Billennium

This is the second story in this short story collection where Ballard talks about intensely cramped "efficient" spaces and overpopulation. I am a little curious if these are spurned by his experiences of growing up in Japan, considering cities like Tokyo where the living situation is very "efficient" i.e. small.

What is really interesting about this story is this sort of evolution of thought and what certain things mean to certain people. So they have to live in 4 cubic meter cubicles, that's the government standard, but they find this room that 15 cubic feet and it's so huge to them! It's funny because that's only like 5 cubic metersish. But all this extra space for them is intoxicating.

There are actually a bunch of topics that manage to be covered by this including overpopulation and government incentives that are self exacerbating. So like to live in a larger cubicle you need to be married and have 3 kids. But the world is already vastly overpopulated. Encouraging more kids just exacerbates the problem of lack of space and overpopulation. We're dealing with overpopulation in the real world even now. The Chinese government for sure screwed up when they mandated everyone have lots of children, now it's gotten so bad you can only have one! I feel that American religion sometimes causes problems with this too. "No sex till marriage" and "birth control (condoms) are bad" both contribute significantly to unnecessary population growth. With birth control it's easy to see, without birth control your chances of getting pregnant are really good. "No sex till marriage," well it encourages kids to get married really young. Not only is this usually dumb (but not always, sometimes it works out fine but the chances are real slim), but often married couples have kids. And merely having generations closer together contributes to the problem of overpopulation. If you wait longer, you spread out the generation and voila, there are less people on earth at once. (Learned this from reading Richard Dawkins, pretty fascinating tid bit eh?).

Fast food is kind of like this. The cheapest food is that which is worse for you, quality food costs a little more, so economically you are encouraged to eat at MacDonald's. Obesity in America unfolds. Quite the simplification I know, but I think it's a relevant thought. The whole idea is I think the model fits many things that happen in the real world.

Excellently written story, with an interesting twist at the end which is very Ballard.

The Overloaded Man

So I've been reading these J.G. Ballard short stories, my buddy Nick got me an anthology of them for Christmas, and I think I'm gonna start blogging about them, and just about everything I read right now. Main reason being, I'm slowing down in the mind book, it's alright but I feel I hit the meat that I was most interested in. Gonna keep rollin' with it, and when I hit the next chapter I will blog about it, but in the meantime, I need to keep writing.

So I just finished The Overloaded Man, and it is a great story revolving around a ton of philosophical concepts I have been interested in recently. Especially philosophy of the mind! So in essence, there's this dude who completely dissociates the connections of the world in his spare time. It's really like a drug, but it's all his own inner reflection kind of shit. It's like experiencing the Cartesian distinction between mind and body as opposed to discussing it.

But essentially it's the idea that the only thing making things the things they are in the world is our minds. This is definitely a topic I've talked about before, and I still believe it. Our minds bring association and distinction to things. "This is a computer", "This is a chair." On their own without a perceiver to distinguish there is no difference. There are magnetic fields that particles and energy fly in and out of, some areas are more dense than others. That's it, that's the material world by itself.

The main character in this story completely sinks into himself and destroys all the associations he makes with objects. They lose their "object-ness" and become formless crap, like he's almost discovering a way to see the noumina. Probably more like he's experiencing Plato's forms actually. Either way the whole story he just cuts himself further and further from reality. The only thing that he ever comes back for is to peep on the neighbors daughter (high five!).

But again if you've ever been in a stage of deep thought it is so like that. The outside world slips away and you enter into an almost trance like state, where everything gets picked and picked apart until it becomes nothing. Sometimes it happens to me with a word, it just suddenly loses it's meaning to me, like "why this word." I feel awkward and almost forget how to use it, it's even happened to me with the word "the" before, believe it or not.

Also a great side line here, this kid runs into this metaphysical problem and asks the guy "The only absolute in space-time is supposed to be the speed of light. But as a matter of fact any estimate of the speed of light involves the component of time, which is subjectively variable." What an amazing question, so much to think about there. Suddenly something we believe as a fact becomes a circular argument. The ground becomes much more shaky. Where do we stand? Stuck in the depths of our mind where we deconstruct the world? Who knows, great short story though, I recommend it to all.

