Moving from perception to force to explanation with Hegel

"Pointing at the moon is not the moon". This wise statement from Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, an ancient Buddhist text, points out that language is not a substitute for direct experience (stated in language, ironically enough). We can refer to the truth of reality all we want, but ultimately it is right there in front of us, waiting to be experienced. This is an appealing metaphysics, as it grounds reality and our knowledge of it down here in the immediacy around me, not getting lost up there in abstractions. However, it is still natural to wonder:  Is there something beyond what I directly sense, a mind-independent reality? Or is this all in my head? If it's all in my head, what is my head in? This candle, with its whiteness, softness and many other features, are those all just my representations of it, or is that what the candle really looks like? Why is science so successful? Is it because reality is composed of atoms and void, or are those just ideas by scientists that might be totally wrong? Those who wonder things like this may benefit from Hegel's dialectic on perception. 

Background

Around Hegel's time, there were a few dominant views with respect to truth and perception in Western thought: 

1) Empiricism (Hume), which argued that what is true is what we directly sense from the world, all universal/formal concepts are derivative and after the fact. Similar to how pointing at the moon is not the moon. 

2) Transcendental Idealism (Kant), which sort of culminated (and defeated) empiricism by arguing that our direct experience is already full of universal concepts (like space and time) that aren't explicitly in the sense data. Our brains must therefore condition data from incoming senses with these universals before they are even experienced. So we don't directly experience the world as it is. Rather, there is the world in-itself, free of our experience of it, and this passes through the senses and the brain, where we condition it with universals like space, time, and causation, leading to the appearances in our experience. If this is true, it would mean we can't possibly understand the world in-itself: metaphysics is impossible. In science, we use space, time, and causation to understand the world. But if the categories of space, time, causation, etc only apply to experience, then we cannot use them to understand what is beyond the experiences--which may not be spatial, temporal, or even causal. In this sense, even physics, which yields real knowledge, is not unveiling the world in-itself, it is rather finding the causal regularities and structures in experience (which, importantly, still counts as real knowledge that allows us to make valid predictions). This is known as the veil of Kant--we are trapped in the world of appearances, forever cut off from the world in-itself. 

3) Correspondence theory, roughly employed by most views on truth up to this point, which is that truth involves confirming that a theory or statement directly corresponds to reality. In fact, Hume attempts to break the rational foundation of scientific truth by showing that it violates correspondence. Using his stance of empirical sense-certainty, he argues that both causation and induction are not logically necessary. Therefore, we have no logical certainty that the predictions of science "correspond" to reality prior to those events occurring. This is why Kant after him is trying to find a stronger foundation to stand on to save scientific knowledge (he ultimately succeeds--by showing that space, time, causation, etc. are already baked into our "direct sensation of the world", we can say with certainty that the structures we find do correspond to fundamental structures composing that experienced world). 

Impressively, Hegel shows that all three of these views fail, and one can show this with a single framework, which will also offer a way out. Part of his motivation here involves revising the grounds of western epistemology to account for the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematical physics," which was starting to become clear around this time.  In this light, Hume's skeptical empiricism will fail because science posits all kinds of invisible things beyond sensory perception in order to explain the world. He questions whether Kant's move of the "inaccessible in-itself vs appearance," while certainly grounding scientific knowledge more fundamentally, was correct in veiling the in-itself from human understanding.  

We can understand Hegel's move at the most general level by looking at his clever reformulation of truth. Truth is not simply evaluating whether a given statement "corresponds to" reality. It is not accessed by standing on skeptical foundations that will allow one to grasp it with certainty (Descartes). In fact, we should be skeptical of this type of skepticism. A true skeptic doesn't doubt everything they possibly can until they find the un-doubtable source of knowledge. A true skeptic accepts that there is no absolute foundation to knowledge. Rather, truth is evolved over time, starting with a goal and growing into its objective, like how an acorn grows into a tree.  It is not something you can apprehend directly through perception or reason, or any particular theory, but something you can see converge by watching the growth of theory over time. In this sense we don't say that earlier theories are wrong because they didn't "access the truth." This would be like saying the earlier stages of the acorn tree are wrong. Rather, we say that they are all necessary stepping stones that grow into each other, not forgotten but rather elaborated on, refined, getting less wrong with time, through a sort of trial and error. The same way Newtonian Mechanics is not wrong or forgotten, but absorbed/evolved/refined into relativity. This shift to a more "process philosophy" that studies movement and growth instead of static essences and direct correspondence is both intensely radical and consequential. Darwinian evolution is predicated on it--literally, animals are not static essences, they are a process over time. It is also the workhorse of Marx's dialectical materialism and the critique of capital. And so to with critical rationalism and Popperian epistemology--which claims that in science we do not access the truth with logical certainty in a given theory or experiment. Our theories are conjectures which can get falsified/refuted and error corrected, slowly growing over time to be less wrong. 

The Dialectic

One might ask: what does this look like in practice? What does it mean to examine the growth of theory over time instead of the validity of a given single theory? Hegel's dialectic, as hinted above, goes something like this: I have a default intuitive stance toward the truth. Then I find some kind of problem in that stance--an internal tension, an error, a contradiction--that forces me to subsume it into an evolved form which resolves the instability. As such, his dialectic on perception will attempt to show that the history of how we view perception--how we think about our experience in relation to reality--is not an accidental or contingent history, but rather a logically necessary path that consciousness must take on its journey toward the truth. This journey involves the transition from perception as the source of truth, to force as the hidden structure of reality. That transition is another massive critical strike in the history of human thinking. We've never been the same since. Below we will walk through the dialectic, first concisely and then in detail.

