Hi Pax,
Astronomical objects are certainly fascinating. But a mind contemplates a star, a star doesn’t contemplate a mind. A star is, a stone is, but a mind is conscious, and a human mind is conscious of its consciousness. A star doesn’t matter to itself. And again, as Frank Ramsey said, a star cannot love or offer sympathy. It’s not that the stars aren’t amazing, it’s that humans are so much more amazing.
A mind contains roughly 100 trillion (10^14) synaptic connections, and across each connection there can be as many as ten different weighted responses. The British astrophysicist Martin Rees has written, “Stars are gravitationally bound fusion reactors.” Complex biological objects are made from simpler astronomical objects. In a debate about consciousness, Marvin Minsky remarked:
"In the old days, to say that a person is like a machine was like suggesting that a person is like a paper clip. Naturally it was insulting to be called any such simple thing. Today, the concept of machine no longer implies triviality. The genetic machines inside our cells contain billions of units of DNA that embody the accumulated experience of a billion years of evolutionary search. Those are systems we can respect; they are more complex than anything that anyone has ever understood. We need not lose our self-respect when someone describes us as machines; we should consider it wonderful that what we are and what we do depends upon a billion parts.
As for more traditional views, I find it demeaning to be told that all the things that I can do depend on some structureless spirit or soul…I feel the same discomfort when being told that virtues depend on the grace of some god, instead of on structures that grew from the honest work of searching, learning, and remembering. I think those tables should be turned; one ought to feel insulted when accused of being not a machine."
Man is a failure in comparison to his gods. He’ll never measure up to his dreams for himself (in Sartre’s words, “…man never coincides with himself”). Success only prompt us to raise higher the goal posts by which we measure our worth. Stanislaw Lec asked:
“Is it progress if a cannibal uses a knife and fork?”
We are not fallen angels, we are pond-scum risen. We did not descend from a God; we ascended from the primal condensation of hydrogen and deuterium, from stellar furnaces, supernova explosions and the primeval swamps. Evolution is never direct or certain. We might never become more than cannibals with good table manners. But I think the answer to Stanislaw Lec’s question is “yes.” I think that every joy experienced and every kindness extended, no matter how small, further elevates us from the swamp. As Minsky said in the quote above, what we are depends on a billion things.
Magius wrote,
Hey Magius,
You’ve reminded me that when I came to this mountain I asked the other engineers if I might replace the mousetraps in the hut with the kind that catches the mice alive. After the laughter subsided a bit I was told a story. Once another engineer caught a mouse alive. It was during winter and he let the mouse run free across the snow. Now, the weather here in the winter can be brutal with temperatures to minus 30 degrees C and winds gusting upwards of 100km/hr. So, this guy closed the door and watched the little mouse run across the snow. It ran less than ten meters before it stopped dead, frozen in its tracks. A raven picked up the mouse a few hours later.
I don’t go around hitting my thumb with a hammer on purpose, but I do make something of a habit out of toying with discomfort. That is, I go out of my way not to feel like a pampered papoose. I wonder if others do the same? For example, winter or summer, I often finish my shower in cold water. I push myself in the gym unto exhaustion and occasionally go without food until I’m light-headed. Religious ascetics in the past wore “hair shirts” made of coarse cloth as a penance for their sins, whereas I figuratively don the “hair shirt” because it makes me feel a bit more alive. A warm shower feels like heaven and a simple bowl of soup tastes as good as a meal in a fine restaurant after one has trudged across a mountain in a fierce snowstorm. Epicurus wrote in his, Letter to Menoeceus:
"…they have the sweetest enjoyment of luxury who stand least in need of it…
But ’tis a different thing altogether when pain is beyond ones control. I use small doses of pain to sweeten my pleasures, but for so many others pain only brings interminable suffering. Such suffering fosters despair rather than enlightenment. This suffering diminishes our humanity, and as such, I despise it.
Indeed, it is very tempting to believe that. But I ask you this, is that the truth?
After all, up until the 19th century they all believed Euclid’s fifth postulate to be universally true…
Suffering is part of being human, being truly human. This doesn’t mean you should start cutting your fingers off, one by one, and dance on fire. Suffering usually brings enlightenment, but that only after bringing despair.
I didn’t quite make my point clear in the last post.
