ttj

Monday, June 29, 2009

Do Intuitions about Reference Really Vary across Cultures?

To give a related example of what I am saying, Knobe et al (2009) says of compatibilism and incompatibilism "In our view, the data presently available is not sufficient to decide between these contrasting hypotheses. In short, there is still much work to be done. And while the problem of free will has historically been the prerogative of philosophers, the current study suggests that researchers everywhere who investigate folk psychology, folk physics, and moral cognition have contributions to make in solving this particular puzzle". Now Knobe's work was carried out in United States, Hong Kong, India and Colombia and the authors still have that view. As far as I know only domesticated American and Hong Kong cases were dealt with by Sytsma and Cantonese diaspora cases by Lam and Machery. And Hong Kong is compact, developed, relatively modernised (with a better modern skyline than Manhattan) and not typically Chinese as much of mainland China is.

Of all the above cases, diaspora cases do not sound the best cases to use to attack Kripke's argumentation, as the cultural references presumably refer partly and possibly primarily to the host country, normally the USA for these diaspora studies. It is all very well to effectively go to the local fish and chip shop or deli to make your foreign language queries and in fact Knobe's early work (in English) was done by asking questions in Central Park, NY., and this is a very legitimate way to get a general local feeling, but world anthropology and evolutionary psychology and its conclusions at Tooby and Cosmides level really are another matter. It is far better and often essential to go back to source. At the "Institute for Fundamental Studies" (which at present has main headquarters in UK, Maharashtra (India), and Goa) we normally deal with non-diaspora Hindi, Marathi, Konkani, Tamil and English speaking cases, and we get gratifying results.

Machery (2009) says "So, what's going on?". Well, the above is some of what's going on.

But there is much much more !

I am saying that in a further three ways at least - and simply as a beginning - that more care must be taken.

Firstly I mention Vul (2009) and Haynes (2008). On comments on Haynes' work on free will, for example, Auburn University Professor Roderick T. Long (2009) says "This is a hopelessly bad argument; the results of this study have nothing to do with the free will issue at all. This is simply a case of experts in one field (neurophysiology) thinking they are experts in another field (philosophy ) that they seem to know very little about." To be fair, Haynes himself did start his career briefly in philosophy but most free will philosophers either ignore Haynes's work, or deny free will already, or are seeking a work round.

Fortunately I do not seem to need a work round as Haynes's work seems to provide simply more evidence that the McTaggart B series is insufficient and we need the A series as well. Perhaps more details later (Yates, 2008, 2008a, 2008b, 2009).

But my opinion aside, Long's general position (though not necessarily his views on politics or economics) is quite widely held. Professor Colin Blakemore, a neuroscientist and director of the Medical Research Council, apparently said (Guardian, 2009) : "We shouldn't go overboard about the power of these techniques at the moment". I certainly agree ! It seems that X-phi has still largely to come to terms with Haynes' work, but the eager assumption of a very simple interpretation of results such as those of Haynes, should certainly not be made. I refer to particularly to the recent work of Vul (2009) concerning MRI interpretations and also to the implications of the work of Hacker (2003) but detailed discussions on both could add considerable additional material to the above.

Secondly I mention the important work that has recently been done in behavioural economics, and in particular the work of Ariely (2009). This helps to bring yet more clarity to the view that the old idea that market approach which presumes that “the common people know what they want" is actually quite wrong. Ariely (2009), who is Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioural Economics at M.I.T. has written many papers to this effect. This work undoubtedly affects questionnaire design and we all need to consider these angles. This sort of matter goes well beyond minor details of presentation. Most Westerners do not know or care, for example that the colour "white" is a colour for weddings and the like in the West, but anyone who lives in India can hardly miss that in India, "white" is the colour for funerals and "red" is the colour for weddings ! But Ariely's work, which is not per se given cross-cultural connotations in his experiments, must have its conclusions considered in such ways in each and every local context - when we are considering reinterpretations of philosophers like Kripke.

Finally we have prejudice.... Unfortunately it does not begin and end with Engine Charlie Wilson's dictum "What's good for General Motors is good for the USA". The Implicit Association Test (Nosik, 2009) has its most surprising and controversial finding as its indication that about 70 percent of those who took a version of the test that measures racial attitudes have an unconscious, or implicit, preference for white people compared to blacks. This contrasts with figures generally under 20 percent for self report, or survey, measures of race bias. Current studies in the research came from a number of countries including Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Poland and the United States. They looked at such topics as attitudes of undecided voters one-month prior to an Italian election; treatment recommendations by physicians for black and white heart attack victims; and reactions to spiders before and after treatment for arachnophobia, or spider phobia.

Obviously the IAT does not apply to white people only. One might apply it to Iranians living in Iran, for example, and their views on non-Iranians. Most certainly it will influence all who give or take such tests, to a greater or lesser degree. I think it was Joshua Knobe who did somewhat similar tests on philosophers as compared to lay people, and found such a bias there, but in his tests it acted as a reverse bias. At this point we could well become worried about relativism and hermeneutics in the sense of Heidegger and Gadamer.

A further brief point I'd like to make is the question as to whether this approach to Kripke involves modern semiotics quite directly rather than simply semantics. I hesitate to mention Barthes, Saussure, Lacan and so on but their conceivable relevance seems obvious. David Sless (1986) remarks, 'semiotics is far too important an enterprise to be left to semioticians' and it may well be true.

Conclusion:

This note is not to be in denial of progress, just to say progress may be difficult and when back at the "Institute for Fundamental Studies" in Mumbai after the monsoon I intend to do some investigations myself, bearing in mind the earlier work of Kripke, parallel universe ideas like those of Deutsch, Parfit etc., and the approach of Noe and of Clark and Chalmers. Naturally all this may ultimately give further evidence for the Many Bubble Interpretation, involving the A series of McTaggart.

References

Ariely D., (2009), http://web.mit.edu/ariely/www/MIT/papers.shtml ; e.g. "Tom Sawyer and the construction of value", Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Vol. 60 (2006) 1–10 ; popular book: "Predictably Irrational", Harper Collins, (2008), etc.

Frances B., (1998), Mind 107, 703-727.

Haynes J-D., (2008), http://medgadget.com/archives/2008/04/not_a_free_will_after_all.html

Hacker P., Bennett M., (2003), "Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience", Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN-10: 140510838X, ISBN-13: 978-1405108386

Lam B., (2009), http://philpapers.org/rec/LAMACS ; http://faculty.vassar.edu/balam/arecantonesespeakersreallydescriptivists.pdf

Long R.T., (2008), http://medgadget.com/archives/2008/04/not_a_free_will_after_all.html

Knobe, J., Sarkissian, H., Chatterjee, A., De Brigard, F., Nichols, S. & Sirker, S. (forthcoming). Is Belief in Free Will a Cultural Universal? Mind & Language ; http://www.unc.edu/~knobe/cultural-universal.pdf

Machery, E., Mallon, R., Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2004). Semantics, Cross-cultural Style.
Cognition, 92, B1–B12.

Machery E., (2009), http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/experimental_philosophy/2009/06/do-intuitions-about-reference-really-vary-across-cultures.html

Nosek, B. A., Smyth, F. L., Sriram, N., Lindner, N. M., Devos, T., Ayala, A., Bar-Anan, Y., Bergh, R., Cai, H., Gonsalkorale, K., Kesebir, S., Maliszewski, N., Neto, F., Olli, E., Park, J., Schnabel, K., Shiomura, K., Tulbure, B., Wiers, R. W., Somogyi, M., Akrami, N., Ekehammar, B., Vianello, M., Banaji, M. R., & Greenwald, A. G., (2009), "National differences in gender-science stereotypes predict national sex differences in science and math achievement", PNAS published online before print June 22, 2009, doi:10.1073/pnas.0809921106; Greenwald https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/research/ ; Sriram N, Greenwald A.G., (2009), "The brief implicit association test", Exp Psychol. 2009;56(4):283-94 ; http://faculty.washington.edu/agg/pdf/BriefIAT.26Jan09.pdf

Sless, D. (1986), In Search of Semiotics. London: Croom Helm

Sosa, D. (1996), “The Import of the Puzzle About Belief,” The Philosophical Review, 105, 373-402.

Sosa, E. (2007), "Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Intuition", Philosophical Studies, 132, 99–107.

Sytsma, Justin and Livengood, Jonathan (2009) A New Perspective concerning Experiments on Semantic Intuitions. In [2009] Society for Philosophy and Psychology, 35th Annual Meeting (Bloomington, IN; June 12-14).

The Guardian, Friday 9 February 2007, Colin Blakemore as quoted therein: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/feb/09/neuroscience.ethicsofscience

Vul E., Harris C., Winkielman P., Pashler H., (2009). Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, in press ; Vul E, Kanwisher N. (in press). "Begging the question: The non-independence error in fMRI data analysis". To appear in Hanson, S. & Bunzl, M (Eds.), Foundations and Philosophy for Neuroimaging.

Yates, J. (2008a). http://cogprints.org/6176/ , "Category theory applied to a radically new but
logically essential description of time and space",PHILICA.COM, Article number 135.

Yates, J. (2008b), http://cogprints.org/6232/ , "Experimental philosophy and the MBI",
PHILICA.COM, Article number 139.

Yates, J. (2008), "A study of attempts at precognition, particularly in dreams, using some of the
methods of experimental philosophy." , Philica.com , Article number 146.

Yates, J. (2009), "The Many Bubble Interpretation, externalism, the extended mind of David Chalmers and Andy Clark, and the work of Alva Noe in connection with Experimental Philosophy and Dreamwork", http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2009/05/many-bubble-interpretation-externalism.html

Friday, May 15, 2009

The Many Bubble Interpretation, externalism, the extended mind of David Chalmers and Andy Clark, and the work of Alva Noe in connection with Experimental Philosophy and Dreamwork

Abstract

The idea of dreams being mere internal artifacts of the mind does not seem to be essential to externalism and extended mind theories, which seem as if they would function as well without this additional assumption. The Many Bubble Interpretation could allow a simpler rationale to externalist theories, which may be even simpler if the assumption that dreams have no worthwhile content outside the mind is omitted.

