If human beings are nothing more than matter, why are you conscious as yourself?
If human beings are nothing more than matter, why are you conscious as yourself?
Quora question:
Philosophy: If human beings are nothing more than matter, why are you conscious as yourself?
The implication of materialism is that we are in essence wet robots, without free will, just chemical reactions. But if this is true and we are conscious, then does it logically follow that all chemical reactions have “consciousness” to some degree? If the human mind is just an extremely advanced computer, then at what point does “consciousness” occur?
We don’t know that chemical reactions are unconscious, but if they were, then it makes sense that the entire universe would also be unconscious. It is very tricky to examine the issue of consciousness and to draw parallels within common experience without unintentionally smuggling in our own expectations from consciousness itself. This is the Petito principii or circular reasoning which derails most fair considerations of consciousness before they even begin in earnest.
Unlike a clock which is made up of gears, or a particular sized pile of hay, the addition of consciousness has no conceivable consequence to the physical function of a body. While we can observe a haystack burst into flames because it has grown too hot, we cannot look at the behavior of a human body see any special difference from the behavior of any other physical body. There is complexity, but complexity alone need not point to anything beyond an adjacency of simple parts and isolated chains of effects.
Just as no degree of complication within a clock’s mechanism would suddenly turn into a Shakespearean sonnet, the assumption of universal substitution is not necessarily appropriate for all phenomena, and for consciousness in particular. To get a color image, for instance, we need to print in colored dots, not black and white. Color TV programs cannot be broadcast over a monochrome display without losing their color.
Unlike chemical or mechanical transformation, the nature of awareness is not implicated in the shuffling of material particles from one place or another. Any natural force can be used to do that. We have no scientific reason to insist that conscious participation and aesthetic appreciation is derived from some simpler functioning of complex systems. To the contrary, ‘complexity’, and ‘system’ can only make sense in the context of a window of perception and attention. Without some teleological intent to see one part as part of a whole, and to compare remembered events with current perceptions, there is no such thing as ‘function’ at all.
There are several important points wrapped up in this question, which I will try to sum up.
1. The failure to consider consciousness metaphysically.
This is the most important and most intractable issue, for three reasons:
- because it is difficult for anyone to try to put their mind outside of mind. It’s annoying, and winds up feeling foolish and disoriented.
- because it is difficult in particular for the very people who need most to get past the difficulty. I have found that most people who are good with logic and scientific reasoning are not necessarily capable of doing what others can. The skillset appears to be neurological, like handedness or gender orientation.
- because those who do have difficulty with thinking this way are often not used to intellectual challenges that escape their grasp, their reaction is so defensive that they react with intolerance. It’s not their fault, but it cannot be cured it seems. Some people cannot see 3-D Magic Eye art. Some cannot program their way out of a paper bag. In this case it is the ability to consider consciousness from a prospective rather than a retrospective view which can prove so inaccessible to so many people, that frothing at the mouth and babbling about unicorns, magic, and the supernatural is considered a reasonable and scientific, skeptical response. Of course, it is none of those things, but it takes a lot of patience and courage to be able to recognize one’s own prejudices, especially when we are used to being the ones telling others about their biases.
2. The taboo against metaphysics, panpsychism, and transrationality
Long after Einstein, Gödel, and Heisenberg shattered the Humpty Dumpty certainties of classical math and physics, we are still trying to piece him back together. Regardless of how much we learn about the strange properties of matter, time, energy, biology, and neurology, there are a huge number of very intelligent people who are convinced that we will only know the truth about the universe when it all looks like a vast deterministic mechanism.
The compulsion to reduce awareness to passive mathematical or physical states is ironic, given that the defense of automaticity is often accompanied by very hands on personal intention. Even when it is pointed out that arguing against free will is futile (since someone without free will could not change their own opinion about it even if they wanted to, let alone someone else’s opinion), the mind of the determined determinist will always find a way of insist upon being in the right, even when they are ultimately sawing of the limb that they are sitting on.
When it comes to anything that suggests the possibility of non-human awareness, many people not only become personally uncomfortable, but they become socially uncomfortable as well. The taboo against unconventional views on science (even when backed by anthropological universality) is so pervasive and xenophobic that it is career suicide for a working scientist to publicly acknowledge them in any but the most condescending tones.
3. The pathetic fallacy
The pathetic fallacy is to take a metaphor in which some inanimate object is given a human quality (“The camera loves you”), and take it literally. While I count myself among those who once saw computation and pattern as being the only ingredient necessary for awareness or life, my understanding now is that no pattern can exist without a capacity for pattern recognition. The ability to receive and make sense of the real world is not a matter of generic relations of disembodied bits of “information”, but is in fact the concrete reality of the cosmos. The universe does not exist for us humans, but it cannot exist as silent, unconscious, intangible physics for billions of years and then suddenly invent the whole of sensation, emotion, intuition, cognition, etc, just for some hominids on this backwater planet. It now strikes me as profoundly anthropocentric to imagine that the entire universe could be devoid of perceptual content until life evolved.
In my view, the universe itself is nothing but a continuum of qualities of consciousness. These qualities, however, relate to experienced contexts. We cannot take the human-ness out of a human and put it into a machine. Biology has mechanisms and performs computation, but if that’s all it was doing then the inside of the brain would look like logic, not like sex and violence and musical theater.
