MM-Theory

Form vs. Meaning in Logic

2010-09-07T11:34:00.000-07:00

Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com

One learns in the study of logic that what determines the adherence to rules (rules like modus ponens, DeMorgan's law, excluded middle, etc.) is form - that is, the form taken by the propositions involved.

All Xs are Ys.
This is an X.
Therefore, this is a Y.

From Aristotle down to present day logicians, the tradition has been to recognize in syllogisms such as the above, as well as other common logical structures, the form of the argument as the one distinguishing feature that justifies drawing the conclusion from the premises. We don't know what Xs and Ys are - they are meaningless terms in this case - and so it can't be meaning that justifies the argument. All we have a right to discern here is its form.

Of course, this disagrees very sharply with one of the basic tenets of MM-Theory - namely, that what justifies drawing the conclusion from the premises is meaning through-and-through - that it is only in virtue of what the premises mean that the conclusion can be drawn. Therefore, I must take it upon myself to rectify this contentious point and defend MM-Theory against this tradition in the field of logic.

The point I would like to make is not so much that form is not a determining factor, not even the determining factor, but that by 'form', one should not understand something contrary to 'meaning' as MM-Theory defines it. This nevertheless does require some defense as the tradition has been to place form in contradistinction to meaning. The point has traditionally been that where only the form of a logical argument is evident, meaning is absent. What I wish to show, however, is that were meaning truly absent, not a single trace of it to be found, not even form would be left.

To start with, compare the following

All Xs are Ys.

with

zupe diva ectongle arba

We could suppose that the latter is a statement expressed in a hypothetical language. Now I ask: which statement strikes us as truly meaningless? I would expect the answer to be: the latter. For at least we get something from the former, some minimal information that tells us more than the latter. What is this minimal information? Is it form? One could say so, but how do we know that the latter - making sense in our hypothetical language keep in mind - doesn't adhere to the same form? Of course, one could say that the latter indeed may adhere to form, but if only we understood the language, we could then demonstrate it. But does not this supposition presuppose that, by 'understand', we mean 'to apprehend the meaning of'? Does it not follow from this that in order to determine the form of a proposition, we must at least determine some meaning therein?

So the question becomes: What about the former statement allows us to apprehend (or impose?) meaning on it such that the latter doesn't? The most obvious answer that comes to mind is that there are units of language present in the former statement that are absent (at least in English) from the latter - namely, units such as 'all' and 'are'. These are English words. They have a meaning. What they tell us is, not so much what things Xs or Ys are, but what kind of words they are - that is, what function they perform in our language. For example, to say "All Xs" seems to indicate that the term X is a noun. This further implies that Xs are 'things' - perhaps abstract things, but things in some sense. It can further be deduced that Ys are also things. In particular, the pluralizing of the term 'Ys' rules out the interpretation that the term is an adjective (for without pluralizing, the statement becomes "All Xs are Y" which shares the form with "All men are mortal"), as well as the interpretation that it is a verb (as that would share the form with "All men are living" - though the latter interpretation could be secured with the suffix 'ing' - as in "All Xs are Ying"). Needless to say, the term 'are' also adds some substance to the meaning of the statement, for the term Y would clearly become a verb should the statement read "All Xs Y" (or grammatically incoherent should Y remain pluralized as in "All Xs Ys").

Thus, form, should it require at least a few clearly defined language units such as 'all', 'are', 'my', 'not', 'if', 'then', 'some', 'at least one', 'This is a' and so on, must also supply us with a rudimentary level of meaning - and in fact must do so in order to serve its very function of form (for without doing so, there is no form to be gleaned as the latter statement above evinces).

Now I say that this rudimentary level of meaning still leaves us wanting for something more substantial for apprehending what Xs and Ys are. We still don't know what kind of things they are. But insofar as the grammatical form of the statement tells us that they are things, this is the beginning of meaning. It has much potential to be developed and refined, but we must acknowledge that we have something meaningful to start with. So long as the right units of language are supplied - the 'all's, the 'are's, the 'like's, etc. - the form of an argument manifests for all who speak the language to see. Without these units, one cannot make heads or tails of its form:

All Xs are Ys.
This is an X.
Therefore, this is a Y.

zupe diva ectongle arba
Tet vi pip diva.
Idavox, tet vi pip arba.

And of course, it goes without saying that the meaning supplied to these terms - Xs and Ys - as rudimentary as they are - also supplies meaning to the overall statement - perhaps also rudimentary, but meaningful nonetheless. Thus, the meaning of the premises overall allows for, and entails, meaning in the conclusion.

It should also be noted that the meaning gleaned from such statements depends not so much on what practiced users of the language know it to mean (in the sense that a statement can have a 'right' meaning), but simply on whether we can glean a meaning (right or wrong). The point here is that insofar as we can glean some meaning, whether or not users of the language correct us, this affects how we recognize the form of the argument overall and whether or not that form is proper. This, after all, is the central argument we want to make: we wish to say that insofar as the mind apprehends some meaning, it is able to make use of that meaning towards entailing further meaning - that is, towards instigating the flow of experience (thought in this case), towards drawing conclusions from the premises in what it takes to be a logical manner. If it is mistaken in this pursuit, it would not be on account of an illusion of meaning (for it creates its own meaning), but on account of disagreement with a majority of others.

Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com

The Physical Universe - One or Many?

2010-08-27T22:05:00.000-07:00

Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com

In the introduction to our paper Reality and Perception, we defined the terms "indepedent-" and "dependent models of reality", and those of "objectivist-" and "subjectivist theories", in such a way as to render models of reality that were singular and pluralistic respectively. We also offered, further into the aforementioned paper, the chamber metaphore according to which each subjective reality in the subjectivists scheme could be construed as though it were a chamber amongst many others, each housing a conscious subject at its center. This metaphore served not only to clarify what a subjectivist theory entails, but truly highlighted the pluralistic character of reality that dependent models must accommodate.

In this blog post, I would like to reverse this picture. I would like to propose that though there is not one subjective reality that is in every way identical to another, and though each one is nevertheless equally real as any other, there is a way to argue that what they have in common is indeed singular, and that this commonality is, among possible other things, none other than the physical universe that the bulk of objectivists believe in. In other words, though there are many subjective realities, there is only one physical universe. How is such possible given a subjectivist account like MM-Theory? The objective of this post is to answer this question.

We may begin by revisiting our account of identity given in our paper The Universe and 'God' - in particular, the section Equivalence. Let's recall what we said:

There are a couple conditions under which we say that two or more things are identical. We say this when the things in question are actually one and the same thing, or when all their properties are identical in quality and proportion. In the latter case, the things in question are not one thing, but several, and it's the fact that they cannot be told apart except for where they exist in space and time that we call them identical. For example, two baseballs that are exactly the same in terms of their size, their color, their cleanliness, the quality of the stitches and other materials, and all other features can be said to be identical, but if they are indeed two, then there will always be a difference in their place in space and time. It stands to question, therefore, whether they could still be said to be two distinct objects should we somehow take away the properties of space and time that they bear. If their places in space and time are the only features distinguishing them, then to take them away would be to make them unconditionally indistinguishable, and therefore one and the same thing. Although it makes little sense to propose this for physical things like baseballs, it makes more sense for metaphysical things - things like numbers, for example. When we talk about numbers, we are not talking about tangible, physical things that exist in the outer world. There is nothing called "a 5" or "a 9" out there. Because of the metaphysical status of numbers, it makes little sense to say of them that there are two or three that are identical. Either they are different numbers, in which case they are not identical in any sense, or there is only one of them. There is no "a 5" or "a 9", there is the number 5 and the number 9. The only kind of identity that makes sense with numbers is the kind in which there is only one of the number in question. This is true of any metaphysical entity whatsoever, the reason being that metaphysical things do not take physical form, and therefore lack the properties of having a place in space and time, which in turn means they can't be distinguish on this basis.

What this says essentially is that take away the property of the spatiotemporal positioning of a plurality of identical things, and they become not only metaphysical but singular. The question I would like to pose, then, is this: should we or should we not consider the physical universe in its totality as having a spatiotemporal position? And I would like to answer: no. It is perfectly reasonable to consider the objects in the physical universe as having spatiotemporal positions, but when it comes to the physical universe itself, it becomes difficult, if not incoherent, to propose that it too exists at a particular position in space and time. Rather, it is space and time that are positioned in it - and not in any particular position (as though there could be a number of them) but constituting the groundwork of the universe itself as the basic medium in which all physicality takes place and unfolds. The physical universe is chock full of spatiotemporal positions but does not occupy one itself.

An obvious question that this highlights is this: is the physical universe, then, metaphysical? This is a puzzling question in light of the foregoing considerations, but I don't feel we should veer too far from the obvious - namely, that the physical universe is, well, physical - but we nevertheless should recognize this one peculiar feature: that is doesn't thereby occupy a position in space and time itself. I don't intend on delivering a clean and tidy answer to this question - is the physical universe thus metaphysical? - though one might consider my answer (that it is obviously physical) as unclean and not so tidy, but rather to follow the implications thus far derived (that it is without a position in space and time) to the logical conclusion drawn from our treatment of identity above. That conclusion is that there can only be one physical universe.

To put this in terms of the chamber metaphore, we would say that every physical universe - each one that resides in one person's chamber and every other - is separated not by space or time, but by the "transcendental landscape" as we playfully described it in the paper Reality and Perception. The transcendental landscape, being obviously metaphysical through-and-through, thus affords no basis on which to distinguish between one physical universe and another insofar as all features the physical universes in question bear are identical. Therefore, the chamber metaphore, banking as it does on our ability to visualize it, serves us less well than we hitherto assumed (for visualization depends on the simulation of spatiotemporal forms). We are left to rely on our conceptual understanding exclusively to thoroughly grasp these implications.

But how can these implications be reconciled with the point that any subjectivist must hold to according to which every one of us resides within our own subjective reality - unique unto itself and therefore distinct from every other? Does it not follow from this that each subjective reality constitutes its own distinct reality relative to its subject? Yes, it does, but now let's keep in mind that a subjective reality is different from a (or the) physical universe, for although the latter constitutes a large part of the former, there are many things left out, things such as beliefs, values, perspectives, tastes, attractions, repulsions, etc. that will differ from one subjective reality to another and will not easily find a place as physical entities in the physical universe. A rose, for example, might smell sweet to one person (or in one subjective reality) but putrid to (or in) another - and so we may still make use of the relativist language - but when it comes to the question of whether or not the rose itself exists, it can be answered in the affirmative without requiring that we specify which rose is in question - for there is only one.

Needless to say, this new perspective on the plurality or singularity of subjective realities needs much fleshing out. Let us begin by resting everything so far said, and to be said below, on the following principle: that a subjective reality be defined in terms of set theory, and its constituent experiences in terms of members of a set. What we can say to begin with, then - and this will facilitate our discussion a great deal - is that where two or more subjective realities share certain members (or experiences) in common, the sets overlap, and where they don't, they occupy different spaces ('spaces' here connoting something more abstract than physical space). Thus, a group of subjective realities that share a number of experiences in common might be drawn as follows:

Quite easily, as the diagram above evinces, we might assign the experience of the 'physical universe' - broad and whole as that - to the common area they all share. We may assign our differences - in tastes, perspectives, opinions, etc. - to those areas they don't, to the areas corresponding exclusively to that subject whose taste, perspective, or opinion it is. Thus, with the aid the theory of sets and the Ven diagrams it affords, we get a better understanding of what it means for there to be only one physical universe amongst a variety of distinct subjective realities.

But of course, our experience of the physical universe can't be torn away so easily from certain, more basic or detailed, experiences as it can from those considered above (namely tastes, perspectives, opinions, etc.). The latter experiences might be categorized and put asside as those coming after our sensual experiences of the physical universe as an integrated whole. But should the reader be aware of the myriad details involved in building the physical universe from the bottom up (that is, how the mind builds it up) - that is, the experiences coming before and culminate in a wholistic image of the material world - he will know that those details can vary greatly from one individual to another despite the fact that we may end up experiencing the same physical world. One obvious example is that in order to visually apprehend a physical object - say a pizza - we need to experience it from a particular angle. Another individual will have to view it from a different angle. One individual might see it through specific lighting conditions, thereby affecting its color and brightness, while another may see it through different lighting conditions. Therefore, those experiences that make up the whole object - namely, its lines, angles, colors, brightness, position, and so on - will unavoidably differ from one individual to another. These are the properties of the physical objects we experience, and in fact constitute them. How are they, then, the same object - one and singular?

The answer to this comes simple once we understand what a 'physical object' is to a subjectivist. Some might be accustomed to the argument that a physical object is nothing more than the sum of its properties - its colors, texture, weight, position, etc. - but I would like to venture a different account, one that we have already put forward in The Advanced Theory of Mind and Matter - one that doesn't so much give us the account we're looking for but serves as its background. We said in the Advanced Theory:

When I look at my coffee mug, for instance, I not only see some mysterious object composed of a set of elementary visual experiences (like lines, shapes, colors, etc.), I see my mug! What's happening here is that the essence of my mug - that is, my concept of it - is being attributed to what I see, thereby furnishing it with real existence.

With this idea in the background, we can move into the foreground with the following point: that though the details of the physical objects we experience may differ, they will usually lead us to a common essence - that is, a common object or entity - one that, at least insofar as it projects from a concept, can be said to stand apart from the details (although it will often be fused into the details). So although the particular angle or lighting of the pizza might differ from one individual to another, and therefore occupy different regions in a Ven diagrams, the essence of which these details are properties belongs in the common region. And in a very down-to-earth sense, this way of understanding the places of our experiences accords well with our common parlance. We will agree, in the great majority of cases, that the angles, the colors, the positions, etc. that we attribute to objects depend on whose frame of reference we take. To one person, who has in mind one coordinate system with its own unique origin, might attribute one position or angle to a particular object, whereas another, with another unique coordinate system, might attribute a wholy different position or angle, and out of this we have learnt to be relativistic in our descriptions of the actual state of things. But no one disputes the fact that there is indeed an object there - one pizza! - and this can be taken as a clue for what we have made explicit: that the pizza itself rises above and beyond the relativistic details - above and beyond its position, angle, exact color and lighting conditions - and is a real thing - singular and there in the world for a variety of individuals, with their diversity of perspectives and points of view, to grasp commonly.

I believe this accounts for the question of the variety of sensual experiences competing to be the official properties of objects we perceive in common. But other questions are raised by this idea - that we, in the fray of qualitative diversity that is our subjective realities, share one physical universe - two of which can be posed thus: 1) What can be said of hallucinations - both positive and negative* - for in this case it seems that in one physical universe at least, there will exist some object, but not in another? 2) Are we not obligated to say that if the experience of the physical universe as a whole is one experience, not many, that we all have in common, then the quality of that experience must be precisely the same across all of us? I do not have in mind here the question of the details or properties of the physical universe, for those we addressed above, but rather the question of the essence of the physical objects (or the whole of the physical universe itself) as projected from our concepts of them. To assume these objects, by virtue of a common essence, are one and the same for each subject, we must commit ourselves to the idea that the concepts from which the essence of these objects project are experienced in precisely the same way no matter who we have in mind - that is, the quality of these experiences, the way they feel, must be the same. But a moment's consideration on the range of diversity across individuals, across our brains and the very MODs corresponding to the experience in question, should persuade us that not one of us is that much alike to any other as to experience our concepts in precisely the same way. This latter question is challenging indeed. I will hold off on it for now, admitting up front that I have no easy answer to offer, and focus first on the former question.

In the case of hallucinations, one simple solution that comes to mind is to place the object in that region of the Ven diagram that not all individuals share. When it is no more than one individual who sees the object, this region would be shared by him and him alone. In the case of negative hallucinations (or positive ones that, by shear coincidence, more than one individual have in common), the objects that are in fact perceived would fall into a region that is shared by more than one person. This would entail, of course, that the region in question be shared by a majority of individuals (indeed by at least 99.99% of individuals as the case typically is), and though this may prove difficult to draw, it is well within the logical parameters of set theory. Such a matter is simple enough; a more challenging task is to address what this implies for the physical universe as a whole - that is to say, taking into consideration two individuals - one perceiving the world normally, the other hallucinating a swarm of pink pixies sprinkling their dust on him - are we to say that they experience the same physical universe or two distinct universes that are, though 99.99% similar, not precisely the same. After all, in order for two entities to indeed be one, they must share all features in common.

This question can be answered in much the same way we did the question of the details and properties of objects before the mind amasses them into an integrated and whole object. The key to answering that question was to note the manner by which the projection of essences from concepts raises the object qua object above its mere details and properties. Something similar can be said here vis-a-vis the relation between the physical objects in the physical universe and the physical universe itself. Just as each object therein will inherent from us - that is, from the projection of our concepts - its own essence that raises it above its details and properties, the physical universe as a whole will likewise rise above, in virtue of our bestowing it with its own essence, its constituent parts. This is not to say that, as a result, we regard the physical universe as something other than the collection of its constituent parts - rather, it is to say that it gives us the ability to regard it as a single thing as opposed to - or rather, in addition to - a plurality of things. Nevertheless, it also allows us to regard its constituents in much the same way as we regard the details and properties of physical objects - that is, as relative to the individual who perceives them - despite that the physical object itself may be universal across all (or most) people. Thus, although for the one individual, the physical universe consist of magical pixies showering him with their levitating dust, and for the other it doesn't, it is still the same physical universe. Whether or not it consists of these pixies can be considered, like the details and properties we experience on the most basic sensual levels, relativistically - that is to say, we can still say that relative to one individual, the universe consists of these pixies, and relative to the other, the same universe doesn't.

Now, as I stated above, the second question is a lot more daunting. In fact, I have no solution to it as yet. The best I've entertained hitherto is as follows: Though it strikes me as unreasonable to say that we all experience the concept of a given object in precisely the same way, it is much more reasonable to say that we experience it in approximately the same way. Though this falls short of justifying a license to conclude that we all inhabit the same physical universe (for that demands perfection in the similitude of all features), it does render the problem in such a form that a solution can be brought to bear on it, one we have seen in another area of MM-Theory - namely, the one we brought to the problem of quantum superposition: Determinism and Free-Will. What we offered there was the following: quantum superposition can be accounted for by the unclarity of meaning. That is to say, it turns out to be possible, according to our interpretation of quantum superposition, that the meaning in experience vary in term of how clear it is. In other words, some experiences are extremely close to perfectly clear - meaning that there is nearly no question as to what they project as - whereas others are vague and obscure, their meaning being inherently hard to define - there is a question as to what they project as. If the same account can be brought over to the question at hand - how can the physical universe be one and the same if it seems unthinkable that we could all experience it in precisely the same way? - we might solve the problem such a question hints at in a similar vein. We would say that the physical universe - in virtue of human differences - exists in a state of superposition - and how superposed it is depends on how differently we each experience the physical world. Such an account harkens very loudly to the Many Minds interpretation of quantum mechanics (Quantum Mechanics) though I will not follow the call of that harkening at this point as that is a whole other can of worms unto itself (perhaps after refining my thought on the matter over the course of time, I will post another entry, but not now).

I say this solution is only the best I can bring to the table - not that it settles the matter once and for all - for two problematic reasons: 1) it raises a question as to what would count as sufficient differences between experiences so as for those experiences to project as different entities after all. Incorporating a degree of 'fuzziness' into what things project as certainly makes for a similiar degree of arbitrariness in where the line is drawn between entities that are one and the same but 'fuzzy' and entities that are inherently distinct from each other and multiple. The arbitrary nature of where this line is drawn entails that it is up to us where to draw it, but this in turn entails that it is not inherent to the experiences themselves, nor to the things they project as, but something imposed on it by us and our 'reality designs'. As an example, consider an individual whose mental functioning is, for whatever reason (say because of some brain abnormality), sufficiently atypical of the average man that he projects his concept of objects, of 'things', in a form that can only be called 'approximate' if that term is stretched to include a wide variety of divergent forms, but not so atypical as for everyone to unreservedly agree that it is indeed 'different' from the norm. There is, in other words, a difficult question as to whether he experiences objects or things in the same way, or close enough to the same way, as everyone else, a question that no simple answer bears on. The obstinacy of this question is precisely the first of the problems that plagues the above solution. 2) If we accepted the above solution, we would be overlooking the gross misapplication that the concept of superposition - and therefore the concept of the unclarity of experience - is being employed towards. It is a misapplication because if there is any lack of clarity in experience, that lack must be inherent to the experience in question - at least, if it corresponds to the states of superposition featured in quantum mechanics. But in the present context, the lack of clarity isn't in any one individual's experience - we each project our concepts of objects and things to a sufficiently clear degree as to be reasonably certain about what it is we are expriencing. The lack of clarity here is in some abstract and calculated 'average' of all our experiences. Does such an average exist? Is there any one of us who experiences it? Or is it the case that we each experience only the particular elements, or 'data points', that go into the derivation of this average? Without the unnecessary contemplation over these questions, we can verily answer that this average only exists as an abstraction, a construct invented as a consequence of our analysis on the problem at hand. It does not exist as a fully vivacious experience in its own right. Therefore, how can we posit its existence in its own right? What (or who) is actually experiencing it? Some may, in response to this question, answer: of course, the universal mind is. But then I must reassert the problem: if the universal mind is experiencing it at all, it can only be in the form we experience it, for our experiences are all it has to draw from. And again, not one among us experiences it in the superposed, or unclear, manner required to resolve this problem. The universal mind would merely experience a collection of very clear experiences, each one approximating every other, but no one being a 'meld' of the whole.

But of course, it is a human being who would insist that the world conform to its terms - those terms being precision in the states of things, leaving no room for ambiguity and unclarity. But the fact remains that we are human, and therefore can't escape this insistance, or at least our propensity towards it. This consideration compels me to entertain the possibility that the problem at hand isn't really a problem after all - or rather, that the problem is with us and the constitution of our minds, and not with the nature of the greater reality beyond them. But if so, it is indeed a problem with our minds, and the problem can be articulated thus: we are left wanting for a proper way to conceptualize this arrangement - the arrangement of conceptualizing our experiences and the forms into which they project, their 'fuzziness', and what that says about their unity and plurality in the grand scheme of things - such that we can offer a solution to the above problem and thereby resolve it. We can grant, in other words, that the world beyond our minds doesn't work according to our limited conceptualization of it, but such a granting amounts to nothing more than an assertion that it all works out in the end despite our inability to understand it. Though such an assertion may be true, it is bankrupt of the means by which we can understand it.

But as I said earlier: though it may take some time and investment into thinking, I may yet come up with such an understanding, and should I succeed, I will surely submit another post. In the mean time, let's be sure to keep in mind that this problem only arises in the case of positing that the physical universe is indeed one common experience among us. Should this problem turn out insoluble, we can at least fall back on our prior understanding - namely, that we each house separate and distinct chambers, lonely as that sentiment may be.

* For those who are unacquainted with the term 'negative hallucination', it is the failure to sense some actually existing object despite that the object is impinging on the senses in such a way that, under otherwise ordinary conditions, one would perceive the object (not seeing it when it is in fact there).

Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com

Physicalism vs. Subjectivism - A Conflict of Accounts on the Flow of Substance

2010-07-06T12:17:00.000-07:00

Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com

Physicalism has it that causation works through the motion and interaction of material objects in space and time. MM-Theory puts a different twist on this: it has it that causation (if it can be called "causation") works through experiences flowing from one form to another; even this flow, however, works in a different direction from that assumed by the physicalist - we might call it "perpendicular"; the reader might recall from an analogy we drew in the Advanced Theory how fitting this term - "perpendicular" - is, for in the analogy of the auroras borealis, we saw how the apparent motion of lights across the sky was, in reality, motion of particles down from the sky - perpendicular to the apparent motion. Likewise, in MM-Theory, we say that the apparent motion of physical objects across space - that is, across our visual field - is only a consequence of the "real" motion of experiences streaming into our minds through our visual field - perpendicular to the apparent motion.

