Subjects
and objects; metaphysics, biology, consciousness, and cognition.
Seán Ó Nualláin
Freeman Lab,
Department of Molecular & Cell
Biology
University of California
at Berkeley
Berkeley CA 94720-3206
USA
tel 1-510-642-4220 fax 1-510-643-9290
Published in
Biosemiotics journal, Volume 2, Pp. 239-251
Abstract
Over the past half-century, the Freeman
laboratory has accumulated a large volume of data and a correspondingly
extensive interpretive framework centered around an alternative perspective on
brain function, that of dynamical systems.
The purpose of this paper is first briefly to summarise this work, and bring it
into dialogue with other perspectives. We end with a causal view of consciousness qua process as a force. The contents of
consciousness, by contrast, are seen as an inevitably sparse sample of events
in the perception-action cycle. The paper proceeds to an attempt to elucidate
the contents of this sparse sample. A
critical concept is that of selfhood, and how it presents itself
phenomenologically. It is argued that our experience of selfhood is an artifact
of the necessity of preservation of subject/object relations. As this part of metaphysics has been badly
misunderstood, we scrutinise it at some
length in quantum mechanics, biology, and cognition. The paper then proceeds to
outline a view on how selfhood is best considered wrt the immune response. This
is interrelated with phenomenology, and some data are adduced to support this
central hypothesis. Finally, consequences for the social sciences in general
are hinted at.
1
Introduction
In recent years, we at Freeman laboratory (Freeman 1975,
2000, 2007) have teased out the consequences of the dynamical approach to cognition and consciousness at
some length. In Freeman (2005a ) we
established that local dynamics in
rabbit and human neocortex are scale-free, and that every skilled action involves
all cortex and basal ganglia in varying degree. Self-similarity from the
microscopic to the macroscopic levels of the cortex allows the cortex to change
state very quickly. Freeman (2002)
introduces the notion of a wave packet, amplitude modulation of which
constitutes
the expression of knowledge, which is stored in synaptic
modifications and expressed by phase
transitions. Freeman (op.cit., 517) also makes the radical
contention that we do not need
independent access to
the external world for communication to occur; it is sufficient that the
internal meanings in speaker and hearer come transiently into harmony.
In recent work, we have elaborated on the notion of
consciousness as it fits into classical physics. It is hypothesised that
consciousness is best regarded as a force, perceived like other forces through
volitional activities of the psychophysical entities that we are. The felt
experience of consciousness is constrained by the fact that the cortex operates
discontinuously, with “shutter” states interspersed with the generation of wave
packets (Freeman 2007). Moreover, while eschewing the technical apparatus of
decoherence, recent work has adopted quantum field theory (Freeman et al,
2006c) to explain the phenomenon of anomalous dispersion in the brain. Just as
the vibration induced by a blow will reach the other side of a solid object at
a different time to the sound thereof, wave packets show properties of
transmission independent of neural impulse itself. In fact, the brain behaves
in ways not dissimilar to a boson.
Freeman (2005b) introduces several other leitmotiven.
Globally coherent brain activity may be
an objective
correlate of consciousness through preafference. Preafference, in turn, enters
once
the more veridical notion of circular causality is
substituted for the stimulus-response act.
Briefly, once an action is lined up, the brain prepares the
system for the sensory consequences of this action in the preafference process.
The consequences for consciousness qua process are enormous.
Essentially, Hume was right; there is no conscious will, but
there does exist a conscious “won't”. Agency as a concept needs to be
correspondingly attenuated; when the intending of an act presents itself to
consciousness, it is experienced as a cause;consciousness of the consequences
thereof are experienced as effects. This vastly consequential idea is revisited
below in the context of the late Benjamin Libet's (1994) classic work.
What we assert,
then, is that conscious states comprise
a sparse sample of the wave packets that embody motor commands, corollary
discharges, and pre-perceptions that we conceive as unconscious. We accept the
idea, pioneered by Piaget (1954, P. 434) that
“thought in its various aspects reproduces on its own plane the
processes....in the case of sensorimotor intelligence and the structure of the
initial practical universe” Wave packets embodying motor commands are the
substratum for mathematical and other abstract thought. Furthermore, focal
consciousness samples at far too slow a rate to give veridical access to the contents of our cortices, and nature has
gifted us various mechanisms to get around this, some of which are mentioned below.
