h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Dmitri! Interesting you should be speaking about this. I’m currently working on a philosophical book called ‘The Human Project’ and I deal with the matter of mind at length! I agree with you: the mind cannot be an ‘epiphenomenon’ … it is the primary phenomenon through which we experience all other phenomena! But ‘science’ can’t easily see it that way: science is supposed to be ‘objective’ but dealing with mind, consciousness, awareness is a matter of subjectivity. Scientifically it is pretty much impossible to discuss! All ‘scientific’ writing is couched in objective, impersonal language, the writer doing his or her best to hide his or her own self … which is precisely the thing that must take center stage if we are to speak about mind! But then, many people who try to speak about the mind get all spooky about it, which again is not the right approach either. This is why it is taking several long sections of my book to really tackle the matter. But the conclusion I come to is the same as yours … it can’t be possible that minds are largely irrelevant. This also means that it can’t be possible for minds to go ‘extinct’ like materialists suppose happens when we die. The knowledge and experience gained by each mind over a lifetime is too important for that. Like you say … if not, then what is this entire travail of life *for*? All the same … scientifically, philosophically, or in any other way, it is very hard to work out what really happens to a mind at death. Now complacent Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Atheists or people of most other big belief systems are satisfied they have the answer – but there are so many answers and those disagree among themselves! Personally I’ve tried many ideas on for size … and I want to remain open to do so, I’m certainly nowhere near ‘settling’ on an ultimate answer. I find it hard to believe in an afterlife in a world *different* from this one. To me, this world is too amazing and important to leave behind permanently. And it is the only world I, for one, *know*. It is a sure thing while other worlds for other kinds of afterlives are speculation and gambling. And this universe, as far as I can determine, was built to last – it will be around for billions of years, so it’s hard to see it as just a station we pass through on the way to somewhere else. So … I would want to believe my own soul (for one) would somehow remain here. Some kind of reincarnation, maybe. I think it might actually work. Maybe the Buddhists are on to something … they believe that the enlightened soul may pass on to Nirvana but *some* such souls can choose to become re-incarnated as teachers to help the other souls along. Now I’d like that job …

But of course I don’t know if that’s the ultimate truth either. I’m still working on many possibilities … there might be other ways in which souls can carry on though bodies die. We might need to re-think the matter of identity. I often think that there is a ‘great big entire soul’ that our small individual souls are part of. So when individuals die, they stop entirely existing as separate entities and their souls join back with the big one. All that they know, learnt, experienced, goes back to the whole, which continually gives birth to new lives and new souls. I can’t really call the big soul ‘God’ though it would be God-like … but it won’t be like God most people think of because it won’t be all-knowing and all-powerful, it would be a soul that needs to learn and to grow and that can only act through the smaller souls that are part of it.

In the New Age biz there’s talk of the Akashic Records. This is like a cosmic library storing all individual knowledge and experience … absolutely everything every single conscious mind ever learns or knows. If this is so, then individuals may come and go, but all that they’ve experienced that is important, gets preserved, and passed on to other individuals. Woolly as this notion is, I also think that there might be merit in it. What is information after all? It has to belong to some kind of ‘realm’ … where indeed does the info go when a computer hard drive gets fried? Even speaking in terms of physical science, information is ‘coded’ in time and space and all information might be potentially retrievable. (Difficult notion that I’m also working on in my book.) But yes, there must be ‘conservation laws’ for information, too.

There might also be ‘higher realms’ BUT I think, not fully separate from the physical reality around us. Instead I think these would belong to this very same reality, but represent ‘higher levels’ of it. They would be all around us but we can’t see them because they need to be perceived and interpreted on a higher level than we have access to … the difference from looking and seeing what’s around you when you’re on a high mountain peak, to when you’re looking from the bottom of a valley. But we’re nowhere near the peak yet. It is very, very likely that we’re still just scratching the surface when it comes to reality. What is real is real, but so far we only know a teeny tiny bit of what’s real. As we learn more and come to understand better, layer upon layer of reality becomes revealed to us … it would be ridiculous to think that what we know about our universe *now* represents anywhere near all that it *is*.

