In trying to find out more about the nature of the mind and of reality, you very often find yourself like a man on a boat reading about the sea. Though learning about the discoveries and interpretations of others, often better equipped technologically, is very important, you shouldn't stick your nose too close to the book as to miss out on the chance to see the ocean with your own eyes.
It is one thing to hear someone say that the truth is a just sense of comfort and it is an entirely different one to experience that for yourself. In our own search, quiet observation of the motion of our minds has allowed us to witness the cogs of our thinking process and recognize crucial emotions which are involved in many other mental phenomena. "Love doesn't have to make sense to make sense." (quoted from How I met your mother by C.B.S.). The feel of making sense is something more universal than what pure logics considers sensible. If you take a careful look at the phenomenological interplay within your mind you might too come to realize the algorithmic diversity of the many logics at our disposal of which the one described in mathematical books is only one of them.
The internal world is an odd and complex universe whose exploration will definitely amaze you. It can't do any less than enrich your understanding of existence. We would like to present here a mental technique which developed as we explored our new views of reality. It revealed and still reveals a lot to us about our own perception but, above all, it is a lot of fun. We picture it as a sport with great side-effects. We call it - for lack of a worse name - the Way of the Intercepting Mind.
There's another reason why this technique was so important to us. In coming to realize the absolute relativity of things, even of granted absolutes such as truth or the notion of self, we experienced, to say the least, a strong mix of dismay and excitement. Of course, we could just be bananas, but the loss of any stable frame of reference sounds like an acceptable excuse to feel lost. We were suddenly confronted with a very different world where we didn't really know how to behave. The Way of the Intercepting Mind has helped us cope with it. Imagine yourself living in your own little village in northern Norway and you read about the outrageous incomprehensible habits of the inhabitants of Canton. You feel lost, maybe even angry. They do things you thought you couldn't do. They eat things you thought nobody would eat. Worst even if you're transported there and you suddenly realize that you don't know how to behave properly anymore. All the references that you built throughout your long learning experience growing up to your age are useless. You don't know how to hold a pair of chopsticks, you can't talk, you don't even know how to read body language. That is how we felt.
The Way of the Intercepting Mind is basically an immersion program to familiarize yourself with this exotic reality. It's the sane, let's say compassionate, approach to dealing with this new world. Instead of cursing these strange people and running back to your homeland and closing the drapes to the outside world, it's a choice to befriend what you can't wish away. It's a way of learning how to live in a universe that makes sense in a very different way from what makes sense. It's kind of like a wise insanity.
The technique is very simple. To start, just sit, relax, and look at what's happening in your mind. It's not as easy as it looks. We know from the study of dynamical equations that a system coupled to itself often exhibits runaway or oscillatory solutions. Your mind might quiet down or release full blown chaos on you. It might start to chase after it's own tail. You are likely to feel a strong feeling of utter boredom. Your legs will start to twitch and you will feel this thing, this strong emotion, trying to pull you away from that situation. It will tell you that this is stupid, that this is useless, that you're doing it wrong, that you're wasting your time, that if you keep doing it, it could lead to the very breakdown of your self. The way of the intercepting mind gives you a chance to witness first hand how powerful this force is, how it fuels your thoughts and even moves your body. How little in control you are.
Your goal is to surf this force.
The name The Way of the Intercepting Mind comes from the idea of not running away from these forces but facing them, not in a confrontational way but in an embracing way. You don't want to be rolled by the wave nor to stand your ground against the wave (because you're likely to lose). You want to surf it. As you start to observe the mind you will start to recognize different drives, different forces, how they interact and how they drive you. They make you walk, talk and think the way they want you to think, talk and walk. You will become aware of how much more is going on in the backstage. How thoughts are like steam floating on a boiling pot. You may blow the steam away and quiet you thoughts, but soon more steam comes out of it. That's why when people tell you not to think about something you can do it for a few seconds, maybe even a few minutes but not more. That's also why ideas are so difficult to convey: in this text we are giving you the print of that steam and we are asking you to reproduce the boiling pot.
The familiarization with these forces is the main objective of the technique. It doesn't take very long to catch one; after all, they make up your whole experience. Once you succeed in riding one you'll realize that the way of the intercepting mind can safely take you much further along this emotion than being simply rolled by it. You can experience profound sadness or excruciating pain without jumping off a balcony. Like any other sport, it just takes practice.
Becoming proficient in this art you could develop a feeling of pride because you're invincible. You can ride any emotion you want. Though if you're actually really good at it you will eventually catch a glimpse of the force that compels you to ride other forces. There's always one behind your back, making you do whatever you do.
