A stammering sheepdog

In my son's stammering, I feel his same urge to "just spit it out", with the same concern and frustration that the words aren't coming. He is not self consciousness yet, and all you see is his dogged determination to soldier until his meaning is clear.

I find myself latching onto a word and cycling over and over from one sentence to the next, waiting for the next latch word to cycle to. Similarly the same ideas repeat, waiting for the next one that fits. I intellectually circle round and round a theme until finally a few words come and some of the meaning is captured.

What a sight I must be- A stammering sheepdog struggling to group ideas that are decidedly unsheepish.

The Christina Meme

Rachel Maddow noted on her show that the conventional wisdom is that even a ban on selling assault weapons to people on the Terrorist watch list would be defeated. Why is that? In response to the tragedy in Tuscon, Rabbi Joshua Grater calls for moral conversation. What sort of conversation does that need to be, and what do we know about the sort of language that is required?

We face opponents who speak to universals that expand their "base" far beyond that of the Christian right. Due to the impotence of Rove's approach in the 2008 election, the right recalibrated their attention to focus on more primitive memes that function not just on relatively higher cognitive centers that religious language work on, but on far more fundamental brain stem responses.

Does it mean that the Right has better propaganda and that progressive leadership needs to get better at manipulation of the American psyche? Far from it. We begin by observing that the Right is tapping into the power of what Paul Tillich calls ultimate concerns. Martin Luther King became interested in how Tillich intended to expand the religious message to those who consider themselves agnostic or secular. He saw even in the sixties that progressives were losing touch with a deep source of motivation to act on ultimate concerns.

As those who concern themselves with religious matters, the service we can provide our non religious brethren is connection with those ultimate concerns. Whether Tillich was or ever will be convincing to this group, Martin Luther King's objection to Tillich was that he went to far in his apologetics- that it was difficult to understand how Tillich's personal God was anything more than a "mere symbol". Yet Tillish's symbols are the units of consciousness that some neurologists call cognitive maps, and others popularly call memes, and if anything is to be learned from current neurological research, there is nothing "mere" about them. Mainstream theories in neuroscience state that the memes of the cerebral cortex have connection to the brain stem where modeling of the intentionality of potential prey or predators is shared with many other species. Down in the non conscious centers of the brain stem, these memes are inextricably linked with primal feelings of fear, fight or flight, sex and so on. Researcher Antonio Damasio refers to these deeply penetrated narratives as "maps" of actions. It is wrong to think of these negatively as "baser" feelings, since included among them are positive emotions of nurturing, loyalty and courage a mother bear feels in protecting her cubs. There is substantial fossil evidence of similar behavior from dinosaurs that extends well beyond guarding a nest of eggs or a clutch of its newly hatched offspring. So the meme of the parent protecting the innocent is not just ancient- it is a unit of consciousness that is so deep in our evolutionary makeup that it existed prior to the rise of mammals. The points here are multiple but for the thread I am pursuing the point to keep in mind is that there are memes that are so deeply wired into our minds that they can gives us powerful motivation to act.

I am not suggesting that the solution involves everyone holding moral conversations in the language of the Judeo-Christian memeplexes that are deeply jacked in into our brain stems. Although these can powerfully motivate people to change their lives, heterogeneous societies require a more inclusive language. Tillich's notion of ultimates went well beyond a prescription for a specific religious perspective, or in fact what we typically think of as religion. Everyday we come into contact with people expressing ultimate concerns that are not overtly religious. We've seen the bumper sticker: "You can take my gun when you pry it from my cold dead fingers." The political reality that keeps bludgeoning progressives is that the Right is hooked into multiple interlocking sets of memes that their members take very seriously. For gun owners as an example, it's not just an isolated issue but part of an interlocking memeplex (or if you like, Weltanschauung) expressing a deeply held ultimate concern regarding rugged individualism and so on. They take it very personally. Progressives in general regard such a cognitive style with the suspicion because of the its frequent co-occurrence with self delusion, bigotry, authoritarianism and so on.