Almost everybody agrees that mind and world are causally coupled (Prinz, 2009).

In normal perception we don't have the problem of stabilising detail. Noe (2009) points out - and in that follows the point made by LaBerge and many others - that if a dreamer looks more than once at, say, a printed sign in a dream the sign is likely to say something different on second viewing (apparently always in LaBerge's experience). The sign's content may even change whilst it is being watched. It often does in my experience of dreamwork. In general terms I have found that recorded results of dream experiments are more consistent over a series of experiments involving many different dreamers, than some experiments in the waking world which could be expected to be much more easily quantifiable and even more easily measurable (Yates, 2008). Synaesthesia is one example. That is to say with dreamwork we are left with a pile of reasonably consistent data to consider, even though the data itself may be construed as irrationally produced or even arising from a random source. Others such as Domhoff seem to confirm this.

But, even though dream results are in some way scientifically collatable, there is still the problem with instability of detail within individual dreams. For example, it is not like measuring UV spectra, when the same pure substance should give the same results each time. Now variability is not too unusual in psychology experiments, but clearly this level of variability is well beyond the norm.

Noe interprets this as meaning that dreams are not real, in the sense that waking experience is real, though he admits that the perceptual experience of dreaming is real. He then reasonably says that this implies that waking experience is different to dreaming experience, and that dreams cannot be construed as evidence in effect that reality is just another dream.

Yes, we can go this far. Andy Clark and Chalmers also seem largely to admit this view. In principle for day to day working purposes we can accept such an idea but we would use Ockham's razor yet again to say that it does not mean, either, that dreams necessarily consist ONLY of results from within the brain. In a way Noe would betray the thread of his own argument if he took the view that dreams necessarily consist only of results from within the brain, as he is very much into Merleau-Ponty type externalism.

In other words, if we accept Noe's variety of externalism in principle, we should leave it as open ground that dreams may come not just from a simple B-series 3+1 dimensional lump of white and grey neural matter. In fact our own position involves the A-series as well, where externalism, we trust, provides less of a problem. (Yates, 2008, 2008a, 2008b).

So such a position should be arguable and indeed essential at least in principle with Noe.

And in fact the mental status of dreams is still not clearly known, and there is no need for dreams to be purely internal in origin to allow most of Clark's argumentation.

Of course anyone who seems to claim entirely the unfortunate implied position that we only need consider what goes on in the brain to understand how the brain operates in the world, probably can be dealt with using a slightly different paradigm, not the topic of the present note.

The position of both Andy Clark and of David Chalmers seems to differ quite substantially from that of Noe. Although they both seem to favor augmented extensions of the simple B-series 3+1 dimensional lump of white and grey neural matter, it is sometimes difficult to visualise a satisfactory precise detailed formulation of that idea. Without a clear A series somewhere, instinct tends to make one fall back to Fodor's position.

With the A series on board, things differ dramatically. Purely to illustrate this point in another quite different case, if we consider Butterfield's (2001) critique of Barbour's work (Part 3.1), we realise that the moment McTaggart's paradox is invoked, the situation changes drastically.

It looks to me that Andy Clark is apparently activating the Foundation Argument against dreams, according to his correspondence with Noe (2009) at least. This seems to be a needlessly blunt edged sword to establish his views. The idea that consciousness depends only (or mainly) on what is happening in the brain the brain would take him away from the more extreme stance of Noe. And the Foundation Argument idea seems quite unproven anyway. It is essentially close to the idea of Crick. Noe gives quite cogent reasons against that, which may not concern the present argument. It really hardly matters to Clark's main argument that he should also apply it against dreams if he applies it to a lot of other things too. In other words, Clark's occasional comments that "dreams" seem to constitute almost purely cranial/neural matters do not really seem to be a clincher to his argument, but incidental ideas.

And as I just pointed out, we can look at even more unfortunate paradigms elsewhere. To put it largely, arguments against solipsism and generally accepted brute fact can come into such a discussion, except in specialised areas of mind science. There we are talking of Churchland as well as Crick and Searle, and our own working argumentation would be presented differently in such a case.

So it is perhaps simplest to look at the views of Fodor (2009) and Chalmers (2009). Fodor is claiming that Clark is effectively using the slippery slope argument between Otto and Inga, and also that notebooks are not the same as minds. Now that, apart from intentionality factors, does seem to be the case.

I'm not sure of the dispositional claims of Chalmers. Obviously Chalmers seems maybe to eventually want to solve a problem which Noe refers to on the first page of his preface "Only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious . . . has emerged unchallenged: we don't have a clue." The Chalmers solution could presumably involve yet more machines, and Fodor presumably would not quite take that line.

I think here we are left with different levels of implied logic. Noe's approach could be construed as a sophisticated "ad hominem" level argument, briefly to the effect that everyone knows that the world exists in the way most people think it does (for example, in no sense is it anything resembling the Matrix). That is somewhat in the sort of way that some have said Dr. Johnson tried to refute Bishop Berkeley, by kicking a stone and saying "I refute it thus". The problem is of course not just time constraints but more importantly constraints as to apparently available accurate scientific knowledge about situation and circumstances. In the context of neurophysiology and consciousness research generally we frequently seem to be deep into the area of informal logic (Groarke, 2008, 1999). Of course Noe has written a lot to expand and rephrase his arguments and to include a great detail of neurophysiological detail, and that is indeed of great value to his comments, and that fact must be remembered.

But in the case of Clark and Chalmers I am left feeling that they are looking for more of a logical commitment (Groarke (1999), Walton, (2002)). The most recent post of Chalmers (2009) suggests that it has not got there yet, but my thinking is that the sort of overall approach that Mandik (2009) has used, where he actually goes so far as to question the current idea of representation, is perhaps more relevant. Details in Mandik's case are sketched out by others in Mandik (2009a).

Whether there is an appropriate formalism is not the point here, as dreams is our current topic in this note. But it is possible to point out that it is only if the brain is considered as a simple B-series 3+1 dimensional lump of white and grey neural matter that worries about externalism overawe us so much. In the Many Bubble Interpretation (Yates, 2008, 2008a, 2008b) the relationship comes out naturally. Simple mathematics is not there in detail yet but so far all seems straightforward.

To look briefly forward, purely for a simple modus operandi in experimental philosophy, I consider that Knobe's (2009) style of approach may be better than a lot of mathematics before we can contrive more parameter values.

---------------------------------------

Conclusion

It cannot be assumed that dreams are of necessity simply part of a simple internal mental continuum.

The Many Bubble Interpretation could allow a simpler rationale to externalist theories, which may be even simpler if the assumption that dreams have no worthwhile content outside the mind is omitted.

References

Butterfield J., (2001), "The end of Time ?", arXiv:gr-qc/0103055 v1 ; especially for example 3.1

Chalmers D., (2009) http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2009/02/fodor-on-the-extended-mind.html

Fodor J., (2009) http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n03/fodo01_.html

Groarke L., (2008), "Informal Logic", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .

Groarke L., (1999), "The Fox and the Hedgehog: On Logic, Argument, and Argumentation Theory", ProtoSociology, (13), p29.

Knobe J., Phillips J., (2009), Psychological Inquiry, Volume 20, Issue 1, 30 - 36,

Mandik P., (2009a), http://www.consciousentities.com/?p=117

Mandik P., (2009), Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16, No. 1

Noe A., (2009), "Out of our Heads", numerous pages: including p179 on dreams, p203 on Andy Clark etc, ; Hill & Wang.

Prinz J., (2009), "Is Consciousness Embodied?" [In P. Robbins and. M. Aydede (Eds.) Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (forthcoming)] ; http://subcortex.com/IsConsciousnessEmbodiedPrinz.pdf

Walton D.N., (2002), "Are Some Modus Ponens Arguments Deductively Invalid?", Informal Logic, Vol. 22, No. 1 (2002): pp. 19-46 ; http://io.uwinnipeg.ca/~walton/papers in pdf/02modus.pdf

Yates, J. (2008a). http://cogprints.org/6176/ , "Category theory applied to a radically new but logically essential description of time and space",PHILICA.COM, Article number 135.

Yates, J. (2008b), http://cogprints.org/6232/ , "Experimental philosophy and the MBI", PHILICA.COM, Article number 139.

Yates, J. (2008). "A study of attempts at precognition, particularly in dreams, using some of the methods of experimental philosophy." , Philica.com , Article number 146.

Thursday, December 25, 2008

A study of attempts at precognition, particularly in dreams, using some of the methods of experimental philosophy

Dr. John Yates, M.Sc., Ph.D. Institute for Fundamental Studies, Vasai, Mumbai, India & Fulham, London, England

Institute address: Goa Campus (Assonora, provisional), Institute for Fundamental Studies, Goa ; Vasant Nagri, Vasai E, Mumbai, India ; Fulham, London, England

Correspondence address: email: uvscience[AT]gmail.com

Published work: Yates, J. (2008). "A study of attempts at precognition, particularly in dreams, using some of the methods of experimental philosophy." , Philica.com , Article number 146.

Abstract: Actual situations where folk philosophy might have predicted precognition effects were studied and dealt with experimentally and theoretically. Extremely strong experimental results were obtained but the findings supported not precognition but the Many Bubble Interpretation, which uses at this time dynamical systems theory as applied to the physics of the brain. Further experiments and theoretical work were discussed.