2
Subjects and Objects
2.0 Introduction
The Vedanta tradition in Hinduism is monist to the
point of apparent folly. There is one entity, the Self, which is synonymous
with Being, Reality, and consciousness. Adepts in Vedanta are trained to change
their habits of proprioception to
experience their bodies as continuous with the physical world outside. (As it happens,
of course, our body image is quite malleable along these lines. See
Ramachandran et al, 1998). Vedantins are similarly encouraged to view their
minds, as if from outside, as a set of disconnected thoughts given spurious
unity by a pseudo “I”. Again, contemporary cognitive science can countenance
this (Gazzaniga, 1995); we go through the day narrating to ourselves a set of fictions about what is happening to
us that posits ourselves inappropriately as chief protagonist in events which
are far beyond our control. Where Vedanta goes off the page, as might be
expected, is in its confrontation with quantum mechanics (QM). Haines in James
Joyce’s Ulysses comments that Shakespeare is a happy hunting-ground for a mind that has lost its balance; such minds may
now turn to QM.
This is all the more true in that Qm initially seems
to confirm the most egregious extremes of Vedanta. Reality is boundless,
non-specific, spread out over time and space; so is the wave function prior to
observation. Von Neumann (1955) famously proved that the boundary between S and
O could be placed anywhere in the paradigmatic task of observation in QM; as
the experimenter and her observing apparatus are themselves made of the same
sub-atomic particles as the putative object, the line between S and O can be
put anywhere. In fact, it can be put
between a disincarnate pure consciousness and a world coming into existence
instant by instant. Alternatively, the weaker claim can be made that the
identity of the wave function just before breakdown and the observer just
before observation parallels the Vedantin’s positing of identity between
Brahman, external Reality, and Atman, the individual soul.
The analogy can be continued, and perhaps even lived
out. We do not seem to need biology in this description of human existence. While
we feel that the notion of a ‘molecular nirvana principle’ (Balazs, 2004) is
somewhat extravagant, it does posit an alternative route to solving the
symbol-matter dichotomy, with some reference to personal experience, however
strained. Stapp (in press) does not cavil at a Leibnizian dualism; his quantum
interactive dualism posits “two entirely different types of realities, mental
and physical, which interact”. His
adaptation of Von Neumann (1955) was slightly less extreme; the subject could
be attenuated to physical neural processes supporting the contents of
consciousness, and the system the rest of the experimenter's psychophysical
apparatus and the object being observed.
It is not the business of this current paper to
adjudicate between the ontological and epistemological interpretations of QM;
briefly, the former states that the Qm experiment can reveal where the particle
is, while the latter does not assert that reality is cognitively penetrable at
this level, and is content with operational knowledge. The latter also allows
for state-vector reduction in the absence of conscious observers; this
objective reduction can be implemented by a mechanism like spontaneous
localization. Let us be clear; the
ontological interpretation allows for a universe generated at Planck time
intervals through some kind of cosmic observation process, just as objective
reduction allows this to occur by a mechanism like spontaneous localization.
There is little need for biology to mediate between subject and object in these
Olympian perspectives.
One task of
this paper is to reintroduce biology in as principled a form as possible at all
levels of description. For Pattee
(2001), the paradigmatic subject-object distinction belongs to Biology; it is
the other disciplines that will have to phrase their analogous distinctions in
terms created by the biological science. The central problem of life for Pattee
is how symbolic structures can control dynamics. He posits as his central
concept an “epistemic cut”, a distinction between rate-independent symbols and
the rate-dependent dynamics that they control. This epistemic cut is
discernible for him in the relation between genotype and phenotype, observer
and observed in QM, and indeed mind and brain. Conversely, the problem of measurement
is mapping from the latter dynamics to a single symbolic entity; in the case of
QM, that is to be a single real number.
Our central concerns here are different to Pattee’s
valuable contributions to the issue of the origin of life itself. The central
argument in Ó Nualláin et al (2007) is
that, just as natural language processing by computer(nlp) failed because of
its inability to handle the problem of context, so also is the general problem
of gene expression likely to prove intractable.