1. Sense certainty: Truth lies in the immediate particular. Concepts are inventions after the fact. 
• Issue: Concepts are already present in the immediate particular
2. Perception: Truth lies in the conditioned universal. My experience is conditioned with concepts, I experience particular objects with universal properties.
• Issue: I experience objects as a plurality of independent universals, yet I also know that they have particular, determinate identities that persist through time. How can the object be both one and many?
3. Force: Truth lies in the unconditioned universal. There is an "entity of interaction" beyond experience, not conditioned by us, that allows for determinate and distinct objects in my experience. This entity is formal and universal and thus can be conceptualized by the mind.
•  Issue: We cannot pin down what the force is, as it dances infinitely between latent and manifest, solicitor and solicited.
4. Law: Truth lies in the relational universal. We fix the dance of forces as an image that unites both latent and manifest on the same terms, as a relation. Appearances become an inference to the real, a window to the beyond. The distinction between appearances and mind-independent reality begins to dissolve. 
• Issue: Laws show the connection between conceptual hidden and appearances, but doesn't explain how this connection is possible, leaving them as a passive description. 
5. Explanation: Truth lies in the reflexive universal. With the dissolution of the distinction between the appearances and the beyond, we understand that truth discovery is an activity purely within consciousness. The idea of trying to "leap outside of the mind" to get at the truth is revealed to be an illusion. Our minds already grow out of the universe, using its own formal structure to understand it from the inside.   

1. Sense-certainty, default stance 

We start by assuming as little as possible. No conceptual constructs exist beyond our direct experience. We directly perceive the world as it is through our senses. The world is sense data. Universals like self, space, time, causation, scientific concepts, are all constructed by the mind after the fact. Truth, in this view, is accessed directly, as the immediate particular: this tree I see here right now, etc.

• Contradiction: when pointing out a particular moment or object in the world, we already employ universals. Even something as simple as pointing out a tree, involves "I, here, this, now" which are all universal indexical concepts. The attempt to ground knowledge in the immediate particular collapses into universality. 

2. Perception, synthesis

Universals are already baked into experience. We are no longer directly apprehending the world as sense data (immediate particular), but perceiving the world as particular objects with properties (conditioned universals). I have an object in front of me, a piece of chalk, and it appears as a bundle of universal properties including whiteness, hardness, cylindrical shape, etc.  In Kant's formulation (described in Background), he epitomizes this position, arguing that our mind (or brain) uses universals like space, time, and even causation, to structure raw sense input into coherent objects that we can understand. 

But this coincidence of a particular object, with a bundle of universal properties, runs me into a different issue. These “conditioned universals” do not simply appear on their own. They seem to coalesce into independent, particular, unified single objects, the identities of which are at the same time dissolved into a plurality of universal properties. Is the object one or many? How can unified identity through time be coincident with such a plurality of variable, independent properties? What is tying them together for each object? One might think there could be one property that "determines" the object, and all the other properties are secondary. But this doesn't work, because the properties present themselves as universal and independent...there is nothing about "whiteness" that uniquely determines chalk, for whiteness appears in all kinds of things. So then if all the properties are secondary, what determines the unique identity of the object?

• Contradiction:  The opposition here is that perception is now oscillating between the unity of the thing and the plurality of its properties without resolving how both can coexist. Perception has collapsed. How can this be resolved?

Here, Hegel has a hint from Spinoza: determinate negation. To be a unique, determinate perceptual object, you must be distinguishable from other objects. Something is what it is by not being something else. The chalk is white as opposed to brown, or green. If white were the only color that existed, it wouldn't be an identifying property of the chalk in the first place. The identifying properties are those that can be opposed to each other in reality. And thus a thing is only defined by its opposition to other things. The thing-in-itself becomes the thing-for-another. The essence of the thing is not substance, but negation, interaction, opposition. Something which allows objects to interact with each other, so that they can oppose and distinguish themselves from each other. If true, the contradiction between unity and multiplicity would dissolve, because the unitary essence of an object does not "inhere within the object," it is determined through its relations with opposing objects. We will call this interactive entity at the core of reality "force."

3. Force, synthesis 

Up until this stage, we have tried to avoid moving beyond experience. Our immediate particular collapsed and we moved to perception, or conditioned universals, in order to  recognize the primacy of universals, while still preserving truth as given in experience. But if the universal properties that are characteristic of an object are all independent of one another, and that's all we see in experience, we need some unifying principle that is not an appearance, that can bring unity into this apparent plurality. The understanding must now move beyond appearances to explain reality . Force is thus is an unconditioned universal, a mind independent entity which acts whether or not it is being perceived. And as mentioned before with determinate negation, this invisible unity must allow objects to interact with each other, to determine themselves as they appear to us, unifying their diversity of appearances. With gravity for example, all the diverse appearances of objects falling and behaving a certain way on earth, are unified by this invisible, unified entity, which is fundamentally relational.

Force does not need to be conditioned by the mind like perception, but it is a universal in that it is ultimately a concept. The properties we sense are all secondary...after the fact. The perceptual given (whether immediate particular or conditioned universal) is no longer the source of knowledge and reality. Rather, the core of reality is now conceptual—the unconditioned universal. What we posited as fixed objects with properties in experience turns out to be a play of forces within a reality beyond our experience. To gain knowledge of reality we need to understand this play, and how it manifests into the appearances that we experience--determinate objects with properties, doing stuff. 