Introduction:

Blackmore's (2002) analyses are possibly the most up to date detailed appropriate account of controlled trials on precognition. Her remarks go back as far as the early dream work of Lord Kilbracken. Any results reported in Blackmore (2002) or implied by it seem to suggest that the subject does not present much future hope for precognition. Specifically with regard to dreams, Hobson (2005, 2006) doubted if there is any precognitive element in dreams though he seems to have had at least one dream which could be fitted to that category (a totally different thing, of course). I am largely in agreement with some aspects of Hobson's position on interpretations to date though there is still much exciting work to do, some of which I begin in this essay .

I have already considered the dreamwork of Domhoff (2002, 2003), Hobson, Metzinger (2004) and others elsewhere (Yates, 2008). The point has to be made that Domhoff has tried to computerise many aspects of dreamwork and his approaches to the multifarious problems of detail and interpretation plus his genuine attempts to involve internet interactions have to be borne in mind at all times, if not necessarily to be followed. Hopefully further experiments may be carried out at least partly on the internet, but many additional considerations, including those of experimental philosophy, will need to be dealt with.

Generally speaking, Hobson's and Blackmore's results and the largest fraction of similar work carried out with reasonable scepticism suggests that precognition does not happen, inside or outside of dreaming, under the constraints and conditions which have been imposed to date. I think that both Hobson (2006) and Blackmore (2005) were willing to be convinced otherwise by an effective proof, and therein lies the rub.

However we have already pointed out in earlier essays (Yates, 2008, 2008a, 2008b) that existing statistical methods may be inappropriate here and also that there is much more to be found or interpreted through observations.

I have also looked at other statistical and quasi-statistical aspects of the situation and have come to the conclusion that the methods of experimental philosophy have led to surprisingly exciting insights into dreamwork from a rather different angle.

Of course I refer to the continuing work of Schwitzgebel (2002, 2003, 2006, 2009) into colours in dreams as being seminal in this regard, and also with regard to specific methodologies.

Accordingly and also consequent to Yates (2008a,2008b), some experiments have been carried out on a number of subjects, as detailed below.

Whilst we have said that conventional statistics will not give a full picture of events (Yates, 2008) we now point out relatively conventional alternative methods by which dream studies can be carried out (Schwitzgebel, 2002, 2003, 2006, 2009) and there is doubtless much more to come. Schwitzgebel (2005) favours up to a point the classical traditional methods of the Titchener school of psychology and we could see that these can be leavened by some comments of Sosa (2007) (for example "if philosophers are ill-equipped to probe the brain in the ways of neuroscientists, it would be easy enough to broaden the movement’s self-conception to include interdisciplinary work, provided neuroscientists care enough about such issues with philosophical import, as no doubt some already do. Indeed, many experimental philosophers would probably define the movement in this interdisciplinary way").

We also have to bear in mind that much work of the Titchener school seems to have been only repeatable precisely enough by the Titchener school. I refer particularly to the chequered history of the Perky effect (Segal, 1964), (Martens, 2005) as a clear instance, but have to point out that Baars (2003), for example, still seems to take the Perky effect, or what it seems to imply, quite seriously and we have to consider the at least roughly feasible interpretations of Brockmole (2002). So whilst we cannot but concede that the general Titchener approach can be taken as somewhat of a curate's egg (addled but good in parts, as the curate proverbially says), it is a valiant attempt at a difficult problem in consciousness and as Schwitzgebel (2005) says, can be suitable for improvement. Schwitzgebel's own work at least hints as to directions which this may take.

The Experiment as Performed

This experiment helps us to discover the degree if any of backward leakage using the present approach which can be obtained by dream studies. The MBI ('Many Bubble Interpretation') approach and the importance of McTaggart's work certainly do not stand or fall on the basis of such studies but they could provide a pleasant confirmation of its correctness. The MBI may ultimately replace the present crude 19th/20th Century idea of punctal time, which seems like only a dim shadow of reality in comparison.

In Stickgold's experiment he had his subjects perform sequences of tasks and then showed that many of the subjects subsequently dreamt about these tasks. The present experiments record the dreams and then have the subjects carry out the tasks, which of course are chosen prior to the dreaming without informing the subjects in any way of the tasks, prior to the dreams. In terms of folk psychology, successful results could be regarded as precognition but according to the Many Bubble Interpretation, it is simply backwards leakage.

One idea will be to then try to obtain some parameters to enable us to improve our existing dynamical systems models (Yates, 2008) along the lines of the work of Hannon and Ruth (1997) or using other mathematical brain models such as those of Baars, Franklin or Koch, appropriately modified.

But first we will describe briefly the original Stickgold experiment. Following this we give an explicit mathematical account of how a reverse Stickgold effect can be produced. Then we will go on to obtain results which may help to confirm or indicate the reverse Stickgold effect, referred to in an earlier paper.

Stickgold's experiment

Stickgold (2000, 2003, 2005) controlled the content of 17 different people’s dreams after the first hour of sleep. Twenty-seven test subjects played Tetris on Nintendo sets for three days, with a two-hour morning session and a one-hour evening session the first day, and a one-hour morning and evening session the following days. Of the 27 people, 12 were beginners to the game and 10 were experts. Five of them were amnesiacs as well. Seventeen members of the group recalled dreaming of falling Tetris pieces at least one hour after falling asleep. Most of the dreams occurred the second night.

As far as I am aware these are the first major trials in history which so consistently seem to induce specific and definite dreams, and as such they should be extremely relevant to the present backward leakage study. The problem with psychological tests as compared to simple physics measurements has usually been the great difficulty in obtaining clear and consistent results. The chequered history of, for example, the Perky effect which I mentioned in detail earlier is an extreme but only too typical example. At the other end of the scale we have, say, Milgram's (1974) torture experiments which seem to have had very high repeatability all over the world.

Mathematical Representation of Stickgold and reverse Stickgold effects

To write down a mathematical model of the reverse Stickgold effect (Yates, 2008, 2008b), we use experimental philosophy and the work of Pizarro (2006).

This concerns the ripple effect. Now we consider a simple B1 series representation of the A series bubble. This is only a preliminary model and is not necessarily an accurate description. Because the A series cannot be precisely mapped onto the B series the model will never be completely accurate, because it cannot be. Thus the B1 series representation may appear to have substantial weaknesses as compared to a bona fide B series, and indeed may be inconsistent with it. We regard a present time bubble as PaPrFu(n) at Tn.

The ripple effect - the giving of an individual at a present time, information about an event which he remembers, is supposed according to Pizarro (2006) to alter his real (perceived) memory of the event. Here we have a physical effect on the brain from an applied information input. Say by an application of information f in the present the new configuration becomes PafPrfFu?(n) . Paf is the modified memory. Prf is the new present situation. We have not filled in Fu? because we do not need to for present purposes.

Now we need to remember that we are dealing with the neurology of the brain and presumably other factors. Now along the B or the B1 series we have a simple timeline. So one way of writing it would be that at T(n) we have one bubble PafPrfFu?(n) and at T(n-) , an earlier time, we have PaPrfFuf(n-). This is only a rough preliminary model but we are talking about real neural and perhaps other configurations at two different times. I do not deal with Fu?(n) at T(n) because in the present treatment we do not need to, but the work of Hohwy and Frith (2004) and others, makes it clear that Fu? is likely to be a real 'physical' configuration in a real 'physical' B series.

Here Fuf(n-) represents the future in the B1 series where there is going to be a a perturbation f. At this point we do not have to immediately consider many of the problems and paradoxes which one might normally expect as we know that it is not physically likely to be possible to get a completely accurate and consistent B1 series model as we would expect in the B series.

Now what is the relation of PafPrfFu?(n) to PaPrfFuf(n-) ?

Well these are two representations of a individual at times T(n) and T(n-). They are both brain models which can or should be each writeable down consistently and mathematically although we are not certain of their mutual consistency.

Well we specifically defined PafPrfFu?(n) above. As for PaPrfFuf(n-) , common sense hopefully tells us that it will exist too. It seems to mean that could well be a future perturbation of Fuf(n-) and that this will also occur in a simulated present Prf(n-) which of course is combined with past and future to form the bubble PaPrfFuf(n-) at T(n-).

So at T(n-) we should be able to write down, or to predict, the future. It is possible that it will only be a weak prediction, at the present state of the art, as we remember that Pa(n) was clearly weak.

But the general point is made that, in the B1 series at least, we can perturb the system by a perturbation f at time T(n) and that this will appear in the bubble PaPrfFuf(n-) as Fuf(n-). One's first reaction is that in a normal block time B series, this would be expected as that is how mathematics works. We might take the view that it could hardly be any other way anyway, and that toy models should also wrap up quantum and chaos effects in the same kind of system.

But this is a B1 series in the MBI . And the existence of the bubble PaPrfFuf(n-) implies that at time T(n-) we already have in our system enough information to write down (or if you like in folk philosophy terms 'forsee') something concerning the future. And we can use methods like those, for example, of Hannon and Ruth (1997) to actually mathematically represent the system at time T(n-) and to include the future of that system at T(n).

So now we have to ask what PaPrfFuf(n-) is in real terms. Well one representation might be a person in a particular psychological state. For example the dream state in Stickgold's experiment seems to represent Paf2Prf2Fu?(n) where f2 is a perturbation in the past (in Stickgold's case, the playing of Tetris), mirrored in a present dream state Prf2(n) (where Tetris is presumably dreamt about), in a simple situation where future involvement is not concerned.

So the equivalent representation of PaPrfFuf(n-) is the dream of a future perturbation, perhaps the playing of a game of Tetris in the future. All this does not prove the matter but it makes it clear that it can be written down mathematically using say the methods of Hannon and Ruth (1997). So perhaps the big question is: how reliable and consistent can such experiments be made ?

The work of Jones and Pashler (2007) suggests that prediction is never superior to retrodiction, even when subjects are forewarned of a forward-directional test. Only 217 and 353 subjects were used in their two experiments and of course the test was carried out subsequent to all the images to recall being memorised. It has been suggested that prediction may be an organizing principle of the mind and/or the neocortex, with cognitive machinery specifically engineered to detect forward-looking temporal relationships, rather than merely associating temporally contiguous events. There are not many tests for this idea, other than Jones (2007). The fact that Jones's work seemed to show no evidence of temporal asymmetry tends to bode well for the more advanced cases we consider in the present paper.

