The Past and Present of the Self

Notes on a conversation with a friend ...

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

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

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

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

Damasio and the Self

Pop fears about the AI apocalypse often feature the machine suddenly and inexplicably "coming to life." The "lights go on," and all of a sudden, the machine supposedly feels like us, has a consciousness like us and (therefore) starts to exhibit all of our worst attributes. In particular, it "wants" to live and suddenly "sees" us as a threat.

All of this plays on thousands of years of confusion about what it is to be human in the first place. What is it to "feel alive"? What is consciousness? What is "self"?

I think that thousands of years of superstition and religious "theology" shed no light at all on this question. If you are one of those who are looking for a detailed treatment of the "soul" as distinct from the body, I wish you good luck. As for me, I see no reason to invent a separate realm of reality to house my mind - even as I admit that it is difficult to say just exactly how a slab of meat between my ears creates the feeling we all know as "being here." That said, there is a lot we can say about these matters. I tend to listen most carefully to actual brain scientists before the philosophers.

My favorite brain scientist is Antonio Damasio, and the best way to get into his way of thinking is his most recent book (at the time of writing): the "Strange Order of Things." I commend this book to the reader's attention. What follows is probably a garbled account of his ideas. He has a lot to say about the issue at hand:

• The "feeling" of "being here" is, at the very least, a feeling. What is a feeling? In short, to have a feeling the organism must have an internal model of itself, plus a model of the outside world. The organism need not be very complicated to meet this threshold. A feeling abstracts raw sensation and connects sensation to action in an indirect way. An organism that responds directly to sensation (say, sunlight) without any intermediation won't have feelings. For our purposes, we note that "feelings" are a very ancient attribute of our branch of the tree of life. It is conceivable that a machine may have a model of itself (although this is rarely the case in state of the art AI) but it is debatable whether this would produce "feelings" of any kind, let alone the feeling of "being here". The problem with machines is that they lack a billion years of evolutionary experience as organisms in the world. Can this be "taught"?
• A popular survival strategy of living this is to exist in nested hierarchies. Beehives, schools of fish and the multi-cellular organism are examples. The behavior of the organism tends to support the survival of the individual organism, but also the cells making up the organism's body and the survival of the "herd". In fact, many organisms, including humans, are rarely found in nature by themselves and are not equipped to live for long by their own wits alone. If we watch a flock of birds, a school of fish or a swarm of bees, we are struck by the sense that the flock itself is alive in some sense. Working from the bottom up, we are struck by our sense that we can look after the health of the billions of cells that make up our body by actions that make no sense at the cellular level. It would seem odd to think that this setup is somehow unique to humans. What we perceive as a "self" is a conglomerate that exists far below our awareness. In fact, one may think of our brains as presenting the most simplified version of our true nature unless some kind of emergency requires action at the "meta" level.
• For me, Damasio's ideas challenge the idea that our experience of the "self" is misleading. We communicate with the group in ways that show us only "our end" of the communication, missing the way that all these communications add up to very definite group behavior. 

Many philosophers seem to insist that the "self" is either a phenomenon of the body or something on another plane entirely. Neither is true. Our perception of self easily transfers from our own body to the social situation we find ourselves in. It is perhaps a linguistic accident that we regard "I" as more fundamental than "we." It is only when we are near death do we perceive that our organs and cells are shutting down on their own schedule. The current rule is, when your brain is dead, you are dead. We rarely consider the complex system of cells that keep us alive under "normal circumstances" by keeping themselves alive. My favorite "meditation" on this subject is to think of my brain cells (neurons) as not that much different from any single-celled animal, except that they have found a way to survive comfortably in my head, producing the ideas that I put on this page as a byproduct of their metabolism. What do these cells do to justify the expense of their upkeep? They have feelings. They respond to the stimulus by sending a signal. This is not mere "wiring". There is a complex, indirect model that specifies the details of this reaction. The model - the "program" - is written in the DNA of every cell.

To be a "self", I require a body. But I need more than a body. I need a body that fits into a specific environment which includes other "bodies". Thinking of "mind" as something that happens in my head is not wrong. It's just incomplete. I have a lot more to say on this subject in a previous blog.

So how do we endow a machine with a "mind"? Simple. We find a way for existing human minds to participate in a structured, meaningful way to create a "higher" mind - a "supermind". This is nothing new and it has nothing to do with "technology". It's the way human society has always worked. In fact, it is the reason anything like human society exists.

Focus - November 19, 2017

I have a lot of time on my hands - perhaps too much. I read a lot, usually 2 serious books per week or maybe more if you count the books I check into and decide not to read or put on the back burner for later. In the "later" category is the emerging genre of books explaining all the details of Donald Trump's horrible personality and personal history. I get it. No further information required.

There is a danger of being pulled into a rabbit hole, following "click bait" until starvation sets in. Sometimes I wonder if I'm doing something similar on a larger scale, taking advantage of the cheap and easy access to books (Kindle) and general information (Google/YouTube).

So here are, in theory, the "topics" I'm following.

