"Not in my lifetime!"
Wittgenstein once insisted that the happy man and the unhappy man live in actual different geographical worlds, and I can only say that this idea is impossible to test but I do feel that I have experienced this. Hardly evidence, let alone proof, but interesting all the same, I feel. If you have felt this too, then we are one reader away from triangulation.
This business of running our lives and caring for others is fraught with the impossibility of ever knowing for sure why we do the things we do. And why we do not do the things we do not do.
Causation is a mystery and this is a problem.
In the first place we have the unconscious to contend with. Ninety-nine point nine per cent of the deal, according to the smart nerve-scientist on the radio. I do not know if he was including the pre-conscious and what some call the subconscious, and clearly there are widely differing levels or types of consciousness even in the conscious mind of homo sapiens, who are still evolving and have plastic brains: think of the difference between driving home without noticing any road signs or other vehicles and doing zazen for forty-five minutes. Hardly the same experience at all. Polar opposites, some might say.
Even more fascinating -- and I was ego-ish about having heard this coming -- our scientist, when asked how one might map the brain and its relation to the mind, insisted that like our map of our planet, it will never be complete. Even understanding the "foam" (as the presenter put it) on top of the iceberg is a task so enormous as to be virtually impossible. This is handy thinking, because it both wipes out the mind-body dualism problem by denying it (something Professor Nicholas Garnham hinted at when interviewed at this blog) and concedes that for now we are observing two things not one.
Doubleplusgood is that this way of thinking also makes the issue of robots with consciousness moot. "Not in my lifetime!" said the happy scientist. On the wireless. And when you think about how the neuron and the electron are connected to the synapses and how the leg bone is connected to the cheek bone that is connected to the synapses that are connected, or rather not connected, but also then get involved with proteins, tracks, lines and messages that go in different directions at different times in different places in different people all of whom are always changing? Plus serotonin and dopamine levels pushing us here and there without our knowledge. Some of this based on faulty (usually overly-optimistic) visions of what is around the corner. (A world-view that has taken a bit of a beating of late. Pessimists are the best predictors of future, you tulip fools.) Well the scale of the task is rather like asking a fly with no franks on it to write a book about how to engineer virtual spiders.
Four, not two -- I saw that coming, too. You are talking about trillions of bits of information, moving in time, so we can assume then that the Michael Jackson Robot is some way off, whatever Sony (sorry, Google+) might think.
But then again, some would say, Michael Jackson the robot, he already lived and died his zombie poplife. Mental illness obviously but shared with all, one way or another. Because the problem with these solutions is that they lead naturally to an even worse problem: where does free will go? Morals. It goes to Jarvis Cocker of Pulp showing his bum to the audience at the Brit Awards in protest against child abuse, and I say Good Bloody Job. But no one knows for sure why Jarvis did that. Good thing that he did.
Fear not, a team of twenty scientists are at work on the matter and they plan to crack it -- map the entire brain, which means we might find the mind -- in five years.
They will fail to do this. That is a guess. Fancy betting against it? Send me an email.
The mission is impossible not because it is impossible (although it is, since we can never obtain a totally accurate map of the world, for not even the world itself is a fully accurate representation of itself because it depends on where you are standing) but because there will not be enough time for 20,000 monkeys to jump up and down on an mfri machine while trying to guess at mental states from looking at colors and tracking implants in the brains of patients who have implants for other reasons. This research is a by-product. The patients have implants to treat brain illnesses. The cartographers are piggy-backing on this important work. But in the time that they have, this seems to me like trying to map the whole of Cornwall, down to every last grain of sand, in five minutes or less. On your own. While drunk.
The intractable issue here is that we do not know:
- What consciousness is; 1i) or why it exists;
- What the relationship is or is not, between mind and body; 2i) if they are separate things;
- What time is; or
- How the colors on the machine and; 4i) the measurements from the implants, communicate information about meaning, feeling tone, projection-splitting, synaesthesia, condensation-metaphor, thoughts, wish-fulfillment, emotional states, delusion, desire for death, psychosis, hallucinations, revulsion and nausea in the pretty face of civilization, and so on; or; 4ii) if something they call depression might be a sacred state, etc.
One of the most likely but seemingly ridiculous ways of making sense of some of this is the hard block theory of the universe. It is something that I find vexing, since in my work on the music of Led Zeppelin I have come to feel that while many misunderstandings occur, artworks remain nonetheless, intentional acts. However, as Elisabeth Anscombe via Ludwig Wittgenstein have spelled out, intention and intentionality are not the same concept at all. Now add collective cultural production, wrestling with industrialization and embracing (with bad faith at 11) commodification. Ironically enough, I first read about the hard block theory in Erik Davis' book on Zeppelin's fourth album. Their smash hit. According to this way of seeing, all the events that have ever happened, are happening now (which means at least half-a-second ago because it took that long for your brain to decode the words on this screen), and all that ever will happen, are happening.
Now.
'When The Levee Breaks' is being recorded right now, but not right here. Except for those who are there, now.
We are travelling through this (presumably more than four-dimensional) world using only five senses, one brain that we do not understand much about at all, a mind that we cannot locate using an ego that does not exist, and the reason why we cannot answer certain questions is because only a more than four-dimensional being would know how to frame the question in the first place. Let alone answer it. We cannot get there from here. All the roads are not connected to all the other roads. Some synapses are Closed. Think: Grand Canyon to the power of 100. We are like two-dimensional stick figures who arrive in a three-dimensional land and happily see a circle take shape and get bigger as the Rover lands and smashes this world to bits. By curving it.
The idea then, is that you and I travel this hard road on pre-destined routes while seeming to be in the driving seat. We are like Number Six in 'Arrival', trying to escape on a chopper that is controlled by Number Two's assistant. "Contact imminent!"
It is like listening to Daniel Dennett the psychologist who thinks that he has explained consciousness but is in fact totally deluded telling marxists off. If the Revolution is inevitable, then why do we have to DO anything? He smirks in one of his books that are in fact all the same book. To which I say, no YELL like a hoolie: If your theory of consciousness is true, then when do you have to bother discovering it and writing best-selling books about it then, since this truth would have revealed itself anyway?
I mean, it is all well and good, the lifting of the burden of having to do anything that Professor Dennett is unwittingly and foolishly proposing. Quite a weight off the old shoulders. Phew! Do whatever you like then because you were bound to do it anyway? That's an ontology a few would vote for. Well, have. It is called hedonism. It also has no way of connecting to ethics, which for some of us is the most vital part of doing (and trying, somewhat feebly at times but not all ways, to live) philosophy. For this view leads directly to a problem about personal responsibility and moral action (bodily, and speech acts) that I am going to think about some more and post about again, maybe tomorrow.
If in fact that decision is up to me. Or, not.
