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Episode 1: What It’s Like to Be Your Brain
Have you ever wondered how electrical activity within your brain can give rise to the experience of a real world with you in it? In this episode, we explore how that is possible by putting ourselves imaginatively in the brain’s place.
Download (Right click, Save As): What’s It Like To Be Your Brain.mp3 Episode page (including transcript).
Episode 2: The ‘Hard’ Problem of Consciousness
Have you ever wondered what consciousness is and why scientists and philosophers have such a hard time explaining it? In this episode, we’ll try to see why consciousness is elusive and how we can understand it.
Download (Right click, Save As): The ‘Hard’ Problem of Consciousness.mp3 Episode page (including transcript).
Episode 3: The World as a Black Box
Have you ever wondered how it is possible that we can look at things from the inside or from the outside? Here we explore the concept of the black box, to understand what it means to be an observer.
Download (Right click, Save As): The World as a Black Box.mp3 Episode page (including transcript).
Episode 4: Truth By Definition
Some claims can’t possibly be true, while others can’t possibly be false. On the other hand, most claims that people make could be either true or false, and we are faced with the challenge to decide. Here we explore a particular kind of truth and its role in mathematics and science.
Download (Right click, Save As): Truth By Definitionn.mp3 Episode page (including transcript).
Episode 5: How Do You Know?
We live in an age that craves precision and certainty. Even information can be measured scientifically. Yet, it is precisely in an environment polluted by disinformation and cluttered with junk information that there is the greatest need to ask: how do I know what I think I know?
Download (Right click, Save As): How Do You Know?.mp3 Episode page (including transcript).
We live in an age that craves precision and certainty. Even information can be measured scientifically. Yet, it is precisely in an environment polluted by disinformation and cluttered with junk information that there is the greatest need to ask: how do I know what I think I know?
Download (Right click, Save As): How Do You Know?.mp3
Subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or through your favorite podcast app (feed).
Transcript:
We’re born with instinct and we quickly develop an ingrained trust of our senses and other faculties. We naturally believe that reality is what our eyes show us. For, how else can we know how to act in a given situation, unless it’s clear what the situation is? Yet, reality is not naturally clear. We see things a definite way because ambiguous perception would be useless, leaving us confused, wavering in doubt. We trust our feelings because they provide an instant assessment and prompt us to ready-made behavior, especially when delay could be fatal. But precisely because of this haste, perception, instinct, and feeling can be wrong. Fortunately, we have reason as well. But how reliable is reason?
One likes to think that logical thinking leads to truth. That is because the truths of logic are independent of particular facts, which are always subject to doubt. However sure the steps of logical reasoning might be, they are merely stepping stones from presumed facts to action. They are only reliable if we know where to put our foot in the first place. To arrive at certainty, you must begin with certainty. Much of our reasoning is now done for us by computers, which are logic machines. But like us, their output is only as reliable as their input.
Logic forces the issue of certainty, because it is based on language rather than on reality. Logical propositions are statements framed to be either true or false. By formulating statements that way, reason misleads us to believe that we can know things to be clearly one way or another. We are even trained in school to answer “true or false” questions on examinations. But only statements are true or false, not reality itself. At a given time and place, it may seem that either it’s raining or it’s not. But when you step outdoors and feel a single droplet on the skin of your face, is it then raining or not? The question may only matter if you are trying to decide whether to take your umbrella, or even whether to go out at all. And that is the crux of the matter: the point of certainty is to decide, to know what to do next.
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You may be familiar with the frustrating limitations of public surveys, which ask you to rate your degree of accord with various propositions. In effect, these are “multiple choice” questions, also familiar from school days. Expanding the number of categories beyond simply true or false may seem like an improvement, but in fact all categories are arbitrary divisions. In the case of surveys, our replies are used by others to make decisions that matter to them. Perhaps such information is reliable to the extent that people actually behave in ways that correspond to how they answer questions on surveys. But, haven’t you felt that the questions are misleading in the first place, and wished you could give more nuanced answers? In some ways, the public survey is an apt metaphor for our own internal thought processes. We query ourselves in order to decide some issue that could require action. How we reason, the questions we pose, the options we imagine, and the sort of answers we expect are all shaped by language—our self-talk. We tend to think in words, which means in propositions and categories.
