Further Thoughts on "Box 1"

This essay builds on the concept of "Boxes" introduced in my April Summary. In a nutshell, we are all trapped in "Box 1", which is the world "inside our heads".

For millennia, there has been little dispute over the fact that our access to "reality" is far from trustworthy. In the extreme, there are those who claim that "reality" doesn't exist at all, or at least the existence cannot be proven. I am reminded of a professional geologist I once met. He managed to make a living dating million-year-old rocks, while simultaneously believing that the world was 4,000 years old. As the Red Queen said, we are capable of believing six impossible things before breakfast.

"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Both "reality" and the "mind" exist and are susceptible to experimentation. Obviously, mental phenomena are correlated with events in the brain. Much of the focus of "Cognitive Studies" is on this correlation. We see books like Dennet's "Consciousness Explained," which would better be titled "Consciousness Explained Away." The core of this approach is to study the brain in the context of what I call "computational" models of how the brain produces the various phenomena it does, including consciousness. At present, this approach seems to be able to detect the presence of consciousness through sensors placed in the brain, but, apart from Science Fiction, we see no evidence that we will ever be able to "peek in" to share the experience of another human being.

I believe that this approach sidesteps the core issue, which should be to explore the mind in its own terms, whatever the "mechanism" may be. In fact, attempts to "explain" consciousness seem to misunderstand the nature of "explanation" itself. I think Sam Harris put it best when he said it's hard to imagine what an "explanation" would look like. For one thing, "explanations" of the mind in terms of physical phenomena the language of explanation itself is a major roadblock. Those who would "explain" the mind assume that "mind-like" concepts can be stripped from the explanation, in a way that evolution can be reduced to physics, chemistry, and math. Damasio's approach attacks this particular problem at the root, by defining life itself as "striving to thrive." One may view this as a metaphor, but the fact is that it is tough to describe any living behavior without introducing the "mind like" language of what the organism is "trying" to do. Planets don't "strive" to obey the laws of gravitation, nor does nature "strive" to conserve energy. Or at least, this is the way we are taught to think of things.

All this tends to bypass the most amazing capability of the human mind, which is to construct a deep, rich, detailed universe that we experience in one particular time and place. Everything we know about that universe is the product of our own mind with extensive help from other minds. The world, as we experience it, is "mind-like" for a good reason. It is an active product of the brain.  The implications of this are routinely missed.

Anne (not her real name) says things like "things happen for a reason." She is always asking"why" bad things happen to good people. Such a mindset fails to recognize that the universe, as experienced. It is a mental phenomenon, full of intentions, reasons and justifications,  The evolutionary purpose of the mind is precisely to search out reasons and explanations - expecting to find them when a more objective perspective would claim that such statements and questions are inappropriate when applied to a world governed by physics and mathematics. The misunderstanding here is to mix up Box 1 (the mind) with Box 0 (the "real world" that is assumed to exist but is forever just beyond our grasp).

Anne is not happy with the explanation that an innocent girl was killed due to broken bones, gravity and momentum when hit by a car, yet she will accept that this explanation is somehow valid. What she fails to understand is that her own mind - a reason-seeking machine - is spinning its wheels, unable to detect agency where none exists. In fact, her wheels will keep turning as she seeks out an agent, such as a negligent driver, bad breaks, unmarked crosswalk, neglectful parents and on and on. In an emergency, Anne can always fall back "karma" and "fate", which hangs on to the notion that the universe is "mind-like" but that its intentions are unknowable.

Anne experiences a feeling of profound injustice and moral outrage. She is hard-wired to attribute the source of this outrage to be some Universal "mind" behind everything that happens. She is also hardwired to accept her perceptions as real. We don't wander through the world telling ourselves that "this is not real". Anne's perception (not just her abstract belief) is that there is something beyond herself that looks upon the situation and feels the same grief that she does.

