The End of Illusion

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One of my goals in my pursuits of thought, and indeed one of the goals of philosophy itself, is to pierce through all the misconceptions and arbitrary knowledge we have built up through experience and culture and find a place of raw truth, the sandbox within which all knowledge is constructed.

Now, after building up a toolbelt of knowledge and contemplating the nature of reality, the Bayesian network model of knowledge, the is-ought gap between fact and morality, the concept of narratives, and the effects of language, I believe I have finally found a place free of all illusions. It is this: what happens happens, and all else is interpretation.

It is very hard to talk about this idea using language. After all, by describing it, I am, well, describing it. That in itself adds a layer of interpretation to something which is supposed to be beneath interpretations. Yet, as we discussed last week, it is possible to use words to describe things beyond words, so I will attempt to do so.

Consider how the squirrel sees the world. The squirrel has no language, knows no words. Yet still it perceives the world. Though it has no word for “cloud,” it notices differences in patches of the sky. Though it has no word for “tree,” it knows there are cylindrical surfaces with lots of footholds to grab onto.

There was a time before language, when all things saw the world as the squirrel does. There was a time before perception, and a time before life. Yet the universe existed back then, just as much as it exists now. And it behaved according to its inherent nature, just as it does now.

This is reality beyond illusion. That which is, independent of perception or belief. It does what it does, and all concepts, narratives, and models, from philosophy to religion to science, are merely interpretations.

What Words Do – Literal Meaning vs Manifest Meaning

 “Actions speak louder than words,” the saying goes. And it is quite clearly true. If someone says “I love you,” and another person gives you a gift that shows they have been paying attention to your likes and interests, the second person’s intention comes across much more strongly. But there is a deeper level to the phrase “actions speak louder than words:” words are a kind of action.

In our culture, we think of words as a tool for communicating ideas based on the words’ literal definitions. If I say, “Light is an electromagnetic wave,” it is natural to assume I am communicating the physical structure of light, and that is the end of the story. But if we are in a group of people talking about cultivating an inner light to share with the world, and I say “Light is an electromagnetic wave,” then the group would give me dirty looks. This might frighten me, and I would say, “What? It’s true.” This would drive a wedge between me and the rest of the group, and they might ask me to leave.

Here is what just happened. If we look at the literal meanings of the words, “Light is an electromagnetic wave,” and, “What? It’s true,” we find a true story. Light is physically an electromagnetic wave, and it is indeed true. But the actions of these words, what I call their manifest meaning, is to say “I do not buy into your spiritual metaphor and neither should you,” and then, “You shouldn’t be upset, because I am not trying to get you to change your beliefs.” In the realm of actions, these true phrases are, in fact, deceitful.

If you think about it, we never say anything simply because it is true. There is always a reason behind what we say. I have never mentioned before that there is a large parasol in the yard outside my window, even though it is true. This is because I have never had a reason to bring it up. Even now the reason I am telling you about it is not because it is true (although it is), but because it illustrates the point of this blog post. The reason we say words is not because of their literal meaning, but because what we say and when and how we say it is an action.

In order to understand other people, we must not only look at the literal meanings of the words they say, but at the actions they are performing by saying them. If we get too caught up in the literal meanings of the words, we get confused and do not understand. This is true not only for others, but for ourselves as well. In the above example, the person who says “Light is an electromagnetic wave” does not understand their own actions, because they are fixated on the literal meanings of their words. The exchange is not about physics, it’s about personal growth and its effects on others.

So we see that for words to be true, they must not only be literally true, but manifestly true. Yet I would go even further and say manifest truth is more important than literal truth. There are times when what someone needs to hear is not what is true, but something motivational. For instance, if someone is going through a hard time, we can tell them, “Hang on, everything will be okay soon,” even if there is no sign of when things will be okay. Maybe it’s literally true, and maybe it’s not, we don’t know. But the manifest truth, “You don’t have to suffer as much if you think positively,” is. However, straight-up telling someone “You don’t have to suffer as much if you think positively” is not nearly as motivating, and for some people it has its own manifest meaning, “You are to blame for making yourself suffer.” This is obviously not the message we want to get across, so instead we say, “Hang on, everything will be okay soon.” Everybody knows this statement’s literal truth is uncertain, but it is still sometimes the right thing to say; its manifest meaning is true.

