Category Archives: Memes

The Hard Problem? Really?

control, CSP, Language, Memes, Newton, resonance, Time

The Hard Problem? Really?

There is no “hard problem”. The language used to set up the hard problem repeats all the known and fatal errors that arise when dealing with experience.

The supposed qualia are experiential, not observable. As used in standard discussion within the field of cognitive science and its philosophy, they are an attempt to take the domain of experience and treat it as a thing – as something to be found in the world. Worse, they partition experience, until all that is left is the poverty of the notion of “redness” or “sweetness”. Experience does not reduce in this fashion. This is the persistent problem: treating of mind, or consciousness, or qualia, as something to be found in the world.

My preferred term, because it helps to get things straight, is experience. Mind, consciousness and qualia are all just confused ways of acknowledging the reality of experience in the first person. And experience is not to be found in the world. Experience is what gives us a world in the first place.

Let us digress, before this becomes bitter, and go back to a fictional Isaac Newton, sitting under an apple tree in rural England, looking at apples, perhaps picking one or two up, feeling them, hefting them, throwing one up in the air and catching it, then biting into one.

Content and Vehicle

CSP, Film, Memes, P-worlds

There is a long-standing discussion among some consciousness philosophers, about the need to distinguish between the content of consciousness and the vehicle that enables that content. You look at a two-dimensional illuminated glass panel, but you see through the TV screen to the content beneath. Bollox. This may surprise, but there are only vehicles to be seen. All we can talk about are media, the surface, the vehicles. The content is subjective experience, and we can not refer to that. Language has limits.

Overcoming Dualisms

CSP, Madness, Meaning, Memes, neuroscience, P-worlds, Self

Sometimes, we increase our understanding by introducing distinctions. If you look at a lump and can’t figure out its structure, you might make a distinction, and notice that the lump is a composite of two distinct things, and suddenly you understand its structure much better. We do this all the time, as when we identify two kinds of diabetes, with similar symptoms (the lump) but distinct etiologies (juvenile and acquired). Or when we learn the name of a new flower.

At other times, we learn by reconciling apparently distinct things. In this case, we see two entities turning out to be but different images of the same underlying structure. We do this often also, as when reading a story, the plot falls into place and you can reconcile previously incongruous sub-plots, or when we recognize the mother in the child.

Should we consider these to be distinct enterprises? Is the first Science and the second Religion? Hardly. Yet the knowledge offered by the contemplative traditions seems to be that obtained by following the second course exclusively, while the first is a caricature of purely reductionistic science.

But I think in bringing experience under the fold of collective inquiry, or in finding ways of discussing experience that, at least, do not offend scientists too much, we are making progress in the second way, and science, or our common stock of understanding, improves as a result. Here are some that merit our attention:

In talking about minds, we habitually use the terms “inner” and “outer”. This is a strange linguistic habit, and we should be taken somewhat aback if asked about the spatial referents of these terms. There are none, although convention locates the “inner” space within the head. However, if we look inside, we see only brains. Unifying these two is a huge hurdle, and possibly one of the resolutions of opposites that may be said to accompany enlightenment. The extended mind thesis testifies to the possibility of unifying the language in which we discuss these two, though it stops short of recognizing that they are not distinct realms, going for the cheap gag of making you imagine your mind somehow leaking out into the world.

Another pair that admit of unification is rather surprising: perception and action are not separate things. We have been thinking of them as input and output to something, and have identified with the middle bit, and called it mind. However, the cellular example (described elsewhere) perfectly illustrates the relation between perception and action, whereby we can see that they are co-determining, and not in a relation as cause and effect. This is true for a single cell, and it is true for humans. We can see the direct relationship only sometimes: the swaying room in which the optic flow at the retina allows the coupling of room and torso motion nicely illustrates the coupling between perception and action which is so tight that they become indistinguishable. Nervous systems mediate this relationship, making it harder for us to see, but the lawfulness of the relation still obtains. The mediation is what ultimately gives rise to phenomenal worlds. So if perception/action are unified, that places us in a bit of a bind. It presents with the puzzle of interpreting present experience, which now seems to be deterministic or at least sufficiently lawful that it will not support our notions of volition and agency. If the perception/action relation is invertible, present experience does not consist of cause and effect.

One way out of this bind is to recognize the P-world as distinct from the self. The P-world is present experience, and in recognizing it, we can learn to overcome several dualities. In present experience, the P-world, the subject/object divide is no more. There is no distinction between the perciever and the percept. Attention/Salience is another dualism that is hereby overcome. Salience is the “outer” form of attention. Attention the “inner” form of salience. Damasio does this nicely in his work when he distinguishes between emotion and feeling (if I am correct here, I need to check), one of which is the phenomenological concept, the other the observable counterpart.

The experience of a sound in Brighton

CSP, Meaning, Memes, P-worlds

Brighton, 7/8/08

I was hungover today. I’m at a cognitive linguistics conference. I just came to have a wee look. I’m not from this territory. But they put on a bit of a show, with George Lakoff and Lera Boroditsky and Michael Tomasello, and that seemed to be worthwhile, and I had funding and Jack is away in Portugal, so I came.

Last night was the banquet, and true to form I got drunk. Had a swim on the way home, talked too loudly at dinner about drugs. The usual. This morning, I intended going to talks. Its the last day of the conference, and there was a big session on Gesture, and my grad student, Tom, was there and under some obligation to attend. I skipped the first big talk, and made a leisurely entrance about 11 o’clock. The first speaker got up and managed to alienate me within about 3 sentences. She talked about language. Ok. I’m down with language. She talked about embodiment. I’m well down with embodiment, so that’s cool. Then she talked about mental representation and the propositional vs imagistic debate. I couldn’t even stay in the room. I left. Sent Tom a text telling him that cognitive science is fucked. and left.