There is no such necessary correlation, and progressives should not allow the Right to take ownership of Ultimate Concerns any more that they should allow them to own the flag or patriotism. Until progressives get hooked into memeplexes that convey such deeply held ultimate concerns, we will keep losing elections. I'm not saying that progressives don't get passionate and don't care about important issues. We all feel sad we lost the House and if nothing changes, we will feel even sadder when we lose the Senate in 2012. But unless an issue touches us personally, very few of us have fire in our belly about it. The battle is being lost because progressives and those who occasionally vote for progressives are alienated from the perspective that what they do or don't do on political issues really matters in an ultimate sense.

As we approach Martin Luther King day, we can consider not just the platitudes and general ideas associated with Martin, but look more deeply at a subject that concerned him so much that he devoted his dissertation to it. It was not an obscure theological point, but one that had enormous social impact. When we read his work devoted to the analysis of two Postmodern Christians, we find that MLK parts ways with Tillich over his juxtaposition of the ontological discussion of God versus what Tillich perhaps unfortunately characterized as "symbolic" representations of a Personal God. MLK recognizes that Tillich means symbol in a very rare sense, that a "genuine symbol participates in the reality of that which it symbolizes." The full depth of this participation with representations (as being the only reality that humans actually ever talk about) is something Owen Barfield expands on in his works, but its full epistemological ramifications elude the young MLK. To him, the juxtaposition Tillich makes between the ontological and symbolic terminology make it seem as if Tillich's Personal God is either an inconsistency or some sort of charade that a minister is expected to foist on his congregation. MLK decides on the former and though he recognizes that Tillich denies he is positing an impersonal God, I believe MLK incorrectly concluded that TIllich failed to address the inconsistency. Whether he was right about Tillich or not, MLK was brilliant in his response to the problem of translating from the ontological inconceivables to practical religious and moral action. I personally think the young MLK felt compelled to cut his scholarly work short by the urgency of a quickly approaching moment in history. If there were more time, I think he would have more fully described his solution that is later actions communicate. Individuals do need to feel a personal connection with an ultimate concern, and they need to feel it intensely. He knew that he could not rely solely on the terminology of overtly religious symbols and myth because they are confusing to a lay audience in a world where the account of nominalism and literalism is dominant.

Leaders on the right can dip freely into a vast language that touches the ultimate concerns of potential voters. A leader adept at metaphoric language like President Obama can overcome this limitation and reach others so that they do take the message personally. In the Tuscon speech Obama juxtaposed the powerful memes of the hopeful innocent versus the responsible parent or adult who must set an example. Progressive candidates unschooled in the art of literature find it exceptionally difficult to speak to ultimate concerns with the skill that Obama does. Unlike those who cynically advocate greater propaganda sophistication, Obama establishes a personal connection between idea and deed that is intellectually honest. It is here that we can make a difference, We can help our candidates by crafting ways of communicating to commonly held concerns that potential voters for progressive candidates take very personally­.

That's where we can continue in the struggle for establishing personal connections with meaning that so concerned Dr. King.


References:

• Martin Luther King's dissertation, ‘‘A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman,’’ 15 April 1955, (link)
• Paul Tillich, "History of Christian Thought" (link)
• Owen Barfield "Saving the Appearances: a Study in Idolatry" (paperback)
• Antonio Damasio, "Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain", (kindle, paperback)

Dennet- no brain in vat, or just no brain?

A few years ago, I picked up a book because it’s title referred to a subject I have always been interested, and some skims of various chapters contained many unfamiliar concepts. Unfortunately, upon sitting down to read the book, I was stunned at the shoddy thinking evident in the first few pages. Later on, I was flabbergasted that the person who wrote the book was not some pulp nonfiction hack writer but is actually a well-regarded philosopher in the field of the philosophy of mind.

The point of the introductory passage was to explain why a popular thought experiment known as a “Brain in a vat” is not just technically difficult, that it is impossible in fact.

