A Conversation about Human Beings, Mind and Consciousness: Andrew and Bob have a chat

The following "chat" came about as part of an on-going online discussion I have been having with an online friend called Bob. He, I think he wouldn't mind me saying, has long been interested in matters of mind and consciousness. Indeed, it was talking to him that nurtured and gave impetus to my many articles on Being recently on this blog. I thought it would be interesting if we could ask each other 5 questions on the subject of our own free choice and then publish them here complete with the answers that were given. I'm glad to say that Bob agreed. We start with us both giving our answer to the following question:

What is Consciousness for you?

BOB: I have to warn you that I come at the concept of consciousness from the Tibetan Buddhist perspective. After years and years of searching, questioning, surveying world religions, and reading the classical Western philosophers, it's the only approach that has made sense to me as a complete package and answered the most questions. I've been practicing in this tradition about 20 years now, bringing a lot of hardheaded skepticism to it at first. I'm still here and find no conflict between this approach and modern science.I'm going to use the term "mind" to consciousness.

With that caveat in place, i would tell you that mind is nonphysical, perhaps a type of energy or a state we don't understand yet, that can exist independently in awareness and perception. It has awareness of its own existence, perception of what is beyond itself, and discrete thoughts and reactions concerning perceptions. What it lacks is an interface to interact with the physical world, and this is where the brain comes in. The brain is a tool that mind uses to experience and carry out actions in the physical world. 

There are several reasons I believe this. The strictly material approach argues that all thought is the result of electrochemical activity in the brain. While I accept that brain activity we can observe shows processing activities, I can't accept that brain activity itself can produce all the content of thought. If I think of a blue monkey, what chemical or neural configuration.has to occur?  Does that configuration reoccur every time I think of a blue monkey? How many processes have to occur every day to account for all the thoughts? It doesn't make sense that a strictly physical system could keep up. I think it would burn our brains out if everything actually happened right there. And the big question, what determines the content of thought? I don't believe a physical brain, marvelous as it is, generates the blue monkey on its own strictly driven by chemicals and electricity. I believe the brain processes sense perception for mind and mind generates thought and controls the actions of the body. You have probably noticed that this is getting very close to your idea of a consciousness in a machine. You could say we are "meat machines" used by consciousness.

For the non-physical mind, I also turn to out of body experiences and past life recall, and I'm not getting "new age" here. I'm talking about strictly documented cases that cannot be explained any other way. There are enough of both to convince me and you can find them too if you look for them, but in the West we generally disregard them because they don't fit our scheme of things.

With out of body experiences, they seem to be a natural, controllable thing with some people, but for the most part they seem to occur at times of great physical trauma when the mind-body connection is weakened. With past life recall, there are also enough well documented cases, but almost universally they occur in young children. This is because the memories are fresh for a while, but as the mind struggles to learn control of the new body, process the new experiences, and strongly identify with a new identity, the old memories fade until we think what we are now is all there is.

It's similar to when I was learning Japanese. In the beginning, when I couldn't think of a Japanese word, my mind, desperately grabbing at language, would find and plug in the correct word from my old college German. That went on for a long time and I would make these horrible sentences that were half Japanese and half German. When Japanese really started to be deeply ingrained as a complete language system and I could comfortably communicate, the German started fading to the point that I couldn't remember any German. Even today, I can still speak Japanese, but if I try to think of German words, I can only pull up the Japanese equivalents. German has been totally erased.

Why would a mind, with perceptions far beyond our own, limit itself by inhabiting a physical body? Because of great attachment to the physical world! As we go through our lives we develop habits and attachments and desires that drive our mind to come back as soon as possible when we lose our current body. It's an act of desperation driven by attachment and there is no choice in the selection of a new body. That is driven by the long long ingrained habits and the seeds planted in the mind in the recent life.Over many lifetimes, you cut a groove in your mind that you tend to follow and will propel you to an existence that perpetuates the groove. So you have a new body and shiny new identity, but the old habits and tendencies remain.

Back to the strictly material view, how do you explain a Jeffery Dahmer from strictly observable behavior and electrochemical activity? What was the particular electrochemical reaction that caused him to kill and eat his victims, and does that same brain process occur in other instances of serial killers? Dahmer had a normal middle-class upbringing in a house, his parents were nice people, and they certainly never taught him this or encouraged it. He didn't have any traumatic incident that might have caused this. In my view, it's a deeply ingrained habit of killing from the past that was carried into this life.

Buddhism has no moral problem with homosexuality because it's obviously just a strong memory of being the other gender in a previous life.Don't you have situations, people, places, and things you find yourself inexplicably attracted to? You probably make up some kind of story to explain those based on your current life, but I doubt you can explain them all and some of our "logical" explanations turn out to be very destructive to us.

So, from the Buddhist view, our current type of existence is a trap for the mind. There is no problem with having a physical body, but we get so wrapped up in our created identity, desires, and attachments that we limit mind to basic gross functions and blind ourselves to the reality of how things exist.

ANDREW (ME): That's a very thorough answer Bob but, with the greatest of respect, I want to offer a different one. For me it has to come down to a physical/biological phenomenon. Obviously, no one can actually say for sure what the answer to this question is and so we can only give our best guess or our intuitions. For me, I note that human beings have consciousness and that human beings have this, as far as we can tell, when alive. Now, before you butt in, let me say that, of course, since we don't exactly know what consciousness is we can't even do something so rudimentary as test for it. So let me admit again that all guesses here are somewhat stabs in the dark. And it could be true that consciousness exists before birth and after death. A humble inquiry has to admit possibilities that it cannot rule out definitively. But since I have no way to know if consciousness does exist before or after a human life I make a more modest claim. I think that consciousness is a phenomenon related to the physical existence of human beings who are alive. I would extend this, to a lesser degree, to some other life forms as well. But I don't think consciousness exists "in the universe" or as a general thing or in some mystical sense. I do not, and cannot, envisage minds or "mind" floating about out there. I wouldn't know how to sensibly talk about such an option. It would provide me with no answers but merely exponentially raise the questions. So "minds" are related to people in terms of identity and origin. I further think that consciousness is imagined by human beings as a place where they think and feel and have awareness of themselves and their surroundings. I imagine that it is some function of the brain and arose, in ways as yet unfathomed, as part of our biological evolution because those of our forbears with a growing consciousness of themselves and their surroundings were more successful in their surroundings and, thus, better equipped to survive.

I also would like to note that I find your reasons against a physical explanation unconvincing. Is it really so hard to imagine a computer that can process at the speed and rate of a mind? Are you saying it would always be impossible? That it could never be created? I don't understand how you could. What's more, if taking up a physical explanation for the mind, we do not have to subscribe all thought to "electrochemical" processes at all. We know, for example, that people can be influenced and affected by their environment. Why do we need to make it any more complicated than saying that the brain is the means and the mind is the result? The properties and abilities of electrochemical processes, unknown as they are, need not be determinative in these things. They can just be a means to an end. And, of course, not knowing how it works doesn't mean that it doesn't work. It means that we don't know how. Fundamentally, my point is that you need to start from what you have and not leap straight to something more extraordinary. And I take your "independently existing" minds that need "an interface to interact with the physical world" to be extraordinary. On my understanding, minds can't exist without people.

I would also add that I am open to the possibility that we don't have anything specific that is a consciousness (in any corporeal or incorporeal form) but that, instead, it is merely a construct for a part of our lived experience. This is to say I can see it as possible you could never point to a consciousness and say "that is a consciousness". Human beings already rely on many useful fictions and consciousness could just be another one.

BOB: So, in that case, what for you determines the content of our thoughts?

ANDREW: I want to answer this by saying that I don't think it is enough to answer by saying that I can think of no current way how this might work and so I will posit some entity called "mind" which, like a ghost in the machine, can do it all for me. I also don't think that the immediate and pre-reflective answer "I do" is correct. At least, not without some unpacking. Brains and minds function in many ways unconsciously like many physical functions of the body. You don't have to consciously think to make your heart beat or to breathe. Neither do you need to consciously decide to think. Indeed, I find the Cartesian "I think" to be problematic. Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that "Thought becomes"? I think that human beings are very integrated beings and, even with a few minutes of self-reflection, this seems obviously true. Imagine, for example, how many nerve endings you must have in your body. Your mind is aware of those all at once. That is amazing. It's something you likely could not deliberately achieve and so our evolution has built these things into the way we exist as a functioning organism.