The digital age reflects this inborn propositional thinking. The essence of digital processing is ‘yes’ or ‘no’, ‘either/or’. In logic, by convention there is no ground between true and false. But true and false are artificially sharp categories designed to generate the certainty upon which to act decisively. In many cases this works and serves us well. Even if we cannot predict the weather perfectly, we can send spacecraft millions of miles to rendezvous precisely to a location as elusive as the proverbial needle in a haystack. The mathematics based on this convention, and digital computers in particular, enable us to do this because the truths of mathematics, as of logic, are certain by definition. Yet, no plan or theory ever corresponds perfectly to reality, which is always more nuanced and may include surprises. Calculations are no more accurate than the data on which they are based. If you start with a false assumption, only by sheer luck can you arrive at a true conclusion.
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Probability and statistics compensate for the limitations of conventional reasoning, as it applies to the naturally ambiguous real world. The probability that it will rain in the next minute refers to similar situations in the past, of which a record has been kept. If it rained in 60 out of 100 past situations where similar conditions prevailed, then it is fair to claim there is a “60% chance” that it is about to rain now. Yet, even statistics deals with definable events, which are presumed either to have happened or not. (Was it indeed raining in each of those 60 cases? By what criterion?) Any formal reasoning depends on concepts, operations, and conditions that are clearly defined to begin with. Thought aims toward clarity, but also presupposes it.
Statements can be true or false; reality is just what it is. Certainty is a state of mind, not a state of the world. We hope to feel certain, especially when we need to act, because being wrong (or failing to act) can have dire consequences. Yet, however certain we feel, mistakes are possible. Sometimes (but not always, of course) it is better to do nothing than to act prematurely. In some situations, especially when time allows, it is wise to question what the situation actually is, because the reality is never as clear and simple as we like it to be. There is room for a middle ground between true and false, which are categories that unrealistically presuppose well-defined situations. Yet, navigating the no-man’s-land between true and false is psychologically challenging. Remaining in doubt goes against the fundamental instinct to be decisive and ready to act. Not acting in that instance requires a different sort of action: to take the stance of unknowing, which insists on taking time to question appearances.
They say that seeing is believing. But believing can take the place of seeing. One speaks of believing one’s own eyes, but we are hardly called upon to believe what is readily apparent to the senses. Verbal claims are another matter. Apart from statements of what is immediately given in experience, one must decide whether to believe the claims that others make. These may be claims about their own experience, but often they are hearsay, or about concepts and abstractions that have little to do with immediate experience and a lot to do with emotions. Language itself makes unreason possible. The bottom line is that you can be controlled when you can be led to believe a claim despite the evidence of your senses and common sense. It’s a form of hypnosis, the power of suggestion. Inherent in language is the power to deceive—not only by outright lying but also by creating a parallel world. That may have served society when people had to be tricked into behaving properly. It also serves to entertain us: the willing suspension of disbelief. In the modern era, however, belief has become the bane of demagoguery, social media and divisive politics, which are platforms for bad behavior.
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Conspiracy theories are akin to religious beliefs. They allow the insider to be special, provocative, in the know, even to feel saved. Belief serves to provide identity, status, and belonging, as though within a tribe or cult. It polarizes and divides society. Political extremism flourishes in times of uncertainty, when there is a glut of information, of divergent voices clamoring for attention, overwhelming one’s confidence in the ability to make sense of them or to know what to believe.
Unlike the testimony of your senses, verbal claims—by political leaders, newscasters, and social media—provoke belief or disbelief, unless one simply ignores them. Whether true or false, they direct attention—sometimes away from the real issues. Either way, one’s energies are channeled to sort them out in the terms in which they are presented. It is easier to believe a claim than to reject it, which requires an effort that goes against our social instinct to be agreeable. It is even harder to think in one’s own original terms. These are the downsides and liabilities of our human wondrous human capacity to communicate, to express our thoughts and feelings in symbols. Belief is how we talk ourselves into things that we know in our bones cannot be true and may not even be relevant. Believers do not have to come up with their own vision, their own claims about reality, their own sense of what is important, their own story. They simply sign up to someone else’s story.
If you enjoyed this podcast, tune in to this channel again or visit my website: www.stanceofunknowing.com.
Music by John Nemy. Production by John Humphrey, Eureka Web Design.
Some claims can’t possibly be true, while others can’t possibly be false. On the other hand, most claims that people make could be either true or false, and we are faced with the challenge to decide. Here we explore a particular kind of truth and its role in mathematics and science.