Excellent! You've said that very well!

I agree: we don't know everything. The scientific method is a great tool. But it is not the only tool. We still have to remember with Socrates that we start from ignorance. Especially about consciousness.

I'm just tired of closed systems and false dichotomies.

Willem and Dmitri, this is an article I submitted to the Post but it seems more appropriate to put it here as it addresses some of the points you have raised:

The well-known physicist David Deutsch expressed the opinion (Philosophy will be the key that unlocks artificial intelligence, The Guardian, October 3, 2012) that the failure of scientists to produce anything remotely resembling true artificial intelligence (or Artificial General Intelligence as it is usually referred to now) over the past sixty years is a result of ignoring the philosophical problems inherent in the project.

According to most dictionaries Intelligence is the faculty of understanding that allows us to use our knowledge and skills to solve problems by manipulating our environment and ever since Descartes decided that the only route to indubitable knowledge was the radical separation of mind and matter explicit in the “Cogito”, philosophy has struggled with the problem of what we mean by knowledge and how we acquire it.

One answer to this is Communitarianism: the problem with recognising Descartes as the starting point for modern philosophy is his focussing on the autonomous individual as the repository of knowledge, whereas the immanentism of Aristotle and Hegel and the holistic views promoted by Jan Smuts, Alfred Adler and others have provided an alternative view of the individual as an instantiation of human knowledge. This approach reconnects us with the original idea of philosophy as, literally, the love of wisdom where love is the ability to become one with another individual through empathy (generally referred to in philosophy as Hermeneutics) and wisdom is to understand the connections that make up the Big Picture (that is, the social world we inhabit).

According to this view, then, something can only be considered intelligent if it is able to recognise intelligence and awareness in others. This can be seen to be true when we think about very young children being able to stare at a stranger without embarrassment: their self-awareness has not yet developed to the point where they understand that what they are looking at is a self-aware individual. Arthur C. Clarke thought that machines would have this level of self-awareness by 2001 but his HAL9000 suffered from the very moral problems that proponents of artificial intelligence are presumably hoping to do away with.

But this still leaves us with the problem of what the human brain is doing when it exhibits intelligence. The electrochemical activity in the brain is an entirely material process so does this mean that we are already an example of artificial intelligence? If we are then any idea of Free Will would be meaningless; all our actions would be as predictable as the fall of Newton’s apple. At the moment the alternative views, ranging from quantum tubules in the brain to the idea that humans have a spirit or soul, seem to have very little evidence to support them. In which case there would seem to be no reason why a machine could not eventually develop an individual identity in the same way that humans have but, presumably, the machine being a product of human engineering would imply the human world expanding to include the sentient machine and, consequently, the machine would have to be considered a human rather than an artificial intelligence.

Speaking of artificial intelligences, I had a carefully written post here that the server decided to swallow. Stop that censorship, you beast...

I wanted to compliment you two on this discussion, which I believe is exactly what Robbie and the Core Team wanted us to have when they suggested this topic for Create...could I 'steal' it all for the Post when you're finished discussing the salient points?

I also had a question about self-awareness. Your remark about children looking at strangers without embarrassment pulled up a memory from my data banks. I was about eight, and I had a bad reaction to a friend of my mother's. She was a tall and forbidding looking lady, and I was afraid to stay with her. My mother told me I'd hurt her feelings, as she was really a kind person.

Now that I've copied this content, the server will let it through. That's not AI, that's Murphy's Law...

I was shocked because it had never occurred to me that any attitude of mine could have the least effect on anyone else. Does that mean I wasn't self-aware until that moment? I remember the event as a bit of a cognitive revelation.

I've had quite a few long posts disappear into cyberspace as well - very frustrating!

Robbie's amazing Tedtalk about talking with a digital Douglas Adams was one of the things that prompted me to write that piece.