Our human lives are intimately involved with many networks. The neural net of our brains, the thought patterns of our minds, social connections and cultural entanglements are just some of these. I know of no way yet in which we can comprehensively account for how these networks all function together but I do think that they all exert their influence upon us as thinking subjects. Sometimes this can be as the result of a goal or purpose of ours as we are beings who can have intentions and attitudes. And, as you will know, we hold beliefs. Each of us comes with a genetic make-up, a past and a context too. So thoughts can be directed or organized. But it is never as simple as this. Minds have evolved a more sophisticated and efficient form of operation, one that does not always, or even usually, require our express attention.

So you might now be saying I haven't answered the question. But in a way I have. The answer is "I do". But not in any deliberative way and not simply so.

Now, if I may, let me ask you something else. Given your views on "mind", do you think that a robot with artificial intelligence would be a person?

BOB: I have to say yes, and I certainly support the idea of rights of personhood for artificially created autonomous aware beings that generate their own unique thoughts and are not just following programmed instructions. Following the previous paradigm, an artificial person would have form, awareness of it's own existence, perception of the outer world, and discrete thoughts and reactions based on perception.

ANDREW: So what is the essence of humanity in your opinion?

BOB: Ooooh, the humanity!  I guess you would have to define human as having a human body and human sense perception coupled with a mind capable of higher awareness. I think the blindness to the higher functions of the mind and entrapment in desire, attachment, and ego would help define human. In other words, I guess the average, confused guy on the street would be a good example of the human condition. Now, what do we do with people of extremely limited or nonexistent brain activity? We still identify someone in a vegetative state as a human, but that's mostly identification with the form. On the other extreme, people who have worked deeply with their own minds and accessed higher functions of mind that we can't use or deny even exist seem to be "magic" but they are still grounded in a human existence though they view it very differently.

And now it's my turn again. So, Andrew, can we be aware of our own consciousness in your opinion?

ANDREW: This feels to me like a trick question and I am immediately put on edge! When I think about this I would have to answer no. But that is because I don't perceive of "my consciousness" as something separate from me. I think it was formed along with me, develops and matures as I do and will end with me. I am not aware of my brain either but I imagine that if I had brain surgery and was shown video of it after the fact I would then have an insight into what lies inside my cranium!

I also want to put the idea that there is a "me" in question. Who am I? What would this "I" refer to when I talk about myself? My physical being? The various thoughts I have about myself that are always changing and being changed? A person other people would describe me as? I am not even sure that I can give a decent answer to who I am before I get to any questions of my consciousness.

But, of course, there is another answer to this question and I want to hold this answer in tension with my first ones. I do recognize that there can be different or altered states of consciousness. When I was younger I would have said that I had experienced some of these myself in a religious context. Now I would give what happened other explanations. I do also recognize that some others, such as yourself, offer testimony for differing states of consciousness and I have no way, or desire, to cast them aside out of hand. I'm open to trying to understand better what might be going on there. Of course, it's also worth mentioning that every one of us alters our state of consciousness daily when we sleep. Then we have no sense even of being alive or, in dream sleep, our state of consciousness is somewhat ambiguous. So, I'd want to take up an "interested listener" position regarding this question.

PS There is a third way. This is that when you say you are aware of your own consciousness you only think you are. How would you ever be able to demonstrate the truth of it?

BOB: How, then,  is consciousness related to the ego?

ANDREW: Man, your questions are hard! In my first answer I raised the the prospect that maybe "consciousness" was just a useful fiction. For all we know there is this little spot somewhere inside the brain that is the "consciousness spot" and it generates this field of consciousness much like a holodeck in Star Trek creates a whole world with electronic smoke and mirrors. In that way we have named what is created without knowing how it happens. I want to say that with the ego I would be a little easier to persuade with this kind of answer. What is the ego after all? Our sense of self preservation? A sense of self theorized most notably by Freud? We are talking in conceptual terms and I am reluctant to make things extant that I have little evidence for or of. So I'm saying that maybe we are naming phenomena here that are a function of something else or maybe even just utilizing ideas or conceptions thought helpful in a discussion of the self.

Be that as it may, I think what I am looking for here in answer to your question is a definition or two, a working hypothesis. Let me tentatively say that I regard consciousness as an awareness of things, of being, of self and ego as a more personal self-protection mechanism, maybe even a prison for the self. (I am speaking theoretically not physically, phenomenologically or idealistically.) Consciousness, if you want to call it mind, could be conceived of as our apparatus for existing in a world of perception. I'm thinking out loud here. Now, I wouldn't hold hard and fast to those definitions to the death. Further thought and discussion will inevitably change and refine them. But that is my starting point. To then go on to how those are related I would have to admit that I have no in depth knowledge. I would intuitively think that once more we are back to the integrated nature of our particularly human form of life. The issue is that you might want to say that consciousness is the general name for mind activity. But then ego must be a subset of that or a specific function perhaps since we would normally think of it as some mental faculty. However, when we talk about these things we are talking about ideas which we can distinguish. I think the functional reality of human beings makes it much more difficult to do that. So it's largely a "don't know" here and a reminder that I have a holistic conception of the human being.

My turn. There are people like futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil who believe that we will technologically engineer our way out of death, either by the use of nanotechnology which can heal us from within or by capturing and removing our consciousness to better, robotized bodies. Do these possibilities interest you at all?

BOB: From my view, it's totally unnecessary. We're already transferring our consciousness over and over, and trading a body for a machine is just a different kind of trap. Better to learn the true nature of mind and access the subtle functions so we remove the blindness, gain some control. If mind is non-physical, to really learn to use that would mean we could be physical when we wanted but still be able to access the vast non-physical perception and knowledge of the mind.

ANDREW:  So imagine you are in a room with some animals (a cat, a dog, a monkey), a human being and a robot that has been given artificial intelligence so good it convinces you that it acts of its own free will. What makes the human being special? Anything?

BOB: What makes you think we're special? Mind is mind. Any being that has a mind has the potential to become a fully developed mind, and in fact has been more developed and less developed in the past. The dog and monkey and the robot and me are all just different current examples of the same kind of mind in a particular limited physical state.

ANDREW: So now you get the last question Bob.

BOB: What is your first memory?

ANDREW: A suitably interesting question. I was walking between my parents at a zoo. We approached the ostrich enclosure and an ostrich came close to the fence. I was frightened and made a commotion, trying to pull my parents away from the fence. I cannot precisely locate this event on a timeline of my life but can have been at most 4 as my father left us after that.

I would like to record my thanks to Bob for being prepared to answer my questions and for taking part. He is @iceman_bob on Twitter if you would like to follow him up on what he says or listen to his excellent freeform music made with guitar and synths.

Through The Looking Glass

"It is life, not truth, that really counts."

It has long since occurred to me to examine myself, to look at myself in the mirror and ask "Who am I?" This was not from any highfalutin' desire to be pretentiously philosophical but, instead, simply because it seemed to me to be the right thing to do with one's life if one wanted to take any responsibility for it. (Readers will recall that it was Socrates who said that "The unexamined life is not worth living.") I can report that looking at yourself in the mirror, perhaps even doing that and pretending, just for the few moments it is possible, that you are looking at someone else, gives you a different, more critical perspective on who you are.  Look in the mirror. Imagine you are looking at someone else. What do you see? Now I don't know if anyone else reading this takes a similar view on life. It may be that you never think twice about who you are, about what you want in, or from, life and you are content to just barrel through unthinkingly. But I'm not. And this is my blog and so now I get to write here a bit about what it has taught me. 

Now I could write this blog very philosophically but I'm going to try and resist the temptation. Philosophical terms and lots of "-isms" aren't always the most straightforward of things and in my blog I want to be as straightforward as possible. That's why I tend to make lots of the things I write about quite personal. Not only is this a reflection of my intentions but of my judgments as well. People relate to people better than ideas, I think, and I am a person first.

Now what you will be getting, I hope, if you have read any of my blog before, listened to my music or interacted with me on Twitter is that I am very interested in life and Being. Indeed, the year 2015 has been all about this for me. I can scarcely remember why now but I know that since January I've been writing music in that vein and thinking and writing about it a lot. Recently, I've begun a new phase of reading and thinking, initially started by a friend engaging me in conversation about robots and AI. This led me to start thinking about consciousness and, inevitably, this got personalized and I began applying the thought to myself. Now, this weekend, I had one of those moments I sometimes have where I try and summarize my thinking to this point. This blog is going to be that summary.