Such a problem can be said to underly the whole of religion. This may be supposed to be a consistent failure to recognize the difference between Box 0 and Box 1. It should not be remarkable to find mind-like aspects of a world that is, after all, created by a mind. Our mind.

Not all religions fail this way, but many start out being sensible about the issue then slip into superstition. For example, in the (personal) branch of Zen I follow, we trust experience over philosophical word-play, which can be taken to be all forms of "mind like" assumptions about the world. Even so, I accept that there is no escape from Box 0 such as, for example, taking LSD or sitting in a cave for years. In theory, solid things like logic and mathematics are "mind like" and should be distrusted in favor of experience itself. Such ideas go back to the Tao Teh Ching which points out the difference between what we say about reality and reality itself (depending on the translation you are reading and what you are reading into it). But if you study the book as a whole, you detect a general disdain for investigation of any kind. We actually do need to understand Box 0 as well as we can, for simple reasons of survival if for no other reason.

In practice, Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen become straightforward fantasy worlds, actively denying what the rest of us would call "science." To my mind, this takes skepticism too far. "Skepticism" becomes skepticism of opponents to my religion, rejecting all arguments on principle as existing in some "truth domain" that doesn't touch the experience of the believer.

On the other hand, I think that religious attitudes and practices can be entirely appropriate if they are admitted to belong to Box 1, where there is no such thing as "objective truth." In Box 1 the universe is full of moral principle and agency. I first grasped this in Theological School where the instructor challenged us to ask what we would see if someone videotaped the Ascension of Jesus to Heaven.

This was a challenge (an outrage to a few of us). Are we to take Acts 9:1-11 to be a literal eye witness account, or are we to ask who wrote the passage and why? I became quite comfortable with this kind of question, personally delving into similar thorny issues, such as what was the experience of Isaiah when he spoke not for God but as God.

My approach is to accept religious experience as valid in "Box 1" - the world created by the mind. It then becomes possible to discuss religious beliefs and attitudes as one might discuss literature (in fact that is precisely the approach adopted by liberal schools of theology). Even in the world of imagination, some interpretations make more sense than others.

Of course, this is often offensive to believers, who tend to insist on the literal, objective truth of their version of history. Such folks, through no fault of their own, have come to mix up Box 0 and Box 1. Educating them on this matter can be stressful but, as my own education has proven, not impossible. In fact, most thoughtful believers are curious precisely on this matter.  Not everyone follows the Red Queen.

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.

Thoughts on Religion vs. Reality

For the moment, let me talk about the world of human experience as "E".

The world that Science investigates is assumed to exist apart from human experience, although we can only know it through human experience. Without really thinking about it, we imagine the "real world" to be about the shared experience: verifiable, consistent and augmented by what we call "reason". But we have long admitted that Universe, which I will call U, is not the same as "E". In fact, we assume that we can never know "U" entirely, directly or completely.

We all know that "E" is not the same for each of us. In fact, it is quite remarkably different between different cultures and different times or even for a single individual throughout his or her lifetime.

The question at hand is, is there anything "out there" apart from E and U?

In most religious traditions the answer is "yes".  Most religions postulate a universe in which the individual "soul" - the most important part of E  - exists apart from the individual physical body and survives death into a realm that may or may not is occupied by spirits, gods, occult forces and a whole world. Christianity specifically claims that the "soul" always exists apart from the body - an idea that appears in modern Science Fiction in many forms. Mystical traditions claim that some varieties of E (mystical experience) perceive alternate universes or perceive U directly, whatever that may mean. At least in the early days of the "drug culture", drugs like LSD were seen as a means of exploring that alternate reality - not just a way of bending the brain out of shape.

Religions also tend to assume that there is a moral universe that exists beyond the world of mere mortals but applies in some way to the moral choices we make. For example, the fate of our souls depends on the moral choices we make. In such a moral universe, the concept of "free will" is an essential attribute of the soul. If we have no free will, the entire idea of merit and reward beyond death (or even in this world) makes no sense. Religious apologists are well aware of this problem - frequently claiming that in a world without God (or their religion), morality cannot exist.