What I wanted to ask you was: Do you wonder at your Conciseness because it’s unknowable? An enigma that will forever remain unsolved, as unsolvable problems can be intoxicating for a while. To a creature like ourselves that has evolved because it can see real but abstract relationships between objects, yet when we examine the human mind we only find phantoms. I would say Conciseness is to be aware of our own and others ever changing nature, all things change, but not all have the sense (as in our case sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing, and memory [we can remember what it was like before we changed]) required to experience this change. It’s impossible to be more then what we’re “feedâ€, I mean from our senses. Like the computer processing term, put junk in and you’ll get junk out. We are the same. We can filter, organize, and label data, but if the data is crap, then no amount of hard work will ever transform this into something of value.
We are the chaotic disorder in the material world. The sun will shine, and the rock will stay hard for its allotted time. But humanity is fickle and somewhat unpredictable. We follow general patterns, but there are no specific rules, other then the one’s our physical body must abide by to exist. To me it’s not my Conciseness that I’m amazed at but these unseen Rules that must exist before we can exist. To put it another way, it’s the order in the universe that amazes me, not our conciseness as it’s just one of the many side affects of the Rules. I’m not saying these Rules come from a divinely created universe, but we are a creature that understands cause and effect, so for something not to have a cause is like trying to understand infinity. There’s no reason not to say that the universe has always existed, and on the scale of infinity big bangs are quite common occurrences.
But the real question about our Conciseness comes from evolution: Could we de-evolve just as quickly as we evolved? Evolution is said to be humanity’s ability to adapt because our environment changes. Are we just adapting to our environment without a long-term plan? I believe so. We are no more then a reaction to some external stimuli. We cannot help or stop our adaptation, without creating a protective cocoon around ourselves that is unchanging, static. Do we flatter ourselves by saying we evolve, are we really advancing? Or just changing, like all things in any other chemical reaction, yet we are “lucky†(and I use this word very loosely) that we can see and comprehend this change? If it weren’t for the rock we’d have nothing to stand on, and if it wasn’t for the sun we wouldn’t have used photosynthesis to produce food. Our conciseness is only one small part of the very large picture. But I suppose because we have the ability to say I, by that very nature we get very self centred. (I don’t mean selfish, just our mental centre is our self).
A question I’ve been pondering a lot these days is: If I created complex rules for how all matter interacted with other matter and these rules where built into a device called a “universe.†If I filled said universe full of random matter and gave the whole thing a good shake. Then placing it down and standing back to watch all the random matter start to interact and form things based off my rules from the chaos. Kind of like shaking a snow globe and watching the snow come to rest on the miniature house. Or how when you bake you need to sieve the disordered flour so it’s just right for the cake. Would my universe end up looking like the one we live in now?
That is a Moral statement and would mean nothing to the people unaware of Morality in a swamp. To them it might even look like madness. An example: If the kindness was giving the swamp people food and you did this for everybody in their village they would soon stop hunting and just come to you for their food. If this went on long enough they would eventually lose there keen hunting edge and when you stopped giving them free food they would be at a loss for a time while they adapted back to there hunting ways.
Kindness, is to do an act of some type that we are not directly responsible to carry out. Why does this self-sacrificing elevate us? Kindness only works short term, after that you start to breed dependency as the example above demonstrates. Most people are generous enough to help their friends once or twice, but if that friend doesn’t make an effort to help themselves, patience will soon wear thin. I think this kindness is due to evolution. Everybody at some time or another has problems that they are unable to resolve without help. This short-term kindness can help the group as you don’t needlessly waist a human resource, which over the long term has a positive effect on the group. But long-term kindness only weakens the group, as the person is just a drain on other resources. This dependency goes against the law of survival of the fittest. It all comes back to our postings on “What is Morality is it just something trivial†If morality is not of divine origin then if practiced to a large extent it will create laziness in immoral people. For large problems like world hunger only education and population control will work in the long run. This is how nature has always kept the books in balance, Death! Heartless in moral terms, yet pragmatic and we live in a pragmatic universe. Also I feel the same about greed, or it might be best expressed as avarice; as in the long term this will damage the group.
I hope you don’t think I’m heartless. But I believe real kindness enables people to help themselves, not to become, dependent on others.
Hi H2O,
A postulate is only a postulate. We accept it because it’s useful, not because it’s been proven to be true. Different postulates produce different geometries. Euclid’s 5th postulate is entirely consistent within Euclidean Space. Non-Euclidean geometry hasn’t invalidated Euclidean Geometry. All the various geometries are true (and sometimes useful) within the bounds of their assumptions.
