A tantalizing part of experience is the noise we don’t experience; both the visual and auditory noise in the environment is immense. The environment is an almost chaos. Light, shapes and sounds; all varied and complex. It is natural to think of shapes as formed, ready made for minds to acquiesce. We see ‘a table’ or ‘chair’ or ‘face’, and that is it. From the chaos we see an ordered world. That is amazing.
Furthermore within the order we can navigate, making sense of the fauna and flora of our environments. There is a degree to which the impressionists had it right however, there is a a sense in which their paintings are closer to the reality of perception than our very own eyes. After all we are closer to light than to objects (physically speaking).
Color perception offers a simple illustration. When we see a series of different colors the colors remain constant despite variability in environmental conditions such as luminance. This is known as color constancy and this is thought to be achieved because the brain reads the ratios of difference between the wavebands of light from one surface to the next. As wavelengths vary between the surfaces we are looking at, the brain ‘reads’ the ratio differences between light from surfaces (which stays the same irrespective of light variations) allowing the colors we see to remain constant. In other words the brain computes color properties from ratios which, when we think about the brain as fleshy stuff is just amazing.
We don’t just perceive and navigate, we order the world too. How many of us, moving into a new home hang up pictures ‘where they belong’? The world is not just a thing we receive, it is something we act on and try to control. Our brains, human brains that is, are immense in their ability to both make inferences from the available data and and then structure the world according to our needs. We are the only species known to use tools to make tools. That too is amazing.
Within evolutionary theory there is a not insignificant idea that the more variable a trait is the less likely it is to have adaptive value. The argument goes that truly adaptive changes quickly loose their variability as the remaining population have acquired them, thus leaving previously adaptive traits fully absorbed by a species; they become a part of the total makeup of the species. Although the assumption has been contested the overarching principle has held as a rule.
The point is that there is a base level at which we all operate on the world with the same bodies. Each an agent coming to the world ready to make something meaningful of it with the same demands. It was Darwin who noticed that across cultures facial reactions to emotions have an invariance. To the extent that we as a species have invariant demands, we too have structured responses. In short, we see and act on a world we see that is, in part at least, not just composed of the world, but of our response to it. In as much as that is the case, the world in which we live is our construction.
For me personally, it is not just that we are conscious that is amazing, it is that we are conscious agents with a bid to our futures. We live in reciprocity with the environment in such a way that the environment serves a function in an almost Hegelian dialectic, but rather than being an historical and transcendental metphysic, the relations are immediate and physical. Rather than being governed by an end point that is teleological in some as yet unperceived way, it is itself evolving between the myriad minds that people the world, somehow finding solutions to life as it emerges. In all its detail, that is magical.
Living day to day we sometimes forget the significance of our brain are with respect to the ideas that make up our worlds. In our brain are a considerable number of neurons with significantly more connections. Odd as it may sound, there is nothing like the world in the brain, nor are there any clear ideas, just some gray and white mushy stuff. How your brain and my brain know a table is a table or an idea is an ideas is therefore puzzling.
Of course as science has progressed the questions have been framed differently. The way in which the questions have been framed has become and index for understanding how we relate to meaning in the world; understanding thought and the relationships ideas have to each other is important if we want to understand how we relate to our cultural environment. Knowing how our brains work will help us to frame ourselves in the conceptual world of memes and archetypes.
A good place to start to think about our dreams. In our dreams our experiences bear little resemblance to the actual world. But when we dream we are as good as conscience. For all intents and purposes we see, move and exist in a world, albeit a dream world. The question is how? A lot of work has gone into trying to explain ‘how matter becomes imagination’ (to borrow a phrase from one of my favorite scientists).
To start to understand we must return to when we are awake; there is distribution of activity going on in our heads. Memories encoded across regions of the brain are activated, not just to explicitly remember something, but to relate what we hear to the bank of information already encoded in our brains. Those semantic networks that become active reciprocally influence the way in which we encode the environment, we thus further perceive the world and our relation to it in relation to the memeories already banked up in our brains.
Priming offers a rather good illustration. If we are asked to study a list of words, and we are then given syllables and asked to complete them we are more likely to complete the syllables as the words that were in the list we studied. On a semantic level, if we are ‘primed’ with a word like doctor, we would be more likely to think ‘nurse’ than say ‘telephone’, why, because they are semantically related. Similarly, researchers have found that ‘priming’ people with aggressively related stimuli will get people to interpret others behavior during competitive games as more aggressive and will similarly trigger a more aggressive response than one would otherwise have seen.
