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Consciousness & Matter
I think it’s fair to say that we don’t fully understand consciousness. I mean, even saying the word consciousness pulls in a myriad of different meanings. It can mean awareness. It can mean simply being awake. Some people use it almost synonymously with energy or soul. Even putting all those definitons together would probably only give us a teeny little smidge of what it really is. If it’s even anything at all. Cause hell, Eliminative Materialism (which I pretty much despise) says it doesn’t even exist at all:
In the philosophy of mind, eliminative materialism is the school of thought that argues for an absolute version of materialism and physicalism with respect to mental entities and mental vocabulary. It principally argues that our common-sense understanding of the mind (known as folk psychology) is not a viable theory on which to base scientific investigation, and therefore no coherent neural basis will be found for many such everyday psychological concepts (such as belief or intention) and that behaviour and experience can only be adequately explained on the biological level.
Eliminative materialists therefore believe that consciousness does not exist except as an epiphenomenon of brain function and some believe that the concept will eventually be eliminated as neuroscience progresses. Similarly, they argue that folk psychological concepts such as belief, desire and intention are illusory and therefore do not have any consistent neurological substrate.
It’s kind of a wild thing to think about on the one hand, but incredibly mechanistic and sad on another. All I’m really trying to say though by bringin it into the mix is that among all of us, we just don’t really have a solid handle on what consciousness is, what it means, or what we should do with it.
In a nutshell, I think that’s the best argument I can make against transhumanism. To elaborate on it a little though, if we don’t even know what consciousness is (collectively), how can we decide what to do with it vis-a-vis technology?
What happens if we try to suck out our consciousness and put it into a machine only to find out that the eliminative materialists (EM) were right, and that consciousness doesn’t even exist at all? In a sense, I think EM is probably the most compatible philosophy for transhumanism. Which sounds weird at first though, since the transhumanists are all about weird tripped out psychedelicism. Really, what it seems like though is an outright machine fetishism. And if you’re so into the cold efficiency of machines, then why not just get rid of the idea of consciousness altogether? It’s icky and illogical and undefinable anyway. Ran Prieur made the most succint argument about this in his recent essay, I think:
I used to be a techno-utopian, and I was fully aware of my motivations: Humans are noisy and filthy and dangerous and incomprehensible, while machines are dependable and quiet and clean, so naturally they should replace us, or we should become them. It’s the ultimate victory of the nerds over the jocks — mere humans go obsolete, while we smart people move our superior minds from our flawed bodies into perfect invincible vessels.
Are machines really perfect though? Hardly, and you’ll be forced to agree with me if you’ve ever used a machine anywhere at any point under any circumstances. Period. The counter-argument seems to be, “But at the rate we’re moving, we’ll be able to make the perfect machine someday soon!” 2012 is often bandied about as a probable date - even by people who would scoff derisively if a Christian Fundamentalist tried to predict the return of Jesus to a particular calendar date. It’s not the slightest bit different.
There is one point to transhumanism that I think is really good. Or rather, I ought to say implicit to it, because I’ve not seen anybody make it (but maybe I just didn’t look in the right places). Anyway, the point is that consciousness (if it exists at all) already has a relationship to matter. In other words, some religious traditions say that we are beings made of consciousness who have incarnated into fleshly bodies. What this opens up though are even bigger questions of how and why? What are the requirements to “draw down” or incarnate consciousness into a material form? Must it be organic? What makes something organic? If you break down our cellular machinery, doesn’t it consist of mere inert matter? How does this inert matter come together to form consciousness as we know it (if we know it)?
