Mind, body and ME

[Jonathan Edwards]

When you find yourself wondering whether slime moulds or cats' immune systems have experience it's honestly time to get on with the washing up.

And these are exactly the questions to entertain yourself with while doing the washing-up.
Lymphocytes and slime mould cells will no doubt have experiences but never the whole system. Systems cannot experience - especially if their constituent cells are telling each other different things.

 

[Eddie]

If this stuff interests you then I would strongly recommend reading Frege's Sinn und Bedeutung (but also some of the library of commentary in the 100 years since) and Grice's Studies in the Way of Words, which is transparent. Your framing of the difference between meaning by and meaning to is a bit closer to Frege's distinction between sense and reference I think, although these are Grice's terms. Grice was specifically interested in meaning in language but coined the idea of 'natural meaning'. If you look at a tree stump and see eighteen rings that means that the tree lived for eighteen years. But there is no language.

I will give them a read because this stuff greatly interests me. I think there is something very important in the way language mirrors how meanings travel between neurons. In this case, Natural meaning might refer to the way in which our neurons are wired such that the meaning the neuron(s) derives from the input data of the rings is accepted and provided meaning by the neurons that deal with concepts of time and numbers. The nature of language also must be critically important to concepts of learning and the process by which we can use communication as instructions for others to fire the equivalent neuron as to the one we are firing.

Broadly, I agree with your breakdown. Sensed meaning, or meaning to, divested of the mechanics of language, must reflect the actual physics in a neuron. But of course the meaning of 93 synapses causing local depolarisations will not be '93 synapses causing local depolarisations' but 'there is an orange on the table'. People think that is weird but of course it is not. The neuronal is not accessing the dynamics of the orange in a purely optical fashion. It is not 'seeing' an orange. It is accessing some depolarisations of the sort that our brains use to represent an orange. And there is no other 'transparent' or 'Gods eye view' appearance of an orange that we are missing. It might seem odd that we can see oranges in depolarisations but it only does because we assume this God's eye view exists.
My understanding is that the quantum field theory of biological matter provides a plausible substrate for experiencing very complex meanings of this sort. Why the coding choices are the way they are isn't really a problem. Not only may bees see circles using different physics from us, different neurons in the same human head may see colours and circles using different physics. It would not matter because that physics is never sent anywhere as a language. The next cell just interprets a spike as red because it has come in at the red place.

This is very similar to what I was trying to communicate in my post. However, I think we need to take this further and say that not only does it apply to oranges, but it applies to every thought and explanation we could have. Even the most fundamental beliefs we hold do not reflect anything about the reality of those things, but instead the meaning that the synapse provides. Quantum mechanics might come to act as an explanation of why neurons behave as they do, but our meaning of quantum mechanics only comes from the firing of some number of synapses that provide that meaning.

If we were living in the time of Newton, why things fall would have appeared to be fully explained the law of gravity. But Einstein came along and provided a new theory that better explains how we perceive the universe working. Looking back it seems clear that Newton’s explanation was human representation rather than a fundamental truth about the universe. But my point is that in both cases, these explanations only reflect the meaning that the synapses provide and so Einstein was really no closer to understanding what gravity ‘really’ is. Einstein’s theory is still better than Newton’s in a practical sense, but both of them reflect no ‘god’s eye view’ of gravity. Because of this, any ‘theory of everything’ won't reflect the reality of the universe, but will reflect how we derive meaning from the universe (which is what your theory does).

What is to me most mysterious thing is that our sensed meaning is at times demonstrably wrong. We have concepts that are self-contradictory. How could the fundamental fabric of matter misinterpret itself? I think this may be as misplaced a worry as the one about how we can see an orange in some potentials but I find it hard to unpack.