Unintentional Symbolism: * and #
Part of my approach to making new sense of the universe involves indulging in meditations on unintentional symbolism. Any pattern that catches my attention is a potential subject for intuition voodoo. Usually it pays off eventually, even when it seems absurd at first.
In this case, I was thinking about the # and * symbols that were inserted into our visual culture obliquely, as extra buttons on the telephone which flanked the 0. Taking this as my cue to relate this to the multisense continuum, I compared the symbols graphically, etymologically, and semantically.
The pound sign (hash, hashtag, number sign) seems to me a dead ringer for the Western-mechanistic pole of the continuum, while the asterisk (star) fits quite nicely as the Oriental-animistic pole.
Here’s how it breaks down:
# – number sign, so quantitative and generic. The symbol is one of four lines crossing each other at right angles to yield nine implicit regions of space. The slant provides a suggestion of orientation – a forward lean that disambiguates spatial bias and implies, subliminally, an arrow of time.
In the age of Twitter and Instagram, the hashtag has become an important cultural influence. It is interesting with respect to mechanism in that it refers to accessing a machine’s sorting algorithms. It is a note to the network of how this term should be handled. We have appropriated this satirically so that we recapture it for our own entertainment, but also as a kind of show of affection for and familiarity with the technology.
In direct contrast, the * is am icon which is used to interrupt one level of attention to direct the reader to another level – a footnote. Instead of relating to numbers, the * is a wildcard that can be related to any string. It stands for “all that is preceded by or follows”. Contrary to the cellular modularity of #, the * is a mandala. It implies kaliedoscopic sensibility and fractal elaboration. It is a symbol of radiance, growth, life, unity, etc.
There’s some interesting threads that connect the * with mathematical terms such as Kleene closure (more commonly known as the free monoid construction). Just the words ‘free monoid construction’ ring in my ears as an echo of what I call solitrophy – the constructive progress of teleological unity…the creation and solution of problems.
Also the use of *asterisk* for heightened emphasis links it to the significance of euphoria or magnified feeling (and the euphoria that is associated with significance or magnified prestige/importance). Wikipedia mentions the use of # by editors to represent where space should be added on galley proofs. The use of * is, by contrast associated with repetition of a particular thing – a replication. This is a tenuous but deep connection to the origins of space and time in the difference between syntactic-public sense and semantic-private sense.
The name ‘pound sign’ seems to be fairly mysterious. It does not seem to be related conclusively to either the English currency or the Avoirdupois weight. Both references, however, have very tempting subliminal associations to the Western pole of empirical domination. On the other side, the name asterisk means ‘little star’, from Greek and Latin. I can read into that a reference to ‘as above, so below’, as the twinkling point of light reproduces in miniature that which is the grand solar source of life on Earth.
The Paranormal
As far as the paranormal goes, my approach is not to insist upon collapsing extraordinary experiences into binary terms of real or unreal. To the contrary, I see realism as a quality within consciousness such that its limitations reflect the nature of consciousness itself. By that I mean that our personal awareness has a sub-personal boundary and a super-personal boundary, both of which involve opposite views of coincidence. At the sub-personal bound, coincidence emerges stochastically and meaninglessly as an assertion of the instantaneous. At the super-personal bound, coincidences diverge synchronistically and teleologically as part of a ‘larger now’. The more super-personal we look, the more the real and unreal are blurred, and the more the experience reflects what I call ‘the physics of privacy’ rather than public physics.
Obstruction of Solitude: A Guide To Noise
“And then…all the noise! All the noise, noise, noise, noise!
If there’s one thing I hate…all the noise, noise, noise, noise!
And they’ll shriek, squeak, and squeal racing round on their wheels,
Then dance with jin-tinglers tied onto their heels!” – The Grinch“Karma police, arrest this man
He talks in maths
He buzzes like a fridge
He’s like a detuned radio” – Radiohead
It might be asked, “Why should we care about noise?” Two reasons come to mind.
1) To reduce, contain, or otherwise avoid it.
2) To understand what isn’t noise, and why we prefer that.
Real Noise
The general use of the word noise refers to an unpleasant sound. Even on this most literal level, there is a sense of denial about the extent to which unpleasant qualities are subjective. The stereotypical parent, upon hearing the stereotypical teenager’s musical taste being played at high volume, may yell something like “Turn off that infernal noise!”. There is a sense that the sound demands to be labeled objectively as a terrible thing to listen to, rather than as a sound which presents itself differently according to one’s state of mind or development.
At the same time, we cannot rule out all objective, or at least pseudo-objective qualities related to signal and noise. A garage recording of a metal band or a jackhammer attacking the pavement can be uncontroversially defined as being ‘noisy’, particularly in comparison to other, more gentle sounds. ‘Real noise’, then, seems to have a range of subjective and objective qualifiers. Loud, percussive sounds are inherently noisy to us humans, and we have reason to assume the same is true for animals and even plants:
“Dorothy Retallack tried experimenting with different types of music. She played rock to one group of plants and, soothing music to another. The group that heard rock turned out to be sickly and small whereas the other group grew large and healthy. What’s more surprising is that the group of plants listening to the soothing music grew bending towards the radio just as they bend towards the sunlight.” – source
Whether we enjoy loud, percussive sounds is a matter of taste and context. Even the most diehard metal fan probably does not want to hear their favorite band blasting at five o’ clock in the morning from a passing car. Being able to control what we listen to contributes to our perception of it as noise.
