The Consciousness Rabbit Hole

There is a great video on the subject here. It's illustrative of the "rabbit hole" we go down when trying to "explain" something. Ultimately, this is the same rabbit hole we go down when we try to "explain" anything. "What is consciousness'' has the same problems as "What is gravity?". Any "explanation" would be another description, requiring a certain amount of hand waving to count as pulling the curtain back.

Toward the end, there is a discussion of the difference between "thoughts" and "reality." The problem is framing the issue as a "problem" to be solved. The "problem" can be reduced to the collapse of the wave function (see below). This is not to say we are not left with a mystery. It's just that it has nothing to do with "consciousness".

For me, conscousness is a side issue. Certainly, consciousness is a vast mystery - perhaps THE mystery. But we don't need to have a solution to this mystery to know that the world we experience is created in our brains. Trivially, experience is experience.

"Consciousness" bites off too much of the mystery. It's a matter of information about the world versus the world itself. We can make this distinction if we are talking about robots or bees. The mystery of consciousness can be set aside.

At a fundamental level, quantum mechanics tells us two things:

• "Properties" of the world do not exist when not measured. Einstein disagreed, and he was wrong. See "EPR Paradox".
• The information you can extract from a particle depends on what you are looking for. Precision in one question inevitably results in a lack of precision in another.

A "Scientific" view would assume that the above issues would be true of any information system about the world - consciousness or not. For example, when a mechanical experimental setup is left to do measurements.

This would seem to be a fundamental separation between any kind of "observer" and the actual universe, even if the "observer" is something as simple as a kind of "macro" scale object that produces an "up or down" result.

In the above video, Roger Penrose draws attention to this fundamental idea: the "collapse of the wave function." But he does a lot of "hand waving" to connect the idea to consciousness. His hand-waving wanders off to the area of "microtubules", which have the advantage of being a little understood. Even if he's right, we are still stuck with the "hard problem".

John Searle, one of the "grey beards" in the AI field.

This is a talk by John Searle, one of the "grey beards" in the AI field. It is remarkable that this was delivered in 2015 and is now charmingly obsolete. "Nobody has begun to think ..." His reliance on the idea that computers are all Turing machines is dated. He is over-confident in his answers to the "young Turks," who turn out to be building precisely what he thinks is impossible. Like other philosophers, he relies on a "101" understanding of a computer. For example, he highlights the idea that you need to be conscious to frame a question.

Something it "feels like" is the essence - such as Damasio.

Philosophy ...

Inventor of some ideas popularized by Hofstadter

The crucial element of "semantics" over "syntax" and the claim that computers can never do anything more than play with syntax (language). I would say that this misunderstands the nature of language, as Hofstadter describes language as an analogy engine.

Some hints about my notation ideas - "as if" notation for what a machine does 

For most purposes, it doesn't matter except when we attribute consciousness which is not itself observable ... intrinsic.

I think it's complex motivated reasoning - about definitions and words - typical of philosophy in general. Examples of dogs' consciousness rely on this. A background preposition.

He notes that our "apparatus" for discussing these issues is obsolete. Indeed! Useful to note that humans can be (and once were) described as computers. A lovely example of a falling object computing acceleration.

His arguments are similar to the "God of the gaps."

Computation is a matter of interpretation -- the eye of the beholder.

Kurzweil's comments unravel the problems with language. Lovely answer reflects the difference between the causal framework of the brain versus the way the brain's causal network works.

NOTES ON "MIND, LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY"

Belongs to the school of "external realism."

"Background presuppositions."

The only fact that could make them into a mental state is that they are in principle, capable of causing that state in a conscious form.

Searle, John R. Mind, Language And Society (Masterminds) (p. 86). Basic Books. Kindle Edition. 

How about 4321? Is this, in principle, capable of causing a state in a conscious mind by, say, being a result of a calculation? The same could be said of the sound of a mosquito flying, which could potentially be "noticed" and cause a state of mind. I don't think he's handling "potentialities" correctly, and this goes very deep to the "potential" of a neuron to fire (1,000 brains). Physical "Potential" plays a huge role in consciousness. The entire environment (umwelt) is full of "potential" entities. There are an infinite number of these entities. To some extent, the "contents" of the "mind" are constructed "on the fly."

JS talks about mapping mental states to things in the world but doesn't use the mathematical concept of mapping. A shame. This leads to an unnecessarily complicated talk about "conditions of satisfaction."

It is unclear what JS means by a mental "state,", particularly an "international" state. What are other states? How does one state follow another?

I got totally bogged down and fogged out by his treatment of society, language, and meaning. I suppose these are not sufficiently mysterious to me. I was disappointed that he did not tell me something about how groups of people exhibit (or not) qualities of consciousness.

We can summarize these points in the following propositions. 

• Consciousness consists of inner, qualitative, subjective states and processes. It has therefore a first-person ontology 
• Because it has a first-person ontology, consciousness cannot be reduced to third-person phenomena in the way that is typical of other natural phenomena such as heat, liquidity, or solidity. 
• Consciousness is, above all, a biological phenomenon. Conscious processes are biological processes. 
• Conscious processes are caused by lower-level neuronal processes in the brain. 
• Consciousness consists of higher-level processes realized in the structure of the brain. 
• There is, as far as we know, no reason in principle why we could not build an artificial brain that also causes and realizes consciousness. 

But that is it.

Searle, John R. Mind, Language And Society (Masterminds) (p. 53). Basic Books. Kindle Edition. 

If we accept this description of consciousness, a group cannot be conscious. We are left with a suspicion that ideas like intentionality could apply to a group. He sees elements essential to consciousness, such as memory and continuity, that may apply to the group.

Searle's definition of consciousness seems limited to our own kind of experience, not the (perhaps) wider idea of sentience. Here is an aggressive idea of what sentience is and where we can find it.

In any case, it seems like Damasio, rather than Searle, is our guide to the "hive mind."

Mind and Body

Rene Descartes 1596-1650

Descartes took it for granted that "mind" or "soul" existed in different universes. He wondered about how these universes communicated. Specifically, he wondered how "spirit" can move "matter".

There are many who still take the idea of the spirit world seriously. They imagine the "soul" can be separated from the body and migrates on to some other universe (heaven) at death or somehow migrate to another body. Let's put this belief system to one side. From here on, I will speak to those who don't take this idea seriously.