I have wandered down a number of paths in life. Many were dead ends as, inevitably, they will be. But some of these paths tend to lead somewhere and it's then that we become more enthusiastic in the journey and become eager to see where they go. One such path for me was the path of studying existentialist (sorry for the big word!) philosophy. I came upon this kind of thinking initially because of academic commitments but, as they fell away and became irrelevant, consumed by the relentless march of life, I found that the interest in this thought stayed. I was fortunate that when I was a PhD student I was blessed with a certain amount of money and at that time I bought a number of texts which stay with me to this day. Many lay unread for years but were just sitting on the shelf waiting to have their contents devoured. I have also found that the internet is an ever-burgeoning source of all the reading material you could ever want to find. Hit *author's name* and PDF and up will pop lots of choices on the Google page.

But to the meat. I am a thinker. I've always been a thinker. Partly, I was made that way. Partly, I was shaped that way. We are the products of genetics and environment, each of us living out unique lives that only we could possibly live for no one else completely matches us in those two crucial components. We may say that the journey defines us. But so does the start point. I have consistently found myself asking, even from boyhood, what is all this about? At younger ages these questions had a more religious focus but there was a point at which I got past that and found talk of gods unbelievable. I continue to find such talk unbelievable and beside the point to this day. My focus increasingly came to be this life that I had, the life we all have as individuals. It's the only life I believe any of us have and the only place we will find either answers or meaning.

And that is why I came upon existentialist (sorry!) thinking. OK, here is the explanation bit. Existentialism, in a sense, doesn't really exist. There is no school of existentialists and only really one man, Jean-Paul Sartre, was happy to call himself an existentialist in the first place. Existentialism, is really a body of thought grouped together as a category by other people that centres on thought about life, being and the self. So what is it about? Here is my quick version:

1. Responsibility. An existential frame of mind regards each of us as responsible for our own lives. There is no god or nature or ways of the world or rationality or other body to whom we can shift this responsibility. All higher powers, however conceived, are regarded as cold and indifferent to us.

2. Freedom. Existentialists are concerned with issues of freedom, be that free will or political freedom. This is also from the perspective of inspecting freedoms and asking how they come to be. For example, it's an existentialist question to ask how free "free will" actually is. (Answer: not very!) So existentialists think a lot about how much life "chooses" us and how we can choose it in return. In addition, there is a general acknowledgement that all freedoms come from situated contexts. Freedom is never an absolute and always a specific kind.

3. Individuality. Existentialist thought recognizes that each of us are individuals with our own consciousness, thoughts and feelings. In this sense, we know ourselves intimately in ways others don't. In this sense, we live and die alone. We can, therefore, neither live for others nor have someone else live our life on our behalf.

4. Rationality vs Passions. Existentialists are concerned with the human being and how we are in ourselves. Thus, they grapple with our make-up as rational yet also feeling beings. They question the prominence given to rationality over "the passions" as if the latter were base and unhelpful. (Compare Mr Spock in Star Trek or Mr Data in a later incarnation of the series.) Instead, they recognise that no emotion is ungrounded and that the different characteristics of a human being are not so easily separated in actual use. People are angry, sad, frustrated and a whole host of other things for situated reasons rather than at random. It may be that an impotent rationality is actually helped out by authentic emotions.

5. The Now. Existentialist thought tends to focus on the now of lived experience as the most important thing in life. It might be said that either we find meaning in our lives as they are, and as they are lived, or we don't find it at all. Another way of saying this is that this life, your life in all its particularity, is the only life that will ever mean anything. Some would also suggest that it doesn't really matter much how you live, it only matters that you lived. Thus, meaning is regarded as a personal thing that you experience in the concrete conditions of your life whatever they may be. It is in this sense that even mistakes are steps on the way to somewhere. It is the fact of a journey that is all that matters and the individual steps recede in importance.

 6. The Absurd. For some existentialists, for example, Albert Camus, life is an experience of the absurd. Camus himself conceives of this using the example of Sisyphus who was condemned to roll a huge rock up a hill only for it to roll back down again. He then had to repeat the task. Endlessly.  Camus argues that all of us are in the same position as Sisyphus was in our own lives and that life, for each of us, is ultimately futile. At the start of his book discussing this he thus says that the only serious philosophical question is suicide. That is, why are any of us choosing to live at all? For Camus the answer is in rebellion against the absurdity. This is not to deny the scenario he sets up (life really is absurd and futile) but to refuse to be consumed by the absurdity by taking personal responsibility. It is also to be noted, as I did in a previous blog, that this "futility of life" thought is an old one that we see repeated many times throughout the recorded history of our race.

7. Thrownness. The term comes from a German philosopher but the thought is common to a number of existentialists. The idea is that we are "thrown" into life. We neither choose who we are nor what our circumstances are. So much about who we are and what our opportunities or possibilities are were decided for us by other factors. Each of us lives in a situation we largely do NOT control. This includes not only our genetic make-up (who we physically and biologically are) but also the way we were brought up or the choices and possibilities we have in life. A novella which illustrates the dilemma of this "thrownness" is Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis" in which a man wakes up to find himself transformed into an insect and has to deal with this new form of life.

8. Authenticity. The idea here is one of "becoming who you are" as Nietzsche put it. Each of us lives in social contexts and the temptation to run with the herd is strong. In contradistinction to this, the existentialist is interested in being authentically who they are and living out the full potential of that. So this is about maximising the potential of the particular journey through life that you happen to be on as opposed to just following the crowd. Authenticity is a primary valuation of an existentialist frame of mind.

9. Knowledge vs Meaning. Existentialists come down very firmly on the side of meaning, personal meaning, as the thing which really matters in life. They see things like a search for knowledge as ultimately pointless and self-defeating. There will never be an end of knowing. It is literally a pointless exercise. But not only would you never be able to know enough, what would happen if you did get to the end and know everything? Nothing would. You would just have collected facts. But there is also the question of understanding. Existentialists suggest that existence cannot be rationally understood and therefore the knowledge is again pointless. Instead, what counts is a personal engagement with your own experience of life. In this sense, Camus argues that the impersonal, abstract, scientific view of the world, what one contemporary philosopher has called “the view from nowhere" is what gives birth to the absurd. Ultimately, only personal experience is meaningful.

10. Reflection/Rationality vs Experience. We find the same issue here as in our last point, albeit with a slightly shifted focus. The point, again, is that the lived experience of our lives is all that really matters and gives meaning. In that sense, reflective rationality, is both meaningless and impotent. All the thinking and explanations ultimately fall away and all you are left with is the fact that you lived. It is in your personal struggle with this fact that meaning comes to be. Your journey is what matters, your experience. There is no rationality of the world to get in touch with, no reflection that will make all things clear (as if there was a true, clear or genuine view to find).

So we can see, I hope, that existentialism (which doesn't really exist) is very much a philosophy of life, a philosophy of actual concrete, individual lives. It's not abstract equations or theories of everything. It's about you and me in all our particularity. Thinking about it and reading the words of those plugging into this kind of mentality has certainly helped me to get some sort of handle on my own self-understanding and to set goals for myself. It has also helped me to shape beliefs about who I am and the bigger questions such as "why are we here?" that, I guess, we have all asked at one time of another. Of course, the thought itself is much more complex than this and I have only provided the Existentialism 101 version here. But even if you think about those 10 briefs points here you can see how all sorts of existential questions begin to arise.

Most of all, I think, it focuses the mind on maybe the most important question of all: what is it to really be existing? Existentialism answers: to exist is to take responsibility for yourself, to commit yourself to creating who you are, to commit yourself to the journey that is your life, even though you did not choose any of this and have been thrown into a world and a life much of which you don't control and will never understand. Or, more simply, it's up to you. No one is going to live your life for you.

Now you might wonder why any of this matters and you might also wonder how this actually affects anyone's life. But take it from me that it does. For example, if you go on over to my Bandcamp site, elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com you will find there a lot of albums of what I now conceive of as "existential music", music which, it now seems to me, reflects the views and valuations inherent in a lot of what I have just said. I started out this week with a creative task. That task was to make music that reflected "nothingness". (My next album is to be called Nichtigkeit which is German for "nothingness".) I asked myself what a "music of nothingness" would sound like. And then it hit me. As I have developed my music and my creative persona that has come through automatically. I have been making an existential music, a music of personal responsibility grounded in my specific life, a life and being based in nothing greater than itself, all along. So, for me, the "music of nothingness" is going to sound like me. Just as it always has done.

We are now through the looking glass......

Being is Nothingness

"Stoic absence of passion, Zen absence of will, Heideggerian gelassenheit and physics-as-the-absolute-conception-of-reality are… just so many variations on a single project - the project of escaping from time and chance." (Richard Rorty)

 It is our human nature to rage against the dying of the light, to fill the nothingness with somethingness, to give meaning where there is none, truth where there is none, knowledge where there is none, to make reason where none exists, to be rational where irrationality reigns. At least, this is my observation. I thought I should write something about this at this current time and lay out a more comprehensive article after my last few on being and consciousness. As you will know, these things mean something to me and I want to try and give a slightly more comprehensive account of them from my own understanding. It will at least help me to do this and, maybe, one or two others as well.