Obstruction, Distraction, Destruction, and Leaks
Whether a piece of music offends our personal taste, or it is simply so loud that we can’t ‘hear ourselves think’, the experience of being distracted seems central to its status as noise. In the parlance of sound engineers, and later Silicon Valley schmoozers, the ‘signal to noise ratio’ describes this feature of noise to distract or divert attention from the intended communication. Noise not only obstructs access to the signal, the disturbance that it causes also detracts from the quality of the signal itself. If the signal to noise ratio is poor enough, it may not be worth the effort for the receiver to try to interpret it, and communication is destroyed.
This sense of noise as an obstacle to communication extends beyond audio or electronic signals to any context where information is accessed, transmitted, or stored. In his influential work on telecommunications, Clause Shannon described information entropy as those features of a signal which are costly to compress. Typically it is those patterns which cannot be easily discerned as either part of the intentional signal or part of the background noise. Despite the tremendous computational resources available for mobile communication, the signal quality on mobile devices are still generally inferior to land lines. Between microphone gating that clips off conversation instead of ambient street sounds and the loss of packets due to radio broadcast conditions or network routing conditions, it is amazing that it sounds as good as it does, but it is still a relatively leaky way to transmit voices.
Neural Noise and Withdrawal
Every sense has its own particular kind of noise. Vision has glare, blur, phosphene patterns (‘seeing stars’). Touch has non-specific tingling or itching. Olfactory and gustatory senses encounter foul odors or bad aftertastes. Feelings like nausea and dizziness which are unrelated to food or balance conditions are a kind of noise (noise is etymologically related to nausea and noxious). Part of the effect of withdrawal from an addiction that the brain becomes overly sensitized to irritating stimuli in general. It’s almost like an allergic response in that the systems which would ordinarily protect us from threats is distracted by a false threat and turned on itself. Our sensitivity to the environment, having been hijacked by an external supply of pleasurable signals, has built up a tolerance for those super-saturated instructions.
With any kind of addiction, even healthy ones like exercise or washing your hands, the nature of sense is to accommodate and normalize perceptions which are present regularly. Because the addiction provides positive reinforcement regularly, there is an artificially low noise ratio which invites your senses to recalibrate to listen more closely to the noise (which would be quite adaptive evolutionarily, you would want to still hear that tiger or smell that smoke even when you enjoy a lifestyle of hedonism and decadence). When the source of positive distraction is removed, the sensitivity to negative distraction is still cranked up to 11, which of course, taps into the original motivation to escape the negative distractions of life with an addiction in the first place. We want something to soothe our nerves, to numb the sensitivity and quiet the noise.
A Recipe For Noise
There seem to be general patterns which are common to many kinds of noise. Noise can either be an obstructing presence, or a conspicuous absence (like the dropouts on a phone call). It can be a public or a private condition which clouds judgment, invites impatience, frustration, and intolerance. Noise can be that which is incoherent, irrelevant, redundant, or inappropriate. Some signals can be temporarily irrelevant or incoherent, while others are permanently so. Besides being too loud, an audio noise can also be soft, such as a hiss or other aesthetic defect that exposes leaky conditions in the recording process. The context is important, as with withdrawal from addiction, our senses are more attuned to the relativity of sensation rather than objective measurement. Grey looks darker next to black than it does next to white.
Our ability to use our attention to pivot from foreground to background is part of what defines the difference between signal and noise, or sense and nonsense. We can all relate to the Charlie Brown effect, where the words that a teacher says are reduced to unintelligible vocalizations. As you read these words now, you may be scanning over so much tedious verbiage that looks like generic wordiness more than any particular message. Any signal can be a noise if you don’t pay attention to it in the right way, and any noise can be used as a meaningful code or symbol. Perhaps there is a way to get over our addictions a little easier if we can learn to see our irritation and cravings as a sign that we are on the right path to restoring our neurological gain.
Many Cures
The destruction of information or the suppression of noise is not as simple as it may seem. Take, for example, the difference between analgesic, anesthetic, and narcotic effects. Pain can be relieved systemically, locally, or simply by being made to seem irrelevant. It can be selectively suppressed or wiped out as part of an overall deadening of sensation. There are other ways to get pain relief besides pharmaceuticals as well. Athletes or soldiers are known to perform with severe injuries, and many people have endured astonishing hardships for the sake of their family without being fully aware of the pain they were in. While there may be endogenous pharmacology going on which accounts for the specific pain suppression, it is ultimately the context which the subject is conscious of which drives the release of endorphins and other neurotransmitters.
