We have stressed many times how, in our view, it makes no sense to talk about who experiences what. Subjective experience happens when a phenomenon interacts with another one. The main cause of confusion when thinking about this comes from the failure to distinguish an experience from its analysis. Very often we tend to think that it's the same to enjoy a meal and to think "I am enjoying a meal." but it's not. The second one is another experience which correlates with the original experience of enjoying a meal.
That means that consciousness is not a thing but simply the way reality is. It is not an optional expression which some things might supernaturally be endowed with or not. It's just the way things are. So subjective experiences are happening everywhere at all time. Each of them is consistent with the underlying physical phenomenon. Therefore even though many parts of my brain might be having their own experiences, the part of it which is outputting text onto this blog isn't necessarily aware of it because the underlying phenomena are not directly correlated. One might from here be tempted to picture it as a fluid of individual consciousnesses but that's not even right. The notion of individuality is a particular phenomenon of the mind, which is, granted, a very stronger attractor. Most thoughts we have eventually brush it somehow. But experiences are not like that. They just happen.
Monday, March 17, 2014
Sunday, March 16, 2014
The fundamental nature of economy
The most striking feature of Marjorie is how common human experiences like pleasure and suffering arise in a mechanical system which very much resembles an economy. If each individual behaves in a way as to maximize locally its own benefit by rewarding good neighbor behavior and punishing bad one, an intelligence emerges in the whole system. Still, though this system, Marjorie, is a great way to understand everything that's going on, it is also a very unsophisticated one. Marjorie does not experience any complex network of concepts like we do. All she experiences is suffering and pleasure as she moves towards a stable position. The perception of excessive heat is identical to the perception of pain. In fact, she neither experiences the concept of heat or pain: they are indistinguishable to her. She doesn't even have memory in a conventional sense: she just experiences pain and pleasure, pain and pleasure...
Our own experience is much more complex. We do experience the concept of suffering. We're even talking about it right now. But as we already know, the experience "I'm in pain" is not experienced by anyone. It is the simultaneous activation of several systems which react to the presence of pain substances in the brain and to the notion of self. How does this diversity show up?
Basically, all you need is a very untidy system. Marjorie only cared for temperature because that's all there was. But in the real world there are many more constraints which require many more types of successful behavior. Imagine a network of ports on the Atlantic. When there is a particularly good year in car manufacturing in Europe, certain connections have to open up to help move the merchandise to America. The whole system experiences something which is in a one-to-one correspondence with the increase in car production. That change in the flows might then mean a change in the flow of oil consumption and so on. Locally, each participant in the economy tries to survive by making deals locally: the shipping company with the car manufacturer, the oil company with the shipping company and so on. Each on of them tries to reward the ones who help them by doing business with them. Of course, because the system is messy, each player reacts to different constraints imposed on the system or generated by the very internal dynamics of the system itself. So each player encodes a particular information about either the internal or external condition of the system. The intervention of each one of them makes up an experience. The way an increase in car production will be experienced will depend on how it's effects in the system relate to the effects of other phenomena such as variations in oil production.
Following this line of thought, the sophistication of the human experience is a common thing in the universe. All you need is a large interactive community. And to all these entities, objects have properties, because that's the way they are encoded, as behavior in a network, like in our own brain. Reality can only tell us the outcome of the interaction of two things, not the nature of each of them.
Our own experience is much more complex. We do experience the concept of suffering. We're even talking about it right now. But as we already know, the experience "I'm in pain" is not experienced by anyone. It is the simultaneous activation of several systems which react to the presence of pain substances in the brain and to the notion of self. How does this diversity show up?
Basically, all you need is a very untidy system. Marjorie only cared for temperature because that's all there was. But in the real world there are many more constraints which require many more types of successful behavior. Imagine a network of ports on the Atlantic. When there is a particularly good year in car manufacturing in Europe, certain connections have to open up to help move the merchandise to America. The whole system experiences something which is in a one-to-one correspondence with the increase in car production. That change in the flows might then mean a change in the flow of oil consumption and so on. Locally, each participant in the economy tries to survive by making deals locally: the shipping company with the car manufacturer, the oil company with the shipping company and so on. Each on of them tries to reward the ones who help them by doing business with them. Of course, because the system is messy, each player reacts to different constraints imposed on the system or generated by the very internal dynamics of the system itself. So each player encodes a particular information about either the internal or external condition of the system. The intervention of each one of them makes up an experience. The way an increase in car production will be experienced will depend on how it's effects in the system relate to the effects of other phenomena such as variations in oil production.