A bunch of cool stuff

Now before I start my review of the last chapter, I'd just like to say that I applaud Searle for his humbleness. Like he will admit that even though he thinks he's barking up the right tree, he may not be. And in many ways he is trying to represent consciousness as something more understandable, which is a noble task. One thing I really like about this chapter, is it really encourages scientific research into learning about consciousness. If you read some of your average dualist literature, it's attitude that consciousness can't be discovered or comprehensively described physically or with science as we know it may seem very discouraging for scientists. I feel the way Searle puts it he's very encouraging of scientists trying to follow this path, even though it may be difficult or a dead end. But I'm certainly with Searle in the sense that I think Neurobiological research into consciousness will help us learn a lot about the brain. Sometimes the journey is much more fruitful than the end result.

So, Searle begins by making a controversial statement, he says he believes that just because something is ontologically subjective does not mean it can't be studied objectively. This treads the water of contradiction, but on some levels he may be right. However, as far as studying subjectivity all we really have to go on is reportability and relatedness to our own experiences. Initially I want to accuse Searle of being soft, and he is, but I can see why he does it. He's trying to make consciousness less contradictory with the physical world as we know it. Basically more available for the scientific minded I guess. Sometimes he seems very loose with meaning. Mostly about this statement I'll say that on one hand he's right, but on the other I don't think you can get a deep understanding of subjectivity objectively, there's a wall there that can't be crossed.
He talks about intentionality briefly, kind of defining it, but the next chapter is all about it, so I'm gonna wait till then to really discuss it. I'm still kind of confused, I thought it was like decision making, but it's more about things implying other things in the brain. Like I said, next blog entry I'll give a better description.

After this he goes into several different ways people have attacked the problem of consciousness.
He begins with mysterians who he calls pessimists. Essentially the mysterian angle is that with our current system of science there will be no way to truly understand consciousness. They either believe that it is absolutely impossible to explain as human animals or that we will need to completely revolutionize the way we look at the world to be able to explain it. I think I may be in this camp a bit, I have a strong feeling that the physical world is not the be all end all, that it is just it's own closed system. I know I need to explain that more, but I do feel a complete revolution of how we look at the world would probably shed more light on consciousness than physical science. Not that physical science doesn't have a lot to offer, but like I said earlier, it has boundaries.

Second he talks about supervenience, which actually an idea that stems out of ethics. In ethics it is the idea that two identical actions cannot have different moral values. If an action is good or bad it must be supervenient on other features, and therefore isn't the same action. In the mind, consciousness would be supervenient on the physical processes of the brain. The difference Searle says, is that in morality the action constitutes the morality, but in the brain the supervenience is causal, not constituted. And in other words, supervenience says nothing new, and can pretty much be broken down as the exact same as searle's argument just with different words.

After that he talks about Pan-psychism which is another theory that kind of appeals to me. It is the idea that everything is conscious to some degree. So for example, physics can only talk about extrinsic properties of things. It can only talk about what is objectively observable from the outside, how something interacts with something else, it cannot explain anything that could possibly happening intrinsically in whatever it is discussing, or inside or the exact thing in itself. So maybe the intrinsic things that are moved around by physics are consciousness. And groups of them create consciousness fully. Consciousness is everywhere.

I like it, but Searle does have some good points that I don't think are totally debilitating to the argument, but are certainly worthwhile questions that make you think twice about the theory. First, consciousness appears to be unified and centralized. If it was everywhere part of everything then how is it centralized? His next point is, if it is everywhere why should it feel located. Why don't we have consciousness from the perspective of the room we are in, where do the distinctions happen? Why don't I have the conscious experience of the computer when I touch it? Why does it stop at my hands? Why do I feel it in my brain more than anywhere else? It's a damn good question to be honest. If everything is conscious, why do I feel it here and not there?

