Global Warming! That explains the earthquakes. I wonder if anyone who would know how to do it has calculated the shift in tectonic pressures caused by rising sea levels. Or the damming of the Yangtze or the lowering of the water level in the underground sea which waters our oil-glutted agriculture. Or the loss of shock and heat absorption from sucking out the oil, or or.
We do know that building in enough complexity, the way it's done with nuclear powerplants which can fail even when it's statistically near impossible for that many systems to fail at once, pretty much assures disaster according to how much is riding on it.
We do know that when there's a choice to play against the fates, we always take it. It's a moral imperative, such as when there's a medical test which causes little harm but might reveal something wrong that should be fixed. And there has to be a really really big lottery pay-off before we throw in our lot with the roulette wheel.
Whatever our economic arrangements or the ideologies behind them, we seem to have found an effective way to balance efforts such that more and more cars can run and people can eat and have potable water. Tall buildings get built, and good writers write and thinkers think even though there's always all that hand-wringing about ain't it awful and things are going to hell in a handbasket.
One ought to render amazement where amazement's due. Broadly speaking, something very similar to what people think when they think capitalism has got the globe in its grip. And it works pretty well. Except for the problem with limited resources and complexity which we seem capable to build beyond our ability to stay on top of it. And then we wish we'd left things where we'd found them.
No one of us, individually, wants to push our earth to its edge. But collectively, that's how all our individual desires get rendered. There will be blood.
Increasingly, our desires can be translated to energy costs. Money and oil are fungible, except that oil has come so freely and easily that we have been allowed to spend it almost without any thought. And in the expenditure, we ourselves, conscious humans, have become the equivalent of that asteroid which caused the extinction of the otherwise robust dinosaurs.
It turned out that the universe of dinosaurs was nowhere near diverse enough to have a branch which fitted to a new niche in the cataclysmically shifting environment. Well, maybe the feathered sort, but it was the warm-blooded mammals which evolved through the asteroid winter and the rest, as they say, is history.
No scientist will touch the asteroid story as having any cosmic significance except for its representation of random processes. Stuff happens, and thankfully there must be other pockets of life in the infinite cosmos.
But such an event is surely significant for its formative nature relative to us. No consciousness without it. Which leaves the goddists a loophole big enough to drive a civilization through. But for the scientific community, there's nothing left to chance. To assign meaning of the sort I mean to the random happenings of the cosmos would be to abdicate any responsibility at all.
Fools rush in!
Aside from global warming, our contemporary economy makes it very difficult to credit those chance events which, were we honest, have made each of us who we are. It would be a dronish person indeed whose every personal triumph was planned and prepared for. Who never took an accidental opportunity when it was on offer. But the jobs to be filled call for precisely such drones: people whose enthusiasms have been properly channeled since birth. Without credentials and experience, no-one need apply.
Who did we marry, what happenstance allowed us to take the job or career which has kept us going our whole life long? Even though now I couldn't even dream of applying for jobs I once successfully accomplished, because I never did have the proper resume in the first place. And I'm too old to go back to school for it. Which would be humiliating anyhow since I'd already know most of what my callow classmates were only beginning to understand.
Ah, the indignity of chance's being closed out!!
This is not good. It makes us brittle. And so accidents will or must happen to shuffle us up and redistribute the efforts so that random types can take over responsibilities for which they are manifestly under-qualified. That's how consciousness advances, at least by analogy to evolution. Which is a stretch, but still. I don't think we should all be held in jobs by fear. I don't think we should buy the argument that we're collectively broke, when there's never been so much wealth by any measure.
I don't know how consciousness works, but I'm satisfied that I wouldn't have any if it weren't for the collective sort. I know it makes no sense to say that my consciousness is "in" my brain, and more than it makes sense to say that the meaning of words is in them. These words, these tools, bind me to my fellow man. They crystallize or not according to sense and style and how they guide desires.
I have no trouble allowing that my mind is not so much bounded as centered, and that qua Dennett, the I that is me is a fictional abstraction at the center of my emotive gravity. Were I not cared for, I surely wouldn't exist. And were I not somewhat abused, I'd have no safe compartment into which to pour my standby self, the emergency self-sufficiency generator which runs on rationality. Were I more abused I'd be a drone. I'd be a machine. I'd have no feelings.
Collectively now we render up our rationality, or so we suppose it is, to a collective irrational howl into the blankness of space and it would seem to end there. Nothing propagates in nothingness.
But for the repose of random, which is nothing other from the innering of patterns originated elsewhere from my conscious or our collective conscious desires. Random means other-ordering, not meaninglessness. Meaningless is suicide. Meaningless is pushing emotion out of the cosmos by supposing that only human minds can feel it. Other minds, not earthly, can feel it too, and they already know the accidents in our future. That's what intention means.
But this is stuff and nonsense and not worthy to be written down. I'll grant that. It's free.
Monday, March 14, 2011
Sunday, March 13, 2011
The Narrative Imperative
Now that I have a smartphone, I tend to use it to look up words. Here in America I don't mind so much that Google might be tracking my searches, but it does occur to me that did they want to they could pretty easily discover exactly what I'm reading; I'm pretty sure the choice and sequence of words I'm looking up makes a sort of signature for which book I'm reading.
That sort of search is trivial for computers, and tough for a guy like me. In fact, if you were to highlight all the terms in a particular book which stand out simply for being underutilized in the corpus of all books; nevermind the state of the particular reader's mastery, you'd have a pretty good way to catalog the books. It would also be more enriched than just titles, authors, dates and keyterms. Maybe.
I'm sure this is why Google is so hard at work accomplishing that great public service of scanning in all the works from the world's key libraries, and I wouldn't complain about it. Well, except that as has been indicated by the recent business losses descended from necessary changes to the Google search algorithms, they clearly have too much power.
But imagine if the government were to take the Google utility over. There'd be all sorts of politicization to what really should be decisions motivated only by Google's self interest. If we can't count on that, then what can we count on?
An ever changing catalog of word frequencies could allow the precise placement of written works within the ever shifting sands of cultural epistemes. Works could be dated, authors and readers profiled, and lots of conjecture could be accomplished, mechanically, about where the epistemes are headed. Who's the vanguard, and what is the conservative drag coefficient.
Or we could mandate a pubic database, using reliable and repeatable cataloging principles. Of course we'll have to keep a few libraries open and a few public-servant librarians employed at something better than slave wages if such an extravagant notion is to have a ghost of a chance in the Wild World Web, where information just wants to be free!!!
When I go to the movies, I make decisions about which one to see based on some powerful calculus of the relation among my energies: my desire to escape, to be entertained, or to learn something. But since it's almost always a series of either/or decisions, there's a diminishing chance I'll ever spend my money and time to watch a C-grade movie, whatever the genre. Even if some poor schmuck of a film-maker worked his heart out on the one I'll never see.
I don't read much stuff that's written for edgy specialists either, and why would I? The effort to be expended would quickly encompass the entire professional life I didn't spend. Not to mention the time spent looking things up.
I suppose it'll be a nice day when everything operates the way that NetFlix does, and so Google or some other book purveyor can recommend to me some signature books which follow the pattern of my affinities. (The government can track me down as well, lumping me in with those folks who have nefarious motives for their concealed reading or other weapon-toting habits.)
But there are two things which make life worth living (for the purposes of this narrative). One, of course, is serendipity. The other is authors who consider it their duty to write for a general public without dumbing their writing down the way that Harvard philosophy chair has done (I won't name him since I only read the free Kindle first chapter, and I found it insulting to my intelligence, as though written algorithmically with a flow of words so smooth I hardly even had to think).
Essentially, they reveal the wisdom of their narrow discipline to the greater reading public, among other things just in case someone from a different discipline - or even no discipline like yours truly - is able to take the writing and run with it. Reframing according to the principles of Occam's Razor can be such a powerful thing, and it can never happen at the pinnacle of accomplishment inside some discipline. Not able to see the forest for the trees kind of thing.
Of course, there's also money in writing for a mass audience, and the closer you can make your language conform to the prevalent popular waves, the more there is to be made.
I am apparently not the only person who's read of Rupert Sheldrake's crossword puzzle experiment. It's one of a series of experiments designed to test for "morphic resonance" which predicts, among other things, that tricks once learned are more trivial to learn once some one being has done it.
So, if you pre-publish the New York Times crossword puzzle so that it can be solved by a random selection of puzzlers before it gets published for the general public, that puzzle (presumably randomly selected from a bunch of norm-referenced puzzles) will be demonstrably easier for the general public to solve than puzzles which have not yet been puzzled over. Even though the pre-solvers are prevented from sharing their solutions.
Pretty cool, no? But are crossword puzzles in the realm of normal tasks which require complex understanding or detailed recipes for their solution? In my example yesterday, I contrasted unself-conscious mastery to mastery which can be taught in a kind of aha quantum leap fashion: recipe instruction compared with rapid deployment frame-changing.
I suggested that the most powerful teaching might always involve frame-shifting, which is specific subcategory of principle discovery as opposed to the simple recitation of factual narrative. I also said of myself, since I'm memory challenged, that internalizing operating principles is the only trick I have. I'm lazy I guess. I look for the most direct solution which doesn't involve much higher math.
The rest of you may not be so troubled by porous memory, and so you memorize formulas for a science or a math test, say. I can't and so I must derive them each and every time, or so my life's narrative goes. But I could never do it on my own without knowing that they had been derived before and having myself rehearsed their derivation. In essence I simply reiterate a familiar process. Maybe that's just another mnemonic device, like constructing mental architecture or other techniques I've heard about.