This is a huge move in multiple ways. We have moved from the core of reality being visible, to being invisible. From being a direct appearance, to being a concept beyond experience, accessible to thought through conceptual structure. If, with Kant's veil, we were stuck with the world of appearances we could know, and the unknowable world in-itself, we are now liberated by Force, which acts as a bridge between appearance and the in-itself. The inner structure of reality suddenly becomes conceptual and intelligible. And based on the successes of Newtonian physics by this point in explaining the structure of our appearances, we find that our conceptual apparatus may indeed be capable of coinciding with the inner workings of the world.  The veil, which was once opaque, is starting to look translucent... 

The understanding now looks back on its appearances, through the concept of force. It begins to wonder how this notion of force could structure its appearances...what form must force take if it is to give rise to the patterns in my experience? How is it embedded in objects, and transferred between them? Where does it live? How does it move between the invisible and the visible, the latent and the manifest? On the most basic assumption, we can suppose that force is the One invisible behind the plurality of our appearances, generating them. However, when examining our appearances to pin down this One, we soon run into something unstable:

When moving billiard ball A hits stationary billiard ball B, we assume there is an invisible force transferred from A to B. This is then manifested in appearance as the motion of B. So we have the latent (invisible) force, and the manifest, or kinetic appearance of the force. We want to say intuitively that A is the actor here, imparting the latent force into B, the acted upon, which then manifests it kinetically. However, we find (through Newton's third law) that A is also acted upon, and B is also an actor. For the latent force in A to have any effect on B, there must also be an equal and opposite latent force in B to resist the force of A, otherwise it could have no influence. So there is no clear actor and acted upon. No solicitor and solicited. Both objects seem to have latent and manifest force, both are solicitor and solicited. The force doesn't exist in one object and get transferred to the other. Rather it exists between the objects. Forces require each other to manifest in appearance, dissolving into each other and escaping our attempt to individuate them. Force is now caught in this oscillation between solicitor and solicited, between its true latent aspect beyond experience, and its expression in appearance...both sides referring to each other, caught in a constant loop. This is the play of forces, and it appears highly unstable...we cannot pin it down. Alarmingly: if the distinction between latent and manifest is destabilized, so is the distinction between form (substantial unity of an object, organizing principle) and content (appearances, generated properties that we experience), between reality in-itself and appearance. Kant is indeed under fire.  

It is worth noting another significant move here. In addition to finding that the core of reality is conceptual, we also find that it is not a static structure. This does away with the sort of substance ontology that we assumed back in the stages of perception, which was extremely dominant at the time and went back to Aristotle and even earlier. The view in which the world is constituted by individual, independent entities that persist through change and bear properties. Instead, this previously supposed core of reality merely becomes another appearance. And at the core, we now find a play. A flux, a process, an activity is what leads to the unified and determine objects in our perception. While this is only a stage in the unfolding of the understanding, it is also a significant turning point in history from substance to process ontology.

• Contradiction: In summary, force does not seem to belong to objects, but exists between them, caught in an endless dance between manifest and latent, kinetic and potential, active and passive, solicitor and solicited. And with this collapse we also lose the distinction between form and content core to substance philosophy. The world is no longer composed of stable substances which give rise to the properties we perceive. It is as if the ground beneath us has been lifted away.

How are we to resolve this instability at the core of reality? While force is always caught in this play between appearances and the hidden, it ultimately manifests itself in appearance as stable objects with properties that exhibit patterns over time. And, as shown before, it must be relational in nature. How can we stabilize relation as the core of existence? There must be a way to manifest relationality itself as a stable image of the play of forces, one that shows how they structure stable patterns when expressed in appearance. The understanding must move beyond the unconditioned universal to the next stage: the law.

4. Laws, synthesis

 If forces structure appearance, there must be consistent patterns in our experience that can be discovered as governing laws. Thus instead of chasing the hidden forces moving in and out of appearances, we can try to pin down the regular structure in the organized appearances that come out of this play, as universal formal relations. For example, in the case of the billiard balls imparting force on each other and manifesting those forces in appearance as movement, we can specify the laws governing those appearances as: 

1. Force = mass x acceleration, Newton's second law, which describes how the force on an object relates to its movement (acceleration) in appearance

2. F1=F2, Newton's third law, asserting that the force exerted by the moving ball on the stationary ball is equal and opposite to the force exerted on the moving ball by the stationary ball. 

All of a sudden, the unstable dance of forces between invisible and visible, between solicitor and solicited, gets stabilized as a set of fixed images expressing the equivalent two-way relation...by equations. The equation is our way to make a stable image out of flux. The understanding stabilizes the dance by finding stability within instability, by finding sameness in difference. It now expresses both the latent force and manifest behavior on the same terms. In this sense we don't consider reality as an unconditioned universal, solely hiding behind appearances. With law, we unite appearance and reality as a stable relation. We have now moved to the relational universal. Reality is revealed as formal structure.

With the movement toward law, the understanding sees how force has transformed perception. Perception is not merely passive appearance, it is an inference to the real, a window to the in-itself. And we have formally captured the collapse of the distinction between the in-itself and appearances by expressing them in the same conceptual framework, on the same terms. F=ma not only stabilizes the play of forces, it represents the dissolution of the Kantian distinction between appearances and the in-itself, as well as the substance ontology that preceded it. The in-itself is no longer a hidden entity behind appearances, it becomes a formal structure expressed in appearances themselves. The distinction between in-itself and appearances has collapsed; the law becomes the new stable structure of reality.

It's worth briefly noting the magnitude of this step as well. In force, when the distinction between active and passive failed, so did the distinction between form and content, driving the need for law. What we used to call the thing, is actually emergent from the play of forces, which we can understand with static, unitary, underlying principles called laws. This gives us a static, formal way to describe becoming itself. Plato never thought this could have been possible, that we could capture the fuzzy flux and becoming of appearance with static laws. This is why he believed math lived solely in the realm of the forms, he thought such clean formal relations could never possibly capture our messy, qualitative experience. 

