Showing posts with label consciousness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label consciousness. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Thoughts on having a self - Deric's MindBlog as WebLog - January 2024

In the spirit of the original personal WebLogs of the 1990s that morphed into Blogs that enjoyed a golden era in the 2000s, I am offering readers a trial version of a putative series of posts containing selected and edited free standing clips from my personal  ‘mind journal’ - which is a subset of paragraphs taken from the larger personal journal that I have been maintaining for over 25 years.  Most of these paragraphs suggest perspectives on how our minds work, some are on random topics. I hope these perspectives might not seem too alien to readers, and possibly be found useful by a few.  Below are some mind journal paragraphs from January 2024.

1/2/24
The I* signifier,  (from a recent community.wakingup.com discussion) might be a good minimal token for expressing the space or process from which the present moment’s version of a self or I can appear. During moments of renewal or recharge,  when awareness first intuits this process, there can be an intense brief sense of naïveté, openness and joy - excitement at the prospect of novelty, experiencing new things. For original mind no activity is off the table.

1/3/2024
Has my timing been right a second time?

In the early 1990s I decided that the cream had been skimmed with respect to discovering the basic molecular steps that turn photons of light into a nerve signal in our eyes. Some of the steps were revealed by experiments in my laboratory. I decided to switch my attention to studying how our minds work, not in direct laboratory experiments, but through studying, writing about, and lecturing on the work of others.

Moving from the early to mid 2020s I’m feeling a second ‘the cream has been skimmed’ sentiment with respect to the biology of mind:  There is a general understanding and acknowledgement by the scientific and educated lay community that our illusory predictive selves are generated by impersonal neuronal nerve nets. There is no 'hard problem of consciousness’ - it is an illusion like everything else in our heads - and the main function of counter theories (explanations at the level of quantum physics, etc.) is to sustain the continued academic employment of those espousing them.

I feel like my 2022 UT Forum lecture, “New Perspectives on how our Minds Work” may have been a last hurrah with respect to studying the Biology of Mind, just as the 1996 Brain and Behavioral Sciences article was a last hurrah in my vision research career.

It is feeling like it's time to let go, to move on…perhaps to art, music, AI, studying the emergence of trans-human forms…..

1/3/24
…if other people choose behaviors that will lead to their demise there is little one can do, even with physical restraint and medication, to compel them to choose otherwise. They are performing a version of their I or self that is self destructive, and that they are unable to escape. 

Some are able to escape to feel redemption in surrender to a higher power, being ‘saved by the Lord’ or a secular equivalent such as non-dual awareness. Both are defined by yielding ultimate agency to something other than the experienced I or self - allowing a return to feeling the sense of security and repose of the newborn infant feeling loving care. As that infant begins to develop an I or ego it loses awareness of how much of its well-being depends on powers beyond its control and generates an illusory sense of agency.  

1/4/24
A general rule is to see people as they are, not as you want them to be. However, if you treat people as you want or expect them to be, not as they are, sometimes they might begin to slowly conform to your expectations.  This would be the basis of the effectiveness of Gandhi’s advice to “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

1/8/24 When attention is at bay, the gremlins will play, letting one’s disposition and temperament be molded more by outside input and less by internal reflection. The ending slide of several of my talks is the simple phrase “pay attention.”  The ability to do that is a good assay of biological aging and a predictor of longevity.

1/9/24
Attention doesn’t have to be ‘at tension.’ Priors that have pre-tensed muscles for the most probable action to be taken can sometimes be let go.

1/10/24
Now that I know that I can go to the engine room and reboot the Deric-OS with relative ease, there is no compelling reason to emphasize remaining there. What is needed is an appropriate balance between the brain’s attentional and default mode (mind wandering or rumination) systems,  just as with sympathetic and parasympathetic autonomic nervous systems. Going to extremes interferes with remaining gently attentive to one’s states of arousal, valence, and agency (A/V/A) and in touch with value, purpose, and meaning (V/P/M).

The point of paying attention is not to be in some sort of constant blissful or calm state, but rather just to be a normal creature. This journal is a useful present centered tool that modulates appropriate function by enhancing recall of the recent past and projected future.