Crossword puzzles involve, sometimes, surprising word associations, which, like jokes, once told seem quickly to become general currency. If they were already general, then the puzzle part of the crossword simply wouldn't work.
But just as with jokes, they work because they are, more or less, in the air. If one comedian doesn't coin it, someone else will. Puzzle master, first solver, Stewart/Colbert (who always joke about the same stuff some of the time). This obsession with priority is so pre-post-modern!
The guy stuck in the old frame, who just doesn't get it (me!) can never be the teacher, and some jokes just aren't ready to be told, but once the overall ground of discourse is tilled for it, there is a kind of inevitability about someone somewhere and maybe almost everyone everywhere being able to come up with the resolution, the joke, the word-association.
Pinpointing the shift toward readiness is about like locating free will or the conscious actor on the Cartesian Stage. Among the contingencies and deliberations, false starts and completions of someone else's beginnings, I still wonder why it matters. What matters is that things do originate, it hardly matters where. Unless self-aggrandizement is the goal (which, of course, it always is - that's a part of the narrative imperative).
But clearly, if there is attention to the problem, and the solution is arrived at, then the world (of discourse, in this case) has moved a smidge in a direction it might not otherwise have moved. Because there is no known conduit for transmission doesn't mean we have to fill in the blanks with ESP or psi or other words which stand in for what we either don't or can't know or both or either.
The problem of precise origination or precise location or precise causal chains is remarkably analogous to the problem (solved!!) in physics about particle/wave mass/momentum information/perception. To within a cloud of precision some things simply can't be known. That doesn't mean they aren't.
I wonder why that is such a surprise, and why there is such resistance to buying it?
Well, of course it's a cheap trick and undermines all the hard work we've done to build up complex theories to explain not just how things work. In those momentary choices which must be made, while standing in line to watch the movies, or deciding what to read or with whom to mate, we really do want guidance. But not to the point of the absence of any free will.
Right now we are all still in thrall to the meme of mechanism, of cause and effect originating somehwere, which causes (!!!) us, collectively, to go marching off the virtual cliff, which will certainly be for the good of the planet if not for the good of the species. (Or was that the other way around? Our march to the cliff is wreaking an awful lot of havoc on the planet, which might wish that we would jump already, if it were to have wishes).
A crossword puzzle is an arbitrary shift in the ground of discourse, meant only for the amusement of those of us enamored of words. A choice about which movie to watch if of no consequence whatsoever. But if the field of possible choice is reduced to that with which the powers that be feel unthreatened, we start to worry about being entertained to somnolent death.
If the rewards for origination become so extravagant that individuals can control the wealth of nations (Gates, Zuckerberg, Jobs, the Googles not to mention the actors [actors!!??], we start to wonder about our relative freedoms.
We are all whores to dictators if the price is right!
If, on the other hand, the cataloging of our corpuses of words in the world of discourse were never a matter for proprietary algorithms: If the fiction of the private were dissolved within the fact that there is no private discourse, and if the catalog were to remain stable according to the well-worn paths of seekers. And finally if the role of serendipity were to be embraced as fundamental, finally, to what it means to be alive, which of course it is. Then we might not be required to follow one another over that cliff which is the only possible end to our clambering after the pinnacle of origination. The spike of free will's tipping point.
Yes, to make any sense at all a narrative has to be time-sequenced. Attention gets paid in order. The bounds of shared meaning get explanded. And when the seed crystal is dropped into the supersaturated tangle of words - or when the vessel gets tapped - sense does start to crystallize without any matter of authorship origination proprietorship or wealth to drag it down. The truth is feerer than all the efforts now deployed to keep it costly. Well, apart from the Scientologist, no-one does put a price on knowledge.
How odd that this mad mad race for knowledge and understanding should fall victim to its own efforts. Because it was thought more complicated than it is. If we simply were to recognize our interdependence and the role of chance in the lot of each of us, we might yet realize the fruits of our conscious labor.
That sort of search is trivial for computers, and tough for a guy like me. In fact, if you were to highlight all the terms in a particular book which stand out simply for being underutilized in the corpus of all books; nevermind the state of the particular reader's mastery, you'd have a pretty good way to catalog the books. It would also be more enriched than just titles, authors, dates and keyterms. Maybe.
I'm sure this is why Google is so hard at work accomplishing that great public service of scanning in all the works from the world's key libraries, and I wouldn't complain about it. Well, except that as has been indicated by the recent business losses descended from necessary changes to the Google search algorithms, they clearly have too much power.
But imagine if the government were to take the Google utility over. There'd be all sorts of politicization to what really should be decisions motivated only by Google's self interest. If we can't count on that, then what can we count on?
An ever changing catalog of word frequencies could allow the precise placement of written works within the ever shifting sands of cultural epistemes. Works could be dated, authors and readers profiled, and lots of conjecture could be accomplished, mechanically, about where the epistemes are headed. Who's the vanguard, and what is the conservative drag coefficient.
Or we could mandate a pubic database, using reliable and repeatable cataloging principles. Of course we'll have to keep a few libraries open and a few public-servant librarians employed at something better than slave wages if such an extravagant notion is to have a ghost of a chance in the Wild World Web, where information just wants to be free!!!
When I go to the movies, I make decisions about which one to see based on some powerful calculus of the relation among my energies: my desire to escape, to be entertained, or to learn something. But since it's almost always a series of either/or decisions, there's a diminishing chance I'll ever spend my money and time to watch a C-grade movie, whatever the genre. Even if some poor schmuck of a film-maker worked his heart out on the one I'll never see.
I don't read much stuff that's written for edgy specialists either, and why would I? The effort to be expended would quickly encompass the entire professional life I didn't spend. Not to mention the time spent looking things up.
I suppose it'll be a nice day when everything operates the way that NetFlix does, and so Google or some other book purveyor can recommend to me some signature books which follow the pattern of my affinities. (The government can track me down as well, lumping me in with those folks who have nefarious motives for their concealed reading or other weapon-toting habits.)
But there are two things which make life worth living (for the purposes of this narrative). One, of course, is serendipity. The other is authors who consider it their duty to write for a general public without dumbing their writing down the way that Harvard philosophy chair has done (I won't name him since I only read the free Kindle first chapter, and I found it insulting to my intelligence, as though written algorithmically with a flow of words so smooth I hardly even had to think).
Essentially, they reveal the wisdom of their narrow discipline to the greater reading public, among other things just in case someone from a different discipline - or even no discipline like yours truly - is able to take the writing and run with it. Reframing according to the principles of Occam's Razor can be such a powerful thing, and it can never happen at the pinnacle of accomplishment inside some discipline. Not able to see the forest for the trees kind of thing.
Of course, there's also money in writing for a mass audience, and the closer you can make your language conform to the prevalent popular waves, the more there is to be made.
I am apparently not the only person who's read of Rupert Sheldrake's crossword puzzle experiment. It's one of a series of experiments designed to test for "morphic resonance" which predicts, among other things, that tricks once learned are more trivial to learn once some one being has done it.
So, if you pre-publish the New York Times crossword puzzle so that it can be solved by a random selection of puzzlers before it gets published for the general public, that puzzle (presumably randomly selected from a bunch of norm-referenced puzzles) will be demonstrably easier for the general public to solve than puzzles which have not yet been puzzled over. Even though the pre-solvers are prevented from sharing their solutions.
Pretty cool, no? But are crossword puzzles in the realm of normal tasks which require complex understanding or detailed recipes for their solution? In my example yesterday, I contrasted unself-conscious mastery to mastery which can be taught in a kind of aha quantum leap fashion: recipe instruction compared with rapid deployment frame-changing.
I suggested that the most powerful teaching might always involve frame-shifting, which is specific subcategory of principle discovery as opposed to the simple recitation of factual narrative. I also said of myself, since I'm memory challenged, that internalizing operating principles is the only trick I have. I'm lazy I guess. I look for the most direct solution which doesn't involve much higher math.
The rest of you may not be so troubled by porous memory, and so you memorize formulas for a science or a math test, say. I can't and so I must derive them each and every time, or so my life's narrative goes. But I could never do it on my own without knowing that they had been derived before and having myself rehearsed their derivation. In essence I simply reiterate a familiar process. Maybe that's just another mnemonic device, like constructing mental architecture or other techniques I've heard about.
Crossword puzzles involve, sometimes, surprising word associations, which, like jokes, once told seem quickly to become general currency. If they were already general, then the puzzle part of the crossword simply wouldn't work.
But just as with jokes, they work because they are, more or less, in the air. If one comedian doesn't coin it, someone else will. Puzzle master, first solver, Stewart/Colbert (who always joke about the same stuff some of the time). This obsession with priority is so pre-post-modern!
The guy stuck in the old frame, who just doesn't get it (me!) can never be the teacher, and some jokes just aren't ready to be told, but once the overall ground of discourse is tilled for it, there is a kind of inevitability about someone somewhere and maybe almost everyone everywhere being able to come up with the resolution, the joke, the word-association.
Pinpointing the shift toward readiness is about like locating free will or the conscious actor on the Cartesian Stage. Among the contingencies and deliberations, false starts and completions of someone else's beginnings, I still wonder why it matters. What matters is that things do originate, it hardly matters where. Unless self-aggrandizement is the goal (which, of course, it always is - that's a part of the narrative imperative).
But clearly, if there is attention to the problem, and the solution is arrived at, then the world (of discourse, in this case) has moved a smidge in a direction it might not otherwise have moved. Because there is no known conduit for transmission doesn't mean we have to fill in the blanks with ESP or psi or other words which stand in for what we either don't or can't know or both or either.