If you agree with the fact that we can never have any meaning outside of our neurons then we can only ever confirm that our beliefs within the closed system of the brain. There is no way to check our meaning against reality, other than to continually confirm our more complex meanings with the first layers of input meanings which in a sense is what I think Hume was getting at. There is never any way to show that a meaning is objectively demonstrably wrong, other than it appears to conflict with the meanings of some other neurons. Maybe if there is an example you have about a self-contradictory concept I could try and explain my thinking better.

I understood none of this at all until my late forties and didn't start piecing things together until my mid fifties. There are a huge number of things to integrate into a conceptual framework but I do think it can be done.

I have a decent lead on trying to piece these things together then, but it still seems quite overwhelming a task to integrate them. Every time I think I have an answer to a question, there are so many more questions that arise as a result.

 

[Eddie]

And these are exactly the questions to entertain yourself with while doing the washing-up.
Lymphocytes and slime mould cells will no doubt have experiences but never the whole system. Systems cannot experience - especially if their constituent cells are telling each other different things.

I had a similar kind of thought last night but with dogs. When a dog barks to signal something they must be trying to get a human neuron to fire. But because are neurons are probably very different, this only happens in a very crude sense and we have to use vast amounts of input data to understand the context of the situation and understand that the bark means it wants a walk.

 

[Eddie]

This is very similar to what I was trying to communicate in my post. However, I think we need to take this further and say that not only does it apply to oranges, but it applies to every thought and explanation we could have. Even the most fundamental beliefs we hold do not reflect anything about the reality of those things, but instead the meaning that the synapse provides. Quantum mechanics might come to act as an explanation of why neurons behave as they do, but our meaning of quantum mechanics only comes from the firing of some number of synapses that provide that meaning.

One other way I just thought about this might be that there isn't any gravity, red, or cat that is presenting itself to the neuron. It is the signal(s) from inputs or neurons that are doing the presenting. What this signal actually is, the electrical or chemical message, has no relation to the external thing that is being meant by. If we swapped the cell that means gravity and the cell that means cat and ensured that the input signals still triggered the meaning, then gravity would mean a creature that has four legs and a tail.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

You are reminding me of Plato, @Eddie.
There are other layers, at least some of which you may be very familiar with. I will need to reply in the morning. The big question is whether there is anything that gravity really is beyond its contribution to determining experience in various ways in various events. Not that we have to be idealists in the popular (largely straw man) sense. But we must avoid circular argument.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

The nature of language also must be critically important to concepts of learning and the process by which we can use communication as instructions for others to fire the equivalent neuron as to the one we are firing.

Language provides a lot of lessons but a number of philosophers of language I have met have made me challenge the Chomskian view that meaning lies in the combination of word semantics and sentence syntax. It does much of the time in usage but people like Ruth Kempson (Dynamic Syntax), Charles Travis (pragmatics) Juan Uriagereka and Wolfram Hinzen point out that it needn't be that way. Ruth shows that depending on what has gone before you can create propositional meanings with single words, almost how you like. The other thing that fascinates me is deaf people's International Sign (which doesn't even call itself a language). Sign languages make far more use of metaphor and deixis in individual semantic units such that propositional syntax becomes less important. The game of charades shows that humans can convey complex concepts without actually using language as such, just strings of actions.

The cellular model of meaning/consciousness puts focus on the problem of how neuronal encode complex meanings. The problem is implicit in the work of Ann Tribesman on feature binding and Christopher von Der Malsburg but nobody takes it seriously as a physics problem because they dig the 'where is it manifest' question. My deduction is that because meaning is integrated at a single time window in the brain, rather than as a string, as in language, issues of syntax turn inside out. Instead of having words as atoms and propositions as molecules we must have propositions as atoms and scenarios as molecules and arguably the semantics does not appear until you have the molecular scenario.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

Even the most fundamental beliefs we hold do not reflect anything about the reality of those things, but instead the meaning that the synapse provides.

