Language, Reality and Experience

Today I had the unexpected pleasure of a long, detailed conversation with Ambre Singh, a brilliant and creative Second Life citizen. It related to her new (to me) installation at 

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Commune%20Utopia/9/248/27

(You need to be logged in to second life to use this link)

I really can't come close to describing all the ideas we touched upon. Only the ideas that grew out of it. 

We talked about the limitations of language. How we must never lose sight of the fact that "reality" or "experience of reality" is primary. Language is merely "about" reality. It is totally inadequate when we wish to share an experience that is unique to us.

There is much to unpack here. I'm thinking of two of Bertrand Russel's colleagues at Cambridge: Wittgenstein and Kauffman. Russel himself attempted to describe the human language (or at least the interesting subset that mathematicians use) in formal terms - almost like a computer language. This project was blown up by Goedel and his incompleteness theorem - another story.

Wittgenstein (as far as I can understand) thought that the purpose of language was to describe "what is the case". To him, language is a kind of game, in which the participants agree on what does and does make sense. Whether such statements are true seems to be beyond the reach of language and (therefore) philosophy. Certainly my experience.

Kauffman took a radically different approach. In "Laws of Form" (available as a PDF) he uses language in a different way - as instructions or commands. "Draw a distinction". Call the "inside" A and the "outside" B. From this approach, Kauffman claims (who knows?) to derive all of mathematics. His claim is way beyond my abilities to confirm or deny, but his use of language is compelling. One person is telling another to do something and "follow along". It's like when Galileo commanded, "look through this device. Do you see Jupiter has moons?"

In this way of seeing things language is not a free-floating statement of "what is the case". It stimulates us to share an experience. Experience, not language, is the primary source of "truth". Of course, it can be a terribly misleading source but it's the way that leads us to a shared understanding of the world we inhabit.  It is easy for those who think that "truth" is all about something going on in our brain (specifically the language centers of our brain) to entertain the idea that reality doesn't exist at all.

On this point, Ambre and I respectfully disagreed. Her installation seems to lead us to the view that "mind" and "stuff" are somehow ultimately different. That "mind" is somehow eternal and not an "epiphenomenon" of the body. I think we agreed that the image of the mind apart from the body is a metaphor - what is really happening is (at least at present) beyond our imagination. The metaphor ceases to be useful if we start to think that there is nothing but mind and what we experience as reality is nothing but an illusion.

It was a great pleasure for me to agree with Ambre that questions are more valuable than answers. It's a journey.

What Can Be Said

I urge the reader to take the time to listen to this song - sorry about the ads.

Rows and flows of angel hair

And ice cream castles in the air

And feather canyons everywhere

Looked at clouds that way

But now they only block the sun

They rain and snow on everyone

So many things I would have done

But clouds got in my way

 

I've looked at clouds from both sides now

From up and down and still somehow

It's cloud's illusions I recall

I really don't know clouds at all

Moons and Junes and ferries wheels

The dizzy dancing way that you feel

As every fairy tale comes real

 

I've looked at love that way

But now it's just another show

And you leave 'em laughing when you go

And if you care, don't let them know

Don't give yourself away

I've looked at love from both sides now

From give and take and still somehow

It's love's illusions that I recall

I really…

You can run into the same idea all over the place and through the ages. For example, I remember the opening words of the Tao Teh Ching

The Tao that can be named is not the real Tao

(From a hard copy edition, long lost and long out of print)

Chinese pictograms are delightfully ambiguous - impossible to translate into English. Another translation (from a version I accidentally purchased with Amazon's one-click) goes:

The Tao is teachable, yet understanding my words is not the same as following the Tao. The guidance is describable, yet knowing the description is not the same as following the guidance.

Liang, Yuhui. Tao Te Ching: The New English Version That Makes Good Sense (Kindle Locations 637-639). Kindle Edition. 

The second version makes more "sense" in English but I quoted the first to myself almost daily for 60 years.

Much too early in my life, I took on Wittgenstein's "Tractatus".

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence

Jodi makes the same point as Lao Tsu and Wittgenstein, but in a way that is so clear it wound up on the hit parade. How can that be?

It's a question worth asking with an answer that can change the way we think about life. In fact, I have said that Jodi's song is 30% of Zen. The other 70% can probably be found on the Country Hit Parade.

