Binary Brain

I was challenged, and challenged hard last weekend about my insistance that the mind/consciousness is really nothing more than the material.  There was a lot of drinking involved, so I’m not sure how much of the conversations were coherent – but, in reality, that does not matter.  I’ve known great one-off thought to come from a night of dillusion.

What I did struggle with was all of this talk of non-local effects.  There is a piece of quantum mechanics that Bell calls the no-go theorem.  Loosely, it says that quantum theory breaks down locally or action-at-a-distance is wrong (if there is a physicist out there who can help me make a more coherent statement, please tell me).  The question is, however, how does this actually effect cognition/thought/consciousness?  I argue that the only thing it does is complicate any modeling we would try to do of the brain.  In the situation where we would ever try to duplicate a brain, I propose we would still never end up with the same consciousness in both brains because of uncertainty (physical) and the odd way in which external forces can impact local events (action-at-a-distance).  We hardly understand these things, but if our experiments are correct, we know that there is a level of uncertainty permeating every physical event and knowing the current state of a system will only provide us with a rough idea of the outcome on the other side of time.

Perhaps this is where fantasy comes in.  Complications in consciousness arise when we go beyond the physical input and stimulus that drives much of our behavior (by behavior, I simply mean activities) and there is where the development of fantasy comes in.  In order to plug the holes created by an inconsistent stream of physical stimuli, we have developed the mechanism of fantasy to fill in those holes.  What role fantasy plays and how it permeates our conscious life, is a whole other topic – but it is one I find thoroughly fascinating.  Does a Buddhist meditating feel the universe outside of local consciousness?  In two ways, this may be possible: fantasy or non-local action.  We could say that non-local action is more real than fantasy and therefore, we hope that this is really what Buddhists experience.  We could say that… but it isn’t necessarily better than fantasy.  Fantasy may be no less real than stimulus driven consciousness and we may find that it is the cornerstone to a new evolutionary development underway in the human brain.

I really have no idea.  As a pseudo materialist, I hope that the concept of fantasy will see more research and development, as I think it holds more promise to explaining what is really going on when we have religious experiences (which I believe are as real as a physical experience – just that our description of it is limited because language has always been closely tied to physical occurrences and therefore makes it difficult to convey a religious experience).  Any ideas?  Anyone?

I finally finished Dennett’s book, Consciousness Explained, and am stricken by the thought that he’s so right that he can’t possibly be wrong.  I graduated with my BA in Philosophy many years ago and I remember a friend asking me what I find to have been the most important learning experience I’d pass along to others.  Knowing you don’t know shit. I’m well aware of how vulgar that may seem, but that is what you learn in philosophy.  Every semester, I had a new series of classes; a new onslaught of ideas and each of those topics, those philosophers, those coherent arguments were so very right!  Only after having 10 epiphanies was it that I started to realize that nuance does not mean correctness and infallible argument does not imply probable premises.

But, this time, with Dennett, it feels so right.  Essentially Dennett rewrites the book (for me) on conscious experiences as an entity separate from my biological consciousness.  Instead of a man behind the curtain (or puppet, whichever you wish), the man is a chaotic semblance of the strongest smell wins.  The mind and consciousness is nothing but a series of gates that has evolved to introspection and self referentialism.  I don’t want to demean or diminish Dan’s arguments (may I call him Dan?), but in essence, our consciousness is a culmination of all of the internal conversations we’ve had with ourselves since we were born.  It is the structure of our experience and predilections.

My god.  That’s so damn easy!  (And, I don’t wish to do Dan any injustice in implying it was easy to arrive at that conclusion or that he thinks it is any less of a miracle than we know consciousness to be.  Ahem… not magical miracle, but this-is-so-friggin-unlikely-from-a-mathematical-perspective-that-I’m-amazed-it-exists-at-all.)  If we could all just agree to start with that premise – i.e. whatever consciousness is, it isn’t in the ether and it is certainly not some spiritual globule that we can neither understand nor study – it would likely lead to so many radical discoveries that we may, indeed, learn to fly.  Without planes.

