Weltanschauung

The Philosopher’s Stone

zenothestoic@protonmail.ch

Tag: Qualia

  • Meditation – Peace out of Chaos

    Meditation – Peace out of Chaos

    For nearly a decade, I have been adrift in a Sea of Words, documenting a relentless search for truths as a form of unashamed catharsis intended to explain myself to my own mind.

    My archive consists of hundreds of posts, recording a transition from the bad-tempered rants of an aging cynic to a state close to ataraxia—an almost undisturbed mental tranquillity.

    I have often been asked if this journey has led to any tangible conclusion, and my response is always the same: yes, but you must make the journey for yourself. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

    It does not matter what the Dalai Lama says, nor does it matter what is written in the thousands of “self-help” books that clutter the shelves of the “Wellness Industry”. What matters is whether a practice works to relieve the profound suffering of the human condition.

    I can confirm that after sixty five years of being blighted by serious, black depression, I have succeeded in besting the beast.

    The Arid Desert of Seeking

    I was a “seeker” for over thirty-five years. I looked in every corner for the “Philosopher’s Stone”—the answer to life, the universe, and everything. I studied the Book of Common Prayer for its sublime, calming language, the Buddhist sutras for their powerful remedy, and the works of modern science to see if the “men in white coats” had finally unravelled the mystery of consciousness.

    For a long time, I was seduced by the promise of the “silver bullet”. I tried every medically approved drug on offer, from SSRIs to psychedelics, in the hope of finding an instant escape from trauma and misery. I listened to cross-legged Russian windbags and diamante-spectacled gurus who promised a short cut to god and liberation for a fiver.

    I discovered that most of these “merchants of dreams” are cynical fakes. They offer “McMindfulness”—a fashion accessory for the busy professional—rather than a genuine path out of the pit. I learned that you cannot buy your way into Nirvana. The answer lies within, and it requires a level of persistence and rigorous self-discipline that few are willing to apply.

    The Rigor of the Daily Path

    My own success began not with the “blinding flash” of enlightenment, but with a determined, daily commitment to meditation practice. For the past four years, I have followed a routine that would seem to most like living in a closed monastic order.

    Each morning begins with at least one hour (often two) of sitting meditation before I even get out of bed. I no longer worry about “technique” or whether I am “getting it right”. I sit in comfort, following my breath and occasionally repeating a simple mantra of my own making.

    Through my practice, I have proved to myself that the subconscious can be trained. The damaging “scripts” of worry and rumination that once ran like well-worn tracks through my mind have been overwritten by more beneficent patterns. When I meditate, the world recedes, and I am left (more often than not) in a place of fecund emptiness where all seems well.

    The second pillar of my practice is meditative exercise. I perform slow, sloth-like Pilates or Yoga for an hour or two every day. This is not a sweaty marathon but a rhythmic, deliberate stretching that deepens my inner calm. Lying back on my mat, I am often flooded with a sensation of mild ecstasy—what the scientists might call an endocannabinoid high, but what I experience as pure, unadulterated peace.

    The Result: Life as a Meditation

    Has this practice changed my life? I can say, without any shade or shadow of doubt, that it has. I find that my entire existence has become a meditation. I am no longer a character in a book that has already been written; I have become an autonomous agent capable of authoring my own reality.

    This “Proof of the Pudding” is (mostly!) visible in how I greet the world:

    1. The Absence of Conflict: I have learned to let go of the need to be right. I no longer engage with the “Pigs,” “Salesmen,” and “Trolls” who once irritated me so intensely. I have withdrawn from the “Human Zoo” of politics and business, recognizing it as a zero-sum game of greed and power play.
    2. A Raised Hedonic Baseline: My default state is now mostly one of calm and acceptance. The Black Dog that pawed at my door for over six decades has more or less disappeared.
    3. Oneness with the Background: I often feel the sensation of fading into the environment, being absorbed into the beauty of the natural world. Whether I am pruning fruit trees or watching a kestrel hover over the marshes, I often feel a sense of almost mystical unity that requires no god or dogma to explain.

    The Simple Rule

    We live in Puzzle’s Stable (like the dwarves in Narnia’s Last Battle), surrounded by paradise but unable to see it because we are blinded by our own small vanities and concerns. We treat our planet like a slaughterhouse and our fellow men as competitors to be crushed.

    Once you come to know a quiet mind, you realize that the world does not need more entrepreneurs or tech titans or politicians seeking to own the planet. The world needs no crusades or missiles, no endless brutality.