Though my aim in this post is not to question the logic that stands behind this line of reasoning, it is to question a deeper logic that underlies MM-Theory more at its core, one that the aforementioned line of reasoning would seem, if one were to delve into it carefully enough, to undermine. For if we grant, in spite of our disagreement with the physicalist, that his is nevertheless an adequate description of the typical manner by which we experience material reality, we in the same stroke renounce any right to invalidate his claims. Yet this is precisely what our analogy seems to attempt; it seems to purport that the physicalist, in his attempt to describe his experiences as such - a move our theory sanctions as justified on its own grounds (just as it does for any experience) - is "wrong" and that our account of motion and causation, which works "perpendicular" to that of the physicalist's, is "right".

Up to this point, one who is familiar with MM-Theory might find this point of contention relatively easy to resolve - that is, so long as we bring in a few inter-reality rules - namely, the rule of applying reality qualifiers. We could say, quite simply, that in the physicalist's reality objects move through space and cause other objects to move by interacting with them, whereas in the subjectivist's reality objects, or rather experiences, flow from one form to another in a "perpendicular" direction to that of physicalist's objects. This would be all well and good, and would settle the matter, if it weren't for the fact that in this particular case we are dealing not merely with "reality designs" (as defined in the paper Reality and Perception), but with a particular kind of experience. In this case, we are dealing with non-cognitive experiences - the visual beholding of objects moving through space and, in a temporal sequence, leading from one event to another (the latter we might interpret as "causation" but more on this in a bit). If this is truly the best description of our visual experiences, then we really have no right, given MM-Theory, to dismiss the reality of objects moving through space and events unfolding in time as merely the domain of the physicalist's design for reality. Such a dismissal can only rightfully be carried out if the design in question were purely cognitive - a theoretical doctrine through-and-through - and though there is certainly a theoretical component of the physicalist's doctrine, there is also clearly this empirical grounding which is not nearly as subject to interpretation and relative to one's belief. We all experience the physical world as constituted by objects in motion and events giving way one to another. Given that MM-Theory sanctions such an experience as valid - that is, as "real" - we really have no right to dismiss it as merely the "physicalist's reality" - it is our reality too.

How to reconcile this with our account of the "perpendicular" motion of experience is the aim of this post. To begin with, we should take stock of a few of the most basic tenets of MM-Theory - two in particular. First is that in order for a thing to be real, it must be experienced as such - that is, as the thing it is. This includes physical objects and their motion through space. It should require no reminder that our visual beholding of physical objects finds its roots in specific MODs in the brain, but it might require such a reminder for our experience of motion. Indeed, the latter can be linked to specific neurons geared to perform the very function of detecting motion. Therefore, we can assign the experience of motion - that is, the visual beholding of it - to these neurons, and thus cast it as its own unique experience. As such, it projects as its own unique "real thing" - namely, motion. The second tenet we want to bring in from MM-Theory is that of flow - or the law of entailment - which says that the manner by which experiences flow is by one entailing another. What we want to note from this for the present purpose is how this differs from the corresponding principle of physical motion. With respect to the latter, we generally think of motion as a mechanical matter, as pushes and pulls governed by laws of cause and effect, whereas with respect to the former, MM-Theory has it that experiences flow by the fact that the meaning in the antecedent one "entails" that of the ensuing one. I add the quotes to "entails" for emphasis - not merely because MM-Theory attributes a customized definition to the term (which should be clear at this point), but because of the importance of reminding the reader of the origins of that very customization - namely, that it draws on the analogy of logical entailment (for example, the rule underlying modus ponens) - for we rarely consider logical rules an example of mechanics - more an instance of semantics and what follows therefrom.

The first of these tenets would seem to bring the present problem to the surface, whereas the second is the key to resolving it. Part of this resolution, however, depends on being very clear about what the first tenet proposes, and therefore the mentioning of it is quite important. The importance of the latter can be stated as follows: it would be one thing to insist that the existence of physical objects depends on their being projected from experience - in this case, the visual beholding of them - and that thereafter their motion depends only on their existing in space and time and their being subject to the laws of mechanics - but it would be entirely another thing to insist that this motion too depends, not so much on the existence of physical objects in space and time and their being subject to mechanical laws, but on experience. In the former case, we might account for motion by appeal to what might be termed "meta-experiential principles" - that is, principles of motion that would fall outside the dominion of experience, and for all intents and purposes would be equivalent to the traditional laws of motion we find in classical mechanics - that is, as an objectivist would have it. The existence of physical objects would remain dependent on experience of course - namely, the visual beholding of them - but, as the argument would go, once extant, the laws of classical mechanics would "take over" as the means by which such objects would move through space and time. Consequently, such an argument would entail that there are other things besides experience - namely, laws of motion - and though the form they would take are obviously quite abstract and intangible, we could not defend the claim that all can be reduced to experience - there would be more to existence than that. It is important to appreciate, therefore, the strict conditions that MM-Theory places over the "realness" of any phenomenon - even when it comes to phenomena that are as abstract and intangible as motion itself - for that condition is that being real just means being rooted in an experience. Thus, motion must depend for its realness on one's experiencing it. What this means, then, is that to commit ourselves to MM-Theory is to commit ourselves to the "perpendicular" path of flow as the "true" direction by which those things that really exist unfold. We are then challenged to account for how motion can exist at all if we are to concede, as we should, that its direction of flow seems verily at odds with that of experiential flow.

As stated, the key to resolving this rests in the second tenet expounded above - namely, that "flow", as defined in MM-Theory, is not to be understood in terms of mechanical causation - or even remotely akin to it - but in terms rather akin to logical entailment. To put this in yet more refined terms, experiential flow should be understood in terms of reasons - that is, reasons for whatever phenomenon in question is projected, reasons that would account for, make possible, justify and necessitate the reality of that which is being experienced. To put the idea of mechanical causation in yet more refined terms, we might say that it is nothing more than the manner by which physical events are ordered in a temporal sequence, the arrangement of which is presumably necessary. From the subjectivist point of view that MM-Theory grants, the experiences preceding that of motion are the reasons for why motion exists in the first place; they do not cause motion (at least not in a mechanical sense), but justify motion and its existence. But even having said this much, the physicalist will still find fault with it, for not only does he maintain his disagreement with subjectivism on the whole (which is of no concern to us at present), but maintains that his account for the reasons or justifications underlying the motion of objects resides in the causal nexus that characterizes the interactions between those objects. In other words, it is not, the physicalist insists, something prior to, or "outside", our experience of physical reality that supplies such reasons and justifications, but something inside and between the objects therein - this he calls "causation". So indeed, he concludes, what accounts for the motion, or "flow", of the basic things of the universe (not experiences, as we would have it, but physical objects) works parallel, not perpendicular, to the motion of those objects - for this motion, along with all physical interactions, is none other than the manifestation of causation at work.

Our reply to this can be put as follows: indeed, we have granted that motion must exist for us (as subjectivists) just as much as it does for the physicalist, for it is directly grounded on an elementary experience of the human mind. But we need not grant the same for causation, for as David Hume made evidently clear, and with which the great majority of philosophers now-a-days agree, causation is not the sort of thing that can be classified into the same pigeonhole as other empirically verifiable phenomena. Physical objects are most definitely real, for we experience them quite acutely. Motion is likewise real, for we experience it with equal acuity. But causation? What Hume has shown is that when it comes to the question of causation, we are deep within the sphere of cognitive experience. It is true - we believe that one event following another, even with flawless consistency throughout our past experience, is an instance of a causal relation. We will often disagree on what causes what, or whether two terms are indeed causally connected or merely correlated – or even nothing but sheer coincidence. We do not see, Hume concludes, causation - we infer it.

Inference, it need not be stressed, is a cognitive act. Therefore, unlike in the case of motion, we do have the right to dismiss the case of causation linking physical events as holding merely within the physicalist's reality design, and to say of it that it is true relative to the physicalist's theoretical doctrine. The alternative doctrine offered by MM-Theory, featuring as it does an account of flow in terms of “entailment”, holds within the context of an utterly different reality design, and therefore, all such designs holding true relativisticly, need not concern itself, under the guidelines of inter-reality rules, with the physicalist’s doctrine.

Yet there is one last rebuke from the physicalist. So causation is not directly experienced, in most cases, through any mode other than cognition, but there is one case that can't be so easily formulated, and that is the case of motion itself, for motion is, in a sense, a form of causation, and if you are not prepared to dismiss motion as unreal, then neither ought you to dismiss causation in this form as unreal. What the physicalist means to convey by this argument is that one can justifiably trace the cause of a object's being in a particular spatial position to it's having been in another spatial position just a moment before and that, in that position, it was in a state of motion that brought it into the current position (and it need not have come to rest in the current position - objects in motion will continue in motion). If its motion is real, in other words, its being at any one position in the course of that motion must be accounted for by the fact that its being in motion brought it to that position.

In this particular case, we can grant the physicalist the truth of his claim, for if we insist that motion is necessarily real (being a projection of experience), then we must also grant that it functions as, or takes the form of, a particular variety of causation (namely as described just now) - that, after all, seems to be precisely what motion is, and therefore what the experience of it projects as. But this defense of causation, and physicalism in general, is not as detrimental to our form of subjectivism as it might at first seem. It is important to distinguish between our claim that the experiences preceding that of motion serve as the reasons or justifications for motion, and the claim - which we are not making - that those preceding experiences give reason for and justify the mere existence of objects at any particular point in the course of their motion. In other words, it is important to understand what is being justified by these preceding experiences; it is not the state of an object at a "snapshot" in time, but the entire lifespan of its motion insofar as that lifespan constitutes and exhausts the full experience of the object's motion.

Now this is an interest, and quite peculiar, point. It seems to imply that in order to have the experience of motion, such an experience must be had throughout an extended period of time - neither motion, nor the experience thereof, can exist in an instant of time. This is interesting, for it cannot be said of any experience (one can, for example, imagine the experience of seeing red in an instant of time), but in the same breath, it should not come as too much of a surprise. We have, after all, argued (in the Advanced Theory) that the experience of motion is one of the foundations for the more general experience of time (the other two founding experiences, the reader might recall, being memory and anticipation). Thus, in being temporally extended, the experience of motion creates time - or at least, one of the seeds from which a full temporal dimension can grow.

Understanding this certainly helps to come back to the physicalist's point and reply as follows: those experiences which precede that of motion can very well serve as the reasons and justifications of the latter while at the same time allowing that the mechanical cause of the moving object being at any one particular spatial point is that it had moved there from a different point. This is allowed precisely because what is being justified or given reason by the preceding experiences is the entire course of motion - the one comprising the object and its occupying all spatial positions in question. In other words, the mechanical cause that brought the object from one point to another just turns out to be an aspect or constituent of the experience of motion. What the preceding experiences are in fact justifying are the whole causal nexus insofar as it constitutes the motion being entailed.

Naturally, this needs to be understood against a caveat: such preceding experiences cannot extend their justificatory power beyond the scope of the present experience of motion. That is to say, we do need to distinguish between motion as it unfolds in the present moment (i.e. as it is presently experienced) and motion as it continues on into future moments or has continued from past moments. The latter intervals of time are, by definition, not experienced as occurring in the present. They can, however, be said to be experienced in other forms - namely, as memory and as anticipation (or as future predictions and reconstructions of the past) - but as the reader will surely concur, these experiences are highly cognitive in their characterizations, and therefore subject, with recourse to Hume once again, to the same treatment given to the physicalist's doctrine of causation generally. Thus, causation, the kind that parallel's the flow of physical objects through space, can only be granted the same reality as motion insofar as the motion in question, which such causation would after all be constituted by, is experienced in the present moment (however extended that moment so happens to be), and any other brand of causation - even that linking the motion of objects into future and past intervals of time (i.e. those that are beyond the scope of present experience save cognition) - stems purely out of cognitive inferences, and is therefore subject to the rules of relativism that our subjectivist stance allows for.

To conclude, then, there is no contradiction between the two world systems - that of physicalism and MM-Theory - at least in respect of the direction of flow, vis-à-vis the form of substance, that each one posits - not so long as they are well understood. In the first place, though the flow of substance in each case is rightfully described as "perpendicular" to each other, there is a world of difference between what is connoted by the term "flow". In the one case, physical motion is connoted; in the other, entailment. The meaning of these two versions of "flow" is such that they are not mutually exclusive in the least. The one (motion) constitutes something in existence, the other (entailment) that which justifies or gives reason to its existing. To put this another way, both are needed in order to have either, for in order that physical motion exist, some underlying reason must support that existence, and for that underlying reason to hold, it must necessarily give way to the existence of physical motion. The fact that physical motion requires an elongated interval of time in order to be complete is of no consequence to its coming from the preceding experiences that justify or give reason to its existence - for as we made clear in the Advanced Theory, any experience prior to those we call the human ones need not be bound to time themselves - they may very well hold sway throughout the whole lifespan of the experience of physical motion - from beginning to end - the former being grounded in a timeless state all the while. And in the second place, the entailment of experiences, being atemporal as it is (at least in some cases), can subsume temporally extended experiences (such as motion) into its network as mere nodes. That is to say, for example, that supposing we visualize the preceding experiences leading to the experience of motion as two nodes connected by an edge (that edge representing the entailment of the latter from the former), and the experience of motion leading to yet other human experiences (for example, a cognitive analysis of the motion under observation) as the latter node connected by an edge (again representing entailment) to a third node, we would have every right to allow that the middle node should represent the experience of motion however much it must take place throughout an extended period of time. We are allowed this precisely because of the atemporal character of the network so depicted (or at least its irrelevance to time), for in that case time itself, and therefore motion too, can be represented as a single node among all the others in that network. We come to a point, therefore, where we can conclude with this: that the flow of experience, best depicted as a timeless graph, should in no way conflict with the flow of physical objects through space (and time), for not only are they worlds apart in their basic character, and therefore perfectly compatible with each other in the ways we have expounded in all the preceding, but mutually imply, and in a sense depend on, each other.

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Corrections to Is Logic Contingent?

2010-04-28T11:55:00.000-07:00

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It has come to my attention that I need to make a couple corrections to some things I said in the post Is Logic Contingent? One is that I rested my argument of the necessity of logic on physical law when MM-Theory clearly has it the other way around. I said:

Now I want to bring this discussion to a close by following it through to its logical conclusion - namely, that the scope of necessity spans far beyond formal logic. Patterns of thought which would be ordinarily deemed illogical and plagued with fallacies of every sort would be deemed necessary by the one who believes them. The necessity he feels is not to be found in logic, but in the narrow range of possible streams down which his thought can flow. This range is narrow because the neural wiring in his brain is configured in such a way to allow only for that particular flow of thought during that particular instance. In other words, the necessity is to be found in the rigidity of the physics of his brain. Whether he is extremely practiced in the science of logical thinking or hasn't got a clue, his brain and the neural circuitry within it are configured in a particular way. Given that configuration, the particular style of thought it makes possible - logical or fallacious - is necessarily the style of thought he employs. He can't help it. The laws of physics hold even in his logic depleted brain.

But as MM-Theory would have it, the laws of nature and the necessity which we attribute to them only serve to represent the necessity of the experiences that correspond to them. Far from being dependent on the necessity of natural laws, MM-Theory puts the necessity of experiences the other way around - that the necessity of natural laws dependent on it.

The other point in need of correction is not so much something I said, but something I may have inadvertently insinuated: that if the necessity of our thoughts, when conforming to formal logic, are determined by the "third term" defined in the post Is Logic Contingent?, then it would seem I am going against the main crux of my argument for the necessity of entailment laid down in the Advanced Theory, thereby quite probably compromising MM-Theory as a whole. To explain further, I argued, in the Advanced Theory, that the necessity of entailment is evident in (if anything) the logic of our thoughts. It was argued that this necessity is evident in the way our thoughts - or more particularly, their meaning - seem to lead irrevocably to their conclusions - and further that this irrevocability can be understood - that is, we can understand why the logic holds. In other words, some third term outside our thought is not needed in order to understand the necessity of entailment. We need only to grasp the meaning of the thoughts themselves. But if what Is Logic Contingent? argues for is that no such necessity would exist, or be possible, were it not for this third term, then it essentially argues that the meaning in thought, even logical thought, is not sufficient, thereby undermining the argument put forward in the Advanced Theory. It might still be argued that the necessity of entailment is still there - in the combination of our thoughts and the third term - but this can only function to weaken the overall argument in support of necessary entailment, for in that case, the one thing I could point to (namely, logical thought) as a sure example of necessary entailment (for all rational thinkers should agree that logical thought has the character of necessity to it) has been stripped away, and we are left to rely on some hypothetical "third term" of which we are not even epistemically aware (as will be argued below), let alone doubtful over the necessity with which it flows. If I had trouble arguing for the necessity of the flow of experiences in general (for example, as applied to something as far removed from logic as emotions) - which the aforementioned post was supposed to facilitate - then what hope have I to convince my readers of such necessity if not even the logic of rational thought can be held up as an example?

If I can clear up the latter misunderstanding, it will be that much simpler to clear up the former.

The key to clearing up the latter misunderstanding (about the necessity of entailment) is to identify this misunderstanding in the supposed separability of the logical thoughts from the third term that makes them necessary. The latter should not be understood as supplementing our thoughts, but as inhering in them. In other words, it makes little sense, as we shall see shortly, to suppose that such thoughts are even possible without the involvement of the third term (though the third term itself is quite variable), for the latter is an indispensible part of what makes up our logical thinking.

To see this, we must compare the neurology of the third term with that of logical thought generally. The third term, the reader will recall, is just the local form of the UOS corresponding to the atomic structures constituting the neural circuitry associated with logical thought. Thus, logical thought must be a special application of the third term, or a particular form it sometimes takes on, just as the firing of a neuron is a special application, or particular form, that the atomic structure of the neuron takes on. The firing of a neuron consists partially in the exchange of sodium and potassium ions across the cell membrane via ion channels. This is clearly an instance of atomic structures undergoing atomic activity, and therefore corresponds to particular experiences that serve as local building blocks for the UOS. The "third term" is just the expression we use to signify these experiences. Obviously, then, one can no more separate the third term from the thoughts themselves as one can separate the atomic structure of the neurons in question from the firing of those same neurons.

The third term is therefore a very intrinsic part of the constitution of our thoughts as they conform to logic, and the latter would be quite impossible without the former. On the other hand, this inseparability doesn't hold the other way around. One can obviously have the atomic structure of a neuron without that neuron firing, and so the third term can be experienced (below the level of epistemic awareness) without experiencing thought.

Now there still remains a question of the variability of the third term - how its quality differs from one person, whose thinking patterns adhere consistently to logical form, to another, whose thinking patterns may not. As it concerns the latter person, she may sometimes experience the third term differently, thus permitting logical mistakes from time to time. But if the third term is an intrinsic part of our thoughts, then it follows that the thoughts themselves - as a whole - must feel different.

A few implications can be drawn from this: 1) if they feel different, then the words we use to express such thoughts - for example "Socrates is mortal" - are the same merely at the level of language, and underneath - at the level of inner experience - we can expect to find some degree of diversity between one person's understanding and that of another's of what such words denote. Yet such diversity would not be enough - or at least, would not be of the right kind - to warrant a different usage of words (for example "Socrates is alive"), for any change in the wording can still be expected to have the usual consequences - namely, denoting a whole other idea. The diversity in question is not in respect to the idea one or another individual understands, but in why that idea should, in combination with other ideas (i.e. other premises), lead to some logically prescribed conclusion by necessity. What needs to be understood is that this "why" (the answer to which comes as the third term) constitutes an intrinsic part of the idea in question, and that the quality defining this idea is affected (in part) by it. Since the latter can vary from one person to another, so can the thought affected by it, but not in such a way that a different manner of verbally expressing the idea is warranted. In short, it's the same idea, only somehow experienced differently.

2) Such differences in how we experience the same idea can only manifest through the manner in which they entail subsequent thoughts (for example, the conclusions drawn from a line of reasoning), for this, as should be clear at this point, is the key consequence to be expected from differences in the third term. It could not manifest through any direct epistemic awareness. This is true not merely in the trivial case of our lack of access to anyone's thoughts but our own (thereby making comparison impossible), but in that we have no epistemic access to the third term residing in our own thoughts apart from our epistemic access to the thought as a whole. It may be the case that as the third term "colors" our thoughts (i.e. it contributes its share to the overall quality of our thoughts), this color can be known to us (epistemically) as a part of being epistemically aware of the thought itself (for these notions are more or less equivalent), but apart from this overall quality (or "color"), we cannot discern (epistemically) any detail below this level of scale. This, of course, means that we cannot discern any third term apart from the overall quality (or meaning) of our thoughts. Thus, as far as our epistemic awareness is concerned, to experience the thought is indistinguishable from experiencing the third term in it.

These foregoing considerations restore our original understanding of the necessity of entailment. The third term is the ground on which our thoughts lead to their conclusions with necessity, but only because it makes up a vital part of those thoughts - contributing to their very meaning - and hence such necessity and the entailment that follows still finds its roots in that meaning.

This improved understanding of the role played by the third term in our thoughts should facilitate the correction needed vis-a-vis the other point of contention mentioned at the beginning of this post - namely, that the necessity of logic rests on the necessity of physical laws and how this point conflicts with MM-Theory's reversal of it. The correction of this conflict is carried out quite simply by resting the argument made in the post Is Logic Contingent? on the third term itself rather than on the laws of physics manifest in the brain. This can only be done, of course, after having clarified the role played by the third term in logical thinking, which is why the latter had to be established first. Having established this clarification so, we can rephrase the point made in Is Logic Contingent? in full conformity with MM-Theory - namely, that the physical laws manifest in the brain fill their usual role as material representations (rather than necessary conditions) of the necessity of entailment as experienced in our logical thinking. This necessary entailment continues to be understood in terms of the meaning of our thoughts, only now enriched by the conjecture that this meaning can be reduced further, at least partially, to the third term which has been our focus up to this point (albeit without any epistemic awareness of it apart from the thought as a whole). Nonetheless, the notion that a particular logical thinker can't alter the logical necessity of his thoughts because of the rigidity of physical laws playing out in his brain still serves a purpose; it serves to represent the inherent necessity of his thoughts and the manner by which they entail. Particularly, to consider the fact that these same physical laws reduce to the level of atomic activity guides us in understanding the manner in which his thoughts reduce to, among other things, the third term and the manner by which it contributes to the necessary entailment of his thoughts. To put this another way, the type of relation that bears between the atomic activity within our neural circuitry and that neural circuitry itself is the same type of relation that bears between the third term and the thoughts that reduce to it. Thus, an appeal to such atomic activity and the physical laws that make it, along with any neural events that reduce to it, necessary is still an adequate account, at least as a representation, of the necessity by which our thoughts entail, and the point made in Is Logic Contingent?, which is just such an appeal, ought to be construed in this sense.

Lastly, this should not take away from the intended force of that post - namely, to bolster the claim that necessity spans beyond the scope of logic alone - for one can verily see that even in the case of illogical thinking, the third term is still alive and well, accounting for the sense of necessity in such thinking, and in fact determining the necessity of such thinking. It was never a question of whether the laws of nature are conditioned by or the condition for the necessary flow of experience, but one of their generalizability. To see that the third term must be active in both cases of logical and illogical thinking serves to reinforce this generalizability. By reducing the necessity of logical thought down to the third term, which in turn is represented by atomic structures, one has every right to generalize not only the third term in like fashion to atomic structures throughout all material systems in the physical universe, but to the manner by which it determines the necessary flow of all experience. To see this generalization at work in the case of illogical thinking is confirmation of this move, and this counts as the special edge I hoped to structure my argument around in Is Logic Contingent?.

