Belyea Rd 7 - The Bubble World of "Believers"

 What do we think of as "experience"? How we interpret the world depends on "Scientific" findings that we trust - not direct experience. Without such (tentative) knowledge, it's hard to characterize modern "experience".

Is the "zen" acceptance of consciousness naive? Is it not true that consciousness floats on the top of a very deep well of processes that are not available to consciousness. We know that we are deeply rooted in the "real world" as the ancients didn't. Whatever consciousness may be, it has deep roots in the physical world, just like a tree.

The mystery remains, but this is no reason to abandon rationality in favor of ancient mysticism.

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.

Russian Dolls and The Mind

On Tue, Mar 12, 2019, at 7:30 PM Len Bruton <...> wrote:

There seems little doubt that science looks for explanations by seeking out those physical objects within brains that may yield a closer appreciation of how minds function and maybe just where they are to be found!!  Following your very different approach, my thought experiment is to ask whether Earthly minds and whether Earthly consciousness existed 100 million years ago?  Is it then a valid question to ask whether reality existed prior to minds

This question can send us spiraling down an infinite regress. There seem to be two ways of stopping this. Either accept the reality of "mind" or accept the reality of "the world". Otherwise, you have a problem of reality being something in the mind, which is itself in reality, or a model of reality and so forth ...

Wayne Brown <chillyfinger@gmail.com>to Len
Given that we have a mind, it also makes sense if other living things have a mind or something like it. Such questions can provide insight into our own mind. It even makes sense to ask if Google has a mind. 

I have no doubt that my dog has a mind of sorts. However, she is stuck with a mind that she inherits through her genes (which is why it makes sense for her to circle around before lying down to sleep). Wolves share their minds when they hunt down a moose but within pretty sharp limits. I think neuroscience can provide a lot of insight into mammalian minds and we are mammals. 

Our minds are built up from birth by language, culture, becoming shared minds. Human minds can be fruitfully explored by the experience of sculpture, astronomy, photography and so much more. If our minds were "nothing more" than mammal brains we would not be interested in them at all. 

But your question was about reality, not minds. I think all life is deeply rooted in reality. Life sucks as much information from the real world as possible - information that can be turned to advantage in the struggle for survival. Information that can be stored within the physics and biology of the organism. As it happens, such information, once obtained, can be used for other purposes. 

Humans do even better by obtaining information from each other, through reason and through instruments. Still, it is information about reality and not reality itself. Some would argue that, since we cannot know reality directly, we can't really know that reality exists at all. This type of talk may be suitable to impress half drunk girls at a party, but can't be taken seriously. To follow Descarte's line of thinking just a bit further: to "know" reality implies a knower and the subject of knowledge (knowledge about ...). Our "model" of reality is not reality itself, but it is wonderful, endlessly expansive, explorable and shared. 

It's frustrating when we bump into fundamental limits of observation, such as we do in cosmology and quantum mechanics. In these areas, we must lay aside our tools of observation and rely on pure reason. At that point, it becomes painfully obvious that we are discussing ideas about reality rather than reality itself. In the "real" world, perhaps logic, space and time do not exist or exist in a way we cannot observe. Or perhaps we have the wrong idea of "existence" itself.  

In any case, exploring the model of reality the mind creates is more productive than attempting to create a model of mind in reality (or, more precisely, our mind within our model of reality.). We've been doing this for thousands of years and progress is being made steadily. 

Neuroscience will never discover art or physics in my brain, nor will it discover my model of reality. Building that model is the very purpose of the organ in question. To learn about my model of reality, it's best to explore reality itself.

Design Is In The Eye of The Beholder

A "design" is an abstract concept. We can speak of the "design" of the human heart without expecting to find a blueprint somewhere. Even in cases where we know there was a human designer, the design of a human creation remains even if no documents or memory of the design exists. We see design where we see purpose.

"Design" and "model" are closely related concepts and both may be seen to live in the same "space".

DNA can be seen to embody the design of a life form, but the physical embodiment of the design in the DNA is not essential. In fact the non-essentiality is a characteristic of models/designs. We could imagine creating a process that would produce all the machinery of the cell by some other means - even such a simple means as switching the chemical structure but not the "meaning" of one of 4 letters of the genetic code.

At the "mind" level of model and design, we know that our minds are somehow implemented in our brains, but we have assumed for millennia that this relationship is non-essential, most recently by imagining that a computer might have a mind. At this level, it is still difficult to imagine that our minds are, in fact, completely abstract and only implemented in our brains.

For the supermind, it appears that the "implementation" is ephemeral, like the structure of a hurricane. Of course, a hurricane is "real" but what makes it a hurricane (its "design") emerges from the physics of heat and water. Similarly, a "supermind" emerges when many human minds share attention and intention to act upon the real world. Take away that attention and the supermind vanishes. A philosopher might easily to say that the supermind doesn't exist at all, but that's like saying only heat and water exist: but not hurricanes.

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The concept of "design" here owes a great deal to Daniel Dennett, especially "From Bacteria to Bach and Back"

The Birth of Soul

The "soul" is perhaps the poster child example of a "meme". What is essentially "us" survives death. Stripped to its fundamentals, this is the idea that the "mind" exists in some kind of parallel universe, independent of the physical world we all inhabit on a daily basis.

Modern versions of this idea set aside the parallel universe and assume that we can somehow "upload" ourselves into computers. This preposterous idea flies in the face of anything we know about the brain, but it has roots in the ancient lore of the soul. We just can't let go of the idea that we are ghosts that can be somehow set free.

