The First Law of Consciousness

It's interesting to speculate about the role of the structure of the body in the development of ideas about a separation between the mental and the physical (dualism). I think that a strong argument can be made that dualism is the natural result of organizational constraints related to perception in living systems.

For as long as human beings have conceptualized consciousness, we've certainly known that there is sometimes a correlation between mental events and physical events. We don't see this correlation for all mental events, but it is certainly evident for many. For example, when we interact with the physical objects of our environment, it is clear that these physical events form part of the whole experience.

Scientific experimentation has shown us that the correlation between the mental and the physical is deeper than once thought. It's not just that some mental events correlate with physical events. On the contrary, experiments (like those involving the artificial electrical stimulation of nerve cells in the brain) have suggested that even our most intangible thoughts and feelings can be elicited by the artificial stimulation of certain areas of the brain. As a result, we've become aware of a deeper relation between the mental and the physical. The formerly non-physical nature of feelings, ideas, dreams, etc. has now been shown to be false because these things are physically manifested in terms of activity within a biological system.

Nevertheless, there is a difference between knowing that every mental event is accompanied by a specific pattern of activity in a physical system, and being able to grasp the dynamics of this correspondence-fully knowing the mental in terms of the physical. The physical processes that underlie a given certain mental state cannot be exhaustively known by the organism that is having that mental state as it is having it because such knowledge would require a more advanced physical system, which would in turn require more brainpower-the increasing requirements would feed back on each other!

Even though we can't fully grasp the dynamics of the biological side of our conscious experience, it's very interesting to speculate what it would be like to have this activity fed back into the perceptual organs so that the nervous system activity that corresponded to our waking experience could be perceived in real time. If we could make any sense out of the activity that we perceived, I would guess that this would have a significant effect on what it's like to experience. Of course, our existence is already defined by the fact that we do have a certain amount of this: we perceive our selves in real time-just not every process that's occurring. I believe it's this incomplete perception that is to blame for dualistic ideas about mind and matter that have arisen over the ages.

A THEORY OF VALUE

Two contexts in which I might use the term value:

1. A set of items has a numerical value
2. I value a certain piece of music


These seem to be very different uses of the term value, and, while not disputing the differences between them, I want to argue that our use of the term value in both of these instances is indicative of a very abstract and useful concept of value that is equally applicable in both cases.

At the very foundation of this abstract concept of value is the fact that values require evaluators. Valuing is something that is done by organisms (and maybe-someday-by inorganic technology). More specifically, by evaluating, an organism assesses some part of the environment with respect to an existing system of classification. As a result of the assessment, the organism will categorize the assessed in terms of one or more dimensions of classification, which may be affective, moral, numerical, etc. Such is the process of evaluating, and therefore, to say that something has value is to say that it has been appraised by the organism in this manner.

I'm arguing for this abstract concept of value because I see it as forming a very important and basic component of all cognition and action in organisms. Any organism's ability to act in the world will be affected-for better or worse-by how adaptively the organism is able to evaluate in this general sense. The fact that there is such a big gap between e.g. moral values and numerical values does nothing to detract from the validity of this general concept. These very differences illustrate the diversity of means by which evaluating is done. That numerical values seem so different from values like patriotism is a testament to the diverse processes that may lead to values-which are themselves as diverse as the evaluative processes that created them.

From this standpoint, we can go forth and say: What is numerosity? What is patriotism? What is love? From an abstract level of a certain perspective, all of these are the same type of thing: they are all values.

Analogies

At the place where I work there is a set of keys used by the employees around the work area. This particular set of keys is connected to a plastic keychain, similar to the ones pictured here. As a result of its being stretchy, bouncy, and exhibiting what Buckminster Fuller called tensegrity, playing with these keys is something that I do often. I think that most people have-to varying degrees-the tendency to nervously play around with things like this, but what I think is noteworthy about my playing around with this keychain, is that it exhibits dynamics that remind me of much more complex-and less concrete-situations.

I'm thinking about one dynamic pattern in particular, which occurs when the coils of the keychain are twisted with both hands at two different places simultaneously. I really wanted to capture this on video, but my phone is blocking me from using the video camera until I get a memory card, so a verbal description will have to suffice. I should state that, while this may be very hard to picture without such a keychain at hand, with one, it is very obvious.

Anyway, the dynamic response that I'm talking about occurs when the keychain is held by the thumb and index finger of both hands (which have between them about 2 complete rotations of the coil), and twisted by both hands simultaneously in opposite directions (clockwise and counter-clockwise). Doing this causes the coils to initially expand in diameter, but if the twisting continues, the coil will suddenly reorganize itself. The reorganization takes the form of an inverted twist in the coil that goes in the opposite direction of the rest. While this may be difficult to picture, everyone has seen it, either with a key ring, or a slinky that has an obvious imperfection in the coil.

I think it may be helpful to describe the process temporally: When the coil is twisted as described above, it keeps its shape and simply expands in size-at first. However, as the twisting continues, a point is reached at which a new inverted twist emerges. At that point, the coil could no longer maintain the original shape, and it reorganizes itself into a new form. Once an inverted coil has emerged, no further outside force is necessary to maintain it. One can let go and the inversion will persist. Interestingly, once the inversion is in the coil, it can be removed by applying both hands in the same way as was used to implement the twist, and twisting in the opposite directions. Also noteworthy is that, when implementing or removing the inverted coil, stretching the keychain while applying force will lead to the reorganization requiring a greater amount of force.