The problem of precise origination or precise location or precise causal chains is remarkably analogous to the problem (solved!!) in physics about particle/wave mass/momentum information/perception. To within a cloud of precision some things simply can't be known. That doesn't mean they aren't.
I wonder why that is such a surprise, and why there is such resistance to buying it?
Well, of course it's a cheap trick and undermines all the hard work we've done to build up complex theories to explain not just how things work. In those momentary choices which must be made, while standing in line to watch the movies, or deciding what to read or with whom to mate, we really do want guidance. But not to the point of the absence of any free will.
Right now we are all still in thrall to the meme of mechanism, of cause and effect originating somehwere, which causes (!!!) us, collectively, to go marching off the virtual cliff, which will certainly be for the good of the planet if not for the good of the species. (Or was that the other way around? Our march to the cliff is wreaking an awful lot of havoc on the planet, which might wish that we would jump already, if it were to have wishes).
A crossword puzzle is an arbitrary shift in the ground of discourse, meant only for the amusement of those of us enamored of words. A choice about which movie to watch if of no consequence whatsoever. But if the field of possible choice is reduced to that with which the powers that be feel unthreatened, we start to worry about being entertained to somnolent death.
If the rewards for origination become so extravagant that individuals can control the wealth of nations (Gates, Zuckerberg, Jobs, the Googles not to mention the actors [actors!!??], we start to wonder about our relative freedoms.
We are all whores to dictators if the price is right!
If, on the other hand, the cataloging of our corpuses of words in the world of discourse were never a matter for proprietary algorithms: If the fiction of the private were dissolved within the fact that there is no private discourse, and if the catalog were to remain stable according to the well-worn paths of seekers. And finally if the role of serendipity were to be embraced as fundamental, finally, to what it means to be alive, which of course it is. Then we might not be required to follow one another over that cliff which is the only possible end to our clambering after the pinnacle of origination. The spike of free will's tipping point.
Yes, to make any sense at all a narrative has to be time-sequenced. Attention gets paid in order. The bounds of shared meaning get explanded. And when the seed crystal is dropped into the supersaturated tangle of words - or when the vessel gets tapped - sense does start to crystallize without any matter of authorship origination proprietorship or wealth to drag it down. The truth is feerer than all the efforts now deployed to keep it costly. Well, apart from the Scientologist, no-one does put a price on knowledge.
How odd that this mad mad race for knowledge and understanding should fall victim to its own efforts. Because it was thought more complicated than it is. If we simply were to recognize our interdependence and the role of chance in the lot of each of us, we might yet realize the fruits of our conscious labor.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Occam's Razor Redux - Rupert Sheldrake's Morphic Resonance - Doggie Style
Hmmm, it seems to me I've worried this one enough, but, well just like dogs seem to worry bones based on some hard-wired (what a weird locution) feedback loop, certain things just won't get out of my head. Like I have this dog companion now who came along with my companion companion, and she automatically knows which oncoming dogs to steer clear of and which to avoid.
Not being a dog person, I have no clue. So, I'm focusing on which dogs cause this one to be alert, and which are ignored and I'm looking for some clues based on size or skittishness, and then finally I ask at what must be the right moment, and the answer is 'oh, I just look at the owner.'
Now I'm sure I could have discerned some pattern eventually and become almost as reliable in my predictions, but basically I was looking at the wrong thing. I would have required a lot more data, and I'm not that smart. You should have seen me trying to figure out the best way to light a wood stove and maximize its output. Eventually I became a master, but there was hardly anything conscious or systematic about it. A master would have put me to shame, though maybe not with my stove.
My master in the doggie follies did happen to know her own trick, which made it trivially easy to teach and so now I can quickly learn which dogs to avoid. Wouldn't it be great if all teaching were that trivial? The trouble is that I doubt I could teach someone else to light a fire as well as I finally was able. And to add difficulty to trouble, it seems just as likely that someone else would do better off alone rather than to try to assimilate my highly idiosyncratic and possibly mistaken assumptions.
I do rather tend to assume that my students have a better way than I might show them, although if someone is evidently experiencing frustration, I'll break down my assumptions for them. Ways to estimate moisture content, the air flow in some relation to holding the heat in depending on how much heat is being generated. And finally that wonderful balance where there is very little air moving through, but lots of heat generated. It feels like magic. I'm talking about my wood stove.
I've taken a glancing read of Sheldrake's radical departure from analysis to describe morphogenetic fields. It's exciting. But here's a case of satisfying Occam's Razor without any facility to fill in the space where the answer lies.
In the case of a magic trick also, you are already certain that things are not as they seem since the seeming is simply too unthinkable. But you don't know where to look. If someone points it out, you feel that wonderful 'aha!' sense of cognitive dissonance resolved.
I need detail. Just how does a morphogenetic field work? What does it explain that genetic expression doesn't for instance. And if it "explains" why something once learned makes it easier for remote learners to learn it the next time around even without teaching, how is that different from the fact that simply knowing that something has been solved makes the solution both easier to accomplish and sometimes less interesting?
Just because some shift in the discourse patterns propagates faster than we think it should given what we know about communication doesn't mean we know everything about communication. There are lots of things going on in our peripheral vision, as it were, that never enter our consciousness.
"Morphic Resonance" seems too vague a catchphase, and in danger of exposure as was the "ether," which turned out not to have been necessary for the propagation of perceptual information. And yet its evaporation - the *poof* which made the ether go away - actually forced a look toward a far stranger construing of the way things work. It seems that there are "as if" waves which propagate in nothingness in advance of perceptual impingements.
Now this is an explanation which nicely fuels still more investigation, since it both answers and defines new questions. We can chase our tail forever!
When staring us down, right in the face, as it were, is a resolution which both satisfies the demands of Occam, as well as to do away with that frustrating named lacuna. Morphic Resonance is, in other words, a place-holder without meaning, rather like God or soul or for that matter mind. The very utterance of the word fools the mind (??) into thinking that something will be found to fill the space where something simply must be because we named it.
In fact (I use the term advisedly, which is to say as self-conscious metaphor) what has to happen is that we need to change our usage. Matter propagates very much as if there were an ether, the way that sound waves propagate through matter.
Mind functions very much as though it were located, even though it's demonstrably not. Mind might be destroyed right along with brain, but so is sense when words are jumbled. That doesn't mean the sense was *in* the words.
Although it represents my strongest self-identification, I have no trouble at all conceiving that my mind extends to all the universe of which I am aware. Right down or back or over to that great Big Bang, I suppose. I think that's what it means to make sense. Um, not that I always make sense, but you know what I mean.
My mind would be nothing were it not for the words and texts and discourse of all those others before and around me. And once we succeed in our quest for dominion over all that lives on earth, I have no trouble at all declaring, now before it's too late, that my consciousness will go the way of all consciousness. To sleep, perchance to dream. Most certainly not to be.
It is not a simple trick of language to consider that mind is coeval with cosmos. It's just a better definition of the word. Things exist in relation before they are in perceptual touch. Perception is mediated by particles, right down to the limit of that elusive hadron, graviton, what you will.
Beyond it? There is emotional attraction; a prediction of contact, though no force can be detected.
Not being a dog person, I have no clue. So, I'm focusing on which dogs cause this one to be alert, and which are ignored and I'm looking for some clues based on size or skittishness, and then finally I ask at what must be the right moment, and the answer is 'oh, I just look at the owner.'
Now I'm sure I could have discerned some pattern eventually and become almost as reliable in my predictions, but basically I was looking at the wrong thing. I would have required a lot more data, and I'm not that smart. You should have seen me trying to figure out the best way to light a wood stove and maximize its output. Eventually I became a master, but there was hardly anything conscious or systematic about it. A master would have put me to shame, though maybe not with my stove.
My master in the doggie follies did happen to know her own trick, which made it trivially easy to teach and so now I can quickly learn which dogs to avoid. Wouldn't it be great if all teaching were that trivial? The trouble is that I doubt I could teach someone else to light a fire as well as I finally was able. And to add difficulty to trouble, it seems just as likely that someone else would do better off alone rather than to try to assimilate my highly idiosyncratic and possibly mistaken assumptions.
I do rather tend to assume that my students have a better way than I might show them, although if someone is evidently experiencing frustration, I'll break down my assumptions for them. Ways to estimate moisture content, the air flow in some relation to holding the heat in depending on how much heat is being generated. And finally that wonderful balance where there is very little air moving through, but lots of heat generated. It feels like magic. I'm talking about my wood stove.
I've taken a glancing read of Sheldrake's radical departure from analysis to describe morphogenetic fields. It's exciting. But here's a case of satisfying Occam's Razor without any facility to fill in the space where the answer lies.
In the case of a magic trick also, you are already certain that things are not as they seem since the seeming is simply too unthinkable. But you don't know where to look. If someone points it out, you feel that wonderful 'aha!' sense of cognitive dissonance resolved.
I need detail. Just how does a morphogenetic field work? What does it explain that genetic expression doesn't for instance. And if it "explains" why something once learned makes it easier for remote learners to learn it the next time around even without teaching, how is that different from the fact that simply knowing that something has been solved makes the solution both easier to accomplish and sometimes less interesting?
Just because some shift in the discourse patterns propagates faster than we think it should given what we know about communication doesn't mean we know everything about communication. There are lots of things going on in our peripheral vision, as it were, that never enter our consciousness.