Which leads us to our next question: why does F=ma work so unreasonably well? Why should the conceptual structure of laws coincide with the structure of appearances in the first place? We can, and should, discover the laws, but if we don't explain how our conceptual apparatus happens to perfectly coincide with the inner structure of reality, allowing us to predict our appearances, it becomes unclear whether we are really explaining reality or merely re-describing it. It seems as though the fate of consciousness is not merely to observe the laws passively through experience, that it may have a more active role in creating them. Perhaps the distinction between law and appearance is itself part of the issue.

• Contradiction: Laws passively describe relations between inner reality and appearances without explaining why they coincide. While laws stabilize the flux, we need to introduce flux into laws.

5. Explanations, synthesis

In order to resolve this tension between law and appearances, let's first look back at the movement from perception-->force-->law. The understanding doesn't assume realism as a given from the beginning, realism emerges from the attempt to grasp reality through sense certainty--consciousness must posit something beyond itself. And after doing so, it finds that this realist distinction itself--between appearances and reality in-itself--gets dissolved into a flux of forces, which gets stabilized by law. This points to two critical realizations:  1) Law reveals reality as formal structure. 2) Realism was never given or inevitable, it was itself produced by consciousness as an explanation for that stage of understanding, before being subsumed by the next. These distinctions and their resolutions all exist within consciousness, as part of the understanding's process of explaining reality to itself, of growing toward the truth. The theories we get, and the corresponding reality implied by them, are simply the best explanations up to that point. These realizations will together resolve the tension between law and appearance.

We can illustrate point 2) further by briefly stepping into the scientific process. This process involves taking our observations (appearances) and finding a way to model/explain them through our conceptual apparatus, updating our beliefs and reinventing the apparatus as necessary to match new observations. For example, moving from a Newtonian to a quantum conceptual framework to account for observations such as blackbody radiation. But our perceptual observations, and our conceptual apparatus--these are both completely within the activity of consciousness. There is no moment in which we step outside of the mind. We verify it from within, reflecting on our appearances, using our conceptual apparatus to discover the laws behind it, and improving our theory with time as we find problems, just as we have been throughout this very dialectic. 

With law, we see that reality is ultimately formal structure. Formal structure which governs the play of forces, which generate our experience. And crucially, formal structure which the mind grows out of. The mind's conceptual apparatus can understand the formal structure of reality in-itself because it grows out of that very structure. And it does not grasp the full formal structure directly as a given, but through a creation and discovery process. A dialectic where it tries to explain the world to itself, and update those explanations over time as it finds problems within them. In this sense even the laws themselves, which constitute the universe, are not fixed. They reflect a stage in the journey of the understanding. We do not simply find laws in the world, we create them through our conceptual activity over time, in our project to understand the world. Structure is recognized as produced by the understanding as it gets closer to the truth of reality. We are the structure of the universe, and as we look deeper into the world over time, we look deeper into ourselves. 

Discovery of the world is thus a process of self-discovery, a movement in which we update our beliefs over time, growing toward the truth. We now understand why F=ma works so unreasonably well.  The conceptual order of appearances is grasped through the same logical structure that constitutes reality in-itself. Thus reality moves from the relational universal to the reflexive universal. The positing of reality in-itself leads to a realization that the structure of this reality can be accessed by the concept. The structure of the world is the structure of the understanding. The lifting of Kant's veil is complete. 

Synergy with Critical Rationalism and Explanatory Realism

It is worth noting the synergy at this stage with explanatory realism and critical rationalism, the modern Popperian philosophy of science position alluded to above, currently held by lauded physicists and philosophers such as David Deutsch. It is no coincidence that this stage in the dialectic happens to use the same word as that movement. In explanatory realism, reality is composed of the objects in our best current explanations. Here, in step with Hegel, is a recognition of the mind's fallibility, and the impossibility of absolute foundations, moving instead toward a rational theory growth process over time to converge on the truth. They both accept that we initially seem "trapped in the subjective," but find later that we don't need to leap outside of the mind and "grasp" the external world absolutely. In fact, such a notion is almost non-sensical and is itself produced by the mind, dissolving away under further reflection. And what is left is a gradual, self-correcting process which evolves over time toward the truth, from within consciousness. In this process, we accept that the most real things are whatever our best explanations allow them to be, whatever we currently know to be real. Reality, with its truth and its formal relations, ultimately proceeds from our attempt to explain the world to ourselves. Both Hegel and explanatory realism collapse the distinction between epistemology and metaphysics in this way. 

As a second synergy, the resolution that the stage of Explanation offers to the understanding is oddly resonant with David Deutsch's own explanation for the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematical physics. Deutsch essentially points out that the laws of physics are computable (formal, logical relations that can be computed, like F=ma above), and the matter in our universe happens to be structured in such a way that it can make universal computing machines (our brains). Therefore, we are able to simulate the laws of reality because our brains grow out of reality (which is governed by laws) into an ordered structure that allows them to think in formal, universal concepts, reflecting the laws back at the universe. Sound familiar? This is precisely the reflexive universal!

Both of these minds are pointing to the same thing: that the reason we can so effectively capture the fundamentals of the universe with our minds, is that our minds are not external to the universe to begin with. They grow out of the structure of the universe, which is logical and formal, and use that structure to examine it from the inside. If the universe is formally structured, and our minds are a piece of this universe trying to know itself, then it is not so surprising that our thought structures can map unreasonably well onto reality, and grasp it at the most universal level. In that sense--and again both Hegel and Deutsch agree here--we can say optimistically that as we move deeper into the understanding, into explanation, into self-consciousness, into our "pointing of the moon," we do not move further from Being, we get closer to it.

