Noise-beings

What I have been talking about in the Doubt-beings and Love-beings posts is probably best thought of as a metaphysics of cognition, a subject which needs a metaphysical treatment only because of our relative ignorance about how we produce thought. However more and more the field is advancing, and one of the most productive areas is the investigation of noise in neuronal processing, or what looks like noise because we don't quite understand its role yet.

Did a quick google on noise in neuronal processing, and discovered enough interesting studies to last a long time. [Possibly a career's worth. We'll see!]. See these [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
Still, for now, a quick recap and see how this bears on my previous two posts.

In the late 80's Roger Penrose in his book The Emperors New Mind attacked the stance of strong AI (which claims that consciousness is algorithmic and so can be executed on a UTM), saying that cognition was essentially a non-algorithmic process characterised by [what I'll call for want of better phrasing] Godelian relationships. He also made the bold claim that perhaps resolution of quantum linear superpositions was occurring as neurons act, therefore making thought a practically non-deterministic process. This view was downplayed by the mainstream, as it was thought that neuronal activity was too large-scale to be affected by quantum phenomena. The claim has not been verified or disproven, but there is some evidence to suggest that quantum phenomena do play a role for the average neuron.
The implications were this hypothesis to be proven true are staggering in scope - and they really do bear heavily on any metaphysical look at consciousness. We'll come back to this toward the end, after a few more research perspectives.

One view of the brain is a rather rattletrap contraption, riddled with signal-delivery noise and therefore stacked with signal-processing redundancy.
There's a nice article here about how noise is inherent in wetware but is compensated. Essentially, from a reductionist perspective the picture is that neurons are signal carriers that can loose signal, distort the encoding or lose it entirely. Redundancy of processing for brain areas effectively combats noise - neuron groups and signal trains are used, like this example:
"When we hear a sound, hair-like structures on neurons in our ears wiggle. Their wiggling creates a pattern of voltage spikes, which the neuron then passes on to 10 to 30 other neurons. All of those neurons then carry the same signal toward the brain, where they can be compared. Each neuron degrades the signal in a uniquely random way, and by averaging all of their signals together, the brain can cancel out some of the noise."

This perspective comes from looking at the action of single neurons, and then extrapolating that behaviour up to the next level at which hard science is possible - single event response mapping. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), they can examine the brain as it acts (almost in real time, now). But the entire picture is far too big, busy and chaotic to treat scientifically, so they have to prime the brain to respond to a single event, like a sound, and map the response in the fMRI results.
The problem with this, valuable work though it is, is that it gives a picture of the brain that is too functionally modular. The brain is modular, sure, but it is also interconnected. The whole brain is switched on (though perhaps not acting) at the same time, and it is occlusive to think in terms of one part at a time. In complex emergent systems, it is the high level behaviour that embodies the most powerful and beautiful results. Ant algorithms are very simple on the individual ant scale, but the entire culture of an ant colony is a staggering construct for such tiny creatures.

So another perspective on noise in the brain keeps the higher order in mind - that noise encodes decision possibilities until resolution and so the brain represents information probabilistically, by coding and computing with probability density functions or approximations to probability density functions. This implies that the brain is actually a Bayesian probability calculator.
On the face of it, that's not so different to the ear example above - lots of signals are sent, the averaged sum of probabilities gives an approximately correct answer. The differences in the technical details may be larger, but one non-technical difference in particular strikes me - in this latter view, the noise is not really noise at all. It is a pre-cursor to the system - in a way, it is the principle around which the system is built. In other words, our brains evolved the way they did because the biological substrate they evolved within has to have noise. If a noise-free system were possible, we wouldn't think the way we do at all (well, we as us wouldn't exist, but for the sake of argument...).

So there we have a few different fresh perspectives on how the brain is processing and decision-making. Can we relate this in some way to the level of discussion of the earlier posts, Doubt and Love?
I'm loathe to start drawing definite inferences, since I'm working myself on the basis of intuition. Yet I think that with the most open of minds, we could imagine a brain that operates from the quantum level toward resolution of probabilistic predictor functions. This type of brain could operate as we know it does, and yet also operate within the undifferentiated, relative and probabilistic reality that we suspect* exists independent of our conscious experience of it. In other words, we exist in touch with the beautiful everythingness of reality, and yet filter it down to a point of focus that permits self-aware pro-active consciousness. I may be jumping crazily about waving my hands in the air, but I believe that I have just summarised my Doubt and Love posts with reference to hypothetical operative descriptions of the brain.