There wants to be a spontaneous dance between intentional and mind wandering modes in the present moment. That way, one might manage to break the pattern of having a morning high energy caffeine fueled attentional focusing, which with the fading of the chemistry turns into an overly aimless mind wandering in the afternoon. Perhaps, if both could be kept in check, one might have a more seamless moving through a day, particularly as one’s energy begins to wane towards its end.  

1/14/24 Trying to describe the 'new platform' (Deric-OS, self center of gravity, I*, where experienced self is coming from) doing frequent resets to zero in the midst of change that toggle the system to problem solving, matching input to appropriate output, like a learning newborn. Short circuiting blips of arousal or fear that are irrelevant, but still able to run from a lion attack. Going with the computer metaphor, ‘processing platform’ as a candidate for a bit of language that describes what is indescribable in words.

1/17/24
Mulling over how little of my self (I*, it)  experience is spent outside of my linguistic narrative self thread.
 
1/18/24
Arousal/Valence/Agency (real/real/imagined) are the deep structure of the whole show, and well being occurs to the extent that the sliders are the the direction of low/high/high.

1/19/24
Construing oneself as kind and caring caretaker of family and friends yields value, purpose, and meaning (V/P/M), and integrates it with the machine room viscera.. And, the kindness and positivity of the caretaker role nudges the valence part of A/V/A towards being more positive. This supports being a caring presence that observes, listens, asks questions. Wishing the best for others, while letting their experiences and issues be their own.

1/19/24 The pre-linguistic animal platform as experienced center of gravity with language bits that rise from the simmering caldron to enable connections with other humans experienced as ephemeral transient wisps or vapors, with the real biological creature being the vastly larger originating presence, the creature's experienced place of rest and residence.

1/20/24
A grandiose fantasy: The Imperial Poobah, secure in its belief in itself as master of the random, the surfer of uncertainty. Ready to face the  “There be dragons there” description sometimes written on unexplored areas depicted on ancient maps of the world.

1/21/24 There is so little to provide a sustaining narrative in the current social and geopolitical context that expanding awareness towards its interoceptive, prelinguistic, gestural and prosodic animal state becomes more appealing and sustaining, along with letting awareness focus on potential remedies rather than further detailed descriptions of dysfunctions. Being active in pursuing small sanities.

1/23/24
Mulling over the calm and equanimity offered by impersonality, being 'it', the animal, just resting, watching. Also able to be kind and caring in response to input from others, offering sympathy, empathy, and accepting that one might influence but can not  compel fixes to problems that are not one’s own.

1/27/24
Mulling over how I continue to spew out chunks of ideas, presenting them in the flow of the present moment, from which they then recede to become part of a largely lost and unrecognized archive, still accessible in principle by searches - but I frequently have difficulty finding them. My golden bonbons of the moment, finding their resting place among their previous instances. Think of Andrew Sullivan’s once prominent blog ‘The Daily Dish,’ mostly unknown to the present. It doesn’t matter. One still keeps banging out the material.

Monday, January 29, 2024

Mind blog’s first 18 years - what next? A space for discussions among MindBlog readers?

This is post number 5,537 of Deric's MindBlog, which will soon be celebrating its 18th birthday.  I started this blog on Feb. 6, 2006, in the middle of the golden age of Blogging, with a post titled “Dangerous Ideas.”  In the late 2000s the rise of social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram shifted audiences towards shorter more engaging posts, and after 2010 multimedia platforms like YouTube, Twitch, and TikTok became popular. Max Read laments the increasing effort required to deal with the info sphere as millennials have ‘aged out’ and members of generation Z have become more eager early adopters of  ChatGPT than their elders.  The current digital landscape emphasizes content monetization, influencer marketing, and multi-platform presence, but here still  remains a vital role for niche blogs such as this one, where readers can find specialized content beyond the mainstream social media noise. 

I recently received an email from a MindBlog reader in Germany who lamented that MindBlog received very few comments from readers. I have  received numerous emails over the years from silent but loyal readers who express gratitude for effort I put into the blog, but there have been only a few extended discussion threads, such as those of anti-aging compounds and life optimization snake oil .