One other important things about sleeping is that when we sleep our minds have a chance to encode and rehearse information that was important during the day, that is as well as process things that may have been on our minds. The same semantic networks that are active during the day are active in our sleep minus the real world to order them. Of course this is a rather simple account. But it’s the principle that’s important. The principle is that the world that we experience is related to active constellations of information in our brains, formed by the activity between neurons that structure and encode that information. That activity has an impact on how we act on the world, and of course that has an impact on our experiences, which further influences the world that influences us.
As human beings, as minds a significant part of that activity is ideational. A significant portion of our experience is formed through ideas, concepts and semantic activity. Things mean things (if I am permitted a circularity).
And that is the significance of meaning. The meaning we find in things drives us. We relate to meaning of things. Jung in his book The Science of Mythology drew this point out (albeit psychoanalytically), and if we think of the way in which we use representational mediums, like deserted islands (Deleuze), or the significance of a Brand in the modern world, we come close to understanding the significance of ideas in our lives. But they run deeper.
The concept of a schema is important in understanding the same point. Schema, or patterns that represent some part of the world don’t come in-built like the ability to recognize faces (or like the structures that contain the schemata). The concept of the archetype is of this form as is the concept of the meme. They share enough similarities to be synonyms for each other. That is they are both referents for ideas.
Combining all of the elements in this picture we can begin to form an understanding of our relationship with the world of ideas. Ideas, represented often as objects, have significance by virtue of our relation to them. The relationship between the objects we encounter, the ideas that we form them and the ideas we get learn in society act as referents, providing the environment with a sense of significance. That significance drives our relationship with our environment: pressing forward en-mass the development of ideas contained in that environment shape a shematic of ideational content pressing us with meaning. Thankfully this is a partial picture. One I hope develops the importance of ideas in the world as factors in our relationship with it. One that can help us better conceptualize why some ideas work and some don’t as we creativity develop an image of the world we’re in.
Overhead the earth is a miracle of magnitude. Removed from the immediate youth of all that is present. Embedded in the flesh we see with our eyes, we are narrowed to the compass of vision, trapped; if it were not for imagination. Trapped to the hunger and lust that are the anathema of civilization.
And at every level each age is closer to the physical character of being. Before we adulterate life children play with no thought of the concrete. The world is the world of imagination, it is the world we destroy. Possibility, unscathed by the meanings of everything, children free to imagine, the world they dream could be real. It could couldn’t it?
It is blank of the things to come; those things which daunt the prospects of every child.
One Sunday we were like children, playing in the fields, running after gazelle in the mist as they jumped from puff to dew. Our house traveled with light and warmth through the horizon as the world awoke to a jaded reality, and we lived a moment of innocent nothingness before that time. And soon the quicksand of being took us from the playground to the world; preoccupation faintly understood. But we were not disappointed.
And so from the world within to the world without, life was only told though stories, communicated at other times. Never twice the same.
On the kitchen floor a giggle signified the privacy of our experience. Shared, but not to be shared again. Like a nod between men, as full of meaning and companionship as any nod can be. We giggled like children.
How many freedoms? The mystic and the rational combine, if only in the innermost parts of the mind; at some level recognizing the sense of another reality, one disconnected from the occupation of the body, connected only with the imagination; we travel with each other infinitely in finite time remembering the the impossibility of the infinite in the expression of mind.
And we would be forgiven for thinking that beyond the concrete lies nothing but space. However, within the depth of our minds are the rhythms of meaning. That would be nonsense anywhere else. Yet they carry for each a significance not held by any other.
That is the power of nostalgia. A Time forgotten, a time only the passing bird sees. It is held in the spaces beyond quantification, to be understood to the longing for more than the void. There is a world we find within others when we smile, it is that single moment of creative insight that exists between people; the meanings of the worlds are resonant equally among us all at this time.
It is the essence of all human bondage. In a world that none but minds can acquiesce, can forget and can live on: The moment of belonging is the moment of genuine imagination.
But for those moments those worlds were there; between us and forever in our minds, our worlds to share. They were there to remind us that beyond here the world continues, devoid of the facts of the minds but full of a psychological reality. A real reality for us.
It is that world across the human that is the humanity. It was the fact of experience that meant the word and not misunderstanding or false interpretation monopolized existence. It was that which is all that matters, all that does matter.