A song invites us to share an experience, along with visual images, emotions, and whole life history. It's a "whole brain" communication.  Words and logic are processed by a relatively small part of the brain (the language centers and forebrain). Experience is much more than words can capture. In the end, our experience is an illusion. The ultimate nature of reality (The Tao) is ultimately unknowable.

  A person of my generation summed up all this in a review of Jodi's song:

About 50 years ago a group of friends and myself went out on a Friday night to Phil's Steak and Pancake House located at the Chinook Shopping Centre on MacLeod Trail in Calgary.  They had live entertainment every weekend and on that particular night there was a shy young girl (a student at Mount Royal College) by the name of Joan Anderson who was our entertainment for the night.  She mesmerized us all with her music and she still has that effect upon me today.  Although she did not perform this song (I don't think she had written it yet)  when it came out on her Clouds album I just fell in love with it.  To hear her sing the same song  almost half a century later and appreciate the lyrics which now have seriously different meanings is breath taking.

 

I am an old man and do not feel ashamed at all to cry every time I watch this

What, if Anything, is "Reality"

We are hard-wired to accept the direct and indirect evidence of our senses as painting a picture of the "real world". Whatever disagreements we may have over interpretation, we all take it for granted that there is a real world "out there". We are just limited in the amount of evidence we can collect, the power of our analytical tools etc.

The inevitable conclusion for all of his is that "reality", as we experience it, is about our experience (something that happens in our heads) and is not something separate. Our ideas about the world are not the world itself.

This observation has been made repeatedly down through the ages. I encountered it twice at approximately the same time back in the 1970's. First in the Tao Te Ching:

The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal name
The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth
The named is the mother of myriad things

and in the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said that what we could not talk about in the "language game" must be passed over in silence.

Later, I struggled to understand a much deeper and more fundamental issue, the "EPR Paradox" in which Einstein directly challenged the standard interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, in which we can only speak of the results of experiments and not what is "really going on". Einstein, quite reasonably, felt sure that there was an underlying reality there whether we measured it or not. He designed a "thought experiment" that would settle the issue. To make a long story short, it was eventually possible to actually perform the experiment and Einstein was wrong. In a fundamental sense, there is nothing "going on out there" apart from the stories we tell ourselves about our experiences.

Before I go on, I must point out that both Wittgenstein and the EPR paradox are right at the edge of what I able to grasp. I'm not an expert or even a passable student of such issues. In fact, in the link I provided above, the EPR paradox is described in a way I have not seen before.

You don't need to be immersed in the arcane world of Western Philosophy or Quantum Mechanics to run into this issue. Most recently, I encountered it in an issue of National Geographic, which covered he phenomenon of "Mary worship" around he world. Along the way, we learn that there are literally thousands of people who claim to have been visited by the celestial Mary. Possibly quite a few more than have actually performed the EPR experiment.

How can we deal with this? It seems to me that the answer lies in the concept of "intelligibility", combined with the rather awkward interpretation of "reality" that we see culture in general. Even in Science, our confidence in what we know about "reality" comes out of consensus. For example, a Scientific experiment or observation is not seen as valid unless it can be repeated or shared with anyone. But the same criterion, if thousands of people agree that that they have seen the risen Virgin Mary (or Christ, or any other celestial being), then you have .... what?

What you have is a shared experience. Something that "believers" can talk about in a way that "makes sense" to each other. "Reality" can never be more than what we agree it to be. What's worse, that "reality" will differ in fundamental ways depending on who is talking to whom.

All this leads me to a certain humility when I am tempted to dismiss the world view of religions, which are basically communities of people who can discuss their "reality" in terms intelligible to each other.

There are ways to wriggle out of this interpretation, but it's wise not to leave humility behind. One way that makes sense to me, proposed by Alisdair Macintyre is to think that my philosophy is somehow superior to yours if I can "explain" or talk intelligibly in my universe about yours but you cannot do he same about mine. For example, I have no problem explaining (in my terms) why a "cargo cult" culture might emerge, but that culture would have problems explaining how actual aircraft work.