"Idealism" takes the view that we can know only the world of the mind - indeed reality itself is the illusion. This is simply another variant of the concept that mind and world are fundamentally disconnected.

Where did this idea come from?

I think there is a simple answer. Imagine yourself to be a hunter-gatherer way back tens of thousands of years ago. Somebody dies. What do you make of this? What do you think has happened? Reasoning as humans do, you look for something similar. The only similar state of affairs that would occur to you is sleep. The person must be asleep but can't wake up. You know from personal experience that, during sleep, you dream. You do all kinds of normal things in your dreams, like hunt and avoid dangerous animals. You do strange things too, like fly and talk with the dead. It is perfectly logical to assume that your dead companion is dreaming but can't wake up. In fact, he is stuck in an alternate universe - a "dream world". From time to time, you may even visit this person in the dream world and chat with him. Conclusion: the essential nature of the person survives and does not depend on the physical body. Everyone has a "soul".

This is all very logical and not, as some would claim, "superstitious". It is not, as many assume, simply the result of wishful thinking or denial of mortality. It was a good theory based on a available evidence.

Over thousands of years and hundreds of civilizations, this meme has morphed into a myriad of religions, all based on the fundamental assumption that death is like sleep and we go on after death to live in a realm eventually populated by dead people and gods. Eventually, the oldest profession (the priesthood) arose, providing a living for those who claim to have special knowledge of he alternate universe and a unique ability to communicate with the spirits who inhabit that world. By the time we arrive in historical times, religions have become competing unwieldy tangles of mythology and guesswork. People are willing to kill over the precise details of religious theories. It's good to remember the assumption they all make: the existence of the soul. Imagine a world where all of a sudden people stopped believing in the "soul". To cite just one example, Islam would vanish like a popped party balloon. The attitude we characterize as "extremism" absolutely depends on belief in the immortal soul.

Even the minority of us who reject the idea of the immortal soul are still stuck with the idea that the "mind" (the modern word for soul) is a rather small, personal thing, rattling around in our brains. Our "mind" is something that mysteriously arises in the brain. Something to do with "consciousness". But this is just the soul stripped of its immortal qualities and trapped in our heads.

Many of the posts in this blog and the sister blog "Programmable Ape" explore the idea that "mind" is only partly a private thing. For example, you cannot understand the "mind" of any person without taking into the account language of his "inner voice" or the "programming" provided by his culture. It's also true that one evolutionary purpose of the mind is to accurately model the real world [1]. While it is true that this model is imperfect, it must also be admitted that the "real word" plays a large part it our experience - the "contents" of our minds. It almost seems that we don't learn a lot of useful information about "mind" from the fact that we seem to need a brain to have a mind. This is why we have entire branches of Science devoted to the study of how minds work in general without any specific reference to how the brain works. On the other hand, we see a million papers published every year in neuroscience but few that shed any light on how the mind actually works and none that tell us why it feels the way it does to have a mind (or does it feel this way to have a part of a mind?)

I conclude that we need to seek analogies and models for the mind that don't rely on the "trapped soul" metaphor. The mind is not an "epiphenomenon" arising out of  the complex neural structure of the brain, nor are our minds some kind of ultra-sophisticated computer. While it is far from the whole story, we can start by imagining the mind to be an active subset of the incredibly subtle and powerful "software" of human language [2]. If we imagine a brain that lacks this capability, we wind up with brains that lacks language - the brains possessed by the rest of the animal kingdom. The vast gap between the mind of a human and the smartest non-human animal gives a hint of the importance of this single capability. The example of language hints at the fact that "mind" is something shared among many humans and ultimately bound to the universe humans inhabit (what language is about). This is very far from the "dream world" theory of the mind. If there is to be an "alternate universe", it must be the world of the mind itself, which we all understand (in non-mystical terms) to differ from the "real world" in specific ways revealed in laboratory experiments and everyday experience. If we reject idealism, we must accept that both realms (mind and the real world) are real and in intimate communication with each other. Neither is "imaginary".

This view of "mind" also takes us away from the fashionable assumption that the mind is somehow identical to the brain. No amount of billion-dollar brain initiatives will uncover the secrets of the mind. The mind is not to be discovered in a "wiring diagram" (the "connectome"). It is more likely to be discovered in studies that reveal he structure of language, human society and reality itself. The brain is neither necessary nor sufficient for the existence of "mind", although in humans, it seems to be necessary but not sufficient. Accordingly, the wiring diagram of the human brain will not tell us much about what mind is.

In parallel to our efforts to re-imagine the "mind", it makes sense to reconsider what we mean by "self". How are these two ideas related? Modern psychology and experimental philosophy is teaching us a lot about the "self". For example, we learn that our sense of continuity with the past is very fallible (which is not the same thing as an "illusion"). We learn that our concept of free will is elusive in the laboratory.  We learn that "personality" depends as much on context as on some innate attribute of the soul. In general, the "self" is subject to exploration from the "outside". In fact a case may be made for the view that the "self" is the way we explain our behavior to others and even to "ourselves". Behind all this data gathering is the unstated question: What is it like to be X? What is i like to be me? That is a question that endlessly fascinates us and drives many forms of art. In all our investigations, we find that the "self", like the "mind"often seems like a small wave in a vast ocean of real people in the real world.

