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A blog about This

Story and its forms

9/10/2019

 
I got the seed for this post from a post on Facebook by J'aime ona Pangaia titled You, Me and Harry Potter.

Harry

As you read the book in your hands, you follow Harry Potter’s journey from indistinct and unloved orphan to powerful wizard. The words take life in your mind, and Harry learns his craft, battling dark forces that killed his parents, forces that now threaten the world. He pursues adventures with friends, suffers setbacks, makes decisions and enjoys or endures consequences. It seems this Harry leads an extraordinary life.
​

In a moment of pause, still feeling the book in your hands, you might catch your flowing thoughts and ask, ‘What does this Harry Potter experience?’ The book’s weight on your palms might remind you that Harry Potter, the boy wizard, the beloved character of J.K. Rowling’s ultra-successful fantasy series, experiences nothing. This Harry is a fictional character that Ms. Rowling, through the medium of her words, has created. He is, in one sense, nothing more than curved patterns of lines on a page, patterns that conform to an alphabet, language and grammar that have meaning to you. While Harry exists as this beguiling character, he does not exist as that which the story makes him out to be - a real boy wizard in the real world, a boy who experiences what is happening like you do.

In another sense, we might say that Harry is not these words but rather the composite character that the words, together with your imagination and memory, create within you. If any experience is being had here, then you are the one having it. You are experiencing Harry’s adventure and that of the other characters in a way determined by the interplay of Ms. Rowling’s text and your mind. Because you are sitting in a chair and reading rather than rushing about a magical castle-school, that experience differs not only in content from your everyday life but also in colour and texture. Although in many ways it feels ‘real,’ its nature is clearly different from your full-sensory lived experience.

You might rub the pages between your fingers as you consider four components to this reading-Harry-experience of yours: the author, the medium, the story and the experiencer. J.K. Rowling authored the story of Harry’s adventures. Ms. Rowling’s brilliant mind conjured Harry and the entire environment in which his life unfolds. From a verdant well within her, the story blooms. Although she almost certainly draws on personal experience, proclivities and perspectives to create this work of art, although it has come and could have come only from her, she knows that she is not the story. She knows that the story is not her life.

What emerges physically from J.K. Rowling’s hand is words in patterns on paper pages. This is the medium through which she transmits the story to you. Through your eyes, you absorb the patterns, and thereby the story. The nature of the medium influences the story and your eventual experience of it.

The story folded into these words is rich. It includes Harry - descriptions of him and his actions, a privileged view into his thoughts and feelings, perceptions from his point of view. Multiple other characters move through the story, and you may gain access to their perspectives as well as a ‘God’s eye’ view of some action. A whole world of sights, sounds, sensations, emotions, actions, decisions, happenings, things, people and strange creatures is woven into the medium of squiggles on paper. 

Harry as a character is part of that weave. It is obvious when you think about it that he cannot move separately from it. If J.K. Rowling writes, ‘Harry ran down the stairs,’ then that is exactly what Harry does. If she had written, ‘Harry decided to leave magic behind and become an accountant,’ then Harry would have decided just that. J.K.’s words on the page dictate the story’s every detail, which is what Harry’s life and the unfolding of everything in his world are. Harry and the other characters are not free; the story binds them.

At the receiving end of this chain of story transmission, you, the reader, sit. Your eyes and mind conjure a final alchemical transformation. What began as thought sprung from a creative well in the author, what made its way to you encoded as ink on paper, transmutes into experience. The words on the page interact with your mind, which is to say with your history, your way of making meaning, your assumptions, your quirks, to create a unique instance of J.K. Rowling’s story, to bring Harry and his world to life. This life is known only by you and only as the private experience in you as you read. Harry, his friends and his enemies experience nothing; only you as the reader experience the story. The story lives in you.

When you read of Harry’s sadness as he thinks of his lost parents, of his pain as the Hogwarts headmistress makes him write with that pen that carves its message into his skin, of his mortal peril as monsters corner him, you feel strong sensations and emotions, both for Harry and on his behalf. Deep down, though, you know that there is no Harry to experience these pains in the way a real human does. Although you can enjoy being swept up by his story, you recognise deep down that you are not Harry, so the nature of your experience is not the same as if the real you were sad, terrified or pained like the character is. You as the experiencer of the story are close enough for it to entertain you but not so close as to make you mistake yourself for Harry or to believe that the story’s ups and downs are your own. The story binds its characters, but you as the reader remain free.

Blanche
Not all stories arrive by written word. Tennessee Williams wrote A Streetcar Named Desire for performance on the stage. A creative wave issuing from him and traveling through time joined more recent ones from a director, costume designer, set designer and others to form a live audio-visual offering to today’s seated public. The playwright's submission does not complete the creative, pre-performance input. An entire team, with the playwright to the fore, replaces J.K. Rowling’s solitary role in generating the content and setting.

And we might include the actors who play each character within the creative team, for create they do. But we might also consider them as part of the medium. It is through their words, facial expressions and actions, in the crafted setting of the stage and theatre, sporting costumes, employing props and furnishings, that the story unfolds. Their performance and the setting in which it takes place are the medium in this artistic form.

When Blanche Dubois utters, ‘Whoever you are… I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,’ the words, born of Tennessee Williams, do not reach you through quotation marks on a page, but in the voice of Vivien Leigh. Vivien has latitude in her tonal and bodily expression when delivering this line, but except in limited cases of artistic licence, Mr. Williams’s script binds her. 

Vivien plays Blanche, but she is not Blanche. At the end of the performance, she will step from her role and engage in her offstage life. Even onstage, we might suppose that her thoughts, when she is less actively engaged in the scene’s action, browse any number of topics that have nothing to do with the play. She knows that she is not Blanche, and she maintains a personal distance from the great trauma and turmoil that Blanche suffers in the play. When Blanche is humiliated, raped or led away to an asylum, Vivien does not suffer. She must be able to get very close to Blanche’s feelings, words and movements so as to play her role convincingly, but we would have to pronounce her mad if she took herself to be Blanche, if she fused with the character itself. Vivien’s experience is not Blanche’s but that of playing Blanche.

Let’s turn to the story, and within it, to Blanche herself. Like Harry in your book, the character of Blanche is more inescapably defined than Vivien is as an actress, for Blanche can only be what the summed creative efforts of the playwright, the director and the actor dictate that she is. Blanche is not free. Blanche cannot wonder, ‘Is it Vivien Leigh who is playing me tonight?’ unless Vivien Leigh utters the question for her, and that may be somewhat greater artistic licence than the director would allow in diverging from Tennessee Williams’s creation.

Your experience, sitting in the audience, differs from what it would be if you read A Streetcar Named Desire from the page, differs from how you experienced Harry’s story. Whereas you could access much of Harry’s inner world, you only have access to what Blanche externalises through words or body language. You watch and hear the events taking place on the stage rather than looking at squiggles on a page. Perhaps this gives more vivid visual and auditory experience than your imagination mustered when you read the descriptions of Harry’s surroundings and events. Perhaps it leaves less to your imagination to fill in?

Still, the final step in the chain, the step whereby the entire production becomes your experience of it, happens within you. Your eyes and ears take the story in, and your mind does the rest. Because it is your mind, the creative merging of the ‘raw’ story with it generates a unique experience - not an experience, like one of the actors, of playing one of the characters, but rather an experience of the story as a whole. If the story is a powerful one, if it is one that resonates with you, if your state of mind this evening is one that lends itself to immersion in the story, then it will move you deeply. You will have strong feelings of empathy with some characters, judgment of others. But you’ll not mistake yourself for Blanche or any other character in the story, and you’ll not mistake this story for your own. You experience it in an individual way no one else will, but it does not capture you completely. At evening’s end, you will leave the theater and proceed with your own story. As the audience, the experiencer, you remain free.

Mike26
Mike26 is your avatar’s name in a near-future version of Call of Duty: Battle Sense, a multi-player online game. In Battle Sense, your avatar fights alongside other avatars and pre-programmed but flexible  characters. The enemy unit is populated the same way. Behind each avatar is a human player, who may be sitting anywhere in the world, connected via the internet to the centralised game engine. Stealthy patrols, devastating raids and pitched battles fill your game time, fill Mike26’s life.

Battle Sense is the product of a delicately balanced creative process of agile design and development that tip-toes the line between structure and openness. Hundreds of software engineers and designers contribute to the game world’s birth, to the pre-programmed characters, to the avatars the players adopt and adapt, finally to the dynamic engine that, along with the real-time input of the human players around the world, dictates how the game unfolds second-by-second. The authorship of any period of gameplay is therefore highly distributed, both across the team that created the product and among the players currently sharing it. This story has virtually countless parents.

The medium through which the story evolves is paradoxical. On the one hand, the product that the engineers and designers create is a static collection of binary information: 1s and 0s storable in a small box that you could hold in one palm. On the other, it is a womb of structured potential that can manifest in unpredictable ways depending on players’ actions. It is, in a sense, both static and dynamic. Its resting state encodes movement.

The name Battle Sense comes from its five-sense immersion. Players wear virtual reality headsets, noise-cancelling headphones and haptic bodysuits. They hold small, refillable bluetooth lozenges in their mouths and sit near a refillable vaporiser. All of this means that they experience all five senses from the perspective of their avatar in the game. When Mike26 takes a punch to the mouth, you taste blood. When a grenade explodes twenty-five meters away, you not only hear the deafening blast but feel its shockwave and smell the lingering cordite. You see the whole scene only through his eyes. You hear the avatars’ voices, each with a live human voice behind it. Mixed among them are the shouts and utterances of the game’s pre-programmed characters.

