The Ducks of Meaning.

Hmm. Hokay, I want to try to describe how 'meaning' can be ascribed to a physical point located on a neural network. There is nothing special about the particular neurons there, they are all indistinguishable to the eye. They don't have "Hi I'm your concept of fashion" tattooed on their membranes. So why does one neurone-body mean "affable" and another mean "snot"..?

I want you to imagine a pool of still, unrippled water. The edge of the pool is populated by specially trained ducks. Each has a pebble to push in with its beak. They all have electrodes wired to their butts. All these wires coil away into the back of our volunteer for the evening - Bill's - head. Each wire is connected to parts of Bill's sensory sytems - His visual centre, his tactile centre etc. A very cute nurse is handing things to Bill for him to percieve, and every once in a while wiggling her hips for no reason in particular. Let's call her Miranda. And make her a blonde-bombshell.

Anyway. Miranda gives Bill a big blue bowling ball. The 'blue' bit of Bill's visual perception centre goes 'bing' and the impulse sent along the wire causes the duck attached to it to nudge his pebble into the water - it goes 'plop' and makes a big ripple widening across the placid pond. At exactly the same time the 'size' bit of Bill's perception is causing a duck somewhere else to nudge a pebble, and the 'round' bit, yet another pebble somewhere else.

So - we have three separate circular ripples spreading across the pond, each with a different duck epicentre. Three big rings, getting bigger, touching, then crossing eachother.

At the exact point where the three ring cross - another of our little friends - Larry the dragonfly - zips down and drops a little floaty buoy with "Big blue ball" written on it.

Now here's the clever bit. We wire up the ducks' webbed feet and attach recievers sensitive enough to detect sequentially where the wavefront of any ripple, generated on the pond surface, hits duck-toe. - And send the impulses back to the corresponding sensory centres of Bill's brain.

Now we send out Dragonfly Larry to jump up and down on the "big blue ball" buoy. The ripple produced heads toward shore, lands and activates the recievers ashore in the same exact sequence that created the location of the buoy in the first place. And Bill, for no particular reason he can fathom - Gets a sudden sensory 'recreation' built out of the individual attributes of the previously percieved object - an image of a "Big blue ball"

ie: in a neural net - the simple connective positioning (what portions of the sensorium it is connected to, and how strongly) of a single neuron would be enough to indicate its 'meaning'. No awareness or understanding necessary. Simple mechanics and sensory 'signatures".

This is not a perfect picture of neural 'meaning' - It's only 2D for a start, the real thing would be more like a sphere, with a lot more ducks. But still. Am I getting paid for this..?

So each node in the net, simply from it's connective position, holds effectively a sensual 'map' of a specific object. And now let's add some new connections - The internal commentary of pain and pleasure, and also the emotional colouring that has arisen from that simple black and white. And another thing, a sense of time, or if not exactly time, at least a sense of things that came before, and things that came after.

So now, when Larry jumps up and down on the big blue ball buoy - Bill gets not just a static ball, but a myriad of overlaid sensations - the happiness of childhood balls past, associations with his father and the times they played, a wince from the time he caught a ball in the face... The list is quite literally endless, as, like dominoes, each association triggers others at tangents, and those at greater tangents still - Till the entirety of his experience whirls around this stupid blue ball. Referenced. Real. Whole.


Not so much what 'ball' means, but what it means to Bill.

"Okay Tab - That's fine for concrete objects" you say... "But what about abstract concepts, uh, like 'generousity' for example... Huh-huh..?"

Childsplay. Okay - First we accumulate a whole bunch of 'nouns', built from our perceptions of their attributes. And, because our own bodies are effectively 'external' to our sensorium and their movements intimately 'sensible' to us, we also quickly build up a whole bunch of 'verbs' and 'prepositions of place' - Run, walk, up, down, bend, straighten, etc. We see other people's faces - We get 'adjectives' - happy face, sad face, pain face. We don't have to guess - Mirror cells in our brains reverse-engineer our perceptions of others' movements to help us recreate personally the feelings that engender these faces/actions - divining the physical/emotional meanings of others' movements.

These are the first layer.

Now - Each of these nodes of meaning has effectively become shorthand for a vast range of sensory qualities. A single connection to any one of these 'words' is a connection to the whole of its underlying physical 'meaning'. Imagine each node is now a note on a piano keyboard. Play one, you get a single note. Now imagine hitting a few of them together, now you get a chord. And the number of chords, even on a piano keyboard, is huge.

- Now imagine a keyboard with a million keys.

'Generousity' is node with connections to:

Give. Recieve. Happy face. Pleasure. Grateful face. etc.

A composite. Abstracted - But with hard connections to physical/emotional sensations. In itself though, largely devoid of an immediate invocation of these sensory remembrances.

Organic shorthand. The ghost in the (bio)machine.

...Continued...

The Carrier and the Content.

AMOEBA, another marvel of engineering, but this time one not aspiring toward being alive. Now we can write our names upon the water, and not be overly Keatsian about it. Anyway. What is this doing here..? Well, it illustrates my ideas about the carrier and the content very well.

In the last post I talked about a TV:

"None of the components of a TV are individually alive. But, together, in orchestra, they support a picture, a story, the content of which has very little to do with the mechanics of the device supporting it."

But this device - comprising about 50 small wave generators acting on a common medium to form a standing wave of meaningful content - acts as a much better analogy to our own situation.

Standing waves occur all over the place in nature as well as science - a wave at equilibrium that seems to stand still, even though water, or whatever other medium in which it occurs, is constantly passing through it. For example - on the beach:
Anyway, before we get carried away with the pretty pictures, let's imagine the sum total of our remembered experiences as the pool in which the letters form in the picture right at the top, and the differing areas of the vast network of neurones in our brains as the series of wave-generators around its circumference.

Anyway, the important thing to remember is that though the wave-generators act to create and support the central symbol, they have no inkling of its meaning. They only blindy fire as they are programmed to do according to whatever external force - in the case of AMOEBA a human programmer - supplies the directives.

This is a crucial divide I think - though the entity we take for granted, our ever-lovin' selves, our "I", our persona or wtf.ever term you prefer, is initially generated by our neurophysiology, indeed constantly supported and lent a sense of continuity by the mechanics of the brain throughout its functional lifespan, the nature of that central symbol - In AMOEBA's case an 'S' but in our case an "I" remains somehow other, aloof, like the plot of a story copied out perfectly over and over by someone who cannot read.

ie. The generator, and the generated are separated, by barriers of comprehension/meaning if nothing else, however intimately they may be emeshed.

One last picture:



The pile of rubbish on the floor is just rubbish on the floor. The arrangement, to the eye of our 'I' looks random, no rhyme or reason to it. Just as from viewing a brain floating in a jar you can in no way discern the persona it once projected.

Meaningless, just as 'we' are meaningless to the skeins and tangles of the indivdual neural nets that in concert, throw us forth.

But shine a light... And suddenly, there we are.

...Continued...