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A Relationship With The World

in A Place For Thought, Art, Broken Postcard, Consciousness, Design, Embodied, Humanism, Images, Logic, Psychology, Science, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | No comments

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.

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An anatomy of the idea

in A Place For Thought, Analytical Philosophy, Art, Belief, Broken Postcard, Consciousness, Design, Embodied, Logic, Psychology, Science, Sleep, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | No comments

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.

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Memes don’t exist (or things without existence)

in Analytical Philosophy, Broken Postcard, Philosophy, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | 1 comment

Logical Arguments For The Non-Existence Of Memes

Of course it’s not like existence is a property that things can have. We can’t divide the world into those things which do and which don’t have the property ‘existence’. Existence is more like an intransitive verb, We do the existing and that’s that.

To say that there are two classes of things to which the property ‘exists’ does apply (the class of all things y) and the class of things that don’t ‘exist’ (the class of all things x) is also to say that the class of things that don’t have existence in fact do exist. One must exist in order that one really has any properties at all, including existence. A vicious circularity seems almost in force.

Memes just don’t exist; they are a chimera. For those of you who don’t know, memes are often likened to words, ideas or bits of information. In a sense they are what genes are to ontogeny. ‘Toasters’ are memes as is ‘the rain in Spain’. Toasters are devices that do something and the idea of what they do is a meme as is the way in which they do it. The rain in Spain connotes the idea of something that doesn’t happen, hence the saying many of us learnt as children ‘The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plane’ before going on holiday.

Both toasters and the rain in Spain convey an idea to us and memetisists would have us believe these ideas are transmitted, mutate and evolve. What is more they shape our behaviour. Martyrdom, freedom and chastity are all memes that are interesting cases of this. They make us behave in ways that either kill us or that don’t allow us to further our genes. Either way they don’t obey basic principles of evolution as far as we are concerned. That facet of memes has led advocates of memetic theory to suggest that memes are a bit like viruses.They’re not interested in us at all, they’re interested in themselves and furthering their own existence. We’re hosts to our ideas in that respect. Also, like viruses they’re not conscious; viruses are just strings of nucleotides. But at least with viruses we know what the information is made of. As mentioned memes have been likened to bits of information. The problem is that talking about bits of information is  a bit like talking about litres of liquid, what’s left unclear and undefined is what the litres or the bits actually are of.

We can call this problem 1 of memetic theory. Better stated, problem 1 of memetics is that memes aren’t clearly about anything at all; or what they denote has been left undefined. We know that there is information and we know that information is communicated but, we also know that stating this doesn’t prove that memes exist any more than it shows that they don’t; it shows us that the problem is much sharper than we originally thought. There is a full force machine within the academic community evangelising the meme meme as it were, who have skilfully managed to dismiss the one question that crops up over and over again; what do memes refer to.

Problem 2 is worth exploring and is related to the problem of universals. The problem of universals dates from the time of Plato. Plato suggested that there is a world of pure forms, in his conception they are the pure forms from which the imperfect forms in our world are shaped from.

The common way to think of universals is to think about either tables or triangles. There are a million different tables in the world but there has to be some ideal table from which all the different tables of the world are drawn, similarly there is no perfect example of a triangle naturally occurring in the world, yet in geometry dating from the time of Euclid we have been able to define the perfect triangle from Euclid’s axioms of geometry. Universals are what things have in common. It is not clear however that one meme has anything in common with another meme.

Bertrand Russell gave a good example of an argument for universals in ‘The Problems of Philosophy’ (1912). He phrased his argument by asking us to consider prime numbers; we know that there are numbers below 100 which are divisible by 1 and themselves, all of which we know (there are 25 below 100). We also know that we could indefinitely enumerate primes above 100 (see the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic) if we had the time (which would have to be infinite). Therefore we also know that there exist some number which is a prime that we haven’t yet found, or we can say there will always be a prime number we haven’t found. Since this is the case then we can say there exists number we can never find, as if we found it then it wouldn’t fit into our definition. Numbers are the best example of universals (they are the common property that all things have in common), and if we follow Bertrand Russell’s argument there are universals that exist that we can never know: better stated, these rules apply universally irrespective of human minds perceiving them.