The story here is a series of realistic battle scenes in which your actions and those of your fellow players determine the outcome. You see colleagues die. Your own injuries hamper your movement and sap your strength. You take enemies’ lives. Through occasional accidents as happen in all war, you even extinguish the lives of your own comrades. All around you swirl death and destruction. Sometimes, oblivion taps you on the shoulder: Mike26 perishes, and you wait out the remainder of the scene on the sidelines, reliant on the game for a regeneration. The game world cheats the real world by giving your Mike26 countless lives. 

Eventually, in each scene, one side emerges victorious, and the scenario shuffles forward to a logical next stage. Mike26 is not free. You control him. Considered more carefully, your control is only partial, for his life is also constantly influenced by the actions of the other players and by the intricate lines of binary code that determine the unfolding of the game. In truth, what is happening with Mike26 in any moment cannot be disentangled from what is happening in the game as a whole. In any moment, the game state determines Mike26’s state.

Connected, watching, listening, deciding, feeling, tasting, smelling, you sit and experience technology’s best approximation of the fictitious Mike26’s life. The depth to which the game places you ‘within’ Mike 26 is impressive and unprecedented. In so many ways, you are experiencing him and his life. You are ‘wearing’ and ‘driving’ him. His part in the unfolding of the Battle Sense story is, to a large degree, what you experience. And you are the only one who experiences it; of course Mike26, as a computer avatar, experiences nothing. 

Still, as you remove your game gear and step out for a bite to eat, you consider how your experience falls short of perfect immersion. Setting aside any sensory imperfections, you focus on the most obvious aspects of experience that always remain yours rather than Mike26’s: your thoughts, your feelings, your memories, emotions and preferences, your hopes and intentions. Because of these and other personal specifics, the experience you have is different from what any other ‘driver’ of Mike26 would have. As a person, your experience derives from the collision of the ‘raw’ input to your senses from the game with your conditioned mind.

The intimacy of your Mike26 experience is certainly greater than your Blanche experience and probably greater than your Harry one. Yet you always retain a degree of distance from identification with Mike26. Your identity doesn’t meld with this character. You know that you are distinct from these experiences. As a person, you have one foot solidly outside the game world and can contrast the game world with your own. You experience Mike26, but you are not him.

DreamYou
You sleep peacefully next to your partner under your favourite duvet, and you dream. In your dream, DreamYou is walking to class. DreamYou meets your friend, and you head to English class together. She mentions in passing that she was up all night completing her term paper. A knot forms in DreamYou’s gut as they step into class. The teacher welcomes everyone and announces that he’ll be collecting all term essays at the end of the period. DreamYou now fully realises that they’ve completely forgotten to start, let alone finish, their ten-thousand word essay, which makes up most of the course grade.

You are the sole creator, the lone author of this story. It arises from the creative spring of your mind. Every detailed aspect of the dream is exactly as it is because your mind calls it into being. And yet, you don’t create it through any conscious effort or decision. You don’t decide that DreamYou will forget the paper; you don’t will the mistake into existence. Although you are the author, your creativity arises spontaneously. The dream issues effortlessly from you.

What is the dream’s medium? Of what is it made? You’ve never really considered it before, but this and all dreams play out in your mind and seem to be made of nothing but your mind. There are no hardcopy materials, no screens or stages, no computers or speakers. The entire story unfolds within you.

That story involves DreamYou, which during the dream seems to be you. But the story also involves your friend and your teacher. And both of these characters, just as surely as DreamYou, exist only in your mind and are made solely of your mind, as is the classroom and hallways you walk with your friend. Isn’t it interesting, though, how, when you tell your partner in bed the next morning and then your work colleagues later in the day about the dream, they all say they’ve had one just like it? So perhaps, though made only of your mind, the dream has also existed with small variations in and been made of countless other minds!

You as the sleeping dreamer are the experiencer of the dream. DreamYou experiences nothing. DreamYou is an aspect of the dream, a sliver of what is experienced, a character in the story. Only you as the dreamer ‘hear’ the dream words, ‘see’ the dream images and ‘feel’  the dream anxiety. What’s more, during the dream, DreamYou is absolutely certain they are you. It doesn’t even arise as a question in the dream. Yet, upon waking, it is just as obvious that DreamYou was not and is not you. You are too old to be in high school English class. You have no paper due today. You are not in trouble. You needn’t worry.

That sinking feeling, that escalating anxiety as DreamYou realised they had forgotten the assignment, was something you experienced, but now you realise that, even then, at the time of the dream itself, there was nothing for the real you to worry about. The  unpreparedness in the dream was never a threat to you as the dreamer; it was only a problem for DreamYou. Having woken, you realise things are fine and that things were equally fine even as you slept and experienced an anxious dream, a disturbing story.

You don’t have to scold DreamYou. No need to admonish, ‘How could you have been so silly?!?’ DreamYou couldn’t help it. They were just a character in the dream, in the story that existed within and was composed of your mind. DreamYou could do no differently than they did. DreamYou was not mistaken. As the character, they were bound by your mental creation of them; they were simply being themselves as they were. 

DreamYou knows nothing of you the dreamer, because they know nothing at all. They cannot understand you, because they understand nothing outside the context of the understanding you give them within your dream. They are a character whose composition may include ideas about a higher level reality, but those ideas, if they are present in DreamYou’s ‘mind’, are there only because the real you dreams them.

You needn’t be disappointed in yourself either, ‘How could I have mistaken myself for that dream character?’ You didn’t mistake yourself for the dream character at all. You were simply the experiencer of the dream, and the dream was a story in the first person from the perspective of the main character, DreamYou. You experienced the story with perfect clarity and accuracy. It’s just that the story contained the strong sense of subjectivity that the main character was a conscious self with a will, a history, preferences, senses and thoughts. Upon waking, you realise the illusory nature of that sense, but within the dream, there was no perspective from which to see this. The perspective is part of the story. There is no perspective from outside while experiencing the dream, only once it ends.

You were not mistaken. You experienced your dream exactly as it was.

You
Now, something to consider.

What if the you who dreamed the DreamYou above is really a DreamYou itself? What if that which you’ve always taken yourself to be is not actually a subject at all, is not the experiencer, the knower of your life? What if that personal you is a DreamYou and therefore an object of experience in a greater consciousness?

Would this be scary? Does it mean you don’t really exist? Wouldn’t it instead, since you rather than the person you’ve taken yourself to be? Let’s consider it as we did the previous scenarios: author, medium, story, experiencer (reader, audience, player, dreamer).

In this scenario, the ‘greater consciousness’, which is You (capitalised here onward), is the author of the story. Like in the dream scenario, this author is the creator in the sense that the entire story arises from the well of potential that You are, but You do not choose how the story unfolds, do not sculpt its details through design decisions. You are the author, but not in the sense of a dictating director expressing a will. No, rather as pure creativity, infinite potential. This greater consciousness (which is really the only consciousness) that You are, is not a person drawing on preferences, experiences and imagination to create. You draw from your own essence - unbounded freedom and creativity.

Of what is the story made? On what page is it written? What is its medium? It is made of experience. It is experience. The story is the experience of the story, the experience of itself. And that experience is made of nothing other than the greater consciousness itself. It is nothing other than You. You are both the creator and the medium of the story.

This story is, from the perspective of the person (now recognised as a character) you once took yourself to be, absolutely comprehensive. It is your personal life. It is everything that happens, everything experienced from that personal perspective, across every second of the life that that experience constitutes. The story is a personal life including the person itself, all the other characters and the entire environment in which the life unfolds. From the personal perspective, the story is life, reality, manifestation, the universe, everything.

Yet, the person is part of the story. The person is, like the rest of the story, experienced. It is not the experiencer. It, the person, is not You. You are the experiencer of the story, of life, of reality, of manifestation, the universe, everything. If your personal name is Bob Smith, then consider that Bob Smith experiences nothing. Only You experience Bob Smith, his life, the story of which he is the main character.

You are this greater consciousness that is not any thing, is no thing, is nothing. None of the particulars of the story apply to or limit You. You are no object that has defining properties. All objects and properties arise in You, all are composed of You. You experience all properties but are bound by none. 

Yet, because the story is composed of nothing but this consciousness, this experiencing, You are everything. You are nothing in the story, yet You are everything in the story. The story is created by You, composed of You and experienced or known by You. The story is Your experiencing of Yourself. Consider too that, since all that differentiates Bob Smith and his life from any other character from any other life, all that differentiates any story from another, is detail, limiting and defining properties that apply in different measure and in different combinations in one story than in another, You, this experiencing consciousness, are the same You that experiences all main characters, the subject behind all perspectives, the author, medium and experiencier of all stories.

In the previous scenario, the dreamer was a person. That person awoke to a more fundamental level of reality. From that waking level, the person could assess the dream ‘from the outside’. The person could realise from outside that DreamPerson was not the real person. The person could compare the dream to other dreams and to waking life. The person could analyse it, consider alternatives to it, judge it. 

In the current scenario, which is to say in reality, a greater intelligence, You, experience all stories, but experience each only from the inside. This is why Bob Smith is unable to know, can only guess at, Sally Brown’s experience. You know every story by experiencing it, but Your only experience, aside from the eventless knowing of Your eternal stillness, is through one or other of the countless stories, from countless different personal perspectives, that spool from Your creative heart. You are none of these people, but each of them exists only in and as You.

These stories. These endlessly varied, uncountable, comprehensive lives and perspectives are each whole and perfect, as is Your knowing of them.

Bob Smith may be accepting or judgmental, but You as the experiencer of his life accept every aspect of the story that arises within and as You, including Bob’s acceptance or  judgment. All judgment, like its opposite, sits with Your perfect acceptance. Anything that exists, exists only because You have accepted it.