The thing about self-awareness is that it is a gradual development: it is your individual identity being formed by memory. As someone who spent 20 years looking after dementia sufferers, I've seen how individual identity breaks down as the memory fails.

Today’s news about Tara Palmer-Tomkinson (U219157) and the fact that I’ve now got the hang of this Copy and Paste thingy encourages a long-held ambition to write about Book Of The Future. This has at least a tangential significance for this conversation that I hope will become clear eventually.

It was Christmas 2002 that I noticed the BBC advertising the idea of people submitting articles predicting the future to BBCi (as it was called in those days) for a democratically constructed book to raise funds for Comic Relief. Having signed up to the website I sat one Wednesday night in January 2003 in the otherwise deserted café of Motherwell YMCA waiting for my daughter to finish her gymnastics class, scribbling notes on scraps of paper for an article proposing that social change tends to be much more difficult to predict than technological change because people take for granted the milieu in which they have grown up, lacking sufficient understanding of history to see how fragile it is.

When it came to typing the article onto the site I realised that it was far too long for the recommended 500 word limit so I edited out all the jokes, which reduced it by about six words, and then cut it in half with the intention of putting the second half in later. However, at this point the editors changed the rules so that no one could have more than one article in the book because one of the Futurists was giving multiple votes to his articles, something we were specifically asked not to do, so the second part never got written.

The BBC asked several famous people to get involved; Brian May, Irvine Welsh, Zac Goldsmith, David Levy, Michael Meacher, Ute Navidi, Ralph Steadman and others contributed. My namesake was asked but refused and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson wrote a poem which unfortunately was so bad that people voted for it NOT to be put in the book. However, the editors seem to have taken pity and so, at the bottom of page 70, two lines are included:
“I’d end the starvation of every nation
And people would cry from love’s elation”
What a shame that the rest of the poem along with almost everything else that was on that bit of BBCi was, presumably, deleted from the BBC servers when hootoo was dispatched to its present location.

The book seems to have been regarded by the BBC as an embarrassing failure as they hastily claimed that it would be against the BBC Trust rules to advertise it after it “hit” the shops. In fact, it was so difficult to persuade bookshops that it really did exist that I, somewhat naively, phoned the editors office. The person I spoke to obviously mistook me for the famous Chris Morris and said that I should have been sent a complimentary copy and went to find out why it hadn’t arrived. I imagine the conversation in the office went as follows: “The real Chris Morris didn’t contribute, it’s just some nobody with the same name. He can damn well buy his own copy.”

Such is the nature of fame…

BBC - Book of the Future - Thinking The Unthinkable - A958656



Thinking The Unthinkable (original version)
Written by: Chris Morris
Created: 06 February 2003


Imagine someone writing in the 1890s on what the world would
be like in twenty years. Predicting the technological
developments would have been relatively easy; predicting the
social upheavals would have been virtually unthinkable. And
now we have to think the unthinkable in order to predict the
changes we might experience in the next twenty years.

To guess where our society is going we need to know where it
came from. The modern world that we (particularly in the
English-speaking community) so take for granted is essentially
a product of the 17th century scientific revolution and the
subsequent Enlightenment period. This was, in effect, the
search for some absolute truth not derived from Aristotle or
the Bible upon which could be constructed a society where all
citizens would be treated equally. It was a success to the
extent that, having emptied the term 'God' of its meaning, the
rigid social structure of the medieval world (built around the
idea that God made the world perfectly fixed and unchangeable)
was broken down and many great statements of democratic ideals
such as the U.S. Constitution were written.

But, as Alisdair McIntyre has argued, the project eventually
failed to discover any single, overriding principle that would
provide a rational structure for a truly democratic society.
The three most notable attempts to implement such a principle
have all failed: Fascism, because it is too rigid and
parochial to outlive the person who embodies it; Communism,
because Marx couldn't bear to admit that Hegel might be right
- and, of course, Capitalism.

