Where Is The Mind?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What, if anything, is the "self"?

What is the "self"?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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