Space capsules: Bach Sonata Makes Sound if Nobody Hears It?

Space capsules, and Eastern I-told-you-so: or, Does a Bach Sonata Make Sound if Nobody Hears It?

Douglas R Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach, says this of a recording of Bach's Sonata in F minor, inspected by aliens outside the solar system after a space capsule lands on their planet: "Thus immediately its shape, acting as a trigger, has given them some information: that it is an artifact, perhaps an information-bearing artifact. This idea--communicated, or triggered, by the record itself--now creates a new context in which the record will henceforth be perceived. The next steps in the decoding might take considerably longer--but that is very hard for us to assess. We can imagine that if such a record had arrived on Earth in Bach's time, no one would have known what to make of it, and very likely it would not have gotten deciphered. But that does not diminish our conviction that the information was in principle there [my emphasis] ; we just know that human knowledge in those times was not very sophisticated with respect to the possibilities of storage, transformation, and revelation of information."

And so it is with all effort at ordering the world. We don't have Archimedes' lever, no standing point outside the world, or outside consciousness, from which we can speak with certainty. We can only say "it is our conviction," which carries a sense of reasonableness, but that's all it is. As I say in the 6 January article, "The traditional view of the world as external obscures or denies that we cannot explore or explain cognition without the very faculties we want to explore or explain. As living systems, we exhibit cognition. We occur within this circularity of X explaining itself."

Was the information already there? We are carried back to assumptions, not validations. (See When Is A Head Like A Rock?, 6 November.) Since the early decades of the last century physicists have found with the double slit experiment and wave/particle duality that whenever they try to validate, the wave function collapses so that they get a confirmation of sorts but not of a world wherein information is already there. Instead, information complies with the shape of their need for it. We think this occurs only on the quantum level, but how can we be sure that it does not also occur in our larger world and in the universe as gravitational?

Hofstadter supposes that rather than landing on a distant planet, the space capsule and its recording are met by a meteorite which, instead of deciphering the information, punctures it. We might be tempted to call the meteorite stupid, but "perhaps we would thereby do the meteorite a disservice. Perhaps it has a ' higher intelligence' which we in our Earth chauvinism cannot perceive, and its interaction with the record was a manifestation of higher intelligence. Perhaps, then, the record has a ' higher meaning'--totally different from that which we attribute to it: perhaps its intelligence depends on the type of intelligence perceiving it. Perhaps."

This fits with our modern situation in that we understand our intelligence to be limited either by consciousness alone or by a larger system of which we are unaware. Electrons seem to exist in various dimensions (not that we have ever seen them) and yet in our lives we apprehend only four dimensions--length, width, depth, and time. In wave mechanics, we get the information we are looking for. We get velocity if we measure one way, and position, if we measure another way. (See Heisenberg in the 10 November article.) To resolve our puzzlement we propose a Many Worlds theory to explain superpositioning (see Schrödinger's Cat, 2 January). Or we accept the standard Copenhangen Interpretation (See Wheeler, Delayed Choice, & Time, 21 September 2006.).

So Consciousness may indeed be all, and I have no doubt it is. But I don't regard this situation as leaving Eastern thinkers with an I-told-you-so smugness. They have wrapped their teachings in doctrine, dogma, and ignorance, and have remained satisfied with ancient explanations for the enlightenment experience. They project an aura of beatitude over somebody who has experienced it. Its initial stage, the discovery of no-self, need not be wrapped in some mystical ballyhoo, however liberating the revelation. Some modern scientists and philosophers of consciousness accept it as a given and have quite good and well-reasoned explanations for it. (Daniel Dennett is one; for a scientist's explanation at this site, see Varela: Cartesian Anxiety, 6 January.)

On the other hand, were more scientists to seek ways to render into theory the teachings of the ancient East, they might find practical explanations for that which has so far puzzled them at the quantum level. For example, an understanding of the manufacture of time by thoughts, would yield a new way of regarding the double slit experience. However, as I have pointed out elsewhere, this requires experiential expertise, and not just rational analysis *. (See Varela: Cartesian Anxiety, 6 January, and Dawkins, Memes, Genes, & God, 31 December.)

As for Bach's sonata and Hofstadter's space capsule, we allow them as hurtling somewhere through the black infinitude of space, although we cannot know where they are. What are they, if not a thought? To end on an earlier note, the question does not diminish our conviction that the thought is in principle there.