It is my intuition that the time has come to acknowledge the gaping hole that exists at the centre of Being, to acknowledge that our human powers and perceptions fail, to acknowledge that truth is insubstantial, knowledge is merely what is useful, that our seeing is partial and mostly blind, that we are contingent and merely fitted for a form of life, a very narrow form of life, evolved to live and die on an inconsequential speck in the vastness of space. I do not see that there is any Whole or Unity or Truth or amount of Knowledge or Privileged Insight or Enlightenment or Meaning that we can work our way towards or find. There is no Deity or Spirituality, no Body of Privileged Information or Holy Being which is going to allow us to see behind the veil of our limitations and glimpse the Holy of Holies of  "how-things-really-are" or "what-life-is-all-about". There is no "our-true-place-in-the-universe". These things are a mirage, and we are victims of their illusion.

It should be noted, then, that I am hardly the first person to diagnose nothingness at the centre of all that is. "Nihilism" has been a problem for European philosophy for 200-300 years. In other traditions, emptiness has been held as a value in itself. 2,300 years ago there was at least one Jewish teacher (a person named Qoheleth, the speaker in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes to which I will return below) teaching that life is "breath" and a chasing after the wind. And he was continually asking "What does it profit...?" So we can be sure that we are not the first to have the thought that at the centre of Being is…. nothing and that life itself is insubstantial. It may be, like the Ego, that certain illusory goals and beliefs (the aforementioned list of gods and pseudo-gods such as Meaning, Truth and Knowledge) were necessary and that evolution fitted us with them to best enable our survival. But we make a terrible mistake in taking them too seriously, petrifying them and making deities of them. But, then again, maybe we are only living out the life that we were meant to lead in doing so?

Nevertheless, I want to suggest today that the claim that something "is" (in any essentialist or foundational sense) is the most meaningless claim any human being could ever make, in my opinion. We have neither the insight nor the means to make any such claim. We live in a constant stream of existence, of consciousness, and randomly pluck things from the torrent as it rushes past and then make connections between one and another. If it has the utility of working or being, so it seems, repeatable, then we deify it as something that is…. but have no genuine right to do so. We can only ever speak properly of a constant becoming, a changing as one day turns into the next. We are part of a stream and we observe a small stretch of the journey before we blink… and cease to exist.

I think the key insight here, which I hope to flesh out below, is that it's not in spite of the nothingness that we make meaning, truth and knowledge: it's because of it. It might have been thought, pre-reflectively, that these things arise as we have an awareness of a greater thing that is out there, some god or truth or insight into being that is currently beyond us. And so we yearn to reach it guided by our belief that there is "a-way-things-are". But this is not so. Instead, we experience the void of nothing and experience the edge of chaos and cannot bear it. And so we become (or, in evolutionary terms, became) machines for the creation of meaning, truth and knowledge to give us something that can allow us to live. No one could survive the chaos, it would make our lives unlivable. Instead, we find a form of life through which we can survive, endure and prosper. Because at the heart of Being there is a void, we find things plastic to our touch and begin to create. This is to say that our "reality" is not nearly so fixed as some might have you believe. Or, at least, not nearly as restrictive.

It's worth noting at this point that I am not here making any claims to universal knowledge. That would be both arrogant and entirely contradictory to my point. I am simply emptying out onto the page my understanding such as it is at this current time as it has been educated by the thoughts, and the thought, that I have encountered on my journey down the stream. I regard "right and wrong" in this connection as to be strictly missing the point. I don't regard the journey as about right or wrong. I regard it as about the experience of the journey. I regard philosophy, which is nominally what I am doing here, as about utilization of the mind and as about, as it originally was, a love of wisdom and not as a means to some fabled special insight, much less some technical or hidden knowledge. As such, I believe that questions are more fundamental than answers and that thinking is the most important activity, one that can lead us to find the questions at the heart of our existence and our being. This, I see as I look back, is what I have really been doing throughout my life since I was 8 or 9 years old.

For myself, I see myself at a crossover of Philosophy and Spirituality, two things which can, indeed, be compatible. There have been many spiritual and philosophical thinkers. The belief in god is a logical outworking of one way of doing these things but not a necessary one and not one I have found myself coming to be convinced by in the end. Indeed, I think back 20 years to when I would have said I believed in a god and cringe at how naive I was at that time. However, I don't think that spirituality, in itself and in all its forms, is to be pilloried or violently attacked as some like Richard Dawkins do. Both Philosophy and Spirituality are searching for things to fill the nothingness at the heart of being (things like meaning, truth, knowledge or god) and, as such, are entirely understandable in that context. The attacks of those like Dawkins merely show an arrogant and boorish lack of humble understanding. Humility, we should remember, is perhaps the quality human beings need most in the face of the all-encompassing nothingness that surrounds us. Perhaps those who are least humble are the ones who are most desperately running away in a futile attempt to escape it? I would argue that where Dawkins sees "god" and rages he actually only sees "Truth" instead - which functions in much the same way for him as god does for his opponents. He is more like those he despises than he would ever want to admit.

My approach below in the rest of this blog will be based on a firm belief that all the connections human beings make in their thinking are fictions. They are merely either useful or not useful. (It is to be noted that fiction is not an opposite of truth. We habitually share fictions that, whilst not true in themselves, elucidate some truth or beliefs we would hold dear.) All syntheses are at least fictional and tell a story that works at a certain time and place. We know that nothing stands for all time and so in place of models of accuracy and truth, models which have their very failure inscribed within them from the start, I use models of honesty and authenticity which have a validity of time and place. What follows will be my attempt to describe the nothingness at the heart of not just human being, but all Being, and how I came to find it. I will do so in my own words (believing that this is the most authentic way I can do it in a blog for general readers) and I will also try to point up some issues this raises and some of the options before us. I take it that I don't need to point out again that this is merely my own partial account (in at least 2 senses).

So why would anyone think that at the heart of Being there is a gaping chasm of nothingness, a black hole at the centre of all that is? For me this realisation came by thinking and reading in addition to the lived experience of my life. I read philosophers like William James who said that "truth" was those things that were merely "good in the way of belief" and Richard Rorty who wrote papers and books extolling the idea that beliefs are not true or false in the sense of corresponding to an antecedent world, but only in the sense that they are useful beliefs and that it pays to believe them. Where James, a man of his philosophical time, talked about the world of experience, Rorty, in keeping with the linguistic turn and focus in more modern philosophy, talks about language. Indeed, Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher obsessed with thinking about Being, called language "the house of Being". But it is when thinking about language that we begin to realise that language is not a perspicuous tool for penetrating to the heart of Being but, instead, a collection of "tools for coping with objects rather than representations of objects, and as providing different sets of tools for different purposes" (Richard Rorty). Another very famous philosopher of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, described language as like a game in which we, as various different communities, need to know the rules of the game we are playing in order to take part in using the language. This makes language sound very much like a social practice as opposed to the innate logic of the universe, something that, at first, Wittgenstein himself had tried to find. But, on his later thinking, no language gets us closer to reality because that is not what language is for. Language is there to help us deal with things not represent them, correspond to them or describe them in their essence. All this is to say that language is in no way foundational to Being like a code for how things really are. Rather, it is descriptive of it in as many ways as there are human purposes.

There were for me other philosophical indicators that traditional god substitutes such as Knowledge, Truth or Meaning had ideas above their station. About 16 years ago, as I prepared to start my PhD studies, I chanced upon a book by Friedrich Nietzsche. I knew next to nothing about him save that I knew his work had been co-opted (and corrupted) by the Nazis. I began to read the book (which, soon after, grew to become all his books) and found it very reader friendly but in no way simplistic. I have learned many things in those 16 years since by reading Nietzsche. One of those things is the "will to system" that human beings have. Another is that human beings are excellent at deceiving themselves. Nietzsche, at times, is a very astute and insightful observer of his kind and of their intellectual habits and failings. Thus, he describes truth as "a mobile army of metaphors" and says that "We believe when we speak of trees, colours, snow, and flowers, we have knowledge of the things themselves, and yet we possess only metaphors of things which in no way correspond to the original entities." In the same piece of writing he will argue that our concepts are a "making equivalent of that which is non-equivalent" and that "The thing-in-itself (which would be, precisely, pure truth, truth without consequences) is impossible even for the user of language to grasp". Perhaps my favourite Nietzschean thought, though, is this one:

Life as the product of life. However far man may extend himself with his knowledge, however objective he may appear to himself - ultimately he reaps nothing but his own biography.