Furthermore, all this to my mind, presents a picture not so much of dichotomy but of layering of relational activity. There is not just one view of the world or the other (as I have presented in the previous two posts referenced above), but a system that requires both views to exist simultaneously and harmoniously, and therefore produce conscious thought.

Note: In all this I am kind of taking the stance that conscious thought is somehow a desirable end product of the setup of our brains - a final** and valuable cap stone of the system. Another stance might claim that consciousness is just an accidental by-product, that the 'zombie in the brain'*** is what's really in control, and the whole apparatus only operates in order to enable the 'selfish gene'. I just find the letter view a mite shortsighted and pessimistic, though I don't claim I know better.

* I am using an uncertain form in order to admit the solipsist outlook.
** Or possibly not final! But thats another days discussion.
*** Look up V.S. Ramachandran 'Phantoms in the Brain'

Phantoms in the Brain: skim-over

In thinking about an upcoming post, I came back to a really eye-opening book I read many years ago called Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, by V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee (I also see that it is the book's tenth anniversary, so this is a well-timed remembering). I thoroughly enjoyed the book for it's wit as well as wisdom (well, it is a tour of some research findings, so perhaps wisdom is the wrong word). I found a list of quotes from the book (particularly like the last one), so without the time to write a nice synopsis or review, I'll just bang them straight out with a recommendation to read the whole thing.

p. xi:

"In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it."
- John Archibald Wheeler.

p. xv:

I'd also like to say a word about speculation, a term that has acquired a pejorative connotation among some scientists. Describing someone's idea as "mere speculation" is often considered insulting. This is unfortunate. As the English biologist Peter Medawar has noted, "An imaginative conception of what might be true is the starting point of all great discoveries in science." Ironically, this is sometimes true even when the speculation turns out to be wrong. Listen to Charles Darwin: "False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science for they often endure long; but false hypotheses do little harm, as everyone takes a salutory pleasure in proving their falseness; and when this is done, one path toward error is closed and the road to truth is often at the same time opened." Every scientist knows that the best research emerges from a dialectic between speculation and healthy skepticism.

p. 1:

For in and out, above, about, below,
'Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-show
Play'd in a Box whose Candle is the Sun
Round which we Phantom Figures come and go
- The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

p. 35:

The completely static picture of [cortical maps] that you get from looking at textbook diagrams is highly misleading and we need to rethink the meaning of brain maps completely.

p. 35:

You never identify yourself with the shadows cast by your body, or with its reflection, or with the body you see in a dream or in your imagination. Therefore you should not identify yourself with this living body either.
- Shankara (A.D. 788-820) Viveka Chudamani (Vedic scriptures)

p. 61:

For your entire life you've been walking around assuming that your "self" is anchored to a single body that remains stable and permanent at least until death. Indeed, the "loyalty" of your self to your own body is so axiomatic that you never even pause to think about it, let alone to question it. Yet these experiments suggest the exact opposite - that your body image, despite all its appearance of durability, is an entirely transitory internal construct that can be profoundly modified with just a few simple tricks.

p. 81:

in science one is often forced to choose between providing precise answers to piffling questions (how many cones are there in a human eye) or vague answers to big questions (what is the self), but every now and then you come up with a precise answer to a big question (such as the link between deoxyribonucleic acid [DNA] and heredity) and you hit the jackpot. It appears that vision is one of the areas in neuroscience where sooner or later we will have precise answers to big questions.

p. 93:

People often assume that science is serious business, that it is always "theory driven", that you generate lofty conjectures based on what you already know and then proceed to design experiments specifically to test these conjectures. Actually real science is more like a fishing expedition than most of my colleagues would care to admit. (Of course I would never say this in a National Institutes of Health [NIH] grant proposal, for most funding agencies still cling to the naive belief that science is all about hypothesis testing and then carefully dotting the "i's" and crossing the "t's". God forbid that you should just try to do something entirely new that's just based on a hunch!)

p. 110:

the primary visual cortex, far from being a mere sorting office for information coming in from the retina, is more like a war room where information is constantly being sent back from scouts, enacting all sorts of scenarios, and then information is sent back up again to those same higher areas where the scouts are working. There's a dynamic interplay between the brain's so-called early visual areas and the higher visual centers, culminating in a sort of virtual reality simulation.