"Morphic Resonance" seems too vague a catchphase, and in danger of exposure as was the "ether," which turned out not to have been necessary for the propagation of perceptual information. And yet its evaporation - the *poof* which made the ether go away - actually forced a look toward a far stranger construing of the way things work. It seems that there are "as if" waves which propagate in nothingness in advance of perceptual impingements.
Now this is an explanation which nicely fuels still more investigation, since it both answers and defines new questions. We can chase our tail forever!
When staring us down, right in the face, as it were, is a resolution which both satisfies the demands of Occam, as well as to do away with that frustrating named lacuna. Morphic Resonance is, in other words, a place-holder without meaning, rather like God or soul or for that matter mind. The very utterance of the word fools the mind (??) into thinking that something will be found to fill the space where something simply must be because we named it.
In fact (I use the term advisedly, which is to say as self-conscious metaphor) what has to happen is that we need to change our usage. Matter propagates very much as if there were an ether, the way that sound waves propagate through matter.
Mind functions very much as though it were located, even though it's demonstrably not. Mind might be destroyed right along with brain, but so is sense when words are jumbled. That doesn't mean the sense was *in* the words.
Although it represents my strongest self-identification, I have no trouble at all conceiving that my mind extends to all the universe of which I am aware. Right down or back or over to that great Big Bang, I suppose. I think that's what it means to make sense. Um, not that I always make sense, but you know what I mean.
My mind would be nothing were it not for the words and texts and discourse of all those others before and around me. And once we succeed in our quest for dominion over all that lives on earth, I have no trouble at all declaring, now before it's too late, that my consciousness will go the way of all consciousness. To sleep, perchance to dream. Most certainly not to be.
It is not a simple trick of language to consider that mind is coeval with cosmos. It's just a better definition of the word. Things exist in relation before they are in perceptual touch. Perception is mediated by particles, right down to the limit of that elusive hadron, graviton, what you will.
Beyond it? There is emotional attraction; a prediction of contact, though no force can be detected.
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Opening an E-mail to Daniel C. Dennett
Naturally, Professor Dennett can't afford to read nor certainly respond to anonymous emails from his fandom, but at least I got a very nice canned response explaining that.
Still, even though it's as dense and therefore time-consuming to read as everything I write, I thought I'd post it here, just for the record.
Of course, since writing it, my own thinking has evolved, and Professor Bem was kind enough to remind me that he has refuted his refuters, and more importantly, that he did, in fact, use both a pseudo random number generator and a true random number generator in his experiments.
So, while I would drop my proposed "experiment" I still maintain that all that can be tested for is the reasonable limits for a definition of mind (its boundary) and not pre-cognition per se. Or in other words, if mind cannot be dis-implicated from matter (a major burden of Dennett's work) then the imposition of time's arrow, which is difficult to accomplish *in* the mind, is difficult to distinguish from fictional or creative narrative.
It is, of course, my burden to de-center notions of narrtive true-ing processes more generally, and I carry on:
Professor Dennett;
I've just finished reading Consciousness Explained and then familiarizing myself with your work more generally. In brief, I find the writing brilliant and the overall case cogent and convincing. Since it's far too late for me to take up the study of consciousness to the level of your accomplishment, I feel entirely comfortable saying that for my purposes you have indeed explained consciousness. (I'll still read on through what you've written since!)
Here's why I write: As it happens, I read your book in light of the soon to be published work of Professor Bem regarding Psi and possibly pre-cognition of which I'm sure you are aware. I also read a cogent critique from the Bayesian side of statistics which relieves me, at least, of the need to worry too much about pre-cognition as Bem's work purports to discover it. Were there pre-cognition it would, of course, fall within the margin of error which Bayesian statistics provides as corrective to non-Bayesian methods. That's almost definitional. Accounting for the priors is hard to distinguish from accounting for frame of mind.
But since your approach to consciousness defies attempts to "locate" it, say in a brain, and since therefore there can be no meaning to simultaneity among drafted cognitions in a single mind - as you demonstrate convincingly in your book - therefore time's arrow has no place "in" the mind. A properly time-sequenced narrative must emerge for sense to prevail, but that is a separate matter from the order of events perceived, conceived, cognized or re-cognized.
You also challenge, at least implicitly, the bordering of the mind by the limits of its physical substrate (the brain, for instance) among other places by your suggestion that a single mind may be thought to be distributed, as in certain twins who inhabit a coherent biography.
So first of all, if there is no singular locus for any thought inside the brain, any cognition there must in effect allow for pre-cognition. Indeed it's not a problem worth bothering about, since even in principle there's no way to measure it, again as I believe you amply demonstrate in this book. At the very least any thought remains subject to subsequent cognition for so long as it might be held in abeyance by some sense that there will be more to assimilate before a completed thought is uttered.
Consciousness, in other words, may have more to do with sense of completion, rather more like the ballistic act of throwing a ball than like hitting a target. You initiate and correct along the way until release.
But more interestingly to me, if the mind cannot be located entirely "inside" the brain, then all those peripheral happenings which impinge on thought, of course including chance or random events, could be thought to condition moment of release according to their various potentials and probabilities (as variously perceived or conceived) regardless of their literal time-sequencing.
In Bem's experiment, the button-clickers have some anticipation of porn - they have a motive to click, not unlike someone playing Jeopardy.
Pre-cognition, however, is the wrong thing to test for. Rather, there should be some test along the lines of how Bell's Theorem is tested in physics, to demonstrate the impossibility to disprove spatial separation of cognitive inputs (technically indistinguishable from pre-cognition) to within the margin of error between Bayesian and non-Bayesian statistical models.
My suggestion would be to redo the Bem experiment but using the pseudo-random number generated by the bounded system of the computer, rather than the "true" random number generated in the same "cosmos" within which the subject's mind is choosing.
After all, it is damned impossible to determine that the coin is a fair coin after a long run of heads, other than by invoking "prior" knowledge. But as with voting machines which preserve a physical record, as least with a pseudo random number, you have a trace to compare against.
Of course it is my sense that, as with physical reality, there is some dimension beyond which certainty is not only impossible for practical reasons, but impossible in principle. I suspect that this prospect unsettles you no more than it does me. I'd love to learn of a better conceived experiment than the one I propose, but I can't think one up right now - I know it's out there!
Of course I have plenty more to say on the subject, but I have used enough of your time (pure wishful thinking on my part).
Best!
Still, even though it's as dense and therefore time-consuming to read as everything I write, I thought I'd post it here, just for the record.
Of course, since writing it, my own thinking has evolved, and Professor Bem was kind enough to remind me that he has refuted his refuters, and more importantly, that he did, in fact, use both a pseudo random number generator and a true random number generator in his experiments.
So, while I would drop my proposed "experiment" I still maintain that all that can be tested for is the reasonable limits for a definition of mind (its boundary) and not pre-cognition per se. Or in other words, if mind cannot be dis-implicated from matter (a major burden of Dennett's work) then the imposition of time's arrow, which is difficult to accomplish *in* the mind, is difficult to distinguish from fictional or creative narrative.
It is, of course, my burden to de-center notions of narrtive true-ing processes more generally, and I carry on:
Professor Dennett;
I've just finished reading Consciousness Explained and then familiarizing myself with your work more generally. In brief, I find the writing brilliant and the overall case cogent and convincing. Since it's far too late for me to take up the study of consciousness to the level of your accomplishment, I feel entirely comfortable saying that for my purposes you have indeed explained consciousness. (I'll still read on through what you've written since!)
Here's why I write: As it happens, I read your book in light of the soon to be published work of Professor Bem regarding Psi and possibly pre-cognition of which I'm sure you are aware. I also read a cogent critique from the Bayesian side of statistics which relieves me, at least, of the need to worry too much about pre-cognition as Bem's work purports to discover it. Were there pre-cognition it would, of course, fall within the margin of error which Bayesian statistics provides as corrective to non-Bayesian methods. That's almost definitional. Accounting for the priors is hard to distinguish from accounting for frame of mind.
But since your approach to consciousness defies attempts to "locate" it, say in a brain, and since therefore there can be no meaning to simultaneity among drafted cognitions in a single mind - as you demonstrate convincingly in your book - therefore time's arrow has no place "in" the mind. A properly time-sequenced narrative must emerge for sense to prevail, but that is a separate matter from the order of events perceived, conceived, cognized or re-cognized.
You also challenge, at least implicitly, the bordering of the mind by the limits of its physical substrate (the brain, for instance) among other places by your suggestion that a single mind may be thought to be distributed, as in certain twins who inhabit a coherent biography.
So first of all, if there is no singular locus for any thought inside the brain, any cognition there must in effect allow for pre-cognition. Indeed it's not a problem worth bothering about, since even in principle there's no way to measure it, again as I believe you amply demonstrate in this book. At the very least any thought remains subject to subsequent cognition for so long as it might be held in abeyance by some sense that there will be more to assimilate before a completed thought is uttered.
Consciousness, in other words, may have more to do with sense of completion, rather more like the ballistic act of throwing a ball than like hitting a target. You initiate and correct along the way until release.
But more interestingly to me, if the mind cannot be located entirely "inside" the brain, then all those peripheral happenings which impinge on thought, of course including chance or random events, could be thought to condition moment of release according to their various potentials and probabilities (as variously perceived or conceived) regardless of their literal time-sequencing.
In Bem's experiment, the button-clickers have some anticipation of porn - they have a motive to click, not unlike someone playing Jeopardy.