I’m comfortable in my belief that a Christian God is only a medieval superstition. But I cannot tell you with 100% certainty that there is no Christian God. Neither can I tell you with 100% certainty that a meteorite won’t crash through the ceiling and kill me within the next minute. I live my life and make my plans as though no meteorite will strike me and as if there is no God. Given the evidence available to me both of these assumptions are entirely reasonable.
Heracleitus wrote, “The beast has to be driven to the pasture with blows.†Is this how it is for us? Is what is best in man brought out by the sting of the lash? The Judaeo-Christian world is but a vale-of-tears where pain is welcomed as spiritually uplifting. Christianity is a veritable theme park of suffering: the stain of original sin, the cross we must all bear, the scourging, the crown of thorns…
If suffering is a conduit to enlightenment it should be interesting to consider our state of mind whilst we suffer. Do you experience the poetry of the universe through your toothache? In his Enemies of Hope, Raymond Tallis writes:
â€In toothache, I am as remote as possible from being a lens on the universe; I am a place of toothache…To be in severe pain is to be rolled in the brazier of anti-meaning.â€
I don’t reach out to connect with the cosmos while I’m in pain; instead I contract into a little ball of suffering. My entire universe shrinks to the dimensions of my suffering.
I sat next to my physician brother-in-law at a big family dinner this past Christmas Eve. As dessert was coming out an old fellow hobbled over to ask my brother-in-law for advice concerning his acute spinal stenosis. We all became quiet and stared down at our plates as this old man loudly pleaded for relief from his pain. What drove this man to ignore normal propriety and to risk embarrassment by announcing his personal problems in the middle of our Christmas cake and coffee? Didn’t he realize that he was as welcome as a skunk at a garden party? No, I think his pain had driven him to despair. His world had contracted to the dimensions of his lower vertebrae. There was no room in his world for the joy of Christmas, for the enjoyment of the fine meal, or for the pleasure of the company of others. The pain in his back had absorbed his entire being. Tallis would say that this poor man had been rolled in the brazier of anti-meaning. To misquote Dr. Samuel Johnson, pain has a wonderful ability to focus one’s mind, but the focus is concentrated exclusively on the source of our pain. When we suffer “it’s all about us.†Emerson wrote:
â€Sorrow makes us all children again.â€
I’ll occasionally comment about the fine weather to someone only to have them say, “Yes, but we’ll pay for it later.†Must we really pay for our pleasures with our suffering? Some folks are afraid to enjoy their life because they imagine that as soon as their life is going well a tragedy is bound to occur. This reminds me of a groom on his wedding night constantly looking over his shoulder, for fear that his father-in-law will appear with a baseball bat. It reminds me of prison inmates afraid to venture out of their cells long after their jailers have unlocked the doors and fled. But life does not punish those who enjoy it, nor must we earn our joy by our suffering. Spinoza wrote:
â€Nothing forbids our pleasure except a savage and bad superstition.â€
I heard an old Vermont farmer tell a story about the time he was driving home along the back-roads when he suddenly saw a large young man run screaming across a field towards his truck. The farmer said that his first reaction was fear; he felt the impulse to step on the gas. But then the farmer thought he heard the guy say the word “cow.†The farmer pulled over. When the guy reached the truck he yelled, “Our cow’s just calved!†The farmer took his hand, congratulated him, and listened to the guy tell him all about the birth of his first calf. The farmer said he probably never had seen someone so happy. As the farmer drove away he figured it out; “Sorrow can be borne alone, but joy has to be shared.†The British philosopher, Roger Scruton, has said:
â€A truly solitary laugh is not a laugh at all, but a snarl of isolation.â€
Likewise, Pierre Corneille wrote in his, Notes par Rochefoucauld:
“Le bonheur semble fait pour etre partage.”
“Happiness seems made to be shared.”
When I have a migraine headache I only want to be alone, but when a Hermit Thrush sings in the evening I instinctively reach for my wife’s arm. Sartre wrote:
“An emotion is a transformation of the world.â€
We transform our world through both our sorrow and our joy. Sorrow shrinks our world to the dimensions of our suffering and is most often expressed by whelps of pain and sobs of grief. Joy expands our world and is best expressed by laughter and poetry. The Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, went so far as to say:
Hi Pax,
Your post certainly provided grist for the mill. When asked how long it took to write his speeches, the American president, Theodore Roosevelt supposedly said, “For a half-hour speech it takes me two days, for a five minute speech it takes a week, but for a two hour speech I could begin right away." I hope this helps explain why it’s taken me so long to reply to your excellent post. It takes some time to compress my diffuse thoughts into a sufficiently dense package.