These days, those of us who are scientifically inclined imagine the "mind" to be a phenomenon that somehow happens in the Universe that is governed by physical law (and perhaps other laws so far undiscovered). Exactly how this happens is a live debate and a key area of investigation in the new university departments of "Cognitive Studies". These same departments work on another hot subject: machine learning and "artificial intelligence". Naturally, these two issues tend to overlap, producing "computational" theories of "mind". It's quite respectable these days to consider "mind" to be some kind of computation that could, in principle, happen on a computer.

I'm not too impressed by "computational" theories. As far as I can see, they tend to side-step the core question and propose some kind of hypothetical process that bears no obvious relationship to "mind" as we experience it nor, for that matter, much to do with actual brains.

The debate over the mechanism of consciousness draws a lot of attention away from the core issue, whatever the mechanism may be. These debates also tend to assume that consciousness is something that happens in the brain: an assumption that has become so "obvious" that it is rarely questioned. This is partly due to the "computational" theories, which picture the brain as a kind of computer. What else could it be? It is an uphill fight to wrench people away from this metaphor, but the clues are easy to find if you examine what human consciousness is actually like. It also helps to have a few decades of experience with computers. My experience with simulated people like Alexis and Siri reinforces my impression that "there is nobody home".

The more you learn about the brain (and we are just starting to learn about this), the more we learn about how the brain plays a central role in creating "mind", but the picture changes when we ask What the brain is for? What is it doing? No organ in the human body exists for its own sake. The brain is one of the largest and most energetically expensive organs in the body. What is it doing?

Suppose Rip Van Winkle came to life in 2019 after a 40-year sleep. We hand him an iPhone and ask him about it. After a few hours of careful investigation, he might guess that it's a tiny computer operated with a touch screen, which is kinda true. What he might miss is that the essence of the thing is its ability to communicate with the outside world. It's a phone (which Rip may understand) but it's "aware" of its location and its orientation. It's constantly chatting with the owner and the outside world, warning of upcoming radar, suggesting places to eat, keeping the user up to date on the news and assisting the owner to navigate the real world. The essential role of an iPhone is to "know" the status of the owner and to connect relevantly to the outside world. It's like a little "mind". More precisely, it's a tool that extends the power of the mind.  It gives us a clue about what a mind is.

My claim is that an iPhone may be a computer, but this fact hardly describes its role in the world or the role it plays in the owner's life. Similarly, whatever the brain may be doing, and whatever neuroscience may tell you about how it "works", you will not know what it is for, how it works and what benefit it bestows on the owner. In fact, the role of the brain resembles the role of the iPhone. It "knows" about its internal state, the location of the owner. It handles inbound and outbound messages. Unbidden, it alerts the owner to relevant local information and opportunities and so forth. Subjectively, all these things add up to what we call "mind"*. The brain's role in creating mind is undisputed but, like the iPhone, that role makes no sense if we ignore the role of the outside world, the needs of the owner and the interests of the owner in participating in society by personal messages and general information. You may say that the brain creates consciousness but the consciousness is not "in" the brain. The brain strikes a match which lights a fire that joins in the conflagration that is the shared experience of all human society. Participation in this conflagration is what it feels like to be conscious.

The way that all that happens in the brain is still a huge mystery. It may not even make sense to ask why it feels the way it does (the "hard problem"). It is, however, quite clear to me that we will never understand consciousness by ignoring everything that goes on outside our brain. In my view, we can learn a great deal about "mind" by exploring the parts of "mind" that are wide open for investigation, such as language, memory, perception and decision making. I see the mind in two ways: mind in the world and world in the mind. By studying the world itself, we discover the mind that creates and "models" the world. We can also study the "mind" (especially the brain) as an object in the world.

It may turn out that the brain is, after all, doing a kind of "computation". It seems to be doing other things that computers do, such as retaining memory, sensing the body and the world, controlling a "puppet" body and so forth. All this is appropriate to any kind of brain - the brain of a worm, for example. But we don't want to stop there. We are interested in the mind of human beings. Human minds do things like write symphonies and build space ships. That's the part of "mind" that interests us. That's the phenomenon of mind that is interested in itself.

My dog is very smart. She has a brain that follows the same mammalian architecture of my own. Her brain does all the kinds of "brain things" that I mentioned above. The "computational" power of her brain is probably not orders of magnitude different from my own. But she doesn't know she's a dog, nor is she curious about it. It would certainly be interesting to know all about how her brain works and what kind of a "mind" she has. This would certainly tell us a lot about how my own brain works. But it would hardly tell me much about my mind, which seems to participate in all human experience.

It's natural to think of "mind" as something that arises in the brain due to the complex physical connections between neurons. That's kinda like a computer, isn't it? Perhaps we need a different metaphor. Maybe something based on 21st-century computers, not the computers of 1960. The Internet is created by connections between multiple "hosts" - usually computers. These connections need not be physical (think cell phones and WIFI). The way they are connected is irrelevant to the way they work and what they are for. Most of these hosts are in the business of communicating with other hosts, usually for the purpose of sharing information. Similarly, our "minds" are connected to other minds through speech (sound waves and marks on paper) and many other indirect ways. Breaking these non-physical connections produces a serious degradation in the function of "mind", like turning your computer into an old fashioned "stand-alone" machine with no Google, no Email etc. A brain that is never "connected" to the outside world or other minds is a baby without much of a mind at all. You may choose to call it a "mind", but it is hardly the kind of "mind" we wish to know about. Not the kind of mind you and I have.

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* Of course, the "mind" is more than what is hinted here. "Consciousness" is a faculty of mind but the mind is far more than that. In fact, it seems that most of what "mind" does operates on an automatic and unconscious level. When considered in detail, much of this operation slips out of the "computational" model, but that's a topic for another day.

The "Hard Problem" and the Meaning of Meaning

We all know what we are saying when we talk about what is meaningful to us. These are first-person statements. If the Universe is imagined as "outside" and the mind is "inside", meaning is on the "inside".

Einstein remarked that he was amazed that the fundamental laws of nature are discoverable and, by the way, beautiful. There is something behind this observation that seems almost spiritual - in fact, people talk about "Einstein's God".

