Unmaking Sense

How can the inside of an isolated system change despite the fact that from an outside perspective nothing changes? We think about this from the point of view of energy and of how it’s possible for there to be an exchange of energy between parts of a system even though the system as a whole has no change of energy. We think about the universe and how even if it does not change by receiving anything from outside or emitting anything to the outside because as one might say it doesn’t have an “outside”, it can nevertheless support life inside which involves separating significant from insignificant events. How is that possible?

We continue our exploration of what it’s like to be an ant or what sort of intelligence an anthill is displaying and whether it needs to be intentional, and then we think about what kind of intelligence a Vogon may believe that we have, and how superior intelligences can perhaps not imagine what it is like to be human any more than we can imagine what it is like to be a dog or a bat or an ant or a virus. Yet once we allow for a multiplicity of sources of self-referential knowledge, the picture again changes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.