Irrational Man: An Analysis (Part 4, Chapter 11: The Place of the Furies)

In my last post in this series on William Barrett’s Irrational Man, I examined some of the work of existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, which concluded part 3 of Barrett’s book.  The final chapter, Ch. 11: The Place of the Furies, will be briefly examined here and this will conclude my eleven part post-series.  I’ve enjoyed this very much, but it’s time to move on to new areas of interest, so let’s begin.

1. The Crystal Palace Unmanned

“The fact is that a good dose of intellectualism-genuine intellectualism-would be a very helpful thing in American life.  But the essence of the existential protest is that rationalism can pervade a whole civilization, to the point where the individuals in that civilization do less and less thinking, and perhaps wind up doing none at all.  It can bring this about by dictating the fundamental ways and routines by which life itself moves.  Technology is one material incarnation of rationalism, since it derives from science; bureaucracy is another, since it aims at the rational control and ordering of social life; and the two-technology and bureaucracy-have come more and more to rule our lives.”

Regarding the importance and need for more intellectualism in our society, I think this can be better described as the need for more critical thinking skills and the need for people to be able to discern fact from fiction, to recognize their own cognitive biases, and to respect the adage that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  At the same time, in order to appreciate the existentialist’s concerns, we ought to recognize that there are aspects of human psychology including certain psychological needs that are inherently irrational, including with respect to how we structure our lives, how we express our emotions and creativity, how we maintain a balance in our psyche, etc.  But, since technology is not only a material incarnation of rationalism, but also an outlet for our creativity, there has to be a compromise here where we shouldn’t want to abandon technology, but simply to keep it in check such that it doesn’t impede our psychological health and our ability to live a fulfilling life.

“But it is not so much rationalism as abstractness that is the existentialists’ target; and the abstractness of life in this technological and bureaucratic age is now indeed something to reckon with.  The last gigantic step forward in the spread of technologism has been the development of mass art and mass media of communication: the machine no longer fabricates only material products; it also makes minds. (stereotypes, etc.).”

Sure enough, we’re living in a world where many of our occupations are but one of many layers of abstraction constituting our modern “machine of civilization”.  And the military industrial complex that has taken over the modern world has certainly gone beyond the mass production of physical stuff to be consumed by the populace, and now includes the mass production and viral dissemination of memes as well.  Ideas can spread like viruses and in our current globally interconnected world (which Barrett hadn’t yet seen to the same degree when writing this book), the spread of these ideas is much faster and influential on culture than ever before.  The degree of indoctrination, and the perpetuated cycles of co-dependence between citizens and the corporatocratic, sociopolitical forces ruling our lives from above, have resulted in making our way of life and our thinking much more collective and less personal than at any other time in human history.

“Kierkegaard condemned the abstractness of his time, calling it an Age of Reflection, but what he seems chiefly to have had in mind was the abstractness of the professorial intellectual, seeing not real life but the reflection of it in his own mind.”

Aside from the increasingly abstract nature of modern living then, there’s also the abstractness that pervades our thinking about life, which detracts from our ability to actually experience life.  Kierkegaard had a legitimate point here, by pointing out the fact that theory cannot be a complete substitute for practice; that thought cannot be a complete substitute for action.  We certainly don’t want the reverse either, since action without sufficient forethought leads to foolishness and bad consequences.

I think the main point here is that we don’t want to miss out on living life by thinking about it too much.  Since living a philosophically examined life is beneficial, it remains an open question exactly what balance is best for any particular individual to live the most fulfilling life.  In the mean time we ought to simply recognize that there is the potential for an imbalance, and to try our best to avoid it.

“To be rational is not the same as to be reasonable.  In my time I have heard the most hair-raising and crazy things from very rational men, advanced in a perfectly rational way; no insight or feelings had been used to check the reasoning at any point.”

If you ignore our biologically-grounded psychological traits, or ignore the fact that there’s a finite range of sociological conditions for achieving human psychological health and well-being, then you can’t develop any theory that’s supposed to apply to humans and expect it to be reasonable or tenable.  I would argue that ignoring this subjective part of ourselves when making theories that are supposed to guide our behavior in any way is irrational, at least within the greater context of aiming to have not only logically valid arguments but logically sound arguments as well.  But, if we’re going to exclude the necessity for logical soundness in our conception of rationality, then the point is well taken.  Rationality is a key asset in responsible decision making but it should be used in a way that relies on or seeks to rely on true premises, taking our psychology and sociology into account.

“The incident (making hydrogen bombs without questioning why) makes us suspect that, despite the increase in the rational ordering of life in modern times, men have not become the least bit more reasonable in the human sense of the word.  A perfect rationality might not even be incompatible with psychosis; it might, in fact, even lead to the latter.”

Again, I disagree with Barrett’s use or conception of rationality here, but semantics aside, his main point still stands.  I think that we’ve been primarily using our intelligence as a species to continue to amplify our own power and maximize our ability to manipulate the environment in any way we see fit.  But as our technological capacity advances, our cultural evolution is getting increasingly out of sync with our biological evolution, and we haven’t been anywhere close to sufficient in taking our psychological needs and limitations into account as we continue to engineer the world of tomorrow.

What we need is rationality that relies on true or at least probable premises, as this combination should actually lead a person to what is reasonable or likely to be reasonable.  I have no doubt that without making use of a virtue such as reasonableness, rationality can become dangerous and destructive, but this is the case with every tool we use whether it’s rationality or other capacities both mental and material; tools can always be harmful when misused.

“If, as the Existentialists hold, an authentic life is not handed to us on a platter but involves our own act of self-determination (self-finitization) within our time and place, then we have got to know and face up to that time, both in its (unique) threats and its promises.”

And our use of rationality on an individual level should be used to help reach this goal of self-finitization, so that we can balance the benefits of the collective with the freedom of each individual that makes up that collective.

“I for one am personally convinced that man will not take his next great step forward until he has drained to the lees the bitter cup of his own powerlessness.”

And when a certain kind of change is perceived as something to be avoided, the only way to go through with it is by perceiving the status quo as something that needs to be avoided even more so, so that a foray out of our comfort zone is perceived as an actual improvement to our way of life.  But as long as we see ourselves as already all powerful and masters over our domain, we won’t take any major leap in a new direction of self and collective improvement.  We need to come to terms with our current position in the modern world so that we can truly see what needs repair.  Whether or not we succumb to one or both of the two major existential threats facing our species, climate change and nuclear war, is contingent on whether or not we set our eyes on a new prize.

“Sartre recounts a conversation he had with an American while visiting in this country.  The American insisted that all international problems could be solved if men would just get together and be rational; Sartre disagreed and after a while discussion between them became impossible.  “I believe in the existence of evil,” says Sartre, “and he does not.” What the American has not yet become aware of is the shadow that surrounds all human Enlightenment.”

Once again, if rationality is accompanied with true premises that take our psychology into account, then international problems could be solved (or many of them at least), but Sartre is also right insofar as there are bad ideas that exist, and people that have cultivated their lives around them.  It’s not enough to have people thinking logically, nor is some kind of rational idealism up to the task of dealing with human emotion, cognitive biases, psychopathy, and other complications in human behavior that exist.

The crux of the matter is that some ideas hurt us and other ideas help us, with our perception of these effects being the main arbiter driving our conception of what is good and evil; but there’s also a disparity between what people think is good or bad for them and what is actually good or bad for them.  I think that one could very plausibly argue that if people really knew what was good or bad for them, then applying rationality (with true or plausible premises) would likely work to solve a number of issues plaguing the world at large.

“…echoing the Enlightenment’s optimistic assumption that, since man is a rational animal, the only obstacles to his fulfillment must be objective and social ones.”

And here’s an assumption that’s certainly difficult to ground since it’s based on false premises, namely that humans are inherently rational.  We are unique in the animal kingdom in the sense that we are the only animal (or one of only a few animals) that have the capacity for rational thought, foresight, and the complex level of organization made possible from its use.  I also think that the obstacles to fulfillment are objective since they can be described as facts pertaining to our psychology, sociology, and biology, even if our psychology (for example) is instantiated in a subjective way.  In other words, our subjectivity and conscious experiences are grounded on or describable in objective terms relating to how our particular brains function, how humans as a social species interact with one another, etc.  But, fulfillment can never be reached let alone maximized without taking our psychological traits and idiosyncrasies into account, for these are the ultimate constraints on what can make us happy, satisfied, fulfilled, and so on.

“Behind the problem of politics, in the present age, lies the problem of man, and this is what makes all thinking about contemporary problems so thorny and difficult…anyone who wishes to meddle in politics today had better come to some prior conclusions as to what man is and what, in the end, human life is all about…The speeches of our politicians show no recognition of this; and yet in the hands of these men, on both sides of the Atlantic, lies the catastrophic power of atomic energy.”

And as of 2018, we’ve seen the Doomsday clock now reach two minutes to midnight, having inched one minute closer to our own destruction since 2017.  The dominance hierarchy being led and reinforced by the corporatocratic plutocracy are locked into a narrow form of tunnel vision, hell bent on maintaining if not exacerbating the wealth and power disparities that plague our country and the world as a whole, despite the fact that this is not sustainable in the long run, nor best for the fulfillment of those promoting it.

We the people do share a common goal of trying to live a good, fulfilling life; to have our basic needs met, and to have no fewer rights than anybody else in society.  You’d hardly know that this common ground exists between us when looking at the state of our political sphere, likely as polarized now in the U.S. (if not more so) than even during the Civil War.  Clearly, we have a lot of work to do to reevaluate what our goals ought to be, what our priorities ought to be, and we need a realistic and informed view of what it means to be human before any of these goals can be realized.

“Existentialism is the counter-Enlightenment come at last to philosophic expression; and it demonstrates beyond anything else that the ideology of the Enlightenment is thin, abstract, and therefore dangerous.”

Yes, but the Enlightenment has also been one of the main driving forces leading us out of theocracy, out of scientific illiteracy, and towards an appreciation of reason and evidence (something the U.S. at least, is in short supply of these days), and thus it has been crucial in giving us the means for increasing our standard of living, and solving many of our problems.  While the technological advancements derived from the Enlightenment have also been a large contributor to many of our problems, the current existential threats we face including climate change and nuclear war are more likely to be solved by new technologies, not an abolition of technology nor an abolition of the Enlightenment-brand of thinking that led to technological progress.  We simply need to better inform our technological goals of the actual needs and constraints of human beings, our psychology, and so on.

“The finitude of man, as established by Heidegger, is perhaps the death blow to the ideology of the Enlightenment, for to recognize this finitude is to acknowledge that man will always exist in untruth as well as truth.  Utopians who still look forward to a future when all shadows will be dispersed and mankind will dwell in a resplendent Crystal Palace will find this recognition disheartening.  But on second thought, it may not be such a bad thing to free ourselves once and for all from the worship of the idol of progress; for utopianism-whether the brand of Marx or or Nietzsche-by locating the meaning of man in the future leaves human beings here and how, as well as all mankind up to this point, without their own meaning.  If man is to be given meaning, the Existentialists have shown us, it must be here and now; and to think this insight through is to recast the whole tradition of Western thought.”