In the next few weeks, I’m hoping to actually do a bit of a summary of what I’ve read so that I can put onto paper what I’ve learned.  I’ve read Consciousness Explained before, but I’ve never read it with this type of interest nor understanding.  I don’t think Dan would state he’s discovered “it” and I think there’s a lot to be dissected and maybe changed, but he has got me on the right path.  We’ll see where it leads from here.

Tonight, as I was pondering the problems of multiple dimensions and proton collisions at CERN, it struck me, what would actually happen if we understood consciousness? I have always been suspicious of ideas like a Grand Unified Theory that the likes of Stephen Hawking promoted because it assumes that there is an ultimate end to knowledge.  And, for some reason, that just doesn’t jive with my way of thinking.

History proves not only what the winners were willing to write about their enemies, but it also shows that knowledge evolves.  Every time we humans figure something out, a new door opens to another set of more complex questions.  It’s like that drawing of the snake eating its own tail.  Knowledge begets questions and questions beget knowledge… all the while my gut grows because I can’t stop eating these cookies while reading this amazing book on black branes.  Ergo, knowledge begets gut aches, too!

I think we’re growing our collective knowledge by leaps and bounds today and you can see this when we look at the momentum of technological change.  In a few days, Apple’s iPad will be released upon the US market and as an observer and obsessive user of technology, it looks like a revolutionary device – much the way the iPhone was and is.  These devices make contact and quick access to important (and obscure) data so easy that a few weeks ago, as I was flying form New York to LA, I learned why popcorn pops because the plane had inflight wifi.  (Now that’s a life altering tidbit of info that was worth the $10 login fee.)  In reality, that little bit of quick, efficient search and seizure of knowledge is analogous to accessing the random and long-term memory that makes the human brain so special.  Things in our world have progressed to the point where we can supplement that massive file-drawer, calculator thingy with über connected devices that let us look up things we’ve forgotten or didn’t even know.  (All assuming the information we access is even accurate – but that’s another problem.)  It doesn’t end there.  Had I really desired something more obscure, I could have gotten on Skype or AIM (or whatever the kids are using these days) and looked up some of my other pointy headed friends to see if they could help solve my latest knowledge crisis, how do airplane toilettes work and why the hell do they use blue water? I could have not only accessed other biological filing cabinets, but utilized their ability to access the non-volatile memory that we know as the net, thus, using a loose sort of distributed processing approach to solve a problem or answer a question

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.  Who knows what the folks in AI are really doing with artificial brains.  As the bitches (my two female dogs – no, really, they are bitches…) slurped down their last bit of ground up cow heart, I continued my thoughts of CERN and said to myself, let’s say we do figure out how consciousness works.  Then what? Really.  What then?

I don’t think it is that easy, though.  I think it will follow the trend of history that I mentioned above.  Some day, we will open that door to reconstructing the brain with hard wires and solder and then suddenly realize that in the process of commanding such an understanding of how the mind works, we can move objects with our thoughts.  We wonder how the mind works now, think of the questions that will come up when people are stabbing each other with forks from across a restaurant with the power of sheer thought!

This is a topic that I hope gets a beating over time.  Dennett has floated this idea that consciousness is really a massive parallel process by which the loudest contemplative state wins wherein the master puppeteer ceases to exist.  I doubt I am giving his theory justice in that statement.  Right now, though, that’s how I view it.

So, this morning, in the shower, I was thinking, why do some thoughts win out over others? Why does a given string of contemplation take the place of another more logical thread?  In particular, I was daydreaming about a woman I met a year ago and how intrigued I was with her behavior, thought process, ideas, etc.  In brief, I was infatuated with the idea I had of her.  There is no possible way to know if my concept of this person was close to the real thing (even after a third of my life spent in a serious relationship with one person, I hardly know her, so how could I possibly know this person whom has occupied all of a day’s worth of time in dialogue), but for whatever reason, that daydream/thread of thought beat out all the other ideas and thoughts cruising through my head.  I had to finally talk myself out of the daydream and go onto thoughts that I felt would be more responsible and relevant thoughts for the day before me.

