Weltanschauung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Tag: Consciousness

  • Why I doubt my Existence

    Why I doubt my Existence

    I believe that I am merely a “program” and that similar programs run every animal and living thing on earth.

    I have originated, like everything else, in a complex “program” not so very different conceptually from that on my computer which can evolve cellular automata: 

    “a set of units in a mathematical model which have simple rules governing their replication and destruction, used to model complex systems composed of simple units such as living things or parallel processors.”

    Buddhism has considered such deep philosophical questions for over two and a half millennia and science is beginning to lead us to the same conclusions as this ancient thought system.

    Put simply, to the Buddhists reality is an illusion and so is our sense of self. The concept is remarkably similar to Stephen Wolfram’s ideas. 

    The world and everything in it is mere deterministic cause and effect. An endless series of chemical reactions which has woven the fantastic complexity we see all around us from a few basic and simple rules. 

    The Buddha’s Anattalakkhana Sutta states: 

    “Every consciousness is to be seen as it actually is with right discernment as: ‘This is not mine. This is not my self. This is not what I am.’”

    Researchers in consciousness such as Giulio Tononi are coming to the conclusion that consciousness is simply what you get when something, some object is sufficiently complex.  His Integrated Information Theory seeks to measure such complexity.

    So I may feel that I am “me”. I may feel I have a soul, some separate existence from you or that rock over there. But evidence seems to be mounting that the only difference between myself and that lump of rock is complexity – the way “my” particular atoms are arranged. 

    And you and I? Similarly arranged atoms of sufficient complexity to have attained the ability to witness the universe. Perhaps Carl Jung’s concept of universal consciousness has legs after all.

    My conviction was emphasized recently when “my”personality changed dramatically and most definitively following the ingestion of medicine.   I had been on too high a dose and began to feel  an abnormal, generalized and most unusual fear.  I was a different person, its that simple. My consciousness was different, my outlook, views  on life, attitude to everything and everybody were, simply put, different.

    And then I cut back on the dose and its frequency and this other “person” disappeared and was replaced by a more recognizable persona.

    So there is little in me which is permanent or unchanging. Chemicals can re-arrange my consciousness and replace person A with person B. Probably permanently, given enough persistence, by re-arranging the “code”, the DNA, whatever.

    Quite clearly my subjective experience counts for very little except in my own mind. But for what it is worth, I am ever more convinced that we humans are merely collections of matter arranged and re-arranged programatically. As a matter of “faith”,  my belief is that as science advances we will be able to rearrange our matter and our program to become whoever or whatever we want. 

    I will leave aside questions of determinism and free will. We don’t seem to be much further forward on that question than we were in the times of the ancient Greek philosophers.  One day at a time?

  • Discarding the Irrelevant

    Discarding the Irrelevant

    In recent years I have found it increasingly beneficial to narrow my focus.

    Lampmagician published a fascinating article Carl Jung and a Brief Overview of Satan.

    It contains information I was vaguely aware of and might have found somewhat “useful” in past decades.  It is interesting but I do not need the information.

    Perhaps it is because of age – I increasingly hurry (while my brain remains functional) to fill in the many gaps in my limited achievements and marginally less limited knowledge.

    I have no doubt that the study of history is vital. As Ecclesiastes reminds us, “there is nothing new under the sun” and if we do not learn the lessons of history, we are doomed to repeat the same tedious and unnecessary mistakes for ever. Greed, war, materialism, cruelty to name but a few.

    But do I need now, today, to know what the medieval and earlier church thought about two fictitious deities, Satan and Christ?

    In my own case most assuredly not. While I concur wholeheartedly with the Beatitudes, much of the rest of it is backward superstitious nonsense.   Fine for the historian who can summon the interest but not for me thanks.

    The interest in such topics must remain purely historical, academic. Or perhaps “should remain” is more pertinent. The mind must filter out what is not useful to it so that it can focus on what is.

    In earlier days I may have attributed some importance to this esoteric information, other than as a mere record.  Long ago I may still have been influenced by my Judaeo christian upbringing.  These days I tend to remain focused on what I find useful in my daily life and have abandoned “belief” in deities. I mostly prefer to spend my time on more modern and forward looking endeavors.

