Time (Some rambling thoughts)

 Time

2024-12-08 to 11 

Einstein’s Special Relativity (SR) says that time is one of the four dimensions of spacetime. String theory claims there are more dimensions, but that’s a side issue.

We move through the three space dimensions. SR shows that our motion affects how we perceive motion and time.

We measure our own motion within our frame of reference. In fact, measuring motion defines a frame of reference. We ride in a car sitting still. But the car moves at 100 kph along the highway, so we are moving at 100kph along the highway, too. And the Earth spins, and orbits the sun, and the solar system moves within the local star cluster, which moves within the spiral arm that orbits the Galaxy. The Galaxy spins, and moves towards Andromeda. And so on.

Within us, the blood moves, air moves, muscles expand and contract, molecules move about and react with each other. Within larger molecules, groups of atoms move this way and that as the molecule changes shape. The atoms themselves move, and within the atom, the electrons and nucleus move. In fact, they move so much that the best we can do to specify their motion is to describe it as a cloud of possibilities, using a wave function that’s said to collapse when we measure those motions.

Heisenberg says the more precisely we measure the motion of electrons etc, the less precise the measurement of their location. Or the more we know about how the electron moves, the less we know about where it is. Which interpretation of the math is correct? I don’t know. Take your pick.

Why do I emphasise motion? Because all motion “takes time.” That is, any change in a space dimension entails a change in the time dimension. This seems to me the intimate integration of space and time that Einstein formalised as General Relativity. I hope this interpretation Einstein’s insight is correct.

So the other day I was thinking about time as a dimension, for about the 777th time. It had occurred to me that if we move through space, what would it mean to say that we move through time?

We normally think of time as “passing”, and point to clocks that measure that passage one tick at a time. Where a tick is a small motion of something. In the international standard of time  measurement that tick is a single cycle of the vibration of caesium:

The second [...] is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the caesium frequency, ΔνCs, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium 133 atom, to be 9192631770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to s−1.[1]

That “.... one tick at a time...” is either evidence of our brain’s conceptualising limits, or else proof that time is real in the same sense that space is real. Take your pick. I mention this puzzle because recently Carlo Rovelli and other physicists have wondered whether time is real or an illusion. Maybe space is all there is, and the feeling that time passes is created by our brains. The question may have been instigated by the awareness that being aware means being aware of time passing.

We speak of “spending time”, and continue with the terrifying thought that once we’ve spent a chunk of time, we can’t (unlike with money) earn an equivalent chunk of time to replace what was spent. Heraclitus supposedly said that we never step in the same river twice, since the water has flowed on between steps. Time, he said, is like that river. There’s a hymn that includes the phrase “time, like an ever-flowing stream”, which is a cliche by now. These ways of thinking all imply that time is some kind of entity. It’s not like space. Which may be why we have trouble dealing with Einstein’s concept of spacetime.

Does thinking of time as something we move through solve these conceptual problems? Maybe. Let’s try it.

Begin by supposing that there’s more than one time dimension. We happen to be confined to a line within that space, our timeline. Specify a frame of reference and you specify a timeline. We move through time along that line whenever we move through space. And as I’ve sketched above, we are always moving with respect to some other entity. Utter repose is impossible. Even death entails motion: as our body decays, its bits and pieces move in all directions, transported by the critters that eat them or the wind and water that carries them away. The skeleton that remains moves with the Earth.  

Now suppose that we could move off that timeline, in any direction, sideways, up and down, at an angle, in a circle. Just as in space we can take a shortcut, we could take a shortcut in time, and arrive at a future point on out timeline without passing through the intermediate ones. Time travel the would be moving off our timeline, moving around in time, and rejoining our timeline.

If time is multidimensional, would there be some way of writing a formal theory that could be tested? I’ll leave that up to the people who can handle the math. But the concept could work as a premise for sci-fi story. I’m sure the idea has occurred to someone else. If not, I hereby claim first invention (or discovery), and grant a non-transferable licence to anyone who wants to use it. Just give me a cut of the royalties.

© W. Kirchmeir

Is the Self Real? (Hood, The Self Illusion, 2012)

 Bruce Hood. The Self Illusion. (2012) An excellent overview of the implications of neurological research on questions of awareness, both of the external world and of the self. Hood’s reporting of the research is IMO fair, based on my (gappy) knowledge derived from reading several dozen miscellaneous sources.

I think that the term “illusion” is unfortunate, since it suggests that the Self is not real. It is as real as all the other simulations generated by the brain. I note that the Self is centred on the body, and that my sensations of my body’s shape and colour etc are the same kind as my sensations of the shapes and colours of other bodies and objects in the world around me. So I conclude that these sensations are simulations, not illusions. As simulations, they must match reality well enough that I can do whatever it takes to survive and procreate. Evolution rewards mechanisms that enable those processes, so I conclude that the simulation my brain creates is good enough for those purposes.

Study of other organisms has revealed that their senses are not exactly the same as ours, so presumably their simulations of reality are different. This stance suggests that the famous conundrum about what it’s like to be a bat can be reframed as not knowing what a bat’s simulation of reality is like. But then we can’t know exactly what another human’s simulation is like either. A favourite question of my students was “How do we know that we see red the same way?” The answer is, we don’t. But we can tell whether we see the same differences between red and green. If we don’t, the we agree that one of us is red-green colour-blind.

This principle of comparing perceptions underlies all scientific research. Science has expanded from describing and classifying perceptions to recording measurements and devising mathematical models that predict the measurements. If we record the same measurements, then presumably we have stumbled on some constant in the simulations, and may infer that this implies some constant aspect of reality.