Semiotics of Noise
Looking at noise from a Piercean perspective, it can be seen as a failure of semiosis – a broken icon, symbol, or index. A broken index would be something like tinnitus or a phantom limb. The signal we are receiving does not correspond to the referent that we expect, and in fact corresponds only to a problem with the signaling mechanism, or some deeper problem. A signal which is broken as an index but can be understood meaningfully as a symptom of something else (maybe the tinnitus is due to a sinus infection) has reverted from a teleological index to a teleonomic* index. It coincides with a condition, but does not represent it faithfully in any way. It is noise in the sense that the expected association must be overlooked intentionally to get to the unintentional association to a symptom.
A broken index would also be one which we deem irrelevant. This type of noise, which would include the proliferation of automatic alerts, false alarms, flashing lights, spam, etc. There may be nothing wrong with what what the message is saying, but considerations of redundancy, and context inappropriateness makes it clear that what a computer thinks is important and what we think is important are very different things. This type of noise fails at the pragmatic level. It’s not that we don’t understand the message, or that its not for us, it’s that we don’t want to do anything about it.
Broken icons and symbols would similarly be made incoherent, irrelevant, or inappropriate by lacking enough syntactic integrity or semantic content to justify positive attention. Fragmented texts or degenerated signs can fail to satisfy functionally or aesthetically, either on their own, or due to intrusions from outside of the intended communication channel. The overall function of noise is to decompose. Like the odor of something that has spoiled, disorder and decay are symptoms of entropy. In the schema of cosmic metabolism, entropy is the catabolic phase of forms and functions – a kind of toll exacted by space and time which ensures that whatever rises to the threshold of existence and importance, will eventually destabilize, its differences de-tuning to indifference.
What Noise Tells Us About Signals
If we begin with the premise that signal and noise are polar opposites, then it may be useful to look at the opposite of some of the terms and concepts that have just been discussed. If noise is irrelevant, inappropriate, incoherent, and redundant, then the qualities which make something significant or important should include being relevant, appropriate, coherent, and essential. Where noise obstructs, distracts, and destroys, sense instructs, attracts, and constructs. Where noise is noxious and disgusting, signals soothe and give solace.
In the larger picture of self and consciousness, it is our solitude that is threatened by noise. Solitude, like solidity and structure are related to low entropy. It is the feeling of strong continuity and coherence, a silent background from which all moments of sound and fury are foregrounded. It is what receives all signals and insulates all noise. Integrated information? Maybe. The Philosopher’s Stone? Probably.
*teleonomy describes conditions of causality which are driven by blind statistics rather than sensible function. Evolution, for example, is a teleonomy since it does not care which species live or die, it is only those who happen to have been better suited to their ecological niche which end up reproducing most successfully.
Sensory-Motive Zodiac
Wittgenstein, Physics, and Free Will
JE: My experience from talking to philosophers is that WIttgenstein’s view is certainly contentious. There seem to be two camps. There are those seduced by his writing who accept his account and there are others who, like me, feel that Wittgenstein expressed certain fairly trivial insights about perception and language that most people should have worked out for themselves and then proceeded to draw inappropriate conclusions and screw up the progress of contemporary philosophy for fifty years. This latter would be the standard view amongst philosophers working on biological problems in language as far as I can see.
Wittgenstein is right to say that words have different meanings in different situations – that should be obvious. He is right to say that contemporary philosophers waste their time using words inappropriately – any one from outside sees that straight away. But his solution – to say that the meaning of words is just how they are normally used, is no solution – it turns out to be a smoke screen to allow him to indulge his own prejudices and not engage in productive explanation of how language actually works inside brains.
The problem is a weaseling going on that, as I indicated before, leads to Wittgenstein encouraging the very crime he thought he was clever to identify. The meaning of a word may ‘lie in how it is used’ in the sense that the occurrences of words in talk is functionally connected to the roles words play in internal brain processes and relate to other brain processes but this is trivial. To say that meaning is use is, as I said, clearly a route to the W crime itself. If I ask how do you know meaning means use you will reply that a famous philosopher said so. Maybe he did but he also said that words do not have unique meanings defined by philosophers – they are used in all sorts of ways and there are all sorts of meanings of meaning that are not ‘use’, as anyone who has read Grice or Chomsky will have come to realise. Two meanings of a word may be incompatible yet it may be well nigh impossible to detect this from use – the situation I think we have here. The incompatibility only becomes clear if we rigorously explore what these meanings are. Wittgenstein is about as much help as a label on a packet of pills that says ‘to be taken as directed’.
But let’s be Wittgensteinian and play a language game of ordinary use, based on the family resemblance thesis. What does choose mean? One meaning might be to raise in the hearer the thought of having a sense of choosing. So a referent of ‘choose’ is an idea or experience that seems to be real and I think must be. But we were discussing what we think that sense of choosing relates to in terms of physics. We want to use ‘choose’ to indicate some sort of causal relation or an aspect of causation, or if we are a bit worried about physics still having causes we could frame it in terms of dynamics or maybe even just connections in a spacetime manifold. If Wheeler thinks choice is relevant to physics he must think that ‘choose’ can be used to describe something of this sort, as well as the sense of choosing.
So, as I indicated, we need to pin down what that dynamic role might be. And I identified the fact that the common presumption about this is wrong. It is commonly thought that choosing is being in a situation with several possible outcomes. However, we have no reason to think that. The brain may well not be purely deterministic in operation. Quantum indeterminacy may amplify up to the level of significant indeterminacy in such a complex system with so powerful amplification systems at work. However, this is far from established and anyway it would have nothing to do with our idea of choosing if it was just a level of random noise. So I think we should probably work on the basis that the brain is in fact as tightly deterministic as matters here. This implies that in the situation where we feel we are choosing THERE IS ONLY ONE POSSIBLE OUTCOME.
