Framerate of consciousness and motion of shades

About our "internal clock" or the "framerate" of consciousness: the characteristic speed may be the result of limitations and constraints of biochemical reactions in the brain, but it may also be the product of evolution.

Take for instance the motion of the shade cast by a tree under the sun: its motion is barely noticeable, it seems to be just under the threshold of perception, but not very much lower. Why? Perhaps it is no coincidence, there may be an evolutionary reason: if we saw it moving it would interfere with our ability to detect moving creatures under the tree!

So, perhaps the speed of rotation of the Earth is somehow responsible for the setting of a lower bond of our perception of flow of time (our "deltat"). Other things may also be factored to, such as the grow of plants.

11.12.2004 - Encanto del olvido

Supongamos que conociese un encanto que trajese mi felicidad, pero a condicion de compensar con la infelicidad de alguien desconocido. Usaria esa magia? Claro que no. Porque? Porque no podria vivir ni disfrutar sabiendo que en realidad mi felicidad implica el sufrimiento de otra persona, y eso por mi culpa. Supongamos entonces que el encanto tambien genere el olvido de que uno es el responsable de esa infelicidad. Lo usaria? Tampoco. Porque? Porque no puedo, en el presente soportar esa idea!
Pero no sera lo que sucede hoy precisamente? quizás algún encanto recitado en otras épocas haga que yo sea (bastante) feliz, y que otra gente sea infeliz en otras partes del mundo. Trabajamos para no recordarlo; quizás no seamos responsables directos, pero el hechizo existe y se llama economía de mercado...

13.7.2009 - bear with me for a moment: 1+1=3

Sometimes one thinks: "if I were this person..." or "if I could do such and such" or "if things were this other way...", etc. What do we really think when we consider these counterfactual universes? I mean, what is interesting about this kind of reasoning is that somehow one can imagine a parallel reality in which some things are different from this one; but is this at all possible? My thesis here is that in certain cases it may be a logical mistake, a fallacious belief that things "could be different". I mean: suppose that I ask you to imagine what if 1+1=3. You may answer that you cannot consider such thing as possible, and that you cannot find a way to "imagine" it. Suppose now that I ask you to imagine a regular polyedhra with 21 faces. You "bear with me" that it may exist, but this is not just a mathematical conjecture: for a moment you believe in its existence, in particular if you don't know about the regular polyhedron that actually can exist in 3d space. This belief, although not founded, can last for a whole life, or even centuries. The same may apply to reality as a whole: there may be things that are logically (physically) possible, and others that cannot happen. However, reality is too complex to "feel" it is logical/physical impossiblility. Hence, we "imagine" these impossible parallel universes (if one were to draw all the consequences in the past and future of this parallel universe, perhaps one would arrive to a contradiction, but this is what we cannot do). This points to something very interesting: it may be the case that the illusion of the Self is tightly related to these questions of "impossible" beliefs. The reason being that one can "imagine" being someone else, when this is just a meaningless construction of the mind. If one were to derive all it's consequences, then one would be forced to conclude that "being someone else" means exactly that: there is no trace of onself in the other, and hence either we "are" already that else, or, if one does not want to trivialize the meaning of "being", then the other option is to conclude that the very idea of "being someone else" is meaningless.

25.2.2009 - GPS and Robinson Crusoe

If I knew everything (I mean everything, from theory to practice) about how to make a computer for instance, starting with raw materials (sand, water, etc), how long it would take for me to actually build one? What is the actual bottleneck? the speed of my motion? the decision making? And what if I know that too (I mean, exactly what decisions I have to make, so there is no waste of time for planning), then could we estimate the time it would take to this modern "Robinson" to build his laptop with GPS and wireless connection and send an email to the distant civilization that would come to help him?

7.12.2008 - having and sharing crazy ideas

If you are lucky enough that you can choose what to do for living, then you have to dedicate yourself only to those things that you like and that you are good at (both goes hand in hand): you will be happy and you will make other people happy. The rest may be a waste of time. Hence the importance of knowing yourself, your tastes, your weaknesses and qualities. I wasted a lot of time dreaming of being a theoretical physicists: it was a chimeric dream, since I am not sure I really would have liked this kind of work (I do like Physics, which is not the same), plus I am not good enough to play the game (again, both are sides of the same coin: if I were good enough, I would surely liked it; and you cannot really like something if you cannot play with it at easy). I am lucky enough that I have quite a great freedom in choosing what I do for living now; then, I discovered only very recently something I am good at, something I like, and it's doing things that some people call media art, others "inventions". Having and sharing crazy ideas. I should be, I am happy. Will it last?

12.9.2008 - Being an afterthought

From time to time, we are all (philosophical?) zombies! In fact, we are most of the time consciousless: most of what we do, we just do without really being aware of. Why then it looks like to ourselves as if we "are" there all the time? well, perhaps for the same reason that, at any time, it looks like to us that we are "seeing a perfectly detailed and total" image of the world with our eyes: because the potentiality of eliciting consciousness is there at any time: we can "switch" at any time a routine of "self awareness" so as to describe (to ourselves and to others) our current experience - but this does not mean that this routine is always on - nor that it need to be for us to "function" efficiently. We are not continuously scanning our actions, or at least not all the time with the same level of self-attention. Internal or external stimuli can switch this process on and off (cf. attentional self-less concept proposed in my boxedEgo paper). For instance, if I ask you if you are conscious, you will certainly reply that yes, that you are. But this does not imply that you were conscious, even half a second before my asking you. It may look like you were, because you will reconstruct/describe your self using your memory, remembering, reconstructing a the self in the past. But you were not performing this self-awareness process in the past.

In other words, we are always no more than an afterthought.

