Philosophical Musings 4 QuantumBrain

I don’t think I’m the only one in saying, especially amongst scientists, that I find it difficult to see the point in a lot of, if not all of art. How does it help us? It provides little in the way of scientific advancement, medical care or environmental protection, possibly three things that the modern world is most concerned with at the present time. Art is a reflection of a single person’s, or even a specific group’s, perception of the world and his/her/their understanding of it. Who cares? Why should the rest of us be exposed to it? Even Socrates is claimed to have such an attitude towards art, as Plato makes out in the Republic. Socrates wanted to ban artistic works from the likes of Homer as it was of no use to his ideological republic state.

Except that…..I’ve found myself writing poetry and drawing pictures. I enjoy it - I find it a good form of meditation and it helps focus my thoughts. There’s even a part of me that wants to show it off to others. And then I thought, “why would they want to see it?” I usually only write or draw when I’m in just the right emotive state, when ideas become as clear to me as watching a film, with every frame and the pictures and information they carry evolving and generating a new level of perception over time. How can I expect other people to understand what is such a personal state of mind? So I began to think that maybe art does have a purpose but only for the artist. It is a way of them expressing and coming to understand their own ideas about the world, about life. However, artists shouldn’t impose their work on others as they cannot possibly understand.

Can they?

I’ve just finished reading a small article entitled “Art for Art’s Sake”, written in an Oxford University periodical, Exposition. In it, the author describes the critical response to William Wordsworth’s Poems, in Two Volumes. It should be mentioned that in these poems, Wordsworth attempts to express the sort of “sensibilities”, that is a person’s “receptivity to external stimuli”, that one can have for even the most simplest of objects or events in nature. In doing so, Wordsworth hoped that, by reading his own elaborate description of his own sensibilities, the reader would become more receptive to such stimuli themself. Wordsworth was using his poetry to try and reach out to others, to enhance their sensibilities, probably with the goal of a more sensitive society. As such, Wordsworth felt his own art had purpose - a moral purpose for society. However, the underlying theme of the critiques was that Wordsworth’s descriptions of his own sensibilities acted more as metaphors and similes for his own emotions and thus none of this poetry was transferable, or useful, to other readers.

The article goes on to say how Wordsworth’s style changed towards the end of his life, how his works became less egocentric and more sympathetic to the possible states of mind of his readers. So, if an artist goes about work in this fashion, with a hope of reaching others for the good of society, can art be said to have purpose?

I think that the critiques of Wordsworth resonates even in this case as the artist is restricted to only his or her sensibility of the sensibilities of those to whom the art is presented. Therefore, art can never be said to have any objective value to society.

However, the critics have ignored one crucial thing: some people are quite alike. Perhaps not in their entirety but enough so that they might get some subjective value, however slight, from the artwork. A large number of subjective opinions can, in many cases, appear objective and provide sufficient motivation for objective progress to be made - take the case of Gandhi’s work in India: his subjective ideal of human equality and non-violent resistance, multiplied by his many followers, resulted in the object liberation of these people from British rule.

I find that there is a lot of art I don’t understand. I expect this is the case with the majority of people. I’m sure that, if I had studied an arts subject, I would be more sensitive to it. I have come to realise that my original claim that art has no use was simply a product of feeling pressured into understanding art that I simply could not understand. Why I felt this pressure I’m not sure - perhaps a desire to feel more cultural or to learn something new yet consistently not being able to find it in other people’s art. Now I would say that, thanks to my own involvement in it, there is indeed a use for art. It helps to focus ideas and cultivate understanding, at the very least for the artist but perhaps even for others who share similar views of the world. And if art can help increase the sensibility of just one person such that they are more receptive (and thus hopefully more responsive) to the society and nature around them then it can only be a good, useful thing.

“The logic of biological regulatory systems abides not by Hegelian

laws but, like the workings of computers, by the propositional alge-

bra of George Boole.” (Francois Jacob & Jacques Monod)

I have just finished reading this article, Bacterial Computing, written by Martyn Amos of Manchester Metropolitan University. The idea that we might harness the rules of nature to perform logical computations in living systems has fascinated me for a couple of years now but I’ve never properly come across any description of it taking place. I was pretty stoked when I found this article.