Moreover, Pattee’s subsuming of all the issues involved under the
general rubric of “the epistemic cut” is naïve. The problem of how symbols mean
something is a “semantic” problem (Freeman, 2002). The problem of how they
relate to the external world, including controlling processes, is a often a
subset of this issue, a “pragmatic” problem (ibid). The problem of the correct sequencing of
symbols is a syntactic problem (ibid.). At times in nlp, context becomes so
restricted that both semantic and pragmatic relations can be elicited from
syntax alone.
At one extreme, then, we have the Vedantin’s
non-biological link straight from consciousness to all aspects of reality
without the mediation of Biology. At the other, we have Pattee’s salutary
emphasis of the reality of our existence as biological creatures, with the
caveat that his vocabulary needs to acquire a finer grain. To wit; the
metaphysical problem is the general issue of the relation between subjects and
objects, and includes the conundrum of observer status in Qm. Must an entity be
conscious to be an observer, or can any substantial entity, organic or not,
obtain this status? Indeed, is observation necessary at all, or does
spontaneous localization of the wave function occur to pre-empt its necessity?
Secondly, the semantic problem is the problem of how symbols mean something,
which subsumes the pragmatic issue of how they relate to the world. This has been a bugbear in Cognitive Science
and AI for a generation (O Nualláin, 2003,
143-144, 208-209). Both fields have had some success in cognition at the
subsymbolic level, where links between organism and environment are not
preprogrammed in any strong sense, and emerge through experience. We currently
hide our ignorance of the specific processes that obtain through invoking
almost as shibboleths “dynamical systems”, “emergent behaviours”, “complexity”,
“self-organisation”, and so on. The task
of unpacking these words into something resembling hard science may take a generation,
and we began this paper with some preliminary attempts.
At a more macro level, a
distinction between systems that re tightly coupled to their environment and
“decoupled” architectures that are more likely to be explicitly symbolic has correctly been stressed by Tirassa et al
in their contributions in (O Nualláin,
ed., 2000). A final shibboleth, another indication of our ignorance, in nlp is
“context”, which relates a fortiori to
decoupled/symbolic processes. This concept is central also to the problem of
gene expression (Ó
Nualláin and Richard Strohman (2007) )This, the semantic problem, in turn needs to be
distinguished from the ontological problem, which arises when subject, object,
or both are conscious. At the phenomenological level, this has been stressed by
French existentialists like Sartre (“Hell is other people”) and, far less
melodramatically, by Merleau-Ponty’s (1942, 1945) careful analysis of the flow
of information between subject and world. Below, and in O Nualláin
(forthcoming) argue in this context that our sense of self, when coherent and
familiar, is an indication that the brain has succeeded in successfully
differentiating the information impinging on the organism into that which is
useful and that which is not. Finally, the epistemological problem is the
general problem of objectivity, the relationship between mind and world. Let us
now review these issues systematically, from QM through biology.
2.1 State-vector reduction in QM
This writer gives a more detailed run through of this
material in O Nualláin (2004, Pp 74-82).
However, it behooves us here to familiarise ourselves with a theory of
the ultimate nature of physical reality so bizarre that vedantins seem at least
to have a point. The paradigmatic QM
measurement involves these three steps;
1.
Preparation
of the system
2.
Evolution
3.
Measurement
Evolution is time-reversible; it is possible to get
back to the starting point. The wave function is a potentially infinite set of
terms with complex number weightings. Measurement involves asking a simple
yes/no question. Obviously, the massive
number of terms is going to be collapsed into a single real number. More
fundamentally, the operation of matrix multiplication involved produces a large
number of cross-products which are ignored in the calculation of the ultimate value. This loss of information is called
“decoherence” and makes the experiment time-irreversible at this point. Again
at this point, a break from classical mechanics has been made.
It is important to note that there is no need for a
human or indeed sentient observer in many interpretations of QM. Any physical
body of a certain body may be said to have “observer” status; the “dynamic
reduction” ethos claims a spontaneous series of wave-function breakdowns;
according to the Bohmian model, a “guide wave” probes the environment for
information which is used to regulate the nature of the state vector reduction.