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A Second Look at the Problem of Contradiction Ridden Realities

2010-02-11T20:38:00.000-08:00

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In a previous post, I argued, rather dogmatically I admit, that the problem of any conflicting beliefs within the same subjective reality can be resolved by taking the underlying principles on which dependent models of reality are based to their logical conclusions. These logical conclusions would yield, among other things, that contradictions between propositions (i.e. beliefs) can't exist except by way of projection. Consequently, the suggestion, as uneasy as it may be, that any oblivion to their existence, which is to be expected in the minds of those who hold such contradictory beliefs, would amount to a failure for such projection to occur (thereby removing the grounds on which such contradictions can exist) ought to be taken seriously for what it logically implies (namely, that that's all there is to it). The uneasiness of this suggestion was simply chocked up to the difficulty with which we struggle over dispensing with the deeply rooted (perhaps culturally, perhaps psychologically) Platonism that our minds seem in the habit of clinging to. Platonism will reinforce a strong leaning towards an independent model of reality in which a "Truth" is a real (i.e. non-mental) absolute and metaphysical entity whose existence persists independently of one's mind. Thus, any contradiction that may exist between such Truths is also real, absolute, and independent of one's mind, and furthermore itself takes the form of a truth (in virtue of its being subject to formulation as such). The conclusion we are persuaded to draw from this is that no system of thought (i.e. belief) could be sustained as a projected system of truth should there be any contradiction therein. Thus, if any one subjective reality consisted of even a single contradiction, the notion of its projecting as a reality is, at best, problematic, and at worse, impossible. But the solution we entertained in the aforementioned post consisted of a wholesale rejection of reality as an independent model would have it, thereby freeing us from the condition under which a contradiction must exist as a real, absolute, and independent entity. Adopting a dependent model instead, it is our right to posit that contradictions exist only insofar as one is aware of them - and only for the one who is so aware. For anyone else - i.e. those who remain ignorant of such contradictions - those contradictions will not project, and consequently will not exist.

It is the dogmatic flavor of this solution, however, or rather the uneasiness of the aforementioned "suggestion", which has left me open to, and in search of, a more persuasive and conciliatory solution. I believe I have found one, and I will spell it out in this post.

The inspiration for this solution comes from Hume and his skepticism of causation, for I recognize between the two - his skepticism and ours over contradictions - a close kinship in terms of the rationale underpinning them. I'd like to show how the difficulty over the rejection of either concept - in Hume's case, that reality must be exhaustively and causally deterministic, and in ours, that reality must be contradiction-free - as groundable on the same (at least in form) argument. I plan to approach the problem from the same angle as well - namely, through an examination of the relevant concepts (that is, "reality" and "contradiction") - with the aim of exposing their logical compatibility. That is to say, just as Hume showed that there is nothing logically inconsistent with the notion of reality consisting of uncaused events, I in a similar vein wish to show that there is nothing logically inconsistent with the notion of a reality consisting of contradictions between its constituent truths. If I can show this, then I can argue for the possibility of a contradiction ridden thought system projecting as a reality. Should any uneasiness remain after all is said and done, such uneasiness can be chocked up to the same uneasiness that plagues the notion of a reality potentially housing acausal events.

My first task, therefore, is to briefly summarize the Humean argument against necessary causation. It is as follows: We can prove neither empirically nor rationally that a sequence of events is causally related. Two events, the one immediately following the other in time, can only be said to be correlated. There is nothing in time between the events, in other words, that we can identify as a proper "cause". For all we know, the two events occur together purely by coincidence, or a third variable exists unbeknownst to us that causes both. We only ever infer a causal relation after repeated experiences with the two events, and only when such experiences consistently turn out the same. But there is no guarantee that this inference is true. Hume calls this inference a "habit of constant conjunction", which is to say that when two events are constantly conjoined in experience, the mind develops the habit of expecting the consequent event every time the antecedent one occurs. The term "cause", according to Hume, is just the word we use to express this expectation.

That's the argument against any empirical proof of causation. But Hume also puts it in terms that undermine any rationalist proof. As the rationalists would have it, we know causation by way of the principle of sufficient reason, which states that all things have a reason, and in the case of worldly events, a cause. The rationalists would like to take this principle as a hard and fast rule of logic, one akin to the law of contradiction or excluded middle. But if the term "cause" refers merely to an expectation, one rooted in something as contingent as a habit of the mind, then it hardly qualifies as a rule of logic. Thus, Hume contends that the principle of sufficient reason is not grounded on anything remotely as firm as an immutable rule of logic. Rather, it is grounded on the same habit of mind, the same expectation, with which we infer particular causes. Even if we were to concede that, from a statistical standpoint, this expectation is highly reliable in most cases, it is nevertheless an inductive leap. This is Hume's famous Problem of Induction, which is often phrased as "the future is under no obligation to mimic the past" and holds even in the case wherein the past has a perfect record (i.e. no exception to the causal rule exist on record). In other words, Hume argues a strong case for the absence of any rule of logic, and thus any rationalist proof, necessitating that any event be caused by, or the cause of, another.

That's the Humean argument against proof of necessary causation, but there is a larger - and deeper - message we get from this, one that is significant for our present purposes. Namely, it is that we sometimes mistake mere human inclinations or modes of thinking with logical necessity or proof. We have a tendency, even a desire, to assume causal relations linking events constantly conjoined in experience, and we often mistake this tendency or desire with certitude or proof. Note how this mistake is no proof of the contrary either - namely, that such conjoined events are not causally related - but only an overestimation of the grounds we have for asserting causal relations. Hume's skepticism is not a radical shift to the opposite pole, but simply a withdrawal from polarization one way or the other. In fact, it isn't even clear whether Hume doubted causation at all - only that if he did believe in it, he recognized that he must ground such a belief on induction - that is, faith.

To show the relevance of this point to our present purposes, let me rephrase it in terms of concepts. In particular, let me rephrase it in terms of the concepts "reality" and "cause". When isolated from its intricate connections with the latter, the former concept (reality) can be understood as compatible with an acausal picture of how events unfold. If Hume is right, and our concept of "cause" refers to an expectation for a consequent event to follow an antecedent one, then it is based only on constant conjunction in experience, and not any principle of reason. Reason is therefore free to entertain the possibility that reality may consist of uncaused events, and thus it follows that the concept "reality" is not antithetical to the concept of acausal events occurring within reality.

I believe we ought to understand the relation between reality and truth contradictions in nearly symmetrical terms - that is to say, we ought to understand that the concept "reality" is not antithetical to the concept of contradictions subsisting between the truths descriptive of reality. Just as the concept "cause" denotes (for Hume) more a habit of expectation borne out from experiencing constant conjunction than an inherent feature of reality, for us too the concept "contradiction" ought to denote something other than an inherent feature of reality. It ought to denote (that is, we ought to recognize that it denotes) something psychological. And what is that psychological something? It is none other than a feature of (or rule for) logical thought. That is to say, the term contradiction denotes the rule: free your thinking from opposing propositions as a means for conforming to logic.

The key to understanding the force of this argument, not to mention that of Hume's, is to keep in mind the distinction it makes between the concept of reality* and reality itself. The focus of the argument is on the former, not the latter. It is an analysis on the meaning inherent in the concept "reality", and how nothing antithetical to the concept (or meaning) "contradiction" (derived from a similar analysis) follows from it. That is to say, just as one can imagine the possibility of reality tolerating uncaused events, one can also imagine the possibility of reality tolerating contradictions between certain truths pertaining to it.

This is different from imagining contradictory propositions both being true simultaneously. An example of the latter might be to imagine Socrates being both mortal and immortal at the same time, of which I have no qualms conceding its inconceivability. An example of the former, on the other hand, might be to consider the possibility that reality is such that, despite the impossibility of conceiving it, Socrates is somehow both mortal and immortal simultaneously. The difference between these two examples, in other words, is that the former presses us to conceive a logical impossibility whereas the latter presses us to conceive merely the possibility that what is logically impossible is, in fact, actual (i.e. that reality does not conform to logic). The former is, as a rule, inconceivable, but the latter is only about something inconceivable, but may itself be conceivable.

This latter point brings to light a correlate to the argument presented here - namely that whereas the concept of reality is not antithetical to the notion of its tolerating contradictions, logic is. That is to say, whereas one may be able to conceive that reality may tolerate contradictions, one cannot argue logically for such contradictions. So whereas I may be able to assert as a brute fact that Socrates is somehow mortal and immortal simultaneously, and genuinely believe it without any degradation incurred to my concept of reality, I cannot argue for it logically (though I may think I can). If one finds, in other words, that contradictory conclusions can be drawn from the same supposedly logical line of reasoning, that is a sure sign that an error exists in the presumed logic. Be that as it may, the fact remains that reality, or at least our concept of reality, is such that it is not at all incoherent to suppose that it may persist fraught with contradictions independently of our minds. Though such a notion is not incoherent, it is beyond the reach of demonstration by means of logical argument. That is to say, one could never demonstrate by means of a logic proof that two or more contradictory conclusions accurately describe reality.

Nonetheless, the world is chock full of people who really believe in the possibility, or even actuality, that reality tolerates contradictions. This alone is enough to prove the point being made here - namely, that the concept of reality can survive such a notion (however uncomfortable that makes us feel). These people recognize our propensity to find logically consistent accounts of reality as merely a human need, much like Hume recognized the same of causation, and not something we directly perceive in the inherent nature of reality herself. Reality, these people will tell us, cares not for such trivialities as human needs and modes of understanding, and is not affected one iota by these. If reality can be described by contradictory propositions, then it is too bad for us if this puts us ill at ease. The reason why these people are able to propose this is precisely because the concept of reality is such that it can be proposed. Reality is conceived such that it exists and maintains its inner structure and nature independently of our minds and the logic with which we aim to understand it.

The prevalence of so many people who can bring themselves to believe such things is not the only support for such a notion. There is also scientific evidence that reality may in fact feature phenomena that can only be described in this contradictory way - namely, the phenomena, given by quantum mechanics, known as the superposition states of particles. An example of this is the fact that particles sometimes seem to spin in both directions at once. That is, they can spin "up" at the same time as spinning "down" (mind you, the terms "up" and "down", or "spin" for that matter, are technical terms which don't precisely carry the same meaning as the "spin", whether "up" or "down", of an ordinary macroscopic object like a ball or a planet). Another example of a superposition state is how the momentum of a particle will never be determined as one precise value (such as 100mkg/s or 200mkg/s). Instead, particles will always have some range of momentum with no clear boundary marking the limits of this range. For example, the act of measuring the momentum of an electron can be said to yield something in the range of (say) 100mkg/s and 200mkg/s with a probability of 95%. What this means, in other words, is that the particle is moving at a whole range of speeds all at the same time. It is moving with both momentums 100mkg/s and 200mkg/s - and every other value in between - simultaneously.

Now, although such notions as spinning up and down at the same time, or moving at different speeds at the same time, jar the intellect for sure, it is still questionable whether it warrants interpreting reality as featuring contradictions. One objection that might be raised against this interpretation is that a true contradiction takes the form of "A and not A" whereas for a particle to spin both up and down simultaneously can only be formulated as "A and B" (where A="The particle spins up" and B="The particle spins down"). One might infer that spinning down is semantically equivalent to not spinning up, but that is the crux of the objection. Those who hold to this objection would be those who take the findings of quantum mechanics to indicate that it is not true that a particle's spinning down entails its not spinning up - that is, particles can spin in both directions simultaneously. In other words, where the proper formulation of the proposition in question is "A and B" (as opposed to "A and not A"), both "not A" and "not B" can be ruled out precisely because both A and B are established and take priority. Essentially, the point would be that spinning up and down is no different for a particle than being red and soft is for a sweater. Though the former may seem contradictory, this is a mistake on our part - that is, our intellect is merely built to interpret the former as contradictory, and that beyond our intellect, such an interpretation does not hold sway.

Yet another objection might follow: that the term "superposition" is best understood to denote a state that is, for all intents and purposes, inconceivable to us, and when we describe such states as (for example) "a particle spinning up and down simultaneously", this is only the closest approximation we can articulate given the limits of our language and understanding. In other words, it is not true to say "the particle spins both up and down simultaneously" - not exactly - for whatever is the case, it cannot be put into words at all. Thus we have no right to describe the superposition states of particles in contradictory terms - at least, not on the grounds of these considerations.

That being said, such objections are ultimately inconclusive - the first because if B did connote "not A" (or A connoted "not B"), we would have the same findings, and although A would certainly still be one of them, "not A" would, in virtue of B, also hold true - and we would be forced to concede that reality operates under contradicting principles. The second objection is inconclusive one two grounds: first, that although superposition states might denote occurrences in reality that are incomprehensible to human understanding, the alternative - namely, that there is nothing wrong with our understanding and contradictory states are in fact what we have - has not been ruled out. Secondly, even if superposition states do denote incomprehensible occurrences in reality, it doesn't follow that those occurrences will unfold according to the rules of logic (or any set of rules that guarantee freedom from contradiction). The only thing that would follow would be that we are dealing with unknowns, and reality may yet feature contradictory states.

But whatever the case, quantum mechanics has certainly bolstered notions of contradictions in reality and made them more plausible to a great many. But none of this can be taken to either logical conclusion - that reality features contradictions or is consistent through-and-through. Therefore, I implore the reader to note the following about my overall argument: that I never once said, nor will I ever say, that reality is subject to description by means of contradictory terms. This is where the distinction between the concept of reality and reality itself, a distinction we admonished the reader to heed earlier in this post, is most relevant. The argument so far no more suggests that this is the case, or is even possible, than Hume's argument suggests that acausal events actually happen or are possible (quantum indeterminism, as we've just seen, seems to suggest otherwise, but this is neither relevant to the force of Hume's argument nor conclusive on the matter). It might be the case that reality can be described in contradictory terms (at the peril of MM-Theory, of course), but nothing of the argument so far supports or denies this. It is simply not for us to say. What we are saying here is that the concept of reality (not reality itself) is consistent with the concept of its featuring contradictory states (and this without the concept of reality being inherently contradictory in and of itself). Thus, a reality design that features contradictory elements may still project without negating its standing as a reality.

We would nevertheless like to stay consistent in our analysis of reality and our quest to understand, for if ever we arrived at contradictory conclusions, we ought to urge ourselves to re-examine our analysis and find the logical blunders we inadvertently stumbled over. What we want in the end is a thoroughly consistent account of reality, one that will survive any onslaught of criticism and panel of objections. That is why in building MM-Theory, we will always strive for logical consistency (or as close as we can get) despite arguing for the possibility of projecting reality containing contradictions. The latter may be possible for some arbitrary individual, but we don't want that for ourselves. Contradictions in a reality can only function to weaken the arguments in support of it, and so long as such contradictions exist, they can be exploited. Thus, we still want to avoid contradictions for all the usual reasons.

Yet I anticipate the following objection: to permit any arbitrary system of belief, however fraught with contradictions, projects those contradictions along with the reality that houses them, thus by implication making those contradictions real in the Universal Mind of MM-Theory. MM-Theory, in other words, features those contradictions. We can reply as follows: we ought to keep in mind that although such contradictions will, in virtue of projecting, become real, they are still cognitive, or propositional, in nature, and so their realness - or rather their truth - is just as MM-Theory says it is - namely, relative. That is to say, the contradictory propositions in question are only true relative to a particular reality design. More specifically, they are true relative to the reality belonging to the beholder - that is, the one who believes in them. They are not necessarily true of MM-Theory itself. They may be true in MM-Theory - or rather in the Universal Mind as depicted by MM-Theory - but this is wholly different from the notion that they are true of MM-Theory (or the Universal Mind). The latter notion is nothing more than a gross misunderstanding of the relative nature of truths (i.e. beliefs, propositions, etc.). However much such truths may be found in the Universal Mind, they are not about it - rather, they are about a completely different reality design, one that stands as an alternative to MM-Theory. We may still have to concede the truth of their relation to each other being a contradiction (for that, I'm sure the reader will agree, would be true in all possible worlds), but this is no more detrimental to the logical consistency of our theory than conceding that a fairy tale or the delusions of a raving schizophrenic might feature contradictions is detrimental to the logical consistency of any ordinary understanding of reality.

After all is said and done, I personally feel that this reconciliation on the problem at hand is superior to the one entertained previously (that is, in the previous post that this one is a follow up to), not only in that it frees us from the burden of having to brutely deny the projecting of contradictory beliefs in the subjective realities of those who hold such beliefs, but also in that it entitles us to posit this projecting even when the subject consciously accepts his reality with those very contradictions (i.e. as someone who believes reality can be described in contradictory terms). Such a double edged sword is a suitable note to close on. We can assert, with the above rationale, that no need exists to account for the projection of whole realities (or at least, reality designs) when those realities consist of certain truth contradictions because the projection of reality proper (i.e. as the concept of reality) is utterly unaffected by such contradictions persisting within it. Thus, in conclusion, we will leave the issue as such - namely, as a non-issue.

* This is the concept of reality qua reality - that is, regardless of any consideration of what reality consists of or contains.

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Rewrote Advanced Theory

2010-02-11T20:13:00.000-08:00

Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com

I have recently rewritten large portions of the Advanced Theory. In particular, I have rewritten my account of selfhood - what it is and how to explain it - and my account of space, time, and momentum, and what they represent vis-a-vis their correspondences beyond human experience. I would advise the reader to check them out.

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Clarifications on the Reduction of Experience

2009-07-08T09:00:00.000-07:00

Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com/

From early on in writing the papers for my website, I've always wanted to make something clear but both procrastinated and couldn't find just the right spot for it. I'll clarify it here. It concerns the reductionist approach we seem to take towards experiences at various points throughout the website - at some points decomposing experiences into their parts, at other points showing equivalence relations - but all the while passing over in seeming ignorance the fact that we declared experiences to be the fundamental elements of the universe to which all real things reduce, and beyond which no further reduction is necessary. So I feel this needs to be accounted for.

What was argued was not that experiences are irreducible, but that reduction isn't necessary if one's goal is to find the ultimate basis for things. At no point was it argued that experiences can't be decomposed - they certainly can, and indefinitely. What was argued was that such reduction gets one no closer to a fundamental basis. Albeit, this was the very argument leveled against physical reduction, and was the prime reason for abandoning it. However, the reason why this warrants abandoning physical reduction, but not that of experience, is very subtle. The reason is that with physical reduction, one begins without a grasp on the ultimate basis for the physical phenomena in question - the essential character of their manifestation, the reader will recall, being contingency through-and-through - whereas with experiential reduction, one begins with such a grasp - the essential character of their manifestation being necessity. Thus, in both cases of reduction - physical and experiential - the decomposition of the object of interest into its parts, though easily done, is futile and pointless. In the one case, the ultimate basis for its existence is absent at no matter what level of reduction, and in the other, it is there at every level. In the one case, one can't attain an ultimate basis, in the other, one has no further need to.

Perhaps the best account of this given in my website is figure 3 of The Advanced Theory which shows that we reach an ultimate level of reduction by reducing the physical to the experiential, yet at the same time, one can reduce either the physical or the experiential along physical or experiential lines (respectively) indefinitely. The point we want to get across, however, is that one can do so until one is blue in the face, and one will be no closer to an ultimate basis for anything. If one reduces along physical lines, one gets no closer to the experiential hierarchy of reduction because such a reduction heads in the wrong direction, and if one reduces along experiential lines, one still gets no closer but this time because one is already there. However, if one reorients the direction of reduction - by 90 degrees clockwise according to the figure - one is not only able to reduce the physical to the experiential, but one stops there content to have found where the path ends.

There is also the matter of our epistemic awareness of our own experiences. We argued, at one point, that even those experiences of which we have epistemic awareness can be reduced beyond the level of such epistemology. We argued this on the grounds that their physical counterparts - namely, neuro-chemical phenomena - can likewise be so reduced. But at another point, we argued that anything and everything that an experience can be reduced to must be experienced through-and-through. We said:

Meaning is always beheld - it is always "inside". It must be because, as the core essence of experience, it must be felt... Because there is nothing in an experience that is hidden from the beholder, it will be felt down to its very depths, right down to the fundamental level where reduction no longer holds.

But if we lose epistemic awareness beyond a certain point of reduction, in what sense can we continue to say that the experience is "felt down to its very depths"? We can say this in the sense that what an experience feels like is different from our knowledge of it. Our lack of epistemic awareness past a certain level only means we won't be able to identify - epistemically, cognitively - any one detail or component apart from the full collection consisting of every other detail or component. But we can certainly know and feel the whole collection. The thing is, the question of what the whole feels like and that of what the components feel like - that is, the components collectively - is, essentially, the same question. So to feel the whole is, ipso facto, to feel the parts - but that is, to feel the parts collectively - and why should it be any other way? If we carry out our reductive analysis properly, we shouldn't deduce the presence of any one, or any subset, of details or components separately from the rest. The parts we uncover in the final analysis should come along with every other part that belongs to the original experience.

But then the issue is complicated by the introduction of equivalence. Following that concept is the implication that none of the details are there in the original experience. The reason why the original experience feels uniform and homogenous is because it is uniform and homogenous. The only experience that exists therein is the one we are epistemically aware of. But this is not as problematic as it might at first blush seem. Equivalence is a useful concept for understanding the sort of reduction that applies to things whose essential character is semantic as opposed to physical, objective, tangible, or something of that variety. The sort of reduction in question is such that the meaning at every level is the same, and indeed one, but the forms or expressions of that meaning are not only different but not even the same entities. This is completely unlike physical reduction whereby the sum of the components just are the whole - that is, they are the same entity - but with equivalence, the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

So albeit the issue is complicated by equivalence, it is not complicated in a way that proves to be a problem for us. Notwithstanding the fact that one can still trace a path along a reductive line (however much that line is defined in terms of equivalence), the worry over how one feels the components imbedded in one's experience despite having no epistemic awareness of any subset of those components is nicely done away with. It is no longer a question of how one feels these components, for the components aren't actually there. There is nothing to feel but the whole experience - uniform and homogenous - and because any equivalent set of experiences would bear exactly the same meaning, the subject, having only epistemic awareness of the whole, of the singular meaning, would discern not one distinguishing feature between the equivalent experiences. Essentially, what this means to say is that one can't feel any other experience than the one that is uniform, homogenous, and whole, for one discerns only one singular meaning. To feel a whole set of experiences, though it may be equivalent to the single one, would be to discern more than one detail therein - that is, to be epistemically aware of more fundamental components - and indeed this may be the case in certain hypothetical scenarios. For example, we could conceive of brains whose epistemic centers were sensitive not only to whole neurons firing from within other centers, but activity below the level of neurons - activity such as the passing of potassium and sodium ions through channels, or the release and binding of neurotransmitters to receptor sites. We can safely say that whatever experience we think we're feeling - because we are epistemically aware of feeling it - we are not only correct in thinking this, but it is the only experience we're feeling. Any other set of experiences we might reduce it to isn't so much there "in" the experience, but merely equivalent to it.

Having said this, a final word is perhaps in order - a word to address the principle we laid down for the interchangeability of equivalent experiences. We said that:

...there is no basis upon which we can proclaim any one experience as the "real" one and the others simply waiting to pop into existence should there be a need to replace it. Where their realness is concerned, they are all on equal footing...

Now it seems we are retracting this statement. It seems as though we are saying that only the singular and whole experience we are epistemically aware of - the one we feel as uniform and homogenous - is actually there. This may be true, but it is not to be taken in an absolute sense. It is true relative to one's epistemic awareness. If we like, we can decompose the experience - or contrive an equivalent set - and treat that as what's, in fact, being experienced - and there would be no error in this - but what we must do in addition is to carry out a similar substitution for the epistemic awareness associated with the original experience. The reason for this become clear when we examine the same maneuver as it applies to the physical brain. Suppose, for example, that the original experience was a visual one, and its neural counterpart was a neuron from the occipital cortex. When we replace the experience with a set of equivalent ones, this move corresponds to a decomposition of the neuron into its parts - say its molecular constituents. But the catch is that it makes little sense to decompose the neuron like this without decomposing every other physical system whose relations to the neuron are relevant to this scenario. In other words, a good rule of thumb to follow in these mental exercises - perhaps a must - is that when we reduce any one component of a system to its parts, we ought to do the same for every other part. In that case, to reduce the visual experience to a set of equivalent experiences, we must also reduce the experience of being epistemically aware of the original experience - we must consider the set of experiences that are equivalent to that epistemic awareness, and at the same level of reduction to which we have taken the visual experience. It follows from this, however, that the experiences we would be considering are not the epistemic awareness we are familiar with. They are a different, though equivalent, set. That being said, we have no reason to expect that the set of experiences equivalent to the visual one we started out with should come along with any epistemic awareness. We would essentially be epistemically unconscious of them.