I find in this perfectly crafted thought (and Nietzsche's books are full of hundreds of such thoughts as well as more lengthy arguments) a perfect summary of all of our lives. Life, so it says to me, is not about knowledge or truth or meaning. Language does not get to the heart of anything. We do not perceive past some intellectual or spiritual barrier to something that is more real than real. Life is just a time period and all we do when we live is create our history.

And so I took up and ran with this theme as I continued my studies. I entered the world of  French 20th century philosophy where Camus tells us that the only genuine philosophical question is to ask if life is worth living at all. In that same environment Sartre proclaims that we are all "condemned to be free", an expression of our individual existential freedom, Foucault delineates how our human knowledge is shaped by the operations of power and Jacques Derrida builds a whole philosophy around the idea that human language, and human meaning with it, corrupts and deconstructs itself even as it goes about its business. 

My final philosophical insights came not from a Frenchman, but from the very American literary and legal academic, Stanley Fish. His work on meaning as constructed, on human communities as always situated and contextualised and, thus, on just "anything" never having the possibility to be the case, ("anything that can be made to go, goes" is his insightful gloss on the more traditional "anything goes" that people who "don't believe in reality" are often accused of believing) convinced me that there can be no "real world" in the highly philosophical sense that some people often mean it. There is the world that is available to us, the world that we sense and describe and brush up against every day. It is a world that constricts and constrains us. But we cannot penetrate it in the way that some deceptive dualisms such as those like reality and appearance or intrinsic and extrinsic would have us believe. There is no inner reality to find. There is, for example, no inherent morality of the universe (there is merely prudent or considerate behaviour). Instead, all we have is a world of relations and descriptions, some more useful than others, a world that constrains but that is also material for the constructive and creative engines of our minds and language and purposes.

It is at this point that it would be reasonable to feel loss. We want to think that what we have in our hands is solid and, well, real. I say that the world I am describing, the one with nothingness at its heart, is and that I certainly have no problem believing that we live on an amazing planet in an amazing universe full of everything from planets, stars and galaxies to electrons and electro-magnetic radiation. It's just that there is no god figure for us to bow down before, nothing really real that we can feel appropriately supplicant before or in touch with, no divinity of any kind that we can share in, no "real-way-things-are" unconnected from some human purpose or description. There is only the world of experience and our means of describing it and making use of it. Perhaps, then, we might want to share in the conclusion of one of the biblical writers, Qoheleth (to give him his Jewish name), when he says "Sheer futility, sheer futility, everything is futile!" (Qoheleth 1:2). I myself often translate the Hebrew word "Hebel" that is behind the word "futile" there (I did study biblical Hebrew at university with some success and so feel able to make such comments) as "absurd". Everything is absurd. It is absurd not in the sense of funny or amusing but in the sense of being pitched into a game you must play but can't win or where, as Camus discusses in The Myth of Sisyphus, we must forever push a rock up a hill only to have it roll down. And thus the cycle begins again. 

Qoheleth looks out upon a world in which human beings die like beasts and the good suffer whilst the evil prosper. No path seems to lead to any meaningful conclusion. There seems to be no point, no target to aim for. In lieu of a better conclusion we might almost say that stuff just seems random, a matter of time and chance. "Why be wise when the wise and the fool both die?" he asks. "All is futility (or absurd) and chasing after the wind" (Qoheleth 1:17). In a later section, Qoheleth muses on that fact that we humans can grasp no overarching meaning or knowledge or truth about our existence or about existence in general. (Today we would call this the death of the metanarrative.)  His conclusion is that the only pleasure to be found is in "pleasure and enjoyment through life" (Qoheleth 3:12-13). And that sounds very like Nietzsche's biography comment to me. If you look for meaning in something greater than yourself, or something greater than you within, you will not find it. It's not there. All you have is the life you actually live - and to enjoy it. 

Of course, the charge may be raised that there are, indeed, many people who do find meaning and truth and knowledge in things greater than themselves. The world does not lack for believers in gods of many kinds - from the little old lady who goes to church to the evolutionary biologist who worships at the altar of "truth" (the aforementioned Dawkins). "So what is going on here?" you may rightly ask. One answer to this, I think, might lie in the thought of French postmodern thinker, Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard is famous for saying that things like the first Gulf War "never happened". He did not mean to suggest that there was no war. He means to suggest that the war we saw through newspaper headlines and 24 hour rolling news coverage was empty and devoid of referent. It was an act of creation in which the reporting came to replace and represent as true something that wasn't really there. This rolling news then became "The Truth" but had no actual referent behind it. Baudrillard's most famous work, Simulacra and Simulation, fleshes out this idea more fully. A simulacra is, for Baudrillard, "never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true". As Baudrillard notes in a section dealing with the media in this book:

We live in a world where there is more and more information and less and less meaning.

So what am I saying here? I'm saying that people can be deceived. I'm saying that much "information" today is shallow and useless and refers to nothing beyond itself in a very reflexive way but, nevertheless, becomes the truth that conceals there is no truth. I'm saying that people can believe anything for the purposes that they have that the world of our experience allows. This may, for some, include gods whilst, for others, it won't. I would remind readers here of the quote I used as the heading to this blog and it's focus on human beings wanting to escape the "time and chance" that they have, with complete disregard for their will, been pitched into. It has, to date, been a project of some, if not all, humans to try and escape the stream of consciousness, the time and chance which is all they have, to find a solid, firm foundation on which to stand. I doubt that this purpose will go away anytime soon. But given a wider perspective, we have every right to doubt the privileged access or insight some people claim. Better, then, to see it as just one more human attempt to shoot at the moon, one more self-referential news report about gods and rumours of gods with nothing behind it, one more go at the oldest human project of all - finding solid ground when, as Nietzsche says, all we have now is the vicissitudes of "the infinite sea".

But if at the heart of all Being there is merely nothingness, a reaching for something forever out of reach, as I claim, then what are we to do? I can think immediately of two things but I think that we are already doing both of them. The first thing we can do is hope. We can hope for a better life in a better world full of better people - whatever we take better in these cases to mean. We can hope to have a better life personally and we can work towards it. We can hope and so allow the seeds of imagination to flourish within us and make use of the opportunity that time and chance has afforded us in our being born. Of course, you can sit in a corner and wait to die too. It's up to you. You might even muse that in the end it doesn't make much difference and I couldn't really argue against you. Not in the end, at least. But there is always the here and now for the living to concern themselves with even if eternity is forever and life is short.

The second thing we can do in the nothingness is create. This certainly applies in the personal area. I was reminded by a friend's tweet the other day that there is no "inner self". Sometimes various kinds of guru try to claim there is an inner self and that you need to find it. But there is no inner self. Just like all the other attempts at grasping something really real, it has an imaginary target. But, in the absence of an inner self, there is just you in all your particularity with all your history, thoughts and feelings. And there is no one version of you for you are always becoming, always changing. You don't even know yourself better than other people. You just have your own thoughts about you, your own descriptions and your own reasons for preferring one over another, albeit that you have more information to go on because you have always been there! 

This world of experience that we live in yields to our descriptions. It is plastic to our touch. We can make use of it and manipulate it and make it useful for our many purposes. And we can do that with ourselves too. We have the opportunity to create something beautiful, if that's not too naively poetic. It may not be that it lasts for a long time for we know that meaning is as temporary as human beings and their projects but, as Nietzsche and Qoheleth both saw, all we have is the lives we are creating day by day. That is where we will find our being and the world of our possibilities: in our world of Nothingness.

I thank you for reading if you got this far!

Yours,

A Nihilist.

You can find a whole catalog of music which flows from my existentialist and nihilist frame of mind by going to my Bandcamp including a series on Human/Being and another called Elektronische Existenz. Thank you for any listening that you do as I try to create and infuse with hope my own existence in this world.

What is a Human Being?

Introductory Remarks

As you may know if you have been following my music or this blog, this year I have been focusing my thinking and my art on the question which is the title of this particular blog. Namely, I've been asking what a human being is. I produced a ten part musical series whilst thinking about this but then, last night, it struck me that I haven't really written anything about it in so many words. (Even though I have written about what I was doing when I was making this music elsewhere in this blog and about related issues. Check out the rest of my blog for that.) And then I thought that I should at least try to put that right. This is not because I think I have anything startlingly original to say. Neither is it because I think there is not plenty that has already been written about it. Philosophers, as only one group of people, have been thinking and writing about being and being human for as long as they have been thinking and writing. It's a subject that has always been there and we as a species have always needed to come back to it again and again. Why else has this subject struck me as so important?