Most animals appear to possess with some measure of consciousness, but a salient feature of humans is that we’re conscious of our consciousness. Of all that exists the only thing I can know from the inside is myself. Thomas Nagel might say that the only thing that I can know “what it is like to be,” is me. But when David Hume went looking for his Self he famously remarked:
“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.â€
But, I do know what it’s like to be me. I know my capabilities and my limitations, my virtues and my vices. Yet when I declare that I am this, I’m actually making a tautological statement of the form of A=A, where “I am” is equivalent to “this.”
To answer your question Pax, yes, I am astonished at my consciousness. I’m astonished that I can reflect upon my Being yet know so little about the nature of my Being. But astonishment is tempered in another respect by the fact that any being capable of wondering about itself has to be something. No non-being wonders at its Being. I didn’t have to be me, but in order to catch myself in wonderment, I first had to be someone living somewhere; so why not me living here? Not only could the Stork have dropped me down any chimney here on earth, it could have dropped me down any chimney anywhere in this or any other universe. Alien beings are probably asking themselves at this moment why they had to be who they are. They could just as easily have been me sitting here as they could have been who they are living halfway across this or any other universe. They had to exist in order to ask why they exist, but the specific situation of their Being is entirely contingent.
I disagree, Pax. Sensory data has no value until we give it value. Data isn’t junk until our junk-filter says its junk. Sunsets are neither ugly nor beautiful until someone happens along to assign a value to it.
Consider that by weight, the human body is comprised of 65% Oxygen, 18% Carbon, 10% Hydrogen, 3% Nitrogen, 1.5% Calcium, 1% Phosphorous, and 1.5% trace elements. But these same elements can be found in any farmyard manure pile! If it’s true that no amount of organization could transform crap into something of value, then how is it that DNA transforms the same elements found in a pile of crap into a living human being? The fact is that unless we give our lives value we would otherwise have no more value than a pile of manure. Man isn’t content to merely exist as a contingent being; man declares that his contingent existence is meaningful. Man is a pile of crap that’s been temporarily transformed into a precious life. When we lose our life we lose both everything and nothing.
A rule is an implication, such as “If x, then y.†Implications are purely mental constructs; they don’t exist “out there†any more than a dent exists “out there†waiting to appear in a beer can. But doesn’t this imply that no rule exists outside of a conscious mind?
The folks a the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico think about just such things. They’re responsible for popularizing the concept of Complexity; the spontaneous self-organization that arises in complex systems. But if complex things (such as humans) arose from simple beginnings, then the attempt to know the state of the world in the beginning might not necessarily lead us to a better understanding of the world as it is. The American astronomer, Craig J. Hogan, says of beginnings:
“…the beginning of time is actually a lot less interesting than what came after. The evidence we have already suggests that the universe began with almost no information, and all the complex structure within it has developed since the beginning, on its own, without external influences. If this is true, finding the beginning of time and even its detailed structure will not help us much to understand the interesting things that have happened within the universe since then.”
We’ve a fairly good understanding of how single neurons function, but we’ve yet to discover how a hundred billion interactive neurons create a human consciousness. Still, the blueprint imprinted in our DNA does a fantastic job at cranking out conscious minds by the billions. Few parents worry that their healthy baby will grow up to be a Zombie. If you reproduce a healthy brain a new consciousness will almost surely appear in it. As Marvin Minsky has said, “Minds are simply what brains do.†There’s no doubt that minds are made of molecules, the question is; must a mind be made of organic molecules? Once upon a time airplanes were made exclusively of wood and cloth. Wouldn’t it have been silly if we’d acquired the notion that only things made of wood and cloth could fly? Minds, made of whatever, are vast systems in which the process of thinking can itself alter the feedback paths between the neurons. Consciousness could someday be built from Silicon or Gallium-Arsenide as it is now made of Carbon based tissue. In theory, consciousness might even be constructed from Tinker-Toys (well, at least in informational theory). But I think it is important to consider that once we’ve succeeded in building an non-organic consciousness, we shouldn’t be surprised when it begins to ask philosophical questions about its world. Minds might be what brains do, but philosophy, no less, might be what self-reflexive minds do!
