We are always dreaming

Take a large pot of water and leave it out in sub-freezing temperatures for a few days. It will turn into a block of ice.

Now take that pot of water and put it on the stove and crank up the flame. Before long, it will start to boil.

Let it cool for a few hours at room temperature and it will resume its familiar liquid form.

If you drop a live fish into liquid water it will swim around and do fishy things.

Things would not go so well if you drop a fish onto a block of ice. Fish are not good skaters.

And if you drop a fish into boiling water…well, the fish will not be very happy.

Think about these states of water as metaphors for how your brain works. A block of ice is a dead brain. A pot of boiling water is a brain having a seizure. Water at room temperature is a normal brain.

The fish represents consciousness.

………………….

Liquid brain

There is a constant low level of electrical activity among neurons (like water molecules bouncing off of each other, doing the Brownian dance). Intrinsic random neuronal activity is the norm – it keeps a low fire burning all the time. In a sense, the brain has a pilot light.

A bit of randomness is helpful for keeping the mind creative and open to new ways of thinking – consciously and unconsciously. Like the ever-present force of natural selection that curates random mutation in genetic evolution, there are dynamical structures in the brain that permit more meaningful, useful energy to percolate from the random background.

Command and control

The majority of the brain’s activity is unconscious. At every second of your life a vast army of dynamical structures are buzzing around, managing the low-level mechanisms of multi-sensory input, attention, memory, and intent. These structures are vast, short-lived, and small. And they are entirely inaccessible to the conscious mind.

The command and control area of the brain is located at the front-top of the neocortex. The signature of consciousness is a network of relatively stable, large-scale dynamical structures, with fractal fingers branching down into the vast network of unconscious structures. The buzz of the unconscious mind percolates and fuses into something usable to the conscious mind. It offers up to the conscious mind a set of data-compressed packets. When the command and control center relaxes, we experience wandering thoughts. And those thoughts wander because the brain’s pilot light provides constant movement.

These ideas are derived from Dehaene’s Consciousness and the Brain.

Surrender to dreaming

When we start falling asleep, the command and control center begins to lose its grip. The backdrop of randomness sometimes makes its way past the fuzzy boundary of our consciousness – creating a half-dreaming state. Eventually, when consciousness loses out, all that is left is this random, low-level buzz of neural activity.

But dreaming is obviously not totally random. Recent memories have an effect…and of course so do old but powerful memories. The physical structure of the brain does not permit total randomness to stay random for very long. Original randomness is immediately filtered by the innate structure of the brain. And that structure is permeated with the leftovers from a lifetime of experience.

So here’s a takeaway from recent neuroscience, inspired by the findings of Stanislas Dehaene: WE ARE ALWAYS DREAMING. That is because the unconscious brain is continually in flux. What we recognize as dreaming is merely the result of lifting the constraints imposed by the conscious mind – revealing an ocean – flowing in many directions.

The unconscious brain can contribute to a more creative life. And a good night’s sleep keeps the conscious mind out of the way while the stuff gathered in wakefulness is given a chance to float around in the unconscious ocean. While in the ocean, it either dissolves away or settles into functional memory – kicking out an occasional dream in the process.

 

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When Earth Discovered Water

When Earth discovered water, life became possible.

“Discover”? I was going to use the word “invent”. Then I remembered that water can be found on other planets, comets, asteroids…and the Moon. Water is not unique to Earth. It may be more accurate to say that Earth invented a way to preserve and manage its water by evolving the biosphere. The biosphere harnesses, protects, filters, and enlivens the water that covers most of the planet.

Mars did not succeed in preserving its water.

The Gaia Hypothesis blows open the perspective of what life is. The evolution of the self-adaptive, self-regulating spherical ecosystem that we call Earth is more than just a collection of interacting organisms. It also relies on the dynamics of storms, oceans, tectonic plates, and the balance of gases in the atmosphere.

I began thinking about this as I was pouring boiling water into a coffee press. A beautiful stream, sparkling and transparent, visible only by virtue of the fact that it reflects the darks and lights of the surrounding environment.