    The world needs people who are willing to stop and listen, go inwards.  To smell the flowers. Who yearn only for peace and decency.

    I have arrived at a final conclusion; my Weltanschauung is complete. Nothing matters except how you treat others. In a seemingly meaningless universe, the only “truth” is the imperative to treat every sentient being with the kindness and decency we would wish for ourselves.

    The Book of Common Prayer speaks of the “peace which the world cannot give”.   And yet, through the simple act of sitting in silence and reflecting on my own behaviour, peace is exactly what I have found.

    If you are standing at the edge of an abyss, you have nothing to lose. Give it a go. The path is long and arduous (or at least it was in my case), but the reward is a window onto the soul that reveals a world of infinite beauty.

    Image: Claude: Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebekah, 1648. The National Gallery, London

  • On Choosing Happiness

    On Choosing Happiness

    I believe on any number of counts, including personal experience, that we have the power to choose to be happy but that the road is not altogether straightforward.

    Our philosopher friends would tell us that happiness is a “quale” – one of a number of different “qualia” which we humans can experience. Qualia are subjective conscious experiences and other examples include emotions such as sadness or anger, or the taste of wine, the redness of an evening sky, the joy in music.

    A quale is “what it subjectively feels like to”….feel sad or happy, or even to be a bat. Or to stare at beauty or ugliness and feel something about it. It is simply the way things seem to us. The nature and even the existence of qualia is a hotly debated topic and Wikipedia has a fair selection of current views on the matter.

    Need this debate worry a seeker of happiness? Not if you are one of the lucky few who by nature get up in the morning with a smile on their face and warm instantly to the day.

    To those of us not so favoured in our disposition, it would augur well to think a little on the subject of happiness and to ponder what it might be and where it might come from.

    I have said elsewhere that much has been written on consciousness, but little empirically proved. In relation to qualia it is fair to say that nothing has been proved as to how or why they arise.

    Progress has indeed been made on what philosophers of mind like to call the “easy” problem of consciousness. The behavioral aspects. Neuroscientists and their learned brethren have made much progress in mapping the neural correlates of our actions and experiences – we are learning to see which parts of the brain light up when we raise our hand, see a bright light, or have an orgasm.

    We most of us readily accept that these are all physical attributes of our make up. That part of us, our brain, which enables us to drive a car, speak, or go to work belongs very much to the physical realm. While we have a very long way to go before answering the “easy” questions of consciousness, few would doubt that the answers will come from physics and its derivative disciplines.

    The “hard” question of consciousness (a term coined by philosopher David Chalmers) is the problem of explaining why and how sentient organisms have qualia or phenomenal experiences. How and why such experiences arise from the simple atoms we are made of.

    As Chalmers put it:

    It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

    My own preference is to believe that this aspect of consciousness, just “is”. That phenomenal experience is a fundamental aspect of nature in the same way as electromagnetism or gravity.

    Phenomenal experience is what you get when matter is arranged a certain way. Where it comes from or why we may never know. It is irreducible – you can’t look into it and expect to find anything deeper. In the same way we may have to accept that electromagnetism just “is” or that matter may be made up of infinitely small strings of vibrating energy.

    Where does all that leave you as a seeker of happiness? It leaves you in the position of needing to explore what factors, internal and external, physical and mental, will produce in you this subjective experience we call happiness.

    Happiness is a pleasant or joyful emotion we subjectively feel within us. We take pleasure in our lives, in our work, in our families and all those around us. We are positive, we are hopeful and often as a result, kind and loving.

    What external, physical factors may help to bring about such a state? Taking care of our material well being first and foremost, although the ascetic may take a different view. Looking after our health, eating and drinking properly, finding warmth, shelter and medicine when we need it. Exercising, being engaged, active in the world.

    Some of us will have different external needs to others. I may crave peace, silence and nature, others the excitement of the urban sprawl and the company of fellow humans. But whatever it is, this is the easiest part of happiness – you can mostly fix it.

    The internal, mental elements are something else and here it is not yet clear where you can choose and when your material constitution chooses for you.

    Here there is overlap between our own volition and introspection and the way our brain is wired, but both can be fixed. And my certainty is that the mechanics of so fixing our physical machinery will become ever more sophisticated and effective – thanks of course to science.

    Even if happiness is irreducible – even if like its fellow qualia it’s instantiation in base matter remains a mystery, we will become ever more able to induce that state.

    If we are physically broken we must try to fix ourselves – our brain that is. My friend Alfred seems to have made great steps in that direction with the use of psilocybin.