But if we stick to the evidence available, we are forced to conclude that our minds and therefore all of E are happening between our ears and are therefore embedded in U, like the rest of our bodies. There is no other Universe. Mind, like gravity, however mysterious, is a phenomenon within U.

One of the most impressive bits of evidence for this is the structure of the brain. Brain structure heavily contributes to "character" in the sense that lesions, injuries, tumors, and drugs can dramatically alter moral behavior. What we consider to be "moral" choices - the ones that supposedly chart the progress of the soul - are the work of identifiable brain structures.  If you break down "free will" into components, you wind up with faculties (brain structures, processes and systems) that may or may not work as expected. These faculties may fail individually or in combination as a consequence of specific injury to specific brain systems. For moral decisions to take place:

• You need to be aware of the alternatives for action;
• The alternatives need to be emotionally "tagged" - some "feel" better than others - otherwise you don't care;
• You need to access applicable memory and social "rules";
• You need to feel things like disgust, lust, shame, pride, and empathy;
• You need to be able to hold all this in working memory long enough to work out an action;
• You need to be able to act according to your mental "computation" (many people "know" what is right but behave in alarming, self-destructive ways anyway).

Drastic departures from "normal" capabilities in these areas are labeled with morally-tinged "disorders" such as psychopathy or even mild character judgments such as "laziness" or "impulsiveness". We are just beginning to understand the physical roots of these personality patterns. The field of psychological neurology is gradually stripping away our common sense idea that "bad" people are acting out of free choice - making "bad choices". What's left is a view that "normal" people make "normal" choices using "normal" brain structures. There is no room left for the idea that morality is something that exists outside of E (what we experience) and our bodies (part of U). We may need to toss wickedness onto the same scrap heap as demon possession.

Brain structures are stunningly complex in a way that shouts "design". Of course, we put aside the "Santa's Workshop" view of this "design". There is no "designer". But what then? We must say that our brain structures are a result of strong evolutionary pressure.

Our nervous systems extract an astonishing amount of detail from basic sensory information. To cite just one example, there are 20 different types of ganglia in the visual system. These nerve cells extract the "analog" information coming in from the retina. Each type of ganglion "speaks its own digital language" to the deeper structures of the brain. At the moment, we have a vague idea what five of these ganglion types are "talking about". What the others are "saying" remains mysterious. In no case are we in a position to decipher the language that each type speaks.*

There are hundreds of different cell types in the hippocampus - the brain area critical to memory. The complexity of this design is several orders of magnitude beyond anything that has come out of human design efforts. What is motivating this incredible process? It can be nothing but what we call R. The "real world". Our brains are embedded in R and they are a direct consequence of phenomena in R. Specifically, evolutionary "pressure" from events in R have consequences for even subtle differences in the design of our bodies - especially our brains. This applies to the way our brains make "moral" choices. There is no particular need for us to know what these "pressures" are. For example, we have been breathing for millennia before we discovered oxygen.

Evolutionary "pressure" is "adaptive", or "survival of the fittest". But for humans, survival depends on acting together with other humans. Great sections of the brain are specifically devoted to this job, including obvious things like speech but even more sophisticated "circuitry" that computes socially acceptable behavior - that's what we call "morality".

The main business of religion is to help us "compute" our behavior in socially acceptable ways. Religion is the result of many brains "computing" general solutions to the problems of existence, especially existence together with other humans.