The mathematician plays a game in which he himself invents the rules while the physicist plays a game in which the rules are provided by nature, but as time goes on it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which nature has chosen.

--Paul Dirac

Consciousness, science, computation, chaos

What makes a good explanation?

A good explanation is one in which the explanatory target is shown to be a necessary outcome of something simpler (and often smaller). For example, when science explained what water was, it did so by showing how all the macroscopic behavior of water--boiling point, viscosity, not mixing with oil, etc--proceeded from the structure of H2O. Importantly, this explanation not only shows that the behavior can proceed from the structure of H2O, but that it necessarily proceeds from the particular structure of H2O. Given this specific molecular structure, you will always get the properties of water, and if you change the structure, you wont get those properties. Thus we concluded a necessary identity between the explanatory target and the explanatory elements: water is H2O (Kripke). This is the hallmark of good science: a necessary identity. The same is true of heat. Even though heat can be a "fuzzy" concept or idea, it is ultimately some macroscopic behavior that can be explained as a necessary outcome of something else: heat is molecular motion.

Do we have a good scientific explanation for consciousness?

No. While we can in some cases show neural correlates for conscious experiences, we cannot demonstrate a necessary identity--why this particular neural firing pattern necessarily leads to that particular conscious experience. In fact, it seems almost ridiculous to expect such a thing even in principle. Given the trajectory of scientific explanations, it's perfectly reasonable to expect to find necessary identities between neural firing patterns and macroscopic behaviors, such as moving your arm. And this is often what neuroscientists focus on, and demonstrate successfully (also why they are usually behaviorists :p). But how could you show that a particular neural firing pattern A necessarily leads to the smell of chocolate, as opposed to vanilla? This type of question is often referred to as the hard problem of consciousness or the explanatory gap. Unlike heat, water, and moving your arm, it's not clear that conscious experiences would necessarily follow from a particular fine structure.

Why is consciousness different?

Unlike heat and water, it doesn't seem like conscious experiences have spatial extension. In the scientific examples, we show how a macroscopic behavior--which is by definition spatially extended--proceeds from a microscopic structure. The spatial extension of the explanatory target almost appears to be a prerequisite for being able to do physics on it--if you aren't extended in space, I can't obtain your physical structure and show how you proceed from it.

In the case of conscious experiences, we have a microscopic structure--the neural firing patterns. And these firing patterns have a well defined spatial extension, localized to the brain. But what is the spatial extension of a conscious experience? When I taste cherries, or think about the number 5, there are spatially extended neural patterns in my brain, but what is the spatial extent of the experience? It almost appears as though conscious experiences don't have an external spatial extension. Rather, they are the internality of some physical process--they are what a specific neural firing pattern feels like, from the inside, so to speak (Nagel). There's no scientific or logical reason to believe that any given physical process should have something it feels like internally. We just happen to know that this is the case for human brains. 

And so we conclude that consciousness cannot be explained by traditional physics because it is not a spatially extended behavior that can be explained in terms of a microscale structure. It is rather the interiority of particular microstructures. And if it does not have spatial extension, it thus cannot be shown to be a necessary outcome of microstructures with physics alone.

How can we get necessary identities for non-spatial objects?

If we need spatial extension to show necessary identity with physics, what can we use to show necessary identity with non-spatial objects? Is there anything that can instantiate abstract, non-extended objects with physical processes? 

Suppose you were watching a red crab on your screen. And your friend, who had never seen a computer, said "whoa, what is that thing on your screen?" You respond "it is a particular transistor firing pattern A." Similar to the explanatory gap problem, your friend responds "but those two things can't be identical. There is no way you can show that this red crab, as opposed to a green crab, is a necessary outcome of transistor firing pattern A. You can only show that they happen to be correlated. Therefore there is no necessary identity, and you have not explained the red crab appropriately"

Your friend is right to have the intuition that there is no way in principle you could show how a random firing pattern leads to this red crab before him, and not a green crab. If you didn't have the interpreter and operating system, it would truly seem like magical emergence that you can make almost anything happen on this screen just from random firing patterns. This is how I personally felt about computers for most of my childhood. They were baffling, like consciousness.

The purpose of a Turing machine, or computer, is to encode abstract objects (like the number 5) in physical processes. In fact, Turing completeness guarantees that any abstract object can be instantiated in a physical process that satisfies certain rules. And with this we have a great example of how a micro-scale firing pattern A will necessarily lead to a red crab on your screen and not a green goblin. It's just incredibly complex and requires an interpreter, operating system, etc. 

Closing

Thus, if we are to show how conscious experiences are necessary outcomes of neural firing patterns, we very likely need to leverage something like computation, in addition to physics/neuroscience. And possibly even blend the line between the two fields, to make a more unified explanatory framework that can handle entities both with and without spatial extent. Disciplines like quantum computing are examples of such fields. We would like to see more of these.

Cognitive science is also another example of such a field intersection, where various computational models are attempted in order to try and replicate things like learning. Neural networks themselves were conceived by McCullough and Pitts, a neurophysiologist and mathematician. Although displays of intelligent behavior are not direct examples of conscious experiences, we build a powerful epistemology for instantiating human-like responses in physical processes, and may shed light on the relation between physical flickering, intelligence, and conscious experience. We are sort of banking on the fact that once we figure out how to fully replicate our general intelligence, consciousness comes along for the ride.

