Snake Psychoanalysis

Yesterday I launched myself in one of these completely insane plans I use for resetting my values just right, that is most humanly. I went half running, half walking up a low angle mountain, to reach a ridge above the grand canyon of the Mokelumne river. Then the plan was to go east towards another mountain along said ridge, and then down a three mile trail (which I had inaugurated before it was a trail, long ago).

At some point the trail I was on veered full west, but I was going north, where the ridge was. Tired and impatient, I decided to aim at the ridge, cross country. Of these sorts of decisions, the best wildlife encounters are made. Once I met an entire bear family, observing the fact that the pseudo-scientific lore that the bear dad was not staying with bear mom was blatantly false. It became even more interesting when the cubs decided to enquire about the strange ape, and mom barked out orders to all concerned. I was not proud for all too long. That was five miles from the closest trail, another stroke of genius.

So, in my latest ill-conceived plan, I was going up a south facing volcanic slope with a few giant cedar trees, with red fibrous fuzzy bark some probably more than a millennium old, three meters across at the base. There was significant underbrush, in full sun. The ground was black volcanic material. Just the sort of terrain snakes like. Not too cold in winter and the understory, thick in places, provides shade from too much sun. I had my guard down, because I was at 8,000 feet, and I was more worried about the direction of my undertaking, cross country. Suddenly I became aware of a sound, the sound of scales brushing scales, my automatic system said, while motion was detected. This is the sort of interesting situations when part of the brain goes into very slow time. The advantage of slow time is that there is plenty of time for automatized part of the brain for taking decisions. The rest of the brain is like a spectator at the movies, disconnected from all irrelevant sensory information. I had become a optical information processing machine. Brain automatisms focused left less than 4 feet away, trying to comprehend the origin of motion.

A full stop to forward body motion had been ordered. Meanwhile the first analysis came back completely blank: never seen anything like that. Seemed big. Then meta alert systems screamed snake, probably from the fact that motion going one way and the opposite had been detected, while automatic visual analysis made another pass, trying to understand the strange happenings, now in the context of (pacific) snakes. I had no encounter with venomous snake recently, so that’s why i was not panicking.

It was a fascinating flow of occurrences in a potentially disastrous context. In the new snake context my neurology had embraced, this tangle of uniformly grey curves seemed to be an enormous specimen of California Boa (which are found at this altitude, even perched in trees, as I saw at least once; they are olive grey and uniform in color, as I was observing; other snakes have patterns and colors).

So, perfectly cool, because boas, however enormous, are cool, I looked better, and came back with a strikingly black picture, oriented away from me, way out of the dynamically entangling snake’s body: it was long and straight and looked exactly like a fer de lance, the tip of a lance, the last foot and a half of a lance, with an impressive triangular head. I knew what it was, but still couldn’t believe it. RATTLESNAKE! Weirdly, because I was so out of the context of “rattlesnake”, having just been into boas, I didn’t get the adrenalin rush.

Huge Olive grey rattlesnake, Black, Bear Mountain August 2020, 8,000 feet. Picture is fuzzy, but one can see clearly part of the gigantic rattle. I could have taken better pictures, but I didn’t want the situation to degenerate, which could have disastrous consequences for all concerned. Lucky stars shouldn’t be taunted. The snake had sheltered in place, firmly indicated that his black life mattered, and further disturbing of the peace was ill-advised…

I went around the bush at the bottom of the big tree. The snake, a potential escape route blocked, had stopped and SHELTERED IN PLACE, at the foot of the large tree trunk, hidden by a bush.

After getting the camera out, I pondered the alternatives, which were numerous. First I had to thank my lucky star. This had been very close: my face was easily within striking distance of the long creature. Had it decided to attack, and inject venom, instead of retreating, I would have died, just there. And venomous snakes know they are dangerous, and can be extremely aggressive. Some individual snakes are prudent as snakes are supposed to be, and here was apparently one. It was not its fault if it didn’t feel me come, the soil was volcanic sand, so vibrations don’t go far…  And it was trying to go away, its head was as away from me as it was trying to find a place to hide.

Second, I could make tests on animal intelligence. Snakes are one of preferred objects of study. Although I didn’t meet a viper recently, I have met plenty over the years, and I fear them intensely. Although the snake did not initially seem aggressive, I take myself for god, in the matter of snakes, and I practice snake psychoanalysis, according to the highest ethical principles. I don’t kill non venomous snakes. 

Venomous snakes are another matter. Even if they don’t kill you, they can maim you for life. There are two types of venomous snakes, according to me: good guys and bad guys. In Europe, vipers are protected. Still, bad guys die under my jurisdiction. A bad snake is an attacking snake. Now, once in Senegal I saw a Black Mamba. It fled, faster than I could run. One Black Mamba rearing a meter high, will stop a buffalo herd. Lions will not. At that time I was just a child, and not into reptilian psychoanalysis. What did that snake knew which i didn’t?

Another time, in the Grisons, the Swiss Alps, still a child, but an older, more combative sort of child, I was charged, on a trail I was ascending, by a viper. I had no idea why the hissing creature charged down, nor did I have time to ponder the situation. The stone flew instinctively and the viper died instantaneously… In the past, the Alps were full of vipers. Because idiotic humans had killed all the birds who prey on them. Now the birds are back, and the vipers have become very rare. 

***

I am not going to tell all my snakes stories here, that would take a book. A memorable one was in Verdon, a deep gorge in France where climbing is practiced. We were 300 meters up, and my partner above had stopped. Suddenly he screamed: VIPER! I looked up and saw a strange sight: a snake, flying in the air!  The viper was undulating in such a way it had achieved some form of lift. Very recent studies have shown that, indeed, just as all snakes can swim, some can fly. They flatten their bodies and become flying bodies. My partner had got to the end of the rope, where the belay was. It was a very narrow ledge, barely the width of a hand, he had to stop and the venomous legless one threatened him, before deciding to take flight. How it found itself on that mini ledge, at the bottom of a chimney with very smooth walls which I led next, was extremely baffling.

It reminded me of my grandfather mantling on a ledge, also at the end of his rope, and finding a viper on the same ledge. Or my spouse, following the pitch I had just led, on a huge 2,000 feet high rock climb in Ailefroide, confronted by a three foot long black viper. 

That Bear Mountain rattlesnake was dark grey, exactly the color of the ground in the area, and of the treebark it was lodged along. No patterns. I had never seen the description of such a snake, and I believe it’s a new subspecies. The closest black rattlesnake is an endangered species in Arizona, 1,000 kilometers away. But it was a rattlesnake alright, it was brandishing above itself an impressive six inches (15 cm) rattle, purple and white.

To ascertain the character of the astonishing creature, I delicately threw its way, light pieces of bark. It hissed mightily after each impact in its vicinity, but did not rattle. Nor did it charge out. Its message was clearly: I will defend myself, but I am not going to attack. It was definitely a good guy, and I stopped bothering it. We had met by happenstance. It could have killed me, but it let me live, and the least I could do, was to do the same. I also suspect it’s a new subspecies, or at least certainly a special breed. 

That Black Life mattered and was allowed to proceed.

But I will have to remind myself never to go across that particular stretch, and in the three cross country episodes which followed the preceding in the next two hours, I was much more careful in aiming for open ground. 

