Episodit
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The core argument of philosopher Daniel Kolak's book, I Am You, is that we are all the same person, or, more precisely, that a single subject (consciousness) is "incarnated" in all human beings. This idea, often called "Open Individualism" (OI), is not meant in a mystical sense, but as a logical and metaphysical possibility. According to Kolak, it's the most coherent explanation for who we are and provides the best metaphysical basis for global ethics.
âBut we sure seem separateâ, one might say. Kolak addresses the various types of borders which we build around the concept of a person to show that we have all sorts of hidden assumptions behind these borders and they might not be as solid as they appear to be. In one sense there are borders we can draw to distinguish you from me, but in another sense, those borders are just constructs and not hard and fast boundaries that divide us into separate subjects.
For instance:
* Physical Borders - I seem to have a separate body from you.. yet my physical body is constantly changing over time and I donât consider myself from last year as a separate person from myself at this moment
* Spatial Borders- People seem to exist in different places⊠yet you are not âover thereâ, rather, you appear âright hereâ in me. The space between us is a construct of our mental map of the world.
* Psychological Borders - Your mind appears separate from my mind.. yet if I have multiple personality disorder, am I to be considered as two people?
I like the way this aligns with some of Douglas Hardings concepts of regional appearances in his Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth. At one level, in the 3rd person point of view, we can distinguish amongst multiple people. At other levels we can be viewed as the earth or as humanity. And from our own first person perspective, we are the alone, the no-thing full of every-thing. Having both views feels more complete than having one without the other. You are you, but also, I am you.
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Physicist John Archibald Wheeler, who coined such terms as âblack holeâ, âwormholeâ, and âquantum foamâ wrote about his concept of the âParticipatory Universeâ in the inspiration for todayâs episode â Wheelerâs paper entitled Beyond the Black Hole.
Wheeler describes his âdelayed choice experimentâ which shows that not only does an electron behave as a particle when observed and a wave when not observed, but that we can delay our choice in whether to observe it and then after making the choice, the electron will behave accordingly. Quantum strangeness like that implies that we as observers have a definite role in shaping the ârealityâ around us.
Wheeler used the analogy of a letter R (for reality) made of papier-mùché where there are definite iron post observations that mark out the structure of reality, but we fill in the rest with our own theories based on those observations.
But arenât we a part of reality as well? In a way, yes, our human appearance is also a part of the reality we observe. In that way, Wheeler said, we are participating in our own creation. And this participation is not just on our own mental scale, but Wheeler says it extends to the whole universe as observed by all observers. Wheeler drew this iconic picture of the universe looking back at itself to illustrate his point. The Big Bang is the top right of the picture where the universe âUâ then expands and ultimately creates observers (represented by the eyeball at top left) which can then look back at the whole history of the universe and thereby bring it into a sort of papier-mĂąchĂ© being.
We play this role for the universe. We get what we look for. Looking down, I find a torso, arms and legs and the earth at my feet. Directing my attention to where those arms and legs and earth are sticking out of, I see just pure nothingness, the source where all that creation comes from and the subject which is the observer of that creation.
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Puuttuva jakso?
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Recently I had the thought âIâm not making things happen, the things that are happening are making meâ. For me this resonates with what Alfred North Whitehead describes in his process philosophy as laid out in Adventures of Ideas. It is based on the insight that we are not static subjects observing static objects - everything is becoming rather than just being.
Whitehead sees each moment of experience as a process where we don't simply "make things happen" - rather, we are constituted by how we prehend (take in and feel) what is given to us from the past. Whitehead calls the process of âconcrescenceâ as the way these prehensions come together to form a new unity which he calls the âsuperjectâ.
Whitehead uses the term âingressionâ to describe how eternal objects (potentialities) and past actual occasions enter into and shape the becoming of each new moment of experience. We don't stand apart from experience and "make" it - we are made by it.
Whitehead reverses the traditional subject-object relationship. Instead of a stable subject that acts on or perceives objects, he sees subjects as emerging from the process of experiencing. The experiencer and the experience arise together. This also relates to what Whitehead calls "creativity" - the ultimate principle by which "the many become one and are increased by one." The "many" (all the past occasions and potentials) come together to create each new occasion of experience, which then becomes part of the "many" for future occasions.
We, and all of reality, are like a river. A constant flow of becoming, always changing, always new.
