The Edge asks whether human beings are unique, via an excerpt from the book Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique by Michael Gazzaniga, a leading neuroscientist and professor of psychology at the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind at the University of California Santa Barbara. There's quite a bit to ponder. Early on Gazzaniga says "We humans are special. All of us solve problems effortlessly and routinely." I'm not sure where he's been looking, but I find that problem-solving is seldom "effortless." But this is interesting:
Although we are made up of the same chemicals, with the same physiological reactions, we are very different from other animals. Just as gases can become liquids, which can become solids, phase shifts occur, shifts so large in implications, it becomes almost impossible to think of a foggy mist being made up of the same stuff that makes up an ice berg. And yet the different substances have the same chemical structure. In a complex relationship with the environment, very similar stuff can become quite different in its reality and structure. Indeed, I have decided something like a phase shift has occurred in becoming human. There simply is no one thing that will ever account for our spectacular abilities, aspirations and capacity to travel mentally in time to almost the infinite world beyond our present existence. Even though we have all of these connections with the biologic world from which we came, and we have in some instances similar mental structures, we are hugely different. While most of our genes and brain architecture are held in common with animals, there are always differences to be found. And while we can use lathes to mill fine jewelry, and chimps can use stones to crack open nuts, the differences are light years apart. And while, the family dog may appear empathetic, no pet understands the difference between sorrow and pity.
Also interesting is the suggestion that, by studying these differences, we learn so much more about what it means to be human.Who Are We?
Brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor addresses the TED conference (video below) with the story of her own stroke, which she studied as it was happening. Because the stroke suppressed the operations of the left hemisphere of her brain, she had an expansive, relatively unfiltered experience of the right hemisphere. She had a kind of amplified meditation experience and gained new insight into the brain's role as a conduit between the individual consciousness and everything/everybody else. Powerful stuff. (Thanks to Brian Massey for the pointer.)
The Great TurningRemind me to pay more attention to Joanna Macy...
A revolution is underway because people are realizing that our needs can be met without destroying our world. We have the technical knowledge, the communication tools, and material resources to grow enough food, ensure clean air and water, and meet rational energy needs. Future generations, if there is a livable world for them, will look back at the epochal transition we are making to a life-sustaining society. And they may well call this the time of the Great Turning. It is happening now.What do you think?
Whether or not it is recognized by corporate-controlled media, the Great Turning is a reality. Although we cannot know yet if it will take hold in time for humans and other complex life forms to survive, we can know that it is under way. And it is gaining momentum, through the actions of countless individuals and groups around the world. To see this as the larger context of our lives clears our vision and summons our courage.
Gary Wolf at Salon reviews a new book by Russell T. Hurlburt and Eric Schwitzgebel called Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic, wherein the two authors explore consciousness from their combined perspectives – Hurburt is a psychologist, and Schwtizgebel is a philosopher and the "impolite" skeptic who "boasts that with some rather basic interrogation techniques, he can impugn almost any person's credibility as a self-witness." The book is about the reliability of introspection.
The classic account of the implications of neuroscience for philosophy is Daniel Dennett's 1991 book "Consciousness Explained," in which he argues that humans are complex machines, without any extra something -- soul, mind, spirit or will -- that does not have its basis in our biological components. Dennett's philosophy is summed up by a beautiful motto he later acquired from the Italian philosopher Giulio Giorello: "Yes, we have a soul, but it's made of lots of tiny robots!"
Dennett did not convince everybody right away. His opponents pointed out that to explain something is not the same as to experience it. Consciousness is not outward behavior, but an inner fact. If we built an automaton that imitated humans, it would still not be conscious, as long as nothing within it had been programmed for consciousness. And since consciousness is inward and subjective, how could we possibly learn to create such a program, or be certain it worked?
At the book's core is about sessions in which the two authors interview a subject, called Melanie in the book, asking her questions about what she was thinking after random beeps, and wondering to what extent the observation is altering the thing (person) observed. Gary ends with a reference to contemplation in Zen, saying "perhaps Hurlburt's lowly beeper, accompanied by an uninhibited skepticism and taste for the comic, can perform some of the same work as the old style of ritual contemplation. Melanie, who begins as the subject of these experiments, promotes herself to co-investigator." [Link]
I found in interesting post about the book at Schwitzgebel's blog (proving again how wunnerful it is to have the blogosphere to extend explorations and conversations). He mentions how, in the book, his co-author defends "the idea that much conscious thinking takes place neither in speech, nor in images, nor in any other symbolic format. He calls this "unsymbolized thinking" and describes the resistance many people have to this idea."