***

For “animal lovers”, let me explain a bit more: my main relaxation is to go through wild areas, for example mountain ranges. OK, the word “relaxation” may seem strange, as much of the usually unused part of the brain have to be on high alert… But the rest of the brain can relax. In the sea, in Africa, I used to swim with harpoon and a huge serrated combat knife on the leg. Being so equipped is reassuring when next to the greatest white shark you have ever seen (another story). In the wild ranges, when I feel in danger, I carry stones. Once I was charged by a Black Bear, in Yosemite Back Country, and I threw a hefty stone at him. Usually, when confronted by aggressive bears, I throw stones at trees, and that’s enough to make them go away: bears know and fear stones, if you are master of stones, you are master of something they fear, and they flee. But that particular bear had attacked a whole caravan of backcountry hikers earlier, and made a good meal from their backpacks. And I was carrying chickens (for a BBQ with family and friends, ten miles from the road). Chicken dinner made Mr. Bear nuts with desire, and he charged. Until he met with my stone. Thereafter he fled for his life. Three weeks later, rangers tracked it down, and killed it. It had grievously injured a grandmother. 

Good wild animals, even snakes, generally respect humans. Bad ones… well, except if extremely endangered species, they should die. This is implicitly the policy set in place in California. Authorities kill bad bears, bad coyotes, and bad mountain lions. Only thus can these dangerous animals be allowed to live in proximity to humans, because only good animals fostering good animal culture are allowed to live.

The case of rattlesnakes is striking. Although there is no such a thing as rattlesnake culture, there are definitively varying rattlesnake mentalities. Most are pacific, but some are not. Twice I met rattlers barring my way. Once it was on a fireroad, but the snake was seven feet long, or so. The other time, the night was coming, and the path was very narrow, and Mr. Snake, blocking my way, was determined to fight. The first snake had to be hit by stones twice before it made way, the second kept on fighting until it was dead. That was clearly a dangerous snake, and it could have killed somebody. In the Berkeley hills, once, in the 1970s, a single rattlesnake killed two young men. Like me, they had been on a slope… And there the hospital is a few miles away…       

What does this all mean? Once I met a gentleman with his pet gopher snake around his neck, a full six feet long. He had found it once in his garden while small. What is striking is that, if you meet a gopher in the wild, it will flee at great speed. Cornered it will try to bite, and make pungy excrements. But there this ex-wild snake was perfectly tame. my five year old daughter played with it. Gopher snake’s brains are peanut sized. Still, high performance. Why? Because they are Quantum Computers. They are all we are, just on much reduced scale: consciousness, and even conscientiousness,  a picture of what the world should be. That large rattler I met survived all sorts of predators, probably by being conscientious about not being over aggressive and over confident. Earlier, I had seen two large Golden Eagles hunting. If they had seen that snake in the open, it was dead. But, for decades, they didn’t see that snake in the open, or then if they did see it, it sheltered in place in such a way that eagles would be discouraged in attacking… which was certainly the case I witnessed.

Survival of the fittest. Meanwhile I am going to think twice before going cross country with underbrush, two hours from road and cell coverage…

Patrice Ayme   

 

The Letter & The RE-ENTRANT MIND

Yesterday I got a letter from Barack Obama.

This gracious gesture left a lasting impression. This real fact in the real world, brought my mind to create, all on its own, a reality that had never been before. And will ever last, as far as I am concerned. It’s not just the multiverse, it’s the private multiverse.

Before you think that I am, at last, humbling admitting I am nuts, let me perfidiously add that we all do this, I am just ahead of my time, in observing it, as Nietzsche would modestly point out, if he was writing on my behalf. A core way in which wisdom progresses is by introspection. Introspection: one does not get more core than that. Deeper, more penetrating introspection is future civilization. Perceiving more correctly what perception is was central to the Quantum revolution. Don’t laugh, the inventors of Quantum Mechanics analyzed in-depth what to “experience” meant; an indignant Einstein was reminded by Heisenberg that he and his colleagues were just following the general philosophical principles set by Einstein of considering carefully what was experimentally perceived.   

Last night, I had many dreams, on many things, but in one of them, pretty short, figured Barack Obama, sleeping like a babe, on a makeshift black leather couch system. A running commentary said he was sharing the (very large) room with the US military chief of staff. I was milling around. Something tense about the state of the world was coming down…

After I woke up, I remembered the dream as if it had really happened. So now in my memory system, there is a vivid picture of Obama sleeping as described above. Although it never happened. (I never met Obama in such circumstances.) 

We mostly perceive… what we think. Thus the world as we perceive it, is the exact opposite of what the ancients imagined it to be.

So there was a part of my history, relative to someone else, created by my own mind in the context of the relationship with that person. And it’s pure fiction as a historical fact outside of me, yet, a historical fact as far as my neurocircuitry is concerned.

Plato never talked about such things, nor the parrots who repeated that tyrant lover, ad nauseam.

Plato’s Cave is a rather stupid, certainly very condescending picture of the universe. Moreover, it misunderstands the wall of the cave: it’s actually the universe itself, a universe we partly created ourselves, the universe of our minds, and it’s much richer than the outside world, which only excites, entices, encourages our perception further along.  

This sort of self-made movies does not pertain to my fertile imagination alone. Everybody does it, although the degree of awareness of its genesis varies. From the real world input of sensations and experiences, human minds create a much more complex world amplifying that input in special ways pertaining to their own history. It’s Plato’s cave, in reverse, with much added.

***

Sad was my mood:

What happened is that, after I got the letter yesterday, I had a poignant feeling of what a waste my friend’s presidency has been. Nothing that the innocence of sleep can ever repair, however strong we imagine differently. I remembered the spark of hope, ten years ago. True, a few things were achieved by his presidency (the fact that health insurance companies can’t deny from pre-existing conditions). But much was lost too (inequality has never been so great, and Obama has his name written all over that, including the unresisted and wildly encouraged rise of tech monopolies and the demolition of the Patent System). Pluto-Democrats devoured it all…

***

While my guitar gently weeps…

Patrice Ayme’

Entangled Minds, Entangled Knowledge

HOW DOES THINKING WORK? Not straight, and beyond twisted!

Does thinking work linearly? No, not at all. Linear logic is how mathematics is presented to the masses. Yet, research mathematicians do not proceed that way the first time they figure out theorems. Mathematicians typically work out explicit baby examples, and then try to generalize, guided by these particulars; physicists do the same; they are all following the same method used by all small children!

Not only is linear logic not really the way the mind explains things to itself, but there is plenty of evidence that even what are viewed as the foundation of basic logics need to be discarded, if one wants to understand the way things are really understood.

What’s below is increasingly supported by neuroscience. The brain “connectome” is ever more important. As I have said in the past, it lives (so to speak) in high dimensional space. Plato had a two-dimensional wall and a three-dimensional world. But now we understand dimensions better!

This illustrates a research article on the importance of the Brain “Connectome”, a much more general spaces than those used to depict experiments in Quantum Physics

A professional philosopher opined in Aeon that Indian philosophy which is more than 3,000 year old compared knowledge to a banyan tree, whereas Western philosophy just said it was a vulgar tree as they are known in Europe, with a single trunk. Silly stuff, because, in any case, knowledge is a forest (knowledge of how to write haikus, or making beer, has nothing to do with ship hull construction!)  

Silly stuff, because we have learned so much more in the meantime! Overall the philosophy of 35 centuries ago can carry a long way, indeed: all our civilization rests on it. Indian mathematicians completed the so-called “Arabic numerals” which they got from the Greeks in a very tentative form. Actually the origins of writing and counting systems are probably 8,000 years old (that we know of; counting animals, and communicating that, is probably a basic hunting skill hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years old).

Lots of thinking has enabled, meanwhile, to establish certain knowledge which we can know reverberates towards general wisdom. “Certain knowledge” is another word for science.

***

So several points, in  support of the ENTANGLED MIND, as the state-of-the-art of civilization has it:

First modern logic (post Turing) shows that a logic can pretty much be anything. None of the axioms viewed as mandatory in the past are actually necessary: even allowing (A and Non-A) works.