    The volitional part requires us to consider choice: are we free to choose? Do we have free will? We must proceed on the basis that we are so free – to concede to determinism is unlikely to ease the mind.

    And what mental effort must we make to enter the land of the blessed?

    Belief, above all we must cultivate belief. Belief in ourselves. Belief that even if the universe has no meaning or purpose pe se, we can create that for ourselves. Kindness also – we must extend it to ourselves and others. Love, by any other name.

    And interest and knowledge and beauty and good things. We must sing and paint and draw and dance – we must pour our thoughts and actions into those things we know creates in us the subjective experience we so desire.

    Have I gone too far? Will I be accused by the skeptical physicalist of spouting new age nonsence and airy-fairy bullshit?

    Perhaps so, but to such people I would say “this is how I see it”, “this is how I try to achieve happiness and often achieve it”. If for some of my readers I manage to bring a smile of recognition to their face, then I too will feel a measure of happiness and achievement for having done so.

  • Original thinking or garbled trope?

    Original thinking or garbled trope?

    I am interested in expressing my own thoughts and reading the original thoughts of others. But too often writers feel obliged to offer up a digest or synthesis of what they have read rather than contributing anything new or original.

    I am well aware that my own thoughts have been deeply informed by others. I am often unconscious of that fact when expressing myself. Yet I try to voice feelings and opinions which are genuinely my own.

    What use if I merely quote Liebnitz or any of my other favorites? Better that than Trump or any of the other boorish ignoramuses of our time, but less of a contribution to society than something fresh.

    It is far from easy to dig deep into one’s psyche and to offer anything new. Indeed, if you were to believe Ecclesiastes, you would come to the conclusion that there is nothing new.

    And yet there assuredly is and from time to time a philosophy or view will pop out which is genuinely and alarmingly fresh.

    Often as not the new will usher in something every bit as dystopian as the new of old, but just occasionally something genuinely useful and peaceful but also revolutionary may emerge.

    Or that is my hope. I was reading through blogs on counter culture this morning. Whatever that expression means. I often consider anarchy, socialism, religious thought and even occasionally conventional centrist politics.  Without much satisfaction.

    There must be some good to be had somewhere. This morning I was reading an article from Sue Stevenson at Discombobula.

    Whether she was joking or not, she suggested that politicians in Australia be served magic mushrooms on toast.

    Researchers announced a few years ago that the psilocybin in magic mushrooms has the ability to foster “sustained changes in outlook and political perspective” for people suffering depression. Even better, those changes are “in the direction of increased nature relatedness and decreased authoritarianism.”

    Now there is an original thought, although I imagine a few of the Flower Power mob back in the 60’s felt much the same way. Which, according to lore, was why psychedelics were banned back in the day. Some say because the newly awakened young were refusing to enlist for the Vietnam war following their psychedelic enlightenment.

    But wait. Do not pass go, do not shut me down in fury and derision. For our Sue has a serious point whether she meant it or not.

    Let me explain. We are the slaves of our Darwinian origins, our evolution. Even the mildest of us will fight tooth and nail for our own survival, when push comes to shove.  We will trample over people on our way to the lifeboats on the Titanic, we will kill and maim and abuse any who stand in our way.

    I am unable to suppress often felt irritation over all manner of things. Which is all very well when I am locked away in my hermetic recreation of Skellig Michael. Faced more closely with my fellow man, I am prone to behave less charitably than I would like. And I am no Ghengis Khan, no Donald Trump. I have no desire to dominate or conquer. I just want to be left alone, as Garbo is reputed to have said.

    My point is that we need to recreate ourselves.  We need to escape from our origins or no amount of good thought or deed will make for a better or kinder world.

    We have had good religious thought for as long as man has existed and when you strip away the claptrap of belief, much of it has something useful to say about how to live in peace with each other.

    But we can not. We did not evolve to live in peace with each other or our planet. We were bred, like the rest of the animal kingdom, for survival – ours – at the expense of everybody else’s.

    And so back to Sue.

    The out of the box, the unusual, the un-thought of.  That is what interests me. Re-engineering our genome, altering our emotions for the better. Increasing our good qualia and reducing our bad.

    Good on you Sue. I agree with you.

     

  • Creating God

    Creating God

    I do not believe that the concepts of “god” and science are incompatible. Provided we accept that we have created the concept of “god” in the first place and that through science we have the means to become godlike.