Hood spends some time discussing free will, and concludes that free will is also an illusion. There is no free will because all decisions are determined by a multiplicity of factors, starting with how our genes and environments interact to produce our individual brains. He reports cases of how brain tumours have changed people’s personalities and perceptions, and how removing the tumours has changed people more or less to back to what they were. It’s clear that if perceptions and attitudes change when the brain is damaged in some way then the notion of free-willed choice becomes questionable at least. That’s important because of our assignment of moral and hence sometimes of criminal guilt.

It seems to me that this approach to the free will problem misses the point. As framed, there is no way to distinguish between a freely willed and a determined choice. Both ways of choosing finally depend on preferences. Reasoning cannot choose, it can only present options. Whether our brain simulates a free choice, or we actually perform one, the result is the same. For free choice will act on options exactly like determined choice. Basically, we choose. Hood argues that insight into factors that influence or determine choice, and the extent to which the chooser cannot control them, should guide our notions of guilt and responsibility. I think he’s right.

All in all, a book well worth reading. ****

States of War (Lapham's Quarterly 01-1, 2008)

Lapham’s Quarterly 01-1. States of War. (2008) (A re-read) The first issue of LQ, and an excellent collection of texts and images about war. But depressing.

     Part 1, “Calls to Arms”, shows that war has almost always been justified as a struggle against evil personified in the enemy, who worship different gods, and are therefore obviously the servants of whatever Satan the warmonger imagines. Looting and other entertainments may be offered as enticements, but the warmongers rarely acknowledge them as the prime goals of invading one’s neighbours.
     Part 2, “Rules of Engagement”, deals with lessons in strategy and tactics, based on experience. There’s advice about how to prepare for war, and advice about how to wage it. The recognition that ultimately all armed conflict tends towards total war comes early in history.
     Part 3, “Field Reports”, shows us the brutalities of war, both on the battlefield and off it. From the beginning, non-combatants have suffered as much as or more than the fighters. Prisoners were taken only if they had some value, such as possible ransoms for the self-styled nobles who led the slaughter, and sometimes as hostage status for other ranks, but usually as slaves, if they weren’t too badly damaged. Slavery was the usual fate of any surviving defeated civilians.
     The last section, “Postmortems”, offers some hope, if only in the reactions of the surviving conscripts who wanted nothing more to do with war. But as often, the survivors saw the peace as  merely a pause on the fighting, good for regrouping and preparation for the next engagement with the enemy.

     “Further Remarks” presents four essays about wars past, present, and probable future. They didn’t do much to improve my mood.
     Is war inevitable? Many people think it’s species-specific behaviour, part of our territoriality, which is also expressed in our tribalism. In evolutionary terms, war has weeded out the more pacific strains of our species, leaving the ones that are willing to use violence in control. In the short term, the quarter–million years of our species’s existence, that’s made for survival. But our technical ingenuity, and our inability to act collectively except when threatened by another collective, plus our unwillingness (or inability, you choose) to give up immediate reward for long-term survival, these traits taken together suggest that evolution has tossed up a species that is likely to destroy the ecosystem that sustains it. We may turn out to be one of Mother Nature’s failed experiments.
     Depressing. But recommended. ****

Visual and other illusions

 

 Visual illusions vary. Some can be controlled. For example, I find that once I’ve seen both images in a dual-image illusion, I can see either one at will. The two faces vs vase is an example. Of course, I can’t see both images at once: The brain computes the image either as a white one on a black ground, or a black one on a white ground. Hence the illusion.

Others are a trickier, for example the Necker cube illusion. I can trigger the flip, but not entirely at will. I have to blink, so that the brain sees a new input, which will usually be computed the way I want it.

Others are impossible avoid, for example the staggered tiles illusion. The only way to see the horizontal lines as truly horizontal is to cover all except the top row of tiles. There is no way to control this illusion.

Many more visual illusions have been discovered in the last 50 years or so, when neurologists began to wonder why and how they happened. One of the most startling is that colour is always perceived as an illusion. The range of colours in a scene, the distribution of light and shadow, the colours in the light source, the colours of neighbouring regions, all these determine what the brain will compute as the “real” colours.

It’s now known that we suffer illusions in all our senses. The general principle is that the brain computes our perceptions from the filtered, hence limited, data provided by our sensory systems. Some of these computations produce illusions: false or mistaken perceptions. We cannot escape them. At best we can question them. By comparing the inputs from different senses, we can usually recognise hallucinations. Memories can also help do this, but are less reliable. 

Knowledge (gleaned from observation and experiment critiqued and organised with reason) can reveal the reality that the brain miscalculates or fails to perceive at all. But this process is not easy, and above all, it’s slow. It takes patience, experience, and understanding of sometimes opaque methodologies to apprehend the reality beyond the illusion. That reality cannot be perceived, but usually there are procedures to calculate perceivable effects. When these are confirmed by observation, we say that we are now a step closer to the “underlying reality.” The name for the knowledge thus generated is “theories”. 

What’s true of the senses is also true of conceptualisation. A concept is a pattern. We suffer from conceptual illusions just as we suffer visual ones. I think the most pervasive one is that these abstract patterns we call theories are closer to the “underlying reality” that our senses so inconveniently misrepresent or hide from us.