My German reader made the interesting suggestion that I consider initiating a platform for direct interactions and deeper engagement among MindBlog readers, perhaps a live video and text platform that might include both experts and educated laypeople outside the scientific community. This would be relatively easy for me to set up if sufficient interest is shown, so I invite readers interested in this prospect to email me at mdbownds@wisc.edu

Sunday, January 21, 2024

Titles and URLs for key MindBlog posts on selves

I pass on a chronological list of titles and URLs of MindBlog posts assembled in preparation for a video chat with a European MindBlog reader:

An "Apostle's Creed" for the humanistic scientific materialist?
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2006/03/apostles-creed-for-humanistic.html

Some rambling on "Selves" and “Purpose”
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2007/10/some-rambling-on-selves-and-purpose.html

Self, purpose, and tribal mentality as Darwinian adaptations (or…Why why aren’t we all enlightened?)
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2020/05/self-purpose-and-tribal-mentality-as.html

MindBlog passes on a note: on the relief of not being yourself
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2020/03/mindblog-passes-on-note-on-relief-of.html

Points on having a self and free will.
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2021/03/points-on-having-self-and-free-will.html

I am not my problem
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2022/06/i-am-not-my-problem.html

The non-duality industry as a panacea for the anxieties of our times?         https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2022/11/the-non-duality-industry-as-panacea-for.html

Enlightenment, Habituation, and Renewal - Or, Mindfulness as the opiate of the thinking classes?
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2023/01/enlightenment-habituation-and-renewal.html

A quick MindBlog riff on what a self is….
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2023/01/a-quick-mindblog-riff-on-what-self-is.html

MindBlog paragraphs bloviating on the nature of the self ask Google Bard and Chat GPT 4 for help
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2023/05/mindblog-paragraphs-bloviating-on.html

A MindBlog paragraph on non-dual awareness massaged by Bard and ChatGPT-4
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2023/07/a-mindblog-paragraph-on-non-dual.html

Constructing Self and World
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2023/09/constructing-self-and-world.html  

Anthropic Claude's version of my writing on the Mind - a condensation of my ideas
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2023/10/anthropic-claudes-version-of-my-writing.html  

A Materialist's Credo
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2023/10/a-materialists-credo.html

How our genes support our illusory selves - the "Baldwin effect"
https://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2023/11/how-our-genes-support-our-illusory.html











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Wednesday, January 10, 2024

If psychedelics heal, how do they do it?

I pass on from a recent issue of PNAS this informative "News Feature" article by Carolyn Beans (open source).  It discusses studies trying to determine the brain mechanisms by which therapeutically effective psychedelics such as MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, commonly known as ecstacy), psilocybin, and LSD have their effect.  They all act on serotonin receptors.  

Friday, January 05, 2024

Capturing non-dual reality in language

For my own future reference and for MindBlog readers interested in my previous MindBlog posts on non-duality,  I want to pass on the start of a discussion thread in the Waking Up Community at WakingUp.com written by Rish Magal, London, U.K, on the subject of capturing nondual reality in language. One of the discussants makes reference to the Laukkonen and Slagter article whose ideas were referenced in my recent lecture on New Perspectives on how our Minds Work.  


From Rish Magal,   London, UK

Prompted by a really great discussion in another thread, I thought it would be an interesting experiment to try and express some important nondual insights in English. Comments and responses would be very much appreciated 😀.
Disclaimers:
    1    Despite being a very long post (sorry!), this is only a very very rough outline. I’m cutting lots of corners, and it would take a book to explain and defend all these ideas.
    2    I needed to stretch some of our normal concepts. This is not surprising, since our concepts are integral to a misguided way of looking at the world. I’ve tried to explain the stretching, but I might not have succeeded to your satisfaction!
    3    This is only one attempt to describe nondual reality. I’m not claiming it’s The One True Way. The purpose of the exercise is to explore whether it’s possible to capture the essence of nondual reality. If this version looks at all promising, other versions are surely possible too.


I’ll label each step, in case anyone wants to respond to an individual piece.