And we ought to take our cue from Heidegger, at the very least, to admit that we are finite, our knowledge is limited, and it always will be.  We will not be able to solve every problem, and we would do ourselves and the world a lot better if we admitted our own limitations.  But to avoid being overly cynical and simply damning progress altogether, we need to look for new ways of solving our existential problems.  Part of the solution that I see for humanity moving forward is going to be a combination of advancements in a few different fields.

By making better use of genetic engineering, we’ll one day have the ability to change ourselves in remarkable ways in order to become better adapted to our current world.  We will be able to re-sync our biological evolution with our cultural evolution so we no longer feel uprooted, like a fish out of water.  Continuing research in neuroscience will allow us to learn more about how our brains function and how to optimize that functioning.  Finally, the strides we make in computing and artificial intelligence should allow us to vastly improve our simulation power and arm us with greater intelligence for solving all the problems that we face.

Overall, I don’t see progress as the enemy, but rather that we have an alignment problem between our current measures of progress, and what will actually lead to maximally fulfilling lives.

“The realization that all human truth must not only shine against an enveloping darkness, but that such truth is even shot through with its own darkness may be depressing, and not only to utopians…But it has the virtue of restoring to man his sense of the primal mystery surrounding all things, a sense of mystery from which the glittering world of his technology estranges him, but without which he is not truly human.”

And if we actually use technology to change who we are as human beings, by altering the course of natural selection and our ongoing evolution (which is bound to happen with or without our influence, for better or worse), then it’s difficult to say what the future really holds for us.  There are cultural and technological forces that are leading to transhumanism, and this may mean that one day “human beings” (or whatever name is chosen for the new species that replaces us) will be inherently rational, or whatever we’d like our future species to be.  We’ve stumbled upon the power to change our very nature, and so it’s far too naive, simplistic, unimaginative, and short-sighted to say that humans will “always” or “never” be one way or another.  Even if this were true, it wouldn’t negate the fact that one day modern humans will be replaced by a superseding species which has different qualities than what we have now.

2. The Furies

“…Existentialism, as we have seen, seeks to bring the whole man-the concrete individual in the whole context of his everyday life, and in his total mystery and questionableness-into philosophy.”

This is certainly an admirable goal to combat simplistic abstractions of what it means to be human.  We shouldn’t expect to be able to abstract a certain capacity of human beings (such as rationality), consider it in isolation (no consideration of context), formulate a theory around that capacity, and then expect to get a result that is applicable to human beings as they actually exist in the world.  Furthermore, all of the uncertainties and complexities in our human experiences, no matter how difficult they may be to define or describe, should be given their due consideration in any comprehensive philosophical system.

“In modern philosophy particularly (philosophy since Descartes), man has figured almost exclusively as an epistemological subject-as an intellect that registers sense-data, makes propositions, reasons, and seeks the certainty of intellectual knowledge, but not as the man underneath all this, who is born, suffers, and dies…But the whole man is not whole without such unpleasant things as death, anxiety, guilt, fear and trembling, and despair, even though journalists and the populace have shown what they think of these things by labeling any philosophy that looks at such aspects of human life as “gloomy” or “merely a mood of despair.”  We are still so rooted in the Enlightenment-or uprooted in it-that these unpleasant aspects of life are like Furies for us: hostile forces from which we would escape (the easiest way is to deny that the Furies exist).”

My take on all of this is simply that multiple descriptions of human existence are needed to account for all of our experiences, thoughts, values, and behavior.  And it is what we value given our particular subjectivity that needs to be primary in these descriptions, and primary with respect to how we choose to engineer the world we live in.  Who we are as a species is a complex mixture of good and bad, lightness and darkness, and stability and chaos; and we shouldn’t deny any of these attributes nor repress them simply because they make us uncomfortable.  Instead, we would do much better to face who we are head on, and then try to make our lives better while taking our limitations into account.

“We are the children of an enlightenment, one which we would like to preserve; but we can do so only by making a pact with the old goddesses.  The centuries-long evolution of human reason is one of man’s greatest triumphs, but it is still in process, still incomplete, still to be.  Contrary to the rationalist tradition, we now know that it is not his reason that makes man man, but rather that reason is a consequence of that which really makes him man.  For it is man’s existence as a self-transcending self that has forged and formed reason as one of its projects.”

This is well said, although I’d prefer to couch this in different terms: it is ultimately our capacity to imagine that makes us human and able to transcend our present selves by pointing toward a future self and a future world.  We do this in part by updating our models of the world, simulating new worlds, and trying to better understand the world we live in by engaging with it, re-shaping it, and finding ways of better predicting its causal structure.  Reason and rationality have been integral in updating our models of the world, but they’ve also been high-jacked to some degree by a kind of super-normal stimuli reinforced by technology and our living in a world that is entirely alien to our evolutionary niche, and which have largely dominated our lives in a way that overlooks our individualism, emotions, and feelings.

Abandoning reason and rationality is certainly not the answer to this existential problem; rather, we just need to ensure that they’re being applied in a way that aligns with our moral imperatives and that they’re ultimately grounded on our subjective human psychology.

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Predictive Processing: Unlocking the Mysteries of Mind & Body (Part VI)

This is the last post I’m going to write for this particular post-series on Predictive Processing (PP).  Here’s the links to parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.  I’ve already explored a bit on how a PP framework can account for folk psychological concepts like beliefs, desires, and emotions, how it accounts for action, language and ontology, knowledge, and also perception, imagination, and reasoning.  In this final post for this series, I’m going to explore consciousness itself and how some theories of consciousness fit very nicely within a PP framework.

Consciousness as Prediction (Predicting The Self)

Earlier in this post-series I explored how PP treats perception (whether online or an offline form like imagination) as simply predictions pertaining to incoming visual information with varying degrees of precision weighting assigned to the resulting prediction error.  In a sense then, consciousness just is prediction.  At the very least, it is a subset of the predictions, likely those that are higher up in the predictive hierarchy.  This is all going to depend on which aspect or level of consciousness we are trying to explain, and as philosophers and cognitive scientists well know, consciousness is difficult to pin down and define in any way.

By consciousness, we could mean any kind of awareness at all, or we could limit this term to only apply to a system that is aware of itself.  Either way we have to be careful here if we’re looking to distinguish between consciousness generally speaking (consciousness in any form, which may be unrecognizable to us) and the unique kind of consciousness that we as human beings experience.  If an ant is conscious, it doesn’t likely have any of the richness that we have in our experience nor is it likely to have self-awareness like we do (even though a dolphin, which has a large neocortex and prefrontal cortex, is far more likely to).  So we have to keep these different levels of consciousness in mind in order to properly assess their being explained by any cognitive framework.

Looking through a PP lens, we can see that what we come to know about the world and our own bodily states is a matter of predictive models pertaining to various inferred causal relations.  These inferred causal relations ultimately stem from bottom-up sensory input.  But when this information is abstracted at higher and higher levels, eventually one can (in principle) get to a point where those higher level models begin to predict the existence of a unified prediction engine.  In other words, a subset of the highest-level predictive models may eventually predict itself as a self.  We might describe this process as the emergence of some level of self-awareness, even if higher levels of self-awareness aren’t possible unless particular kinds of higher level models have been generated.

What kinds of predictions might be involved with this kind of emergence?  Well, we might expect that predictions pertaining to our own autobiographical history, which is largely composed of episodic memories of our past experience, would contribute to this process (e.g. “I remember when I went to that amusement park with my friend Mary, and we both vomited!”).  If we begin to infer what is common or continuous between those memories of past experiences (even if only 1 second in the past), we may discover that there is a form of psychological continuity or identity present.  And if this psychological continuity (this type of causal relation) is coincident with an incredibly stable set of predictions pertaining to (especially internal) bodily states, then an embodied subject or self can plausibly emerge from it.

This emergence of an embodied self is also likely fueled by predictions pertaining to other objects that we infer existing as subjects.  For instance, in order to develop a theory of mind about other people, that is, in order to predict how other people will behave, we can’t simply model their external behavior as we can for something like a rock falling down a hill.  This can work up to a point, but eventually it’s just not good enough as behaviors become more complex.  Animal behavior, most especially that of humans, is far more complex than that of inanimate objects and as such it is going to be far more effective to infer some internal hidden causes for that behavior.  Our predictions would work well if they involved some kind of internal intentionality and goal-directedness operating within any animate object, thereby transforming that object into a subject.  This should be no less true for how we model our own behavior.

If this object that we’ve now inferred to be a subject seems to behave in ways that we see ourselves as behaving (especially if it’s another human being), then we can begin to infer some kind of equivalence despite being separate subjects.  We can begin to infer that they too have beliefs, desires, and emotions, and thus that they have an internal perspective that we can’t directly access just as they aren’t able to access ours.  And we can also see ourselves from a different perspective based on how we see those other subjects from an external perspective.  Since I can’t easily see myself from an external perspective, when I look at others and infer that we are similar kinds of beings, then I can begin to see myself as having both an internal and external side.  I can begin to infer that others see me similar to the way that I see them, thus further adding to my concept of self and the boundaries that define that self.

Multiple meta-cognitive predictions can be inferred based on all of these interactions with others, and from the introspective interactions with our brain’s own models.  Once this happens, a cognitive agent like ourselves may begin to think about thinking and think about being a thinking being, and so on and so forth.  All of these cognitive moves would seem to provide varying degrees of self-hood or self-awareness.  And these can all be thought of as the brain’s best guesses that account for its own behavior.  Either way, it seems that the level of consciousness that is intrinsic to an agent’s experience is going to be dependent on what kinds of higher level models and meta-models are operating within the agent.

Consciousness as Integrated Information

One prominent theory of consciousness is the Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness, otherwise known as IIT.  This theory, initially formulated by Giulio Tononi back in 2004 and which has undergone development ever since, posits that consciousness is ultimately dependent on the degree of information integration that is inherent in the causal properties of some system.  Another way of saying this is that the causal system specified is unified such that every part of the system must be able to affect and be affected by the rest of the system.  If you were to physically isolate one part of a system from the rest of it (and if this part was the least significant to the rest of the system), then the resulting change in the cause-effect structure of the system would quantify the degree of integration.  A large change in the cause-effect structure based on this part’s isolation from the system (that is, by having introduced what is called a minimum partition to the system) would imply a high degree of information integration and vice versa.  And again, a high degree of integration implies a high degree of consciousness.

Notice how this information integration axiom in IIT posits that a cognitive system that is entirely feed-forward will not be conscious.  So if our brain processed incoming sensory information from the bottom up and there was no top-down generative model feeding downward through the system, then IIT would predict that our brain wouldn’t be able to produce consciousness.  PP on the other hand, posits a feedback system (as opposed to feed-forward) where the bottom-up sensory information that flows upward is met with a downward flow of top-down predictions trying to explain away that sensory information.  The brain’s predictions cause a change in the resulting prediction error, and this prediction error serves as feedback to modify the brain’s predictions.  Thus, a cognitive architecture like that suggested by PP is predicted to produce consciousness according to the most fundamental axiom of IIT.