Unusual Brains: Thomson's Unthinkable (2018)

 Helen Thomson. Unthinkable. (2018) Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat showed that suitably edited case histories could help people understand the effects of stroke and other insults to the brain. His sensitive descriptions, his reports of interviews, his attempts to translate his patients’ accounts into accessible narratives, these and more have inspired generations of readers. One of them was Helen Thomson, who cherishes her interview with him a couple of years or so before he died. This book is in part a result of her admiration for Sacks, coupled with a wide-ranging curiosity, and enough neuroscience background (she has a B.Sc) to make sense of the topic of this book: how people with unusual brains manage to survive and thrive.
     Thomson tells the stories of nine people with congenital or acquired brain oddities. There’s Bob, who never forgets a moment. Or Tommy, whose personality changed utterly when he suffered an aneurysm. Or Sharon, whose sense of location is so bad that she has trouble navigating around her house. Thomson interviewed them all, as well as similar ones that she found along the way, and the scientists and psychiatrists who worked with these extraordinary outliers. The result is a reminder that we are our brains. When our brains don’t function as expected, we become different people. That’s the reason we are afraid of dementia, I think. Dementia shows us that what we think of as the most reliable component of our experience, our sense of self, is in fact the most fragile.
     The book confirms my belief that the brain constructs a simulation of reality with the Self, the “I”, not only at its centre but as the essential component, the part that holds it all together. Our “I” knows itself to be “here”, at the centre (the pathological version of this knowledge we call narcissism). If the connection between Self and some component of the simulation is broken or compromised, then not only the awareness of what’s “out there” is altered, but so is the Self.
     I believe that all brains, human and animal, construct such simulations, every one of them good enough to ensure that most members of a species will live long enough to produce offspring. But all of them incomplete and distorted in some way. The outliers that Thomson describes show the common features of the human simulation of reality. They also show how far from the norm any given simulation can be and still function as a human Self. So in the limited sense of the stable Self thereby implied, the Self is what makes each of us a person.
     Footnote: The Christian creeds assert the “resurrection of the body”, which suggests that one of the innovations of the Christian faith was the insight that a Self without a body is impossible. The Incarnation may be understood as another version of this insight. This insight has been slighted or ignored ever since the notion of a disembodied soul was introduced by Augustine and others..
     Recommended. ****

Freedom: We don't agree (Lapham's Quarterly 25 01)

Lapham’s Quarterly 25-01 Freedom (Spring 2023). This collection shows that there has beenprecious little consensus on what  freedom means. Most of the pieces assume a political context. Some discuss the moral meanings, usually in contrast to licence. There’s a good deal of story-telling about the effects of oppression, of the struggles for political freedoms. There’s some discussion of self control versus external control. But most of the pieces explicitly or implicitly assume that freedom means the ability to do what one wants to do, with as few constraints, limits, or consequences as possible. Some think that freedom means no consequences whatsoever. But most writers recognise that, since we live with other people, our freedoms and theirs may conflict. Freedom has limits.

    None of the writers refer to the engineer’s concept, which (briefly) refers to how much the design parameters may vary. In practice, it means that the fixing of some variable limits the range and even the availability of some other variable(s) in the design problem. Decide X’s value, and Y’s value is limited, or fixed. Or Y may be impossible to include.  That’s an operational definition, one that I see applicable to politics, social relations, career decisions, and so on. For example, if you decide that a free market means minimal regulation by the government, then only customer demands or preferences will influence such things as a business’s labour or waste disposal practices, etc. In short, you can’t have it all. Exercising your freedom to choose X limits or prevents your freedom to choose Y.

     Many people believe that unpleasant consequences of some choice are limits on their freedom. That belief animated the protests to the covid-19 pandemic measures imposed by governments and businesses. Taken to its logical conclusion, that belief implies that the criminal is an oppressed victim of unjust law, a conclusion that the protesters would not, I think, accept. Thus, reasoning about freedom becomes a nice example of why reason isn’t always reasonable. That also explains why people have disagreed about the concept. Every definition of freedom implies unreasonable conclusions.

     A good collection, as always. ***

What it's Like To Be Someone Else: An Anthropologist on Mars (Oliver Sacks)

 Oliver Sacks. An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) The title quotes Temple Grandin, one of seven people whose brains function outside the range now labelled “neurotypical”, a term Sacks never used.
     The book begins with “Jonathan I”, an artist whose suffers a high fever, and wakes up unable to see colour. He’s even unable to remember colour. Being achromatic (lovely word, I think) is barely imaginable by anyone who grew up with black-and-white films. But being unable to recall colour, that’s impossible for us to imagine.
     Sacks’s gift is to convey something of the feeling of what it’s like to be the persons he describes. In doing so, he provides evidence that we perceive only what the brain can construct from the inputs of the senses, and that perceptions will vary with differences in the brain. People who are born with unusual brains, or who suffer lesions in the brain, are natural experiments in the range of possible human existence.
     For Sacks also sees that we are what we perceive. Changes in our perceptions are also changes in our selves. Our sense of self, our self-awareness, is part of the totality of perceptions that give us the experience of reality. Sacks’s case histories show that while we cannot fully imagine another person’s experience, we can know where and how our experience differs from that of others.
    Science is the attempt to describe, and the arts are attempts to share, our common experience. Sacks is one of the rare people who can combine these two modes of insight. Any of his books are worth reading. ****

Do you see what I see? (Hallucinations: Oliver Sacks)

     Oliver Sacks. Hallucinations (2012) A posthumous work assembled from Sacks’s notes and drafts. The result is a somewhat gappy discussion and occasionally rough style, but it still adds up to what to me appears a thorough survey of what’s known and unknown about hallucinations.
     Hallucinations are illusions, but they are almost always known to be illusions. Neurological research shows subtle differences between perception, illusion, hallucination, and memory. All involve the brain areas of sensory perception, but the limbic system and the frontal cortex behave differently. While we generally think first of visual hallucinations, hallucinations happen for every sense, as do illusions. Sacks as usual uses case histories to demonstrate the nature of different types of hallucination.
     I learned much. One thing is that the zig-zagged glittering visual aura that precedes most migraines is probably more common as the sole symptom of migraine. (Variations of it also precede epileptic seizures.) Since I experience that aura myself roughly once every other month or so, this information is somewhat reassuring.
     Another interesting fact is that people deprived of sight (even temporarily) experience visual hallucinations. These are oddly similar both in the content and in how the content changes over time.
      But mostly what I learned reinforces the hypothesis that the brain constructs the experience of what we are pleased to call reality. The centre of that experience is the self, the “I”. Sensory deprivation changes the “I”, not merely what the “I” sees or doesn’t see. Many people who lose their sight eventually are no longer able to remember their past visually, for example. But memories are at the core of our sense of self. We are not only our present experience, we are our memories.
     Another very good read. Recommended. ***½

What is Life? A comment on Viruses

There have been many definitions of “life”. I think the simplest definition of life is this one: Life is a system that acquires the substances and energy needed to continue to exist and to reproduce. If it fails to do this, it ceases to exist. Any such system is an organism.