A) What we call a “self” is a useful fiction. Humans use it to plan their interactions with each other, to hold each other accountable, to organise their own behaviour … and a host of other purposes.

B) The fictional “self” is created by the human brain, acting in concert with other human brains. From cognitive science comes the idea that the self is part of a predictive model used by the brain (e.g. Anil Seth). From philosophy comes the idea that a self is a ‘Centre of Narrative Gravity’ (Dan Dennett). Perhaps both of these can be accurate together.

C) From psychology, we know that the human brain does not understand itself very well at all. It has very limited understanding of its own reasons for acting (Michael Gazzaniga). In fact it can easily be mistaken about whether it has even acted at all (Daniel Wagner).

D) There is no ‘Free Will’ or responsibility for actions. (Sam Harris makes a strong case on this, but there are several ways to argue for this conclusion.) Causal chains move through human bodies in the same way that they move through billiard balls. There’s no agency in a human brain, much less a “self”.

E) Perhaps the biggest flaw in our language is the idea that objects cause events. We reify objects with nouns, and causing with verbs. It would be more accurate to say: reality is a succession of events. But even that is too dualistic. More accurate still: there is simply one continuously unfolding process. Events inside human brains are like tiny ripples in this huge universe-sized sea.

F) By various means*, a human brain can come to Realise** that its habitual way of looking at the world is badly flawed, and can grasp one or more of the preceding points.

G) Such a realisation is usually accompanied by a huge emotional sense of relief, release, and bliss — especially the first few times.

H) A human brain which doesn’t have access to a structure of revised concepts (such as the one outlined here) will struggle to interpret its own experience. It is likely to attach to the emotional content, and try very hard to recapture that.

I) Over the centuries, many human brains which have glimpsed these truths have struggled and failed to express them in language. (Until very recent advances in science, psychology & philosophy, it would have been almost impossible to fill out a plausible account of what's going on.) Over the centuries, it has become common to say that these insights cannot be expressed in language.

J) My first claim is that nondual insights can be expressed in language. These steps are one attempt to do so.

K) *My second claim is that describing nondual reality in language (however imperfectly) can be extremely helpful in triggering a brain to grasp these insights. And help it return to them reliably.

L) **By "Realise" I mean something beyond (but including) understanding and agreeing with a statement. "Realising" means deeply believing it to the point of feeling in my bones that it is true.

As an analogy: I understand and believe that I'm going to die one day. But in terms of my daily activities it doesn't really feel like it's true, and my behaviour is basically indistinguishable from someone who thought he was immortal 😁. If tomorrow a neurologist shows me a scan of a huge tumour in my brain, I will Realise the truth that I am going to die in an entirely different way, and my behaviour is likely to change radically.

Note that I already have all the concepts I need to understand this truth. I think the shift from simple understanding & cognitive assent, to what I'm calling Realisation, is a much more immediate and tangible kind of belief, with much more emotional content. I now feel it to be true, as well as simply agreeing with the statement intellectually. But the content of the belief is the same, and can be expressed in language and concepts.
 
M) In this brain, the experienced shift from understanding to Realising usually produces symptoms like laughter, releasing, euphoria, connectedness, presence, empathy, equanimity. But after many such experiences, their intensity varies (at least in this brain). Importantly (IMO): these feelings/experiences are not the point of meditation. The point is the insights themselves — to realise/recognise the nondual nature of reality.

N) These statements above are not an attempt to capture the experience of realising/recognising them. There’s definitely a limit to the usefulness of words in conveying an experience. When people say that the experience of realisation cannot be captured in language, I would agree (though I think we can say a few things about it). But that’s not the case I’m making here. My case is that statements about nondual reality can be expressed in language, and doing so can be extremely helpful.

O) This list is not meant to be exhaustive. No doubt there are more statements about nondual reality which can be expressed in language, which this brain hasn’t grasped. If “your” brain knows of some, please post about them! Thankswhich can be expressed in language, which this brain hasn’t grasped. If “your” brain knows of some, please post about them! Thanks

Sunday, December 03, 2023

A flash of clarity on what current LLMs can and can not do. An AI apocalypse does not appear to be eminent...