Indeed, Darwin never supposed there was a master plan other than the simple truth that what adapts best and replicates most successfully in its environment will tend to have an edge on its competition.
Imagine how lucky you and I were that each one of our many millions of ancestors were able to survive long enough to reproduce? But anthropically speaking, it wasn’t luck, but a virtual necessity that everyone of my millions of ancestors were successful in reproduction.
Again, if there were no sun we’d either not be here to remark upon the fact, else we’d have evolved in the coldness and darkness of space. If the later were true, we’d thank our “lucky stars†that in universe filled with stars none was close enough kill us by its gentle warmth. Neither was the protective ozone layer in the earth’s upper atmosphere a stroke of luck on our part. If there were no ozone layer then either the sun’s ultraviolet radiation would have suppressed life from evolving here altogether, else life would have evolved despite the lack of an ozone layer. The Anthropic Principle is quite a useful tool to have in our philosophical toolbox!
I fully agree with you that indiscriminate handouts tend to diminish our incentive to stand on our own feet. But my concept of kindness has less to do with handouts than it has to do with cooperation, and a mutual concern for our well-being.
I’ve been reading Brainchildren by Daniel Dennett over the holiday. There’s a fascinating chapter near the end of this book titled, “Information, Technology, and the Virtues of Ignorance.†Dennett writes that one-thing philosophers in ethics agree on, is that “ought†implies “can.†When our ancestors lived in small isolated bands of relatively ignorant humans it was easier to be an ethical person. If while walking down by the river you heard cries for help from a person drowning, there was then (as there is now) no question of what you ought to do. If someone was hungry and you had plenty to eat, then it was very likely incumbent upon you to share your food with that tribe member. But what of a starving person living in another small band some thousand kilometers away? Ought you to help that person as well? No, says Dennett; even if you had the knowledge of this other person’s distress, you still didn’t have the means to help. Contrast that with today’s situation where nearly all of us in living in wealthy countries have both the knowledge and the means to help people on the opposite side of the globe. Now, instead of occasionally hearing one voice cry for help, we are deluged each day with thousands of voices crying for help. Dennett says that the more information we have about the plight of others, and the more means we have to help them, the less excuse we have to ignore their cries for help. In this modern version of the Victorian idea of Noblesse oblige, our newfound information and power simply increases our moral responsibility.
But we haven’t yet thought that far, have we? The property taxes imposed upon me by my local “tribe†help pay for football helmets for the kids in my hometown. It’s also morally incumbent upon me to provide the kids in town with team warm-up jackets so they might be fashionably warm when they show up to play football. Yet no one demands that I give money to save the life of a child in the Sudan by providing him with clean drinking water. I’m quite certain that if I should stand up on town-meeting day to suggest that my tax dollars that now pay for football uniforms ought instead to go to treat children’s diarrhea in Africa, the town would doubtless think me crazy (Hmm…perhaps I should?). Morally, we act as though we still lived in small isolated bands of people, even though the banana I had for breakfast came from South America, even though I vacation in Europe, and even though this letter could be read on every continent within a few seconds after I click on “Submit.â€
I don’t think you are heartless, Pax, I simply think we’re talking about different sorts of kindness. For example, I’d never advocate airlifting mountains of food to Africa on a regular basis. If we artificially increased the resources of an otherwise desolate region without simultaneously imposing some measure of population control on the people, then more than likely we’d only be setting the region up for a devastating boom and bust cycle. I rarely give money, for example, to street people because I don’t think the problem with street people in wealthy countries has to do with their not having enough money in their pocket. I refuse to purchase my clear conscience by helping to insure these unfortunate people continue to freeze on the streets. When we take it upon ourselves to help a neighbor we can’t just pitch a quarter in their cup and walk away. We have to get involved; we have to think through the ramifications of our actions. But ethical theories usually look better on paper than they work in practice. The problems can be so complex that the best intentions further hobbled by insufficient time or insufficient resources would fail to improve a given situation. It’s a messy business at best. As Dennet says:
â€The brute fact that we are all finite and forgetful and have to rush to judgement is standardly regarded, not implausibly, as a real but irrelevant bit of friction in the machinery whose blueprint we are describing. It is as if there might be two disciplines – ethic proper, which undertakes the task of calculating the principles of what one ought to do under all circumstances – and the less interesting, “merely practical†discipline of Moral First Aid, or What To Do Until the Doctor of Philosophy Arrives, which tells you, in rough-and-ready terms, how to make decisions under time pressure. My suspicion is that traditional theories of ethics all either depend on or founder on the very sorts of friction that are ignored by the standard idealization.â€
That, in our days. But before being proven to be true, was there one really doubting it? I mean, they all believed it was obvious and it couldn’t be otherwise.