In my view there is no 'reality to things' other than their dispositions to influence the occurrence and meaning of experiences elsewhere. Whatever attempt we might make to imagine how things might 'really be' we can only ever do it in terms of our internal meanings. Maybe you would agree, maybe not. I am not an idealist in the sense that nothing exists except in the mind of the observer (I think this is largely a straw man). But I am a 'pure dynamist' in Leibniz's sense in that there is nothing more to the world other than events of action, with a mathematically identifiable structure, and the ways those events are perceived within themselves or within other events indirectly as representations.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

There is no way to check our meaning against reality, other than to continually confirm our more complex meanings with the first layers of input meanings which in a sense is what I think Hume was getting at.

It intrigues me that Hume and Kant, who were both criticising Leibniz in the seventy years after his death, have been popular over the centuries while Leibniz is either forgotten or remembered for saying implausible things (which are not in fact implausible if you read them in context). Leibniz to my mind had gone way past the insights of the other two. Hume and Kant say some very sensible things but Leibniz leapfrogs to much deeper issues. He does explain how he gets there in odd corners of texts but the reason he is not understood may be that he often assumes the reader has already worked through earlier issues and knows the context. The Monadology is transparent if you have already reached the same sort of conclusions but otherwise it can be completely opaque.

Hume rightly points out that we have no direct evidence of cause but Leibniz has already understood that the only thing we could know would be cause. It is just a question of making sure we build models of causation that keep holding up every time we test them. We cannot possibly know about anything that is not causal. And it is our innate reason that allows us to know what we cannot know!

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

I have a decent lead on trying to piece these things together then, but it still seems quite overwhelming a task to integrate them. Every time I think I have an answer to a question, there are so many more questions that arise as a result.

Looking back I reckoned that there are more or less twelve major steps that involve abandoning an intuitive concept and replacing it with an unfamiliar one that, nevertheless, as things come together, satisfies deeper intuitions about what must ultimately be true. (True in Leibniz's sense of providing consonance.) To begin with one feels rudderless but by about step 8 everything seems to work in harmony and simplify. The universe is a game of chess with no pieces, just moves, each being an experience of the domain in which it arises.

 

[Eddie]

It intrigues me that Hume and Kant, who were both criticising Leibniz in the seventy years after his death, have been popular over the centuries while Leibniz is either forgotten or remembered for saying implausible things (which are not in fact implausible if you read them in context). Leibniz to my mind had gone way past the insights of the other two. Hume and Kant say some very sensible things but Leibniz leapfrogs to much deeper issues. He does explain how he gets there in odd corners of texts but the reason he is not understood may be that he often assumes the reader has already worked through earlier issues and knows the context. The Monadology is transparent if you have already reached the same sort of conclusions but otherwise it can be completely opaque.

You may be right that Leibniz is more deserving and probes deeper than these others. I will need to read him and try to understand how these ideas relate to your work.

I can also see how the many of the insights of Descartes, Hume and Kant were actually reflections of how the neuron creates meaning. It is fascinating to think that they were all trying to describe different components of this phenomenon without any idea of what process they were trying to explain. If meaning does come from the neuron, they got many things wrong. But there are aspects of each view that I think are incredibly important for understanding meaning.

With Descartes, I think he gets right that the one 'true' thing we can know is the meaning the neurons produce. Hume, that the triggering of the neurons must ultimately come from some outside sense data, even if there are multiple steps are involved. And Kant that the meaning is already contained in the neurons and that what things really are is unknowable, as neuron produces the meaning, not the external object itself. I am sure there are plenty more of their ideas that could be considered in these terms, but I will need to spend more time reading first!

I think it is encouraging that the the neuronal meaning hypothesis fits with so many of these thoughts.

 

[Eddie]

In my view there is no 'reality to things' other than their dispositions to influence the occurrence and meaning of experiences elsewhere. Whatever attempt we might make to imagine how things might 'really be' we can only ever do it in terms of our internal meanings. Maybe you would agree, maybe not. I am not an idealist in the sense that nothing exists except in the mind of the observer (I think this is largely a straw man). But I am a 'pure dynamist' in Leibniz's sense in that there is nothing more to the world other than events of action, with a mathematically identifiable structure, and the ways those events are perceived within themselves or within other events indirectly as representations.