Factors taken into account in experiment planning. These include the idea suggested by Montague, Hyman, and Cohen (2004), it may be that events as reward or punishment cause prediction-focussed mechanisms to become active, whereas affect events like those used in Jones (2007) do not. The common observation that people are better at reciting the alphabet forward than backward also reflects the existence of inherently directional motor plans. A temporal asymmetry confined to sequential motor plans that have been repeatedly performed is quite different from an overall specialization of the memory system for prediction, however, although it could point to prediction improvement methods.

Freewill, intentionality (Malle (2001,2004) and such ideas as free will illusionism (Nadelhoffer, Feltz, (2007) may be the subject matter of further discussion and also they could have an obvious role in future experiment design.

Reverse Stickgold effect experiments

We did several studies. Here are two of them:

(1) This was essentially a repetition of the Stickgold experiment using 8 of our own subjects but recording dreams on evenings 7 days before and 7 days after, the Tetris plays.

The dreams were recorded by the subjects themselves, in English. The subjects also filled in a brief questionnaire as to dreaming habits. The subjects were from 6 to 15 years of age. Their mother tongues were Marathi and Hindi, but all could write and speak fluent English, as they were students at a local school where English was taught as a first language. A primary reason for their learning of English was allow personal advancement in whatever sphere of life they were later to lead. Their level of English presentation and expression was thus of a higher standard than would be the case in the average UK school for children of the age range.

Subjects were not told why or how the experiment was being carried out. The Tetris console was simply supplied to them in the middle of the testing session, when they were preoccupied with school, their hobbies and other such things. The subjects had just been asked to record dreams for a fortnight and, in mid session, were given the use of a Tetris gameboard and told to play Tetris a lot over a brief mid session period.

Briefly, the results were that for the 8 subjects there were 10 dreams of a probable Tetris type before play and 6 such dreams after play. Of these dreams, there were 4 very Tetris like dreams before play and none after play. These dreams averaged over the subjects, and there were no notable peak scores. One subject reported no dreams at all after play and one reported no dreams during the entire session.

(2) In this experiment, another group of subjects gave detailed answers to a dream questionnaire. Incidentally, the contention of Schwitzgebel (2006, 2009) that few people dream only in black and white was true for all our subjects. No test subject said that they dreamt solely in black and white. We used 13 subjects, aged between 8 and 15. The mother tongue of all these subjects was Marathi, but they all spoke good Hindi and reasonably fluent English as well. Detailed dream results were collected for four days before, and four days after the mid session day. Details were taken down carefully by an experienced and quadrilingual test assessor over a period of over 10 days and for many hours per subject.

I do not at this point propose to give a quantitative assessment of the results but I bear in mind Stickgold's apparent contention that form rather than specific substance is what is best measured. i.e. in his Tetris and Alpine Skier experiments he was looking generally in the first case for activities which had the same qualities as Tetris and Alpine Skier. Thus in the case of Tetris he might have considered simply pieces moving in the air or at a pinch even raindrops or such like of an appropriate design or pattern. In the case of Alpine Skier he seems to have been looking for the visceral effect of someone actually skiing, or perhaps one of the more advanced multicolored Virtual Reality ski or switchback games now to be found at the better grade of amusement parks. Specifically I saw an excellent such VR game at the seaside in Blackpool, England some years ago. Such games are roughly like the switchback equivalent of a Link Trainer for pilots, and ambitious home construction details are available on many websites (Wikipedia, 2008) There is clearly scope for more ambitious experiments in this regard but the time and effort involved will mean that careful advance experiment planning, relatively speaking as detailed, thought out, and meticulous as the Titchener school had expected to realise, is likely to be required.

At the midsession period, Tetris was not played but a small gift given to each child, of a kind they might like. Examples are a remote control toy car and a remote control toy helicopter. Scoring was based on dreams about the chosen object, i.e. car, helicopter and so on. They were not told before the test what they were getting as a gift. This was a relatively poor area and the subjects rarely received gifts, in fact some had never had any gifts before.

Be all that as it may, on the broad criterion above, which counted some cases of running in motor traffic as amounting to a dream of a car, and so on, the score was 10 subjects having prior (in folk philosophy perhaps precognitive) dreams and 9 having subsequent dreams. One subject claimed to have had only one dream during the entire period and one subject could only recall a vague prior dream. Now this is an extremely good prior score !

On a more narrow criterion, where only dreams specifically about an object exactly the same as the chosen object were included, the prior score was again high, being 6 prior with 7 subsequent dreams. The total number of all dreams per subject recorded was not high, being on average 2 or 3 before and 1 or 2 subsequently. The criterion here was that if they got a toy car (for example), a positive result would be if they dreamt about a car. One subject's prior dream was not only about a car, but he specifically dreamt the correct color which he mentioned without prompting, being the only subject to mention the relevant color (yellow) of the significant object in the dream series.

Now these subjects were all impartially and individually quizzed and questioned over a period of time, without any leading of them in a particular direction. But of course we cannot yet draw too many conclusions, nor determine whether we will always get the same result. One interesting problem (Haidt, 1993) concerns the idea of quizzing subjects about their views on a story in which a person has a pet dog, which unexpectedly dies, probably by accident. The dog is then eaten by its owner. Most people react that such a thing seems to be quite disgusting and gross, given the particular tale, and the relatively limited questionnaire and possible replies allowed, but in some ways it is hard to understand why it should be disgusting and maybe further experiments would clarify the situation. What I am trying to say is that these projects are often hard to understand and are not basically necessarily having a simple and clearcut follow up.

There is probably no very simple external situation either. The subjects' main interest tended to be not in (cars or whatever the gift was) but in sports and football. They did not know what the gift was, and whilst like any small child they liked presents, there was no special liking for motor vehicles, the closest connection being perhaps that one child's father was a rickshaw driver. The subjects had no known motive to 'cheat' or to make wild guesses at what they might have dreamt, or to invent dreams. Of course, mirroring the Tetris experiment, the idea was that the subjects should play a lot with the present voluntarily when they received it. They indeed did so, so at that level the technique used was cheap, modest, but apparently adequate to get a preliminary result.

Possibilities for further improvement in performance

The use of a very large number of experimental subjects of differing backgrounds and personality types could be one step forward. Another step could be the use of virtual reality apparatus during the experiment as mentioned earlier in this paper.

The use of email experiments and some form of content analysis as in Domhoff (2002, 2003) could also lead to more results though such methods become very mechanical sometimes and important detail is likely to be lost.

On that latter theme, epidemic tracking via Google (2008) is by now a commonly used method and with some variations epidemic tracking might be usable for this work. And then of course there is Google Trends, another powerful tool. Careful use of these and similar techniques could eventually be incorporated in or even replace the humble questionnaires. Less conventional internet approaches to detection as in FindTimeTravel.com have not succeeded to date.

Vul (2008) appears to take the view that cognition may be described as statistical inference, and points out that averaging reasonable guesses is better than having only one try - a result which seems to hold for one person as well as for a statistically designed goup. There are several reasons why this may be so, including the idea that the brain is continually generating hypotheses and checking them against reality. Such methods may be considered in a brain model under development. and indeed were implied in one or two earlier attempts to create a model (Yates, 2008).

Philosophical Comment

Philosophically, we are left with the interesting speculation that, using reasonable present day B-series only physics, from the work of Watanabe (1955) right up to the present day (e.g., (Gott, 1997) time travel to the past from the future as well as from the past to the future could become possible. In Gott's example, this form of time travel would be subsequent to the discovery of the first time machine. How this would apply in the case of effects relating to the reverse Stickgold effect, which we may be demonstrating in the present work, still may need to be determined. But clearly the physics might well force that Gott's condition above to apply, and we certainly cannot assume otherwise without good reason. Information theory might seem to make the restriction apply to retain consistency with current theoretical physics. But for the record, my own first patent (Yates, 1980) of time travel was made public in Patent GB2051465A during 1971 to 1979. There are plenty of potential paradoxes here for philosophers, and in my opinion, especially experimental philosophers.

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Thursday, October 02, 2008

Experimental philosophy and the MBI

Experimental philosophy and the MBI

Dr. John Yates, M.Sc., Ph.D. Institute for Fundamental Studies, Vasai, Mumbai, India & Fulham, London, England

Institute address: Goa Campus (Assonora, provisional), Institute for Fundamental Studies, Goa ; Vasant Nagri, Vasai E, Mumbai, India ; Fulham, London, England

Correspondence address: email: uvscience[AT]gmail.com

Published work: Yates, J. (2008). "Experimental Philosophy and the MBI" , Philica.com , Article number 139.

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Abstract

Various facets of the MBI are discussed, and how it can be used in connection with experimental philosophy, experimental psychology and neuroscience. Brief historical references are given. The large implications of the MBI with regards to McTaggart's paradox and the resolution of the difficulties with quantum mechanics is mentioned. Later sections deal with the mereological fallacy, multiple universes, teletransportation, mind cloning and mind splitting. Dreamwork is chosen as a prime example of the use of the MBI and recent work by Tononi and Baars is referred to.

Introduction

In this paper we deal generally with various facets of the MBI ("Many Bubble Interpretation"), (Yates, 2008), and how it can be used in connection with experimental philosophy, experimental psychology and neuroscience. I begin in section (1) with brief historical references and then proceed in section (2) to refer to the large implications of the MBI with regards to McTaggart's paradox and the resolution of the difficulties with quantum mechanics, continuing in sections (3) and (4) to deal briefly with the mereological fallacy, multiple universes, teletransportation, mind cloning and mind splitting. Dreamwork is chosen as a prime example of the use of the MBI and recent work by Tononi and Baars are referred to in that connection in section (5).