THE SELF & COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE

This is a hold-over from the main thread in my "Christian Skeptic" blog. At the moment, it concerns questions about the nature of the self (aka, "soul"). I'm convinced that this issue is very widely misunderstood. Most recently, I have wondered if we should have another pronoun, similar to the "royal we", that refers to the conventional "I" plus all the myriad of influences that determine what "I" know, what "I" want and how "I" make decisions. See The Knowledge Illusion and Behave. Perhaps "I" should just refer to the immediate experience of consciousness in the moment - a result of all those influences. This perspective is not unrelated to long-standing questions coming from "Dragon Theory". How is it that we are deeply "assimilated" into "dragons" like religions and corporations? What does assimilation feel like?

The distinction between "I" and the "Royal We" is important on a day to day personal level - what I might call the "Zen" outlook. I increasingly separate the pseudo-spiritual aspects of Zen from the simple discipline of mental and moral clarity implicit in the practices and traditions. In this case, there is not much more to learn - only the day-to-day struggle to apply what I already know. It's also a conscious effort to be "assimilated" into the right traditions, groups, political parties, and social media "bubbles". To some extent at least, we can determine what our personal "royal we" is.

Perhaps the easy way to understand this perspective is to note that human intelligence, like bee intelligence, is collective. The bee doesn't "know" how smart it is, or why it performs its wiggle dance or why it feels compelled to fly off in a given direction after watching a wiggle dance. Yet, when seen from the viewpoint of the hive, the behavior is perfectly intelligible. This idea applies on many levels to human behavior, but the interesting one applies to everyday experience - the fact that almost all of what we "know" is actually signaled in some way from other humans. Just think of what we "know" as we drive a car across the city.

CHRISTIANITY

I found "Fantasyland" to be a particularly scathing critique of religion - especially the American fundamentalist "Christian" version. However,  I still take the Christian ideal of forgiveness as an antidote to the current witch hunt "outing" all men who have ever behaved in an outrageous manner to any woman. Let him who has no sin throw the first stone. I expect a few stones to be thrown my way when I express this idea. For my own part, I am trying to banish "moral outrage" from my emotional toolbox. In spite of the widespread acceptance of moral "relativism" (acceptance of "gays" for example), most of us are unwilling to go the entire (Christian) distance to recognize that we all have things we are ashamed of and we all need forgiveness: the permission to start over.

Can all my reading and thinking serve to address practical questions, such as What kind of person should I be, How should I act? This has nothing to do with celestial "carrots and sticks." These are questions of personal and public morality. The current tsunami of moral outrage illustrates that many of us are addressing important moral issues with rather blunt instruments. 

ASSIMILATION

The idea behind "Dragon Theory" (now "Programmable Ape") can be seen from two perspectives: "top down" from the "dragon" or "bottom-up" from the assimilated human "component" of the dragon. I started from the "top," asking such questions as Is the "dragon" alive? Quite rightly, one of my readers pointed out that this is chiefly a matter of definition. Subsequently, trying to define the dragon has been quite a project, not unlike the effort to define a "meme." There are similar problems when one attempts to say anything that can not be said without the concept or to say anything that sheds a special light on the phenomenon. Accordingly, I now consider the original vision of the "dragon" as a first draft or glimpse of the phenomenon that is in need of a major overhaul. "The Corporation" remains as one of the most accessible introductions to this idea. On the other hand, my early versions of the idea, namely the "Creedal Group" and the "Spirit System" (dating back to 1970) seem to be surprisingly durable.

I have been encouraged by seeing the progress that some have made with the "meme" idea, especially by Daniel Dennett - most recently in "Bacteria to Bach." Really durable memes are be formed as a result of environmental constraints or the laws of physics. In other words, our "ideas" don't (always) grow out of unconstrained fantasy. In a sense, our ideas connect us to the "real world." Duh. To put it in another way, our "minds" are a (perhaps muddy) reflection of the world we live in. 

I continue to be well served by "Surfaces and Essences," the classic study of how analogies form the very basis of human thought. I'm always on the lookout for the analogies that underlie my ideas. Some analogies are better than others, but they are all analogies. It is wise to use analogies as a "whiteboard" sketch of a concept but always be on the alert for the need to drill down to the details of a phenomenon - especially those that challenge your favorite analogy. For example, from the beginning, "Dragon Theory" set itself up to be a promoter of confirmation bias, especially ignoring the substantial contribution made by individual decision making and constraints imposed by the environment. For example, by definition, the corporation operates in a financial environment, resulting in "behavior" that is more accurately seen as a result of the environment. To use an analogy, the behavior of a fish is, to a great extent, determined by the physical properties of water.

I have made more progress coming from the "bottom up", asking how it is that people get "assimilated." Early on, I realized that part of the answer is to be found in common assumptions, most notably in language and money. Most recently, that has been generalized with the aid of an AI concept: the "fitness function." For example, in the case of a for-profit corporation, the fitness function is entirely expressed in terms of money. This translates directly into the way that humans are assimilated, through hiring practices, employee incentives, customer relations and investor participation. All this is increasingly implemented by AI algorithms, but this only goes to reveal the fitness function that was there all along. By automating a fitness function, we create a monster. This is eloquently pointed out in "Weapons of Math Destruction" and supported by quite a few other sources such as "WTF." "WTF" is an instructive tutorial in how the simple idea of "money" as a fitness function actually works in Silicon Valley. You'd be surprised ...

