Moreover, as a follower of Zen and Tao, I'm quite aware that the world is larger than the world of human ideas, whether these ideas can be expressed in language or not.

Returning to the issue of assimilation, is language the necessary mechanism of all assimilation? Noam Chomsky famously claims that the ability to form ideas that can be communicated linguistically is an innate quality of the human brain. Does this mean that we are "hard wired" to be assimilated?

Human languages are famously sloppy, fuzzy and ambiguous. Computer languages are none of these things. The use of "language" to describe both systems is an analogy only, but the language of Mathematics is closer to the computer side of the analogy than the human side. What is more, hardly any scientific knowledge is respectable these days unless it can be mathematically described. 

Again, we are faced with the problem of a fish discovering water. It seems that we are totally immersed in a world that is described (or lied about) exclusively in language. If, for the moment, we imagine a world outside of that world of language, we come to understand what we mean by being assimilated by language.

In the current historical moment in the United States, the emptying out of language is nourished by the assault on the civic imagination. One example of this can be found in the rise of Donald Trump on the political scene. Trump’s popular appeal speaks to not just the boldness of what he says and the shock it provokes, but the inability to respond to shock with informed judgment rather than titillation. Marie Luise Knott is right in noting, “We live our lives with the help of the concepts we form of the world. They enable an author to make the transition from shock to observation to finally creating space for action - for writing and speaking. Just as laws guarantee a public space for political action, conceptual thought ensures the existence of the four walls within which judgment operates.” The concepts that now guide our understanding of US society are dominated by a corporate-induced linguistic and authoritarian model that brings ruin to language, politics and democracy itself.

- Truth Dig

What would be the alternative? How does the fish walk up on the beach? One hint is the idea of aesthetics. Anyone who appreciates art understands the futility of describing its meaning with words. Yet there is meaning. To the Western mind, a "philosophy" is something constructed out of words. This includes Western religions, such as Christianity, whose "theology" rests firmly on centuries of arcane interpretations of ancient stories. Other traditions, especially Tao and Zen, specifically eschew words and even human ideas in general to promote an aesthetic -- a way experiencing the world wordlessly.

This points to a way of escaping assimilation (at least this type of assimilation), which is to cultivate aesthetic sense. This is to value our direct experience of the world and to be skeptical of attempts to draw us into the herd by means of language. We need to be skeptical of "reasons why", interpretation, valuation, analysis and synthesis. Actually this isn't such a huge leap. We have just been sold the idea that things are not "real" or "important" unless they can be boiled down to language. Most of us understand quite clearly that this is wrong but (of course!) we have problems saying just why this is. 

Perhaps the world we "pass over in silence" is the important one. Perhaps it is where we can discover who we really are.

Note to self: comment on "Monkey Sphere and Echo Chamber"