But we can’t even say any of these things about memes. We can’t articulate any principles that govern the properties of their existence, nor can they be said to share anything in common with each other between the minds which they are hosted.

If they do share anything in common it would be the properties of class membership, but that is referring to an abstraction based on their idea and not any knowledge we have of them in particular. In a sense we have greater ability to talk about the class of all mythical four legged creatures in relation to unicorns and chimeras, at least we could in theory begin to enumerate them and, more importantly exclude some creatures from the class. In the case of memes on the other hand we are just told ‘there are some that don’t have words for them‘ (Daniel Dennett at TED). It would seem that meme theorists would have us include the whole of psychological phenomena and that is problematic as in order that you have a credible and useful class of things one must be prepared to exclude a certain number of objects too.

Problem 2 better stated is therefore that where on the one hand we can at least frame falsifiable arguments for the existence of universals we have no principles in order to frame memes. The idea of the meme is so broadly ill conceived that there is not a plausible method for accounting for their existence.

Problem 3 requires a method of analysis I learnt from my father,  it’s called ‘Getting Down To Brass Tacks‘ or just stating things as they are. No two human minds are the same in far more complex ways than no two naturally occurring triangles can be said to be the same. We all have not only uniquely different histories but, those histories and the minds in which they are embedded are a part of how those minds conceive ideas. What is more our ideas are in part social in context and they are also in part functional. In that respect they will change depending on their application and the functional context in which they apply, both socially and personally. These changes, to the best of our knowledge, occur in a physiological environment that requires massive complexity in a parallel computing machine known as the brain. And unlike numbers and the whole of mathematics, memes can not be applied to our understanding of the brain, they can only be properly called a constituent part. In order to even say that we would have to know something about them. In effect where we find room for ideas (and accept that on some given level no two are the same) we cannot do the same for memes.

Whereas we can talk about numbers and triangles with a certain amount of universality we can’t talk about memes in the same context, only the class of things which are memes. Numbers are of course classes (Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, Bertrand Russell, 1919). But we can apply numbers to things in the world despite never seeing the number 1. We see that there are instances in which the number 1 applies. What we are doing when we do that is applying the number to an instance of something in the world. Symmetry provides us with an interesting case.  Humans have perceived and used symmetry ostensibly for a very long time. In that respect there is a psychological relevance to symmetry. However, humans have also devised a system for categorizing forms of symmetry and enumerated different patterns to symmetry which can beapplied to things in the world. Symmetry can therefore be properly said to be empirical.

Problems 1, 2, & 3 give us a unique insight into the ontological defence of meme theory. According to Daniel Dennett “well words exist don’t they“. But one must ask, in what sense do words in fact exist. When I tell my father in Law’s dog off for growling I don’t assume that the dog understands the words but I do know that the dog recognizes the tone of my voice and body posture. I don’t assume that words have quite the universality that is implicit in Dennett’s rhetorical question. Wittgenstein similarly said that if lions could talk it would be meaningless to talk to them. Words, as far as I am concerned exist in much the same way that George Berkeley would have them exist, that is only in so far as they are recognised and understood by human minds.

Well, what about ideas, I believe that ideas exist within the world of human minds in quite the same sense that words do, but I am far less certain about how they are composed. Well then memes ought to as well, right? That is the ontological stance of memeticists. The problem is it’s unclear that memes are anything like words or ideas, it’s also very clear that words and ideas are not the same kinds of thing as each other. Furthermore if memes were anything like words or ideas one would have to ask if we need them, that is ‘would they add anything useful to our understanding of the world or just further complicate it?‘

Words are a vehicle for ideas in the social sphere but memes (other than the whole of our psychology) don’t seem to have a vehicle, properties or significant relevance. What is more memes require a massive commitment to the existence of entities that we cannot know share enough properties in common to allow us to say anything consistent about them, let alone give them any status in reality.

What in effect problems 1, 2, & 3 tell us is that the idea of memes (for those of you logically inclined NB the asymmetry now between ideas and memes)  is not only internally incoherent but inconsistent with what we do know and can say. They are not a fortiori given but, they are clearly are a posteriori not empirical. That is they are not given to any empirical proof (especially if we can say they are present in any psychological phenomena). In reality they can’t even be ostensibly defined.

