Unmaking Sense

Episode 6.32: The kinds of intelligence anthills or viruses exhibit, and what we learn from it.

If we consider intelligence to be the same thing as the ability to solve problems, then different levels of intelligence are exhibited in the depth and breadth of the problems that different things can solve. The solutions need not be intentional in the sense of self-aware or self-knowing or even deliberately directed because they can be embodied in the structures, in the processes that perform them; what we might in modern terms called the programming that drives the procedures that solve the problems. But that in its turn raises the question of our own sense of separation from the wave function of the universe and how that enables us apparently to show intelligence of a kind that would not otherwise exist but for that sense of separation; for example, the kind of intelligence that over the course of many centuries has brought us to the point where we can manufacture the iPhone on which I am recording this podcast.

Episode 6.31: Why our inside story is inescapably entwined with our outside story through language.

What it is like to be a bat or to be me or to be any kind of sentient creature is changed once we introduce the element of language. But language is not private. We learn language from others and so the meanings that we express in language are collectively made and shared. Therefore our inside story is inextricably linked to and mixed with outside story with a much more common shared story that we all tell about ourselves in cultures and tribes and languages. So my inside story isn’t just mine and isn’t entirely independent of the echoes that other people throw back to me that give me clues about myself because the language embedded is those echoes inevitably includes tribal and collective meanings. Implications of this for self-understanding and in particular for consciousness and self-consciousness and intelligence.

Episode 6.30: How small influences can nudge nonconscious brain activity to produce surprises.

Some examples of coincidences and synchronised thinking that turn out to arise from small nudges from chance remarks and throwaway thoughts. The importance of balance between listening to others and protecting ourselves in the matter of valuing ourselves.

Episode 6.29: “Would you expect to find him in the pink who’s occupied with his own mental stink?”

Stevie Smith’s poem “Analysand” as a litmus-test for our habitual self-denigration and a clue to how we can rid ourselves of it as a dangerous habit. The quote in the episode header leaves out “solely” because it’s otherwise too long.

Episode 6.28: The importance of inverting the way we see ourselves for our mental health.

The habits of mind that place consciousness, self consciousness, and self awareness ahead of our nonconscious existence may without our realising it produce very serious dangers and difficulties for our mental health. We’re we to be able to unlearn those habits of mind, to rid ourselves of those habits and think more in terms of the importance of our nonconscious existence and the lives that those nonconscious thoughts govern for other people and place far less emphasis on our self-consciousness and self-awareness and self-appraisal, we might all be better off. The metaphor of the long-handled spoons.

Episode 6.27: We should reverse the importance we give to our conscious and nonconscious existences

We are brought up to think and do habitually think that it is our consciousness, our self-consciousness, and our self-awareness that matters about us. But perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps what really matters about us is the non-conscious activity that our conscious lives direct by selecting the things that matter to us. We’ve talked about this before, but now we will focus on it as a central feature of how we might change the way we make sense of our existence.

Episode 6.26: Inventing rules and making connections that otherwise would never be made.

Sometimes natural processes in the universe come to a kind of dead end and the dead ends would never be connected but for our interventions. That means that there is a kind of completion, a kind of rewrite rule, a new rule that we invent such as when we connect the ability to scratch a stone with another stone with the ability to invent written language from which things like this iPhone eventually emerge.

Episode 6.25: Three kinds of completion: the natural; the assisted; and the creative.

Some things that happen in the universe happen automatically: there’s nothing we can do about them and there’s nothing we need to do about them. A second kind of thing that happens is something which would happen eventually but to which we give as you might say a helping hand to make it happen a little more quickly or perhaps a little more according to the way we would like it to happen. The third is when but for our intervention the thing that we occasion, the thing that we act as an agent for, would never happen at all. We relate these three things to different kinds of rewrite rules and see the parallels between the two.

Episode 6.24: How decoherence helps solve the subjectivity problem quantum mechanics may create.

We should not understand the uncertainties of the quantum world as a reflection of human uncertainty and therefore as the projections of human psychology and consciousness. Instead we should understand any persistent structure as an observer arising from the interactions or entanglements between structures as the sources of the persistent entities that we find and identify with the classical world. We create the meaning that we find in the world to reinforce our sense of separateness and significance, that we matter in the world, but ultimately we no more matter to the universe than the ant matter to us. Far from being bleak, this should help us to reorientate our sense of our own importance in a way that makes life more intelligible than it would otherwise be and so frame our problems with a better perspective.

Episode 6.23: Decoherence, or how we as large macroscopic beings interact with microscopic worlds.

Learning by doing is about constructing what you think is a coherent narrative out of what you think you’ve learnt. In the case of quantum mechanics and the classical world this is a good example of how we need to learn by building the scaffolding that gives rise to some sort of understanding of the relationship between the macroscopic and microscopic worlds. An observer as a persistent structure that need not be conscious or intentional.