So for Searle he thinks that the best way to go about cracking consciousness is via neurobiology. This is how most scientists would like it to be and I'm sure we can learn a whole lot by this method, but you know my views, I don't think this is the right method, but his explanations why he likes it are pretty good.

He explains that there are two ways to go about explaining consciousness through neurobiology, "building block" and "unified field" approaches. In building block the idea is that if you break the problem up into smaller problems you will make the problem easier. A lot of scientific questions are answered this way. Essentially they feel if they say, isolate red, and try to find the point where red becomes a conscious experience, it will open the flood gates to finding out about all the rest of the conscious experiences. My immediate thought is, conscious experiences are so different that I don't know how you could really keep aligning this model up with say, having an emotion of grief. But it is an interesting way to go about it.

Searle has problems with it to. When we are conscious of something it occurs when we are already conscious. So different conscious experiences aren't consciousness itself, but ripples and patterns in the field of consciousness. This is actually the "unified field" approach, which I do like. What consciousness is like, I'll agree is probably much more like that than it is like "YOU SEE RED NOW" black "YOU SEE BLUE NOW" et cetera. Of course this would be a much more difficult way to try and interpret the mind and would require some seriously intense technology. Maybe a problem for the future, the scope of it is just insane.

His last paragraph in this chapter is brilliant and really speaks to me. I'll just quote it here:
"One of the weird features of recent intellectual life was the idea that consciousness--in the literal sense of qualitative , subjective states and processes--was not important, that somehow it didn't matter. One reason this is so preposterous is that consciousness is itself the condition of anything having importance. Only to a conscious being can there be any such thing as importance"

I'll end with that but next chapters all on that intentionality stuff, so I'm interested in what he has to say there.

Tada! It's fixed... right?

So here it is, Searle's about to complete the impossible, he's going to reconcile dualism and materialism, two sects that are completely at odds. So let's get right down to it.

Searle asks us to forget history, forget context and try to re-examine the facts. Honestly a very good idea, let's get all the crap and bullshit out of the way. So, after doing that, we take a look at what we know: science and physics appear to be a closed system of cause and effect and this can explain everything in the world, we have subjective first person qualitative perspective it is undeniable, therefore this subjective first person qualitative perspective is a part of the physical natural world. Appeals to common sense eh?

Ultimately his conclusion can be stated as simply as: consciousness is causally reducible, but ontologically non-reducible. So let's clarify what reduction means. So say we wanted to do a reduction on my desk, we can reduce the desk to the molecules and forces that make up the desk, so it really isn't a desk, what it really is is molecules and forces. It only exists as it is because we designate it that way (i.e. a desk, something to put my computer on), but we can describe it by the smaller things that make it up, it is reducible.

Now what's the difference between a a causal reduction and an ontological one right? Well causally means we can reduce something to the points in history that have brought what we are describing to the point where it is. For example, evolution and genes become a causal reduction of species and organisms.

An ontological reduction is more like my reduction of the desk. Ontology is the study of the nature of existence, so an ontological reduction is a reduction of its substance or existence. But it can be more complicated than just the molecules in the desk. For example what you see on the computer screen can be ontologically reduced to the software processing in your computer.

Basically for everything in physical science, it can be reduced causally and ontologically. If you find one the other isn't far behind. In some cases they could even seem one in the same, like the cause of the desk is the ever present forces of the molecules of wood, and ontologically the desk is the forces and molecules of wood.

Well what Searle's trying to say is, that consciousness is the exception. It can be reduced causally, but not ontologically. So let's give examples. We've (or at least I've) already come to terms with the fact that it deffinitely is not ontologically reducible. For we cannot see inside anyone else's experience. There is no way to tell what is going on in someone's first person, you only have what they tell you, but for you that's always third person knowledge. Therefore consciousness' existence is not reducible to physical properties that make it up.