For those unfamiliar with the “Brain in a Vat” thought experiment, it is exactly the same problem presented by the Matrix’s "body in a vat" idea. The only variation is minor- the body is subtracted leaving just the brain. The key point of the problem is that the person does not know what is real because their access to their senses is being manipulated so that the person would believe that an artificially constructed world was real.

The book “Consciousness Explained” states that this scenario is impossible in fact because the number of computations necessary for such a simulation is high. Further, the problem is “insoluble” because there is a “combinatorial explosion”. However, rather than demonstrate via proof this supposed computational complexity, or site an expert in computer science that does the same, he makes inferences based on his observation of computer games to jump from “lots of computation” to make the unsupported and surprising assertion that such tedious complexity makes the problem “insoluable”/ “impossible”.

Impossible on current computers? Yes, yes, of course. But this is not what the author Daniel Dennet is asserting. He is asserting that regardless how powerful computers of the future get, the thought experiment is based on an impossible scenario.

Mr. Dennet would have done better by starting his book by consulting authorities in the field of computer science rather than making frail conjectures based on naive notions of how computer simulations work.

Anyway: Some key passages of Dennet’s proposition:

Suppose evil scientists removed your brain from your body while you slept, and set it up in a life-support system in a vat. Suppose they then set out to trick you into believing that your were not just a brain in a vat, but still up and about, engaging in a normally embodied round of activities in the real world….

But now suppose the scientists, having accomplished all this, tackle the more difficult problem of convincing you that you are not a mere beach potato, but an agent capable of engaging in some form of activity in the world. Starting with little steps, they decide to lift part of the 'paralysis' of your phantom body and let you wiggle your right index finger in the sand. They permit the sensory experience of moving your finger to occur, which is accomplished by giving you the kinesthetic feedback associated with the relevant volitional or motor signals..., but they must also arrange to remove the numbness from your phantom finger, and provide the stimulation for the feeling that the motion of the imaginary sand around your finger would provoke.

Suddenly, they are faced with a problem that will quickly get out of hand, for just how the sand will feel depends on just how you decide to move your finger. The problem of calculating the proper feedback, generating or omposing it, and then presenting it to you in real time is going to be computationally intractable of even the fastest computer, and if the evil scientists decide to solve the real-time problem by pre-calculating and “canning” all the possible responses for playback, they will just trade one insoluble problem for another: there are too many possibilities to store. In short, our evil scientists will be swamped by combinatorial explosion [sic] as soon as they give you any genuine exploration powers in this imaginary world…

…Throw a skeptic a dubious coin, and in a second or two of hefting, scratching, ringing, tasting, and just plain looking at how the sun glints on its surface, the skeptic will consume more bits of information than a Cray supercomputer can organize in a year. Making a real but counterfeit coin is child’s play; making as simulated coin out of nothing but organized nerve stimulations is beyond human technology now and probably* forever.

…One conclusion we can draw from this is that we are not brains in vats- in case you were worried. Another conclusion we can draw from this is that strong hallucinations are simply impossible!”

Does this author honestly expect that anyone with a university degree ought to draw this conclusion from this gibberish? The encapsulation of what Dennet has said is basically this: “Hey look- this is complex stuff here- it involves whatchacallits and thingadangles! What’s more there are really really lots of them to build! And it has to be really really fast! Our biggest computers can’t even do it today! Look how bad computer games are! So take it from me, this is a really really big problem.” His inferences based on Donkey Kong would be perhaps forgivable, being ignorant of advanced concepts in computer science. Apart from his poor information, what was exceptionally disappointing was the frailty of the logic being used to form his inferences and conclusions. The proposition was laced together with a pattern of thinking so tenuous that I felt embarrassed for the writer, which quickly gave way to anger for the arrogant pomposity in asking someone to pay money to read such idle thinking.

Dennet bases his conclusion on a startlingly clumsy leap which is in essence: “Since this task is so hard, it is insoluble- take it from me- a philosopher, not a computer scientist.”