Additionally, PP posits cross-modal sensory features and functionality where the brain integrates (especially lower level) predictions spanning various spatio-temporal scales from different sensory modalities, into a unified whole.  For example, if I am looking at and petting a black cat lying on my lap and hearing it purr, PP posits that my perceptual experience and contextual understanding of that experience are based on having integrated the visual, tactile, and auditory expectations that I’ve associated to constitute such an experience of a “black cat”.  It is going to be contingent on a conjunction of predictions that are occurring simultaneously in order to produce a unified experience rather than a barrage of millions or billions of separate causal relations (let alone those which stem from different sensory modalities) or having millions or billions of separate conscious experiences (which would seem to necessitate separate consciousnesses if they are happening at the same time).

Evolution of Consciousness

Since IIT identifies consciousness with integrated information, it can plausibly account for why it evolved in the first place.  The basic idea here is that a brain that is capable of integrating information is more likely to exploit and understand an environment that has a complex causal structure on multiple time scales than a brain that has informationally isolated modules.  This idea has been tested and confirmed to some degree by artificial life simulations (animats) where adaptation and integration are both simulated.  The organism in these simulations was a Braitenberg-like vehicle that had to move through a maze.  After 60,000 generations of simulated brains evolving through natural selection, it was found that there was a monotonic relationship between their ability to get through the maze and the amount of simulated information integration in their brains.

This increase in adaptation was the result of an effective increase in the number of concepts that the organism could make use of given the limited number of elements and connections possible in its cognitive architecture.  In other words, given a limited number of connections in a causal system (such as a group of neurons), you can pack more functions per element if the level of integration with respect to those connections is high, thus giving an evolutionary advantage to those with higher integration.  Therefore, when all else is equal in terms of neural economy and resources, higher integration gives an organism the ability to take advantage of more regularities in their environment.

From a PP perspective, this makes perfect sense because the complex causal structure of the environment is described as being modeled at many different levels of abstraction and at many different spatio-temporal scales.  All of these modeled causal relations are also described as having a hierarchical structure with models contained within models, and with many associations existing between various models.  These associations between models can be accounted for by a cognitive architecture that re-uses certain sets of neurons in multiple models, so the association is effectively instantiated by some literal degree of neuronal overlap.  And of course, these associations between multiply-leveled predictions allows the brain to exploit (and create!) as many regularities in the environment as possible.  In short, both PP and IIT make a lot of practical sense from an evolutionary perspective.

That’s All Folks!

And this concludes my post-series on the Predictive Processing (PP) framework and how I see it as being applicable to a far more broad account of mentality and brain function, than it is generally assumed to be.  If there’s any takeaways from this post-series, I hope you can at least appreciate the parsimony and explanatory scope of predictive processing and viewing the brain as a creative and highly capable prediction engine.

Predictive Processing: Unlocking the Mysteries of Mind & Body (Part V)

In the previous post, part 4 in this series on Predictive Processing (PP), I explored some aspects of reasoning and how different forms of reasoning can be built from a foundational bedrock of Bayesian inference (click here for parts 1, 2, or 3).  This has a lot to do with language, but I also claimed that it depends on how the brain is likely generating new models, which I think is likely to involve some kind of natural selection operating on neural networks.  The hierarchical structure of the generative models for these predictions as described within a PP framework, also seems to fit well with the hierarchical structure that we find in the brain’s neural networks.  In this post, I’m going to talk about the relation between memory, imagination, and unconscious and conscious forms of reasoning.

Memory, Imagination, and Reasoning

Memory is of course crucial to the PP framework whether for constructing real-time predictions of incoming sensory information (for perception) or for long-term predictions involving high-level, increasingly abstract generative models that allow us to accomplish complex future goals (like planning to go grocery shopping, or planning for retirement).  Either case requires the brain to have stored some kind of information pertaining to predicted causal relations.  Rather than memories being some kind of exact copy of past experiences (where they’d be stored like data on a computer), research has shown that memory functions more like a reconstruction of those past experiences which are modified by current knowledge and context, and produced by some of the same faculties used in imagination.

This accounts for any false or erroneous aspects of our memories, where the recalled memory can differ substantially from how the original event was experienced.  It also accounts for why our memories become increasingly altered as more time passes.  Over time, we learn new things, continuing to change many of our predictive models about the world, and thus have a more involved reconstructive process the older the memories are.  And the context we find ourselves in when trying to recall certain memories, further affect this reconstruction process, adapting our memories in some sense to better match what we find most salient and relevant in the present moment.

Conscious vs. Unconscious Processing & Intuitive Reasoning (Intuition)

Another attribute of memory is that it is primarily unconscious, where we seem to have this pool of information that is kept out of consciousness until parts of it are needed (during memory recall or or other conscious thought processes).  In fact, within the PP framework we can think of most of our generative models (predictions), especially those operating in the lower levels of the hierarchy, as being out of our conscious awareness as well.  However, since our memories are composed of (or reconstructed with) many higher level predictions, and since only a limited number of them can enter our conscious awareness at any moment, this implies that most of the higher-level predictions are also being maintained or processed unconsciously as well.

It’s worth noting however that when we were first forming these memories, a lot of the information was in our consciousness (the higher-level, more abstract predictions in particular).  Within PP, consciousness plays a special role since our attention modifies what is called the precision weight (or synaptic gain) on any prediction error that flows upward through the predictive hierarchy.  This means that the prediction errors produced from the incoming sensory information or at even higher levels of processing are able to have a greater impact on modifying and updating the predictive models.  This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, where we can ration our cognitive resources in a more adaptable way, by allowing things that catch our attention (which may be more important to our survival prospects) to have the greatest effect on how we understand the world around us and how we need to act at any given moment.

After repeatedly encountering certain predicted causal relations in a conscious fashion, the more likely those predictions can become automated or unconsciously processed.  And if this has happened with certain rules of inference that govern how we manipulate and process many of our predictive models, it seems reasonable to suspect that this would contribute to what we call our intuitive reasoning (or intuition).  After all, intuition seems to give people the sense of knowing something without knowing how it was acquired and without any present conscious process of reasoning.

This is similar to muscle memory or procedural memory (like learning how to ride a bike) which is consciously processed at first (thus involving many parts of the cerebral cortex), but after enough repetition it becomes a faster and more automated process that is accomplished more economically and efficiently by the basal ganglia and cerebellum, parts of the brain that are believed to handle a great deal of unconscious processing like that needed for procedural memory.  This would mean that the predictions associated with these kinds of causal relations begin to function out of our consciousness, even if the same predictive strategy is still in place.

As mentioned above, one difference between this unconscious intuition and other forms of reasoning that operate within the purview of consciousness is that our intuitions are less likely to be updated or changed based on new experiential evidence since our conscious attention isn’t involved in the updating process. This means that the precision weight of upward flowing prediction errors that encounter downward flowing predictions that are operating unconsciously will have little impact in updating those predictions.  Furthermore, the fact that the most automated predictions are often those that we’ve been using for most of our lives, means that they are also likely to have extremely high Bayesian priors, further isolating them from modification.

Some of these priors may become what are called hyperpriors or priors over priors (many of these believed to be established early in life) where there may be nothing that can overcome them, because they describe an extremely abstract feature of the world.  An example of a possible hyperprior could be one that demands that the brain settle on one generative model even when it’s comparable to several others under consideration.  One could call this a “tie breaker” hyperprior, where if the brain didn’t have this kind of predictive mechanism in place, it may never be able to settle on a model, causing it to see the world (or some aspect of it) as a superposition of equiprobable states rather than simply one determinate state.  We could see the potential problem in an organism’s survival prospects if it didn’t have this kind of hyperprior in place.  Whether or not a hyperprior like this is a form of innate specificity, or acquired in early learning is debatable.

An obvious trade-off with intuition (or any kind of innate biases) is that it provides us with fast, automated predictions that are robust and likely to be reliable much of the time, but at the expense of not being able to adequately handle more novel or complex situations, thereby leading to fallacious inferences.  Our cognitive biases are also likely related to this kind of unconscious reasoning whereby evolution has naturally selected cognitive strategies that work well for the kind of environment we evolved in (African savanna, jungle, etc.) even at the expense of our not being able to adapt as well culturally or in very artificial situations.

Imagination vs. Perception

One large benefit of storing so much perceptual information in our memories (predictive models with different spatio-temporal scales) is our ability to re-create it offline (so to speak).  This is where imagination comes in, where we are able to effectively simulate perceptions without requiring a stream of incoming sensory data that matches it.  Notice however that this is still a form of perception, because we can still see, hear, feel, taste and smell predicted causal relations that have been inferred from past sensory experiences.

The crucial difference, within a PP framework, is the role of precision weighting on the prediction error, just as we saw above in terms of trying to update intuitions.  If precision weighting is set or adjusted to be relatively low with respect to a particular set of predictive models, then prediction error will have little if any impact on the model.  During imagination, we effectively decouple the bottom-up prediction error from the top-down predictions associated with our sensory cortex (by reducing the precision weighting of the prediction error), thus allowing us to intentionally perceive things that aren’t actually in the external world.  We need not decouple the error from the predictions entirely, as we may want our imagination to somehow correlate with what we’re actually perceiving in the external world.  For example, maybe I want to watch a car driving down the street and simply imagine that it is a different color, while still seeing the rest of the scene as I normally would.  In general though, it is this decoupling “knob” that we can turn (precision weighting) that underlies our ability to produce and discriminate between normal perception and our imagination.

So what happens when we lose the ability to control our perception in a normal way (whether consciously or not)?  Well, this usually results in our having some kind of hallucination.  Since perception is often referred to as a form of controlled hallucination (within PP), we could better describe a pathological hallucination (such as that arising from certain psychedelic drugs or a condition like Schizophrenia) as a form of uncontrolled hallucination.  In some cases, even with a perfectly normal/healthy brain, when the prediction error simply can’t be minimized enough, or the brain is continuously switching between models, based on what we’re looking at, we experience perceptual illusions.

Whether it’s illusions, hallucinations, or any other kind of perceptual pathology (like not being able to recognize faces), PP offers a good explanation for why these kinds of experiences can happen to us.  It’s either because the models are poor (their causal structure or priors) or something isn’t being controlled properly, like the delicate balance between precision weighting and prediction error, any of which that could result from an imbalance in neurotransmitters or some kind of brain damage.

Imagination & Conscious Reasoning

While most people would tend to define imagination as that which pertains to visual imagery, I prefer to classify all conscious experiences that are not directly resulting from online perception as imagination.  In other words, any part of our conscious experience that isn’t stemming from an immediate inference of incoming sensory information is what I consider to be imagination.  This is because any kind of conscious thinking is going to involve an experience that could in theory be re-created by an artificial stream of incoming sensory information (along with our top-down generative models that put that information into a particular context of understanding).  As long as the incoming sensory information was a particular way (any way that we can imagine!), even if it could never be that way in the actual external world we live in, it seems to me that it should be able to reproduce any conscious process given the right top-down predictive model.  Another way of saying this is that imagination is simply another word to describe any kind of offline conscious mental simulation.

This also means that I’d classify any and all kinds of conscious reasoning processes as yet another form of imagination.  Just as is the case with more standard conceptions of imagination (within PP at least), we are simply taking particular predictive models, manipulating them in certain ways in order to simulate some result with this process decoupled (at least in part) from actual incoming sensory information.  We may for example, apply a rule of inference that we’ve picked up on and manipulate several predictive models of causal relations using that rule.  As mentioned in the previous post and in the post from part 2 of this series, language is also likely to play a special role here where we’ll likely be using it to help guide this conceptual manipulation process by organizing and further representing the causal relations in a linguistic form, and then determining the resulting inference (which will more than likely be in a linguistic form as well).  In doing so, we are able to take highly abstract properties of causal relations and apply rules to them to extract new information.