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18th century philosopher, David Humeâs essay entitled A Treatise Of Human Nature is the topic of todayâs deep dive. Hume analyzes the role of memory and ideas in or own perception of the self. For Hume, there is an immediate âimpressionâ we get from our perceptions that are then later recalled into fuzzier âideasâ about what we perceived. Impressions have a greater âforce and livelinessâ while ideas are âfaint imagesâ of impressions.
Being an empiricist, Hume argues that we can find no concrete permanent entity called âthe selfâ. Instead of we have a âbundleâ of perceptions which we then connect together in an attempt to understand those events in terms of cause and effect. This forms the idea of the self to explain what happened. He uses the idea of a republic as an analogy for our idea of a self. Just as a republic is the idea of a collection of common persons with similar coordinated behavior, the self is likewise an idea arising from our bundle of perceptions.
This reminds me of the phrase âthe united cellular republicâ that Douglas Harding uses sometimes as one way to describe what a person is. Tying Hume and Hardingâs ideas together, I would say we are a cellular republic which refers to itself as âmeâ, âmyselfâ, and âIâ.
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This short story entitled Where Am I? by philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett really made my head spin. It is the fascinating tale of a fictional character whose brain and body are separated by radio transmitters. So many questions and scenarios are played out and examined by Dennett in this story. Are we the body? Are we the brain? Are we just the point of view that comes from experience happening thru the body?
There are no easy answers to these questions, but this was a really fun story and will hopefully give you as much to think about as it did me.
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Cognitive and computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter is best known for his Pulitzer Prize winning book Gödel, Escher, Bach, and his later book I Am a Strange Loop but todayâs episode is a talk Hofstadter gave at Stanford in 2006 about how analogies are the âinterstate freeway system of cognitionâ (to use his analogy).
In this fascinating and humous lecture, Hofstadter shows how our use of analogy in language and the way we sometimes get tripped up and mix metaphors or blend words together points to the deep role analogy plays in our cognition. He suggests that perhaps it might be analogy all the way down.
In a future episode we will further explore the role of analogy in Hofstadterâs âstrange loopâ concept and how building up a series of analogies eventually leads us to having a sense of âselfâ. But for today, enjoy this talk about how analogy plays a deep role in our thinking process.
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Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes outlines his fascinating theory of the bicameral mind in this essay entitled Consciousness and the Voices of the Mind. Jaynesâ theory is that humans were not always conscious in the way we think of being conscious. Jaynes defines consciousness as the âmind spaceâ we use as an analog of the real world and says we use metaphors to describe our introspection of what this inner model of the world is like. But Jaynes also says this has not always been the case. He cites early written works and cultural artifacts that indicate that as recently as 3000 years ago, humans experienced the world through what Jaynes calls a âbicameral mindâ. Whereas today, we introspect our thoughts and see them as thoughts, to these early cultures those thoughts would appear as auditory hallucinations which they would attribute to the voices of gods speaking to them.
Jaynes says that in the bicameral mind the right hemisphere acts as the âgodâ part which issues commands and the left hemisphere follows the commands without introspection. Jaynes says our modern way of thinking and introspection is a learned process, derived from language like âI see the solutionâ and âIâm feeling downâ. Our sense of âIâ comes along with this language as the subject that is doing the seeing and the feeling.
This theory, although somewhat controversial, just makes me realize how much I take for granted and assume must have always been the way minds work. Even in our own lifetime we may even go through this same process of mental evolution. Jaynes compares the âimaginary friendsâ of some children to the personal gods of the bicameral mind and it does make sense that a lot of our own self-talk seems to be commands and judgements we are giving to ourselves.
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Douglas Hardingâs description of the Heirarchy of Heaven and Earth was clearly influenced by Leibniz and Leibnizâs Monadology. In the Monadology Leibniz describes the concept of monads, where each monad represents the entire universe from a unique point of view. Harding says âwhat I am depends on the range of the observerâ. And this implies that to really understand what I am (from a 3rd person perspective) you have to observe me from every possible angle and every possible distance, with every possible sort of sensory apparatus. This corresponds to the way Leibniz describes looking at the same town from different sides. Each monad has its own distinct perception of the universe, but they all ultimately reflect the same universe.
So each of us, in our own way, contains the whole universe as a living reflection of the whole universe. Though we may seem limited due to our limited perspective, in our very essence we are all whole and complete, lacking nothing.
âNow this connexion or adaptation of all created things to each and of each to
all, means that each simple substance has relations which express all the others,
and, consequently, that it is a perpetual living mirror of the universeâ.