Following this line of thought, the sophistication of the human experience is a common thing in the universe. All you need is a large interactive community. And to all these entities, objects have properties, because that's the way they are encoded, as behavior in a network, like in our own brain. Reality can only tell us the outcome of the interaction of two things, not the nature of each of them.
This notion that there is no one watching is a very difficult one to grasp because right now you're thinking "But I'm thinking!". You know you know you're thinking because a system has been generated that responds to the activity of a broad array of other systems by activating the words I, am and thinking. And even the fact that you experience this analysis of your thought process as a relationship simply means that there is a system which reacts to the very analysis by activating the notion of relationship, of links and networks, which are themselves other systems already in existence. And your conclusions will seem true because there is another system which responds to the final output of all of this by creating this sense of truth, which is really a sense of comfort, which could be a mixed link to how you felt at the beach when you were 5 and how you felt in your mother's arms at the age of 2, which themselves were links to previous experiences.
If you feel now that reality is unreal, don't worry; you've found a link between reality and unrealness. Don't drive yourself nuts between thinking the world is real and thinking that the world is unreal: you'll be simply traveling back and forth the path that leads from one to the other. The more you think, the more dynamical connections there are. It's all just a motion.
That is, it's not that we can't understand reality, it's that we have a misconceived view of what understanding reality really means. To understand something means to solidly connect it to other phenomena we were comfortable with to begin with. We can most certainly do this all the time. Connections happen naturally. But those connections don't need to be particularly sacred or even unique (though as we interact with each other a common set of connections will arise out of our collective discussion). They are just dynamical bridges between experiences.
The piling up of systems on systems means locally each system reacts to the behavior of the other systems and not directly to an outer constraint. That's how sophisticated concepts like fear come about. Fear is to suffer because we think we are going to suffer. A second system with properties similar to the first one has been created to react to the activation of the first.
In a way, mathematics and logics are a similar thing. They are studies of the sense of rational comfort. Each of them is also a system looking a itself by reproducing into a second system which responds to the first. This system reproduction is a very common thing which makes both systems stronger. It happens when a system naturally expands and (occasionally) connects to itself.
To be clearer, this means mathematics and logics are algorithmic theories of the mind. Truth and False describe the sensation of comfort, of whether we should act according to a given proposition or not. These systems also behave like an economy. The theoretical structure of truth or falseness in our minds is like a bad neighborhood. Whenever a new proposition comes in for the first time it has to make friends. The more well-established friends it makes, the safer it will be. Someday it could even become one of the leaders. The connections it builds are logical bridges. If it goes against someone stronger (better connected) it will most-likely be declared False. If it goes up against someone weaker than it will be declared True.
Sometimes we feel like we haven't understood something well enough even though we can use it. That's because that theory is still not well established in the social environment of the mind. It is malconnected and therefore requires a lot of energy to process. That rush of pleasure we get when something suddenly fits in is because it has become a harmonious feature of what was already there.
This sense of comfort is obviously a personal thing despite what one might think. We logical people tend to claim that it is universal even though 99% of all human decisions made in the world do not obey it. Very often, if someone fails to accept our logical reasoning, we call them stupid and move on. That however is a total failure in grasping the full complexity and diversity of the methods of computing this comfort regarding a particular statement.
A good example of this is the theory of pair production versus time reflection. In the twentieth century, physicists discovered that, sometimes, pairs of particles with opposite charge can pop spontaneously into existence, which seemed to violate the well-established notion that nothing is created, all is transformed. A complicated theory was developed to describe it until a handful of physicists, Stückelberg, Wheeler and Feynman, independently proposed that what was actually going on was a particle making a u-turn in time. Indeed, if a particle coming from the future makes a u-turn at some time and goes back to the future then before that time, to an observer moving uniformly forwards in time, one doesn't see anything until suddenly two particles appear, one moving in the same direction in time and the other one in the opposite time direction, a.k.a., one with positively charged and one negatively charged.