It is difficult to accept the Zen contention that the self is an illusion. It is illusive, dynamic and ephemeral, but this does not make it "unreal". It is, in fact, the mysterious foundation of all experience.

[1] It is always dangerous to assume that evolution has a "purpose". To me, such claims don't pass the sniff test. It is equally possible that the primary job of the mind is to support society by, for example, supporting face recognition and fidelity of communication.

[2] While we use the term "language" for the way we instruct computers, computer languages differ from human languages in many respects, the most important being that a speaker of a human language knows (or thinks he knows) what he is talking about.  Computers don't "know" the information they manipulate any more than a car knows about internal combustion.

Intelligibility and he Birth of Paradigm

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

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

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

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

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

Evolution of Mind - Evolution of Machine

I'm wary of the term "evolution" - especially when it is used in a vaguely Darwinian sense to sprinkle scientific fairy dust over wild speculation. I think it makes sense to use "evolution" in a fairly narrow sense, in which we can see that some object, "thing" or situation exhibits the following qualities:

• It's in some "state" of current interest. The analysis of the "state" has some non-trivial explanatory power over the thing in question even when it is considered as a current, static object.
• The "thing" has obviously, necessarily undergone change over time - it wasn't always the same as it is now. It must have been in some other state, usually a simpler state, at some time in the past.
• There is strong evidence that the thing has undergone versions, where one version incorporates design features of previous versions.
• It is legitimate to ask what changes have taken place over time to get from the "simpler" state in the past to the current state.
• Some kind of specific process should be proposed, even if somewhat tentatively. For example, Darwin started with the observation that species are related, asked what we mean by "species" and only gradually came to theorize that species must have emerged over time.  He could only speculate about the mechanism (He liked, but did not use, what we call "survival of the fittest". He didn't know about genetics or DNA). 
• The specific timeline of change will inevitably be speculative. It's nice to establish milestones and approximate dates but this must regarded as secondary to analysis of the change itself. Darwin was famously off by orders of magnitude with his time line but this turned out to be irrelevant to his core ideas.

With those provisos, there are a few questions in the "evolution" of humans that are interesting:

• Speech
• Language
• Writing
• Money
• Social Structure (small bands to cities, craft to corporation, tribe to Nation State)
• Religion
• Nation States
• War

It is useful to speak of the evolution of computation or perhaps the wider and broader term "information processing" rather than the "evolution" of the computer. The other aspect of this evolution is characterized by "information storage". Clay tablets and fingers have their place in this history. It doesn't begin with Babbage or Turing. I like to avoid terms such as "information processing", which would be perfectly acceptable except that virtually all readers will conjure up an image of modern computers when this phrase is used. It is, in fact, still fashionable to call the Computer Department at a University the "Information Technology" department, even though they don't teach about clay tablets or even money. The common thread seems to be progress in externalizing or delegating the task of computing and remembering to machines that grow in complexity and power over the years. Questions can be asked about the progress of mechanical information processing and they are woven in to the above questions about human society:

• Writing
• Counting
• Money
• Computation
• Stored programs ("software as data")
• Networks
• Virtualization
• Class libraries (divorce of design from platform)
• Social networks - close integration of human and computer "societies"

An important thread of this evolution is the way that we gradually shift attention to aspects of reality that can be computed and stored while pushing other aspects of reality aside. This is perhaps the fundamental way that human evolution is linked to the evolution of computation. Wittgenstein's famous saying pops into mind: What can't be said must be passed over in silence.

Several common themes emerge when discussing the parallel evolution of humans and machines:

• Information processing and the evolving nature of what counts as "information"
• Compression
• Virtualization (platform independence)
• Information embedded in language
• Communication
• Formalization and standardization 
• Efficiency

We gain special insight into these common themes by comparing and contrasting their history in the two streams of evolution. In the case of computation, many of the "landmarks" are very clear and have firm dates. Others, such as the appearance of money, have a more complex and debatable history but there is clearly a time when money did not exist and a time when it did. 

In some cases, important innovations appear in one stream and they are not obvious in the other, at least at first glance. For example, "virtualization" is a very clear and specific engineering concept in the computational field. What, if anything, can it mean to speak of a virtual "mind"? One clue is in the fact that philosophers have always felt free to describe the inner workings of the mind without reference to how the brain "works". When they do make reference, their ideas are remarkably sketchy and dated. Tellingly, their ideas about how the physical mind works are not much affected by the specifics. The ideas are "fairy dust". This leaves us free to propose that the "hardware" doesn't matter at all, leadinging in the extreme case to ideas such as Kursweil's - "uploading the mind to silicon" seem perfectly reasonable. This is an argument firmly based on ignorance, like the idea that humans were created out of nothing by God, which made sense until the facts were known.

The evolution of "society" in computation also exhibits some fascination and non-obvious parallels. One precondition of "society" is standardization of components and protocols. Such standards in human history have lead to sweeping changes in human society, including capitalism, cultural genocide and waves of economic crisis when policy is about "jobs" rather than human well being. Standardization of weapons, protocols and military "jobs" has played a key role in the evolution of modern warfare to the point where a single instruction can now spell the destruction of civilization through a "fan out" through standard protocols to standardized weapons and human beings turned into standard components of the military "machine". In the case of the military "economy" (legalized mass murder), there are many milestones on the road to standardization, along with a rich set of parallels between the kind of society humans can form compared to the kind of structure a computation can take.