Special assimilation issues arise in fantasy-ridden, fundamentalist American culture (See "Fantasy Land").

"Wiser" gets into the nuts and bolts of how "herd instinct" works in small groups such as juries and corporate boards. "Wiser" is a road map of how people are assimilated into a group, allowing the group as a whole to be more stupid than any particular member.  "Polarization of opinion" and "race to the bottom" are psychological phenomena subject to laboratory study. There is a large literature about exactly how corporations make stupid decisions. It comes as no surprise that we don't need fancy analogies to explain how the "brain" of the dragon - the prefrontal lobe - makes wrong decisions.

CLIMATE CHANGE

This issue used to literally keep me up at night. I now regard it as a kind of background fact - one of the "givens" that we all need to deal with, such as Calgary weather. It's been awhile since I have read anything new or important on this issue, although I try to connect the skeptics to information on the subject if they chose to actually learn something about it. Strangely, I often find myself in the awkward position of pointing out that there are other things besides climate change going on. Climate change is the background, but sometimes disasters are "ordinary" things like hurricanes, floods, and droughts. We need to deal with these events whether or not they are the result of climate change. To put another way, our preparation and response are within our control. It is useful to think this way since it calls for action from all quarters, including the climate change skeptics.

Zen plays a large part in my ability to retain a cool head while the world heats up. It is important to accept what you cannot change. In particular, we must accept impermanence - even the impermanence of life on Earth.

What, If Anything, Is a "Person"

If we're lucky, the first person we encounter in our lives is our mother.

We naturally generalize to recognize other moving shapes as like our mother but not our mother. We have all experienced the difficulty of calming a baby who refuses to accept the attentions of anybody but his mother.

This leads me to a claim that may seem odd: We discover our mothers before we discover ourselves!

But we are "hard wired" to assemble the meme of "self" pretty early. These fingers and toes are "my" fingers and toes. When you watch a baby, you can see this is a discovery, not a "brute fact". But the "hard wiring" of the motor cortex establishes a predictable link between the perception of the body and the ability to move around body parts. Thus is born "me" (the object in the world) and "I", the one who seems to "be me". One of our main jobs in the first two years of life is establishing an iron-clad link between "I" and "me", controlling "my" body so "I" can walk for example. At a certain point (if we are lucky), all these discoveries are packed away and absorbed into what we experience as "reality". Unless we have a brain injury, it will no longer make sense ask if these hands are "mine".

As we learn to speak, we learn to speak of I, me, mine and what "I" want. At this stage, mother is just another very interesting and special object in the world. Other objects with similar shape and sound may be accepted as "like" mother (a source of food, comfort etc). Objects that are similar but different in alarming ways (different skin colour, loud voice etc) are in a different category of "scary people".

Before too long, we generalize and create a category of "person", which includes "me", my mother and certain entities resembling my mother. It can take a very long time for us to actually attribute feelings and experience like "mine" to other persons (theory of mind). This ability may entirely fail, resulting in a pathological inability to recognize others as persons (Autism and psychopathy for example).

As an adult, we generally recognize a very broad category of human shapes as "persons" who we take for granted have an inner experience like ours. We may even generalize this to animals -- a generalization others may see as the "error" of anthropomorphizing.  Again, this categorization may fail - get it "wrong". We may, for example, regard things with human shapes as not persons if we are taught to do so in the course of military training.

Starting with our mother, we build up memes to model other people. We often make the mistake of assuming that this inner models is the other person. We say, Bob is dishonest, when we really mean, My inner idea of Bob is one of a person who cannot be trusted. Being memes, these models "run" on live brain material, allowing them to have ghostly thoughts and plans. At some point, the oldest of our person memes may accumulate enough related memes to take on a life of her own, even after the original has died. Hofstadter describes this phenomenon at length in "I Am A Strange Loop".

Building from this, we imagine the world to be full of "persons" like ourselves. If we imagine all of these persons (or at least the ones we know and trust) to "believe" in a certain meme, we take this meme as "real", even if it conflicts with our own direct experience. Conversely, we may doubt our own experience if we think it's not shared with other people (that is, our memes of these other people don't include the "belief" that what we are experiencing is real). Thus, we can "believe" in God without evidence or in the face of evidence to the contrary. We can "believe" in the Big Bang with nothing but barely-understood testimony from trusted other persons. We can dismiss our own "peak experiences" (such as oneness with the universe) as "not real" because they are not (perceived as) shared with others.

And then there is "assimilation", which is the phenomenon of absorbing our very selves into a higher meme of society, a nation, a corporation or some "meta-person" I call a "dragon".

The Self and the "I Meme"

The "I" Meme is perhaps the most powerful meme of all: the inescapable impression that the world is experienced in the "first person singular". This seems to be "hard wired' in the brain and this meme finds expression in virtually all human languages, although to varying degrees (It is avoided in Japanese for example).