That's all very well, but it still leaves you with the conclusion that "reality" is what we say it is and what it really is is perhaps forever beyond our grasp. In fact, I find Macintyre's interpretation of the situation to be both satisfying and deeply discouraging.

See also related post "What, if anything, is the real world"

Evolution of Mind - Evolution of Machine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what is a "machine"?

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

In contrast, in a human ...

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

Over time, these differences become blurred:

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

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

"It's All Bullshit"

I have written a massive amount about this subject. I hope not to repeat what I've already said or what anyone would understand without wise words from me.  My problems with language as a representation of reality are discussed there and are hardly original. This post is about a few personal implications of this fact.

My dear departed dad said it best, with typical sensitivity: "It's all bullshit". If he had said it when I was 5 he could have saved me some trouble...

Some hints in the past ...

• By simply stopping to use religious terminology, I broke the spell of Christianity
• I have always felt that philosophy is "just words", as confirmed by Wittgenstein, Taoism
• But the big picture eluded me...
• "Religion" is impossible without extensive abuse of human language;
• All "ideas", including the nutty ones, are made possible by language alone
• Language "cheaters" and "gamers" are a pox on society 
• The weaponization of language can be seen in virtue signaling, "me too", canceling, "stop the steal" and 1,000 other examples

BUT

• Without language, we have no "Science" as we understand it and only the most primitive technology
• Evolution has given us brains that devote a lot of space to language processing. Language is part of our species' survival "strategy". Language is clearly very useful.
• The invention of writing turbocharges the power of language. Written ideas, for good or ill, become immortal. Extremely elaborate systems of "philosophy" become possible, as in "Western".  philosophy where an entire system can be referred to by a single name, such as Nietzsche, Marx, Christ, or Mohammed. 
• The explosive growth of massively complex religions based on "sacred writings" could never be squeezed through the limitations of oral history. Without written dogma (and dogma "experts"), all of these "philosophies" would have been passing superstition.

Lately, my response to religious enthusiasts has been that it's all "just talk". The response has been universal bewilderment. What would your religion be without all this "sacred" mumbo jumbo and centuries of disagreement over it? 

Nothing.

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. 

Christianity and Augmented reality

We all live in the same physical world, but we overlay what our senses and logic tell us with ideas that fundamentally change our experience of it. The result is that many of us (most of us?) live in impermeable bubbles where logic and persuasion cannot penetrate. It is important to realize this basic fact about human beings. It is impossible to "disprove" Christianity to a true believer. They experience a different world. They speak a different language. For them, "Christ died for your sins" is an intelligible sentence - absolutely "true" - although what the word "true" means in their world is very different from what we find in the dictionary. For me, this claim opens the door to a labyrinth of fantasy that could not withstand the questions of a five-year-old. It's just silly. Really? That's the way God set things up?

As George Orwell pointed out in 1984, "Augmentation" is mostly accomplished with language - Scientific or otherwise. We cannot experience what we cannot describe.

For example, a modern person will "see" something quite different from a citizen of ancient Greece when he looks up at the moon or contemplates the night sky. Even when we breathe, we know we are breathing air, which was not discovered until the beginning of the enlightenment. We "know" we need oxygen, unknown until 1774.

On the other hand, many "modern" people wander the Earth under the impression that the "self" they feel can be separated from their body and go on to eternal life (for good or ill). Thus, the most basic experience we have of being in the world is overlaid with an interpretation - motivated reasoning - nothing but a veil of words. The same people would inhabit a world where a powerful spirit - the one who created the entire Universe - concerns Himself with what is taught in school rooms--worried that He will not get proper credit for 13 billion years of effort leading up to the Jesus. Any day now, the entire project is soon to be wrapped up. Presidents of the United States, including the younger George Bush, believed this. The project of the entire Universe was to be settled in the "clash of civilizations" in the Gulf War.  You need to have lived your life in a society of people who talk this way to say things like this with a straight face. They know what you "mean". According to Wittgenstein, you are "playing the language game" according to their rules. To these people, it makes no sense to ask if there is some physical, tangible, provable connection between such words and the world the rest of us live in.

"True" Christians are not the only ones living in such bubbles. "True Believers" of every sort suffer the same disconnect with what some of us experience as physical reality. In every case, there is a wall between their lived experience and ours. In every case, that wall is built with words: motivated reasoning, fallacy, and outright lies. 

