Unmaking Sense

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.

Episode 6.22: The Vogon perspective; completing to make one and separating to make many.

The one year anniversary of Unmaking Sense. How distinction depends upon perspective. The Vogons, the council and an ants’ nest put in proportion. Understanding ourselves apart from and integrated into the world.

Episode 6.21: Why how we observe the world tells us so little about what is going on. (Episode 200.)

When we observe the world, we like to think that what we see is evidence that will help us to decide what we should do, but that may not be the case even though we have little option but to think so. The way the world behaves may be governed by things that lie much deeper within it and the things that we can observe and our understanding of cause-and-effect may be correspondingly unreliable. David Hume was one of the first to intuit this fact, to which we can now add greater detail.

Episode 6.20: Completions, consummations and intellectual exhaustion.

How wrapping ideas up in a summative moment of realisation can leave us feeling exhausted, spent, empty. Completing trains of thought and discovering what if anything comes next. Resisting the temptation to come to premature conclusions.

Episode 6.19: The way we make sense of the world on first encounter is changed by what comes later.

We reduce the complexity of the world to know it, but when we first encounter it we do not have the full picture so what we observe is not reliable. This is not merely appearance and reality but something far more significant.

Episode 6.18: Actively and passively making sense of the world; living with multiplicity.

We reduce the world to one definite thing in order to reduce our anxieties about uncertain things. While the world appears to be in a state of flux and multiplicity we don’t know how to anticipate the future so we are tempted all the time perhaps and often prematurely to reduce the state of the world with all its multiplicities into a single state because it seems more manageable and seems more comfortable even if it turns out to be mistaken.