Summary April 4, 2019

BOXES

One fanciful vision of the (flat) Earth was that it was supported on the back of a turtle, which was, in turn, standing on another turtle and so on: Turtles all the way down.

Similarly, I find it useful to think of "boxes within boxes all the way down." Box 1 is the world we experience "in our head," which includes all experience and everything we know. In particular, it includes what we have been taught and what we have been taught to assume, which is, to a certain extent, "programmed". Box 1 is the "matrix" of individually shared reality. But, unlike the Matrix of Science Fiction fame, our matrix depends deeply on the "real world" outside and our senses within, as eloquently explained by Antonio Damasio.

Our evolutionary survival strategy involves survival as a member of a group, or "super person". Not only do we not "think for ourselves," we can't.

We experience ourselves as objects in the world (that's me) and assume that the world exists without us. It has been here long before we were born, will still be here long after and exposes only a tiny amount of itself to our investigation. This is "Box 2". Box 2 is contained in Box 1. Thinking in "box 2" terms, we recognize that other people exist and that they have an internal world - their "Box 1" which is, to us, Box 3. Of course, there are billions of Box 3's, including Box 3's that belonged to people long dead. We are in "Box 3" when we say things like "I know what he's thinking". Language uniquely provides access to Box 3, when we ask things like "What do you see" and expect an answer that makes sense. It can get pretty crazy. It makes sense to ask if Galileo correctly understood the discoveries and system of Kepler (he didn't). In a similar vein, we can ask of the Church threatened Galileo because of his beliefs or because he was, according to what was known at the time, wrong. All this depends on an acceptance of the fact that each of us lives in our personal "Box 1". This is an unavoidable consequence of our nature. It follows that persecuting an individual for his beliefs is misguided since nobody really "thinks for themselves."

When we are speaking of experience or "external reality," we need to be aware of which "box" we are speaking from. For example, statements about objective reality belong in Box 2 and should not contain "mind-like" concepts like the "laws" of physics. Laws of physics belong in Box 1. They are statements about our experience of the world.

I allow for "Box 0", which is the hypothetical and unobservable world - beyond the reach of our cleverest instruments, observation or reasoning. Like Box 1, Box 0 is relative. We are always biting chunks off Box 0, but we must admit that there are things we will never know about the Universe. At the very least, we must, as individuals, recognize that almost all of Box 0 is beyond what we will ever understand. I assume that "Box 0" exists even if there are no observers anywhere - the situation we assume at the time of the Big Bang and millions of years after that.

I regard all of mathematics as being in "Box 1" as something "mind like." This stands against the common intuition of physicists that the Universe is somehow fundamentally "mathematical" and that we are "discovering" mathematical laws that exist apart from our minds. This assumption is certainly worth challenging, but it's good to make it explicit. Similarly, any statement that includes an "observer" or an "apparatus" is a statement in Box 1, not Box 0.  As far as I know, such "mind like" concepts can be removed from relativity and quantum mechanics without losing anything but hooks for idle philosophers to make their speculations sound "scientific."

"Theory of Boxes" takes a dim view of theories that attempt to explain either of these questions:

• Why is there anything?
• Why does it feel like something to exist (Chambers "hard question")

I am greatly aided in this skepticism by knowing that not all perfectly sensible questions have answers.  While it has not been proven that either of the above questions is formally undecidable, I think it's reasonable to think of them in this way until some future genius settles the matter. For now, at least, I proceed on the assumption that we have something called "experience" and that it is an experience of something other than ourselves. Not much of a stretch I think.

THE INTERFACE

In effect, what we call "mind" is an interface between the "real world" and "Box 1". You could say it's responsible for creating the whole stack of boxes. It is worth asking how it does this, which boils down to curiosity about neuroscience - the brain. More subtly, it involves asking about the nature of the universe we inhabit and what it takes to survive in it.

In this area of concern, we also consider how the interface is "programmed" by language and other cultural factors. Analogy plays a key role here, as outlined in "Surfaces and Essences". A key concept in that books is "isomorphism" - the idea that some analogies are better than others. In fact, the best ones allow us to learn about one system from the properties of another. For example, we assume that objects in the universe behave as if they "obey" laws of gravity (mind-like ideas). Thus, we can predict how objects will behave (say the date of an eclipse) by working out the math in the model. On a broader scale, we can ask which of our ideas genuinely underpin reality itself, the subject of "A Beautiful Question".

Evolution has gifted humans with an obsession with "figuring out what's really going on". Many of our guesses are wide of the mark and wind up as "mythology". Some are impressively robust and useful - they are called "Science". So far, we can't be sure how closely our ideas mirror the "real world", but we can help ourselves by keeping in mind the difference between our ideas (mind-like) and the actual reality we attempt to approach.

The "Hard Problem" and the Meaning of Meaning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is "Supermind"?

