Decisions Decisions.

A quick and dirty neurophys-summary on high-function decision making:

The prefrontal cortex is the outermost layer of the frontal lobes - the bit just above and behind your eyes - the bit that most noticibly separates us from neanderthals and chimps. When the docs started chopping bits out of it back in the 50's in the name of psychiatric science - to calm down 'neurotic women' - side-effects varied between death, and catatonia in rare cases and an almost universal severe impairment of short-term memory and an inability to control impulses.

Put into simple terms, people with prefrontal problems become 'external stimulus biased' ie, you give them a comb, and whatever you might tell them to do with it, they'll comb their hair. Show them food, they'll imediately begin to eat. Make them angry - they fight. They see, they do, without intermediary deliberation. They're great at parties.

The PFL works in three ways.

(1) It restrains emotions. Not the feeling of them, but their ability to make us react imediately under their influence. They give us time to think.
(2) It is the home of short-term memory. Short-term memory is not really memory, what happens is - when the PFL is 'shown' something - either real or conceptual - the mental image remains like an echo for a short time even after the original stimulus has been withdrawn.
Think of it as someone with weak fingers holding a single jigsaw piece separate from the mass of other pieces all around, for a little time, before they eventually drop it back into the pile.
(3) It is stupidly well connected. The PFL is connected to pretty much all parts of the brain - perceptual processing - motor function - long-term memory - limbic system, you name it, it's connected.

To go back to the jigsaw - the PFL holds a piece (for as long as concentration allows) and then, like lightning, compares the edges to everything else that is in our 'minds' - discarding bits that aren't relevant, tacking on others, using our faculties of visual and spacial processing to twist and swivel pieces to fit - trawling through our experiential memory, our banks of conceptual knowledge - physics, chemistry, carpentry - whatever we've learned during our lives. Trying to fill in the picture so that we can find the unintuitive answer to whatever problem we're working on. And all the while it's battling with our emotions, to stop them beating down the door of the senate and simply press-ganging us into whatever half-assed plan our amygdala has cooked up - usually a variaiton of kill it, fuck it, eat it, run away from it etc. The first order responses.

It waits until it find the last piece - the eureaka moment - and only then opens the doors to the emotional army, like in one of those films where the president's about to press the button that'll launch the missiles when a clerk runs in at the very last second with some papers in his hands shouting "Stop, STOP we've cracked it - it was just Castro's laundry list..!"

It's time is limited though, sometimes the president still gets to press the button, though with training and effort - that time of focus and concentration can be extended.

Followed on the MRI a volunteer confronted with a tough conceptual problem - the emotional centers light up, but no action is imediately taken, the prefrontal lighting up to counter. Then the rest of the brain's various centres of processing light up in sequences like a christmas tree as the prefrontal dashes around like mad, then a eureaka moment is reached, or at least a 'best guess' moment, the prefrontal subsides slightly, and the emotional centres spur the implementation of whatever final agreement on the 'right action' has been reached.

Perhaps a better analogy would be that the PFL acts at once as clutch and steering. The emotional motor is still revving like crazy, but de-clutched for as long as the PFL 'leg' can hold down the pedal. Sooner or later it gets tired, the pedal rises, and the car goes in whatever direction the wheels have been turned in during the interim.

An important observation however, is that the volunteers, or people who've faced situations in real-life, upon the moment of solution report that "the answer just seemed right" "the answer just popped into my head" - ie. there seems to be little conscious involvement in the actual number-crunching stage, leading in progression to the final answer - only once the problem is solved/best-guessed is the solution booted upstairs to what we'd term as 'us'. What is reported during the process is... usually after the fact, and sounds suspiciously like commentary "I remember thinking this, then this popped into my head, then I remembered that too, and bingo, the answer just came to me."

With effort and practice, short-term memory can be sometimes vastly improved, allowing us to 'hold' more variables in our 'conscious mind' for appraisal, and critical thinking allows us to 'frame' problems in different lights - usually specificly concerned with loss aversion - To us instinctively, when presented with a 20% chance of dying, we shun the operation, but when presented with an 80% chance of survival, we become more likely to accept the procedure. Stupid, but observationally true. - and as you say, all that stuff.