* (This by Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature, is helpful: " All receipt of information is necessarily the receipt of news of difference, and all perception of difference is limited by threshold. Differences that are too slight or too slowly presented are not perceivable. They are not food for perception. It follows that what we, as scientists, can perceive is always limited by threshold. That is, what is subliminal will not be grist for our mill. Knowledge at any given moment will be a function of the thresholds of our available means of perception. " My point is that expertise in forms of consciousness alters the threshold of perception.)

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Napoleon at 35,0000 feet

Napoleon at 35,0000 feet

In a DC9 at 35,000 feet. Looking down on vast plains of clouds. Layer upon layer of them, nimbus, cumulus. Hurts the eyes, like snowblindedness. The cabin is very light inside. The clouds are real but we fly right through them, like a thought through the mind.

At the National Gallery I saw a larger-than-life portrait of Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David. The Emperor stood before me, the weight of his countenance heavy on history. Over there in that cloud I see his torso lying in state. The nose, the high forehead, the eyelids drawn.

David had captured the man, but which is the greater likeness? That cloud or his portrait?

Western movies, Gary Cooper, and Poland

Western movies, Gary Cooper, and Poland More

Here Lies The Heart: When Mercedes de Acosta Met Ramana Maharshi

Here Lies The Heart: When Mercedes de Acosta Met Ramana Maharshi

Mercedes de Acosta asked Ramana Maharshi, " tell me, whom shall I follow--what shall I follow? I have been trying to find this out for years by seeking in religions, in philosophies, in teachings."

Again there was silence. After a few minutes, which seemed to me a long time, he spoke. "You are not telling the truth. You are just using words--just talking. You know perfectly well whom to follow. Why do you need me to confirm it?"

"You mean I should follow my inner self?" I asked.

"I don't know anything about your inner self. You should follow the Self. There is nothing or no one else to follow."

I asked again, "What about religions, teachers, gurus?" More

Roger Penrose, Consciousness, and Wave Function Collapse

Roger Penrose, Consciousness, and Wave Function Collapse

Our everyday world of classical physics makes sense. If we drop a pebble in a pond it causes waves and sinks to the bottom. At the quantum level the pebble itself would not only initiate the action, but would become a wave. What happens at the borderland between classical physics and quantum physics? Why can we not connect the two in our understanding? On the one hand, we have a ball going where we toss it. On the other, we have balls "tossing" everywhere at once at the quantum level. Is something missing in the way we think?

Some physicists don't like such questions and prefer established investigation patterns, world paradigms which allow acceptable communication between community members. The eminent physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose is asking questions that are on the fringe. He says something is being overlooked in physics. We need a new way of understanding how the mind works. He lays out his ideas in Shadows of The Mind.

Artificial intelligence, or computing, is a current model for thinking about consciousness. Penrose regards it as inappropriate. Using Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, he argues that computational models of intelligence are inadequate to understand mind. Physics itself, says Penrose, is noncomputable. Even the most mathematically inclined people spend far less time than computers do in crunching numbers. Indeed, most of their insight come in leaps of intuition. With Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, Penrose argues that Alan Turing's Intelligence Machine* cannot do what people can. Computers will not know when to stop computing a noncomputable operation. The human mind will recognize when to stop. Penrose points out that a computer will continue its operations searching for an answer to Gödel's Theorem.

* ( Is this human/artificial intelligence test empirically irrelevant? That is, does it belong in the same category as Zeno's Paradox, which is empirically irrelevant? (See Brain in A Vat and Peter Lynds.) We know that despite what Zeno demonstrated, people in fact do reach end points. We also know that despite artificial intelligence theorists' arguments, machines do not demonstrate love, compassion, intuition, or longings for God, mystery, and deceased kin.)

Kurt Gödel aside, the big problem is wave function collapse, which occurs when a quantum event is measured. Penrose posits that the human mind itself is subject to wave function collapse and supposes that brain microtubules allow it. Microtubules are tiny enough to fit at the quantum level while neurons belong at the classical physics level. Within neurons, cytoskeletons form the structures that are the "glue" for cells. Inside them are microtubules, only 25 nanometers in diameter, which control synapse function.