To give you a gist, Martyn describes how bacteria can be used for such boolean algebra. They can be made to do this by exploiting the many signaling mechanisms that are used in genetic regulatory networks. That is, if you draw a flow diagram of how expression of one gene manipulates the expression of another via signaling and protein building then, for certain genes, signaling mechanisms and proteins, you end up drawing a circuit, much like an electronic one. The behaviour of this circuit can be very complex and Martyn doesn’t fail to exhibit some fascinating examples of how these circuits can be designed to perform distinct functions such as producing an oscillating fluorescence, taking photographs and targeting tumor cells.

A problem is that when you insert these genetic networks into living cells so that they can operate, the results, that is, the ability of the cells to perform a desired task, are disappointingly unreliable due to the inherent noisyness of cellular processes. Martyn describes how some scientists get around this problem by deliberately mutating the cells. In most cases, the mutation gives even worse results but, occasionally, the mutation increases the performance of the cells. By keeping those cells that perform better and discarding those that perform worse, the scientists create an artificial evolutionary process over short time scales by which the cells are selected (in a survival of the fittest manner) to perform the desired task reliably. How cool is that!

So I was thinking - can this be achieved not just in electrical circuits, not just in genetic regulatory networks but in social, behavioural networks as well? Given a large number of behaving organisms (so as to smooth out noise) which can communicate between each other (say, via pheromones) and that will react to certain environmental pressures, you could indeed create a logical behavioural circuit. One could actually harness the predictability of collective behaviour (for example, swarming in locusts) such that, given a change in the environment, any predictable change in behaviour would report, to the experimenter, that very change in the environment with a certain degree of reliability.

So I promised to write one more blog in this series where I muse about Consciousness in several ways. I said that I would describe a possible way in which I think free will might be be manifested in physical reality, doing away with the need for a metaphysical explanation. Well, that was then and my thinking has moved on since. I will quickly state, for completeness, that my idea was that free will was some sort of contextual noisy process. Thus the context acts as a set of variables which evolves deterministically. The actual behavioural expression would then be selected randomly from the set by some noisy process which is easily achieved if you just try recording activity from the brain. Writing this, I still think that this must be taking place to some extent but I think that it is not robust enough, i.e. not phrased properly, so as to explain what I find to be the highest order of “conscious” thought, that is creativity. To be able to design a machine that creates new rules for its own behaviour in a manner that is convincingly like that of human behaviour is to crack the science of consciousness.

Anyway, so far this has not been achieved and so we are left with free will remaining in the realms of mysticism and faith. I have so far managed to avoid going into my beliefs of fundamental reality and truth but cannot avoid doing so here. My description of it will be (relatively) quick so no doubt people will find fault with it. Either for a better understanding of what I am about to describe or simply for your own intellectual benefit, I highly encourage you to read The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley. It is truly an outstanding book and is outstandingly written. So this is my truth: all things that exist are manifestations of one thing. To call it “one” thing is misleading as this is comparable to other numbers and other things, suggesting that it can’t be just one thing. By “one”, I mean that it is all encompassing - it is existence itself, it is the God in Christianity, the Tao in Chinese Philosophy, the Brahman in Hinduism, the Allah in Islam. Because it is everything, there is nothing from which to distinguish it - it is as much nothing as it is everything. However, I am pretty sure that, rather than being nothing, it is everything, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this. I struggle to call it anything for to categorize it is to diminish its all permeatingness. However, we are stuck with language in one form or another as our means to communicate and so I call it ‘ism’. It just……is. And all things are manifestations of ism, all one and the same as they come from and indeed are the same existence. For me, quantum mechanics, the ability to describe anything as a function of probability which extends all space and time, is one of the cornerstones of my belief. If you can understand what I mean by ism, then you will understand this: the concept of free will is such that the thing being free must be free from something else. However, if there is only one, the ism, then there is nothing from which to be free. The question of free will only applies when we do not invoke the premise of ism. If you do believe the premise, then the question of free will is irrelevant. One might say that it doesn’t exist since, by definition, it cannot exist in ism. Regardless of this, its importance is not even worth that clarification. It is irrelevant.