But, it is from their precise lack of definition that they do derive some practical value, that is that until they are completely eliminated or a better argument framed, they provide excellent place holders for another theory; that is what makes them such good memes. That said it’s also worth noting that we have both an idea and a word for a chimera, but we’ve never found evidence for one other than their depiction in earlier cultures and that is why it is only their idea and the objects used to represent them that can truly be said to exist.

This allows us to come back to the classes we framed earlier: x & y (those that exist and don’t). We can say that that class y exists in our language and that the ideas belonging to y exist (as does the idea and the word meme), this much we can say without any complication. This fact also places the class of y into the class of all things x. But from this we also know that they don’t have objects to which they can refer. The class properly speaking therefore not only belongs to x, it is a sub-sub-class of x. Although the members of y themselves  don’t exist, y is in effect a class of ideas which do exist. A better way of expressing this would be to say that there are class of terms whose ideas exist but fail to refer to anything in the world.


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Set Them Free: Thought, Inspiration & Creativity.

in Analytical Philosophy, Art, Cities, Design, Humanism, Logic, Philosophy, Psychology, Science, The World, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | No comments

Thought

There is a story about a writer who used to take ether, he had magical thoughts and every time he ‘came round’ he felt like he’d seen the whole universe. He decided to write down his thoughts while he was high and coming round, he looked at his notes. He’d written total nonsense. I’ve sat in the pub with University professors and we’ve fully articulated a subject and its essence between sips of beer. I have heard of writers who have just felt ‘it’ on their cuff, if they don’t catch that illuminating insight as it passes it goes forever. Others feel they have to digest everything they can on a given subject before they can see it in front of them in all of its rich detail.

The Problem

There doesn’t feel like there is any creativity anymore, but there are so many creative people, creative pursuits and industries. You have to believe something to be truly creative, that something in essence is reality; believe in an ideas at least, and we don’t even have real ideas anymore, we are highly conscious of regurgitating iterations or previous insight. Creativity is not an industry. The ideas that we do have are tainted by a scepticism that is as ironically as well placed as it is harmful.

You see I see a world that is not linear. Time, experienced by the duration of humanity, is anything but linear. I can’t comment on objective time because I don’t know enough about it and have certainly not experienced it. However, the duration of time that is the body of all consciousness has crossed ideas and fertilized itself. Immediate problems of the past, ‘how long is the Nile’ for example, have produced theories that have worked. And we can multiply theories to infinity; our capacity for abstraction is enormous. So, exponentially ideas have turned into conceptions of the world, conceptions that have worked because in part they came from the world, but conceptions also that have had to be tested, weeded and that have evolved. That is not just our experience as a species; it’s the experience of individuals as well.

The product has been a certain reservation about truth, a certain specialisation of areas of abstraction and an in conjunction with the growth of modern urban life, the banal. Growth in the size of mankind, systems in place rather than people, they are modern problems. They’re not so modern that they weren’t known to large civilizations but, they are modern enough in the form they inhabit that they concern us immediately. They are the problems of the intimacy of humanity.

We have to abstract from ourselves in order that we survive, at least in our present form. Justice depends on it, order depends on it. However, that we also think, that we instantiate the realization of this way of living means that we are also divorced from ourselves and divorced from the issues that are immediate and real.

That is why people can talk so comfortably about how many milligrams of clonazapam they take. As a species we are driven by the same structures as our ancestors but, as species we live in an environment that has had an exponential effect on itself. It now has to sustain itself when once it was designed to sustain us. And we, marginalised by our own lives are left entertaining ourselves in the process. We’re pathological masturbators, never really having sex.

Inspiration

David Hume (1711–1776) saw that the best knowledge he had of anything was he; that self that he saw was, was a perception from moment to moment, and the self came from joining the dots. George Berkeley (1685 –1753) on the other hand saw that the only knowledge he had of things was through him, without him, things could not known to exist in perpetuity; so to maintain the integrity of existence as he saw it, God glued the dots together. John Locke (1632 –1704) on the other hand saw ideas, ideas were the substance of knowledge and it was through the systematic accumulation of ideas that we had knowledge of the world. Rene Descartes (1596 –1650) was simply concerned to show that we can know our own existence at all (and that existence ‘at all’ prove the existence of God). He saw that he saw his own thought; from his own thought he had a method to think about things. His thought proved his soul and his soul proved the existence of God.