I see this dynamical reaction to be abstractly isomorphic to many phenomena that involve a system (a physical, biological or social structure) that is able to withstand a certain amount of stress before reorganizing itself in a predictable way. Of course, there are no limits to how one might look at simple physical events as being metaphoric for larger situations. I could, for example, comapre a breaking ruler with the downfall of a corporation. But the beauty of the keychain is that it exhibits a complexity that makes it suitable for modelling systems-specifically adaptive systems that reogranize themselves rather than dissipate when disturbed.

If we were to look at the way that a family responds to a crisis, we might see a reorganization occurring at a certain "breaking point"--similar to what is found in the keychain. The organization of the keychain is a function of the system reacting to two different kinds of forces: the outside twisting and the internal force that gives the keychain its shape in the first case. A family is also distorted by outside forces, but the possible reorganization is a function of both the outside forces as well as the internal forces that may serve to maintain the family as a soherent system. The reogranization of a family following a crisis is easily seen as resulting from the force of the crisis, but the reorganization itself may be a product of the existing forces of the family reacting with and persisting after the disturbance--just as in the keychain.

Now, the keychain is not necessarily the best model for a complex system like a family. Nevertheles, I think that it is very useful to realize the analogical properties of complex physical systems like this one which can be seen right in front of ones own eyes. By doing so, we gain physical experience with dynamical processes that we may use to get a grip on dynamical processes whose physical/temporal dimensions dwarf our potential for easy grasping. I'm inclined to take a closer look at children's toys to see if they have access to complex dynamical phenomena like those in the keychain. Perhaps early exposure to such dynamical processes (confined both temporally and spatially for easier comprehension) could have its benefits...

Value

The Wikipedia article about Pitchfork mentions how the site has been criticized by some for what is perceived as that sites control over people's musical preferences. In short, it was claimed that a positive/negative review on Pitchfork has a massive effect on the success of the artist under review, because the site sets an influential example for how a particular work can be received.

I've been thinking a lot about this issue and about the value of shared aesthetic preferences. If Pitchfork does have the power that it has been accused of having, what are the consequences of this for society and individuals?

First off, it seems pretty much clear from the start that shared aesthetic values are important. Enjoying a piece of art with others (mutually revelling in aesthetic enjoyment) is certainly a bonding experience that can link minds by suggesting a similarity of experience between two or more people. Although it is certainly possible to enjoy others aesthetic preferences for their own sake (when we don't share them ourselves), a qualitatively different type of experience is offered by the mutual enjoyment of the same piece of art.

Also clear is the fact that aesthetic experiences are variable in terms of their intensity; i.e., they are not just good or bad, but vary in the intensity with which they are good or bad. This occurs at the level of the individual person, it is not objectively true. What I mean by this is that, to use the framework of Maturana and Varela, the aesthetic experience of art is something that occurs as a result of a coupling between a person and a work of art. Although it could be easily argued that there is also a coupling on a wider social level between a work of art and a society in general-in that a particular society is predisposed to accept certain works of art over others based on the preferences and values of its constituent members-the aesthetic experience of art being explored here is that which occurs on the individual level.

To return to the theme of Pitchfork, I'm wondering what the role of that site (and others like it) is in manipulating people in such a way as to change their potential for aesthetic enjoyment-in other words to change their predisposition to certain art. It would seem that a site like Pitchfork has the potential to act as an organizer of aesthetic preferences for individuals. This is how this would be achieved: First, the site achieves some level of credibility amongst individuals-perhaps this occurs directly, as a result of making individuals aware of music that they immediately like. Once this credibility has been established, further recommendations from the site will be taken more seriously. If the site has been particularly successful in showing its readers art they enjoy, it (the site) will have more freedom in terms of what art its readers will be willing to take seriously.

The things I have just said pertain to art criticism sites like pitchfork, but the same things could be said about an individual who affects the taste of others. Unique to Pitchfork however is that it is not a person, but rather an organization resulting from the collaboration of many people. Consequently, although it is able to attain the same credibility as a person (e.g. a knowledgeable music listener who gives valued recommendations to friends), it also benefits from the fact that it is perceived by its readers as the outcome of the aesthetic preferences of many people-an "in" group-and is therefore more formidable than most individuals.

To be continued...

Social Panic

A recurrent feature in my social life-that is my life in the social domain-is an uncomfortable situation caused by a conflict between two social constraints upon my action. One one hand, as I move about in the social domain, my awareness of the potential meaningfulness of my actions leads me to be aware of my surroundings so that I my temper my conduct with respect to what I perceive, with the goal of maintaining some desired relation to my surrounding social world.

However, ever so often I face a situation whose solution (the course of action that will resolve the situation in a desirable way) is in some other way problematic. For instance, if when walking down the street, I see an acquaintance, it is my usual desire to acknowledge this by saying e.g. "hello". If the acquaintance is more than 20 feet or so away, I am forced to account for the fact that quietly saying hello is unreasonable-especially if it is noisy out. As a result, I have several options: to raise my voice, wait until the person is closer, or give a greeting that is too quiet to hear. Each of these is problematic in that they will be intrinsically meaningful in their own ways-even as they solve the original problem.

By raising my voice I will satisfy my desire to greet the friend, but in doing so, engage in an activity (yelling) that has other social connotations which may conflict with the message I want to convey. If I wait until the friend gets closer, I will solve the problem presented by the distance, but in doing so will do nothing to fulfill my desire to be sociable towards my friend. As I approach the friend silently, I position myself in an ambiguous zone of social relations towards my friend-I may not be planning to greet them, I may be waiting, whatever the case, my positioning is ambiguous to my friend. This is an uncomfortable position to be in, because such ambiguous zones may catalyze (in the friend) several different courses of action. The friend is forced to attempt to interpret the ambiguous performance I am giving, and may interpret my actions in the "wrong" way-a way different from what I myself intend.