Bob may understand his current situation, or he may be confused, but You as the knower of his experience see this understanding or confusion with perfect clarity. All confusion, like its opposite, sits within Your perfect clarity.

Bob may seek pleasure and avoid pain, but You know his seeking, his avoidance, his pleasure and his pain without concern or preference. All pain, like its opposite, sits within Your perfect peace. All preferences and aversions sit within Your unjudging awareness.

Bob may struggle or he may rest in the flow of life, but You know his struggle or ease with absolute effortlessness. All struggle and effort, like its opposite, sits within Your perfect ease. All that happens, including the feelings and thoughts of effort and struggle, happens with no effort whatsoever.

Bob’s travels might take him to remote continents. He might even traverse the stars to distant galaxies. All locations and space itself lie within Your dimensionless infinitude. You occupy no space but hold all space enfolded within Your experiential field.

Bob may be virtuous or sinful, good or evil, but You know his good or evil from beyond good and evil. All good and evil, all love and hate, sits within Your unconditional, welcoming love, a love that says Yes to all that arises to, in and as You, a love that blesses all with Your radiant awareness.

Bob makes decisions, exerts influence, exercises his will. But all decision and action sits within the flow of manifestation arising from the creativity of Your unbounded freedom. Bob is free to be exactly as he is. You are freedom itself, the field of limitless potential and all possible manifestation.

Yesterday, Bob may have been ignorant of his own true nature as You. Today, he may have realised that nature and awakened to his true self as You. But Bob always is You, whether he realises it or not. You are untouched by Bob’s or any character’s ignorance or enlightenment. Enlightenment, like happiness, wealth and virtue, are for the persons, the characters; they are not for You but in You.

Bob was born and will die, but You know his and all birth and death, and You see each moment of every life eternally. All birth, death, movement and even time itself exist within Your eternal stillness. 

You seem to be a person living out an amazing story. You seem that way because that is what the story is. All that You experience is through story, not from outside it, looking in. The story is You. 

You experience Yourself, and thereby the world is born - not once and for all but in every moment of existence. All that can possibly happen awaits manifestation in Your infinite well of potential. Yet no story truly waits, because You bless each eternally with Your creative, radiant awareness. Every moment, from every perspective, spontaneously arises and instantaneously passes, side-by-side, in the timeless blessing of Your presence.

You are. I am.

Archive: A Penrose tour

21/11/2017

 
First posted 21 January 2005. Questions of consciousness. Questions of the role of subjectivity. Questions of time. Questions of a Platonic reality. All still central to what keeps my curious mind busy... Penrose was the adviser of another of my scientific heroes: Julian Barbour.

Roger Penrose, the Oxford Physicist, is not convinced: quantum theory, he believes, is incomplete.  In The Road to Reality he argues that a further revolution is required in quantum mechanics, as indicated by its inability to address the reduction process for the wave function (and thereby its inability to 'join up' with classical physics) as well as troubling incompatibilities with general relativity.

The time asymmetry associated with the wave function reduction (or collapse) upon measurement of a quantum system contrasts sharply with the symmetry associated with the propagation of the wave function itself.  The latter can be made sense of moving either backwards or forwards in time; the former works only moving forward.

A more familiar time asymmetry, the one we experience every minute of every day, is grounded in the extraordinary nature of the Big Bang itself - its strikingly low entropy.  The Big Bang was so ordered that the ever-decreasing order of the universe is a probabilistic near-certainty.  This is what lies behind the 2nd law of thermodynamics and the 'arrow of time'.  It points to the peculiar behaviour of gravity at cosmological singularities - not only the Big Bang but (less spectacularly) black holes.

The presence of this time asymmetry in both the reduction of the wave function and in the Big Bang suggests that gravity might play an important role in wave function reduction. Discovering this role would amount to a revolution that could well resolve the 'measurement paradox' and render quantum mechanics consistent with general relativity and contiguous with classical physics.

According to this idea, it is the gravitational effects of the classical measuring apparatus (and other macroscopic entities in our everyday world) rather than the perceptions of any observer that bring about the collapse of the wave function.  As such, the reduction is an objective rather than a subjective one.  This takes the conscious observer from the limelight of quantum theory.  How does this happen? As the wave function propagates through time, non-uniformities develop in the distribution of energy and matter among its superposed states, and at some point become gravitationally significant. The gravitational interaction with the measuring apparatus (or other macroscopic entity) then brings a collapse into a measurable single state.

Although Penrose takes the consciousness out of quantum reduction, in The Emperor's New Mind he puts quantum reduction centre stage in consciousness, thereby turning the world (as seen by conventional quantum theory) on its head. These same quantum gravitational effects account for the difference between consciousness and artificial (computer) 'intelligence', and Penrose calls upon them in his rejection of the computational theory of mind. There are things - including non-algorithmic, non-computable ones - that the human mind can comprehend while no computer (Turing machine) possibly could. This is in keeping with Godel's theorem, which states that no formal mathematical system (or at least none of the richness required to handle even common arithmetic) can be complete.  There must always be truths that cannot be expressed without recourse to 'meta-mathematical' language that is not part of the formal system.

Penrose suggests that our access to such truths is due to quantum fluctuations, gravitationally induced, within the brain (he suggests maybe in the microtubules of the neurons' cytoskeletans).  Multiple states may exist in superposition in our brains until gravity triggers a collapse to a specific state, with resulting (possibly non-local) effects on our neural states. This is something that is not possible (at least for now) with computers.

There is a deep connection among the time-asymmetry of the wave function reduction, the behaviour of gravity at singularities and the presence of non-algorithmic (non-computable) elements - including consciousness - in the world. This helps to explain the relationship among Penrose's "Three Mysteries":
  1. The ability of the human consciousness to access and understand the full Platonic world of mathematics (even the non-computable areas, because consciousness goes beyond computation, and the Platonic world is woven into the fabric of the universe at the Planck scale)
  2. The remarkable resonance between the Platonic world of mathematics and the physical world (and the ability, not yet realised, of the mathematical world to explain the entire physical one)
  3. The ability of a small portion of the physical world to give rise to the entire conscious world (since Penrose discounts the notion of the soul or brain-independent mind).

There is also an "Escher element" to the relationships among the three mysteries. Escher was an artist (and obviously a mathematician) whose works included paradoxical staircases and streams that seemed to always lead in one direction (up or down) yet returned to their own source.

In Penrose's three world / three mystery model, a small portion of the mental world is all that is needed to capture the mathematical one (since we obviously spend lots of time considering other things). Similarly, a small portion of the mathematical world is applied to the collected (total) formalism of physics, with much else being dedicated to other questions. And finally, only a small portion of the physical world (that part that makes up our cells) is drawn on to explain the mental one. Each part is able to 'swallow' its neighbour in an illogical, unending cycle.

Penrose believes that the secret to this mystery of the mysteries is that all these worlds are in fact one. Perhaps in a holographic, holistic, non-local sense like that evoked by David Bohm, another of my creative scientific heroes?

Archive: The brain revisited

20/11/2017

 
First posted 15 April 2006. These days, I tend to think of the brain a lot less when I'm thinking of the mind, but my sense of wonder for whatever it is that is behind our mental experience is undiminished.

Michael O'Shea's The Brain: A Very Short Introduction has shown me that my longstanding wonder with the brain has been understated.  You see, I have marvelled at the complexity inherent in a collection of 100 billion neurons - each with a thousand synapses, connections with other neurons - and the effectively uncountable number of possible brain states implied by the permutations of these on-off switches.

O'Shea is also impressed by this, but he adds several other elements of our current understanding that demonstrate that the metaphor of a network of binary electrical switches is far too simple:
  1. It seems that glia, the brain cells that outnumber neurons by at least an order of magnitude, may also contribute directly to the brain's computation, by regulating neurotransmitter exchange between synapses.  This suggests even the straight combinatorials are more staggering than I have imagined.
  2. Neurons do not only communicate with each other electro-chemically through their 'wiring' connections.  They also broadcast information to other neurons within certain radial volumes by releasing messenger chemicals that diffuse without regard to synaptic connection.
  3. Information is conveyed not just by the firing (as opposed to non-firing) of a neuron's action potential but also by the rapidity of its repeated firing and by the duration for which the firing is repeated.
  4. The neurotransmitters emitted by a synapse not only send immediate excitatory or inhibitory values to the receiving neuron, but can also trigger secondary messengers within it.  These can alter the characteristics of the neuron (creating new synapses, altering threshold levels for triggering the action potential, etc.) permanently (or until they are again altered by new secondary messenger activity).

All of this suggests that the challenges of 'porting' human intelligence to computer hardware ( a la Ray Kurtzweil) are vastly greater than I had thought.  The challenges are similarly greater for efforts such as Dan Lloyd's to eventually map mental states to brain states: the state space, already mind-bogglingly large, is vastly larger still.

It even makes me slightly more sceptical about Julian Barbour's timeless theory of time, because the asynchronous nature of the brain's neuronal (and glial?) interactions doesn't seem to fit well with the notion that particular brain states are but tiny subsets of instantaneous universe states (or Nows) that happily happen to contain records that act as bridges to other Nows.  How instantaneous is a Now?  If mental states are tied not to instantaneous brain states but are affected by the frequency of repeated neuronal firing, then can a mental state reside within a single Now, given that such a Now, by definition, can contain no change (i.e. no repeated firing)?  

But there is a way out.  I guess if the brain encodes in each instant information about its state in previous instants (as in discussion of the specious now in Dan Lloyd), then there is no necessary inconsistency between the unquestionable existence of subjective experience and Barbour's theory of time.

Archive: When is Now?

17/11/2017

 
First posted 28 June 2006. My view of time and consciousness is surprisingly close in this 11-year old post to what it is today, even though I had not been exposed at that time to the main elements that now underpin my reasoning.