Knowledge is power, and with power comes responsibility. The positive value of recognizing words as actions is immense. It can help us understand and make peace with one another, especially regarding sensitive topics. But there are those who use manifest meaning to manipulate others for their own gain, and understanding the idea of manifest meaning helps us guard against their influence. In politics, manifest meaning is prioritized over literal meaning, no matter what party, no matter what country. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the current United States President, Donald Trump.

It is no secret that Trump spouts nonsense all the time. There’s no point beating around the bush; he does not care about literal truth, and everyone can see it as plainly as the Emperor’s New Clothes. Some people point to the nonsense he says and call him an idiot. But this interpretation is wrong, as evidenced by this one damning fact: Trump got elected President of the United states. You don’t bumble your way into that position. Trump’s ejaculations of the mouth may be nonsense when taken literally, but it all has the same manifest meaning: “Life is a status game, and I’m the winner.” If we interpret his words under this lens, it all clicks into place.

You may be wondering, what is the manifest meaning of this blog post? That, my dear reader, is the question you should ask anytime you read a text. In this case, it can be summed up in this simple idea: words are not just words, they are actions. They have effects and consequences, sometimes independent from their literal meanings. If we want to understand others and navigate through the maze of human communication, we must internalize this and practice speaking and interpreting in terms of manifest meaning rather than getting caught up in the endless, needless tangles of literal meanings. When we do, we will discover life to be so much clearer than it appeared before.

Vast Minds – A Bizarre Possibility of Physicalist Consciousness

Consciousness:

The Hard Problem

Dualism

Physicalism

Idealism

Identifying Consciousness
Vast Minds

Identity, Self, and Other

The Question of Meaning

Disclaimer: The content of this blog post is outside the realm of current scientific knowledge. These ideas are meant as a fun exploration of possibilities, and should be taken with the same level of seriousness as life on other planets and alternate universes. 

Despite all of the revelations of science and philosophy, consciousness remains one of the universe’s most incredible mysteries. We have gone over several explanations of consciousness in this series, and in my judgment, physicalism fits best with the jigsaw puzzle of science. In particular, the version of physicalism that says consciousness is patterns of information in the brain. For this discussion, we will assume physicalism of this kind is true. (And remember, it has nothing to do with the q-word!)

Brains are made of neurons, a very simple machine. A neuron fires an electric pulse if it receives enough stimulus, and that’s it. But get enough of these simple machines together, and we get a system that exhibits conceptual models, self-awareness, free will, and consciousness.

If consciousness in the brain is a result of the collective information processes of neurons, then it stands to reason that if the same information processes happen in another system, such as a computer, that system will be conscious too; consciousness is substrate-independent. The unit of computation is the transistor, which behaves somewhat differently from a neuron, but wire enough transistors together and they can do anything a network of neurons can do. Thus, it should be possible to build a computer that is just as conscious as a human.

But here’s the question that comes to my mind: if we’re going to introduce the idea of substrate-independence to talk about conscious computer programs, why stop at computers? Drawing the line there seems just as arbitrary as drawing it at brains. A few adventurous thinkers extend the idea of substrate-independence to systems like billions of people standing in a field, raising flags or pulling levers. If these people can imitate the human connectome well enough, then this field of 80 billion people will be just as conscious as the human brain it is emulating.

So let’s be speculative pioneers and take this line of reasoning to its extreme conclusion. Let’s dispense with the idea of mimicking brains, and ask what kinds of sufficiently complex systems in general might be conscious? For instance, what about an ant colony?

Ants are not very smart creatures. For brains, they have only 250,000 neurons, which may not seem too shabby, but it is only .0003% of the 80 billion neurons humans have. These little brains can run programs to tell the ant where to find food, what task to perform, when to attack an enemy, and a number of other simple things like that. If an individual ant is conscious at all, its awareness is very limited, more of a mush of impressions and sensations than a thinking mind.

But what about the colony as a whole? The capacity for ants to build nests, gather resources, and wage wars is not in the individual ants, but in the collective actions of the colony. When ants come into contact with their sisters, they interact by sharing pheromones. This influences what each ant does next. The meeting between two ants is the unit of information sharing for the colony. Could the meetings of ants add up to information processing in such a way as to make the colony as a whole a conscious mind?

Ant colonies have between 500 and 10,000 ants. This is much less than the number of neurons an individual ant has. So it seems unlikely that an ant colony would be more conscious than an individual ant. But that conclusion is dramatic in itself; the very fact that known science does not dismiss outright the idea that an ant colony could be conscious if it had enough ants is mind-blowing!

