This essay builds on the concept of "Boxes" introduced in my April Summary.  In a nutshell, we are all trapped in "Box 1", which is the world "inside our heads". For millennia, there has been little dispute over the fact that our access to "reality" is far from trustworthy. In the extreme, there are those who claim that "reality" doesn't exist at all, or at least the existence cannot be proven. I am reminded of a professional geologist I once met. He managed to make a living dating million-year-old rocks, while simultaneously believing that the world was 4,000 years old. As the Red Queen said, we are capable of believing six impossible things before breakfast. "Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why,...

On Tue, Mar 12, 2019, at 7:30 PM Len Bruton <...> wrote: There seems little doubt that science looks for explanations by seeking out those physical objects within brains that may yield a closer appreciation of how minds function and maybe just where they are to be found!!  Following your very different approach, my thought experiment is to ask whether Earthly minds and whether Earthly consciousness existed 100 million years ago?  Is it then a valid question to ask whether reality existed prior to minds This question can send us spiraling down an infinite regress. There seem to be two ways of stopping this. Either accept the reality of "mind" or accept the reality of "the world". Otherwise, you have a problem of reality being something in the mind, which is itself in reality, or a model of reality and so forth ... Wayne Brown <chillyfinger@gmail.com> to Len Given that we have a mind, it also makes sense if other living things have a mind or someth...

For the moment, let me talk about the world of human experience as "E". The world that Science investigates is assumed to exist a part from human experience , although we can only know it through human experience. Without really thinking about it, we imagine the "real world" to be about the shared experience: verifiable, consistent and augmented by what we call "reason". But we have long admitted that Universe, which I will call U, is not the same as "E". In fact, we assume that we can never know "U" entirely, directly or completely. We all know that "E" is not the same for each of us. In fact, it is quite remarkably different between different cultures and different times or even for a single individual throughout his or her lifetime. The question at hand is, is there anything "out there" apart from E and U? In most religious traditions the answer is "yes".  Most religions postulate a universe in ...

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.  T. S. Eliot - Little Gidding I have been writing for a long time about the concept of "supermind" and the "dragon". Groups of humans - armies, governments - have a life of their own and thrive at the expense of the humans that oppose them - even their own members.  These groups steal our identity and prevent us from thinking for ourselves. It's all true, of course, but what is new is the total acceptance of the situation. Comfort almost. This is the human condition. Our "minds" function as part of a whole. It may be a mistake to "analyze" - to break things down into pieces, but indulge me for a moment while I describe things that make up our "minds" that are usually regarded as something happening between our ears. The brain, especially considered as part of the body (Damasio). The functio...

Daniel Dennett likes to give Jaynes the benefit of the doubt: “There were a lot of really good ideas lurking among the completely wild junk.” As Dennett hints (with typical subtly), there is a lot of "junk philosophy" around the subjects dear to Jaynes' heart. In this post, I'd like to extract one of Jayne's ideas and wipe a bit of "junk" off it to see where it gets me. At the center of Jayne's theory is the "bicameral mind", which is firmly based on the idea that we have a "right brain" and a "left brain" with notably different capabilities, each capable of acting somewhat on their own. The "right brain" is good at seeing the "big picture" and sends its judgments to the left brain, where they are perceived as speech - sometimes the speech of the Gods. As things get historically more complicated, we evolve our present day "inner chatter", no longer attributed to the Gods (if we are sane), b...

Roger Penrose is a guy who has a way of asking good questions and providing controversial answers. On page 20 of his monumental survey of applied mathematics, " The Road To Reality"  he explains an interesting theory about three "worlds": R*:The "real", physical world of "stuff" and phenomena, which he (quite reasonably) takes to exist apart from the other two worlds; M:The world of ideas - what I call the "meme space". In principle, this is all the theories, observations, direct or indirect perceptions that could ever be made by the human mind; F:The world of forms, mathematics and logic. While he contends is that each world "maps" completely to the others. In principle at least, each world can be explained in terms of the other.  But he allows us to imagine that the mapping is incomplete. It is the incompleteness that interests me: There may be aspects of reality that are "illogical" or cannot be described by math...

If we're lucky, the first person we encounter in our lives is our mother. We naturally generalize to recognize other moving shapes as like our mother but not our mother. We have all experienced the difficulty of calming a baby who refuses to accept the attentions of anybody but his mother. This leads me to a claim that may seem odd: We discover our mothers before we discover ourselves! But we are "hard wired" to assemble the meme of "self" pretty early. These fingers and toes are "my" fingers and toes. When you watch a baby, you can see this is a discovery , not a "brute fact". But the "hard wiring" of the motor cortex establishes a predictable link between the perception of the body and the ability to move around body parts. Thus is born "me" (the object in the world) and "I", the one who seems to "be me". One of our main jobs in the first two years of life is establishing an iron-clad link between ...

The "R" meme is the most powerful and widely-shared meme: that there is a "real world out there" independent of our minds. This is the intuitive insight that is denied or at least challenged by "Idealism" [1]. Denial of R turns out to be a powerful " intuition pump ". We imagining that the "real world" does not exist at all, and it's "all in our minds". This is a rather strong denial of Idealism, since an Idealist would, I think, admit that the real world exists -- just that we can't know anything about it other than what pops up in our minds. At the risk of spoiling the plot, the view of this blog is that the brain can be thought of as a fantastically complex and specially-constructed knot that intimately ties the mind M to the world R. This connection is so intimate that it is, in practice, impossible to say where mind ends and world begins [2]. In effect, this frames "Idealism" as a discussion about a dis...

In a previous post  I sketched out the importance of being a bit more imaginative when we ask the difficult question, What is the mind like . It's time to abandon the ancient assumptions that I have a little person inside my head  that's the "real me" and somehow, perhaps this little person (the soul) will survive death. It's obviously not like that. There is "nobody home" in the brain, nothing "controlling" it. The "self" is what it feels like to be a brain. That is still a big mystery, but progress nonetheless. Here, I'd like to discuss another aspect of the ancient view. Is there only one "self" running around in my brain? And, while we are at it, is there more to the "self" than this entity that seems to be looking out my eyes? Is there more to "me" than the "me" I feel writing these lines? Mountains of experimental evidence says there is. Lots more. I have always been very interested i...

The Truman Show , 1999, is a rich and thought-provoking source of metaphor (imagine here that I pause to watch the whole movie again ...) The Truman Show Delusion  is a variety of paranoia where the sufferer imagines himself to be "on stage" all the time - the centre of a grand performance. I have tasted this one myself in the early days of what came to be called "bipolar illness" - a rather useless term that has come to refer just about any dislocation in the "normal" way we feel about ourselves and our relationship to "reality". I'm all better now, thank you, but my earlier struggles have taught me that there are many alternatives to what is called a "normal" frame of mind. Almost everyone has a version of the Truman Show Delusion. We all feel ourselves to be the centre of the universe. That's an illusion created by our brains.  If that function is not working, we can have "out of body" experiences. But the "nor...