Several pairs of unreconciled truths (as in best operating guesses) interest me deeply: Quantum mechanics & General relativity, Determinism & Free Will, Materialism & Consciousness.  These pairs are not unrelated, could indeed be different manifestations of the same chasm.  The paradox that may interest me most of all captures aspects of all three and is almost certainly inextricably entwined with each, and that is: Space-time & Temporal becoming.

The paradox has two elements.  The first, in a nutshell, is that our best understanding of space-time tells us that it is a complete, unchanging, four-dimensional (perhaps with seven further dimensions wrapped tightly around themselves, unextended) whole, but our direct experience is of a temporal flow with each moment different from the last.  All is constant, yet the only constant is change itself.

The second is that while space-time itself has no privileged set of parallel planes that can be called Nows (each inertial frame parses out space and time in a different way, with the Nows as planes at different angles to one another) , we each indisputably experience a clear distinction among past, present and future.  The flow from the latter to the former hearkens back to the first element of the paradox.

In an interesting paper, entitled "The Physics of 'Now'", James Hartle takes us some of the way towards a reconciliation.

Space-time
Space-time is a four-dimensional grid, with each point being an event.  If we label one axis as the the speed of light multiplied by time and the others as the space dimensions, then one can imagine two cones, extending in opposite directions parallel to the 'time' axis and meeting at a designated point, or event.  The one pointing back toward the Big Bang is the past light cone for that event, and the one opposite it is the event's future light cone.

There is a reason these are called light cones: given the chosen units of the time axis and the fact that nothing can travel at speeds exceeding the speed of light, all points (events) within the 'backward' light cone can be said to be in the given event's past, they could have played some part in the evolution that led to the given event's occurring.  Similarly, all points in the future light cone can possibly be affected by this given event.  Points outside these cones cannot be said to be in the given event's past or future.  They are what is called 'space-like' separated from it.

If we imagine that event or point as being one of many that make up the history, or world line, for a person as that person travels through life (and space and time!), then, within that person's frame of reference, the plane that runs through that event and is perpendicular to the time axis might be defined as a Now or instant for that person.  

But the thing is that that person's frame of reference is not privileged, is nothing special.  So although it might be called a Now for him, it is not a Now for the universe. Other people could be travelling at very great speeds relative to him, and their Nows would be askew with respect to his.

As it happens, all we humans exist very close to one another (on a cosmological scale), and we move only at very low velocities relative to one another (as compared to the speed of light).  So our Nows are for all intents and purposes not only parallel but even simultaneous.  Still, this is just a local accident.

IGUSes
Why do we distill the time dimension from the space ones and experience it as a flow from future to past?  Hartle believes it is a function of the way that we collect and process information.  Placing humans within a broader set of entities he calls Information Gathering and Utilising Systems (IGUSes), he models a simple IGUS to demonstrate his thinking.

In essence, we have 'registers' for current input and for memories of past input.  These registers contribute directly to conscious thought both directly and indirectly, the latter through subconscious updating of our 'schema' or underlying operational models for dealing with the world around us.  

In any moment, or more to the point, at any event along our world-lines, the 'current input' register is populated by what we are experiencing, the remaining registers are populated by what we experienced in each of several immediately preceding moments.  The direct 'feed' from the 'current input' register to conscious thought gives the sense of Now.  The fact that any brain state enfolds information from previous brain states ( in the other registers), gives a sense of both a past and of a  flow to time.  The future is not represented in any register but is rather the object of calculation in both conscious and subconscious processing.

But why does this flow move in one direction rather than the other, or rather than in both?  Hartle appeals to two old dears of physics, the 2nd law of thermodynamics (which states that entropy must always increase), and the nature of electromagnetic radiation.  I've talked about the first elsewhere.  The second is worth mentioning a bit more about.  Anything we see has radiated from some source.  Electromagnetic radiation only ever travels in that one 'direction' - from source outwards.  

In a sense, then, the past can simply be defined as the direction in time from when radiation strikes our retina to when it is (was) emitted.  Information only travels that way.  Since gathering and processing information is what we do, we naturally take on or assign this direction a prominent place, simply through our interactions with the world.

Questions unanswered
As ever, I'm sure that I've been less than perfectly true to Hartle's original argument, so do read his paper.

I will say, though, that I think he leaves two questions unanswered.  They may well fall outside the scope of his work, but they are related and interesting.  First, Hartle mentions repeatedly that we EVOLVED into the IGUSes we are, to process information as we do, because that is what worked.  He is doing nothing more than making one specific reference to the accepted truth of Darwin's thesis.  But when one thinks of space-time as a four-dimensional, unchanging and complete totality (as I believe it is), one can't help but think differently about evolution.

We no longer say, things are this way because they evolved to be so, and they evolved to be so because being so conveyed survival and reproductive benefits.  That is all true WITHIN the time dimension, but within the eternal space-time picture, that we are this way is just that we are this way.  Both our present state of evolution and every other step in its past and future exist eternally.  So one then asks, why is THAT so?  Why is it that this relationship within four-dimensional space-time exists?  I don't have an answer.  It is just SO.

Second, it is simple enough to refer to a given event on my world-line, look into the 'current input' register and say, "That is my Now".  But the interesting point is that EVERY ONE of the points on the 'conscious' segment of my world line is a conscious now, and every one exists eternally, side-by-side, as it were, in space-time.  Why do I not experience them all at once.  Why do I only experience THIS one and now THIS one?

I do have my own answer to this question, and it is that we ARE experiencing ALL of our Nows eternally, although somehow only ever in one channel at a time.  Every instance from our first sentient experience through to our last is experienced by us eternally.  Each exists at some event in space-time, but all are there in the eternal 4-D block that is existence.  So we don't get life-after-death as such (because the 'after' shows that we are talking within the time dimension with that phrase), but we do get eternal life!  And that eternal life is no better or worse than each instant that you live.  Moments of suffering are eternal, as are moments of elation, despair and euphoria.  Drink deep.  Live it up!

Archive: What the Bleep

16/11/2017

 
First posted 17 Feb 2004 - This film covered a lot of ground. It may have lacked rigour. It may have made insinuations that outreached any fact base. But you can't deny it prompted questions and presented interesting material in relatively digestible form. My own views have shifted significantly from those I held at the time of this review. Some are now closer to the film's, some still not.

Having seen 'I Heart Huckabees' on Sunday, I saw a preview screening of 'What the Bleep Do We Know' this evening - quite a philosophical week.  'Bleep' will probably launch properly in London in March or April.

Well, Bleep certainly covers a lot of ground.  I am on board with the need for a paradigm shift - from one dominated by the residue of our longstanding and recently ended infatuation with major western religions to something that retains the connection with the numinous while using what modern science has to offer. 

I have to say that the paradigm I envisage differs in a fundamental way from that suggested by the film, but it also shares much ground.  Irrespective of whether I or anyone else actually subscribes to the film's specific direction, it is a must see - simply because it is so thought-provoking.

Particular items that caught my attention or stirred a reaction were:
  • The interpretation of Quantum Mechanics as demonstrating the pre-eminence of mind and asserting the observer's role in creating and defining reality;
  • The asymmetry of the arrow of time;
  • The neuro-electrical and neuro-chemical constituents of learning, habituation and addiction; and the implications for how we can improve ourselves;
  • The description of the visual process, or more broadly, the assimilation of new information;
  • The chemistry of our cells and implications for overcoming internal and external chemical addictions;
  • One specific statement regarding cells being conscious (because each 'takes a perspective');
  • The rejection of an objective good and bad;
  • The rejection of western conceptions of a personal God and the support for an eastern or pantheistic approach to spirituality.

Quantum mechanics (QM)
The film starts with a strong version of the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM, which says that sub-atomic particles cannot be said to exist independent of observation.  Unobserved, 'they' exist only as potentials, the probabilistic evolution of which is well defined by a mathematical construct called a wave function.  In this wave form, the 'particle' exists as a weighted superposition of all its possible selves (with different positions and momentums for each potential self).  Only upon measurement by an observer does the wave function 'collapse' to a unique particle with definite characteristics (not all of which can be known to arbitrary accuracy at the same time).  This interpretation obviously gives a special role to the 'observer' in nature.

This is combined with a specific view of the self, one in which Mind stands outside the laws of material nature and in a position of primacy relative to the material world - literally Mind over Matter.  I guess you could say the film was espousing an Idealist as opposed to a Realist (read materialist) view of the world: thoughts, ideas, intentions and emotions are the primary building blocks of the world, not atoms, molecules and cells.

The film intertwines these two propositions and draws the conclusion that we each create reality everyday.  Further, by adopting more positive attitudes and engaging in more positive thought patterns, we can impact the material world around us to make our world a better place.

As you'll know if you've read my articles on QM (If you think you understand this, then you don't, Quantum Determinacy, Problems with Quantum Orthodoxy, and Revisiting the Quantum - information please) and the Self (Who Am I?, Destiny, Subjective Objects), I disagree fundamentally with each of the two propositions above.  I am a causal realist at heart, believing that there is an objective material world that exists independent of us and that subsumes us.  And although I think that the Mind is awe-inspiring, I think that it is wholly resident in and reliant on the body.

So without going into any refutations of the film's positions (because I've discussed that in the articles I've mentioned), I'll just say that the film's position on those dimensions does not resonate with me.  I don't view either of them as absurd in their own right.  However, I do think that the leap to the overall conclusion about our ability to literally impact matter and space with our minds is a bit far.  QM's interpretation is still a mystery, with many holding views close to the interpretation cited in the film and some holding views closer to mine.  Consciousness is also a puzzle, with clear-thinking people on each side of the Idealist - Realist debate.  However, just because QM and consciousness are both unexplained doesn't mean that they are related to one another in any way, let alone a causal tie as blunt and direct as the film proposes.