Despite being a much simpler view, this perspective is still to this day regarded by the many only as a mathematical equivalence because it involves processes that happen in the reverse time direction. This proposition, in competition with the other already existing propositions in their minds, failed to fit in. The discomfort caused by such a view is greater than the discomfort caused by the greater cumbersomeness of the alternative description of spontaneous pair production. Similarly, to creationists, the notion of evolution causes a greater discomfort than the cumbersomeness of their theory on the establishment of species. To a defendant of one view, the simple imagining the other point of view causes enough discomfort to lead to heated discussions and preaching movements where each side tries to eradicate the possibility of the other one. The drive to convince others is a clear signature of the comfort assessing nature of truth.
There are even more exotic computations of comfort. Spirituality, for instance, uses completely different algorithms to compute your comfort, and it is quite likely that this comfort is not described by a single system but by a more colorful array of sensations, allowing it to address the more complex matters than one generally encounters in the emotional realm to which conventional dual logic is usually of little avail. Neither of the systems is more relevant. Each of them has their own dynamical properties, the notion of truth being more a phenomenon of the second (the rational) than of the first. In real life however, they do not act independently but cooperate.
If you feel now that reality is unreal, don't worry; you've found a link between reality and unrealness. Don't drive yourself nuts between thinking the world is real and thinking that the world is unreal: you'll be simply traveling back and forth the path that leads from one to the other. The more you think, the more dynamical connections there are. It's all just a motion.
That is, it's not that we can't understand reality, it's that we have a misconceived view of what understanding reality really means. To understand something means to solidly connect it to other phenomena we were comfortable with to begin with. We can most certainly do this all the time. Connections happen naturally. But those connections don't need to be particularly sacred or even unique (though as we interact with each other a common set of connections will arise out of our collective discussion). They are just dynamical bridges between experiences.
The piling up of systems on systems means locally each system reacts to the behavior of the other systems and not directly to an outer constraint. That's how sophisticated concepts like fear come about. Fear is to suffer because we think we are going to suffer. A second system with properties similar to the first one has been created to react to the activation of the first.
In a way, mathematics and logics are a similar thing. They are studies of the sense of rational comfort. Each of them is also a system looking a itself by reproducing into a second system which responds to the first. This system reproduction is a very common thing which makes both systems stronger. It happens when a system naturally expands and (occasionally) connects to itself.
To be clearer, this means mathematics and logics are algorithmic theories of the mind. Truth and False describe the sensation of comfort, of whether we should act according to a given proposition or not. These systems also behave like an economy. The theoretical structure of truth or falseness in our minds is like a bad neighborhood. Whenever a new proposition comes in for the first time it has to make friends. The more well-established friends it makes, the safer it will be. Someday it could even become one of the leaders. The connections it builds are logical bridges. If it goes against someone stronger (better connected) it will most-likely be declared False. If it goes up against someone weaker than it will be declared True.
Sometimes we feel like we haven't understood something well enough even though we can use it. That's because that theory is still not well established in the social environment of the mind. It is malconnected and therefore requires a lot of energy to process. That rush of pleasure we get when something suddenly fits in is because it has become a harmonious feature of what was already there.
This sense of comfort is obviously a personal thing despite what one might think. We logical people tend to claim that it is universal even though 99% of all human decisions made in the world do not obey it. Very often, if someone fails to accept our logical reasoning, we call them stupid and move on. That however is a total failure in grasping the full complexity and diversity of the methods of computing this comfort regarding a particular statement.
A good example of this is the theory of pair production versus time reflection. In the twentieth century, physicists discovered that, sometimes, pairs of particles with opposite charge can pop spontaneously into existence, which seemed to violate the well-established notion that nothing is created, all is transformed. A complicated theory was developed to describe it until a handful of physicists, Stückelberg, Wheeler and Feynman, independently proposed that what was actually going on was a particle making a u-turn in time. Indeed, if a particle coming from the future makes a u-turn at some time and goes back to the future then before that time, to an observer moving uniformly forwards in time, one doesn't see anything until suddenly two particles appear, one moving in the same direction in time and the other one in the opposite time direction, a.k.a., one with positively charged and one negatively charged.