It is fair to say that we are not going to be biologically enlightened by these
lines of inquiry
2.2 Gene Expression
For Strohman (2000, 2003) , the classic account by
which genotype can be determined from phenotype and vice versa is extremely
incomplete. He refers to work by Veech et al (2001) that examined metabolic
control. This painstaking work gave the
lie to the simplistic story by which a single enzyme is pre-selected to be
rate-limiting, and thus switches particular genes on and off. The situation is
much more complex in our brave new world; any enzyme may be rate-limiting under
various conditions. In Strohman (2000) the new scenario is made abundantly
clear;
“Complex organizational states
exist where, as we now realise, there also exist networks of regulatory
proteins capable of organising patterns of gene-expression and much other
emergent cellular behaviour in a context-dependent way”
We have seen
that for Ó Nualláin and Strohman (2007) the same story
applies for language. Strohman has recently received support from researchers
like Bentolila (2005) who argue that “operational information” is a province of
the cell body and its “cytoplasmic regulatory protein components” (ibid), just as much as it is one of the DNA database.
Enzymes like NAD can sense the bioenergetic status of the cell at a given
moment and in fact regulate the flow of information between genes. Each act of
gene-expression exploits the entire experience of the cell. That is also the
case for nlp by humans, and is ultimately reflected at a phenomenological level
as subjective experience.
As we have seen, attempts by researchers like Howard
Pattee (2001) to find a continuity from state-vector reduction in physics
through gene-expression to the relation between mind and world, though
interesting, are misguided. The relation
between subject and object in physics can be mediated by the well-understood
mathematics of Hilbert spaces; there are specific restrictions, for example, on
the types of operators allowed for wave-function evolutions (unitary operators)
and breakdown (Hermitian operators). No
rules as principled as that are discernible for gene expression; at best, the
mathematics of complex systems may become a bit less opaque as we are forced to
familiarise ourselves with them over the next several generations. The case of
mind and world is worse again; more sophisticated thinkers like Walter Freeman
(2002), as we have seen, doubt that we can ever link thought to object in the
external world, even in the best possible case. The most we can hope for is to
describe the brain state corresponding to the subjects’ personal experience of
the environment, an experience that will inevitably be idiosyncratic to that
subject. For gene expression, language
is the most appropriate analogy.
2.3 The
Immune system
The quintessential biological locus
of subject/object distinction is the immune system. Since Metchnikoff in the late nineteenth
century, the role of phagocytes in maintaining the integrity of biological
entities has been well attested. Burnet’s is essentially the prevalent view of
immunological selfhood. Edelman followed
this up with the notion that the recognizing system first generates a diverse population of
antibody molecules and then selects ex post facto those that fit or match (Tauber 2006 is a
reasonable history of these ideas)
Related to our work is the notion that meaning then
just as the immune system is determined
by the number and position of appropriate B lymphocytes in the whole of the
organism, the meaning state of a particular antigen occupies the whole of the
immune system in much the same way that Freeman argues informational meaning
states (and indeed consciousness) occupy the whole brain. Yet Tauber (1997),
aware of challenges to the classical view of self from postmodern thought,
wishes ultimately to complicate the scenario. To some extent, this current
paper is an exploration of the extent to which the immune system metaphor can
be applied to cognition and consciousness; Tauber (opus. citatum., 424) argues
that Jerne's work is essentially an exploration of the immune system qua
cognitive system. In that context, the comment (ibid., 427) that the immune and
nervous systems have the same messenger molecules and are highly integrated is
intriguing.
The immune system knows only itself; the notion of
the other, foreign matter, is a concept of invasion or degeneracy (425). The
truly alien would not be processed at all. Moreover, the perception of foreign
matter, the epitope, is context-dependent. Tauber finds a postmodern echo in
the work of Varela et al in the Santa
Fe institute (Perelson, 1988). The Santa work
emphasises that selfhood is constructed through life, and is not a once and for
all event as the Edelman immunological work would have us believe.