The Arrow of Time
One of the contributors pointed out the peculiar asymmetry of time.  Most (I don't know whether we call say 'all') of the mathematical formulae that so accurately describe the world around us are indifferent to the direction of time, working just as well backwards as forward.  Yet we can only experience time in one direction.  We can (if we can trust our memories) have knowledge of the past but not of the future.  We are troubled by the thought of our not living into the unending future, but we have no problem with the fact that we were not alive for the many thousands of years before our birth.

Some (but not this contributor) have suggested that time's arrow is tied to the second law of thermodynamics, which says that in a closed system, entropy increases over time.  Entropy MUST increase as time moves forward, so perhaps this irreversibility drives the same irreversibility in time.  But upon closer inspection, entropy's increase is not absolutely necessary: it is only probabilistic.  It just so happens that the universe began in a relatively ordered state.  Since there are many more (uncountably so) disordered states than there are ordered ones, entropy's march is staggeringly probable - NEARLY assured.  Yet that is not the same as being necessary, absolute.  So... if we are to tie time to entropy, we would also have to accept that time's direction is not irreversible in theory, but is only practically guaranteed by the high probabilities discussed above.

The Brain and learning, habituation and addiction
Several contributors discussed the role of neural pathways or networks in our behaviour.  We reinforce the formation of certain sets of connections through our habits.  The reinforced sets 'wire' themselves to respond to the frequent call for their combined performance.  Other possible combinations, if not called upon, do not wire themselves up.  We can, through conscious habituation, re-wire some of these networks (e.g. the ones associated with more positive outlooks, more pleasant moods, more confident postures and more successful behaviours).

And this electrical component is accompanied by a chemical one, with parts of the brain creating (or causing to be created) different chemicals for different needs.  Just like we can become addicted to external drugs, we can become addicted to some of these internal, home-made concoctions.  We then engage in the behaviours and nurture the states of mind that give us our fix.

The important point is that a bit of us can stand outside the fray, perhaps up on the mental balcony, observing and intervening to break the vicious cycle.  But we have to recognise and support that bit, exercise it and have confidence in it.

I don't know the science well enough to comment on the accuracy of this 'folk' version of it, but it doesn't seem outlandish; in fact, it jibes quite well with the rough understanding I have from some previous reading.

I'll see it when I believe it
One scene is built around the story that the natives in the  Caribbean did not see Columbus's ships as they sailed in, because they had no visual or mental construct for a ship.  The more general point is that we cannot see or accept things that do not already exist in our mental model or paradigm.

To be honest, I don't buy the foundational story at all.  I can accept that the natives would not know that the ships WERE ships.  I can understand that they would be confused as to what these dark patches on the horizon were, confused by the shapes they became as they grew closer.  But I cannot believe that they literally did not SEE them.

Like everything else in the film, though, it is thought provoking.  It recalls to mind a vague picture I have of how we deal with sensory input and with anomalies in particular.  We are bombarded with sensory input, with much more than we can process, in every waking moment.  Our brains are partially hard-wired through evolution (i.e. natural selection) to help discern the useful info from the 'white noise', and our particular experiences further shape the more plastic aspects of that filter.

From our earliest days, we begin to assemble our working model of the world.  What matters?  What does not?  What framework allows us to maintain internal consistency across the broadest range of our experience - to make sense of the world?  When new input arrives that is labeled as irrelevant, we do not attend to it (unless perhaps we pay the price for ignoring it and our brains pick up on that fact and adjust the framework).  When new input fits the paradigm and is labeled as important, we attend to it. 

But what happens if new information is so far outside our accumulated experience and reasonable extrapolation from it that we can make no sense of it at all?  We tuck it away into a certain bit of the brain where it sits in a cache; at night, while we sleep and dream, among the routine brain maintenance that takes place is a re-assessment of the framework (or paradigm) in the light of any new anomalous information.  What is the smallest adjustment that can be made to the overall model in order to accommodate, make sense of, this new input?  Do we need to scrap the whole model and start anew (when rocks begin to talk or we find out that we are just carnival entertainment for some other, alien and invisible race!)?  If the accommodation necessary is too large, we may well end up just disregarding the anomaly (the Red Sox didn't REALLY win the World Series) and just continue with the paradigm intact.

So you can see that I identify more than a grain of truth in the film's underlying point here.

Junky cells
Back to the addiction theme, another segment looked at it from the somatic cell perspective.  Every cell has loads of receptors for receiving information from its environment, including the chemical drinks discussed above.  If the receptors are incessantly bombarded by some protein 'hit' they shrink and become less responsive to it, meaning it takes more of it to give the same 'fix'.  Cells can then become so engrossed in getting their next 'high' that they neglect other important functions like communication with neighbouring cells and even elimination of their own waste products.  Keep in mind that I'm talking about 'internal', not 'external' drugs here (although I wouldn't be surprised if the story were much the same for external ones).

You can tell by my over-use of analogy that I'm not up to speed with the proper science here, so I can't judge the accuracy of the scientific claims.  It does, though, appeal to common sense.  (Yeah, yeah, I know, common sense often leads us astray when we venture away from the normal life scales and conditions in which it developed.)

Conscious Cells
One contributor spoke (a bit too loosely, I think) about cells being not only alive - an assertion with which I wholly agree - but also conscious.  She said a cell was conscious because it interacted with its environment and processed chemical information.  This doesn't, for me, suggest consciousness.  Or, to put it another way, if it DID qualify as consciousness, then we would have to admit that computers and computer networks are conscious.  Perhaps we should...

No good, no bad
Several contributors pointed out that there is no objective good or bad 'out there' in the world.  A belief with which I am in agreement, as you can read in my articles: Right and Wrong, Sources of Morality, Ethical Notes, Disobedience, Pragmatic Ethics and Nietzsche's Call to Creativity.

No Personal God
All contributors who discussed religion found the creation of a person-like personal God harmful to mankind and in many instances antithetical to what they saw spirituality as. 

I tend to agree that, however powerful, insightful and well-intended the original spiritual messages are, when organised religion accretes around them, the foibles of man dilute, pollute and hijack them.

This isn't at all to say that all clergy are guilty or that all followers are silly. I just think that the more organised a belief structure is, the more likely it is to lose sight of the wood for the trees.

Re-cap
As I said, there were a number of things with which I agreed and a number of things - including the major thesis - with which I didn't.  Still I can heartily recommend 'What the Bleep Do We Know' as an interesting, challenging, thought-provoking film that may well make you want to sit down and put your thoughts to paper.

Archive: Music and Motorcycle Maintenance

15/11/2017

 
First posted 12 Apr 2004. Tying together Robert Pirsig, Eckhart Tolle and Nietzsche - early influencers of how I now see the world, this post also touches on music, one of the great loves of my life. Just a taster. Oh, and I got rid of my Vespa a few years ago, so now the maintenance analogies have to find their home in the bicycle world...

Ever find yourself in the middle of a confrontational daydream - hypothesising things that might go wrong in the future and then spinning through in your head how you might deal with them?  Or have you caught yourself re-living an event (whether glorious or humiliating) from the past, perhaps second-guessing your actions?  Or how about sitting in traffic, in a queue or in a boring meeting at work, waiting to be able to get on to something interesting or important that lies in the near future?

If you're like me, you probably spend a fair bit of time thinking about the past, the future or some alternative and preferable present.  We do it so much that we think nothing of it.  Yet when you really step back and consider it, as I do whenever I re-visit Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now like I have in the past week, you realise that all this mental hyper-activity is really a useless exercise.

Let's acknowledge up front that of course it is useful to reflect on past events in so far as that reflection generates learning that better prepares us for the future.  Likewise, it is certainly useful to think about the future so as to identify things you can do today and along the way to make that future better.  Our brains are wonderful tools for learning from the past and planning for the future, and we should stroke them lovingly for the outstanding work they do for us on those dimensions.

The problem is that, at least for me, most of the time spent dwelling on the past or fretting about the future involves little of this useful activity.  If learning and planning were all we did, we'd spend a small fraction of the 'non-Now' time we do.  No, what we do is mull over things again and again, causing our hearts to race and inducing other fight-or-flight reactions in our bodies.  We put ourselves through unnecessary worry, regret or other pain.

Although it is almost too obvious to warrant mentioning, let's just remind ourselves that there is NOTHING we can do about the past.  Aside from some science fiction writers and Hollywood producers, no one has found a way to reverse time's arrow.  It naturally follows that obsessing on the past (beyond the aforementioned reflection for learning's sake) is useless.

Not quite so obvious, but equally true, is the point that worrying about the future does nothing to avoid or mitigate negative future events.  Once again, some planning might help, but beyond that, much of the future-anxiety we experience is driven by phantoms, dreamed up proto-scenarios that may or may not ever materialise.

The whole 'so-what' of this is that all we can ever directly influence is NOW.  Every action we ever take is taken in the present.  We might as well pay attention to the present, since that is all we ever directly experience.

Practically speaking
So at one level, a strictly practical one, I personally am trying much harder to minimise the time I spend with useless, unhelpful and uncomfortable past- and future-oriented activity.  Don't get me wrong: I do not purport to be a guru or an expert on this.  I just struggle along like everyone else, but I AM doing better at simply recognising when I begin to drift into unhealthy past-or-future zone.  And just recognising it really does go a long way toward making it stop.