In his most recent newsletter, Venkatesh Rao pulls up a twitter thread he wrote in 2017 making what he calls an ontological distinction between  boundary intelligence and interior intelligence.  This was before transformers like GPT-1 began to attract more attention. The distinction Rao makes is central to understanding what current large language models (LLMs) can and can not do. Here is his unedited text from 2017:
 
1. I'd like to make up a theory of intelligence based on a 2-element ontology: boundary and interior intelligence

2. Boundary intelligence is how you deal with information flows across the boundary of your processing abilities 

3. Interior intelligence is how you process information. Includes logic, emotional self-regulation, etc.

4. A thesis I've been converging on is that boundary intelligence is VASTLY more consequential once interior intelligence exceeds a minimum

5. Boundary intelligence is by definition meta, since you're tuning your filters and making choices about what to even let hit your attention

6. I think it is highly consequential because almost all risk management happens via boundary intelligence (blindspots, black swans etc)

7. Interior intelligence is your poker skill and strategy. Boundary intelligence is picking which table to sit down at

8. Interior intelligence is reading a book competently, extracting insights and arguments. Boundary intelligence is picking books to read. 

9. Interior intelligence is being a good listener. Boundary intelligence is deciding whom to listen to. 

10. Basically, better input plus mediocre IQ beats bad input and genius IQ every time, so boundary intelligence is leverage

11. And obviously, boundary intelligence is more sensitive to context. The noisier and angrier info streams get, the more BI beats II

12. Most of boundary intelligence has to do with input intelligence, but output intelligence becomes more important with higher agency 

13. Output intelligence is basically the metacognition around when/where/how/to-whom/why to say or do things you are capable of saying/doing

14. We think a lot about external factors in decisions, but output intelligence is about freedom left after you've dealt with external part

Next, from the abstract of a forthcoming paper by Yadlowsky et al. Rao extracts the following:

…when presented with tasks or functions which are out-of-domain of their pretraining data, we demonstrate various failure modes of transformers and degradation of their generalization for even simple extrapolation tasks. Together our results highlight that the impressive ICL abilities of high-capacity sequence models may be more closely tied to the coverage of their pretraining data mixtures than inductive biases that create fundamental generalization capabilities.

And then, in the following selected clips, continues his text:

Translated into the idiom from the fourteen points above, this translates into “It’s all interior intelligence, just within a very large boundary.” There is no boundary intelligence in current machine learning paradigms. There isn’t even an awareness of boundaries; just the ability to spout statements about doubt, unknowns, and boundaries of knowability; a bit like a blind person discussing color in the abstract.

This is not to say AI cannot acquire BI. In fact, it can do so in a very trivial way, through embodiment. Just add robots around current AIs and let them loose in real environments.

The reason people resist this conclusion is is irrational attachment to interior intelligence as a sacred cow (and among computer science supremacists, a reluctance to acknowledge the relevance and power of embodiment and situatedness in understandings of intelligence). If much of the effectual power of intelligence is attributable to boundary intelligence, there is much less room for sexy theories of interior intelligence. Your (cherished or feared) god-like AI is reduced to learning through FAFO (Fuck around and find out) feedback relationships with the rest of the universe, across its boundary, same as us sadsack meatbag intelligences with our paltry 4-GPU-grade interior intelligence.

In their current (undoubtedly very impressive) incarnation, what we have with AI is 100% II, 0% BI. Human and animal intelligences (and I suspect even plant intelligences, and definitely evolutionary process intelligence) are somewhere between 51-49 to 99.9-0.1% BI. They are dominated to varying degrees by boundary intelligence. Evolutionary processes are 100% BI, 0% II.

Monday, November 27, 2023

The feasibility of artificial consciousness through the lens of neuroscience

Some interesting perspectives from Aru, Larkum, and Shine in Trends in Neurosciences. Motivated readers can obtain a copy of the article's text from me.  