We wish to extend this argument. In engineering
terms, we often have to learn immensely complex tasks in which there is little
room for conscious feedback. For example, the conventional wisdom as expressed
by Libet (1994) is that there is a time lag of 350ms before we become conscious
of a desire to act. There is then a 200 ms interval during which we are
conscious of the readiness to act, and can veto it. While there is no desire
here to question Libet's findings, which usually related to experimental
subjects' voluntarily moving a finger, the fact remains that half a second is
an eternity for skilled action. Currently, tennis players of both genders can
serve at over 190 km/h; in a half-second the ball is gone over the receivers'
baseline. Yet skilled players can line up a return and hit it with accuracy
during that interval.
Somehow, we manage also to accrete skills, while
maintaining a coherent sense of self as our performance improves. Indeed,
failure to perform at the highest level of which we are capable is intuitively
felt as personal inauthenticity before being articulable. Similarly, we manage
to process microgestures lasting as little as a fortieth of a second while
being unable to report any stimulus lasting shorter than a tenth of a second.
The argument here, then, is that humans have found
ways around the slow, serial nature of consciousness and can recruit
unconscious mechanisms in the pursuit of certain goals.
2.4Cognition
It is probably not an exaggeration
to say that, within the cognitive sciences, we are still recovering from
Descartes. The central mistake in
Cartesian theories of mind is to roll all possible aspects of the subject/object
relation, that is the metaphysical,
epistemological, and symbolic into one crude cut. Conversely, non-human
biological nature was reduced to res
extensa, on a continuum with
inanimate nature. Pattee's work (2001) goes a long way to rectify this. The
Cartesian error is indeed greater still, and extends to the hylomorphic, to use
an old scholastic term. Res cogitans and res extensa
are proposed to be different in degree of
spiritualisation, with the angels being the former to the total exclusion of the latter. These mistakes
are not present in the Thomist views that Descartes presumed to supercede.
An understandable reaction is to fight fire with fire,
and to attenuate the disincarnate subject. This can be done by asserting that
many so-called mental contents are “out there” in the external world, to be
picked up as affordances (Gibson, 1979).
In this vein, Merleau-Ponty (1942, 1945) attempted to describe
subject/object relations at a “coupled” level, to use the terminology in O Nuallain (2000). What we wish to do now is
to propose a framework in which both “coupled” and “decoupled” cognition can be
countenanced. It is argued that selfhood can best biologically be naturalised
as analogous to the immune response. We then proceed to observe some
experimental and simulation data showing the brain processes that our
consciousness samples.
The writer is fully aware of the lacunae in the theory of
embodied cognitive science, and considers it
important briefly to address them. While the Cartesian
disembodied homunculus is undoubtedly an
absurdity, the notion of cognition in which there is a sharp
distinction between subject and object –
including abstract thought
- is not absurd, and such thought does happen. Let us be clear; the distinction is epistemological,
not ontological as Descartes’s conventional interpreters would
have it, and there is no dualist subtext here. Neither Heidegger’s “dasein” nor
Merleau-Ponty’s
“esprit incarnée”
catered for the possibility of this distinction, and the inability to
handle thought
that is both symbolic and situated has hampered cognitive
science (O Nuallain, 2003). This is
exemplified not just in the work of Gibson, but the embodied
robotics schools like those of Brooks,
and the contrasting
projects like CYC. One starting-point is
to consider the various types of
relationship that can
arise between organism and environment in navigation, and then extend this
reasoning to the symbolic level (see introduction in O
Nuallain, 2000).
The following section extends this line of reasoning.
Finally on this point, while it is argued elsewhere (Freeman 2005a) that neural networks should concede some
ground to the dynamical approach, it is undoubtedly the case that the central
idea of distributing symbolic entities and processes over a set of disparate
units undoubtedly leads to certain
cognitively veridical phenomena like the neural network
simulation of senile dementia.
Elsewhere (O Nuallain, forthcoming), the writer attempts to open dialogue with those who,
while perhaps disagreeing with the details of the Cartesian Meditations, insist
that Descartes got the method andgranularity of analysis correct. In fact,
Strawson (2006) goes rather further, and wishes to
rehabilitate the great Frenchman. In our viewpoint,
Descartes's' error is simultaneously more subtle
and more egregious that seems at first the case; far from
being a disincarnate, masterful “punctual”
self as described by
Locke, the experience of self is
essentially that of maintaining intact subject-object relations. This forms the
leitmotif of section 3 here.