Of course, by then you realize that there is no one taking control of anything. What you thought was you surfing an emotion is just another imperative pushing you towards surfing that emotion. You can now surf that imperative but bit by bit you lose the perspective that there is anyone choosing to do anything. The Way of the Intercepting Mind is just the natural phenomenon of all these different forces harmonizing.
Just like surfing a wave, surfing these forces requires letting go. If you try to control the wave you fall. The only way to stand on the wave is to acquire the motion of the wave. It's to become unjudgingly the wave. In that way, the way of the intercepting mind requires you to unjudgingly become you.
And unlike the earlier feeling of pride, a successful letting go actually brings with it a sense of deep compassion. It's probably a side-effect of your constant training towards accepting whatever comes, even things which your mind might initially pass a negative judgement on. Our personal findings appear to agree with the descriptions present in traditional meditative practices such as hinduism, buddhism and taoism. A lot of experimental effort in the field of neurology is going today into understanding better how compassion arises in the practice of meditation (check this out).
Anyway. Go stand on your mind, see if you can.
Sunday, April 6, 2014
Monday, March 17, 2014
A clarification on who experiences the subjective experience
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Why does pain hurt?
All life is suffering.
This is the grounding principle of Buddhism that still amazes me to this day as it was taught more than two thousand years ago by a man with no access to physics, mathematics, neuroscience or any of the other rational commodities we comfortably enjoy today. He hypothesised that suffering was a force that permeated all life and designed a careful path of mental training which aimed at overcoming this condition. Counterintuitively it did not involve the cessation of pain.
This question has puzzled me since an early age. Why does pain hurt? We know what pain is. It's a collection of signals sent from the so-called nocireceptors to the central nervous system and then to the brain. It can be triggered by a strong mechanical stimulation, by high heat or by the potassium release of bursted cells. It travels on known chemistries through known pathways across the nervous system, riding up along the spinal cord, up to the brain stem through the thalamus into the cortex where it blossoms like a beautiful question mark: why does it hurt? Why does pain hurt? Why does this dull, unrecognisably grey exchange in the nervous system hurt so damn much?
To find the answer we don't need to dive so deep to where it's pitch dark. We all know what suffering is. It's something we avoid. And pain is not the problem. You can pinch yourself and though you feel a subtle pain you can go on. The real problem is suffering, of which pain is a common cause. Suffering is what keeps your hand away from the fire.
If we are to view ourselves as mechanical beings then suffering is what will prevent us in the future from doing something. It's a simple observation: if I hit my nose with a hammer and I feel pain and pain makes me suffer, I won't do it again. After the experience, like the nose, the system just isn't the same. It has become dynamically impossible for the system to spontaneously pick up a hammer and hit itself. If you don't believe my word, try it yourself, I trust my odds.
The motion of a system towards a new dynamical state is called learning. The formation of and motion away from a repulsive state is called suffering. The formation of and motion towards an attractive state is called pleasure.
Of course, impossible is such a strong word and an inaccurate one for that matter. The system could very well find a way around it after sometime. The system could also perpetuate its suffering by suppressing the wrong reaction to a painful stimulus thereby hopping on a spiral of hurt. Which is worsened if additionally a smart part of the system reacts positively to it and a dumb part of the system reacts negatively, which results in an obsessive behaviour, with one end of the mind being drawn to an action which causes the suffering of another. The system could also overreact, blocking far more than is required, which is called a trauma. This also explains why you can learn to not suffer from pain, by familiarising yourself with the feeling and ceasing to react negatively to it. And even pleasure, instead of suffering, can arise out pain, if pain's dynamical role is to encourage the system to react more often in a destructive way, which is termed masochism.
These definitions of suffering and pleasure are applicable to any system. In fact, they are familiar experiences to any adaptive system. In the next post we'll deal with a very simple and completely unrealistic one: Marjorie.
Sunday, January 12, 2014
The me and the tree
The ones among us that are vegetarians quite often hear the observation:
"Plants can also feel, you know?"
Putting aside how obvious that is, it is worth considering what actually distinguishes us from plants. We look at ourselves as independent, discrete beings, separated from our surroundings with which we interact. Then we look at a tree and that is what we tend to see as well: a discrete being, with its definite separation from it's environment. We then compare these two discrete units -- the "me" and the "tree" -- and see 'obvious' differences, and the absence of a central nervous system is not the least of them. No one denies the complexity of the interactions between the cells in a plant, akin to the complexity we see in our own skin and other organs. But certainly this is not a match to the complexity of our brains and the whole nervous system!
