mindlace

For my birthday, Vika got me Consciousness, an Introduction, by Susan Blackmore. Much of the text so far revolves around the purported mind-body problem, or the hard problem of consciousness. I’m not sure I have much patience for this alleged ‘hard problem’, and I think the fact that so much time has been spent on it is more an artifact of historical precedent than any strong referent to some interpersonal thing.

I’d like to walk with you down this riverbed while I try to talk out why it seems this way. As I understand the problem, it is a question of “how can I have this ineffable, irreproducible, irreducible experience of being in the moment if I am merely a collection of neurons subject to largely deterministic physical behaviours?” Blackmore surveys the dualist answers to this question, so I shan’t repeat them here, but I remain firmly a monist. Now, before you get too upset with me, I’ll quickly say that I don’t think consciousness is an epiphenomena.

Let’s take a rock and smash it.

Now, pick up one of the pieces. This is your rock. There are many rocks, but this one is yours. Does the rock have a subjectivity? That is, is there something it is to be that rock?

On the first hand it seems the answer is obviously no; it’s a rock, damnit, and it doesn’t think, it has no “experience” of what it is.

But on the other hand, this fragment you hold in your hand is a specific thing; it is a fragment of a rock worn smooth from the flow of the river, and a sharp jagged edge because we just shattered it. This fragment of basalt was pouring from the earth a mere million years ago, something you can see in the rock itself based on the orientation of the magnetic fields within it.

No other rock in history has been subjected to those particular iniquities, so even something as inert and senseless as this rock has some irreducible complexity to it. Moreover, the particular combination of molecules that is represented in this specific fragment of rock are most likely not found in anything with the same volume, and are definitely related to the upwelling it came from. Even though I can’t give you the specific details of this rock, a short thought experiment shows us it must be quite unique.

Lets assume the rock is around 56 grams, and that it has the same distribution of atoms as the average piece of basalt ( Oxygen: 45.6%, Silicon 23.0%, Aluminum 9.0%, Calcium 8.4%, Iron 6.7%, Sodium 2.0%, Potassium, 0.1%). 94.8% of it would be 1.401e+24 atoms. I’m sure the possible combinations of atoms in this rock are substantially smaller than the factorial of the number of atoms in the rock, but even if each known atom in the rock could only possibly be in one of seven positions, there are still 1e+90 more possible combinations that could make up that rock than there are atoms in the visible universe (~ 1e+79 ).

This is all strong evidence for the notion that the rock you just carelessly shattered is absolutely unique in all the universe. Nice going.

There is some literal thing it is to be this fragment of rock, and that literal thing cannot be found in anything else. I believe that this literal thing can be considered a subjectivity (though of course not a subjective experience.)

Now, living things actually go out of their way to reduce the combinatoric space they inhabit; it wouldn’t do if every cell got a perfectly random but equivalent length strand of DNA, nor would it be pleasant if one attempted to randomly assemble ribosomes out of their constituent atoms. Nevertheless, there is something unique that it is to be a living organism. There are all of the aforementioned slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but in addition, life is all about letting experience affect you in particular and repeatable ways. In bacteria differing molecules in the cell trigger different biochemical pathways; in neurons, ongoing stimulation induces the folding of molecules into particularly stable alternate conformations, which in turn affect their potential for additional stimulation.

So if everything has an innate quality of what it is to be that thing, then it should come as no surprise that adding senses into the mix leads to organisms with a sense of what it is to be themselves. The richness and complexity of our subjectivity is more an artifact of the aggregate intersubjectivities of the one hundred trillion cells (including ten billion neurons) that make up one particular human. Thus it is that I come to think the “hard problem” is illusory.

The ability of chimpanzees to track their relative status and standing with other members of the chimpanzee tribes, and to act upon it in various ways, including deception, deceit, collusion and war has been called [machiavellian intelligence][a].

It seems likely that our protohuman ancestor also had this trait. Let’s further assume that some band of already bipedal protohumans developed some kind of mutation that resulted in hypercephaly – either by too-long brain growth, or by an abbreviated body development. It has been demonstrated that [hypercephaly can be induced by a point mutation][b] in mice.

This new, expanded brain still tries to stuff into a more-or less normal monkey skull, and so becomes highly convoluted, and most of the excess growth occurs in late developing portions of the brain – the cortex.

So now you’ve got a monkey with a very expensive brain, with scads more neurons than have a direct function. Even older neuronal clusters, particularly those aspects of the brain responsible for keeping track of who has done what to whom and for how many cookies, are all convoluted and folded in upon themselves, making connections they’d not made previously.

Into this rich bed of neurons began to sink the first, and in some ways only, meme: language. Big brained women preferentially fucked boys with silver tongues, and a race was on; some [preexisting cerebral asymmetries] become the welcoming scaffold in which our [system of communication could evolve][d].

This process, which is largely about protohumans developing ever more elaborate methods of interpersonal relation, helped fuel and was fueled by the increasing sophistication of the machiavellian intelligence in protohumans. The behavioural signposts of machiavellian intelligence are actions that depend on an understanding of the other; deceiving someone requires some sort of model about what they are and are not aware of; knowing who your friend is requires that you have a mental simalcrum of them. In simians and in our presumed protohumans, this ability extends only to their fellows.

In a linguistically developing protohuman, words presumably revolved around this sort of ability. Being able to talk about who did what to whom was one of language’s most valuable assets. Although conversations past have left no fossils, even today, social conversation occupies the majority of human speech.