This blog started three years ago as "Dragon Theory". I was particularly taken by the "corporation", a legal "person" with rights powers vastly exceeding ordinary persons. Then and now, I consider the "corporation" to be a threat to individual rights and freedoms.

I was also inspired by the ultimate evil in the Star Trek series: the Borg. As time went on, I became more curious as to how people are assimilated into "the dragon".

By 2017, assimilation had become my focus and I changed the name of the blog to "The Programmable Ape". I had come to look beyond the mass phenomena like the corporation to see that humans are uniquely engineered to be "assimilated". Our language is a way of "programming" us. This involved a subtle change in outlook. What does it feel like to be programmed? Is it possible to have a thought, experience or perception that is not deeply colored by the thoughts of others?

"Assimilation" as an isolated, evil phenomenon, was beginning to make less sense. "How to Think" put the final nail in the coffin. "Thinking" is a social phenomenon. In fact, we can't think for ourselves.

Yikes!

Is it possible that all aspects of "mind" are social? This went against the prevailing theory that "mind" was something going on in a brain. Surely you need a brain to have a mind, but could you have a mind without people around you?

I was studying a lot about the brain at this point. It was plain that big sections of the brain were devoted to language. Damage to this part of the brain could result in the inability to form thoughts, let alone express them. Another interesting find is that any part of the cerebral cortex (or all of it) can be destroyed without loss of consciousness. This goes against the hand-waving conclusion that "somehow" our sense of self arises in the cortex - usually imagined as some kind of computer. Damasio restores the old idea that fundamental "I" (core consciousness) is a phenomenon of the brain stem, which is intimately involved in "images" created in the cortex. It's just one step to realize that these "images" are, to a great extent, socially created. At a deep, intimate level, our minds are shared.

All this combined with my long admiration for the book "Surfaces and Essences", which explores the nature of analogy as the very basis of thought. Intuitively, I regarded the cerebral cortex to be in the business of analogy-making. Language itself, based on analogies that were mostly made by others was where our "minds" live! 

Finally, I looped back to the "dragon" perspective.  Our "minds" are shared - we think and experience the world only by participating in "superminds". The "dragon" had lost its body, but its mind was real and all-pervasive.

Is "supermind" alive? This lead me to check out other forms of life. It seemed to me that "supermind" was a bit like the "wild west" genetic world of bacteria. Each of us is an individual in the sense that we experience a unique package of "supermind" ideas and influences.

"Identity and Destiny" brought back the ominous nature of "assimilation", drawing attention to the fact that our "identity" defines who we imagine ourselves to be. In many cases, this is total fiction. "Identity" is also behind the most brutal aspects of human nature.

That's the current status of the idea. There is a certain consistency all the way back to 2015, with the idea connecting to a broad range of insights by others while blowing off the quirky "dragon" language and even the "programmable ape". It has become a meditation on who we are from a rather surprising perspective.

The Flynn Effect

It's called the "Flynn effect" — the fact that each generation scores higher on an IQ test than the generation before it. Are we actually getting smarter, or just thinking differently? In this fast-paced spin through the cognitive history of the 20th century, moral philosopher James Flynn suggests that changes in the way we think have had surprising (and not always positive) consequences.

                   - Ted Talk by James Flynn

James Flynn

It is well established that we are, as a culture, getting better at IQ tests. There is a lot of debate over this effect, but I like the explanation offered by Flynn himself.  He takes the bold position that we are, in fact, getting smarter - not just better at taking IQ tests.

In a nutshell, he claims that we have more powerful intellectual tools. Every member of this culture is trained in these tools from birth. The tools are shared.

This has profound implications for one of he central ideas of this blog: that consciousness itself is shared.

Specifically, we are demonstrably getting better at classification and abstract reasoning. Flynn helps us imagine how that could be by providing some insight into how typical well-educated people reasoned not so long ago.

I would say that the ability to make useful classifications and perform abstract reasoning are both key aspects of the way we experience the world - consciousness itself.

It is the culture, most notably the language, that is getting "smarter".

This is perhaps the strongest proof that we are programmed by language and culture.

What is "Truth"?

Daniel Dennett likes to give Jaynes the benefit of the doubt: “There were a lot of really good ideas lurking among the completely wild junk.”

As Dennett hints (with typical subtly), there is a lot of "junk philosophy" around the subjects dear to Jaynes' heart. In this post, I'd like to extract one of Jayne's ideas and wipe a bit of "junk" off it to see where it gets me.

At the center of Jayne's theory is the "bicameral mind", which is firmly based on the idea that we have a "right brain" and a "left brain" with notably different capabilities, each capable of acting somewhat on their own. The "right brain" is good at seeing the "big picture" and sends its judgments to the left brain, where they are perceived as speech - sometimes the speech of the Gods. As things get historically more complicated, we evolve our present day "inner chatter", no longer attributed to the Gods (if we are sane), but now called "reason". Jaynes regards this as the emergence of consciousness itself, which is not what I want to take up in this post. What I like about Jaynes is that he sees language in a dynamic light, evolving and building up over time toward some critical point where the modern mind (along with "civilization") emerges.