Download (Right click, Save As): Truth By Definition.mp3
Subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or through your favorite podcast app (feed).
Transcript:
A guy walks into a bar. He sits down beside you and declares: “I always lie.” “Okay,” you reply hesitantly. It seems an odd thing for a stranger to say out of the blue, even as a way to break the ice. And, there is something odd about the statement itself. For, if he is lying, then he is contradicting himself. His statement “I always lie” would be a lie. Imagine he had said instead: “I always tell the truth.” He cannot be contradicting himself, but it still might not be true. In fact, we are suspicious of such self-affirming claims, which hardly inspire confidence.
Some statements are self-affirming in a different way, simply by being redundant. For example: “All men are males.” This is true by definition, since man and male simply refer to the same thing. The general equivalent in logic is “A equals A.” The equivalent in arithmetic is “One equals one.” These are tautologies, which are true by definition because any defined thing is equal to itself. Yet, real things (which may not be well-defined) change over time and become no longer equal to their former selves. Tautologies involve timeless definitions and not real things in time. The mathematical statement “X plus x equals 2x,” is a tautology if it is a matter of definition. In other words, if “two” is defined as the regrouping together of “one” and “one.” But such general and abstract statements as occur in mathematics are likely gleaned from actual experience with things in the world. Such experience depends on being able to identify individual “things.” Apples are clearly individual objects you can add together. But what about clouds?
While mathematical truths may be tautologies, scientific claims are not supposed to be. By definition, empirical claims cannot be true by definition. They can be true, but they can also be false, provided there is something you can discover that would help you decide. A claim with no means to test it is only speculation. The worst thing you can say about a scientific theory is that it’s not even false.
Scientific laws are generalizations of many data points gained through measurements of real systems. However, the very notion of “system” is a defined thing, an idealization that may correspond only roughly to the reality it is supposed to represent. The Solar System, for example, is now defined to include the sun and eight planets. (It used to include a ninth planet, Pluto.) But it could also include the asteroids, comets that come and go, and distant bodies far beyond Pluto. It is a simple math problem to consider the gravitational interaction of two celestial bodies. But three or more becomes very complex. The whole idea behind idealization is to simplify enough that the system can be treated mathematically.
A law that is formulated to express the observed behavior of a system is a tautology to the extent it describes the idealization perfectly. However, it only imperfectly describes the corresponding reality it is supposed to represent. The law expresses an average of observed data points, from which there are always outliers that don’t fit the curve. It’s a generalization, a rule to which there are always exceptions. The curve itself is an idealization, a line drawn through the data points after the fact. If a mathematical equation can be found for this curve, it becomes a mathematical law. It is a tautology in the sense that it is simply an alternative expression for the geometric curve. So, the idea of laws of nature is somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, laws of nature are generalizations about the real world. On the other hand, they are imaginary human inventions, expressing claims that are true by definition.
The word ‘law’ conveys a dual meaning. In science it means an observed regularity, a pattern that can be formulated. In jurisprudence it means a decree made by an authority, such as a king or a legislature. That is obviously a human creation. Yet, from our religious heritage, we also have the notion of divine decrees, like the Ten Commandments. Because the early scientists were devoutly religious, they imagined that the laws of nature were divine decrees: God created the matter of the universe and also the laws of physics that govern over that matter. The idea of governing laws still lurks in the background of science, especially in the idea of determinism.
At the same time that the early scientists were trying to discern the divine decrees that govern the universe, they were also discovering that the universe could be understood as a machine. Ordinary machines are made by people. They have well-defined parts which interact in well-defined ways. They can be perfectly understood by those who made them. If the universe is a machine made by God, then we mortals should be able to understand it too—at least to the degree we are made in God’s image. So the thinking went. Like a clockwork or simple machine, the universe follows precise laws, which should allow humans to predict its behavior forward and backward in time as precisely as one likes.
However, it is not the real universe that is deterministic, but the idealization as a machine. The laws of physics have no power to “govern” how matter behaves, because they are no more than pithy descriptions of how it actually does behave. Where possible, these pity descriptions are expressed mathematically. Equations are deterministic because they are true by definition. They describe mathematical curves perfectly, yet they only imperfectly describe the natural world. Even today there remains some confusion among physicists about the status of laws, especially in the microscopic realm, where quantum systems seem to really be simple and no more than what we define them to be. However, the lesson learned on the ordinary human scale is that no idealization ever coincides perfectly with the real thing it describes. If that is so, even at the quantum scale reality is more complex than meets the eye.