Is it also possible that there are missing elements in addition to computation? When we look at things like radical leaps in creativity, being able to create something seemingly outside of the existing ruleset of possibilities, causing a paradigm shift in world view (ie from Newtonian to quantum mechanics) these seem to be beyond the realm of what current rule-following LLM's are capable of. What if the brain leverages computation, but also some other stuff? If the brain can, in some instances, operate beyond the critical chaos threshold, it would explain the ability we have to mine novelty out of nothing, to reach outside of our current set of rules into something more general, to be creative. The ordered operation would be predominant, and bring critical inspection, logic, etc to thinking. But the disordered operation would be wild and creative, and it just comes down to brains being able to tune their level of disorder carefully enough to dance around the critical point without spiraling out of control. Thus we conclude that cognitive science and AI should incorporate more disordered computation and learn to dance around the critical point.

Metaphysics, the Self, the gods, some stories

keywords: metaphysics, Huxley, genes, emergence, chaos theory, religion, gods, simulation theory, the universe, the self, Being, Kant, Camus, Heidegger, Descartes, explanations, science

Science is (and maybe just “humans are”) in the business of providing explanations for the seen by invoking the unseen, but it does a terrible job at explaining the sensation of “the self.” 

One of the most peculiar and astonishing things about existence is that we are something rather than nothing. This feeling strikes some more clearly when looking at the stars, or staring in the mirror, wondering “why am I this one?” But other times it might grab you at the strangest moment, in the middle of a conversation with friends, or looking at your hands in the shower. It is the mystery of Being (see: Heidegger) that haunts us and blesses us at all times, and which lies beneath the horizon of all understanding. It is also completely wrapped up in the mystery of the “self,” namely, why should I get to exist at all? I understand that from this brain of a billion neuro-processes, after chaos theory takes hold there emerges a higher subjective experience known as “consciousness” that seemingly hovers around that body, independent from its causal basis. A separate tier of existence, past the infinite opaque horizon, so to speak (‘constructive emergence’)***. But still, why do I specifically get to have THIS consciousness, in THIS body, at this time? What did I do to deserve to exist? Are there souls in limbo that pay money for the chance to inhabit a consciousness in our universe? Perhaps a lottery? How many don’t get to exist? Is there possibly just one soul that inhabits every consciousness, being born again as a new human at a random time period every time death ends its current body? When you really try to confront the absurdity of why we are something rather than nothing, it makes sense that this universe is some sort of creation, or simulation. 

From where this creation comes, does not necessarily have any traits, values, or beliefs that we can recognize. Our minds are only capable of understanding phenomena inside this universe, with our flesh brains, bound by things like cause-and-effect, space, and time for both operation and understanding. So almost by definition, we cannot truly grasp what is outside this universe, or what caused it. The terms themselves, ‘outside’ and ‘cause’ are again part of the boundaries of this universe, so they might not apply to what is beyond it (Kant makes this argument for his proposal of agnosticism over theism when he destroys Descartes…the most rational stance with respect to atheism vs theism is simply that ‘we cannot know’). How supremely boring would it be, if the afterlife (as in some of the Abrahamic religions) contained sensations and values familiar to this world? To find out that this is all there was, that causality and space and time weren’t just specific to this world but to all realities, and that the gods actually cared about whether we followed our secular values, which are somewhat driven by the contingent animal instincts we are born with. It would make way more sense if the reality outside of this one was something radically incomprehensible relative to this universe, and the tools we have for understanding it (space/time/causality).

In addition to constructive emergence***, subtractive emergence is an appealing way to explain consciousness.  That whatever this other reality (or non-reality) is, it is somehow blocking my universality, or ‘mind at large,’ which leads to this quaint, inexplicable sensation of ‘self’ inside a specific body without any other explanation/information. Huxley himself noted that the mind-at-large is some sort of omnipresent/omniscient awareness, and the point of the nervous system is to filter down your mind-at-large to a specific body and locality, for survival purposes. If you were able to perceive your complete mind at large, you would never strive to preserve your body. It is for your own good to filter it down.  What appeals to me about this idea is it starts to capture the surreal-ness of existence discussed above. And it runs opposite to constructive emergence. It treats the nervous system as subtractive rather than generative of experience. But it serves the same purpose, and captures the same mood. 

It is this mood—of astonishment at the absurdity of the self, of why there is something rather than nothing—that motivates the story concepts below. 

*** (constructive emergence) These concepts—how the mystery of Being lies BENEATH this opaque, seemingly infinite horizon of understanding, and how consciousness emerges from the chaos of neuro-processes as a separate tier of existence, warrant a bit of explanation, and are tied into each other. To get more familiar with this, we will pivot to the pilot-wave explanation of quantum mechanics (specifically the double-split experiment which shows that the electron behaves as both a wave and particle, and sort of changes its story based on how you measure it). The current Copenhagen interpretation kind of sucks because it states that an electron is both a wave and a particle, and that by measuring it, it ‘becomes’ one or the other. It does not identify the point of mystery, and simply ASSERTS something completely absurd and untenable. Pilot-wave and chaos theory do a much better job in my opinion—it starts very deterministic and tenable, and then with chaos theory we identify a sort of infinite and opaque horizon BEYOND which the weird behavior of the electron emerges. Similar to consciousness, and probably Being. Basically, think of the electron as a pebble hopping along in a pond. We are deterministic, simple, and clear at this point. Each time it hops, it creates ripples, and those ripples will influence its future trajectory. It’s future trajectory also creates more ripples which interact with the previous ripples, causing this feedback loop that gets very complex very fast. After enough hops—and this is where chaos theory comes in—it becomes MATHEMATICALLY intractable to know exactly where the electron/pebble will be anymore, because of the insane amount of recursive influence that is going on between the hops and ripples. Now, we are no longer simple and clear, things have gotten intractable. This electron/pebble emerges on the other side of this point as “not having a specific position,” but more a probability of positions, from a mathematical perspective. It contains properties of a particle—because it is one—but also waves, because of all the ripples. And based on how we look at it, it can be either. Isn’t this beautiful? We don’t just STATE that it’s a superposition of particle and wave, of various states. We start with a clear situation that gets muddled and intractable after a while, and the electron EMERGES past that point as a trippy superposition. In between these points (clear vs trippy) is the “infinite, opaque horizon.” And I think it’s instructive to consider that consciousness, Being, the self, the emergebnce of life from matter, and other inexplicable mysteries of experience also emerge past the infinite opaque horizon in a similar way. It allows room for things like “having free will in a deterministic universe.” The universe is deterministic, but YOU emerge on the other side of that infinite opaque horizon, and have free will. There’s even a mathematical proof somewhere that asserts that even accepting a deterministic universe, there is no way one could completely predict the outcomes of the universe from within this universe, due to the complexity. Potentially you could from “outside” this universe, whatever that could mean. And here we’ve come full circle to the absurdity of the self and its implication of some greater metaphysical reality. 