Second, how is that wealth of logics possible, and still we call them logics? The answer is simple: logic is actually neurology, and neurology is a collection of sets of networks in what physicists call a “configuration space”. In neuroscience this is now called the “Connectome”. In Quantum Mechanics, those spaces are Hilbert Space. In neurology, hence logics, those spaces are much more general. In any case, at the very least, the topology of these neurologies and logics is not simply connected. Here is your banyan tree, 35 centuries old, as mathematical concept:  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simply_connected_space

Unions of banyan trees and the ground they arise from, are not simply connected. Well beyond that, thinking is a superbly high dimensional activity involving extravagant topologies and geometries: 

Many, many dimensions therein this “connectome”!

Third, evolution itself is not simply connected. All sorts of genetic messages go this way and that, across species. Co-evolution of species actually show that beyond the evolution and co-evolution of species and the ecological niches they evolve, what matters most is the evolution of traits inside ecological systems. Yes, quite a bit as in the movies “Avatar”!

https://www.nature.com/news/biodiversity-moves-beyond-counting-species-1.22079

Or, more generally, the co-evolution which matters most is that of the traits of ecosystems.

Quantum Physics posits that reality is much more, infinitely more, than multifaceted. Reality is not just multispecified, but multispacified. Indeed, each quantum experiment defined well enough to exist posits the existence of a Hilbert space. Each different experiment has a different Hilbert space. Some can be two-dimensional, some can be infinite dimensional. Measuring a quantity is identified to an “operator” inside said Hilbert space.

Science is certain knowledge. But it is subject to circumstances, conditions and context. In a sense, it is more important how we established sciences and guess new ones. We don’t need yesteryear’s quaint concepts. Too much knowing nothing kills better thinking (Internet civilization, as it is, is going nowhere intelligent.) Example: Monads (- single entities) exist, say those infused with obsolete philosophy. Instead, we moderns have the quantum & neurological networks!

There all the interconnections of the human mind, its incredible spaces of immensely complex topologies and geometries come in play mixing logics, pathos, ethos, wishful thinking and metaprincipled stances within, and against, the universe.    

“The Greeks are barbarians,” said the Garga Samhita, a Sanskrit text on the life of Krishna, “yet the science of astronomy originated with them and for this they must be reverenced like Gods.”

The Greeks invented astronomy, precisely because they were rough. Passions lift the spirits, after resting them in their vigorous embrace.  The Gods are barbarian, just go out there in nature, listen to thunder roll, and tremble.

Patrice Ayme’

 

SUBCONSCIOUS (Theory Thereof!)

SUBCONSCIOUSNESS AS HIGHER DIMENSIONAL SPACES OF INCARNATED POTENTIALITIES:

I suggest the following: the “subconscious“, “unconscious”, or “preconscious” (“Vorbewusste”, Freud)  is, partly, the set of all weak synaptic (“Hebbian”) activity (in other words, all weak neural networks; yet, not only!). Thus, I propose that much of the so-called “subconscious” does not differ in nature from normal neuronal activity. The subconscious is not that… subconscious. A difference between conscious and subconscious is in intensity, the facility, of the neuronal pathways, not their nature.

(If you ask where I got this inspiration from, my own brain is a full lab at night, and not just at night; for example hard mountain running causes divided consciousness, but it also shuts down part of the brain, while opening others: thinking about the Foundations of Quantum Physics or Economics, or History, while running, or indulging in another passionate activity, gives completely different insights, contexts, and moods than when cuddling with one’s computer, precisely because parts of the brain shut down, including inhibitory regions… Introspection stays the main engine of philosophy, after all these years; see De La Mettrie’s fever, and his “machine man“, below)

The conscious would be where neuronal connections are strong, well-known. The subconscious would be WHERE connections are weak, and known only occasionally, during sleep, say. Thus the subconscious would be made, in part, of neuronal circuitry which got activated from UNUSUAL CIRCUMSTANCES, thus sparsely, rarely, occasionally, and thus established WEAK connections.

In Its Simplest Form, A Subconscious Connection Is Just A Little Used Neuronal Connection. There are more tentative engrams, and some just potential.

Where Are Consciousness & Subconsciousness Located? Configuration Spaces, Just As Quantum Spaces! 

Amusingly, yet deeply, some may ask where is this “WHERE“, I am talking about where the subconscious would be, in my opinion, somehow, somewhat located. They may sneer: ‘isn’t it all in the brain anyway? how can the conscious be in the same 3 dimensional space as consciousness?‘

So where is this “WHERE“? This “WHERE” is a mathematical space! Hey, why did you think Riemann invented high dimensional geometry for? Interestingly, tellingly, and somewhat connected, the same exact objection has been made when the likes of yours truly have claimed that “Quantum Waves Are Real“: some physicists haughtily sneered back that Quantum Waves couldn’t possibly be real, because they would have to be not just objects in three-dimensional space, like the average tsunami, but in so-called “configuration space“. No, seriously, guys, with Quantum Fields in zillions of dimensions superposed on top of each other, and an omnipresent non-zero “Higgs” field interacting with all other quantum fields, to give them mass, and an all too real as far as the LHC in Geneva has it?… Well, as far as I am concerned, configuration space is space, just like three-dimensional space, is space, it’s real… I am not a mathematician for no good reason!

***

Why Sentient Animals Sleep: So That They Can Think Creatively!

This little theory of part of the subconscious as weak neuronal connections explains in part why animals sleep. Indeed, how were those weak connections which end up constituting most of the subconscious  activated? How come they are not activated in normal, conscious life? Sleep! A trick to do so is by shutting down parts of the brain, and thus forcing connectivity in other parts and pathways. How to shut down part of the brain? With sleep or heavy exercise, or passion, including abject fear and mad hunger, tourism, etc…Shutting down part of the brain, including inhibitory circuitry and organs, forces the Will to Connect to use unusual pathways. If those make sense, they get pre-established, and should some real world situations INPUT resemble what was encountered previously in the inner brain, those networks, that means those logics, those solutions, will get activated…

The usual advantages of sleep are considered to be housecleaning and reviewing, and reinforcing the neurological pathways experienced during the day. What I am saying here is that sleep forces unusual neuronal activity, thus the imagination. It’s an essential way of obtaining creative intelligence.

***

Homme Machine, the Machine Man With A Twist: 

Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751), a physician born in Saint Malo, France, made observations on himself, during a feverish illness, referring to the action of quickened blood circulation upon thought, which led him to the conclusion that mental processes were to be accounted for as the effects of organic changes in the brain and nervous system. De la Mettrie argued that the organization of humans was done to provide the best use of complex matter as possible (this may have influenced Lamarck, and is as modern as possible: Quantum Field Theory find local minima of Lagrangians which depict energy; in a way a form of generalized economics…)

Julien Offray de la Mettrie, l’ Homme Machine! Obviously a Modern Psychology Animated Julien, But He Lived Only 42 Years (Same as his contemporary, Émilie Du Châtelet, discoverer of energy, infrared, etc.)

Most reasonable  Austrian-British philosopher cum physicist Karl Popper discussed de la Mettrie’s claim that man is a machine in relation to evolution and quantum physics:

“Yet the doctrine that man is a machine was argued most forcefully in 1751, long before the theory of evolution became generally accepted, by de La Mettrie; and the theory of evolution gave the problem an even sharper edge, by suggesting there may be no clear distinction between living matter and dead matter. And, in spite of the victory of the new quantum theory, and the conversion of so many physicists to indeterminism de La Mettrie’s doctrine that man is a machine has perhaps more defenders than before among physicists, biologists and philosophers; especially in the form of the thesis that man is a computer.”