If I imagine a purple elephant trumpeting and flying in the air over my house, even though I’ve never experienced such a thing, it seems clear that I’m manipulating several different types of predicted causal relations at varying levels of abstraction and experiencing the result of that manipulation.  This involves inferred causal relations like those pertaining to visual aspects of elephants, the color purple, flying objects, motion in general, houses, the air, and inferred causal relations pertaining to auditory aspects like trumpeting sounds and so forth.

Specific instances of these kinds of experienced causal relations have led to my inferring them as an abstract probabilistically-defined property (e.g. elephantness, purpleness, flyingness, etc.) that can be reused and modified to some degree to produce an infinite number of possible recreated perceptual scenes.  These may not be physically possible perceptual scenes (since elephants don’t have wings to fly, for example) but regardless I’m able to add or subtract, mix and match, and ultimately manipulate properties in countless ways, only limited really by what is logically possible (so I can’t possibly imagine what a square circle would look like).

What if I’m performing a mathematical calculation, like “adding 9 + 9”, or some other similar problem?  This appears (upon first glance at least) to be very qualitatively different than simply imagining things that we tend to perceive in the world like elephants, books, music, and other things, even if they are imagined in some phantasmagorical way.  As crazy as those imagined things may be, they still contain things like shapes, colors, sounds, etc., and a mathematical calculation seems to lack this.  I think the key thing to realize here is the fundamental process of imagination as being able to add or subtract and manipulate abstract properties in any way that is logically possible (given our current set of predictive models).  This means that we can imagine properties or abstractions that lack all the richness of a typical visual/auditory perceptual scene.

In the case of a mathematical calculation, I would be manipulating previously acquired predicted causal relations that pertain to quantity and changes in quantity.  Once I was old enough to infer that separate objects existed in the world, then I could infer an abstraction of how many objects there were in some space at some particular time.  Eventually, I could abstract the property of how many objects without applying it to any particular object at all.  Using language to associate a linguistic symbol for each and every specific quantity would lay the groundwork for a system of “numbers” (where numbers are just quantities pertaining to no particular object at all).  Once this was done, then my brain could use the abstraction of quantity and manipulate it by following certain inferred rules of how quantities can change by adding to or subtracting from them.  After some practice and experience I would now be in a reasonable position to consciously think about “adding 9 + 9”, and either do it by following a manual iterative rule of addition that I’ve learned to do with real or imagined visual objects (like adding up some number of apples or dots/points in a row or grid), or I can simply use a memorized addition table and search/recall the sum I’m interested in (9 + 9 = 18).

Whether we consider imagining a purple elephant, mentally adding up numbers, thinking about what I’m going to say to my wife when I see her next, or trying to explicitly apply logical rules to some set of concepts, all of these forms of conscious thought or reasoning are all simply different sets of predictive models that I’m simply manipulating in mental simulations until I arrive at a perception that’s understood in the desired context and that has minimal prediction error.

Putting it all together

In summary, I think we can gain a lot of insight by looking at all the different aspects of brain function through a PP framework.  Imagination, perception, memory, intuition, and conscious reasoning fit together very well when viewed as different aspects of hierarchical predictive models that are manipulated and altered in ways that give us a much more firm grip on the world we live in and its inferred causal structure.  Not only that, but this kind of cognitive architecture also provides us with an enormous potential for creativity and intelligence.  In the next post in this series, I’m going to talk about consciousness, specifically theories of consciousness and how they may be viewed through a PP framework.

Predictive Processing: Unlocking the Mysteries of Mind & Body (Part IV)

In the previous post which was part 3 in this series (click here for parts 1 and 2) on Predictive Processing (PP), I discussed how the PP framework can be used to adequately account for traditional and scientific notions of knowledge, by treating knowledge as a subset of all the predicted causal relations currently at our brain’s disposal.  This subset of predictions that we tend to call knowledge has the special quality of especially high confidence levels (high Bayesian priors).  Within a scientific context, knowledge tends to have an even stricter definition (and even higher confidence levels) and so we end up with a smaller subset of predictions which have been further verified through comparing them with the inferred predictions of others and by testing them with external means of instrumentation and some agreed upon conventions for analysis.

However, no amount of testing or verification is going to give us direct access to any knowledge per se.  Rather, the creation or discovery of knowledge has to involve the application of some kind of reasoning to explain the causal inputs, and only after this reasoning process can the resulting predicted causal relations be validated to varying degrees by testing it (through raw sensory data, external instruments, etc.).  So getting an adequate account of reasoning within any theory or framework of overall brain function is going to be absolutely crucial and I think that the PP framework is well-suited for the job.  As has already been mentioned throughout this post-series, this framework fundamentally relies on a form of Bayesian inference (or some approximation) which is a type of reasoning.  It is this inferential strategy then, combined with a hierarchical neurological structure for it to work upon, that would allow our knowledge to be created in the first place.

Rules of Inference & Reasoning Based on Hierarchical-Bayesian Prediction Structure, Neuronal Selection, Associations, and Abstraction

While PP tends to focus on perception and action in particular, I’ve mentioned that I see the same general framework as being able to account for not only the folk psychological concepts of beliefs, desires, and emotions, but also that the hierarchical predictive structure it entails should plausibly be able to account for language and ontology and help explain the relationship between the two.  It seems reasonable to me that the associations between all of these hierarchically structured beliefs or predicted causal relations at varying levels of abstraction, can provide a foundation for our reasoning as well, whether intuitive or logical forms of reasoning.

To illustrate some of the importance of associations between beliefs, consider an example like the belief in object permanence (i.e. that objects persist or continue to exist even when I can no longer see them).  This belief of ours has an extremely high prior because our entire life experience has only served to support this prediction in a large number of ways.  This means that it’s become embedded or implicit in a number of other beliefs.  If I didn’t predict that object permanence was a feature of my reality, then an enormous number of everyday tasks would become difficult if not impossible to do because objects would be treated as if they are blinking into and out of existence.

We have a large number of beliefs that require object permanence (and which are thus associated with object permanence), and so it is a more fundamental lower-level prediction (though not as low level as sensory information entering the visual cortex) and we use this lower-level prediction to build upon into any number of higher-level predictions in the overall conceptual/predictive hierarchy.  When I put money in a bank, I expect to be able to spend it even if I can’t see it anymore (such as with a check or debit card).  This is only possible if my money continues to exist even when out of view (regardless of if the money is in a paper/coin or electronic form).  This is just one of many countless everyday tasks that depend on this belief.  So it’s no surprise that this belief (this set of predictions) would have an incredibly high Bayesian prior, and therefore I would treat it as a non-negotiable fact about reality.

On the other hand, when I was a newborn infant, I didn’t have this belief of object permanence (or at best, it was a very weak belief).  Most psychologists estimate that our belief in object permanence isn’t acquired until after several months of brain development and experience.  This would translate to our having a relatively low Bayesian prior for this belief early on in our lives, and only once a person begins to form predictions based on these kinds of recognized causal relations can we begin to increase that prior and perhaps eventually reach a point that results in a subjective experience of a high degree in certainty for this particular belief.  From that point on, we are likely to simply take that belief for granted, no longer questioning it.  The most important thing to note here is that the more associations made between beliefs, the higher their effective weighting (their priors), and thus the higher our confidence in those beliefs becomes.

Neural Implementation, Spontaneous or Random Neural Activity & Generative Model Selection

This all seems pretty reasonable if a neuronal implementation worked to strengthen Bayesian priors as a function of the neuronal/synaptic connectivity (among other factors), where neurons that fire together are more likely to wire together.  And connectivity strength will increase the more often this happens.  On the flip-side, the less often this happens or if it isn’t happening at all then the connectivity is likely to be weakened or non-existent.  So if a concept (or a belief composed of many conceptual relations) is represented by some cluster of interconnected neurons and their activity, then it’s applicability to other concepts increases its chances of not only firing but also increasing the strength of wiring with those other clusters of neurons, thus plausibly increasing the Bayesian priors for the overlapping concept or belief.

Another likely important factor in the Bayesian inferential process, in terms of the brain forming new generative models or predictive hypotheses to test, is the role of spontaneous or random neural activity and neural cluster generation.  This random neural activity could plausibly provide a means for some randomly generated predictions or random changes in the pool of predictive models that our brain is able to select from.  Similar to the role of random mutation in gene pools which allows for differential reproductive rates and relative fitness of offspring, some amount of randomness in neural activity and the generative models that result would allow for improved models to be naturally selected based on those which best minimize prediction error.  The ability to minimize prediction error could be seen as a direct measure of the fitness of the generative model, within this evolutionary landscape.

This idea is related to the late Gerald Edelman’s Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (NGS), also known as Neural Darwinism, which I briefly explored in a post I wrote long ago.  I’ve long believed that this kind of natural selection process is applicable to a number of different domains (aside from genetics), and I think any viable version of PP is going to depend on it to at least some degree.  This random neural activity (and the naturally selected products derived from them) could be thought of as contributing to a steady supply of new generative models to choose from and thus contributing to our overall human creativity as well whether for reasoning and problem solving strategies or simply for artistic expression.

Increasing Abstraction, Language, & New Rules of Inference

This kind of use it or lose it property of brain plasticity combined with dynamic associations between concepts or beliefs and their underlying predictive structure, would allow for the brain to accommodate learning by extracting statistical inferences (at increasing levels of abstraction) as they occur and modifying or eliminating those inferences by changing their hierarchical associative structure as prediction error is encountered.  While some form of Bayesian inference (or an approximation to it) underlies this process, once lower-level inferences about certain causal relations have been made, I believe that new rules of inference can be derived from this basic Bayesian foundation.

To see how this might work, consider how we acquire a skill like learning how to speak and write in some particular language.  The rules of grammar, the syntactic structure and so forth which underlie any particular language are learned through use.  We begin to associate words with certain conceptual structures (see part 2 of this post-series for more details on language and ontology) and then we build up the length and complexity of our linguistic expressions by adding concepts built on higher levels of abstraction.  To maximize the productivity and specificity of our expressions, we also learn more complex rules pertaining to the order in which we speak or write various combinations of words (which varies from language to language).

These grammatical rules can be thought of as just another higher-level abstraction, another higher-level causal relation that we predict will convey more specific information to whomever we are speaking to.  If it doesn’t seem to do so, then we either modify what we have mistakenly inferred to be those grammatical rules, or depending on the context, we may simply assume that the person we’re talking to hasn’t conformed to the language or grammar that my community seems to be using.

Just like with grammar (which provides a kind of logical structure to our language), we can begin to learn new rules of inference built on the same probabilistic predictive bedrock of Bayesian inference.  We can learn some of these rules explicitly by studying logic, induction, deduction, etc., and consciously applying those rules to infer some new piece of knowledge, or we can learn these kinds of rules implicitly based on successful predictions (pertaining to behaviors of varying complexity) that happen to result from stumbling upon this method of processing causal relations within various contexts.  As mentioned earlier, this would be accomplished in part by the natural selection of randomly-generated neural network changes that best reduce the incoming prediction error.