I was then surprised a couple weeks ago, when chatting with a brother in law about his stream of experience, when he casually said -- as though it were the most obvious thing -- that he just had a thought that was quite conscious but neither spoken nor in any imagistic form. When I asked him how he knew that he thought was imageless in this way, he said that it had a specific content but nothing visual, more like words, but actually lacking words, since it was neither in English nor in Hindi.
I was then struck by the following idea: Might bilingual people -- really bilingual people who shift easily and regularly between two languages -- more easily recognize unsymbolized or imageless thought than monolingual people? A monolingual English speaker might experience a thought content and then falsely assume that the thought must have taken place in English. A bilingual person, forced to think about what language the thought transpired in, might in some cases find no basis for choice and so more readily recognize the non-lingustic nature of that thought.
Speaking for myself, I've seen many clues over the years that my metathoughts - thoughts about how I think and what I think, or what I think I thought - are not to be trusted. For instance, as I've become increasingly careful about reviewing my writing before publishing, I've found several instances where I was thinking one word but wrote another; or instances where recordings or photographs or older written passages reveal that some memory I had was inaccurate or plain wrong. Because over the years I've been known among others for my memory, I always assumed that it was always correct - the way intelligent people often assume that they're intelligent about everything.
We depend on our minds for memory and world view; how can we know, other than phenomenological feedback from time to time (like the recordings or images I mentioned), whether our memories are accurate? In fact, our memories of the past may be quite inaccurate, and we should always be suspicious of them. This is a troubling thought.
If you've been around someone with Alzheimer's disease, you know that one of its most devastating effects is the extent to which people so afflicted can be unaware of their gaps and lapses. They may not realize that anything is wrong, and they can be hostile when challenged.
To what extent is our flow of "consciousness" faith-based - not that we know who and what and where and when we are at all times, but that we believe we have that knowledge, are reinforced by what's accurate, and ignore the inaccuracies; sweep them under the rug and forget about 'em.
My wife and I have caught each other, from time to time, remembering vividly something we did, only to realize that our memory is transforming an intention we had to a supposed action. "I put the keys on the table." In fact, I only thought about putting the keys on the table, they're still in my pocket.
To the extent I've come to realize the flaws and gaps in my thinking, I think I've been smarter in general, which is interesting.
I spend much of my time with very smart, often brilliant people who have signficant flaws and gaps, who are really not very smart about some aspects of their lives. This is consistently true. Some work very hard to create the impression they are smart about everything, or to reinforce others' impression that their intelligence is heroic. So much of genius is really just PR.
MagicWhen I was young I thought about consciousness and the various ways people present reality to themselves and others. I studied literature because I was interested in perception - not so much in stories, but in the way characters were presented and scenes were described. I thought I wanted to write fiction but realized I wasn't much of a storyteller. Though I could write well, I wasn't into plot, the construction of conflict and resolution. I wanted to show people as they are (so I started writing nonfiction instead). Spinning forward, my later career has focused on social networking, communication, and community-building, all stemming from my fascination with the social construction of reality.
The New York Times has a great article called "Sleight of Mind," about a recent gathering of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness in Las Vegas. The subject of discussion: how show biz magic leverages perceptual constraints to hack our assumptions about reality. They talked about things like qualia, "the raw, subjective sense we have of colors, sounds, tastes, touches and smells."
The crunch of the crostini, the slitheriness of the penne alla vodka — a question preoccupying philosophers is where these personal experiences fit within a purely physical theory of the mind.
That's the mystery: if we're just meat, where does that poetry come from? How can we imagine something like "spirit," if we're really just a bag of chemicals simmering at 98.6 degrees fahrenheit? Being conscious of consciousness takes you to the heart of the mystery.
Toward the end of the article, the author runs into philosopher Daniel Dennett.
If the hardware and software could be made sophisticated enough, there would be no functional difference, Dr. Dennett suggested, between a human oenophile and the machine. So where inside the circuitry are the ineffable qualia?Fully In Touch
Retreating to a bar at the Imperial Palace, we talked about a different mystery he had been pondering: the role words play inside the brain. Learn a bit of wine speak — "ripe black plums with an accent of earthy leather" — and you are suddenly equipped with anchors to pin down your fleeting gustatory impressions. Words, he suggested, are "like sheepdogs herding ideas."