From my point of view, this is not surprising. Indeterminism does not contradict the machine man. Far from it: it makes it possible. Indeterminism, the fuzziness of waves, smooths out and enriches everything, including in the brain: mechanics now does not mean wheels with teeth activating each other, but nonlinear waves crashing and interfering, a greater wealth of logic.

So, in my view, there is programmation, to generate pre-established connections but it’s self-generated, and those connections become self evolved… That’s a situation quite similar to what happens in biological evolution of the phenotype itself… And it’s related; namely lots of “instincts” are just evolved neurocircuitry. Evolved during one’s lifetime, even in a bee’s brain…

***

The Subconscious Is Not Reduced to Alternative Neuronal Networks: Influential Geometries and Topologies Are Crucial Too:

Are potential Hebbian networks all there could be to the unconscious? No. Some of the unconscious is of an even weaker nature. In that case the full neuronal connections were not made yet, but pathways still potentially exist, from the physical proximity of elements of potential paths…

The unconscious is the domain of possibilities and potentialities. The unconscious is a theoretician of the possible, the imaginable… So neuronal, glial, logical, emotional neighborhoods topologically close can well lead to unexpected, never experienced before connections. Those potentialities are also part of the unconscious. So the unconscious is not just (mini or pre-) Hebbian, about weak electric connections, but also about more subtle topologies (in the mathematical sense!). In particular emotional topologies. Thus the subconscious goes from weak Hebbian connections (what dreams are greatly made of) to topological conspiracies.

Take an example: why plutocrats love art so much; they will tell you that they have a sense of beauty, and I will tell you they have a sense of tax evasion; the plutocrats’ subconscious about art is that it enables tax evasion, by creating an untaxable, untaxed currency and store of value; but of course nothing a plutocrat in good standing will want to have pointed out in the plutocratically owned media. Nor anything that a plutocrat who wants to think highly about himself, or herself, would like to see pointed out, anywhere.

***

Consciously Connecting With Socrates’ Daemon, Monism, and the like:

Historically, the subconscious was defined as the part of consciousness that is not currently in focal awareness. The mechanisms I evoked above explain how that work. “Consciousness” is, first of all, an efficient administrator, not forgetting that the brain consumes up to an astounding 43% of the energy that a human uses. Thus “focal awareness” will favor networks with strong synapses bringing action readily. You can’t hesitate when those saber tooth lions come around, lest you want to become dinner. Hesitation, inaction, will surely kill you. Errors may be survivable (and the source of instruction).

The word “subconscious” is an anglicized version of the French subconscient as coined by the psychologist Pierre Janet (1859-1947), who argued that underneath the layers of deliberative, and critical thought functions of the conscious mind lay a powerful awareness that he called the subconscious mind. In my vision that awareness which lays waiting is an enormous construction zone of potential logics. (Logics in the widest meaning of the term, not just mathematical, or neuronal logic, but also emotional logics and even what viciously spiteful “philosophers” tend to call “pseudologia fantastica“; once Professor John Searle qualified me that way, to give him an excuse to censor me; now Searle is the object of various prosecutions…)

That continual attempted construction of all sorts of new logics, that is, of new circuitry, and new geometry (dendrites!) and topology, of course, uses an enormous amount of energy, as construction sites tend to. This is what the brain does most of the time (and, as most of this activity is not spurred by “focal awareness”, most of the time, this explains why neuroscience does not know (yet) what the brain is spending so much energy doing, most of the time).

There is a big difference between the unobserved brain, trying to establish new logics, and the brain in a social, and in particular, in a war mode. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as enabled some progress in envisioning how complex the brain is. The brain evolved as a social interface, not just as an efficient advanced calculus mathematician in charge of trajectories. As Wired UK put it in “Why does the brain uses so much energy?“: “Scans showed the inferior parietal cortex (IPC), an area that helps us control the amount of energy we use, became deactivated when people felt they were being observed. The IPC works with the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS) to form what researchers called the “action-observation network” (AON). This area of the brain helps people infer what others are thinking based on facial expressions, body language and gaze.”

In any case we are now able to figure out what that “daimon (demon)” who advised Socrates was made of: logical potentialities writ into various material connections and entanglements.

In Plato’s Symposium, the philosophical priestess Diotima teaches Socrates that love is not a deity, but rather a “great daemon”. She explains that “everything daemonic is between divine and mortal” and describes daemons as “interpreting and transporting human things to the gods and divine things to men; entreaties and sacrifices from below, and ordinances and requitals from above…” In Plato’s Apology of Socrates, Socrates claimed to have a daimonion (literally, a “divine something”) that frequently warned him… The Platonic Socrates, however, never refers to the daimonion as a daimōn; it was always referred to as an impersonal “something” or “sign”. Thus Socrates seems to indicate that the true nature of the human soul is pertaining to self-consciousness.

Regarding the various charges brought against Socrates in 399 CE, Plato surmised that “Socrates does wrong because he does not believe in the gods in whom the city believes, but introduces other daemonic beings…” Well those daemonic beings were all potentialities in his head.

Notice that the preceding turns around the problem of the traditional opposition made in philosophy between “monism“(the mind is material) and dualism (body and soul dichotomy). This is true, even without evoking quantum physics, because, even without slipping the ephemeral and ubiquitous Hilbert Spaces of quantum physics in the debate, the argument above implies that the brain geometrodynamics, and topological dynamics are extremely high dimensional objects, always fluctuating (quite a bit in the mood of Quantum Field Theory, and probably, ultimately, for the same underlying reason…)

Also notice that the overall mood of the explanation above is that logical and emotional potentialities are embodied in the brain, and that the brain’s main activity is to further them ever more through imaginable twists and turns (in several manners, including, but not limited to weak Hebbian connections). This is very similar to the potentialities which arise in quantum physics experiments. I believe that’s not coincidence, and that it corresponds to even tighter identification deep down inside, namely that consciousness, which has a lot of characteristics in common with the quantum, originates there; the machine man is quantum mechanical. Or Sub Quantum Real (SQPR!) more exactly.

“Gnosis”, the knowledge of spiritual mysteries, was, for millennia, mostly in the eye of the beholder. Science is now excavating some, spearheaded by the philosophical method. For the longest time, the likes of Joan of Arc, Muhammad, Jesus, Socrates, claimed to have heard voices in their heads, or get otherwise in contact with entities not pertaining to their own consciousness. Maybe, but now we have explanation we can all understand. We also understand why we should take the subconscious seriously: it’s a sort of pre-explanation of whatever may unfold later. It’s both clairvoyance, and exploratory explanatory genius of whichever logics fit best the reality out there…

Run-of-the-mill knowledge should also be considered on the ground of synaptic capability. Thus “gnosis”, knowledge, and beliefs, should be evaluate according to the strength of synaptic connections, integrating Hebb theory…. Thus I am saying that knowledge is more or less known, belief more or less held, on the ground of how neurology works… Electronic circuits, the way we have electronics now either work, or they don’t (electronics is not yet quantum, and, presently, more akin to make water circulate in canal networks). Neurological networks works more or less. So do knowledge and beliefs then. When those networks work very well, consciousness. When they are barely there, subconsciousness…

Patrice Ayme’

Artificial Consciousness?

Move over, Artificial Intelligence! Artificial Consciousness, while not exactly around the corner, is in sight, as a human creation. I have already advocated, on very general philosophical grounds, that “Consciousness Is Quantum“. Now an article in Aeon argues, reproducing rather murkily Heidegger-like Zeitgeist, that “The body is the missing link for truly intelligent machines“. I will argue a bit more precisely, and it is not the first time, that machines are embodied self-creating intelligent designs. When brains learn from the environment, they self-create accordingly. (The details will probably involve a better knowledge of Quantum Physics than what we presently enjoy.)