The problem, as I indicated is that there seem to be multiple possible outcomes to us because we do not know how are brain is going to respond. Because this lack of knowledge is a standard feature of our experience our idea of ‘a situation’ is better thought of as ‘an example of an ensemble of situations that are indistinguishable in terms of outcome’. If I say when I get to the main road I can turn right or left I am really saying that I predict an instance of an ensemble of situations which are indistinguishable in terms of whether I go right or left. This ensemble issue of course is central to QM and maybe we should not be so surprised about that – operationally we live in a world of ensembles, not of specific situations.
So this has nothing to do with ‘metaphysical connotations’ which is Wittgenstein’s way of blocking out any arguments that upset him – where did we bring metaphysics in here? We have two meanings of choose. 1. Being in a situation that may be reported as being one of feeling one has choice (to be purely behaviourist) and 2. A dynamic account of that situation that turns out not to agree with what 99.9% of the population assume it is when they feel they are choosing. People use choose in a discussion of dynamics as if it meant what it feels like in 1 but the reality is that this use is useless. It is a bit like making burnt offerings to the Gods. That may be a use for goats but not a very productive one. It turns out that the ‘family resemblance’ is a fake. Cousin Susan who has pitched up to claim her inheritance is an impostor. That is why I say that although to ‘feel I am choosing’ is unproblematic the word ‘choice’ has no useful meaning in physics. It is based on the same sort of error as thinking a wavefunction describes a ‘particle’ rather than an ensemble of particles. The problem with Wittgenstein is that he never thought through where his idea of use takes you if you take a careful scientific approach. Basically I think he was lazy. The common reason why philosophers get tied in knots with words is this one – that a word has several meanings that do not in fact have the ‘family relations’ we assume they have – this is true for knowledge, perceiving, self, mind, consciousness – all the big words in this field. Wittgenstein’s solution of going back to using words the way they are ‘usually’ used is nothing more than an ostrich sticking its head in the sand.
So would you not agree that in Wheeler’s experiments the experimenter does not have a choice in the sense that she probably feels she has? She is not able to perform two alternative manoeuvres on the measuring set up. She will perform a manoeuvre, and she may not yet know which, but there are no alternatives possible in this particular instance of the situation ensemble. She is no different from a computer programmed to set the experiment up a particular way before particle went through the slits, contingent on a meteorite not shaking the apparatus after it went through the slits (causality is just as much an issue of what did not happen as what did). So if we think this sort of choosing tells us something important about physics we have misunderstood physics, I beleive.
Nice response. I agree almost down the line.
As far as the meaning of words go, I think that no word can have only one meaning because meaning, like all sense, is not assembled from fragments in isolation, but rather isolated temporarily from the totality of experience. Every word is a metaphor, and metaphor can be dialed in and out of context as dictated by the preference of the interpreter. Even when we are looking at something which has been written, we can argue over whether a chapter means this or that, whether or not the author intended to mean it. We accept that some meanings arise unintentionally within metaphor, and when creating art or writing a book, it is not uncommon to glimpse and develop meanings which were not planned.
To choose has a lower limit, between the personal and the sub-personal which deals with the difference between accidents and ‘on purpose’ where accidents are assumed to demand correction, and there is an upper limit on choice between the personal and the super-personal in which we can calibrate our tolerance toward accidents, possibly choosing to let them be defined as artistic or intuitive and even pursuing them to be developed.
I think that this lensing of choice into upper and lower limits, is, like red and blue shift, a property of physics – of private physics. All experiences, feelings, words, etc can explode into associations if examined closely. All matter can appear as fluctuations of energy, and all energy can appear as changes in the behavior of matter. Reversing the figure-ground relation is a subjective preference. So too is reversing the figure-ground relation of choice and determinism a subjective preference. If we say that our choices are determined, then we must explain why there is a such thing as having a feeling that we choose. Why would there be a difference, for example, in the way that we breathe and the way that we intentionally control our breathing? Why would different areas of the brain be involved in voluntary control, and why would voluntary muscle tissue be different from smooth muscle tissue if there were no role for choice in physics? We have misunderstood physics in that we have misinterpreted the role of our involvement in that understanding.
We see physics as a collection of rules from which experiences follow, but I think that it can only be the other way around. Rules follow from experiences. Physics lags behind awareness. In the case of humans, our personal awareness lags behind our sub-personal awareness (as shown by Libet, etc) but that does not mean that our sub-personal awareness follows microphysical measurables. If you are going to look at the personal level of physics, you only have to recognize that you can intend to stand up before you stand up, or that you can create an opinion intentionally which is a compromise between select personal preferences and the expectations of a social group.
Previous Wittgenstein post here.