Pre-cognition, however, is the wrong thing to test for. Rather, there should be some test along the lines of how Bell's Theorem is tested in physics, to demonstrate the impossibility to disprove spatial separation of cognitive inputs (technically indistinguishable from pre-cognition) to within the margin of error between Bayesian and non-Bayesian statistical models.
My suggestion would be to redo the Bem experiment but using the pseudo-random number generated by the bounded system of the computer, rather than the "true" random number generated in the same "cosmos" within which the subject's mind is choosing.
After all, it is damned impossible to determine that the coin is a fair coin after a long run of heads, other than by invoking "prior" knowledge. But as with voting machines which preserve a physical record, as least with a pseudo random number, you have a trace to compare against.
Of course it is my sense that, as with physical reality, there is some dimension beyond which certainty is not only impossible for practical reasons, but impossible in principle. I suspect that this prospect unsettles you no more than it does me. I'd love to learn of a better conceived experiment than the one I propose, but I can't think one up right now - I know it's out there!
Of course I have plenty more to say on the subject, but I have used enough of your time (pure wishful thinking on my part).
Best!
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Consciousness Burlesque
It's well enough known that when the body is suffused with certain kinds of hormones, the mind can make almost any shape erotic. It scans for cues, and finds them in the strangest places. Kind of in the way that once you start, every statement can become a sexual double entendre.
This is among the stuff now fading for me. Could be the hormones, could be the energy to infer shapes where randomness resides, or it could be what it's usually called: memory loss.
It's commonplace to hear people tell, with assurance, how songs are more easily remembered than straight prose. How rhyming is mnemonic. Well, I can memorize hardly anything, and I can assure you on the basis of plenty of experimentation, I can't remember a song to save my life.
Finally, after days and days of trying I did manage to memorize both the words and the chords to Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. Part of its charm is that each time I sing it, it's almost entirely new. Sometimes I go off the rails, and sometimes I have to start over, but I hardly think that either the rhyme scheme or the music is helping me to remember the words. I should work on that, but there are always so many more interesting things to do.
What I do remember easily are principles. Ways to put words together. My principles change, so that some days I'm a strong believer in the possibility of Artificial Intelligence, and others I'm equally certain that it's not possible. Some days I have nearly absolute confidence of the importance of my principles for ordering the stuff of reality, and some days I'm pretty sure that I'm deluded. I'm glad I can still laugh.
But I don't forget those things once they're formulated, and sometimes I find clues hidden among the random stuff I read, or watch, or in process of conversation. It helps in particular to try explaining something that I think I understand really well. I'd say I'm a passibly good explainer. I remember principles, but I forget which side I'm on, especially when I'm in the throes of explaining the opposing case.
It is really really strange that I ever took up the study of Chinese poetry. Traditionally, it's all about memorization, which as I've told you, I just can't do. But I seem to have an easy enough time remembering written forms. I think that's because they get used in sentences and these sentences make sense: each little one of them is like a mini principle, or rather the usage of a word in a sentence invokes a principle specific to that word, and I can remember it. Apparently pretty well. I can't remember the poem but I can remember what the words mean.
Now I've been puzzling over these pre-sentiment experiments which have subjects choosing which curtain the erotic image is behind, before the image has been put there, and they seem able to choose the right one at some frequency greater than chance. And I read the refutations, always investigating where the sleight of hand is.
I think no-one supposes that there is deliberate misleading going on, but the result is so utterly unthinkable, like a pretty woman sawn in half, that there must be something we're paying the wrong kind of attention to. Historically, it takes quite a while to find out what is "really" going on when surprising results are found through the methods of science. But surely something is distracting both the investigators and those who can find no flaws in the method.
I've suggested that the misdirection occurs in the same way it always does; when we think we know what we're seeing and so we direct our attention to someplace different from where the action is really happening.
Experimental evidence from elsewhere amply demonstrates that gross changes can be made to images as we memorize them and we will never notice, so long as these changes aren't made while that part of the image is at our focal point. These magic tricks are accomplished by computers armed with eyeball trackers, and I don't mean the kind which uses cookies on your computer.
They literally track your eyeball movements so that gross changes can be made while your memorization is in process and you won't even know that anything's happened. Write it down, print it out, if you want to be sure of the arrangement.
As investigator Bem points out, when you're all hepped on reproductive urges, there's a pretty big evolutionary payoff to finding sexual objects all over the place. You're motivated and there is an immediate cost in frustration to not finding your quarry; there's a bias in favor of making mistakes rather than to lose the prospect altogether. I guess sometimes almost anything will do, even a pure figment of the imagination.
And yet the research seems to show that so powerful is the motivation that patterns not discernable by ordinary man or machine are discernible by the horny subject. And this is surprising?!
Oh wait, I've performed a sleight of hand myself, haven't I? I've suggested that the subjects were looking for patterns and not for porn per se. And that the same pre-conscious assembly line which creates naked flesh from shadows and used subliminally in advertisements, also knew which way to look between curtain A and curtain B.
But I've also suggested that the hypothesis about effects from the future is misguided. This is rather an experiment to test what should be considered to come from inside the mind as opposed to what originates outside it. It's an exercise in boundary discovery, and not in pre-cognition.
Hepped up subjects will see more porn than not for sure, and so then the proper focal point for analysis might be how the images were tagged as erotic. For some stupid reason I can't identify, I watched the recent movie Burlesque, and I'm a little bit ashamed to say that I didn't find it very erotic at all. Well, not ashamed exactly, but more some function of age I'd like to color over.
Cher looks plastic as always, and Christina Aguilera comes on like a post modern Marilyn Monroe which is to say I know Marilyn and she ain't it. All the pieces are doing what they're supposed to do, the curves are all emphasized in just the right way, the jiggles are choreographed and the cameras are cut away at just the right moment to allow my brain to commit that special crime of filling out the detail (the crime is not in the doing, but in the manner of speaking about it, as Dennett urges) with idealized forms.
You know the principle of eroticism is not erotic at all, but I suppose it must provide good scaffolding for memory in a memory challenged guy like me. Except oddly enough I need the picture. And better than the picture I'll take the real thing. And better than even the most nubile real thing I'll take the one I love, but I guess that's just me. I must be doing something to myself the way that the eyeball tracking machine fixes the picture while I'm paying attention somewhere else.
The mind's interpretation of the mis-ordered stuff of reality obeys the narrative imperative. Before sense can be declared, there has to be some possibility to arrange things according to some plausible order of operation, where plausible means like what happens out there in the real world. And this narrative imperative utterly trumps reality as can be demonstrated by flashing images in the right sequence.
So, back to the experiment and away from this tawdry misdirection! These pictures were distinguished in classification by sufficient normed distance between the erotic and the non-erotic that you'd have to assume that virtually anybody could tell which is which. But by god by the laws of polymorphous perversity, there still has to be someone somewhere among the subjects who's going to be turned on by being turned on or something weird like that.
We have a sort of standoff. Which is more real, the assemblage of the mind which strives to make sense of reality, or the real which presents the mind with impossible to assemble events? Make it work without reward or punishment and the mind will fall asleep. Make it play, and interesting, and the mind will be addicted.
So maybe that accounts for why the correlations weren't stronger: more removed from chance. There is in principle no way to know what your mind is missing from the reality that's out there without the ability to define a boundary. Without a before and after; without an in and out.
But a boundary requires different stuff on one side than on the other. And in the case of the blind spot in each of our visual fields which demarks the spot where the optic nerve crosses the retina, there's nothing on the one side, and therefore, no boundary. The mind "fills in" with plaid if there's plaid around the lacuna: with orange if it's orange.
But no! The mind does no such thing! It ignores the stuff that's not bounded. It doesn't "fill-in" nothing with something. It doesn't have any way to tell that nothing's there, and so the cosmos is complete.
The same is true about what's inside the mind and out. Metaphors for memory seem useful, but they also exclude other ways to think about these matters. Databases often store only indexes to stuff which resides elsewhere. If you destroy the stuff, the index is voided also, but the mind has no way to know that until it looks, and it can't look unless it knows the trick.
So these psi experiments don't show anything at all about presentiments of the future. They only point out blind spots in the mind, whose boundaries don't exist. We presume some sort of continuity; we don't fill it in with what we want to see, but rather by our wanting we actually do see patterns which are not in fact there yet, from some other point of view. We've brought inside the mind phenomena which were heretofore believed to be outside it, or vice versa.
We've supposed a boundary where there never was one, because there is more to to world than can be known. There are lacunae. By our careful interrogations, their outlines can be determined. There is stuff beyond the reach of knowledge. To say that stuff is random is an imposition of a sense we simply haven't made yet. It might be, it might not be. We simply can't know yet.
And so there is no boundary to the mind in any ultimate sense. There will always be more to be brought inside. And dreams of Artificial Intelligence, strangely, are premised on what we know right now of consciousness, even as it changes to something else entirely by virtue of our thinking about it. When nakedness doesn't seem so - when there's nothing left to hide - I guess we'll be back in Eden. I guess free will will be no more.
This is among the stuff now fading for me. Could be the hormones, could be the energy to infer shapes where randomness resides, or it could be what it's usually called: memory loss.
It's commonplace to hear people tell, with assurance, how songs are more easily remembered than straight prose. How rhyming is mnemonic. Well, I can memorize hardly anything, and I can assure you on the basis of plenty of experimentation, I can't remember a song to save my life.
Finally, after days and days of trying I did manage to memorize both the words and the chords to Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. Part of its charm is that each time I sing it, it's almost entirely new. Sometimes I go off the rails, and sometimes I have to start over, but I hardly think that either the rhyme scheme or the music is helping me to remember the words. I should work on that, but there are always so many more interesting things to do.