Well before his famous parrots (Husserl, Heidegger, etc.) the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was saying that we think with our gut. Expressions such as “take heart”, “from the heart”, “gut feeling”, and countless others show that the body was long thought to be the source of emotion.

Indeed, neurology extends over the body: there are neurons, dozens of thousands of them, in the heart, guts, spinal cord.

One may view the rise of animals as the rise of organized intelligence. It is likely that, even before DNA, the sort of teleological intelligence Quantum Physics deploys was hijacked by biology (teleo means: at a distance, this comes from the nonlocality of Quantum Physics; “intelligence”, because all and any Quantum Process proceeds as an intelligent choice between various possibilities, encompassing all, thanks to said nonlocality!)

Innards of an Eukaryotic Cell. We are made of trillions of them. Each has hundreds of organs, each functioning as a Quantum Computer. Such cells appeared 2.5 billion years ago. They are vastly more complex than bacteria, and remarkable by their mastery of Quantum Computing.

This natural selection of intelligent self-design, by the way, is the missing piece of evolutionary theory: consciousness, from bio-engineered intelligent design.

Inside the thinking organism, the same propensity towards higher intelligence should be at work (haphazard selection being bound to find, in the end, the best system). Sleep is mostly flight simulation, where plausible scenarios are self-run, memorized, and meditated upon. The “Meta” function is known to be plausibly activated by new dendrites, new synapses, new neurons, and neurons which control myelination along axons (making them more or less conductive, here or there).

This means that software activation in the brain brings hardware modifications, and even gigantic hardware creation. Through intelligent (self-)design. We were looking for Intelligent Design, in their silliness. And it was us, all along!

Throughout, Quantum Processes are run, more or less haphazardly thanks to whatever stimulation the cosmos brings.

Cosmic rays modify the behavior of smart phones and computers… although those do not, yet, operate Quantum Mechanically (aside from a few prototype Quantum computers), and are larger by orders of magnitude than the smallest biological scale.  Whereas it is known in the case of a few biological systems, that Quantum Physics is central and essential for their functioning (for example chlorophyll). One can guess it is the same all over the finest biology, even for the genetic code (the hydrogen bonds therein are fragile Quantum devices, very sensitive to the environment surrounding the DNA; they will change if said environment changes)

Thus brains are embodied Quantum computers, constantly running, constantly self-recreating, and body-building according to what they perceive out there …

The day we can have Quantum hardware endowed with the same nature, capable of the same feats, we will not just have created Artificial Intelligence. We will have created AC, Artificial Consciousness. The ethical and security consequences will be many.

Patrice Ayme’

WE ARE MATHEMATICS

Mathematically Built Brain: The Example of Grid Cells, Incarnating Algebraic Geometry.

Understanding how the cognitive functions of the brain arise from its basic physiological components has been the final frontier in logic and rational science for thousands of years. (As I tried to explain yesterday, the superstitious religious fanatics tried their best to bury all of science, and the scientific mindset, the essence of humanity; they nearly succeeded!)

The 2014 Nobel was given to John O’Keefe (a “half”!), the rest jointly to May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser “for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain.” I will develop here the philosophical viewpoint, which is broader (O’Keefe’s career was steered by the influence of Hebb, the famous psychologist, who got the idea of the outside patterns imprinting the neurocircuitry of the brain).

Here is Hebb: “Let us assume that the persistence or repetition of a reverberatory activity (or “trace”) tends to induce lasting cellular changes that add to its stability.[…] When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A’s efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.”

Well it turns out that evolution has had even more imagination than that. I will even propose Patrice’s Neural Theory, a vast generalization.

Galileo famously said the language of nature was written in mathematics. It turns out that it is much more than that. Our brain is mathematically organized. What Descartes consciously discovered, a coordinate frame in which to set-up calculus, is automatically generated in the brain. This is the meaning of grid cells.

Grid cells are neurons that fire when an animal moving of its own free will traverses a set of small regions (firing fields) which are roughly equal in size and arranged in a periodic triangular array that covers all of the available environment. They were discovered in 2005 by a couple (literally) of Norwegian researchers, the Mosers, and rewarded by the Nobel Prize in 2014 (shared with O’Keefe, from London, who invented the basic experimental technique, and discovered “place cells”)

Once set, navigation can be done in the dark, blinded. Scientists’ discovery that rodents, bats and nonhuman primates have a system in the brain for so-called “dead reckoning navigation”… “Dead reckoning” refers to the ability to navigate without external cues. The term comes from ship navigation. A crew will “take a sighting” via cues such as the stars or landmarks to determine where the ship is on a map. Then, when the ship moves, ‘dead reckons’ to update location on the map paying attention to speed and direction. The Greco-Romans already had such systems, with little paddled wheels counting the distance covered over the sea. It turns out that ‘dead reckoning’ is enabled by the grid cell system, inside the brain. 

Recording Of Grid Cells Activity Inside Rat Brain (Jeffery Lab and others.)

Kate Jeffery, a professor of behavioural neuroscience at University College London puts it this way:

“The importance of grid cells lies in the apparently minor detail that the patches of firing (called ‘firing fields’) produced by the cells are evenly spaced. That this makes a pretty pattern is nice, but not so important in itself – what is startling is that the cell somehow ‘knows’ how far (say) 30 cm is – it must do, or it wouldn’t be able to fire in correctly spaced places. This even spacing of firing fields is something that couldn’t possibly have arisen from building up a web of stimulus associations over the life of the animal, because 30 cm (or whatever) isn’t an intrinsic property of most environments, and therefore can’t come through the senses – it must come from inside the rat, through some distance-measuring capability such as counting footsteps, or measuring the speed with which the world flows past the senses. In other words, metric information is inherent in the brain, wired into the grid cells as it were, regardless of its prior experience. This was a surprising and dramatic discovery. Studies of other animals, including humans, have revealed place, head direction and grid cells in these species too, so this seems to be a general (and thus important) phenomenon and not just a strange quirk of the lab rat.”

We should have looked for Plato’s cave. It turned out that this cave has been built, is being built inside our heads all along! This cave is built-in two ways: automatically (grid cells) and as a response to the environment, by.us, from the outside, from the environment, in.

(So it matters what our brain experienced before to mold afterwards what comes in anew from the outside! No experience is a neutral experience!)

That cave is both a topology (what’s near and what’s not, the logic of place), and a basic geometry (the grid and its grid cells). To have a grid built automatically is the equivalent of having a reference frame in mathematics. It makes sense if one wants to make mathematics!

And not just mathematics, but even Infinitesimal Calculus! It is indeed clear that animals such as dogs have a mastery of calculus: experiences have shown this, and anybody with a dog throwing a stick sideways in water will see the dog running along the shore a bit, and then jump in the water, so as to minimize the time to reach the stick, a typical calculus problem. Dogs can do calculus, because they can make algebraic geometry in their brains, having a reference frame made of these grid cells! (If they had no grid cells, they would not be able to do calculus.)

Thus Descartes rediscovered, consciously, something which had been found, evolved and calculated by evolution half a billion years ago (or more!). The reference frame, also known now as the neuronal grid cell system, is basic to all of mechanics, even Poincare’-Lorentz Relativity.  (An open question: Quantum Physics uses even more general reference systems, Hilbert spaces; I will therefore predict that the brain has also that sort of organization!)

The world is not as astonishingly understandable, as Einstein would have it. Neuronal grid cell studies show that we are the world. Understanding the world is understanding ourselves.

The world is not just written in mathematical language, as Galileo found out. We are made mathematically. We think mathematically, because we are made of math. We are mathematics.

We are not just looking at shadows in a cave, as Plato would have it. And the cave was not given to us by the gods, as Socrates had it. We are the cave, we, and our personal history, built it.