In an interplay between the quantum cytoskeletal state and classical neurons, consciousness is manifested: anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff's findings support part of this description, but not Penrose's interpretation of it--that consciousness is manifested in the interplay.

When a human makes a quantum observation, wave function collapse occurs. Penrose assumes it results from human consciousness. Until the observation, the quanta are in a superposition of all possible states. (See Schrödinger's Cat, 2 January) Observation causes the quantum system to reduce (collapse) to a specific state.

Penrose argues that a corresponding collapse occurs in consciousness, and within certain microtubules. They self-collapse and each time they do, they correspond with a discrete consciousness event. Sequences of these events give rise to our sense of time,** and a stream of consciousness. Unlike computers, this collapse is non-algorithmic and is what separates us from machines. **(See Peter Lynds, Einstein, Time and "block" universe, 20 November--time as points rather than flow)

Perhaps most outrageous to the scientific community is that Penrose is led to believe in a Platonic scenario. With Plato, for every chair we sit on, its ideal counterpart exists metaphysically as a Platonic form.* For Penrose, conscious states exist in a world of their own, which our minds access. Unlike Plato, his world is physics rather than metaphysics. (Some of his opponents doubt this :-) *(See Julian Barbour here, here, and here.)

With the correspondence between wave function collapse in mind and the objects of mental observation, he seeks to rescue the world of macrophysics (in some instances like the common sense world we experience) and make it compatible with quantum physics. Einstein's gravitational world up to now has been undermined by Superposition Theory (See Schrödinger's Cat, 2 January). Penrose wants to resolve quantum paradoxes to make them "fit" with Einstein's view. He argues that it makes no sense to use the term "reality" for only objects we can see.

Penrose has enough stature that he can risk his reputation on this book, which many consider as wild-speculation. He follows a long line of risk takers, including Copernicus and Darwin. He has stirred up debate, which is good. This could also be science's future. In his last sentence, he says, "These are deep issues, and we are very far from explanations. I would argue that no clear answers will come forward unless the interrelating features of all these worlds [mental, physical, Platonic/mathematical] are seen to come into play. No one of these issues will be resolved in isolation from the others. I have referred to three worlds and the mysteries that relate one to another. No doubt there are not really three worlds but one, the true nature of which we do not even glimpse at present."

(Also see John Wheeler and delayed choice.)

Organic and Inorganic Matter: Zen Master Dogen and Physicists

Organic and Inorganic

In his Shobogenzo, Dogen (1200-1253), profoundly realized and brilliant, does not speculate about time and being but speaks about them out of his deep experience. In his section "Being-Time" he states that time occurs because man disposes himself and takes this disposition as the world. As Dogen puts it, "Thus the self setting itself out in array sees itself." Here is another example: "In your study of flowing, if you imagine the objective to be outside yourself and that you flow and move through hundreds and thousands of worlds, for hundreds, thousands, and myriads of eons, you have not devotedly studied the Buddha way."

He views the world not as inert-matter, not as inorganic, but as an organic whole. In a different sense, physics describes organic patterns. This means that particles, bits of matter, are organic energy. Non-scientists think of anything organic as living. This, of course, is not the intent of describing particles that way.

But what can be said about the organic as distinct from the inorganic?

Think about a rock and a human being. My apologies for the rather morbid example, but it serves my explanation. Drop a rock from a cliff, then drop a human being from it. As matter, organic or inorganic, they are both governed by the same law of falling bodies.

The big difference between the rock and the person is that the rock is lifted, held in the hands, then dropped. The person will put up a mighty struggle before going over the edge. One does not act while the other does. To what do we attribute this action?

At least two explanations occur. One is that the human looks ahead, which is to say he has time-consciousness. He can foresee death. He is time-bound while the rock is not.

But perhaps in certain instances some kinds of matter can also look ahead. When photons are fired through two slits, then through one, the particles exhibit a peculiar behavior, which can be interpreted as knowing in advance which slit will be open. (See Wheeler, delayed choice and time and Schrödinger's Cat.) Physicist Henry Stapp puts it this way: "The central mystery of quantum theory is ' How does information get around so quickly? ' " ("Are Superluminal Connections Necessary?," Nuovo Cimento, 40B, 1977)

Another explanation. Human reaction occurs much more quickly than does inert matter's. Iron reacts to oxygen by forming rust. Sodium reacts to chlorine by forming sodium chloride. Both people and inert matter are time-bound and both respond in different lengths of time. The rock will fall without struggle, markedly different than the person, but one cannot say of the human that he alone is time-bound--only that he can look ahead, which is not a property of the rock.