    Hence for instance I find reading about the nature of consciousness and scientific advance of greater concern and utility,  more worthy of my attention than nonsensical medieval church doctrine. Changing tastes over the decades perhaps. Or perhaps a need to concentrate on what I find important while I have the sentience so to do.

  • Out of my Skull

    Out of my Skull

    What does it mean to be out of your skull? Is it a detrimental term or may it have hidden meanings and use?

    I have been thinking recently about collective delusion.  Where society or a segment of society comes to believe something to be true which is in fact false.

    There are many examples. I have “faith” that religion is a collective delusion. It is a series of stories we tell to explain our own origins, to find our place in a fearful world. It has no basis in fact but whereas we collectively agree that Father Christmas is a fiction, woe betide those who dare to say the same about [insert your favorite deity/prophet].

    Getting out of your skull is not about mindless drug or alcohol abuse. Or at least not the way I mean it. It is about distancing yourself from your own ego. It is about questioning every thought you have ever had about god, the universe and everything.

    It is about deciding whether the answer really is “42” or something else entirely.

    It is about questioning every aspect of yourself, your thoughts your behaviour and the reality you believe you see around you.

    To some extent this can only be the realm of science. Maths and the microscope, maths and the Large Hadron collider, maths and the cosmic background radiation.

    And yet science can be aided surely by getting “out of your skull”. By abandoning dull convention, by thinking new thoughts, by daring to challenge the many collective delusions we have invented for ourselves.

    It may be that the Doors of Perception can only truly be opened by mystic experience. Or by dreams or the mind travels of the shaman. Or the deep meditation of the experienced monk.

    Those of us less brave or determined might achieve a shift in perception by letting go. By renouncing old ways, thinking new thoughts, daring to do new things. By shaking ourselves up, by refusing to bow to convention and collective delusion.

    Few would wish to experience the Dark Night of the Soul and yet we must achieve at least some view through the doors of perception if we are to grow.  To escape the wheel of existence, we must seek to free ourselves from dull mundanity.

  • The Existence of Evil

    The Existence of Evil

    Evil cannot exist without consciousness and free will.

    Imagine a universe without consciousness. Our own universe by way of example but with no life forms with the gift of consciousness. There would be great violence of course: supernovae, asteroids pummeling planets, volcanoes, tsunamis….and Big Bangs.

    But none of that would affect any “body”. None of that violence would be evil since evil must surely show intentionality. And if there were no conscious entity in the universe there could be no intentionality.  No one who deliberately does horrible things to another. And inert matter can not perpetrate or suffer an evil act: however violent a physical reaction may be, if it has no intention of causing harm to a conscious entity which can experience that harm, then evil can not occur.

    Equally there must be conscious beings whose subjective experiences are those of pain and suffering, physical or mental, for evil to exist.  There must surely exist a victim, a subject for an evil to act upon..

    The question becomes a great deal more complex when one factors in the existence (or not) of free will.

    Leaving aside the endless religious nonsense which has clouded the subject for millennia, the question of free will boils down, ultimately, to physics.

    Most physicists are determinists of one sort of another.  Steven Hawkins was convinced humanity are mere robots with no free will. Chemical scum as another enthusiastic optimist called us.

    Strict determinism means that physical cause and effect govern everything from the orbit of the earth round the sun to wars and human history. Using such laws, physicists believe they have traced back our origins back to the singularity of the big bang and forward to the big whimper, the petering out of energy and matter. Atom hits atom in endless Newtonian cause and effect and in such a world free will is an illusion.

    We may believe we have decided to cosh our neighbour over the head with a steel mace but in fact we had no choice in the matter.  Our atoms did it.

    To add to the confusion many physicists also claim that time is an illusion. Without time there can be no change. Without change what evil act or thought could arise?

    So there you have it. Or rather you don’t. The existence of evil is not a simple question..

  • Seeking Consciousness

    Seeking Consciousness

    In my post In Search of the Soul I talked of giving up one life and seeking another.  Some become itinerant monks and if I lived in a warmer climate I would be tempted to do something similar.