What an amazing fluid. A true friend of gravity and heat, forming a collaboration resulting in a network of clouds, rain, snow, glaciers, streams, rivers and oceans.

There’s a deep reason why we can generate so much poetry about water.

“Planetary scientists are quick to stress that it’s not just water that’s indispensable for life, but liquid water. The distinction is key”

Water made life on Earth possible. Some people go as far as to say that water is alive.

On the Origins of Earth’s Water

http://www.iflscience.com/physics/origin-earths-water-discovered-0

Did life on Earth begin with replicating molecules? Depends on how you define life. The backdrop for these replicating molecules was already rich and dynamic, with an interplay of water (in all its forms), gravity, atmospheric and ocean chemistry, electric storms…

…and the rhythms of day and night, winter and summer, which forms a backbeat. That backbeat drives the polyrhythmic dance that pulls water through its many forms – and brings us into being.

 

The Body Language of a Happy Lizard

I love watching my dog greet us when we come home after being out of the house for several hours. His body language displays a mix of running in circles, panting, bobbing his head up and down, wagging his tail vigorously, wagging his body vigorously, yapping, yipping, barking, doing the down-dog, shaking off, and finally, jumping into our laps. All of this activity is followed by a lot of of licking.

There was a time not long ago when people routinely asked, “do animals have intelligence?” and “do animals have emotions?” People who are still asking whether animals have intelligence and emotions seriously need to go to a doctor to get their mirror neurons polished. We realize now that these are useless, pointless questions.

Deconstructing Intelligence

The change of heart about animal intelligence is not just because of results from animal research: it’s also due to a softening of the definition of intelligence. People now discuss artificial intelligence at the dinner table. We often hear ourselves saying things like “your computer wants you to change the filename”, or “self-driving cars in the future will have to be very intelligent”.

The concept of intelligence is working its way into so many non-human realms, both technological and animal. We talk about the “intelligence of nature”, the “wisdom of crowds”, and other attributions of intelligence that reside in places other than individual human skulls.

Can a Lizard Actually Be “Happy”? 

I want to say a few things about emotions.

The problem with asking questions like “can a lizard be happy?” is in the dependency of words, like “happy”, “sad”, and jealous”. It is futile to try to fit a complex dynamic of brain chemistry, neural firing, and semiosis between interacting animals into a box with a label on it. Researchers doing work on animal and human emotion should avoid using words for emotions. Just the idea of trying to capture something as visceral, somatic, and, um…wordless as an emotion in a single word is counterproductive. Can you even claim that you are feeling one emotion at a time? No: emotions ebb and flow, they overlap, they are fluid – ephemeral. Like memory itself, as soon as you start to study your own emotions, they change.

And besides; words for emotions differ among languages. While English may be the official language of science, it does not mean that its words for emotions are more accurate.

Alas…since I’m using words to write this article (!) I have to eat my words. I guess I would have to give the following answer the question, “can a lizard be happy?”

Yes. Kind of.

The thing is: it’s not as easy to detect a happy lizard as it is to detect a happy dog. Let’s compare these animals:

HUMAN        DOG         COW           BIRD         LIZARD         WORM

This list is roughly ordered by how similar the animal is to humans in terms of intelligent body language. Dogs share a great deal of the body language that we associate with emotions. Dogs are especially good at expressing shame. (Do cats feel less shame than dogs? They don’t appear to show it as much as dogs, but we shouldn’t immediately jump to conclusions because we can’t see it in terms of familiar body language signals).

On the surface, a cow may appear placid and relaxed…in that characteristic bovine way. But an experienced veterinarian or rancher can easily detect a stressed-out cow. As we move farther away from humans in this list of animals, the body language cues become harder and harder to detect. In the simpler animals, do we even know if these emotions exist at all? Again…that may be the wrong question to ask.

It would be wrong of me to assume that there are no emotional signals being generated by an insect, just because I can’t see them.