But Searle claims that consciousness can be explained as caused by the brain. So that consciousness is a process of the brain, just not an ontologically reducible process. It can be explained by the brain functions that cause it to happen. And in this he says that arguments like the philosophical zombies, that are identical to us in every physical manner but have no consciousness, though abstractly conceivable, are not physically possible. If they were an exact physical replica, they would necessarily be conscious, even though consciousness is not reducible to smaller physical parts itself. The key he says, is to discard the historical perspective on it and redefine what we think of as the closed loop of physics so that it can include consciousness and it's interesting nature.

So, I think that's about as clear as I can make his argument. I hope it's clear enough for all of you reading it.

Anyway, there are deffinitely appealing things about the theory I think, i.e. the appeal to common sense. The idea that since consciousness exists it would make a lot more sense as part of the closed loop of physics than it would as this random outside attachment looking in that seems to have nothing at all to do with the physical world. However, I think there are some issues with the argument.

My main problem with it is I think it's really a form of ignoring the hard problem of consciousness. It's how I think Searle thinks it should work, and how he wants it to work, but there's a lot of internal wierdness to it. It still doesn't explain how something could be ontologically irreducible in a physical world. Instead it's more like "consiousness is, physics is, I'm tired of it, let's work it in together some how and worry about other stuff, and stop worrying about this problem that refuses to go away!" He wants so badly to be able to explain consciousness biologically and physiologically, but he can really only go so far.

Unfortunately he's really managed to solve nothing, although I'll give him props for putting more effort in than Dan Dennett, who pretty much rejects the idea of consciousness altogether. It's a valiant effort, but even property dualists believe that consciousness is a natural thing. I don't think Searle is even bringing anything new to the table to be honest. It's kind of like he's saying "consciousness is not reducible physically? No big deal!" Basically just accepting consciousness and moving on to brain science. While I think that's totally viable for say a scientist to say, as a philosopher, I don't think he's digging deep enough.

We'll see though, he's got more coming, including arguments about free will and stuff, so maybe that will make his argument stronger. He does say he believes consciousness has a causal role in the world though I'm not sure how. Deffinitely looking forward to that, certainly more to come.

Now it gets interesting.

When I last left you with Searle, I felt disappointed and short changed. It seemed as though he had dropped the ball, and didn't have a firm grasp of the topic, and furthermore wasn't going to take consciousness seriously.
Ah, but there's a twist! The last two chapters have been materialism bashing. First he goes through the history materialism, which is very interesting. Essentially starting with psychology and behaviorism which really brought on the return in popularity of the view, and then moving on to functionalism which is basically just a more in depth view. Essentially the development of the computer, and the idea that the brain is just like a computer, our brain being the hardware and our thoughts being the software, was probably the climax and biggest triumph of the materialists. They now had an explanation for cognition and thought, because they had an example that worked in the real world. Pretty fascinating actually and it makes a lot of sense.
And so materialism has become the dominant philosophy among psychologists, scientists and philosophers and it has become quite the popular world view. Among intellectuals it is considered a guaranteed fact really. And science, and the way it has worked for science, and the way science has unfolded has brought us some extremely convincing evidence towards this theory. However, it ignores one extremely important feature of reality, consciousness. Many dismiss in an Occam's Razor fashion, as useless, and since it doesn't seem to accomplish anything it either a. is an illusion or b. is a waste of time. However both of these are clearly false, a. it is the only guaranteed real thing in existence, b. if it is real it is not a waste of time.
Essentially Searle spends most of these chapters disarming materialism with the normal devices, like the ones I used in the argument with my friend, the Zombies, the Inverted colors, et cetera. But he brings up one new one I kind of like that I'm going to share. This one particularly picks on people who love the computer related to the brain example.
He calls this "the Chinese Room." So say you are like me and you don't speak a lick of Chinese. You are put in a room and given a test in Chinese. You have all these dictionaries and books on how to answer these questions, how Chinese is structured and how to put what symbol where. After however long you finish the test and are able to get all the right answers. You still can't speak a lick of Chinese, but you can get the right answer on tests as though you understand Chinese. You understand all the syntax, but know nothing of the language. This is what computers are like, they need to be given a context, but they do not understand meaning. Anyway it's a really interesting example.
Alright, so Searle has bashed Dualism, he's bashed Materialism, the question is now, what the hell is left? Way to go Searle, you've turned what I thought was a disappointment into a freaking page turner. At the end of this last chapter he said he's going to reconcile Dualism and Materialism, so have at it what's next!