The Primacy of Spontaneous Unique Simplicity
This post is inspired by a long running (perpetual?) debate that I have going with a fellow consciousness aficionado who is a mathematics professor. He has some unique insights into artificial intelligence, particularly where advanced interpretations of the likes of Gödel, Turing, Kleene open up to speculations on the nature of machine consciousness. One of his results has been sort of a Multiple Worlds Interpretation in which numbers themselves would replace metaphysics, so that things like matter become inevitable illusions from within the experience of Platonic-arithmetic machines.
His theory is perhaps nowhere crystallized more understandably than in his Universal Dovetailer Argument (UDA) in which there is a single machine which runs through every possible combination of programs, thereby creating everything that can be possible from basic arithmetic elements such as numbers, addition, and multiplication. This is based on the assumption that computation can duplicate the machinery which generates human consciousness – which is the assumption that I question. Below, I try to run through a treatment where the conceptual problems of computationalism lie, and how to get passed them by inverting the order in which his UD (Universal Dovetailer) runs. Instead of a program that mechanically writes increasingly complex programs, some of which achieve a threshold of self-awareness, I use PIP (Primordial Identity Pansensitivity) to put sense first and numbers second. Here’s how it goes:
I. Trailing Dovetail Argument (TDA)
A. Computationalism makes two ontological assumptions which have not been properly challenged:
- The universality of recursive cardinality
- Complexity driven novelty.
Both of these, I intend to show, are intrinsically related to consciousness in a non-obvious way.
B. Universal Recursive Cardinality
Mathematics, I suggest is defined by the assumption of universal cardinality: The universe is reducible to a multiplicity of discretely quantifiable units. The origin of cardinality, I suggest, is the partitioning or multiplication of a single, original unit, so that every subsequent unit is a recursive copy of the original.
Because recursiveness is assumed to be fundamental through math, the idea of a new ‘one’ is impossible. Every instance of one is a recurrence of the identical and self-same ‘one’, or an inevitable permutation derived from it. By overlooking the possibility of absolute uniqueness, computationalism must conceive of all events as local reproductions of stereotypes from a Platonic template rather than ‘true originals’.
A ‘true original’ is that which has no possible precedent. The number one would be a true original, but then all other integers represent multiple copies of one. All rational numbers represent partial copies of one. All prime numbers are still divisible by one, so not truly “prime”, but pseudo-prime in comparison to one. One, by contrast, is prime, relative to mathematics, but no number can be a true original since it is divisible and repeatable and therefore non-unique. A true original must be indivisible and unrepeatable, like an experience, or a person. Even an experience which is part of an experiential chain that is highly repetitive is, on some level unique in the history of the universe, unlike a mathematical expression such as 5 x 4 = 20, which is never any different than 5 x 4 = 20, regardless of the context.
I think that when we assert a universe of recursive recombinations that know no true originality, we should not disregard the fact that this strongly contradicts our intuitions about the proprietary nature of identity. A generic universe would seem to counterfactually predict a very low interest in qualities such as individuality and originality, and identification with trivial personal preferences. Of course, what we see the precise opposite, as all celebrity it propelled by some suggestion unrepeatability and the fine tuning of lifestyle choices is arguably the most prolific and successful feature of consumerism.
If the experienced universe were strictly an outcropping of a machine that by definition can create only trivially ‘new’ combinations of copies, why would those kinds of quantitatively recombined differences such as that between 456098209093457976534 and 45609420909345797353 seem insignificant to us, but the difference between a belt worn by Elvis and a copy of that belt to be demonstrably significant to many people?
C. Complexity Driven Novelty
Because computationalism assumes finite simplicity, that is, it provides only a pseudo-uniqueness by virtue of the relatively low statistical probability of large numbers overlapping each other precisely. There is no irreducible originality to the original Mona Lisa, only the vastness of the physical painting’s microstructure prevents it from being exactly reproduced very easily. Such a perfect reproduction, under computationalism is indistinguishable from the original and therefore neither can be more original than the other (or if there are unavoidable differences due to uncertainty and incompleteness, they would be noise differences which we would be of no consequence).
This is where information theory departs from realism, since reality provides memories and evidence of which Mona Lisa is new and which one was painted by Leonardo da Vinci at the beginning of the 16th century in Florence, Italy, Earth, Sol, Milky Way Galaxy*.
Mathematics can be said to allow for the possibility of novelty only in one direction; that of higher complexity. New qualities, by computationalism, must arise on the event horizons of something like the Universal Dovetailer. If that is the case, it seems odd that the language of qualia is one of rich simplicity rather than cumbersome computables. With comp, there can be no new ‘one’, but in reality, every human experience is exactly that – a new day, a new experience, even if it often seems much like the one before. Numbers don’t work that way. Each mechanical result is identical. A = A. A does not ‘seem much like the A before, yet in a new way‘. This is a huge problem with mathematics and theoretical physics. They don’t get the connection between novelty and simplicity, so they hope to find it out in the vastness of super-human complexity.
II. Computation as Puppetry
I think that even David Chalmers, who I respect immensely for his contributions to philosophy of mind and in communicating the Hard Problem missed the a subtle but important distinction. The difference between a puppet and a zombie, while superficially innocuous, has profound implications for the formulation of a realistic critique of Strong AI. When Chalmers introduced or popularized the term zombie in reference to hypothetical perfect human duplicates which lack qualia and subjective experience, he inadvertently let an unscientific assumption leak in.