Ant body language is just not something I am familiar with. The more foreign the animal, the more difficult it is for us humans to attribute “intelligence” or “emotion” to it.

Zoosemiotics may help to disambiguate these problematic definitions, and place the gaze where it may be more productive.

I would conclude that we need to continue to remove those anthropocentric biases that have gotten in the way of science throughout our history.

When we have adequately removed those biases regarding intelligence and emotion, we may more easily see the rich signaling that goes on between all animals on this planet. We will begin to see more clearly a kind of super-intelligence that permeates the biosphere. Our paltry words will step aside to reveal a bigger vista.

I have never taken LSD or ayahuasca, but I’ve heard from those that have that they have seen this super-intelligence. Perhaps these chemicals are one way of removing that bias, and taking a peek at that which binds us with all of nature.

But short of using chemicals….I guess some good unbiased science, an open mind, and a lot of compassion for our non-human friends can help us see farther – to see beyond our own body language.

The Evolution of Mathematics on Planet Earth

Many people couldn’t imagine Math and Biology going out on a date. Flirting with each other from time to time…maybe. But a date? Never! Math is precise, abstract, cool, and distant. Biology is messy, unpredictable, prone to mood swings, and chemically dependent…as it were.

But this may be changing.

“The conversion of biology into a more quantifiable science will continue to the extent that it might even become the main driving force behind innovation and development in mathematics”

— Philip Hunter

Let me explain why I think Math and Biology are ultimately compatible, and in fact, part of a Single Reality.

I have written a few articles on the subject of math, and raised questions as to the universality, truth-status, and God-givenness of Math. Here is something to consider about Math and Biology:

Math Evolved in the Biosphere

Let’s start with numbers. Imagine a mother crow busily feeding her three chicks. She would become worried if she came back to her nest to suddenly find two chicks instead of three.

She would know there something is wrong with this picture…because crows can count (they can subitize small numbers, like about 2 or 3).

How did it come about that some animals, like crows and humans, can count? First of all, in order for intelligent beings to be able to count, they have to live in an environment where countable objects are found, and where counting has some evolutionary benefit. Consider a gaseous planet where fluids intermix and there is no way to detect a “thing” or “event” and to compare that with another “thing” or “event”. In this kind of world, there is nothing to count.

For that matter, it is unlikely that an intelligent entity that can count could ever evolve on such a planet in the first place, because structure and differentiation at some physical level are required for living things to bootstrap themselves into existence.

Theories of autopoiesis, negentropy, and the emergence of mind from matter rely on the existence of a prior structure to the universe where it is possible for self-regulation, and self-creation to arise. One might say that the origins of life had a head start long before those first molecules started dancing together and accidentally reproducing. Maybe it wasn’t such an accident after all.

…which brings me to a core concept: since Earth’s biosphere gave rise to animals that can count, as well as those things that can be counted – at the same time, we must understand ourselves as in and of the biosphere – we and it all evolved together: one did not come before the other.

Which came first: the chicken or the egg? Neither. They have both been in a continual state of becoming since egg-like things and chicken-like things have existed. And if you go back in time far enough, these things look less and less like chickens and eggs.

We animals have evolved to understand containment, and that is partly because hierarchy evolved within the fabric of physical biology. We know what it means for something to be “inside” or “outside” of something else. We clumpify, categorize, differentiate, compare, and identify. All animals need some degree of this compartmentalization of nature in order to operate within it.

We cannot separate our math from the environment from which it evolved. The very foundations of math evolved within the bodies and minds of animals as a part of evolution. At least this is what several recent scientists and philosophers are suggesting. (Mathematicians are more likely to claim that math is universal, constant, and unchanged by biology.)

OctoMath

In a previous article I consider what kind of math would have emerged if octopuses has evolved to become the complex and dominant species on earth, instead of humans. This is not so hard to imagine, considering how intelligent they are.