I agree with the bulk of this. If nothing exists except in the mind of the observer, it seems strange that we would get the sense data that we do. But while I think some external world does exists, because our meaning must be contained by the neurons, it is entirely unknowable and therefore isn't worth trying to understand and doesn't actually matter.

Without having read Leibniz, I have a basic understanding of how the universe does seem to have a certain structure founded in math's and logic. It is bizarre that rules like the principle of least action exist in this universe. But at the same time, the fact that Gödel's incompleteness theorems shows that math has problems leads me to believe that the true nature of reality is not actually mathematical, and it is some unknowable other thing. But since it is unknowable, it might be the most useful position to think of the universe as a 'pure dynamist' if it best matches what we observe in QD.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

I think it is encouraging that the the neuronal meaning hypothesis fits with so many of these thoughts.

Yes, it is heartening that all these people, who, even if not always fully understood, have remained respected names because they clearly had deep insights, one way or another fit with the neuronal theory. Descartes really didn't do badly. He didn't know about cells but he knew there must be many distinct 'computing units' in brains that initially tease out the elements of input and then recombine them in a useful way. The pineal was the wrong place but it was a logical guess - the one non-paired structure. But like almost everyone else, including Leibniz, he assumed one central integration site and in the twentieth century it became clear that there are many of every known type.

I think you are right in your allocation of insights. Kant's insight was known to Leibniz and I remember saying to my MA tutor, a Kant expert, that I thought Kant was overrated because Leibniz had already laid out that space and time are brain-created concepts. My tutor replied that that was exactly what people said when Kant published the Critique! But Leibniz does equivocate, largely in New Essays published after his death in about 1760 I believe. Leibniz insists there must be a reason why red light appears red and green light appears green. It could not be the other way around for him. Which of course begs the question - in the light of what you have been rightly arguing. New Essays is a very late work and it may be that he is losing his rigour a bit.

Hume is right to a first approximation, I agree. The odd thing is that he does not refer to Leibniz much as far as I know, whereas Kant writes the Critique deliberately to diss Leibniz. There is a sense in which the brain cannot have any useful thoughts without input from sense organs. But there is an intriguing possibility that this is less true than we assume and that in utero the fetal brain cells are chatting to each other, shimming up their routines like a football team in training passing and dribbling without any opponents until they have worked out how best to handle some real competition. They may do that at night as well and spin off a few dreams in the process.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

it is entirely unknowable and therefore isn't worth trying to understand and doesn't actually matter.

The trouble with that is what is meant by unknowable? If it means there is something to know but we are debarred from knowing it then I don't buy that. Knowing is something we think we do. It is easy to prove that certain knowledge is impossible - in a sense knowing is self-contradictory - but some sort of partial knowing or nearly knowing is what we do. And if we do it then there cannot be something to know that we cannot know - another contradiction. There needn't be anything 'to know'. You might say, but what about knowing stars that are too far away ever to send us light so are unknowable. I think there is a strong argument for saying that no such stars exist. As I said, that gets hairy, but it is the most logical conclusion. Existence, or actuality, may not be as fixed as we assume.

But at the same time, the fact that Gödel's incompleteness theorems shows that math has problems

I think Gödel's incompleteness theorem is rather over-rated. I don't think math has a problem. It is just that mathematicians have a problem explaining it. I have a suspicion that that is because everyone has assumed that set theory is at the bottom of math. The theorem makes a lot of use of set theoretic concepts. But the sort of math we see in Quantum Field Theory - real math out there - as a description of dynamics suggests that set theory is an artefact of the way the brain confuses discreteness with certainty as a pragmatic aspect of meaning allocation. (There aren't any sets or members of set, just one-to-all dynamic relations.) So here we start to get into how our neurons manage to get concepts wrong! I lose my way at this point but maybe one day it will make sense.

