Virtual Reality: Consciousness Really Explained!
(Why, How, Where and What: A Radical Proposal)
Second Edition
Jerome Iglowitz
Copyright January 1, 2007
All Rights Reserved
Dedication
For Chris and my Girls.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
--redo THIS!!!
PUT IN OLD ONE AS REFERENCE INFO ONLY!!!Preface:
“Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”
I think that in many ways the mind-body dilemma is like Dante’s problem in his mythical journey to “Paradiso”[1] long ago. If you think ours is an ordinary problem, (albeit a very difficult one), we really don’t have anything further to discuss –our perspectives are too different. I think it is closer to Dante’s journey -I think it is “Copernican” in the extreme. Let me paraphrase Dante’s book which I read over 50 years ago, (if I get it a little wrong, put it down to the imprecise memory of an old man).
The protagonist, Dante, enters Hell with his guide Virgil through the gateway which bears the label stated above: “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here!” He is required to descend through the multiple rings of hell, each of which represents some profound defect in human nature, (cognition?). Finally, he comes to the bottom and passes beside the devil’s frozen but live and active carcass in middle earth.
But then he is again obliged to climb up the mount of purgatory –again many tiered- until he is finally allowed to enter into the glory of Heaven. Ernst Cassirer, (a very reputable modern philosopher of science), used a very similar metaphor in referring to the mind-brain problem and to the revolutionary epistemology which necessarily lies at its base:
“For man it follows that he must traverse his appointed orbit, in order at the end of his road to find his way back again to its beginning. That is the fate imposed by our ‘circular world’.[2] ‘Paradise is bolted fast, and the cherub far behind us; we must travel around the world and see whether perchance an entrance can be found somewhere from the rear.’” “Spirit and Life”, P.858 in “The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer”, Tudor, 1958 (Cassirer’s quotation is from Kleist’s “The Marionette Theatre”.)
Let me paraphrase his metaphor: Man has been expelled from the eastern gate of Eden, (from simplistic connection to his naive world), by his acquisition of knowledge and the skepticism innate in it. The gate is now guarded by an angel with a flaming sword, (the consequence of reason), preventing his return. Forced to face the harsh and bitter world outside, he has embarked to walk clear round the world, (in his acquisition of knowledge), and hopes to find a gate unguarded on the other side so that he may re-enter paradise! Man was shut off from simple contact with reality when he first questioned that contact. Cassirer asserts that the whole of the human project of knowledge was to return to the ingenuousness from whence we came!
I feel we are now very close to that other gate. Rationality and perception, mind and reality need no longer be antithetical. But it will take hard work to get there. This is not a journey for the timid.
I think this is the hardest problem there is, and I will make one last try to communicate what I believe is its first viable scientific answer. My methodology has always centered around a bitter struggle between me and myself, questioning the very foundations of my belief each and every day and forcing me to re-validate them against the strength of the standard paradigm. My style is therefore contentious –I gave myself no mercy –ever. But the debate has always been with myself, not with you. I allowed myself this liberty with me –it is my method of work. I did not mean it to apply to you!
I demand of my reader just one thing –an unflinching courage to risk the impossible. We must pass through that gate and enter Hell. Hopefully we will together come to reach that western gate, (mixing the metaphor). To get there we must question the basis of each and every belief and tool we possess to include the very logic by which we reason, -the very tool we are using right now!
I think Cassirer brackets the initial problem precisely -the most important problem for the mind-brain dilemma lies in the limitations of contemporary logic itself:
“Every attempt to transform logic must concentrate above all upon this one point: all criticism of formal logic is comprised in criticism of the general doctrine of the construction of concepts.” (Ernst Cassirer) [3]
He believed that our contemporary logical concept –the “concept” that lies at the very bottom of our reasoning right here - is seriously flawed. He goes on with a concise statement of his answer. I consider it mirabile dictum [4]–i.e. it is said so well that it is useless to expand on it.
“When we form the concept of metal by connecting gold, silver, copper and lead, we cannot indeed ascribe to the abstract object that comes into being the particular color of gold, or the particular luster of silver, or the weight of copper, or the density of lead; however it would be no less inadmissible if we simply attempted to deny all these particular determinations of it. …
It would not suffice to characterize “metal”, for instance, “that it is neither red nor yellow, neither of this or that specific weight, neither of this or that hardness or resisting power”; but it is necessary to add that it ‘is colored in some way in every case, that it is of some degree of hardness, density and luster.’ Similarly, we would not retain the general concept of ‘animal’, ‘if we abandoned in it all thought of the aspects of procreation, of movement and of respiration, because there is no form of procreation, of breathing, etc., which can be pointed out as common to all animals.’
Can one really object to this argument and still maintain the sense of his thoughts? What is “stove” without a color? What is “house” without some kind of roof? “Stove”, “House”, “Metal”, “animal”, … are not sufficiently characterized in the hierarchical manner –nor, I think, is much else other than very specialized and delimitated mathematical and logical entities.[5] This, I think, lies at the root of our dilemma.
Cassirer proposed a different Concept instead, which he called “the functional Concept of mathematics”:
“Lambert pointed out that it was the exclusive merit of mathematical ‘general concepts’ not to cancel the determinations of the special cases, but in all strictness fully to retain them. When a mathematician makes his formula more general, this means not only that he is to retain all the more special cases, but also be able to deduce them from the universal formula.”[6]
Cassirer concluded that we must question the very foundations of our logic and, finally, even of our perceptions. But isn’t that immediately obvious in our modern conception of the mind-brain problem? How (in our modern mechanistic view of the world) could mechanistic biological organisms, (ourselves), “know” anything at all -much less about the world outside of themselves? What could “knowing” even mean to a machine? There must be some other rationale for cognition!