Attempts to discuss "I" from the "outside" result in a surprisingly varied collection of apparently related memes, such as the "soul", the "mind", the "spirit" and the "self". These are not identical memes and are each somewhat "weaker" than the I meme. We can, after all, experience the world in the first person without accepting the idea of the soul - in fact some schools of Buddhism explicitly deny the existence of the "self" as an illusion. On the other hand, it is common to regard "I" as separable from the body: the "soul".

Much philosophical sleight of hand relies on a constructed description of the first-person in terms of a "junior" meme for the purpose of denying that some other junior meme makes sense. For example, Dennett makes a great show of contrasting his view of the self as "what it feels like to be a brain" with his "straw man" construction of what people "must" mean by the "soul". All he succeeds in doing is convincing us that the Dennett "self" is probably incompatible with the "soul" meme, which doesn't actually prove that the Dennett "self" meme is a "thing". It turns out that the meme of the self-as-brain "explains" (at best) only what Dennett sets out to explain, leaving the vast experience of the first-person on the "cutting room floor".

Hidden Assumptions About Consciousness

What, if anything, is "consciousness"?

This is a central question of Zen. I have recently taken a look at the more "Scientific" view on the question.

I just read Daniel Dennett's discussion of consciousness. There are lots of Dennett lectures online. He's articulate and entertaining.  Dennett is a philosopher so tends to dig himself into obscure debates about language, terminology and disputes with other philosophers. He borrows a lot of experimental results, but he's not really part of the Scientific culture. Sorry, philosophers, philosophy is not Science. As Robert Laughlin reminds us, scholars of the humanities talk about words; physicists talk about facts. Dennett is still well worth reading though.

Let me sketch out what I think he's talking about.

He seems to be arguing against the intuitive view of consciousness, best represented by what's called the Cartesian Theater. This pictures the mind as something sitting in a theater watching the world "through" the brain. The mind is something other than the brain, in other words, or possibly something very strange and wonderful "in" the brain, so far undiscovered.

The Cartesian Theater cannot be the way it is. It just leaves you asking how the "person" in the theater works, which is where you started. This is similar to the problem with the idea that God created the world. We are not supposed to ask where God came from. At least with respect to the mystery of how the world came to be, God doesn't help.

But what are the options with respect to consciousness? Dennett says, quite convincingly, that we can learn a lot about consciousness from the "outside", what he calls the 3rd person perspective. Submit the subject to experiments designed to probe the "inner workings" of consciousness, and record physical evidence, such as button pushes, speech acts of the subject and so on. In fact, you can learn a lot this way, but Dennett begs the question: what are you learning about? His hidden assumption seems to be that he is learning about what his opponents claim he's not learning about: what boils down to the mind, the soul or the self. Dennett loves to pepper his talks with interesting discoveries about the brain, which leaves the reader with the impression that the experimental discoveries about the "mind" are revealing what is really going on in the brain and nothing more.

Philosophers tend to carve up the Universe into camps and continually make the mistake of assuming that they have proven their own theory when they have discredited the (sometimes misrepresented) beliefs of the other camps. This is the fallacy of the excluded middle.

The discussion, as Dennett frames it, is that either (a) there is something about the "soul" that cannot be learned from 3rd person experiments on the brain or (b) we have no reason to think that such experiments will leave out anything important.

But does this cover all the possibilities? Isn't Dennett assuming that the results of his experiments give us data on the brain? If the "mind" and the "brain" are indeed different (which is, after all, the central issue), can we assume from the outset that our experiments involve only the brain of the subject and nothing else of importance? Shouldn't this be a hypothesis instead of an assumption?

Let me put on my system's analyst hat and look at one of the experiments Dennett presents so entertainingly and refers to every time he discusses consciousness. As a systems analyst (not a philosopher), I find his account crawling with entities that are so familiar as to be invisible to the casual listener. To put it simply, Dennett's accounts risk being considered as mere cartoons or "thought experiments".

• The whole idea is to somehow capture the "1st person" account of the subject and show how this spectacularly disagrees with what is "really" happening. Discrepancies reveal the "workings of the mind". The "1st person" account plus "3rd party" (experimenter) account of what is really happening is the "data" for Dennett's scientific study of consciousness.
• As is typical of psychological experiments, the "subject" is actually a statistical fiction. The "data" is about average responses, typical accounts etc. The goal of peeking inside one mind slips away (and, after all, this is what we want: insight into the feeling we all have of being unique - "me" - the 1st person perspective).
• What is referred to as "3rd person" or "observer accounts are obviously 1st person accounts from the experimenter. Or maybe these are averaged too. We somehow assume that the experimenter's point of view makes no difference, but this has been exposed as a huge mistake in Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. We are asked to assume it is irrelevant in studies of consciousness. To Dennett's credit, he allows the public to become subjects in on-line experiments and appreciate a bit of the "raw data" Dennett is talking about. But Dennett is still "talking over the shoulder" of the subject and immediately providing his interpretation of what is important and/or significant.
• The "apparatus", the context and the overall experimental conditions are assumed to be irrelevant. This is a standard procedure when we try to learn about Nature. As much as possible, isolate the system studied from all other influences. It makes sense if you are studying gravity, but if you are trying to find out if the "mind" is actually confined to the brain, it amounts to an unstated assumption or (better) a hypothesis. It is impossible to study a "mind" on its own. In fact the business of the mind is to reflect context. No context, no mind.

