Several discussions posted to the Internet from 1993 to 1998 dealt with epistemological issues not covered in my article on biological epistemology (Consciousness: Part I).

The idea is to see whether an essentially infinite-dimensional system, the human brain with around 100 billion neurons and 60 trillion synapses, exhibits a small (or at least restricted) set of time-varying global modes. The patterns or modes of brain activity are spatially coherent, but their temporal evolution is complex. By modeling switching dynamics and its multistability, this theory connects brain events (internal behavior) to behavioral events (overt behavior).... the waxing and waning of modes is a result of nonlinear coupling between the outside world and the internal spatial modes of the brain. One can see... that at least seven coherent spatial modes are present in the brain, the contributions of which may vary dynamically according to the kinds of tasks people (and brains) have to perform. It’s tempting to speculate that each of us is born with a brain that operates globally in a relatively small set of basic modes whose contributions vary with life’s trials and tribulations.

Only seven sets! The tests are only beginning, but I would be very surprised if we turn out to be operating in many diverse patterns, our environment does not present us with utter chaos, rather with temporally stable packages of constraints.

Mathematician: This is next leads us into the problem of “archetypal rationality”. For small problems, holding a few dozen Fourier spaces in ones head simultaneously, and picking an answer from some suitably localized one is no big deal, but as the problems get larger and larger, our ability to hold simultaneous viewpoints decreases accordingly.

Technically, it is not the case that “as the problem sets get larger and larger, our ability to hold simultaneous viewpoints decreases,” it is the old uncertainty principle at work, or the depth vs. breadth nonsimultaneity principle. No brain, no matter what its capacity, can escape the physical constraints (really the linear temporal constraint) of what David Gelernter referred to as the “spectrum of focus,” that sliding scale of attention from high-focus analytic to mid-focus emotional to low-focus associative imagination. Any thought, no matter how potent the intelligence is, will land at only one point on this attention scale at any moment in time. A superintelligence that could plunge to an incredible analytical depth of a problem would be a super geek; that could spread to an incredible imaginative breadth of a problem would be a super mystic.

Mathematician: Along this line, brain plasticity may well function by simply reinforcing certain Fourier spaces at the expense of the general set.

I think you mean just the opposite of this, brain plasticity, which is at maximum levels in utero and in infancy, is more closely related to the general set. The process of reinforcing certain spaces describes not brain plasticity, but brain sludge. Evolutionarily, brain sludge enhances the potential for preservation if the environment is not changing too rapidly, brain plasticity is preferable only in chaotic environments.

Mathematician: Each Fourier space has, quite simply, its own logic.

This is an important consideration, the nature of knowledge systems, including scientific knowledge, is radically local. It’s why physicists should never become biologists, or worse yet, neuroscientists. It’s why mixing computer and human metaphors is so cludgy. However, we must be very careful not to fall into compost-modern relativism and get lost in pure coherency theories of truth. We must be aware that each Fourier space will be turned towards or away from truth, that not all Fourier spaces are created equal with respect to their utility for our preservation.

To help show what I mean, by expanding into a few other Fourier spaces, I would like to start with the example from above about the preferred seven coherent brain activity spatial patterns. Then, a couple examples about preferred protein folding pathways and preferred protein design pathways.

From Science 2 August, 1996: 595-602. Holm, Lisa & Sander, Chris. “Mapping the Protein Universe”:

Conceptually, each protein structure may be imagined as a point in an abstract, high-dimensional fold space. At close range in this fold space, clusters represent protein families related through strong functional constraints... At intermediate range, clusters are related by shape similarity that does not necessarily reflect similarity of biological function. At long range, the overall distribution of folds is dominated by five densely populated regions, which we call attractors. [W]e put forward the hypothesis that these attractors represent both dominant folding pathways and evolutionary sinks that are the result of physical constraints. Selective pressure in evolution from random or partially random sequences would be more likely to result in specifically folded stable structures in one of these regions.