If you have enjoyed this podcast, tune in to further episodes of “The Stance of Unknowing”, or visit my website: www.stanceofunknowing.com.
Music by John Nemy. Production by John Humphrey, Eureka Web Design.
Have you ever wondered how it is possible that we can look at things from the inside or from the outside? Here we explore the concept of the black box, to understand what it means to be an observer.
Download (Right click, Save As): The World as a Black Box.mp3
Subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or through your favorite podcast app (feed).
Transcript:
Imagine an opaque sealed container with a single input and a single output. You don’t know what it contains or what it is supposed to do. You can see what goes into it and what comes out of it, but that is all. Such a container is called a “black box.” By definition, you are an observer outside the box. You want to understand what is going on inside it.
Here’s the twist, though: you too are a black box. That is, the brain responsible for “you” and for the experience you call “seeing” is sealed inside a container, your skull. Without opening it up, neither you nor anyone else can see what the box contains. Even if your skull is opened through surgery, it will be far from obvious what the “mechanism” inside is supposed to do or how it works. Like the black box, the best way for an observer to understand what makes you tick is to watch your inputs and outputs. On one level, that could mean watching what you eat and what you excrete. But physical openings are not the only inputs and outputs for organisms. There are also your sensory inputs and your motor outputs. The human body is bombarded constantly with potential stimuli from the surrounding world. Like the brain sealed inside the skull, the body is sealed within the skin. An observer can note what seem to be actions you perform and also what seem to be stimuli to which you respond. However, identifying these is a matter of the observer’s choice and interpretation. A fellow human being from your culture will be able to make assumptions about your inputs and outputs based on what you have in common. An alien observer from another galaxy might be reluctant to make any assumptions at all. In either case, the outside observer may have different ideas than you do about what your inputs and outputs are.
What an organism considers significant to respond to is its own interpretation of energy or matter impinging on it, which may be different from an observer’s interpretation. An outside observer can only speculate on what an organism, such as a human body, considers significant—mostly by observing its outputs in response to inputs. This is something to keep in mind when observing other creatures.
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But just as the body or the skull is a black box to the outside observer, the world outside the body or the skull is a black box to the organism. The barrier works both ways. Inside and outside are mutually relative. Each is a black box to the other. From one point of view, the organism’s sensory interfaces with the world are inputs to the organism. From another point of view, the organism’s motor outputs are inputs to the world as a black box. There is an ongoing interchange between these black boxes.
Any interpretation of the world outside the skull or body can only take place through processes within the skull or body. You cannot jump out of your skin to see the world as it might look to a disembodied spirit. The world has no intrinsic look to it. There is no such thing as the real appearance of the world when no one is looking. There is no such thing as looking without eyes to do the looking. Your brain cannot leave the skull to have a direct view of the world outside. Your knowledge of that world is limited to what can be gotten by treating the world as a black box. In other words, you can try doing something—which for you is a motor output but which for the world is an input—and then observe changes that result from what you do. For you, these are changes in sensory input; for the world, they are outputs.
Imagine yourself to be an observer inside the skull, representing the brain. You can also imagine yourself as an outside observer, representing the external world. From either point of view, if you wish to know what is happening on the other side of the barrier, you can only try some input and observe the output. In this regard, a scientific observer is in the same boat as their own brain inside their skull. The challenge is the same: poke the universe and see what happens or poke the organism and see what happens. Scientific experiments are controlled ways of “poking,” whether they are experiments performed on the universe or on an organism such as yourself.
Perhaps this is one reason why the universe was once thought of as an organism. For a long while since, however, it has been more convenient to think of the universe and the organisms within it as machines. The advantage is that machines are created by human beings, so we can understand them, at least when they are simple, because we made them. They are exactly and only what we say they are. However, the universe—and the organism—were not created by us. They are what they are, not what we say they are. There is no guarantee that we can understand them. Our present idea of understanding is to think that what lies inside the black box is a machine, because machines are predictable. That works to some extent, especially to create technology. But neither the universe nor the organism is literally a machine.
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Trying to understand the universe is tricky enough. Trying to understand yourself as part of it (or as not part of it) adds the problem of self-reference. It is like standing in a hall of mirrors, where you see endless reflections of reflections of yourself. Suppose you want to under-stand how your brain daily creates the impression of a real external world in your experience. As part of that impression, your brain also creates the impression of a self (you!) who seeks to understand. Where exactly do you stand when “under-standing”? Inside your brain looking out, or outside it looking in?