Stories: “It makes way more sense that way”

Story 1—The universe makes more sense backwards

You must have heard that “hydrogen is a colorless gas that, given enough time, becomes aware of itself.” Trippy, right? Its a clever quote which captures the mind-boggling nature of life and consciousness, that life merely emerged from matter, because “rules.” First of all you have atoms that physically interact based on specific rules. If you shine light (provide energy) on these atoms, specifically carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, they will jiggle with each other and eventually pair up to create amino acids. These amino acids, with more energy, will jiggle to make proteins, and this jiggling dance of proteins and atoms and amino acids in the presence of water and light starts to traverse our patented “infinite and opaque horizon.” On the other side of this horizon you have the creation of this thing called the “cell wall,” where some proteins/organelles literally wall themselves off from others and say “we are separate from the rest, we are an automata, a unique agency!!” Once you have cells, you have life. It’s insanely absurd to think about, even as you have all the pieces in front of you. The rules of physics already existed, and just HAPPENED to be so that MY BEING came out of these atoms + rules? Fat chance. It makes way more sense to think that some greater being STARTED with life, this gorgeous self-replicating construct, and started deconstructing it into cells, proteins etc, and naming the rules of physics as they did this deconstruction. Once they got all the way to the end—bare atoms/energy and laws of physics—they decided to press the “rewind” button. Our universe, as we know and experience it, is that rewind. And we’ve now passed the point of cells, the point that was already designed beforehand, and crazy undesigned things have now emerged from that rewind, things like HUMANS and CONSCIOUSNESS. THATS why it’s so absurd. THATS why none of this makes any sense. No one knows what lies ahead, not even the gods. We’ve passed the infinite opaque horizon.  A good question after this story is written might be: Why did some dude make this universe and play it backwards? Well, that warrants a second story.

Story 2—We are the TIME-DEATH universe here to make genes

I think—and this is completely wrong because I’m personifying gods with my own values and beliefs—there could be gods somewhere who are using this universe as a way to get something they want. And I think that thing is genes. In the same way one cannot predict the final state of three bodies orbiting each other, but must simulate them, we are a simulation to get the gods something that they were unable to get analytically. They wanted some kind of algorithm that would be very valuable, that would serve as the optimal formulation of what I can only describe as “survival.” But they couldn’t solve it mathematically. So they created a universe with two major concepts—TIME and LIFE/DEATH. There would be beings in this universe (organisms) that experienced something called death, which would be the demise of the beings. But the beings could also reproduce new offspring and keep dying over and over again, and in each iteration they would refine their mini-codes (genes) in response to death. These iterations are called TIME, and the self-reproducing ability of the beings is what we know as LIFE. Once the simulation had life, death, and time, the gods had everything they needed to run it. The beings would eventually start refining genes over and over again, making them better, more elegant, and perfectly attuned to this thing called survival each time they died. Our universe is that simulation. It makes way more sense to me that our universe is that simulation than saying that this just “appeared” from a “bang” (thanks science). At the end of TIME, the gods will pluck the best genes from this universe and move on.

In conclusion, genes are not here to enhance us, we are here to refine them. It makes way more sense that way.

Story 3—The gods were bored watching the gene simulation, and decided to INHABIT it.

Now the gods, watching this simulation from above, outside of time and space, were bored as heck. And they thought of something interesting—wouldn’t it be cool if we inhabited this TIME-DEATH universe for a bit? We could just sort of hover over the brains of the beings, experiencing their emotions and physicalities, and they wouldn’t know what the hell was going on, they would just call it “consciousness” and be unable to explain it (Descartes noted that he knew God existed because consciousness had some strange element of perfection in it that could only be from God). The rules are that we cannot have any knowledge of the fact that we are timeless gods, that gets filtered out by the nervous system (Huxley!). This way, we’ll get to authentically experience time and death, and for once, NOT feel bored. We’ll also equip consciousness with this insatiable need for purpose and explanation, in a world without purpose or explanation. This would provide the necessary tension to attempt the impossible and transcend ourselves. We would be terrified of death, and would live poetic lives in a desperate attempt to rebel against the futility of it (Camus). We would create beautiful things like love, which could only emerge from a timeless god inhabiting an animal doomed toward death without any knowledge that it was a timeless god. Once we approached this terrible thing called death, and passed it, we would wake back up as the gods we were, exiting the simulation, while the other gods would be laughing at us for being “so scared of death lol I can’t believe you thought there was no explanation and everything just ended in void LOL!!”

I hope these stories help capture the insane, absurd nature of experiencing a “self” in this unexplained world. Maybe someone will write them. Then we can bury it in the ground and people in a few centuries will find it and start a religion or whatever. 