 

[Eddie]

I could attempt to argue all day about what we can know and what math is, but I think we agree on enough of the main points (just maybe disagree on how much certainty we require for 'truth').

What is to me most mysterious thing is that our sensed meaning is at times demonstrably wrong. We have concepts that are self-contradictory. How could the fundamental fabric of matter misinterpret itself? I think this may be as misplaced a worry as the one about how we can see an orange in some potentials but I find it hard to unpack.

Hopefully it is not too far offtrack, but I did want to come back to this as I think I misinterpreted it the first time. Are you referring to illusions such as the brainstorm/green needle audio illusion? I think there is an explanation somewhere in the fact that meanings are being sent and reported internally in a continuous fashion whenever we are conscious. And some of those meanings just happen to arrive at the same time as the input signal and change what neuron(s) provide the meaning in that instant. But I would appreciate your thoughts as to how we can seemly switch between the two.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

Are you referring to illusions such as the brainstorm/green needle audio illusion?

No, these are simple technical limitations of sensory collation pathways. I am talking about basic concepts that do not equate to what we think they do - objects, time, movement. There are no objects; time is not what people think it is - not even quantum physicists; movement is impossible.

It is said that after his trial Galileo muttered 'eppur si muove' - but the earth does move. He was wrong. The Eleatics, led by Parmenides, had realised that 'movement' involved a logical contradiction (even if the main proponent, Zeno, did not express it that well). The authors of the Vedas had questioned metaphysical assumptions long before, but I think Parmenides is the man who realised that scientific enquiry leads you to specific contradictions. Socrates met him.

It is easy enough to see why our sense of movement must be artificially constructed in brain. It is useful to have representations of things both in a place and changing places. But what I cannot grasp is how the fabric of the universe could hold within it meanings like 'movement' when both logic (Zeno) and modern field theory show the concept is incoherent. The Totality of Sufficient Reasons might well require events to be experiential and complicated events to be capable of being representational but surely only Descartes's prankster demon would make them represent things that have no possible existence?

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

And of course there are good and bad and true and false. We get those wrong. It is not, I believe, that they are just illusory ideas. There really are right and wrong outcomes in some sense. There really are consonances and dissonances. And they are not emergent properties of complex systems but embedded in single indivisible events. But we get them confused. To the extent that computers treat 'true' as 1 when it should really be 0!

 

[Eddie]

And of course there are good and bad and true and false. We get those wrong. It is not, I believe, that they are just illusory ideas. There really are right and wrong outcomes in some sense. There really are consonances and dissonances. And they are not emergent properties of complex systems but embedded in single indivisible events. But we get them confused. To the extent that computers treat 'true' as 1 when it should really be 0!

Is this also an idea of Leibniz? Are you suggesting that good and bad and true and false exist apart from the meaning that our neurons provide? Or is it that the meaning that exists in the neurons is something that ultimately boils down to some indivisible event specifically within that context? On a planet without any humans saying that right and wrong outcomes exist doesn't make sense to me.

 

[chillier]

Is this also an idea of Leibniz? Are you suggesting that good and bad and true and false exist apart from the meaning that our neurons provide? Or is it that the meaning that exists in the neurons is something that ultimately boils down to some indivisible event specifically within that context? On a planet without any humans saying that right and wrong outcomes exist doesn't make sense to me.

I think a part of the difficulty I'm having is how these terms are defined. Good and bad can mean hedonic feeling or it can mean a subjective judgement, the former category true and false is irrelevant and the latter category has no objective basis of true and false. Similarly with the computing example, from one perspective 0 and 1 are just symbols used as placeholders for true and false - like a cipher, another perspective they are countable numbers, and from an electrical engineering perspective 1 represents a high current state and the other a grounded state, and there's also a third 'high impedance' state.