Only five preferred protein foldability regions here. The next example is from the same issue of Science pg. 610. Kardar, Mehran. “Which Came First, Protein Sequence or Structure?”:

Whereas ‘foldability’ focuses on the [amino acid] sequence, selecting potentially functional ones... ‘designability,’... is based on the structure of resulting protein. This concept is quantified by measuring the number of sequences that uniquely fold into a particular structure (foldability is thus implicitly included). A great technical achievement of these authors is that they are able, for the first time, to compute the energies of all 103,346 structures, for all 2²⁷ possible sequences of 27-mers.... Some structures are not designable as they do not correspond to the ground state of any sequence; the best structure is obtained from 3794 sequences. Several interesting patterns emerge from the enumeration. (i) At the tail of the distribution, there are structures that are highly designable: the number of sequences that fold into them is much greater than expected from simple probability distributions. (ii) These structures have, on average, a larger gap to their first excited state, making them thermodynamically more stable. (iii) The well-designed structures are also more robust against simple changes in the sequence (random mutations). Thus, a major claim... is that the designability principle unites several properties (thermodynamic stability and mutational plasticity) occurring in real proteins.

Here we have only a few thousand preferred protein designs out of over a hundred thousand possible. Also, the linkage of stability and plasticity at the protein level is exactly analogous to the depth vs. breadth situation in the cognitive focus of attention. Also, a short example of preferred evolutionary pathways from Stuart Kauffman’s Origins of Order (1993):

Whether one is comfortable with the idea or not, the existence of preferred ‘directions’ of alteration of developmental pathways implies something like ‘orthogenesis’ - a tendency of evolution to occur in preferred directions not because of selection constraints but because the underlying system has preferred directions of change in the face of random mutations.

Finally, from John Searle’s Mind, Language and Society (1998):

In a word, since the mind creates meaning by imposing conditions of satisfaction on conditions of satisfaction, then the limits to meaning are set by the limits of the mind. And what are those limits? There are five and only five different types of illocutionary points: [assertive, directive, commissive, expressive, declarations]. Declarations are unique among speech acts in that they actually make changes in the world solely in virtue of the successful performance of the speech act. Such cases, where one performs one speech act indirectly by performing another directly, are called “indirect speech acts.” Other sorts of cases where sentence meaning differs systematically from intended speaker meaning include metaphor, metonymy, irony, sarcasm, hyperbole, and understatement. All of these types of illocutionary acts are already prefigured in our discussion of intentionality. The limits of meaning are the limits of intentionality, and it is a consequence of our analysis of intentionality that there is a limited number of things you can do with language.

Again, the concept of preferred branches comes up, language is not completely mutable, it is limited. There is a design inherent at all scales of reality which dictates that only some forms and actions are possible and not others.

Even at the smallest level we are constrained, the Heisenberg Principle simply is a reflection that we cannot see the past or the future, only the other particles in space around us at the frozen “now.” We cannot see their spin, or momentum, only their position. If we wanted to see their spin, or momentum, we would have to allow some motion, hence, we would not see their position.

Mathematician: The frequency component of this generalized Fourier processor is not limited to the brain, but exists in all eukaryotic cells, thus easily spilling over into the rest of the body (and possibly beyond the body).

This would be helpful in explaining the increasingly well documented cognitive experience of tacit knowledge and implicit perception.

Mathematician: We may yet find that building efficient AI and upload capable devices still requires the use of at least some “wetware” as this meat in our bodies is called.

If each Fourier space is discrete, then the boundaries between them must be analog for jumping to occur. Thus, I would agree with you that an upload capable device must be a mix of digital and analog computers, most probably in roughly the estimated 20% digital-80% analog mix of neurochemical interactions we currently possess. Perhaps it is four times more evolutionarily important to jump boundaries than it is to settle into a Fourier space. Perhaps each Fourier space is at minimum a tetrahedron with four faces. Who knows? Maybe Buckminster Fuller in Synergetics had a few useful guesses at what is going on. As he monotonously said “Angle and frequency modulation exclusively define all experiences.”