Wilczek asks the same question on "A Beautiful Question". He's noting the same deep beauty Einstein is talking about and asking the subtle question - is the Universe "really" beautiful?

So here's a possible road to a "solution" to the hard problem: How do we experience meaning in the Universe? How does it feel to find meaning? Damasio builds his account of "mind" on this very question. This is not merely an "outside" mechanical idea. It's about how it feels to have a mind.

Damasio provides an account of how living organisms evolved central nervous systems - ultimately to discover what is meaninful to the organism.  He provides an account of how these twin phenomena (mind and brain) evolved* together. What binds these two concepts together is meaning, which makes perfect sense on both sides of the "hard question". Damasio firmly roots the feeling of being in physical reality - both the physical nature of the organism and the physical nature of the environment.

In "The Strange Order of Things", Damasio raises his sights to consider how "meaning" arises how meaning works at many levels - from cellular to "organism" to groups of organisms (such as human society). In my view, individual humans are programmed by culture to perceive (feel) "meaning". We imagine we perceive "meaning" as individual organisms, but, in fact, we simply cannot think without our cultural "programming" - most obviously the language we learned as children.

A question that arises is whether these "super beings" (cultures) are alive in some sense or even "conscious". It may be that this question as important but possibly just a matter of definition. However, we would scarcely doubt it if members of the culture were "wired together" by some kind of physical nerve cable. My feeling is that nerves "merely" transmit information and that their function depends on what information is transmitted, not the medium. Great sections of our brains are devoted to sending and receiving messages from other human beings - for example, by language. Again, the medium doesn't seem to matter. The fact is that cultures are "wired together". Individuals in a culture can, at times, pay attention to the same thing, care about the same thing and find the same meaning in the same experience. When we say that two people are "of the same mind", it is more than a figure of speech.  I have discussed ideas along these lines elsewhere.

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* Damasio's account doesn't depend on "evolution" - it's just a fashionable way of speaking of how organisms differ. While plausible, there is no need to drag in the idea that "consciousness" evolving for some reason imagined by the author - usually by imagining how there is some adaptive advantage to whatever phenotype the author is talking about. Personally, I'm not sure that consciousness is adaptive in the long run. The vast majority of organisms on the planet do very well without it.

The central idea of evolution is common descent, which means we can learn a lot about how our bodies work by seeing how other bodies work. We can look around to the billions of living things around us in the current world - postulated by Darwin to be our "relatives" to discover degrees and kinds of how different organisms "calculate" and "feel" meaning. Damasio's central arguments involve organisms with and without a "central nervous system" and how this particular structure is essential to providing a "model" of reality - the organism looks to the "model" rather than directly to "reality". In other words, the mind is a model of the world (and the internal status of the organism).

Substrate of Consciousness

This post is fun to read once processed by Perplexity AI here.


Len writes: My thoughts on this matter have to do with the physical substrate of consciousness and its possible dependence on entanglement as a means of messaging.




Well ..

"The physical substrate of consciousness" ...

There are some metaphors and analogies in that idea that need to be made explicit (Hofstader's Surfaces and Essences is always looking over my shoulder).

The analogy at work here seems to be that "consciousness" is like a thing of some sort - a kind of physical substance. It would seem to be as easy to think of consciousness as a process - particularly a kind of "calculation". It does seem that calculations need a "substrate" - a physical medium to work. Hofstadter spent a lot of time on this idea in his famous "Goedel, Escher, Bach", which won him a Pulitzer. In fact, the idea underlies most of the Science Fiction ideas about consciousness, including the "Singularity", which takes it for granted that human consciousness doesn't depend on any specific "substrate" but would be perfectly OK if transferred to silicon.

This idea is itself an extended metaphor, depending as it does on an image of the mind as some kind of calculation "like" a computer. Indeed, this is a common theme among philosophers who claim to have "solved" the "hard problem" of consciousness. They begin by assuming that the metaphor is more than an analogy - it is fact and that the only problem is to describe how the mind arises (or "emerges") out of the substrate. Fame and fortune await anyone who "solves" the "hard problem".

For those who have fallen far down this rabbit hole, it is hard to spot how this could not be true. Isn't the only alternative "Descarte's Error" - the idea that there are two worlds - the universe of spirit and the universe of matter, somehow interacting through mysterious means? I believe they call this idea "Dualism", but don't quote me.

This is a common fallacy, especially prevalent in politics. If somebody else's idea is wrong, mine must be right.

As I pointed out in our breakfast conversation, total knowledge of the "substrate" of an iPhone doesn't tell us anything fundamental about what an iPhone does and what it is for. We are not lacking in information about the "substrate" of mental functions - presumably the brain. What philosophers always miss is that most of what we know about this "substrate" has been learned in the last 25 years and the "takeaway" is that we have centuries of work ahead of us to understand even this aspect of consciousness. Fans of "entanglement" are "jumping the queue", claiming victory over all the scientists hard at work making real discoveries about brain function, to claim what amounts to a theological connection between entanglement and consciousness. Is it too much to call it theological? Are we not substituting the nakedly theological reasoning of Descartes (where the spirit world is home to God) with the pseudo-scientific idea that "entanglement" is the door to a previously unsuspected realm of reality?

Before I go on, I must point out one issue I have with the idea of the "hard problem". Most people, when they see something referred to as a "problem", automatically assume that there is a "solution" out there. In this case, a Nobel Prize awaits anyone who "solves" the problem. But not all issues that can be framed as "problems" have solutions. As discussed at breakfast, this was something I learned (and actually used) in my thesis in 1969.

Let's go back to the "calculation" analogy. It's quite true a calculation seems to need a "substrate" but, mysteriously, the substrate seems to be irrelevant to the formal description or function of the calculation. Perhaps we should take some time to focus on that "mystery" before tossing out the awkward details to focus on the "substrate" idea, which, after all, seems to be irrelevant in the case of a calculation. What makes a calculation a calculation? I'd say it's quite like the observer in Quantum Mechanics or in Relativity. A calculation is in the eye of the beholder (ignoring for the moment Wolfram's claim that the whole universe is a big calculation). So, even in the case of an apparently "mechanical" calculation, you need a mind - a "programmer" - someone who has purposefully arranged material events to produce a meaningful result. It would seem to me that the analogy falls apart as soon as you include the programmer into the "other side" of the analogy.