My dad would simply call it bullshit.

Zen and Now

While the Western world was setting out to discover a new way of thinking and a new way of exploring the Universe, the marriage of Taoism and Buddhism that begat Zen was already centuries old. Like all religions, Zen freezes doctrine and sets it beyond debate, investigation or refutation. Centuries ago, the dogma of Zen has become the property of revered masters. In Zen as in all other religions, thinking is handed over to the professionals, to defer to the "masters". Those who are interested in Zen are called disciples of the masters, not students. Masters are not teachers -- their role is to get the disciple to dismiss all theories, all experience, all problem solving. The Zen literature consistently places the disciple in the role of the fool -- a dramatic contrast to Western philosophy, founded by Socrates, who had a much more respectful attitude toward his students.

Of course dismissal of all human knowledge and all conceivable worldly goals this is a huge project, which explains why the literature (yes, the "scriptures") of Zen is so voluminous. There are, after all, quite a few ideas that need to be dismissed -- the Zen masters are hard-pressed to cope with the exponentially growing list of ideas, so it's understandable that they take the generic approach and simply dismiss all ideas except of course their own.

But now it's 2013. Many of the core ideas of Zen are due for a hard look.

For example, one of the core ideas of Taoism that is endlessly repeated by Zen masters is the idea that reality and talking about reality are two different things. The word and the thing are not the same. Duh. To a peasant in 12th century China, this would seem like a profound idea. Modern philosophy discusses this issue in far more detail with far more depth. See for example, Wittgenstein. Taoism and Zen constantly return to this point to support their dismissal of all discussion, all ideas, all knowledge expressed in words (and presumably mathematics, which is absent from these ancient philosophies).

Zen is fundamentally anti-Scientific, anti-skeptical. Most obviously, this conclusion can be reached by reading the endless rants against "mere" knowledge but more fundamentally, it comes from the dogmatic rejection of "mere" knowledge. One might also level an even more serious charge of intolerance, since "mere" knowledge is exactly where the opposition to Zen comes from. Within Zen, the opponents of the Zen dogma are dismissed without discussion or refutation as fools and zombies.

Of course, the idea that Zen is anti-skeptical is paradoxical, since skepticism is the very core of Zen. The Zen master will laugh this off and point to Zen as "the way of paradox".  Paradox is also at the core of Zen.

As a mathematician, I'm quite used to paradox. Paradox points to the need to change our thinking -- to discover the boundaries of thought and push them out. This is especially true of paradoxes that rely entirely on language. Paradoxes are amusing and challenging. They are not to be left alone as the foundation of a philosophy. For example, we don't leave Zeno's paradox unchallenged. We step around it to create Calculus, the most powerful and useful branch of mathematics -- indispensable to all of modern physics (By the way, Quantum mechanics deals with paradoxes that seem to be built into the real world, not just the way we talk about it).

Zen claims to be simply a practice -- something you do without theories. Yet, the "masters" provide us with a vast literature supporting a metaphysical theory of mind that goes all the way back to the Hindu roots. Frankly, this is bullshit from the same pile as the (barely) rejected Buddhist metaphysics. The idea that it is somehow possible to escape the "mind" and visit a new level of glorious nothingness is preposterous. The language that the masters use to describe this new experience -- "God consciousness" or "Oneness with the Universe" -- gives away the metaphysical roots which are not supposed to be there in Zen. Zen is not supposed to have theories about Zen experience. In fact, the "masters" rule out all theories except their own and specifically rule out the need to support their theories by any means other than mere repetition.

If we want theories about what goes on in "mindfulness", we can look to neuroscience and scrap the metaphysics. I'm willing to bet that the "mind" is still ticking over even when the greatest Zen master is in the most intimate contact with nothingness.