Searching for Ground

It seems that the search for the existence of free will ends up at the same garbage dump that the search for the existence of rationality ends up at. There is no “ground” to free will any more than there is “ground” to rationality. We have here a method to see where free will is not, but not to actually find out if we have it at all. Likewise, we have a method to see where rationality is not, namely where reasoning entities are selected out of existence, but not to actually find out if we have rationality at all, because what is defined as rational can only intelligibly be done a posteriori. It is not enough to say “I am rational because I am doing something for a reason,” the follow-up question must be asked, “Did it work?” Likewise with free will, it is not enough to say “I have free will because I choose to do something,” the follow-up question must be asked, “What choice did you really have?” The operation of free will and rationality cannot be shown a priori, there is an unavoidable information deficit.

Mathematician: At this time because I feel that no ontological basis has yet been defined for the concept of self-referencing. I am not nit-picking this issue just for the fun of it, but because I believe that establishing the ontological basis for self-referencing requires us to penetrate into an area of the ontologically unknown that we currently perceive as acausal behind which we may find both a truer form of acausality, and the ontological basis for self-referencing.

Leibniz’s monads were a stab in this direction, a very fruitful stab considering that little or no metaphysical work worth the name has been done since him (except Whitehead’s finishing touches on Leibniz). I have been pondering the nature of the link between the hypothesis that life evolves in the direction of “the edge of chaos” (actually defined more rigorously in the biophysics work coming out of the Santa Fe Institute), and the acausal (or transcendental) realm that provides the coherency to matter-energy structural systems, the source of existence, if you will. You have stated the matter well.

Recently, I ran across an analysis by the philosopher Etienne Gilson who concluded (rightly) that: “You must either begin as a realist with being, in which case you will have a knowledge of being, or begin as a critical idealist with knowledge, in which case you will never come in contact with being.”

What Gilson refers to as the “critical idealist” I was referring to as the “smug nihilist.” Being and truth are, of course, different aspects of the same ontological primitive. Unless you begin with a care for truth, you will never have knowledge. You cannot begin with knowledge itself and get anywhere at all, you must begin with caring for truth.

A focus on utility rather than on truth leads quickly to nihilistic barbarism which produces only the illusion of self-control and freedom. The chaotic world outside that such a focus produces, severely limits the courses of action open to you in favor of an over-concentration in your time-energy budget on personal defense; and undercuts any incentive for self-control to develop, in favor of attempting to appropriate whatever appears to be useful to you at the moment. The truth will set you free. Utility alone will enslave you; often without your recognition of the bars surrounding you due to the self-delusion fostered by the turn away from truth.

Certainty is a liquid realm concept, it is the conjunction of consciousness (chaotic realm) and being (ordered realm). Another way to look at the central position certainty has in our lives, is to picture consciousness as a coherent dynamic energy pattern operating in the past, formulating purposes - Thomas Cramer’s backwards-in-time microcausality (transactional interpretation of QM); aimed at and stabilizing in the now - being or the particulate substance of the universe; then springing forth from this ordered foundation into the chosen future, existence itself - Cramer’s forwards-in-time microcausality. We may choose entropic purposes that lead to loss of pattern coherency, we may miss our footing springing from being, our chosen future may go awry in conflict with other entities or brute necessity, but certainty lifts us above inanimate matter and low-level life forms.

The compost-modern worship of the will-to-power that replaced waning interest in truth, had nowhere to go except, as Deleuze & Guattari said, “turning to destruction, abolition pure and simple, the passion of abolition.” The strenuous efforts by the cultural elites (both humanists & technicists share the same culture regarding this) to abolish certainty in favor of radical skepticism (nihilism) have one objective: the denial of a future for humanity. The passion of abolition that sets in, once the truth has been jettisoned, doesn’t abate until we sink back to the animal’s level or lower. A culture with an impoverished epistemology of ‘criticism-unto-destruction’ will result in destruction all right, the destruction of the critic.

The only danger is that pure deduction can lead completely away from truth, or objective reality; and land you in a solipsistic backwater of subjective reality leaving you vulnerable to unpleasant surprises in real life. Pure deduction loses all meaning unless it is correlated to ontological particulars.