But in thinking about human being and human beings there are clearly a number of issues to overcome. For a start, I take the word "human" in my title as both an adjective and as a noun. That is to say that I am concerned with what a "human being" is as an individual creature and with what "human" being is as a specific type of being in the world. Here, immediately, we can see that this subject could become very dense and complicated and I hope not to make my writing about it appear that way. I hope to elucidate my thoughts clearly and concisely. This is a roundabout way of saying that I'm writing a blog here and not a paper for a peer-reviewed philosophy journal. (Although I would point out that my thinking and writing has been guided by an interest in academic philosophy stretching back more than 20 years now.) So I will try to keep my language as perspicuous as possible. I will do that, of course, at the risk of being misunderstood or not being as precise as I might be if I were writing in another context. So maybe now I should say what I'm setting out to do before then going on to make some observations about the subject of this blog.

Let me say straight away that I can't make any claim to be comprehensive here. I live a very specific (and unique) life that is not and will not be replicated by anyone else. (I thank the non-existent gods for that!) All our lives are individual in their particularity and this is something we value about our species. So the things I write below will be animated by my own life experience and the concerns that it has thrown up for me. I would more than welcome it, though, if you read this and feel that I have missed something vital out and feel the need to tell me what that is. I am certainly no oracle and am more than aware of my many thorough-going limitations. So I will be writing a very personal and situated answer to my question. (I could, of course, do no other.) My aim is to put into words issues and questions that I think bear on the subject and that are important to address. Each one could, I have no doubt, be subject to several book-length treatments in itself. I will, on the contrary, attempt to be brief and concise for the sake of my blog readers.


Some Thoughts About Human Being(s)

And so the first thing to say is that we, as human beings, are beings for whom "Being" is an issue. We ask questions such as "Why am I here?" and "Who am I?" and "Why is there something rather than nothing?". This is to say that it occurs to us to be aware of our existence and our surroundings. And these are not just questions about ourselves as individual people who exist. They are also the greater questions about existence as a whole. "Where did everything come from?" is a question of great import that doesn't, we think, occur to every living thing to ask. So it is this consciousness, this inquisitiveness, this awareness of self and surroundings, that becomes a constituent part of our make up as human beings. To be a human being is to experience the world as one. It is neither a gift nor a curse. It just is. And we can reflect on what that means because, as human beings, the meaning of things is important to us too.

But there are also a whole slew of issues that are important to us as human beings just by simple virtue of being alive. I refer to these myself as "the issues of the living". I use this term in distinction to being dead when, of course, these things would not matter at all. For me these things are the things of every day life, of survival and of daily procedure, the questions that we deal with as almost background issues and that are rarely overtly thought about or noticed as important. "What's for dinner today?", "Do my teeth need brushing?" "Am I late for an appointment?" and "I wonder what my colleague at work thinks of me?" would be examples of things like this but there could be a billion other such things. They are the things you think about and process because you are alive. If we wanted to put it more simply we might just say that being alive entails caring about things.

Being alive as a human being also entails caring, or not caring, about other members of our species. It is not unique to human beings to be social as we can see from our observations of the wider natural world. But we also know, as human beings, that we are infused with a strong sense of self. We value and cherish the fact we have individuality and are not, instead, part of some Borg-like hive mind in which everyone else's thoughts are constantly present too. So, as humans, our form of being is shaped by a kind of dual nature as beings who are individual yet also part of wider social groupings, be they familial or otherwise. Most of us have experienced some great communal event together and shared in a kind of group euphoria and we experience that as a group, as beings together in a way that is not individual. And yet we retain a foot in both camps and we can be psychologically affected if either our sense of self or our sense of belonging, or not belonging, to groups is called into question.

A very basic way in which our human being is shaped is by our form. Human beings are physical beings of a very specific kind in a physical world. We breathe air. We pump blood. We can see thanks to our optic nerve and the electromagnetic radiation that exists as photons of light. We can hear, touch, taste and smell. We reproduce in a specifically physical way. We walk on two legs in an upright fashion. We have active brains which can learn and adapt, often overcoming some of these limitations or finding ways around them if some of them are taken away in an accident or due to illness. We can talk. We have organs which stop us from being poisoned by the waste products produced in sustaining ourselves. We can feel pain. We decay. We die. All of these physical things are very specific and I want to make the point very strongly that they are inherent to what makes us human. For me, a human brain in a vat or a mind uploaded to a computer would not be a human being. To lose our physicality is, for me, to lose something vital to our humanity, something that has shaped who we have become and what we are. It may be that one day we evolve our species into beings not made of flesh thanks to scientific advances. For me that would entail a possible gain but certainly also a loss and definitely a change in circumstances. Physical things eventually wear out. As human beings that is always before us in very specific ways. I ask you to consider the question: "If all my body parts were replaced with artificial ones, would I still be me?" My answer to this is that I think being a human being, living a human form of being, is intimately bound up with the specific physical form of our nature.

Another way we can talk of human being is in terms of time. I have already addressed this in a number of musical pieces and philosophers have remarked on our inherent temporality for centuries. The fact is that we are beings who exist within time and who are always conscious of it. This is not merely in terms of appointments or notable dates but also in things like consciousness of death and the cycles of life. (Mid-life crisis? Becoming an adult? Retiring?) But we are also aware of the infinity of time which exists in such large amounts that we literally cannot conceive of the age of the Universe or of even our own planet within it. So, as with the social and the individual, there is a dual focus here as human beings have an awareness of both finitude and infinity and that affects our form of life here on earth. A way to imagine this is to think of the future and the past. One, the future, stretches out before us as an infinite possibility whilst, on the other hand, the past lies behind us as something insubstantial that has slipped through our fingers. Time, in some senses, leaves us completely powerless. We try to grasp it and hold on to it, but it is gone. Only the photograph or the memory manages to hold some traces and time even fades those too.

An important aspect of our humanity is to be found in our fallibility. Put bluntly and rather obviously, we are not omniscient. We are, indeed, quite limited beings. We see more than through a glass darkly. It is easy to fool the senses of human beings, which are our means of gathering information about the world, and there are many parlour tricks which are capable of doing so such as the never ending staircase or the duck/rabbit made famous by Ludwig Wittgenstein as shown below.

                                                             Is it a duck or a rabbit?

We have also developed our own pattern and habits of thinking which, whilst useful for certain purposes, are by no means to be regarded as the best possible or unsurpassable. Human beings have developed by evolution and their powers of thought and means of gathering information have been shaped by their environment and become useful for the form of life they lead. It is conceivable that beings from elsewhere might be nothing like us because their development would be suited to their environment and form of life too. One simple truth is that, if we are honest, we, as human beings, don't even know what it is we don't know. We are working in the dark in the only ways evolution has equipped us to do so. We also need to remember that human beings are not passive robots whose job is merely to be carried out passively as a response to commands. But this is my next point.

Human beings have intentions, attitudes, feelings and emotions. And often we act not simply with intellectual goals in sight but simply because we feel a certain way or because we have a certain attitude towards something. Its also worth pointing out that to have a goal is to be human too. Can you imagine a fly or a table to decide that it purposely wants to do something? Probably not. But you can imagine that a person decides to do something. You can imagine they do this for a number of reasons from it being something they want to achieve to because some other factor motivates them to do it. Human beings, then, are not simply calculators or computers or machines. They can get angry and make bad choices and harm themselves and others and then feel sorry for it. And I think it is important to say this since the machine or computer metaphor is very often used casually and lazily to describe human beings. I think its wrong and misleading. Human beings are not machines. They are, instead, animals and they are imbued with animalistic attributes such as intuition. I recall to mind here a scene from Star Trek in which Spock, who does not have all the information he needs to hand to make a calculation, is advised by the very human McCoy to "make his best guess". And that, indeed, is something that humans often do. They guess. Now when a human being feels cold you might want to describe it as a programmed (or learned) response to sensory stimulation. But is it really that simple? I don't think so. When you cry do you think that a machine could do that? When you feel fear, or anxiety or love you are acting as a living being would not as any machine we have ever yet conceived. I don't regard these things as mere developments based on increasingly complex networks. I think it something fundamentally different that we don't yet, and maybe never will, understand. It is something human. It is something to do with being.