In brief, the one experience we are epistemically aware of is felt in isolation from any other equivalent set because it is uniquely associated with our epistemic awareness, and the other equivalent sets in question might indeed be said to be "on equal footing" with respect to their ontological standing, but they wouldn't be associated with our unique position in and perspective on the grand system of experiences that is the Universal Mind. Such a position, such a perspective, is defined in terms of human experiences - that is, the experiences we are familiar with. These experiences are what make us human, and without them, we wouldn't be ourselves. In other words, to replace any one with another equivalent set would entail replacing them all, and we would be left with a mind that isn't us - at least, not us as we know ourselves.

Having said such a mouth full, I would like to close this post by addressing one last concern. That concern is the dependence of all experiences on other experiences prior to them - that is, on the experiences that entail them. This might come off as confusing to some because it seems to conflict with the principle of the independence of experience from anything but itself due to its roll as the fundamental basis for all things real. This independence is independence from anything below it in reductive terms - that is, unlike a rock which is dependent for its existence on its constituent atoms, an experience is not dependent on any constituents. Again, though, it can be decomposed into constituents (or shown to be equivalent in any case), but not that it depends on any. When it comes to entailment, however, we are dealing with a different sort of dependence. This dependence is akin to causal dependence - that as, as with physical things, they depend on a prior cause for their present state of existence (though I'm reluctant to use the word 'cause' in the case of experiences as causation is too mechanical a term, and not semantic as is the nature of and reason for the flow of experiences). This, however, is not reduction; it is a manner of explaining the origins of things. It is following a path in time rather than scale. Furthermore, although we may have to concede that all experiences are dependent on antecedent ones, we can say that all such antecedents are still experiences, and thus experience in general is independent from anything save itself.

Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com/

A New Insight Into The Problem of "Matching"

2009-05-28T20:28:00.000-07:00

Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com/

Kant's Achille's heal, according to most contemporary philosophers, is the manner in which he seems to fly right over the glaring contradiction in professing knowledge and conception of an unknowable, inconceivable thing-in-itself. If I were to say to you: behold! There are things in the world of which no one can know and not even conceive! You would undoubtedly retort with: but then how do you know this? How can you even profess to have conceived it? For those who don't know Kant's general metaphysics, this is, in a crude sense, what he did, and many philosophers since have pressed him with the same kind of retorts. Kant's metaphysics begins with the idea that the world as it appears can only be an artifact of the mind - much like MM-Theory says - and the world as it really is is something beyond appearance - that is, something that can't be captured in appearances, for appearances are exclusively mental in nature. So for example, even though the desk in front of me appears dark, long, overlain with a wood-like pattern, and to the touch feels hard, a bit cold, heavy were I to lift it, and so on and so forth, Kant would say that these features do not belong to the table itself but to my way of experiencing it - that is, to my mind. What features, if any, belong to the table itself? Kant says none that can be known or conceived. That is to say, the table-in-itself, if it bears any inherent features or has a distinct essence, is unknowable and inconceivable. We are therefore cut off from it, separated into a world of phenomena - that is, a world of appearances - and the "real" world, the world of noumena, of things-in-themselves, although they surely exist, cannot be known or conceived.

But how can Kant espouse such a view without implicitly, and perhaps inadvertently, claiming to know and conceive of such things-in-themselves? That's the Kantian dilemma, and it so happens to be a dilemma for a non-solipsist subjectivist as well. We who subscribe to MM-Theory find ourselves caught in the same Kantian web of contradiction. We say, in one breath, that there exist non-human experiences out there, beyond our minds, but in another breath, that no one can refer to, or even conceive, anything beyond their minds. The latter claim is essentially equivalent to the Kantian claim that the things beyond our minds are unknowable and inconceivable.

This problem was, of course, addressed in Reality and Perception under the section The Infinite Regress Problem in which we solved it by appealing to an alternative set of criteria for a theory's "correctness", criteria that any system model of consciousness, of which MM-Theory is a clear example, ought to heed - namely, to observe internal logical consistency. Of course, we were also upfront about the fact that this "solution" might be taken more as a concession rather than an effective defense of our theory. We also noted, in the last post of this blog, that this concession brings up a problem for belief in our theory - namely, that to believe the theory, at least according to this particular solution to the infinite regress problem, is to automatically invalidates the belief. We offered three different construals of what it is to "believe" a theory, the last of which seemed to restore a sense of pride in our theory, but not nearly to the same degree as it once was at. Thus, our confidence is a little shaken. We are still burdened with the obligation to keep in mind in what sense we can say we "believe" our theory.

Well, I don't so much intend, in this post, to revert back to the conventional sense, but I would like to restore our sense of confidence in our theory. I would like to offer a substitute to the conventional sense of "correctness", one that, although not an alternate sense itself, supplements the sense given by a system model of consciousness. That is to say, we will hold onto our system model criteria for assessing the correctness of our theory, but in addition, I offer some hope that a sort of "connection" can be maintained between the theory and what lies beyond it in the "outer world". This sort of "connection", I feel, rekindles the sense of confidence that was stripped when we abandoned a window model's criteria for "correctness", but without being an alternative set of criteria per se.

The way I intend to do this is by solving the Kantian dilemma, and the solution I offer carries over perfectly well to MM-Theory and the particular problem under discussion which plagues it, for they are indeed, at base, the same problem.

***

We generally equate "accuracy" in a concept with its tendency to reflect or mirror the outer world. It is the same with photographs. We say that a photograph is an accurate depiction of things in reality - a scene, an event - when it mirrors precisely those things. So we equate "accuracy" with "replication". Only if an idea, or a photograph, is a replication of the outer world do we call it accurate.

This stems from the bias of dualism, from the presupposition that the perception and the perceived are separate. If they are separate, then in order for the perceived to in fact be the perceived, the perception must be a perfect replica of it - otherwise, it simply isn't perceived. It also stems from the window model of consciousness which, although not strictly dependent on a dualism of perception and perceived, maintains that if there is a dualism, the perception must be a replication of the perceived, for otherwise consciousness is much less window-like and more system-like.

This view can be most credited to John Locke who espoused a "copy" theory of mental content. That is, he described mind as a storehouse of "copies" of things taken from the outer world. The outer world is first sensed, and the very process of sensing is a sort of photocopy process. The photocopy is then stored in the mind as memory, knowledge, and conception of the things sensed.*

This view, I believe, is archaic and oversimplified. I propose a different model: the key and lock. There is indeed a sense in which our knowledge and conceptions "matches" the known and conceived, but not in that they are replications of the latter. They match in the same sense that a key matches a lock. A key is indeed the perfect match for a lock when it effectively and consistently unlocks it, but by no means does this entail that the key is a copy, a replication, of the lock. If it were, it would be another lock, and completely ineffective in unlocking the first.

In other words, according to this sense of "matching", a thing is the right match for another thing only when there are key differences between them. They must not be perfect replicas of each other. If a concept, say, were a perfect replica of the conceptualized, it would cease to be a concept. A concept of a tree, for example, could not be a tree itself, for then it would cease to be a concept and there would be no conception of the tree to be had.

Numerous examples can be cited for matching in just this sense. Dating services try to find the right "match" for those seeking companionship. Specific nucleotides "match" up with specific other nucleotides along the length of DNA strands. Specific personnel files "match" with actual people. In none of these cases does the sense of "matching" insinuate that the pair in question are identical to each other. It is necessary that they differ in certain ways in order to be the right matches.

The relation between a concept and the conceptualized is a match in much the same sense. This is true regardless of whether the theory of mind we uphold is subjectivist or objectivist. If it is objectivist, then there is no question that concepts differ from things in the world - the former is mental in character and the latter physical. Perhaps the objectivist in question is a Platonist. Then the latter is still not mental but a different sort of metaphysical entity: one of the "forms". The whole reason the mind/body problem exists in the first place is because we attribute such drastically different features and essences to mind and matter - concepts being an instance of the former, the conceptualized being an instance (in some cases) of the latter. Even a materialist, who reduces mental things like concepts to brain states or neural events, can't argue that such things are obviously different from their referents in the world. The concept of a rock, for example, if we are to describe it in terms of neural activity, is not in any sense the same in structure or essence as the rock itself. The materialist takes the neural activity to be a signifier and the rock, the signified. Signifiers and signified are again good examples of this sort of matching. In order for a symbol to be the right match for the symbolized, it must differ in some way - otherwise, it is not a symbol but an instance of the symbolized.

And if one were a subjectivist, then again we see a difference between the concept and the conceptualized. Concepts are formed (usually) by our other experiences - our visual beholding of a tree, for example, entails the idea of the tree in our minds. But the former is a visual experience, the latter a cognitive one. They are different qualities of experience. If it is possible to form concepts of experiences beyond our minds - which we will soon argue is indeed possible - then the same reasoning applies: the concept is a cognitive experience, and the conceptualized is a different quality of experience all together. If the concept in question had to be a perfect replica of the conceptualized experience, it wouldn't very well be a concept; thus, there would be no concept to speak of. Therefore, in order to have the right concept - for anything - it must refrain from replicating the conceptualized.

I would even venture to say that the key and lock is such a fitting analogy that not even the grooves and teeth of the key are replications of any feature belonging to the lock. One may disagree with this, objecting that even things that match by means other than replication must have something in common, some feature or characteristic that is identical. Any robust understanding of the mechanics of locks, however, proves this wrong. The closest one comes to finding replications of features on the key within the lock is the warded lock. The principle of this lock is that grooves on the key match up with protrusions in the lock. The key fits these protrusions like a mold. But the thing about molds is that where grooves exist, there is nothing of the mold there - there is only empty space - unlike the corresponding protrusions of the molded. As for the grooves in the molded (i.e. the lock in this case), a similar point can be made. To put this another way, the sense in which the key matches up with the warded lock is not in that the grooves and protrusions of the key are replicated in the lock, but that they are opposed. That is to say, where we find grooves on the key, we find the opposite in the lock - we find protrusions (and visa-versa where we find protrusions on the key). So it is exactly the opposite principle from replication which is at work in classical key and lock matching.

The significance of this key-and-lock model is that it allows for proper concepts to form of things to which we have no experiential access. Concepts can be categorized according to two general classes: those of things of which we have epistemic awareness and those of things we don't. It seems the manner by which concepts are formed in the former case is through a rather automatic process. Experiences are had and those experiences are acknowledged. Acknowledging those experiences allows for epistemic awareness, and thus concepts of them to be properly formed. Speaking metaphorically, it is a process that starts with a lock and ends with just the right key for it. But it doesn't follow that this is the only process by which the right key can be formed. It is possible to have keys that match locks even if the manner by which the key was formed is any of a number of arbitrary methods. It is possible, therefore, that concepts that would fall under the second category might still match things in the world in this key-and-lock sense - even though we have no experiential access to them.

Of course, we have no warrant to say that any alternative to the automatic process by which concepts are formed from acknowledged experiences can guarantee that the concepts thereby derived are at all accurate. If the conceptualized is beyond our experience, we don't even have the means to verify the concept's accuracy. Nevertheless, the possibility remains open. It is still possible to form keys that may be just the right match for some lock out there. The lock may be inaccessible to us (therefore unverifiable), and the key formed by some arbitrary, maybe even random, process, but there is no reason to dismiss out of hand the possibility of their matching - even if only by sheer coincidence.

Of course, for the most part, it is not sheer coincidence. There is often some measure of reason to the madness of our philosophical musings, some reliable process of cogitation that can yield results worth believing in. When we delve into metaphysics, or entertain ontologies beyond what we can directly access experientially, we try to stick reasonably close to logic and craft our arguments as deductively as we can. This is a methodology - the rationalist's. We draw our philosophical conclusions with as rational a head as we can maintain. It is hardly an exhaustively random or blind process. It seems to prove quite fruitful in many cases wherein our conclusions refer to things we can verify - that is, things of the empirical world - such as when those conclusions are scientifically testable. Why not for things beyond the testable, things which can't be definitively verified? Who's to say that the latter class of things is of such an all together incommensurate nature that they can't be subjected to the same process, the process of matching them up with concepts derived from a more abstract and rationalist method?

But why would the photograph model - the antithesis of the key-and-lock model according to which proper concepts are necessarily replications of the conceptualized - not also work in this sense? Why, for example, would it not be possible to produce a photo, or perhaps a painting, that so happens to replicate some scenery or some event out in the world with a reasonable degree of accuracy, even though the painting may have been mocked up, or is a product of random creativity? After all, if we are allowing that some locks may be "inaccessible" to our experience yet it is possible to form keys for them, then why should a scenery or event be accessible for a photograph of it to be formed (at least, in the context of the metaphor)? Why should we limit the photograph model to the observable?

This objection misses the point of the key-and-lock model. It's not so much in the possibility of deriving a "match" as it is how that matching is characterized: as perfect replication or as key essential differences. Of course we could employ the photograph imagery in the same way we employ the imagery of keys and locks. We could say that a photograph matches a scene or event in exactly the same way a key matches a lock, and therefore it seems the key and lock imagery is unnecessary. But the reason this misses the point is that it fails to address the usefulness of the key-and-lock model, a usefulness that the photograph model is simply ill equipped to emphasize however much we keep in mind the sort of "matching" we intend for it to signify. The reason why it is ill equipped is because photographs are meant to invoke impressions of similitude - not differences. The fact that a photograph is two dimensional, for instance, whereas the scenery or event it is a photo of is three dimensional is generally regarded as a shortcoming of the photograph - at least, insofar as its function is to replicate the scenery or event. If it were possible to replace the modern camera with some more advanced technology - say holographic imagery - there would be much motivation to pursue such replacement. It would be seen as better. This is not so for keys and locks. No one would say that a key built in the exact structure as its lock, with all features identical, is a better key. They would say it is a terrible key, for it doesn't work!

We might also add that photos and paintings have a special kind of psychological effect on viewers, one that keys don't - namely, to "transport" the viewer into a world, or at least an imagined scenery, in which the viewer feels he is really there. It's the same effect as that which happens at the movies. The viewer forgets that he's sitting in a theater, and that the images he sees are just color blotches projected onto a screen by a stream of light. He is transported to an alternate world. This psychological effect, this optical illusion as it were, most likely helps a great deal in fostering the replication model. I believe this is why the photograph imagery, or the "copy" terminology, seems more fitting for emphasizing the replication model of concepts and mental content in general. Photographs and copies have many features in common, obviously, with what they are photographs and copies of, and this helps part of the way in facilitating the understanding of the replication model, and the fact that they have this "transporting" effect on viewers carries it the rest of the way.

So there is hope after all that the concepts we trust to represent phenomena beyond our minds might indeed be faithful "matches" for that phenomena. We still wouldn't have any guarantee that they do match - no method of verification - but the possibility is there.

This works out Kant's meaning. When he displays what seems to be knowledge and conception of the inconceivable, unknowable thing-in-itself, his conception is a key to a lock. The concept of the thing-in-itself is not supposed to be a perfect replication of the thing-in-itself. Kant can have a model of it in his mind even though it doesn't bear any semblance at all to that which it models. When he says of it that it cannot be known, cannot be conceived, what he really means is that its own inherent features, and its essence, are not of any quality that can be replicated in the mind. He is essentially arguing against the window model of consciousness - this should be obvious to anyone who knows his phenomenology - and to argue that the thing-in-itself couldn't reside within the phenomenal world is a logical extension of this. What Kant needed, in addition to this, was the key-and-lock model given here. It is needed because with any phenomenology like Kant's - like ours - the connection between inner reference and outer referent (between knowledge and the known) is essentially severed. Any access to a world beyond one's experience is lost. Therefore, what is needed is a way of understanding how this connection can still be maintained. Such a connection is intuitive in a window model of consciousness - the perception is a replication, a mirror image, of the perceived. It was in the language of this model, I believe, that Kant spoke of the unknowability and inconceivability of the thing-in-itself. The language needed for a system model of consciousness - like his phenomenology - would have to be constructed first - a task he failed to take on. He could only speak, in other words, to the naive realist, for it is the latter's understanding of consciousness, after all, that Kant addresses and, in the end, rejects. He was saying "If you require that proper knowledge and conception of a thing be a mirror reflection of that thing, then I'm afraid to say that no such knowledge or conception is possible for things as they are in themselves." Kant didn't have an effective way of explaining the sense in which such knowledge and conception are possible (i.e. the key-and-lock sense), and so he fell short of accounting for his own knowledge and conception of the thing-in-itself. Building the new language required for this would be a task following the conclusions of his phenomenology, but alas he did not go the extra mile. The key-and-lock model is an example of a building block belonging to this language (a significant portion of the rest can be found in Reality and Perception).

This also allows us to rekindle a sense of "belief" in our theory in the usual sense. Without the key-and-lock model, we struggle, as the previous blog post shows, to understand in what way it makes sense to believe. We found that, according to the solution to the infinite regress problem proposed in Reality and Perception, to believe in our theory means merely that we take the reasoning underlying it to have good form, or that the premises are consistent with the conclusions (and perhaps carry the weight of plausibility). But the same could be said of valid arguments no matter how absurd the conclusion, such as the example given of green men. So it seemed to trivialize belief. We looked at a couple other senses of belief, but neither fully satisfied. The most satisfactory one was the third which gave us the right to believe fully in our premises (insofar as those premises were derived from experiences within our minds), but that because the conclusions required a certain leap of faith or inductive reasoning, the logic didn't really follow through from begining to end, from premise to conclusion. Our reasons for believing in the premises, therefore, could not be applied equally to the conclusions. We could deem the conclusions plausible, or persuasive, or likely, etc. but we could not claim to have proven them nor, therefore, to know them. Thus, belief in them was just beyond limits.

Now, with this new key-and-lock model, we can invest fully in belief in the conventional sense. What blocked us before was that we had no other way of understanding "belief" than as a matching between an idea and the referent of the idea, and that we had no other way of understanding "matching" than as a replication of the referent in the mind. The latter notion seemed inseparable from a window model of consciousness, and thus it seemed that to believe in our theory was to invoke that model, essentially contradicting the system model it upholds. But this new understanding of "matching" doesn't invoke the window model, and so we are not burdened with a sense of contradiction. We are free to believe without negating the theory we believe in.

***

If the key-and-lock theory is correct, then it implies that no concept is a match for anything else in the sense of replication. It wouldn't make much sense to say that some concepts are mirror images of the conceptualized, but that other concepts only correspond to the conceptualized as a key to a lock. This means that even simple concepts of things we can experience directly, like the visual beholding of a tree, are not replicas of such experiences. This says something about certain conclusions we drew at various points in the explication of MM-Theory. So in this last section of the current post, I'd like to go over them (at least those that have come to my mind).

For one thing, we argued at length, in The Inconceivability of Consciousness, that, as opposed to all our non-sensory experiences, objectification produces the right concepts for the things we sense. But what does the "right" concept mean in this context? Surely, if no concept is a replication of the conceptualized, then perhaps objectification isn't needed after all to form the right concept of any experience. For instance, it was said in The Inconceivability of Consciousness that we in fact don't have the right concepts of our emotions and our thoughts - although we certainly know when they're present, and some concept, however short of accurately representing them, does come to mind automatically - because, unlike sensory entities, we have no right to objectify them, at least not if the aim is to grasp conceptually their true essence. But if accurate replication doesn't stand in the way anymore, perhaps we can form the right concepts after all.

So what does objectification do for sensory experiences that it doesn't for other kinds of experiences if not to build the concepts accurately? Well, it isn't so much that it fails to building concepts accurately, nor that objectification isn't important for the proper construction of concepts pertaining to sensations; it's that objectification doesn't necessarily hinder the proper conception of non-sensory experiences. Objectification is indeed needed for conceptualizing sensory experiences because it adds the element of "thing-ness" which is the essence of sensory objects. But "thing-ness", although not essential to other kinds of experiences, doesn't hinder the proper conception of them.

What this says, essentially, is that objectification is not a general requirement for the construction of proper concepts, but a specific one for sensory experiences alone. What is general is that it be the right "match" - the right key for the lock - and this matching has little to do with objectification, with "thing-ness". Although our concepts will always have this thing-like character - objectification always having its way with them - it is more of an epiphenomenon, an out-dated tag-along harkening back to objectification's original purpose (i.e. dealing with sensations). But as an epiphenomenon, it is really quite harmless. We can appreciate this especially by considering what we have repeated many times: that we usually have no trouble dismissing the thing-like impression we get from our objectified concepts; we are usually not fooled into believing that the most abstract of our concepts are literally things just because there is an air of "thing-ness" about them. So long as we remain wary of this, our objectified concepts, replete with "thing-ness" as they may be, can still be the right keys for the particular locks they aim to open. In fact, we might even have to say that since "thing-ness" is an essential characteristic of all concepts, it is required to form keys, but this should not be misunderstood as a requirement for matching that particular key to its particular lock, but only that it is required for it to be a key. The lock, on the other hand, may stand free from any thing-like status, and it does so without requiring that the key also stand free. Therefore, if it feels as if we have the right concepts for our non-sensory experiences - that is, it feels like we understand what they are - we probably do.

The key-and-lock model leads me to wonder something further: if we can say that we have (or can have) the right concepts for all our experiences, then can we say the same for all experiences in general? Can all experiences, regardless of their quality, be thought of as locks, and therefore keys for them theoretically possible? Are concepts the sort of thing with the capacity to match anything non-conceptual? This is a very interesting thought. It means the entire universe is potentially comprehensible, at least in principle. It means that in the hypothetical pool of experiences considered in The Basic Theory, there is a concept for every unique non-conceptual experience. It means that at least 50% of the experiences therein are concepts for all the other non-conceptual experiences (and if each and every concept should have a matching concept of its own - every key also being a lock for another key - the ratio of concepts to non-concepts may verge towards infinity to zero).

Even if this were possible, it doesn't mean we can acquire any concept we wish. It could be that some of these concepts are still beyond the human mind's capacity to comprehend. Perhaps some undiscovered alien intelligence can, but not us. It could be that the algorithm required to build such concepts requires starting from a point that is beyond our reach considering where we are now - like a point on land across a great chasm, accessible only to those already on the right side.

Another consideration is how far back towards a window model of consciousness this new idea of "matching" takes us? Whereas a system model gives us a sense of disconnect with everything beyond our minds, this key-and-lock theory re-establishes a connection. Is such a connection grounds for classifying our model of consciousness back into the window camp? No. We still aren't experiencing the phenomena our concepts match up with - not directly, not as if looking through a featureless window - but there is now a new kind of relation between our concepts and the conceptualized, a relation defined by "matching" in the in key-and-lock sense. This key-and-lock sense only works in a system model of consciousness; the alternative - the window model - is banked on replication if anything. We still don't intend for our theory to be taken in a window model sense, and neither does this new idea of "connection" give us the right to propose an alternative sense in which it can be taken. MM-Theory is a system model of consciousness, and that is exactly, and only, the sense in which it is meant to be taken. This new idea of "connection" is not a whole other theory of consciousness; it is merely a footnote to the one we already have, something to consider after the facts of a system model have been laid out, an idea that says: even as we take our theory in a system model sense, it is still possible that, in a sense, it might match the state of things in the world beyond our minds.

However, the meaning of "correctness" is once again brought up and not as easily dismissed. On the one hand, on a subjectivist's account, an idea is always correct because it defines a reality for the subject to believe in (it constitutes a reality design). On the other hand, if there is this sort of connection with an outer world, then it's possible for the key to be a mismatch for the lock it is supposedly made for. Or, to put it another way, the right lock may not exist. In that case, wouldn't we have grounds to say the idea is wrong? Not necessarily. Just because we're toying with this new sense of "connection", it doesn't follow that it must serve the same purpose as that according to a window model of consciousness - namely, to be the criteria according to which ideas are judged right or wrong. That is to say, according to a (radical) window model of consciousness, truth exists out there, in the world, and we only call our beliefs "true" if they match those truths. This sort of matching is the traditional kind, the sort we're calling "replication" - that is, the belief must be a replication of the truth out there. For a window model of consciousness, that is the criteria for deeming a belief "true". But according to a system model, the criteria is all together different, and simpler - it is that an idea be believed. If it is believed, it is true (for the believer), for "truth" is what it projects itself as. That is to say that a system model of consciousness brings truth in from the outer world and into the mind, and in fact fuses it with belief. Therefore, the question of what makes a belief true is no longer a matter of the "connection" it bears to an outer world - it is no longer a matter of "connection" at all. In this post, we are not reversing this idea back to what it was, but showing how the old "connection" that we abandoned still has an equivalent, albeit of a different sort. Since a belief is true by default, the character of the new "connection" can't be defined as the criteria for truth. Instead, it is defined as a "match" in the key-and-lock sense.