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Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup takes the âhard problem of consciousnessâ and completely turns it inside out. Kastrupâs PhD dissertation titled Analytic Idealism: A consciousness-only ontology, argues that consciousness is fundamental. Everything supposedly âmaterialâ (including our bodies and brains) are appearances in consciousness.
Kastrup uses the concept of alter-egos to describe how we all appear to have our own individual consciousnesses. It is not that we are separate individuals with our own bodies and our own minds, but rather that each of us is one of the many âaltersâ in a universal consciousness and that âothersâ are what the other alters look like from the perspective of our own alter.
According to Kastrup, this explains away the âhard problemâ. Instead of the traditional view that brain activities are the neuronal correlates of consciousness - e.g. proof of the brain generating thoughts, the opposite may be true. Brain activity is actually just what the mental process of one âalterâ looks like to another alter.
I find this to also be a beautiful way of thinking about âthe oneâ and âthe manyâ. At one level we are many minds, but at another level we are one mind. Wouldnât that totally change the nature of disagreement in this world if we took seriously the idea that âtheyâ are really âmeâ experiencing different thoughts?
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In his article, On the Nature of Time, Stephen Wolfram describes the computational model he has for the universe and how that results in a new way to look at time. Wolfram is a physicist, computer scientist, author, inventor of Mathematica (software used by scientists and engineers) and Wolfram Alpha (the brains behind Siri) so he knows a thing or two about computation and physics. He has been spearheading a project called The Wolfram Physics Project where they have been building a model of the universe based on computation.
The way I think of this model is that there is what Wolfram calls âThe Ruliadâ which is the set of all possible rules for all possible universes, and then there is a huge dataset where every point of space exists and gets updated by running through the rules, or actually, running through all possible rules and then getting all possible points of space. We, as observers, are or course included in all that exists as well and we see our section of this process that is local to our section of space unfolding according to our section of all possible rules.
But what is time? In this article, Wolfram describes that as these rules unfold and are computed we see the âfutureâ unfolding before our eyes as the next set of states for everything that exists. However, since our brains can only compute at a certain rate and that rate is much smaller than the rate of everything unfolding in the ruliad computations, we end up with summarized snapshots of the universe that unfold before us like a movie made of so many images per second instead of as a stream of countless bits of information.
Wolfram summarizes it as follows:
âIn our everyday life weâre typically looking at scenes involving objects that are perhaps tens of meters away from us. And given the speed of light that means photons from these objects get to us in less than a microsecond. But it takes our brains milliseconds to register what weâve seen. And this disparity of timescales is what leads us to view the world as consisting of a sequence of states of space at successive moments in time.
If our brains âranâ a million times faster (i.e. at the speed of digital electronics) weâd perceive photons arriving from different parts of a scene at different times, and weâd presumably no longer view the world in terms of overall states of space existing at successive times.â
So according to this theory, it seems that time is just what it feels like to see one snapshot after another in a certain sequence. We are starring in, and projecting the movie of our lives.
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You know how in cartoons sometimes they show a dotted line from a personâs eyes to show what the person is looking at? It turns out, that we actually do something like that in our own heads to track what another person is looking at. This paying attention to how we and others around us are paying attention is a part of what Michael Graziano talks about in his theory of consciousness called Attention Schema Theory (AST). In his paper, called A Conceptual Framework of Consciousness, Graziano describes the way we model our own attention along with two principles which, taken together, form a materialistic explanation for how a conscious experience could arise from information processing in the brain.
It goes like this:
* What we experience is generated by the brain. If we see an apple, it may be because we are processing photons bouncing off a real apple or it may be an hallucination, but either way it is the result of a brain process.
* Just like we model our body schema to track where our bodies are in space, we track our attention to control what we are paying attention to. Both the âbody schemaâ and the âattention schemaâ are models of what is actually going on, and all models are simplified versions of reality which leave out a lot of details in order to make them efficient and useful.
In other words, we invent the idea of being conscious to explain how we come to be aware of what we are aware of. It is possible to be aware of something in a subliminal way without having a conscious experience of that thing. The Attention Schema Theory is basically saying that the âmeâ and âmy experienceâ are just stories made up when trying to pay attention to paying attention.
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Do things have properties in and of themselves, or is a thing only what it seems to be to its observer and the interactions it has with other things? Is there a universal notion of time, or is time just a local experience that is different for each observer?
These are some of the questions being tackled by Carlo Rovelli in his theory of Relational Quantum Mechanics which was analyzed by Mauro Dorato in his paper Rovelliâs Relational Quantum Mechanics, Anti-Monism, and Quantum Becoming.