If that’s an argument transhumanists are going to make, it seems like they are necessarily going to have to become some type of pantheists or animists. If consciousness exists inherently even in the most inert matter, then it’s going to have to exist in everything, everywhere. This means that trees, bugs, rabbits, rocks, air and all matter is conscious on some level. If all matter is conscious on some level, then computers are already conscious. We don’t need to figure out how to make them conscious (since they are made of matter and therefore conscious), but how to raise their consciousness to such a level where we can communicate with it. And then once we’ve done that, would we really have an ethical right to actually suppress their conscious self-awareness and impose on them our own? What then would make us better than them that they could be subjugated to our desires? Nothing. Such a revelation of the universality of consciousness might lead to a kind of technological Jainism, where we try to withdraw projecting our will onto the consciousness of other forms of matter. We would find ourself also praying to and asking forgiveness of any food or substance we take into our bodies. We would need it’s express permission to do so.
It seems to me that transhumanists aren’t asking any of these really tough questions. Nor are they looking at their own motivations - which might even be more vital than any of the possibilities for inquiry I described above. What makes you want to live forever as a computer? Why is that the right thing to do? Don’t tell me progress and don’t tell me evolution. Those aren’t reasons - those are excuses so you don’t have to examine your actual reasons. Are you scared of dying? Are you worried you won’t experience enough things in the real world that you want to experience them artificially? Do you just want to “get off” and be stimulated? What happens when you get tired of that? What happens if once you’re living inside a computer it’s exactly like this world you’ve been trying to escape? Are you going to build another virtual computer inside that one, and then suck yourself into it? What if that one’s no different? What if the problem is actually you?
And by the way, when I say “you”, I mean me. I’m not afraid of transhumanism as some have suggested. But I realize that the things I’m not satisfied with are things about myself. Those things aren’t going to be solved by me running around in a virtual or real outer-space environment with some kind of suped-up comic book cyborg body. I wish to God that that was the answer, but I just know that it’s not. I have to actually knuckle down and make shit work, right here and right now.
In closing, I think Jeremy makes one of the best points about this that I’ve seen: rather than trying to evolve your body into a new form, or upload your consciousness into some super-computer, what if you spent all that time trying to evolve your sense of compassion? Then when you discover that all matter was already conscious, or that consciousness doesn’t exist, or that people are just as crappy in a virtual world as they are in a real one - you’ll be prepared to handle it no matter what. You’ll know that we’re all connected & we’re all made of the same stuff, and we’re all in this together for better or worse.
July 11th, 2005 at 9:08 pm
“I think it’s fair to say that we don’t fully understand consciousness.” — hilarious.
but yeah, this is a great post. i think you’re right about eliminative materialism being some kind of weird machine fetishism. i mean what is this INTENSE COMPULSION to come up with a model of reality within which we can eliminate the “problem” of consciousness altogether? why would anyone want everything to be totally sterile and mechanistic?
or, in the words of mary swanson, “who are these sick people?”
July 11th, 2005 at 9:32 pm
Well, to be fair, I’ve never actually seen an advocate of transhumanism also advocate eliminative materialism. But that’s precisely why I dragged it in. They are both machine fetishism, but I think EM is rather more honest with itself and logically consistent - which would be important to a machine
July 11th, 2005 at 9:50 pm
Yes
Yes
… not to impose my own belief system on anyone else
July 11th, 2005 at 10:01 pm
Your comment on Eliminative Materialism makes me think of another principle that should be adopted in the kind of philosophical/theological inquiry you (I/we) are undertaking. When considering somebody else’s claim, an important consideration is motive.
Why the hell are the proponents of EM so eager to promote that viewpoint?
Seriously, what do you get out of denying the human soul? Is it that they are committed to the Truth, bitter though it may be? If so, they are neglecting the pesky ontological issue of what, exactly, energy and matter are, especially since the foundations of quantum mechanics leave you with a pretty uncomfortable feeling about the independence of matter and consciousness.
Or is there some other Ahrimannic agenda going on here?
July 11th, 2005 at 10:21 pm
“Why the hell are the proponents of EM so eager to promote that viewpoint?
Seriously, what do you get out of denying the human soul?”