We are left with a view of the world and our role in it that departs significantly from virtually all religions, but, at the same time, tells us why we have religions and why there is no particular reason for them to "make sense":

• There is no "soul" apart from the body. Consciousness - and all the mysteries of the self - are created by the brain. The "self" can be disassembled bit by bit or ultimately destroyed by injury to the brain. The fact that we can't "explain" this does not put the phenomenon in a special category. We have no ultimate explanation for anything at all - including gravity.
• "Free will", if it exists at all, is severely constrained by the details of our individual brain structure and health.  Wild departures from "normal" - such as psychopaths - have brain abnormalities not much different from being blind from birth. We must challenge our common-sense idea that others may be regarded as fundamentally "good" or "bad" in some absolute sense. 
• With no "soul" or independent realm that dictates moral choices outside of our minds, the need for anything like "heaven" or "god" vanishes. As Pascal famously noted: "We have no need for that hypothesis".

But does the need for religion itself vanish? Our brains are designed to depend heavily on the input from other brains. To cite a simple example, our courts could not function without laws. Laws could not exist without language and the deep history behind the moral "computations" performed by cultures over the centuries. The fact that different cultures compute different answers to the moral problems presented does not diminish the fact that individuals are not "designed" to make moral choices entirely on their own.

It does seem possible for these insights to inspire something that looks like "morality". For example, perhaps we should back off from our natural tendency to regard people with different moral standards as "evil". Perhaps we should be more skeptical of ideas like deliberation and willfulness in those who offend against our laws. Perhaps we need to re-think our ideas of "justice" entirely - especially when it comes to our systems of punishment and reward that supposedly motivate people to behave in the "right" way. It seems to me that people who accept compassion as a core religious belief are already close to accepting this attitude for simple "scientific" reasons. It is a simple, verifiable fact that E is a creation of the human mind in response to the "real" pressure from R plus our efforts to survive in partnership with others (also playing itself out on a stage in R).

The vast majority of the human race believes or acts "as if" their own cultural standards of morality are absolute and not "invented" by "mere" humans. We want to think that their worldview is not "merely" mythical but in some sense reflecting a special insight into the nature of reality, usually augmented by some kind of "supernatural" (not part of U) history. I don't think it is too much of a leap for such people to accept that their worldview is a special case of "E". Other worldviews - even conflicting worldviews - need to be understood as fundamentally human and not uniquely valid conclusions of the nature of reality. For the individual, morality boils down to what we should do - here and now, in this world. Practical experience tells us that it's quite possible for folks with utterly different worldviews to agree on a wide range of common action.

On the other hand, it should be possible for us to deny "supernatural" justifications for actions that cast others as "evil" - deserving suppression or even death.

It's not too much to ask.

* More on visual system ganglia and the "big picture" posed by the brain here.

Now What?

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. 

T. S. Eliot - Little Gidding

I have been writing for a long time about the concept of "supermind" and the "dragon". Groups of humans - armies, governments - have a life of their own and thrive at the expense of the humans that oppose them - even their own members.  These groups steal our identity and prevent us from thinking for ourselves. It's all true, of course, but what is new is the total acceptance of the situation. Comfort almost. This is the human condition. Our "minds" function as part of a whole. It may be a mistake to "analyze" - to break things down into pieces, but indulge me for a moment while I describe things that make up our "minds" that are usually regarded as something happening between our ears.

• The brain, especially considered as part of the body (Damasio). The function of the brain is primarily to support the organism - the efforts of that organism to thrive. 
• "Reality" - what "scientists" observe and explore. Quantum mechanics has taught us to think of "reality" as a set of shared observations and models - strictly speaking, that is what we "know". Actual "reality" (apart from what we can measure) always seems to be just out of reach.
• "Society" - from birth, we are knit into a human milieu. We parse reality in words we learn as children, we grasp and learn tools that reflect hundreds of thousands of years of invention and ingenuity.  

It is not wise to separate these three except for the purposes of discussion. The brain is "hard-wired" into the body and the body is a real thing - an object in reality. We cannot speak of any of this or learn the simplest task of existence without drawing on what we are told and shown by the people around us.