Yes, you don’t reach out to connect with the cosmos while you’re in pain. The entire universe shrinks to the dimensions of your suffering, but only to show you your real dimensions, relative to the universe. Only then you will see The Truth, not the reality, because reality is delusive (even when being high, what you perceive is reality). And knowing The Truth is enlightenment, as far as I can tell.
And elightenment comes only after suffering, not while suffering. Suffering is just a way.
I know some psychologists who would argue that we can’t make accurate judgements about our own dispositions, as we need to see ourselves in away we find acceptable. An example might be, I could be cruel to somebody, but then say to myself I’m not being cruel, but am trying to help them. That way turning what is mean into something of benefit, as I need to see myself as a kind person.
Yes, but that’s because it can’t. Like Hume said, I am = This. While for the rock it has only its existent in the physical, and does not live on another level. When I hear Hume say that equation I feel he’s actually leaving out an equally importance part. For me the equation reads as follows:
Body + Consciousness = This or Me
If you take away either the Body or the Consciousness, my idea of Me will change. If the Consciousness is removed then I’m unable to do self-examination. If you take away my Body, then who I am no longer has any power in a physical world, and ceases to feel the effects from one. So either way I can no longer understand myself in the same way. To paraphrase Descartes, “Even if what I experience through my senses are a lie, the fact that I think about them must therefore mean I am.†But if Descartes had no senses to lie to him, he would have nothing to think about, as what could he possibly be left with to think about?
“This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin.†(Plato, Theaetetus, sec.155) Socrates, Aristotle, Bacon, Montaigne, Whitehead, Schopenhauer all said something very similar. There is nothing that we call knowledge that did not have its birth in the perception of the natural world. It’s because there is order in the world we see that allows us to find things that are of value. [i](I’ll say more on this in a fuller way later in this posting)[i]
I agree that it’s our filters that make things junk or not. But our filters are a product of life experiences, which calibrates them. What we perceive affects the sensory organ used to perceive it. Meaning when I hear a noise with my ear, my eardrum vibrates like the air vibrated to carry the noise to me. If the noise is loud it can vibrate my ear so much causing it to be damaged, these types of noise are unpleasant to hear, because of the damage and pain the vibration of the noise is causing to my ear. While another type of noise might gently vibrate my ear and the ear finds this pleasant and soothing (like the way if someone gently rubs their hand along your arm it’s enjoyable). But a single noise to the mind can become boring very fast, so you need to arrange these noises in interesting patters a.k.a. musical songs. That way you have noises that the ear and the brain can both enjoy on different levels. The same is true for the eye, as bright lights will cause them pain because they’re becoming damaged. Like the way sounds vibrate the ear, if you look at colours from opposite ends of the visible light spectrum and are side by side on a page. When you look at one then the other in quick succession for a couple of seconds it starts to tire the eyes. This is because the iris is going to its max, and minimum focal lengths. This is actually giving your eye mussels a workout! Looking at certain colour combinations can have the same affect as the hand caressing you arm, but on your eyes.
Physical factors set aside, how we understand what we perceive, is also affected by emotional attachments to an event. Taking the example again of “someone gently rubbing their hand along your arm,†to almost all people this is a pleasurable experience. But to someone who this was a precursor to rape, it would send them into blind terror, as they know what is about to follow. I’ve unfortunately read many cases were men and women are unable to have normal relationships because of an abusive childhood experience.
But all this said, I still wonder, at the wonder a beautiful sunset instils in me.
I cannot agree with you here because you even say it yourself, “the same things that make a human body make a pile of manure.†If it’s not the materials that makes the difference, it has to be how the materials are arranged! Arrangement implies order and order requires rules to be followed.
It is precisely because if x, then y that Newton founded all his principles. I can’t find the quote but to paraphrase what Schopenhauer said, “You cannot know something unless you derive it from experience. All theory comes from examination of natural experiences.†This is the reason if you try to explain love in words you will fail miserably unless the other person has experienced what it is like to be in love. Or try to tell somebody what salt tastes like. I’d say it’s close to impossible to explain experiences in words alone, analogies are always more vivid and meaningful. But analogy is just substituting one experiences likeness for an others.