Has capitalism failed? The path of free-market individualism
that it followed from the Enlightenment has given it the
flexibility to adapt to many different cultures. However,
individualism is a dead-end. Humans can only be social animals
and, as that well-known anarchist Margaret H. Thatcher
informed us, for the true free-marketeer 'there is no such
thing as society'. Hence, the obsession in post-Modernism for
reconnecting individuals with some sort of social structure;
but this can't be the old mass society of the modern world, it
has to be a menu of sub-cultures and interest groups from
which we can choose at random and transiently.

What does this mean for our future? Capitalism seems to be
reaching the limit of its adaptability. The old certainty of
the modern world, especially one where most people could
expect free education and healthcare, long-term, stable
employment and a pension is disappearing rapidly. It could be
that, when George Bush (Sr.) declared that the 'free world'
had won the Cold War he was making one of his worst verbal
gaffes. Communism, like Capitalism, is another facet of the
industrial age and its demise is more likely to be just
another event in the downfall of that age. The transition from
pre-modern to modern society was accompanied by the Hundred
Years War; perhaps George Bush (Jr.) is now beginning a second
Hundred Years War, as blissfully ignorant of history as his
father.

Since the certainty presented by the social sciences and the
corresponding concept of Progress central to the ideology of
the modern world are increasingly seen to be an illusion,
large numbers of people are desperately trying to return to
the pre-modern certainty of God. However, as noted earlier,
this is an empty term; consequently people can, in a very
post-modern fashion, fill it with any content they choose -
hence the growing number of fundamentalisms, sects and cults.
But this very choice will be the downfall of religion as it
will lead to increasing dissatisfaction and conflict, not
perhaps within the next 17 years but soon enough.



People have been talking about this Article. Here are the most recent
Conversations:


TITLE Last Posting:

No subject Mar 20, 2003

I think that Goverment will be.... Mar 1, 2003

Hi Chris and Dmitri! Please give me some time to respond properly ...

That story about the book is amazing.

Hi, Willem
This debate's been raging for about 2,500 years so I don't think anyone's in any hurry!

Dmitri, the full story of the Book really needs to be told. Unfortunately it seems only broelan and myself of the people in it are still posting here.

Hi again Chris and Dmitri! Dmitri, on my account of course you could use this discussion.

Anyways ... for now just *one* aspect I'd like to comment upon. If the mind can exist without a body, then what's the use of bodies? Personally I feel the body must also be very important. Since I am suffering from a rather serious mental illness, I've had to deal in many ways with a mind going wrong because of a *brain* going wrong. I've experienced a lot of fragmentation of my own identity as a result of the illness. I haven't yet suffered complete dementia ... but I realise that I might. But ... this does suggest 'mind' *needs* a body, some physical substrate. Not to *exist as such*, necessarily, but rather, to be all that it can be. I have a vague idea that there must be a kind of mind-field in the universe. This field is then operated upon, elaborated, focused, through physical brains of all sorts, not just human brains. TSo when we die or something goes wrong with our brains, we lose the connection with the mind field. But the field persists, and carries in some way the elements needed for making new minds that are focused and instantiated in individual bodies. Well, that's the idea I have. I'm developing it further ... a good point there about memory being necessary to enable a person to have a coherent identity. Memory is thus a major mind-organizing factor ...

I’d like to go back to the two opening statements and respond directly to a couple of points
In the initial article, Dmitri sets up a strawman argument in listing “What most of these fuzzy thinkers seem to be saying…” It seems extremely unlikely that any serious secular humanist would base their views on the argument “I don’t like this particular modern, superficial idea of God or religion, therefore I must believe that nothing other than the material world exists.” The whole point of secular humanism is the primacy of rational thinking informed by reliable evidence; there is nothing pessimistic about it, it joyfully embraces reality.

However, even worse than a strawman argument is the idea that when Schiller writes “…above this tent of stars, a loving father must live”, his status as a great poet gives the statement equal standing with the work of, for example, Marvin Minsky. This is not a false dichotomy, rather in an area as difficult as this, it shows how important it is to keep a sense of proportion.