What I do remember easily are principles. Ways to put words together. My principles change, so that some days I'm a strong believer in the possibility of Artificial Intelligence, and others I'm equally certain that it's not possible. Some days I have nearly absolute confidence of the importance of my principles for ordering the stuff of reality, and some days I'm pretty sure that I'm deluded. I'm glad I can still laugh.
But I don't forget those things once they're formulated, and sometimes I find clues hidden among the random stuff I read, or watch, or in process of conversation. It helps in particular to try explaining something that I think I understand really well. I'd say I'm a passibly good explainer. I remember principles, but I forget which side I'm on, especially when I'm in the throes of explaining the opposing case.
It is really really strange that I ever took up the study of Chinese poetry. Traditionally, it's all about memorization, which as I've told you, I just can't do. But I seem to have an easy enough time remembering written forms. I think that's because they get used in sentences and these sentences make sense: each little one of them is like a mini principle, or rather the usage of a word in a sentence invokes a principle specific to that word, and I can remember it. Apparently pretty well. I can't remember the poem but I can remember what the words mean.
Now I've been puzzling over these pre-sentiment experiments which have subjects choosing which curtain the erotic image is behind, before the image has been put there, and they seem able to choose the right one at some frequency greater than chance. And I read the refutations, always investigating where the sleight of hand is.
I think no-one supposes that there is deliberate misleading going on, but the result is so utterly unthinkable, like a pretty woman sawn in half, that there must be something we're paying the wrong kind of attention to. Historically, it takes quite a while to find out what is "really" going on when surprising results are found through the methods of science. But surely something is distracting both the investigators and those who can find no flaws in the method.
I've suggested that the misdirection occurs in the same way it always does; when we think we know what we're seeing and so we direct our attention to someplace different from where the action is really happening.
Experimental evidence from elsewhere amply demonstrates that gross changes can be made to images as we memorize them and we will never notice, so long as these changes aren't made while that part of the image is at our focal point. These magic tricks are accomplished by computers armed with eyeball trackers, and I don't mean the kind which uses cookies on your computer.
They literally track your eyeball movements so that gross changes can be made while your memorization is in process and you won't even know that anything's happened. Write it down, print it out, if you want to be sure of the arrangement.
As investigator Bem points out, when you're all hepped on reproductive urges, there's a pretty big evolutionary payoff to finding sexual objects all over the place. You're motivated and there is an immediate cost in frustration to not finding your quarry; there's a bias in favor of making mistakes rather than to lose the prospect altogether. I guess sometimes almost anything will do, even a pure figment of the imagination.
And yet the research seems to show that so powerful is the motivation that patterns not discernable by ordinary man or machine are discernible by the horny subject. And this is surprising?!
Oh wait, I've performed a sleight of hand myself, haven't I? I've suggested that the subjects were looking for patterns and not for porn per se. And that the same pre-conscious assembly line which creates naked flesh from shadows and used subliminally in advertisements, also knew which way to look between curtain A and curtain B.
But I've also suggested that the hypothesis about effects from the future is misguided. This is rather an experiment to test what should be considered to come from inside the mind as opposed to what originates outside it. It's an exercise in boundary discovery, and not in pre-cognition.
Hepped up subjects will see more porn than not for sure, and so then the proper focal point for analysis might be how the images were tagged as erotic. For some stupid reason I can't identify, I watched the recent movie Burlesque, and I'm a little bit ashamed to say that I didn't find it very erotic at all. Well, not ashamed exactly, but more some function of age I'd like to color over.
Cher looks plastic as always, and Christina Aguilera comes on like a post modern Marilyn Monroe which is to say I know Marilyn and she ain't it. All the pieces are doing what they're supposed to do, the curves are all emphasized in just the right way, the jiggles are choreographed and the cameras are cut away at just the right moment to allow my brain to commit that special crime of filling out the detail (the crime is not in the doing, but in the manner of speaking about it, as Dennett urges) with idealized forms.
You know the principle of eroticism is not erotic at all, but I suppose it must provide good scaffolding for memory in a memory challenged guy like me. Except oddly enough I need the picture. And better than the picture I'll take the real thing. And better than even the most nubile real thing I'll take the one I love, but I guess that's just me. I must be doing something to myself the way that the eyeball tracking machine fixes the picture while I'm paying attention somewhere else.
The mind's interpretation of the mis-ordered stuff of reality obeys the narrative imperative. Before sense can be declared, there has to be some possibility to arrange things according to some plausible order of operation, where plausible means like what happens out there in the real world. And this narrative imperative utterly trumps reality as can be demonstrated by flashing images in the right sequence.
So, back to the experiment and away from this tawdry misdirection! These pictures were distinguished in classification by sufficient normed distance between the erotic and the non-erotic that you'd have to assume that virtually anybody could tell which is which. But by god by the laws of polymorphous perversity, there still has to be someone somewhere among the subjects who's going to be turned on by being turned on or something weird like that.
We have a sort of standoff. Which is more real, the assemblage of the mind which strives to make sense of reality, or the real which presents the mind with impossible to assemble events? Make it work without reward or punishment and the mind will fall asleep. Make it play, and interesting, and the mind will be addicted.
So maybe that accounts for why the correlations weren't stronger: more removed from chance. There is in principle no way to know what your mind is missing from the reality that's out there without the ability to define a boundary. Without a before and after; without an in and out.
But a boundary requires different stuff on one side than on the other. And in the case of the blind spot in each of our visual fields which demarks the spot where the optic nerve crosses the retina, there's nothing on the one side, and therefore, no boundary. The mind "fills in" with plaid if there's plaid around the lacuna: with orange if it's orange.
But no! The mind does no such thing! It ignores the stuff that's not bounded. It doesn't "fill-in" nothing with something. It doesn't have any way to tell that nothing's there, and so the cosmos is complete.
The same is true about what's inside the mind and out. Metaphors for memory seem useful, but they also exclude other ways to think about these matters. Databases often store only indexes to stuff which resides elsewhere. If you destroy the stuff, the index is voided also, but the mind has no way to know that until it looks, and it can't look unless it knows the trick.
So these psi experiments don't show anything at all about presentiments of the future. They only point out blind spots in the mind, whose boundaries don't exist. We presume some sort of continuity; we don't fill it in with what we want to see, but rather by our wanting we actually do see patterns which are not in fact there yet, from some other point of view. We've brought inside the mind phenomena which were heretofore believed to be outside it, or vice versa.
We've supposed a boundary where there never was one, because there is more to to world than can be known. There are lacunae. By our careful interrogations, their outlines can be determined. There is stuff beyond the reach of knowledge. To say that stuff is random is an imposition of a sense we simply haven't made yet. It might be, it might not be. We simply can't know yet.
And so there is no boundary to the mind in any ultimate sense. There will always be more to be brought inside. And dreams of Artificial Intelligence, strangely, are premised on what we know right now of consciousness, even as it changes to something else entirely by virtue of our thinking about it. When nakedness doesn't seem so - when there's nothing left to hide - I guess we'll be back in Eden. I guess free will will be no more.
Bem, Dennett, Yudkowski, Wagenmakers, da bunch of 'em
Like accepting an award at the Oscars, it's hard to know whom to thank, but the list is growing. People arguing about pre-cognition, who should be arguing about something else instead. My list is not the same as your list.
Here's what we know: Statistical analysis falls short of classical proof in at least a couple of dimensions. First it always is and always will be subject to interpretation. After a while, the machinery gets way complex and the various experts sound like they're differing only in point of view.
We also know that definitions for mind, while radically incomplete in a lot of ways, should at least begin to accommodate the notion that there is no strict boundary between inside and outside the mind. And if there is no strict boundary, then it's pretty arbitrary whether you decide that pre-cognition is possible or if it's not, since it pretty much comes down to how you place that boundary.
In any given instance, most candidate boundaries involve volition. If something originates in the mind then it impacts stuff on the outside. But even that quickly becomes a chicken and egg problem where the distinction between paying attention and having your attention drawn is hard to discern.
So it looks as though there's going to have to be an experiment which will skirt the issue of statistical predictive analysis and unambiguously debunk the mechanics of cause and effect. That's already been done in physics to at least the point where we are arguing multiple universes and which metaphors for subatomic are the most consistent among, say, strings, particles and overall strangeness.
I wonder why we remain so skeptical in the macro world? Surely we understand that temporal ordering in the mind is a function of the ex-post-hoc narrative function of mind's threshold for outering or utterance. That is by itself definition of the boundary between in and out. We assemble perceptions which come at us all out of order, but their condition for utterance is their completion, which includes their re-ordering into a temporal narrative.
You can't really talk to someone meaningfully if you're going to be telling them about what's going to happen unless you can direct their attention to shared perceptual data which is going to assure them you're right. If you refer to something only in your mind, then you have resort only to trust as the "mechanism" to gain that other person's concurrence. Ordinarily, it's no trick to trust that someone in a position superior to yours should be trusted when they shout "duck!"
For most of us, trust is also required to adjudicate among the contending scholars of statistical analysis, since all we really know for sure is that there's lies, damn lies and statistics, and we're getting damned tired of realizing that the experts use these matters against us to sell us quack medicine as often as they use it for our benefit. Practitioners are not always the most informed, especially when they're motivated.
So you end up assessing who has a stake in dreams of immortality, who just wants to get laid and who needs to be incredibly rich. Because he seems a kindred spirit, and doesn't seem to be dissociating from deep psychological hurt, in general I'll go with Dennett.