AI is a hobby that I really enjoy. I believe within my lifetime that a computer will be able to really understand the meaning of words and simple experiences. I don’t think they will be able to feel emotions, but will solve logical problems with ease as they self modify to adapt to the ordered data they’re fed viva their input senses. As soon as I finish off my theory on how time is just state change / movement. I plan to program an AI that will learn to adapt to its environment through experiences and remembering them for future use.
Yes, that’s my point exactly. It’s not human Consciousness that is special but anything that exhibits Consciousness! Humans are just one of possibly many other sentient forms of life in this universe, that are capable of exploring self-examining contemplations. The fact that life in its variety of forms can almost, by brute force, bring itself into existence leaves me in constant awe and wonderment. But it’s only because there are Rules to the way the universe works that makes this possible. And it’s this order in the universe, that I bow my head to.
That’s a good point, Pax. It prompts me to ask if you are who (or what) you think you are, or do you think you might be something quite different than what you think you are? If you’ve read Hoffstader’s Godel, Escher, Bach, you might remember this passage:
" One of the most severe of all problems of evidence interpretation is that of trying to interpret all the confusing signals from the outside as to who one is. In this case, the potential for intra-level and inter-level conflict is tremendous. The psychic mechanisms have to deal simultaneously with the individual’s internal need for self-esteem and the constant flow of evidence from the outside affecting the self-image. The result is that information flows in a complex swirl between different levels of the personality; as it goes round and round, parts of it get magnified, reduced, negated, or otherwise distorted, and then those parts in turn get further subjected to the same sort of swirl, over and over again-all of this in an attempt to reconcile what is, with what we wish were.
The upshot is that the total picture of “who I am” is integrated in some enormously complex way inside the entire mental structure, and contains in each one of us a large number of unresolved, possibly unresolvable inconsistencies. These undoubtedly provide much of the dynamic tension which is so much a part of being human. Out of this tension between the inside and outside notions of who we are come the drives towards various goals that make each of us unique. Thus, ironically, something which we all have in common - the fact of being self-reflecting conscious beings - leads to the rich diversity in the ways we have of internalizing evidence about all sorts of things, and in the end winds up being one of the major forces in creating distinct individuals."
Our conscious self is only the tip of the iceberg. Roughly 16 million bits of information are passed each second to our unconscious minds by our senses, yet only 16 bps of information can be processed by our conscious mind (a ratio of a million to one!). Thought of in this way, the unconscious mind is an impressive filter. It decides which 16 bits we should be conscious of and which 15,999,984 bits should be discarded. The unconscious is quite good at certain things: filtering, regulating (heart rate, body temperature, respiration, reflex actions, etc.) and memory functions, for example. The conscious mind, on the other hand, is handed those tasks which our unconscious mind does least well (planning, problem solving, mathematics, philosophy, etc.). In other words, the unconscious mind does the “no brainer” stuff, while all the messy stuff is dumped on the consciousness.
Imagine what it might be like to be conscious of your normally unconscious mind. It might be something like standing inside an old mechanical telephone switching matrix. From among the many signals pouring in, a signal might arrive from a body sensor indicating an elevation in temperature. The appropriate relays would immediately clack to direct the sweat pores located on the skin to open. Let’s say input AP628392 switches on output MF478104. Useful? Of course. Interesting? Not really. Well, I suppose if a thermostat had consciousness it might be interested in striking up a conversation with my unconscious mind.
My becoming conscious of my unconcious wouldn’t improve my understanding of what it means to be me any more than if I were to become conscious of the cells replicating in my liver. I am primarily what the rest of my brain doesn’t want to deal with: the messy decisions, the doubts, the uncertainty…
Raymond Tallis says that we are no more present in our toes or in our mouth than we are present in our clothes. In his book, On the Edge of Certainty, p.157, he continues:
“I might fail to recognize my foot from a photograph but, unless I was seriously brain damaged, I would always recognize my face. Moreover, if I were to point to my face in a photograph I would most likely say, ‘That’s me’ whereas if I pointed to my photographed foot, I might well say, ‘That’s mine’…I cannot as clearly see the distances between you and your body as I can experience the distances between me and my body, or between me and a particular part of my body…I do not as readily separate you from the physical appearance of your body as I separate myself from…my body…In short, we are and we are not our bodies.”