(1) History of my Contact with Experimental Philosophy and some other matters

My first contact with experimental philosophy was probably a comment in about 1967 by Ted Bastin during a meeting with Ted Bastin, and also Dorothy Emmet and R.B. Braithwaite (the 'epiphany philosophers') at a large house in Cambridge. The “Epiphany Philosophers” seemed to take it as a goal to show that christianity and science were not only compatible but that they supported one another. Further, some of their considerations of matters such as ESP could certainly be taken as pseudo-science and as such I certainly never endorsed them. It also appeared that Ted Bastin's contention at one time (Noyes, 1999) was that paranormal phenomena should be defined as contradicting physics.

From a philosophical point of view, I thought then, and still think, that there could hardly be a basic objection to making hypothetical contentions of a somewhat speculative nature as it allowed for at least a metaphorical way - if a somewhat doubtful and even sometimes probably far too naive way - to the nicing down particularities in metaphysical conjectures. Some of such conjectures could give rise to real practical concerns with the forwarding of technology, in such ways as proposed 'mind uploading' and 'mind duplication'. I go into a little more detail later in the essay, whilst considering the work of Parfit.

However. The term 'spam' was not at that time used, I believe, as the art term it seems to have become but I think Ted did not at that time altogether approve of some of the rather mechanical sounding questionnaires which are still associated to some extent with the concept of experimental philosophy and there seemed to be a feeling that the idea of experimental philosophy could well become popular, but could eventually degenerate. The effect is probably noticed as early as 1938 in the work of Naess (Naess, 1938 ; Appiah, 2007). I suppose part of the problem is that we might in effect, be throwing away the baby with the bathwater by being over zealous with some of our refinements. This must of course be avoided when it is appropriate to do so.

To sum it up, to me experimental philosophy sounded as if it might be a good idea and that it might allow such positive factors as the sharpening up, refining, and sometimes rejecting for day to day purposes, the ideas of folk philosophy.

(2) The MBI ('Many Bubble Interpretation') and its use with McTaggart's Paradox

A plan for a model of the MBI ('Many Bubble Interpretation') is described in Note 5 of Yates (2008) and elsewhere in the same paper. The MBI has already shown its utility and potential further utility as described in Yates (2008). The McTaggart paradox is regarded nowadays by many philosophers as a real paradox, which it is. Much literature is available to that effect and this will be assumed, though it can be argued in detail as has been the case elsewhere. We resolved McTaggart in Yates (2008) and the effect shown is that, to do physics or neuroscience properly, we need to bear the paradox in mind, and to use both A and B series. As an analogy, not to do so would be like pretending to live not in 3 spatial dimensions, but instead to live in Flatland. Mathematical detailing of the MBI can have a very intimate connection with the human brain and we have used a neutral monist approach, though not critically, and we tend to bear neutral monism in mind for the future. The Gestalt Bubble model of Lehar (2003) is of course not the same as the Many Bubble Interpretation (MBI), although for many years I also have been a great enthusiast of the work of Kohler and Wertheimer, as well as Lewin and Leeper and so there may be some similarities in approach.

Velmans (2003), whose model has some philosophical appeal, holds a different view from authors like Lehar (I've often referred to Velmans' work in my blog, http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/), and for this present paper I hold a similar view, up to a point. Velmans states that Lehar argues that the phenomenal world is in the brain, and concludes that the physical skull is beyond the phenomenal world. Velmans argues that the brain is in the phenomenal world and concludes that the physical skull is where it seems to be. This fits in with my own work and Velmans is also a monist. James, too, was also said to be a kind of neutral monist, as Velmans (2003) points out.

And, although Velmans (2008) very reasonably makes objections (particularly in his notes 4 and 5 and related comments) to some of the ideas put forward by Baars, the popular GWT (Global workspace Theory) model of Baars has some advantages for general use, though particular instances such as Baar's theories on magnetic fields may need to cope with some objections, and may be a little too direct. We can consider the model overall and with some refinement it can possibly cope with the thrust of my argumentation.
I will continue in Section (3) by surveying the alleged mereological fallacy and multiple universes, and then go on in Section (4) to discuss brain cloning, and in Section (5) I will briefly discuss the ongoing experiments in dreamwork, one of the many possible applications of the MBI.

(3) The mereological fallacy, multiple universes and related matters.

The mereological fallacy (Hacker, 2003) ìs supposedly that it isn’t actually your brain that does the thinking at all. In fact, the very idea that it does is virtually incoherent: not just wrong, but meaningless. Only you as a whole entity can do anything like thinking or believing. Hacker's views are essentially based on the philosophy of Wittgenstein, which many serious thinkers disagree with entirely, or accept at best only in part as in Hohwy (2003), and in present cases relevant to neuroscience, Hohwy and Frith (2004). In fact Table 1 of Hohwy and Frith (2004) almost in itself constitutes a formula for the start of writing an experimental philosophy paper but it needs more 'aha' possibility added for an appropriate questionnaire, like the early ideas of Knobe (2003) have.

To discuss Knobe's ideas I must go into a little detail about various multiple universe conjectures.

We must distinguish plainly between firstly such ideas as the many worlds interpretations of such as Deutsch and Everett, which largely seemed to be based on the many peculiar and at times often seemingly paradoxical results which arise in relation to quantum theory; indeed the still commonly accepted Copenhagen interpretation, sometimes even described as the "shut up and calculate" interpretation, is still frequently made use of, despite its problems - indeed it was over 30 years ago that Sir Rudolf Peierls commented to me, at a meeting I had convened at the Institute of Physics, London, as to the advantages that alternative-universe approaches seemed to have over Copenhagen. Since then we have had the work of David Deutsch, Gerard 't Hooft and much other work, and hopefully this will eventually help to illumine remaining difficulties in quantum mechanics and produce other results and perhaps even allow us to specifically explicate and use in detail, at least quantum multiverses - or other and totally different approaches. But like the poor, the problems of quantum mechanics are unfortunately still with us. However up to a point we may still stand aloof from all this in our present treatment. In the MBI (or 'Many Bubble Interpretation') the Schrodinger cat problem and other such problems slot in neatly enough, and to all intents and purposes are resolved or resolvable ! And for a start quantum theory as at present described in the literature is totally B series anyway, and we know in the MBI that for a proper description of a universe we need to use an A series also.

But of course we now have a newish breed of speculated universes, namely the multiverses of such people as Tegmark, Rees and Vilenkin. Tegmark (2007) neatly classifies his universes currently in 4 levels, and roughly speaking the old style 'quantum multiverses' seem to occur in level 3. But it seems to me that, however worthy such attempts may be, they are still in my opinion very clearly within the realm of speculation, like the continuous creation theory and other theories of Fred Hoyle, and like the 'Fundamental Theory' of Eddington of previous times. Does this matter ? I think it does, as we need a serious breakthrough if any great merit is to be ascribed to such work. At the end of the day, of course there may well be some points of such theories sufficiently in touch with known reality to allow us to proceed, and of course that is important, but such a toehold in scaling the mountain of wisdom will definitely not do for all, even though we must admire the efforts of such intrepid mountaineers. Now one rider to this probable fact is that philosophical studies based on such theories can be a bit lacking. I am talking for example of Knobe's ideas on freewill and this was basically discussed by him, in Knobe (2008). The interviewer John Horgan presents the view which can lead to the idea that a relatively straightforward inflationary universe theory could be best left unused because of moral implications.

Now at this point I think it is correct to mention some brief details about the background of these two authors. Horgan it seems is an agnostic journalist increasingly disturbed by religion's influence on human affairs. His details are available on the web, and seem to be mainly in the realm of popular science. He is currently unhappy with the Templeton Foundation which he seems to feel should have been more even-handed in their funding, by awarding the Templeton Prize to someone like Richard Dawkins for example and on the other hand seems to have bet Michio Kaku that “By 2020, no one will have won a Nobel Prize for work on superstring theory, membrane theory, or some other unified theory describing all the forces of nature.” Joshua Knobe is a well known philosopher whose father-in-law is Alexander Vilenkin, Director of the Institute of cosmology at Tufts University, and with whom Joshua Knobe has discussions about the universe, and indeed has published with jointly.

Basically I cannot concede to Horgan's idea that important theories (like Tegnark's or Deutsch's theories, for example) may be only 'metaphysical' in the sense that they may never have any currently acceptable proof. Also I cannot concede to Knobe's apparent idea that Vilenkin's theory, one out of many, is necessarily likely to be the right theory to follow, although Knobe (2008) himself wisely states high levels of general philosophical doubt.

It seems to me that for any theory, from my standpoint there should be a meaningful likelihood that it can be proved or disproved at some present time or within the forseeable or conceivable future. The ideas of Max Tegmark and David Deutsch, for example, look as if they are sitting there on the shelf waiting for elements of proof or disproof and whether these can be found, at some point, can be good reasons as to whether they are worthy of consideration in current physics and related disciplines. Though they could, regardless, perhaps cast meaningful shadows on the wall of philosophical speculation. Anyway the hope in present ventures is to obtain meaningful and provable results. My problem here is that some of Knobe's ideas (Knobe, 2006) on freewill would appear to be based on the philosophy of Vilenkin.

The inflationary world idea of Knobe (2006) is very clear and refers to real, observable worlds, given that Vilenkin's theory is more or less correct. It also seems to me that Knobe's theory does indeed differ from the actualism of Ayers, which is just a strong form of determinism, in some forms ruled out by way of chaos theory anyway. On the basis of inflationary theory Knobe says we may not even have “a unique copyright on our own identities” These new theoretical ideas casts up a set of new philosophical questions. Now my worry is that we are here going well into unknown territory. I for one do not accept that there is any good evidence for the inflationary world idea. Philosophers may like to speculate on it and I do not contest that idea, but a blind semi-acceptance of its truth is very much another matter. One positive possibility may be the assignment of likelihood possibilities or betting odds, so we can know how to decide how much time to give such theories or even to set up some ranking order.