From Descartes to Hume we move from proof of the world and our ability to know it to proof that we have no real knowledge at all. For what David Hume showed was that if it is the case that I am only perceiving from moment to moment, and in some sense that is true of all of humanity, however joined up, then in order for me to have knowledge I have to piece together my perceptions. However, between the pieces anything can happen that I am unaware of. There are two things therefore that are certain, and one less than the other; perceptions and inductions based on those perceptions. It is the perceptions that have the greatest certainty, after that anything is possible.

Creativity

And so we have the modern world. Rationalism, Logical Positivism, Science, Pragmatism, they lay claims to the groundwork of knowledge. Rationalism emphasises the role of the mind in piecing together, Positivism and Science in one form or another lay claim on systematic and inductive procedures in conjunction with logical truth. Pragmatism on the other hand offers us conception of best truth based on the whole body of what works at the time. But, implicit in all of the ideas is the divorce from reality, from the permanence of ideas and the need to impose a structure that at least works.

As much as reality may be unfolding to itself through time, truth must be permanent. If you believe this then you are somewhat like a Platonic realist. If you don’t then you are more of a nominalist. If you are unsure then you are modern. That is what makes up the irony of today; certainty about abstraction with uncertainty about truth. If I knew how to emphasize enough to what extent this paradox I would. It is a gross, and modern; that we are divorced from a reality we abstract is paradoxical; in order that we believe in the abstraction we must believe in the reality it is abstracted from.

Solutions

And that is what I mean by the modern problem, by banality and creativity. Creativity, ideas and inspiration all come from the world. Divorced from the world we are left with cogitations; computation on computation. Without a recursive variety of thoughts, an intimacy with each other and the problems we are all involved in together; we will necessarily lack true creative spirit, and that is true for all of humanity, not just parts of it.

Time as experienced by humans is not linear, if you look at the conceptions and the ideas, the problems and their solutions they, coevolve, they draw backwards and sideways through the whole of mankind. There has to be immediacy about the present, belief in something shared and there has to be a direct contact with reality in order that we don’t ossify. Shared between cities and places, entertained rather than concerned, fragmented rather than formed we cannot be creative in a truly organic way. At least the writer on ether, despite the nonsense he came up, for that moment felt inspired, he saw the world. Had the vision come without the ether he might have been inspired truly. Set your thoughts free, set them forth into the world.

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Nothing exists somewhere quite impossible

in Analytical Philosophy, Broken Postcard, Logic, Philosophy, Science, Thoughts by Alexander Crockett | No comments

The substance of nothing has been taking my fancy as of late. I’ve been reading some great stuff by Strawson, Russell and Quine. My greatest wonder has been concerned with Universals, Memes and the idea of ideas. Why ought objects and nouns exist in a Universe of Universals and not, say conjuctions as well. They are words after all, and words are a kind of abstraction. Why couldn’t there be a universal of the word ‘and’. And how would it figure in the world of universal ideas. Would ‘and’ stand between other ideas? Would it be closer to ‘or’ or ‘not’?

Better than conjuctions, why not prepositions in an eternal world of bliss, forever being above or below every other idea (except odly themselves – which raises quite an odd paradox). For surely, if the set of all things that have ‘below-ness’ were in the world of ideas, they couldn’t be below themselves, for then they would in some sense be above themselves as well, not really below then?

Maybe in Plato’s world  ’nothing’ could subsist as an eternal idea. But then that being the case, where is everything, at least in realtion to nothing? What strikes me is how similar the world of Universals, is to the spatially irrelevent connections of associations in our brains, there are after all no ‘objects’ in the brain as we see them in the world, just our own mental creations, ‘representing’ what we see or think.

Nothing, existing nowhere and yet somehow being somewhere is quite an appealing idea. The fantasist in me wants to grant the absurdity some credit, simply for being so wonderfully absurd.

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