THe reason that this situation is so undesirable is that we do not look appetizingly on the possibility of reacting to ways of acting that are beyond our control. We act in certain ways towards others so that we may enjoy a particular social positioning. There are courses of action that we don't take because we don't want to face the social consequences of acting in these ways. When are actions make our intentions ambiguous, we enter a realm in which undesirable responses form others are made more likely.

Thus, such situations place us in a bind: though we want to position ourselves in a certain way, the possible courses of action that we have for achieving such a positioning would actually make our positioning ambiguous because these actions have additional significance-in addition to offering solutions to the present problem.

The Externalization of Perception

In his book, Signs of Meaning in the Universe, Jesper Hofmeyer talks about how in the phylogenesis of animals, the role of the genome has shifted from directly anticipating how to detect and respond to the environment (by specifying structures that will detect and respond to specific aspects of the environment in specific ways), to simply specifying means of perceiving and acting that will be flexible, as well as an organism that will be able to learn from its world how to act adaptively using its abilities of perception and action. Using this idea, we can look at how this process has taken shape within the comparitively recent history of human development over the last 40,000 years. Within this period there is a definite trend affecting human perception: The externalization of the perceptual process. In other animals, the perception of things in the environment is an internal process that occurs within the organism's nervous system. When a deer sees a lion in its field of vision, the process of recognition occurs largely within the nervous system, which makes use of the pattern of light to interpret the scene. It is possible to see the deer react to the lion once it has been interpreted as such, but it is not possible to see the process of interpretation itself which occurs completely within the nervous system. In contrast, it is possible to see human beings perform externalized processes of perception. Examples include a person counting a set of items, or a research team collecting data about a population. In the latter example, computers may even be used, in which case the perceptual process is in fact distributed throughout the environment and only overseen by the human being.

Inextricably connected to the development of new (externalized) ways of perceiving is the development of new things to perceive that, in different ways, overtaxed internal systems of perception. The first way that existing internal perceptual systems were overtaxed was by the proliferation of vast numbers of perceivable things that occurred as a result of linguistic distinctions. This proliferation overtaxed the memory and forced certain parts of the process of perceptual recognition to be stored externally. Of the many thousands of bird species in the world, I know only a small number of them, and of these I know virtually nothing more than their appearance. Despite this, if I see a strange bird I can learn a good deal about it if I consult a guide to wildlife.

The second way that the overtaxing of internal perceptual abilities led to the development of external forms of perception was the development of new things to perceive that were not suited to the existing internalized perceptual abilities. The latter are well suited to perceiving discrete objects in the environment, and to a limited extent, things that are distributed spatially or temporally. As spatial and temporal distribution increases, internalized perceptual processes become increasingly unfeasible. However, externalized processes of perception, combined with language allow for the perception of widely distributed things like population density, or its change over large amounts of time.

With externalized processes of perception, what we are able to perceive is a function of how we use our body to perceive things about the environment. The world that we live in (that we perceive ourselves to live in) is partly a function of how we act. Learning how to perceive new things in the environment is therefore an incredibly fruitful open-ended endeavor.

Second Order Perception

When we think of perception, we think of something being "picked up", or sensed, and then a process that is somehow induced within a system as a result of that stimulation. In other words, there is an initial stimulation, and then a process occurs that gives meaning to that stimulation. In visual perception, this may manifest itself when the stimulation of our retina leads to the phenomenological sensation of seeing a ball.

Certain practices within human culture demonstrate that the processes leading up to the phenomenological state of perceiving something may take as a part of their input other phenomenologically perceived states. Number provides a good example. If I stand by a pond and count out a group of 25 geese swimming in front of me, a perceptual process has occurred that used the perceived geese (which were already the output of another perceptual process) as its input.

A pattern of activity in the brain led to the perception of the geese, and another pattern of activity led to the perception that there were 25 geese. This demonstrates that it is possible to create meta-perceptual systems that may be quite useful. While the practice of enumeration demonstrates this, the entire field of statistics also exemplifies it. The goals of that field are none other than to create second order systems of perception.

Even though numbers may be very powerful tools for us, it is clear that there is much room for improvement as far as systems of perception go. THe perceptions furnished by numbers are very one dimensional. I don't think I'm going out on too much of a limb when I say that second order systems of perception are now in the stages that first order perception was in with the emergence of light sensitive cells that only later developed into vision. The question is, what can be done to expand the dimensionality of these new forms of perception?

What is there without language?

I think that anyone in their right mind would be interested in experiencing just a taste of what life would be like without language.  What would be different? What couldn't we do? What could we learn to do? Finally, if we were able to learn some of our lost abilities in a new non-linguistic world, how would the process of learning them be different?

I've begun to think that getting a glimpse of what a non-linguistic existence would be like is not as impossible as it might seem.  I've been engaging in some phenomenological reflection along these lines and have really started to make progress.  What I do is simply try to block language from my experience-that is, to block language from the outside world and from the inside one as well.  For anyone who hasn't tried this, it's definitely worth a try.