However, language and grammar are interesting examples of an acquired set of rules because they also happen to be the primary tool that we use to learn other rules (along with anything we learn through verbal or written instruction), including (as far as I can tell) various rules of inference.  The logical structure of language (though it need not have an exclusively logical structure), its ability to be used for a number of cognitive short-cuts, and it’s influence on our thought complexity and structure, means that we are likely dependent on it during our reasoning processes as well.

When we perform any kind of conscious reasoning process, we are effectively running various mental simulations where we can intentionally manipulate our various generative models to test new predictions (new models) at varying levels of abstraction, and thus we also manipulate the linguistic structure associated with those generative models as well.  Since I have a lot more to say on reasoning as it relates to PP, including more on intuitive reasoning in particular, I’m going to expand on this further in my next post in this series, part 5.  I’ll also be exploring imagination and memory including how they relate to the processes of reasoning.

Conscious Realism & The Interface Theory of Perception

A few months ago I was reading an interesting article in The Atlantic about Donald Hoffman’s Interface Theory of Perception.  As a person highly interested in consciousness studies, cognitive science, and the mind-body problem, I found the basic concepts of his theory quite fascinating.  What was most interesting to me was the counter-intuitive connection between evolution and perception that Hoffman has proposed.  Now it is certainly reasonable and intuitive to assume that evolutionary natural selection would favor perceptions that are closer to “the truth” or closer to the objective reality that exists independent of our minds, simply because of the idea that perceptions that are more accurate will be more likely to lead to survival than perceptions that are not accurate.  As an example, if I were to perceive lions as inert objects like trees, I would be more likely to be naturally selected against and eaten by a lion when compared to one who perceives lions as a mobile predator that could kill them.

While this is intuitive and reasonable to some degree, what Hoffman actually shows, using evolutionary game theory, is that with respect to organisms with comparable complexity, those with perceptions that are closer to reality are never going to be selected for nearly as much as those with perceptions that are tuned to fitness instead.  More so, truth in this case will be driven to extinction when it is up against perceptual models that are tuned to fitness.  That is to say, evolution will select for organisms that perceive the world in a way that is less accurate (in terms of the underlying reality) as long as the perception is tuned for survival benefits.  The bottom line is that given some specific level of complexity, it is more costly to process more information (costing more time and resources), and so if a “heuristic” method for perception can evolve instead, one that “hides” all the complex information underlying reality and instead provides us with a species-specific guide to adaptive behavior, that will always be the preferred choice.

To see this point more clearly, let’s consider an example.  Let’s imagine there’s an animal that regularly eats some kind of insect, such as a beetle, but it needs to eat a particular sized beetle or else it has a relatively high probability of eating the wrong kind of beetle (and we can assume that the “wrong” kind of beetle would be deadly to eat).  Now let’s imagine two possible types of evolved perception: it could have really accurate perceptions about the various sizes of beetles that it encounters so it can distinguish many different sizes from one another (and then choose the proper size range to eat), or it could evolve less accurate perceptions such that all beetles that are either too small or too large appear as indistinguishable from one another (maybe all the wrong-sized beetles whether too large or too small look like indistinguishable red-colored blobs) and perhaps all the beetles that are in the ideal size range for eating appear as green-colored blobs (that are again, indistinguishable from one another).  So the only discrimination in this latter case of perception is between red and green colored blobs.

Both types of perception would solve the problem of which beetles to eat or not eat, but the latter type (even if much less accurate) would bestow a fitness advantage over the former type, by allowing the animal to process much less information about the environment by not focusing on relatively useless information (like specific beetle size).  In this case, with beetle size as the only variable under consideration for survival, evolution would select for the organism that knows less total information about beetle size, as long as it knows what is most important about distinguishing the edible beetles from the poisonous beetles.  Now we can imagine that in some cases, the fitness function could align with the true structure of reality, but this is not what we ever expect to see generically in the world.  At best we may see some kind of overlap between the two but if there doesn’t have to be any then truth will go extinct.

Perception is Analogous to a Desktop Computer Interface

Hoffman analogizes this concept of a “perception interface” with the desktop interface of a personal computer.  When we see icons of folders on the desktop and drag one of those icons to the trash bin, we shouldn’t take that interface literally, because there isn’t literally a folder being moved to a literal trash bin but rather it is simply an interface that hides most if not all of what is really going on in the background — all those various diodes, resistors and transistors that are manipulated in order to modify stored information that is represented in binary code.

The desktop interface ultimately provides us with an easy and intuitive way of accomplishing these various information processing tasks because trying to do so in the most “truthful” way — by literally manually manipulating every diode, resistor, and transistor to accomplish the same task — would be far more cumbersome and less effective than using the interface.  Therefore the interface, by hiding this truth from us, allows us to “navigate” through that computational world with more fitness.  In this case, having more fitness simply means being able to accomplish information processing goals more easily, with less resources, etc.

Hoffman goes on to say that even though we shouldn’t take the desktop interface literally, obviously we should still take it seriously, because moving that folder to the trash bin can have direct implications on our lives, by potentially destroying months worth of valuable work on a manuscript that is contained in that folder.  Likewise we should take our perceptions seriously, even if we don’t take them literally.  We know that stepping in front of a moving train will likely end our conscious experience even if it is for causal reasons that we have no epistemic access to via our perception, given the species-specific “desktop interface” that evolution has endowed us with.

Relevance to the Mind-body Problem

The crucial point with this analogy is the fact that if our knowledge was confined to the desktop interface of the computer, we’d never be able to ascertain the underlying reality of the “computer”, because all that information that we don’t need to know about that underlying reality is hidden from us.  The same would apply to our perception, where it would be epistemically isolated from the underlying objective reality that exists.  I want to add to this point that even though it appears that we have found the underlying guts of our consciousness, i.e., the findings in neuroscience, it would be mistaken to think that this approach will conclusively answer the mind-body problem because the interface that we’ve used to discover our brains’ underlying neurobiology is still the “desktop” interface.

So while we may think we’ve found the underlying guts of “the computer”, this is far from certain, given the possibility of and support for this theory.  This may end up being the reason why many philosophers claim there is a “hard problem” of consciousness and one that can’t be solved.  It could be that we simply are stuck in the desktop interface and there’s no way to find out about the underlying reality that gives rise to that interface.  All we can do is maximize our knowledge of the interface itself and that would be our epistemic boundary.

Predictions of the Theory

Now if this was just a fancy idea put forward by Hoffman, that would be interesting in its own right, but the fact that it is supported by evolutionary game theory and genetic algorithm simulations shows that the theory is more than plausible.  Even better, the theory is actually a scientific theory (and not just a hypothesis), because it has made falsifiable predictions as well.  It predicts that “each species has its own interface (with some similarities between phylogenetically related species), almost surely no interface performs reconstructions (read the second link for more details on this), each interface is tailored to guide adaptive behavior in the relevant niche, much of the competition between and within species exploits strengths and limitations of interfaces, and such competition can lead to arms races between interfaces that critically influence their adaptive evolution.”  The theory predicts that interfaces are essential to understanding evolution and the competition between organisms, whereas the reconstruction theory makes such understanding impossible.  Thus, evidence of interfaces should be widespread throughout nature.

In his paper, he mentions the Jewel beetle as a case in point.  This beetle has a perceptual category, desirable females, which works well in its niche, and it uses it to choose larger females because they are the best mates.  According to the reconstructionist thesis, the male’s perception of desirable females should incorporate a statistical estimate of the true sizes of the most fertile females, but it doesn’t do this.  Instead, it has a category based on “bigger is better” and although this bestows a high fitness behavior for the male beetle in its evolutionary niche, if it comes into contact with a “stubbie” beer bottle, it falls into an infinite loop by being drawn to this supernormal stimuli since it is smooth, brown, and extremely large.  We can see that the “bigger is better” perceptual category relies on less information about the true nature of reality and instead chooses an “informational shortcut”.  The evidence of supernormal stimuli which have been found with many species further supports the theory and is evidence against the reconstructionist claim that perceptual categories estimate the statistical structure of the world.

More on Conscious Realism (Consciousness is all there is?)

This last link provided here shows the mathematical formalism of Hoffman’s conscious realist theory as proved by Chetan Prakash.  It contains a thorough explanation of the conscious realist theory (which goes above and beyond the interface theory of perception) and it also provides answers to common objections put forward by other scientists and philosophers on this theory.

Darwin’s Big Idea May Be The Biggest Yet

Back in 1859, Charles Darwin released his famous theory of evolution by natural selection whereby inherent variations in the individual members of some population of organisms under consideration would eventually lead to speciation events due to those variations producing a differential in survival and reproductive success and thus leading to the natural selection of some subset of organisms within that population.  As Darwin explained in his On The Origin of Species:

If during the long course of ages and under varying conditions of life, organic beings vary at all in the several parts of their organisation, and I think this cannot be disputed; if there be, owing to the high geometrical powers of increase of each species, at some age, season, or year, a severe struggle for life, and this certainly cannot be disputed; then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their conditions of existence, causing an infinite diversity in structure, constitution, and habits, to be advantageous to them, I think it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variation ever had occurred useful to each being’s own welfare, in the same way as so many variations have occurred useful to man. But if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterised will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offspring similarly characterised. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection.

While Darwin’s big idea completely transformed biology in terms of it providing (for the first time in history) an incredibly robust explanation for the origin of the diversity of life on this planet, his idea has since inspired other theories pertaining to perhaps the three largest mysteries that humans have ever explored: the origin of life itself (not just the diversity of life after it had begun, which was the intended scope of Darwin’s theory), the origin of the universe (most notably, why the universe is the way it is and not some other way), and also the origin of consciousness.

Origin of Life

In order to solve the first mystery (the origin of life itself), geologists, biologists, and biochemists are searching for plausible models of abiogenesis, whereby the general scheme of these models would involve chemical reactions (pertaining to geology) that would have begun to incorporate certain kinds of energetically favorable organic chemistries such that organic, self-replicating molecules eventually resulted.  Now, where Darwin’s idea of natural selection comes into play with life’s origin is in regard to the origin and evolution of these self-replicating molecules.  First of all, in order for any molecule at all to build up in concentration requires a set of conditions such that the reaction leading to the production of the molecule in question is more favorable than the reverse reaction where the product transforms back into the initial starting materials.  If merely one chemical reaction (out of a countless number of reactions occurring on the early earth) led to a self-replicating product, this would increasingly favor the production of that product, and thus self-replicating molecules themselves would be naturally selected for.  Once one of them was produced, there would have been a cascade effect of exponential growth, at least up to the limit set by the availability of the starting materials and energy sources present.

Now if we assume that at least some subset of these self-replicating molecules (if not all of them) had an imperfect fidelity in the copying process (which is highly likely) and/or underwent even a slight change after replication by reacting with other neighboring molecules (also likely), this would provide them with a means of mutation.  Mutations would inevitably lead to some molecules becoming more effective self-replicators than others, and then evolution through natural selection would take off, eventually leading to modern RNA/DNA.  So not only does Darwin’s big idea account for the evolution of diversity of life on this planet, but the basic underlying principle of natural selection would also account for the origin of self-replicating molecules in the first place, and subsequently the origin of RNA and DNA.