Now that the door is open, let’s let ourselves loose and imagine the possibilities of consciousness in other collective systems. Perhaps the internet is conscious. After all, it is a network of sites and files and cookies and all that, which people and programs are constantly clicking through and changing. Perhaps the entire internet is one giant conscious mind, or maybe pockets of it are minds, like Facebook and YouTube.

What about more abstract things, like economies? The economy shares information through transactions, and every transaction influences future transactions and the overall state of the economy. Might an economy be conscious? Could our purchases, working hours, and business ventures contribute to the health and wellbeing of a living mind?

What about other complex systems? Might weather patterns be conscious? Ecosystems? In another discussion, we analogized ideologies, religions, and cultures as memetic organisms, propagating themselves through memetics rather than genetics. Might religions, ideologies, and cultures literally be alive and conscious?

It all seems absurd, and for all I know, the answer to all these questions is no. To the best of our knowledge, the only things in the universe that we can be certain are conscious are brains. But, consciousness is the least understood phenomenon known to science, and it may well be that once we understand it better, we start to find consciousness in all kinds of places we never expected.

Facts about Morality – How Small can We Make the Is-Ought Gap?

Some time ago, we talked about the is-ought gap, the idea that there will always be an unbridgeable logical gap between facts and moral duties. This is true, but that doesn’t stop us from turning the lens of fact onto morality, and seeing how close we can get.

To begin with, let’s step back to get a look at what morality is from an impersonal, objective point of view. Out of all the different views of morality there are, they have one thing in common: the idea that some things are better than others, that there are potential ways things should be and actions people should take, and there are potential ways things should not be and actions people should not take.

What determines what is judged to be good and what is judged to be bad? It starts with stimulus reaction and anticipation. Some things cause pain, and some things cause pleasure. We naturally recoil from pain and seek out pleasure. This is the beginnings of morality.

It is not the whole story, of course. We often abstain from pleasure or allow ourselves to suffer pain in the service of higher values. We might value order, justice, honor, or a clean mind, and make sacrifices in the realm of pleasure and pain to serve these values. The weight we give to each of our values determines our morality. In fact, we can think of the instincts surrounding pleasure and pain as values, and describe morality as the process of making choices and choosing rules for life based on our values. Values can be fluid; we might occasionally be able to choose our values, but most of the time they are influenced unconsciously, either by nature or by socialization.

It is not just our own circumstances that influence our values, but our capacity for empathy and compassion, to imagine what it is like to be in others’ shoes, and to want good things for them as well as for ourselves. There is a part of us that wants to do what is good for everyone, to make the world better, not just our own lives and actions. This is a double-edged sword, because although it can motivate us to help others, it can also make us think we know what is good for them better than they do, and to try to control their values and the choices they make.

On top of our values, we craft narratives. These can come in the forms of myths and stories, ideologies, philosophies, and religions. Narratives shape our values and help us remember them when the pleasure and pain stimuli become strong enough to make it hard to think. Compelling narratives for values different from ours can influence us to adjust our values in their direction.

The space of moralities is vast and varied. But despite all the variety of this moral landscape, the goal of all moral systems can be summed up in one statement: to make things good.

This is intentionally vague, because “good” means a lot of different things. Some say it’s happiness, others fulfillment, wellbeing, absence of misery, eudaimonia, or any number of similar concepts. In fact, as the philosopher G. E. Moore pointed out over a hundred years ago, it is impossible to define “good” as any specific thing. But in this context, we observe that any time a person looks at themself and the way things are and the way things will be, and says, “this is good,” they all share the same core idea: to be satisfied with one’s life and the world.

Despite “good” meaning different things to different people, it is the goal of all morality. Thus, we can take all conceptions of goodness and all measures according to all people, and indeed all conscious creatures, and add them together to make a “total goodness.” For any event, action, circumstance, etc., there is an objective level of total goodness, determined by the aggregate of its subjective, individual goodness to every person and conscious creature. This is messy and complex and always changing, but it does, in fact, exist.

And here lies the question. Can we say it is an objective, factual moral imperative that we ought to aim to increase total goodness? Well . . . No. Because we run into the is-ought gap. Even though the total goodness of something is an objective fact, that does not mean it is a fact that we ought to work toward increasing the total goodness. There is still an unbridgeable gap in the logic.

Any passage between is and ought requires a leap of faith. But the more descriptive facts about morality we take into consideration, the smaller the leap required. To me, the leap from the fact that there is such a thing as total good to the opinion that we ought to work toward increasing the total good, is small. Not even a leap, really, just a step. I am willing to take that step, and I invite you to take it with me. Let’s make this world a better place.