It seems to me that "mind" does, indeed, require a substrate. Ultimately, there seems to be no reason to suspect that "mind" is a phenomenon outside the realm of physics. "Mind" obviously requires at least a brain and there is no mystery about this (a vast amount of experimental data verifies this). Since our brains are physical objects, we may assume that "deep down" they follow the rules of quantum mechanics. But we find these rules to be of limited explanatory value in our models of small molecules, let alone the huge molecules involved in life processes. We seem to be doing very well with "ordinary" chemistry and biology. See, for example, the Saporsky's wonderful "Behave", which delves deeply into the many-layered mystery of human behaviour in terms that range from synapse function to cultural pressures. Saporsky takes up perhaps the most relevant aspect of "mind" - namely, Why we do what we do? His answer draws on "bleeding edge" experimental science and provide a sense of where more information might come from. For the purpose of the current topic, "explanations" of behaviour whiz past chemistry rather quickly to include the organism's environment. It makes no sense to discuss behaviour without discussing the organism's actual or perceived environment, or, to put a fine point on it, what the mind is for.

Incidentally, when you learn the actual details of how behaviour arises, the analogy of a "calculation" seems remarkably unhelpful, but there is one idea that pops out. If we acknowledge that "mind" is somehow related to behaviour - and that behaviour is really the main clue that we have that mind is present, does it make sense to talk about the "substrate" of behaviour? Indeed it does - as Saporsky shows at length. In short, the "substrate" of behaviour is reality itself in all its staggering complexity.

Dawkins himself (the author of "Selfish Gene") was great at "substrate" questions. His "memes" required the substrate of the human brain (plus human society if you think of it). He also invented the idea of the "extended phenotype", which recognizes the behaviour and the environment of an organism as important as its physical form (phenotype). Our "extended phenotype" includes a mind. Damasio does an excellent job of tracing the emergence of "mind" in tiny steps all the way through evolution from, as puts it "From Bacteria to Bach".

In spite of all this great work, the "hard problem" of consciousness remains unsolved. Damasio comes closest when he gives the problem the respect it deserves. Why does it feel this way to be alive? Consciousness is a feeling. What, exactly, is a feeling?

The Strange Order of Things

Strange Order Of Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To Bee or Not to Bee - Revised 11/22, 11/27, 2018-11-28

This essay is an "intuition pump". The term was invented by Daniel Dennet. An intuition pump is a thought experiment designed to nudge us from our usual way of thinking to see the world in a new way.

Bees have approximately one million neurons in 0.5 mm; humans have 100 billion neurons. And yet bees can learn, and understand abstract concepts, and make complex decisions

But does a bee know it's a bee?

With a mere million neurons in a speck of a brain, it's not surprising that a bee doesn't have a lot of mental hardware for luxuries like "consciousness." Its brain is busy doing things like being a skillful a flight controller. It's not surprising that we don't have bee philosophers. But if we did, would they ask a similar question of us? Do we know we are human?

Is it possible that I know less about what it is to be human than a bee knows about being a bee?

But don't I know everything there is to know about the experience of being me? Isn't this why it seems so silly to as if a bee knows it's a bee?  And nothing is more important that consciousness - precisely that feeling that I know I'm having that feeling of knowing ...

We are at a loss to explain consciousness - it's known as the "hard problem of consciousness." In fact, we are so stuck on this problem that it's hard for us to imagine what an "explanation" would even look like. It's possible that we are totally wrong about what's going on and, by implication, completely wrong about what it is to be human. For thousands of years, many philosophers have been asking if consciousness is as important as it seems. Perhaps it's not even real.

But we know the important stuff, don't we? We know consciousness has something to do with those 100 billion neurons. That's the most important thing to know, right? Maybe. But we must admit that no neuron "knows" it's part of a brain (us), nor do we know just how all these neurons add up to "us". We could be on the wrong track. Maybe all our brain theories are on the wrong track entirely. Perhaps we are like the bee, which manages to offload the really important stuff so it can do its thing with the absolute minimum of hardware on board.

Most of us would agree that being a bee is to be a smart component of the hive. All the stunning capability of the bee is in service to the hive. Its brain is part of the "hive mind." Its knowledge is part of the collective knowledge of the hive. The hive thinks and behaves as a "superorganism."  The individual bee is completely expendable from the point of view of the hive. One bee is as good as another. This may be the most important thing a bee doesn't know about being a bee.

Part of the problem is that my mind, like the iPhone, "just works". There's a lot of stuff going on under the surface.

Suppose I tried to explain my iPhone to Isaac Newton. I would quickly run into an infinite set of boxes within boxes. Along the way, I'd need to explain probability and Quantum physics before I could explain how transistors work before I could explain logic gates and computer logic. Then I'd need to explain the millions of instructions on the phone along with the trillions of instructions on remote services. Oh, and radio and telecommunications theory from scratch, along with such details as cell phone architecture and TCP/IP protocols. I would need to unpack a big chunk of all human knowledge to explain how my phone works. And that would just be the start. I'd need to explain how and where it is manufactured, the skills required for each tiny bit. Then, of course, I'd need to explain why I have one, what it cost and what I use it for. You get the idea.

But how is it that I use my iPhone so effortlessly without any of this crossing my mind? The answer is that I have been blessed with a mind that effortlessly rides a wave in a vast sea of knowledge. My mind floats along under the impression that it "knows" all this, when, in fact, what I really know is a tiny sliver of the knowledge I hold in my hand. For the bee, all the knowledge of aeronautics, navigation and "wiggle language" is buried in hive brain - the work of the "blind watchmaker," evolution. Am I so different?

And that's just the start. It's not just about iPhones. It's about language. It's about doorknobs and flush toilets. This illusion is eloquently described in "The Knowledge Illusion". This is the illusion that we feel that we move around in a world we "know" when what we actually know is next to nothing.

So, the next time I watch a bee, perhaps I will feel a little less superior.

What do I know?

I spent a long time thinking about this post and concluded that it is rather half-baked. The reader might wonder, what's the point? I wondered about the role of scale. Viewed from a "big picture" scale, humans do look a bit like ants. It's important to remember that they are not ants, but their ant-like behavior is not part of their consciousness - the "bee" phenomenon. Some connection is also needed to the concept of assimilation. I also thought a lot about the bubbles that our minds construct - we are not aware of the very small, the very large, things out of sight and far away, the past or the distant future. We seem to "move" into the future, partly because we pay so little attention ... 