By that definition, a virus is alive. It’s the simplest form of life: a packet of genetic information that drifts about until it latches onto a cell that it can invade. It then uses the cell to acquire the substance and energy it needs in order to reproduce.

Since a virus needs another organism to survive and reproduce, it is a parasite. Most parasites either do not harm their hosts or provide some benefit. A few (mostly microbes) are necessary for their host’s well-being and even continued existence. A few parasites harm their hosts, and some kill their hosts. A parasite species will survive only as long as its hosts do not die out.

It’s likely that many viruses, like many microbes, are not merely beneficial but necessary for their hosts’ well being. We know enough about bacteria, for example, to know that without them we would have trouble digesting much of our food. We don’t know that much about viruses. But we do know that some of them kill bacteria that are dangerous to us. We also know that viruses can transport bits of DNA between species, and that this sometimes results in beneficial changes to an organism’s genome.

What all this amounts to is that we are woefully ignorant of viruses’ roles in the web of life. The handful that bother us create the impression that we would be better off without them. That is certainly a false impression. We just don’t know enough. Yet.

Footnote: Very early on, some computer programmers wrote small programs with a rather strange property: they would use the computer's operating system to write copies of themselves into every available memory space. Rewriting these programs so that they would send copies of themselves to other computers was the next step. Thus the computer virus. Are they alive? Most of them are not. To be alive, the program would have to also prevent the computer from shutting down, thus maintaining the energy it needs for continued existence.

Do we live in a simulation? (long read)

A comment on David Chalmers’ ideas about virtual reality

Abstract: I argue that the brain’s construction of our experience is in fact a simulation, and consider some of the implications of this view.

David Chalmers has recently been noticed for his ruminations about whether we live in a virtual reality (or simulation), and whether we could tell. In an interview published in New Scientist, he claims that we could not know whether we are living in a simulation. (1) On CBC’s radio program Quirks and Quarks he was one of three people asked this question (2), and Mary Hynes interviewed him on Tapestry. (3) Several of his discussions around this topic are available online: a search on “David Chalmers virtual reality” will present a dozen or more examples.

My answer is, “Of course we live in a simulation. It’s the one created by our brains.” (4) What’s more, the “I” that experiences this simulation is itself part of the simulation. So it would be more accurate to say that “We live as a simulation created by our brains.”

As asked, the question assumes that “I” is somehow distinct from the simulation. That assumption is misleading. Its explicit formulation dates from Descartes, who assumed that mind (or perhaps soul, he’s not very clear on the distinction) and body are separate. He does this because we experience our bodies. But that experience of my body is the “I” that experiences it. There is no separate experience. That is, there is no evidence that “I” can experience anything other than what my body and brain present as reality, which includes the experience of “I”. Thus, the simulation of reality includes “I”. (5)

Elsewhere, Chalmers has claimed that consciousness is the hard problem. Yes it is, if one assumes that “I” is separate from the reality it experiences. However, if “I” and experienced reality are one, then “I” is what is simulated as the experiencer.

Each of us lives as their own simulation. We can compare those simulations by converting them into other simulations. We can talk about our experience, or make pictures, or replicate the situation in the presence of other people, or ask others to do what we did. (6) What’s important about these comparisons is that we can detect differences, and we can detect them reliably. For example, I don’t know whether you see red or green as I do, but we can tell whether or not we see the same or similar differences between red and green. I don’t know how you see Aunt Emily, but we can both recognise that a photo is or is not a picture of her. We can also tell whether we both see that one portrait is a painting and another is a photograph. And that one shows her as a girl, and the other as an old lady. (7)

Science is the attempt to describe whatever it is that the brain simulates. That is, science is an attempt to create a simulation that is the same for everyone. Thus, a scientific theory is an attempt to eliminate the differences between our individual simulations. Suppose I can’t see the same red/green difference that you see, yet by some method we can both detect the same difference between red and green. One method would be to measure the frequency of red and green light, and agree that we observe the same measurements. By this method we have filtered out those idiosyncratic differences caused by the differences in our retinal cells and brains. We have created a simulation (the measurements) that we have in common. We have replaced our individual “subjective” simulations with a common “objective” one. We infer that the shared method of seeing red/green difference must therefore be closer to whatever it is that our simulation simulates. We call that whatever-it-is “reality”. But in fact all we ever do is compare simulations.

Scientists have discovered that aspects that can be mathematised are constant in a way that other aspects are not. This relates to what Wigner called the “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”. (8) I don’t think it’s unreasonable at all. Mathematics is the part of language that translates exactly from one language to another; it’s a lossless translation. For example, no matter how the symbols are pronounced, the algebraic expression (a+b=c) means exactly the same in every language. (9) As every multi-lingual person knows, there is something lost in the translation of every other kind of speech. Each language creates a different simulation; neither their elements nor the relationship between elements map exactly onto each other. Languages are not congruent simulations; they are similar but not identical. The constancy of mathematics across languages preserves what’s constant across simulations. (10)

Mathematics works by abstraction. Moreover, it does not describe content, but structure. A mathematical statement expresses a relationship between two or more entities. The red/green difference can be expressed as a difference in wavelength: red is larger than green. This statement says nothing about the experience of red and green that we may or may not share, nor does it say anything about the quality we label “colour”. It states only that one aspect of our experience of the colours red and green is constant. It also states that we must take care to arrange our experience so that this constancy is revealed.