The whole idea of 1st person, 2nd person, 3rd person is a linguistic convenience and the kind of thing philosophers love to dispute over. But they certainly don't exclude the possibilities, especially when the subject of discussion is the human imagination or the "mind's eye". What I mean by "me" is the whole question.

• 1st person refers to the way I describe my own experience. It's the perspective that Dennett seems to regard as an illusion. He's not alone in this, but "illusion" over-states the issue. You can't get around the fact that it feels like something to be me, no matter how much you learn about what's happening in my brain to make me feel like that.
• 2nd person is "you", the reader of this post, for example. Speaking of "you" involves an assumption by "me", commonly referred to as a "theory of mind", that you have a mind like mine and experience the world more or less like I do.
• 3rd person is "they", not me or "you" but objects in the world. When these objects are human, "theory of mind" applies.

To my knowledge, this exhausts the possibilities built into language, although fine distinctions can be made about the gender, social status or personal relationship of the individuals involved. But there are lots of other "persons" that we talk about routinely.

• The "observer" in Relativity is a god-like entity whose only attribute seems to be a location in "space time". The observer mixes the attributes of "I" and "me", seeing the world from his unique perspective even though he/she is always referred to in the 3rd person. The Relativistic observer has been stripped of all human attributes or capabilities apart from those useful to the theory of Relativity itself. This "observer" is capable of visiting places and times that would be inaccessible to humans (such as inside a black hole or just after the Big Bang), so "theory of mind" hardly applies. The Relativistic observer really only "knows" things. He"observes" and measures.
• The "apparatus" is operated by a close relative of the Relativistic observer in Quantum Mechanics. This observer can "know" only what the apparatus (like a Geiger counter) tells him. In Quantum Mechanics, neither the observer nor the Universe exist separately. Einstein intuitively thought that the world had properties that didn't depend on observation but was proven wrong. This has left us with a huge problem, in particular, it has left us scratching our heads about what counts as an "observer" in Quantum Mechanics. Not surprisingly, different Relativistic Observers can get different results from straightforward Quantum experiments, such as counting the number of protons in a box.
• The story teller has a long tradition in human thought. We are so used to stories beginning "Once upon a time" that we forget to ask who is telling the story. The story teller adopts an omniscient point of view, knowing even the inner thoughts and motives of the humans in the story. Steeped in stories like this, it is easy for us to imagine God a celestial story teller, even though we know that all stories are ultimately told by a story teller from a 1st person perspective. Accounts of Scientific experiments often slip into this perspective as if God were taking notes, reading minds and revealing what is "really" going on.

The issue of "person" - human perspective - is right at the middle of the discussion of consciousness and we need to be very careful about who is who in the stories we hear about experiments supposedly "about" consciousness. Whose consciousness?

Milgram's Obedience Experiments

The point can be illustrated from a famous series of experiments conducted by Miligram, which claimed to provide a peek into one small aspect of the human mind, specifically our tendency to inflict cruel punishment on other humans when ordered to do so by authority figures.

Milgram's experiments and his analysis crawl with the same demons that inflict Dennett's. Milgram is tryies to sort out the effect of context on the subject's decision to be cruel. If so, his conclusions and extensive discussions about how subjects "feel" need to be set aside.

• Milgram's "discoveries" turn out to be heavily influenced by his interpretation. In other words, they are 1st person accounts of records of events, exactly in the spirit of Dennetts (in fact, Milgram's experiments are some of the first of this kind). Milgram cannot subtract himself from the experiment. Most obviously, Milgram was struggling to understand the Holocaust and how such cruelty could be inflicted by supposedly ordinary people. He imagined he got the answers to the questions he posed. Other questions were set aside. In this case, Milgram adopts the God-like "person" of the story teller.
• It turns out that it makes a big difference who the "subject" is. "Results" are actually statistical and convey information (if at all) for a rather small set of specific subjects. It makes no sense to speak of what, say, 100 people are thinking "on average", yet this is precisely what Milgram is trying to do.
• It makes a difference who the "tester" is (the person giving instructions). Varying the tester (by giving him a lab coat or not) makes a difference. This is an invisible 3rd party in Milgram's stories. Correctly interpreted, Milgram's results are about situations not just decisions.
• Culture and history make a difference. The "self" of individual subjects depends on where they were born and the culture they belong to.
• The physical setup (the Quantum "apparatus") makes a difference. To get results similar to Migram's you need to exactly replicate his experimental setup. That's standard Scientific practice, but the practice again emphasizes that the conclusions are about the specific situation, not about the inner workings of the mind.

It's reasonable to expect that a successful theory of consciousness, like any Scientific theory (Evolution, Relativity, Quantum Mechanics) will force us to abandon the "obvious" and draw us into new ways of thinking. It seems to me that consciousness poses an even bigger challenge than the problems tackled and overcome in the 20th century. Is it possible to glimpse what a new theory might look like? Maybe.