From the mystical to the concrete we live, and we live on; with pleasure disguised as an opiate, the fallacy of misunderstanding that has left the possibility and the reality of all which is false to nothing; we continue to live, and our life remains in this world between us, between the concrete and the abstract, it is this world of interaction. Embedded we are and embodied we become.
“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time…..I am insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist…….nor do I conceive what I is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity”
David Hume: A Treatise On Human Nature
“1. The world is all thst is the case”
“1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.”
Wittgenstein – Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
“Assuming physics to be broadly speaking true, can we know it to be true, and, if the answer is in the affirmative, does this involve knowledge of other truths besides those of physics?”
Bertrand Russell – Physics and Experience
To think about consciousness is difficult, moment to moment it is the one thing of which we are not aware, that is despite its unique relationship with all with which are aware. Of course from time to time we will comment on how we feel or what we see but in none of those statements are we even implicitly referring to our own consciousness. But without it, we wouldn’t have the awareness that would make any of those statements remotely intelligible.
The words here as they are read by you, the sense of your hand guiding you, the sense of the back of your neck. These are not things, they exist as constellations of activity in your brain. They are qualia, aspects of consciousness. The sense of having a word on the tip of your brain, that’s also consciousness. But, and it would be unnatural to do anything but this; we conflate each of those experiences with the things they are experiences of; they are in fact just mental activity.
Of course your hand and your neck exist, as do these words. However, the point remains; between you and your experience is a world taken for granted. That world is an interpretation, and reality, once you’ve been removed from it is something quite different to what we interpret. Cut open a human brain and there is nothing that looks like a word or a book or even a desk lamp, there is a fleshy organ and in that organ millions of connections infer not just the lamp, the book and the words, they infer you reading it as well.
Given that this is the case, and this is the case, what certainty do we have that we are even really real? That is a question that has been asked and examined and attempts have been made to answer with varying degrees of satisfaction. Ultimately however, each answer has led to a regress of absurdity, leading to more and more questions at every turn. One of my favourite answers used to be the idea that it is by virtue of the coherence of evidence that we can be sure that the world exists, and my favourite retort; we could also be be coherently wrong about all of those facts as well.
To make matters worse; physics tells us that the world that we see is in fact an inference and a relatively bad one at that. The table, the book and even the ink on the page that make up the words are made up of billions of electrons buzzing about, and between them a lot of empty space.
The issue it seems to me that makes us nervous is that we like to feel certain about things. Novelty is always nice when it doesn’t threaten you, but when you can’t be sure that you’re really reading these words on this screen because you may in fact not exist, or these words may only exist by virtue of your thinking them, then the uncertainty is a little more daunting.
To be certain of everything you believe is in reality a probabilistic nightmare. Desire for certainty is a necessary disease of the mind, it is the anxiety of uncertainty that lies behind neurotic disposition, and that is the point. How many nightmares have been caused in the world because one group of people have killed to defend one false proposition against another? How much of history is marred by sacrifices made in the name of ideas that today we’re certain are parochial, ridiculous even. Science itself is in part built around the idea that it’s central authority lies in its own ability to falsify itself. And how many ideas that we take to be the fabric of reality today will our future generations inquire with an equal humour? But that said the fabric of what we take to be the essence of the world, the values and assumptions we make in the simplest of our observations seem unavoidable.
That single impasse, the impasse of pragmatism has shifted debate from the quest for truth to the nature of attitude. Progress, it seems, is less to do with what we know than our attitude towards what we think we know.
And yet we certainly will, and we certainly do take our own existence for granted. But we fail to take for granted the same sense of existence in others, or even the world in which we live. The distance between us and the minds of others, those minds who share the uncertainty of reality with us are at a greater distance from us than the least tenable of our beliefs.
That is an irony, and it’s a bad one too; the further away someone is from us the easier it is to forget the one thing they certainly do share with us, that is humanity, consciousness and a mind. It is all of the minds in this world taken together that give is the most coherent picture of the world we can have, it therefore seems viciously illogical that we are also so capable of standing at such a distance from people who for all the superficial differences are in essence the same as us. Most importantly, people who share a world with us and have as much right to a picture of existence as us.
Within the depths of those minds are the anxieties of existence that drive each of us. For some however that existence is in fact desperate, and in a society that can give anything to anyone most people struggle with the very fact of existence. That is madness for a rational society.