In short, our minds are not "our own", nor does it make much sense to insist that we "think for ourselves". Our minds are constrained by what they are - or, if you want, the fact that they are embedded in reality in a certain manner - a manner that is inescapable.

So what is new (and perhaps an echo of thoughts I have had for half a century) is to see all this at once.  This leads to experiences that are somehow kissed with new insight. For example, I see scenes of happy congregations hugging and greeting each other in a new way. I would normally harrumph in the background about how silly their beliefs are and shake my head at how amazing it is that so many people can all be so deluded about the core nature of reality. But now I see this as a whole and don't separate what is supposedly going in between the ears of the believer. What is going on is happening to everyone in the room and has roots that go back centuries. The "mind" at work is what I used to call "supermind", but what I have been missing is that the individual experience of mind is just what goes on in our own minds. We are mostly unaware that we are not "thinking" our own thoughts, not being motivated by our own motives, not intending what we individually intend. The process works so smoothly and so naturally that we know as little about it as do bees in a hive.

This perspective puts an end to the "supermind" blog. It is an error to think of mind and supermind separately, just as the behavior of bees makes no sense without reference to the "goals and intentions" of the hive. This insight also marks a new direction for this blog, which started out trying to find a rational, skeptical way forward in a sea of myth and misdirection. In a way, I see the name of this blog (The Christian Skeptic) as a theme to which I must now return, knowing that we are all in a state of tension between our "heritage" and what comes next. Skeptics, like Christians, don't "think for themselves".

Of course there are many, many layers involved in this process.  You can go on splitting and analyzing to your heart's content. For example, in "Behave", Sapolsky analyzes our reasons for doing what we do, going up the ladder of detail from the way nerves move our limbs to the way society tells us what is "right" and "wrong'. If nothing else, Sapolsky ties human behavior into the physical structure of the brain - everything from the chemistry of enzymes to the modular structure of brain "systems". The brain is a thing - an object in reality.

Drilling Down to Motivations

Sapolsky reluctantly concludes that there is no place for "free will" in his analysis. Perhaps that is because he, like others, is stuck with the image of the "self" as being some kind of puppet master between the ears of the individual. The truth is that the borders of "self" are extremely fuzzy, both in time and space. What happens in our heads is the result of an astronomically complex calculation whose inputs go back to the swamps when life first emerged - a point that structures Damasio's story of who we are - the Strange Order of Things. We have motives - feelings - that Damasio sees at the very root of being and Sapolsky confirms are rooted in biology - the term "computation" for this process is misleading. We are not computers.

In Damasio's account, to live is to thrive, which means that living things don't just "try" to continue their existence, the "try" to push themselves further into the future (persist). They reproduce, grow and grab all the resources they can to do it. In corporate turns (which Damasio hates), living things don't just break even, they make a profit. Damasio walks right up to considering human groups to be alive in their own right (since they satisfy his criteria for being alive), but balks at the conclusion since human groups overlap. For some reason, he feels that a single organism can't be part of two superorganisms at once. There is no particular reason for this criterion, which seems to emerge out of the blue - unconnected to any of his other arguments. In any case, as pointed out by one very early reader of the "Dragon" blog, it's mainly a matter of terminology. What is important is to recognize the actual relationship between the individual human and society, whether you call society "alive" or not.

Strangely, Damasio is quite willing to consider a beehive as alive (and even conscious) in its own right.  His arguments for this are convincing and I really don't see why they would not apply to human society, which is quite happy to "brainwash" its citizens so that they throw their lives away for the sake of their country or even corporate profits - profits that they themselves never see.

But the trick is to see that we are all brainwashed all the time. Otherwise, we could not speak, find our way around or feed ourselves. This is who we are, what we are.