But we are now starting to know better. Remember the simple model akin to a neural network. I say 'akin', of course, because it is not necessarily composed by neurones. Look back at the tree. It might seem to be a simple being when compared to ourselves, but they tend to live in large societies we usually call forests. And we are not talking about "autistic" individuals, living their own life without caring (or knowing) about their neighbours. They communicate with each other. Widening the scope of our analysis to this community we can see all sort of amazing dynamics. For instance: trees infested with bugs will signal the surrounding trees the event so that they can prepare, excreting chemicals that dissuade the same sort of insect attacks. They might even communicate with predatory insects to ask for protection from herbivores [1]. Furthermore, we are coming across with several ways of communicating [2]. We now know that the use of an intricate subterranean system of fungi to communicate chemical signals is fairly common. The roots themselves are obvious ways of communicating underground messages. And, as it has been known for a while now, chemicals can be emitted to the air and picked up by nearby trees, conveying messages as well. The dynamics of these systems are not that different from the dynamics of a nervous system, though with different temporal and spacial scales (we will come back to this in a later post).
We thus might have been letting the trees block our view of the forest. We just need to look to the right scale -- the forest, including other beings that interact with the trees -- and realize that we are not that different.
We leave you with an exercise. Observe the world today and consider: what other systems, subsets of the world around us, show this wonderful dynamic behaviour? Are you part of it? What would it (He? She?) think of you?
Friday, January 10, 2014
Paradox Powered
Some might have missed the point of the previous post, because it's a subtle one. The initial statements we made were based on the assumption that there is an underlying physical world which is fundamental and true. Then we added that all observers are phenomena within this physical world and whose relative reality is necessarily bounded, even though the underlying reality remains true.
The main point is that values such as truth are not universal but relative. We may take them for intrinsic qualities of reality but that only works within a limited scope. Truth is itself an outcome of the interaction of phenomena and we would like in this post to develop this idea a bit further, by bringing out its dynamical qualities.
Let's dive right in. If the truth is the state of a system then a proposition is the external stimulus. The system reacts to the stimulus by going either to the state 'true' or 'false'. If we wish to make a statement about everything then we must also include the state of the system itself in the statement. Such is an example of a complete set:
This statement is true.
albeit not a very enlightening one. The statement connects the outcome of the truth system and of the statement, which in this case are the same entity. It's a complete statement, the same as an equation that describes the dynamics of the system as a whole, like the equations that governed the motion of our magnet-and-detector system. As an equation, it can be solved by finding the true/false trajectory that satisfies it. So if we start by assuming the statement "This statement is true." to be true then the statement tells us the statement is true, which corresponds to a trajectory
where each square represents the truth value of the statement at a given time (flowing from left to right, black means 'true', white means 'false'). If we start by assuming the statement is false then the opposite of being true is false, so the statement is consistently false
Try however, this equation instead:
This statement is false.
If we start with the assumption that the statement is true, then it is false. If however it is true then it must be false. This equation has no stationary solutions. They are:
Both equations can be described in the following way:
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Once we realize that paradoxes can be treated as equations with non-stationary solutions then we're pretty much ready to analyse just about anything. A scientific view is a collection of logical statements which are connected somehow, of which some of them are the theory and some of them are the observational evidence. They must form a complete set, so that the equations can be solved. We usually expect the scientific view to be like
which is a stable view. However, it looks more often like
where some problems remain unsolvable. Nevertheless, even a stationary view can be challenged by the results of an experiment
In this case, the system undergoes some turmoil but then returns to a stable configuration with the conclusion that the experiment is wrong. However, this behaviour is also possible
which is called a scientific revolution. The very complex linkage between statements makes the system prone to radical changes, a very common feature of complex systems. Here, the system is pushed out of balance by the new evidence and undergoes a transition phase as it's caught in the basin of attraction of another stable configuration which eventually becomes the next accepted paradigm.
Stationary solutions are common but have a huge lack of adaptability and are therefore selected away by the constant inflow of knowledge. Real theories, like real organisms, include mostly stable statements but also some oscillating ones, persistent loops of logic.
When we include ourselves in the theory we quickly run into such loops. That's why it's so difficult to think about the consciousness as our reasoning inevitably starts to chase after its own tail. But we should not be discouraged by this event: it actually reveals the phenomenological and dynamical nature of reality. It means that, instead of worshipping it like a precious stone, we have to treat our theory like a living organism, with its evolving traits but also its cyclic ones, its beating heart and breathing lungs. We started from the assumption that subjective experience stems from physical phenomena and we found that physical phenomena stem from subjective experience. None is more fundamental, they revolve around each other in a logical gravitation.
On the other hand, string theory and other religious movements perpetually seek additional statements which preserve the stable structure of certain dogmatic ones. This ends up being a neurotic behaviour eventually leading to a messy, energy-consuming organism of very little use, like a fat untouchable king cloistered amongst his own devout guard. Sane views abandon the pretence of universalness.
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