So, for the purposes of this blog, this is my list of attributes when thinking about human being:

1. Ontological
2. Alive
3. Individual and Social
4. Physical
5. Temporal
6. Fallible
7. Animal

There is one more that I finally want to add at this point. And that is that we are incomplete. We are not finished but are always in a process of continuing to become something else. We are like this blog. No matter how much I say, there is always more that could be said. There will always be new occasions or contexts in which it could be said again with new force or in new and probably better ways. The understanding and the searching never stops. And so it is with us as people and as a people. We are never complete, we are never finished. Human being and human beings never reach a point at which they can stop and say they are done and there is no more to do. A constant process of becoming as people "condemned to be free" (as Jean-Paul Sartre put it) is the only game in town.

8. Incomplete


I hope what I have written above gives anyone who has got this far something to think about. If you want some music to have in the background as you maybe think about these issues then my Human/Being series is just for you and you can hear it at my Bandcamp.

Consciousness, Bodies and Future Robot Beings: Thinking Aloud

So yesterday I came back to thinking about consciousness again after some weeks away from it and, inevitably, the idea of robots with human consciousness came up again. I was also pointed in the direction of some interesting videos put on You Tube by the Dalai Lama in which he and some scientists educated more in the western, scientific tradition had a conference around the areas of mind and consciousness.

But it really all started a couple of days ago with a thought I had. I was sitting there, minding my own business, when suddenly I thought "Once we can create consciousness procreation will be obsolete." (This thought assumes that "consciousness" is something that can be deliberately created. That is technically an assumption and maybe a very big one.) My point in having this thought was that if we could replicate consciousness, which we might call our awareness that we exist and that there is a world around us, then we could put it (upload it?) into much better robot bodies than our frail fleshly ones which come with so many problems simply due to their sheer physical form. One can easily imagine that a carbon fibre or titanium (or carbotanium) body would last much longer and without any of the many downsides of being a human being. (Imagine being a person but not needing to eat, or go to the toilet. Imagine not feeling tired or sick.)


So the advantages immediately become apparent. Of course the thought also expressly encompasses the idea that if you can create consciousness then you can create replacements for people. Imagine you own a factory. Instead of employing 500 real people you employ 500 robots with consciousness. Why wouldn't you do that? At this point you may reply with views about what consciousness is. You might say, for example, that consciousness implies awareness of your surroundings which implies having opinions about those surroundings. That implies feelings and the formation of attitudes and opinions about things. Maybe the robots don't like working at the factory like its very likely some of the people don't. Maybe, to come from another angle, we should regard robots with consciousness as beings with rights in this case. If we could establish that robots, or other creatures, did have a form of consciousness, would that not mean we should give them rights? And what would it mean for human beings if we could deliberately create "better people"?

At this point it becomes critical what we think consciousness actually is. It was suggested to me that, in human beings, electrochemical actions in the brain can "explain" the processing of sense data (which consciousness surely does). Personally I wonder if this does "explain" it as opposed to merely describing it as a process within a brain. One way that some scientists have often found to discuss the mind or consciousness is to reduce it to the activities of the brain. So conscious thoughts become brain states, etc. This is not entirely convincing. It is thought that the mind is related to the brain but no one knows how even though some are happy to say that they regard minds as physical attributes like reproduction or breathing. That is, they would say minds are functions of brains. Others, however, aren't so sure about that. However a mind comes to be, it seems quite safe to say that consciousness is a machine for generating data (as one of its functions). That is, to be conscious is to have awareness of the world around you and to start thinking about it and coming to conclusions or working hypotheses about things. Ironically, this is often "unconsciously" done!

So consciousness, as far as we know, requires a brain. I would ask anyone who doesn't agree with this to point to a consciousness that exists where there isn't a brain in evidence. But consciousness cannot be reduced to things like data or energy. In this respect I think the recent film Chappie, which I mentioned in previous blogs, gets things wrong. I don't understand how a consciousness could be "recorded" or saved to a hard disk. It doesn't, to me, seem very convincing, whilst I understand perfectly how it makes a good fictional story. I think that on this point thinkers get seduced by the power of the computer metaphor.  For me consciousness is more than both energy or data, a brain is not simply hardware nor is consciousness simply (or even) software. If you captured the electrochemical energy in the brain or had a way to capture all the data your mind possesses you wouldn't, I think, have captured a consciousness. And this is a question that scientist Christof Koch poses when he asks if consciousness is something fundamental in itself or is rather simply an emergent property of systems that are suitably complex. In other words, he asks if complex enough machine networks could BECOME conscious if they became complex enough. Or would we need to add some X to make it so? Is consciousness an emergent property of something suitably complex or a fundamental X that comes from we don't know where?

This complexity about the nature of consciousness is a major barrier to the very idea of robot consciousness of course and it is a moot point to ask when we might reach the level of consciousness in our human experiments with robotics and AI. For, one thing can be sure, if we decided that robots or other animals did have an awareness of the world around them, even of their own existence or, as Christof Koch always seems to describe consciousness, "what it feels like to be me" (or, I add, to even have an awareness of yourself as a subject) then that makes all the difference in the world. We regard a person, a dog, a whale or a even an insect as different to a table, a chair, a computer or a smartphone because they are ALIVE and being alive, we think, makes a difference. Consciousness plays a role in this "being aliveness". It changes the way we think about things.

Consciousness, if you reflect on it for even a moment, is a very strange thing. This morning when I woke up I was having a dream. It was a strange dream. But, I ask myself, what was my state of consciousness at the time? Was I aware that I was alive? That I was a human being? That I was me? I don't think I can say that I was. What about in deep sleep where scientists tell us that brain activity slows right down? Who, in deep sleep, has consciousness of anything? So consciousness, it seems, is not simply on or off. We can have different states of consciousness and change from one to the other and, here's another important point, not always do this by overt decision. Basically this just makes me wonder a lot and I ask why I have this awareness and where it comes from. Perhaps the robots of the future will have the same issues to deal with. Consciousness grows and changes and is fitted to a form of life. Our experience of the world is different even from person to person, let alone from species to species. We do not see the world as a dog does. A conscious robot would not see the world as we, its makers, do either.

In closing, I want to remind people that this subject is not merely technological. There are other issues in play too. Clearly the step to create such beings would be a major one on many fronts. For one thing, I would regard a conscious being as an individual with rights and maybe others would too. At this point there seems to be some deep-seated human empathy in play. There is a scene in the film Chappie where the newly conscious robot (chronologically regarded as a child since awareness of your surroundings is learned and not simply given) is left to fend for himself and is attacked. I, for one, winced and felt sympathy for the character in the film - even though it was a collection of metal and circuitry. And this makes me ask what humanity is and what beings are worthy of respect. What if a fly had some level of consciousness? (In a lecture I watched Christof Koch speculated that bees might have some kind of consciousness and explained that it certainly couldn't be ruled out.) Clearly, we need to think thoroughly and deeply about what makes a person a person and I think consciousness plays a large part in the answer. Besides the scientific and technical challenges of discovering more about and attempting to re-create consciousness, there are equally tough moral and philosophical challenges to be faced as well.

Thoughts On Online Speech

For a while now there has been growing concern (in some quarters more than others) about standards of online speech - especially around areas of social media like Twitter. Several notable and, to my knowledge usually female, people have come out and said they have received death or rape threats. Some people have even reported threats to the Police and people have been sent to jail - usually for a few weeks. Concerned and august organs like The Guardian newspaper then write articles about the phenomenon of "hate speech" and "death threats" online and a certain narrative gets created and mutually re-inforced. In addition to this, "trolls" are said to be a problem, although defining this term is often a problem in itself when the word seems to be applied both to people with bad manners, making an inappropriate or unwelcome comment, and more organised individuals looking to spoil or derail a specific conversation.

Now this is just a personal blog and I'm not here to solve or dissect this problem in any overarching way. This blog is just a place for me to write down some of my thoughts as they occur to me in real time. As such, you shouldn't hold me to much of a standard of debate. I will say what I think on the subject and it should simply be taken as my point of view. And, for starters, I do believe that people should be allowed to have points of view, even, whisper it quietly, points of view that do not agree with yours. You, by the way, are also allowed to have a point of view. And it doesn't have to agree with mine. This is a basic tenet of the idea of free speech, the idea that people are allowed to have points of view and express them publicly. This applies expressly, if not in an exemplary sense, to exactly those views that you don't agree with yourself. "Free speech" is not merely speech you agree with. Its all the speech you don't agree with too.

So what I intend to do now is just jot down a few points related to this whole phenomenon. I make no claim that they are my final thoughts on the matter. If anything, they are more the points and questions that come to my mind when I read about this subject or hear of yet more example of trolls and hate speech. They are outlined in random order and may be considered as goads to further thought.