My key takeaways from this paper were:
* Things are defined by their interactions with other things and have no inherent properties of their own
* A system cannot know itself fully and therefore the universe as a whole is unknowableâŠ. âeverythingâ is in many ways identical with âno-thingâ.
* We all have our own timeline and our own view from âhereâ that serves as a âlocal becomingâ. In a way, our point of view is our universe.
One quote that really jumped out at me that was not even one from Carlo Rovelli. It was this quote from Julian Barbour:
âif we want to get a true idea of what a point of space-time is like we should look outward at the universeâŠThe complete notion of a point of space-time in fact consists of the appearance of the entire universe as seen from that point.â
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The physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (for whom the unit of velocity as compared to the speed of sound was named), brings us todayâs episode, based on his book: The Analysis of Sensations. In this book, March argues that our understanding of the world is based on our sensations and that physical objects are merely thought-symbols for complex combinations of these sensations. Mach rejects the distinction between mind and matter, and emphasizes the economical nature of science, suggesting that scientific theories should be as simple and efficient as possible.
This view of the world is very well represented in Machâs famous âself portraitâ where he depicts âhimselfâ as his visual field of view. This radical approach says that, yes, 3rd party observers would paint a portrait of us as a person with a head, arms and legs (assuming that observer were at a distance of a few feet away) â but for ourselves, what we see is what we are at the moment. Mach argues that the series of first-person perceptions which we have throughout our lives is what we use the shortcut/symbol âIâ to mean, even though the person we were as a baby and the person we are now are clearly very different looking and having very different experiences.
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Thanks to the recommendation of a friend at book club, I bring you todayâs episode which instead of being based on an article, is based on a YouTube video of a presentation by researcher Chris Fields entitled What Are Our Bodies?
Have you been feeling old lately? Well, guess what? You are a lot older than you think. According to Fields, our bodies are part of one single body that is 4,000,000,000 years old. Not only that, it means that we share that body with every other living thing on the planet. It really makes one question the notion of âselfâ and âotherâ.
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The Three Dialogues, written in 1713 by George Berkeley lays out his philosophy of âindeterminismâ via a series of dialogues between two characters: Hylas (representing common sense) and Philonous (representing Berkeley as the philosopher). This writing style may have been an inspiration for the approach Douglas Harding takes in parts of the Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth as a device to argue against conventional ways of thinking.
Berkeley argues that there are nothing but âsensibleâ objects perceived in a mind and that the notion of âmatterâ which is somehow outside of mind does not make any sense (literally and figuratively). In fact, says Berkeley, the âthingsâ which we sense are actually the redness, sweetness, and roundness which, in language, we commonly refer to as an âappleâ. Ultimately, Berkeley (who was a bishop in the Anglican Church of Ireland) uses this chain of logic as a proof that God exists â for how else could there be things outside of our individual human minds, if they were not in the mind of God.
p.s. I get a kick out of how this painting of Berkeley looks like he is doing one of Hardingâs pointing experiments.
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The NotebookLM tool that I use to generate these podcasts just got an upgrade which allows me to provide input to the âhostsâ as to how they approach their discussion. This allows me to now indicated that this podcast is called the Headless Deep Dive and is targeted to those interested in the Headless Way. Iâm thrilled with the outcome and I hope you are too.
Todayâs episode is based on the Essays in Radical Empiricism by the psychologist and philosopher William James. James focuses on the importance and primacy of the unending stream of experience that we commonly refer to as âconsciousnessâ. However, he does so in a way so as to be clear that there are not two things (consciousness and the world) but rather there is just the stream of experience. Interestingly he connects breathing to the development of the idea that there is a separate thing called âconsciousnessâ:
âŠbreath, which was ever the original of âspirit,â breath moving outwards, between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as consciousness. That entity is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. But thoughts in the concrete are made of the same stuff as things are.
The argument goes that while noticing the breath and other âinternalâ sensations like thoughts along with the rest of the experiences going on at the same time, we develop an intuition that there is an âinsideâ and âoutsideâ â a âmeâ and âthe worldâ. James argues that this is just a mistaken impression and there is only what he calls âpure experienceâ.
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If the sense of being a âmeâ is an illusion, where does it come from? Thatâs a topic that Professor Jay Garfield covers in todayâs article called: Second Persons and the Constitution of the First Person. In the article, Garfield cites the work of developmental psychologist Vasudevi Reddy, who emphasizes the role of dyadic (two-way) interactions in infants and the way these interactions contribute to the development of self-understanding. Apparently, even before language develops, the interactions we have with other people creates a you-me relationship and hence the sense of âmeâ begins to develop.