Despite being a much simpler view, this perspective is still to this day regarded by the many only as a mathematical equivalence because it involves processes that happen in the reverse time direction. This proposition, in competition with the other already existing propositions in their minds, failed to fit in. The discomfort caused by such a view is greater than the discomfort caused by the greater cumbersomeness of the alternative description of spontaneous pair production. Similarly, to creationists, the notion of evolution causes a greater discomfort than the cumbersomeness of their theory on the establishment of species. To a defendant of one view, the simple imagining the other point of view causes enough discomfort to lead to heated discussions and preaching movements where each side tries to eradicate the possibility of the other one. The drive to convince others is a clear signature of the comfort assessing nature of truth.
There are even more exotic computations of comfort. Spirituality, for instance, uses completely different algorithms to compute your comfort, and it is quite likely that this comfort is not described by a single system but by a more colorful array of sensations, allowing it to address the more complex matters than one generally encounters in the emotional realm to which conventional dual logic is usually of little avail. Neither of the systems is more relevant. Each of them has their own dynamical properties, the notion of truth being more a phenomenon of the second (the rational) than of the first. In real life however, they do not act independently but cooperate.
Saturday, March 15, 2014
Marjorie
Marjorie is a simple being. In all of her life, all she does is move back and forth in a tube filled with goo. Marjorie is a humble collection of cells. That happy little village of cells lives off the goo in the tube. Whenever the goo is hot, the little cells work and work, and the product of their work, expelled in puffs, propels the whole in some direction. The hotter it gets, the more frequent these puffs are. Life is pleasant for Marjorie.
Now, being temperature the only thing we can tell Marjorie craves for, we decided to stick a candle under the pipe to make her happy. Far away from the candle, Marjorie swims back and forth at random, with wide gaps between the puffs that send her in either direction. In this dark extremity, she is starving. Her cells are slowly dying away. Fortunately, thanks to aeons of natural selection, the cells of her kin have developed this ability to emit a beneficial substance that stimulates cellular growth whenever there is a sudden increase in their activity. Because the walls of the cells only absorb substances when they're puffing, only the active cells at the moment of the increase in activity will absorb it. So if a cell is puffing at the time when an increase of temperature happens (which causes an increase in cell activity), the activity of that cell is reinforced. In this way, the cells whose activity brings the whole closer to the candle will work more and more, whereas the other ones will work just as much. They will swim towards the candle, away from the darkness where they wanted as the collective of cells, otherwise known to us as Marjorie, experiences pleasure. That is what pleasure is: the activation of a mechanism by which a certain behavior is reinforced. The more general process is called learning. Marjorie has learned that swimming towards the heat is good.
It is important to notice that this type of learning, pleasure, is pure positive reinforcement. If the candle were placed at the middle of the pipe, Marjorie would happily swim past it until the cells swimming in the other direction get equally reinforced.
Her cells, unfortunately, do not deal so well with excessive heat. If it's too hot, her cells start to die. Again, thanks to generations of trial and error, whenever a cell dies, it emits a substance which is absorbed by the puffing cells. However, this time, the substance actually kills the cell, or at least reduces its activity. It's as if when a cell died, it inadvertently exerted a post-mortem revenge on those who caused its death. In practice, this results in a decrease in the activity of the cells that swim towards the heat whenever the heat becomes too excessive and starts to damage the cells. The whole, Marjorie, experiences suffering. It is also a learning experience, but a negative one. That's what suffering is: the activation of a mechanism by which a specific behavior is inhibited.
But this reaction is not enough. Suffering only teaches not to do, it doesn't force Marjorie out of her present condition where if she stays, she will slowly die, cell by cell. Though let's not forget that as she shakes around that spot, any increase in activity will release beneficial substances which will reinforce the motion away from the excessive heat. Marjorie will eventually find a stable position at the sweetest spot between fire and ice where she will live on to grow and prosper, reproducing all the way to a beautiful dinosaur.
In our own brains, this basic behavior of elements reinforcing what helps them and punishing what harms them is enough to explain intelligent behavior. Marjorie was meant to point out how suffering and pleasure come about naturally. Therefore any adaptive system experiences them.