• Consciousness is accompanied by a non-local pattern of activity in the brain over time. Large areas of the brain are involved. It's clear that there is no single area "in control". This looks to me like a field phenomenon.  For example, in quantum mechanics, it makes little sense to talk about where particles are or imagine a bunch of tiny billiard balls whizzing around. The world is best described in terms of variations in a field over time. So my guess is that consciousness is a whole-brain kind of phenomenon. At least.
• In quantum mechanics, there is a mysterious process known as "collapse of the wave function". Quantum fields are wave-like probability distributions, which tell you the probability that an event will happen at any given time and location, should you introduce an apparatus to detect it. The events that the apparatus detects are actual, "real" events.  Is the experience of consciousness a similar "collapse" of the field-like activity in the brain? This idea is getting quite a lot of serious attention (Google it). The idea is that collective "chatter" between neurons "collapses" into a specific perception or "thought". Dennett's experiments illustrate the idea, where the perception magically seems to shift as the subject "sees" the same scene in a different way. I am skeptical about attempts of mystics to co-opt Quantum theory directly into a theory of mind. I think Quantum theory gives us clues about how a theory of mind might look like, but the "field" in question is quite a different sort of thing.
• It's worth asking about the boundaries of the "self" under examination. Quantum wave functions are "about" a system of particles and tell you about, say, the probability that an atom (a system of particles) will emit a photon  of a given wavelength. Psychological experiments involve a "subject" along with everyone and everything that has ever influenced the subject, including the specific setup surrounding the situation of the experiment. Is it correct to assume that the "brain" of the subject is identical to the "mind" that produces the data? The Zen way of looking at it would be to ask, is the "mind" not a product of the whole Universe? Are the distinctions the result of the way the brain works? Is the "illusion" a matter of feeling that the mind is exclusively happening to "me"?
• Robert B. Lauglin's "emergence" is probably a better paradigm to work with than Daneil Dennett's reductionism if only for the reason that emergence seems to be a better paradigm for everything. Reductionism in Science is on its way out.

ZOMBIES

There is an entirely different issue going on in Dennett's presentations. The idea of the "philosophical zombie".

Theoretically, a Zombie is physically identical to a human being but lacks a "mind". The Zombie will perform exactly the same as a real human in any experiment. Philosophers love to dream up ways that you could tell if the Zombie really has an "inner experience" or is just faking it. Of course, you can't by definition, but what the Hell, it's publish or perish.

This image gets a lot of popular exposure in movies about "strong AI" and in Ray Kursweil's idea that we could eventually migrate our "selves" entirely into a machine, leaving our biological bodies behind. This idea if fundamentally "dualistic", assuming that the "mind" is something other than the brain and could be implemented on an entirely different (presumably better) technology (Why not Heaven?). Both ideas depend on the widening experience of people with computers, which seem to be getting "smarter" all the time. Is it not just a matter of time before they become conscious?

As one who has lived with computers since they started to proliferate, my guess is that a computer, no matter how sophisticated, will have no more "inner experience" than a cuckoo clock. But this is not obvious to others and this keeps the zombie concept alive and well. Real AI research gives us a practical way to build "real" zombies and, as a byproduct, explore what it is to be human.

Kursweil's invites us to think seriously about zombies. The last thing Kursweil would admit to is Dualistic ideas(soul apart from brain), but that's exactly what he's assuming.

Kursweil's bottom line is that we could (a) build a computer that is functionally identical to a human mind (Zombie) and (b) we could migrate our biological mind into such a machine and thereby become an immortal non-Zombie and (c) if a machine thinks it's me, it's me. It should be noted that the movie "Singularity", based directly on Kursweil's idea, (a) and (b) are assumed but (c) is challenged as well as any serious idea may be discussed in a Hollywood movie. 

If we assume both (a) and (b) of Kursweil's Science Fiction, we are left with some questions. What do we do with my biological body after my mind has migrated to a better home? Presumably that body still thinks of itself as "me". Recycle? Scrap? Keep as backup? Once "I" am safely ensconced in my computer home, why not clone me? Would both clones be "me"? Check out Oblivion.

These are what Dennett refers to as "Imagination Pumps": questions that force us to think about old issues in new ways. Kursweil's zombies are ideal test subjects for Dennett's thought experiments. Whatever we figure out, it's certain to be a big surprise.

See also:

Zen and Outside-In Mind
Re-Thinking Mind and Soul
What, If Anything, Is Reality?
What, If Anything, Is the Self?

Emergence - A Different Universe - Robert B. Laughlin

What, if anything, is the "real world"?

It has been pretty obvious for centuries that all we know about the world comes to us by means of our senses. Even the vast new body of knowledge about the universe that Science has provided lately comes indirectly through indirect "evidence" and human reasoning, which turn out to be the most powerful of our senses in the long run.

But if anyone suggests to me that this means that the "real world" is entirely a matter of our imagination and there is really nothing "out there", I will suggest that he (it's always a "he") take another drag of on his funny cigarette and go lie down somewhere. Let the rest of us talk seriously.

