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/
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