As for the future (because I tend to be much worse about drifting in that direction than drifting toward the past), I find lists to be very helpful, and here's why.  If I think of something I need to do in the near future and don't write it down, it just swirls around in my head until I get it done.  And it doesn't swirl around peacefully, it leaves a trail of anxiety.  Whereas if I write it down, then I feel it is captured.  Then I just cross it off when I do it, whenever that is.

Now some people have problems with lists, because they make these really comprehensive ones that try to encapsulate EVERYTHING they need to do to 'get themselves together.'  Having filled page upon page with these details, they then look at the list and are instantly overwhelmed by the magnitude of the project before them.  All I can say to this is that we all need to prioritise and schedule among the demands on us.  You work your way through that list the same way you eat an elephant - one bite at a time.

A Deeper Level
Now let me turn to a slightly different problem, that of following our minds into alternative, preferred presents rather than directly our minds towards the ACTUAL present in which we sit.  This is the category of problem that includes the anxiety in traffic jams, long queues and other 'useless' periods.

At the risk of (once again) stating the obvious.  Either we can do something about the situation in which we find ourselves or we can't.  In the former case, we should just get on and DO it.  In the latter, we can but make the most of it.  In either case, the first step is to accept (which is not to say celebrate) the real present, recognise and acknowledge it.  Only having done that can we figure out whether we can usefully act.  All too often, I just skip this all-important step and move straight into emotional over-reaction, with the accompanying unhealthy physical manifestations of stress and frustration.

Now this is where I could really be a lot truer to my professed world-view.  I believe that whatever happens is the best that CAN happen and the worst that CAN happen.  In other words, whatever happens, happens NECESSARILY.  By better keeping this in mind, I can more helpfully acknowledge what IS and then work WITH it to the limits of my ability.

Motorcycle Maintenance
There is another reason for paying more attention to and granting acknowledgment to the present moment.  There is an entire world out there as well as within us.  Our real contact with that world, is entirely in the present.  If we restrict the attention we give to it by frittering away part of our capacity on past and future ghosts, then we degrade our connection with reality.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig speaks of quality - that characteristic that defines something that is good from something that is not.  In essence, quality surfs right on the leading edge of the present moment.  It imposes itself on us in its raw, undefined Romantic form in the instant between awareness and consciousness.  Once our rational, Classical consciousness - a filter defined by our make-up and experiences - takes hold of it, we analyse it, dissect it and place it into the appropriate category or pigeon-hole.  If our awareness is in itself inhibited because our minds are leading us away from the present to battle past or future demons, then we are twice poorer: first in gaining only an attenuated or partial experience and second in what we can extract from that experience.

The mechanics who screwed up Pirsig's bike weren't sufficiently engaged in their work to do a good job.  This might have even been the case if they did care deeply about achieving a good final product.  The point is that you have to care about what you are DOING, not what any future product of it is.  Caring about what you're doing (which is always in the present moment) is the single most important thing in motorcycle maintenance - and of course by extension, the most important thing full stop.

Music
For Nietzsche as well, reality was this pre-rational raw wave within an ever-evolving flux.  The front edge of that wave is all we can ever access.  In fact, this unmitigated experience is so powerful that we have evolved physically and socially so as to buffer ourselves against it.  Given our self-imposed safety padding, designed to protect our sanity, the closest most of us can safely get to unadulterated Being is through music.
Music speaks to us without words, riding a standing wave at the edge of our awareness and the rest of existence, with which that awareness is inextricable entwined and essentially one.  For Nietzsche, only a new being, born of man but incomparably braver and sturdier, can 'face the music' without being overwhelmed.  It opens the window to not only the beauty but also the terror of existence.

Just to come back to the mortal world, I have to admit that my experience with music has never been this earth-shattering.  Yet I do see something in what Nietzsche is saying.  Music does help bring me into and hold me in the present moment.  It brings my mind out of its self-generated battles and makes it still.  Then, whatever I turn to do, I do with a clearer mind.  I am able to immerse myself more deeply into that activity, in the DOING rather than the product.

I don't do my own maintenance on my 50cc Vespa, but if I did, I would want to have my MP3 player nearby.

Archive: The Anatomy of Experience

4/11/2017

 
First posted 24 Oct 2005. I used to be a 'the mind reduces to the brain' guy, whereas now, I'm more of a 'the brain (and everything else) reduces to the mind' guy. The book that this post refers to was my introduction to phenomenology - the study of experience. Thinking of the world in terms of experience has ended up being the biggest shift in how I see things. That shift has taken more than 10 years, from the time of the post below, though.

The Internal World
All we ever have direct access to is our mental states. Those states could be the result of our interaction, via our sense, with the external world; they could be part of a dream; they could come from wires and electrodes stimulating our brains, which sit in vats of syrupy liquid in a world run by computers. Both philosophy and science fiction have wrestled with questions of whether those mental states correspond to or represent an external world. The question is no less interesting (and no closer to being answered) than it has ever been.

But those mental states, that internal world itself, is rich ground for investigation as well. Phenomenology is the study of experience, and a recent book I read was my introduction to it. The book, an atypical mix of novel, philosophical introduction and scientific primer, is called Radiant Cool, and here is what I have taken from it:

Internal Objectivity
I've always taken objectivity to mean the view 'from outside' and subjectivity to be the view 'from inside' a person. But, using a specific visual perception example, even in our internal 'views' we are aware of the difference between some relatively stable mental object, say the image of a chair, and any number of particular angles (or points of view) from which that chair can be seen.

Think about it. As we walk around a chair, looking at it, our mental states do not feel like we're seeing a constantly changing stream of things, but rather that there is a single thing there, which we are viewing from a constantly changing angle. All of this is equally true if we simply imagine walking around a chair, which shows that the physical presence of a material chair isn't necessary. The point, which had never occurred to me before, is that even within our subjective experiences, there is a stability and assumed objectivity of entities rather than just a constant flux. This is despite the fact that the sensory input we receive is literally nothing but an ever-flowing flux. So... there are non-sensory elements to our experiences, even to those experiences that - on the face of it - seem to be purely sensory.

Affordance / superposition
When we think about it a bit more, it becomes obvious that the in-built assumption or experience of objectivity / permanence is not the only non-sensory element to our perceptual consciousness. Everything we see presents itself not just in its bare form but always with a collection of non-sensory baggage - inseparable emotions, associations, anticipations, etc. This property of immediate perceptual objects to 'carry' these other properties has been called affordance or superposition.

The possible bits of baggage that can accompany perception are virtually innumerable. We can model a theoretical mental-state-space of consciousness, with each possibility constituting a binary (either experienced or not) dimension in that space. If each conscious moment were represented by a time 'slice' of this space, then putting them all back to front temporally would create a squiggly line tracking through state-space moment by moment.

Temporality
In fact, the most important of these non-sensory elements - perhaps even THE defining one for explaining consciousness - is temporality itself. Our mental worlds are built upon it. And I'm not speaking here of memory and anticipation - casting back or forward from the present moment. Temporality is embedded even WITHIN each moment. Each immediate experience can be thought of as having three components: retention, presence and protention. The middle one is the instantaneous snapshot of the flux of sensory input. Retention is the context in which that snapshot sits, grounded in what the previous instant contained. Protention is the immediate projection or extrapolation of what the retained and present elements imply for the next moment.

A simple but insightful example brought this home to me. Think of a musical melody. In any instant, the only SENSORY element of the experience is a single note, yet your experience of that note is inseparable from the pitch, volume, duration and other qualities of the notes immediately before and after it.

Neural Networks
Lloyd used diagrams and explanations of simple, synchronous neural networks to show how temporality can be embedded within a cognitive system. If some of the nodes (neurons) in the system encode the previous values of the neurons that receive and 'process' the sensory inputs, and if those time-lagged neurons feed back into the sensory processing ones, the feedback loop ensures that each instant recursively captures all previous instants. Then the 'output' from the sensory-processing neurons constitutes the system's best guess for what the next moment (immediate future) will be. A number of examples showed that this model world works very well at keeping time and tracking the future. But do brains work this way?

Brain scans
Lloyd then moved from toy brains to real ones, using the tools currently at science's disposal to look at the evolution of brain states over time while subjects performed different mental tasks. The results suggested that we can track these states quite well, and Lloyd showed how further empirical testing can pull much of the discussion from the world of the philosopher to that of the scientist. But it was also obvious that further technological advance was necessary to make findings more exact and more robust.

Mental state = Brain state?
Where is this all going? Well, Lloyd and others think that the ideal objective is a deepening of our understanding of both brain states and mental states, an understanding that may well include a one-for-one matching between the two that reduces the mental to the physical, firmly placing the mental world within the natural world. I say 'ideal' objective because we may never be able to reach a neuron-by-neuron level mapping of brain states. If that degree of specificity is required for perfect mental state matching, then we may be stuck with some degree of averaging and clumping of brain and experience states. Still, this could provide the empirical basis for finally dumping Cartesian dualism, the Cartesian theatre, and all the misunderstanding they create.

Archive: The Power of Now

3/11/2017

 
Originally posted 29 Nov 2003. Back then, I took away some interesting practical points and identified some common ground. I didn't accept the metaphysics. I didn't really get the metaphysics.  I sort of do get them now. Although the nature of metaphysics is that we can never know whether they are right (hence the meta), these days Tolle's picture is one that makes intuitive sense to me and is not inconsistent with any evidence.

Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now - A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment signposts a journey toward inner peace. I took much from it when I read it a year or so ago. I don't happen to agree with Tolle's metaphysics (time is an illusion, the role of the unmanifested), but I think he makes some good points.

I am no interpreter of Tolle's work, so I do not seek to set forth his argument here. Instead, I would like to highlight a number of the parallels and tangencies between his points and the way I think about Being, Life, Sentience and Consciousness and about the relation between the objective and subjective perspectives.