What is an endless subject of fascination is the surprising difference between what we perceive and what we can subsequently learn is "really" happening. We learn that we do, indeed, see the world through very foggy lenses and that the more we learn about the world, the more we find out how little of it is perceived or even suspected by us poor humans. The world is obviously much more than we can imagine, which is one of the many reasons why it makes no sense to think that we are somehow dreaming it up as we go along.

In fact, we are probably getting a lot more information from our "conventional" senses than we consciously realize.

In Zen, we take it for granted that the mind is "nothing more" than the sum total of sensations and thoughts it "contains" at any one moment. The "self" and the "mind" are often rather imprecisely equated in this line of thinking (I have shown that the self is more than the "mind" in another post). But if the "senses" are delivering more to the mind than we know, then perhaps the mind and, by extension, we ourselves, are more than just what happens inside our heads, plus what we perceive (or know we perceive) at the moment.

Why should this matter and what the hell am I talking about?

Lets take a simple example and confine ourselves to the old six senses. The real world around me is modelled in my brain, which, as previously described, is part of "me". But that real world is shared. It is packed full of objects whose identity, purpose and meaning is shared with people around me. This is especially true in the modern world where, as I look around me, everything in my field of view has been created by another human being. This shared reality is part of me. To put it another way, our "selves" significantly overlap.

I suspect that this "overlap" is much wider and more significant than we normally perceive it to be, like the "background" reality created in our heads that seems to be "just there".

Last night, we watched the excellent movie "Oranges and Sunshine", the true story of how, in the 20th century, the UK government abducted 130,000 children and sent them off to horrible lives (including sexual slavery) in the "colonies". The children all lost their birth parents and the parents had no idea what happened to their children. The movie is about the massive effort to reconnect parents and children, plus the importance of making this connection. Somewhere along the line it struck me how much of my own identity depends on knowing quite a bit about my parents and their parents, along with as much as I can learn about their lives. I am currently reading about Alberta in the 30's, where my father grew up. It's important because, in a sense, it happened to me.

At least for me, this shared, overlapped "selfhood" is very much like my inner view of the world itself. It's background and seems to be "out there", when it is actually created by me. It is part of me.

"We don't know what this is, but we are all in it  together"

Models of Mind

In a previous post I sketched out the importance of being a bit more imaginative when we ask the difficult question, What is the mind like. It's time to abandon the ancient assumptions that I have a little person inside my head that's the "real me" and somehow, perhaps this little person (the soul) will survive death. It's obviously not like that. There is "nobody home" in the brain, nothing "controlling" it.

The "self" is what it feels like to be a brain. That is still a big mystery, but progress nonetheless.

Here, I'd like to discuss another aspect of the ancient view. Is there only one "self" running around in my brain? And, while we are at it, is there more to the "self" than this entity that seems to be looking out my eyes? Is there more to "me" than the "me" I feel writing these lines? Mountains of experimental evidence says there is. Lots more.

I have always been very interested in dreams. I often remember them very well and sometimes become aware that I'm dreaming while continuing to dream. There are many things to learn in this state. For one thing, I encounter other people in my dreams. They seem to be rather stupid and inarticulate. It's hard to understand what they are saying and they don't seem to pay much attention to me, but they are separate personalities nonetheless. I can have a heated argument with one of these dream ghosts. I can wake up angry about some completely ridiculous discussion that, after all, was conducted entirely within my own head.

Under normal circumstances, the brain doesn't seem to be able to animate more than one fully functioning personality during wakefulness, but there are important exceptions. We take it for granted that we are different people in different situations, especially when assisted by chemicals. The difference can be very substantial, as in psychosis.

Sufferers from schizophrenia frequently hear voices that seem to be totally separate from the "self". Obviously, such voices are being animated by the same brain as the one that "hears" them. I think of this as the diseased brain "booting up" little "partial people" running in parallel with the one that feels like "me". I consider this to be the root of many (perhaps all) religious experiences where the voice of God (or spirit) is heard or perhaps appears visually. To me, it is not surprising that some people occasionally hallucinate fully functioning, visible and tactile people wandering around in the "real" universe, that is, after all, constructed inside their heads under normal circumstances. It would be hard for most of us to get through the day if such experiences were common. However, the very rarity of these experiences does not make them miracles. They are authentic experiences, as "real" as any other, but that does not mean that they are evidence of an alternate universe. For example, "ghosts" are not evidence of an afterlife.

All this leads me to think of the "self" as a specific "mode" or configuration or "state" of the "program" running in the brain. The brain can configure itself in different ways. Each configuration has access to all the memories in the brain and the sensations of the body, along with the experience of "selfhood", the experience of being "me". When I'm asleep, the brain has he ability to "boot up" one or more additional personalities. The one that feels like me is barely ticking over, deprived (for example) of the use of the frontal lobes (logic). In a dream, I can often switch characters, with the sense of "me" moving to a different personality in the dream or "I" can become a kind of author or stage director.

If I am an actor or the "stage director", who is building the set? Where does the scenery come from? Obviously this is an important category of the "contents" of the mind, or self. More profoundly, this is also true of the "set" that I observe when wide awake. The entire perceived world is created in my brain from "evidence" rather indirectly from my senses or assumptions I make about what is "out there". So this, too is "me". All this is created actively, "on the fly" so to speak.