Would an advanced octopus race have stumbled upon complex numbers? Would they have become as obsessed with the Cartesian coordinate system as we are? Since they have no skeletons, would they have formulated a geometry based on angles and lengths? Of course we can’t know, but it is likely that they would have created some math concepts that we may never achieve. And that would be because the long history of math that we have built and that we rely on to create new math has taken our brains and societies too far away from the place where an octopus-like math would naturally arise.

Now consider aliens from a completely different kind of planet than Earth. What kind of math would originate in that world? Many people would argue that math is math and it doesn’t matter who or what discovers or articulates it. And there may be some truth to this. But we can only hope and imagine that this is the case.

Until we meet aliens from another planet and ask them if they understand and appreciate the fibonacci sequence, I have to assume that their math is different than ours.

What do you think?

(I would have consulted one of my octopus friends on the subject…but I don’t speak their language).

How the Future Changes the Present (Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature)

In his book, Incomplete Nature – How Mind Emerged from Matter, Terrence Deacon tackles some of the deepest and gnarliest philosophical questions about life and mind, and how they emerge from the physical world despite the fact that the laws of physics can only explain lifeless, mechanical processes. Regarding the second law of thermodynamics, which states that everything is in an eternal state of eventual decay, Deacon says this:

“There is the dead, pointless, uncaring world and its rules, and the living, striving, feeling world and its rules, and the two seem to be working in quite contradictory ways. Because the spontaneous order generation that is so characteristic of life and mind runs counter to this otherwise exceptionless current of nature, it demands that we take seriously the possibility that our usual forms of explanation might be inadequate. When unrealized future possibilities appear to be the organizers of antecedent processes that tend to bring them into existence, it forces us to look more deeply into the ways we conceive of causality and worry that we might be missing something important.”

I am in the process of re-reading the book, which is fat and dense.

Deacon makes little attempt to help the reader by phrasing his sentences and paragraphs for easy digestion. Subsections are rare, and I feel like I’m often wading in a vast ocean without a view of an outcropping to pause and catch my breath. I beg for a period, perchance a comma. But despite the relentless texture of the writing, what Deacon has to say is inspiring…almost breathtaking. Actually, the breath-taking happens after I allow Deacon’s ideas to percolate in my mind during a short walk – which I find necessary for getting the depleted oxygen back into my brain.

…which reminds me of a core concept of the book. Billions of years of evolution have gone into the making of this unlikely spacetime dynamical event, which is me: a fully conscious human who happens to be writing words for you to read at some point in the future. The fact that I can choose to go for a walk for mental and physical health, and maintain my equilibrium (on many levels of consciousness, mostly un), is nothing short of a miracle. This is especially true when you consider the general trajectory of atoms in the universe.

But in fact it is not a miracle. It can be explained with a systems-attitude overlaid on top of physics that includes emergence. “Emergence” is so wonderfully explained by Daniel Dennett in his descriptions of skyhooks and cranes. Here’s my take on the topic: when a higher level of structure emerges in the world, it reaches down to manipulate the lower levels that brought it into existence – it regulates and modulates those lower levels for its own survival. Then another level of emergence comes into being, and begins to regulate and modulate the previous structures. This upward cascading of order – this ever-complexifying hierarchy of constraints – is particular to life and mind, and it runs counter to the entropy that is the general rule of the universe. This is sometimes referred to as negentropy.

I had previously struggled to understand the “incompleteness” aspect of Deacon’s thesis. In the first part of the book, he spends a lot of time re-stating the notion of things that “aren’t there” or that exist “for the sake of something missing”, after only briefly defining this concept up-front. In my first reading I had started out with a limp. Perhaps some training wheels with familiar language would have helped, as these are new and subtle ideas.

This is not unlike a small criticism from Daniel Dennett, in a book review. Overall though, Dennett’s review is very positive. In fact, Dennett says the book has him re-examining his fundamental working assumptions. When something rocks Daniel Dennett’s world, you stop and take notice.

The Future Does Change the Present

Living things have inner representations of the world they find themselves in – that’s part of the holographic picture of life. For us humans, these representations are not just in our brains; they are infused in our technology – distributed throughout our extended phenotypes. Organisms with minds not only put a lot of effort in trying to predict the future (which is necessary for survival), but they act in accordance to those predictions.