To begin with, Dennet does not grasp how computer modeling works, falling into the neophyte's confusion between simulations and virtual reality. He seems to think that simulations used for predicting nuclear blast yields are programmed in a canned fashion as are virtual reality computer games.

Such simulations cannot be canned because such short cuts would defeat the very purpose of computer models. Instead, such simulations are dynamically generated. The level of confidence that scientists must have in these simulations is very high- the lives thousands of people depend on correct and exceptionally complex fluid dynamics modeling of wind flows around objects and how the complex of structure of a skyscraper interacts with such flows. The lives of millions rely on correct prediction of whether a nuclear device will function as designed or not.

Technically, there are many approaches for implementing such simulations but to illustrate how elementary an error it is to assume a computational model where there is a combinatorial explosions of predicted cases for event outcomes, consider for example constraint based approaches. These models generate simulated phenomena based on large numbers of primitives that reflect particular physical laws. Naturally it would be a monumental task to build such a model that included interactions between simulated objects at fine levels of granularity obeying all laws that typical individuals understand. Admittedly, the computer processing required for the calculations might necessitate a massively parallel design for the simulation to be able to run in real time. Bayesian evaluation might be used in place of boolean rule logic.

Clearer exposition of practical approaches would be possible except that Dennet leaves his crucial point undescribed- what exactly is it that Dennet believes presents the insoluble problem? Is he expecting the reader to so flummoxed by these vague hand waves about complexity that the reader will simply give up and take the professor's word for it?

The engineering requirement is that the simuluation encode all known physical laws and allow multiple agents interact with that simulated world.

Some Computer Science engineers might object to this exposure of Dennett's vacuousness in this way: “Well sure, the set of physical laws is closed and therefore as a finite domain it can in principle be encoded, but there may be hard limits to future computation capacity. There may be laws of physics which limit future ability to compute such massive models in real time.” But this notion doesn’t even pass muster as a frail objection.

Firstly, the simulation is self limiting. We know the laws of the physical world from what we learn of it. If there were “real” laws too complicated for the evil scientists to compute, then how would we know about these “real” laws? Things behave as “our science” observes them in the simulation to behave. Within the simulation, the person has no external point of reference, so the evil scientists are free to leave out any laws that are too hard to simulate.

Secondly, even if such a hard limit on computational power were known, it is based on a feeble understanding of how we perceive time. Each microsecond of simulated phenomena could take a millisecond, and the human mind would not know because we measures time in terms of the pace that events take place. If the events were to take place at a slower pace, by what clock would we be able to detect that the pace of events “was too slow”?

Sorry, but the model that science has of the world reduces every phenomena to a small number of fundamental laws. The evil scientists do not have the hard problem of simulating entities with free will and consciousness- (such simulations may well be computationally intractable). But correct modeling of consciousness is outside the problem domain- conscious actors can exist by rigging up other brains in other vats.

The task of representing a physical laws in a global sized simulation may be large since it would have to encode our immense knowledge of the rules of the mechanisms of nature. But because these rules represent a finite domain, and because we have the option of punting any computationally expensive rule from the model, the problem is without doubt a tractable one. Our knowledge though comprehensive and though endowed with great predictive power is in fact a finite domain, and the rules though intricate and highly interconnected form a closed system.

On a closing historical note, the idea of the Matrix was predated by the brain in a vat thought experiment which was itself just a modernized version of Descartes experiment which led to his famous conclusion, “I think, therefore I am”. It is unclear to me what purpose Dennet has in attacking the validity of this thought experiment. Though I do not believe we are Brains in Vats- that neither God nor some other entity controls our perceptions in this way, Dennet’s argument has no force and we are forced to admit that the scenario is factually possible. Dennet’s follow on to his false conclusion is that “Strong hallucinations are impossible”. If he bases this belief on this line of reasoning, he is equally mistaken. The shoddy work this writer has done convincing himself of this argument was an exceptional disappointment to me. I would have thought that modern day philosophers had better training in logic and skills in research than this.