I agree that the self, through consciousness, freely roams the universe. Consciousness may be a point aspect of the backwards-in-time microcausality from Cramer’s transactional QM interpretation. However, there still is a subjective “I” separate from everything else in the universe. This separation is what makes it impossible for anyone to ever produce a valid scientific theory of consciousness, each individual consciousness is utterly unique and totally inaccessible. You cannot ever feel what I feel inside, nor can any experiment test any theory about what I feel, subjectivity is impenetrable. There is a boundary between “I” and the rest of the universe, and this boundary is definite, not indefinite. There really is something that gives coherency to the subjective “I” and that something constructs a boundary between one quark or bit of substance and the quark immediately next to it.

Hermeneutics

You cannot live a public or private sordid life and still think straight because the movements of the body are inseparable from the thoughts of the mind. The growing scientific view of the couplings between brain and behavior or mind and body arising from biophysics, neuroscience and coordination dynamics is putting to rest the disingenuous notion that leading a squalid private life will not produce squalid thoughts for public consumption.

For instance, Stuart Kauffman discusses cellular positioning mechanisms, then concludes “the entire genomic system is, in reality, a single coupled system whose attractors constitute both map and interpretation at once.” If hermeneutics is interpretation and deconstruction is mapping, then these two post-rational programs must go together to make any sense. Practicing hermeneutics is inviting the deconstructionists to shred the past.

For another instance, Gerald Edelman emphasizes the coupling of multiple conceptual maps to our sensorimotor behavior in a global mapping, “a dynamic structure containing multiple reentrant local maps (both motor and sensory) that are able to interact with nonmapped parts of the brain.” The link between our behavior and our thoughts occurs prior to learning, prior to recognition, he says “sensorimotor activity over the whole mapping selects neuronal groups that give the appropriate output or behavior, resulting in [perceptual] categorization.” Continual recategorization, arising from our on-going behavior results in memory, which is foundational to our higher conceptualizing processes.

Scott Kelso in Dynamic Patterns (1995) notes that a baby will only try to make an adult sound when it is close to one of its own babbling sounds, “Access to the world of language, it seems, depends on these preferred perceptual-motor patterns.” The formation of our language itself depends on our behavior. I believe this holds true indefinitely, indeed, I believe that worldview attractors function similarly, one only learns something close to one’s attractor. Kelso’s ideas of the coupling between behavior and thoughts sound familiar, “Intending and doing are but two aspects of a single behavioral act” and “Planning and executing are but two aspects of a single act.” He summarizes his position:

An order parameter isomorphism connects mind and body, will and brain, mental and neural events. Mind itself is a spatiotemporal pattern that molds the metastable dynamic patterns of the brain. Mind-body dualism is replaced by a single isomorphism, the heart of which is semantically meaningful pattern variables.

This close connection is why the branching of vocations is the greatest cause for the explosion of memes over time; as we behave in specialized ways, our language and knowledge, our thinking itself, branches away from each other. It is also why, during ages of highly refined, civilized behavior, language is refined, and during ages of coarse, uncivilized behavior, such as our own, language is uncouth.

Did Martin Heidegger live such a sordid life that it undoubtedly contaminated his thinking processes? Yes, he did. I will post a summary from “Snowblind: Martin Heidegger & Hannah Arendt” by Berel Lang in The New Criterion January 1996, and Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger by Elzbieta Ettinger (1995) (who was granted unusual limited access to the Heidegger estate’s private archive of letters). Heidegger was 35 and married with two children, Arendt was 18 and a first-year Jewish student at University of Marburg in fall of 1924 when they began an adulterous affair. He dropped Arendt for another woman when he was appointed professor at the University of Freiburg. Heidegger was a Nazi Party member from 1933 to 1945, and for thirty years after the war, never condemned the Nazi regime. He was made rector (actually called Fuhrer) at Freiburg in 1933 during the expulsion of Jewish students and faculty. He announced in 1933 that “the Fuhrer and he alone is the present and future German reality and law.” Arendt referred to Heidegger as a “potential murderer” when she found out that Heidegger sent a circular letter refusing permission to enter Freiburg to all former Jewish faculty, including his own mentor, Edmund Husserl, who became ill and died shortly afterward. He was suspended from the university for four years, until 1950. Arendt describes Heidegger as “ly[ing] notoriously always and everywhere, and whenever he can” (1950); “He certainly believed that... he could buy off the whole world at the lowest possible price and cheat his way out of everything that is embarrassing to him” (1949). Arendt got back together with Heidegger in 1950, even though he increasingly resented her success as a philosopher.