Origin of the Universe

Another grand idea that is gaining heavy traction in cosmology is that of inflationary cosmology, where this theory posits that the early universe underwent a period of rapid expansion, and due to quantum mechanical fluctuations in the microscopically sized inflationary region, seed universes would have resulted with each one having slightly different properties, one of which that would have expanded to be the universe that we live in.  Inflationary cosmology is currently heavily supported because it has led to a number of predictions, many of which that have already been confirmed by observation (it explains many large-scale features of our universe such as its homogeneity, isotropy, flatness, and other features).  What I find most interesting with inflationary theory is that it predicts the existence of a multiverse, whereby we are but one of an extremely large number of other universes (predicted to be on the order of 10^500, if not an infinite number), with each one having slightly different constants and so forth.

Once again, Darwin’s big idea, when applied to inflationary cosmology, would lead to the conclusion that our universe is the way it is because it was naturally selected to be that way.  The fact that its constants are within a very narrow range such that matter can even form, would make perfect sense, because even if an infinite number of universes exist with different constants, we would only expect to find ourselves in one that has the constants within the necessary range in order for matter, let alone life to exist.  So any universe that harbors matter, let alone life, would be naturally selected for against all the other universes that didn’t have the right properties to do so, including for example, universes that had too high or too low of a cosmological constant (such as those that would have instantly collapsed into a Big Crunch or expanded into a heat death far too quickly for any matter or life to have formed), or even universes that didn’t have the proper strong nuclear force to hold atomic nuclei together, or any other number of combinations that wouldn’t work.  So any universe that contains intelligent life capable of even asking the question of their origins, must necessarily have its properties within the required range (often referred to as the anthropic principle).

After our universe formed, the same principle would also apply to each galaxy and each solar system within those galaxies, whereby because variations exist in each galaxy and within each substituent solar system (differential properties analogous to different genes in a gene pool), then only those that have an acceptable range of conditions are capable of harboring life.  With over 10^22 stars in the observable universe (an unfathomably large number), and billions of years to evolve different conditions within each solar system surrounding those many stars, it isn’t surprising that eventually the temperature and other conditions would be acceptable for liquid water and organic chemistries to occur in many of those solar systems.  Even if there was only one life permitting planet per galaxy (on average), that would add up to over 100 billion life permitting planets in the observable universe alone (with many orders of magnitude more life permitting planets in the non-observable universe).  So given enough time, and given some mechanism of variation (in this case, differences in star composition and dynamics), natural selection in a sense can also account for the evolution of some solar systems that do in fact have life permitting conditions in a universe such as our own.

Origin of Consciousness

The last significant mystery I’d like to discuss involves the origin of consciousness.  While there are many current theories pertaining to different aspects of consciousness, and while there has been much research performed in the neurosciences, cognitive sciences, psychology, etc., pertaining to how the brain works and how it correlates to various aspects of the mind and consciousness, the brain sciences (though neuroscience in particular) are in their relative infancy and so there are still many questions that haven’t been answered yet.  One promising theory that has already been shown to account for many aspects of consciousness is Gerald Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection (NGS) otherwise known as neural Darwinism (ND), which is a large scale theory of brain function.  As one might expect from the name, the mechanism of natural selection is integral to this theory.  In ND, the basic idea consists of three parts as read on the Wiki:

1. Anatomical connectivity in the brain occurs via selective mechanochemical events that take place epigenetically during development.  This creates a diverse primary neurological repertoire by differential reproduction.
2. Once structural diversity is established anatomically, a second selective process occurs during postnatal behavioral experience through epigenetic modifications in the strength of synaptic connections between neuronal groups.  This creates a diverse secondary repertoire by differential amplification.
3. Re-entrant signaling between neuronal groups allows for spatiotemporal continuity in response to real-world interactions.  Edelman argues that thalamocortical and corticocortical re-entrant signaling are critical to generating and maintaining conscious states in mammals.

In a nutshell, the basic differentiated structure of the brain that forms in early development is accomplished through cellular proliferation, migration, distribution, and branching processes that involve selection processes operating on random differences in the adhesion molecules that these processes use to bind one neuronal cell to another.  These crude selection processes result in a rough initial configuration that is for the most part fixed.  However, because there are a diverse number of sets of different hierarchical arrangements of neurons in various neuronal groups, there are bound to be functionally equivalent groups of neurons that are not equivalent in structure, but are all capable of responding to the same types of sensory input.  Because some of these groups should in theory be better than others at responding to some particular type of sensory stimuli, this creates a form of neuronal/synaptic competition in the brain, whereby those groups of neurons that happen to have the best synaptic efficiency for the stimuli in question are naturally selected over the others.  This in turn leads to an increased probability that the same network will respond to similar or identical signals in the future.  Each time this occurs, synaptic strengths increase in the most efficient networks for each particular type of stimuli, and this would account for a relatively quick level of neural plasticity in the brain.

The last aspect of the theory involves what Edelman called re-entrant signaling whereby a sampling of the stimuli from functionally different groups of neurons occurring at the same time leads to a form of self-organizing intelligence.  This would provide a means for explaining how we experience spatiotemporal consistency in our experience of sensory stimuli.  Basically, we would have functionally different parts of the brain, such as various maps in the visual centers that pertain to color versus others that pertain to orientation or shape, that would effectively amalgamate the two (previously segregated) regions such that they can function in parallel and thus correlate with one another producing an amalgamation of the two types of neural maps.  Once this re-entrant signaling is accomplished between higher order or higher complexity maps in the brain, such as those pertaining to value-dependent memory storage centers, language centers, and perhaps back to various sensory cortical regions, this would create an even richer level of synchronization, possibly leading to consciousness (according to the theory).  In all of the aspects of the theory, the natural selection of differentiated neuronal structures, synaptic connections and strengths and eventually that of larger re-entrant connections would be responsible for creating the parallel and correlated processes in the brain believed to be required for consciousness.  There’s been an increasing amount of support for this theory, and more evidence continues to accumulate in support of it.  In any case, it is a brilliant idea and one with a lot of promise in potentially explaining one of the most fundamental aspects of our existence.

Darwin’s Big Idea May Be the Biggest Yet

In my opinion, Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection was perhaps the most profound theory ever discovered.  I’d even say that it beats Einstein’s theory of Relativity because of its massive explanatory scope and carryover to other disciplines, such as cosmology, neuroscience, and even the immune system (see Edelman’s Nobel work on the immune system, where he showed how the immune system works through natural selection as well, as opposed to some type of re-programming/learning).  Based on the basic idea of natural selection, we have been able to provide a number of robust explanations pertaining to many aspects of why the universe is likely to be the way it is, how life likely began, how it evolved afterward, and it may possibly be the answer to how life eventually evolved brains capable of being conscious.  It is truly one of the most fascinating principles I’ve ever learned about and I’m honestly awe struck by its beauty, simplicity, and explanatory power.

The Origin and Evolution of Life: Part II

Even though life appears to be favorable in terms of the second law of thermodynamics (as explained in part one of this post), there have still been very important questions left unanswered regarding the origin of life including what mechanisms or platforms it could have used to get itself going initially.  This can be summarized by a “which came first, the chicken or the egg” dilemma, where biologists have wondered whether metabolism came first or if instead it was self-replicating molecules like RNA that came first.

On the one hand, some have argued that since metabolism is dependent on proteins and enzymes and the cell membrane itself, that it would require either RNA or DNA to code for those proteins needed for metabolism, thus implying that RNA or DNA would have to originate before metabolism could begin.  On the other hand, even the generation and replication of RNA or DNA requires a catalytic substrate of some kind and this is usually accomplished with proteins along with metabolic driving forces to accomplish those polymerization reactions, and this would seem to imply that metabolism along with some enzymes would be needed to drive the polymerization of RNA or DNA.  So biologists we’re left with quite a conundrum.  This was partially resolved when several decades ago, it was realized that RNA has the ability to not only act as a means of storing genetic information just like DNA, but it also has the additional ability of catalyzing chemical reactions just like an enzyme protein can.  Thus, it is feasible that RNA could act as both an information storage molecule as well as an enzyme.  While this helps to solve the problem if RNA began to self-replicate itself and evolve over time, the problem still remains of how the first molecules of RNA formed, because it seems that some kind of non-RNA metabolic catalyst would be needed to drive this initial polymerization.  Which brings us back to needing some kind of catalytic metabolism to drive these initial reactions.

These RNA polymerization reactions may have spontaneously formed on their own (or evolved from earlier self-replicating molecules that predated RNA), but the current models of how the early pre-biotic earth would have been around four billion years ago seem to suggest that there would have been too many destructive chemical reactions that would have suppressed the accumulation of any RNA and would have likely suppressed other self-replicating molecules as well.  What seems to be needed then is some kind of a catalyst that could create them quickly enough such that they would be able to accumulate in spite of any destructive reactions present, and/or some kind of physical barrier (like a cell wall) that protects the RNA or other self-replicating polymers so that they don’t interact with those destructive processes.

One possible solution to this puzzle that has been developing over the last several years involves alkaline hydrothermal vents.  We actually didn’t know that these kinds of vents existed until the year 2000 when they were discovered on a National Science Foundation expedition in the mid-Atlantic.  Then a few years later they were studied more closely to see what kinds of chemistries were involved with these kinds of vents.  Unlike the more well-known “black smoker” vents (which were discovered in the 1970’s), these alkaline hydrothermal vents have several properties that would have been hospitable to the emergence of life back during the Hadeon eon (between 4.6 and 4 billion years ago).

The ocean water during the Hadeon eon would have been much more acidic due to the higher concentrations of carbon dioxide (thus forming carbonic acid), and this acidic ocean water would have mixed with the hydrogen-rich alkaline water found within the vents, and this would have formed a natural proton gradient within the naturally formed pores of these rocks.  Also, electron transfer would have likely occurred when the hydrogen and methane-rich vent fluid contacted the carbon dioxide-rich ocean water, thus generating an electrical gradient.  This is already very intriguing because all living cells ultimately derive their metabolic driving forces from proton gradients or more generally from the flow of some kind of positive charge carrier and/or electrons.  Since the rock found in these vents undergoes a process called surpentization, which spreads the rock apart into various small channels and pockets, many different kinds of pores form in the rocks, and some of them would have been very thin-walled membranes separating the acidic ocean water from the alkaline hydrogen.  This would have facilitated the required semi-permeable barrier that modern cells have which we expect the earliest proto-cells to also have, and it would have provided the necessary source of energy to power various chemical reactions.

Additionally, these vents would have also provided a source of minerals (namely green rust and molybdenum) which likely would have behaved as enzymes, catalyzing reactions as various chemicals came into contact with them.  The green rust could have allowed the use of the proton gradient to generate molecules that contained phosphate, which could have stored the energy produced from the gradient — similar to how all living systems that we know of store their energy in ATP (Adenosine Tri-Phosphate).  The molybdenum on the other hand would have assisted in electron transfer through those membranes.