    Regardless, my post was metaphor and I hope to achieve something more satisfying.  As a child I had frequent occasions when my brain would short circuit leading to a feeling close to panic.

    It was a single and simple thought which provoked this reaction: “what would there be if the world I see around me did not exist?” I could not conceive of nothingness in a calm and reasoned manner. Somehow the thought terrified me.

    Many years later I can see that the answers to such questions can only be sought through science and empirical, rational thought.  At the time such words did not form part of my vocabulary.

    If this post had not been a whimsical one, it might have been destined for the taxonomy “science” and not “spirituality”. I am not even sure what the latter word means.

    And yet I do not intend to talk of consciousness as such but merely of the importance of the search.

    We have little understanding as yet as to what makes us subjectively aware of the world.  This is perhaps not so surprising: the difficulty of studying consciousness might be likened to that of a goldfish in a bowl contemplating cosmology.

    And yet we need to get there. How can a “Theory of Everything” be complete without understanding what gives a collection of star dust the ability to ponder the origins of the universe?

    And so back to  In Search of The Soul.  Instead of wandering India with a begging bowl it might be rather more satisfying to turn my coat.  We may not have an understanding of what “Breathes Fire into the Equations” but to study what we do know about life, the universe and everything holds rather greater interest for me than the financial markets which I have studied to little avail for much of the past 30 years.

  • Positivity

    Positivity

    I was going to call this article “Negativity” and then realised my mistake.  I wanted to write about the subjective experience of having one’s well being affected by concentrating on “negativity” and then realised this was precisely the damaging behaviour pattern I was telling myself to avoid.

    Instead of talking (or writing) about “negativity” there are two benefits of instead writing about “positivity”.   The first benefit is that it demonstrates the point I was going to make but in reverse: you life will feel subjectively better if you concentrate only on things which are positive.   The second benefit is that by actually writing about “positivity” I will myself feel subjectively positive and also be taking my own medicine.

    I reviewed some of the recent posts I had written, mostly about the financial markets.  Some of those posts are positive and helpful: in particular 8 Steps to Profitable Investment and Profitable Stock Market Investment is Very Simple .

    After more than 30 years in the financial markets these two posts represent my view as to how stock markets work.

    I then looked at a few other posts and realised they were horribly negative: in particular Fundamental Analysis – Expensive and Futile ,  Where are the Customers’ Yachts? and Technical Analysis – Embarrassing Nonsense .

    In a sense this presents me with quite a difficult problem.  These negative posts represent deeply held views based on long experience. The problem is they trash almost the entire industry.  The fact is also that so many industries can (and probably should) be similarly trashed (at least in part).

    The question is: should you do it? Morally speaking, if you are sure enough of your grounds for criticism, the answer has to be yes. Warn people of the dangers. But on a personal level the answer has to be a resounding no: any sort of negativity seems to create (subjectively speaking) a destructive feedback loop. The negativity may spill over into your life as a whole.

    The common sense answer may therefore  simply be to ignore the negative and instead guide people to what you believe is the positive.

    Instead of telling people what does not work in investment (or any other aspect of life) tell them what does work so that they will be able by default to avoid what does not.

  • Am I a Quale?

    Am I a Quale?

    A quale is the singular form of the plural qualia.  Qualia are a linguistic attempt to describe the subjective experience of consciousness.

    Pain and happiness are qualia. Physicist  Max Tegmark argues that consciousness itself is a quale. Our experience of colour is a quale. Any subjective experience our consciousness allows us to feel is a quale: sadness, joy, wonder, epiphany.

    We do not know what we are or how we work.  We do not know whether mind and body are one and hence our mental states are merely a production of our physical mind and body. Or whether by contrast subjective consciousness is a law of nature – a physical “force” or object in its own right.  Perhaps we are more than the sum of our physical parts.

    I know that “I am”, but I do not know what I am.  The question of consciousness and its nature has puzzled us for millennia and in some senses, we are no further forward in our understanding than we were back in the times of Plato and Aristotle.