The consequence is that the closer science gets to a universal simulation, the more abstract that simulation becomes. It is finally pure structure. The most abstract simulation is that created by physics. Einstein’s relativity theories are descriptions of structure. Special relativity describes how the shape of one person’s experience can be precisely transformed into the shape of another person’s experience, given that we know their relative velocities. General relativity goes a step further and describes our experience of reality in terms of its space-time structure. Quantum physics describes interactions, that is, the behaviour of entities that behave differently (for example like waves or particles) depending on context. Hence what we can know about them is context bound. What’s more, context defines events and vice versa. Thus, quantum physics describes reality in terms of event-contexts.

But neither theory describes whatever it is that we label reality. They describe structures, the structure of space-time in the one case, and the structure of event-contexts in the other.    

Both theories are highly abstract. They are highly reliable and precise in predicting how we will experience those abstract aspects. Hence the belief that these more abstract descriptions are truer descriptions of reality than the more concrete subjective simulations of reality that our brains create. I don’t think that belief is justified. What’s more, I think the question of what’s real is an unanswerable one. We know our own experience, because we are that experience. We can know some of what each other’s experiences have in common, because we can talk about them, or make pictures of them, or express aspects of them in music and dance, or describe them using mathematics.

                                     

In the New Scientist interview, Chalmers says “I think, at the very least, virtual worlds [created by virtual reality devices] provide a particularly pure illustration of Descartes’s problem.” Descartes had a problem because he assumed not only that body and mind are separate entities, but that one is physical and the other is not. (11) Chalmers perpetuates Descartes error by asking whether we can know whether we “live in” a simulation. That question makes sense only if “I” and the simulation are ontologically distinct entities. (12) Assuming that distinction begs the question: If “I” is not an essential part of the simulation, then of course we can know “I” is “living in” that simulation. The question is interesting, that is productive, if and only if “I” is an essential part of the simulation.

The brain creates the experience of reality, including “I” as the experiencer of that reality. We can know no other. It is the brain’s creation of our experience that enables “virtual reality” devices. What’s significant about these devices is that they present the “first-person” viewpoint. That is, they present the same structure as the subjective reality that they imitate. They are incomplete, however, because they do not simulate the proprioception necessary to experience the 1st person viewpoint as “I”. (13)

Chalmers ends his New Scientist interview with “A sort of structuralist conception of reality – that the world isn’t intrinsically the way we thought it was, but still has a similar sort of structure – is very strongly suggested by modern science.” I think he’s right. The brain’s simulation of reality is enough like reality, whatever reality “really is”, that we survive quite well. But exactly how much it is like reality can’t be decided. The theories of physics are highly abstract descriptions of some aspects of the structure of our experience of reality, and that is the best we can do.

Notes
(1) Interview with David Chalmers in New Scientist: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25333710-900-david-chalmers-interview-virtual-reality-is-as-real-as-real-reality/

(2) Broadcast 2022-03-05. https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-51-quirks-and-quarks/clip/15898721-could-living-computer-simulation-and-were-tell

(3) Broadcast 2022-08-23 https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/are-we-living-in-a-simulation-look-to-free-guy-not-the-matrix-for-answers-says-david-chalmers-1.6393525

(4) Here’s one explanation of how the brain does this; an online search will garner many more: https://neuroscience.stanford.edu/news/reality-constructed-your-brain-here-s-what-means-and-why-it-matters

(5 ) Every creature with a brain computes some simulation of reality. The bar for accuracy and completeness is rather low. The simulation needs only to be good enough to raise the odds that the creature will survive long enough to reproduce. For example, a frog reacts to a moving fly-size blob, but not to a static one. It will try to catch a raisin tossed past it, but will ignore a dead fly lying near it.

(6) The arts can create simulations of realities that don’t exist, and even of realities that can’t exist. We call these simulations “fictions”. Simulations of reality are called “history”, “physics” “reports”, “portraits”, "descriptions", etc. We have many terms for simulations, because we can make so many different kinds of them.

(7) These comparisons depend on our memories of Aunt Emily. That is, we compare one simulation (the photo of Aunt Emily) with another (our memories of Aunt Emily).

(8) http://www.hep.upenn.edu/~johnda/Papers/wignerUnreasonableEffectiveness.pdf

(9) Wigner writes “My principal aim is to illuminate it from several sides. The first point is that the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it.” It seems to me that this statement encapsulates Wigner’s puzzlement. I think he fails to notice that mathematics is a component of language. It is not a separate language.
    All known languages include ways of expressing or describing number, size, shape, spatial and temporal relations, collections of things (sets), kinship (classification), rates of change, etc. These terms label mathematical concepts. The number and sophistication of mathematical terms or concepts varies between cultures, but all cultures have mathematical concepts. These concepts are used to communicate individual experience just as the rest of language is used.
    Mathematics begins as an attempt to regularise trade, property, kinship obligations and rights, etc. That is, mathematics is part of the attempt to find those common elements of our individual experience that satisfy our desire for justice, fairness, equity, connection, community, etc.
    Mathematics as a method for enabling and enforcing justice, fairness, equity and so on was formalised in rules of kinship rights and obligations in pre-literate tribal societies, and such rules still make up an essential part of what we experience as our way of life. Literate societies wrote down these rules, and added recipes for calculating the requisite quantities.
    Mathematics as a discipline begins with Euclid’s attempt to organise the concepts into a logical structure. This logical structure translates exactly from one language to another.