This has the effect of creating alternate futures – of changing the course of events – based on something represented in the mind of the organism – represented but not actually “there” (though it could be there in the future). I believe this is what Deacon means by incompleteness, things that are missing, or, in his own words: “absential features“.

According to Raymond Tallis in a Wall Street Journal book review, An absential is a phenomenon “whose existence is determined with respect to an . . . absence.” This sounds somewhat opaque but captures something essential to mind. In the push-pull universe of mechanical causation, only that which is present shapes the course of events. In our lives, by contrast, we are always taking account of things that are no longer present or not yet present or that may never come to pass. Thus “absentials” include our beliefs, the norms to which we subscribe and those great silos of possibility such as “tomorrow” and “next year.”

Alan Kay is once said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it“. This is not just good advice for entrepreneurs; it might also be the motto for all living things. How else can we explain the fact that life on Earth has continued to exist for billions of years, with robust self-similar structures that persist for several millions of years – gradually changing, only to become better at predicting the future.

Why do we not expect every living thing to quickly dissolve into a gas, or at least some entropic state of uselessness? This is what classical physics would predict for such a rare, unlikely, and delicate assemblage of molecules. The answer is that living things have their futures infused into their DNA, their minds, and their societies. We fight the force of entropy, and we succeed.

For the most part.

Physics does not (at least not yet) adequately explain how the future effects the present. For this reason, Deacon is helping to build the foundations for a new kind of physics (or perhaps a new kind of meta-physics), which includes…

you, me, our consciousness, and everything that has meaning.

Happy Earth Day

ventrella.com/earthday

Pi is Meaningless

Ladies and Gentlemen. Introducing…a completely random series of numbers:

 3.11037 55242 10264 30215 14230 63050 56006 70163 21122 01116 02105 14763 07200 20273 72461 66116 33104 50512 02074 61615

Those are the first 100 digits of Pi in base 8.

“Base 8?” you screech. “Why base 8”.

Why not? We humans use base 10 because (scientists conjecture) we have ten fingers, and our ancestors used them to learn how to count. Having five digits at the end of each appendage is common in most animals we are familiar with.

But if the octopus had become the dominant species on Earth, and developed complex language, math and the internet (underwater), it is quite likely that it would have come up with a base 8 number system.

Therefore, octopuses would celebrate Pi Day by reciting its digits in base 8.

Or not.

Maybe they would think Pi is boring.

Like me.

No I’m not an octopus. And no, that’s not me. But it’s cute, don’t you think?

The point is:

I don’t understand why people pride themselves on being able to recite the digits of Pi (in any base). It is a waste of valuable gray matter that could be used for something useful.

According to Michael Hartl, “some people memorize dozens, hundreds, even thousands of digits of this mystical number. What kind of sad sack memorizes even 40 digits of π ?”

It has been found that the digits of Pi are indistinguishable from a random sequence of digits, no matter how high you count. If you select any sequence of digits in Pi (like, say, the first 100 digits starting at the billionth digit), you will find no particular bias or pattern. In fact, the likelihood of any digit (or sequence of digits) occurring is statistically flat: evenly-distributed. It’s as random as it gets (although there is no PROOF yet of the “normality” of Pi).

This is why I suggested in a previous blog post that the music in this video:

…is meaningless. This guy Blake (who is a fine musician) could have just as easily used the digits from a random number generator.

By the way – I now see that there was a legal battle regarding copyright infringement in a case of using Pi as the basis for a melody.

Two unfortunate first-world preoccupations rolled into one.

Instead of fetishizing the digits of Pi (or any irrational number), why not explore the teachable aspects of Pi such as this:

…or this:

 

 

 

…or this:

According to Wolfram,

What’s interesting is how chaos is formed – whether in an abstract number system or in a natural system. The digits of Pi should be understood as the result of a dynamical process that emerges when we try to find relationships between circularity and linearity. The verb is more meaningful than the noun.

-Jeffrey