For example in (Marshall, 2000) on MWI (the "Many Worlds Interpretation") it seems that "Political scientist" L David Raub reports a poll of 72 of the "leading cosmologists and other quantum field theorists" about the "Many-Worlds Interpretation" and gives the following response breakdown.
"Yes, I think MWI is true" 58%
"No, I don't accept MWI" 18%
"Maybe it's true but I'm not yet convinced" 13%
"I have no opinion one way or the other" 11%

Amongst the "Yes, I think MWI is true" crowd listed are Stephen Hawking and Nobel Laureates Murray Gell-Mann and Richard Feynman. Gell-Mann and Hawking recorded reservations with the name "many-worlds", but not with the theory's content. Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg is also mentioned as a many-worlder, although the suggestion is not when the poll was conducted, presumably before 1988 (when Feynman died). The only serious "No, I don't accept MWI" named is apparently Penrose.

Obviously these statistics would not be easy to prepare, and probably would be much harder than simply referring to the citations index. Status of person holding the opinion and accessibility and clarity of a particular theory would be just some of the factors involved. Also it would be unwise to expect too much of new or revolutionary theories, or to base too much on impressive personalities. Joshua Knobe himself, who is seemingly becoming more and more doubtful as to which if any views on many philosophical matters are relevant or justified, seems to have begun his polls with a much less straightforward idea of how to indulge the philosophical relevance of various views, and I mention in particular the very interesting paper of Kimpe (2008) in this regard. To my mind Kimpe's (2008) paper illustrates at least one way, though it be pedagogical, as to how this sort of thing should be carried out, and of course we also have the highly inspiring early example of Knobe ( Nadelhoffer, 2008). My own feeling is that a touch of Milgram (1974) could be needed for further work, and indeed in Slater (2006) the UCL group got their volunteers to wear VR helmets to experience a simulated version of the Milgram experiment. It was designed to be the same, but the strangers getting shocked were just computer animated avatars. Yet the UCL team conclude their test subjects reacted on "the subjective, behavioural and physiological levels as if it were real in spite of their knowledge that no real events were taking place." Measurements of heart rate and heart rate variability showed they reacted as though the situation was real. They were just as aware and worried they were doing wrong, but shocked the stranger anyway. Other experiments seem to have also shown much the same effect, and one could very easily be led to suppose that some feelings of grief, kinship and empathy are merely biological reactions. Without doing a study of these matters, I tend to assume that some of these reactions relate simply to the novelty of the avatar situation, and may reduce in effect the more generally experience on these matters is available. Also there is the immersive effect and the fact that the participants knew they were being watched. It is also very unclear as to the ethical situation of such experiments, and whether such methods can be used in other mass murder experiments. On the other hand these factors can be partly put aside, bearing in mind the massive and apparently largely harmless exposure of world cultures to some forms of television and video gaming.

Slater's (2007) subsequent experiments indicate that much more work needs to be done on the effect of virtual environments, but that the Slater (2006) result was no individual chance happening. Slater (2003) makes it plain that the idea of 'presence', and probably many other concepts, may need to be meticulously defined for philosophical purposes in a world which is part VR and part factual reality.

Philosophy has so far not had quite the same need of definition, and it could turn out to be very enlightening - given enough further experiments. The task is probably large but well within our control, in my view.

(4) Teletransportation and brain cloning

However now we will get down to a simple case, the one referred to by Parfit (1984) in "Reasons and Persons" as teletransportation on p199-200 of the above book. I have to say that whilst the theoretical possibilities of teletransportation may be there, using methods which have been used for atoms, the actual teletransportation of human beings or indeed any animate matter - even beings as hardy as tardigrades (Jönsson , 2008) for example - is so far not possible and for a variety of reasons may never be so.

As Parfit points out, for circumstances like the above, Wittgenstein would have pointed out "It is as if our concepts involve a scaffolding of facts .......... if you imagine certain facts otherwise.....then you can no longer imagine the application of certain concepts" or Quine who advised not to "suggest words have some logical force beyond what our past needs have invested them with". But Parfit says (to paraphrase) "we strongly ... don't like" - unpleasant consequences of teletransportation. And we believe that these visceral reactions will also apply even in real circumstances. At the present state of experimental philosophy, this also seems to mean that the Wittgenstein/Quine view may be the view (i.e. we can ignore such outlandish possibilities, prior to any actual such device being in play, or as existing as a mere hypothesis) on our 'abstract' side, and the 'visceral' view may apply to our judgement for real cases (i.e. if we suppose that such a device could somehow be brought into being).

And we certainly seem to have come much closer, in recent years and since the publication of Parfit's book, to a 'visceral' situation rather than an 'abstract' one, so if we were to consider Parfit's view directly in terms of experimental philosophy, we would be perhaps wise to frame our queries in accordance with the temporal change, if we were to ask a class of aspiring young philosophers about such issues, in a rather similar way to Kimpe (2008). And indeed some of these interviews if repeated every few years might give outstandingly differing poll results.

Effect of Temporal Change on Philosophical Reasoning : But indeed we would probably for the moment at least, confine our attentions for the moment to late 20th and 21st century philosophers like Parfit, who must have been involved with the effect of temporal change (scientific change being of most importance as this can induce immediate 'no-no', but also spiritual change and political change) on philosophical reasoning over a period of time already. That of course partly accounts for the changing views of philosophers even in the 20th century, Bertrand Russell's changing (political) views on the use of nuclear bombs being only one instance out of many. And it probably also accounts in part at least for Joshua Knobe's expressed feelings for the apparent indeterminism of philosophical results, perhaps not to the level of Heidegger or Wittgenstein (Minar, 2001) who seem to try to show us how skepticism presents a symptom of our way of inhabiting our condition. They take a view as if the world had first to be stripped of the taint of meaning before it could again be rendered an hospitable environment for the dwelling of mortals.

Since Knobe takes a look at a world, constantly changing even in basic scientific and physical understanding all the time, thus leading to a continual shaking of its philosophical foundations, he is understandably not eager to take very definite views on many matters, as next week's scientific advance in (say) perception theory could undermine an entire philosophical structure of a lifetime ! Not that the proponents of such a theory will want to admit it, of course, any more than Heidegger after World War II must have really wished to truly change his philosophical lucubrations from a semi-political viewpoint to a quasi-poetical one, but circumstances, and not just physical circumstances must have made him 'want' to do so. So too Knobe has his 'abstract' and his 'visceral' and it is probably possible to take great pains to venture from there. His views on such matters as freewill, morality, ethics, and even crime and punishment, seem to be up to a point conditioned by his tentative acceptance of Vilenkin's physics, and the fact that he is attempting to obtain great achievements in his thought, and indeed to relate, through experimental philosophy, his 'take' on these matters to that of others. From the present point of view a fairly all inclusive theoretical base and nonetheless a directed approach seem the most appropriate, at this time. And we bear in mind that the use of experimental philosophy may be one good way to attain this.

Perhaps obviously, deep questions of relativism arise and I try to proceed with the work by avoiding these, and also avoid a detailed consideration of the perhaps rewarding work of Gadamer on hermeneutics, or for that matter of Davidson's work.

Parfit on p203 of "Reasons and Persons" says that he considers identity as "the spatio-temporal physical continuity of an object". (One perhaps looks at Kimpe (2008) to consider the mereological aspect of this matter). One can see the relevance and explication of physical continuity, probably, but psychological continuity (and particularly continuity of memory) are also reasonably considered by Parfit at some length on p205 et seq. However in regard to something like memory, which leaves the impression of relating to the obvious physical aspects of the brain, but to an as yet unclearly defined mental feature, we seem to be right there at the coal face of understanding, and could go very wrong. We certainly do not even know accurately how to erase very specific and individually chosen memories by physical means, for example, using needles or electrodes in very small areas. Many people say that such things as thoughts and memories are spread out in some way over the whole brain, as it were like a mathematical Fourier transform. And of course Hacker goes even further than this, suggesting that it is one thing to suggest on empirical grounds correlations between a subjective, complex whole (say, the activity of deciding and some particular physical part of that capacity, say, neural firings) but there is considerable objection to concluding that the part just is the whole. Hacker then uses the traditional Wittgenstein view that to do so is nonsense. For myself I would not care to take the traditional Wittgenstein approach so far, but like Parfit would like to consider the evidence as and when it arises through neurological experiments. And Parfit's continued strivings can be looked at fairly benignly until at least p209, up to which he more or less accepts the possibility of and/or need for some sort of physical and psychological continuity.

It seems to me that in the teletransportation case of Parfit, there can be both physical and psychological continuity for both of the persons (the teletransported person and the clone), as the original person has obvious continuity and the person on Mars also has continuity in space and time, using real teleportation methods of the kind - not known when Parfit wrote his book - we have at the moment for single particles, if these can be extended to larger objects. There is a quantum effect during the creation of the clone, but this is day to day and in an emaciated way is satisfactory in B-series quantum physics, and also occurs in the MBI. The only problem is that we now have two 'originals'. A perfect chance for experimental philosophy to ask each of them questions to decide which is the authentic item, and, to me, it seems fair enough if they both seem to be authentic. But duplication is common in every production line and if people can be duplicated, both duplicants should have importance, and in fair systems, human rights.

The only 'visceral' worry to either clone should probably be as to whether he and other clones are treated fairly. Whether such a worry need occur depends on historical circumstances which are not yet with us, and which basically seem to have no immediate connection to the act of cloning.