We - the 'we' we'd regard as our essential conscious selves - still seems to be shut out of the process, simply watching as the PFL we've so lovingly buffed-up and pimped-out, races around the track without us. Which ain't such good news for the whole freedom of choice bit.

There is hope however, in many ways the will has been freed over the years from the purely instinctive monkey-see-monkey-do evolutionary will.



Top left and top right: The will has been freed, to some extent, from time. Via memory, and predicitons based on memory, our brains are able to access libraries of information outside of the limited timeframe of the events concurrent with the instance of choice at hand.

Bottom Left: The will has been freed from limited physical POV. To some extent our visual and other perceptual processing centres can perform extrapolative actions on percieved objects/stimuli - we can happily rotate a cube in our minds for example - and attach additional frames - vectors, estimates of speed, possible functions etc etc.

Bottom Right: The will has been freed of reality, in that it can overlay filters and interpretations based on heuristics that have no 'real' physical counterpart - anything from physics to theology.

I stress "cause" in each case as these additional faculties all chuck their two-cents into the great pile of composite causality that eventually collapses into effect.

Anyway, that's about as far as my poor PFL can go without needing some down time.

The Brain that Talked to Itself.

I was talking with a friend the other day about language and thinking, and how the brain does it. He said, quite emphatically:

 "brain chemistry must have something in it that represents a statement in a linguistic way"

And I was pretty much tsaying that it doesn't.

Not as he imagined anyway.

Linguistic representation is to the brain is as sky-writing in a plane is to us. Effortful, showy, slow, and kinda dumb. Imagine Shakespeare writing all his plays with the aid of a funky single-prop plane.

First, let's talk about speed. I'm just gonna write "I want to go to town and get a pizza" on a bit of paper. Okay, it took me 14 seconds. Now, I'm gonna type it. i want to go to town and get a pizza. I cheated a bit with the capitals. Still it took 10 seconds. I am only a three-and-a-half finger typist however, I imagine their are faster typers out there.

Now, I'm going to risk a few weird looks and say it out loud, at a normal conversational pace. Took about 2 seconds. And one weird look. Now I'm going to say it as fast as I can. awannagotatownangettapizza. About a second. Now I'm gonna think it.

That's where it gets tricky. If I simply mentally speak it, it takes the same time as the speakasfastasican version. Which is no surprise as the systems are the same, except during 'speech thinking' your brain simply supresses the movements of your tongue and mouth. However, if I don't really try to 'say' it seems just to hover there whole. Taking no time that I can measure on my watch anyway.

Quick. Imagine a pizza.

You did didn't you. Bing - there it was. Now, if I'd asked you to describe a pizza using words, you'd have been half an hour or so, depending on how diligently you undertook the task. But its visualization, seeing it in your mind full of steamy pepperoni goodness, took absolutely very very little time at all.

That's as fast as your brain can go. Except it isn't because in this case, in the case of speech acts and conscious thinking acts, your train of thought tends to stop at each station along the way. We stopped at 'pizza junction' and stayed a while, before moving on. But in 'unconscious' processing, that train doesn't stop ever, until it reaches 'action station'. What's more, it pretty much calves off other trains along the way, sending them off down other routes to the same destination. All the points are open, all the guards are frantically waving them through with green flags. All the cows are cleared off the lines. ZZZooooommmm.

To continue. You're prolly thinking right now "Yeah okay, so the brain talks really fast, but it's still talking - so what..?"

Aha.

I want you to imagine some wires. Most of these wires are very very thin, like the ones you get in the guts of cheap chinese toys. Their insulative sheaths are even thinner. Imagine them all lying very close to eachother. Let's zoom into two. One is the hunger wire. The other is the pizza wire. The hunger wire, being a basic drive, is comparitively big, and carries quite a bit of current. The pizza wire is thin, and carries just a trickle.

Now. One day you are at home, and you're hungry. The hunger wire is firing. Someone's left a half a pizza uneaten in the oven. Pizza wire fires. You eat the pizza, pizza wire and hunger wire are firing separately, but at the same time.

Let's say you do that a lot.

Pizza wire and hunger wire spend quite a bit of time firing at the same time. The wires get hot, and where they lie very close together, their sheaths touching, one day, the sheaths melt due to the heat, and suddenly, in a flash, the two wires join at that point.

