Square Soap Bubbles

I have suggested the image of a square soap bubble to help in understanding how one can appear to be discrete, autonomous, separate, and yet be part of all that exists, unified with world and all that happens within it.  I find it helpful. The bubble is discrete, separate, has a distinct identity, yet at the same time, no part of it has an independent existence.

Here is Maturana on a similar theme:

Systems as composite entities have a dual existence, namely, they exist as singularities that operate as simple unities in the domain in which they arise as totalities, and at the same time they exist as composite entities in the domain of the operation of their components.  The relation between these two domains is not causal; these two domains do not intersect, nor do the phenomena which pertain to one occur in the other” (2002, Cybernetics & Human Knowing, 9:5–34)

 

 

The bounds of rationality

Take some flat tiles. Arrange them together to cover a small area. If you live in a flat place, you can make the resulting surface quite large. As you are of human size, it will not be possible to notice that the local impression of flatness contrasts with the large-scale properties of the Earth, which is approximately spherical, and hence not flat.

Take some uncontroversial propositions as premises. Combine them and reason deductively to arrive at new propositions. If your starting premises are rich, you can generate a large set of related propositions related to the first by deduction. These, too, appear uncontroversial, and compel agreement. A recondite theorem by Kurt Gödel assures you that there are macroscopic properties of the set of propositions that are “uncontroversial” that you will not encounter in your purely local reasoning.

Reasoning is always local: from these propositions to those. Rationalists believe that reasoning delivers certainty, and is a fine basis for belief. But if we look at the application of reasoning in all domains, we find bizarrely incompatible belief sets. Where these belong to exotic others, we interpret them as superstition, religion, culture, anything but reason. Our reasoning, so it goes, should not be prey to such pollution. Yet in the most exotic and incompatible cultures, we still find the clothes of reason; arguments are built with premises and conclusions. The premises, we say, are no longer uncontroversial. Those others do not seem to be aware of the limits of their reasoning.

Within contemporary Western scientific discourse, every attempt is made to keep out the spooks of religion, the chimera of mere culture, and the fabrications of fantasy, we seem to detect in the exotic others. But in discussion of human individuals, or persons, there arises a peculiar entity, the psychological subject, to whom agency is attributed, and with which we identify. We quibble about its exact makeup and constitution, even its location, but it would be very upsetting to discover that it might be no more real than Krishna, Gabriel, Satan or Mary Poppins. For if it were to be banished, we should no longer be able to establish meaningful premises that referred to our valued selves.

Discussion of the person sometimes refers to a body, but more frequently, and importantly, it refers to the locus of feelings, sentiments, and experience. Attempts to naturalise the presumed domain of experience have led to such unstable suggestions as the equation of the activity of brain with “mind”. The presumption of a cognitive system that causally gives rise to actions is another such attempt. Phenomenological perspectives share the belief of neurophysiological reductionists that there is a one-person domain of lived experience that could, in principle, be naturalised.

Lurking underneath all such efforts is some kind of P-world assumption that is tied to the notion of the present moment, the here-and-now for a subject, in which qualia exist, arising from sensorimotor embedding in a world. Time, and the relation between subject and world, are inextricably intertwined. Furthermore, the P-world is conventionally held to be distinct from, and prior to, the fabric of conceptual structure required to imbue the human world with stable entities and forms of organisation.

But the agent with its P-world is, itself, a pre-theoretic assumption of a kind with the pre-theoretic assumptions of other cultures. It is a Protestant, post-Enlightenment creation, upon which we have founded legal systems, ethical systems, states, and our (not-so) modern world.

When we recognize this, and accept that some such assumption will always underlie our discussions about ourselves, we see that we need to place bounds on rationality. It does not extend everywhere. We will always have to have discussions with others whose beliefs, no matter how scientifically schooled, are radically different from our own. This requires diplomacy. We need to learn to speak with caution.

 

You are the border of me

First, we recognize that we are committed, somehow, to the notion of the P-world: the domain of first person singular, the now, extended into the specious present.

Then we recognize that it is hard to find the borders of the P-world in space-time.  We can track the limits of the senses, but memory, feeling and emotion ensure that we have a hard time finding borders.

Then we realize that the specious present extends into the future through the (Bayesian) notion of prediction.  Most things in the P-world are utterly predictable if we adopt a sufficiently modest temporal window.

Agents, or other sources of action, in the P-world introduce limits to predictability.  They thus represent a border.

You are the border of me.

Addendum: If we engage in strictly synchronized behavior, then we become much more predictable for each other, and the border recedes.

PPS: The hell of solitary confinement in prison is the openness, not the fictitious boundaries.