Heidegger’s estate is still holding much of his private correspondence secret, presumably because it will damage his prestige further, sending his Being and Time onto Barnes & Noble’s bargain shelves. The thoughts that come with living a sordid life tend not to rise above justifications for animal behavior, satisfying uncivilized desires revolving around carnality and blood lust. The river of moral pollution fouling our social environment, in the form of Hollywood’s movie and television productions, has a tributary in Heidegger, along with many others. Heidegger nowadays is an anti-rational creature of the left, one of the Unabomber’s buddies.

Heidegger wrote (from Basic Writings):

The end of philosophy proves to be the triumph of the manipulable arrangement of a scientific-technological world and of the social order proper to that world. The end of philosophy means the beginning of the world civilization based upon Western European thinking.

This is sophomoric utopian One World State drivel. As Etienne Gilson said “Philosophy always buries its undertakers.”

He also wrote (from Heidegger ed. T. Sheehan):

Philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline.

Now obviously, a guy who writes this kind of nonsense shouldn’t be taken seriously, especially by soi-disant extropians. This is just ‘crypto-Marxist’ determinism, pure and simple. The power of individual free will is not to be discounted, arguments of inevitability of any specific technological development becoming dominant in world culture are Marxist in nature. Heidegger in a 1935 lecture “An Introduction to Metaphysics” held that violence is a stronger value, more profound, noble and beautiful, than the weaker values of compromise and mutual aid. So much for non-coercion, is it any wonder that ‘crypto-Marxist’ philosophies grew like weeds in a filthy back lot after being fertilized with Heidegger?

The linkage between sordid living and corrupted worldviews is drawn out in Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals (1988) where he portrays the dark, irrational underside of the supposed paragons of rationality, the secular prophets of hedonism and utopianism. E. Michael Jones, in his Degenerate Moderns: Modernity as Rationalized Sexual Misbehavior (1993), nails the sordid intellectuals in general:

...the crucial intellectual event occurs... when vices are transmuted into theories, when the ‘intellectual’ sets up shop in rebellion against moral law and therefore in rebellion against truth. All modern ‘isms’ follow as a result of this rebellion... All of them can best be understood in light of the moral disorders of their founders, proponents, and adherents.

Marx, Rousseau, Sartre, Freud, Bertrand Russell, Margaret Mead, Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells, Keynes - all privately sordid, all to be viewed with extreme caution along with Heidegger.

Hermeneutics is part and parcel of postmodernism, of which Richard Tarnas in The Passion of the Western Mind (1991) succinctly says: “Implicitly, the one postmodern absolute is critical consciousness, which, by deconstructing all, seems compelled by its own logic to do so to itself as well.” Deconstruction, indeed compost-modernism as a philosophical program, destroys all foundation of authority and justice, including it’s own foundation, it is the essence of anti-rationality, it is “self-destructive.” This is nothing more fancy than nihilism, it leads inexorably to authority and celebrity worship, self-granted authority and celebrity: smug nihilism. Richard Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) puts it that truth is “what our peers will let us get away with saying.” We then choose our peers and place them on altars for our worship, since only they have been granted the authority (by ourselves, of course, hence, the smugness) to pronounce on “truth,” which becomes nothing more than consensual validation, a civilizational sclerosis of narrow-minded, self-selected credentialism.