Including yourself in the picture introduces a maddening circularity. You want to know how your brain produces your experience. Yet “your brain” is an idea, which is part of the “experience” your brain is supposed to produce, which is also an idea that is part of your experience… and so on. Of course, everything that can enter your consciousness is part of your experience. It only seems otherwise when it becomes a feature of a story you tell. It then seems to be an element of objective reality, potentially a story science can tell. Science would like to explain your personal experience in terms of basic entities and forces—to explain sensations, thoughts, and feelings ultimately in terms of the movement of atoms and electrons. But the concept of atom and the concept of electron are derived from the personal experiences of scientists, which are specially gleaned through the use of experimental apparatus. To explain those personal experiences in terms of atoms and electrons simply repeats the question on another level. Science goes in circles when it tries to explain mind in terms of matter, because both ‘matter’ and ‘mind’ are concepts in the mind.
When you think of yourself as a black box, you are in a particular dilemma, which is also an opportunity. You are both the inquirer and the object of inquiry. Questions like “why did I do that?” or “why am I feeling this right now?” invite you to look from both perspectives. You can search your real-time experience for reasons in your own private logic. You can also wonder, as an outside observer would, what is the cause of your feeling or behavior. We are privileged to have both ways of looking.
If you have enjoyed this episode, please tune in to more on this channel or visit my website at www.stanceofunknowing.com.
Music by John Nemy. Production by John Humphrey, Eureka Web Design.
Have you ever wondered what consciousness is and why scientists and philosophers have such a hard time explaining it? In this episode, we’ll try to see why consciousness is elusive and how we can understand it.
Download (Right click, Save As): The ‘Hard’ Problem of Consciousness.mp3
Subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or through your favorite podcast app (feed).
Transcript:
To many thinkers over the ages there has seemed to be an unbridgeable gulf between the material world and our consciousness of it. You can hold physical things in your hand or weigh them. They can do you harm. Thoughts, feelings, sensations and imagined things don’t seem to have weight or to be the same kind of thing at all. We say: “Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you.” What is the relationship between physical things like stones and mental things like words? Science attempts to explain the physical world in physical terms. It runs into trouble trying to explain the mental world, which does not consist of physical things.
Physical things interact with other physical things like a succession of dominos knocking each other over. One thing causes another to happen. But what causes thoughts and feelings? Science says that electrical and chemical processes in the nerves of the brain give rise to them. But if physical events can only cause other physical events, how can they cause mental events? That’s the mystery we hope to unravel here.
But what exactly do we mean by ‘mental’? In this context, it means whatever you can consciously experience. Not the things in the world you have an experience of, but the experience itself. In many cases, that’s an elusive distinction. When you look at something, you are seeing the thing, not seeing your experience of it. But when you picture a red apple in your mind’s eye, or remember having seen one, the real apple is not there. What seems to be there in your consciousness is not a physical thing. Science would like to explain its presence in your mind in terms of physical events in your brain. But that is exactly what is so challenging.
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Scientific explanation is a kind of story. The story may or may not be true, which is what science tries to find out. But, either way, the story is an account told by one person to another. Even when you tell the story only to yourself, it is told from a different point of view than having the experience the story is about. Scientific explanation is always a story about experience, but it is not the experience itself. Science describes the material world from an impersonal point of view, but conscious experience is always personal. The difference between these two points of view is the source of the gulf between the physical and the mental. The scientific story is about events in the physical world. But the story itself is not part of the physical world. It consists of words and their meanings, which are not physical things but mental things. We might be able to explain consciousness better if we can understand how words and meanings relate to the physical things they are about.
As described by an onlooker who tells the story, physical events and processes are matters of cause and effect. But the story itself is a different sort of thing. The words in the story don’t cause each other. Of course, there are physical vocal cords involved in speech, and marks on physical paper involved in printed words. But the meanings of the words are not determined by the physical things they represent. Meanings are assigned by people—deliberately, if not consciously.
Of course, there are neurological events going on in the physical brain, which correspond to those meanings, just as there are electrical operations going on in a physical computer. In the computer, there is physical wiring and in the brain there are neurological connections. You can understand the wiring in an electrical circuit in terms of flowing electrons; but you can also understand it in terms of the reasoning behind it, what it is designed to do. The term ‘neuro-logical’ has two components. There are neural events, such as the chemical discharges of nerve cells, propagated along axons. These can be viewed as events in the physical world that happen through causal processes taking place in space and time. However, these processes are also logical events, which take place in logical order rather than sequence in time. They are not something that just happens but something the brain does as part of the body’s survival strategy, its reasons.