The "point", if any, is how our idea of who we are, why we do what we do, is so shockingly limited. This is hardly an original point but it may be possible to express it more forcibly with a hint of practical application.

From an emotional point of view, mindfulness allows a "reset" to "bubble zero", allowing us to cautiously expand awareness to what may matter a bit more than what we allow ourselves by media traps and daily emergencies. For example, I feel like I'm an American democrat, constantly outraged by the attack on America by DT. This is a media effect. Should I not worry more about what matters to me and what matters in general?

Tragedy

THE HUMAN TRAGEDY

There has been a lot going on since my last "status report". A few little insights have added up to quite a change in outlook - not so much from a logical point of view, but from the subtle emotional impact of it all. This post builds on some previous fragments and may seem to ramble a bit, but here goes ...

The Sam Harris podcast on consciousness made a few interesting points that take awhile to sink in.

• Sam points out that it is hard to imagine what an "explanation" of consciousness would look like. There is something about it that puts it in a different category from even the most notoriously difficult to explain things such as quantum mechanics and the Schrodinger wave equation.
• Thomas Metzinger plugs a powerful meme into my head when he suggests that final acceptance of our mortality leads to a "tragic" view of human existence.

That word, "tragic" seems to chew around the edges of everything I have intellectually decided to make it all feel real and more urgent.

Making things "feel real" is the subject of a book on neuroanatomy: Decarte's Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain. For me, This built on the excellent "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Their Best and Worst.", along with "Zen and the Brain", which I read a few years back and started me on my "Zen Phase". Taken altogether, these texts have made me more and more comfortable with the general workings of the brain, along with some respect and awe. We know a lot, but there is a lot we don't know - perhaps a lot we will never know - cannot know (see Sam's first point). The issue of consciousness (the inexplicable "first-person" perspective) is fascinating and worth an essay or two on its own, but I will leave that for now.

It is obvious that we are a brain - more precisely we are a body with a brain (turns out you can't ignore the body when you consider emotions, which are phenomena in the brain). Through experiments and injury, you can disassemble the personality and, by inference, the mind itself - the "soul". Even major injury to the "body" (apart from the brain) can result in major changes to "personality" - who we are.

We have an unknowable soul that is mysteriously identical to the very fragile and mortal body (seen from an inexplicable first-person point of view). This is the tragedy.

UNIVERSAL IGNORANCE

As Metzinger points out, the vast majority of human beings deny the tragedy itself or respond in ways that completely deny the reality of the human condition. The "Abrahamic" religions, deny mortality in a direct way-we survive death (for better or worse - new problem). Buddhism and Hinduism, assume that the "soul" lives on to be reborn. This creates additional problems that were never far from the mind of the Buddha. All of these religions assume with no evidence that there is a kind of "moral machinery" behind the world, that cares about the minutiae of human behavior. 

Perhaps  Buddha* saw this most clearly. Life is unavoidable suffering. But his response was to withdraw from life and escape from the imaginary "wheel of rebirth". If life is awful, we need to avoid being continually re-born into it. So both his response (withdrawal) and the reasons for it were, to say the least, flawed. It's worth asking if life really is unavoidably awful but that's a subject for another essay ...

Over history, Buddhism has become just another religion, split into dozens of factions, including the one sponsoring genocide in Myanmar (Burma). As in all religions competing "schools" of authority lead to endless fragmentation and violence over fundamentally irreconcilable issues. This doesn't happen when authority is about something real, such as quantum mechanics, which enjoys its own controversies, rarely resulting in death. In science, evidence counts. In religion, only authority counts. But I digress ...

Religious wars and persecutions were sponsored by the Christian religion from the beginning (there are echoes in the New Testament over whether Jewish law applied to new Christians), through the middle ages (the Crusades) but also the Catholic/Protestant divide which still claims lives in Ireland. Again, the dispute is over who is right (the authority) about a subject that bears no relationship whatever to verifiable reality. Disputes like this can never be resolved - they simply fester and become more and more divisive over finer and finer points of mythology. The only way you can be "right" is to kill off those who disagree with you. That's the "solution" that has appeared in history for thousands of years and continues to this day.

Those who reject "organized" religion fail to fully re-think the question. We hear vague bullshit like "Things happen for a reason" or "There must be a power greater than us". Those who reject even this can claim to be "spiritual", which usually means attributing some cosmic significance to the soul or life in general, denying its indispensable connection to the physical brain along with the alarmingly contingent nature of human existence. 

Those who reject all of the above tend to deny the existence of the "soul" altogether. Supposedly, our feeling of being in the world is an "illusion". This idea seems to be a modern spin on the ideas from some minority sects of Buddhism - usually explicitly acknowledged by the modern Guru in a faint claim for authority. We also see quite a few philosophers and scientists who make grand claims to "explain" consciousness (usually "explaining it away") while never peering into the consequences of a worldview stripped of the most fundamental assumptions of religion - the existence of the soul.

Finally, we are left with hardcore skeptics who sweep aside the whole issue as not worth discussion. The problem is that who and what we are matters. Adopting a sensible position on this matter would seem to form the basis of any other decision, both personal and public.

So that's the second aspect of what I am calling the "tragedy" of the human condition. We live in a tragedy but tragically fail to recognize it. The mythical Buddha* would have advice for us on this score. Step 1 would be to accept the fact as an unavoidable circumstance, not a problem to be solved (by ritual, prayer, or living right for example). Step 2 is to realize we are all in this together, which should inspire genuine compassion for all living things. Or so it seems to me.

BEING ALL IN IT TOGETHER - GOOD NEWS/BAD NEWS

One thing that neuroanatomy teaches is that a great deal of our human neocortex (the gray matter) is taken up with getting along with / cooperating with other human beings. Specifically:

• We have extensive areas on the left side of our brains devoted to speech and speech recognition. This makes sense only in the context of communication with other humans. Speech is instinctive and fundamental to who we are. We are not born knowing a language but we are hard-wired to learn one.
• We have brain areas that specialize in face recognition. We are also great at voice recognition.
• Our logic centers, in the cortex that govern our ability to make decisions in social situations - such as what to say when your wife asks if her dress makes her ass look big. Social calculations play a huge role in our lives but we pretend that mathematical logic governs what we do or at least should govern it.