— that’s exactly my gut reaction to the EM philosophy. i really can’t fathom what DRIVES an individual to seek refuge in such a philosophy. i think maybe (and this is PURELY speculative) people who are committed to EM have confused “truth” with empirical knowledge.. and this confusion is compounded by what strikes me (again, speculation) as some kind of weird self-loathing…? otherwise why not just allow the other possibilities to exist? this strikes me a movement bent on stamping out the human spirit.
i like philosophies that are centered around discovering “new stuff” about the universe… rather than obsessively dismantling and deconstructing everything, including stuff that brings comfort and sincere joy and meaning to a LOT of people.
July 11th, 2005 at 10:36 pm
i.e. serving the ends of Ahriman (in Rudolph Steiner’s metaphysical model, recently summarized at Alchemical Braindamage). Is this accidental or intentional (in the sense of being funded at a parapolitical level)?
BTW, I think Steiner’s model of Lucifer/Ahriman/Sorath is quite useful in understanding the nature of Satan/Archons/Qlippoth.
July 11th, 2005 at 10:48 pm
I’ve spent a lifetime thinking about science and spirituality and their nexus. It was my original motivation for becoming a scientist way back in my undergraduate days, although I ended up in a field very far away from cognitive science.
I spent a long time being very confused, until I started to inquire about the underlying motives of the people advancing certain ideas. I know for a fact (especially now that I have to chase grant $) that scientific questions that do not serve a particular agenda do not get funded. The body of scientific knowledge created/discovered in the 20th and early 21st Centuries is completely determined by politics, industry, and the military in the sense that questions whose answers do not serve those interests do not get asked, much less answered.
And Jeff Well’s blog seems to answer a nagging question I’ve had: if magic and other forms of consciousness and energy manipulation “work”, why are the techniques not accepted or at least studied. The answer seems to be that they are studied, albeit secretly.
Watch the sources of mainstream culture very carefully and you’ll find (if you haven’t already) that knowledge is very carefully managed. That which bestows power is hidden, that which sows doubt and denies the spirit is cultivated.
July 11th, 2005 at 11:31 pm
One pretty base (but I think valuable) way to think of this crap is to compare people who are driving in cars to people who are walking. I guess I’m presupposing that compassion and human understanding are valuable assets, but people who are wearing cars as machines tend to be much bigger assholes that people who are just walking around . . . I mean, except for New Yorkers. People in rush hour traffic all over the country get all worked up and sweaty inside their little iron robots and see everybody else as just an asshole inside an iron robot. The advancement of technology may help you see more of the world and cover more ground but it just seems like it draws the powers of self destruction inward… So what if you have the climate controlled and your favorite music playing and you are moving without walking towards wherever you’re going. I’d sure hate to be stuck in traffic for the rest of eternity…
July 11th, 2005 at 11:48 pm
Well, as long as you had your iPod shuffle and the latest U2 album, it wouldn’t be so bad! LOL!!!
July 12th, 2005 at 12:45 am
Well, just to play Devil’s Advocate, you at least need some degree of computation present in order to have the smallest amount of consciousness, so you won’t necessarily have the continuum extend down to all base matter. Advances in artificial intelligence may provide some interesting reflections on consciousness as a continuum, though.
Trying to theorize away consciousness doesn’t worry me. We’re experiencing it; even a perfectly accurate model that claims it doesn’t exist won’t change our experience of it. Sure, consciousness, belief, desire, and intention may all be illusory, and I’m sure Zen masters will be quietly amused if advanced neurological theory arrives at that conclusion centuries later than their founders. But the theory won’t change us.
I don’t know any transhumanists who are planning to throw themselves into a computer until they’ve verified that the conversion process is lossless or they’re already in dire straits (such as being nearly dead or already frozen). The appeal, I think, is not merely in the notion of being able to live in virtual reality with current mental capabilities; it’s the opportunity of expanding one’s mental capabilities as easily as you write new software packages. How would you like to be able to cross-reference everything you’ve ever read as easily as you form the intention? To have a continuous feed of all reporting of esoteric phenomena quietly arriving in your mind as you go about your daily chores? To be able to experience someone else’s perceptions firsthand? And what problems might you be able to solve that are currently beyond your grasp? That, I think, is one of the appeals of upgrading the mind.