In other words, neurological events are intended as well as caused. An intention is not a material thing like a stone or an electron. While the organism is a material object, it is also an agent with purposes. Its actions, whether external or internal, can be viewed as moves in a sort of game, with reasons behind them. Neurological events, like computer operations, can also be viewed as instructions, in the way that a computer program is. Just as there is a programming language, the brain has its own language of internal communication.
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We want to close the gulf between the physical and the mental. There exists a parallel gulf between words and the mental images and feelings they evoke. Just as we want to know how brain processes give rise to sensations, thoughts, and feelings, we can ask how words give rise to thoughts and mental imagery. Though there does not seem to be a “hard problem of language,” there is no more scientific ground for understanding how words give rise to meanings than for understanding how brain activity gives rise to consciousness. In fact, they are examples of the very same mystery: how an agent’s intention gives rise to its conscious experience.
At least we are familiar with language, which does not seem like such a mystery. We can gain some insight into consciousness by turning the whole question on its head. We can now say: consciousness arises from neural processes like the way that meaning arises from words. Words do not cause you to have thoughts or images. The word tree means nothing to someone who does not speak English, nor the word arbre to someone who does not speak French. Rather, words evoke a thought or image because you have already assigned them meanings. You agree to have the word evoke the image. You give the word its meaning by asserting it to be so. In the same way that you create meaning in spoken or written language, your brain creates the meanings of its internal language, the language of the senses. What emerges in your consciousness is the story it tells about the world outside the skull.
If you have enjoyed this podcast, please tune in for other episodes, or check out my website: www.stanceofunknowing.com.
Music by John Nemy. Production by John Humphrey, Eureka Web Design.
Have you ever wondered how electrical activity within your brain can give rise to the experience of a real world with you in it? In this episode, we explore how that is possible by putting ourselves imaginatively in the brain’s place.
Download (Right click, Save As): What It’s Like to Be Your Brain.mp3
Subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or through your favorite podcast app (feed).
Transcript:
It may seem to you that you are a person, who looks out at the world through the portals of your eyes, as though through an open window. That’s the normal illusion we all live with. But your head is not a room with windows. It is a completely sealed chamber. This “you,” who seems to be looking, is a squishy ball of nerve tissue, filling up the space inside your skull. The eyes that seem like open windows are actually solid organs of flesh. They are like motion detectors or remote sensors, not open windows. They connect to the brain by wire-like nerve fibers. The same is true about your other senses, such as hearing, touch or smell. These all involve remote sensors sending information to your brain through wired connections, one pulse at a time. Your brain is like a vast computer processing all this information. Somehow it creates the illusion of being a person with a body, living and moving freely about in a real world. Let us try to understand how and why the brain creates this illusion, by putting ourselves in its place. That shouldn’t be too hard, since your brain has already done the reverse trick, which is to create you to stand in its place! So, in order to understand how it creates the experience we call reality, imagine yourself inside your skull. It is somewhat like being in a command center, inside a concrete bunker deep underground, without windows or doors. You are that command center, and you have no direct contact with anything outside the bunker, above ground.
However, human beings are creatures that move about and do things. We interact with our surroundings. So, instead of an immobile bunker, a better metaphor is to imagine yourself inside the control room of a submarine, which can move about and interact with an underwater world. This submarine has no portholes and no hatch, however. There is not even a periscope. All knowledge of the world outside the hull can only come in through wires from remote electronic sensors, such as sonar. All actions or movements of the submarine can only take place through commands going out from the control room, sent over wires connecting to motors, perhaps to activate the propellor or maybe a robotic arm.
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Imagine also this strange situation: not only can you not see outside this control room, you have never set foot outside it either! You have no idea what lies outside, and no reason yet to believe that there is such a thing as “outside.” You have no idea how you got here. You know nothing about the parts or operation of the submarine, and don’t even know what a submarine is or that you are inside one. You are surrounded by dials and gauges of various sorts, and also levers, switches, and buttons. But you have no idea yet what they are for or why they are there. All this remains to possibly discover.