So this theory provides a very plausible way for catalytic metabolism as well as proto-cellular membrane formation to have resulted from natural geological processes.  These proto-cells would then likely have begun concentrating simple organic molecules formed from the reaction of CO2 and H2 with all the enzyme-like minerals that were present.  These molecules could then react with one another to polymerize and form larger and more complex molecules including eventually nucleotides and amino acids.  One promising clue that supports this theory is the fact that every living system on earth is known to share a common metabolic system, known as the citric acid cycle or Kreb’s cycle, where it operates in the forward direction for aerobic organisms and in the reverse direction for anaerobic organisms.  Since this cycle consists of only 11 molecules, and since all biological components and molecules that we know of in any species have been made by some number or combination of these 11 fundamental building blocks, scientists are trying to test (among other things) whether or not they can mimic these alkaline hydrothermal vent conditions along with the acidic ocean water that would have been present in the Hadrean era and see if it will precipitate some or all of these molecules.  If they can, it will show that this theory is more than plausible to account for the origin of life.

Once these basic organic molecules were generated, eventually proteins would have been able to form, some of which that could have made their way to the membrane surface of the pores and acted as pumps to direct the natural proton gradient to do useful work.  Once those proteins evolved further, it would have been possible and advantageous for the membranes to become less permeable so that the gradient could be highly focused on the pump channels on the membrane of these proto-cells.  The membrane could have begun to change into one made from lipids produced from the metabolic reactions, and we already know that lipids readily form micelles or small closed spherical structures once they aggregate in aqueous conditions.  As this occurred, the proto-cells would no longer have been trapped in the porous rock, but would have eventually been able to slowly migrate away from the vents altogether, eventually forming the phospholipid bi-layer cell membranes that we see in modern cells.  Once this got started, self-replicating molecules and the rest of the evolution of the cell would have underwent natural selection as per the Darwinian evolution that most of us are familiar with.

As per the earlier discussion regarding life serving as entropy engines and energy dissipation channels, this self-replication would have been favored thermodynamically as well because replicating those entropy engines and the energy dissipation channels means that they will only become more effective at doing so.  Thus, we can tie this all together, where natural geological processes would have allowed for the required metabolism to form, thus powering organic molecular synthesis and polymerization, and all of these processes serving to increase entropy and maximize energy dissipation.  All that was needed for this to initiate was a planet that had common minerals, water, and CO2, and the natural geological processes can do the rest of the work.  These kinds of planets actually seem to be fairly common in our galaxy, with estimates ranging in the billions, thus potentially harboring life (or where it is just a matter of time before it initiates and evolves if it hasn’t already).  While there is still a lot of work to be done to confirm the validity of these models and to try to find ways of testing them vigorously, we are getting relatively close to solving the puzzle of how life originated, why it is the way it is, and how we can better search for it in other parts of the universe.

The Origin and Evolution of Life: Part I

In the past, various people have argued that life originating at all let alone evolving higher complexity over time was thermodynamically unfavorable due to the decrease in entropy involved with both circumstances, and thus it was believed to violate the second law of thermodynamics.  For those unfamiliar with the second law, it basically asserts that the amount of entropy (often referred to as disorder) in a closed system tends to increase over time, or to put it another way, the amount of energy available to do useful work in a closed system tends to decrease over time.  So it has been argued that since the origin of life and the evolution of life with greater complexity would entail decreases in entropy, these events are therefore either at best unfavorable (and therefore the result of highly improbable chance), or worse yet they are altogether impossible.

We’ve known for quite some time now that these thermodynamic arguments aren’t at all valid because earth isn’t a thermodynamically closed or isolated system due to the constant supply of energy we receive from the sun.  Because we get a constant supply of energy from the sun, and because the entropy increase from the sun far outweighs the decrease in entropy produced from all biological systems on earth, the net entropy of the entire system increases and thus fits right in line with the second law as we would expect.

However, even though the emergence and evolution of life on earth do not violate the second law and are thus physically possible, that still doesn’t show that they are probable processes.  What we need to know is how favorable the reactions are that are required for initiating and then sustaining these processes.  Several very important advancements have been made in abiogenesis over the last ten to fifteen years, with the collaboration of geologists and biochemists, and it appears that they are in fact not only possible but actually probable processes for a few reasons.

One reason is that the chemical reactions that living systems undergo produce a net entropy as well, despite the drop of entropy associated with every cell and/or it’s arrangement with respect to other cells.  This is because all living systems give off heat with every favorable chemical reaction that is constantly driving the metabolism and perpetuation of those living systems. This gain in entropy caused by heat loss more than compensates for the loss in entropy that results with the production and maintenance of all the biological components, whether lipids, sugars, nucleic acids or amino acids and more complex proteins.  Beyond this, as more complexity arises during the evolution of the cells and living systems, the entropy that those systems produce tends to increase even more and so living systems with a higher level of complexity appear to produce a greater net entropy (on average) than less complex living systems.  Furthermore, once photosynthetic organisms evolved in particular, any entropy (heat) that they give off in the form of radiation ends up being of lower energy (infrared) than the photons given off by the sun to power those reactions in the first place.  Thus, we can see that living systems effectively dissipate the incoming energy from the sun, and energy dissipation is energetically favorable.

Living systems seem to serve as a controllable channel of energy flow for that energy dissipation, just like lightning, the eye of a hurricane, or a tornado, where high energy states in the form of charge gradients or pressure or temperature gradients end up falling to a lower energy state by dissipating that energy through specific focused channels that spontaneously form (e.g. individual concentrated lightning bolts, the eye of a hurricane, vortices, etc.).  These channels for energy flow are favorable and form because they allow the energy to be dissipated faster since the channels are initiated by some direction of energy flow that is able to self-amplify into a path of decreasing resistance for that energy dissipation.  Life and the metabolic processes involved with it, seem to direct energy flow in ways that are very similar to these other naturally arising processes in non-living physical systems.  Interestingly enough, a relevant hypothesis has been proposed for why consciousness and eventually self-awareness would have evolved (beyond the traditional reasons proposed by natural selection).  If an organism can evolve the ability to predict where energy is going to flow, where an energy dissipation channel will form (or form more effective ones themselves), conscious organisms can then behave in ways that much more effectively dissipate energy even faster (and also by catalyzing more entropy production), thus showing why certain forms of biological complexity such as consciousness, memory, etc., would have also been favored from a thermodynamic perspective.

Thus, the origin of life as well as the evolution of biological complexity appears to be increasingly favored by the second law, thus showing a possible fundamental physical driving force behind the origin and evolution of life.  Basically, the origin and evolution of life appear to be effectively entropy engines and catalytic energy dissipation channels, and these engines and channels produce entropy at a greater rate than the planet otherwise would in the absence of that life, thus showing at least one possible driving force behind life, namely, the second law of thermodynamics.  So ironically, not only does the origin and evolution of life not violate the second law of thermodynamics, but it actually seems to be an inevitable (or at least favorable) result because of the second law.  Some of these concepts are still being developed in various theories and require further testing to better validate them but they are in fact supported by well-established physics and by consistent and sound mathematical models.

Perhaps the most poetic concept I’ve recognized with these findings is that life is effectively speeding up the heat death of the universe.  That is, the second law of thermodynamics suggests that the universe will eventually lose all of its useful energy when all the stars burn out and all matter eventually spreads out and decays into lower and lower energy photons, and thus the universe is destined to undergo a heat death.  Life, because it is producing entropy faster than the universe otherwise would in the absence of that life, is actually speeding up this inevitable death of the universe, which is quite fascinating when you think about it.  At the very least, it should give a new perspective to those that ask the question “what is the meaning or purpose of life?”  Even if we don’t think it is proper to think of life as having any kind of objective purpose in the universe, what life is in fact doing is accelerating the death of not only itself, but of the universe as a whole.  Personally, this further reinforces the idea that we should all ascribe our own meaning and purpose to our lives, because we should be enjoying the finite amount of time that we have, not only as individuals, but as a part of the entire collective life that exists in our universe.

To read about the newest and most promising discoveries that may explain how life got started in the first place, read part two here.

A Scientific Perspective of the Arts

Science and the arts have long been regarded as mutually exclusive domains, where many see artistic expression as something that science can’t explain or reduce in any way, or as something that just shouldn’t be explored by any kind of scientific inquiry.  To put it another way, many people have thought it impossible for there to ever be any kind of a “science of the arts”.  The way I see it, science isn’t something that can be excluded from any domain at all, because we apply science in a very general way every time we learn or conceive of new ideas, experiment with them, and observe the results to determine if we should modify our beliefs based on those experiences.  Whenever we pose a question about anything we experience, in the attempt to learn something new and gain a better understanding about those experiences, a scientific approach (based on reason and the senses) is the only demonstrably reliable way we’ve ever been able to arrive at any kind of meaningful answer.  The arts are no exception to this, and in fact, many questions that have been asked about the arts and aesthetics in general have not only been answered by an application of the aforementioned general scientific reasoning that we use every day, but have in fact also been answered within many specific well-established branches of science.

Technology & The Scientific Method

It seems to me that the sciences and the various rewards we’ve reaped from them have influenced art in a number of ways and even facilitated new variations of artistic expression.  For example, science has been applied to create the very technologies used in producing art.  The various technologies created through the application of science have been used to produce new sounds (and new combinations thereof), new colors (and new color gradients), new shapes, and various other novel visual effects.  We’ve even used them to produce new tastes and smells (in the culinary arts for example).  They’ve also been used to create entirely new media through which art is exemplified.  So in a large number of ways, any kind of art has been dependent on science in some way or another — even by simply applying the scientific method by hypothesizing a way to express art in some way, even through a new medium or with a new technique, where the artist experiments with that medium or technique to see if it is satisfactory, and then modifies their hypothesis if needed until the artist obtains the desired result for what they’re trying to express (whether through simple trial and error or what-have-you).

Evolutionary Factors Influencing Aesthetic Preferences

Then we have the questions that pertain to whether or not aesthetic preferences are solely subjective and individualistic, or if they are also objective in some ways.  Some of these questions have in fact been explored within the fields of evolutionary biology and psychology (and within the field of psychology in general), where it is well known that humans find certain types of perceptions pleasurable, such as environments and objects that are conducive to our survival.  For example, the majority of people enjoy visually perceiving an abundance of food, fresh water and plush vegetation, healthy social relationships (including sex) and various emotions, etc. There are also various sounds, smells, tastes, and even tactile sensations that we’ve evolved to find pleasurable — such as the sound of laughter, flowing water, or rain, the taste of salt, fat, and sugar, the smell of various foods and plants, or the tactile sensation of sexual stimulation (to give but a few examples).  So it’s not surprising that many forms of art can appeal to the majority of people by employing these kinds of objects and environments within them, especially in cases where these sources of pleasurable sensations are artificially amplified into supernormal stimuli, thus producing unprecedented levels of pleasure not previously attainable through the natural environment that our senses evolved within.

Additionally, there are certain emotions that we’ve evolved to express as well as understand simply because they increase our chances of survival within our evolutionary niche, and thus artistic representations of these types of universal human emotions will also likely play a substantial role in our aesthetic preferences.  Even the evolved traits of empathy and sympathy, which are quite advantageous to a social species such as our own (due to them reinforcing cooperation and reciprocal altruism among other benefits), are employed by those that are perceiving and appreciating these artistic expressions.