Great sections of our brains are devoted to fitting our individual existence into the group. We have "speech centers" in the (normally) left brain devoted to generating and understanding speech. We have forebrain modules that are constantly doing "social" calculations to determine what is the socially appropriate thing to do (Sapolsky). On a more subtle level, our brains seem to work in such a way as to parse the world in terms of "objects" and "events" that lend themselves to verbal communication.  In other words, "language" is deeply embedded in the way our brains actually work - an insight spelled out in great detail in "Surfaces and Essences" - Hofstadter.

What is often overlooked is the fact that all this functions according to the laws of physics, chemistry, and geometry. We are embedded in a real world. It is commonplace to remark that we only see part of what is "out there". What is overlooked is that what we do see is actually "out there". One image I have in my head is the way our brains are packed into a finite volume but fold the surface to maximize the amount of cortical area. One imagines that we would have had big, spherical brains except that they would be unwieldy. It's just the way I see geometry placing constraints on what and how we think - who we are.

Along these lines, I see "society" and culture as a way of escaping constraints that we inherited from millennia of evolution - the "design concept" of individual organisms, reproduction and all that. Human societies "thrive" by a new mechanism - one involving "information" breaking free of its DNA shackles to exist out in the open as the blood and bones of human society.

My First Introduction To Zen

Key to this insight is the analogy between DNA - the "program" that determines the physical shape and behavior of an organism - with "Information", the physical, real-world "tools" that society uses to thrive. In the latter category are not just what is usually seen as "information" (books and computer files etc) but the physical creations of society, like telescopes, automobiles and language itself. When you sit behind the wheel of a car, you are being absorbed into the skills and thought processes of tens of thousands of people who invented everything from the dash ornaments to the theory of internal combustion. This is an insight that goes back to "Zen and The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance", a book I read when it came out (1974). The book is not about Zen or Motorcycle Maintenance, but I did take away the idea that a motorcycle is an idea cast in metal. I come back to the same place and know the place for the first time ...

It is worth noting that I come back to this idea having absorbed many of the key ideas of Zen. I'd say "motorcycle" actually extends Zen in an exciting way. Perhaps Pirsig, like the rest of us, knew more about Zen than we thought at the time. Specifically, the insights here vastly expand what we think of as "mind", "attention" and "consciousness". These are the central concerns of Zen. There is no particular reason why those who follow the path of self-discovery should be stuck with the metaphors created thousands of years ago.

Back in 1974, I would frequently point out that a man with an ax is as different from a man without an ax as a zebra is from a horse. Our tools accelerate evolution in a new way. But back then I didn't quite grasp that the tool exists in its own "space" - the supermind - that is using the man as much as the man uses the ax.

So it is that today, in 2018, I have the unusual comfort of having a big insight that has been bubbling up from below for half a century. It makes sense.

But now what?

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. 

Mathematics: The Modern God

Roger Penrose is a guy who has a way of asking good questions and providing controversial answers. On page 20 of his monumental survey of applied mathematics, "The Road To Reality" he explains an interesting theory about three "worlds":

• R*:The "real", physical world of "stuff" and phenomena, which he (quite reasonably) takes to exist apart from the other two worlds;
• M:The world of ideas - what I call the "meme space". In principle, this is all the theories, observations, direct or indirect perceptions that could ever be made by the human mind;
• F:The world of forms, mathematics and logic.

While he contends is that each world "maps" completely to the others. In principle at least, each world can be explained in terms of the other.  But he allows us to imagine that the mapping is incomplete. It is the incompleteness that interests me:

• There may be aspects of reality that are "illogical" or cannot be described by mathematics. Such a possibility goes against the grain for Penrose, who is, after all, a mathematician.
• There may be ideas that correctly describe the world, but are beyond the ability of the human mind to grasp, even "in principle"
• There facts of math and logic that are beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend. Questions that we cannot even think to ask, postulates - even "important ones" that we will never discover

"In principle" raises a red flag. It quite often means "This is obviously false, but lets pretend its true". It is a good habit to challenge every use of this term and ask precisely what is meant by it.