How can you discover it? There is no way but to try things out, more or less at random, and see what happens. So, let’s suppose you do that. You fiddle with a lever or switch and note any change that happens in the instrument readings on dials and gauges. You keep track of any patterns that emerge from this trial and error. But how do you know what is “error” and what is success? What do those even mean? And why would you bother doing this, or anything at all?
This brings us to an important further aspect of this imaginary situation. While the task of learning how to operate the submarine is metaphorical, the task facing the brain is literal and real: learning to operate a body and navigate the world. The brain must do this if the body is to survive. A child learns how to live in the natural and human worlds, but its brain must already be able and motivated to do that learning. Those conditions came about through natural selection—through a sifting process over many generations of evolution. The only creatures that exist are those that can do what is required to live in their world and are motivated to do it.
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Of course, submarines are not living creatures. They are a product of human design and not of natural selection. While no machine (so far) has a stake in its own existence, an organism is defined by that stake. The living organism bothers because otherwise it would not exist. The organisms that do exist have learned how to negotiate their environments and would not exist otherwise. Natural selection is the process of eliminating failures, which drives evolution. So, we must imagine a corresponding principle whereby submarines that lack a “realistic” enough working knowledge of the underwater world are potentially eliminated. Because we are trying to understand the challenges facing the brain, we must imagine a sifting process parallel to natural selection. We must imagine a submariner who knows nothing yet of that principle, who simply succeeds or fails to preserve the submarine through trial and error. We must imagine generations of submarines that have adapted (or not) to the underwater world through some equivalent of natural selection.
So, imagine now that you are playing a computer game called “Underwater Survival.” You are the captain of your submarine, which can be destroyed through any mistake you make. But if you “die” in this game, you can “reset” and play again and again. As you gain experience over many such generations, your skills improve and you get better at staying in the game. You also care about the moves you make and their outcomes, because you have only gotten this far by embracing the goal to win—that is, to keep on playing.
Simply through pulling levers and reading dials, you have collected data and noticed resulting patterns. The patterns matter, because you want to stay in the game. You get the impression that these patterns are not arbitrary or random. Something systematically connects the levers and switches you control with those particular readings on dials and gauges that did not lead to destruction. You are trapped inside the submarine, but an outside observer can see that what connects them is the underwater world outside the hull. There are reefs and other obstacles to steer around. Perhaps there are other submarines or dangerous sea creatures, like the giant squid in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Without being able to actually see this underwater world, you must learn to navigate it successfully, just by means of instrument readings. You learn to think of these readings as coming in from sonar, and to think of the levers as controlling speed and direction. You learn to think of the mysterious link between controls and sensing instruments as a world outside the hull. That intervening world is what completes the feedback loop between the inputs you receive from instruments and the outputs you make with controls. That world seems real to you, because it holds over you the power of life and death, according to what you do in the game. You take it seriously. If it was just a game, it would be no more than a fantasy.
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Your challenge is to interpret the inputs from instruments, as evidence about a real external environment, and from that evidence to “visualize” that environment. In our metaphor, you have eyes to see the interior of the submarine and limbs to move about inside it and manipulate controls. But all that is no more than a concession to the metaphor. In relation to the reality outside the submarine, you begin blind, ignorant, and uncoordinated. Like for a baby, the task is precisely to learn to see and to navigate the surrounding world. Your goal, and your achievement, is to see straight through the hull, as though with x-ray vision. You accomplish this by creating a theoretical model of what you imagine lies outside the hull, using the data you have collected. To the degree the model works, you come to experience it not as a model you devised inside the submarine, but as a real world outside the hull.
You re-work that model as a virtual reality, to aid in visualizing the world outside. It’s a simulation of the undersea world, achieved through a long learning process you have formalized and computerized. Yet, the simulation does not in any way copy or resemble the real outside environment, to which there is no direct access for comparison. Let us therefore imagine a virtual reality that is an original creation, not a copy of something else. Let us suppose further that this original creation of yours—which you call your consciousness—is nonetheless guided by something outside your head, in the same way that the development of your model in the submarine was guided by the interaction between controls and instruments: through a feedback loop that includes a hypothetical real environment. Then your brain’s ability to see outside your skull is like your ability in the submarine to see right through the hull. In both cases, you project a virtual reality as a real external world.
Have you ever wondered how electrical activity within your brain can give rise to the experience of a real world with you in it? In this episode, we explore how that is possible by putting ourselves imaginatively in the brain’s place.