But his work harbors a deep inconsistency. On the one hand he seems to want to defer questions about pre-cognition off into infinity, while on the other he comes pretty close to saying that there are no clear bounds to the mind.
So, we have a definitional problem here. What is the mind and what is considered to be "in" it.
In my usage a mind is a truly trivial thing, present at creation. What? Creation!? No, that's not what I mean, since what the hell can creation mean? Anyhow, mind is simply that quality of phenomena which involves relations which are not mediated by perception.
In physics, perception involves the exchange of particles, up to the limit of gravity, which seems to implicate virtually everything at the macro level to the extent that gravity is only felt in relation. It seems to be true that there is a divide which cannot be crossed in principle between conceptual and perceptual relations, because the act of crossing collapses the conceptual into the perceptual. Trust me, that's what quantum physics means!
So perceptual reality is outside the mind and conceptual reality is in. I'm not sure how you can test for that, since for me it's by definition; there is no way otherwise to be consistent in what we talk about. Science is all about (actually, I think it's only about) reducing trust issues to as near to zero as can be accomplished, and even then, qua Wittgenstein, you have to have a willing interlocutor. Which hardly happens at the fringes of science, even among scientists who respect one anther. They always end up questioning motives. Sheesh!
And that's where emotion sneaks back into the game. Emotion as in what is it that you really want? Once you show up on Colbert, it's assumed you want book sales, but maybe that's because there's no other way to assert the rightness of your findings. You know they're right and that they will be swamped unless you garner a critical mass of readers to force attention.
But emotion is, you know, always implicated in the life of the mind. Conceptual motion is - and again I'm being definitional which is probably a crime in China, but I'll do it anyhow because around these parts we still believe in free speech - emotion. That's right! If you sense something having only a conceptual relation to something else moving on a collision course, you would be wise to predict actual perceptual implication. And in that sense sensed motion, or I mean emotion, is predictive of events in the outered world.
Since, by definition there isn't any perceptual implication yet, this prediction is not utterable. What you can talk about is your feelings, your wants, your hopes, your aspirations, but you can't assure anyone that these things will come about except by acting on them. (how cool that even a word like "thing" becomes a metaphor!)
Feelings tend to be shared, and in precisely the manner that Fox TV can predict the future by creating it, you might find that the world's greatest narrative doesn't have to be true. It only has to change the world, Q.E.D. (Quite Evidently Dirty)
Well, OK so this is starting to feel dangerous. I only want to come up with some experimental proof that my definitions are better than your definitions. The presentiment of porn stuff is proving problematical since there are stubborn true believers out there who just won't buy it no matter the discount.
I'll bet if I were to offer a million dollars to the first person who comes up with a good experiment, I'd get it. Of course I don't have a million dollars, but I would have if someone were to take me up on the offer. Still, I'm just not that kind of gambler. Hmmmmm
OK, how about this: After thinking really really hard about why you won't slurp your own spit but you will slurp your lover's spit and more, which should sharpen your mind about the inside/outside boundary thing, now try imagining a world in which you just don't care about anything, but manage to stay conscious all the while.
You have no particular reason to pay attention to this or that, and no pretty asses catch your gaze (gender neutrality is critical here, since we don't want to fall into the Fox TV trap!). No emotional attachment to any sun God or other abstractions, so you can't imagine yourself a monk. A Buddhist, perhaps, but how many of them get to ZaZen in this lifetime? A scientist without passion about his work? Really??
You really can't do it, since you'd be imagining yourself perhaps acting as yourself but not being yourself.
I declare!
I really do doubt that there is an experiment which can be devised, unless it's the one over there among the borderlands of Europe, where they want to capture something metaphorically equivalent to the graviton. But where all the complexity just won't stay still long enough for things to get up and running.
My stars! What shall we do?
I for one am pretty cool with accepting a bit of ambiguity. I'm fine with notions of immortality by reputation and that one day my want will reduce to nil. That my consciousness comes and goes, and my me gets displaced and replaced, but that my desire remains until it to is resolved in crystalline clarity indistinguishable from death.
Or I would be fine to end me with a question mark, and allow as how consciousness is in a bottle, tossed to sea or smashed. Machines are awake already, sure, and not in some dim future. I feel they are already in control, and we have already become unfeeling.
But I will not be fooled by experimental evidence which is but sleight of hand. I want to see the outside in and the inside out before I admit defeat. I want to be educated.
OK, sorry, cheap ending. But I can't come up with a better one. Educate me!
Here's what we know: Statistical analysis falls short of classical proof in at least a couple of dimensions. First it always is and always will be subject to interpretation. After a while, the machinery gets way complex and the various experts sound like they're differing only in point of view.
We also know that definitions for mind, while radically incomplete in a lot of ways, should at least begin to accommodate the notion that there is no strict boundary between inside and outside the mind. And if there is no strict boundary, then it's pretty arbitrary whether you decide that pre-cognition is possible or if it's not, since it pretty much comes down to how you place that boundary.
In any given instance, most candidate boundaries involve volition. If something originates in the mind then it impacts stuff on the outside. But even that quickly becomes a chicken and egg problem where the distinction between paying attention and having your attention drawn is hard to discern.
So it looks as though there's going to have to be an experiment which will skirt the issue of statistical predictive analysis and unambiguously debunk the mechanics of cause and effect. That's already been done in physics to at least the point where we are arguing multiple universes and which metaphors for subatomic are the most consistent among, say, strings, particles and overall strangeness.
I wonder why we remain so skeptical in the macro world? Surely we understand that temporal ordering in the mind is a function of the ex-post-hoc narrative function of mind's threshold for outering or utterance. That is by itself definition of the boundary between in and out. We assemble perceptions which come at us all out of order, but their condition for utterance is their completion, which includes their re-ordering into a temporal narrative.
You can't really talk to someone meaningfully if you're going to be telling them about what's going to happen unless you can direct their attention to shared perceptual data which is going to assure them you're right. If you refer to something only in your mind, then you have resort only to trust as the "mechanism" to gain that other person's concurrence. Ordinarily, it's no trick to trust that someone in a position superior to yours should be trusted when they shout "duck!"
For most of us, trust is also required to adjudicate among the contending scholars of statistical analysis, since all we really know for sure is that there's lies, damn lies and statistics, and we're getting damned tired of realizing that the experts use these matters against us to sell us quack medicine as often as they use it for our benefit. Practitioners are not always the most informed, especially when they're motivated.
So you end up assessing who has a stake in dreams of immortality, who just wants to get laid and who needs to be incredibly rich. Because he seems a kindred spirit, and doesn't seem to be dissociating from deep psychological hurt, in general I'll go with Dennett.
But his work harbors a deep inconsistency. On the one hand he seems to want to defer questions about pre-cognition off into infinity, while on the other he comes pretty close to saying that there are no clear bounds to the mind.
So, we have a definitional problem here. What is the mind and what is considered to be "in" it.
In my usage a mind is a truly trivial thing, present at creation. What? Creation!? No, that's not what I mean, since what the hell can creation mean? Anyhow, mind is simply that quality of phenomena which involves relations which are not mediated by perception.
In physics, perception involves the exchange of particles, up to the limit of gravity, which seems to implicate virtually everything at the macro level to the extent that gravity is only felt in relation. It seems to be true that there is a divide which cannot be crossed in principle between conceptual and perceptual relations, because the act of crossing collapses the conceptual into the perceptual. Trust me, that's what quantum physics means!
So perceptual reality is outside the mind and conceptual reality is in. I'm not sure how you can test for that, since for me it's by definition; there is no way otherwise to be consistent in what we talk about. Science is all about (actually, I think it's only about) reducing trust issues to as near to zero as can be accomplished, and even then, qua Wittgenstein, you have to have a willing interlocutor. Which hardly happens at the fringes of science, even among scientists who respect one anther. They always end up questioning motives. Sheesh!
And that's where emotion sneaks back into the game. Emotion as in what is it that you really want? Once you show up on Colbert, it's assumed you want book sales, but maybe that's because there's no other way to assert the rightness of your findings. You know they're right and that they will be swamped unless you garner a critical mass of readers to force attention.
But emotion is, you know, always implicated in the life of the mind. Conceptual motion is - and again I'm being definitional which is probably a crime in China, but I'll do it anyhow because around these parts we still believe in free speech - emotion. That's right! If you sense something having only a conceptual relation to something else moving on a collision course, you would be wise to predict actual perceptual implication. And in that sense sensed motion, or I mean emotion, is predictive of events in the outered world.
Since, by definition there isn't any perceptual implication yet, this prediction is not utterable. What you can talk about is your feelings, your wants, your hopes, your aspirations, but you can't assure anyone that these things will come about except by acting on them. (how cool that even a word like "thing" becomes a metaphor!)
Feelings tend to be shared, and in precisely the manner that Fox TV can predict the future by creating it, you might find that the world's greatest narrative doesn't have to be true. It only has to change the world, Q.E.D. (Quite Evidently Dirty)
Well, OK so this is starting to feel dangerous. I only want to come up with some experimental proof that my definitions are better than your definitions. The presentiment of porn stuff is proving problematical since there are stubborn true believers out there who just won't buy it no matter the discount.
I'll bet if I were to offer a million dollars to the first person who comes up with a good experiment, I'd get it. Of course I don't have a million dollars, but I would have if someone were to take me up on the offer. Still, I'm just not that kind of gambler. Hmmmmm
OK, how about this: After thinking really really hard about why you won't slurp your own spit but you will slurp your lover's spit and more, which should sharpen your mind about the inside/outside boundary thing, now try imagining a world in which you just don't care about anything, but manage to stay conscious all the while.