Any new experience, idea or emotion, taught or experienced, is another brick in that wall of perception and analysis, we better consider it carefully, before indulging in it. Call that the Principle of Mental Precaution But that Principle extends also to what we chose NOT to experience, which can be just as bad, if not worse.

You are not just what you think. You mentally are what you were submitted to, and what you decided to submit to. Fate is written in mathematical patterns, one theorem made out of neurons, their axons, dendrites and supporting glial cells, at a time.

Such theorems are written with the physics of minds, just as sturdy as the physics of stars. Just as hopeful, just as ominous.

Plato thought mathematics were “forms”, out there, outside of the physical world. This is not what science is finding. There are not “forms” out there, and physics, nature, somewhere else. Our minds are literally made of math.

So here is my theory:

“Whatever exists in mathematics exists in the brain. And reciprocally.”

Patrice Ayme’

 

Bees Learn From Culture & Experience

When “INSTINCT” IN BEES:TURNS OUT TO BE LEARNING JUST AS HUMANS DO. Bees Practice The Experimental Method, Observe Others & Transmit Knowledge To Others!

Bumblebees can experiment and learn to pull a string to get a sugar water reward and then pass that skill on to other bees.

This comforts a long-held opinion of mine. See: https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/10/02/instinct-is-fast-learning/.

There I claimed that:

“Innate Knowledge” is a stupid idea. The truth is the exact opposite: LEARNING IS EVERYWHERE, OUT THERE. Learning is the opposite of innate. This insight has tremendous consequences on our entire prehension of the world.

My reasoning was typical philosophy: well-informed general reasons. Now there is increasing evidence that not only big brained vertebrates, but smaller brained invertebrates learn.

Conclusion: we humans do not differ from other animals, even insects, in kind, but in the amount of capability we enjoy. Thus, if we want to be truly human as much as we cannot just lay there like cows.  If we want to be fully human we must learn more of what is significant, and learn how to learn it. We cannot just sit on our hands and do as Barack Obama, the do-not much not-so-funny clown in chief, did, obsess about easy one liners and sport scores.

***

Intelligence Is A Fact, Instinct Just A Vague Theory:

For years, cognitive scientist Lars Chittka was intimidated by studies of apes, crows, parrots, and other brainy giants. Crows make tools. And they obviously talk to each other (my personal observation in the mountains). From the latest research in Brazil, parrots seem to have advanced language among themselves (which we don’t understand yet, as it too fast and high pitch for humans to hear it, and there is too much “austerity” around to pay scientists to understand the world as much as they could).

Chittka worked on bees, and almost everyone assumed that the insects acted on so-called instinct, not intelligence. Instinct? Come again.

Hillary Pulling Out Her Reward? As Bumblebees Can Learn To Pull Strings, So Can Plutocrats. Thus We Need To Outlaw Such Pluto Strings

Sophisticated behavior from “instinct” is a rather stupid assumption, because it is a superfluous assumption: Who needs instinct to explain an animal’s behavior, when we have simple, old fashion intelligence to explain it? Well, speciesists! (Same as who needs the Big Bang, a theory, when we have Dark Energy, a fact, to explain the expansion of the universe.)

Indeed we know of intelligence (some people, and certainly children, can be observed to have it). We can observe intelligence, and roughly understand how it works (it works by establishing better neurology, that is, neurology which fits facts better).

We can define intelligence, we cannot define instinct. But what is an instinct? We can neither observe “instinct”, for sure, instead of learning. Nor can we give a plausible mechanism of how “instinct” would generate complex behaviors (DNA does not code for “instinct”).  

When carefully analyzed, complex behaviors turn out to be learned. In humans, social motivations such as the Will to Power, are primary, thus Chitkka was motivated by : “…a challenge for me: Could we get our small-brained bees to solve tasks that would impress a bird cognition researcher?”

***

Einstein Bumblebees & Their Superstrings:

Now, it seems his team has succeeded in duplicating, with insects, what many birds and mammals are famous for. It shows that bumblebees can not only learn to pull a string to retrieve a reward, but they can also learn this trick from other bees, even though they have no experience with such a task in nature. Christian Rutz, a bird cognition specialist at St. Andrews university in Scotland concludes that the study “successfully challenges the notion that ‘big brains’ are necessary for new skills to spread”.  

Chittka and his colleagues set up a clear plastic table barely tall enough to lay three flat artificial blue flowers underneath. Each flower contained a well of sugar water in the center and had a string attached that extended beyond the table’s boundaries. The only way the bumble bee could get the sugar water was to pull the flower out from under the table by tugging on the string.

The team put 110 bumblebees, one at a time, next to the table to see what they would do. Some tugged at the strings and gave up, but two actually kept at it until they retrieved the sugar water: two Einstein bees out of 110! In another series of experiments, the researchers trained the bees by first placing the flower next to the bee and then moving it ever farther under the table. More than half of the 40 bees tested learned what to do with the strings. See: .Associative Mechanisms Allow for Social Learning and Cultural Transmission of String Pulling in an Insect.

Next, the researchers placed untrained bees behind a clear plastic wall so they could see the other bees retrieving the sugar water. More than 60% of the insects that watched knew to pull the string when it was their turn. In another experiment, scientists put bees that knew how to pull the string back into their colony and a majority of the colony’s workers picked up string pulling by watching one trained bee do it when it left the colony in search of food. The bees usually learned this trick after watching the trained bee five times, and sometimes even after one single observation. Even after the trained bee died, string pulling continued to spread among the colony’s younger workers.   

But pulling a string does not quite qualify as tool use, because a tool has to be an independent object that wasn’t attached to the flower in the first place. Yet other invertebrates have shown they can use tools: Digger wasps pick up small stones and use them to pack down their burrow entrances, for example.

***

Bees: New Aplysias For Intelligence & Culture?

Nobel laureate Eric Kandel, following a mentor of his in Paris, worked on the brain of the giant California sea snail, Aplysia Californica with its 26,000 neurons. This enabled to progress in the understanding of basic learning and memory mechanisms. However, Aplysias are not into tools and culture. Bees are. Bees have a million neurons, and a billion synapses.

[The bee brain is only .5 mm; whereas the human brain is ~ 400 larger, thus 4x 10^2 larger, its volume is thus ~ 10^2 x 10^6 = 10^8 larger than that of the bee brain; thus scaled up, with the same neuronal density, the human brain should have 10^14 neurons! Which is the number of synapses in the human brain. The density of the bee brain Thus we see, in passing, that human neurons pack up much more power than bee neurons! That has got to be a quantitative difference…]

The discovery of bee culture involved almost 300 bees, documenting how string pulling spread from bee to bee in multiple colonies. Cognitive studies of vertebrates like birds and monkeys typically involve smaller tribal units (30, not 300). Thus the bee studies on culture, more broadly based, show better propagation (at least at this point). .

Clearly bees are equipped, psychobiologically, for the meta behavior known as creative culture: learning from others, while experimenting on one’s own. Thinkers of old used to believe these behaviors were exclusively humans: animals were machines (Descartes) and only man used tools (Bergson, who called man ‘Homo Faber”, Homo Worker)

That insect can learn and experiment, and have culture was obvious all along, according to my personal observations of wasps’ intelligence: when I threaten a wasp. It gets the message, and flies away (I have done the experiment hundreds of times; it does not work with mosquitoes). Reciprocally, if I try to get a wasp out from behind a window, it somewhat cooperates, instead of attacking me. Whereas if I come next to a nest, I will be attacked when my intent is deemed aggressive (reciprocally if a nest is established in a high traffic area, the culture of the local wasps makes it so that they will not attack).   