Tolle believes that we let our rational, conscious mind get in the way of real life. It is a useful tool, but we let it run out of control. How does this manifest itself? We spend too much of our lives planning and fretting about the future or reliving and regretting the past. Our memory and our capacity to form intentions and plan their execution keep us from opening to the raw experiences of life's moment - the here and now.

Tolle goes on to say that there is actually nothing else but the Now. I disagree with this, instead seeing time as one dimension of space-time, just as real as the others, but different from them. Whereas we can move freely among the three spatial dimensions, we are dictated to by the time dimension. We have to move at its speed.

Our access to that dimension is only through the narrow slit that at any moment is now. Our memory gives us imperfect access to the past, as if looking through a rear-view mirror. Our scientific understanding allow a very limited and narrow predictive look at the future. But we can only ever experience now - this moment. This differs hugely from what an objective observer, sitting outside space-time (a-la Flatland fashion) would see. He would see the stretch of all time just as easily as he sees the extension of space. To use a film analogy, he would see the whole reel unwound at once, rather than be restricted (like us) to seeing one frame at a time in quick succession.

Metaphysics aside, I think that Tolle makes a good practical point. If we let our self-conscious powers run amok, dwelling on the past, reliving it, resenting it; scheming about the future, preparing for every eventuality, plotting moves, then we lose out on the wonders that our senses are trying to present to our (animal) sentient awareness. In over-exercising that which sets us apart from other animals (perhaps in the vain hope of convincing ourselves that we're not animals) we miss the simple pleasures of qualia - warmth, melody, beauty. Our unique subjective worlds become cluttered with 'noise'.

Tolle also emphasises that we are not our minds. For him, each person has an eternal presence, an essence part of yet identical with the great unmanifested. I agree that we are more than our minds, though I see it differently from him. Rather than appeal to a supernatural 'unmanifested', I find a foundation in the natural world - the stuff of which we are made, the recipe by which we are made, the chain of actions of which we play a part - basically the eternal web, or flux, of everything. Our roots reach endlessly to the past and our legacy stretches ceaselessly into the future - two opposing cones with us at their common meeting point.

Anyway, to re-iterate the common ground, don't confuse your self with your mind, especially your self-conscious, rational mind. It is a special, important part of you, but it is rooted in more fundamental stuff.

Archive: The End of Time

2/11/2017

 
First posted 15 January 2006. Barbour's picture is about as close to my worldview as you can get from a materialist perspective. I 'just' replace his infinite set of particle configurations with an infinite set of experiential moments.

I've just read Julian Barbour's The End of Time, a good history of the physics and philosophy of time that also puts forward a radical view of time itself.

Update to the Block View
Barbour's historical account helped me to realise that the view of time I put forward in All the Time in the World (or more specifically a couple of aspects of it) is Newtonian and doesn't recognise a couple of truths from the relativity revolution.

In that post I said, when distinguishing between the space dimensions and the time dimension in space time that although we can easily imagine orienting a three-axis grid however we like in space, we cannot think of 'rotating' the time axis at some angle.  In fact, special relativity and Minkowski space-time do away with absolute simultaneity and DO in fact allow rotating the time axis in 'trade-offs' with the space ones.  (It also gives us light cones and time-like, space-like and light-like relationships among events, but I'll save that for another post.)

General relativity goes even further by getting rid of the idea of 'clean' Euclidean planes of simultaneity altogether, at least in the vicinity of mass and the distorting effect it has on space-time.  Although I think I've got my head around the special relativistic implications for my view, I can't quite claim to be on top of what adjustments general relativity requires.

Getting rid of the vessel and defining a new space
Barbour doesn't adopt the 'block view' of time that appeals to me.  Instead he asserts that time does not exist.  Einstein's radical step was to dismiss the notion of absolute simultaneity and to take the very practical approach of asking what we could know via the use of rods and clocks.  Barbour thinks a further radical step is necessary, and his denies not only the existence of temporal becoming, which is denied by many others, but also the existence of any space-time 'vessel' for holding all the things that exist.  In the absence of that vessel, all that matters is the relative positions of the things themselves.  A scientist named Mach, whose influence on Einstein was great but fell away in Einstein's final analysis, is the father of this view.

Barbour believes that a Machian world is strongly suggested by Einstein's general relativity, but that Einstein didn't quite carry things through far enough to see it.  He goes further to say that such a view may be exactly what is necessary to reach an acceptable theory of quantum gravity, reconciling and uniting Einstein's cosmological theory with the weird microscopic world of quantum dynamics.

For Barbour the building blocks of reality are the infinite possible relative positional configurations of existing particles.  Each of these configurations might be thought of as an 'instant'.  (Certainly, in a layman's evolutionary view of time, each instant corresponds to some configuration of particles - a snapshot of the universe, although one might ask just how long an instant is.)  These snapshots are not layered neatly onto one another to create a book or block.  They are just in a jumble, like wooden shapes in a bag.  So Barbour's view might be called the 'timeless bag' view.

Now if we can imagine a mathematical space of huge (indeed, infinite) dimensionality, we could match each possible configuration of the universe to one point in that space.  Barbour calls this space Platonia, and it is central to his story.

The case for Structuralism
The term structuralism, as applied here, is mine, not Barbour's.  His theory is structural in that the 'shape' of configuration space (Platonia) determines how the wave function - that messy thing (or mathematical construct, depending on your view) central to quantum mechanics - hovers over it, making some configurations more likely than others.  So causality exists not 'vertically' (i.e. through time) but rather horizontally (i.e. sheerly through eternal relations and resonances).

Barbour reminds us that Schrodinger's first derivation of his wave equations was actually a time-independent one.  It predicted with great accuracy the energy levels in the Bohr model of the atom.  Schrodinger went on to develop time-dependent equations, which came to be viewed as the more fundamental relations.  For Barbour, the first is the more fundamental, and it is strong support for a timeless universe.

He also cites what is known as the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. This equation is controversial in that its derivation may be flawed, in that it is mathematically incomplete (new techniques must be developed to solve it), and in that its interpretation is not clear.  But Barbour thinks it could be an early version of the ONE equation that describes the whole universe, uniting the two great theories of relativity and the quantum.  And he thinks that it points to the 'timeless bag' view.

Philosophically, Barbour's interpretation of quantum mechanics has much in common with Everett's Many Worlds interpretation, in that it gives positive ontological status to all possible configurations of the universe.  But whereas Everett thought in terms of infinitely branching histories, all of which are 'real', Barbour sees, no 'real' histories, since histories require time, the existence of which he denies.  No, the infinite possibilities are simply configurations - those wooden shapes loose in the bag, those individual points in Platonia.  Every possible configuration exists, and the quantum wave function for the universe determines the 'number of copies' of each (which is a timeless way of thinking about the frequency of occurrence for each).  And because there is no time dimension, all of these instants exist simultaneously (or more properly, eternally).

Reconciling with our experience of temporal becoming
But why does it seem to us that only a tiny percentage of these possible states has been or will be realised?  And why is it that they seem to us to be strung together by a causal history (notwithstanding apparent quantum indeterminacy)?  Finally, why do we FEEL like we are moving through time or that events are flowing from the future to the present to the past?

The answer starts with this: all of the most probable states (again, as determined by the universe's wave function) are what Barbour calls 'time capsules' in that they contain 'records' referencing an apparent past.  These records include fossils, books, empirical test results and artefacts.  More important, they include human brain configurations that contain memories.

Barbour reminds us that any conscious access to 'the past' is through CURRENT brainstates.  In any instant a brain state is nothing but a small bit of the universe's overall configuration and but one of the many records potentially contained in that instant.  Barbour must also intend (although I don't recall him saying it explicitly) that 'time capsules' are specifically those configurations that contain overwhelmingly (although not necessarily perfectly) CONSISTENT records.  Otherwise, if we lacked a significant degree of inter-subjective agreement, or if physical records pointed randomly in different directions, life would be very difficult and confusing.

Another thing Barbour doesn't (as far as I could make out) make clear is whether the configurations to which records refer are in themselves time capsules.  If not, then the configurations (and the records' referents) still EXIST, because all possible configurations exist, but the records are in a sense false, because the apparent past to which they point is not a likely one.  If the  configurations to which time capsules point ARE time capsules themselves, then there is a linked path of time capsules through Platonia, and our memories are 'true' in a sense they would not otherwise be.

As for our feeling of temporal becoming, Barbour puts that too down to brain states and the notion of the specious present, familiar to phenomenologists.  I wrote about the specious present (retention, protention and the immediate now) in The Anatomy of Experience, so I won't go into any detail here.  The bottom line is that each instantaneous brain state contains not only the current input from the world but also a record of the last brain state, and within that of the one before, etc.  This recursive encoding of records in our brain states accounts for our subjective experience of the flow of time, of temporal becoming.  But, says Barbour, just like longer-term memories, this feeling is actually wholly contained in each single instant, so long as that instant is one of the probable ones he calls time capsules.

Do I buy this?
Now, although I have a lay interest in physics and read a fair bit about it, I obviously am not at its cutting edge, so I can't comment on the technical aspects of Barbour's theory.  But here is what I think of it at the level at which I can engage.  I am on record elsewhere as arguing for realism and determinism in the interpretation of quantum dynamics.  Barbour's view is a probabilistic one and therefore not deterministic, so my instincts lean away from it.  But his equating our experienced states with those that are most probable (maybe by a vast margin most probable) goes some way toward alleviating my discomfort.  If time capsules are, by definition, the states 'awarded' highest probability by the wave function (as it overlays the structure of the configuration space, Platonia), then our specific history IS given a special, privileged position, one that arises directly from the structure of Platonia.  But I'm not quite sure whether Barbour is saying this.