Amusingly, then, mass production could almost produce a 'detournement' effect on Heidegger's ideas. Heidegger apparently (according to Steiner) warned as early as the 1920s that 'as this soap powder [i.e. conveyor belt consumerism] spreads over the planet, over the universe, it will be almost impossible for you to be you and not just one'. On the contrary, individual 'ones' and their clones may each be able to show great individuality from a basic cloned person, and each one of us may become independently available as millions of quite separately acting individuals, totally disconnected to each other, with their own psychological reactions after the cloning. Furthermore, unlike Vilenkin's inflationary world-view where it could be said free will (given the noted restrictions) is effectively almost written out of the scheme of things in the universe, overall, there would be an almost limitless free will available for individuals to put into practice, as each clone could try something different and even compare notes. Whether there would be any means of contact between clones, other than normal physical ones available to everyone, is of course unknown. And of course such a universe could also exist in (or on top of) Vilenkin's version.

Returning now to the work of Parfit, on p273 he starts discussing mind backups. Again, this is outside of existing technology, so up to a point one could assume discussion on the matter is empty. The idea presumably is that the mind backup will simply replace the existing mind, should it become damaged, say in transit. However such a backup in practice is unlikely to have access to what happens in the mind after backup and until fatality, so is likely to to be 'just another approximate clone'. Maybe whether individuals would see such a clone to be of value could depend on their circumstances, for example family responsibilities and commitments for continuity of an existing enterprise. But it seems clear that personal continuity will have been breached.

At this point we have to bear in mind that Parfit is what he claims to be a 'reductionist' and in his understanding, persons are nothing over and above the existence of certain mental and/or physical states and their various relations. But this point in his chain of argument appears to be circular as he either claims that we can give a full description of each individual thought without assuming it has a thinker, or perhaps he is claiming that we can describe the totality of our thoughts without assuming that that has a thinker. That a person's life may be seen for some purposes as a sequence of temporal events, each one an aggregate of mental or other events, provides no grounds for the assumption that the person themselves can be identified as being this sequence. Such a sequencing may perhaps be used to tag, or keep track, of a person and even to develop theories such as the MBI, but that does not mean that we have thereby established the sequence or tagging as being the person himself. Furthermore Nagel (Harth, 2004) and others seem to define reductionism in a somewhat different way to Parfit.

(5) Use of MBI and GW theory for dreamwork

We are seeing apparent continuity of human beings' existence whilst dreams occur. Most normal people simply welcome a good night's sleep, and have no fear that it will be the end of their life, or that a new person will take their place when they 'wake up' the following day. Parfit and others have of course considered such possibilities, but we can probably rule them out for the current practical exercise.

We have already used dynamic systems modelling for the sleep condition and referred to it in Yates (2008). For the interim, rather than refining existing models we intend to try to determine empirical factors which will sharpen and enhance the reverse Stickgold effect, but to relate such progress to MBI theory also.

We note from Knobe's work that there seem to be two aspects to any real philosophical views, namely abstract ideas or views and visceral ideas or views. This suggests the possibility of something quite different to Pavlovian 'conditioning' or effects of such a nature, such as simple computer-aided classical conditioning after the manner of Richard F. Thompson. The idea is simply to give some of the subjects small rewards during the process of dream recording, likely to take place over about 10 days with the reward given mid-session. The control group will not be given rewards and we will see what difference this makes to the dreams, if any. A number of other techniques will be used during the tests, some of which are currently ongoing.

Global workspace and other theory : In connection with his theories of consciousness, Tononi (2008) claims that consciousness fades during early sleep, and that this is likely to be due to the dreamless brain either breaking down into causally independent modules, shrinking its repertoire of possible responses, or both. He has carried out work using EEG and rTMS results to help to validate this view. As Tononi puts it his theory suggests that "the brain breaks down into little islands that can't talk to one another." Now this is a reasonable postulate in the B series and whether in effect something similar occurs in the A series (which may well have additional ability to integrate information in the brain, notwithstanding B series dissociation ) is as yet undetermined. Stickgold had said earlier "He has plainly and elegantly demonstrated a breakdown in the ability of cortical areas to interact normally as we fall asleep, but he hasn't provided any reason to think that this is related to the changes in consciousness as we fall asleep." "Scientists have nothing approaching an understanding of why we are conscious when we are awake or, indeed, why we are awake. So looking for what changes cause a loss of consciousness is a very difficult question because we don't know what we're looking for. I don't think this adds anything substantive about consciousness. It does add some information about the changes in brain function that accompany the shift to sleep, in a very elegant and beautiful way to show it." Tononi however seems to be of the view that "the ability of distant parts of the brain to communicate with each other constitutes consciousness."

I have by now written at length about psychological aspects of this matter - clearly a lot can be said about the hard problem , where the deceptively simple position could roughly in effect be that "the map is not the country" (or, "the Tononi effect is not consciousness"), and indeed a lot can also be said about the work of Jack et al (2007), who can also see that there are problems but would favour a different mode of tackling them. From my own standpoint, dynamic systems theory may give interesting results for the MBI, but our additional experiments could also be helpful. And, we clearly would be much happier if we could carry out mind cloning to help with the parameters (as in that case, the differences between the A series of the clones might help with parameter values, but for the moment we can certainly contrive to make do with dreams and other experimentation. But the assumption of the mere possibility of cloning could perhaps help us to better formulate the A series.

In Baars (2006) it is pointed out that Hobson and Stickgold have suggested a neural mechanism for this phenomenon in terms of cholinergic activity during REM sleep. Thus the only memory available for the recall of a dream is the small capacity WM (working memory), resulting in dream amnesia. The limited capacity of WM would yield a memory only of the final small portion of the dream. The rapid decay of WM would account for no memory of the dream at all after a slow awakening.

References

Appiah K. A., (2007), "Experimental Philosophy", Presidential Address, Eastern Division APA, December 2007

Baars B.J., Franklin S, Ramamurthy U., Ventura M. , (2006),"The Role of Consciousness in Memory" http://www.brains-minds-media.org/archive/150

Hacker P., Bennett M., (2003), "Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience", Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN-10: 140510838X, ISBN-13: 978-1405108386

Harth E., (2004), Journal of Consciousness Studies, 11, No. 3–4, pp. 111–16

Hohwy J., (2003), Minds and Machines 13(2): 257–268, 2003

Hohwy J., Frith C., (2004) "Can neuroscience explain consciousness?" Journal of Consciousness Studies, 11 (7-8): 180-198, 2004)

Jack A., Robbins P., Roepstorff A., (2007), "The Genuine Problem of Consciousness" http://www.petemandik.com/blog/2007/01/01/pms-wips-008-anthony-jack-philip-robbins-and-andreas-roepstorff-the-genuine-problem-of-consciousness/

Jönsson K.I, Rabbow E.,Schill R.O, Harms-Ringdahl M., Rettberg P., (2008). "Tardigrades survive exposure to space in low Earth orbit",Current Biology, 18 (17): R729-R731. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2008.06.048.

Kimpe K., (2008) , http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/experimental_philosophy/2008/09/polling-as-peda.html

Knobe, J. (2003). “Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language.” Analysis, 63,
190-193 ; and http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/experimental_philosophy/files/knobe_writeup.doc

Knobe J., Olum K., Vilenkin A., (2006), "Philosophical Implications of Inflationary Cosmology", The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 57(1):47-67; doi:10.1093/bjps/axi155

Knobe J., (2008), http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/8796

Lehar S., (2003) "Gestalt Isomorphism and the Primacy of the Subjective Conscious Experience: A Gestalt Bubble Model. Behavioral & Brain Sciences" 26(4), 375-444

Marshall J., (2000), http://www.themilkyway.com/quantum/FinalReport/IntroductionQE.html

Milgram S., (1974), "Obedience to Authority", Harper & Row, USA, ISBN: 0 422 74580 4

Minar E, (2001), "Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Skepticism", Harvard Review of Philosophy, Vol IX, p37

Nadelhoffer T., (2008), http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/experimental_philosophy/2008/06/the-knobe-effec.html

Naess A., (1938), '“Truth” As Conceived By Those Who Are Not Professional Philosophers' (Oslo: I Kommisjon Hos Jacob Dybward, 1938)

Noyes, H.P. (1999) arXiv:quant-ph/9906014v1 3 Jun 1999

Parfit D., (1984), "Reasons and Persons" Oxford Clarendon Press, ISBN 0-19-824908-X

Slater M., (2003) , " A note on presence technology" http://presence.cs.ucl.ac.uk/presenceconnect/articles/Jan2003/melslaterJan27200391557/melslaterJan27200391557.html

Slater M., et al. (2006) "A Virtual Reprise of the Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiments", PLoS ONE 1(1): e39. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000039

Slater M., et al (2007),The International Journal of Virtual Reality, 2007, 6(2):1-10 ; and Geser H., (2007), "A very real Virtual Society. Some macrosociological reflections on "Second Life"". In: Sociology in Switzerland: Towards Cybersociety and Vireal Social Relations. Online Publikationen. Zuerich, May 2007 http://socio.ch/intcom/t_hgeser18.htm ; and Hagni K. et al (2008), "Observing Virtual Arms that You Imagine Are Yours Increases the Galvanic Skin Response to an Unexpected Threat". PLoS ONE 3(8): e3082. oi:10.1371/journal.pone.0003082

Tegmark M., (2007) arXiv:0704.0646v2 [gr-qc]

Tononi G, Massimini M. , (2008), "Why does consciousness fade in early sleep?", Ann N Y Acad Sci 2008;1129:330-4.