What is the neural basis for these “smarts”? Some say that the insects might not be all that intelligent, but that instead, “these results may mean that culture-like phenomena might actually be based on relatively simple mechanisms.” Hope springs eternal that, somehow, human intelligence is different.

Don’t bet on it. Studying how bees think will help us find how, and why, we think. And the first conclusion is that it matters what we do with our brains. If we want to rise above insects, we cannot mentally behave as if we were insects all day long. Being endowed with human intelligence is not just an honor, but a moral duty. (Learn that, clown in chief!)

Patrice Ayme’

No Many-Worlds Consciousness

OFF WITH DENNETT’S CONFUSED THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Consciousness is not part of science… Yet. Science will be complete, when it is. Except, and that is a huge ‘except’, possibly, most people would have to admit, consciousness may already haunt the foundations of Quantum Physics: this is what the ‘Schrodinger Cat’ paradox is all about (the lives of cats depends upon what we think!). And, indeed, I believe consciousness has to do with the Quantum.

But first I have to dispose of those who claim that consciousness is a non-problem. The famous academic philosopher Dennett asserts that consciousness has to do with brain parallelism. My friend Karen Eilbeck, a ‘biomedical informatics’ professor: “I never was satisfied with [Dennett’s] explanation of consciousness”. Indeed. Consciousness and ‘multimodal parcellation’ are completely unrelated.

It is now considered that there are around 180 different areas of the cortex, per hemisphere, each doing different things (it used to be 83 different “areas”). 

The Brain Is An Orchestra With More Than 180 Players, Per Hemisphere

As the authors of  “A multi-modal parcellation of human cerebral cortex” (August 11, 2016), have it:

“Understanding the amazingly complex human cerebral cortex requires a map (or parcellation) of its major subdivisions, known as cortical areas. Making an accurate areal map has been a century-old objective in neuroscience. Using multi-modal magnetic resonance images from the Human Connectome Project (HCP) and an objective semi-automated neuroanatomical approach, we delineated 180 areas per hemisphere bounded by sharp changes in cortical architecture, function, connectivity, and/or topography in a precisely aligned group average of 210 healthy young adults. We characterized 97 new areas and 83 areas previously reported using post-mortem microscopy or other specialized study-specific approaches. To enable automated delineation and identification of these areas in new HCP subjects and in future studies, we trained a machine-learning classifier…”

Thus the science of finding regions in the brain is more than a century old, it was not viewed as, nor has anything to do with trying to make a theory of consciousness . Yet, Dennett confuses brain activity here, there, and every way, with consciousness. 

Dennett observes that there are “various events of content-fixation occurring in various places at various times in the brain”. (everybody knows this: reach synapse, each neuron, even each axon and dendrite, etc.) The brain consists of a “bundle of semi-independent agencies“; when “content-fixation” takes place in one of these, its effects may propagate so that it leads to the utterance of sentences that make up the story in which the central character is one’s “self”.

A pretty useless ‘explanation’, dear Dennett, and not the problem of consciousness: consciousness is a feeling we all have, not just an utterance. If consciousness were an utterance, the speaking robots we are now interacting with, would be conscious. They are not. They are just algorithms. An algorithm does not have any more consciousness than a canal system. (Philosophers love to pontificate by calling what Dennett did, a ‘category error’; namely one confuses unrelated categories.)

Dennett followers claim that “subjectivity” can NEVER be made a subject to objective inquiry. That is a contradiction with the entire history of science, ever since the first Homo made the first fire.

What do I mean by this? ANY scientific theory started from a subjective experience. The first hominid who realized he could generate sparks with flints was subjectively engaged. So was the first who realized rubbing sticks could also generate incandescence. So the entire history of science, in the last three million years, has consisted, again and again and again, into turning subjectivity into objective inquiry.

When Dennett’s followers claim to have discovered that ‘subjectivity’ can never turn ‘objective’, they fail to understand that science rests precisely on this. In other words, they think as if they did not know that science is possible. Sorry to ask them to jump three million years.

Dennett looks a bit like Socrates with a big bushy beard, he is paid to utter statements viewed as philosophical, and has no doubt many other duties to attend to his enthusiastic following. So much thinking to produce, so little time, drowning in an ocean of fame. Can’t be easy.

How can fame and mental depth coincide? They are adverse to each other. It would be like getting money from oligarchs or financial monopolists, while claiming to want to help average people.

Is there really no connection whatsoever between the brain’s cortex working in plenty of little areas (brain parallelism) and consciousness? I did not say that. Dennett identifies consciousness and parallelism. That’s wrong. But that does not mean that consciousness did not evolve to make arbitrage between all these little areas, being the conductor of that otherwise discordant orchestra.

So Dennett confuses one evolutionary advantages of consciousness and the nature of consciousness. That nature probably has to do with the nature of the Quantum, and the difference between vegetal and animal. “Animal” comes from anima (soul in Latin). The soul is Quantum, this is what the Schrödinger(-Einstein) Cat thought experiment says.

Why the allusion to the “Many Worlds” Interpretation of Quantum Physics in the title? It is more than an allusion. The Many Worlds interpretation of the Quantum consists into sweeping the difficulty of how one goes from many possible outcomes to just a single one, under the rug of formalism. Instead of figuring out what is really going on, Many Worlders of physics say basically that everything and anything goes (all outcomes are ‘real’). One can say that Many World physicists shrug and answer the way Valley Girls do:”Whatever!“. Dennett does just the same. And this is not just a meta-analogy. If I am correct, and consciousness is intrinsically Quantum, the reason is exactly the same: evading a serious attempt at a deeper explanation… of the same phenomenon.

I don’t really expect celebrity physicists and celebrity philosophers to acknowledge that their cute little reasonings are shallow cope-outs, and popular, precisely because they are shallow and cute. However, the last nail in their coffins consist in pointing out that they offer an endearing, yet really terrible example of superficiality to the rest of debating society. Civilization rots by its head.

Patrice Ayme’  

I FEEL, Therefore I THINK

It has been discovered recently that bilingualism helped with setting up a theory of mind in children, and also that physical exercise helps the brain.

It’s not surprising: in both cases, the brain is forced to exercise more. In a way, the brain is asked to do something, a particular task belong to a new category of tasks, and, when tested about that category of tasks, test higher than if it had never engaged in these tasks.

Exercise forces much of the brain to get active, and at a sufficient performance level (otherwise one crashes).

An Aspect Of My Personal Alps, Where I Frequently Run

Bilingualism forces to realize that the logos depends upon generalized semantics, that is what one means by a particular word, and which emotion a particular concept is supposed to connect two. Having two versions of semantics and truth, forces one to practice arbitrage, hence higher mental functions. Maybe the Jews of Central and Western Europe, were so smart because they learned both the local language and Yiddish. Similarly for children of upper classes learning Greek and Latin on top of their language (Caesar learned Greek before Latin).

Are there other activities which force our minds to expand?

Facing lions and killing mammoths comes to mind. Neanderthals did this, and their brains were significantly larger than those of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. (Racist Homo SS having been trying to insult Neanderthals about this, ever since the first one was identified in 1856 as a “ricketty Cossack“).

More generally I favor the racist explanation that, living in much harder circumstances, Neanderthals were actually smarter, and their domestication of wolves proves it.

Confronting bears with bare hands, is an interesting activity. Bears hate stones, as they are familiar with the fact stones are dangerous, and when stones start flying, that’s strong magic which gives them an enticing excuse to retreat.)

Short of confronting bears with bare hands, what can we do? To improve mental performance?

What should we do?

Well, go to nature. Real nature, complete with wasps (another big black flying insect trying to sting me since my wasps adventure, but got tangled in my hairdo several times, instead; amusingly it was less than 1,000 feet from where I got attacked by wasps, but this time on a standard fire road, which allowed me to escape more readily; I am going to ned up believing in genies like the Muslim god, if they keep coming at me in the same place…).