 

Resonators

The pharasaic artform, the resonator, is the experiential equivalent of the Newtonian three-ball problem.  There are three media elements.  Any two together will lend itself to the creation of a simple narrative.  But three at once, with no actual connection between them, becomes entirely unpredictable.  As you try to see the whole thing, to frame it in your view finder, and exert maximal grip, it defies a predictive analysis.  Micro-fluctuations become amplified, symmetry is broken by a random event one level down.  This lightweight structure, where meaning arises without effort, this is you-here-now-awareness-attention.  It is a tool, designed like a mantra.  And it must be allowed to run for at least 30 seconds.  Otherwise, that ain’t part of the game.

 

Husserl and the P-world

In my P-world musings, I am at some pains to avoid pinning down the P-world.  Indeed, the P-world is not an object, or thing of some sort, and considered as such, a P-world does not exist.  Husserl seems to have trodden a similar path in his later work, the Crisis of European Science.  In that work, he makes liberal use of the notion of the Lebenswelt, which, as far as I can see, is roughly co-extensive with the P-world.  Like any good phenomenologist, he clings rigorously to the centrality of lived experience, but with the Lebenswelt, he seems to move further from the silly idea that there might exist a technique that would allow you to capture, and then describe, experience in some raw form.  He also correctly points out the tragic consequences of ignoring the P-world/Lebenswelt by science.

 

Redefining the explanatory gap

So much blood and ink has been spilt trying to bridge the gap between something called mind and something called world. The gap I seek to bridge is instead between something called experience and something called language. This we can do. And with that the game is won.

 

Mysteries and dissent

So I’m reading Tecumseh Fitch (paper here) on the Biolinguistic Enterprise.  He asserts that there are 3 extremely hard problems that stand in the way of bringing biolinguistics to the stage of real science.  Oddly, I seem to have something to say about all three, and from the way he poses the problems, I doubt we are in any danger of reaching agreement any time soon.

The 3 problems are:

1. We don’t know how brains generate minds,
2. We don’t know how genes control development form single cell to complex organism, and
3. We don’t have a theory of meaning.

My brief comments on each after the break.

 

Film and subjectivity

The camera, and to a greater extent, the moving camera, have truly messed with our notions of experience and objectivity.  The movie editing techniques that have proliferated do not respect the view from one point of view.  In that, they insist upon a third person view of the world.  Weird. Wherewith with that?

 

Causal explanation is tricky

Causal explanation is tricky. I have in mind what I think is the Aristotelian distinction between Formal Cause and Efficient Cause. Of course I interpret these from the standpoint of a soggy philosopher/scientist in 2009, so Aristotle would probably not concur. Efficient Cause is closest to folk usage of the word. A causes B iff A precedes B, A necessarily gives rise to B, etc. Let us not get into necessary and sufficeint conditions, but suffice it to acknowledge that often, this kind of causation is what we mean by ’cause’. Formal Cause is completely different. A full dynamical description of, say, a pendulum, that captures essential properties of the system (typically position of the bob over time) is a formal causative account, but it does not contain any notion of efficient cause. With a full dynamical description, we have determinism, but, critically, you can run time backwards or forwards, and the lawfulness remains the same.

Now fans of efficient cause like to distinguish between explanation and mere description. Formal cause, as I interpret it here, is description. But I claim that it is as full a causal story as one can have. The notion of mere description sugests that description is theory neutral. It is not. In providing a description of the movement of the pendulum over time, I have selected some properties of the world as relevant (idealized bob position) and some as irrelevant (pendulum colour). Description is never theory neutral. Efficient cause fans seem to suggest that a causative account takes a theory neutral description and improves on it by adding causal relations within a theory. I would argue that one can do no better than describe, and that description is the building of a theory.

Most of the time, the desiderata of a full formal dynamical description are not available to us. System boundaries are unclear, knowledge is incomplete, the objects of our attention are subject to too many uncontrolled influences, etc. That is just the everyday messy world of observational science. Efficient causal stories try and limit this complexity by positing hypothetical idealized entities A and B, which stand in causal relation.

By preferring formal causal accounts, we are acknowledging that any selection of A and B is the imposition of a theory, and full description is the best we can do. Efficient causal stories are just that: stories. They need langauge for expression (which formal causal accounts do not: they are captured by equations). Language gives us causal stories. They are important in coming to grips with the world in a common sense way. But they are not privileged. Nor do they trump formal causal accounts.

 

The scientific reading of entrails

This argument has to be worked out in some more detail, but in essence, given my claims about the match between the phenomenal world and the nervous system/organism, it is clear that one might develop a probe of ones self by exposure to stochastic stimuli: like listening to static. But unstructured noise, like static is not rich. Entrails, and tarot cards, and such, are uniformly very rich in structure, albeit without any additional forcing of interpretation. Thus it is not too surprising that they can serve as sounding boards for reading oneself, to find out what is latent within oneself, but not otherwise triggered by the environment.

In a similar vein, the interpretation of coincidences may prove to be a useful technique. Coincidences are important for illustrating what it is that the subject sees. In this way, the world is the sounding board.

More on this anon.