Escaping language from the outside is relatively straightforward, and it happens to us regularly throughout the day (although not as often as many of us might like).  Just avoid hearing speech or written words.  Blocking off language from the inside is easy as well, but it's not something that we regularly do.  There may be different approaches to this, and I may be missing something major, but what I've been doing is consciously avoiding attaching words to my experience (not all the time of course).   When I reflect on the role of language on my thoughts, I find that I frequently bring words up in my mind to apply to either whatever is going on around me, or whatever I'm thinking about.  By doing this, I've noticed that I don't really have access to concepts as I normally do.  I just can't bring them into my mind.  I'm using concepts here in a broad sense.  Basically I mean any discrete mental entity that can be brought to mind when its not present in my immediate surroundings (e.g., in my field of vision).  I don't know yet if this means that I wouldn't be able to make decisions with them in the ways that I'm used to.  For example, if I'm struck with an important decision that would affect my family, would I be able to take them into account if I wasn't able to use language?

The Cultural Construction of the Self

Who am I?

Growing up in the 21st century, I am familiar with the concept of the self, and I self-apply it. The peculiar way in which I do this is the result of cultural-historical forces in general, and in particular, scientific advancements. This implies that the concept of "the self" has changed over time. I would like to examine the dynamics of these changes, approaching them as shifts in the way that experience is related to, and understood in terms of, its objects.

Pure experience, as in experience without perspective, untempered by the world, is inconceivable and perhaps impossible. To come alive, experience must be manifested in something which itself is not pure experience. It is as if experience were a light shining on our back, invisible to us until we hold something in its rays and reflect it back on ourselves.

I experience an orange, holding it in front of my field of vision. It is essential to the presence of the experience that it be conveyed by something (in this case the orange), yet the fact that it is conveyed by an orange is trivial. I could just as easily have had an experience (albeit a different one) with another fruit.

A self is a coherent pattern of experience extended through time. The coherence of the self comes from the stability of the body which continually captures and creates experiences. The sense of a localized self is caused by the temporal and physical linking of experiences flowing through the same body. The interpretation of each successive experience is shaped by those that have preceded it. At the same time, the unique qualities of each new experience shape the memory of past experiences. This is very similar to the way that new water flowing down a stream bed is (on one hand) shaped by the paths cut by past flows, but also reshapes the path in relation to its own particular movement. New experiences occur in relation to the "same old self" because they are brought forth within a system that has previously brought forth (and been shaped by) all of the experiences of that self.

Before going on, I should note an inadequacy of the otherwise useful river metaphor used above. While both a riverbed and a biological body are shaped by natural forces, bodies are structured to be receptive in a wide variety of extremely subtle and complex ways. Riverbeds have nowhere near this kind of complexity.

While experience most likely exists apart from human society, the general concept of the self most likely does not. The self is necessarily a product of society. On one hand it separates the individual from the rest of society, but at the same time it aligns and coordinates the individual with respect to his/her own goals, as well as to society as a whole. The self can be viewed as either the catalyst for, or the reaction to, the emergence of the social domain. Like most things, it's probably a mixture of both. In any case, the self only becomes practical once organisms become primarily social creatures.

Next time...

The particular form that a self may take in a given society is a function of culture. Here culture is understood as concerning the form of social interactions. What types of interactions are possible is a function of culture in general and a function of the self in particular.

Self consciousness/concepts

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I'm trying to construct a timeline of sorts for the development of the self concept or self consciousness. I mean self con. in a very broad sense, referring to the ways that people understand themselves. As someone with an interest in the cognitive sciences, I'm interested in how advancements in our understanding of our own experience will affect our self concept (from this point on I'm merging self concept and self consciousness into one thing). At the same time, I'm interested in the possibility of understanding the development of cognitive science in terms of the larger development of an understanding of experience. This would include the development of primitive self concepts like the idea of "myself" as a person.

Bertallanffy on The Problem of Consciousness

The thing that got me interested in psychology and philosophy was consciousness. Specifically the mystery of consciousness: How is it that our bodies can produce conscious experiences?

The great thinker Ludwig von Bertallanffy published a paper on consciousness that goes a lot further towards making sense of consciousness than anything I've ever read. He is able to make sense of the mystery of how mere arrangements of matter may give way to something as spectacular as consciousness. I want to summarize his position here.

Based on the evidence from modern science, Bertallanffy concludes that consciousness is produced by our bodies. The fact that this strikes us as such a mystery is a result of the fact that we attempt to explain conscious experience using certain products of that experience. Let me try to clarify: Consciousness is primary within our experience. Within conscious experience , we have our understanding of the world, including various causal models, etc. At the present we have reached the conclusion that "Yes, consciousness seems to be caused by the arrangement of particules making up physical organisms, even though we have no idea how this might occur." Bertallanffy argues that the reason for this is that the particles (or arrangements of them) are mental representations of the particles that actually cause consciousness (whatever the hell they are). They are the maps of the real particles.

The point can be illustrated by a heirarchy.

The primary layer is comprised of the actual "objective" structures of molecules and particules that give rise to consiocus experience. There is no way to talk about this level coherently since it is impossible to talk of things that are not perceptions. I bring it up because it is what the third layer models. This level gives birth to...

The secondary layer which is conscious experience itself. In terms of our own experience this layer is primary. It gives birth to...

Models of the primary layer of particles and molecules. These models are insufficient for explaining consciousness because they are incomplete representations of the primary level.

A recurrent pattern in my life has been an interest in learning about the basic facts of reality. [I couldn't find a more constructivist way to phrase that sentence]. In particular, I want to come up with better models for this experience that I have. Recently, this has led me to want to learn about memory, in particular to understand the physical basis of memories.

In doing this, I often feel daunted that I will be embarking on someting too extreme; that learning too much about the creation of my experience will lead to changes in how that experience unfolds further down the road. At the root of that is what I perceive as my own mental instability-or potential for instability.