As he sipped his drink he tried out another metaphor, involving a gold panning technique he had learned about in New Zealand. Lead and gold are similar in density. If you salt the slurry with buck shot and swirl the pan around, the dark pellets will track the elusive flecks of gold.
With a grab bag of devices accumulated over the eons, the brain pulls off the ultimate conjuring act: the subjective sense of I.
"Stage magicians know that a collection of cheap tricks will often suffice to produce 'magic,' " Dr. Dennett has written, "and so does Mother Nature, the ultimate gadgeteer."
Particularly relevant quote I ran across; something to read and re-read.
The person that desires to have only pleasure and refuses pain expends an enormous amount of energy resisting life--and at the same time misses out enormously. He or she is on a self-defeating mission in any case, for just as we evade certain forms of suffering we inevitably fall victim to others. Underlying our glitzy modern consumer culture there is a deep spiritual under-nourishment and malaise that manifests all kinds of symptoms: nervous disorders, loneliness, alienation, purposelessness . . . So blanking out, running away, burying our heads in the sand or videotape will take us nowhere in the long run. If we really want to solve our problems--and the world's problems, for they stem from the same roots--we must open up and accept the reality of suffering with full awareness, as it strikes us, physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, in the here-now. Then, strange as it may seem, we reap vast rewards. For suffering has its positive side. From it we derive the experience of depth: of the fullness of our humanity. This puts us fully in touch with other people and the rest of the Universe.
--John Snelling
RU Sirius has put together an online course on Timothy Leary and his work, called "Timothy Leary: Personas, Media, and Messages." The course is six weeks beginning February 26, at a cost of $120... offered through the M a y b e L o g i c A c a d e m y.
One aspect of the course will deal with Timothy Leary’s personal and intellectual history. We will look at how he changed culture. We will look at the controversies around his life and person. And we will understand transhumanism and Leary’s role as one of the first transhumanists .Free will vs sophisticated meat machines
The other aspect of the course will incorporate exercises suggested by Leary himself in exploring his evolutionary circuits in his book, The Game Of Life.
In an essay publsihed by the New York Times, Dennis Overbye wonders whether free will is an illusion. [Link]
“Is it an illusion? That’s the question,” said Michael Silberstein, a science philosopher at Elizabethtown College in Maryland. Another question, he added, is whether talking about this in public will fan the culture wars.
“If people freak at evolution, etc.,” he wrote in an e-mail message, “how much more will they freak if scientists and philosophers tell them they are nothing more than sophisticated meat machines, and is that conclusion now clearly warranted or is it premature?”
A complicated network of causes
Via Tricycle's Daily Dharma, I got whacked across the mind by the Dalai Lama this morning... [Link]
In general, instead of realizing that what we experience arises from a complicated network of causes, we tend to attribute happiness or sadness, for example, to single, individual sources. But if this were so, as soon as we came into contact with what we consider to be good, we would automatically be happy, and conversely, in the case of bad things, invariably sad. The causes of joy and sorrow would be easy to identify and target. It would all be very simple, and there would be good reason for our anger and attachment. When, on the other hand, we consider that everything we experience results from a complex interplay of causes and conditions, we find that there is no single thing to desire or resent, and it is more difficult for the afflictions of attachment or anger to arise.Machine intelligence?
I just posted a response to a message about "machine intelligence" that came over the nettime-l email list. Here's what I posted; feel free to comment:
The concept of AI as "conscious machine" is, in my opinion, bogus. So often we hear terms like "machine intelligence" or "artificial intelligence" where "intelligence" is undefined, and the implication is that somehow machines will become "consious." To me, that's like saying once we have a critical mass of light switches in the world, thrown in just such pattern, the electrical grid will become "conscious."
So the reason machine intelligence is persistently predicted but never quite manifest seems clear to me. You can build the golem and you can assume that the more like a man you make him, the more likely he is to self-animate and do a little dance. However he n ever quite moves, because replication of human form is insufficient... just as machines that mimic intelligence are not truly intelligent, and machines that may seem to be 'conscious' really aren't, unless you redefine consciousness to fit machine reality.
My friends Max More and Natasha Vita-More are more sensible about the singularity - it's not about machines becoming like humans, but about the increasing cyborgization of humans - we become increasingly closer to our machines, and we enhance our capabilities as a result. But we won't become machines and machines won't become human. Our robot fantasies are probably just an indication that we don't quite know what it means to be human.