There is a subtle assumption behind the Zen writings about the importance of the Zen practice and theory. People who do not get with the Zen program are described as zombies. All religions attempt (usually without practical success) to push the priority of religious practice ahead of "worldly" things like finding something to eat, looking after security etc. Usually, some metaphysical justification is offered, which invariably dismisses conventional "reality" in favour of something that is somehow more real. For example, we may be promised a better break in the next reincarnation or bliss in Heaven (which is just a way of saying we only get reincarnated once). Zen offers us a chance to live one life with the default being no life at all. To access this "real" life, we must toss out all the concerns of ordinary life (as with all the other religions). Officially, Zen preempts all other concerns but offers no reason for it. In fact, practice of Zen for a purpose is specifically ruled out. This leaves us with the obvious question of why to fool with Zen at all?  The Zen answer seems to be "why not"  I think there may be a good reason, but it will put Zen on the level of healthy diet and exercise, very much like the marriage of yuppie Yoga and physiotherapy.

Zen (and it's ancestor Buddhism) does have something to say about a useful and healthy state of mind called "mindfulness". Zen does remove a lot of metaphysical clutter -- such ideas as the Biblical concept of God, Karma, Reincarnation are set aside (but still seem to be banging on the door wanting to be re-admitted). The Zen practitioner has permission to toss out metaphysics and just incorporate mindfulness in his life. Reading of the "literature", use of the terminology, recitation of the anti-thought rant is not compulsory. In fact, it seems that you could adopt the practice of mindfulness and plug in a totally different pack of metaphysical bullshit (such as the Christian one or Nazi theories of history for example) and still find mindfulness useful. In my own case, I plan to "plug in" the world view advocated in this blog, which specifically takes a skeptical view of all metaphysics but still identifies with the values of the Christian tradition. The word "Zen" is so commonly mis-used that its mis-used meaning is quite useful. Otherwise I'd use a term like "brain yoga".

Through the Taoist and Buddhist roots, mindfulness is connected to a scheme of ethics -- the branch philosophy the answers the question of virtue: "What sort of person should I be?". Of course, this question has survived the advent of Science and still remains an important concern. I've met a lot of people raised in the Western traditions that imagine that Taoism and/or Buddhism and/or Zen have the solution to this fundamental problem. I'm sure there are exceptions, but, to me, these people arrive at their respect for the ancient philosophies by tossing out or ignoring 99% of the ancient "wisdom". This is exactly what goes on with those who claim the Bible has the solution to all our problems. In fact, the Bible has a few exceptional ideas a lot of very, very bad ones. At first glance, Zen (as "brain yoga") does seem to directly imply a few changes to the way I behave on a daily basis. I'll let you know how this turns out.

The Language Game

I want to make a note of a couple of good ideas that I sometimes lose track of. Not mine, of course. Just things I have read but forget to apply sometimes.

One is from H. G. Wells "Modern Utopia".  He mentions that names for groups of people do not denote anything in the real world. The larger the group, the more useless the name. This applies to "socialist", "black people", "climate change deniers" ... The advice is to seriously limit the use of such words in serious discussion.

A similar insight comes from Buddhism, which goes further and applies skepticism to words that denote anything at all. A "real" object does not exist in and of itself. It exists in relationship to other "things". Its existence is time-limited and is constantly in flux. I would add that our ideas about "things" are "scale dependent" in time as well as space. If you look closely at anything, the "object" is lost and a new world appears. If you learn to think in terms of "deep time", what you mean by "the world" shifts. Astonishing things can be observed in freeze-frame, slow motion or time-lapse photography. What we take for granted as "real" is strongly "relative" to conventional perception of time.

Finally, I recall what Wittgenstein called the "language game". For example, you can confidently use the word "I" properly in a sentence but that doesn't mean you have a clue about what "I" really is. In fact, what we refer to as "meaning" seldom goes beyond how to use a word in context. This insight is specifically noted in modern Buddhist thought, which is skeptical about all "concepts" that are merely conventions of language.

In passing, I remember the ideas of McIntyre (sp?) who refers to "intelligibility" rather than "truth" in any statement. It's about the job of philosophy to be recognizing "legal moves" in the "language game". "Understanding" and "truth" are another matter entirely.

Finally, I remember E H Carr's "What is History", which makes the case that "history" is simply the story we come up with when we focus on certain aspects of the past. Those are the ones that the historian regards as "relevant" in his own time. This reminds me of the blind men experience the Elephant. - also mentioned in my readings on Buddhism.