In the previous post of this series on consciousness, I gave my reasoning for consciousness being a trait of behaviour that is an emergent property of nature’s evolution. It gives us a sense of purpose in what can be reduced to a very mechanistic world and thus a reason to live, to reproduce and thus maintain the survival of our species! Consciousness has a large role to play for humans, being very complex beings. We have a greater sense of self than many other species, for which consciousness plays a less important role. This seems very apparent in the complexity of behaviours we observe in other species, i.e. they are not as complex as human behaviours, which matches their seemingly having a lower degree of consciousness.

This being said, it seem that consciousness, a tool which helps remove us from the mechanistic determinism of the world, arises mechanistically itself as this emergent property of evolution! Knowing this, what help is there for us?!

Adding to our sense of consciousness

In the previous post, I claimed that, consciousness being a natural and vital component of our behaviour, we should seek out experiences to enhance our perception of being conscious. Now, this is where I realised that these ideas don’t quite add up. In fact, their not adding up led me to an even more fundamental understanding, as I will describe.

It is natural, as a consequence of this emergent meme, consciousness, for us to seek new experiences. However, for us to follow the natural laws of nature - to form a society, create hierarchies, find a partner with whom we may procreate, teach those with fewer experiences than our own, form religions, search for food, earn a living etc. - is to be mechanistic in our behaviour. These are things we expect ourselves to do.

This can’t add much to our experience of being conscious, these behaviours being evolutionary advantageous for us to survive as a species. It seems that evolution has come up with a solution to this as well: our conscious behaviour has evolved such that we seek unnatural behaviours, by which I mean indulging in the arts, playing sport etc. which have no direct influence on survival and seem to be there just for the sake of it. Sure, these behaviours may have arose from refining societal interactions or training competitively for physical endeavours that would increase chances for survival (e.g. it is thought that javelin arose from hunting with spears to catch food/ward of predators) but that isn’t the case nowadays. These activities are simply for our pleasure.

Examples of unnaturally natural behaviour

For example, the creation of national parks and organisations concerned with conservation seems unnatural in a way. One might think that it is natural for a species to proliferate, feeding off the land until resources become so exhausted that the species begins to die off until there is plenty of resources for the reduced population again, which then proliferates and so the cycle continues. However, we have sanctioned large areas of land to stop this from happening. Well, I suppose that stabilising one’s environment, thus increasing the predictability of its behaviour over time, just seems like an intelligent thing to do.

I quite like this next example though: I once saw a news report about the action conservationists were taking to bring a turtle that had strayed far from its natural habitat back to its home. Is this really what nature had intended? Hasn’t evolution hinged on the migration of animals to new parts of the globe where the environmental pressures have given rise to changes in that animal’s anatomy and behaviour over many generations? Yet here were these conservationists, supposedly fighting for nature, yet going against it! I admit that that turtle may not have survived the passing tankers and boats, predation from new species or simply the changes in temperature. But it may have. Another example is of the lioness who adopted a gazelle fawn, an animal that is usually its dinner, on two occasions (the second as a result of the first being eaten by the alpha male!). This was shown on an episode of Big Cat Diary on the BBC.

There seems to be a natural tendency for animal behaviours to go against the grain of nature. Now this certainly would add to the sense of consciousness. It gives a sense of making up your own rules. Yet, as I have said, this is still a naturally occurring, emergent property of nature.

The self destructive nature of nature

So, we have a naturally occurring behaviour which is designed to go against nature! All in aid of increasing this sense of consciousness.

It is natural to go against nature. This recursively destructive statement holds within it a simple truth. Can one say that it is a natural law to have no natural laws? If there are no natural laws then how can there be a law stating it so? This strikes accord with Godel’s incompleteness theorem. In fact, the most simple, fundamental of truths that I have come across are all self destructive. In their absoluteness, there is nothing. In the case of natural laws, “it is a natural law to have no natural laws” leaves no room for any sense of the term “natural law”. What, then, is left? A world without law. Free will. From where this free will arises, I cannot say. Suffice it to say that it must exist.