Highlights

Large language models (LLMs) can produce text that leaves the impression that one may be interacting with a conscious agent.
Present-day LLMs are text-centric, whereas the phenomenological umwelt of living organisms is multifaceted and integrated.
Many theories of the neural basis of consciousness assign a central role to thalamocortical re-entrant processing. Currently, such processes are not implemented in LLMs.
The organizational complexity of living systems has no parallel in present-day AI tools. Possibly, AI systems would have to capture this biological complexity to be considered conscious.
LLMs and the current debates on conscious machines provide an opportunity to re-examine some core ideas of the science of consciousness.
Abstract
Interactions with large language models (LLMs) have led to the suggestion that these models may soon be conscious. From the perspective of neuroscience, this position is difficult to defend. For one, the inputs to LLMs lack the embodied, embedded information content characteristic of our sensory contact with the world around us. Secondly, the architectures of present-day artificial intelligence algorithms are missing key features of the thalamocortical system that have been linked to conscious awareness in mammals. Finally, the evolutionary and developmental trajectories that led to the emergence of living conscious organisms arguably have no parallels in artificial systems as envisioned today. The existence of living organisms depends on their actions and their survival is intricately linked to multi-level cellular, inter-cellular, and organismal processes culminating in agency and consciousness.

Wednesday, November 01, 2023

David Brooks on "What is a Person?"


David Brooks has an astounding ability to simplify and present important ideas. I pass on a few clips from Chapter 5  - titled "What is a Person?" - of his new book  “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.”  In chapter 9 he offers an equally lucid presentation of work in the cognitive sciences by Gibson and Proffitt showing how people in different life circumstances literally see different worlds. I've enjoyed reading this book and recommend that you read it. 

As we try to understand other people, we want to be constantly asking ourselves: How are they perceiving this situation? How are they experiencing this moment? How are they constructing their reality?
Let me dip briefly into brain science to try to show you how radical this process of construction is. Let’s take an example as simple as the act of looking around a room. It doesn’t feel like you're creating anything. It feels like you're taking in what’s objectively out there. You open your eyes. Light waves flood in. Your brain records what you see: a chair, a painting, a dust bunny on the floor. It feels like one of those old-fashioned cameras—the shutter opens and light floods in and gets recorded on the film
But this is not how perception really works. Your brain is locked in the dark, bony vault of your skull. Its job is to try to make sense of the world given the very limited amount of information that makes it into your retinas, through the optic nerves, and onto the integrative layer of the visual cortex. Your senses give you a poor-quality, low-resolution snapshot of the world, and your brain is then forced to take that and construct a high-definition, feature-length movie.
To do that, your visual system constructs the world by taking what you already know and applying it to the scene in front of you. Your mind is continually asking itself questions like “What is this similar to?” and “Last time I was in this situation, what did I see next?” Your mind projects out a series of models of what it expects to see. Then the eyes check in to report back about whether they are seeing what the mind expected. In other words, seeing is not a passive process of receiving data; it’s an active process of prediction and correction.
Perception, the neuroscientist Anil Seth writes, is “a generative, creative act.” It is “an action-oriented construction, rather than a passive registration of an objective external reality.” Or as the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett notes, “Scientific evidence shows that what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell are largely simulations of the world, not reactions to it.” Most of us non-neuroscientists are not aware of all this constructive activity, because it happens unconsciously, It's as if the brain is composing vast, complex Proustian novels, and to the conscious mind it feels like no work at all
Social psychologists take a wicked delight in exposing the flaws of this prediction-correction way of seeing. They do this by introducing things into a scene that we don’t predict will be there and therefore don’t see. You probably know about the invisible gorilla experiment. Re- searchers present subjects with a video of a group of people moving around passing a basketball and ask the subjects to count the number of passes by the team wearing white. After the video, the researchers ask, “Did you see the gorilla?” Roughly half the research subjects have no idea what the researchers are talking about. But when they view the video a second time, with the concept “gorilla” now in their heads, they are stunned to see that a man in a gorilla suit had strolled right into the circle, stood there for a few seconds, and then walked out. They didn’t see it before because they didn’t predict “gorilla.”
In my favorite experiment of this sort, a researcher asks a student for directions to a particular place on a college campus. The student starts giving directions. Then a couple of “workmen”—actually, two other researchers— rudely carry a door between the directions asker and the directions giver. As the door passes between them, the directions asker surreptitiously trades places with one of the workmen. After the door has passed, the directions giver finds himself giving directions to an entirely different human being. And the majority of these directions givers don’t notice. They just keep on giving directions. We don’t expect one human being to magically turn into another, and therefore we don't see it when it happens.
In 1951 there was a particularly brutal football game between Dartmouth and Princeton. Afterward, fans of both teams were furious because, they felt, the opposing team had been so vicious. When psychologists had students rewatch a film of the game in a calmer setting, the students still fervently believed that the other side had committed twice as many penalties as their own side. When challenged about their biases, both sides pointed to the game film as objective proof that their side was right. As the psychologists researching this phenomenon, Albert Hastorf and Hadley Cantril, put it, “The data here indicate that there is no such ‘thing’as a ‘game’ existing ‘out there’ in its own right which people merely ‘observe’ The ‘game’ ‘exists’ for a person and is experienced by him only insofar as certain things have significances in terms of his purpose.” The students from the different schools constructed two different games depending on what they wanted to see. Or as the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist puts it, “The model we choose to use to understand something determines what we find.”
Researchers like exposing the flaws in our way of seeing, but I’m constantly amazed at how brilliant the human mind is at constructing a rich, beautiful world. For example, in normal conversation, people often slur and mispronounce words. If you heard each word someone said in isolation, you wouldn't be able to understand 50 percent of them. But because your mind is so good at predicting what words probably should be in what sentence, you can easily create a coherent flow of meaning from other people's talk.
The universe is a drab, silent, colorless place. I mean this quite literally. There is no such thing as color and sound in the universe; it’s just a bunch of waves and particles. But because we have creative minds, we perceive sound and music, tastes and smells, color and beauty, awe and wonder. All that stuff is in here in your mind, not out there in the universe.
I've taken this dip into neuroscience to give the briefest sense of just how much creative artistry every person is performing every second of the day. And if your mind has to do a lot of con- structive workin order for you to see the physical objects in front of you, imagine how much work it has to undertake to construct your identity, your life story, your belief system, your ideals. There are roughly eight billion people on Earth, and each one of them sees the world in their own unique, never-to-be-repeated way.