(10) Linguists refer to “idiolects”, our idiosyncratic versions of our common language. That idiosyncrasy is in fact the definition of “style”. To understand someone is to translate their idiolect into one’s own, a process we perform almost entirely without conscious awareness. That unconscious translation is one source of mutual misunderstanding. See Steiner (1975).

(11) Another problem generated by the mind-body dichotomy is expressed as “How can the non-physical mind cause physical effects?”

(12) Another version of this problem is whether we would ever know whether we were minds uploaded into a computer.

(13) It’s not clear how a virtual reality systems could provide proprioception. Some kind of body-suit could provide external sensory inputs, but it couldn’t provide internal ones. Perhaps inputs through the brainstem could do it, but experimentation would raise interesting ethical problems. The study of the sensations produced by training simulators is instructive: Our brains can and often will construct more complex sensory experiences than the actual sensory data provide.

Bibliography
Many thinkers have stimulated my ideas. I am grateful to them all. The following represents a small selection of the sources most relevant to this paper.

Damasio, A: Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (1994; revised 2005)
Damasio, A: The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999)
Gelernter, David H: The Muse in the Machine: Computerizing the Poetry of Human Thought (1994)
Hawking, Stephen: The Theory of Everything (2002)
Hofstadter Douglas & Dennett, Daniel: The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul (1981)
Hofstadter, Douglas: Gödel, Esher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (1979)
Hofstadter, Douglas: I Am a Strange Loop (2007)
Kraus, Lawrence: A Universe From Nothing (2012)
Norman, Donald A.: The Psychology of Everyday Things (1988)
Rees, Martin: Just Six Numbers (1999)
Rosenfeld, Israel: The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten. (1991)
Sacks, O: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985
Sacks, O: The Island of the Colorblind (1997)
Sacks, O: The Mind's Eye (2010)
Steiner, George: After Babel (1975)

2022-04-14

Consciousness and Reality (essay)

 Consciousness and the real world

The New York Times recently reprinted an essay by Galen Strawson. Read it here:
Strawson Essay

I don’t usually review articles, but this one is I think worth reading. Strawson’s argument reverses the commonplace conception of what we know and don’t know about reality.

Briefly, this is how I interpret his thesis: The Hard Problem is not Consciousness. It’s Physical Reality. Physics offers an incomplete view of reality. It tells us how reality works, but it does not and it cannot tell us what reality is. This point was commonplace 100 years ago, Strawson writes, but it has gotten lost in the recent discussion of consciousness. Stephen Hawking makes this point dramatically in his book A Brief History of Time. Physics, he says, is “just a set of rules and equations.” The question is what “breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” What is the fundamental stuff of physical reality, the stuff that is structured in the way physics reveals? The answer, again, is that we don’t know — except insofar as this stuff takes the form of conscious experience.

In a post about Schrödinger’s Cat, I made the point that what physics offers us is a model of reality, of whatever-it-is that’s out there. Models are inherently limited. Whether built of equations or of plastic and metal, a model is not the prototype. It’s not even a replica of its prototype. (1) A model behaves in some limited respects like its prototype, which can be useful. A bridge design, that is, a conceptual model of a bridge, allows us to calculate the stresses well enough that the real bridge built according to that design will carry traffic without falling down. (2)

The model of the bridge can exist in several media: drawings, sets of equations and algorithms, physical objects made of wood or plastic or metal. None of them is the actual bridge, and none of them captures the total reality of the bridge. But, says Strawson, we can know the real bridge, “insofar as [the bridge] takes the form of conscious experience”. Indeed we can. We can look at it, we can hear the wind make the supporting cables hum, we can feel it shake as a truck passes over it, we can feel the texture of the railings as we hold on to them. That, says Strawson, is the physical reality that our theoretical models can never capture. But our conscious experience is what we know, and all that we can know directly of physical reality.

So the hard problem is the problem of matter (physical stuff in general). If physics made any claim that couldn’t be squared with the fact that our conscious experience is brain activity, then I believe that claim would be false. But physics doesn’t do any such thing. It’s not the physics picture of matter that’s the problem; it’s the ordinary everyday picture of matter. It’s ironic that the people who are most likely to doubt or deny the existence of the conscious self (on the ground that everything is physical, and that consciousness can’t possibly be physical) are usually also those who are most insistent on the primacy of science, because it is precisely science that makes the key point shine most brightly, the point that there is a fundamental respect in which the ultimate intrinsic nature of the stuff of the universe is unknown to us — except insofar as it is consciousness.

 

 

Strawson implies that reality is consciousness.  I’m not sure that I agree with that. But his stance has at least two advantages over the notion that Consciousness is the Hard Problem.

First, it reminds us that physics itself is motivated by a desire to make sense of our conscious experience. The fact that our models become ever more abstract, that  they become “sets of rules and equations”, is a side effect of the experimental process that we believe yields objectively true insights. (3)

Secondly, it validates the empirical stance. We test accounts of reality, no matter how abstruse or abstract, against our own experience. “Truth” is the feeling we have that what’s being said corresponds to reality as we perceive it. This applies as much to the most mystical theology as to the most concrete engineering problem. It applies as much to the silliest confabulations as to the most tested and proven theory.

“The truth is out there” undergirds all our sense of reality. But we know the truth only by sensing congruences between different experiences, both remembered by ourselves and shared with others. Whatever is “out there” will forever be a mystery. That was Plato’s point in his image of the cave. His mistake was to believe that reasoning could access the reality outside the cave. He began the line of thought that ends with the blithe assumption that the “sets of rules and equations” describe reality not only more accurately but more completely than the accounts of our subjective experience.

There’s an irony here: The more we try to understand the nature of reality, the more we retreat from it. As Russel commented, in mathematics we know whether what we are saying is true, but we don’t know what it’s about; while in poetry we know what we are talking about, but we don’t know whether what we are saying is true.