The only daunting challenge to this position (that I can think of anyway) is examples of how this key-and-lock matching can sometimes be verified, such as when the lock so happens to be blatantly accessible to our experience. For example, when someone (a friend, a lover, a relative) gives us a gift (say on our birthday), and we feel so sure we know what it is (say because we've been asking for it), we can verify our beliefs by opening it and observing what's inside. If our belief turns out to be thwarted, this sure seems to act as a powerful criterion for tearing down the belief and its truth status. So observing the lock and recognizing it as a mismatch for the key seems to reinforce the old notion that a proper "connection" is required for a belief to be true. But let's recall what was said about this, or something similar to this, in Reality and Perception (under the section of the Infinite Regress Problem). We said that it wasn't so much the observation itself that served as the criteria, but the knowledge yielded by that observation. We said that

On the other hand, we do insist that whatever we believe and claim to know, it is imperative that it match up with our empirical experiences - or at least, that such empirical experiences don't falsify it. What is this all about? First, keep in mind that this sort of "matching" between belief and empirical experience is not the kind of match we have in mind. Even if an empirical experience confirms one's belief, there is still a very clear distinction between the structure of an empirical experience and a belief. The former is sensory, the latter cognitive. The requirement we are obliged to meet has nothing to do with matching - not in this sense, at least. It has to do with the fact that such empirical experiences entail their own knowledge. I see traffic on the road, I know there is traffic. It is this knowledge that puts demands on our belief that they conform to its terms. Only contending knowledge can decide whether the knowledge contended against is right or wrong, and the human mind so happens to be built such that if the knowledge in question is derived from empirical experience, it has the final say.

So the real criteria seems to be truths that have been inserted into the mind by one's observations. Since those truths have trumping power, if they don't match one's preconceived beliefs (this time à-la-replication), they will stamp out the latter and become the new beliefs. When this happens, when they are the only surviving beliefs, they become the dominant truths that hold sway over one's reality.

Something similar to this is going on even in our thought experiments wherein we imagine a key and its corresponding lock mismatching - even if the lock is beyond verification. If we imagine that we have a key in our minds but that it fails to match its lock in the outer world, this gives us a general sense that the key, the concept, must be wrong. It instills a sense that we must heed to the old window model criteria for judging the correctness of our concepts. But the thought experiment is setup from the start to affect us in the same way that empirical observation does - namely, to allow for fresh knowledge or truth to be inserted into our minds, and thereby overrule all contending preconceptions. Obviously, this affect is due to our knowing that the key and lock don't match. We define the thought experiment in just this way. So we have no chance, going into it from the start, of inspecting the irrelevance of this sort of matching to the truth criteria for our beliefs.

It may be true that empirical observation is what, in many cases, establishes truth to begin with, but that doesn't make it a criterion, for beliefs can be established in many other ways. A criterion is a requirement, not an option among a list of choices. The one thing all such cases of projected truth have in common is that they are believed, and thus belief, it seems to me, is the sole criterion.

This also means that we are still obliged to observe the principle of Referential Monopoly which says that "no conscious being, finding itself in a subjective reality, can make reference to anything, whether physical, abstract, or any other form, beyond its own subjective reality". In other words, although this new brand of "connection" makes it seem as though our beliefs and ideas refer to those entities they are "connected" to, this is not quite warranted. If it were, we would be back into the window model of consciousness and the state of the entity our beliefs and ideas refer to would indeed be the criteria by which they are deemed right or wrong. So Kant's beliefs about the thing-in-itself don't actually refer to the thing-in-itself (that is, the lock for the key) but to mental models in his own mind. Likewise, the non-human "experiences" that MM-Theory makes so many claims about don't actually refer to anything beyond the human mind (the "mind", that is, as a self-presenting-the-model, as we put it in Reality and Perception - although they would refer beyond the mind as a self-in-the-model), but to mental models of experiences within our minds. So we have not quite escaped this unseemly predicament, and our solution to the infinite regress problem remains the only feasible one thus far appreciated.

But what do our beliefs and ideas refer to? Themselves? No, not themselves, but to concepts (at least, for the most part). It is important to distinguish between beliefs, which project as truths, and concepts, which project as something else, usually objects or "things" (although I have entertained the notion of "essences" as perhaps the best way of understanding the form in which concepts project - but that's best put aside for another post). For example, one may believe that "it's raining today" and this belief would consist of, but wouldn't be identical to, the concepts of "rain" and "today". This goes even for non-beliefs - or statements in general - such as what would be true in a story or fantasy world. It goes for any reality design whether that design be one's subjective reality or an invention put together by some creative genius, like George Lucas's Star Wars. For example, if we take the statement - or truth as it would be in the context of the design - "Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father", and we ask "What does the statement refer to? What is it talking about?", the answer clearly is "Darth Vader" and "Luke Skywalker". That is to say, the statement, or truth, refers to specific elements that, in part, make up the reality design in question, in this case concepts. Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker are, at the very least, concepts. There will be cases in which the statement or truth in question refers to things other than concepts, things like sensory experiences, emotions, or other mental content, but we will deal with these in turn. First, let's deal with concepts as the referents that statements and truths refer to.

Obviously, one of the first things the reader will notice is that the concepts that statements and truths refer to are, without any exception I can think of, constituents of those statements and truths (well, in the case of statements, they are constituents of the idea the statement is meant to invoke). A belief such as "it's raining today" indeed consists of the concepts "rain" and "today". This doesn't make it self-referencing, but it does point back to a component within itself. It is the component that is being referenced, not the whole. Some may be mislead to think that the former implies the latter - that is, that the component may not be referenced without the whole with it - but in order to understand that this is not the case, we can recall our discussion from The Inconceivability of Consciousness about arrows and how they perform their function. We said that in order to determine what an arrow points to, it is not enough to look at what lies in its path (that is, along its axis), but to know what its purpose is - that is, what function it is meant to serve. This function can only be determined by the one who drew the arrow, for he is the one who intends to convey something by drawing it, to point to something, to refer. Likewise, we have to understand the functions of our statements and beliefs, what we mean to refer to in uttering them. We mean to refer to the concepts that are expressed in those utterances. Therefore, since it is the concepts we mean to refer to, and not the whole belief or idea itself, then those concepts are the referents, and the fact that they constitute the belief or idea that refers to them is as irrelevant as the fact that an object may lie in the path of an arrow's axis is to determining what that arrow points to.

Do these concepts in turn refer to other things? I would say no - they don't refer at all. If I were to bring to mind the concept of a butterfly and apprehend that concept alone, I would not be making any statements or entertaining any belief. I would, therefore, not be referring at all. I would simply be exercising a rather meaningless, purposeless mental act. It would be true that I would be apprehending something - I would be apprehending "butterfly" - but this isn't a reference to anything. Perhaps "butterflies are beautiful" would be, but as you can see, this is a statement, an idea, perhaps a belief.

On the other hand, it could be argued that the belief or idea itself constitutes a concept, one that perhaps rises above the mere sum of constituent concepts the belief or idea refers to. For example, to believe that "it's raining today" requires at least conceiving of it raining today. without such a concept, how could one possibly believe it to be true? But that doesn't mean that the belief refers to that concepts. It still refers to the constituent concepts of "rain" and "today". Perhaps a thought like "it raining today makes me miserable" would refer to "it raining today" but the reference is now a different statement. It's a statement about "it raining today" as opposed to the more elementary concepts "rain" and "today".

But any way you cut it, the fact that the belief that it's raining today is constituted by the concept of it raining today seems to insinuate that concepts can refer. If the belief refers to the concepts "rain" and "today", is this not equivalent to the concept "it raining today" referring to those same concepts? Not quite, for the same thought experiment can be carried out - the one wherein we imagined entertaining the concept "butterfly". We can imagine entertaining the concept "it raining today" without believing or referring, so the concept itself doesn't refer. Something extra is needed in order to form a belief out of it. Perhaps a belief is just the result of making a concept refer. It is surely the result of taking a stance on the ontological standing of a concept - that is, whether or not it depicts something in, or the state of, reality - but perhaps taking such a stance is just the act of making the concept refer. If this is the case, then it is indeed possible for concepts to refer, but they must be made to refer, and at the end of the day, they still refer to things within the mind. The things they refer to, whether more elementary concepts or otherwise, are not made to refer - they are the referents - and so the referential path terminates with them.

So beliefs and ideas typically refer to concepts within one's subjective reality, or at least a reality design of some sort, and they say things about - indeed, they constitute - the intricate relations between those concepts which define the reality in question and thereby automatically sanction their truth. However, it could be argued, by bringing to our attention obvious cases, that often our beliefs and statements refer to other kinds of experiences. For example, if I were to see my wife walking up the stairs, I could think to myself and believe "hmm, she seems to be going up the stairs". In that case, it would seem that I am referring to something I sense rather than a concept I introspect. This may or may not be true, but in either case, I find it irrelevant to our present concerns. Having said that, I would think that there must be some conceptual medium by which I can make such a reference, for if I did not conceive my wife walking up the stair, how could I even utter it to myself? Indeed, it seems necessary that I at least conceive it in order to note it to myself. It would seem, therefore, that some kind of conceptual apprehension must mediate my sensory experiences and my being able to refer to them. This would naturally be true of any of my non-conceptual experiences, for I would have to at least understand that I'm having such-and-such experience in order to refer to it, and such an understanding constitutes conceptualizing it. Whether or not this entails that such a reference is to those experiences directly or to the concepts I depend on in order to understand what I experience is another matter, and to me seems irrelevant, for whatever the case, it would still be a reference to something within the mind, and so the principle of Referential Monopoly holds true.

***

Having said that the key-and-lock model considered here doesn't allow us to reference anything beyond our minds, one might be left asking what the point of introducing it is. There are three points: 1) to solve the Kantian dilemma, 2) to rekindle a sense of justification in believing our theory, and 3) to resurrect a sense of "connection" with a world beyond our minds even if that sense is not quite the fully fledged one that a window model of consciousness offers. Let's look at these three advantages provided by the key-and-lock model in order to close this post with a full understanding of what it accomplishes.

First, the solution that the key-and-lock model offers the Kantian dilemma doesn't require any reference to things beyond the mind. To understand why, we need to understand a couple things about the manner in which Kant's conception of the thing-in-itself has been altered under the light of the present considerations. First, we can always interpret Kant's meaning according to our solution to the infinite regress problem, in which case we would not say that it is Kant's own mind, or ours, to which the thing-in-itself is inconceivable, but the mind-in-the-model as it were. That is, in constructing a model of reality - with its distinction between phenomena and noumena - Kant tells us that the noumenal world is both unknowable and inconceivable to those minds which find themselves at the center of phenomenal worlds, but because these minds are elements in the model, Kant has every right to, at once, conceptualize the thing-in-itself, thus rendering it conceivable to himself, and claim that such a thing is inconceivable to any mind capable of forming concepts, for the latter refers only to minds as they exist in the model. As they are defined by the model, they may very well be incapable of conceiving the thing-in-itself (also as defined by the model). Of course, this may not, and probably wasn't, the sense Kant intended for his view to be taken, but as it seems to be the closest approximation that works vis-à-vis the dilemma needing to be absolved, it will be the sense in which we take it.

The second manner in which Kant's thing-in-itself has been conceptually altered is by way of the key-and-lock model. Without the latter, the former alteration - that is, the distinguishing between the mind-in-the-model versus the mind-presenting-the-model - wouldn't amount to much of a redemption of Kant's view, for skeptics could still argue that although the mind-in-the-model could indeed be said to lack the ability to conceive of the thing-in-itself, this says nothing of our ability to conceive the thing-in-itself as it exists beyond our minds. Without the key-and-lock model, those same skeptics might go on to say that because we surely seem to have such a conception, and because we couldn't be referring to anything beyond our own minds (according to Kant's own logic), Kant has no right to carry the implications of his claim from the model itself to anything having to do with reality. That is to say, he couldn't say, in addition to claiming that the thing-in-itself is inconceivable to minds-in-the-model, that it is inconceivable to us - we who are minds-presenting-the-model. The mere act of thinking about the thing-in-itself entails that it is verily conceivable.

The key-and-lock model, however, allows us to posit that although we indeed have such a conception, it need not bear any resemblance to what it might correspond to - if indeed there is such a corresponce - should it match, in the key-and-lock sense, something beyond our minds. So just because the thing-in-itself is conceivable, it need not imply that the relation that bears between the thing-in-itself so conceived and the mind-in-the-model can't match up with an analogous relation between that concept and something beyond the mind. In other words, the key-and-lock model can be taken as a response to Kant's skeptics, telling them that as long as Kant's metaphysics is understood in the light of the solution to the infinite regress problem - where we distinguish between minds-in-the-model and minds-presenting-the-model - there is no basis on which to level the criticism that Kant's conception of the thing-in-itself can't possibly bear the same kind of relation to things in reality that other concepts, models, theories, and cognitive structures in general bear. Such a relation may hold without anyone actually referring to things in reality, to things beyond their minds.

Furthermore, we may believe that such a relation exists without reverting back to the window model of consciousness. The problem of belief, which we looked at in the last post, was the problem of how to maintain belief in a theory like ours when to do so seemed to imply that we weren't taking our theory according to the terms of a system model of consciousness, terms we are obliged to heed by the theory itself. Rather, it seemed the mere act of believing was to take our theory in terms of the window model. We offered three renderings of the meaning of "belief", none of which seemed to fully satisfy, but now that we have the key-and-lock model, we can spell out a fourth: to believe, according to the key-and-lock model, is to uphold faith that there exists a relation between the theory so conceived and a corresponding lock, a relation that is of the same type, the same integrity, as those between properly formed concepts and their corresponding locks. We put it in terms of "faith" because our theory still doesn't rest on a bedrock of deductive arguments, but at least faith isn't something so problematic as to make the theory self-negating. Such a definition fits perfectly square with a system model of consciousness, and therefore no need exists to fret over the threats posed to such a model by the implications of believing.

Such a rendering of belief need not imply that we are, or think we are, referring to things beyond our minds. It may require referring beyond the mind in order to define belief (and even then, the "mind" in question is the mind-in-the-model), but defining belief is different from the act of believing. We can define belief in terms of the key-and-lock model without referring beyond the mind in the act of believing. Since the key-and-lock definition we have given for belief is perfectly compatible with a system model of consciousness, we can rest assured that believing our theory does not make it self-negating.

And after all is said and done, the key-and-lock model still furnishes a sense of "connection" with the outer world even if that world is beyond our ability to even reference. Even though we are always limited to referencing things within our own mind, there is a certain brand of relation that holds between the referencing idea and that which it matches in the world beyond the mind. Knowing that this relation holds restores the sense of "connection" alluded to. It is the same kind of connection that exists between any properly formed concept and the conceptualized. Although this connection may not be formed by a kind of direct conscious exposure to the conceptualized, as a window model would have it, it is characterized in a specific and idiosyncratic way - namely, by matching in the key-and-lock sense. And so just as the window model of consciousness allows for a sense of connection, so too does the system model of consciousness when it adopts the key-and-lock model of matching. These types of connection are the equivalents of each other; it is only the manner in which it is established and what characterizes it in an essential way that differs. Thus, we who uphold a system model of consciousness have our own reason to believe in the authenticity of our model, a reason that matches that of the window model, and although this reason differs noticeably, it is nonetheless equally valid, and so we don't have to feel nearly as cut off from the world outside our minds as we might without the key-and-lock model presented here.

* In quite another sense, he didn't espouse a copy model - in fact, he argued against it. Locke divides experience into two categories: those that are replicas of the world, and those that are simply isomorphic to it (he calls these, respectively, primary qualities and secondary ones). So he was not a window model adherent for consciousness overall, but only for his primary qualities. However, he did maintain that whether the sensory experience was a replica of the outer world or merely an isomorphic representation, the conception of it was always a replica of the sensory experience.

Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com/

The Error of Belief

2009-03-27T17:16:00.000-07:00

Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com/

In my paper Reality and Perception, I attempted to resolve the "problem of the infinit regress" as I called it. Hopefully, this solution sits well with those who have read it. However, a question that has lately been brewing in my mind has been this: do I have the right to believe my theory? I ponder over this question because, if you think about it long and hard enough, the aforementioned solution seems to imply that to believe in the theory immediately invalidates that very belief. How so? Well, consider the solution in more depth: it says that we need to abandon the window-to-reality model of consciousness, and we need to abandon it even in light of the theory itself - that is to say, based on the theory's own tenets, we have no right to lay claim to any knowledge or proper conception of reality as it actually exists beyond our minds, but that we can settle for confidence in the logical integrity of the structure of the theory itself - that is, we can boast confidence that, regardless of whether the theory is right or wrong vis-a-vis its matching up with ultimate reality, it is internally consistent and makes sense. Now, to invest such confidence in that is to uphold belief in the logical structure of the theory - to take an affirmative stand on the valid relation between the premises and the conclusions, and any argumentation in between - but not so much to affirm the truth of the theory. So when the question comes up: do I believe the theory? - I am a little lost for words. To say yes intuitively implies that I take the theory to be true - to be the right "match" for reality - but to say no seems to imply, intuitively, that I ought to abandon the theory - disowning it as pure nonsense. So I'm going to devote this post to a thorough consideration of this question. What should I say to one who asks me: do I believe in MM-Theory?

First off, belief is typically a personal matter. The very question on the table bears nothing on MM-Theory - at least, not if we take the solution to the problem of infinite regress to heart. That is to say, if we present MM-Theory in the spirit of a system model of consciousness, boasting only that our theory is consistent and logically valid, and that listeners can take it or leave it on those grounds alone, it really doesn't matter, to us or anyone, whether we or those listeners subscribe to the theory and invest belief in it. That's a choice we can all make on our own and bears not the slightest consequence to the consistency or logical validity of theory as presented. That being said, however, each of us, in our considerations of whether or not to believe, ought to take stock of the question of whether such belief is self-annihilating - that is, self-annihilitating insofar as one understands the implications of believing - namely, that to believe in the theory seems to be equivalent to taking a stance on the nature of ultimate reality as it is beyond our minds. So the question is not whether belief in the theory invalidates its internal consistency or logical integrity, but whether committing ourselves to an exclusive focus on such internal standards rips us of our right to believe in the first place.

The correct approach to answering this question, I'm convinced, is the same approach taken towards the problem of the infinite regress itself. The approach we took there was to understand what it means for a theory to be "correct" according to a system model of consciousness. Likewise, therefore, we ought to understand what it means to "believe" accord to the same model. After all, to "believe" means to "take to be correct". But as we can easily see, the adjustment made to the meaning of "belief" becomes a tad bit dissappointing. If the meaning of "correct" turns out to refer exclusively to a theory's logical consistency, then "belief" turns out to refer to our recognition of that same consistency. In other words, when we say that we believe in the theory, we mean only that we believe it to be logically consistent. We have effectively abandoned any faith in its fitness for mirroring ultimate reality. Of course, this in no way implies that an alternative theory can be any better a match - as we argued in Reality and Perception, the whole problem revolves around ultimate reality being "unmatchable" - so no theory suites as the perfect match. Nonetheless, such a notion would seem to imply that we ought to abandon belief all together, and this seems rather unsatisfactory.

Therefore, for the remainder of this post, I would like to work towards embellishing this notion of "belief" - that which a system model of consciousness leaves us with - with concepts that are a bit more flattering. I intend to approach this from a variety of angles, one of which, I feel, fully restores our sense of flattery.

Angle 1

Before we get to this most flattering of embellishments, however, let's examine the meaning of "belief" we have so far derived. We said above that according to a system model of consciousness, a "belief" can be logically vindicated so long as it constitutes a valid appraisal of the logical integrity linking a set of premises to their conclusions. According to this meaning of "belief", I can say that I believe the following syllogism:

     All grass is green.
     All men are grass.
     Therefore, all men are green.

What it would mean for me to say that I believe this is that I take the statement

     If all grass is green, and if all men were grass, then all men
     would be green.

to be true. That is to say, it means that for any argument, theory, mental model, etc., if we express it as one all encompassing conditional statement - where the premises constitute the antecedent, and the conclusion the consequent - then we take that statement to be true.

But to say that a conditional statement is true is one thing; to say that the premises, on their own, are true is another. Returning to the syllogistic form of the statement, it is only to say that we take it to be valid - but not necessarily that it is sound. Soundness, of course, requires more than valid form; it requires that we also take the premises to be true, the conclusion becoming true consequently.

It would be nice if we could take the premises of MM-Theory to be true, and thus the theory overall to be true. But the solution to the problem of the infinite regress seems not to allow us this priviledge. It doesn't allow us to believe our own premises. We are reduced merely to demonstrating the valid form of our arguments. On a brighter note, it doesn't compel us to take our premises as false either; rather, what the solution to the infinite regress problem demands is that we disregard the whole question of the truth or falsehood of the premises, focusing exclusively on logical form.

Of course, if it is form we're interested in, we should note now that we won't find a stringently deductive structure to the theory's logic through-and-through. In many places, we quite openly go out on a limb, make inductive leaps, invest somewhat in faith, and so on. These shouldn't be taken as flaws in our theory, for when we boast internal consistency in our theory, we mean that it is free from internal contradictions (so my use of the term "logical validity" is to be taken informally). We can freely venture into a bit of speculation here and there without necessarily contradicting what we have said elsewhere.

Nevertheless, what we are concerned with, according to the meaning of "belief" under consideration, is the truth of the conditional form of our theory - that is, the truth of our theory when expressed as: if our premises are true, then our conclusions are also true. If we make certain inductive leaps here and there, the proper form of this statement ought to read: if our premises are true, there is the possibility, even the plausibility, that our conclusions are also true.

It's important to include such words as 'plausibility', for our theory certainly has more value than a syllogism about green men. The validity of its logical form - or rather, its consistency - is perhaps the least it has going for it. The fact that it's persuasive, even believable (the current question on belief notwithstanding), and effectively solves the problem of mind and matter (which itself could be taken as only a problem in the logical consistency of certain relevant concepts*), gives our theory value above and beyond its internal consistency.

Thus, it is perhaps not so bad that we interpret "belief" in this way. Even if we are reduced to taking a stance on the truth of our theory expressed as a conditional statement, it is still quite a significant statement, one whose implications many may find interesting and of value in one way or another. After all, if the premises of MM-Theory were true, then it is this sense of "belief" that we must apply to any theory of reality - even objectivist ones like materialism or niave realism (giving them the benefit of the doubt, of course, vis-a-vis their logical consistency). Nothing on the matter can be proven one way or another otherwise. That is to say, neither model of consciousness - whether a system model or a window one - can be proven conclusively; therefore, whether we are all dealing exclusively with mental models of reality, none of which can be said to bear the slightest degree of resemblence to reality outside the mind, or we are apprehending reality for what it truly is, our beliefs on the state of reality depend on which model we uphold. Thus, it can be said that any such belief is always theory dependent, always reliant on some model of reality. All we are ever doing, in the end, is adopting one model of reality or another, along with one model of consciousness or another, and starting with that, building all our other beliefs upon them. These primal models and theories are selected for many reasons, often good ones, but they are indeed unfalsifiable, and as such they are selected somewhat by free choice. Nothing ever proves one over any other to be the ultimately correct and final one. Each one is a fundamental and quite significant premise, held up only as an assumption, from which all our other beliefs follow. All we are doing, in the end, is trying to build a model from it as consistently and persuasively as we can.

