Sense and Sensibility

This is NOT about the 1995 movie starring Emma Thompson, Kate Winslet & Hugh Grant

Copyright Columbia Pictures

Thanks for the patience as I missed my post last week Monday as well as yesterday. I definitely missed writing but didn’t quite feel up to it. I have finally stopped coughing and feeling better! Hopefully I will sneak in a catchup post since I missed last Monday AND this Monday.

Keep It Simple!

I am a relative novice when it comes to the topic of meditation. The extent of my knowledge is I have sampled it and it is a powerful experience if you commit to it. A companion topic that gets an awful lot of space these days is consciousness. A Substack friend shared the perspective that there are a lot of self-important people with all sorts of all-encompassing explanations while a perfectly serviceable version emerged with the Buddha THOUSANDS OF YEARS ago! The level of self-importance is captured best by the number of times people fall back on “the hard problem”. I wonder if Newton or Einstein interrupted people all the time and reminded folks that what they were considering was a “hard problem”? I figured it would be unfair to write about this topic unless I did some research which included a fair amount of reading and some Podcasts.

For those of you who follow the consciousness discussions in science news there is finally pushback on a well developed theory called Integrated Information Theory (IIT). I am not a neurology expert but I am also not a dolt. To the extent that I’ve read about it, this seems like an explanation that requires a bit of faith rather than a scientific test. It’s okay to believe what you wish absent evidence, it just doesn’t seem like science to me. Before folks like Newton started providing TESTABLE explanations for how stuff moves in the sky, a prevailing theory for comets was Gods riding fiery chariots. These are fun stories but absent a testable thesis it is hard to call it science.

That’s a Lot of Arrogance!

Exploring a topic like consciousness is a blast. When I wrote about the remarkable creatures named Orca Orcinus a while back, I learned enough to doubt the tendency of a bunch of Homo Sapien neurologists to craft a tale that simply fed their narcissism, assured we are special, we are different and consciousness is rare and reserved mostly for upright walking apes. I think it was at that moment I decided such reasoning was ridiculous. The Orca story is not primarily a consciousness story but entertaining nonetheless.

An Iberian Play Date

Isaac Newton Didn’t Retreat to the “Hard Problem”

Now I suppose if you are enamored or mystified or even awe-struck by consciousness, this might seem like a bunch of bluster. However, I do believe that the most amazing discoveries of how this universe works have turned out to be simple and elegant. To me, there is no reason to believe history won’t repeat itself. When Isaac Newton was vexed by how things like planets and moons moved around, he might have had moments thinking “this is a hard problem”. What actually happened is he imagined a simpler explanation. Of course, to prove it oo himself, he sharpened his writing utensil and developed a variation on mathematics to explain himself. One of the funny things about calculus, perhaps a subject many avoided in their college years is it is quite simple and elegant. It merely focused on describing change (differentiation) and accumulation (integration). While the symbology might seem daunting, it remains simple and elegant. My favorite part of Newton’s journey was the title of his seminal work. “On the Movement of Heavenly Bodies” is the title he chose. Newton’s Laws of Motion would fit on an index card. Simple and elegant.

If It’s Not Special, Not Rare, What Is It Exactly?

We’ve crafted belief systems that place humanity as centrally important and having dominion over all other creatures. Over a wide array of my writing, I have focused on the transformational quality of measuring things. It has been the gateway to unbelievable discoveries and insights about our world. There is NOTHING special about our eyes but the inspiration of the telescope and the microscope changed everything. There are creatures in this world with senses well beyond what our lowly genome can manage. The ability to sense electric currents, and magnetic fields, and see the ultraviolet is littered across the animal kingdom. What good are these senses/sensors unless we can act upon them? That, to me, is the magic of creating an image of what all these senses mean. My sense is this is consciousness.

Bring Back the Nintendo 64

Early in my career, I worked on computing systems for nuclear power stations. The original installed systems had 64K of core memory. A nice phone nowadays has about two million times as much memory. I know these comparisons are boring to some but they have a point. The point is even those original crude computing systems were sufficient to monitor a nuclear power station and inform operators when valves closed to a precision of 16/1000s of a second. Maybe those systems were comparable to what a beetle can surmise. When I think about the Nintendo 64 (or the main monitoring computer for a nuclear power station circa 1975), the lesson for me is a little bit of computing goes a long way. I’m not sure what the comparable number of neurons is but I imagine it is quite modest. A while back I profiled a silly science experiment wherein a small number of neurons were programmed (in a dish) to play pong. All of the following cool tasks (1) play Donkey Kong (2) monitor a nuclear power station (3) play Pong might just be what neurons do and that is all there is to it. Searching in vain for something that deviates from simple and elegant may just be a fools’ errand.

Lets Play Pong

Photo by James Wainscoat on Unsplash

Let’s Talk Beetles Just To Mess With the Neurologists

A long time ago I profiled the showcase of different senses. The lowest to the grandest of creatures sport different arrays of senses. Some of them are quite surprisingly advanced relative to our capacity. I looked back on an old post and realized that beetles have infrared sensitivity that allows them to migrate in forest fire conditions and sense the heat for upwards of 50 miles! For the record, beetles have vision, touch, smell, and taste. A handful of beetles can even hear! It’s not that I’m proclaiming outsized capacity for beetles. What I am saying is all animals of every range have senses and varying capacities and contemplative brains for planning and analysis. I think it is contrived to design theories of consciousness in deference to the “hard problem” that carves out a special place for humans. Embracing something fanciful just because your current capacity to analyze falls short seems foolish. I don’t think this is necessarily science but more likely an outsized, unjustifiable arrogance. It is amazing we can frame a model of the world our senses provide the inputs to. I share your wonder. However, I think we are far from alone.

How About Machine Consciousness?

What I learned from those primitive computers from the 1970s adequate to monitor nuclear power stations is that we shouldn’t sell the basic models short (think beetles and birds). I also believe neurons are neurons and just like a modern iPhone, it is amazing compared to one of those old nuclear plant computers (64KB vs 256GB corresponds to 4M times as powerful). It is not a shock that a shiny pocket-sized computer might have all of the pre-requisites for consciousness. I believe this is the root reason why neurology researchers are moving the goalpost and making arbitrary pronouncements largely not subject to validation for their flavor of consciousness.

The Poll & Music

With all the unease about artificial intelligence, I suppose it is okay to start thinking about this sort of stuff as external rather than innate. Here’s a song that explores the idea.