Language also was used to talk about the environment, and it is here that the first break came; in talking about each other, we came to be able to access our person-models through the conduit of language. With this power we even began to be able to discuss people who weren’t there, and from there to discuss people we had never encountered before. These people-models were abstracted people; they link into our people-modeling only through language. As soon as we’re able to make that link, the subsequent ability to think of our environment like a person is natural; it’s precisely the same mechanism used to think about people-we’ve-never-met.

Closely on the heels of this come spirits and gods; words used to link to people that are qualities of the environment. Through paintings, carvings, and eventually through the rise of the written word, markings and objects aquired the ability to be personified. Over thousands of years, a process of cultural evolution allowed these personas to become less and less human-like, and those with the talent to think in this way to have their effects amplified; initially as shamans and seers, eventually as priests using symbols and instruments to measure the heavens and judge the fortuitous times for crop planting and obeisances to the gods whose measure they took.

Even today, the most highly trained abstract thinkers [cannot help but anthropomorphise][e]; and while this tendency is derided by the same, it seems somehow fitting that our loftiest, most ‘pure’ reason comes to us from the millenia-long drive to understand each other better.

[a]: http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machiavellian_intelligence
[b]: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Retrieve&list_uids=8995755&dopt=Abstract
: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi/10.1126/science.279.5348.220
[d]: http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/phw/6xxx/kirby.pdf
[e]: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD09xx/EWD936.html

Eckhart Tolle is a man who was very unhappy and then figured out how not to
be. In [The Power of Now][] he writes about the truth that he discovered that
helped him to be that way, and kindly tries to share it with us.

Unfortunately, his understanding is tainted by his lack of understanding of
the brain, the body, and reproductive biology. This means he has to make
things up:

* He claims “bad emotions” (fear, anger, hate) are of the mind and “good
emotions” (joy, love, compassion) are of Being. Convenient, but disprovable
by anybody with an fMRI; [The Emotional Brain][] is a good treatise on this
subject.

* He talks about a “pain body”, a somewhat interesting anthropomorphization of
the way the amygdala and hippocampal memory interacts with the conscious
mind. Unfortunately, he once again needs energy fields to explain things.

* He’s determined to get you to be “outside of your mind”. He’s making an
important point here. It *is* important not to identify with the narrative
self. However, he has to make up some non-physical realm to explain how this
is possible. The underlying phenomena, and way out, is argued better by Dr.
Susan Blackmore in [The Meme Machine][]; she requires no woo-woo land to
achieve the same effect.

* he claims that “drugs” always leave you feeling bad after they make you feel
good. Anyone with a moderately broad experience of “drugs” knows that drugs
have a variety of effects, and many of them have little to no physiological
aftereffects. [Erowid][] is a good resource for exploring more
information on this subject.

* He joins with many, many others in trying to elevate sexual dimorphism to
mystical truth, particularly in a portion entitled “Why Women are Closer to
Enlightenment”, and continuing on in a section about relationship.

[The Cooperative Gene][] is an excellent book that covers the biological
truths underlying sex and gender, making the interesting and highly
relevatory point that while sex is necessary for beings of greater
complexity, gender is an artifact of the historical adoption of
mitochondria.

On the personal level, it is a mistake to consider yourself “one half” of
some complete whole, as Tolle affirms, when gender is just a hack and
sex is an elaborate mechanism to induce selfish genes to be a little more
selfless.

Moreover, it takes only a cursory glance at the set of sexually reproductive
beings to find that the vast majority of them aren’t really very formal
about this whole gender affair, doing everything from swapping genders if
it seems appropriate to punting on the whole tedious buisness of finding a
reproductive partner and just fertilizing themselves.

Finally, the overwhelming majority of life on this earth doesn’t even bother
with sex or gender.

All this conspires to make a claim for some sort of gendered universe or
diety a bit silly.

* He tries to make a psychological or abstract claim about love and the nature
of attraction; the fundamental truth is that attraction is in no small part
a biological process. One excellent example of this is the vomeronasal
organ, also known as [Jacobson's Organ][], though there are many others.

Some could dismiss my critique as not addressing his main argument about
“living in the now”; frankly, it’s hard to take his (reasonably sane) argument
seriously when it’s tainted by such a thouroughly contrived worldview.

In short, the Power of Now contains nothing spiritual that hasn’t been said
better by other authors, and its ontological understandings stem from
ignorance of the current state of knowledge about the mind, body, and biology.

[The Power of Now]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1577311523/mindlace-20
[The Emotional Brain]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684836599/mindlace-20
[The Meme Machine]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/019286212X/mindlace-20
[Erowid]: http://erowid.org
[The Cooperative Gene]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743201612/mindlace-20
[Jacobson's Organ]: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0452282586/mindlace-20

In the article Finding happiness the author discusses a Dr. Davidson who has put together enough fMRI and EEG recording to build an index to different moods, so you can look at a fMRI and say “This person is happy” or “this person is stressed”. More importantly, there’s a more crude left-right measure. The article also mentions Investigating the mind which has some useful things to say about what goes on in the brain when you meditate. Finally, here’s an excerpt of a book called Destructive Emotions about what meditation looks like in an fMRI (in part).

You have 32 electrodes each plugged into a programmable gain amplifier distributed in roughly equidistant points across the scalp.

You may consider each a mono audio input.

You have two sets, one for each head.

For each electrode pair on the two heads you patch them both in as audio inputs.

You use a filter such that the output is the difference between the two.

The goal of the game is silence.

bayesian filtering applied to neuronal firing data(pdf) appears to tell me how to find neuronal patterns and possibly predict them. I admit the math is a bit over my head, if someone could confirm or deny my impression that would be great.