All this is simply to mention the deep currents behind what I have been saying recently about everything. It is consistent with one of the themes in this blog: that we can't really "think for ourselves". We can only "speak" of the world and come to a common understanding of the language game rules, making "intelligible" statements that allow us to "think" in groups. While useful, there are some very fundamental reasons why this process rarely results in a true understanding of the "world" we live in. In fact, the agreed-to rules of language can create a dangerous distance between what we expect of the world and what we actually experience.

The Buddhist answer to this dilemma (and the one proposed by "Science") is to trust actual experience. It doesn't get us all the way out of the woods but is where the light is coming from.

Thoughts on Assimilation August 27, 2015

The original idea behind this blog (Dragon Theory) is that there is a dangerous tendency for human beings to be assimilated into machines, giving up their essentially human nature to serve the nature of the machine. By "machine", I mean a system that operates by impersonal inflexible rules, in contrast to the chaotic, creative behaviour of real human beings. We use "machine" in this way when we talk about an army as a "war machine".

I still love this idea. Like all good ideas, it raises more questions than it answers. Today, I'll consider some of these questions. In some cases, the questions are more interesting than the original thesis, which is a good thing. I have always thought that progress results from asking impertinent questions rather than from the answers we discover.

The theme of a recent issue of Scientific American (August, 2015) is "How we conquered the planet". Curtis W. Marean puts forward the thesis that the key to our world-conquering success is our ability to cooperate, especially on large scales, with individuals who are unrelated. Like any good thesis, it raises more questions than it answers--many of the same questions raised by "Dragon Theory".

Exactly what is meant by "cooperation"? Several threads of cooperation come to mind and all of them promote "assimilation" - surrender of individual human nature to an artificially created entity.

• Trade. There is plenty of evidence that humans are traders by nature, quite willing to barter with strange humans rather than simply stealing what they want. Trade is the mother of "economy" -- a slippery slope leading to the idea of money. The more a person depends on trade the more a person becomes defined by economic principals. A person becomes poor when he measures himself by the degree to which he participates and relies upon the money economy and that participation is slight (the famously large part of the human race that lives on less than a dollar a day).
• Conquest, loot and pillage. A very popular form of human cooperation which is made possible when individuals think and act as members of a gang or army. The degree of coherence and assimilation often determines the "success" of the conquering hoard. In many cases, it defeats enemies who are "weak" only because they are less organized, less assimilated. The Mongol "hoards" are my favourite example of a "war machine", which assimilated most of the civilized world by means of a very short list of operating rules - laws which explicitly overrule such human qualities such as mercy, fallibility and judgement. 

There are obviously many other forms of assimilation that humans are good at (religion comes to mind), but I will pass over these to focus on one that has, until today, escaped my notice: language.

It seems that language is the key to the unique degree of cooperation that Marean talks about. Today, I started to wonder if, by learning a language, we automatically become assimilated into something that has a life of its own. This is an idea that is hard to discuss using language itself, like fish discovering water. Do we surrender something of ourselves by learning to describe our experience in the same way as those around us? Without realizing it, do we learn to ignore every aspect of our experience that cannot be communicated and discussed with those around us who speak the same language?

Western philosophers assume that all truth is accessible to language. There are notable exceptions. Wittgenstein claimed that what cannot be said must be passed over in silence. Of course, we can't say just what is passed over. But we can ask if the same things will be passed over by speakers of different languages and whether there are important things that will be passed over by any speaker of any language.

I have been a computer programmer since there were computer programmers, I have seen the evolution of computer languages over half a century. "Languages" like FORTRAN and COBOL barely deserve the name of language. Modern languages, like Java, make it possible to express ideas that could never be expressed in COBOL or FORTRAN - ideas that are, in many cases, very difficult to express in "human" languages. For me, it's quite natural to see that language defines a world of ideas that can be expressed and also a (presumably larger) world of ideas that cannot be expressed. Moreover, as a follower of Zen and Tao, I'm quite aware that the world is larger than the world of human ideas, whether these ideas can be expressed in language or not.

Returning to the issue of assimilation, is language the necessary mechanism of all assimilation? Noam Chomsky famously claims that the ability to form ideas that can be communicated linguistically is an innate quality of the human brain. Does this mean that we are "hard wired" to be assimilated?

Human languages are famously sloppy, fuzzy and ambiguous. Computer languages are none of these things. The use of "language" to describe both systems is an analogy only, but the language of Mathematics is closer to the computer side of the analogy than the human side. What is more, hardly any scientific knowledge is respectable these days unless it can be mathematically described. 