Penrose's claim amounts to believing that the world can be completely understood by the mind and the way to do it is through mathematics. Thinking like a mathematician, he feels that mathematics "maps" completely to the real world and therefore the two worlds are the same "for all intents an purposes" (another red flag expression). 

Mathematics is claimed to govern the workings of the universe, both seen and unseen. Denial of Penrose's optimism amounts to claiming that, although mathematics rules the universe, many of its "laws" are beyond the reach of human intellect. Even worse, things might happen that are fundamentally illogical. This debate sounds vaguely theological.

Mathematics does not share the personal attributes of the Old Testament God but this new god is all-knowing and, in a sense, separate from the universe governed by the laws of mathematics. This is because the world of mathematics is larger than the universe we inhabit. Other universes can easily be described by mathematical constructs such as the Shrodinger Equation (just fiddle with the constants in the equation). String Theory, a perfectly consistent model of something that looks like a universe, suffers from the problem that it describes too many universes. Ours is a special case.

True believers in a God are familiar with the idea that the "ways" of God's are ultimately unknowable to the human mind. The same is true of the "math god".  Godel's Completeness Theorem guarantees that there are some things that are "true" in mathematics that cannot be proven. In fact, there are an infinite number of such things and you never know if your favourite "obvious" postulate is one of them. Mathematics moves in mysterious ways.

Penrose's belief that the universe can, in principle, describe all phenomena we experience can be seen as faith: pure and simple. Penrose, whose scientific background is in subatomic physics, shares the faith of his peers. He regards subatomic physics as "fundamental" and believes (against all evidence) that all of the more complex phenomena of the world can be "explained" in terms of "fundamental" principles. This is the "reductionist" faith, modern fundamentalism. It is logically identical to the claim that everything you need to know about life can (in principle!) be learned from the Bible. Like religious fundamentalism, reductionism can only be supported if you spend most of your time among other true believers. In the early 21st century, this is not hard to do, since reductionism seems "obvious" to  almost everyone, just as the existence of God was obvious to Descartes.

Richard Dawkins has made his fame by attacking religion, challenging centuries-old "obvious" ideas that have long since lost their relevance to human experience. Religion is reductionist since it claims that everything comes down to God, even though we are not quite sure about the details. So religion is a special case of reductionism. Challenging reductionism is like a vaccine against a huge category of nonsense.

Laughin in "A Different Universe" destroys reductionism with an "emperor has no clothes" argument. He provides one example after another where reductionism fails. He provides an alternative theory as to why this failure is a fundamental aspect of reality.  

As things stand now, it is rare to find anyone who draws a parallel between the universe of mathematics and the heavenly realm. Most of us think we are immune from the kind of nonsense that people took for granted 200 years ago. But the mere fact that we take it as obvious that the mathematical world as real and, in some sense, superior to the world we live in marks us as "true believers" in the old tradition. At least we can certainly claim that mathematics is far more useful than theology when it comes to "explaining" the phenomena of the world, but we cannot defend our assumption that the universe "obeys" mathematical laws or that mathematics is somehow "fundamental".

Lets look at another aspect of Penrose's claim: that mathematics, in principle, completely describes the real world and, indirectly, the brain and the human mind. So, things like consciousness, compassion and creativity could be (in principle!) reduced to a branch of neuroscience. This idea applies reductionism to the link between the brain and the mind, even if the workings of the brain cannot be explained in mathematical terms.

The poster boy for this idea (that consciousness can be, in principle, be explained by workings of the brain) is Daniel Dennett. Typically, Dennett is his own best critic. He  identifies the weakness of his own approach as "Greedy Reductionism".

Like the theist view of the world, reductionism needs to be abandoned as one of those "obvious" ideas that simply doesn't fit experience. Mathematics and logic create a wonderful, fascinating world but we will probably never know if mathematics somehow underlies all of reality itself. It seems likely that there is a lot of things we'd like to know about the universe that we will never know. The worlds that Penrose talks about communicate in interesting ways, but they are not the same in any meaningful sense. 