There is no particular reason to locate these two faculties at some location in the brain and this is perhaps Jaynes main mistake - built in to his terminology. But we can understand his arguments very well without referring back to his neurological ideas. In fact, he rarely does so himself. You could go through his book and translate "Left Brain" as "Kidney" and "Right Brain" as "big toe" without impacting the meaning of what he's saying.

What we regard as "truth", at least in the Western traditions, is a linguistic concept. The "most" true statements are those of mathematics, which can be "proven". As Wittgenstein famously pointed out, such proofs are basically moves in a language game, where everyone agrees to the rules and agrees about what is "proven" in dialogue. As Hofstadter points out in Surfaces and Essences, the concept of language can be broadened to include the "models" of Physics - the underlying idea is metaphor and analogy.

Jaynes, Hofstadter and others point out that language is a huge labyrinth of metaphor. We "bootstrap" our store of metaphors as children (Jaynes is particularly good at describing how this bootstrap process works) and we proceed to produce the vast store in our heads - tens of thousands of words. It is in this language that our "inner voice" speaks. If our inner voice proclaims something to be true, it does so according to the impenetrable rules of the language that has been programmed into our brains. In the vast majority of cases, the beleivability of that inner voice comes from uncounted assumptions and analogies buried in the language it speaks. For example, if my inner voice calls someone a "nigger" in my head, that one word carries centuries if history and thousands of voices. It will make no sense to me to say to the inner voice: No, that person is not a "nigger". In fact, given the language that is being spoken, such a question makes no sense.

If you think that "1" is a solution to "x squared minus one equals zero", you speak the language of mathematics. If it seems sensible to say "I think, therefore I am", you have learned to talk like Descartes. Like him, you will regard that statement as self-evidently true. Those who fail to see the statement as self-evident are used to speaking a different language in a whole different culture which, for example, may regard the "self" as an illusion. Such a statement would make no sense to Descartes. It's not a matter of "truth" outside of the rules of the "language game". Descartes spoke the language of the religion of his time, which regarded the soul as the "self" -- the "self evident" starting point for any discussion of what is "real".

Is there any other way we can reach the "truth"? Jaynes says there is: that "right brain" which sees the truth but speaks it to the "left brain". It's better to characterize this source of perception as some kind of holistic or aesthetic sense that goes beyond language and perhaps precedes language historically. It is an open question whether this "right brain" (or big toe) processing works according to analogy. I think it's better to say it works by hard wired recognition of symmetry, but that is another topic.

For example, this "right brain" truth pops up when we say a certain combination of notes "sounds right" or a scene is breathtakingly beautiful. It certainly shouts loudly at us when we judge another human being to be beautiful, honest or friendly.

This simple observation leads me to some wide-ranging conclusions.

• By definition, we cannot expect language to reach into non-linguistic "truth". Western philosophy, including that of Dennett, even when purged of "wild junk", has nothing to say about "truth" revealed by our innate mental capacity to judge certain experiences as special and valuable.
• Zen, emphasizes direct aesthetic perception and takes pains to isolate and ignore the "inner voice". There is no reason to prefer one path over the other. In fact, I'm perfectly happy to leave the whole idea of "truth" to the language experts and seek for other words that reflect the judgement of my "right brain". This consideration is a much needed justification for being open to Zen.
• Our "right brains" have a shared language, a culture and a history of their own, referred to as "art". I would also contend that they have a built-in "language" of their own - perhaps reaching back far into the past, perhaps part of the very definition of life itself. Even when the "art" in question is expressed in language (the novel for example), quality judgement are made by standards that are difficult to express in the language of logic, although critics struggle endlessly to do so.
• We need to distinguish between what is "real" and what is "true". Truth is the umpire's call in the language game. Reality is what remains after all alternatives are ruled out.

There is another road to "truth", described in our language as "Science". Advances in Scientific knowledge are made chiefly through language - vigorously expanding our vocabulary. There are maybe 180,000 words in the English language (give or take). Scientific journals add a few more with every published article. Moreover, Science is constantly adding new models of reality. The first of these was "Euclidean Space". More recently, Feynman Diagrams have added to our ability to "picture" and discuss quantum reactions. Many things are easily "said" with pictures but almost impossible to "say" with words. However, these pictures ("maps") obey the same principles as language as discussed by Hofstadter and Jaynes. All lovers of maps and models will agree that there is a strong element of aesthetic beauty in a good map. 

There is also a strong aesthetic motive in Science as a whole, most eloquently described in "The Beautiful Question" by Frank Wilczek. Wilczek makes a strong case that the universe really is governed by symmetric principles, which also appeal strongly to our sense of what "looks right" (this is a right-brain kind of "looking right"). In other words, our taste for symmetry is a reliable guide to what is real.

So, in Science all three roads to the truth come together. 

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.