In our own brains, more and more systems have developed on top of each other. We not only have systems which reinforce the increase in the cellular activity but we also have systems which directly react to the variations of pain conveyors, to reinforce behavior which minimizes the pain. That is why you feel pleasure when pain ceases. That is also why you seek more and more that behavior. It is the underlying dynamical situation which translates into pleasure in your own subjective experience.
On the other hand, if the system reacts positively to the substance emitted by the cells when they die, the behavior which led to that will be reinforced and a self-destructive trajectory is undertaken. In your own life, you would perceive that as cutting yourself with a knife and doing it more and more often, instead of less and less as it usually happens. You would feel pleasure instead of suffering. Masochism is just that. Pain does not have to mean suffering. It's how the system reacts to it which dictates the way it's experienced.
Now, being temperature the only thing we can tell Marjorie craves for, we decided to stick a candle under the pipe to make her happy. Far away from the candle, Marjorie swims back and forth at random, with wide gaps between the puffs that send her in either direction. In this dark extremity, she is starving. Her cells are slowly dying away. Fortunately, thanks to aeons of natural selection, the cells of her kin have developed this ability to emit a beneficial substance that stimulates cellular growth whenever there is a sudden increase in their activity. Because the walls of the cells only absorb substances when they're puffing, only the active cells at the moment of the increase in activity will absorb it. So if a cell is puffing at the time when an increase of temperature happens (which causes an increase in cell activity), the activity of that cell is reinforced. In this way, the cells whose activity brings the whole closer to the candle will work more and more, whereas the other ones will work just as much. They will swim towards the candle, away from the darkness where they wanted as the collective of cells, otherwise known to us as Marjorie, experiences pleasure. That is what pleasure is: the activation of a mechanism by which a certain behavior is reinforced. The more general process is called learning. Marjorie has learned that swimming towards the heat is good.
It is important to notice that this type of learning, pleasure, is pure positive reinforcement. If the candle were placed at the middle of the pipe, Marjorie would happily swim past it until the cells swimming in the other direction get equally reinforced.
Her cells, unfortunately, do not deal so well with excessive heat. If it's too hot, her cells start to die. Again, thanks to generations of trial and error, whenever a cell dies, it emits a substance which is absorbed by the puffing cells. However, this time, the substance actually kills the cell, or at least reduces its activity. It's as if when a cell died, it inadvertently exerted a post-mortem revenge on those who caused its death. In practice, this results in a decrease in the activity of the cells that swim towards the heat whenever the heat becomes too excessive and starts to damage the cells. The whole, Marjorie, experiences suffering. It is also a learning experience, but a negative one. That's what suffering is: the activation of a mechanism by which a specific behavior is inhibited.
But this reaction is not enough. Suffering only teaches not to do, it doesn't force Marjorie out of her present condition where if she stays, she will slowly die, cell by cell. Though let's not forget that as she shakes around that spot, any increase in activity will release beneficial substances which will reinforce the motion away from the excessive heat. Marjorie will eventually find a stable position at the sweetest spot between fire and ice where she will live on to grow and prosper, reproducing all the way to a beautiful dinosaur.
In our own brains, this basic behavior of elements reinforcing what helps them and punishing what harms them is enough to explain intelligent behavior. Marjorie was meant to point out how suffering and pleasure come about naturally. Therefore any adaptive system experiences them.
In our own brains, more and more systems have developed on top of each other. We not only have systems which reinforce the increase in the cellular activity but we also have systems which directly react to the variations of pain conveyors, to reinforce behavior which minimizes the pain. That is why you feel pleasure when pain ceases. That is also why you seek more and more that behavior. It is the underlying dynamical situation which translates into pleasure in your own subjective experience.
On the other hand, if the system reacts positively to the substance emitted by the cells when they die, the behavior which led to that will be reinforced and a self-destructive trajectory is undertaken. In your own life, you would perceive that as cutting yourself with a knife and doing it more and more often, instead of less and less as it usually happens. You would feel pleasure instead of suffering. Masochism is just that. Pain does not have to mean suffering. It's how the system reacts to it which dictates the way it's experienced.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)