But as much as we would like to believe it is the case, society is not rational. Of course the law, the government and the values that we share preserve some kind of rationality. The concept of human rights, international diplomacy and democracy are in effect standards of rationality that have developed and evolved over time, they have been made possible through history; even though many of these ideas were born of inequity at one time or another. But there is a deeper and more significant point, one that leads to an absurdity that is unavoidable, just like art, language and any other form of expression, each of these institutions are born of human minds and shape human reality and in as much as that is the case, and again, that is the case, they are only capable of as much reason as we are in using them.
“THE HOPE OF SATISFACTION TO OUR MORE HUMAN DESIRES – THE HOPE OF DEMONSTRATING THAT THE WORLD HAS THIS OR THAT DESIRABLE ETHICAL CHARACTERISTIC – IS NOT ONE WHICH, SO FAR AS I CAN SEE, A SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHY CAN DO ANYTHING WHATEVER TO SATISFY”
&
“THE GOOD WHICH IT CONCERNS US TO REMEMBER IS THE GOOD WHICH IT LIES IN OUR POWER TO CREATE – THE GOOD IN OUR LIVES AND IN OUR ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE WORLD. INSISTENCE ON THE BELIEF IN AN EXTERNAL REALISATION OF THE GOOD IS A FORM OF SELF ASSERTION, WHICH, WHILE IT CANNOT SECURE THE EXTERNAL GOOD WHICH IT DESIRES, CAN SERIOUSLY IMPAIR INWARD GOOD WHICH LIES IN OUR POWER, AND DESTROY THAT REVERENCE TOWARDS FACT WHICH CONSTITUTES BOTH WHAT IS VALUABLE IN HUMILITY AND WHAT IS FRUITFUL IN THE SCIENTIFIC TEMPER.”
This was a moment in time. The second the shutter captured the light, even before that the moment ended. Lens cap on feet trod on through the mud toward another spot in the forest. Sun shining, the light foaming through the atmosphere the freshness betrayed a deeper truth to the scene. Ants, birds, flowers and vine crawling through in a world with a hidden complexity, every crack a cranny of life; each and every colour not by accident passing the lens of my eye, transforming at each moment from the electrons that make them up to the empty space between, life buzzed with energy. Even the epiphenomena served their purpose as they come to do in nature, much like human consciousness purpose, function, the very raison_d’être a teleology by human standards. As nature would have it every new phenomena become as much a part of the whole as all preceding mutations served their purpose to all their temporal descendants. And through of the present, the minute transformation of life of which my camera only captured a instant I stood there on a Sunday afternoon overhwlemed by the present. This symmetry is no accident, it is by nature that this picture could be taken, it is by evolution that the image can be carried forward, for your eyes to see, for your mind to comprehend, and in all of this; in both the natural world and in technology we are left intrisically embedded in nature.
Birth, growth, decay; year by year, month by month as much in the forest as anywhere else. The cosmic struggle to survive goes beyond this image and at times leaves a sense of almost futile apathy. Without even noticing the cycle of creation and decay exist as much for the universe as it does for an ant in the wood, like a universal principle guiding the whole of what exists existence itself turns on its head. One day our galaxy will collide with Andromeda and the likely result will be the total annihilation of the woodland in this image along with what we think to be our solar system, and with total entropy the universe that can sustain life in any system will itself dissipitate and a darkness will loom over whatever it is that existence is.
The harmony in this picture is almost a cliché. Yet that very harmony is also the seat of our anxieties; we are commited not just to life but to certainty, yet the certainty that we have made our commitment to is a fleeting irrelevance beyond the boundries of our minds. It is not for nothing that the truth Sisyphus imparted to the humans from the gods was his own punishment and it is not for nothing that the answer to our own survival lies in his own punsishment, not to struggle but to live each breath and take in each moment of majesty that nature has allowed us to acquiesce in. It is the struggle for life that defines us, but it is the majesty of living that makes us. And that seems to be the irony of this image, it is only through the reflection we can achieve away from the immediacy of life that life as a whole begins to bear meaning.
From unity with nature to disunity from it; the duality of man and nature and of man have encouraged a new system in which we are the progenitors of our own destruction through nature, and yet with an almost poetic twist we are forced not just to face nature, we are forced to face ourselves within the natural world. We are the creators of a future that is now embedded in a world we have created, and the poetry is that we have now come into closer proximity with the very nature that the industrial age and the enlightenment sought to surpass.