Similarly with the sense of an observer, perhaps it could be true that an indivisible conscious event can intrinsically have an observer component, and/or that the cell structures could be considered a stable persisting observer. However, I don't think this is describing what is intuitively meant for most people when they talk about an observer. It is a feeling that you are your body, or in your body/ head in some way, looking out with a sense of directionality at the world. If you look a tree, you feel like you (sensations in your head probably but not necessarily) are observing a tree - there is no feeling that the tree is observing your body/head or anything else, but this would be just as valid because outside world and the inside of you are equally generated by your brain presumably. There's degrees of ownership given to different sensations. @Jo You are presumably not suggesting that the physics definition of an observer is really the same thing or directly informs this broader sense of 'being' an 'observer.'

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

Is this also an idea of Leibniz? Are you suggesting that good and bad and true and false exist apart from the meaning that our neurons provide? Or is it that the meaning that exists in the neurons is something that ultimately boils down to some indivisible event specifically within that context? On a planet without any humans saying that right and wrong outcomes exist doesn't make sense to me.

It stems from Leibniz. The indivisible event would be something like a field to excitation interaction (in which the excitation comes into existence) within which field patterns manifest as meanings, including good/bad and true/false. That interaction would be in neurological terms an event of dendritic integration in which a field pattern determines firing at a certain time.

Leibniz claimed that the dynamic indivisibles in us have a much higher level of perception than most but that all dynamic indivisibles will experience or perceive with a greater or lesser degree of clarity. As to whether good/bad and true/false would figure in those perceptions is certainly at present to hard to guess. But I don't see any particular reason for it being restricted to humans. A paramecium might host a sense of good/bad or even true/false. Some claim they learn which suggests comparison and therefore room for true/false. I think it might well be that a sense of good/bad is very widespread, even in events in non-living systems. Leibniz linked it to 'appetition' - a universal feature of all dynamic indivisibles.

But of course Leibniz is well aware that right for me may be wrong for you, even if true is always true. His best of all possible worlds was a drastic compromise of the greatest good at the highest level, with the minimum of starting rules, taken overall in a context where misery might have to be all over the place. Voltaire may have been right that this was fanciful but where can the perception of good come from if not from the underlying dynamic fabric?

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

It is a feeling that you are your body, or in your body/ head in some way, looking out with a sense of directionality at the world. If you look a tree, you feel like you (sensations in your head probably but not necessarily) are observing a tree - there is no feeling that the tree is observing your body/head or anything else, but this would be just as valid because outside world and the inside of you are equally generated by your brain presumably. There's degrees of ownership given to different sensations. @Jo You are presumably not suggesting that the physics definition of an observer is really the same thing or directly informs this broader sense of 'being' an 'observer.'

My understanding is that we grow up in a culture that assumes each of us is a body containing a single observer. Very likely DNA encodes that assumption somehow. But it is wrong. We localise a sense of 'I' to behind the eyes. But if you stand and look at a painting and then make a nodding movement while keeping your eyes fixed on the painting you find that the sense of I drifts up to the third ventricle and then down to your pharynx past the sphenoid bone. It is clearly an artefact of the representation being displayed somewhere - which could be thalamus or prefrontal cortex, and in my model in massive multiplicity.

And yes, it is that sense of a receiving, perceiving 'I' that I am saying belongs to each of many neurons, almost certainly on both sides of the brain. If you put on virtual reality specs you can have a sense of viewing yourself from the tree behind your back. There are studies of that and you get to feel you are behind yourself.

At least I think my answer is yes. The idea of being an observer is a cultural meme we all buy into but which experimental psychologists have taken apart for some time now - if not quite as drastically as I do.

And of course the 'sense of being' is another of those conceptions that we do not learn from our senses. It must somehow be set up as an option in nerve cells by our DNA, which has echoes of Jung but Jung should not be taken too literally!