* R,M and F signify core memes outlined in my blog on the workings of the mind.

What, If Anything, Is a "Person"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Real World - The "R and Q Memes"

The "R" meme is the most powerful and widely-shared meme: that there is a "real world out there" independent of our minds. This is the intuitive insight that is denied or at least challenged by "Idealism" [1].

Denial of R turns out to be a powerful "intuition pump". We imagining that the "real world" does not exist at all, and it's "all in our minds". This is a rather strong denial of Idealism, since an Idealist would, I think, admit that the real world exists -- just that we can't know anything about it other than what pops up in our minds.

At the risk of spoiling the plot, the view of this blog is that the brain can be thought of as a fantastically complex and specially-constructed knot that intimately ties the mind M to the world R. This connection is so intimate that it is, in practice, impossible to say where mind ends and world begins [2]. In effect, this frames "Idealism" as a discussion about a distinction without a difference -- not unusual for philosophical discussions in general.

One of the pillars of R is he "Standard Model of Physics" (I will call it Q) an idea that claims to be "isomorphic" with the "real world" [2] at almost all contexts of experience. That means that we have a complete explanation of things like atomic and sub-atomic particles and forces operating on us. The contexts where this model doesn't apply include the interior of black holes and the early time of the Universe (between the "big bang" and "inflation". Q includes a specific and elegant description of its own limitations, captured in the idea of an "effective field theory", which may be thought of as a formal definition of what's meant by "for all intents and purposes" when applying Q to specific phenomena.

Q is a powerful meme, underlying a sweeping range of ideas we have about reality, including things like photosynthesis, the lifetime of stars and the behavior of semi-conductors. Particle physicists and cosmologists tend to wax poetic about this idea, calling it "fundamental" and the "theory of everything". This over-states the matter. The mind, not R, is "fundamental". R is an idea, not reality itself, so therefore included in the world of memes (even it it turns out to be false!) In this sense, the theory of memes (especially as envisioned by Hofstadter) is more "fundamental". The idea that Q is "fundamental" is the bedrock of reductionism and fails for all the reasons reductionism fails. Q enthusiasts also tend to rely on the common confusion between a description and an explanation. The fact that all observed phenomena are consistent with Q does not imply that Q "explains" or predicts anything at all. Q fails to predict many "emergent" properties, such as the chemical properties of matter and becomes of marginal importance as the level of complexity increases. For example, Q doesn't help much when explaining how he mind works.

[1] "Idealism" The idea that we cannot know anything about the world except through the prism of our minds. This has many modern variants, such as the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (Q meme). Its shadow can be seen in Einstein's introduction of the "observer" into physics, banishing the all-knowing "god" view of the universe. Idealism can be contrasted with the idea we see in Eastern philosophies (Zen), which claim that the mind is an illusion.

[2] In Quantum Mechanics, the fact that the theory and the world are not the "same thing" can never be swept under the carpet. "Isomorphic" is an idea borrowed from mathematics, which says that there is a one-to-one mapping between one domain to another.  For. example, "isomorphism" means that all the properties of a "real" electron are exactly mirrored in the electron of Q meme (leaving nothing out). Conceptually, "isomorphism" can be taken to mean that the two domains are, "for all intents and purposes", the same thing, which almost amounts to claiming the universe itself is an idea. The R meme would deny this, claiming that there "must" be aspects of the universe that cannot be "isomorphic" to human ideas. Some things are forever beyond the grasp of the human mind (It is certainly true that Q itself is beyond the grasp of all but a tiny number of actual minds).

The concept of "effective field theory" (part of Q) is an open admission that isomorphism fails at some point, meaning that Q does not "map" to everything in the real universe. Even in its own terms, Q is not a "theory of everything".

Models of Mind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is more wonderful than we can imagine.

The Truman Show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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