* [my italics]

The Matrix and dialog with persons of faith

We in the west have a Weltanschauung that we are pretty cocky about. We know that we are still learning things about physics at the micro and macro boundaries of the universe, but the stuff in the middle- earth round, no such things as flying spaghetti monsters- most of us are pretty confident about stuff like that. And those who aren’t are derided as lunatics or Christians / or members of other religions.

To outsiders, people of faith seem like a queer bunch- how for example could any person of science believe in events that defy the laws of physics? The polite thing is to simply not talk about it. Well here were are on a blog, and we are free to talk about it without the social constraints. You won’t destroy a friendship, if the discussion gets to uncomfortable you can walk away, and so on.

The movie “The Matrix” introduced to many the notion that it is at least scientifically conceivable that we are living in a world that is vastly different in nature than what we currently believe. For example, what if instead of the machines controlling the sensory inputs for human beings that God does? We would be in a world pretty much exactly as everything appears to us today, but where so called miracles really do occur- where men could survive inside a fish for 3 days, that the waters of the Red Sea could part, that a man could raise another from the dead, and so on.

My conception of such a Christian Matrix does not happen to follow such a radical science fiction conception of reality. But it does have the same effect of bringing what we know of science and religious world views into accord. I develop the Christian perspective here, but a similar perspective could be applied to other faiths. My views are founded on currently thinking in the fields of epistemology, theories of perception, and the philosophy of Owen Barfield who conceived the notion of a Christian’s “directionally creator” relationship to the world.

Ruth Millikan's Biosemantics

Ruth Millikan advances the notion that representation creation ought to be analyzed by considering representation consumption rather than the representation production analysis which leads to causal/ informational accounts such as those by Fodor, Dretske, Dennis Stampe, or Mohan Matthen.

What struck me most about her paper "Biosemantics" was the sweep of her consideration of representations. Representations are fundamental to survival of extremely primitive forms of life.

"Dretske tells of a species of bacteria which orient themselves away from toxic oxygen rich surface water by attending to their magnetosomes, tiny inner magnets. This allows them to move to oxygen free water... Concentrate instead on how the systems that react to the representation work, on what these systems need in order to do their job. What they need is only that the pull be in the direction of oxygen-free water at the time...."

It looks like it is representations all the way down- since the very beginning. This very activity of making sense of sensory inputs so that the organism may react in a way beneficial to its survival exists even in organisms without brains, even in organisms without neurons or even multiple cells. So the Word is necessary at the most fundamental forms of life.

Secondly, all sensory systems are relativist.

Note also that, on the present view, representations manufactured in identical ways by different species of animal might have different contents. Thus, a certain kind of small swift image on the toad's retina manufactured by his eye lens, represents a bug, for that is what it must correspond to if the reflex it (invariably) triggers is to perform its proper functions normally, while exactly the same kind of small swift image on the retina of a male hoverfly, manufactured, let us suppose, by a nearly identical lens, represents a passing female hoverfly...

Dennett and Fodor attack Millikan's position as advocating a proposition that bacteria and paramecia have mental states- that they think. This of course is not what Millikan is proposing, and she enumerates several fundamental characteristics that differentiate human beliefs from other representations.

One implication of what Millikan is saying is that the evolution of the representations is very very old indeed. Each of the characteristics vary in sophistication. Some would be present as an innovation among higher forms of life, but still be unthinking creatures. For example, the innovation that representations can be persistently stored in order that the pattern of sensory data may be represented in the same way. This becomes the basis of learning, but note that such representations need not be true. They can be rules of thumb that work more often than not. As long as a persistent representation delivers even a modest survival advantage, over time, the weight of numbers delivers triumph over the organism without the persistent representation.

It seems immoderate to call these persistent representations "beliefs", yet that is how the literature appears to habitually refer to them. That can be forgiven, since most considerations of the functions of mind have a horizon that quickly falls off outside the set of hominids.