In post 1 Willem echoes Dmitri’s opinion that death seems to make no sense if there can be no continuation of mind or soul but, in my view, life can have no other meaning than death although it can, I think, have any purpose you choose to give it. I’m very happy to think that when I die I shall return to stardust (who would have thought that Joni Mitchell was an astrophysicist) and my daughter will remember me and the knowledge that we’ve shared.

It might help to make the problem clear if we start with what we know to be true: there is overwhelming evidence to support both evolution and that we are thinking, self-aware individuals. The problem is how does one lead to the other? One answer is to call it an emergent property which seems to be scientific jargon for a happy accident. This would certainly rule out any idea of a “Plan” and it would require some impressive evidence to bring the idea of any such plan back into a rational discussion.

Going back to Marvin Minsky (and I don’t think it’s possible to have a conversation like this without taking his views into consideration), he argued in his book “The Society of Mind” that human intelligence is the product of the interaction between many semi-autonomous but essentially unintelligent resources in the brain. My experiences suggest to me that these resources are held together by a system of filters in which, as Willem points out, memory plays a major part. Drugs such as LSD seem to disable these filters sometimes permanently preventing the individual identity from being reassembled as was perhaps the case with Syd Barrett.

Actually, that wasn't intended to be a strawman, even if it came out that way.

That was a summary of actual, real-time conversations that have, unfortunately, been directed at me, and they weren't exaggerated. I don't think the speakers were serious 'secular humanists'. I think they were fuzzy thinkers who *think* they're secular humanists because they heard the phrase on TV. (In the US, both proponents and opponents of 'secular humanism' are very likely to have no idea what in the world it means.)

I have nothing against rational thinking - I just don't think there's enough of it going on these days.

I also probably talk to dumber people than you do.

You may not want to talk to me, either - I absolutely do tend to give statements by poets equal weight with those by academic scientists.

Wow! Dmitri I'm impressed that you can have conversations like that in real life. In this area, where the Orange Lodge holds one of its most important annual Walks, I probably wouldn't live long enough to get a reply in if I started that sort of discussion! Rational debate still tends to be a blood sport here.

Aha. We are separated by an ocean, and by different rules of engagement. It's good to know these things. I appreciate your forbearance better, knowing what you have to put up with.

Sorry for the lack of response – I’ve just had a day in bed recovering from a heavy cold.
To take my mind off my sore nose I’ve tried unsuccessfully several different approaches to counter your claim for equal weight of statements by poets and scientists. This is both very difficult and extremely important; difficult for me because, for example, I’ve been privileged on a couple of occasions to attend readings by Seamus Heaney and experience the way his beautiful voice could reveal layers of meaning in deceptively simple words and important for obvious reasons now that the White House has migrated to the world of alternative facts.

Choosing to mention Heaney here is, of course, a deliberate ploy; would you compare him with Schiller? Whose words contain the greater truth? Who would have the authority to decide? Obviously, these questions make no sense in this context as poetry and music allow us the comfort of reaching out and feeling the presence of other minds in a way that doesn’t require confirmation (is this what it feels like to have religious faith, I wonder?). Asking questions of someone like Marvin Minsky, however, produces a knowledge that does require confirmation (and, of course, a good scientist would insist on providing that in the form of well-founded evidence).

On the other hand, one of the first people I met when I started University was John Curtice, now the favourite political scientist of the BBC, so I had the interesting experience for four years of being able to study at close quarters one of the sharpest minds around that believes without doubt that humans can be studied objectively as collections of statistics while I was gaining a political philosophy degree that gave me very good reasons for believing that social science is and always will be incapable of producing any results of similar worth to those of the physical sciences.

The reason for this lay in the birth of modern science-based society in the 17 and 18th centuries, when the ASPIRATION to study humans individually and collectively was an essential part of the movement to free people from the rigid authority of the Church and the Divine Right of Kings, unfortunately achieved at the cost of failing to find a way to construct a single universal political principal founded on scientific objectivity, leaving the way open for cultural or political relativism. Mostly, this difficulty has been covered up or ignored but what has come to be referred to as post-modernism in academia and the world of ideas is actually the growing realisation that the problems that are manifestations of this contradiction have to be recognised openly and engaged with honestly.