An additional explanation is that human beings have choice. The struggle occurred because the individual chose to struggle. Perhaps. Certainly humans respond through an intricate complex of factors. Today much empirical evidence indicates that the individual is programmed by genes, and by environment (maybe even by the Big Bang some fifteen billion years ago). The individual puts up a fight because the struggle to survive, as one example, is innate and can be found in all life forms, from plants, with tropisms to turn from pain, to animals, with immediate responses.

For this brief commentary I have lumped together applications of the term organic but, even were they treated separately, a central question would remain. Can we clearly delineate between the organic and the inorganic? Is it more instructive to think of everything as organic? Neils Bohr concluded that both organic and inorganic matter are constructs which cannot be used simultaneously in the same situation. Nonetheless both are required for a complete complementarity description of a quantum event.

To maintain a distinction between inorganic and organic, we must reduce things to less than they are. By themselves neither sodium nor chloride is novel, yet together they produce salt, an emergent property, which cannot be fully explained by its parts. The DNA in our bodies has never died, but instead emerged into new properties out of bacteria swimming in primordial seas. (See One Life.) In each case, where does the inorganic end and the organic begin?

Douglas Harding has pointed out that to think of this planet as a life-infested rock is as absurd as thinking of the human body as a cell-infested skeleton. How can the organic and inorganic be separated? (See his link under Consciousness in the sidebar.)

We are imprisoned by a way of seeing, to include distinguishing between organic and inorganic. In the exercise of intellect, we must distinguish, and should, as reason is a noble faculty, but we should also understand that we and every organism create our own environment. Our knowledge of the world is, in one sense, self-knowledge. We "know" the world into a translation of events as bodily processes via the nervous system and brain. Bees can tell the position of the sun by observing a patch of blue sky. Bats echolocate their flight path with a kind of sonar.

Dogen does not answer any question directly, but instead poses new ways of being aware. Of dichotomies such as that between organic and inorganic, he points out our tendency to category awareness: "The flowers depart when we hate to lose them; The weeds arrive while we hate to watch them grow." He promotes a different way of seeing with such questions as these: "Is there a real basis inside or outside your body now? Your body with hair and skin is just inherited from your father and mother. From beginning to end a drop of blood or lymph is empty. So none of these are the self. What about mind, thought, awareness, and knowledge? Or the breath going in and out, which ties a lifetime together: what is it after all? None of these are the self either." (Gakudo Yojinshu*, written in 1234. * Guidelines For Studying The Way.)

Sex Crimes

Sex Crimes

Sex Crimes: In the early 18th century Margaret "Mother" Clap became proprietress of a molly house, and she left her name as a lasting sign of those venereal times. In Samuel Stevens' testimony at her trial he stated he saw, "40 and 50 Men making Love to one another, as they call'd it. Sometimes they would sit in one anothers Laps, kissing in a leud Manner, and using their Hand[s] indecently. Then they would get up, Dance and make Curtsies, and mimick the Voices of Women." More

Mother cultures, Individualist and Collectivist: Why Bush Should Have Hired a Cultural Anthropologist Before Deciding to Invade Iraq

Mother cultures, Individualist and Collectivist: Why Bush Should Have Hired a Cultural Anthropologist Before Deciding to Invade Iraq

Americans say the squeaking wheel gets the grease. Japanese say the nail that stands out gets pounded down. A speaker in the West will be introduced as "distinguished" while an Asian speaker begins by saying he knows little about the topic.

Various research reveals differences between the two. Cross-cultural scientific studies indicate individualism as a deep feature of Western cultures as distinct from most others. This research perhaps will pioneer a new way of looking for so-called universal human values, and it should. Collectivist cultures comprise 70 percent of world population but virtually all data of social science and psychology derive from individualistic Western cultures. "Universals" of human behavior may apply only to advanced, materialistic societies, a minority of world population. Collectivism predominates in most cultures of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. The most strongly individualistic cultures include the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain, Canada, and the Netherlands. Other Northern European countries also rank high.