You have no particular reason to pay attention to this or that, and no pretty asses catch your gaze (gender neutrality is critical here, since we don't want to fall into the Fox TV trap!). No emotional attachment to any sun God or other abstractions, so you can't imagine yourself a monk. A Buddhist, perhaps, but how many of them get to ZaZen in this lifetime? A scientist without passion about his work? Really??
You really can't do it, since you'd be imagining yourself perhaps acting as yourself but not being yourself.
I declare!
I really do doubt that there is an experiment which can be devised, unless it's the one over there among the borderlands of Europe, where they want to capture something metaphorically equivalent to the graviton. But where all the complexity just won't stay still long enough for things to get up and running.
My stars! What shall we do?
I for one am pretty cool with accepting a bit of ambiguity. I'm fine with notions of immortality by reputation and that one day my want will reduce to nil. That my consciousness comes and goes, and my me gets displaced and replaced, but that my desire remains until it to is resolved in crystalline clarity indistinguishable from death.
Or I would be fine to end me with a question mark, and allow as how consciousness is in a bottle, tossed to sea or smashed. Machines are awake already, sure, and not in some dim future. I feel they are already in control, and we have already become unfeeling.
But I will not be fooled by experimental evidence which is but sleight of hand. I want to see the outside in and the inside out before I admit defeat. I want to be educated.
OK, sorry, cheap ending. But I can't come up with a better one. Educate me!
Monday, March 7, 2011
Allowing for Presentiment, a Sketchy Sketch
You will likely not know about this, but there is an interesting polemic brewing about what would constitute adequate proof that presentiment, or awareness conditioned by events which haven't happened yet, is possible. Well, if you've been reading what I write, then you will know all about it, but that doesn't change the odds much, since reading me now demonstrates more likelihood that you've never read me before. (I have statistical proof of that if you're interested),
Meanwhile, consider this: Much if not most of what constitutes the readiness of a mind to consider a thought complete enough for utterance actually exists beyond what are ordinarily considered to be the boundaries of the mind. I should say "persists" as in things outside of us stay relatively put, and so we hardly have to keep checking in on them.
Living things move around more than inert objects, and virtual reality is less reliable than the real kind. There's no need, in other words, to stow whole chunks of reality "in" the mind since we can easily assess that it's likely still to be there when next we check. Words we utter simply require a stable reference and must draw attention reliably.
Inanimate objects moving without agency generally would give us the creeps. Most of us will want lots of testing before we're willing to cop out and call it ghosts. A similar thing is true about presentiment. Even if we just think we sense it, it's creepy.
We can pretty much assume that when someone turns their head as though in knowledge of our gazing at the back of it - they seem to have some kind of sensation that we were looking at them - it's because of occult features - simply unknown features - of the environment which indicate how something changed by the fact of our looking.
Maybe it's what's happening in other peoples' eyes, or maybe it's a kind of complex reflection or refraction beneath our conscious ability to make note. Perceptual trajectories bending by the gravity of our attention.
Maybe it's something in the shared surroundings which made us look at that person in the first place, and they simply sense that they are at its epicenter. Who's to say that we are the deciders in any particular instance, as opposed to responding to things happening around us that we haven't learned, consciously, to accommodate.
If there is a shifty portion of the world around you, it will change the valence for holding a thought inside, and for tagging it mentally as not ready to be part of any utterance. The more abstract they become, the more we might struggle to grasp the usage of words. Some instruments require much more practice before they're mastered.
Things about us which don't cohere may escape words altogether. We might be left with Wow! or Yikes! Sometimes intentional action is like taking steps into some empty seeming space which you can't resolve enough by your senses to be confident that the ground will be there. Even when it's always been there before.
But if something forces the issue, like say a fire at your back, you may leap as the better option against what you know with certainty.
After whatever was going to happen has happened, if it was a life-or-death matter, you'll clearly be confirmed in the correctness of your decision. The alternative is, in a trivial but silly sense, unthinkable. In a small way, of course, the ability to toss the dice well has to be considered a part of our strategy, individually and collectively, to come as far as we have.
But that's not what survival of the fittest means. It's our genes whose fitness is being determined, and we only count to the extent that our continued stability enhances the overall likelihood of our distributed gene-pool to persist. And even then our clan's persistence might be contrary to the interests of the greater good.
Surely our selfish happiness functions in relation to our retroactively confirmed presentiments about which would be the best course. Happiness wouldn't even be possible without a relatively fixed cosmos of possibility; suffering would never be worthwhile without the prospect to alter certain of those aspects which would make our happiness seem impossible.
Things outside our minds which matter to us are said to be held "in mind." When they change our mind changes. And when we know they will change, though they have yet to change, we might still change our mind before they do. In that case, our mind has been changed as much as we have changed it ourselves, and yet the change which caused it has yet to happen. This is only presentiment when the assurance can't be described or prefigured or calculated.
Now must it be that there is a known causal relation between our assessments of future change, and what eventually does happen? What about when a change to a third thing changes the relation between two things already held in mind without awareness of the third? New knowledge, in other words, might change the relation of the two already held in mind without anything needing to happen, eventually or right now, to the two not touched by the third.
Our actions can cause the changes we anticipate as much as they might respond to them ahead of time. And if this change occurs in mind prior to our conscious awareness of it, that would feel a lot like presentiment, right? Once caught in the act, we'd be likely to rationalize as though there were no choice.
Now proof is offered that things are still more mysterious. I'm liking it, but I find myself at a loss for words. Yes, the structure of the cosmos admits of mind apart from matter. It changes nothing except at the fringe where will and helplessness collide. At such moments consciousness arises.
Meanwhile, consider this: Much if not most of what constitutes the readiness of a mind to consider a thought complete enough for utterance actually exists beyond what are ordinarily considered to be the boundaries of the mind. I should say "persists" as in things outside of us stay relatively put, and so we hardly have to keep checking in on them.
Living things move around more than inert objects, and virtual reality is less reliable than the real kind. There's no need, in other words, to stow whole chunks of reality "in" the mind since we can easily assess that it's likely still to be there when next we check. Words we utter simply require a stable reference and must draw attention reliably.
Inanimate objects moving without agency generally would give us the creeps. Most of us will want lots of testing before we're willing to cop out and call it ghosts. A similar thing is true about presentiment. Even if we just think we sense it, it's creepy.
We can pretty much assume that when someone turns their head as though in knowledge of our gazing at the back of it - they seem to have some kind of sensation that we were looking at them - it's because of occult features - simply unknown features - of the environment which indicate how something changed by the fact of our looking.
Maybe it's what's happening in other peoples' eyes, or maybe it's a kind of complex reflection or refraction beneath our conscious ability to make note. Perceptual trajectories bending by the gravity of our attention.
Maybe it's something in the shared surroundings which made us look at that person in the first place, and they simply sense that they are at its epicenter. Who's to say that we are the deciders in any particular instance, as opposed to responding to things happening around us that we haven't learned, consciously, to accommodate.
If there is a shifty portion of the world around you, it will change the valence for holding a thought inside, and for tagging it mentally as not ready to be part of any utterance. The more abstract they become, the more we might struggle to grasp the usage of words. Some instruments require much more practice before they're mastered.
Things about us which don't cohere may escape words altogether. We might be left with Wow! or Yikes! Sometimes intentional action is like taking steps into some empty seeming space which you can't resolve enough by your senses to be confident that the ground will be there. Even when it's always been there before.
But if something forces the issue, like say a fire at your back, you may leap as the better option against what you know with certainty.
After whatever was going to happen has happened, if it was a life-or-death matter, you'll clearly be confirmed in the correctness of your decision. The alternative is, in a trivial but silly sense, unthinkable. In a small way, of course, the ability to toss the dice well has to be considered a part of our strategy, individually and collectively, to come as far as we have.
But that's not what survival of the fittest means. It's our genes whose fitness is being determined, and we only count to the extent that our continued stability enhances the overall likelihood of our distributed gene-pool to persist. And even then our clan's persistence might be contrary to the interests of the greater good.
Surely our selfish happiness functions in relation to our retroactively confirmed presentiments about which would be the best course. Happiness wouldn't even be possible without a relatively fixed cosmos of possibility; suffering would never be worthwhile without the prospect to alter certain of those aspects which would make our happiness seem impossible.
Things outside our minds which matter to us are said to be held "in mind." When they change our mind changes. And when we know they will change, though they have yet to change, we might still change our mind before they do. In that case, our mind has been changed as much as we have changed it ourselves, and yet the change which caused it has yet to happen. This is only presentiment when the assurance can't be described or prefigured or calculated.
Now must it be that there is a known causal relation between our assessments of future change, and what eventually does happen? What about when a change to a third thing changes the relation between two things already held in mind without awareness of the third? New knowledge, in other words, might change the relation of the two already held in mind without anything needing to happen, eventually or right now, to the two not touched by the third.
Our actions can cause the changes we anticipate as much as they might respond to them ahead of time. And if this change occurs in mind prior to our conscious awareness of it, that would feel a lot like presentiment, right? Once caught in the act, we'd be likely to rationalize as though there were no choice.
Now proof is offered that things are still more mysterious. I'm liking it, but I find myself at a loss for words. Yes, the structure of the cosmos admits of mind apart from matter. It changes nothing except at the fringe where will and helplessness collide. At such moments consciousness arises.
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