In my "Programmable Ape" blog, I have explored the idea that we somehow "clump" into entities ("dragons") that acquire a life of their own - sometimes having aims that work against the interests of the human beings that make up the "clump". Neuroanatomy provides the details of how we are "wired in" to such organizations, often to the detriment of ourselves and any other human being. We are assimilated. Resistance is futile.

THE TRAGEDY OF LANGUAGE

The "glue" that binds us together in clubs, nations, religions, corporations, and armies is primarily language. But language is, to say the least, imprecise. We can lie with language much more easily than by any other means. We can use language to sound like we are talking about something real (such as what "God Wants") when there is no substance behind the words. It is language that makes the poison of religious conflict possible. It is language that inspires young men to kill and die for causes spun out of thin air.

The Koran praises itself and mandates that the believer trust words over reality in these words:

This is the Book; in it is guidance sure, without doubt, to those who fear Allah.

Mysteriously, the word of God has required entire libraries of interpretation ("scholarship") and spawned dozens of sects at war with each other over fine points of interpretation. It is taken for granted that the ordinary believer cannot figure out what the Koran is saying without consulting one of many dozens of self-styled "authorities". This is only possible if there is no evidence behind the squabbles. It's solely about authority. Squabbles over authority are made more violent when the parties speak different languages (as do the Shia and the Sunni). The Shia (who speak Persian) remark in hushed tones that it seems that Allah only understands Arabic.

It is easy to see the entire history of religious conflict as one inspired by language itself: the use of language to support spurious claims of authority and the role of language to make different parties unintelligible to each other.

Of course, language plays the same role in International conflict and many conflicts within nations, including my own (Canada), which. 150 years after its birth as a nation, struggles over "language rights" for French and Indigenous peoples.

Language is the main instrument in the toolbox of those whose agenda is based on "us and them". This is the third face of our tragedy. We are helplessly tossed in a bag with our friends and neighbors, weighted with our superstitions and assumptions, then thrown overboard into an uncaring world.

LIVING IN A TRAGIC DRAMA

Tragedy has long been recognized as a rich theme in drama. Even our comedies - the good ones - encourage us to smile at our own foolish nature. We are not entirely uneducated in this way of seeing the world. Even in tragedy, the dignity of the human soul can shine. One might even say it is only in tragedy that we find deeply inspiring meaning. We are not living in a Walt Disney version of Jungle Book. We are living in a dangerous world where our lives and the lives of those we love can be snatched away at any moment. This is the curse of human consciousness: to know our ultimate fate. To my way of thinking, this is where we need to start if we are to face life and find meaning in it.
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* What we learn about Buddha in the "West" is the "Walt Disney" version. For those of us who have traveled in the birthplace of Buddha, Buddhism seems like a rather jarring example of ignorant religion. Study of the actual writings of Buddha reveals a man deeply caught up in the superstitions of his day. The way of life he recommends seems right and sensible only when viewed through the spectacles of an individual hungry for an authority to show the way. The same considerations apply to Zen, which has been laundered for the West as "mindfulness" and Hinduism laundered as "Yoga". Even self-appointed 21st-century sages such as Sam Harris seem unaware of how much they rely on the ersatz authority and (lack of) standards of evidence coming from "Eastern Wisdom" doctrines.

The Hard Problem - Who Counts?

Stripped of philosophical rhetoric, the Hard Problem of Consciousness is: Why does it feel this way to be me? It's about the inner experience of being. I won't digress into the history and controversy of the issue except to say that I do indeed regard the problem as "hard". It seems to me that no amount of understanding of the "mind" as an epiphenomenon of physics can explain the feeling of being in the world. In fact, it is hard to imagine what such an "explanation" would look like.

For me, the first step in tackling a hard problem is to recognize that it is, indeed, hard. The most critical step in my Master's thesis research was to recognized that the problem I was trying to solve was provably impossible. The key was to ask the right question and to know that the question you'd really like to ask is unanswerable.

For the purposes of this discussion, I will use the term "soul" to refer to a (possibly hypothetical) entity that is capable of experiencing the world in some way similar to the way I do. I know I have a soul (but I may still be wrong). I'm less sure about you.

I love to collect impertinent questions about consciousness. Let me give you one that had my head spinning for awhile.

Sam Harris poses a thought experiment:

Suppose we could build a robot that perfectly mimicked human behavior with the ability to totally fool anyone as to its mechanical nature (passing the Turing Test with flying colours and then some). In philosophy, this entity is called a "philosophical zombie" which is identical to a human in all respects except lacking a "soul".  Typically, Sam sprinkles scientific fairy dust on an old problem by imagining the zombie to be a robot. This is just a modern spin on an old issue [2].

Harris claims (and I agree) that we would treat this robot as a "person" long before this high level of functionality was achieved. After all, people love their cars and pet spiders.

So Sam asks, What is the meaning of such a relationship? If you fall in love with a robot, are you not, in fact, alone in he universe and just fooling yourself about being "in love"? Good question.

Harris is famously capable of asking impertinent questions, but, like the rest of us, rather poor at coming up with pertinent answers [1]. What is it that is bothering Harris? One thing you will know about Harris if you listen 5 minutes into any of his podcasts is that he loves an audience. He would clearly not be doing what he's doing if he had only an audience of robots (I feel the same way about my blog, by the way). So it makes sense for him to be horrified by the notion that a person might have nothing but "relationships" with soulless machines [3].

Perhaps Sam needs to get over himself. Really, there is no way to know for sure if Sam himself is not a robot . At the core of his concern is his need to know that there is a soul-to-soul connection which, as a byproduct, validates that he himself has a soul.  Possibly a robot would falsely validate Sam's soul by acting in a programmed way like a human being but, inside, being nothing but millions of lines of code instructing the machine to act like a living being. How does Sam know that he is not a zombie? Impertinent question: why does it matter? Is it not annoying to as the Universe the ultimate question and get back the response: Why do you ask?