At the same time as I think this I am also aware of an opposing feeling: Could it really be that I have the special priveledge of being able to access deep "truths" about my experience? I mean, what are the odds that scientific knowledge has matured sufficiently now to allow for a completely different type of self awareness than ever before? Now, let me state that of course scientific knowledge allows for me to take a different position on my own existence than has ever been possible. My point is that I would hesitate before saying that "advances in neurosciences will allow my generation to advance its understanding of itself in ways that are incomparable to past advancements".

In other words, I aim to see our self concept (or the individual self concepts of individuals) as a work in progress. If I came to understand the neural mechanisms behind specific abilities, this would advance the particular self concept that I have of myself. If it led to a qualitatively new kind of self concept, then I would be tempted to believe that all past advancements of this kind were proportionally significant.

I'm not sure how far I would go with this. It's tempting to think that applying an advanced model of ourselves as biological beings to our experience would be as profound as the past development of the self concept of the person.

Patterns among systems

What patterns are there among the systems in our world?  In particular, what patterns are there between the cell as a system, the body as a system, and a society as a system?  I am concerned with patterns of adaptation: how a system learns to act adaptively in response to something that it perceives.  

Let's take the threat of environmental change as an example.  The solution to the current climate crisis will have to involve an effort that occurs on the level of (most of) humanity, not the level of the individual person.  Such a response would be an adaptive reaction taken on behalf of the system.  But at the same time, the constituent parts of this reaction (individual people) are not unaware of what they're a part of.

It would be very strange if a cell, or even the body were to operate like this.  Can we say that killer T cells understand what they're doing?  Do neurons understand what they are doing?  If they don't understand exactly what we understand them as doing, do they understand something-and what is it?

Systemic Awareness

Climate change threatens to affect humanity on the  individual level as well as the collective social level.  In order to prevent an ecological catastrophe, action must be taken on the collective individual level.  In other words, action must be taken on the level of the system, which in turn translates to many different actions being simultaneously undertaken by many individuals.

My interest in climate change was bolstered when I re-imagined the whole issue as a challenge facing the world itself, viewed as a potentially adaptive system.  I began to look at the world as if it were a single cell whose pattern of activities was driving it closer and closer to an undesirable future.

I realized that the challenges facing the earth are the same as the challenges facing any living system.  To survive, a system must be able to do two things: (1) perceive threats to their survival and (2), take actions to maintain survival on the basis of these perceptions.  

There is a third step that is implied between these two, and it is arguably the most important of all.  This is the creation of the appropriate links between actions and perceptions.  These links will allow for the perception of climate change (as well as the perception of appropriate ways to "change the change") to trigger the appropriate actions to prevent the undesirable changes.

There are two domains onto which we can apply the processes of perception and action that will be necessary to prevent a climate change.  These are the individual and the collective.  I think that it is most productive to choose the latter.  The reason is that the changes that will have to be made are structural and "macro" in nature.  They will certainly involve (at some point) changes made by individuals, but the necessary changes will have to be made on a large scale, by corporations or governments.  The problems have their origin on this level, anyway.

On the individual level, there is a large-scale recognition of the climate problem, although it is certainly not universal.  Unfortunately, this is less true on a collective level where the changes must be made.  

One thing is certainly clear:  This crisis can take lessons from biology and systems theory, and those disciplines can take lessons from it.  What we are seeing now is learning, taking place on a larger scale than has ever been possible.  This learning is not the kind that involves the memorization of facts.  It is the fundamental kind of learning that involves making adaptive connections between perception and action.

This kind of learning also occurs in the corporations and other systems that are responsible for the climate crisis.  Those systems learned to perceive threats and opportunities related to their financial survival, and they learned how to act in ways that would take advantage of their perceptions in order to generate capital.  The motivation for them was capital, and it is clear that this is a potent motivator.  It motivates the component parts of systems to adapt themselves to make a better system-better in terms of being more profitable.  

It could be said that the reason why climate change is such a difficult issue is that it occurs on a large timescale.  Although there is a payoff for preventing climate change, there is also a payoff for doing some things that will hasten climate change, and this payoff occurs in the shorter term.  However, it is not the fact that these payoffs occur on the shorter term that makes them better motivators, it is the fact that they are the kinds of payoffs that literally pay off.  

The motivation to work for climate change is to ensure long term survival.  The problem is that working for climate change has no short term payoff, and hence, no possibility for short term survival.  With short term survival in jeopardy, long term survival becomes irrelevant.

Next time, I will look into ways to make operations affecting the long term survival pay off positively or negatively in the short term...

Systemic Awareness

I came up with this new term in the hopes that it will be a useful tool in making sense of a subject that I've been dwelling on for some months now.  The subject in question basically has to do with the limits to our intentionality.  

We have wishes and desires, and knowledge that relates to these.  The fact that we are able to use our bodies to do things that we want does not mean that our bodies will align themselves precisely with our wishes.  Picture a drug addict who is fully aware of the damage that his addiction is doing to himself and others, yet who continues to use drugs.  Even though he knows on some level that he does not want to continue to use drugs, certain systems within his body "want" him to continue to use.  

I understand this phenomenon as being caused by a partial lack of systemic awareness.  When a system contains a single mechanism for perceiving and responding to an environmental cue adaptively, that system has achieved a minimum level of systemic awareness.  The system has become an adaptive entity when adaptive mechanisms at the level of the system itself have emerged.  These mechanisms require three interrelated parts: receptors (to sense), effectors (to act) and the appropriate connections between them.  