Angle 2

Even though I generally take an agnostic view of my own theory - saying more often that I don't know whether or not it is true (and therefore refrain from full fledged belief) - there is another sense in which I say it is my belief. I don't mean this in the sense that if I can't rely on infallible reasoning or conclusive evidence, then I must rely on something like faith or educated guessing (although I could mean it in this sense); rather, what I mean is that the theory belongs to me - I created it, I take pride in it, and I use and defend it in philosophical discussions as well as my private thoughts. In short, I use this sense of "belief" to mean that the idea is mine.

This is not an uncommon sense. Most religious views are clung to for this very reason. Most people don't believe their religious convictions because they have been proven in any way, but simply because they have been passed down to them. "I am Christian" often means that I have been raised to observe Christian ideas or that I come from a Christian community. It is a part of one's identity and stems from the fact that the beliefs in question have been "given" to them (by parents, by community, by teachers, by authority, etc.). Being given, these beliefs become one's own - as though it were a piece of property - and therefore become referred to as "my beliefs".

One harbors a special sense of ownership over one's beliefs when those beliefs are not so much given but invented. The inventor of anything is duly recognized as the owner of his invention - probably more so than one who has been given something instead.

Even if we regard MM-Theory as only a model whose value lies in its internal consistency, that model is still invented. I created it, and therefore I regard it as mine. It is my idea. I defend it in discussions and I use it to answer questions if I deem it relevant. I put it to use, just like a tool I own. We don't question the truth or falsehood of a tool, and it has nothing to do with its usefulness. The same can be said of a model in the mind - regardless of whether it is true or false, or whether truth/falsity even applies, it can still be useful. It might be regarded as a computer program, as my paper Practical Applications makes clear, a sort of abstract tool that we implement on the more concrete tool we call the brain. This, therefore, may be acceptable criteria for calling it a "belief". In this sense, when I say that I believe in MM-Theory, I mean that the idea is mine and that I use it, like a tool, on a regular basis.

Angle 3

What the solution to the infinite regress problem prohibits us from doing is believing in anything beyond our minds. What lies within our minds, however, we are free to believe in. A moment ago, we looked at certain syllogistic forms and concluded that we had no right to believe in the truth or falsity of the premises, for that would lead one necessarily to the truth or falsity of the conclusion, a conclusion about things beyond our minds. But what if the premises were about things within our minds? Would we then have the right to believe in them? It seems we should, but the problem, of course, is that if they lead irrevocably to the conclusion, which posits the existence of things beyond our minds, then the truth we attribute to the premises also gets carried through to the conclusion, and thus so does our belief.

The premises MM-Theory starts with are, more or less, the three defining features of all experience - their being an instance of qualitivity, their possessing the essence of realness, and their being meaningful - and we get these premises from reflecting on our experiences and describing their commonalities. These experiences are, of course, within the mind, actually constituting it, and therefore we have the right, not only to incorporate these premises into our model, but to believe them. We might also include the correlative formula we gave for the relation between mind and behavior in the Basic Theory as an additional premise. Whether or not "behavior" counts as a phenomenon beyond our minds depends on the context, but I believe the context in the Basic Theory was conciliatory to this - meaning that "behavior" can be said to refer to that which we see within our subjective realities, and therefore within our minds.

In any case, we seem to be free to grant the truth of these premises since it doesn't seem to initiate the infinite regress. We can know about our experiences. In fact, we gain such knowledge because those experiences entail that knowledge. That is, the truth of this knowledge is justified by the experience it is about. Such is how entailment works.

So we can at least believe in the premises of our theory, but what happens when we try to carry this belief through to the conclusions? What happens is that we have to make an inductive leap. Even in generalizing the three features of experience to all experience we have access to, we hit a limit, the limits of our own minds. If we want to say that these three features apply to all experience - not just all our experience - we have to argue inductively. The notion that the truth of the premises carries through to the conclusion only works when the argument in question is thoroughly deductive. We have stressed above that MM-Theory is not thoroughly deductive but makes innocuous leaps of faith here and there, the inductive leap currently considered being one of the major ones. This is not just happenstance. It is inherent to the kind of theory that MM-Theory is. It is the kind of theory that requires an inductive leap in order to posit anything beyond our immediate experiences. So the answer to our question is no, the truth of our premises don't carry through to the conclusion (not that it makes it false either), and therefore neither do our beliefs.

What we get, then, is a model that works consistently with premises we can believe in, but it is still only this consistency which we hold up as valuable. It is still persuasive, however, especially given the believability of the premises. Although we have to rely on induction, induction can still be very tantalizing. If not, no one would be persuaded by scientific evidence (see Hume's argument on induction and the limits of science), no one would be persuaded by statistics, no one would be conditioned by their own life experiences. So long as we have a large enough sample size to draw inductive conclusions from (and there is quite the qualitative diversity within the human mind), induction is quite alluring. It is for this reason that I say MM-Theory has value above and beyond the mere fact that it is consistent.

We still don't get to invest full belief in MM-Theory, but what we have is the right to believe in the premises and the right to be persuaded by the plausibility of the model suggested by an inductive leap from the premises. We have the right to believe in the premises and to find the conclusions reasonably plausible. This squares quite well with our longing for a more flattering sense of "belief". It means that we only need to suspend full belief in the theory to the extent that we would admit it rests on a bit of faith. In other words, if we are willing to admit there is some faith invested in our theory - that is, a few inductive leaps - we are doing nothing different by denouncing absolute belief. It amounts to the same thing. Nothing can be known for certain. Nothing can be believed in full.

Now in my next post, I'm going to do our sense of flattery one better. I'm going to go further than where the solution to the infinite regress problem seems to leave us. It leaves us at the point where we have to settle for the consistency in our theory as opposed to its truth, but I think I can conjure up a way according to which we can say that our theory is "right" - not just in terms of its internal consistency, but in its "matching" the world out there. It won't be the same sense as the window model would have it, but it does restore our sense of "connection" with the outer world. So stay tuned.

* I often consider the problem of consciousness - what it is and how it arises - to be like a logic puzzle, or something from a book of brain teasers. It therefore need not reflect anything real - that is, there doesn't have to be consciousness in order for there to be the problem of consciousness. What makes it a problem is that the inherent concept are problematic - they don't work together - and that we cling to certain assumptions about the nature of consciousness because we have trouble dismissing these concepts. Like I said in the introduction to my website: the strength of MM-Theory is that it reduces two seemingly distinct philosophical problems - that of ontology and that of consciousness - to one - but neither ontology nor consciousness need be real for this, only that our concepts of them be clearly defined.

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Re-Wrote Basic Theory

2009-03-18T10:44:00.000-07:00

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I have re-written a major chunk of the Basic Theory - mostly everything from the introduction to Experience and Meaning. About 50% of the material there is new or completely editted.

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Is Logic Contingent?

2009-03-14T08:12:00.000-07:00

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Although the human mind is capable of thinking along consistently logical lines, we more often than we like to admit stray from this line. We commonly commit logical errors. Logicians have therefore provided us a thoroughgoing list of logical fallacies so that we might be wary of them (for example, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_fallacies). There is, for example, the fallacy they call "affirming the consequent" whereby the consequent of a conditional proposition is assumed to imply the antecedent. If I were to say "All criminals were breast fed as babies. Bob was breast fed as a baby. Therefore, Bob is a criminal."* I would be affirming the consequent. Yet when one hears this, there is at first a brief impression of soundness in the reasoning. Only the skilled logical thinker is able to suppress this impression and recognize the fault that lies therein. But so many are not so skilled, and the fallacy of affirming the consequent is readily made and passed over.

This is no doubt a consequence of neural wiring in the cognitive centers of our brains. But then it also follows that this wiring isn't uniform across individuals, for it is obvious that some are rigorous adherents to consistent logical thought whereas others are hopelessly poor at it. Furthermore, it is equally obvious that no one begins life as a logic expert. The kinds of fallacies known to logicians are most frequently succumbed to by young children. Logical thinking is a skill we acquire as we mature. Even then, however, not all people acquire the skill as easily, or at all, for there are many adults, even ones in prominent and highly valued positions in society, who are demonstrably lacking in the department of logical thoroughness. By no means does this mean that such adults can't acquire the skill with enough practice and attention paid to their thinking, and indeed it has been shown that such acquisition is possible even for those getting on in age. Therefore, it seems reasonable to suppose that logical thinking is not something innate, not something that can be simply passed off as the "nature of thought", but something learnt.

But then who is the teacher? Are we taught solely through our schools? Is logic just an arbitrary idea - like a particular religion, like a particular philosophy, like a particular political ideology - that we learn only because the older generation wishes to preserve it by passing it on through our educational institutions? Some may say so, but not I. I say we learn logic from the world itself. We learn by making mistakes. We learn after being shown, by the world itself, time and time again, the fallacies we inadvertently stumble over. Logic is where we come to rest when we've finally trained our minds to make predictions about real-world outcomes that consistently come true (notwithstanding predictions based on inductive reasoning and random guessing, of course). So logic is a style of thinking used by those who have acquired a deep understanding of the inherent pattern by which the world operates.

I say this understanding is "deep" because it touches on something more profound than what science teaches. Science can tell us about particulars and contingencies - for example, that Kepler's laws guide the manner in which the planets orbit the Sun, or that life is intricately determined by DNA, or that all matter is reducible to particles such as electrons, protons, and neutrons - but that Bob isn't necessarily a criminal if he was breast fed is something supported not so much by scientific evidence, but by the fact that the world is such that Bob couldn't be a criminal solely on the basis that he, along with all criminals, were breast fed. To understand this is to understand something so "deeply" fundamental to the nature of reality that the discoveries of science become irrelevant. Science could have taught us things radically different from what we know, and logic would still have to hold. Reality simply could not cohere otherwise. (I believe this is the distinction between David K. Lewis's possible worlds and impossible worlds - regardless of what world Bob lived in - whether it was one in which he was a criminal or another in which he wasn't - the erroneous syllogism given above could not be the basis for this in either world).

So then to the central question on which we will, from here on in, focus: if we indeed learn logic through real-world encounters, does that make logic contingent? And if so, what does this say about the seeming necessity of logic? Would the contingency of logic serve as license to generalize the necessary character of our thought (at least, how it feels) beyond strict logic? Beyond thought? After all, one who commits a logical fallacy does so because he/she is totally oblivious to the fact - he/she believes with all honesty that his/her fallacious conclusions are supported necessarily by the reasoning. Shouldn't we say, therefore, that necessity - at least, the veneer of necessity - is apparent in any style of thought insofar as it is taken to support one's belief?

Let's be sure the question is understood: we are not asking whether logical rules - such as modus ponens, modus tollens, D'Morgan's Law, etc. - are necessary - they surely are - rather, we are asking whether it can be taken as contingent that the world turns out to conform to those rules - and if so, whether this implies that a different logic would be equally necessary should the world have turned out differently (assuming that's even conceivable :)). In such an exotic logic, the fallacies mentioned above - such as affirming the consequent, illicit major, illicit minor, etc. - may turn out to be the rules. A further point to keep in mind is that contingency does not necessarily exclude necessity - so we are not asking whether it is either/or - for sometimes it's both. For example, it used to be believed, and still is by many, that the laws of nature were unyieldingly necessary - that they could never be broken under any circumstance - but even today we are hard pressed to understand why the world should adhere to the laws of nature (even if it is only an extremely high statistical probability). Therefore, from the standpoint of the human perspective, the laws of nature, despite whether they are necessary in themselves, are contingent to us. In the same vein, the fact that nature works according to logical principles, as well as logic itself, as well as the fact that the world teaches us to think logically, is not devoid of necessary underpinnings, but because these necessary cases are, from the standpoint of the human perspective, contingent, they may be both necessary and contingent at the same time. Even more interesting is the notion that this may imply that a completely different and contradictory logic may very well be just as necessary. Let's see how far we can go towards this notion.

First, let's talk neurology. It is no mystery that real-world experiences are one of the major contributors, if not the major contributor, to our neural programming - that is, to what determines which neurons are connected to which others and in what ways. To show how this might unfold, let's consider a purely hypothetical scenario - one in which, I must disclaim, I really have no idea as to its accuracy in reflecting the way our brains actually work, but works nonetheless in principle as a hypothetical model. I will assume - as a hypothetical model - that the fallacy of affirming the consequent can be modeled neurologically as follows.

Let's denote the antecedent of a conditional (i.e. "If one is a criminal...") as A and the consequent (i.e. "...then he was breast fed as an infant") as B. Then, I will propose that the statement "If A then B" primes two MODs or two neural firing patterns in the brain to be sensitive to one another. That is to say, if A corresponds to the thought "one is a criminal" then A represents the experience associated with one of the two MODs or neural firing patterns in the brain, and B, which would correspond to the thought "one was breast fed as an infant", represents the experience associated with the other of the two MODs or neural firing patterns. The statement "If A then B" would prime these two MODs or neural firing patterns to be sensitive to each other - meaning that if one is activated by the utterance of either A or B (which ever it corresponds to) then it stimulates the other into activation as well. The utterance "If A then B" doesn't actually trigger the activation of either - it only primes them for sensitivity to activation. What actually triggers the activation is the utterance of either A or B. That is to say, the major premise (if A then B) only prepares both to become activated in response to the other being triggered into activation, and the minor premise does the activation.

This is, of course, the neural configuration of a brain that has yet to learn the fallaciousness of such information processing. Using this configuration to predict the truth of A when B is shown to be true is sure to fail at least part of the time. These failures, if the brain properly adapts to them, should result in a re-wiring such that the configuration as it is changes to one in which the utterance "If A then B" only primes the MOD or neural firing pattern B into sensitivity to the activation of A, and not visa-versa.

Yet, there is still a difference between such a re-wiring as it takes place within the specific MODs or neural firing patterns corresponding to the thought "If one is a criminal then one was breast fed as a baby," and that corresponding to the more general understanding of the logical principle of modus ponens. That is to say, the former sort of re-wiring is only done to one's understanding of the relation between criminal status and having been breast fed, whereas the latter is done to one's understanding of the actual logical principles at work here. In the former case, one may learn from real-world experiences that one ought not to assume that if one was breast fed as a child, one is a criminal - and one may keep this lesson at the forefront of his mind for the rest of his days - but nevertheless fail to apply this lesson of logic to all such cases of affirming the consequent. In other words, one may still fall into the same trap, affirming the consequent to a whole array of situation, always being careful not to do so over the question of the criminality of those who were breast fed as infants.

So how should we model the neural process by which one learns the logical principle, as opposed to contingent states of affairs such as the fact that not all who were breast fed as children turn out to be criminals? How does one learn to apply proper logic to all situations one encounters or contemplates? Well, for one thing, we can expect that a MOD would exist or a specific pattern of neural firing would be frequent that represents the understanding of the logical principle in question. Let's call this MOD or neural firing pattern C. C might have effects on those corresponding to the more specific instances of modus ponens or affirming the consequent. That is to say, concerning A and B above, the MODs or neural firing patterns corresponding to them would react differently when C is present compared to when C is absent. C would have the effect of preventing the MOD or neural firing pattern corresponding to A from activating when the MOD or neural firing pattern corresponding to B is active, but it would allow B to activate when A becomes active. C would have to have the same effect on all instances of this sort - that is, all MODs or neural firing patterns corresponding to thought processes which adhere to modus ponens when C is present, and could potentially lead to affirming the consequence when absent.

Now, these neural changes are examples of changes in one's expectations over particular events, or changes in how poorly thought out logic is implemented. The individual who makes mistakes in his expectation due to poorly thought out logic will go on to make more mistakes, being corrected by the world each time, until he is corrected on a higher, or more abstract, level - that is, on the level where he grasps the basic principles of logic. On this level, he not only takes account of how he was wrong on any one particular occasion, but on the whole series of such occasions (insofar as he can remember them), and then - only then - realizes there is a principle of logic to be learnt from this. This lesson is encoded in his brain as the MOD or neural firing pattern we have denoted C and it oversee most, if not all, future applications of this logical principle on real-world situations.

So it would seem that the principles of logic are lessons learnt from our experiences with the real world. If it were possible to experience the world differently, we might learn a whole other set of logical principles. Far from being a fallacy, affirming the consequent may be one of these rules. So we are confronted with a world that just so happens to play by the rules of logic as we know them. We don't know why it does - it just does. Does this give us the right to say that logic is contingent?

The answer is yes and no. It is no in the following ways. First, logic in itself is necessary. We will not go so far as to say that if all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then Socrates may somehow be immortal. The conclusion is still bound by the premises. Second, the nature of the world itself may be necessary. We have been speaking as though the world could have been different - as though Socrates could have been immortal in another world even though he is a man and all men are mortal. But it may be that such a world is necessarily impossible. When we talk of possible worlds, we usually entertain different possible contingencies - such as the possibility of the dinosaurs having survived for much longer should there never have been an asteroid that hit the Earth, or the possibility of JFK serving his full term in office should he never have been assassinated - but when it comes to necessities - such as the rules of math and logic - these could not be different in any possible world. So the fact that the rules of logic hold in our world may be necessary. Third, it may even be necessary that we learn logic after so many experiences with the world. That's not to say that everyone, by necessity, must learn logic at some point, but that when it happens, it happens according to certain necessary principles. If we were to put this in term of physics, we'd say that the events in the world that teach us logic do so by way of their physical effects on our brains. We first experience these events through our senses, then our brains are programmed with the right neural circuitry to grasp the principles of logic. All of this can happen according to a complex system of physical laws that operate on our senses and our brains, thereby rendering the final effect - namely, our being programmed to think logically - an inevitability in such specific cases. We can also put this in term of MM-Theory - that is, in terms of experiences. We would say that the flow of experiences prior to our having sensations - which entail by necessity - necessarily entail our sensations, which in turn necessarily entail our cognitive experiences about them, which in turn necessarily entail the grasping of an insight - the principles of logic.

Of course, it is true that quantum mechanics has other lessons in store for us - namely, that the world does not operate right down to the bare bones by necessary processes. But this is simply the going consensus among the majority of scientists who make quantum mechanics their expertise. No one can be absolutely certain about whether the world is inherently probabilistic or necessary through-and-through. So we hold out for the possibility that the world is exhaustively ruled by deterministic - that is, necessary - forces after all, and that these necessary forces are there in the very processes by which we learn logic.

The way in which logic is contingent is in how we learn it, how we are confronted with it. If it's true that we don't begin life thinking perfect logic at all times, and that we make logical mistakes without realizing it, then it can't be said that we expect to learn it, that we can predict a future point at which we will stop making mistakes and start thinking more logically. In other words, that we should eventually learn logic is not something we can figure out a priori, for that term - a priori - presupposes a grasping of logical principles to begin with. Therefore, the real-world lessons that teach us the errors of our cognitive ways strike us as a matter of contingency. That is, after all, what it means for a thing to be contingent - that is, it can't be deduced as matter of logical necessity. From the point of view of the subject, the world just so happens to turn out that way.

That's not to say that one can't reflect on his/her own thought processes and figure out that one is making logical mistakes, but this doesn't count as a deductive prediction that one will eventually learn to think logically; rather, it is the very act of learning it. It requires logical thinking in order to occur. It's true that this wouldn't involve learning from real-world experiences, but it would be the equivalent as it takes place in a thought experiment built to simulate the real world. To put this another way, learning to think logically by reflecting on one's own thoughts and noticing the mistakes is the equivalent of using logical thought to deduce that a contingent fact is necessarily the case on account of seeing that it is the case. That is to say, it is like saying that if X is the case, then necessarily it is the case. It's a simple tautology. It's only true in virtue of Aristotle's first principle of logic: the law of identity. It doesn't make X any less contingent, for the type of circular reasoning that the law of identity leads to is no defeater of the contingency of anything. Just the same, learning to think logically by reflecting on one's own thoughts is no defeater of the contingency of the lesson learnt. To predict logical principles using logical itself is the equivalent of seeing that those logical principles hold - just like seeing that it so happens to be a rainy day - and this sort of 'seeing', whether of the real world or our thought experiments, comes upon us contingently.

Could the world have turned out differently? I highly doubt it. And by that, I mean I don't think so at all. Some contingencies may have turned out differently - for example, our solar system may not have been right for sustaining life, the dinosaurs may not have been wiped out, president Kennedy might not have been assassinated, etc. - but I can't imagine a world in which Socrates is immortal even though he's a man and all men are mortal. I can, however, imagine a world in which I have not learnt the basic rules of logic, and might expect Socrates to be immortal. I may not be using logic proper to back this expectation, but I can see how I might mistake myself for using it. The fact of the matter is, after all, people don't always think logically, even though they sometimes think they do. If they really believe they're thinking logically, it must be because they feel their thoughts flowing in a necessary manner.

What this means, then, is that the necessity we feel in the logic of our thoughts is there regardless of whether that logic is proper and formal or sloppy and flawed. So the question becomes this: on what grounds can professional logicians hold true to the claim that formal logic, as conventionally understood in the discipline, is the "right" logic and all other so-called "logics" are inauthentic and flawed? They can say this on the grounds that it is this formal logic that seems to be the destination, the final resting point so to speak, at which the cognitive programming stops. That is, it is the state the human mind tends towards as it gets programmed by real-world experiences. That is to say that although one person's brand of logic may feel absolutely necessary despite the many flaws a professional logician would point out therein, it is still subject to correction insofar as this person has the opportunity to experience his expectations and predictions, derived from his logic, being thwarted, and thereby coming a step closer to formal logic by learning from those mistakes and making the appropriate modifications to his thought. This process - the mistakes, the thwarted predictions, the learning, the adjustments - can go a long way, but it does reach a point of perfection, of completion. There seems to be a point at which one has learnt all that one can from the world about the proper way to think - and this we call formal logic. Once one has learnt the full set of basic logical principles, and has trained himself to heed them in his thinking, we can take his mindset, call it "formal logic", and hand it over to the logician as his field of expertise.

Note the implication: that formal logic doesn't so much stand out from other kinds of logic (informal logic, folk logic, flawed logic, etc.) in that it is necessary whereas the others are not, but in that the tendency is for those other kinds of logic to evolve towards the formal kind and not visa-versa (at least, it seems pretty darn unlikely that one's mind can be programmed from formal logic to another informal kind). To put this another way, formal logic seems to have the power to correct and assimilate other brands of logic (by example, by demonstration, by evidence, etc.), effectively converting or annihilating them, whereas the latter don't have the same power over the former. But insofar as the latter are left to their own devices, they will feel just as necessary to the beholder as the former.

This can be understood by considering what makes the flow of electric information through our neural circuits necessary. It doesn't matter how they're configured, the way they process information will be governed by the laws of chemistry, neurology, and electrodynamics. Therefore, whatever the thought process - whether ruled by a learnt set of formal logical principles, or as yet unrefined by these principles - it will feel necessary. The only reason logical fallacies seem necessarily impossible to the seasoned logical thinker is because the corresponding physics in his brain makes it impossible. His brain is physically wired to process information in a specific way, and any alternative is physically impossible. And because the lessons that teach us to use the rules of logic are contingent, the necessity of logic is also learnt contingently. One might very well learn as necessary something other than logic.

But now there arises certain paradoxical implications. How can Socrates be necessarily mortal for one person, while at the same time not necessarily mortal for another? How can the same conclusion follow from a set of premises both necessarily and not necessarily at the same time? To answer this, we need to look at the roll the UOS (Universal Operating System) plays in all this.

Should the reader recall from the Advanced Theory what we mean by the UOS, he will recall that we mean those experiences corresponding to atomic structures and process of all things in the universe. The importance of the UOS for our current purposes is to recall that it continues to run while no activity can be discerned on the more macroscopic level. That is to say, for example, that although no experience may correspond to an inanimate macroscopic structure like a rock or a table just sitting there doing nothing, there are indeed experiences corresponding to the more lively actions of the atomic structures composing the rock and the table, actions such as electrons orbiting nuclei, atoms vibrating, positive and negative charges attracting and repelling each other, etc. This flurry of activity can be seen not only in rocks and tables, but in the neural networks in our brains - that is, even when they are not actively processing signals.