They technically become one wire. So, whenever you feel hungry, the hunger wire fires, and automatically its charge also flows through the pizza wire, now cojoined, instantly. But also the reverse happens, and when you see a pizza, the pizza wire also fires a charge through the cojoined hunger wire, and you get hungry. A bit.

But the story doesn't end here. Adjacent to the pizza wire are other wires. Citymap wires, transport wires, location wires. One day, when there is no pizza at home, you dig out the menu, find the location, and get out the car keys. You do that a lot too. More wires, firing together often, burn through their sheaths, and become cojoined.

Pic time.

You see, at this level of brain function, there is no language, only clusters of neurones firing at the same time. Hit the hunger button and the choice is already made, the action of hitting the hunger button contains all the rest in one, due to the connections involved.

What happens though, when we do engage our conscious minds to say things like ""I want to go to town and get a pizza" is different.

At the single wire level, the wire is just a conduit. All the biochemical causes of hunger siphon into this wire, and at the other end, the feeling of hunger comes out. Same with pizza, all the perceptual and conceptual properties of pizza siphon into this wire, and come out - bing - as the brain's composite map of pizza. Its spacial location, its connectivity contain the meaning built in. The wire is the thing.

But when you get a cojoining of wires - of Hunger and pizza, that nodal point in the network gives you the brain's version of a phrase. "Hunger pizza". Another pic.

Now as the picture shows simplistically, the conscious mind is like an eye above the brain. When our consciosness formulates language, about what we are doing/going to do etc. It checks the net, portions of which are firing as one, and focusses on the nodes of cojoinment, puts them in a cocktail shaker, shakes, looks at its watch for tenses, and adds grammar.

Hungerpizzapizzahutcar becomes "I'm hungry so I'm gonna get a pizza from pizzahut in my car."

Now, there are two ways to go from here.

The first path "no conscious involvment in choice": Here, the neural net firing in a certain pattern due to the initial input of hunger, or pizza, or a pizzahut advert on the telly, makes the choice automatically - the firing and the 'choice' are combined. And the conscious mind, examining the net's state gets its answer like some ancient Delphic oracle asking "What am I doing" and receiving Apollo's reply. "Oh right" the conscious mind says "I'm doing this apparently." as his body is already moving.

ie. it arrives too slow at the choice party, and sits in the corner sober, while all the neurones get off with each other.

The second path: "Conscious involvement in choice": The conscious mind, examining the neural net, finds out what the neural net has already decided based on the input so far, and excersizing an executive function either goes with it, or vetos it and re-runs the series with added inputs.

But as to which of those paths is the 'true' one... I have no idea.

Free-Will. Two Men & A Bear.

Funny how inspiration strikes sometimes. I was sitting on the balcony thinking about the debate with a friend, and about free-will. And that old joke about the two guys running from a bear popped into my head. You know the one - one guys says "Shit, we gotta outrun that bear." and the other guy says "Nah, I just gotta outrun you..."
And for some reason, something clicked.

We experience having free-will, and yet it seems to contradict everything else we observe. Something aloof from the usual clunk-clunk cause-effect universe.

If I were better at computers, I'd have produced a wonderful simulation to illustrate this next bit, but unfortunately, I'm not, so we'll have to do with imagination. Imagine a board, a bit like a chessboard, but bigger perhaps.

In the middle is a cafe. The cafe makes and serves only two kinds of food, blue food, and pink food. Dotted around the edges of the board are the homes of blue and pink people. They stay in their homes until they get hungry. Each get hungry at specific times, on utterly clockwork cycles, three times a day. When they get hungry, they move at a rate of one square a second, along the shortest path between their home, and the cafe. The blue people eat blue food, the pink people eat pink food. That's all they ever eat. After they've eaten, they go home, retracing their paths, to await the occasion of their next hungry cycle.

The chef in the cafe, knowing what they will eat, when they will eat it, and the exact times that each will appear in the cafe, buys stocks and prepares it accordingly, there is no lack, no waste, the food is always hot and ready as soon as the patrons sit at the tables.

It is a very simple simulation. No variables, no random factors. It runs faultlessly, automatically, day in, day out. The chef knows exactly what will happen at any given time, however far in the future that time may be. The system is utterly predictable, each node in constant lockstep with all the rest. Determined. There is no free will - no choice for the people to restrain or pre-empt their hunger, no choice of what route they will take, no choice of what they will eat. They make no choices, they also know exactly what they will be doing at any given time.

