Persistence of Memory (updated)

IBM Maritime Device Lunenburg Museum Display

I would like to follow-up on my brief previous posts regarding continuity and consciousness after having read Piero Scaruffi's wonderful survey and synthesis on the nature of consciousness.

To be a "me" is to want to persist in time. This "want" is a big part of what we call consciousness, and Piero makes the very strong argument that you have to follow this want all the way down to elementary particles, otherwise it cannot exist, it cannot be created from the non-wants we have in current physics - both quantum and relativity based. These are objective physics, and we need a "motive" physics. Sounds silly at first glance, but there is already the seed of it in the persistence of matter. Rather than a warm grey entropy soup of energy, we have particles. They are present and atomic, and very very difficult to break-up.

They exist in time.

Stu Kauffman, the meta-biologist, in some of his later talks, asks why in the myriad ways that proteins can form are some favored over others. Adrian Bejan, the engineering theoretician, believes that there is a tendency in the physics of thermodynamics to use up as much energy as possible in the shortest time, and that that "weeds out" the things that are not persistent to the benefit of those who are, for example DNA and some of the proteins that result from interaction with it.

Maybe this tendency is a sort of meta-consciousness. We need a physics and a math that take time seriously, not just as a dimension but as history. Statistics begins to do that.

Time remains enigmatic in that it seems to be different at different scales, and of course depends on the observer. So we have a potential handle for experiments. If we can detect the presence of the "want" to persist, we have begun to detect the "C" property in physics which Scaruffi postulates must exist for consciousness to exist.

As a side observation, when the elementary particles were first split, the massive release of energy was poetically seen as a release of evil, by Oppenheimer no less. This is prescient, since the particles can be said to not "want" to be broken up and led towards the grey entropy cesspool.

And while we are on the playful side, we can agree with the sci-fi writers of the fifties and sixties that hypothesised about conscious machines not wanting to be turned off. Consciousness is the will to persistence. Building on matter's predisposition to exist with complex structures and energy patterns (say like holographic memory standing waves related to Bose-Einstein phenomena), we may make machines that become difficult to turn off. But that is a taboo observation in cognition research. Even the word "consciousness" is avoided by many, since it seems to be outside current physics.

It is telling that today, engineers struggle with the problem of making machines that are reliable, that do not break-down, when in our corner of nature, the opposite seems to be true, it is hard to stop things from living on, from being persistent and often fertile. Bacteria for example are everywhere.

Once we start using such building blocks to make machines, we may be in trouble. Even DNA and RNA like to persist way beyond the ability of transistors, who just need the excuse of a bit too much voltage or current to break. Maybe it is just a matter of finding the right temperature and chemistry as Piero alludes to in one of his chapter endings.

Our scientific tools and language (mathematics and logic) are model-biased. They are, as George Lakoff points out, metaphors for reality, firmly based in the way our brain processes sensory data. These metaphors are integrations, categorizations and ultimately simplifications. Models can be manipulated symbolically. That is the point of making one. This seems to be at odds with how nature works, despite claims that mathematics is "unreasonably effective" at explaining the world. Mathematics is unreasonably effective at explaining how we perceive the world because it is an extension of perception, it is biased towards our perceptual machinery.

That bias may be part of the problem with building cognitive and ultimately living mechanisms. Biology deals with statistical data, fuzzy numbers and processes, parallel possibility searches. Math can handle this, but not without a lot of horsepower to process the possibilities. Statistics is a good model for the macro view of such processes, and it continues to be used effectively in quantum physics. We need to invent a better conceptual language to deal with the processes of cognition. Logic is not enough.

Finally, since this blog is a ledger for insights, let me follow-up one last one from Piero, from his Web writings: that machines are conditioning us to be like them through use. Of course this is a conceit, but a functionally accurate one. We are the consciousness of the internet, and we adapt to its use, learn not to make mistakes, in the dumb way computer software wants us to be. So we are moving towards the logical model of reality that we created, we are moving closer to a culture of logic and mathematics, and it can be argued that this is a move away from higher life and ultimately a regression of our cultural heritage, as discussed here. Computer addiction is a manifestation of this. We get small rewards by doing things "right", and we get back a sensory reward, repeat and rinse.

Sam Sheppard famously said that he stays away from computers, and I have heard other creative types express that feeling, similarly to those who in the past stayed away from TV. It is a valid position, because they are time sinks, but they are also connectors to others, and when they are used for communication and creativity, they do amplify these consciousness mechanisms. The danger is the other fun stuff, the surfing modes.

The Divide

from my flickr

Just read Iain McGilchrist's book on the divided brain. There is also a documentary video that summarizes the 1000 or so pages, which is difficult if not impossible. McGilchrist has a career spanning literature and neuro-psychiatry at the highest level. His thesis, formulated over 20 years is that our thinking and perception evolves from a confrontation between the verbal analytic side of our nature and the integrative perceptual side, and ideally should flow back and forth in a sort of collaboration to achieve good things.

His book has to err on the side of denotation to prevent attacks from the scientific culture which he criticises, and that is both its strength and weakness, it has to live in a left hemisphere world, defending the right, a bit like the opponents of our current demagogues, who need to use their tactics to get though a message. It is a losing game, but one that must be played for the long term.

I want to highlight the relationship to Jane Jacobs' ideas from her book on Systems of Survival where she makes a case for the healthy confrontation between cultural guardians and commercial facilitators. This work complements and consolidates her arguments across the history of the humanities and of the sciences.

Implicitly, the book links Dewey's (and Pirsig's) ideas on Quality and morals to the continental existentialists (finally!), but there is much more work to be done bridging the philosophies of the positivists with that of the continentals, especially in our English speaking cultures. There are glints of hope, for example Lakoff and Johnson's work, but too little uptake from what I can see.

Kahneman and Pinker are also present as critics in the background of McGilchrist's arguments, against thinking fast and favoring thinking slow, and arguing for the primacy of language over music. McGilchrist forcefully responds to Pinker's attack on his web site. I am also not sure how this relates to Chomsky's embedded linguistics, but we shall see. Chomsky can be quite defensive, as Tom Wolfe writes.

Existence precedes essence is so well presented, with forceful cultural, scientific and artistic evidence by someone raised in the positivist tradition. We (the West) need to budge away from Platonism. This key to our success, our domination of the environment, may no longer work now that we are on the downside of the arc of sustainability. This crisis may be a touchpoint, who knows.

I am listening to Joni Mitchell who understood that we were heading this way, back in the late sixties.