Therefore, the way to show how the necessity of seemingly contradictory systems of logic holds is, first, to more precisely point out the sort of effect the real world has on the neural circuitry of logical thinking - the circuitry, that is, even in its latent state during which no signals are processed. We said it was to program those neural circuits such that logical thought becomes more standardized throughout the whole of our cognitive and neural networks. But programming neural circuits is not the same as activating or stimulating them - it is simply to fortify the neural connections, pathways, and overall configurations. What this entails is that the arrangement of atomic and molecular scaffolding making up the neurons and their overall circuitry is being reconfigured. What this entails in turn is that the UOS, at least that part of it corresponding to said atomic and molecular scaffolding, undergoes certain permanent changes. These changes introduce a set of experiences, still part of the UOS, that play a significant roll in the flow of the logical thinking corresponding to the circuitry. These experiences, corresponding as they would to activity that constantly reinforces itself, reacquiring its prior states, are more or less stable and endure even throughout long moments of silence on a more macroscopic level. In other words, syllogisms like the one about Socrates don't flow necessarily only because of the meaning in the premises, but because of the meaning in the experiences of the UOS that the structure of the circuitry is based on. In other words still, Socrates is not mortal only because he is a man and all men are mortal, but also for some additional reason that can only be expressed in the experiences of the UOS. Take away those reasons, and it doesn't follow from the explicit premises that Socrates is mortal - at least, not necessarily.

It's almost as though a third term is added to "All men are mortal" and "Socrates is a man" - namely, "the world works according to the rule of modus ponens". This third term is not part of the argument, of course, not part of the logic, not an explicit premise, but it's what makes the logic necessary. It's like saying the form of logic, as opposed to its contents, is the third term, and that it is learnt just as contingently as "All men are mortal" and "Socrates is a man". If we do not learn this third contingent term, as in the case of children and some adults, the UOS will be different amidst our cognitive networks, and so will be the third term.

So the reason why Socrates can be both necessarily mortal and not necessarily so is because in the one case, there is a third term that makes it necessary and in the other, that term is lacking (or there is a different term that makes it unnecessary).

The real world is partially responsible for this. It is responsible for laying down that particular form of the UOS in the vicinity of our cognitive neural networks. In terms of experience, it lays down the "third term" that defines the rule of modus ponen (and, more generally, all other rules of formal logic), and in terms of neurology, it lays down the specific neural circuitry that makes logical thinking necessary with the use of that circuitry.

Now I want to bring this discussion to a close by following it through to its logical conclusion - namely, that the scope of necessity spans far beyond formal logic. Patterns of thought which would be ordinarily deemed illogical and plagued with fallacies of every sort would be deemed necessary by the one who believes them. The necessity he feels is not to be found in logic, but in the narrow range of possible streams down which his thought can flow. This range is narrow because the neural wiring in his brain is configured in such a way to allow only for that particular flow of thought during that particular instance. In other words, the necessity is to be found in the rigidity of the physics of his brain. Whether he is extremely practiced in the science of logical thinking or hasn't got a clue, his brain and the neural circuitry within it are configured in a particular way. Given that configuration, the particular style of thought it makes possible - logical or fallacious - is necessarily the style of thought he employs. He can't help it. The laws of physics hold even in his logic depleted brain.

Now if this is the basis for the feel of necessity in our thoughts, then it must be the basis for the feel of necessity in any experience - cognitive or otherwise. All our experiences correspond to neural and chemical activity in the brain. This activity is likewise governed by physical laws. These laws regulate what goes on therein in quite a determined manner. Hence, what happens therein happens necessarily, and we feel that necessity in the very experience that corresponds to it.

Thus, I hope this lends some support to the argument made in the Advanced Theory, the argument whereby I tried to show how the necessity of the flow of our experiences spans far beyond the scope of logical thought. Although logical thinking is perhaps the best example of the necessity of this flow (because most reasonable thinkers will agree that logic is indeed necessary and that it describes the pattern according to which we think - some of the time anyway), it is only one very specific instance, and necessity can be generalized far beyond that. It can be generalized to all experiences as all experiences correspond to the operations of physical systems - operations that are characterized by necessity in virtue of their conforming to the necessary laws of nature. That, I say, is where we find necessity.

* My thanks to my grade 10 math teacher who provided this syllogism as a means of demonstrating the fallacy of affirming the consequent.

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Modification to Website

2009-02-20T14:13:00.000-08:00

Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com

I modified the section The Infinite Regress Problem in my paper Reality and Perception. I split it up into 3 sections, the last of which replaces the last few paragraphs with something different. Whereas before I offered a patch-up solution to the difficulty some may have with constantly seeking the next step in the infinite regress, I now examine and root out what might seem like a point of inconsistency in the theory, one that could be taken as the cause of the infinite regress problem to begin with. I felt this was needed because although we settled on the solution that the infinite regress was not a problem so long as our theory was internally consistent, we didn't bother to question this consistency (we just assumed it). So now, I do question it and show that the theory is indeed internally consistent.

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An Aid to Understanding the Locality of the Transcendental

2008-11-26T13:59:00.000-08:00

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Near the end of the Advanced Theory, I provided the reader with a few visualization exercises. From these, the reader should have gotten a sense that whatever was inside the bubble represented everything within our subjective reality, and everything outside represented everything transcendent to our subjective reality (that is, everything else in the Universal Mind). A shortcoming of this visualization exercise is that it leaves the impression that these transcendental experiences (or real things) are somehow localizable "outside" our phenomenal universe. But does it make sense to give them a place? Can something that is transcendent to the infinit extents of space itself have a place? Yet we know that they can't be in space either - only physical objects occupy space. So where are they?

The whole question of "where" they are is, of course, misguided, and to help with understanding how, let me offer the following analysis. They are unlocalizable in the same way that our emotions are unlocalizable. Emotions don't take up a place anywhere in space. Their material representations do - namely, neural and chemical activity - and they take place in the brain, but not the things represented, not the emotions themselves. But even though they don't take up a place in space, neither do they take a place "outside" space in some transcendental extension to our universe. They are, to put it one way, immanent but placeless.

This is precisely the way we should think of all experiences and real things beyond our subjective realities. They are not "outside" the sensible universe; they simply have no place. Nonetheless, they do function, or can function, as the reasons for the events and phenomena in our subjective realities. The only difference between them and our emotions is that we are epistemically aware of our emotions whereas we are not of these transcendental things. But this makes no difference to their locality - they are still "in the midst" of our emotions and all our other experiences.

This applies to other people's subjective realities as well. Other subjective realities are not "outside" one's own, but placeless instead. This is not an unsound thing to say. Although human subjective realities are the basis for which there can be places and things occupying places, they do not have places themselves; there is no greater spatial medium in which subjective realities float around. Thus, they are all placeless. They exist relative to each other in much the same way as emotions exist relative to other things (whether they are placed or placeless).

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The Subjectivist's Take on Inconsistencies Within Belief Systems

2008-11-25T15:32:00.000-08:00

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I'm going to copy and past a paragraph from my introductory post to this blog:

In my website, I have a paper called "Reality and Perception" where I resolve the major conflicts that a subjectivist theory like mine usually comes up against, one in particular being the problem of conflicting beliefs between two people both being correct. The resolution to this problem works insofar as the conflicting beliefs reside in two separate minds, but there are cases of a single individual who holds conflicting beliefs within his own mind without acknowledging or being aware of them. What to say about that?

What to say indeed. The solution to this is both simple and complex. It is simple in the length it will take to spell it out. It is complex in how hard it might be to swallow. But if one follows the basic tenets of MM-Theory towards it, one should see that nothing more can be, or needs to be, said about it.

The problem we have in accepting conflicting beliefs held by a single individual is rooted in our habitual clinging to an objectivist view of the world, or an independent model of reality. That two or more beliefs should conflict independently of anyone's assessment is what we have trouble dismissing - just as we would the notion that 2 + 2 = 4 independently of anyone's thinking it.

It becomes obvious, then, that when one believes an idea and some other idea that conflicts with the first, even if he fails to recognize the conflict, the only way it can be said that they indeed conflict is if the one saying it recognizes it as such. So when we say of certain beliefs that they conflict despite the one holding those beliefs not realizing it, the conflict is a projection of our own insights into his beliefs - we make them conflict - just as we make 2 + 2 = 4 by thinking it. Naturally, we can't conceive of it any other way. We can't perform thought experiments in which we image two conflicting beliefs not conflicting because the very parameters of the experiment require that we recognize a conflict.

So if the one who holds the so-called conflicting beliefs doesn't recognize the conflict, then those beliefs, for him, will not conflict. I understand that such a view is hard to swallow, but I still hold that the difficulty rests in our clinging to our innate sense of objectivism (because it's innate, there is little hope, short of performing brain surgery on ourselves, in detaching ourselves from it).

But as I said, the main tenets of MM-Theory lead us directly to that conclusion - that is, the conclusion that if one doesn't see a conflict between any of his beliefs, no conflict will exist. This is, in fact, central to MM-Theory because of its deeply subjectivist theme - that is, because of the manner in which it posits the reality or truth of things - namely, that things are the way they are solely because of the way they feel. If a system of belief feels consistent and true, it will be consistent and true for that person. Its consistency and truth are a projection of its feeling that way.

However, MM-Theory also says that the reality or truth of things is dynamic such that if a system of belief were consistent and true one moment, it needn't be for every other moment. Systems of beliefs still harbor the potential to come undone in virtue of the possibility of conflicts suddenly emerging or being pointed out. What I argue is that it is only when those conflicts surface that they can be said to be there - and only for the person to whom they've surfaced. I say this in opposition to the more tantalizing, but objectivist, intuition that if a conflict can be validly pointed out, it must have been there all along. The latter, to me, is much too Platonic - that is, it harkens back to an independently existing realm of pure and abstract truths, and relations between truths such as conflicts and consistencies. It leads to a picture of the world in which not only truths exist independently and of themselves, but conflicts between them as well. Plato, it could be said, is the archetypical radicalist when it comes to the objectivist position, taking to an extreme the notion that truths support and contradict each other in a manner independent of our thinking. I would prefer to swing the other way, and if that means swallowing something that goes against every objectivist fiber in my body, then I guess I'll have to tolerate a minor inconvenience.

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Qualitative Diversity From Qualitative Monotony

2008-11-20T07:55:00.000-08:00

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Let me pick up from where I left off talking about BIVs. I left off declaring that I had come up with my best account yet of how we get qualitative diversity out of qualitative monotony. Being more specific, I mean to say that I believe I can explain how a set of experiences with a limited diversity of qualities can amount, on a higher level, to an experience whose quality is nothing like that of its constituents. How, for example, do we get experiences such as emotion, thought, or vision if they are all reducible to the quality of experience that must correspond to the firing of single neurons, which is relatively the same throughout the entire brain? Likewise, how does one get such a qualitative range of experience when it is reducible to simple pains and pleasures, the experiences we assume to correspond to the activity of fundamental particles?

Even if pains and pleasures are a poor description of the kinds of experiences corresponding to the activity of fundamental particles, the broader question is still fair: how do we get qualitative diversity out of seeming qualitative monotony? It certainly seems, when we look at the activity of fundamental particles and that of neurons, that such activity is quite monotonous. Fundamental particles seem to do little more than attract and repel. Neurons seem to do nothing but fire or not fire. Whatever experience these represent, the question is still raised.

If my latest insight into the problem is correct, then what we have been doing wrong is assuming that the higher level experience that reduces to the lower level ones is somehow an "average" or a "sum" of the lower ones. We used color and mathematics a lot as analogies. For example, we said that if red and yellow represent two experiences, then orange could be said to represent the higher level experience that these two constituted in that it was a sort of "average" of red and yellow. Also, we said that if an experience can be represented by the number 1, then its components could be represent by fractions that sum to the number 1 - like .25 + .25 + .25 + .25. These worked insofar as they clarified other ideas, but the idea we want to clarify here is different, and it is not served nearly as well by these analogies - in fact, they lead us astray.

A third analogy that we drew on maintains its use in this context: the meaning of an experience can be reduced to the meanings of its component experiences as the meaning of a word can be equated to its definition given in any standard dictionary. This analogy, when contrast with the above two, shows a key different - the meaning of a word is not the "average" or the "sum" of the meanings of the words given in a dictionary definition - it is given by these words, and particularly by the way they are strung together to make meaningful sentences (and this is key), but not as an average or sum. The meaning of the word is something more than those of the words of its definition - more than the sum of the parts.

We have difficulty understanding how pain and pleasure, or any set of experiences whose qualitative diversity is relatively monotonous, can give rise to the multiplicity of qualities in all other experiences because we expect these other experiences to be a "sum" or "average" of pains and pleasures, which would make them pains and pleasures themselves or some gray area between. But if pains and pleasures become something else, something more, then you can have the emergence of other qualities.

But how? What exactly is the process by which pains and pleasures become other qualities?

As I said in an earlier post, the inspiration for this insight came after considering the relation between the "shape" of experience and the configuration of the MODs that correspond to them, and how this solves the problem of single neurons being stimulated naturally or by electrode, in the brain or out, from the cognitive center or the visual. In the Basic Theory, we said it was the configuration of MODs that determines the "shape" of experience. Configuration is just another word for arrangement or combination. So if every MOD is composed of the same old monotonous building block - namely, neurons - then it's the configuration - that is, the arrangement or combination of parts - that makes the whole unique. As a result, the whole becomes something different. It becomes something that could be distinguished from another whole made up of exactly the same parts but configured differently. It is this difference - this uniqueness - that accounts for the unique and novel qualities that come out of a set of monotonous experiences. It is what the higher level physical structure has become, along with the characteristic behavior that results from its unique form, that corresponds to a unique and novel quality of experience.

As an analogy, consider a string of 1s and 0s. It looks like this:

001010100111010111110

This represents one possible configuration of 1s and 0s (which themselves represent two elementary experiences - say pain and pleasure). Here's another configuration:

101000111100100101000

Now, if we label these, along with a list of other configurations, each one unique, then we have a labeling system that exemplifies, not only each string's unique configuration, but its being something new that wasn't there before the 0s and 1s were put together:

A = 001010100111010111110
B = 101000111100100101000
C = 101101010010010111101
D = 110101000100100011101
E = 000101001001111010100

The labels A, B, C, D, and E not only exemplify qualitative diversity but newness - that is, although it is the same 0s and 1s being repeat within and across each string, the fact that they form novel configurations means that something new comes about in the construction of such configurations. When we label them with unique and non-quantitative symbols, this novelty is nicely expressed.

We can see how new physical structures emerge when we configure their physical components in new ways, but how do we articulate this relation for experiences. How do we, for example, talk about the "configuration" of a set of pleasures and pains? What a "configuration" amounts to, as it concerns experiences, is the relations that hold between the component experiences involved - that is, in terms of entailment and the qualitative differences between them (which, as we know, is represented by their spatial and temporal relations). In other words, when we want to understand how one goes from these lower level experiences to the higher level one they constitute - from, say, pains and pleasures to thought - one must not only consider the qualities of the lower level experiences, but their relations to each other. These relations matter in much the same way as the relations between words in a definition matter to the word being defined. You could take exactly the same set of words and rearrange them into different sentences, thereby changing their relations to each other, and you would not get the same overall definition.

Yet this could still use some elaboration: it still isn't fully clear how the relation between experiences contributes to the quality of the higher level experience they constitute. We can see that it seems to be an important part of the equation, and we can see how such relations linking physical components determines the unique structure of the physical whole, but there seems to remain a conceptual gap when we try to understand how it works with experiences. How does a "relation" determine an experiential quality. We didn't have this difficulty with other analogies such as color - when we considered the quality of orange, we saw that it had to be the result when mixing red and yellow. But what does a "relation" add to the quality of an experience. We can see how relations make for a unique combination of experiences, and how their interactions might make the manner of their flow unique, but how do we translate this into the quality of the overall experience on the higher level?

Yet we see that it must be translated in some way. After all, if we return to the Basic Theory and recall the formulation we gave for the relation between mind and brain, we said that the mind serves as the reasons for our behavior, complimenting the causal function that the brain performs on our behavior. If the monotony of experiences that corresponds to the monotonous firing of neurons is reason enough for the behavior that results from it (whatever those experiences are), then any higher level experience must serve equally as a reason for the same behavior. Somehow, the quality of the lower level experiences, along with their relations to each other, must translate into an experience that plays the same roll vis-a-vis the ensuing behavior, and it would appear that such a translation doesn't necessarily result in an "averaging" or "summing" of the lower level experiences - something new can, and must, come out of it.

Therefore, we can state this as a rule: the quality of the higher level experience must be such that it serves equally well as a reason for the behavior of the system to which it corresponds. But how this quality is determined from those of the lower level experiences, plus their relations to each other, remains a mystery. But at least we see that this is possible because there is something more than the qualities of the lower level experiences that contributes to the higher level one - namely, their relations to each other.

Needless to say, this account, although probably the best explanation for the issue of deriving qualitative diversity out of monotony so far, leaves something to be desired, but at least the desire is now a little more satiated than it used to be.

Before leaving it at that, however, we should say something about the implications this view has for other things MM-Theory says about the reduction of experiences to their components. Really, there is only one thing we ought to say, and it concerns equivalence - that is, the idea that the higher level experience is not identical to the sum of its component experiences, but equivalent. What shall we say about this? Nothing! The concept remains valid in any case. The reason why we had to introduce the concept of equivalence was because among the lower level experiences, we fail to find any one quality that matches that of the higher level experience. Thus, we proposed that it was the meaning of the lower level experiences - that is, their "average" - that is identical, but since an average doesn't really exist among the lower level experiences, we couldn't say it was the lower level experiences that were identical to the higher level one. The only difference we should add to this now is that it is not an "average" per se which is identical, but something different. We are still at a loss to explain what this is, if not an average (except that it involves the "configuration" of experiences), but we can still rightfully say that the concept of equivalence is needed, and for the same reason - namely, that among the lower level experiences, we don't find the quality of the higher level one.

Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com/

On Materialism - A New Thread at ILP

2008-11-17T09:42:00.000-08:00

Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com/

http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=165861

Above is a link to the latest topic I entered into at http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/. It asks the question whether materialism is inconsistent with a belief in consciousness. I enter in half way down the first page. The discussion develops into a much needed clarification of the 'how' problem (as it comes to be called) and what most materialists think of it. The 'how' problem is how neural and chemical events can give rise to qualia or 'feels'. The majority of materialists on this forum admit that science has not yet answered the 'how' problem, but they are confident that one day it will.

Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com/

The Problem of Consciousness: Tracing It to The Source

2008-11-14T11:56:00.000-08:00

Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com/

When it comes to the philosophy of consciousness, philosophers sometimes like to trace the problem back through history to find where they went wrong. That is to say, if there is indeed a problem, the solution may not be to go forward but to go back, seeking a critical point where we made a wrong assumption or followed a train of thought not wholly logically.

If we are to go back in history, how far back do you think we ought to go before introducing MM-Theory into the development of thought on the matter? At what point should we accept everything that came before and reject everything that came thereafter, substituting MM-Theory in its place?

We certainly would have to go beyond Locke, as the paper The Inconceivability of Consciousness makes clear. What about the dualism of Descartes? Well, we did seem to start there, at least in the way we began the Basic Theory, but we did so not to defend it, but to tear it down. What we showed in the Basic Theory, and followed through with in the Advanced Theory, was that the reality of the world must be present in our experiences of it. Reality isn't something that parallels mind, as any hardgoing dualist theory would imply, but lives within it. Of course, the dualism of Descartes is one that relates the mind to the body, not so much to reality itself, but this is more a matter of scope than of kind. That is to say, the relation between mind and body is just a special case of the relation between mind and reality. Reality, it is assumed in classic Cartesian dualism, is the realm of the material, of the extended, whereas mind, or perception, is the realm of thought. The body is just one entity within the former realm, the one that seems most intimately mixed up with consciousness. But that is neither here nor there insofar as we are rejecting dualism. The more important issue is what the rejection of dualism entails regarding our search for a place in history where MM-Theory would have saved us a lot of confusion and blind wondering.

Descartes didn't invent dualism. Dualism was a mistake plaguing philosophers since the time of the Greeks. Descartes simply rendered his version of dualism as one of substances - mind and matter were two different substances. The word 'substance' was undergoing some significant changes around Descartes’ time - it came to bear similar connotations to "stuff" rather than the archaic Aristotelian connotation of "thing-ness" - and Descartes was making use of this new meaning to refine the concept of dualism in the hopes of making headway on the problem of consciousness. But not only do we need to undo this refinement of dualism, but we need to get rid of dualism all together.

Dualism finds its roots in a time before philosophy itself. We need to go back to prehistoric times to understand where the problem began. Back then man recognized no difference between perception and reality, between thought and truth. Man did have a rudimentary idea of "mind" but it wasn't the elaborate and flourished idea philosophers grapple with today. It was more or less synonymous with what we call the "imagination". Man always had an imagination - and he knew it. This is what eventually came to be known as "mind" today.

But the concept of the imagination was rather simple. Man did not have an extended concept of "perception" - that the world he saw might be illusory only, or that his eyes might deceive him. He had no concept of belief - he only knew truth. It may have been his truth, as we would rightly recognize it today, but for him it was the truth. In other words, all that man knew of mind, other than his imagination, was the variety of its projected forms. There was no perception per se, but real things in the real world.

MM-Theory regards the projected form of things their true form. The concept of an unprojected form of experience is something that has been handed down to us by dualism. Experiences never really become unprojected, but we still find use in the concept. We use the concept in order to talk about mind and experience as opposed to real things in a real world, but we recognize these as things united with the real world rather than separate entities or a distinct phase they enter in and out of. But primitive man had no such concept. The world was never "unprojected" for him. The only thing "mental" for him was the imagination.

But in regards to the imagination, what does it mean to say that man recognized it as "mind"? Was it something unprojected? No, it was projected as all other things, but it was the thing it was projected as which was different. Just as rocks and trees are real things, and 2+2=4 is a truth, and pain is bad and pleasure good, the imagination was really mental. Mind was a real thing. It didn't take the same form as physical things, or absolute truths, or good and bad, but none of these things ever took the form of any other of these things. They were each comprised of their own unique domains of reality.

But what made the imagination especially unique was that it was the domain of the "unreal" - that is to say, everything we imagined, we duly recognized as not really there in the "real" world. This is not to say it failed to project, but simply that, although the things therein were envisioned similarly to things in the world of sensation, they were not really there in the world of sensation. In other words, "unreal" only means "not in the domain of sensory things" (in fact, it means not in any domain other than its own, but because the imagination is primarily a visualization faculty, it is to be contrast foremostly with the visual world).

This was an evolutionary necessity. It was necessary that we regard the imagination as unreal, as under our control, as ours. This was because of its primary function. Its function was to simulate the world of sensation such that we could form models of it and use those models to make predictions and gain better control of it. It was an inner laboratory, so to speak, in which we conducted thought experiments, testing the real world in a safe and controlled setting. But this required that we deem its contents unreal, for otherwise we'd be struck with alarm every time we imagined a predator or other kinds of dangers. We had to recognize that this wasn't actually happening in the "real" world, and that it was always under our control.

But of course, man can't get far before encountering the schism. Man must eventually come to experience occasions when he is deceived by his senses, or what he thought was true but turned out to be wrong. To be wrong is not enough per se to create the mind/body problem, or the problem of reality and perception. One must first reflect on the erroneous belief and contemplate what made reality seem as though the belief were true. One must take the apparent reality and question what it was if not the actual reality. Man can go so far as to posit a difference between reality an appearance, but to lump appearance together with mind, or the imagination, one must first draw the link between the two. This link is formed when one considers the false appearance to be unreal - that is, bearing the same ontological status as the products of imagination. When man recognizes this similarity, it makes sense to suppose that he only imagined reality to be as it appeared. So to say that certain beliefs or perception are really mental was, originally, to say that they were imagined.

But now the conception of the imagination takes an interesting turn. It is no longer the domain of the manifestly unreal, but can sometimes spill over into other domains, or at least to appear to be doing such. In other words, the imagination can sometimes seem to be real things or matters of fact. Man begins to question what he sees and believes. He sees food; he wonders if he's only imagining it. He believes certain things to be the case; he wonders if these are nothing more than his thoughts.