3.0
Self as
gatekeeper
The child manages to differentiate the physical body from
the world outside in the first such
achievement; when this experience is recapitulated, a tacit
sense of self enters consciousness.
Similarly, in skill learning, we have to maintain previous
achievements under the rubric of a sense
of ego-consistent versus ego-alien; this is not how I hit a
backhand, I need to get back to myself.
Only from these tacit directives can we construct new
skills; conversely, absent brain damage,
nature does not allow us to regress to previously achieved
relations of subject and object.
When wave packets propagate, previous experiences of
selfhood are recapitulated, sampled at rates
much faster than
normal focal consciousness. They are reported back to us merely as
ego-consonant
versus ego-dissonant
(to use perhaps better terms). This goes for physical skill-learning, from the
most basic operations like walking to the finest musical
performance, as it does for explicit, symbolic
belief-systems. So self as gatekeeper , preventing us from
being overwhelmed by data , is the
unifying concept through all of this.
Damasio (1999, P. 79) is concerned with
establishing how our experience of qualia can include a sense of self;
“The brain uses structures designed to map both the organism and
external objects to create a fresh, second-order representation....it presents
within the mental process the information that the organism is the owner of the
mental process”
So, as he continues, “objective brain
processes knit the subjectivity of the conscious mind out of the cloth of
sensory mapping” (ibid.)
Damasio separates selfhood into two
aspects; one related to a core
consciousness, located perhaps in the upper brain stem and hypothalamus, and an
extended, autobiographical consciousness, ceaselessly re-created for each
object with which the brain interacts. The latter might, he suggests, involve the cingulate cortex.
Tauber (2006) is concerned with
emphasising the contingent, socially conditioned nature of selfhood and
recruits Charles Taylor (1989) to his cause. Taylor (ibid.) argues that political
structures require the notion of a “punctual” self; masterful in that it can
control the rest of the organism, and also introspectively available, to be
reflected upon as necessary. More radically, Marxist critics would argue that
it is economic forces that generate selves. We of course disagree with this
latter presupposition, though its radical nature is not inconsistent with the
rest of this paper.
Let us now look at some of the relevant experimental evidence. We
have recently extended the findings in Freeman (2006a) which shows that 3-7 times a second, the brain
approaches a limit attractor cycle at which any external signal is amplified as
the noise abates at the singularity. Consequently, there is no need to invoke stochastic
resonance to explain how extremely weak signals get detected. At this point,
the phase is undefined and background noise is
minimised. Remarkably, we have
established that one can usefully simulate neural activity as white noise,
approximated at the mesoscopic level as brown noise, and the resulting activity
shows remarkable parallels with real data in its being filtered through
gamma-rate EEG (figures 1a and 1b);
Figure 1a; real data, filtered at the gamma level.
Figure 1b; simulated data, same scale,
again at gamma level
It might indeed be argued that these
maximally sensitive states are a result of brown noise being filtered at a
certain ratio of the Nyquist. But how does this relate to the main themes of
this paper? It is being claimed that consciousness is a sparse sample of
overwhelming volumes of data buffeting the organism from instant to instant.
Moreover, the sparseness of this sample apotheosises in intuitive feelings that
can be described only as ego-consistent or ego-alien. We experience the
cognitive equivalent of T-cell activity when the going gets sparse; recent work
on microgestures indicates that such experience is indispensable in allowing us
function in the world. In particular, we seem to be able to identify
con-artists through the activity of these fast unconscious processes that
reveal to consciousness only the half-glimpsed
fact that something is
amiss.
What then of our rich mental life?We weave
a narrative placing ourselves at the center of our world, and ascribing
considerable agency, often totally inappropriately, to ourselves. What we in
essence are is a moot point, and the Marxist notion on this point is by no
means without merit, as Cushman has indicated in his critique of contemporary
American culture (O Nuallain, 2003, 248) . In fact, Vedanta goes so far as to
say at a psychological level that self is awareness itself, and its exercises
can be seen as attempts to stabilise one's self-identification at the
cutting-edge of subject and object, force itself. On that point, it is worth
noting that the vast and confusing literature on the physiology of meditation
is beginning to throw up the hypothesis that its deeper levels involve
prolonged periods of zero amplitude, null spikes as above in figs 1a and 1b but
extended over seconds and then minutes.