Society can be usefully regarded as a machine than as collections of living things. In this sense, our two streams have been steadily converging over recorded history. The evolution of this aspect of society is worth discussion in its own right, as I have done in "The Programmable Ape". By regarding machines and humans as co-evolving along very similar paths, it becomes possible for me to describe the human machine (the "dragon") in more precise and familiar terms. This can possibly overcome the common perception of what a machine is. 

So what is a "machine"?

• Machine "language" is tiny, formal and inflexible. 
• Machines are formed of components which exist for no other purpose than to serve the purpose of the machine.
• Very few machines are "unique". They are themselves "cogs" in a larger system that demands precise standardization of components. 

In contrast, in a human ...

• Language is vast, informal, open-ended and general
• Humans are famously difficult to organize into coherent groups with coherent purpose. In practice, this involves stripping them of what makes them human in the first place.
• Humans are unique. This uniqueness is built in by the way DNA works and the inherent limitations of their nervous system. 

Over time, these differences become blurred:

• Humans become "standardized" into "jobs" in order to fit into the larger economic machine. Unique human qualities are suppressed or even punished.
• Human "machine languages", especially the language of economics, become more and more rich and complex. To many, it starts to sound like talk about the "real world" and not "machine language".
• Machines are more and more frequently referred to in anthropomorphic terms, such as what "Wall Street fears" or what "Germany wants".
• Individuals are increasingly "programmed" by tremendous pressures of living in a man-made world of things and information. Thinking "outside the box" is difficult if all of language - including your inner voice - speaks only about boxes.

You can get a lot of fun out of taking these analogies seriously at face value. There is usually a kernel of truth - a way of seeing that machines and men are really the same in important ways. For example, if someone is talking about "efficiency", they are talking about a machine. Think of the situation they describe in terms of machines, computation and the history of such things. When they talk about "profit", think about computer games. When they talk about what is "best" for a corporation, take them at their word and imagine the corporation to be alive and part of human history. Ask how such an abstract machine can possibly acquire a desire to survive and thrive.

Daniel Dennett: "From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds"

This talk introduces a recent book by Dennett, rehashing and updating his theories on the mind. I have the hard copy of the book on order. These comments refer to his summary of it delivered as part of the Google Talks series.

It is much to Dennett's credit that, as he goes along, his ideas become more precise and articulate. His examples are more apt, his analogies closer to the "essence". He never seems to say, "I was totally wrong about this", but he does make progress - partly by not taking himself too seriously. It is much to Dennett's credit that he is rarely caught in an "argument" -- he sees an element of truth in almost everything, always putting his own ideas on the table without allowing opposition to get personal. This is good because he gets a lot of opposition.

"Consciousness Explained" (1991) was a serious over-reach. Rather a mess that didn't come close to delivering on the promise in its title.

Yet, in the intervening 25 years or so, Dennett has wrestled with the ideas in "Consciousness" and made them almost work. There are many signs of progress ...

COMPUTERS

His facile understanding (1971) of the way computers work has been replaced by a deeper insight -- especially contrasting the machine with the living cell. Yet he manages to navigate the tricky issue of what is and is not alive ("Animus"). It's about "internationality" - behavour that makes little sense if you don't take into account a future "purpose". He's very good at showing that this behavour does not necessarily involve consciousness. I note that this particular talk was delivered to the folks at Google, who arguably know more about computers than anyone else on the planet. There were not patronizing giggles from the audience. Questions from the audience were respectful - it was a dialogue between peers.

COMPETENCE

He makes it clear that some entities are more "competent" than others even if they don't actually know what they are doing. Increasing competence is happening in evolution even though it is a mindless process. It is, in the end, governed by a close partnership between the entity and its environment. Not all things are possible but "R&D" is required to find out what is actually possible. In a sense, "thinking" takes place in partnership with reality! How very Zen!

It's worth noting that he sees his pet 3D vision of the evolution of mind from blind chance to intelligent design as not a picture of what is real but an arbitrary choice of 3 axes for the purpose of explanation. In other words, he's very aware of the role of analogy (as brilliantly explained in "Surfaces and Essences"). There are good analogies and bad ones. Dennett is aware of these things as "memes" - (thinking tools) things that evolve to become more useful or are discarded as misleading. This applies to the meme of the meme itself, which may become much more useful than it was when it was born in the pages of "Selfish Gene".

REDUCTIONISM

In his early years, Dennett was literally the poster child for "reductionism", the idea that behavour of systems was "merely" the result of the behavour of their constituent parts. Dennett has become very good not only at accepting the idea of emergence (the whole is more than the parts) but explaining how this becomes true. A good theory of emergence (the classic being the theory of gases based on basic Newtonean physics) don't just explain emergent behavour but explicity tie it down to what is going on at a simpler level. This is never easy.

MEMES

Dennett is still very respectful of the ideas of his friend Richard Dawkins and recommends the book that made Dawkins famous (Selfish Gene). It is interesting to note that Dawkins has since downplayed the idea of memes presented in that book. Dennett, on the other hand, has picked up the idea and run with it. Dennett's "memes" are useful and, in fact, it's possible for Dennett to talk about memes without using the word. An echo of the talking points of "four horsemen" of Atheism is still to be found here, as Dennett speaks of the virus-infected ape - the viruses being memes. This is gratifyingly close to my term: "The Programmable Ape". In both cases, we are referring to the fact that our minds consist largely of culturally determined "memes". To understand this idea, it is not necessary to see the genetic evolution theory of memes as literally true (it is hopelessly imprecise) but it's a great analogy and points precisely to what Zen would claim the "mind" is an illusion - there are only "ideas" running around in our heads. No "observer".