Obviously - this 'bears' no resemblance to reality. [Bears geddit..? Arf.]

Let's shake it up a little. Now the Pink people eat blue food, but only on Tuesdays, and the blue people, if it's a Thursday, eat pink. But it's too simple, the chef still is able to predict and plan to cater perfectly for his clientelle. Still a determined system.

Again, we'll add complexity. They go for haircuts on specific times every month, again, predictably and in an utterly clockwork fashion. The length of their hair affects what they can eat - short and they switch preferences until it grows past a specific length. Again, now if there are more right turns than left as they move across the board from their homes to the cafe they switch preference from the one dictated by day, or hair length. And again, if they are preceded by two people of the same colour, they switch from their previous preference.

Okay, now the situation is a lot more complex, I couldn't work it out straight off the cuff, but still the system is determined - the computer can run it perfectly. The chef buys his produce, cooks it serves it, no mess no fuss no waste.

The point I'm trying to make is that as long as the behaviour and preferences of the people living on the board are known explicitly, are predictable by the chef, the system is inarguably determined, and there is no question of choice involved on the parts of the pink and blue people.

Here's where the two guys and the bear come in. Except this time one of the guys is the conscious experience of free-will, and the other is autonomic prediciton, determinism. The bear, well hell, the bear's kind of extraneous, so he can still be a bear.

And to complicate matters, both these guys are running inside of one head. Your head. You have two guys and a bear in your head. Okay..? Also might help to view your brain as a great big prediction engine.

So, now imagine the head of a pink person. Which guy is running ahead of the other..?

Well, prediction of course. Prediction looks at his watch, remembers the time he was last hungry, works out when he will be next hungry, remembers the path he takes to the cafe, the turns it takes, the time it takes, knows what day it is, checks the length of his hair, knows his colour... And knows absolutely what he will being doing at any point in his future. Each moment, each action, flows seemlessly into the next like clockwork.

The experience of choice, the experience of free-will, is eaten by the bear.

But the brain, this marvellous prediction engine we all carry within the confines of our skulls, is only so big. Prediciton can only run so fast. If the number of states, the number of variables it has to deal with during predicitive acts goes over a certain [and pretty small really] limit, poor old prediction starts to stumble, starts to run out of breath.

And I think, that is when the experience of free-will, of choice, of being able to have chosen a different food to the one we find ourselves eating, begins to overtake. The chef drops his wok, fucks up his shopping list and starts swearing at the staff. Now it's prediction's turn to feel bear-nibble.

Did you know you are effectively blind for around forty minutes of each day..? It's called Saccadic masking. Basically, to prevent your world from looking like the jerky camcorder movie all day, your brain shuts down your optic nerve while your eye is in motion.

I have a feeling that our experience of deliberation, leading to the experience of having made a chioce, of free-will, is similar. A masking process, to cover the periods in time when our (unconscious) predictive engines get their cogs in a twist and can't get up sufficient momentum to whip us across from one action to the next.

When we walk, or climb stairs, we have no consciousness of having chosen where to put our feet. It takes a minefield, or a tango class to wake us up to what we're doing. It takes complexity, processing lag, to wake us up.

We observe, albeit with a few quantum quirks, an utterly deterministic universe. We ourselves are made of matter, our thoughts are generated and supported by physical sysytems. Our systems of meaning, of relating or associating thoughts and thought images are also deeply emeshed in the physical world, and are laid down according to experience in the physical world, in relation to physically limited parameters of chemical and electromagnetic brain function. There is no magic lurking in our synapses. No get out of jail-free cards.

I think what we experience as free-will, of choice, is simply a kind of papering over of the cracks, akin to a sort of maintained cycle of surprise - the brain locked in a state of not knowing wtf. is going to happen next.

That said however, the illusion of free-will, if indeed it is illusion is a damn convincing one.

Part of the experience of having free-will - of choosing - is the existence of multiple alternate futures we could have chosen from. In one future, I chose the fish, in another I chose the steak, in yet another I said "fuck this" and walked out. All seem to have hovered before our eyes, equally choosable at that moment of choice. Why would these ghosts of future possibles haunt me so, if there is no such thing as freedom of choice..?