We are converging in scientific terms
toward a notion of consciousness as force, and self as utterly labile, capable
of being precisely the perception of the effects of that force. What remains to
be discussed is the nature of the world which is presented to this bare
consciousness. That will require an inventory of what is “out there” in the
consensual social world, and will be the subject of a much longer paper than
this.
4
Conclusion
Above all, this paper concerns itself with
the linkage between mind and matter. At the quantum level, the palette of
options available includes the (mis?)application of the ontological
interpretation to yield a universe generated by a cosmic mind. Inevitably, one
is at least operationally committed to a less grandiose view once experiments
on the relation between the cognizer and its world begins. Having reviewed QM,
we looked at Pattee's work, which is reminiscent of symbolic AI, with
rate-independent symbols controlling rate-dependent processes. That this for
Pattee is the quintessential subject/object and indeed mind/matter relation,
subsuming QM, gene expression, and cognition motivated us to examine all these
fields in a little more detail. We found that his work in uninformative in the
QM context, where the mathematical apparatus provided by Heisenberg and
Schrodinger is agnostic wrt his work. Gene expression itself turns out a great
deal more complex than his work might suggest; finally, cogntion admits of a
contrast between decoupled and coupled, egocentric and allocentric, all of
which terms must be engaged with.
The immune system provided some guidance.
In particular, a narrative along these lines seems possible; the experience of
self is an immunological process in the cognitive system. A consonant feeling
of self arises from appropriate exclusion of ego-alien material. Superimposed
on this simple process, we create a narrative attributing agency and potency to
ourselves, most of the time (if not always) inappropriately (Libet, 1994). The
self as built up by socioeconomic forces, with its immersion in nature, depths,
and orientation to the good as described in Taylor (1989) is a virtual system built from
these modest beginnings.
Therefore, selfhood is built from
sketchily sampled data, events that occur far faster than the conscious moment
of perhaps 0.1 seconds. Experimental work (Freeman, opera cit)indicates that
during periods of maximal sensitivity – the null spikes of 1a and 1b above –
the entire cortex can be destabilised in 0.003 seconds. Absent the processing
resources of focal consciousness, we are left with qualia indexing self-consistent
versus self-alien as our best guide. Conversely, there does seem to exist the
possibility that trained meditators can keep the amplitude of the EEG at zero
for some time, allowing the self to identify with pure observation, devoid of
contents, while maintaining exquisite sensitivity.
What then is the relationship between
subject and object? Where there exists a neat semantic characterisation of the
domain, precisely as Howard Pattee describes; rate-independent symbols with
reference in the outside world. A fair analogy, and one that indicates how rare
this is, might be the fact that only 2% of diseases have been found to have a
precise genetic correlate. The other 98% of the time, the symbols are being
affected by contextual factors; metabolic
processes in the case of gene expression, and “world knowledge” in the
case of human symbolic operation. The latter also is itself the apotheosis of a
distancing from the world, initially achieved by “decoupling” from the
realities of Gibsonian affordances.
Finally, we come to the messy reality of
our actual existence. Here we use the virtual machine surrounding selfhood to guide us. The social and other
realities that we encounter are indeed, as Piaget claimed, the results of
internalisations of physical experience.Much of our knowledge is beyond
conscious access; indeed, it would be impossible to function otherwise. As we
behave, we rely on a lifetime of previous learning, the results of which are
presented to us, instant by instant, as self-consistent versus self-alien. We
can indeed unpack these intuitions, given time, and find their origin in
previous learning experience; modern life rarely affords us what has become
almost this luxury.
While the ontological interpretation still
stands as a possible viewpoint, and mind/matter dualism is entirely logically
defensible, in this writer's opinion it behooves us to consider what the
disciplines surveyed in this paper have to say before multiplying entities
unnecessarily, to adapt William of Ockham. It is indeed possible that we will
find acts of cognition that require an ontological or otherwise QM
characterisation, but they will be in a tiny minority. It is appropriate first
to look for developmental disciplines which focus on our embodiment and situatedness, and possessors
of a nervous system that has evolved over billions of years to do very
different things from what we are currently doing.
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