It is culture and especially language that is evolving and getting smarter at an exponential rate over the last 100 years or so.

Dennett's little talk is perhaps the clearest explanation I've seen of what is going on and why. My old "Dragon Theory" (now Programmable Ape) blog explores a special case of this insight - especially the darker implications.

LIFE ITSELF AND "ANIMUS"

Dennett does us a big favor by breaking down the concept of "life" (not merely consciousness). We still don't know how life arose but Dennett has provided a way of talking about the emergence of life without the need for mystical language, a mysterious miraculous event or a whole set of new words to describe what is going on.

Virtualization and Understanding Consciousness

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

ARCHITECTURE

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

COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE

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

THE CLOUD

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

That's virtualization.

VIRTUAL MINDS

Something similar goes on in our minds.

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

LANGUAGE AS THE GREAT VIRTUALIZER

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

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

BEES

Consider the bees ...

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

But it doesn't know it's a bee. 

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

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

DO WE KNOW WE ARE HUMAN?

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

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

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

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

Zen, the "Z" Meme

In spite of its official contempt for merely human ideas, Zen encompasses a wide variety of ideas. The most important one is inherited from Buddhism: the idea that the mind itself is an illusion. I'm calling this particular idea from Zen the "Z" meme, with due recognition that there is more to Zen than this meme. In fact, Zen meditation is particularly valuable in allowing the practitioner to sharpen his skills in self-reflection: the first step in answering the question, What am I. The Z meme purports to answer this question in a particular way (answer: nothing).

I think this idea arises from fundamental errors of categorization and imagination. We are no longer required to think of the mind as a special kind of "stuff" (as Descartes did). We now routinely speak of "things" like processes and structures which are clearly real - not "illusions". Of course, there is usually some kind of old-fashioned "stuff" involved, but you can't understand a process by studying the "stuff" involved. For example, knowledge of electronics won't help you understand your word processor.

Hofstader provides a different way to think about thinking, which depends in many ways on our modern experience with computers - "Thinking Machines". Roughly speaking, the "mind" is a self-referential, recursive structure of "memes". This structure is as real is anything can be - it's what we define as consciousness. This view specifically provides for the phenomenon that Zen masters have such a problem with, If you let go of the mind, what is it that knows you have let go? Recursiveness and self-reflection are very modern ideas. Any computer programmer learns to deal with them comfortably. Obviously, the Buddha was no computer programmer.

A Good Place to Start

"I think, therefore I am". So began Descartes in his attempt to build a comprehensive picture of reality, starting with what he knew for sure. Like many philosophers, he pretended to mimic the newly-discovered certainty of Mathematics.  Descartes was barking up the wrong tree and his "axiom" instantly hit a dead end. Strangely enough, there are more than a few mystics, philosophers and neuroscientists who would doubt even Descarte's "axiom". The "self" may turn out to be an illusion.

In the Universe we happen to inhabit, there is no sure path from "simple" to "complex". We need to start somewhere else. That's good news, since it turns out that we all know a Hell of a lot more than we thought we did. As Descartes realized, it's all uncertain to some degree, but that need not stop us from exploring an uncertain world. After all, we don't have an option.

We learn very little about our minds by comparing them to the "minds" of chimpanzees, cats and frogs. If we assume that our minds are "nothing but" two pounds of meat on our shoulders, we succeed in explaining nothing while ignoring everything we know about our minds from first-hand experience.

I'd like to share with you some ideas that I have found helpful in the hope that you will too. My aim is to be intelligible, not necessarily "right" or "wrong" (that's up to you). This turns out to be a key policy for moving forward. Descartes was preoccupied with certainty. He wanted to find things that were absolutely true. Our goal is much more modest: to talk about the ideas we share, whether they are right or wrong. The most important aspect of ideas is that they are shared [4].

We will be wandering through a maze of connected ideas. Feel free to wander. There is no "start" or "end". My hope is that we will gain some valuable experience by wandering around together. Our journey starts where Descartes' left off: by understanding what Descartes meant (or should have meant) by "I and "think" [5].

Historically speaking, great advances are made not by answering the great questions but by realizing we were asking the wrong questions and we need to replace them by new, more productive lines of thought.  What we need is a way to conduct a dialogue that makes sense to all parties, together with a way to understand our differences, especially those differences that seem so important, heated and intractable.

I have worked on many other blogs. While I will probably update them from time to time, this blog continues and replaces two of them. I'll attempt to cross-link the blogs where that seems preferable to copying posts wholesale from one blog to another.

• Diary of a Christian Skeptic documents the long "spiritual" path I took from an early age to the present in search of answers to the "big questions". I no longer consider Christianity or any particular religion to be of central importance, but, being born in a "Christian" culture, I needed to fight my way through the assumptions of this culture that were woven into the my thought patterns from childhood.
• The Programmable Ape documents my struggle to understand social organizations as living things in their own right, together with the way we are "assimilated" into these organizations, often resulting in surrender of humanity to mechanical rules and non-human goals. The current blog will continue to expand this theme, making such concepts as "assimilation" more precise and useful while adding precision to the "dragon" concept itself." I don't think you can understand human organizations simply by understanding the human beings that make them up. It turns out that this is a special case of the futility of reductionism, of which I will have much to say.
• Zen of Value is a related blog - a "work in progress" that is devoted to the study of one meme: value. The "Mind" is a super computer between our ears that can instantly calculate value. Computers and economists work only with money, which is not the same thing at all.