Next slide please:



Obviously this model is woefully simple and doesn't indicate that all causatives are not external - there are a great number of internally-generated causatives or 'wants' - hunger for one, as exemplified in the original post. But it does emphasize the recursive/reductive processing the brain is forced into doing by the limits of its processing power.

The aforementioned wants and other drives that we experience are the condensed reductions of a myriad of other lesser causatives generated by the body - when we experience hunger we are not aware of the individual detail - PH of stomach, blood-sugar concentrations, the hormonal tides of circadian rhythms etc. etc. etc. - we simply feel 'hungry'. The brain has helpfully simplified the inputs from the body systems into a single imperative.

Getting back to the diagram, you must extrapolate the numbers of recursions our brain-states undertake when faced with difficult high-variable situations - generating multiples of alternate futures, which in turn are then re-considered - becoming virtual causatives in turn - and plowed back into the heuristics our brains use for reducing effect-clusters into behavioural imperatives - forcing action.

But I'm getting technical, which is always a bad sign. In short, we experience as part of the process of determined causal reduction - deliberation/choice - sometimes a myriad of alternate futures. But that does not mean we are as free as we think to act upon them.

I think it's about time to dredge out the classic Socratic "He who knows what is right will do right" there are of course many interpretations of this quote but to me, the implication of not being able to undertake an action deemed as 'wrong' has always been apparant. Put into cognitive terms: The brain seeks the 'right action' in response to a set of external and internal causative variables.

And once it alights upon what it defines as 'right action' undertakes that right action - this is the important bit - and no other.

The alternates we are aware of as we seem to choose are merely ghosts, never to have been realized - not ends in themselves, but simply parts of the process.

Another pillar supporting the notion of free-will and meaningful choice is external to the individual rather than hidden coiled and invisible within the crenulations of the brain. We in the world have surrounded ourselves by choice. The open buffét of real life...



...is a long way from the deterministic Café's blue food/pink food combo. Why so much choice if there is no free will..? I mean, it's one thing to fool ourselves, but a wholly other thing to fool the world.

It comes down to prediction once again. Remember the chef in the BluePink café..? How easy he had it, with his utterly predictable clientelle..? No mess, no fuss..? What would have happened if he'd launched a menu of orange food..? Well, it would have just rotted on the plates, untouched, un-ordered.

Trouble is, when it gets to the point where not only can you not predict the actions of others, but cannot even predict what you yourself will do from moment to moment with anything like total accuracy... Then making orange food doesn't seem so foolish.

Whether choice and the ability to choose is real or not, it doesn't matter. Illusion and reality aside - choice begets choice. The chef, faced with an unpredictable range of punters, is drawn to follow the path of making best guesses. Creating a broader range of food, following a bell-curve diversity of stuff he's come to observe everyone likes, quite a few people like, what's in vogue right now, what's in season right now, what's cheap and what's expensive right now. He also, like a speculative investor, will try to create a new menu option from time to time - a long-shot. I dunno - fried ice-cream or something.

Some of these long-shots will pay off, becoming subsumed within the great collective cuisine of the masses, others will be spat out, and get struck off the menu. But always the number of choices made available will grow. It will be the same in any industry - fashion, automotive etc. etc. Ford's classic "you can have any colour as long as it's black" never lasts. In attempting to cater for a range of tastes beyond his capability to predict accurately, the great chef will always err on the side of too much, rather than not enough, or be out-competed by the fancy restaurant next door.

This last point is of dubious importance. It has to do with the idea of "shaping".

In the orignal model - the board-game world of predictable blue and pink people - the chef, because of his perfect knowledge of his patrons, was able to 'shape' himself to them. By this I mean he could perform his job so well as to become invisible to the person visiting his cafe. They would come in and the right food, at the right temperature, would have been placed on the table only seconds before their hand had alighted upon the handle of the cafe door. The need for interaction between the workings of the cafe, and the punter, drop to zero if prediction is total and accurate.

Now imagine a world that could predict you absolutely, and naturally shape its machinations around you, one that you could subconsciously predict perfectly yourself. Need you be conscious at all..? Would anything actually require your attention..? Or active involvement..?  All would in effect, be one indivisible system, and would have always been one.

In short, I have a feeling that consciousness, our sense of individuality, and imperfect prediciton are very closely involved.

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...