The need for the appropriate links between sensors and effectors can be seen within the human body:  If I were told that I was about to be bombarded with bacteria (at a higher level than usual), I would be unable to mobilize my immune system to prepare for the onslaught.  The immune system does have the ability to "work overtime", but this ability cannot be elicited by my knowledge of my current state.  This is a case of a lack of systemic awareness.

For another example, we may jump to a higher level.  The ecosystem on the planet earth is being driven away from its current state as a result of the effects of human life.  Considered as an organism itself, humanity has some knowledge of what is happening, yet it is unclear if the appropriate steps will be taken in time to prevent disaster.  If disaster is averted by collective action, this  will most likely be the result of humanity having developed the appropriate mechanisms of perception and action.

I think that we are in the position to learn some valuable lessons about how to prevent climate change by looking at the ways that adaptive chains of perception and action occur in the human organism.  It's important to point out that the mechanisms of bodily action that perform (e.g.) action x are not necessarily mobilized when a different level of organization in the body knows that action x is needed.   So, if humanity is going to deal with the climate crisis in a way that bears any resemblance to the way that other biological organisms deal with crises, we ought not to expect that the solution will come from a mere reversal of every process that has been causing climate change.

I think that a shortcoming of much of the literature espousing a "systems" perspective is weakened by one point:  There is a persistent failure to acknowledge that people in general realize that, for lack of a better phrase, "everything affects everything else."   

The importance of systems theory does not derive from this realization, but rather from founding a way of thinking based on systems rather than discrete entities.  This subtle difference was, for me, the biggest impediment towards appreciating this perspective, which for me is epitomized by Gregory Bateson.

Knowledge, Adaptation and Meaning

I've been thinking recently about knowledge and adaptation.  About six months ago I started getting into Piaget, as well as others who may be labeled "evolutionary epistemologists".  The result of this encounter was that I created a strong link between knowledge and adaptation-specifically the idea that adaptations constitute knowledge about the environment.  

Recently, I've been thinking about the difference between knowledge in its commonsense-sense and adaptation.  I still think there's a strong link between knowledge and adaptation, but I don't think that the two should be considered synonymous.  I think it's incorrect to say that knowledge is inherently adaptive.  Rather, knowledge allows for the spontaneous and flexible creation of adaptive behavior.  For example, if I hear that a certain bridge that I must take on my way to work has washed out, I will use this knowledge to take a different route.  The knowledge about the washed out bridge is not in itself adaptive, but it does allow for adaptive behavior.

What follows is meant to clear up the relation between adaptation, meaning and knowledge.  My goal has been to get to the pure essence of these things-inasmuch as that is possible.  I believe that in our day to day lives, knowledge, meaning and adaptation are tightly and intricately interwoven in incredibly complex ways.  Nevertheless, I feel that what follows sheds light on what would otherwise be just a mess.

What is it about knowledge that allows for it to be used in the creation of adaptive behavior if it is not intrinsically adaptive?  I believe that knowledge can be understood as something that is predictive (or believed to be predictive) about sensory-motor activity.   Returning to the example of the washed out bridge, the knowledge about the washed out bridge is a prediction about possible sensory-motor activity-specifically the sensory motor activity that will occur when one is at the bridge.  

So far I have explained knowledge as something that is predictive (or believed to be predictive-in the case of false knowledge) about potential sensory-motor activity.  This leaves unresolved the main question of how knowledge may be used adaptively.  To resolve this issue, we have to assume that sensory-motor activity itself has meaning.  By meaning I mean that we are able to interpret sensory-motor activity as it relates to our livelihood (and especially our survival).  

What's so special about natural intelligence?

To be blunt, I think that a lot of the mainstream arguments for why human beings are not like digital computers miss the point.  I'm not one to pontificate about this since I am just an amateur, but it is only recently (in the last 6 months) that I have been exposed to some really solid arguments on this topic.   In this post, I want to single out three works that really get at the meat of the issue, which I'll talk about first.

All three of these books emphasize what I think is the crucial and criminally overlooked distinction between artificial and natural intelligence.  The essence of this distinction is that, in computers, the meaningfulness of different symbols is specified externally by the programmer.  In animals, the meaningfulness of a specific part of the environment is the outcome of the developed structure of  the animal itself.  The animal has developed within the environment in ways that make specific aspects of that environment meaningful.  This is a subtle point that I resisted at first.  Another way of putting it is to say that NOTHING (or very little) is meaningful to a computer, because the syntactic operations that occur therein have been specified by a human, and are therefore only meaningful to the human.  Content on computers may be part of meaningful loops, but those loops always include a human being.

I should mention that there is an exception to this.  Feedback loops within the computer that are monitered and are important to the computers functioning are certainly like parts of the human body.  However, these are not typically the reason why people equate computers with human, and the same types of feedback loops can be found in many devices, like thermostats.

As I said above, three books/articles touch on this issue (or related issues) in much better ways than I am capable of. They are:

One of Peter Cariani's articles on semiotic systems.  In this article he touches on the Peircean ideas of secondness and thirdness, stating that all syntactic operations on computers only attain thirdness when a human observer interprets them.  In other words, the computations solved by the computer are not meaningul to the computer, and that is the crucial fact that separates computers from people.

The Embodied Mind by Varela, Thompson and Rosch.

I will most likely make a posting devoted to this fantastic book.  This is one of the most carefully written, clear (once you get used to the subtle language used by the authors), and deep books I have ever read.  The amount of ground covered is astounding, and the authors give a good introduction to the incredible developments done in the field of cybernetics that preceded cognitive science, and foresaw many of its shortcomings by decades.

Bright Air, Brilliant Fire by Gerald Edelman.