Notes: (I will try to provide comments and important off-page links at the bottom of the topic, like this, to make it easier to verify the links are all working and to avoid too much clutter in he main text).

[1] A detailed biography is supplied [here]

[2] "Mind" is a central topic, introduced [here]
[3] Deleted
[4] This a radical transformation of the way we think of language. It is certainly not "like" a branch of Mathematics and not mainly concerned with "truth or falsehood" or even conveying "information" in the modern sense. Language events take place in the "Universe of Discourse" described by Hofstadter [here].
[5] Douglas Hofstadter helps us out by shedding a bright light on "I", the most important idea of all which turns out to tell us what "you" means and a lot about the "meaning of meaning".

I warmly welcome your comments. 

Milestones - Mind, Time, Society

I've been doing a lot of thinking and reading lately. Things seem to be coming together in a way that demands a bit of summarization.

THE PROBLEM OF "MIND

I think Dennet's reductionist approach is wrong. He seems to think that everything important about "mind" can be learned from studies of the way the physical brain works (neurology) plus experiments with subjects to correlate what is known about the brain with what subjects reveal about their "first person" experience of the world. This is a "bottom up" approach.

I would say that for, humans at least, the brain is almost certainly necessary but not sufficient to create a "mind". The first person experience of the world is infinite, open-ended and individual. It can't be "averaged" and will resist creation of general "laws" of much interest. The mind is, to a first approximation, identical with the first person experience of the Universe.

At first, there would seem to be a conflict between "I=Universe" and he Zen contention that "I" am an illusion. However, Zen meditation practices are precisely aimed to foster awareness of the Universe (taken as a "given") and the Mind as "nothing more than" a reflection of that Universe. The goal is to make the Mind a perfect mirror of the Universe, which amounts to either the elimination of the Mind or the absorption of the Mind in the (real) Universe, depending how you look at it. This contrasts with the reductionist view that the Mind is "nothing more" than firing of neurons in the skull.

Data coming in from the reductionists can therefore be regarded with interest but it's not fundamental. You will learn more about "minds" in general by reading great novels (or appreciating the wonder of your own experience of the world) than neurology or laboratory experiments will ever reveal. One might almost say that the idea that "I" am a brain is just a more sophisticated way of saying "I" am something inside my brain (like a homunculus). What is actually gained by trading the homunculus for the brain in our model of the mind?

Why do I say the brain is "almost certainly" necessary? I consider the example of an ant colony. If the colony has anything like a "mind", it belongs to the whole colony. It's in an organizing principle that is unknown to the individual ants. So, the question is, how much of my "mind" is shared with other aspects of my environment? If I'm looking for subtle features of the mind (as Dennet's experiments pretend to do), am I barred from considering subtle influences of society or even mathematical limitations on the kind of things minds can contain? Do these influences depend on the brain of an individual person or are they shared to such an extent that it makes sense to talk about a shared mind? If that makes sense, the individual brain is not the end of the story. The individual mind is always, to some extent, assimilated into a larger entity which I regard as a living thing. This assimilation is somewhat subtle (Freud thought of it as part of the unconscious mind), but it is real enough and quite close to the surface: easily discovered and analyzed.

TIME, FREE WILL

The "arrow of time" undeniably exists at the human scale, where we live. The idea that all natural phenomena look the same when time is reversed is simply wrong at our scale. The idea that time is reversible at the quantum scale depends on the kind of thing physicists do when inferring "laws" about any system. They neglect "unimportant" details (like gravity). When examined closely, there is no reason to expect that the future is somehow determined by initial conditions at any scale. The problem of free will is seen to rely on assumptions about the physical universe that turn out to be false. This was revealed even in Newton's lifetime, yet Newton's "clockwork" universe somehow survived in the popular mind.

NONLINEAR DYNAMICS, CHAOS, PHASE CHANGES, SCALING

A detailed study of these fields is necessary to get a "feel" of how the world really works. In general, it's about how "things" evolve over time and how we make approximations, especially when it comes to scale. Without this understanding, it is not possible to understand the "basics", such as what space is and what life is. Unfortunately, such understanding is beyond the grasp of almost everyone. Most people choke when a few symbols or graphs are introduced into an argument. Philosophy (a fancy word for "talk") is left in the dust when serious questions need to be answered. Fortunately, my education allows me to "speak the language" of serious physics, but it means that the ideas hat emerge will not make much sense to my friends or the readers of this blog.

The founders of modern science, from Galileo to Einstein have pointed out that mathematics is the language of the Universe. Nothing deep or profound can be learned about the Universe by those who don't speak its language.

Daniel Dennett and His Intuition Pumps

Dennett's "Intuition Pumps" has inspired me, at last, to write a book. Maybe. I'd call it "Better Intuition Pumps" (BIP).

Dennett's book is a lovely "intuition pump" in its own right, but it cries out to be rewritten, refuted or at least challenged.

In other posts, I'll flesh out possible chapters in BIP, but I can outline some main points here.

Dennet champions as "Scientific" discipline for the study of mind, which he calls heterophenomenology "H". The idea is that anything important about the mind can be learned from the "outside", through experiments, interviews etc.  The data "H" works with is the set of observable, documented "observations" along these lines.

My problem with H is that it doesn't actually study the mind. Dennett is making the assumption that the mind is, for all intents and purposes, the brain. But one would think this is exactly what he needs to prove.