A zombie is supernatural because it implies the presence of an absence. It is an animated, un-dead cadaver in which a living person is no longer present. The unconsciousness of a puppet, however, is merely tautological – it is the natural absence of presence of consciousness which is the case with any symbolic representation of a character, such as a doll, cartoon, or emoticon. A symbolic representation, such as Bugs Bunny, can be mass produced using any suitable material substance or communication media. Even though Bugs is treated as a unique intellectual property, in reality, the title to that property is not unique and can be transferred, sold, shared, etc.
The reason that Intellectual Property law is such a problem is because anyone can take some ordinary piece of junk, put a Bugs Bunny picture on it, and sell more of it than they would have otherwise. Bugs can’t object to having his good name sullied by hack counterfeiters, so the image of Bugs Bunny is used both to falsely endorse an inferior product and to falsely impugn the reputation of a brand. The problem is, any reasonable facsimile of Bugs Bunny is just as authentic, in an Absolute sense, as any other. The only true original Bugs Bunny is the one we experience through our imagination and the imagination of Mel Blanc and the Looney Tunes animators.
The impulse to reify the legitimacy of intellectual property into law is related to the impulse to project agency and awareness onto machines. As a branch of the “pathetic fallacy” which takes literally those human qualities which have been applied to non-humans as figurative conveniences of language, the computationalistic fallacy projects an assumed character-hood on the machine as a whole. Reasoning (falsely, I think) that since all that our body can see of ourselves is a body, it is the body which is the original object from which the subject is produced through its functions. Such a conclusion, when we begin from mechanism, seems unavoidable at first.
III. Hypothesis
I propose that we reverse the two assumptions of mathematics above, so that
- Recursion is assumed to be derived from primordial spontaneity rather than the other way around.
- Novelty can only be meaningful if it re-asserts simplicity in addition to complexity.This would mean:
- The expanding event horizon of the Universal Dovetailer would have to be composed of recordings of sensed experiences after the fact, rather than precursors to subjective simulation of the computation.
- Comp is untrue by virtue of diagonalization of immeasurable novelty against incompleteness.
- Sense out-incompletes arithmetic truth, and therefore leaves it frozen in stasis by comparison in every instant, and in eternity.
- Computation cannot animate anything except through the gullibility of the pathetic fallacy.
This may seem like an unfair or insulting to the many great minds who have been pioneering AI theory and development, but that is not my intent. By assertively pointing out the need to move from a model of consciousness which hinges on simulated spontaneity to a model in which spontaneity can never, by definition be simulated, I am trying to express the importance and urgency of this shift. If I am right, the future of human understanding depends ultimately on our ability to graduate from the cul-de-sac of mechanistic supremacy to the more profound truth of rehabilitated animism. Feeling does compute because computation is how the masking of feeling into a localized unfeeling becomes possible.
IV. Reversing the Dovetailer
By uncovering the intrinsic antagonism between the above mathematical assumptions and the authentic nature of consciousness, it might be possible to ascertain a truer model of consciousness by reversing the order of the Universal Dovetailer (machine that builds the multiverse out of programs).
- The universality of recursive cardinality reverses as the Diagonalization of the Unique
- Complexity driven novelty can be reversed by Pushing the UD.
A. Diagonalization of the Unique
Under the hypothesis that computation lags behind experience*, no simulation of a brain can ever catch up to what a natural person can feel through that brain, since the natural person is constantly consuming the uniqueness of their experience before it can be measured by anything else. Since the uniqueness of subjectivity is immeasurable and unprecedented within its own inertial frame, no instrument from outside of that frame can capture it before it decoheres into cascades of increasingly generic public reflections.
PIP flips the presumption of Universal Recursive Cardinality inherent in mathematics so that all novelty exists as truly original simplicity, as well as a relatively new complex recombination, such that the continuum of novelty extends in both directions. This, if properly understood, should be a lightning bolt that recontextualizes the whole of mathematics. It is like discovering a new kind of negative number. Things like color and human feeling may exploit the addressing scheme that complex computation offers, but the important part of color or feeling is not in that address, but in the hyper-simplicity and absolute novelty that ‘now’ corresponds to that address. The incardinality of sense means that all feelings are more primitive than even the number one or the concept of singularity. They are rooted in the eternal ‘becoming of one’; before and after cardinality. Under PIP, computation is a public repetition of what is irreducibly unrepeatable and private. Computation can never get ahead of experience, because computation is an a posteriori measurement of it.
For example, a computer model of what an athlete will do on the field that is based on their past performance will always fail to account for the possibility that the next performance will be the first time that athlete does something that they never have done before and that they could not have done before. Natural identities (not characters, puppets, etc) are not only self-diagonalizing, natural identity itself is self-diagonalization. We are that which has not yet experienced the totality of its lifetime, and that incompleteness infuses our entire experience. The emergence of the unique always cheats prediction, since all prediction belongs to the measurements of an expired world which did not yet contain the next novelty.