This is a fantastic book that touches on biological findings and incorporates them into a view of cognitive science that does not ignore experience.  Edelman is a fantastic writer who explains the basics of neuroscience with a clarity and logical organization that is immensely satisfying to those with very little knowledge of biology.

There are many other sources for ideas similar to those that I have touched on here. This is by no means a thorough list.  Instead, my point is to show that there is a crucial difference between computers and people that is all too often ignored, or not spoken of clearly.

Objective Knowledge

I will begin this by saying that I love Wikipedia.  I am proud to say that I loved it from the moment that I found it (although I first found WordIQ and was excited about that). 

With Wikipedia (and more recently sites like Wolframalpha), those of us who use the internet have more readily available access to a huge store of knowledge that tries to be as independent of particular subjects as possible.  That is, the content of Wikipedia is supposed to be objectively verifiable-not the stuff of opinions, feelings and whatnot. 

Of course, all knowledge is from the standpoint of an observer.  That the peony is the state flower of Indian is knowledge to someone-as all knowledge is.  It cannot exist outside of a someone who knows it.

That being said, there is some knowledge that is more "objective" and some that is more "subjective".  These two terms work very well in a functional sense.  For example, that Cazenovia, New York is a beautiful town without compare, and that it is a town with less than 7000 people both constitute knowledge from the standpoint of an observer.  However, I would have to admit that only the latter is objective.  The second bit of knowledge is something that we can derive from the use of specially formed cultural tools (the concept of number).  These tools work in such a way that they yield knowledge that is the same from observer to observer-provided that they have the cultural tools.

Wikipedia and other "knowledge sites" make use of this kind of knowledge exclusively.  It could be argued that the dominance of this kind of knowledge will lead to the downfall of the other "softer", more subjective kinds.  I feel that in fact the reverse will happen-hopefully.  The dominance of objective knowledge will lead to a more widespread realization of the nature of subjective knowledge (which is actually more like feelings than "knowledge").  In other words, the rise of objective knowledge will serve to conceptualize subjective knowledge as its foil.  I really hope this is what happens anyway.

Self Description

In a post a few days ago, I stated that I would comment in a future post on ways to conceptualize (to make models (maps) of) the human ability to understand ourselves.  For lack of a better way of phrasing this: From the standpoint of naturalized epistemology, how can we conceptualize self reflection?  

I'm not going to act like I know how to proceed here, but I would suggest that the work of Jesper Hoffmeyer and others holds an important key.  Hoffmeyer talks about DNA as a form of self reference (see Signs of Meaning in the Universe among other sources).  The DNA within an organism is about that organism.  

From this perspective, can we talk about our own conscious self reflection (or our creation of biological models of ourselves) as a higher order reflection?  Can we inform our understanding of this reflection with what we know about DNA?  Are there structural or functional analogues between these two types of self reflection?

THOUGHT EXPERIMENT #1: Amelia

This is a follow-up from the last post-it may make the most sense to read that one first, but I will make every effort to make this one stand on its own.  

I should note that I'm always annoyed by thought experiments that don't seem to be plausible.  The "zombie" thought experiment in particular annoys me.  I just don't think that a point can be made if the basis of the thought experiment itself is not possible.  This thought experiment is potentially implausible as well.  However, I think that it's acceptable in ways that the "zombie" was not.

The thought experiment is this:  Imagine an incredibly intelligent person, Amelia, who grew up completely isolated from an understanding of the shape of her body and has no familiarity with models of life as we know it-yet she is conscious and intellectually endowed to an amazing extent.   

Suppose that Amelia happens upon a detailed description of a human body.  This description would include everything: how all of the interrelated parts worked and sustained themselves, etc.  The diagram would have enough detail so that IF someone had the intellectual capacity (and Amelia DOES), they could look at the diagram and understand how the human body worked from a molecular level up to the highest levels of organization.  Of course, the diagram would have to also include very detailed information about the environment in which the creature lived.  In fact, it's unclear what (if anything) about the universe could be bracketed off as irrelevant to understanding the diagram.

Amelia would read the diagram and be able to understand precisely how humans could survive based on their physiological makeup in relation to the environment.  She would understand how the autonomic functions controlled the visceral functions of the body and how the somatic nervous system worked with the cortex to enable actions in the world.  Yet, she would have no understanding that this was a model of something like her body-a body that she has no understanding of (assume that it has been hidden from her view somehow).

My question is: What would emerge from this understanding?  It seems to me that even if Amelia started off in her study of this model with no understanding of life (I know how ridiculous this sounds), fully understanding how the human in the model functioned and emerged in phylogeny and ontogeny would lead to that understanding-it would lead to grasping the meaningfullness of human life.  It would lead to understanding how certain visual patterns on the retina would cause a reaction-and if that reaction was understood-then some semblance of it as a MEANINGFUL reaction would have to be understood.  

I know that I have given no definition for "meaningful".  I'm using the term as a way of touching that quality that the different parts of our experience have.   The way that-to a drinker-a bottle of gin is different from a bottle of vodka, even when the drinker knows nothing of the chemical differences between the two substances.

Overall, the question that I aim to get at with this thought experiment is this:  If, from looking at the model, Amelia could understand how it worked as a dynamic system, would she have to know that the system generated experience?

OK, I am not going to focus here on creating a model of reflection-that's on the backburner for now.

Instead, I want to comment on one of the underlying sources of motivation for this blog: the relation between the physiological structure of the body and lived, embodied experience.

Here I'm just going to skip any kind of introduction and dive right into the heart of the matter: What is the relation between conscious experience and the (dynamic) structure of the body?