    We may have sent man to the moon. Man may have traced our origins to stardust. We may have posited the Big Bang and forecast Big Crunches or Big Chills but we are no further forward in understanding how, what, why or where we are.

    As a matter of “belief” I think science will eventually give us all the answers we seek to the meaning of life, the universe and everything. Neuroscience is already using techniques such as MRI scanning to spot the neural correlates to qualia. We can already control machinery using thought alone. The Human Brain Project seeks to understand cognition and to map and simulate the human brain.

    In the meantime, we are left wondering whether we are mere information processing systems and whether the processing of that information leads to subjective feelings.  Has evolution given us pain and pleasure to secure the survival of the selfish gene?  Or is there more to it than that? I don’t know and currently no one else does either.

    Leading writers I have dipped into include:

    Susan Blackmore

    Daniel Dennett

    Oliver Sacks

  • Can Artificial Intelligence dream of electric sheep?

    Can Artificial Intelligence dream of electric sheep?

    I have been captivated for many years by the thoughts of David Deutsch and was relieved to hear he is still a believer in the power of science.

    Physics has created the human mind; physics aided by the human mind can certainly create general artificial intelligence.

    Deutsch’s intuition is that general AI will only emerge when we have a shift, a giant leap forward, in philosophy. We need to think about the question differently.

    The Deep Mind program that won at Go, however magnificent the achievement, worked within a closed system, a “game” bounded by rules.  Is the universe merely a game bounded by rules? Perhaps so. And if so, then perhaps however complex and all encompassing, those rules may one day be codified and understood in their entirety.

    If Deep Mind were to teach itself the rules of the universe, would it become a person? Would it have consciousness? Would it qualify as general artificial intelligence?

    Intuitively we know what consciousness is, even if we don’t know how it works. And it would be difficult to argue against the sentience of a program which knew and could apply the entirety of the universe’s ruleset.

    But within the physical, mechanical rule set of the universe, what is it that gives consciousness emotion? Pleasure and pain (in the mental as well as physical sense)?

    It seems to me you can not (or perhaps should not) have general artificial intelligence before ascertaining exactly what it is that makes us human. Or understanding consciousness fully.

    Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University has fascinating views on the biological origins of animal behaviour and yet there is so much further to go.

    A hot water bottle on a cold night gives me pleasure. That is perhaps explainable easily enough in physical, chemical terms.  Animals need a certain temperature to survive.  Warmth and comfort is good for them…and so makes them feel good.  Fine, but how exactly does this good feeling come about?

    Well, the scientists will tell us that it comes about through chemical reactions and electrical signalling.  Fine, that I can accept.  But it is till somehow unsatisfying as an answer.  Am I a mere robot? Perhaps I am.

    The questions become infinitely more complex when we try to understand our attraction to less physical comforts and pleasures.

    How about art?  And music?  What gives us that feeling of transcendence, that feeling of partly physical bliss at the sight of a Van Eck painting? Or on listening to Palestrina  or Allegri’s Miserere?

    Well, yes, it is chemical. It is electronic activity in the brain. It is dopamine or whatever the latest theory is.

    But what does that mean exactly?

    Scientists seem pretty sure that we are NOT more than the sum of our parts and so “qualia” must be solely explicable in physical terms.

    Well if that is the case (and I do not doubt it is) then we will need to ensure that robots “get” qualia as well.  And qualia are surely missing from Deep Mind.

    For Deep Mind to become a person, it must feel qualia. It must be capable of pleasure and pain. It must feel altruism, pride, fear, joy, sadness. It must know emotion.

    Or must it? If it does not, then we do indeed face The Terminator.  But perhaps The Terminator is the way the universe mostly is?  A purposeless place with no up, no down. No right, no wrong?  A place of rock and gasses and quarks and photons…

    Perhaps that is the way we found it.  But something HAS come out of nothing. Consciousness has somehow arisen from gas clouds and super novae. There is a very real sense in which we humans ARE more than the sum of our physical parts.

    So what I would add to David Deutsch’s essay is that we must track down these elusive qualia.  We must understand awe and joy and suffering at all levels.  And we must learn to gift that awe and wonder to our “artificial” people.