My biggest questions are those alluded to three paragraphs above.  Are the many instants that are referenced in the records at instant T, time capsules, as instant T is?  Are the records in instant T-3 the same as those in instant T, except that they exclude reference to instants T-2 and T-1?  If the answers to these questions are 'yes' then I think Barbour's proposal could be a sensible one, and I'm willing to throw away the dimension of time.  My comfort arises from the fact that Barbour would then be assigning to the wave function (as influenced by the shape of Platonia) the ordinal role we normally assume to be performed by time.  From a practical perspective, the upshot would be the same as in the block view of time that I have endorsed - all that IS, exists eternally.  The STRUCTURE of the universe is set, and it is a peculiarity of our experience that we seem to flow through a time dimension.  In either case, the god's eye view is of an eternal structure (one in Platonia, the other in 4-dimensional space-time).  I'm not saying that there are no differences between the two - there are very big ones, especially for physics.  But at the level of philosophical implication, I think that they are quite close.

If the answer to either question above is 'no', then I have a hard time swallowing the theory.  (This of course doesn't mean the theory is wrong, and it needn't bother Barbour at all!.)  If the instants, the configurations, of existence are not related to one another consistently - whether via a neatly stacked vertical causation or via consistent reference among configurations jumbled loosely 'in a bag', then there might as well be (and may indeed be!) only one instant.  This is certainly philosophically possible, but it makes me want to go to bed and not get up again.  (But this is what the determinism that I expound does to many other people, so there you go!).

For a more coherent and/but much more technical analysis of The End of Time by a philosopher of science, see Jeremy Butterfield, of Oxford University.

Archive: All the time in the world

1/11/2017

 
Originally posted 9 May 2005. My view shifted less than a year after writing this, when I came across Julian Barbour's The End of Time.  Still, this was a step along the way. I guess my present view isn't far off what is expressed here briefly as 'Presentism'. But in another sense it is a special case of a B-Theory, with no 'real' flow of time.

I have for some time held a 'Block' view of time, without realising that it had such a name. Upon thinking a bit more about time, I realised that my view on it is so closely entwined with my views on personal identity, determinism and morality that I really should make it a matter of record.

The Block view at a glance
By a 'Block' view of time, I mean this: that time can be seen, within limits, as a space-like dimension that, when visualised in conjunction with the three spatial dimensions, creates a four-dimensional 'Block' of spacetime. This Block is the vessel that contains the complete history of everything - or simply IS the collection of all histories - in our universe. If space or time is infinite (as it now seems at least space is), then this Block too is infinite. This, I think, is the standard scientific view of time, and four-dimensional spacetime is the stage on which Einstein's general relativity is set out.

But there are potential problems with this. From a scientific angle, at least one of the leading candidate theories of quantum gravity - the required next big step in reconciling relativity with quantum theory and advancing our understanding of the universe - does away with spacetime altogether. From a philosophical perspective, some say that such a view fails to account for the flow of time.  Leaving quantum gravity for another time, I'll concentrate hear on the philosophical issues.

My Block view falls under the umbrella of what is known as the B-Theory of time. There is another set of theories that fall under the A-Theory umbrella. Essentially, I think that the key differences are these:

A-theory and B-theory of time
The A-theory believes that the flow of time (temporal becoming) is real, objective and absolute. NOW is a moving instant that flows at one second per second. The A-Theory also believes that the temporal properties of futureness, presence and pastness are real temporal entities. A specific version of the A-Theory, Presentism, denies the existence of past and future, leaving only the eternal NOW. See my post on Eckhardt Tolle's The Power of Now.

The B-Theory holds that past and future events, like present ones, are real. As a matter of fact, B-Theorists hold that, just like there is no objective special place called 'here', there is no objective special time called 'now'. There are just points in the temporal dimension at specific dates and times, and the only real temporal entities are the temporal RELATIONS of earlier than, later than and simultaneous with. The image is one of a time axis on which we can see that some points lie to the left of (and are hence earlier than) other points.  But the thing to grasp is that events that lie to the 'left' and 'right' of the time we presently occupy are just as real (at those times) as the events we witness now. And it goes further.

The philosophers discuss time mainly by talking about the truth of statements about temporal relations. For B-theorists, if my mother kisses the US President at 12:30 pm on 5 December 2003, then the statement, "D's mother kisses the US President at 12:30 pm on 5 December 2003," is true not just at 12:30 pm on 5 December 2003, but eternally. Eternally in this sense does not mean 'at all times' but rather timelessly. That truth, like the truth 2+2=4 does not exist in time at all.

A closer look at the Block view
But talking about truth values of statements doesn't do it for me.  I want to talk about the existence of things and events.  I am drawn, and have been since long before I read about the philosophy of time, to an image of spacetime, as seen from a perspective OUTSIDE spacetime. Of course, such a perspective cannot be attained, but we can think of it as a God-like one. From outside spacetime (and therefore necessarily outside time), we 'see' a four dimensional container, and that container holds the entire history of every particle, field and every other entity. If we were to pick out a single rock, we could follow it along the time dimension (which, since we can't visually represent 4 dimensions very well, we might think of as going from left to right) and see that it's spatial position shifts (up, down, etc) as it moves 'forward' through time.  Now, I've said we can imagine this God-like perspective, but the more important point is that this is how things are, although we cannot attain the proper perspective to see them this way.

Just as the philosopher says that the STATEMENTS 2+2=4 and "D's mother kisses the US President at 12:30 pm on 5 December 2003," ARE TRUE eternally, I believe that that rock and everything else within the spacetime 'container' (or collection) EXIST eternally. Once again, this isn't to say that they exist at all times; if we say that we are still thinking within the time dimension. The Empire State Building came into existence at a particular time and will no doubt cease to exist at some time. It is rather to say that anything that exists at ANY TIME, exists eternally, timelessly, from this God-like perspective, outside of the time dimension.

This visualisation I've used also helps show the main objection that B-theorists have with the A-theory: there is no special time in this 'vessel' labelled 'Now'. Time is just a fourth axis for the grid system.

But this simultaneously throws up the big problem that A-theorists have with B-theory: it doesn't adequately account for the Now-ness or presence of certain events. The vessel is filled with events, but why do some specific ones feel very different than the rest, i.e. why do they feel like they are happening NOW. B-theorists answer, once again, more in terms of the truth value of temporal statements rather than about events / things per se. But I am quite happy to take it that the events that are happening NOW as opposed to at some other time are those events that are near-simultaneous with my asking 'Which events are happening now?' Events that happened in the past are those that happened earlier than my asking that same question, and future events are ones that happen later than when I ask the question.

What makes time unique among spacetime dimensions?
But this does highlight another problem that many B-theorists have with my particular Block time version of there own theory. Time is obviously not a truly space-like dimension.
  • First, whereas we can draw three axes to represent the space dimensions and orient these axes however we like (so as to look 'normal' to an observer looking from any direction), the time axis seems to demand a particular orientation. We can't imagine tilting it at 30 degrees clockwise or spinning 25 degrees to the rear.
  • Second the time axis has a strict direction of succession, always heading 'forward' in time. Contrast this with my ability to move either up or down, left or right, backward or forward in space itself.
  • Finally, although the spatial dimensions extend vastly all around us for our inspection, in the temporal dimension, we have sensory access to only a moment at a time, access to the past only by memory, and no access to the future at all.

This is where the real mystery comes in, and perhaps it is a particular weakness in my theory that leaves me in this cul-de-sac having to throw up my hands and appeal to mystery...  But I haven't seen anyone else bottom it out yet either.

We could say, and many philosophers do, that it simply is the case that the temporal dimension is qualitatively and irreducibly different from the spatial ones - objectively. Or we could say that it is not that different objectively but that there is something about the nature of sentience and consciousness that makes our inter-subjective experience of it seem different.

If we're willing to accept one of these explanations, what are the knock-on effects? Well, on my view, accepting the Block theory of time answers the free will / determinism debate once and for all. Although such a theory of time is not necessary for determinism to hold (an A-theoretical flow forward from a set of initial conditions according to fixed and determinate laws does the job as well), I think it is definitely sufficient. If all of history is captured in spacetime, with us just consciously 'riding' through the time dimension, then everything we do, we do necessarily.

Eternal life?
I think that the block view also prompts interesting questions about sentience and consciousness, life and death. If all that exists does so eternally, and if the flow of time is simply something that we experience subjectively, then are we not eternally living those lives?

When I die as when I live, all of the moments of my life exist in that four-dimensional spacetime; if that window that moves along the time dimension, providing access to the 'present' as it rolls forward, is not objectively in the nature of the temporal dimension itself but rather in our experience of it; if no moment in time has a privileged position relative to all the others, then I live my life, from 16 June 1966 to the day I die, eternally.

That doesn't mean that I live my life over and over again. It doesn't mean retracing and taking different turns through supposed possible worlds, as it is always exactly the same. But it could mean that my subjective experience itself (or perhaps more exactly each and every moment of it) runs eternally between those two points on the timeline.  My first sentient experience (probably even before birth) exists eternally.  My last dying experience exists eternally.  And so does every experience in between.

Maybe the whole history of the entire universe sits, still and unchanging, four dimensions. Maybe the only movement is the eternal subjective movement of sentience between the start line and the finish line of each sentient life in the temporal dimension. And the existence of that sentience, that subjective perspective, is just something that happens to be, arising from the relations among entities in that four dimensional space...

If so, then Nietzsche wasn't far off with his doctrine of the Eternal Return.  Although he saw eternity as a never ending looping repeat of history, which is quite different from what I've spelled out, the recommendation is the same: live each moment of your life as if you will live it eternally.  See my post on Nietzsche here.

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