A Recent Discussion

So, I'm real close to writing a blog about the next part of the Mind book, but I gotta talk about something else first. However, to give a preview, I'm starting to like where Searle is suddenly headed, so needless to say it is getting much more interesting!



Anyway I was having a discussion with my friend the other day. And I'd like to begin by saying he's really smart, he understands math and science way better than I do, he got a degree in it. However our discussion was about consciousness and it's existence and the nature of physics and such. So it was somewhere between a logic/science/philosophy discussion, but over all it deffinitely got me thinking.



Essentially my position was consciousness exists and is irreducable by physics. It is essentially not physical. He on the other hand said that this is absolutely impossible, and at one point claimed that this theory would be "magic." So I'll go a little back and forth. I'll begin with mine which is clearly less orthodox and needs more explanation, because science in most cases would certainly be on my friends side.



One of the most important parts about arguing about consciousness is being clear on what it is before you start arguing. Otherwise things can get muddy quickly. Consciousness is the subjective experience. When observation is going on it is the thing that is observing. It is the first person. And furthermore as far as my hypothesis goes, and was a topic of contention in the discussion, consciousness is not synonymous with brain states or the cognitive properties that may give rise to it. I.e. "the experience of red" is not synonymous with "the cognitive interpretation of light recieved by the eye at a certain wavelength," even though the latter may give rise to the former.



So I gave him some classic examples to illustrate what I was trying to say. One was the famous zombie example. Essentially imagine an entity that is an exact replica of yourself, physically, physiologically, everything, going through the exact same life that you do, the only difference is, this replica has no conscious experience, no first person reality. It is in essense a zombie. It is physically on all levels exactly the same, but there is no consciousness. Therefore consciousness would be an additional property, not a physical one.



Secondly, I gave the inverted colors argument. This is the idea that when I look at blue and you look at blue, we both call it blue, we both react to it entirely the same way, and behave the same around it, but it turns out what you call blue, is what I call red. There is no way to know that this is not the case. There is no way that physics could prove one way or another what precisely the color that you or I see is. The only person who knows what blue likes like to me, is me.



So my friend responded to the zombie idea by saying that it was impossible for the zombie not to be conscious. Essentially saying that it was necessary that if it was physiologically precisely the same as him, it would necessarily be conscious. He explained that consciousness is an emergent property. For example, the planet earth has an extremely complex weather system. On other solid planets that are larger, the complexity of the weather system increases exponentially. There are different types of weather that we do not experience at all on earth in addition to those that we get on earth. And essentially, because are brains are large and extremely compact, it allows for tons more neural connections than our closest ancestor, and with this exponential increase in complexity, consciousness becomes an emergent property of this new level of complexity. But it is also necessary physically that it emerge at this level of brain complexity.



As for my second example he explained that either a, if we saw different colors there must be a physical explanation. and b. if the two people were physically and physioligically the same then we would know conclusively that they were seeing the same color.



Essentially, his arguments as far as I can tell, revolved around something like, 1. physics is a closed system, 2. if two things are physically identical they are the same thing, 3. if it doesn't exist inside physics, it doesn't exist, 4. consciousness exists, therefore 5. consciousness must be a physical property.



Ultimately it sounds like a pretty solid argument. And his other arguments are also very interesting and on certain levels persuasive, however there are some deffinite holes and fallacies.