p. 152:

"What we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts."
- Thomas Henry Huxley

p. 156:

[Sigmund Freud] had discerned the single common denominator of all great scientific revolutions: Rather surprisingly, all of them humiliate or dethrone "man" as the central figure in the cosmos.

p. 157:

If you think you're something special in this world, engaging in lofty inspection of the cosmos from a unique vantage point, your annihilation becomes unacceptable. But if you're really part of the great cosmic dance of Shiva, rather than a mere spectator, then your inevitable death should be seen as a joyous reunion with nature rather than as a tragedy.

p. 180:

Some of these [temporal lobe personality] patients are sticky in conversation, argumentative, pedantic and egocentric (although less so than many of my scientific colleagues)...

p. 183:

Higamous hogamous
Women are monogamous
Hogamous higamous
Men are polygamous

p. 185:

Just because religiosity has a neurological basis, does not in itself deny the existence of God, just as the neurophysiological basis of color vision does not deny the existence of color.

p. 204:

jokes have much in common with scientific creativity, with what Thomas Kuhn calls a "paradigm shift" in response to a single "anomaly" ... the joke is "funny" only if the listener gets the punch line by seeing in a flash of insight how a completely new interpretation of the same set of facts can incorporate the anomalous ending.

p. 206:

Freud's explanation [of humor as the relief of tension] belongs to a class of explanations that Peter Medawar has called "analgesics" that "dull the ache of incomprehension without removing the cause"

p. 222:

There's much truth to Sir Arthur Eddington's famously paradoxical remark "Don't believe the result of experiments until they're confirmed by theory."

p. 227:

[According to Hindu tradition] the self - the "I" within me that is aloof from the universe and engages in a lofty inspection of the world around me - is an illusion, a veil called maya

p. 227:

Everything I have learned [from neurology] points to an unsettling notion: that you create your own "reality" from mere fragments of information, that what you "see" is a reliable - but not always accurate - representation of what exists out in the world, that you are completely unaware of the vast majority of events going on in your brain. Indeed, most of your actions are carried out by a host of unconscious zombies who exist in peaceful harmony along with you (the "person") inside your body!

p. 228:

"Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it."
- Stuart Sutherland

p. 229:

[The] need to reconcile the first-person and third-person accounts of the universe ... is the single most important unsolved problem in science. Dissolve this barrier, say the Indian mystics and sages, and you will see that the separation between self and nonself is an illusion - that you are really One with the cosmos.

p. 235:

[The zombie argument] is based on the fallacy that because yuo can imagine something to be logically possible, therefore it is actually possible. ... even though you can imagine an unconscious zombie doing everything you can do, there may be some deep natural cause that prevents the existence of such a being!

p. 256:

It seems somehow disconcerting to be told that your life, all your hopes, triumphs, and aspirations simply arise from the activity of neurons in your brain. But far from being humiliating, this idea is enobling, I think. ... Once you realize that far from being a spectator, you are in fact part of the eternal ebb and flow of events in the cosmos, this realization is very liberating.

Love-beings

This is a companion piece, so best to read the post Doubt-beings beforehand!

I've said I'd use this term love to describe what I'll talk about below, so even though the doubt piece proved that adapting language to new uses can be counter-productive, I'm pressing on. Bear with me!

There is the sense of the word love that follows everyday use, and this is emotional and interpersonal. People mostly love other people - I'll come back to why I think this happens, toward the end. One can talk about loving things, concepts and so forth, but most people recognise that such emotion is inherently different to what people feel about other people.

Although perhaps in one sense, it is not so different. Love is a term that is used in other contexts - I'm thinking of teachings on enlightenment. Love is the Buddha...all is One, and One is love. At least, that's what they tell me. Now this is not emotion, because emotion is a product of the self, it's constrained and relational. And as mentioned, here love is ALL.

Yet it relates to the humble emotion we call love in the day to day. Perhaps what we call love is a snapshot of this great constant Oneness, or better a flash of light through an iris opened by the reduction of the obsession with reflection on the self. True love feels like a very selfless thing. Is it just a play on words to suggest that this is because true love involves the exact same opening of being outward beyond the self, as enlightenment does?