Buddhists say: there is no actor apart from action, no perceiver apart from perception, no conscious subject behind consciousness. I agree with that: the Self is an illusion, an "explanatory" reconstruction of our analytical minds (that tend to see intentions and actors everywere), and its apparent substance elusive an ineffable - as it should be if one think of it as the "high-level" qualia of a multimodal experience.

15.2.2008 - Some idiosyncratic reflexions on the mind/body problem - talking to my brother

The starting point for some philosophers of consciousness is the "evidence" that there is a world out there, and a mind in here, and that in between there is the body that shapes and mediates the perceptions of that world (Locke?). I don't agree at all with this model of phenomenology. I will explain why, but instead of directly attacking what may look like the core of the model (the distinction between a mind and a world), I will first try to challenge the evidence that we can actually define a "body" at all, that mediates these two other "things". Let me proceed with a little (silly) thought experiment. Imagine that you are cutting some paper with a pair of scissors. You move the scissors confidently, the paper is being cut smoothly, you can feel it being cut, just as if the scissors were a prolongation of your hand. Yet most will agree that the scissors are not part of their body, but just a tool that extend it's capabilities - the range of possible actions that they have on the world (I am here assuming the model to better undermine it from the inside of course). Now, let's say you notice a stain on the paper recently cut. You try to scratch it with your nail, and while you do that you feel, of course, the texture of the paper again, the bumps and all the details its surface has to offer. Now, most people would agree that their nails are part of their body. Take a nail cutter and cut one of your nails: the part just cut is no longer your body, you have stripped from it. Now start cutting another nail, but don't finish the work. Is the nail being cut still "your" body? When does it stop being part of your body? When the nail is separated one cm from your finger? one millimeter? one micron? But wait a minute: the actual atoms of the piece of nail, even before being cut were already separated by the rest of the nail by some micrometers! and what about the atoms that are on the tip of the nail? they were already a cm away of the part that would remain being your body! Can we find an useful (meaningful!) definition of a body? Perhaps, an useful one could be: your body is composed by all the atoms that are never separated by more than, let's say, a few microns. Yet this cannot work either: you are standing on your feet, and the sole of your shoes (or the socks if you want) are probably a few microns apart from the sole of "your" feet: therefore it should be part of your body. Since this is not the case (is it?), then it means that the previous "definition" is not usable. Well, you see my point: keep adding "physical" conditions that would qualify for the "body ownesness", you will always find a way of challenging the usefulness of the definition (try it: organics matter separated by few microns? just touch a piece of meat. Organic living matter separated by a few microns? just touch a pet - no, wait, not even necessary: millons of microbes over the surface of your skin would "be your body").

Is there a way out? Perhaps: you can try to play the game in two opposite directions:

(1) declare that the nail was not part of your "real" body in the first place; that your real body is, well, closer to your head for instance. And stubbornly keep this view of "otherness" accepting all its consequences, which means that your body will shrink more and more until.. until what? until it reaches the little homonculus in your cartesian theatre? You have a better, more profound retreat though: to conclude that you DON'T have a body.

(2) take just the opposite strategy: what about saying that yes, the nail already cut is still your body? Well, this will produce an avalanche of reasoning that will make you conclude that the whole world is your body.

In both cases, we would be forced to conclude that the concept of "body" is an useless one (thanks Occam!).

But the concept of body is not useless at all! we communicate and refer to this concept all the time. This is because it is an useful convention, a functional definition of a part of the process of knowledge gathering (just like "living" animal, or sentient being, or self, or... - but I am going to quickly here). Let me add something before I take another angle of attack on the model of mind/body/world. There is, I believe one one way out yet it will take us in a completely different direction, by giving us a new insight: let's go back to the scissors that are cutting the paper. If you were obliged to declare that the scissors are part of your body, what reason would you (reluctantly) give? Perhaps that they act "as if they were part of your hand": which I read as: their FUNCTION enhances the function of your hand, the action of the scissors is not an obstacle to my intention of cutting the paper, but it just HELP "me" doing it better (it even redefines and clarifies the intention of "cutting" something). One can even wonder to which extend the "intentionality" is not a by-product of the availability of a function, of the capacity of acting on the world. From that point of view, the scissors, or the body for that matter would be defined inasmuch as it can create patterns of action, and enable (create!) intention. But given that the boundary between the "world" and the "body" is ill defined, we have to conclude that the world itself is a critical "part" of ourselves (the self defined as the subject/object capable of intentionality).

Now, before developing this view further, I will come back to the initial problem and take another angle of attack. Suppose that from the very first day of being born, I perform on a baby some little grafts: I add an additional arm, controlled by the muscles of the abdomen (as Stelark has done during his adulthood), then I put a permanent green pigment on his cornea, so the world would be ever-green, then I put ear-aids that act upon the surrounding sounds, so that, for instance, the individual would only hear a discrete, temperate scale of pitches instead of the continuous range of frequencies. Most would say that the so modified human being won't be experiencing the "real" world. That the perception of the real world has been modified by some sort of artificial prosthesis. But this statement does not resist analysis: if you were born blind, or deaf or without arms or skin sensation, then you wouldn't be experiencing the "real" world? This is at least politically incorrect: it would mean that the only one entitled to "experience the real world" are those born with sight, legs, arms, etc. We are forced to conclude that what some call the objective reality is no more than a convention - a democratic one though.

So, the body (defined as the conventional human machine) clearly modifies the nature of the experience we have of the world, but what I intended to show here is that the very idea that there is a world out there mediated by the body is wrong: the world, the things that we call "the world" are "experiential invariants" of the action-perception loop created by a certain form of the body (which as we have seen is an ill-defined concept, and variable, modifiable).

In other words (worlds!): the model of world/body/mind is misleading, it is like the shadows in the cavern. A poor description of what is really going on.