Values most important in the West are least important worldwide.

Novels in the West focus on a lone figure seeking private goals. Stories in the East celebrate duty to kin or other authorities, despite personal temptations. Huckleberry Finn leaves civilization behind. Krishna, in the Bhagavad-Gita, is persuaded to do his duty, and plunge into battle.

(What about justice in cultures? See John Rawls and Social Justice.)

The Metaphysics of Grammar

The Metaphysics of Grammar

I am these words you read. Or, if you want, these words are you. They radiate from this screen, involving you in their shapes, in their meanings, in the very mystery that they can communicate at all. We don't know one another and will never meet. Yet you read these words, each of them composed of letters, which shape representations. Representations of what?

Ah, there's the rub. Of what? What is it that is transpiring between us, you and me? Take this word: computer screen. There, that has clear representation. We register the screen surface, the edges, note the colors. That transpiration is clear. But what about other words? Where are their references? How is it possible that we make any sense at all together? What is it that we participate in to create this communication? It has been called consciousness, but that is another word.

We are wrapped in language. Our universe is linguistic. Poets, astronomers, philosophers, lovers, politicians, businessmen, even animal trainers, all use it. Most of it is based on airy conceptions, none of which does any more than help us think we know what we are talking about. Take grammar as an example.

Grammar has three basic tenses: we were, we are, and we will be. Our everyday language is founded upon metaphysics, the metaphysics of time. With the future conditional, we would, speculation about choice and determinism arises.

We accept grammar as common sense rules of language and it works well to help communicate events as we experience them: what did happen, is happening, and will happen. Still, its tenses are flimsily based.

In "The Unreality of Time" (1908), Scottish philosopher J.E. McTaggart concluded that we label the tenses of our lives as time, and that is all it is, a mere name.

He said that confusion arises because we think the coffee was hot but is no longer hot. Instead, the coffee involves properties of hotness, then coldness which, as past and present, are properties of time which do not relate to one another because gone is gone, and here is here, so to speak.

Here are two different claims McTaggart poses about time:

A. Once in the past, a property can no longer be present. Only two possibilities are involved, present or not present.

B. But every event also has three properties; the coffee was hot, is cold, and will be gone (evaporated).

Claims A and B are logically incompatible. (No longer present? Three properties?) McTaggart must conclude that this inconsistency renders the tensed theory of time as false. Hence, he said time is a name for what we can't explain.Time is the strangest of our concepts, one that we rarely question. In terms of strangeness, consider the next paragraph.

Einstein's Special Relativity Theory folded space and time into spacetime, a four-dimensional block universe. In Relativity the observer determines the present. For our purposes, think of a light cone, which is the history of a flash of light. Relativity implies that time is unique to an observer's light cone. Philosopher Hilary Putnam pointed out an implication of relativity in which observers Joe, Linda, and Jennifer might involve these scenarios: Joe witnesses event X, which is not the future for Linda (therefore unreal), but is in the past for Jennifer (therefore real). How can events be both real and unreal?

Consider that in the night sky your eyes might register a star's light emitted billions of years ago. The light is real and present for you but the star cannot "see" the same light, which is in its past. Thus, too, dead stars may still live as we see their light for the first time.

Of time, St Augustine said, When you don't ask I know; when you ask, I know not. Modern theorists would say, When you ask I can give you lengthy explanations, but still I don't know. A Thirteenth Century Zen master and a brilliant mind, Dogen Zenzi said that man disposes himself into the world and takes this disposition as time. He meant that our "neural itch" creates time. We are always impelled forward, always changing.

An understanding occurs when we realize that we are intelligent energy and that our changes are manifested as time. Some physicists would not touch this proposition. It does not readily yield itself to mathematical equations. It is one that each of us must explore for himself or herself.

Turn the light of consciousness inward and all thoughts, all sensation, all half-impressions disappear as it illuminates them. What remains is the light itself. This is not theoretical but is empirically verifiable. Turn the light on whatever arises, and only it, a clear presence, remains until eventually clarity notices that all arises and falls away.

At this point, words again become a mystery because they remain on the remote edge of any further discussion. I had begun by saying I am, or you are, these words, and then, headed for laybyrinthine convolutions, tried to clarify meanings. But what are we when we turn away from them? What are we without meanings?

