Milestones - Mind, Time, Society
I've been doing a lot of thinking and reading lately. Things seem to be coming together in a way that demands a bit of summarization.
THE PROBLEM OF "MIND
I think Dennet's reductionist approach is wrong. He seems to think that everything important about "mind" can be learned from studies of the way the physical brain works (neurology) plus experiments with subjects to correlate what is known about the brain with what subjects reveal about their "first person" experience of the world. This is a "bottom up" approach.
I would say that for, humans at least, the brain is almost certainly necessary but not sufficient to create a "mind". The first person experience of the world is infinite, open-ended and individual. It can't be "averaged" and will resist creation of general "laws" of much interest. The mind is, to a first approximation, identical with the first person experience of the Universe.
At first, there would seem to be a conflict between "I=Universe" and he Zen contention that "I" am an illusion. However, Zen meditation practices are precisely aimed to foster awareness of the Universe (taken as a "given") and the Mind as "nothing more than" a reflection of that Universe. The goal is to make the Mind a perfect mirror of the Universe, which amounts to either the elimination of the Mind or the absorption of the Mind in the (real) Universe, depending how you look at it. This contrasts with the reductionist view that the Mind is "nothing more" than firing of neurons in the skull.
Data coming in from the reductionists can therefore be regarded with interest but it's not fundamental. You will learn more about "minds" in general by reading great novels (or appreciating the wonder of your own experience of the world) than neurology or laboratory experiments will ever reveal. One might almost say that the idea that "I" am a brain is just a more sophisticated way of saying "I" am something inside my brain (like a homunculus). What is actually gained by trading the homunculus for the brain in our model of the mind?
Why do I say the brain is "almost certainly" necessary? I consider the example of an ant colony. If the colony has anything like a "mind", it belongs to the whole colony. It's in an organizing principle that is unknown to the individual ants. So, the question is, how much of my "mind" is shared with other aspects of my environment? If I'm looking for subtle features of the mind (as Dennet's experiments pretend to do), am I barred from considering subtle influences of society or even mathematical limitations on the kind of things minds can contain? Do these influences depend on the brain of an individual person or are they shared to such an extent that it makes sense to talk about a shared mind? If that makes sense, the individual brain is not the end of the story. The individual mind is always, to some extent, assimilated into a larger entity which I regard as a living thing. This assimilation is somewhat subtle (Freud thought of it as part of the unconscious mind), but it is real enough and quite close to the surface: easily discovered and analyzed.
TIME, FREE WILL
The "arrow of time" undeniably exists at the human scale, where we live. The idea that all natural phenomena look the same when time is reversed is simply wrong at our scale. The idea that time is reversible at the quantum scale depends on the kind of thing physicists do when inferring "laws" about any system. They neglect "unimportant" details (like gravity). When examined closely, there is no reason to expect that the future is somehow determined by initial conditions at any scale. The problem of free will is seen to rely on assumptions about the physical universe that turn out to be false. This was revealed even in Newton's lifetime, yet Newton's "clockwork" universe somehow survived in the popular mind.
NONLINEAR DYNAMICS, CHAOS, PHASE CHANGES, SCALING
A detailed study of these fields is necessary to get a "feel" of how the world really works. In general, it's about how "things" evolve over time and how we make approximations, especially when it comes to scale. Without this understanding, it is not possible to understand the "basics", such as what space is and what life is. Unfortunately, such understanding is beyond the grasp of almost everyone. Most people choke when a few symbols or graphs are introduced into an argument. Philosophy (a fancy word for "talk") is left in the dust when serious questions need to be answered. Fortunately, my education allows me to "speak the language" of serious physics, but it means that the ideas hat emerge will not make much sense to my friends or the readers of this blog.
The founders of modern science, from Galileo to Einstein have pointed out that mathematics is the language of the Universe. Nothing deep or profound can be learned about the Universe by those who don't speak its language.
THE PROBLEM OF "MIND
I think Dennet's reductionist approach is wrong. He seems to think that everything important about "mind" can be learned from studies of the way the physical brain works (neurology) plus experiments with subjects to correlate what is known about the brain with what subjects reveal about their "first person" experience of the world. This is a "bottom up" approach.
I would say that for, humans at least, the brain is almost certainly necessary but not sufficient to create a "mind". The first person experience of the world is infinite, open-ended and individual. It can't be "averaged" and will resist creation of general "laws" of much interest. The mind is, to a first approximation, identical with the first person experience of the Universe.
At first, there would seem to be a conflict between "I=Universe" and he Zen contention that "I" am an illusion. However, Zen meditation practices are precisely aimed to foster awareness of the Universe (taken as a "given") and the Mind as "nothing more than" a reflection of that Universe. The goal is to make the Mind a perfect mirror of the Universe, which amounts to either the elimination of the Mind or the absorption of the Mind in the (real) Universe, depending how you look at it. This contrasts with the reductionist view that the Mind is "nothing more" than firing of neurons in the skull.
Data coming in from the reductionists can therefore be regarded with interest but it's not fundamental. You will learn more about "minds" in general by reading great novels (or appreciating the wonder of your own experience of the world) than neurology or laboratory experiments will ever reveal. One might almost say that the idea that "I" am a brain is just a more sophisticated way of saying "I" am something inside my brain (like a homunculus). What is actually gained by trading the homunculus for the brain in our model of the mind?
Why do I say the brain is "almost certainly" necessary? I consider the example of an ant colony. If the colony has anything like a "mind", it belongs to the whole colony. It's in an organizing principle that is unknown to the individual ants. So, the question is, how much of my "mind" is shared with other aspects of my environment? If I'm looking for subtle features of the mind (as Dennet's experiments pretend to do), am I barred from considering subtle influences of society or even mathematical limitations on the kind of things minds can contain? Do these influences depend on the brain of an individual person or are they shared to such an extent that it makes sense to talk about a shared mind? If that makes sense, the individual brain is not the end of the story. The individual mind is always, to some extent, assimilated into a larger entity which I regard as a living thing. This assimilation is somewhat subtle (Freud thought of it as part of the unconscious mind), but it is real enough and quite close to the surface: easily discovered and analyzed.
TIME, FREE WILL
The "arrow of time" undeniably exists at the human scale, where we live. The idea that all natural phenomena look the same when time is reversed is simply wrong at our scale. The idea that time is reversible at the quantum scale depends on the kind of thing physicists do when inferring "laws" about any system. They neglect "unimportant" details (like gravity). When examined closely, there is no reason to expect that the future is somehow determined by initial conditions at any scale. The problem of free will is seen to rely on assumptions about the physical universe that turn out to be false. This was revealed even in Newton's lifetime, yet Newton's "clockwork" universe somehow survived in the popular mind.
NONLINEAR DYNAMICS, CHAOS, PHASE CHANGES, SCALING
A detailed study of these fields is necessary to get a "feel" of how the world really works. In general, it's about how "things" evolve over time and how we make approximations, especially when it comes to scale. Without this understanding, it is not possible to understand the "basics", such as what space is and what life is. Unfortunately, such understanding is beyond the grasp of almost everyone. Most people choke when a few symbols or graphs are introduced into an argument. Philosophy (a fancy word for "talk") is left in the dust when serious questions need to be answered. Fortunately, my education allows me to "speak the language" of serious physics, but it means that the ideas hat emerge will not make much sense to my friends or the readers of this blog.
The founders of modern science, from Galileo to Einstein have pointed out that mathematics is the language of the Universe. Nothing deep or profound can be learned about the Universe by those who don't speak its language.
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