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I began my quest with one blinding insight, i.e. of the pregnant implications of David Hilbert’s revolutionary mathematical idea of “implicit definition” for the problem of the mind plus an unswerving fanaticism to just two criteria which I considered as absolutely fundamental realist prerequisites. Without resolving them I felt that we could only attain pseudo solutions, (I still think so). These two prerequisites were:
(1) the existence of a reality external to myself, and,
(2), the existence of consciousness
- both taken in their naïve senses! These constitute the absolute minimum and necessary presuppositions for the problem to which I have dedicated my life. They are contained as part of Hillary Putnam’s tenets of basic realism. George Lakoff and Gerald Edelman restate them as follows:
1. External Reality: “(1) a real world (including humans but not depending on them).”
2. Concepts,(Mind), and the World: “(2) a linkage between concepts and that world”
3. Some relationship: (3) “a stable knowledge that is gained through that link.”
The combination of my three themes will confirm Putnam-Lakoff-Edelman’s first and second postulates, but the “knowledge” in (3) will be argued as mathematically and scientifically relativistic in its significance and pragmatic, (i.e. algorithmic), in its justification.
I propose to give the first scientifically viable answer to the mind-brain problem.
The Argument from Dogmatic Materialism:
Most of the force of the materialist argument lies, I think, in the “bragging mode”, (i.e. “Put up or shut up!”), rather than in logical argument! By this, I mean that materialists can point to the fact that at every moment, new confirmations of their fundamental thesis arise -from new PET scan procedures to new antibiotics, to the discovery of new atomic particles - even to the development of new and different ways of playing the game of marbles -and an integration of just about everything in between. It goes on and on and is eminently successful. They can and do retort to any argument by demonstration, not primarily by a resort to logic. Their perspective is so “perfect” that logic is largely irrelevant! I tried to make this point in my book. (There are holes in their position –mainly in what they will not look at—see Gleich, Van Fraasen, etc.)
I have been trying to formulate a better answer to their position than “they will never explain the mind-brain relationship”. That is clearly not good enough, and can never suffice from their own perspective until and unless an alternative can provide new devices, new results –new “toys”. This is what the acceptance of Einstein’s relativity by materialists was all about even though it embodied a perspective radically different from their own. Or of the acceptance of Bohr’s Quantum Theory for that matter! Materialism, moreover, is an inbuilt perspective - framed and dictated, I believe, by biology itself. (This is the whole sense of Chapter 1.) The best response I had come up with at the point of the first edition of my book was:
“Is it not more believable, (under the very Naturalist assumption), that we have merely expressed our own particular mode of existence, -that human civilization, like a swarm of bees, has simply built a (closed) hive? What is this logic we are so sure of? Ultimately, biologically, it is an expression of the “structural coupling[7]” of the race with its environment. But the invariants of that coupling are derived from the structure of the uniquely human brain. Other brains, other modes of coupling almost certainly would embody another protologic.[8] Ordinary logic, (i.e. “associationist” logic -in Dreyfus’ terminology), denies its biological roots. It believes it has touched eternity and verity. How? Why? What teleological mystery does it hide? When we thought that man was created by God in his image and that God gave us this open channel to truth, then there was a meaningful rationale for such a view. But when man became purely and simply a material animal, derived mechanistically and randomly by material combination, then this mechanistic process lost all justification as correlating with anything other than its own mechanical necessities. But it works! How and why? Perhaps that is itself the answer. It is an operative process that works (superbly) in the world in which it lives! This provides no guarantee of its ontological posits at all however -it is an operative process, (an algorithm), that works -and that’s all!” (But there are transformations other than Isomorphism which allow “working” as I will discuss in Chapter 1.) It is, I admit, a superb working nonetheless! How could it be otherwise?
But is that answer good enough? Frankly, the answer is no. But it is early times for the conception I have birthed. Copernicus stood in like stead –it took two hundred years for Newton to finally achieve a synthesis. I hope to give a better, more specific answer than the above this time around. Welcome to Hell!
Introduction
“Popper [said that] ... hypotheses are interesting only if they are bold -that is, if they are improbable and thus likely to be falsified. For then, to withstand falsification by rigorous testing is a triumph, and such a hypothesis is significant. Safe (that is, probable) hypotheses are a dime a dozen, and the safest are logical truths. If what science is seeking is primarily a body of certain truths, it should stick to spinning out logical theorems. The trouble with such safety, however, is that it doesn’t get us anywhere.” (P.S. Churchland, 1988, P.260)
Is anyone really interested in an answer to the mind-body problem? And why should they be? If science is able one day to deal with all of the ravages of mental illness, and to explain the whole of human behavior as biological phenomena -as it surely will- then the problem would seem fit for the debates of philosophers with philosophers alone, and of interest to no one else.
But, as in science generally, there is also a problem of organization - how do we organize these biological phenomena? And more importantly -how do we predict and integrate them? It is one thing to catalogue prior experiment, and it is quite another to integrate it into a comprehensive and predictive framework useful to empiric practice. Ptolemean vs. Copernican cosmology is the prototypical illustration of the distinction. Ptolemean theory was quite capable of cataloging any celestial movement, but it could not lead to Kepler’s –nor to Newton’s laws. It was sterile for the progress of future deep science. Heisenberg and Schroedinger[9] supply a more modern instance. Heisenberg’s matrix conception of quantum mechanics was comprehensive, but not predictive. Schroedinger’s alternative was.