Again, we are faced with the problem of a fish discovering water. It seems that we are totally immersed in a world that is described (or lied about) exclusively in language. If, for the moment, we imagine a world outside of that world of language, we come to understand what we mean by being assimilated by language.

In the current historical moment in the United States, the emptying out of language is nourished by the assault on the civic imagination. One example of this can be found in the rise of Donald Trump on the political scene. Trump’s popular appeal speaks to not just the boldness of what he says and the shock it provokes, but the inability to respond to shock with informed judgment rather than titillation. Marie Luise Knott is right in noting, “We live our lives with the help of the concepts we form of the world. They enable an author to make the transition from shock to observation to finally creating space for action - for writing and speaking. Just as laws guarantee a public space for political action, conceptual thought ensures the existence of the four walls within which judgment operates.” The concepts that now guide our understanding of US society are dominated by a corporate-induced linguistic and authoritarian model that brings ruin to language, politics and democracy itself.

- Truth Dig

What would be the alternative? How does the fish walk up on the beach? One hint is the idea of aesthetics. Anyone who appreciates art understands the futility of describing its meaning with words. Yet there is meaning. To the Western mind, a "philosophy" is something constructed out of words. This includes Western religions, such as Christianity, whose "theology" rests firmly on centuries of arcane interpretations of ancient stories. Other traditions, especially Tao and Zen, specifically eschew words and even human ideas in general to promote an aesthetic -- a way experiencing the world wordlessly.

This points to a way of escaping assimilation (at least this type of assimilation), which is to cultivate aesthetic sense. This is to value our direct experience of the world and to be skeptical of attempts to draw us into the herd by means of language. We need to be skeptical of "reasons why", interpretation, valuation, analysis and synthesis. Actually this isn't such a huge leap. We have just been sold the idea that things are not "real" or "important" unless they can be boiled down to language. Most of us understand quite clearly that this is wrong but (of course!) we have problems saying just why this is. 

Perhaps the world we "pass over in silence" is the important one. Perhaps it is where we can discover who we really are.

Note to self: comment on "Monkey Sphere and Echo Chamber"

Is Artificial Intelligence Stuck in the Language Bubble?

"Artifical Intelligence" raises more questions far outside the field of technology.

As one who has spent a full career in "Information Technology", I can testify that "IT" is directly or indirectly about language. New languages and new development environments come and go, but they all boil down to the interpretation of text.

As Mitchell's book teaches us, even "deep learning" models that "recognize" faces ultimately depend on masses of text - even "languages" whose vocabulary is nothing but ones and zeros.

This touches on a problem that has been recognized for thousands of years, most notably by Buddha and Lao Tsu (founders of Buddhism and Taoism respectively) and recently by Ludwig Wittgenstein, that "language", no matter how clever or deep, only stands for reality. It is about reality but it is not reality itself. You may say that this points to a fundamental problem that we may share with machines - "software" can never be more than a "description" of reality. However, unlike machines, our knowledge of the world relies on the fact that we are flesh and blood participants in the world. Billions of years of evolution have made us objects in the world that react and learn in ways that go far beyond knowledge. To cite a simple example, our hearts beat perfectly well for millions of years before we discovered the circulation of blood. The same goes for our "understanding" of the world, which seems to mostly take place "under the surface".

Mitchell gives us a snapshot history of the futile effort to make a list of everything a human "knows" by "common sense". The effort mostly shows the sad fact that computer programmers should read more philosophy. To mention just one example, Hofstader's "Surfaces and Essences" sketches out the way that virtually infinite bits of "knowledge" can be spun out from the sparse base of human experience by analogy - the engine of thought. Computers need to be "taught" to recognize analogies, such as whether there is a car in the picture. They are terrible at it. And what you get, in the end, is a clunky attempt of the computer to "learn" from thousands of people to "recognize" categories that it is utterly unable to recognize on its own.

It's even worse than that. As philosophers endlessly point out, human categories are somewhat arbitrary - suited for the unique situation that humans find themselves in the world. A chair is only a chair if you are a human that knows about sitting. 

The Domains of I, M and R

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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