1. When is a death threat not a death threat? When the person concerned only wishes you dead and doesn't personally threaten to kill you.

There is a case in the UK at the moment of TV personality, Sue Perkins. Perkins allegedly received a few tweets wishing her dead after she was touted to present the very popular TV show, Top Gear. The story itself, according to Perkins, was entirely false and she has no interest in the job anyway. Nevertheless, some fans of the show seem to have reacted strongly and in haste and tweeted her on her public Twitter account. I personally have seen a couple of examples where people wished her to be "burnt at the stake". No tweet, that I have read, was from someone saying that they personally wanted to kill her and neither Perkins nor anyone else has produced any such tweet. However, quite predictably, this has been reported and written up by many as "Sue Perkins received death threats". And this happens in other cases too. The problem is these people are quite often not receiving death threats at all. They are simply receiving unpleasantness from people saying the equivalent of "I don't like you" in a more extreme way.

Then there is the further issue of credibility. Do murderers and rapists regularly broadcast their intent to commit rape and murder online to the target of their attacks? Doesn't that strike you as making any threat less and not more credible? You may say that we have no way of knowing and its better to be safe than sorry. But when we live in a world where a person upset that he can't take a flight from a regional airport because it is closed due to the weather - and then tweets that they need to get their shit together or he will blow it up - and is arrested and convicted of a crime, we need to be wary. People talk on social media in the vernacular. They talk and act like they would with their mates but often to people who aren't their mates at all. They are strangers. Add into this equation the fact that tone of voice, humour and all the general clues that would usually come from knowing the speaker are not present in 140 character social media snippets. It sets up a strange kaleidoscope of words and understandings. The possibility to take things the wrong way or give them the wrong weight is obvious. We should be all the more wary knowing that some people are more than ready to have their outrage triggered at a moment's notice.

I also find it relevant that public discourse, especially the distorted online version of that phenomenon, is becoming infantilized. These days, and I must say I see this agenda often being pressed by those with feminist leanings, people are encouraged to be victims. They are encouraged to be naive and irresponsible. They are told it is their right and that if anything unpleasant happens to them it is absolutely not their fault or, more importantly, their responsibility. To put the focus on the responsibility of people for themselves and their own safety, we are told, is "victim-blaming". In my view this is both stupid and childish. As I see it, everyone is responsible for the choices they make and so a constituent part of any consequences that occur. In a world where people can choose A or B to choose one or the other is to contribute to a chain of events. There is no rhetorical way to escape this inevitability. In the same way, taking part in public forums or social media is a choice you make. In doing so, you open yourself up to what is out there. On Twitter you can even lock your account so that your comments are reserved for those of your choosing and no one but who you choose can reply to them. If you choose not to do so you contribute to the possibility that people might send you unpleasant messages. You are not to be blamed for being sent such a message. But you did contribute to it being possible in the first place.

2. Its a public world.

The world of public discourse is changing, as we might expect it to in a world now awash with mobile devices and giant social media corporations. These corporations want to lock us all in to their platforms and they want us to take part because we are their product that they want to sell. What this means is that, like never before, you have access to so many more people in the world. No longer is it true, as it was in the 1970s when I was a boy, that all you know is contained within a few miles of home. Now you can speak to people from all over the world. You can also tell them that you hate them, they are fat and that you hope they burn to death. But is this a new phenomenon? Did people only start being nasty to each other with the rise of the mobile phone and the Twitter app? No, they didn't. I remember telling a girl in my class "You smell!" when I was 8 or 9 at school. Other school friends brought me to tears at age 11 by telling me that the cassette recorder my mum had bought me for Christmas was "shit". I've seen people be told to "Fuck off!" in football grounds across the country. I've heard racist and sexist things (unfortunately) in basically every public place you can think of. I've heard derogatory comments and conversations in every workplace I've ever had.

And this is the issue. In our modern world besides things being thrown more open they have also become more enclosed. Once more the online world puts a microscope on this phenomenon. There are now micro-groupings for every interest (and none) imaginable. There is probably a group somewhere for "Muslim baseball fans who like to wear green jeans whilst playing ping pong". Strangely, it seems that more openness also creates more enclosedness. Try butting in (or, more generously, offering a comment) on some conversations online and be prepared to be bitten as the insiders of the group concerned protect their turf and bite back at you for daring to offer a point of view. The attitude seems to be "Who are you? Sod off!" The internet era is the era of partisanship and, crucially, now everyone can play. And they do. It seems to me that, more often than not, it generates more heat than light. When you might think that more opportunities for communication would bring more togetherness they, in fact, bring as much disharmony as harmony. But there's a good reason why this shouldn't surprise anyone.

The point I would make here is that this is a public world. Its not a world where you can go into your little nest where every truth is yours and every heresy is anything you don't agree with. Its not a world where you will never hear something you don't like or where no one will ever call you names or say something nasty to you. Is the wish for this kind of bubble world really a realistic wish? Why is someone saying "I hope you die" in the street or at work in a tiff or disagreement any more or less serious than if they say it in a tweet? Are they not equal statements? (And, to my mind, equally ephemeral and throwaway?) It seems to me that a great many of these public threats are not threats at all. They are the equivalent of saying "You are a cunt!" I can appreciate that to some this may be upsetting. I've been upset by online comments myself when a passing You Tube viewer insulted the quality of something I had uploaded. And it stayed with me for a day or two as well. But this is not to make every negative comment a genuine or credible threat of anything. People insult you in the street and keep walking. Most online things, I suggest, are exactly the same.

3. Beware the censor.

For many people who I don't agree with all these things I have been talking about call for action - legislative action and Police action. We are told by some that people who say bad things should be arrested and put in jail. Others suggest that the Internet should only be accessed by those prepared to use their real identity in a verifiable way. Anonymity is seen by many as a problem because people can spray their insulting comments about freely and be seen to get away with it. This isn't necessarily the case of course. People have been arrested and convicted in the UK of sending malicious communications, notably to feminists Caroline Criado-Perez and MP Stella Creasy. These women, and others, often write articles full of censorious and moralistic ideas to the extent that, in a nutshell, they want to control the Internet according to guidelines, and morality, that suit them.

But can you control someone being obnoxious on the Internet? Its worth noting that it is not illegal to either be on the Internet or obnoxious. And both things, it seems to me, are equally impossible to control in the final analysis. Many people who get upset at insulting and threatening speech online seem to have the attitude that the world should run on the basis that only things they like should be allowed to happen. This usually involves them being allowed to walk round in a bubble, shielded from the harsh, nasty world outside. But this is not a realistic (or achievable) desire. The problem is not technology. The problem is people. People can be arseholes. Most people, in fact, are arseholes some of the time. Some more so than others. You can't legislate or moralise that away. This attitude, added to the one that infantilizes people and turns them into victims of ever growing hordes of unscrupulous people, is not a solution either. All that happens if you go down that road is that you generate a never-ending rolling wave of more and more examples of the phenomenon. Of course, in their determination to show how horrible life is for them, that is exactly what some people want to do. But that is a destructive and not a constructive agenda. Fundamentally, you cannot control speech by censoring it. It would be like trying to hold back the waves with your hands.

4. Its Time To Be An Adult.

At the end of the day I think people need to stand up and be responsible for themselves. I don't condone any form of hate speech, death threats or rape threats. I appreciate this is a serious issue. My attitude would tend to be that if such things happen in some kind of flare up then the best response is to let it go. (People can and do have disagreements and they do share harsh words.) This is what Sue Perkins seems to have done. She doesn't seem to have taken it too seriously but has just walked away from her account for a while to let the dust settle. I think that's probably wise. Of course, if you are getting repeated comments from the same person then that moves into harassment territory and it becomes more serious. The same is true if you happen to know the person. It is true that you can never know for sure if a threat of something is serious but, as I said above, I would tend to regard threats as not credible if someone is wanting to see you die in some outlandish way ("burnt at the stake") or is making the point of telling you in advance via a publicly accessible social network. This is especially true if this is just some random out of the blue. There are remedies available for those who feel under attack or threatened such as the blocking or locking available on Twitter or involving the authorities if its believed to be something more serious.

But should every nasty, insulting, threatening or obnoxious comment be referred to the Police though? No. You can't legislate for douche bags or for the obnoxiousness of the human race. To be in a public space is to acknowledge you relinquish some control over your environment and to open yourself up to interactions with others you may not desire, whether online or offline. That is just common sense. At the end of the day, if you don't want to hear what other people have to say its in your hands to do something about it. Be responsible for yourself and accept that you live in a world you don't always control.