I have sometimes had the type of "peak experience" where a I suddenly feel that there is a personality behind the entire universe. It feels like seeing God. But of course there is a person behind the Universe. It's me. Under normal circumstances, my brain tricks me into thinking that I am moving around in a "real" world, not the world as simulated by my brain. Sometimes the veil slips and I glimpse the living mind behind the scenes. It's me, or perhaps the most interesting and wonderful part of "me".

One of the objects of Zen practice is to experience the world this way. The object is not to discover some occult reality hiding behind everyday experience. The object is to experience reality "as it is". Of course, opinions differ on just what is experienced by the "masters". Are we reaching to experience ultimate reality beyond the self? I'd say, no, we are attempting to more fully experience the self.

I am willing to leave the door open, just a tiny crack, to the possibility that the "deep self" is not entirely confined inside the skull. The more we learn about "reality", the more we discover the vastness of our own ignorance. We seem to make our biggest mistakes by assuming that certain things are obvious and not open to discussion or investigation. We must admit that the idea that the self is "nothing more" than what it feels like to be a brain is not even entirely obvious. It may not be possible to escape the self, but the self is much bigger, more complex and more wonderful than we imagine.

It is more wonderful than we can imagine.

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 ...

The Truman Show

The Truman Show, 1999, is a rich and thought-provoking source of metaphor (imagine here that I pause to watch the whole movie again ...)

The Truman Show Delusion is a variety of paranoia where the sufferer imagines himself to be "on stage" all the time - the centre of a grand performance. I have tasted this one myself in the early days of what came to be called "bipolar illness" - a rather useless term that has come to refer just about any dislocation in the "normal" way we feel about ourselves and our relationship to "reality". I'm all better now, thank you, but my earlier struggles have taught me that there are many alternatives to what is called a "normal" frame of mind.

Almost everyone has a version of the Truman Show Delusion. We all feel ourselves to be the centre of the universe. That's an illusion created by our brains.  If that function is not working, we can have "out of body" experiences. But the "normal" illusion (that we are this particular lump of protein) creates a lot of problems, most notably the feeling that what is going on around us is mainly about us.

The movie features another key character in the delusion -- the Godlike creator of the show who is watching over us from birth. God is an essential character in the Truman Show Delusion, lending by His very presence, plausibility to the idea that life - your life - means something, even if you don't know what.

Challenging this illusion is one task of Zen: to let go of "I, me and mind", even for a few minutes, and experience the world as it is, or at least, as it is when not viewed through the lens of our own desires, plans, prejudices, hopes and fears.  Of course, without the illusion of self, the need for the ghostly creator also vanishes.

I keep coming back to another metaphor in the Truman story: the bubble universe that Truman lives in and ultimately escapes (sorry, plot spoiler). It's easy to imagine that we live in such a bubble and that there is a world outside to be explored if only we had the means to find the "wall" and punch through. This idea is supported by the illusion mentioned above: that we are in our bodies and therefore somehow inside the "bubble" of the  Universe.

Others feel that there is no wall. Given the time and the technical ingenuity, we can eventually discover all the secrets of the Universe. Such optimism is captured in the "Theory of Everything" that physicists seek - one master "explanation" for all the forces in the Universe - an exhaustive inventory of what can be.

Something strange happened in the early 20th century. First Einstein showed that it is not possible to remove the observer from any description of what is happening. There is no "godlike" point of view, no absolute "platform" from which to describe the Universe. Then the same problem arose in Quantum Mechanics, in a far more troubling form. Quantum Mechanics predicts the result of experiments in astonishing precision, but has nothing whatever to say about what is "really going on". It only describes interpretation of results of experiments. Again, the observer cannot be subtracted from the theory. This is made even more troubling when certain results, though predictable, make no logical sense. Particles do not "have" properties, they are not "in" any specific position. They only produce predictable results when subjected to an experiment by an observer. What is going on between observations is cloaked in mystery. This "cloak" seems to be a fundamental aspect of reality, or, if you will, experimental proof that  Truman's wall has no secret door.

Of course, there are many who believe that "outside" the bubble of human experience, there is a whole "supernatural" world. Some would say that this world is the real world and what we experience is (like the Truman world) just a stage. The true meaning of experience is only known outside of the bubble. Such people generally claim to have some special knowledge of the view from outside the bubble - the "God" perspective if you will. For others, such as myself, such claims are paradoxical at best (claiming to know what is unknowable by definition) and unimaginative fairy tales at worst.

To me, the Zen experience takes me to the wall, but no further. I must accept the limitations of being human and on a more fundamental level, being an observer. As a human observer, there is only so much I can know and experience. What I can do is challenge the hard-wired assumptions that come with a human form. As a human, I have a strong tendency to build a bubble within the bubble, to devote my attention and energies to maintenance of the illusion of "self". Keeping with the metaphor, then, the goal is to make the inner bubble as transparent as possible.

If we return to the Truman metaphor, this might be like escape from the inner bubble to explore the "real" world. Or not. It's just a metaphor after all ...