You Don't Die: No Death in DNA Replication Process

From One Life:

Conclusion 1: There is no death in the DNA replication process. Argument: All of the material in the original strand of DNA becomes a part of the resulting two strands. There is no residue. There is no dead tissue. There was no death.

Conclusion 2: There is no new life created during the replication process. Argument: The information in the coding in each side of the original strand of DNA is identical (although one side is the reciprocal of the other, the information content is identical). One of the sides, containing its complete description of the organism, went into one of the resulting DNA strands, while the other side went into and became a part of the other. There was no new life created. The life in each new strand came directly from the original. The original merely grew into two.

Conclusion 3: All living DNA today has been alive since the first life. Argument: To replicate, the DNA must be alive. When it replicates, it passes its life physically and directly to its offspring. All living things today are alive by virtue of the DNA living in each cell in their bodies.

Conclusion 4: All of the cells in the human body contain the same life. Argument: When a human child is conceived, it consists of a single cell. In that cell are two sets of 23 chromosomes. One set came from the father, one from the mother. The set that came from the mother contains an X chromosome. The set that came from the father may also contain an X chromosome, in which case the new child will be a female. The set from the father may contain a Y chromosome in the place of the X, in which case the new child will be male.

The DNA will immediately start dividing. When the cell contains four sets of chromosomes, instead of its original two, the cell itself will divide. As the DNA grows, so grows the child. The cells multiply in the series 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc. until the total cell count approaches 10 billion at maturity. We have seen in conclusion 2 that as the DNA replicates, it carries the actual life forward.

Conclusion 5: There is only one life and it is shared by all living things. Argument: From conclusions 1 and 2, if there is neither death nor creation of life during DNA replication, then the life after the replication must be the same life as that which existed before. From conclusion 3, all life since the first life has been alive since then. All modern life is the same age. Life has been growing since the beginning.

Life, therefore, is collective and it began millions of years ago (the life in our bodies is that old). We are vessels that carry a small portion of that life for a short time. Death for the individual is not an end to life, since life continues to exist in all other forms of life, and will continue to do so as long as there is life.

Conclusion 6: A philosophy that satisfies the needs of the human must also include all other life. Argument: In its strictest sense, a human is alive only by virtue of the DNA in its body. It is the DNA which lives and which gives all of the forms of life their structure. In the structure of life, the human is only one element in a multitude. To determine the goals, aspirations and moral behavior for the human, therefore, the human's inclusion within and its interface with all other life must be considered. (The site no longer exists. Its URL in 2004 was www.onelife.com.)

Two Sages and a Taoist

Two Sages and a Taoist

Excerpts from a couple of What Is Enlightenment magazine interviews*, one with sage Ramesh Balsekar, the other with sage Swami Dayananda.

Ramesh Balsekar interview:
Q: [To Balsekar regarding his assertion that he and all of us are fated, not determined, and have no choices in what we do.**] On the other hand, though, if one believed that one does have control over [his action] as opposed to believing that one doesn't, one might not have done it in the first place!

RB: [He responds with various explanations of fatalism, but comes eventually to this clear statement:] It is not God's will that human beings think in those terms. It is not God's will that the human being be perfect. The difference between the sage and the ordinary person is that the sage accepts what is as God's will, but—and this is important—that does not prevent him from doing what he thinks should be done. And, what he thinks he should do is based on the programming. [Emphasis mine]

Q: But why would the sage "do whatever he thinks he should do" if, as you've already explained, he knows that it is not he who is thinking in the first place?

RB: You mean, how does the action happen? The answer is that the energy inside this body/mind organism produces the action according to the programming.

Swami Dayananda interview:
Q: One of the subjects I'm very interested in is the relationship between the nondual realization that you've been describing and action in the world of time and space. For example, in the empirical world, in empirical reality, even the realized soul who has no doubt about his true nature finds that he still must take a stand against, in opposition to the forces of delusion and negativity operating there.

SD: We need not impose a rule like should and must--he may take a stand.

Q: May take a stand?