I walked today. I walked and walked. East three miles, back, west three miles, back, inland, up and down. Mainly looking at pretty girls. Sun shining. Bikinis at the beach. Brain wasted. Very much enjoying living in the moment, attending to experience. And wondering what that was, attending to experience. If there is no subject and no object in experience, there is no one to attend. But not taking it too seriously, and looking for nice women to look at.

Then I kicked a limpet. One of the ubiquitous slipper limpets. The sex changers. I heard the sound. I was trying to see the experience as it is, without the subject/object split. I was, briefly the experience. Which is fine. But where was the experience? It was out there. About a metre in front of my toe. The experience was out in the world. There is confusion about experience. This brought it home. I almost puked. I knew experience. It was nowhere near my head. My head, at most, provided the origin of a coordinate system. Other than that, there was only brains, wet brains, in my head, and I had no perception of them. The sound, or the experience of the sound, was a metre in front of my toe.

Then I started trying to distinguish between the sounds, all the sounds, around me, and the experience of those sounds. I failed completely. In every attempt. The sounds, and the experience of the sounds, were indistinguishable. And lovely. I relished the experience, and the experience was a distance away from me. I tried it with vision. I nearly fell over. I looked at a car. I can see the car. Easy. The experience of the car was in the location of the car. Nowhere near my head. You can talk about the car I was seeing, but all I had available to me was the seeing of the car. It was well off in the distance.

It was the most worthwhile hangover I have ever had. I own my own P-world. I feel it. The “where” question is just funny. I want to scream it. Look. Here. Now.

Addendum, a year later:

I came across Wolfgang Göethe’s notion of “Gegenständliches Denken”, and recognized it as being about the same relationship to the phenomenal:

Gagenstaendliches Denken

Hat tip to Bill Sharpe for pointing out the account of Göethe’s  scientific method.  Here’s the whole document: Goethe’s Delicate Empiricism

The lunatics are in the house

Art, control, CSP, Madness, Memes, music, P-worlds, resonance, Silly

Most psychotics are harmless.  Lucky people get to be psychotic without harm.  Musicians do. Music is psychosis without the pain.  Best really listened to alone. But there is a serious point to this.  If there is continuity between the suffering psychotic and the happy psychotic, and both rest on an altered equilibrium between the endogenous dynamic and the exogenous one, then we could learn more by studying the felicitous ones.  Are there mirrors there when they are enjoying themselves?  Do advertisements inhibit enjoyment? What role do the various visible evidences of other similarly constituted dynamics give? It is a huge imaginative step to try to imagine a P-world that is not subjected to the influence of endogenous and exogenous dynamics.  It can’t really be done.  But recognizing this boundary does not rob the individual of autonomy.  Because there is no I in a P-world.  There, there is a boundary that marks the subject-object divide.  It has to do with nervous systems.  It is the mediation between perception and action.   Perhaps here is a way to reconcile personal and public.  The altered equilibrium referred to above is morally neutral. By studying the interface in the happy and the sad lunatics, we will learn more.  The word lunatic is about to get a new definition.  p.s. I now feel silly for thinking badly of people who listen to music in the background while they work.  There is no background.  No foreground either.  Experience is a shape shifter.  This was written along with some excellent Russian modern classical tones.

Addendum, over a year later, I stumble upon this in Charles McCreery’s work:

picture-10.png

Found here.

Exercise: disconnecting

control, CSP, Memes, Self

Here’s a handy little exercise you can try at home.  Or near home, because I need you to go to your local supermarket.  The one you shop in most.  Go in, and act you are doing your shopping.  Walk among the familiar aisles.  Now disconnect.   Stop acting like you are shopping.  Become aware of the physical space around you.  Note the volume of the building.  Now look at all the people around you.  Notice how all their behavior is dictated by the supermarket: this communally designed engine.  It tells them where to look.  It plays them like fiddles.  It develops their expectations and weakly satisfies them.  That much is easy.  Now, you just disconnected from the matrix.  You stopped being pushed and pulled around by the memes.  It may surprise you to learn that security are almost on to you at this point.  You will stand out.  Your behavior will register as abnormal.  You are now among the mad.  Retain enough common sense to disconnect where it will not seem weird if you just stand there and look a bit mad.  Have fun, and tell me (stonepharisee@gmail.com) how you get on.

Bring on armageddon!

Art, CSP, Future projects, Madness, Memes, music, resonance, Silly

The Church of the Stone Pharisee demands belief in the rationality of the lunatic.  The ‘delusions’ are none such, but result from a specific relationship between the P-world of an individual and those around him.  They often are being controlled by the ideas.  In hearing voices, they are merely being aware of some of the stuff going on in nervous systems (that annoying repetitive tune: do you own it?).  No wonder its confusing, and the stories come out peculiarly.  Therein lies the lack of the self: the P-world has lost some of its autonomy.

In this regard, I am highly amused to see that that gloriously batty compser, Alexander Scriabin, described Stravinsky as “Apostle” to the “Latin reactionaries”.  I have no ideas who these Latin reactionaries are, and I suspect that they do not constitute a natural kind. Scriabin was entirely incoherent, and that is interesting, because he was standing at an interesting point. He was immersed in a sea of cultural currents, and he dreamed of multimedia performance (Scriabin was a VJ long before there were VJs).  He was probably also a synaesthetic. He had tics as a child and was known for not sitting still (Children, pay heed!).

Before he died, runour has it that he was working on a big light and music job, to be played in the Himalays.  Once played, in the right setting, it would bring on Armageddon.  Anybody fancying having a go?  I’d love to try it out.