"Pumps" sets up a false alternative. Either the mind is the brain or the mind is something "inside" the brain or somehow associated with the body, like a "soul" or "homunculus". Why are those the only alternatives?

His mistake seems to be assuming his conclusion. To escape this mistake, we need to take a closer look at what a "mind" is. I happen to have one that we can examine as closely as time permits. Mine.

Here is the first "Better" Intuition pump. Consider the "mind", M, to be identical to the first-person experience of the Universe. This makes no assumption about the brain or, for that matter, a "soul". Moreover, we can use H techniques to investigate this mind in as much depth as we wish.

My discussion of M will show that it is not possible, even in principle, to determine anything of interest about M using H. In particular, H studies brains not minds.

A second BIP is the "Xombie". This is related to Dennet's "philosophical Zombie", a fascinating creature that is identical in all respects to a human being except he lacks the experience of being human. There is "nobody home". If you think that such a being is impossible, you are, according to Dennet, a victim of the "Zombie Hunch". You think that there must be something other than what shows "from the outside". Dennet challenges the reader by saying that this is "just a hunch" and needs proving. Otherwise, the default view is H, which assumes that we can never tell the difference between a Zombie and a person with "real" experience of the world.

I hold that Dennet's Zombie is interesting only in a rather trivial way, by proposing a way to "build" a Zombie in a particular way - a Xombie. The difference between a Xombie and a Zombie is that we specify in principle how the Xombie manages to "fake" consciousness. In summary, we imagine a robot that is exposed to he totality of human experience of the world from "birth". The Xombie can fake having a "mind" because we maintain that the mind itself is M, the totality of first person experience of the Universe. Thus, our Xombie is, by definition, "conscious".

Then, the question boils down to whether we could, in principle, actually build such a robot. This question veers of into what we might call "garden variety philosophy" as we look into things that make up an "M-like" mind but may be hard to implement, even in principle. Here are a few things in my mind that may be hard to implement:

• I know that fish don't wear hearing aids
• I may mistakenly believe that Napoleon was King of Spain
• I don't understand the math of General Relativity and I know I don't

My suspicion is that the "boundary" between the known Universe of M and the "known unknowns", the "unknown unknowns" and so forth may be hard to model.

IBM's "Deep Blue" tells us that such things may not be as hard as they look.

But of course, we are still left with the suspicion that our robot doesn't have a real experience of the world. He has no real "first person" - he just fakes it. But at least we have a better idea of what he's faking: a deep, intimate, long-term relationship with the Universe. In other words, the Universe itself plays a large (perhaps indispensable) role in a "mind". The brain is just a detail.

There are other things to say about H. What, exactly, are the "results" of H - the theories, generalizations and hypotheses that make H a "Science". A Science is not just a menagerie of curious phenomena. What is H about? If H leaves out what I regard as the most important aspect of M (the Universe), what is it studying? My position is that you can't make generalizations about "minds" because they are by definition unique. Any generalization you make will be about brains, "typical" human behaviour etc. Is it really meaningful to talk about what people on average claim to experience? Haven't you left the baby out with the bath water?

A simple example can suffice. Ask our subjects to describe the first time they made love. It's hard to imagine that that all the "H-data" in the world would come close to "investigating" the real, personal experience of the individual, which is, after all, what we are supposed to be investigating.

I'm sure Dennet is familiar with this objection, but I'm not sure he is aware that there are an infinite number of objections like this. In fact, the infinite "space" of M is precisely the most impressive feature of M itself. This "space" can be explored by H, but such an exploration leaves theories of the brain far behind.

Another BIP is "Object Oriented" design (OOD), which would replace Dennet's lame chapter that tries to explain how computers work.  OOD explains everything about computers from the microscopic structure of memory to the emergent structure of the group mind - the Internet - and everything in between. It is perhaps one of the most powerful set of memes ever invented. It as a subset of human language that has he advantage of being totally unambiguous and "mappable" to the "real world". With OOD in hand, one can ask interesting questions about how the Internet acquires something like an M-type mind. OOD can be used to explore complexity and emergent phenomena.

Another BIP comes from self-organizing structures, which would complement Bennett's chapter on the game of Life. Besides being built entirely out of OOD components, the Internet is also self-organizing. 

So, computers and the Internet are worth including as "imagination pumps" in their own right.

It would be worth discussing whether a living thing is "sorta" an OOD creation. I'd say it's not and the differences may turn out to be fundamental - in other words, it may be impossible to build a carbon-based living thing following only OOD principals. If true, this would be hugely interesting. There seem to be serious problems with any attempt to "model" living cells, organelles, synapses and tissues using OOD ideas. These also happen to reveal some objections to the idea that a living thing is, in some sense, a "machine". Does this mean that there is some fundamental obstacle to building a machine mind.

Finally, Denett's books tend to present a rather simplified view of the brain. His "neurons" and "genes" are almost mythical creatures, no much different from demons. They are philosophical constructions - "memes", with almost all real behavior of brain tissue left out. What do we learn when we introduce real brain structures into Dennet's discussions? Is there a simplified version of the real brain that could serve as an "imagination pump"? Would it be useful to keep in mind that Dennet's discussions that seem to talk about the brain, using words that seem to refer to real things may trick us in the same way that Astrology tricks us by talking about real stars?

There seem to be quite a few publications around that describe real brain function. Worth a look. At first glance, we see a lot of OOD-based concepts.