SD: Yes. Because once he's free, who is to set rules for him? You see, if he is free enough to do, then he is just as free not to do--that is what I say. [End of interview excerpt]

Lao Tzu:
He who knows, does not speak. He who speaks, does not know.***
________________________________________
*2003 issue. Web site no longer extant.
**See Daniel Dennett and Choice Machines on the difference between fatalism and determinism.
*** 1) Invoked only for the determinism/fatalism issue. 2) Because he said, "The world is everything that is the case," this by Ludwig Wittgenstein, would not fit: "Of that which we cannot speak, we must be silent."

Daniel Dennett and Choice Machines

Daniel Dennett and Choice Machines

In his book Freedom Evolves, Daniel Dennett says we have more freedom if determinism is true. A determined world has less randomness, less unpredictability. It allows us to make informed judgements on reliably future events. If you are about to cross an open field in a deterministic lightning storm you can plan when lightning will next strike by measuring intervals and making your run to safety. If it strikes wholly randomly, you are at its mercy.

He says people confuse determinism with fatalism. They think JFK's assassination could not have been prevented, or that they can never avoid getting a disease.

Determinism holds every event as a result of earlier events. Cause begets effect; no event is purely accidental. "Choice" derives from antecedents.

Fatalism is determinism with you left out. It is the idea that something will happen no matter what you do. Determinism holds that an event depends on what you do, on what you know, or what you are caused to know. In short, determinism doesn't mean inevitability. (Even if the you is omitted, as in Advaita or Buddhism, fatalism is not necessarily implied. See My comments, appended to the 28 December Balsekar/Goswami/Libet article.)

Dennett distinguishes between situation-action machines and choice-machines. He calls humans choice-machines. Situation-action machines' rules say, "If in situation X, do A," "If in situation B, do Z." If the action is on the list, it is done. The rule says so. Choice machines see options, "If I did this, what would happen? Or, if I did that? If I did this other thing?" They don't have lists of rules to follow.

Where do we get our values to make these choices? They evolve over time. Of them, he says in an interview, "our responsibility for our values is not absolute and it’s not zero." You can’t choose your parents, your culture, nor even your kindergarten teacher. As you mature you can gradually assume responsibility for your own actions. We try to raise our children as moral agents, which means eventually letting go of them by saying, "I’ve done the best I can. . . . I’ve created this hopefully moral agent. . . ."

But some take responsibility; others don't. How do they differ? Dennett doesn't refer to irresponsibility, but to nonresponsibility. If you are simply unable to notice what you’re doing and its implications, you’re less responsible than somebody who can.

We learn morality much as we learn language. "We hear stories, or we watch how people get rewarded or punished, and what we see and hear shapes our characters over time." We are not born moral.

Memes. Ideas culturally evolve analogous to biological genes in evolution. Some ideas survive better than others, mutating, recombining into new ideas. Such units of cultural evolution have been called memes. Copyright and patent laws deal with some memes. Like genes, memes may be worth copying.

Genes "speak" the language of DNA and RNA. Memes are culturally more varied. Just as biology evolves, so does culture, and through memes. They don't transmit DNA information but cultural information. In fact, natural selection can favor memes over genes in that culturally well-equipped social groups can survive others. (See Richard Dawkins, Memes, genes, and God.)

The self is only a metaphor for our bodies and brains as they exist in time. Without social interactions, the self wouldn't exist. This contravenes Descartes' idea that the self does all the person's work. For Dennett, the self is functionality. It is not one thing, but little things, neurons wired together, so to say. This explains why when philosopher David Hume looked for the self he couldn't find it. It is not localized and is rather like the internet, existing as a whole but not traceable to a single node. Unlike Eastern thought, however, the self doesn't disappear. "It bottoms out with the neurons." (In practice, Eastern religions allow that ego never completely vanishes.)

To those who charge he has disenchanted the world, rendering it meaningless, he replies that he has disenchanted it but it retains meaning, which doesn't depend on magic.

It's reductionist Professor Arthur Deikman, University of California, San Francisco, would say. It reduces us to less than we are. Are we choice machines? Deikman has responded to points of view similar to Dennett's. "When mathematics and chemistry define your world, it has no meaning; the world dries up,. But, for you, as you walk the streets, engage others, live your ife, your world is charged with meaning, filled with purposes, conflicted or aligned at every level." In a context about the "realistic" perspectives of science, he asks do they "really fit what you feel, what you experience, moment by moment--or are they something you have been told, something you now think?" (From Personal Freedom, found in Spiritual/Mysticism, a web site no longer existing.