Wednesday, October 25, 2023

A Materialist's Credo

This post passes on a recent effort to put down some basic ideas in as few words as I can manage.

A Materialist’s Credo

In the beginning was the cosmos, fundamentally as incomprehensible to our human brains as quantum chemistry is to a dog’s brain.

What our human brains can understand is that our ultimate emergence from countless generations of less complex organisms can be largely explained by a  simple mechanism that tests the reproductive fitness of varying replicants.

Systems that try to predict the future and dictate whether to go for it or scram - from the chemotaxis of bacteria to the predictive processing of our humans brains - have proved to be more likely to survive and propagate.

Modern neuroscience has proved that our experienced perceptions of sensing and acting are these predictions.  They are fantasies, or illusions, as is our sense of having a self with agency that experiences value, purpose, and meaning. Everything we do and experience is in the service of reducing surprises by fulling these fantasies. An array of neuroendocrine mechanisms have evolved to support this process because it forms the bedrock of human culture and language.

We are as gods, who invent ourselves and our cultures through impersonal emergent processes rising from our biological substrate.

Personal and social dysfunctions can sometimes be addressed by insight into this process, as when interoceptive awareness of the settings of  our autonomic nervous system's axes of arousal, valence, and agency allows us to dial them to more life sustaining values and better regulate our well-being in each instance of the present.

We can distinguish this autonomic substrate from the linguistic cultural overlay it it generates, and allow  the latter to be viewed in a more objective light. This is a deconstruction that permits us to not only let awareness rest closer to the 'engine room' or 'original mind' underlying its transient reactive products, but also to derive from this open awareness the kind of succor or equanimity we once found in the imagined stability of an external world.

Hopefully the deconstruction that takes us into this metaphorical engine room makes us more able to discern and employ illusions that enhance continuation rather than termination of our personal and social evolutionary narratives.