With all its quirks and imperfections, the world presented by our conscious experience is the only reality we know.

Footnote 1: There is a difference between a scale model of a steam locomotive that runs on a steam, and a full size replica of the same locomotive. The model’s boiler, for example, will have to have thicker than scale walls, else it cannot sustain the necessary steam pressure. The model will not accelerate and decelerate in scale proportion, because its power to mass ratio will be different. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNER_Peppercorn_Class_A1_60163_Tornado

Footnote 2: Nineteenth century theories of bridge behaviour were incomplete enough that many bridges fell down, and many people died. The real bridge does not behave exactly as modelled, thus giving graduate students in engineering lots of opportunity to observe them and refine the models.

Footnote 3: Quoting Bertrand Russell, Strawson writes:  “We know nothing about the intrinsic quality of physical events,” [Russell] wrote, “except when these are mental events that we directly experience.” In having conscious experience, he claims, we learn something about the intrinsic nature of physical stuff, for conscious experience is itself a form of physical stuff.

 Edited 2022-09-23

Why art?

 

 Why Art?

I came across this quote of Jack Chambers after I’d written everything following it. I think Chambers is right: the desire to share one’s delight in the world is fundamental. I think that we make art for the same reason we do science: We want to make sense of the world. We want to perceive meaning. With both science and art we attempt to organise our experience into shapes that feel orderly and significant, which is a pompous way of saying we want to account for the unaccountable fact that we perceive beauty and truth. Keats equates beauty with truth. That’s also what mathematicians claim. Anyone who makes or performs any kind of art knows that it’s true. All art on this page made by me.

“The artist may hope to redeem man’s reality by showing him the world as it looks when it is loved.” (Jack Chambers, ca. 1978)

Why art? Many years ago, I took a course in the philosophy of art, and that was one of many questions that it didn’t answer. Psychology and anthropology note that the making of art is species-specific, and that it figures in everything from attracting a mate to shaping religious ritual to asserting social status. Does that mean that art has only such utilitarian functions, or is there something more to it?

Another question was the value of expertise. Does it or does it not increase one’s pleasure? Is there such a thing as educated taste? After all, how do you differentiate the pleasure derived from educated taste from that of untutored delight? As the man-in-the-street is supposed to have said, “I don’t know anything about art, but I know what I like.” And why should the taste of the person knowledgeable in the history of some art determine what’s worth looking at or reading or listening to? Isn’t educated taste just someone else’s taste that for some reason one deems superior to one’s own? Besides, educated taste looks suspiciously like the taste of people who can pay more for art than you can afford. What do rarity and price have to do with the value of art? Isn’t a lot of great art simply that which the privileged classes patronise?

What’s a classic? Isn’t it just some old work that has found admirers many years or centuries after its first audience has died off? Or maybe it’s just what the sons and daughters of privileged families have read during their expensive university education, and which now functions as a signal of belonging to that class of people.

Besides, aren’t popular literature, painting, theatre and music popular precisely because most people haven’t benefitted from the training in taste and insight their social betters have received?

As you can see, these questions all implicitly assume some answer to the question, Why art?

2021-12-13

 

Two by Feynman: Occasional pieces add up to an autobiography

 

Feynman explaining one of his diagrams, and a couple of helpful hints for his students

Richard P. Feynman. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman? (1985) Feynman’s memoirs, recorded, assembled and edited by his student and friend Ralph Leighton.

Feynman is one of my heroes. Ever since I heard his anecdote about how his father showed him the difference between knowing words and knowing things, I’ve been hooked on his straightforward common sense. I don’t understand his contributions to quantum mechanics, because I can’t do the math of quantum mechanics. But I understand that his approach to making sense of the world works.

He was an intensely curious man. If he came across something he didn’t understand, he tried to figure it out. The puzzles that he loved most were about physics, but he also strove to make sense of art (he learned to draw, which trained his perception well enough that he could tell the difference between a Raphael and painting by one of Raphael’s students). He wanted to understand dreams, and how we can make images when we don’t have sensory stimuli to prompt perception (he died before fMRI scans provided the basis for an answer). He wanted to understand hallucinations, and spent several sessions in Dr Lilly’s sensory deprivation tanks.

He liked mastering gadgets, earning pocket money as a boy by fixing broken radios. He wanted to master drumming, so he practiced, practiced, practiced. He did the same with combination locks used on file cabinets at Los Alamos when he worked at the Manhattan Project, demonstrating how insecure they were, which eventually prompted the authorities to buy better safes. (He tells how a big-wig colonel who wanted the best safe for himself didn’t bother resetting the combination from the factory setting, thus proving well before computers that the greatest weakness in any security scheme is the human being). When he discovered something that mattered to him, he changed his behaviour: when he was still a young man he stopped drinking because he didn’t want to screw up his thinking machine.

He didn’t suffer fools gladly, especially when they came on stage with pompous claims to scientific rigour. His Caltech commencement address dissected “cargo cult science”, of which he found depressingly many examples in the social sciences. He didn’t like what receiving the Nobel Prize did to his reputation: he found his fame was used by many institutions to attract audiences. To have a Nobelist as a guest speaker reflected glory on the sponsor. Feynman hated that.

I’ve heard Feynman speak on recordings and in videos available on YouTube. Reading this book, I heard his voice again. A wonderful book by a wonderful human being. ****

Richard P. Feynman. “What Do You Care What Other People Think?” (1988) More memoirs, lectures, and anecdotes, as well as letters, sketches, and reports. Part 1 includes the title piece,  Feynman’s memoir of his first wife Arlene, who died of tuberculosis of the lymph glands. Part 2 is a dossier of his participation in the Challenger investigation. His key insight, that the rubber sealing rings in the booster joints could not adapt to cold temperatures, was prompted by his Pentagon minder, a General Kutyna, who was savvy in the ways of Washington, and so was able to give Feynman the hint that set him on the trail. The book also includes photographs, badly printed, but good enough to get an impressions of people and the occasion.