Real nature activates, I believe, the proper neurohormones.

Making love makes the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richard happy, because it’s a strong passion.

However nature, wild, savage nature, provides with even stronger passions. A sex maniac such as the famous navigator Olivier de Kersauzon, admits that, when he sails around the world, he thinks about sex not once for one second, being too worried by survival, or crushed with fatigue. John Muir climbed a tall conifer during a storm in the Sierra, to appreciate the passions nature provides with, even more.

Nature feels beautiful: it evokes in us the neurohormonal states we call beauty. How are we going to experience beauty otherwise? Love? Yes, sometimes, somewhat, somehow, love is beautiful. But love is tied either to family, children, or where they all come from, the desire to unite with some other(s). It’s a bit too contingent upon others.

But give a human a desert, with grand vistas: even with no one else around, beauty will be had, aplenty.

Appreciating the beauty of the universe, its cosmicity, is related, in humans, no doubt, to many deep emotions we, humans, are made to leverage, to use our minds to their full capabilities. Not just scanning for prey, water, or enemies. But also contemplating what we humans created, because we are stewards of the Earth. We are of this world (that’s what “cosmic, kosmikos” means, in Greek). This world we created (as the Earth has become a vast human garden, complete with totally modified ecology, from pole to pole).

The Beatles insisted: All we need is love!

Well, sometimes we can’t get love, just from the circumstances. Where is love, walking alone under the starry sky, surrounded by darkness? If you are on a barren island, where is love going to come from?

Well, even in the desert, there is always the beauty of nature, love for the beauty of nature, of which love for other human beings is a particular case. Love for nature is not just a faithful companion, it’s a teacher of love and hope.

I think therefore I am, said the other one. But to think better, thus to be better, we have enjoy more the teacher no one can eschew, nature itself. And all the emotions, all the neurohormones, all the mind it can endow us with.

Go to the woods, or the woods will come to you.

Making fun of “I think, therefore I am” dates back at least to Wittgenstein. However, my point is serious. Whereas robots can walk, robots do NOT have sensations. Worms do. So worms feel, and decide what to feel: they are unpredictable, as I pointed out in “Three Neurons, Free Will“.

I would suggest that consciousness is more basic than the impression of “thinking”. And that unpredictability is a symptom of consciousness. Yes, consciousness has a feel to it, and that varies… Hence the unpredictability, both of sentient beings, and of the thinking process itself (and the Quantum Computer will confirm that!)

Patrice Ayme’

Are Creative Thinkers Crazy?

John F. Nash Jr., a famous mathematician, who got the Nobel in economics, died in a car crash on Saturday at age 86. He was coming back from receiving the Abel Prize in Norway. That’s one of several Nobel-like prizes for mathematics.

The taxicab driver lost control of his vehicle, and collided with a guard rail and then a car frontally. Nash and his wife of sixty years or so, apparently did not wear seat belts. They were ejected, and died. Others survived. Conclusion: don’t be so crazy as not to wear seatbelts.

Nash was famous for contributions to game theory and other mathematics. He found something called the “Nash Equilibrium” in a type of games he studied. I will further here a bit what Nash said about mental illness, and its connection with mathematics.

Establishment Keen To Burn Green Fairy, Lest Too Many Ideas Blossom

“Economists” were no doubt delighted to have still a new abstruse field of mathematics behind which to hide their complete sell-out to plutocracy. Nash Equilibrium probably could be invoked to explain why High Finance should get all the money in the world, and ten times more. Hence the Nash idolatry?

Just another crazy idea of mine? Not so sure. In the period 1950-1955, John Nash volunteered to work for the NSA, and a correspondence exists (declassified on 2012). One can observe a mind anxious to please the establishment (just the type of minds the establishment loves).

Nash became most widely known because of his mental illness, as portrayed in the book and film “A Beautiful Mind.” Nash said he regained his health by simply rejecting irrational thought… and the neurohormonal changes due to aging (something I explained was at the root of the Dark Side).

However, Nash dared to reveal that an irrational mood could not be separated from mathematical ability. I will dare say that this is a general phenomenon: to be mentally creative means to become mentally disturbed, so that one can be mentally disturbing. Please don’t get disturbed by this perspective.

Nash: “Even when I was mentally disturbed, I had a lot of interest in numbers. I began to think more scientifically as to the years like the 80s, and maybe the later 70s. And so there’s a transition from really having more of an enthusiasm for the numbers, like maybe magical or representing a divine revelation, and just a more scientific appreciation of numbers, and these are not necessarily entirely far apart.” [PBS documentary “A Brilliant Madness.”]

Nash: “The ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.”

[“A Beautiful Mind,” by Sylvia Nasar.]

Patrice Ayme: Most of my social experience, outside of family, has been with mathematicians. A striking fact, with the latter, is the quasi-divine status they confer to the (extremely theoretical) entities they work on. To most mathematicians, mathematical entities become like divinities to them, and mathematics the only universe worth knowing. It may be necessary to be as involved with something so abstruse.

Nash: “I would not dare to say that there is a direct relation between mathematics and madness, but there is no doubt that great mathematicians suffer from maniacal characteristics, delirium and symptoms of schizophrenia.”

[In “The Riemann Hypothesis: The Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics,” by Karl Sabbagh.]

Patrice Ayme: I would not dare say they are crazy, but, no doubt, they are? Once again, to progress in math, one has to attach extravagant importance to extreme subtleties, make them come to life.

Nash: “I can see there’s a connection between not following normal thinking and doing creative thinking. I wouldn’t have had good scientific ideas if I had thought more normally.”

[“Glimpsing Inside a Beautiful Mind,” The Irish Times.]

Nash: “I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists. However this is not entirely a matter of joy as if someone returned from physical disability to good physical health. One aspect of this is that rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person’s concept of his relation to the cosmos.”

[“Les Prix Nobel: The Nobel Prizes 1994,” edited by Tore Frangsmyr.]

How do new thoughts appear? According to me, thoughts are elements of brain geometry. New thoughts are new geometry. The more complex the thoughts, the more extensive the change of geometry. Thus brains which generate new thoughts are different, and the deeper the new thinking, the greater the difference.

The “green fairy”, absinthe, was excellent apparently to bring brains to operate under different “laws”. There is little doubt that it brought a lot of innovation in thinking, as particularly well illustrated by Van Gogh. Absinthe drove people a little bit too crazy, and became a threat to the establishment. Or, at least, that the way it was perceived.

New ideas, when able to explain, that is approximate, elements of reality, are contagious (through culture). They can change brains, thus society, ultimately making The Establishment unstable, or crazy. It fights back by pointing out that the new ideas are, obviously crazy (as it has interest to perceive them to be crazy, it makes sense).

Any really new idea is, or will be perceived, to be crazy. Thus insanity, this explorer of different laws, has to be respected (as long as it is not outright dangerous, that is injurious in a way which can be legally defined, and is not just a matter of trampled spirits).

So freedom of expression is not just about saying whatever, it is also about thinking whatever, as long as it is innocuous enough.

Absinthe was reauthorized in France recently (at lower concentration). Are creative thinkers crazy? They have to be. Any really true logic is not found in yesterday’s world. By yesterday’s standards, it’s completely crazy.

An example which made it to official science? The Lorentz-Poincare’ theory of “Local Time” (advertised by Einstein). Before 1900 CE, that would have been viewed as sheer insanity. But the philosophically motivated logic of Poincare’ is now viewed by theoretical physicists as simple common sense.

Crazy yesterday, obvious tomorrow: a metric to measure progress.

Patrice Ayme’