Is it possible that one of the key attributes of this hypothetical "soul" is simply the desperate need to contact other souls? Perhaps one preoccupation of "souls" is to prove their own existence - another form of the "hard problem"!

We can understand Sam's problem without invoking the idea of soul at all (this happens a lot with "soul" questions). Humans are social animals. Our evolutionary survival strategy gives us hard-wired brain functions that recognize faces, voices and social status. We have "mirror neurons" that allow us to experience the behavior of other people as our own - an ability that allows the great apes (and some birds) to learn by watching. The great evolutionary achievement of man is language, which makes no sense unless it's an excellent way to share experience. Thus, we can suspect that this hunger for connection arises out of human nature. Not necessarily anything to do with "souls".

Along with this "deep hunger" are two more notable human characteristics: curiosity and self-awareness. We can easily understand why humans would be aware and curious about their own need to connect with others "like themselves" and for some of them at least to ask, What do I mean by "like myself"? Damn. The hard question again.

Returning to Sam's concern, I'd say that it "feels good" to make connections with entities that feel like souls. It's more than just feeling. It's good for you - a way of behaving in a human way. Not feeling this way is "swimming upstream", bound to create unnecessary tension and suffering. Cutting to the chase, our lives will feel just fine even if we are living in a society of zombies. By definition, zombie relationships will fulfill all the inner needs of a human unless that human persists in asking unanswerable questions.

So Sam, If you can't find someone to love you, buy a dog. Or start a blog ...

But wait! Suppose Sam is, indeed, a zombie. This is an even more chilling scenario: a world consisting of nothing but robots - just machines pretending to interact in a human way. A world of intelligent cuckoo clocks. Since there is nobody left to fool, we can imagine that the robots fall far short of accurate human simulation. If we think about it for a second, this is worse than Sam's empty love affair. We can see that we don't need Sam at all to reach this horrifying dystopia. What if only our machines are left and there are no souls at all in the Universe?

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[1] Sam is also good at burying his ideas in a deep layer of scientific "fairy dust", making it seem like he's got a new spin on very old problems. By sleight of hand, it can seem that his new way of asking the old problem actually answers the old problem.

[2] In fact, Sam's problem may not even deserve treatment as a philosophical question at all. Is it not painful to be in a relationship with someone who "has no idea who I am?" Is that not a common complaint? Is that not a relationship that lacks "soul to soul" connection - like living with a zombie? Possibly even feeling yourself to be a zombie?

[3] The vast majority of "hits" on this blog come from Russia. I assume that these are "bots" crawling the web for nefarious purposes not including an interest in philosophy.

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.

The Domains of I, M and R

Quick and dirty definitions, to be clarified as we go along:

• R Refers to the "real world". Accepted wisdom is that we have no direct access to R.  It turns out that we actually do have quite a good access to the R domain - the M/R interface, also known as "Science". For the individual, the I domain is tiny compared to the vastness of both M and R. However, with effort and training, it is possible for the individual to open a tiny peephole into R - at least so far as to put to rest the notion that R does not exist at all - that it's all an illusion.
• M Refers to "meme space" or the entire set of ideas, actual and possible. For example, all of Science exists in M, existing uncomfortably with all religions, past present and future. It is everything we know or could know or think we know, possibly including all those things that may be conceivable by some alien intelligence or even "God". M happily accommodates all the wrong ideas and the opposite of every idea.
• I Refers to memes that can be called to working memory. These may be thought of as a subset of M but it's more fruitful to regard the I/M interface as closely analogous to the M/R interface. "Calling up" memes to working memory involves a meme translation. We say we "get" the idea if our translation from a meme m from M to I leaves m unchanged in some way. Or we could say that m will translate to an isomorphic version of m no matter who calls it to working memory. This is a kind of symmetry, which the theory is all about. 

I call the theory that links all this together IMR Symmetry or IMR for short. At bottom, IMR is an extended analogy, asking us to visualize three worlds and ask questions about the interfaces between them. Much of the work consists of cleaning up or ideas about what these three worlds consist of and how we imagine that they communicate.  Advanced warning: many of these ideas will seem counter intuitive unless you "do your homework" and check the references liberally referenced in the text.

• The idea of "self" and "consciousness" are disassembled and put back together into something very different from the common understanding of these ideas.
• The "modern" concept of the "mind" as being an epiphenomenon of something going on in the neurons of our brains is also tossed aside.
• Many of the big philosophical questions, such as "Idealism vs. Realism" are implicitly solved by a new picture of what the mind is and what reality is. This will annoy professional philosophers. Physicists have more to say about this issue, resulting from actually examining the world rather than just thinking about it.
• IMR brings aesthetics, art and science under the same umbrella. This rows against the current fashion of considering such things as fundamentally incompatible ways of experiencing the world. For example, we can find "truth" and "beauty" in all three worlds using very similar criteria.
• My view of the self and consciousness is deeply informed by Zen. By this I don't mean that Zen is "right" but only that Zen is free from many of the misconceptions and fuzzy language that underpins the way most of us talk about the issues under discussion here. Readers not familiar with Zen (or its cousin "mindfulness") may find it worthwhile to take a detour to "wake up" to what they are actually experiencing day to day (the I world).

In line with Frank Wylczek, I take symmetry to be the key to usefully describing the "machinery" in all three domains -- an important criterion for what "works" and what doesn't "work":

• In the I domain, symmetry saves a lot of work by allowing us to work with "chunks" of ideas that don't change when we make "irrelevant" transformations. For example, we have an idea of our house which is the same house from any angle and over a long period of time.
• In the M domain, symmetric ideas have special appeal. For example, we like ideas that apply everywhere and at all times, like Newton's laws of motion. This illustrates the fact that an idea (meme) may be a "good" one (persistent) if it is symmetric but not strictly "right" in that it doesn't always map perfectly to the corresponding phenomena in the R world. "Good" ideas tend to spawn fruitful analogies - that is, they retain many of their essential features when they undergo the "like" transformation.
• Wylczek goes to great lengths to point out that there is enormous real symmetry in the R domain ("real world). In fact, he proceeds by assuming this symmetry then going out to find out if experiments agree with what such symmetry concepts (M world) will predict. A Scientific theory is valid if and only if predictions of the theory is isomorphic with results conducted in the "Real" world.