There certainly IS a relation, that much is undeniable.  It's not as if the model of our body bears no decipherable relation to our conscious experience.  On the contrary, our model of the body has eyes that relate to our vision, ears that relate to our hearing, etc.  Furthermore, these things are not just isolated, but instead interconnected by nerve cells in the brain.  This last bit can account for the coordination between our different senses.  Already it's clear that there is a relation between our body and our experience-a relation that makes sense in at least some respects.

All of this is slightly tongue in cheek, of course.  Is it even reasonable to assume that an embodied species could make a model of its body that could not meaningfully correspond to experience?  How could a model that didn't correspond even come into expstence.  Is it possible to imagine a creature that had a body, yet could not even make the slightest steps towards understanding the relation between their body and their experience?  

Before things get out of hand we should take a moment to ask ourselves: Does our model of our body make sense of our experience to any real extent?  Take vision for instance.  Our model makes sense of vision to the extent that it models our eyes as light receptive organs.  To that end, the model helps us understand vision as something that results from the eyes' sensativity to light and its connection to the rest of the nervous system.  Yet at first glimpse that says nothing of experience.  Rather, it commits the homuncular fallacy.  We accept a model of how the eyes works that just pushes the problem of visual experience further back into the brain.

The incredibly ambitious point that I'm getting to is this:  What kind of model could possibly account for experience?  I mean a model that one could read about and comprehend relatively easily that would make lived experience make sense in much the same way that evolutionary adaptation makes sense of life on earth (but not necessarily lived experience).  

Already I've shown the insufficiency of explaining, e.g., visual experience by focusing on just the visual system.  That approach could generate a research program that studied the visual system in great detail, and the end result would be an account of a biological mechanism that was receptive to changing light patterns in such a way that the patterns received on a sensor (the retina) would be somehow deconstructed and give way to patterns of neuron firing.   That tells us a lot about the design of an optical sensor.  It tells us nothing about visual experience-well, maybe something about how we may come to connect meaning to specific things in our visual field.  

Still, it's obvious what's missing:  We can explain how we are able to do certain visual tasks-e.g., how we can recognize, categorize, act, etc.   In fact, all life processes viewed from the third person perspective are comprehensible-certainly not in detail, but at least theoretically.  But there's always that missing crucial ingredient-experience.  What is it about all of these things that causes experience?  In the next post I will attempt to address this with a thought experiment...

One Territory

Since I made the post below, I've changed my mind on what is more or less the main point.  In that post, I claimed that biological models of the body are maps (in the sense of "the map is not the territory") that have two territories, one being the body itself, the other being experience itself.

I've changed my mind on this based on the fact that a "map of the body" is not a map of experience itself, but just of the body.  To think otherwise would be to imply that experience is caused solely by the body.  In reality, experience owes the entire experienced world in addition to the body for its existence.

This leads to the question of what the map of all of experience is.  Is it possible to make a map of experience in the same way that a biological model of the body can be made as a map of the actual body?

I think that the way to achieve this is to make a map of all of experience-a map that would take as its object experience itself.  Such a map would not have to account for the intricacies of experience, since maps in general don't do that.  Rather, the map would in general account for the nature of the coupling between the organism and the environment.

Ideally, the map would specify itself, and this would of course be recursive.  However, I don't think that this should be a central concern from the beginning. It would be best to first try to map the experience of an animal that is not self reflexive, and then to introduce self reflection as a developmental addition to the basic map.  

Because I'm impatient, in the next post I want to address what form self reflection could take in such a map...

Two Territories With One Map?

When we think of the phrase "the map and the territory", we usually think of a single map and a corresponding single territory. Nevertheless, a single territory could yield different maps. Depending on what kind of information is desired, maps of a single territory can vary wildly-compare an anatomical map of the nervous system with the famous "map" of the human body that shows the different body parts scaled in proportion to their sensitivity. Clearly it is not difficult to create multiple maps from the same territory. Furthermore, the differences between the multiple maps are easy to understand: They are caused by (a) which particular features of the territory are incorporated into the map or (b) the manner in which these features are incorporated.

In addition to the same territory giving birth to multiple maps, is it possible for the same map to refer to two different territories.

Think of biological models of the body as maps.

It is here that the map (the model of the body) has two territories. There is the interpretation of the territory as being the viewed body (the object of the subject-object distinction), and the territory as the structure of first person experience, (which results from the systemic nature of the body).

Biological models of the body are frequently used to understand why bodies (our own and others) act in certain ways. If we accept experience as another territory of biological models, then those maps can be used to understand the relation between patterns in our phenomenological experience and the structure of our bodies. For example, I have a certain degree of conscious control over certain parts of my body, and I am only privy to certain bodily processes. Can anatomical maps of the human body and an understanding of systems biology can help to shed light on why our experience has the particular character that it does?

We understand the immediate physiological causes of a sneeze, or of an allergic reaction, regardless of whether they occur in our own body or in others. This is a different territory than the structure and regularities of our experience. The fact that we have the experience that we do is not completely suggested to us by existing biological models, although perhaps a super-intelligent observer could discern this. A biological model will affirm that we have the ability to move our arm by showing that how the appropriate muscles work. It will not immediately suggest that we can only exercise conscious control over certain parts of our bodies.

If we want to use biological models to understand conscious experience, we must learn to look for similarities between that experience and models of the body that causes it. Of course, there is the obvious, e.g., I experience an arm, therefore, the model must incorporate an arm. I'm suggesting that we can go further and say things like "I have voluntary control over a specific subset of body parts," therefore, the model must be one that makes sense of this fact, or somehow accounts for it.