Interestingly, the University originally set up in the 18th century to make “useful learning” available to the whole community had, in the 1980s become dominated by a Thatcherite view of education as a profit-based industry and the politics department had changed to the Department of Government. After four years I had contemporaries who knew everything about the mechanics of government but understood nothing about politics. It was also decided that philosophy was not “useful” and the department was closed.

Hi again Dmitri and Chris! I will try to keep up with this, but am very busy with little internet time.

Anyways I think philosophy is necessary alongside science. There are things that are real, that do exist, and yet science doesn't and in some cases cannot know about them. The mind - not just the human mind, but all of mind - is a huge problem area for science - AND philosophy. I'm writing my book to try and clarify all of that. I try to point out certain rational arguments hardly ever used. One such argument is *assuming* something as true, and then deriving a contradiction from it. This proves the initial assumption must have been wrong ... UNLESS you want to believe there are actual contradiction in the universe - intrinsic to its very nature.

I don't think there's any irresolvable contradiction in the universe. For me it's seeming more and more likely that ultimately we will have a unified, holistic view of everything - INCLUDING the mind, and its nature, how it arises from matter and what it will ultimately do with matter.

Anyways Chris, when you speak about returning to 'star stuff' ... are you speaking of your body alone or of your mind as well? I personally think that stars are made of mind-stuff! The idea I have is that there has to be a 'realm of mind' and that it's equally real to supposedly objective material reality. But actually there's no division ... mind ultimately *is* matter, and matter mind. But mind, looked at as mind, has properties unique to it. It looks to me like an intrinsic apparent contradiction that ultimately proves to be non-contradictory, like the wave/particle duality in physics.

But the realm of mind has traditionally be the bane of scientists and there has been 'mind-denialism' such as by the Logical Positivists. Science has grudgingly moved beyond positivism, but now they have the idea of 'epiphenomenalism' which is just putting a label on it without understanding it. If mind is indeed an epiphenomenon, then it is not grounded in reality ... it doesn't flow by any cause/effect laws or processes, it just 'emerges' at a certain level and we can't say how. I consider that to be a scientific cop-out; it is akin to saying 'we can never know'. This is the opposite of the spirit of science!

In contrast to this, I believe that mind is indeed fully integrated in the world of matter. My own philosophy is a kind of holism ... everything is part of everything else, and lower levels can include higher levels. In my view, mind has to fit into this picture.

I hope your cold is better.

I wouldn't put forth an argument about poets and scientists and equal weight - I wouldn't dare. It depends on whose forum, whose criteria, whatever...just saying that's how *my* mind works.

But for what it's worth (not that much), I'm an admirer of Seamus Heaney's work, too. I've got his Beowulf translation and I find it very good. Since I've studied the original poem with experts, and been through it a few times, I think I'm in a position to say *that* safely, anyhow.

My personal view is that there are many ways of approaching truth, similar to the 'blind men and the elephant' idea. And while they all give us something, I'd be loath to think we could arrive at a definitive, all-encompassing methodology, a Deep Thought 'answer to everything. I feel the same way about all ancient texts, traditions, and religious approaches. I don't like to throw anything away: I think our attic is big enough to contain all of it. Somebody might need that scrap someday to complete their research...

But again, that's just me, and very subjective.

Oh, and the idea of closing a philosophy department...I'm speechless. Although they closed the language department I taught in at one time because they needed a few more s, so I shouldn't be surprised. But I would have thought philosophy was safe.

I will post a reply to these questions when I get time. In the meantime I have just watched the Trump press conference (what I'm sure will be referred to in future as The Trump Press Conference). Seeing the most powerful person in the world demonstrating himself to be utterly irrational is probably one of the most frightening things I've ever seen (and I'm old enough to remember the Cuban missile crisis).