    Qualiacomputing is run by people with the impressive aim of discovering what triggers our feelings, our emotions, our “qualia”.   These people believe that qualia have a mathematical, scientific basis and hence can be re-created and manipulated. That qualia represent certain brain states – those of harmony (in the case of pleasant states) and disharmony in states of malaise and pain.

    I follow their website with interest. Like their friend the fascinating philosopher  David Pearce, they wish to save the world through science. To make us happy and good, well and altruistic through altering our genetic make up.

    I responded as follows to a recent post:

    My own worldview seems to accord mostly with your own. Of course I have no scientific basis for my view, merely intuition and disconnected theorizing. Nonetheless for what it is worth my conclusion is that everything we conscious entities feel, suffer or enjoy is, at bottom, a quale. Spirituality is, for example, the quale we “enjoy” when certain external factors put our mind into a certain state.

    By way of example ritual (church music, incense, incantation, intonation of the psalms) can put me into a state where I feel at one with the world and seem to be connected to some sense of the numinous.  And I am an atheist or at best agnostic.

    How does this come about? And does it suggest that there is a deity “out there” or perhaps at least some pantheistic or Jungian uber consciousness?

    My belief is that it comes about through electrical and chemical reactions in my brain which smell, music and rhythm cause. Call this reductionist if you will. Hence I do not believe that a deity is “out there”. Nonetheless like Pascal, I believe we should act as if there was.

    I believe in a sense that we make our own deity and certainly our own meaning. But at heart we do so through the basic laws of physics. To use your own terminology through “harmony”, by creating certain states of rhythm and harmony in our brains which cause us to feel in a certain way. To experience certain qualia.

    And we “should” feel those qualia for the world to evolve in a better and kinder way.  We “need” to feel those qualia. To manufacture, bring about and encourage those qualia. Hence I firmly believe in the sort of project you are aiming at: to alter our qualia for the better, to raise our hedonic set point.

    I believe that to do so makes for a better world. I believe that the application of science through the methods you have suggested (genetic engineering for instance) will enable us to create what the religious has never been able to create – a heaven on earth.

    Is that spirituality? Or is it reductionist and bare, feeling-less science?  I do not believe you should separate the two. If “god is within” as so many of the world’s religions postulate, then surely we should use science to amend and adjust the “within” to achieve the bliss, beauty and love we so sadly lack. We created “god” in our own image. It is we who now have the chance to become godlike – perhaps in the way that Frank Tipler envisaged. Or, in a slightly more traditional and religious way, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

  • If God could be killed, it’d be dead already

    If God could be killed, it’d be dead already

    I have been following  Qualia Research Institute and Qualia Computing.  My attention was recently caught by an article on  personal identity views.

    I quote from the Abstract:

    Personal identity views (closed, empty, open) serve in philosophy the role that conservation laws play in physics. They recast difficult problems in solvable terms, and by expanding our horizon of understanding, they likewise allow us to conceive of new classes of problems. In this context, we posit that philosophy of personal identity is relevant in the realm of ethics by helping us address age-old questions like whether being born is good or bad. We further explore the intersection between philosophy of personal identity and philosophy of time, and discuss the ethical implications of antinatalism in a tenseless open individualist “block-time” universe.

    I believe that you may well have to have a tendency towards existential anxiety to be interested in such matters. I have that and I am interested. However I am also wary of endless thinking, endless philosophy.

    I have no qualm with “thought experiments” per se ( which have lead to many scientific breakthroughs) but I believe the matters contained in this article are fruitless in terms of speculation unless they can be tested and acted upon.

    I like these guys, I like what they have to say. But I would like to see some action. I would like to see some progress towards the “Abolition of Suffering“.

    I therefore responded as follows on their website:

    While I am interested in your article and indeed in your website as a whole, has the time not come to cease to speculate and to actively progress and investigate how to measure and improve qualia?

    You and I and everyone around us (or most of them) are living as “closed individuals”. I do not believe anyone other than a mystic or tripper has witnessed any other type of existence.

    And once the meditation or psilocybin trip is over, even those individuals return from unified consciousness back to the state of “closed individual”.

    So what needs to be done to eliminate suffering?

    Can the beneficial effects of psilocybin be prolonged indefinitely? Can some other method of increasing our joy and decreasing our pain (permanently) be found?

    I am not sure that any of the theories you describe above represent any law of physics. I am not sure that any such theory gets us any further forward.

    We need to take practical steps and hope that these will confirm or refute such theories.

    I am done with theorizing. I want progress.

    Perhaps I should become a psychonaut.

  • 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.