I can't say that without addressing why everyone is not enlightened - most of my readers will know more than I, but anyway...it takes awareness to be enlightened, one must be aware that the self is not real, is an illusion that needs to dissipate - and that awareness is very hard to hold as well, because its a scary thing at first. (This is what I've read, at least. No Buddha am I!)

With regard to the snapshot idea, I am playing with this concept in respect of my own life, trying to see how love can occasionally and spontaneously explode for people and things I have no relationship with, for variable lengths of time and no apparent reason. Or how it can last long past the end of a relationship, although that relationship may have ended acrimoniously. Or how it arises for nothing, just because my state of mind relaxes, my concerns drop away for a moment, and the world around me looks very beautiful. This often happens when travelling - walking or on trains mainly. And a curious thing accompanies - very often I will start to notice a lot more detail about the world, like how the trees beside the path on the way in from the train station to my office are all curved the same way at the base, suggesting when they were saplings the prevaling wind was nor'westerly. Of course, such musings invariably become recursive, and I start to think about my own thought process, and the spell is broken. The self is back. Is this a familiar experience?

This kind of makes me think of what else may be coming through with the emotion of love (as I am describing it. Keep in mind as you read that your own experience - and thus idea - of love is going to be different, so its just a word). If the emotion itself is a window on a constant, does this suggest that the relationship between the self and the emotion is like the opening of a valve? OK, and what does the constant represent? I'm thinking of it like a pure recognition by the right brain of the sublime quality of reality. The whole thing is pretty amazingly put together, I think our best science supports that indubitably (see what I did there?), and art has known it forever. If we consciously get a glimpse of that, its a sublime feeling. Could it be that there is a substantive recognition of intrinsic quality in the Oneness of reality that leaks through as we experience the world without the processing mechanisms of our left-brain filtering system? This idea is not that far from Kant's ideas on aesthetics, as I understand them. It is not a world away from Robert Pirsig's Chautauqua on Quality.

Maybe it gives us another channel from the narrow self-oriented conscious left-brain to the wide-open undifferentiated unconscious right-brain...love as the non-filter, a time-division multiplexed interface with the beauty of reality where doubt (or discrimination, or whatever you want to call it) is frequency-division multiplexed.

...

Coming back around again to the common idea of interpersonal love. A lot is at stake here, as we hardly want to relegate this important facet of our lives to a mere mechanistic working of cognitive functions. So all I'll say is that if the emotion of love is a reflection of this Oneness constant, then falling in love, or loving your family, could be (in operation) a lowering of defenses and a reduction of concerns about the self. You enter willingly into a vulnerable place because you trust the other person you love, and that starts the process of stripping away the illusory trappings of the self and opens you to feeling the reflection of Oneness. You're not becoming enlightened (probably the opposite >:D ), but you actively feel bliss.

But the awareness that this process is beginning isn't present as it is when enlightenment is being sought, and the relationship with the other comes with its own cares, and so the self quickly reasserts itself. And so we get this flash of pure bliss, which is over quickly but cascades into associated positive emotions, and the whole thing is labelled by our categorising left-brain as 'falling in love'. And its great! But it has less to do with this other person, and more to do with our own state, than we think.

...

Final thought - can the self-oriented, analytical left-brain experience be trained toward the state of mind I have been talking about here? Could Flow be a left-brain version of this sort of openness of being? If we had a rigorous knowledge of either one type of experience or the other, we might have a better idea, but as I say (too much) in my work - that is an issue for future work*!

*the academic equivalent phrase to 'that would be an ecumenical matter' :D

Disclaimer: There is NOTHING about thinking this through that bears on the actual experiences involved - no clarity is gained with loved ones, no steps toward enlightenment achieved, no knowing what the next moment of a new relationship might bring. It's only words - but I enjoyed setting them down :)

Poll Results

Post-oil warring into a new stone age	30.8%	4
Historical precedent says everything will stay much the same, only more so	30.8%	4
Super-intelligent borganisms	15.4%	2
Whaa!?	15.4%	2
An unforseen utopia of free energy and human kindness	7.7%	1

Wow, 13 whole votes!
Looks like the trend of belief is either down or level, which given that nothing ever stays the same really, looks like a majority vote for pessimism. And only one true optimist! And I can't even remember if it was me!