B. Pushing the UD – If the UD is a program which pulls the experienced universe behind it as it extends, the computed realm, faster than light, ahead of local appearances. It assumes all phenomena are built bottom up from generic, interchangeable bits. The hypothesis under PIP is that if there were a UD, it would be pushed by experience from the top down, as well as recollecting fragments of previous experiences from the bottom up. Each experience decays from immeasurable private qualia that is unique into public reflections that are generic recombinations of fixed elements. Reversing the Dovetailer puts universality on the defense so that it becomes a storage device rather than a pseudo-primitive mechina ex deus.
The primacy of sense is corroborated by the intuition that every measure requires a ruler. Some example which is presented as an index for comparison. The uniqueness comes first, and the computability follows by imitation. The un-numbered Great War becomes World War II only in retrospect. The second war does not follow the rule of world wars, it creates the rule by virtue of its similarities. The second war is unprecedented in its own right, as an original second world war, but unlike the number two, it is not literally another World War I. In short, experiences do not follow from rules; rules follow from experience.
V. Conclusions
If we extrapolate the assumptions of Compuationalism out, I think that they would predict that the painting of the Mona Lisa is what always happens under the mathematical conditions posed by a combination of celestial motions, cells, bodies, brains, etc. There can be no truly original artwork, as all art works are inevitable under some computable probability, even if the the particular work is not predictable specifically by computation. Comp makes all originals derivatives of duplication. I suggest that it makes more sense that the primordial identity of sense experience is a fundamental originality from which duplication is derived. The number one is a generic copy – a one-ness which comments on an aspect of what is ultimately boundaryless inclusion rather than naming originality itself.
Under Multisense Realism (MSR), the sense-first view ultimately makes the most sense but it allows that the counter perspective, in which sense follows computation or physics, would appear to be true in another way, one which yields meaningful insights that could not be accessed otherwise.
When we shift our attention from the figure of comp in the background of sense to the figure of sense in the background of comp, the relation of originality shifts also. With sense first, true originality makes all computations into imposters. With computation first, arithmetic truth makes local appearances of originality artifacts of machine self-reference. Both are trivially true, but if the comp-first view were Absolutely true, there would be no plausible justification for such appearances of originality as qualitatively significant. A copy and an original should have no greater difference than a fifteenth copy and a sixteenth copy, and being the first person to discover America should have no more import than being the 1,588,237th person to discover America. The title of this post as 2013/10/13/2562 would be as good of a title as any other referenceable string.
*This is not to suggest that human experience lags behind neurological computation. MSR proposes a model called eigenmorphism to clarify the personal/sub-personal distinction in which neurological-level computation corresponds to sub-personal experience rather than personal level experience. This explains the disappearance of free will in neuroscientific experiments such as Libet, et. al. Human personhood is a simple but deep. Simultaneity is relative, and nowhere is that more true than along the continuum between the microphysical and the macrophenomenal. What can be experimented on publicly is, under MSR, a combination of near isomorphic and near contra-isomorphic to private experience.
Why do humans have a conscience?
Why do humans have a conscience?
See the link for an answer to the Quora question on conscience. Part of it is as follows:
So, on this view, the conscience works something like this:
- Consider an action
- Search the normative model database for anger-oriented objections to actions like this.
- If you don’t find any, then consider the action permissible.
- If you find an objection, then see if there are ways to justify doing the action in spite of the objection.
- If so, then the action is permissible (but be careful, and be ready to justify yourself if questioned)
- If not, then the action is wrong.
I commented:
It seems to me that there are some normative assumptions in evolutionary psychology which fail to consider personality deeply. If, for instance, this model of conscience were put into a cartoon, rather than having an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, the character would have only an angel since the only thing that prevents them from doing what they would otherwise do (which, as in game theory assumptions, assumes blind self interest) is fear of anticipated social consequences, including guilty feelings.
I think that the stereotypical angel-devil cartoon actually has it more correct. Children and adolescents tend to embody this more clearly than adults, as ‘bad kids’ may not only have poor impulse control or a faulty conscience, but they are motivated by a more sadistic reward system. They enjoy hurting others, sometimes more than they are afraid of being hurt themselves.
By contrast, ‘good boys and girls’ may have a conscience which is naive even to guilt and is motivated by the better angels (of parental approval or perhaps self approval). There is something sexual here too…sort of paradoxical in that good kids are seen as both more ‘mature’ (trustworthy, better judgment) and less mature sexually (goody two shoes = late bloomer/virgin).
It seems to be very common that families often have kids where conscience is radically unbalanced. One is saintly, one is the delinquent, one presents themselves as tougher or nicer than they are…many combinations. Often these characteristics can seem present before their role in the family has even developed. This suggests to me that evolutionary psych models overlook some of the most important motives that drive conscience, which I think are ultimately only loosely related to evolutionary biology. Before we can care about right or wrong, we care about how we feel and how other people feel. It is not a model made by our brain at all, it is the direct presentation of anthropological aesthetics.
I agree of course that we have sub-personal mechanisms but that does not mean that we do not also contribute directly to our own life and the lives of others in a way which is irreducibly individual, non-mechanistic and volitional. The image of conscience as a matrix of modal logic is too reactive to rise, plausibly, to the level of conscious attention. If it was just a matter of not making others mad, we should have no business knowing that any strategies were being formulated at all – no more than our stomach would need a digestion conscience to avoid disappointing the colon.
Multisense Realism 
Recent Comments