Hermeneutics is interpreting deconstructed maps; the maps change with technology, the interpretations change with new purposes. Hermeneutics is thus somewhat of a lost cause if you intend to reconstruct original meaning, unless you have no new maps or facts, and no new purposes or values. The practice of hermeneutics is really just gussied up current human judgment, achieving only ghostly apparitions of past worldviews at best. The extreme difficulty of adopting original purposes for one’s own, so that an approximation of the original meaning of writings can be arrived at through personal interpretation, makes individuals turn from explanatory synthesis to the much easier descriptive analysis, just so that they can point to a finished product, facts. So much for the purpose of hermeneutics, it naturally devolves to deconstruction, which, as I said, is simply subversion. Unless you can adopt the original worldviews, with their core consensual purposes and adherent values, you cannot reconstitute the original intentions of writers from earlier ages, because you cannot interpret the words, or the facts, without applying your own current values to them. Heidegger and the pre-Socratics would not be able to communicate face-to-face except on the most rudimentary behavioral basis no matter how much he imagined he’d penetrated to their worldviews.

One doesn’t ‘examine’ value, one makes an evaluation of which historical consensual purposes most closely mesh with one’s own current personal purposes, and use the living traditions growing out of the values and meanings adhering to those purposes to buttress one’s own purposes, values and meaning. This evaluation is aided immensely by a thorough understanding of the historical facts pertaining to the times in question, as well as an understanding of the current facts, the context of the present modified by the traditions of the past aimed at the achievement of your purposes in the future. One never answers anything unbiasedly, one aims to further one’s purpose keeping a close eye on the objective truth of present circumstances.

It seems to me, that this exercise is just deconstructionist ‘language games,’ a popular fashion. Life is not a game for those who seek truth while pursuing ‘the good.’ The abandonment of common-sense, everyday ‘is’ results from a denial of the possibility of truth, only uncertainty is left. This is nihilism of the radical skepticist variety, no static, no dynamic, nothing at all. What self-evident truths does E-prime reveal to ordinary individuals?

Darwin’s theory does seem like a ‘just so’ story. Many individuals believe Darwin held that evolution occurs by ‘random’ mutations, but this is not what he proposed. In Origin he specifically does not endorse randomness when he says that novel variants arise ‘by chance’; “This, of course, is a wholly incorrect expression, but it serves to acknowledge plainly our ignorance of the cause of each particular variation.” The theory has an unbroachable epistemological barrier in it, selection obscures the variants it works on, making it historically difficult to track the selection process. Likewise, identifying the immediate causes of selectional effects are beyond our ability to determine because the designation of fitness, like the designation of rationality itself, can only be made conclusively, a posteriori. Darwin did not deify chance, unlike QM physicists who have deified random activity as an ontological primitive for lack of the intellectual fortitude to search for firmer metaphysical foundations (also a failing of positivists who deify information as an ontological primitive). Individuals who mistake the mental concept of randomness for something that actually exists in physical reality cannot make a rational case for the possibility of rationality, let alone the fact of rationality. It is mistaking an epistemological barrier for an ontological primitive.

Using the language of your opponents, if they are the garden-variety death-worshipping types, is a waste of time, they worship irrationality, deify chance, they believe their lives are purposeless and meaningless. Either they are close to a saddle of a worldview moral attractor, and hence, could slip over into a superior attractor through a tangential understanding of my language, or they are deeply inside their degraded attractor and aren’t going anywhere no matter what. As Ayn Rand concluded from bitter experience, “It is impossible to deal or even to communicate with men whose ideas are fundamentally opposed to one’s own.”

Since an appeal to reason doesn’t work on anti-rational individuals, a better method is absorption of ideas over time. I read a well-stated account of this process in On Parallels in Universal History (1972) by Alan Gowans: “Ideas can only develop in minds already accepting their presuppositions; and these presuppositions cannot be forced in, nor picked up by chance observation. Or more succinctly, to be absorbed and acted upon, truths must seem self-evident.” He goes on to point out that the “underlying mental attitudes of civilization in any age are not transmissible in the ordinary sense. They are absorbed by rather than taught to its members. They are not arrived at by reasoning processes, but instead provide the foundation for whatever reasoning processes a given civilization may employ.” Reason has to start somewhere, this is the value of tradition.

Reilly Jones

© 2001

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