Reflecting on this point of view, I do see how other third persons are like objects moving through the world - sights and sounds to be seen. But when those third persons turn their attention towards âmeâ, then the feeling arises of âwhat are you looking at?â. If I go looking for what they are looking at, all I see is the world along with the thought that I am looking at the world. So when it comes to duality, you and I are in this together.
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Todayâs article is called HOW AND WHY CONSCIOUSNESS ARISES: SOME CONSIDERATIONS FROM PHYSICS AND PHYSIOLOGY by Mark Solms and Karl Friston.
What I find fascinating about this paper is the detailed description of the active inference process used by us humans, and other intelligences, to model the world, predict what it is we should be sensing and then either adjust those predictions based on prediction errors that come back from the next set of sensations or take action to gather more input. All of this is done while also paying attention based on âaffectâ or the âfelt sense of uncertaintyâ , as the authors put it, in order to guide what is salient in this moment that we should actually be paying attention to .
In a sense we are living in a projected reality based on our predictions of the âoutsideâ environment but this is where it gets really interesting. What is âinsideâ and what is âoutsideâ? The paper speaks of interoception, or the sense of our âinner statesâ like our heart rate, but as I began to think about it, what makes the sense of my heart rate any different than the sense of the ticking clock on the wall? The definition of âinnerâ and âouterâ, âselfâ and âenvironmentâ is entirely a defined by a specific point of view and is somewhat of a moving target.
Look at your own perceptions right now. What I find in my view is sights, sounds, feelings, and thoughts all of which are presumably my environment, or at best something I have, since it is âIâ who has them. Todayâs paper argues that this intuition of âIâ is also one of those things I am predicting along with the sights, sounds, feeling and thoughts. Wow.
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Todayâs article, Predicting green: really radical (plant) predictive processing by Paco Calvo and Karl Friston reveals that plants, like animals, engage in predictive processing - a fundamental aspect of intelligence involving predictions and evidence-gathering to minimize surprise and uncertainty.
Despite lacking a central nervous system, plants demonstrate intelligence through adaptive behaviors, predicting future conditions and adjusting their growth patterns accordingly. I found this to be amazing.
Humans also generate internal models of the world, comparing predictions with sensory data and adjusting beliefs and actions to minimize discrepancies. I find that this process creates a sense of separation between self and environment and a constant striving to align reality with expectations.
However, Douglas Harding's Headless Way provides a complementary viewpoint. Harding invites us to notice that at the center of our experience - where we assume our head to be - there is actually a vast, boundless awareness. This awareness is the space in which all sensations, thoughts, and predictions occur.
Harding's insights remind us that there's more to our nature than prediction and adaptation. We are also the vast, open awareness in which all of life's predictions and surprises play out - a truth we can directly experience here and now.
By integrating these perspectives, we can navigate life with both the wisdom of our adaptive, predictive nature and the freedom of boundless awareness. Editors Note: True to the nature of the Headless Deep dive I worked with Claude.ai to help me draft this article.
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Michael Levin is one of my favorite scientists. He and his collaborators are working in the area of biology and cognition with a framework he calls the Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere (TAME), which I find to be very much compatible with eastern philosophy and the Headless Way.
One of the most mind blowing papers is Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence. This paper struck a chord with me as both someone who is interested in Buddhist-type philosophy and someone who is interested in AI. The concept Cognitive Light Cones introduced in this paper as a way of describing the depth and breadth of what an intelligence cares about is an idea that should be at the forefront of AI research as we bring new intelligences into the world. It seems rather obvious that we would want those new intelligences to care about us and the things we care about as well.
More than that though, this paper got me thinking about âcareâ as a fundamental quality behind everything we experience. What we experience â what we see, hear, feel, smell, taste, and think â is optimized and shaped by evolution to be what we care about. It is those aspects of the world that we find salient to our own existence and thus when I see the world I see what I care about. It brings a new flavor to everything. There is care, love and compassion underscoring all experience.
It is not about preferences, or approval or disapproval of what I experience. The mere fact that I experience it means I care for it. Now that puts a new spin on those annoying people and situations in life. So-and-so may really tick me off, but I experience their words and actions because deep down I care about other people and what they say. I may not agree with them or approve of their actions but I canât help but care about them. Caring comes before any judgements are made. Caring is what lets them in to my awareness in the first place.
I hope you enjoy this episode of Headless Deep Dive as much as I did.
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