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.