I’m not making any decisions about what course to follow on uploading until there are decisions to be made, and I’m not going to be the first to volunteer for destructive scanning. It may take extending Moore’s Law out to 2050 and hyper-obsessive modeling of human neurology to figure out that no, you just can’t make a machine conscious, and a side product will be a repeatable test for the existence of a soul. (Wouldn’t that open a can of worms!) Or we might have human-equivalent intelligence inside computers by 2020. Thinking programs might turn out to be capable of superior compassion by suppressing selfishness, or horrifyingly ruthless by “optimizing” away all capacity for sympathy. My attitude is “wait and see, and if I get a chance to design them, build them to love us as parents.”
July 12th, 2005 at 12:56 am
Devil’s advocate or no, that seems like an entirely baseless assertion to me.
I don’t really know how that would help me. I don’t really know how what I’m doing already here helps me. Increasing the speed of it, getting lost in the information is pretty much the opposite of what I want right now.
July 12th, 2005 at 1:16 am
How so? All manifestations of consciousness that we can currently observe reliably are based on neurons, which are computational elements.
With the expanded capabilities that transumanists theorize are possible, you wouldn’t be lost. You could keep track of all of it. Are you tempted yet?
July 12th, 2005 at 1:34 am
Cybernetics was ‘invented’ in 1948 by Norbert Wiener of MIT. It is the science of control and communication, in machines and animals. (The Greek word kybernetes means a steersman or governor.) Now with a little ingenuity I could devise a control similar to the ball-cock which cuts off the water when the cistern is full in one’s toilet, but to say control the mechanism of my bath taps in my tub. In science and industry, the process I may want to control may be many times more complex. For example, some chemical process that might develop in several directions, in which case I must make use of a computer and program it to deal with the many possible situations. Even a card with a few holes punched into it is enough to give the computer its instructions and to make it behave like a foreman seeing that a job gets done properly.
Since the late nineteenth century, it has been understood that living creatures derive their characteristics from tiny cells called genes, which are contained in the male sperm and female egg. My hair, size of my feet, cute tush, mussed up teeth, are all determined by genes. But no one was sure how the genes did this. Then in the mid-1950s, it gradually become clear that the genes are like a complex computer card with holes punched into it. These so-called ‘holes’ are actually now known as DNA.
In 1969, a cybernetician, Dr David Foster, posited that from cybernetics point of view, it is possible to consider the whole universe in terms of data and data processing. An acorn, for example, may be seen as the ‘program’ for an oak tree to be executed over the course of time. Even an atom can be thought of as a computer with three holes punched into it, the holes being (a) the number of particles in the nucleus, (b) the number of electrons orbiting round it, and (c) the energy or vibrational frequency of these electrons expressed in terms of the smallest known ‘parcel’ of energy, Planck’s constant. Dr Foster goes on to say, “…the essential nature of matter is that the atoms are the alphabet of the universe, that chemical compounds are words, and that DNA is rather a long sentence or even a whole book trying to say something such as ‘giraffe,’ ‘elephant,’ or even ‘man’.”
He goes on to point out that the basic building block of a y electrical information theory is one electrical wave and a wave consists of two halves, as its measured from the top of one hump to the bottom of the proceeding trough. That is, a wave is a binary system, and computers work upon binary mathematics. This is important, as we’ve seen waves are essentially the basic vocabulary of the universe, and the core analogy for explaining most models of quantum mechanics, the you can think of life—in fact, all matter—as being due to waves that have somehow been cybernetically programmed.
Now scientists hate a little something called ‘teleology.’ Evolution accounts for the giraffe’s neck and the elephant’s trunk in terms of accident. Just as you might explain a rock worn into the shape of a face by pointing to the wind and rain. Science hates the notion of purpose. The notion of teleology. The rock didn’t want to be sculpted into the shape of a face, they say; and the wind and rain didn’t want to sculpt it; it just happened. Similarly, biologists hate the heresy of ‘vitalism,’ the notion that life somehow wants to produce healthier and more intelligent creatures; they just happen to get created because health and intelligence survives better than sickness and stupidity. But when one realises that human beings are produced by a highly complex computer card, it becomes difficult to wonder who programmed the computer in the first place.
