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 Continuity of Consciousness

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Pereira

Were the Greeks onto something when they coined the roots of the word "consciousness" and "continuity"? To be conscious is to remember the last moment of perception and to link it to the next, to have your brain relate perceptions into some coherent short term stream, so that you can feel and act on it.

Consciousness is continuity of perception. As you fall asleep, that continuity gets fragmented and you tend to forget the next moment, you lose consciousness and continuity.

Consciousness depends on the existence of the short-term cache used to process incoming data from the senses. It has to be fast, and it has to integrate the information for the deeper layers, the one that drive action and long term memory. It has to draw upon memory as well. Short term memory is limited in size because it is big on processing power. Lots of neurons required.

Current research on cognition suggests that we have a bunch of neural bundles in the brain that do this work all in parallel, that these compete for bandwidth, and the resultant dynamic network signals are what we can call consciousness. The signals that have control of the bus at the time, and that pulse it to make us act and remember are the Self.

This model does not address the big question of the Me. What makes a writer want to take this flow of perceptions, call them ideas, record them on secondary external memory and publish them so as to possibly communicate and affect the behaviour of others. The Will to Power?

What links us to the world as Beings. This is what the better religions are struggling with, and Zen Buddhism comes close to understanding it when it concludes that the universe is Me, and that the relationships between beings is the Universe. Still, a loop. Maybe language is the issue. We have an object-oriented language, and that is a flawed model, as many programmers and programs are discovering. The world cannot be entirely described as a hierarchy of "objects" What is an object anyhow, except an integration by the senses, a model. Another loop.

Some drugs like alcohol, anaesthetics, and sleep hormones allow these neural bundles to slow down, to rest and possibly to re-organize, do to maintenance. Caffeine and other stimulants speed up the bus somehow.

We feel and act differently under these influences because our front end processing changes, the continuity of short term memory and of sensual processing changes, thus affecting our sense of self and our relation to our longer term memory and patterns of integrated behaviour.

Musicians and visual artists discover new patterns under the influence. Whether they create "better" work or play better is difficult to say, but I think that the intent is to explore different avenues, which can lead to better work when edited. Write drunk and edit sober said the late Kingsley Amis.