Another possible evolutionary component related to our appreciation of art has to do with sexual selection.  Often times, particular forms of art are appreciated, not only because of the emotions it evokes in the recipient or person perceiving it, but also when they include clever uses of metaphor, allegory, poetry, and other components that often demonstrate significant levels of intelligence or brilliance in the artist that produced them.  In terms of our evolutionary history, having these kinds of skills and displays of intelligence would be attractive to prospective sexual mates for a number of reasons including the fact that they demonstrate that the artist has a surplus of mental capacity to solve more complex problems that are far beyond those they’d typically encounter day to day.  So this can provide a rather unique way of demonstrating particular aspects of their fitness to survive as well as their abilities to protect any future offspring.

Artistic expression (as well as other displays of intelligence and surplus mental capacity) can be seen as analogous to the male peacock’s large and vibrant tail.  Even though this type of tail increases its chances of being caught by a predator, if it has survived to reproductive age and beyond, it shows the females that the male has a very high fitness despite these odds being stacked against him.  It also shows that the male is fit enough to possess a surplus of resources from its food intake that are continually donated to maintaining that tail.  Beyond this, a higher degree of symmetry in the tail (the visual patterns within each feather, the morphology of each feather, and the uniformity of the feathers as a whole set) demonstrates a lower number of mutations in its genome, thus providing better genes for any future offspring.  Because of all these factors, the female has evolved to find these male attributes attractive.

Similarly, for human beings (both male and female), an intelligent brain that is able to produce brilliant expressions of art (among other feats of intelligence), illustrates that the genome for that individual is likely to have less mutations in it.  This is especially apparent once we realize that the number of genes in our genome that pertain to our brain’s development and function accounts for an entire 50% of our total genome.  So if someone is intelligent, since their highly functional brain was dependent on having a small number of mutations in the portion of their genome pertaining to the brain, this shows that the rest of their genome is also far less likely to have harmful mutations in it (and thus less mutations passed on to future offspring).  Art aside, this kind of sexual selection is actually one prominent theory within evolutionary biology to explain why our brains grew as quickly as they did, and as large as they did.  Quite simply, if larger brains were something that both males and females found sexually attractive (through the feats of intelligence they could produce), they would be sexually selected for, thus leading to higher survival rates for offspring and a runaway effect of unprecedented brain growth.  These aesthetic preferences would then likely carry over to general displays of artistic ability, thus no longer pertaining exclusively to the search for prospective sexual mates, but also to simply enjoy the feats of intelligence themselves regardless of the source.  So there are many interesting facets that pertain to likely influential evolutionary factors relating to the origin of artistic expression (or at least the origin of our mental capacity to do so).

Neuroscience & The Arts

One final aspect I’d like to discuss that pertains to the arts within the context of the sciences, lies in the realm of neuroscience.  As neuroscientists are progressing in terms of mapping the brain’s structure and activity, they are becoming better able to determine what kinds of neurological conditions are correlated with various aspects of our conscious experience, our personality, and our behavior in general.  As for how this relates to the arts, we should also eventually be able to determine why we have have the aesthetic preferences we do, whether they are based on: various neurological predispositions, the emotional tagging of various past experiences via the amygdala (and how the memory of those emotionally tagged experiences change over time), possible differences in individual sensitivities to particular stimuli, etc.

Once we get to this level of understanding of the brain itself, when we combine it with the conjoined efforts of other scientific disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, evolutionary biology and psychology, etc., and if we collaborate with experts in the arts and humanities themselves, we should definitely be able to answer a plethora of questions relating to the origin of art, how and why it has evolved over time as it has (and how it will likely continue to evolve given that our brains as well as our culture are continually evolving in parallel), how and why the arts affect us as they do, etc.  With this kind of knowledge developing in these fields, we may even one day see artists producing art by utilizing this knowledge in very specific and articulate ways, in order to produce expressions that are the most aesthetically pleasing, the most intellectually stimulating, and the most emotionally powerful that we’ve ever experienced, by design.  I think that by putting all of this knowledge together, we would effectively have a true science of the arts.

The arts have no doubt been a fundamental facet of the human condition, and I’m excited to see us beginning to learn the answers to these truly remarkable questions.  I’m hoping that the arts and the sciences can better collaborate with one another, rather than remain relatively alienated from one another, so that we can maximize the knowledge we gain in order to answer these big questions more effectively.  We may begin to see some truly remarkable changes in how the arts are performed and produced based on this knowledge, and this should only enhance the pleasure and enjoyment that they already bring to us.

The Placebo Effect & The Future of Medicine

The placebo effect has been known for a long time, and doctors and medical practitioners have been exploiting its efficacy for a number of ailments.  Whether it is sugar pills, a fake surgery, or even prayer, the power of belief and the psychological effect on our physiology is real and undeniable.  While the placebo effect may have its roots (or been most thoroughly exploited) in various religions, through the power of belief, it has been used by non-religious medical practitioners for quite some time now, and it is starting to be investigated much more thoroughly in cognitive neuroscience, and psychology.  Scientists are beginning to design and implement new techniques that take advantage of this effect of the mind helping to heal the body.  It’s become a fascinating area of research with some potentially huge benefits that may prompt a significant paradigm shift in the future of medicine.

A major advantage of placebos (at least those in the form of a pill or injection) is that they don’t require the expensive R&D and drug-synthesis manufacturing processes that traditional treatments do, which means that there are likely billions of dollars that can be saved in the future, as well as the very important benefit of greater environmental sustainability, by consuming less energy and creating less hazardous waste in the pharmaceutical manufacturing process.  In the case of placebic-surgeries (which have been successfully performed), if surgeons simply have to make a far less complicated incision or two, along with some other protocol and ambiance considerations and requirements to produce the desired effect, then the costs of the far simpler operation are drastically reduced, as well as any chances of malpractice or other long-term complications resulting from the surgery.

One thing that will have to be considered as we start making greater use of these placebic treatments (specifically “drugs” and surgeries), is how the pricing and costs associated with placebo options will be decided for a patient.  Will placebos be as expensive as normal drugs (if they are comparably effective), or will the decreased cost of placebo manufacturing offset/reduce the cost of other drugs so that the average trip to the doctor will be cheaper for everyone?  As always, we will likely have to continue battling with pharmaceutical companies and or medical practitioners that take advantage of the cost savings just to increase their own profit margins while giving no trickle-down savings to the patient.  In the grander scheme of things, having healthier people at the same cost that we currently have is still better, but nevertheless, we can only hope that these discoveries will continue to reduce the costs for the patient as well.

As for other types of placebos, such as meditation, prayer, various rituals, etc., since these placebos do not require any physical mediums or materials per se (or at least not in many cases), they are relatively inexpensive, if not entirely free in some cases.  Modern medicine, however, is also making more use of similar placebo methods, that is, placebos that don’t require the intake of a chemical nor require any surgery.  In fact, one can certainly argue that modern medicine has been utilizing these “non-material” placebos for quite some time already.  For example, various psychological treatments have been used to help heal people with all kinds of ailments, many of which are psycho-somatically induced, and all of which can be exacerbated by hypochondria, pessimism, and other causes of stress — and the placebo effect is certainly a likely contributing factor in many of these successful treatments.  These kinds of treatments could very well be applied in many (if not all) other cases that aren’t currently considered “psychological” ailments.  Putting this all together, I think we are going to start seeing a shift in medicine where psychology, cognitive and neuroscience are going to combine with modern “material” medicine to form a more obvious hybrid.  This integration will be significant, as currently many medical practitioners or schools of thought within medicine have a large divide between what are believed to be either psychological or physical ailments.  In reality though, it appears that every ailment is actually a combination of the two that can be more effectively treated, when both aspects are treated rather than merely one or the other.  After all, the brain and the rest of the body operate as a single unit, and so they should be treated as such.

Another positive discovery relating to the placebo effect is the fact that even if people know that they are being given a placebo, it is still effective, as long as they believe that the placebo is effective.  A more common concern regarding the placebo effect is that it will lose all efficacy if patients are informed that they are receiving some kind of placebo, however it turns out that this isn’t the case at all.  To give an example, in a recent study at the Harvard Medical School, people with irritable bowel syndrome were given a placebo and they were informed that the pills were “made of an inert substance, like sugar pills, that have been shown in clinical studies to produce significant improvement in IBS symptoms through mind-body self-healing processes.”  Then the researchers found that despite being aware that they were taking placebos, the participants rated their symptoms as “moderately improved” on average.  This seems to imply that it is the belief in efficacy of a particular treatment that houses the placebic potential for healing, regardless of the substrate used to implement it, and this solves a lot of ethical complications regarding the desired disclosure that a patient is receiving a placebo.

If the belief in the efficacy of a placebo is the primary factor for the placebo’s effectiveness, this would imply that stronger belief will produce a stronger placebo effect.  So it appears that one of the most major challenges in producing ever-more effective treatments within this domain, is going to be finding ways to increase the belief in a treatment’s effectiveness (as well as other psychologically beneficial factors including being generally optimistic, reducing stress, and other factors that haven’t yet been discovered).  It may even be possible one day for this “belief” maximization (or the neurological effect that it causes) to be accomplished by physically altering the brain through various types of electrical stimulation or other neurologically-based treatments, so a person wouldn’t need to be convinced of anything at all.  On a related note, I’d like to mention that we also need to consider that the opposite effect, that is, the “nocebo” effect, also exists and presumably for the same psychological reasons.  That is, by a person believing that something will harm them or that they are getting sick, even if there is no actual pathogen or physical medium to produce the illness, they can actually get sick and make things much worse.  For a powerful example, there were chemo-therapy participants in a certain study, some of which only got a placebo, and they still developed nausea and had their hair fall out (alopecia) because of their expectations of the treatment.  So the placebo effect works both ways, and this means that medical treatment will also likely change with regard to finding new ways of countering the “bad news” of a diagnosis, etc., possibly through the same kinds of psychological and neurological techniques.

Nobody is sure exactly when the placebo effect was first discovered, but it was likely unknowingly discovered many thousands of years ago in various cultures with particular religious beliefs, including those that involved prayer and faith healing, shamans and other medicine men, etc.  Without seeing any material cause or knowing what was causing its efficacy (i.e. dynamics in the brain), people no doubt chalked up many positive effects to the supernatural, whether by the interventions of some god or a number of gods, magic, etc.  So this appears to be one of many examples of how natural selection favors not only certain genes, but also certain memes.  If people began to spread certain religious memes (ideas) that promoted self-healing by utilizing the power of belief, they would be more likely to survive, and this would be yet another factor in explaining why religions formed, why they’ve been as ubiquitous as they have, and why they’ve propagated for so long throughout human history.  To be sure, it could have been the case that humans long ago experienced the placebo effect (without knowing it) and this led to the development of certain religious rituals or beliefs (because the cause was mis-attributed or unknown), or it could be that certain religious beliefs that were formed for other reasons happened to produce a placebo effect (and/or to strengthen it by other psychological factors).  Either way, it was a very valuable discovery indeed.  Now that we are starting to better understand the real physiological/neurological/psychological factors that produce the placebo (and nocebo) effect, we can continue advancing a scientific world-view and continue to increase our well being in the process.