Describing how something has occured does not describe what it is. This is the problem with his emergent property argument. Even if consciousness is an emergent property its other problems, the hard problems as Chalmers puts it, don't go away. Secondly as far as the response to his second argument, it is decidedly not conclusive that two people necessarily see the same thing. There is absolutely nothing to check the experiment with. If you look at all the action in the brain, even with superfuturistic technology, you won't see green in the brain, or more importantly you won't see "them seeing green" in the brian, which is actually what consciousness is. Consciousness is unobservable. Brain states that happen at the same time in the brain as someone seeing red, are not seeing red. Red itself is indiscribable to another person, other than pointing to something that is red and saying "it looks like that."

Ulitmately, both of his responses are just attempts at dodging the issue. The examples themselves are by no means a practical explanation, but more an illustration of how consciousness is not observable objectively. How it can be conceived that there are physical replicas of ourselves that are merely computers or zombies and not conscious. The only way to observe consciousness is through the first person. And if it cannot be observed physically than it is not a physical property. This was the point when my friend said "what you are explaining is magic." But consciousness undeniably exists. There is experience being had. This clashes hard with his assumption that "if it does not exist in the physically it doesn't exist." But if that were true, then consciousness wouldn't exist. But it does necessarily, by the mere axiom a=a. If it exists it exists.

New book!: "Mind a Brief Introduction" by John R. Searle

So I've finished "The Selfish Gene" and after reading it I have to say, it's actually a really awsome book. I recommend it to anybody interested in evolution. It ends up being very tastefully done, only a couple little pot shots here and there (at religion), but mostly he is very thorough scientific with it. Plus he's a very good writer, can put things in a way that's not only easy to understand, but kind of makes everything exciting. Despite my criticisms I may have said before, it is a truly fascinating and well written perspective.

So now we start with John R. Searle's "Mind a Brief Introduction." I got this book for a couple reasons, a. I love philosophy of the mind and kind of wanted a refresher and just a survey of what's big these days, b. I wanted to hear a new perspective, after looking at Dennet and Chalmers it seems, at least by the explanation on the back, come up with some kind of crazy third way to look at it. Figured it should be interesting. I like learning stuff.

After reading the intro and the first chapter I must admit I'm kind of disappointed. I mean it is a book for beginners on the subject, so it kind of glosses over some stuff (even though he gets almost randomly specific about other stuff). But since this book has a thesis, and that was one of the things that drew me to it, it is extremely biased.

Well, let me just get to the point that's really bugging me, no more beating around the bush, he calls Descartes contribution to philosophy of the mind a disaster. All I can say is "you can't be fucking serious right?"

Basically he says Descartes has created more questions than answers. I don't see how this takes away from the profoundness of Descartes work. If the truth has more questions than originally thought so be it. I've found that in my life the more I learn, the more I realize I don't know a lot. In fact in most situations more knowledge has led me to find that I have a lot a lot more questions. If you're looking for easy answers, don't be a philosopher. I mean what the hell is the whole point of Socrates right? Question shit! Granted there are problems with the Cartesian model beyond that of "creating more questions" but ultimately Descartes discovered the way in which we can prove the truth of consciousness.

Ok, got that off my chest. Ultimately, Searle has laid out 12 questions based on the problems he has found with Descartes' dualism: 1. Mind-Body Problem, 2. The Problem of Other Minds, 3. Skepticism about the External World, 4. The correct Analysis of Perception, 5. The Problem of Free Will, 6. The Self and Personal Identity, 7. Animals, 8. Sleep, 9. The Problem of Intentionality, 10. Mental Causation and Epiphenomenalism, 11. The Unconscious, 12. Psychological and Social explanation. These are pretty much going to be the focus of his book he explains. The main topics.

Now I do like his stress on importance of philosophy of the mind, and he does have some interesting comments on it's history and how it's picked up the slack of philosophy of language over the past couple decades. And I'm deffinitely going to give him a chance. But he's got some tell tail signs that we may have some disagreements. Especially because he seems to paint some mind ideas with really broad strokes where he ought to be more careful, at least so far it seems. I'm very interested in seeing what his solutions are for these problems though. How he can some how reconcile Dualism and Materialism without being either, and trying to remain purely scientific about it. All I can say is, I guess we'll see!