True enough, if I feel a pain there’s no question in my mind whose pain it is. Whatever pain I feel must belong to me.
I agree.
When I ask if rules exist apart from minds I’m not denying the physical world. I’m simply saying that the world does not make rules. And if the world doesn’t make rules it can’t very well follow them. Of course, humans make rules, but why should the physical world have to obey human rules? Think of the chickens that have discovered the “rule” that every morning a man will come to feed them. Only one morning the man comes not with food, but with an ax. The rule existed in the minds of the chickens, not in the man.
Pax, I’m equally fascinated by the prospect of AI, though I think we could build a form of intelligence that’s anything but artificial. “Artificial” consciousness could be as genuine as ours. I think that someday men will discuss metaphysics with their non-biological children.
Good stuff, Pax. Reading from a recent entry in my own journal:
"The way the morning sunlight illuminates the rime coated trees on this mountain is deeply meaningful to me. I know the orange light is only an artifact of the low angle of the morning sun. I know that rime ice is only frozen fog. I know, I know…but still I say:
'Verweile doch, du bist so schoen!
And if we are not immediately damned,
the stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
But it is open to us to regret each minute as it passes."
Goethe
Hehe, this reminds me of something I said to a friend not so long ago. “I have an IQ of about 90, but I’m sure my subconscious’s is about 240!â€
I agree with you about the messy decisions. At times when I think consciously about things, the answers just seem to pop out of nowhere into my consciousness, its like all thinking happens at a subconscious level. When reading books about psychology, I’m always fascinated at the idea that most of what I choose to do, and the real motivation for doing it will remain a mystery. I’m always left perplexed and unsure of myself, when I then have to make decisions of consequence. But then almost paradoxically I put my trust in, my subconscious, as it must only want the best for me… I hope?
I agree with you that the physical world of reality doesn’t have to follow any rules, but yet we are capable of deriving general theories from it. All the rules we follow in Physics exist today only in our “perfect†Mathematical world, which is independent from the physical world. But we try to model in maths through calibration of equations to observations made of the phenomenon that seem to be consistent in the physical world. Your argument, it could be seen as trying to refute gravity or other seemingly consistent rules. The way I look at the physical world and its simulation through maths is as follows in a simple example:
We see what at first looks like a simple interaction between a force and an object. Gravity is pulling the ball to the ground. So the rule is, all objects unless supported will fall to the ground, because of the force of gravity. Then somebody drops a feather, but this doesn’t fall to the ground directly but seems to move from side to side in the air while falling. The rule now has to be updated to take account of this new observation. The weight of an object has an effect when the object is falling. Then in another experiment were both objects are the same weight but different shapes. They learn an object shape also has to be added to the equation, because as the object moves through the viscosity of air it has an effect on the falling motion.
It can be seen from this example what we call laws are only partial rules, as at each new discovery we must refine what we previously believed was a complete rule. Science of the physical world is a process of discovery. We might make the rules up, but we base them off acts of experience. We should also not get complacent and think that we know it all, as rules are always liable to change. It’s very lightly that we’ll have to completely scrap old rules as we find more complete equations. While the way we calculate could changed the general idea of what we are trying to calculate is the same. Rules may change, but the idea being expressed will most of the time remain similar. Of course when we are at the forefront of scientific discovery everything is liable to change. Thinks like Quantum Theory or String Theory in a hundred years time will probably look quite different from they way it does today.
You said, “I know the orange light is only an artifact of the low angle of the morning sun. I know that rime ice is only frozen fog. I know, I know.†How do you know it’s the sun? Or the ice could be a figment of your imagination. I don’t want to be pedantic, but there must be some laws to the universes existence. Everyday as long as I can remember the sun has always dawned and set and I believe this will continue to happen for a long time to come. While I agree with you that we don’t really know the true rules, there does seem to be enough consistency to believe that things aren’t just randomly happening. I’m also not saying that the Universe is conscious that its following rules, like a computer it could be following instructions without knowing what it is actually doing. But I do fully believe that we are capable of figuring out how parts of the universe work, and also being sure that this knowledge will be consistent in other similar environments.
I feel as long as you have a healthy amount of scepticism, over the long run you will learn quite a lot of, what could be consider fact. To deny this possibility, to me, is to reject what we are, and not have faith in ones own abilities. While I might toy with the idea to learn from it, it’s something I would never believe. They say the wise man knows he knows nothing. But I think, the wiser man knows not to think what he does know, is just empty foolishness.