The nature of truths

It is quite a bold thing to claim a common denominator to truth. I am a philospher in the sense that I love the search for wisdom but admit that I have no formal training in philosophy, other than through my education in science. All I can say is that there are things that cannot be refuted by any argument simply because the argument refutes itself. Yet the argument holds a necessary clause from which necessity is banished. To me, these statements hold the purest truths I have come across. They are different ways of expressing a more fundamental truth. Yet I think the holding of this truth in one’s mind is dependent on one’s perception of its meaning. And this meaning will have varying importance to those who understand it.

Let me give a few examples of what these truths I talk of:

• There is only one thing that we can know and that is that we cannot know anything - does that mean that we cannot know that we can’t know anything? If so then we can indeed know it! And so the cycle continues. What does this mean? Well, to me, it means that knowledge is something that exists - it is the truth. Afterall, one cannot know something that is not the truth. It is held within existence, there to be accessed briefly, in some reduced form, by a portion of that existence which may be our brain. And the workings of our brain are a part of that truth. One thing cannot know another in the sense that that knowledge holds within it the knowing thing.
• The one natural law is that there are no natural laws - I have already spoken about this. The same commentary as that for knowledge applies. It gives rise to the absence of restraints on nature as a necessity. Ironic, as necessity is a form of restraint. I think one of the problems here is the restraining use of language. This is why I tend to refer to existence. As Descartes pointed out, the one thing we can be aware of is existence.
• Existence is everything and, in its encompassing all things, it is as much as nothing - this is my own take on the most fundamental truth. It is a reflection of the Tao (a way) or, as I call it, ism: the being of everything. As there is nothing outside of the ism, its being everything, there is nothing to which it can be compared and, as such, using the definitions of our language, is no one thing - it is nothing as there is nothing from which it can be distinguished.
• Good things are only put into proportion with respect to bad things - for me, this truth has helped me through hard times. The nature of comparison of things manifest within ism is the only way one can describe nature. It is the only way one can come to know truths. One cannot state the fundamental truth simply because the truth encompasses everything, including that statement! I have tried to come as close as possible to describing it above but that statement doesn’t even come close to my understanding of it and my part as a manifestation within the truth of ism. This comparison, or balance between opposites, is one of the keys to Taoism. They describe it as the Yin and Yang, the soft and hard, the cold and hot, the good and bad, the rough and smooth, the joy and misery etc. of life/reality/truth/tao.

There are several points from the original blog of this title that I would like to review. This comes having attended a seminar given by Dr. Susan Blackmore entitled “What does it feel like to be a rat?”. Following a personal communication with her after the talk, she brought my attention to the idea of memes, a term coined by Richard Dawkins. To quote the most reliable of all educational sources out there, Wikipedia:

A meme (pronounced /miːm/) comprises a unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices; such units or elements transmit from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena. The etymology of the term relates to the Greek word mimemafor mimic.^[1] Memes act as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures.^[2]

Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme” as a neologism in his book The Selfish Gene (1976) to describe how one might extend evolutionaryprinciples to explain the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. He gave as examples melodies, catch-phrases, and beliefs (notably religious belief, clothing/fashion, and the technology of building arches).^[3]

Meme, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

In light of this, I would like to replace my use of the term “evolutionary emotion” in the original with meme. Not only does this describe what I mean more accurately but “emotion” can be misleading. An emotion gives rise to a distinct physiological response and as such has a definate physical presence, unlike what I was trying to describe for consciousness. Of course, one could argue that emotions are learnt and are thus encapsulated by the term “meme”.

Since the dawn of human kind we have strived to answer fundamental questions on existence and reality in the hope of reaching a pure truth.

As part of our quest for a better understanding of ‘mind and matter’ and that of a conscious being, indeed what consciousness itself really is, we are opening the doors to new ideas. It is our hope that we shall first come to the right questions needed as scientists to investigate this area. After which who knows what nature will throw at us.

This space will be used as an arena for philosophical debate. And in the spirit of such everyone is invited to contact us to share their opinions and comments which we will share with the community through this very space.