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

Re-thinking Mind and Soul

What am I?

In many religious traditions, the answer would be given in terms of the "soul" -- something that is fundamentally "me". Believers in this tradition imagine something inhabiting the body but separable from he body, especially at death. After death, the soul goes on to further adventures in Heaven, Hell, the Happy Hunting Ground or perhaps another body, human or not. In any case, the soul seems to inhabit an entirely different universe, immune from the laws of physics or, dare we say it, logic.

Outside of religious thinking, we generally use the term "mind" in place of "soul", but the common image is still something inhabiting the body, different from the body and somehow "looking out" on the real world. This way of thinking saddles us with the "mind-body" problem, in which we attempt deal with one of life's central mysteries: How is it that I can look out from "inside" my mind on to a material world? The "inside" (especially "consciousness") and the "outside" seem to inhabit utterly different universes.

I have recently undergone one of those special moments when many different threads of contemplation, investigation and experience come together to give a new perspective on perhaps the most fundamental question of all: What is Mind?

MOTORCYCLES

Much of what I have to say here will seem to be utterly incomprehensible to the average reader. For someone who wants to dip his toe in these waters before attempting to swim the channel with me, I recommend the best seller, "Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance". This book impressed me deeply when I first read it back in the early 70's. What I remember most clearly is the author's claim that a motor cycle is an idea. You cannot possibly understand, operate or maintain a motor cycle without entering into and sharing the designer's idea. Otherwise it's just a complex lump of metal.

It has taken me over 40 years to make the next baby step. If the motor cycle is an idea in the mind of its designer, then quite obviously, the mind of the designer (in some sense) contains the motor cycle. Zen claims that we are "nothing but" the thoughts that run through our brains. But if an actual, physical motor cycle is one of these "thoughts", we need to start thinking of our minds in a totally new way. The "Zen connection" is further explored in "Zen and the Outside-In Mind"

OVERCOMING FANTASIES ABOUT THE SOUL

Perhaps this perspective seems crazy mostly because we have been fed from birth on the religious or neo-religious idea that our minds are contained in our heads. Whatever our minds are, they are either inseparable from our brains (and therefore are destroyed when our brain die) or they are separable and act like "souls" which can wander on to other things once the body dies. There seems to be only two alternatives.

Like many religious ideas, the chief harm done by this fantasy world view is to block consideration of alternatives. Perhaps Mind, has been "out there" in the real, physical world all along.

BIOGRAPHY - KNOWING THE MIND OF ANOTHER PERSON

Let's take a step back from motor cycles and imagine a different scenario. Suppose I die and, for some strange reason, someone wants to write a biography of me. They want to know my "mind", even though my brain has presumably gone up in smoke or is feeing worms somewhere.

Such an individual would be well advised to spend a lot of time in my library, where I spent most of my time when alive. There are hundreds of books there which I "weeded out" from the normal clutter. Every remaining book was treasured and valued by me while I was alive. A patient investigator could enjoy a years-long tour of my mind by reading every one of those books. Someone obsessively determined to know my mind could go out and interview hundreds of my former clients to understand what I built for them (my equivalent of motor cycles) and why. The point of all this is to show that, even though "I" am gone from the scene, I leave a massive physical footprint of objects that were (or are?) the contents of my mind in the same sense that motor cycles are ideas in the mind of their designers. It's fair to say that such an intrepid biographer would wind up knowing my "mind" even better than I do now, which is a spooky conclusion. Even in life, my "mind" extends tendrils into the world and outside my skull. In life, I am well aware of many of these "tendrils" (I'm happy to recommend good books and I vaguely remember all the software I wrote, some of which is presumably still running). On the other hand, I must admit that I have put most of these "tendrils" on the burner behind the back burner. Perhaps they are irretrievably lost and forgotten.

THE STRUCTURE OF THOUGHT

Let's come at it from a different angle. Full disclosure: I am a systems analyst with a strong preference for "data structures". When I think of any "system", what I see in my head is a bunch of interconnected blobs representing "ideas" with the connections representing relationships between ideas.

So from a data structure point of view, I picture the ideas (thoughts) running through my head (this is  a Zen picture). They are connected to each other, so for example, the thought of the kitchen may lead me to the idea of fetching a glass of orange juice. But they are also connected to objects in the real world. For example, I remember where I left my car keys. That makes the car keys "ideas" like the motor cycle. The keys could be meaningless to someone else who found them.

Following this line of reasoning and picturing my "mind" as a data structure, I find that my mind extends outward from my skull to touch millions of objects in the real world.

THE SHARED MIND

I invite the reader to "try on" this way of thinking for awhile. It's a new idea to me as well, but it feels like the key to many related questions. For example, if our minds are "out there" in the world, they are obviously shared by others who share the same real world. This opens a new or perhaps simplified way of thinking about how we influence each other, simply by sharing the contents of our minds through the overlapping aspects of reality that are present in the minds of those around us.

Of course, the "stuff" in the real world means different things to different people. The "meaning" is the way ideas are connected with each other. We still read each other's minds imperfectly. Even so, it's a new experience to look at some object in the world and feel that we are connecting with the minds of others who know that object in some way. In the modern world, we are surrounded by objects designed, built and/or owned by others. Looking around, we pass through the minds of thousands of others. We are not unaware of this. We are endlessly curious about the people connected to the things we see: What were they thinking?

Enough for now. This idea connects all over the place to Zen of Value and Dragon Theory, for example. There is much "wiring up" to do ...