If I saw a complex chemical process being regulated and controlled by a computer, in a controlled environment—space and time—I would infer that someone programmed the computer. Dr Foster is saying, in the eyes of the cybernetician, the complex structures of life around him reveal data processing on a massive scale. This is a matter of scientific fact And he naturally found himself wondering what intelligence processed the data?
Foster explains that as an automation consultant, whenever he designs a control system for a process it is axiomatic that the speed of the control system must be greater than that of the motions of the process concerned. For example, you can drive a car because you can think faster than the engine works; if you couldn’t, you would crash. But in that case, programming of matter must be achieved by vibrations—or waves—much faster than the vibration of matter. That is, in cosmic radiations, and in forces constantly being discovered with every passing decade.
There is definitely as hierarchy of complexity among waveforms. A wave that carries more condensed, higher vibrational energy is different from a wave that does not carry information. The information is imposed upon its structure by intelligence. This is also scientific deduction, not metaphysical speculation. He mentions the Compton Effect in physics, by which the wavelength of x-rays is increased by collision with electrons, and the rule deduced from this is that you can make red light from blue light—because red light vibrates at a lower frequency—but not blue light from red light. “The faster-vibrating blue light is programmed for red light, but not vice versa.”
In terms of an intelligent universe and man as human kind as an evolving, learning experiment, is not much different from a picture of rats in a cage. Where science’s aim has long been reductionism, of reducing man, the occult glimpses a hidden meaning and offers unto us a goal at the end of the maze. As the psychologist Abraham Maslow put forth, “Man has a higher nature that is just as instinctoid as his lower, animal nature…”
July 12th, 2005 at 7:23 am
i will predict that as soon as the interface between consciousness and computers is made functional, in any form, people will begin to upload. it doesn`t mean it`s right or wrong, correct or otherwise. it is merely human nature to explore. the magellans of the new frontier will jump the analog/digital barrier in a heartbeat. then we will know with certainty what is going on. are there any emerging technologies that show promise in this direction? i have to ask this though; how long will skinbags last once one psychopath enters the mainframe? moot?
July 12th, 2005 at 11:30 am
Hogwash. No one has ever scientifically observed ANY manifestation of consciousness ever anywhere. Show me the headlines: “SCIENTIST PROVES CONSCIOUSNESS EXISTS”
Not remotely tempted. And it would be getting “lost” in the info. Although by that I don’t mean stranded. I mean tempted away from the *True Path* which is beyond all information, outside of all logic and rationality and can’t be expressed in words
July 12th, 2005 at 12:13 pm
I found this interesting in light of the debate raging over all of this:
“Why computers are like the weather,” New Scientist
And here is the arxiv.org article, “Chaos in computer performance,” in PDF.
July 12th, 2005 at 5:23 pm
I define consciousness as the ability to experience. If someone tells me consciousness is illusory, than that means my experience of them saying that was just an illusion, so I don’t have to believe it.
July 12th, 2005 at 5:49 pm
Then why do you think any of this would convince anyone that “consciousness exists inherently even in the most inert matter”?
July 12th, 2005 at 6:13 pm
Look, I’m not fucking trying to convince anybody of anything beyond the fact that we can’t even come up with an agreeable definition of what consciousness is - as I stated in the first line of this essay and which you yourself have proven. All I’m saying if that there are huge unanswered questions to all this which desperately need exploring.
July 13th, 2005 at 7:09 am
i don`t think science has the mean to discover or prove consciousness. the type of maths used are looking in the wrong direction. conciousness is only measured and calibrated by one thing. more consciousness. how arrogant to think we need consciousness proven……….much like the sky or birdsong need proving. or the talking interplay between jimmy page`s guitar and robert plant`s voice in “since i`ve been loving you”. no proof needed.