This shift in the conception of imagination was brought to its ultimate conclusion by Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers. Descartes recognized that the deception of the imagination could be brought to bear on all aspects of reality we felt ourselves in touch with. Anything we perceived, believed, felt, or were in any way consciously in touch with could be doubted, could be a product of the imagination. Kant sealed this line of argument by showing that everything necessarily was just perception - what he called 'phenomena'. His argument was that if we have no way of knowing whether any of our perceptions, beliefs, etc. were real or not, then they are all necessarily only appearance, and so all we have are the way things appear - that is, perception. He didn't want to cast out reality so he had to invent 'noumena'. This is what the dualism of mind and reality leaves us with - a world of perception that we are intimately involved with, and a world of things as they really are that we have no epistemic or experiential relation to.

This is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. Various forms of monism have been adopted to counter this problem. We won't get into these here, nor the reason I'm opposed to them (though for anyone who has read MM-Theory, my reasons can easily be surmised). I would simply like to end on the following note. We have traced dualism to its source. Dualism begins when man learns to allocate his experiences of reality to the imagination, subjecting their authenticity to doubt. He then questions whether what he sees, believes, or feels in any other way is real or just in his head.

This was the birthplace of the problem of consciousness. If we want a monism, we have to back track to this point. We have to avoid the mistake of taking our experiences of reality and allocating them to the imagination. But what can we do instead? After all, we still misperceive, misbelieve, misjudge, misunderstand, etc. What are we to make of these if not illusions borne of the mind? The solution that MM-Theory offers is that we take the dynamics of mind - the believing and then disbelieving, the perceiving and then misperceiving, the judging and then misjudging, etc. - and plasters them directly onto reality - that is, the dynamics of mind are the dynamics of reality. How this works out is outlined in the paper Reality and Perception. In that paper, we find a new understanding of the nature of reality. Reality really is dynamic in this way. It's not that when one finds that his beliefs were mistaken that they were "merely" mental - it's that reality itself has changed. He finds himself in a new reality, with a new timeline. Looking back on this timeline, he finds he once believed things erroneously, but there was another configuration of reality with a different timeline. In the past of that reality, his beliefs were true, and it was that reality from which he migrated to the new one (all this is made more clear in the aforementioned paper).

Well, I have nothing more to say on this matter. I just wanted to write out my thoughts on where the problem of consciousness began and how MM-Theory would have taken it in a new problem-free direction. That's it.

Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com/

An MM-Theory Twist on BIVs

2008-11-13T08:56:00.000-08:00

Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com/

Okay, so like I said in my previous entry, I'm going to touch on certain questions that I feel were left lingering in the official website (even though I said the paper 'The Universe and God' pretty much covers all loose ends - heh heh). I'm also going to drop the formality a bit in my style of writing - make it a bit more free flowing and 'human'.

Anyway - first topic: brains in vats.

I'm actually going to do something different from what I said I'd do in the previous post. I said I'd explain a way that brains in vats might have wholly different experiences than brains in craniums - even though their internal neural configurations would be the same and the same signals would be fed into them. Since posting that, I've had time to think about it, and now I'm convinced that the experience wouldn't be at all different. But let me explain my thoughts anyway since I still think it sheds some important light on the questions that originally lead to the idea.

Philosophers abbreviate 'brains in vats' as BIV, and so will I. A BIV is essentially what it sounds like. Take a human brain out of the cranium and place it in a vat of life-supporting liquid. Plug cables into any neural entry points to the brain where it would have gotten external information should it have been left in the cranium (i.e. the senses). Information is fed into the brain through these cables from a super-complex computer capable of mimicking the real world (kind of like in The Matrix). The computer is programmed to stimulate the brain exactly as if it were being stimulated by the natural environment for a typical human being living a typical life. We assume that such a brain would be completely fooled by the information fed to it, thinking the computer generated world it was being presented with was in fact the real world, and he'd have no indication of it being otherwise.

Philosophers typically take it for granted that this experience would feel no different than if the brain were to be kept inside the cranium - but I wonder about that. I have reason to suppose - given MM-Theory - that the experience would be nothing at all like it - that it would be indescribable in terms of ordinary human experiences (yes - even though the physical internal structure of a BIV would bear no signs that it had indeed been "envatted" as they say).

Why do I suppose this?

It starts with a simple thought experiment (keeping MM-Theory in mind at all times): consider a thought neuron from the human brain. Assuming that one thought can be said to correspond to the firing of a single neuron, then it stands to ask what would happen to the experience of this neuron should we remove it from the brain, place it on a table, and stimulate it with an electrode. Would it still correspond to the same thought? To a thought?

I don't see how it could. A thought, according to MM-Theory, can only be thought if it is entailed by the appropriate antecedent experience. But what this implies is that the antecedent experience in question would have to correspond to the electrode. Strictly speak, this is not all together contradictory to what MM-Theory says - it has ways of justifying how the same experience can correspond to both MODs and electrodes - and furthermore the thought being entailed need not proceed from exactly the same experience - one quality of experience can be entailed by more than one quality of antecedent experience.

But now consider this. Suppose you took a neuron from the visual cortex and gave it the same treatment. Would it still correspond to the same visual experience? In this case it seems especially odd because there would be absolutely no discernable difference between it and the case in which the neuron was taken from the cognitive centers (assuming both neurons are relatively the same in structure). Why would one correspond to a thought while the other to a visual experience?

To this, I brought in the following insight: perhaps the firing of a single neuron doesn't correspond to a particular experience but only to the way the experience is processed. The experience fed into it would correspond to the electrode's activity, and the structure and predispositions of the neuron would only guide the manner in which the experience would subsequently flow. The neuron therefore represents a sort of algorithm - that is, a structured pattern by which the flow of experience is regulated. It would be like a mathematical formula - it leaves open the possibility for any quantitative value to be assigned to the variables, but rigidly determines the manner in which those values are calculated.

And if this is true at the level of single neurons, why not for larger structures - whole MODs for example. And if this is true for whole MODs, why not for whole brains? That is, for example, if we removed the brain from the larger system of which it was a part (i.e. the body) and plugged it into artificial stimuli, like electrodes and other such cables, what reason would we have to expect that the experiences corresponding to its stimulation feel anything like they do when kept inside the cranium? The experiences it would experience would be determined, not by its internal structure, not by the configurations of its neural networks, but by the experiences fed into it by the machinery it is hooked up to. In other words, since the experiences corresponding to the computerized machinery it is hooked up to would have to have some notable differences from the experiences corresponding to the ordinary organic structures of our usual anatomy - such as the optic nerve, or the inner ear structures, or the tactile nerves stemming from our skin - then those differences would remain as the experiences morphed into those corresponding to the activation of our primary sensory regions. In effect, our sensory experiences in the BIV scenario would be nothing like those in the mundane scenario of brains in craniums.

This is how I arrived at the alternate version of MM-Theory, and now I'll explain why I abandoned it. In so doing, though, I'll have to find some other way of explaining what happens to a neuron as you take it out of the brain and stimulate it with an electrode. The problem is this: in pondering over BIV thought experiments, philosophers tend to consider only such cases wherein the BIV is there to stay - supposedly for the remainder of its life. It may have been taken from a living human body, but no one ever asks what would happen if it were placed back into a living human body. So let's ask this question.

Well, it seems like what would happen is nothing. We might think at first that the person would report all his wild and crazy experiences and how different they were from the real world, but this would entail that his brain could distinguish between the BIV experiences and the post-BIV ones, which in turn would entail that his brain was processing information differently in the post-BIV state from the BIV state. But this contradicts the parameters of the thought experiment. A BIV, at least in the thought experiment, does not process information any differently than a non-BIV. Its internal structure and neural configurations are no different in any significant way from those of non-BIVs. In effect, when plugged back into a human cranium, the brain would have no basis upon which to express his real-world experiences any differently than his envatted experiences; the brain in question should not physically react to real-world stimuli as if they were in any way different from those of the envatted state. Such a brain would not notice any difference.

My gut reaction to this thought was to say that the brain in question would not be epistemically aware of any difference, but that experientially it would. However, two problems exist for this reasoning: 1) one's epistemic awareness cannot be wrong. To be epistemically aware of seeing an apple, say, is only possible if you are indeed seeing an apple (epistemic awareness can only be entailed by the experience one is epistemically aware of). So if the post-BIV is indeed epistemically aware of the same experiences he was epistemically aware of in the envatted state, the difference between experiences cannot be at the level of epistemic awareness - they must be below that level. But this leads to the second reason: 2) if we are to say that the difference exists below the level of epistemic awareness, then it seems to defeat the purpose of proposing any difference at all. Let me explain: consider the thought experiment that lead us to this proposal in the first place - namely, the removal of a single neuron from the brain and stimulating it with an electrode. Whatever experience we are epistemically aware of corresponding to this neuron, it would have to be the same experience whether in the brain or removed from the brain and connected to the electrode. If there is a difference at all, it would have to be below this level. But then that means that what's being entailed - whether plugged into the brain or an electrode - is the same experience at the level of epistemic awareness. So, for example, if one was epistemically aware of the thought "I should clean the house", that would have to be the same thought whether in the brain or connected to an electrode. Furthermore - and this is where it becomes paradoxical - a neuron taken from the visual cortex - say one corresponding to the sight of red - would, when connected to an electrode, have to then correspond to the same thought. The latter situation is especially troubling since, as we've seen, the physical structure of such a neuron is indistinguishable from that of the thought neuron considered earlier, and epistemic awareness of thought is obviously different from that of redness.

An alternate solution to this problem is to say that the post-BIV simply has no recollection of his envatted state, that any memories that were physically encoded in his brain while envatted are themselves experienced differently once taken out of the vat. After all, memory is not brought to consciousness out of a void; it is triggered by current conscious thought or other experiences. If these experiences, now different from the envatted state, are the input fed into the neural circuitry corresponding to memory, and if this neural circuitry represents only an algorithm as opposed to the precise quality of the corresponding experiences, then the output, namely the memory itself, need not bear any resemblance to the output of the envatted state. The neural circuitry of memory only represents the way information is processed, not what experiences felt like. It is another way of saying that if one experiences reality as one usually does in the non-BIV state, then one will recall his memories as coming from that reality with exactly the qualities one would expect from that reality. If one experiences reality as one would in the envatted state, however, his memories will likewise be recalled as though they came from that reality with precisely the quality expected of that reality. It wouldn't matter whether those memories were accurate or not - it just matters that they define a particular reality in a particular way. In other words, if that's what one remembers happening in reality, then that's reality for that person at that time.

But this too was eventually abandoned after considering the following thought experiment: the half-BIV. A half-BIV is a brain that, while still inside the cranium, is half plugged into the machinery it would otherwise have been fully plugged into if it were a full BIV. Suppose, for instance, that we plugged that same machinery, run by the same computer with the same program, into only half the subject's brain, but with one important difference: the machine doesn't simulate the real world but replicates it - that is, it takes real-world information (through cameras, touch pads, sound recorders, etc.) and digitizes it. The digitized information is used to reconstruct the real-world within the hardware, and then it is sent to the subject's brain. Because the subject's brain is receiving this information from a completely digital world, there shouldn't be any significant difference between it and that of the full BIV case. So his entire left hemisphere is being fed information from the computer while the right hemisphere is being fed information from the real-world. Would he then be able to contrast and compare the difference in experiences? Would the world then appear half bizarre, half normal? Again, the same problems arise: he couldn't possibly behave or talk as if there were any difference because there would be no difference in the physical effects or configuring of neural networks between the two hemispheres; it would be exactly as if both hemisphere's were being fed unmediated information. We couldn't say that he was remembering the machine fed experiences wrong because it has nothing to do with memory - they're happening now.

This was the final straw. I decided right then and there that the half-BIV thought experiment meant the disaster of the alternate experiences theory of BIVs. It just wasn't working.

So then we come back to the original question: if BIV's experience the digital world no differently than BIC's experience the real world, then why would a single neuron taken out of the brain experience stimulation by an electrode any differently than a neuron in the brain experiences stimulation by neighboring neurons? To get a solution to this problem, we have to go back to the Basic Theory - we have to go back to the theory of what "shapes" an experience - namely, the neural configuration of MODs.

This is what made different experiences different. It isn't nearly as problematic to suppose that a full MOD taken from the brain would correspond to the same experience when stimulated by electrodes because the electrode in question would have to be of a very particular design and programmed to stimulate the MOD according to a very particular pattern. If we recall the analogies drawn between MODs and computer circuits, we can describe MODs as having a set of "input lines" - these would be the neural sites where stimuli like other neurons, neurotransmitters, or electrodes have their initial effects on the MOD. Therefore, to stimulate the MOD as the brain would, an electrode would have to be "plugged into" the MOD at each of its input lines. There might be a specific pattern of input, such as one input line being stimulated before another, or every odd one in synchrony with each other and every even one being stimulated at random, in order for the MOD to function as it normally would when plugged into the brain. The electrode would have to mimic this pattern as well. The electrode, in other words, would have to be tailored to work with this one MOD only, or at least a very select few MODs. It could not replicate the idiosyncratic pattern of activity of any old MOD as manifested in a normally functioning brain. It may invoke atypical patterns, but then we wouldn't be talking about the same corresponding experience.

We could still bring into question the versatility of this manner of invoking particular neural activity, and thus invoking particular experiences - that versatility being the multitude of devices we could use to stimulate a particular MOD in the same pattern as would be found in a functional brain. For example, instead of using electrodes, I could plug the MOD into my computer and program it to behave as if it were plugged into a functional brain. The question would be whether it still makes sense to say that the vast array of devices one could use to invoke this pattern of activity could possibly correspond to the same antecedent experience. However, this problem is not really a challenging one. First, as we noted earlier, there needn't be only one such antecedent experience - a whole slew of them might exist, each fully capable of entailing the experience corresponding to the MOD in question. Second, the antecedent experience would not be the only factor in the equation. We must also take into consideration the experiences of the UOS (Universal Operating System) corresponding to the atomic organization of the MOD. Those too count as experiences, and it is only in conjunction with them that the experiences corresponding to our stimulation device can entail that corresponding to the activation of the MOD. Setup such an atomic arrangement different, and you'll have not only a different MOD but a different resultant experience. So the antecedent experience (the one corresponding to our stimulation device) cannot entail the one corresponding to the activity of the MOD alone - it needs the assistance of certain experiences belonging to the UOS.

Perhaps we can make this into a general principle, one that is long overdue: the capacity of one particular experience to entail another particular experience is equal, and corresponds, to the capacity of the particular physical system corresponding to the first experience to have particular effects either on itself or another physical system, which in either case would correspond to the second experience, that were necessitated by natural law. What this says, in simpler words, is that if we are not surprised by the fact that an electrode can stimulate a particular MOD (because the laws of physics necessitates it), why should we be surprised by the implication that the one corresponding experience entails the other? If the physical event is necessitated by natural law, then the experiential event is equally necessitated by the laws of entailment. That's what the physical systems and the laws of nature represent, after all. We could have argued this all along, of course, but it seems so less absurd when considered in the context of whole MODs rather than single neurons - primarily because whole MODs are so much less generalizable and require very particular preconditions in order to be stimulated.

***

PRINCIPLE: The capacity of one particular experience to entail another particular experience is equal, and corresponds, to the capacity of the particular physical system corresponding to the first experience to have particular effects either on itself or another physical system, which in either case would correspond to the second experience, that were necessitated by natural law.

***

But what should we say of the case of the single neuron? We shouldn't leave such danglers lingering. First, I'd be loathed to suppose that a thought, or any experience we as humans are epistemically aware of, would correspond to something as simple as a single neuron. I can see the allure of such a notion, however, when I think how thoughts and the firing of single neurons seem to have in common the likeness of a "unit of information". I have my doubts however. I doubt a thought corresponds to a single neuron. It more likely corresponds to a particular pattern of neural activity across various centers in the brain. To suppose it were the product of a single neuron firing would imply that it could be wiped out - made impossible to think - with only the destruction of that single neuron. But a pattern of neural activity not only accounts for the unit-like impression of this sort of mental information, but its continuous flow as well. You see, even though our thoughts feel like units, there is great difficulty in spotting exactly where one thought ends and another begins - at least, in the flow of time (you can spell out its beginning and end in how its expressed - a few English sentences usually do the trick). The unit-likeness of thought can be seen in the unit-likeness of a particular pattern of neural activity. With no other pattern quite like it, it stands out as a unit among other unit-like patterns. A single neuron added to or removed from that pattern changes the pattern. On the other hand, the flow from one pattern to another would not likely be a matter of discreteness or zero-overlap - it would likely merge from one to another, thereby accounting for the elusiveness of beginnings and ends to a particular thought within the flow of consciousness. In any case, I see no reason to suppose that any of our experiences, the ones we are epistemically aware of at least, correspond to the firing of a single neuron.

However, this doesn't help us much when the question is turned to the firings of single neurons. Is the experience corresponding to the firing of a single neuron in our brain the same for each and every instance? Is it the same whether in the brain or taken out and stimulated by an electrode? If so, how do we get the kaleidoscope of qualities that seem to come with MODs higher up in scale? The reader might notice this question seems eerily similar to the one that plagues us from down at the subatomic level of things. That is to say, the question of how experiences corresponding to things like the behavior of fundamental particles, with their electromagnetic pulls and pushes, can give rise to the multitude of qualities we enjoy as a part of human life, and presumably life in the mind of the cosmos. This question pivots on our assumption that the experiences in question - those corresponding to the behavior of fundamental particles - are something akin to pains and pleasures. How do we get things like red-ness or musical melody out of pains and pleasures?

Well, as it turns out, my insights of late - the ones relating the the BIV problem just discussed - have shed new light on this problem. I may have come up with my best answer to this question yet. It will account for the plethora of qualities we experience on our level of scale in terms of both fundamental particles and the firings of single neurons - but I think I'll divulge this in a future post.

Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com/

introduction

2008-09-05T08:27:00.000-07:00

Hello, and welcome to my blog on my theories of mind and matter. My name is Gibran Shah. This blog is an appendix to my main website found at http://www.mm-theory.com/, the theme of which is my own personal theory on the relation between mind and brain (or mind and matter). It is a theory that explains how it is that something physical like the brain, something that functions on the laws of physics (i.e. biology and chemistry) and computes information much like the electric signals inside a computer, create something so non-physical, non-law-abiding, non-computer-like as the mind - that is, as conscious awareness? How is it that this squishy, gooey, pulsating piece of living tissue can give rise to thoughts, to emotions, to seeing, to feeling pains and pleasures, to a sense of self identity, and to life in general? That's the question I aim to answer in my website, so if it interests you, go ahead and visit the site. The purpose of this blog, however, is to add supplementary thoughts to what is said in my website as they come to me over the years. I may also deviate from MM-Theory at times to go down other philosophical avenues, but the bulk of these blogs will pertain mainly to MM-Theory itself.

The first things I want to add to this blog are some answers to questions that I feel the website itself left lingering. I tried to be as complete as possible, but found that some ideas/problems just didn't fit in anywhere, so I'm going to devote the first few post of this blog to these ideas.

Some examples include the following:

* In my website, I have a paper called "Reality and Perception" where I resolve the major conflicts that a subjectivist theory like mine usually comes up against, one in particular being the problem of conflicting beliefs between two people both being correct. The resolution to this problem works insofar as the conflicting beliefs reside in two separate minds, but there are cases of a single individual who holds conflicting beliefs within his own mind without acknowledging or being aware of them. What to say about that?

* MM-Theory states that all physical systems as we perceive them are sensory representations of other non-human experiences being had by the Universal Mind. By default, we therefore assume that any specific instance of a physical system undergoing some activity represents a specific quality of experience undergoing a specific manner of change. As much as this may very well be, I want to propose a different formulation. I want to propose that physical systems and their activity represent, not so much a specific quality of experience, but only the manner in which they change. This would be akin to a mathematical formula representing, not so much the specific quantities that go into the variables of that formula, but the manner in which those quantities are calculated to yield the result; the quantities may be variable, but they are always calculated according to the same operations.

I will be using the famous "brain in a vat" thought experiment that philosophers are fond of. The idea would be that whereas a brain in a cranium will typically correspond to familiar human experiences like vision, emotion, thought, memory, hearing, language comprehension, etc., a brain in a vat connected to wires that simulate life as usual by stimulating the sensory regions with electric impulses might correspond to totally alien experiences that no human can even dream - despite the internal constitution and organic functionalities of the brain having changed not one iota. I'll explain this in full when I finally get to it.

* I want to propose that logic is not intrinsic to the nature of human thought - that is, it is not genetically "hardwired" into our brains - but learnt from our experiences with the world and how it works. In this way, I want to strengthen my argument about how the necessity I claim characterizes all experience spans beyond logic. What I want to propose is that we don't think logically until our illogical expectations of how the world should work get thwarted by that very world. In other words, our tendency to thereafter think logically is really based on contingencies - that is, the contingency of real world events and our experiencing them. This is similar to saying that a syllogism such as "All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal" is no more necessary than the fact that all objects fall down - the world just so happens to work that way. This is not to say that the conclusion "Socrates is mortal" doesn't follow necessarily from the premises - of course it does - but that syllogisms in general should depict the way the world works is only true contingently. The necessity that characterizes syllogisms would be found in any other learnt thought pattern should our experiences of the world have turned out differently. If we could verify, by empirical experience, that all men are indeed mortal and that Socrates is indeed a man, but that somehow he isn't mortal, we would learn to think this way and this style of thought would indeed feel necessary. The necessity of our thoughts was felt even before we learnt to think logically, and would therefore continue to be felt any other way. To say, after being given the two premises above, that Socrates is immortal is rightly recognized as a logical fallacy, but not because of some intrinsic necessity that it doesn't hold; rather, because of the extrinsic necessity that if we experience the world that way then the thought patterns that match those experiences (i.e. syllogism) must hold. That we should experience the world that way, however, is contingent.

Naturally, I will have to shed a bit of light on how it is that two opposing conclusions from the same set of premises can both be true necessarily - that is, how one, who doesn't think logically, can conclude that Socrates is immortal, and how another, who does think logical, can conclude that Socrates is mortal. I touched on this briefly when I said, in the Advanced Theory, how some people's "logic" can flow by necessity based primarily on how those thoughts feel (i.e. there's a difference in "feel" between the thoughts of the logical thinker and the illogical thinker), but we can say more now that we understand the correspondence between experiences and the molecular structures of our neurons - which would indeed be different between the logical and illogical thinker.

There are other ideas I would like to add and this blog is where you'll find them.

Before I get to them, however, I'll give a few links to some philosophical discussions I got myself into on the forum http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/, which I frequent regularly.

http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=165134&start=0

This one has me discussing what constitutes life, and whether things like rocks or a comatose patient can be said to "live". The discussion digresses into me explaining the basics of MM-Theory and the concept of the self. I jump into the conversation near the middle of the first page.

http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=162783

Me and "Daybreak" discuss our very similar views on the nature of perception and reality, questioning whether psychedelic and marijuana induced perceptions of reality are "real". But we seem to differ on how we account for conflicts between contradictory beliefs held by different people.

http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=163306

I thought this one was interesting for its own sake. It doesn't have much to do with MM-Theory directly, but it does lean towards potentially proposing a mental technology (i.e. a cognitive program) that could foster more trust and trustworthiness in people.

http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=157550&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

Philosophy can be nasty sometimes. In this thread, one guy gets nasty with my opening question: What's more important? Truth or Health? - obviously relating to the position I take in my paper "Practical Applications".

http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=157314

Here I lay out my argument about why the problem of free-will exists, which one can also find in my paper "Determinism and Free-Will.

http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=156812

I dared to argue that Nietzsche was an optimist in this thread. Again, has very little to do with MM-Theory, but what the hey.

http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=154539&st=0&sk=t&sd=a

Me and "nano-bug" share our pantheistic views. I enter in about a third of the way down page 2.

http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=150396

I try to "save" mind from the jaws of materialism and nihilism. Another one that gets nasty.

http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=149572

Questioning the reality of reality. This debate, in which "faust" and I argue over the meaning of "reality", gets very "heated" (but not nasty). This discussion has taught me a lot about how to argue my points with more care. I jump in near the middle of page 1.

Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com