I still don’t understand, though, why that daydream took precedence over other ideas that could have occupied my mind.  Was it the connection with emotion?  Was it some suppressed hope for attention from someone similar?  Why do we fantasize?

I consider myself a relatively logical individual with a drive to think and focus my thoughts on things that matter and yet I can become completely preoccupied and engrossed in irrelevant and impossible ideas and it takes the power of persuading some part of my consciousness to go onto other things.  This process is what makes Dennett’s idea of how consciousness works so plausible.  If there truly were a master puppeteer in my head who really controlled the thoughts and was the spirit behind the machine then the idea of streamS of consciousness wouldn’t make sense.  Nor would the fact that I can actually have one conversation in my head that attempts to overtake center stage from another.  I can’t find the particular page in Consciousness Explained, but Dennett relays the statement of another philosopher/psychologist (can’t remember which): when I’m thinking hard about something, the only real language that comes to mind that would describe what is going through my head is “go… you can do it… keep thinking harder…” Isn’t that funny, I thought?  That’s exactly what is going through my head when I’m trying to find the solution to a complex problem.  The actual language content I can come up with to describe the situation is a cheer and not the content of the process that is being used to solve the problem.  Delicious.

No, I don’t mean with regards to communicating with others.  First, a word of information, I’m in the middle of reading the following books:

Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett
The Synaptic Self, Joseph LeDoux (Reading 2nd Time)
The Mind and the Brain, Jeffrey M. Schwartz & Sharon Begley
The Little Book of String Theory, Steven S. Gubser

This gives great flavor to what I’m thinking about right now.  On the back burner are various books by Aristotle, Aquinas, David Stove, C.S. Lewis, Brian Doherty, Ayn Rand, etc.  I try to keep a rotation of about 4-6 books going.  (As you can imagine, I get easily bored.)

This thought, however, is greatly impacted by Dennett and a statement he makes on p 301 of the 1991 hardcover version of Consciousness Explained:

“Language infects and inflects our thought at every level.  The words in our vocabularies are catalysts that can precipitate fixations of content as one part of the brain tries to communicate with another.”

That is seriously profound.  Think about that.  If your language were limited to 5000 words, what kinds of thoughts would you have and would there be fundamental limitations to what thoughts you could have?  I’ve been thinking about this problem for quite some time, as I am fluent in two languages and have a very rudimentary understanding of another few.  Because I have command of well over 800,000 words because of the combined vocabulary of the base two languages, does that make me able to think of more than someone who is limited to 5,000?

Something in me questions this logic, however.  An autistic savant may be a mathematical genius and yet have no way of linguistically communicating this genius to his peers, etc.  Does this mean that language has limited him and his ability to think?  I think not.  Just because you cannot communicate something does not mean that you do not fundamentally understand it.  We can agree that communication ability is usually a sign of knowledge, but I know of many a politician who speak with full authority on topics of which they have absolutely no knowledge.  So, communication ability does not equate to knowledge and intelligence.  If that is the case, why would the converse be true?

I do know how different my thought has evolved as I have learned more words and more ways of describing a given thought, but that doesn’t mean I understand it any more than I did before having those additional concepts with which I could play and dance.  I think thoughts “precipitate fixations of content” and this is where I am at a loss to describe the process by which this would/could happen.  Dennett is very correct in pointing out the importance of language and the barriers it can impose on thought.  But, he is wrong (if my interpretation of his commentary here is correct) in assuming that it is as all infectious as he makes it out to be.  I would never say that I think in words, as it is only when I wish to communicate with someone else that the process of forming words really begins to take place (and sometimes that person with whom I am trying to communicate just so happens to be in my own head).  I think it is helpful to command a larger vocabulary, but it can also be confounding because I spend so much time on the tedium of implication instead of simply get the thought out there for others to criticize.