On Pet Appreciation, and a Potential Parallel with Supernatural/Extrasensory Phenomena

So 2 things 1. pet appreciation and 2. the gods

1. We ask: what makes us really appreciate pets, or animals in general? Like why do I ultimately appreciate a pet dog more than a pet fish? There are many ways to articulate it, and one way is ability to perceive me as a holistic, autonomous agent. If I have a dog and I pet him, throw a frisbee for him, put out food for him, he realizes all of those things are me/being done by me, the same larger animal. This gives me a special recognition that could be integral to human-animal relationships in general.

However, if I have a fish in a fishbowl, it merely perceives all of my actions as randomly happening in its environment. Fish food falls from the sky, a blurry face appears and moves around, all of the water disappears and then more comes in. With my hamster, I can poke him from one end, with one finger, and he will turn around and stare at it and sniff it. It's unclear whether he even relates this finger as belonging to me, or associates it with my face, or can even make out my face as a face, etc. He probably just thinks of it as "flying thing that pokes me with that specific scent." And then while he's staring at it, I can bring my OTHER finger to poke him from the other side, and he'll turn around, and now think there are 2 "flying things that poke me with that scent," but might totally think of them as separate agents. It seems like there are two factors which determine this inability to perceive me as a holistic being. 1. Size: because I am so much larger than he is, so I can make my fingers come in from opposite ends and he can't even see that they are connected to the same being, and 2) he doesn't have enough sensory + logical processing capabilities to recognize my face as a face and connect that all the things I'm doing are related to me/my face etc. (The self is synonymous to the face in that the eyes are the window to the soul)

2. And this segues into the next idea: the gods. The same way that a smaller, lower-level creature can't perceive my actions as mine, and sees them as a bunch of random, disconnected events, perhaps I can't perceive a higher, extrasensory being's actions as theirs, and just see them as a bunch of random disconnected events in my life. This might relate to certain feelings we have on things like synchronicities, collective consciousness, Murakami novels (where seemingly disconnected events are connected in a greater way), etc. Perhaps God was originally posited by the same analogy, while someone was observing an animal. Maybe a supernova in a distant galaxy and a comet coming for earth, or two oddly similar events at very different times in your life, are connected in origin: some super huge higher-dimensional dude trying to pet you.

Science Literature + Funding Pressure Encourages Divergence

We ask: why is the literature on charge-transfer (CT) mechanisms in organic systems such a shitshow? There are so many different terms for different types of potential mechanisms: tunneling, hopping, but then also superexchange, and resonant tunneling, and multi-step tunneling, coherent hopping, electron delocalization etc etc. Are there likely this many different mechanisms governing the charge transport in organic systems? The answer is definitely not, and a lot of these actually pick out the same fundamental mechanism but just use different terminology because their results were a little different when they ran the experiment.

You have many different groups under pressure from funding sources to publish. This puts a time crunch on things, and you should just get your results out one way or another.

But, you don't want to step on the toes of another published person in the field who might review your manuscript, so you use different terminology. you avoid really pitting your results against their framework, and just use different words, and that wont offend them.

As a result, there isn't a collective effort by the community to converge on a single unified explanation, but rather the opposite force to avoid each other as much as possible to just publish without problems. 

So the answer is: the social organization between researchers, journals, and funding sources.

Short term solution: write a review that goes over all the terms for different CT mechanisms, and what different major groups mean by them. And then you can distinguish (for example) superexchange vs superexchange', where the latter is how the XXX group uses the term which is completely different than the traditional technical meaning.

Long term solution: Rearrange the social dynamic of this deadly triangle. How would you do it?

The Earth's Will to Reproduce

Just quick dump of a thought here, but hopefully will have time to expand.

Q: If the earth is an organism, why hasn't it reproduced?

A: The earth first needs to reproduce by sending its seeds out into space to colonize it. This likely forms the basis of the human fascination with space, remarkable ability of humans to build tech to go into space and explore and proliferate, etc. We are the earth's seeds, and our desires, goals, fascinations, etc all proceed from the earth's will to reproduce.

Camus Absurdism vs Marx Leftism

Encountered the following challenge on an Absurdist forum:

do you not think reveling in absurdity and meaningless is a luxury you can afford if you dont have debt and work and struggle to get by every day?
if i stopped giving a fuck, which i wish i could do, i'd lose everything materialistic and financial. id be kicked out of my course.
"Schopenhauer was laughed at for praising suicide at a laden table [but he was technically right]"
He was maybe right but he still could afford the luxury of that being one of the only proper worries.
i cant imagine myself exactly being relaxed and happy and accepting about being homeless or out in the cold and the rain.

TLDR: If you can't avoid work/money/housing related anxiety, it's very difficult to be content in the absurdity and meaninglessness of it all, even if you're aware of it.

or maybe i'm just an idiot

Twofold Response:

1. This rings similar to the concept of a rollercoaster effect, where lower income brackets are statistically less likely to commit suicide because they are working toward something and have a direction of progress. Once you "make it to the top" and see that you have no more fulfillment than you did when you were climbing, you become depressed and have no where to go but the "steep drop" into oblivion.

Absurdism (I think) is supposed to help you see this steep drop before you begin climbing, so that you don't waste time "climbing the ladder of success" with expectations of fulfillment, only to confirm the meaninglessness that you knew was there all along.

2. Another point is that the concept of "not giving a fuck" in absurdism doesn't translate to "not caring about physical sustenance." It's more like "acknowledging that you are forced to care about physical sustenance as an animal organism even though you know it's all futile as a human being. And rather than ending it all, you decide to accept this and fall prey to your physiological needs because you don't give a fuck."