Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com
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).
Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
The Subjectivist's Take on Inconsistencies Within Belief Systems
Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com
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.
Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com
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.
Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Qualitative Diversity From Qualitative Monotony
Read my theory: http://www.mm-theory.com/
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/
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:
This represents one possible configuration of 1s and 0s (which themselves represent two elementary experiences - say pain and pleasure). Here's another configuration:
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:
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/
Monday, November 17, 2008
On Materialism - A New Thread at ILP
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/
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/
Friday, November 14, 2008
The Problem of Consciousness: Tracing It to The Source
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/
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/
Thursday, November 13, 2008
An MM-Theory Twist on BIVs
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/
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