Dennett helps to free ourselves from thinking that someone must "have" ideas (M domain). As Plato suspected, the world of ideals has a life and existence of its own. We can thank Wylczek for drawing a clear line from Pythagoras to the Standard Model of Physics, illustrating the persistent idea that the world of memes (especially mathematics) is somehow real. For example, the number 321,534,332 has definite real properties even if nobody has ever thought of that particular number.  

Many authors have concentrated on the concept of "working memory" or "attention" as a surrogate for what we call "consciousness". However, when we read about this idea, the impression is created that the contents of "working memory" are somehow conjured up from what is sitting around in the brain (or possibly on the "live" channel to the outside world - the sensations). Here, we take a somewhat more dynamic and open-ended view. For example, 321,534,332 can be conjured up in the brain of the reader as a "chunk" to be divided by two, squared or verified as non-prime. This illustrates that the "chunks" of working memory (consciousness) are constructed on the fly. The brain helps with this process by providing all kinds of tools (What Dennett would call installed subroutines) but it is not correct to say that the mind is entirely an "epiphenomenon" arising in a few billion neurons. If it is an epiphenomenon at all, it arises from M and R through to a process in the brain.

It is worthwhile to come up with a temporary vision of what the M domain looks like. It's vast. it includes:

• Every book ever written or could be written in any language past present or possible.
• Every word in every language, along with their definitions
• All of Science, including all possible Science and all incorrect theory
• All of Religion
• Every possible sensation
• Every possible inference from sensation or theory (the result of any possible experiment)

As the name suggests, I'm temporarily trusting M to be the world of "memes", but I will have a lot to say about memes. They are not created equal. In a way, they fight for survival. In the language of IMR Symmetry, what they "fight for" is the ability to survive through time and through translation (installation) in many different brains (I-worlds). This is a form of symmetry - a form underlies "evolution" in the M-domain, just as Dawkins suspected in 1979 when he coined the term. Hopefully, our discussion of the M-domain will prove to be a contribution to the field of memetics - an attempt to nail down the "meme" concept with some semblance of rigour. 

In Surfaces and Essences, Hofstadter and Sander make a heroic attempt to show the key role of analogy in structuring human thought - in other words, a key role in the structure of M. They show how analogy plays a fundamental role in human language but also more complex structures of ideas, such as Scientific Theory. Our commentary on M will always keep this insight in mind: "Surfaces" provides powerful insight into the kinds of transformation that memes (ideas) can undergo through the process of analogy. Sometimes when we say A is like B, we are saying that A and B are isomorphic - for all intents and purposes, the same thing. This is another way of saying that the analogy transformation from A to B is symmetric. Other analogies are not so "powerful", extracting only a few properties common to A and B. In fact, we can put A and B in the same "category bag" arbitrarily without them sharing any properties at all. "Surfaces" is well worth reading as a brave attempt to map M. Is there more to say about M? I would say, yes. "Surfaces" is about one kind of transformation we can make on a meme. We are left asking about where memes come from in the first place and whether there are other kinds of transformation - especially transformations that claim to be strong mapping to R or "ideas" that can pop up in working memory (I).

As a career systems analyst, I have been particularly interested in the problems we face when mapping "real world" problems into the M-domain of the computer. We need to build a "model" of the real world situation in order to "computerize" decisions that ultimately have effect in R. One key insight in the last 50 years of the discipline is that our models should be, as far as possible, isomorphic with the entities we think exist in R. Strictly speaking, we have a conceptual model m in M that is usually thought of as "being" real. We need a machine version m*of m that is as isomorphic as possible (symmetric) to m. To do this, our model has entities corresponding to "real" things like "persons", properties of persons and transactions between persons. In the early days of computing, our models consisted of thinly disguised pictures of machine operations like "decisions", "calculations" and free-floating "data" such as integers and text. Today, all this is summarized by the Universal Modeling Language (UML). UML itself is a giant meme, which, when installed in the brains of human analysts, allows them to construct conceptual models in M that can be isomorphically mapped to real models in physical machines operating in R. Such models can turn out to have real impact on real people and other objects in R, such as the ability to drive cars in the real world or land real robots on the real planet Mars.

As a computer geek, I think of I-domain as a "virtual machine" simulating in M in the R-world "hardware" of the brain. "Chunks" of M (memes) are called into working memory either directly out of the brain (buffer to M) or "calculated" by programs installed in the brain from M. We can think of the dynamic aspect of I (he flow of consciousness) as a continual calculation - producing on set of "chunks"after another at a rate of a few cycles per second  For those of us who inhabit the "google sphere", we are familiar with the fact that we can "think" about "chunks" that can be instantly called up from the entire universe of human knowledge. In a profound sense, we swim in a world of information that is not somehow encoded in our heads. What I "know" and what "we" know is becoming more and more difficult to sort out. In fact, my model has no place for what "I" know - only what "I" am able to bring to mind at any particular moment. "I" am a virtual machine running in R, simulating M. I don't think of M as static either. Millions of people are churning away in M to bring new ideas to the surface. As Dennett has shown, ideas can float to the surface and acquire a life of their own even if nobody "has" the idea. Ultimately, the "affordances" of R (what is possible) strongly effect what "bubbles up" in M, so ultimately R has a strong influence on what happens in M. In particular, the process of evolution is a result of R "thinking" or conducting a program of R&D without anyone "having" the ideas behind life itself - ideas we find in "M". I and M also have their "affordances". Wittgenstein said that what cannot be said must be passed over in silence (commenting on what can arise in the language domain - part of M). We know that the brain cannot deal with more than a limited number (less than 10) of "chunks" at any one time.

In subsequent postings, I will flesh out the ideas of the I, M and R domains along with the idea that we best understand the relationship between these worlds in terms of symmetry. The analogy is with the success that such projects have had in reconciling the part of M called "Science" with experiments that confirm that our "Scientific" ideas map very well to the real world. The flagship example of this mapping is the Standard Theory of Quantum Mechanics, which so far maps to the real world to a precision of 12 decimal places or more. The success of this model has come in large part from the concept that the most useful ideas ("laws" in M) are the ones that are symmetric in some sense because it turns out that reality itself (R) is governed by symmetric principles. I claim that the most useful "chunks" to hold in memory are those that are in some sense "symmetric" and that the most useful ideas in "M" also have this property.