Two things stood out for me. First, that Feynman was a private man, who took great care in showing only what he wanted to show of his inner life. His love for his wives and his family nevertheless comes through, as do his essential playfulness, and his fierce love of the truth. Then there’s his integrity. He won’t fudge the truth as he sees it, nor will he pretend certainty where there is none. A remarkable man. ****

Update 2026-05-11: I've come across a video supposedly showing Feynman explaining why getting to Mars is impossible. It was generated using AI.  Th explanations are valid, but they're not quite in the style of Feynman. "Feynman" is shown in colour, but his facial expressions are limited, and he doesn't move around like Feynman actually did. Beware: there will be many more of these.

 

Thinking Out Loud about Reality, Experience and Truth

     Our experience of reality is created by the brain. We know reality indirectly, since the brain creates our experience from the sensory inputs. Past experience, expectations, emotions, social context, focus of attention, etc all determine what we perceive as reality “right now”. Thinking about our experience produces what we believe is an accurate description of reality. One way to understand reality is to list a hierarchy of complexity, like the following. It’s not original with me, but I can’t recall exactly where and when I first came across it. “Many decades ago”, is about all I can tell you.

Sensory data
Sensation
Perception
Fact
Knowledge
Significance
Insight
Understanding
Wisdom

     Every level in this hierarchy combines data, primarily from the immediately lower level, but also from any other level. Controlling the data used at any level controls the experience. Magicians know this, and do their best to control the data the audience receives.

     Sensation and higher levels occur entirely in the brain, not the sense organs (which, by the way, also combine data from several sensors), although the process can be affected by factors like alcohol, oxygen deprivation, etc. For example, “seeing” is what the brain computes from the data provided by the eyes. However, perception of a shape (and its colour and motion, etc) is not enough to identify the object: Fact is another computation, which includes information from other senses, and from memory, etc. And so it goes. Your conscious experience consists of the level on which you focus your attention, perhaps surrounded by a kind of nimbus of all the other levels of experience. That’s something that seems to vary both between and within individuals.
     For example you’re looking at your back yard at night, and perceive a dark irregular shape moving across the visual field. What is it? A bear, or the neighbour’s dog? The answer is the fact that it’s the dog.
     Once you’ve identified your neighbour’s dog, the next level is knowledge: What is it doing in your back yard? At this point, guesswork (hypothesis) enters in. You know the dog roams the neighbourhood, so that’s what it’s doing. Is this knowledge significant? To compute that, you need more information, such as the dog’s habits, whether or not the neighbour is at home, whether coyotes or foxes have been seen in your neighbourhood, etc. It depends on how you get on with the neighbour and their dog, or your knowledge about doggy lives, or your tolerance for strange animals in your back yard, or your town’s ordinances about stray pets, or any combination of these and many other factors that make up the context of the event. You may decide to call your neighbour, and tell them their dog’s out. Or maybe not.
     Will you derive some insight? Maybe. Perhaps you realise that the dog is on patrol, and will return tomorrow night. Could be that you realise that you rather like the idea of a dog roaming in your back yard. Or that you really must find some way of persuading your neighbour to keep their dog under control. Or whatever. And then perhaps you may understand that the inconvenience, if any, if the dog’s invasion is really of little importance. With luck, you may achieve the wisdom of deciding not to call the neighbour about their dog.

     All the while, your attention flits around the total constellation of disparate sensations, perceptions, facts, significance, etc, as you try to figure out what to do about the dog. At any moment, some event may attract all your attention so that you forget about the dog, until next day, when your neighbour tells you that he came home badly injured from an encounter with the fox.

    The brain makes errors at every level, some of which can be corrected by training/education, and some of which cannot be corrected, even when they are recognised as errors. This is most obvious in the computation of perceptions from sense data: Visual illusions persist even when we know we are seeing an illusion.
     We also suffer from illusions of fact: that dark irregular shape is actually a bear, but our brain has computed it to be a dog. We need more data to correct that illusion. But even with added data we may be still be convinced it was a dog we saw. Why? Because we expected to see a dog, and not a bear.
     There are illusions at more abstract levels. We suffer from illusions of insight, understanding, etc. Call them conceptual illusions. Some can be detected and corrected (with some effort) by applying logical analysis to our descriptions of our insights and understanding. This is one of the goals of scientific inquiry.
     Science is a method of recognising errors, and if possible correcting them. It begins with our remembered experience, which modifies our present experience. To understand what the dog is doing in our backyard we test a guess against everything we know about that particular dog, about dogs in general, about our neighbourhood, about wildlife in our neighbourhood, etc and so on and so forth. We do all this very quickly, mostly unconsciously, and repeatedly modifying our guess until we have a plausible explanation. “Plausible” merely means “fitting the specific and general facts well enough to feel correct.”
     This still isn’t science, however. Science is systematic and conscious framing and testing of guesses in order to have a more general understanding of dogs, and neighbours, and wildlife, and social obligations, and so on. It will likely entail gathering more facts, and/or integrating several pieces of knowledge. Items will have to be evaluated for their significance, and with luck and perseverance, we may arrive at some insights that lead to a more complete understanding. We want to be able to say,  “Because of my understanding of reality, I know how to make wise choices”

      We want the feeling that we have an understanding of reality that’s general enough to include a large swath of our experience. We want to be able to say, “This, my individual experience of reality is valid. What I have to say about it is true.” More, we want a Theory of Everything. We want to believe that, at least in principle, all human experience can be explained, that it’s possible to describe Reality in such a way that everything is included, and that every possible statement in that description is true.