Madness seems to me to be a subjective word. There are plenty of definitions, and many of them go out of flavour. However, there is a degree of insanity to our predicament, and a healthy one. Our rationalism has in part caused the conditions of our fate and it is the same rationalism that will navigate us through the twisted strands of fate. It is to the woods that we must find our reflection in order to regain the remnants of sanity we seek, and it is in unison with them that we must also look to the future.
This was a moment in time. The second the shutter captured the light, even before that the moment ended. Lens cap on feet trod on through the mud toward another spot in the forest. Sun shining, the light foaming through the atmosphere the freshness betrayed a deeper truth to the scene. Ants, birds, flowers and vine crawling through in a world with a hidden complexity, every crack a cranny of life; each and every colour not by accident passing the lens of my eye, transforming at each moment from the electrons that make them up to the empty space between, life buzzed with energy. Even the epiphenomena served their purpose as they come to do in nature, much like human consciousness, purpose, function, the very raison d’être a teleology by any human standard. As nature would have it every new phenomena becomes as much a part of the whole as all preceding mutations served their purpose to all their temporal descendants. And through of the present, the minute transformation of life of which my camera only captured an instant I stood there on a Sunday afternoon overhwlemed by the present.
This symmetry is no accident, it is by nature that this picture could be taken; it is by evolution that the image can be carried forward for your eyes to see, for your mind to comprehend, and in all of this for the whole to be as much a physical as a mental reality; in both the natural world and in technology we are left intrisically embedded in nature.
Birth, growth, decay; year by year, month by month as much in the forest as anywhere else. The cosmic struggle to survive goes beyond this image and at times leaves a sense of almost futile apathy. Without even noticing, the cycle of creation and decay exist as much for the universe as it does for an ant in the wood. Like a universal principle guiding the whole of what exists, existence itself turns on its head. One day our galaxy will collide with Andromeda and the likely result will be the total annihilation of the woodland in this image along with what we think to be our solar system, and with total entropy further on in the future the universe that can sustain life in any system we know will itself dissipitate and a darkness will loom over whatever it is that existence is.
The harmony in this picture is almost a cliché. Yet that very harmony is also the seat of our anxieties; we are commited not just to life but to certainty, yet the certainty that we have made our commitment to is a fleeting irrelevance beyond the boundries of our minds. It is not for nothing that the truth Sisyphus imparted to the humans from the gods was his own punishment and it is not for nothing that the answer to our own survival lies in his own punsishment, not to struggle but to live each breath and take in each moment of majesty that nature has allowed us to acquiesce in. It is the struggle for life that defines us, but it is the majesty of living that makes us. And that seems to be the irony of this image, it is only through the reflection we can achieve away from the immediacy of life that life as a whole begins to bear meaning.
From unity with nature to disunity from it; the duality of man and nature and of man have encouraged a new system in which we are the progenitors of our own destruction through nature, and yet with an almost poetic twist we are forced not just to face nature, we are forced to face ourselves within the natural world. We are the creators of a future that is now embedded in a world we have created, and the poetry is that we have now come into closer proximity with the very nature that the industrial age and the enlightenment sought to surpass.
Madness seems to me to be a subjective word. There are plenty of definitions, and many of them go out of flavour. However, there is a degree of insanity to our predicament, and a healthy one. Our rationalism has in part caused the conditions of our fate and it is the same rationalism that will navigate us through the twisted strands of fate. It is to the woods that we must find our reflection in order to regain the remnants of sanity we seek, and it is in unison with them that we must also look to the future.
Among the most difficult issues faced by humans in science and in philosophy is consciousness. The problem with consciousness is that is has many sides to it. On the one hand there is the very difficult problem understanding what it is. Is is a stuff like say an electron is something i.e. matter, or is it it’s own stuff? That is the problem of substance. Then there’s another problem, that is: how is it that we are conscious?
Wittgenstein remarked “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him”. It’s worth noting that the insight was not Wittgenstein’s alone. Xenophanes (approx 400 BC) stated “if oxen, horses…. had hands or could paint…
my own exploring of my identity through sound and vision. I put these short videos together in 2009 as an experiment, trying aesthetically express my sensibilities. Each of the three depicts a different aspect of me. As usual I am always grateful for peoples views and ideas.
A tantalizing part of experience is the noise we don’t experience; both the visual and auditory noise in the environment is immense. The environment is an almost chaos. Light, shapes and sounds; all varied and complex.
Knowing how the world and our own consciousness of it will help us to frame ourselves in relation to the concepts that inhabit our world. The physical world is important if we want to understand that other word we inhabit, the world of ideas.