Velmans M., (2003) "Is the world in the brain, or the brain in the world?" (A commentary on Lehar, S. "Gestalt isomorphism and the primacy of subjective conscious experience: A Gestalt Bubble model", Behavioral and Brain Sciences, in press). [Journal (Paginated)] (Unpublished) ; http://cogprints.org/2756/

Velmans M., (2008), "Reflexive Monism", http://www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/departments/psychology/staff/velmans.html , Journal of Consciousness Studies (2008 – in press)

Yates J., (2008), Philica no 135 ; http://cogprints.org/6176/

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Category theory applied to a radically new but logically essential description of time and space

Category theory applied to a radically new but logically essential description of time and space
Dr. John Yates, M.Sc., Ph.D.
Institute for Fundamental Studies,
Vasai, Mumbai, India & Fulham, London, England

Institute address: Goa Campus (Assonora, provisional), Institute for Fundamental Studies, Goa ; Vasant Nagri, Vasai E, Mumbai, India ; Fulham, London, England

Correspondence address: email: uvscience[AT]gmail.com

Published work: Yates, J. (2008). "Category theory applied to a radically new but logically essential description of time and space", PHILICA.COM., Article number 135.

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Abstract

McTaggart's ideas on the unreality of time as expressed in "The Nature of Existence" have retained great interest for many years for scholars, academics and other philosophers. In this essay, there is a brief discussion which mentions some of the high points of this philosophical interest, and goes on to apply his ideas to modern physics and neuroscience. It does not discuss McTaggart's C and D series, but does emphasise how the use of derived versions of both his A and B series can be of great virtue in discussing both the abstract physics of time, and the present and future importance of McTaggart's ideas to the subject of time. Indeed an experiment using human volunteers and dynamic systems modelling which was carried out is described, which illustrates this fact. The Many Bubble Interpretation, which also derives from McTaggart's ideas, is discussed and various examples of its use and effectiveness are referred to. The Schrodinger Cat paradox is essentially resolved in principle, the quantum Zeno effect interpretable, Kwiat's recent result referred to, and the newly discovered reverse Stickgold effect described.

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Introduction

I began in the late nineteen sixties , with Professor R.O. Gandy in Manchester, England, by trying to describe and attempting to completely incorporate into a mathematical system, the laws of physics. I used basic methods, such as those of Gentzen, Heyting Brouwer etc., etc. But both I and Professor Gandy found a practical solution, even in the very abstract, to be too difficult at the time. I believe we both thought that we needed some new mathematics, which either did not seem to exist or which we simply had not located !

Now the work of Turing, and later Chaitin and Connes, for example, should have helped but somehow it seemed to me necessary to go even deeper down and more basic. In fact the philosophy of approach with which I began was that of the early formal system theory of Smullyan (1961). Clearly on the face of it, it looked as if strange mathematical constructs like that of Godel universes as well, could be included in such an approach. But at that point, the pieces did not seem to fit. For example, pursuing the Turing path, which has been trod by so many workers by now, like for example Juergen Schmidhuber, was not going to be enough. There was more to it than simple computability problems, we needed to go in a sense to a higher level. Even using the physically peculiar looking results of quantum theory which have by now been incorporated into modern methods of quantum computing, and some of the early results of which, for example, were first published in a journal which I founded and of which I was Editor in Chief for many years (Feynman, 1982) could certainly enlighten us and might well have to be included in some more complete description of the universe which more finally became of use to us, were probably too intellectually ad hoc and thus too flimsy to effectively suppress or even mollify the deep angst of our lack of basic understanding. It was almost like trying to understand modern number theory in a position where transfinite numbers had not been invented. There almost had to be "another dimension or dimensions", or even another "kind of dimension".

Early string theory was around at the time, but at this very basic level, the explanation was unlikely to have that kind of simplicity. It was likely to be much more basic, deep and profound. In sum we were looking for fundamental mathematics, not just the simple technical physics that string theory, even today, would seem to amount to.

I felt in the early nineteen sixties, and still feel now, that the great Emmy Noether, who has since been described flamboyantly but possibly realistically as the greatest mathematician who ever lived, in making a comment on the equality of numbers outlined a more basically sensible approach and that comment should be able to enlighten our understanding. "If one proves the equality of two numbers a and b by showing first that "a is less than or equal to b" and then "a is greater than or equal to b", it is unfair, one should instead show that they are really equal by disclosing the inner ground for their equality". The same idea applies of course if, for example, a does not equal b but the formulation of our problem here is thornier. And although I end up here talking about the A and the B series, it is not with the idea of using a simple logical, physical, or mathematical proof but a striving for something closer to the absolute.

McTaggart and Angst

Referring now back to space and time, Buber (1959) pointed out 'A necessity I could not understand swept over me: I had to try again and again to imagine the edge of space, or its edgelessness, time with a beginning and an end or a time without beginning or end, and both were equally impossible, equally hopeless – yet there seemed to be only the choice between the one or the other absurdity'. The problem here is that when Buber tried to get down to philosophical details he just had not got the right stuff and relativity theory shows us that. There is really no certain reason, using relativity, why time or space would have a beginning or an end - philosophical problem solved.

Now we could say that Buber's confusion was caused by his acceptance of Newton's concept of space rather than Leibniz's. In Newton's world-view physical objects could exist by being in space, but space could exist even if devoid of any physical objects. In Leibniz's view, objects existed anyway and could touch one another, be separated by various distances and so on but space, per se, did not exist. This immediately resolved Buber's problem. One can solve such a problem by showing that it contains an untenable proposition. In this case the problem was not with space itself, but with Newton's conception of space. The answer was to accept Leibniz's more economical view, or simply to look for a consistent definition of space, which without relativity was hard to find.

McTaggart (1927) reasonably showed that in his context time showed a contradiction and he was right and logical to suggest that time did not exist, or is unreal. That was a sensible and economic view but slightly harder to develop than in Leibniz's case, where Leibniz had effectively inferred that space, per se, did not exist and was able to get quite a good theory for his era. But McTaggart's concern with time is in many ways very analogous with Buber's concern with space. Buber knew more or less what space was, but when he thought about it, it looked somehow spooky and unreal. Maybe we could say that that is "Angst". It is certainly a clear indicator that something needed to be done.. Anyway, the same thing happened to McTaggart with time, and as we will pointed out here, just as Einstein resolved Buber's philosophical worry about space, so too category theory can up to a point resolve McTaggart's problem with time. But that of course does not give us the right to ignore McTaggart's problem just as relativity has shown we should not certainly not have ignored Buber's problem. Just as in a way we have all been ersatz Leibnizians, prior to Einstein, let us importantly try to avoid continuing the same line of error with McTaggart, whether or not a resolution of his problems is more of a serious mathematical and philosophical challenge than Einstein's resolution of Newton's problem was.

Neurophenomenology and Category Theory

The term 'neurophenomenology ' was used by Varela, who also made a serious effort to understand consciousness (Varela 2000,2000a). It has to be said that it is a good idea to take his work at least almost as seriously as that of McTaggart (1927), and indeed Lawvere (2005).
In his day (till 2001) Varela was probably at the forefront of neurophenomenology. However even as recently as the end of the last century, there was relatively little work on complexity theory and category theory as applied to neurophenomenology. The papers of the Ehresmanns (1999) gives an account of how the Ehresmanns at least, tried to use category theory. And references (Ehresmann, 1999) at least explain how it could be done. Some ongoing work is being done, for example, by Brown (2006). This indicates potential use of category theory which is anything but irrelevant and abstract.

Varela and the Specious Present

I should point out that though Varela wrote frequently about the specious present he does not seem to have ever actually used category theory as a working mathematical tool, nor to have given reasons why not. However both Varela and many others have clearly found coping with the specious present to be difficult, and certainly have not given convincing accounts on McTaggart's paradox. However when we read the account of Brown (2006), for example, we can readily work out that at least a meaningful account of the specious present can be made. At this point we are not unduly concerned with emergence, for which Brown thinks he may be able to obtain answers and, apparently, even mathematical results.
What we can certainly try to do now is to use colimits in a way like Brown et al (2006) tried to use them. There is a problem with Varela's work and it comes out clearly, for example, in section 3(2) ('The neurodynamics of temporal appearance') of reference (Varela, 2000a). I believe that one problem is that earlier workers have had to try to describe the McTaggart A series in terms of Newtonian time. Newtonian time is essentially punctal and in using it, we would have, very often, in effect to try to turn a blob into either one dot or into a series of dots. That is what happens to Varela. I will not give a bibliography here of all the other efforts to turn a blob into a dot, but they are common. For example, some of them are referred to in the references in Savitt (2002). Symbolic logic certainly produces some intricate formulae but those do not describe an 'instant in time' very well either.

Colimits and the Specious Present

We may not need to go quite so far as Brown et al (2006) does. We only need for the moment to consider an approach somewhat like that of the Ehresmanns. I append two diagrams from the Ehresmanns' study (Ehresmann, 1999).

I will carry out this explanation in a way paralleling reference (Ehresmann, 1999), so that anyone who reads and understands Ehresmann,(1999) may be able to refer back to it directly to help to make it clear what I am saying here. There are many important differences to Ehresmann (1999), however.

Now for anyone who has not a copy of McTaggart (1927) on hand, Professor Soshichi Uchii's rough one-page summary (Uchii, 2003), which does not go into all the subtleties of McTaggart's two volume book but will do for an introduction though is probably inadequate for the preparation or consideration of critical comment, is available on the internet. Uchii's summary at least tries to represent the A series as instants in time. (Don't worry about most of his comments or views at this stage).The B series can be a 'block universe' or some other punctal time representation that we care to use.

We don't worry about the McTaggart paradox as such at this point either, we just set up a McTaggart style representation.

We consider an instant P as a pattern of past present and future. This could be at this point the past present and future of the universe or of one object, say an observer, in a universe.

In a category, a pattern P is modelled by the data of a family of objects Ni and of some distinguished links between them. A collective link from the pattern to another object N' is a family of individual links fi from each Ni to N', correlated by the distinguished links of the pattern, in the sense that, if g is a link in P from Ni to Nj, we have gfj = fi .

The collective links model collective actions (constraints, energy, or information transfer) of all the Ni acting in cooperation along their distinguished links, and which could not be realized by the objects of the pattern acting individually. The cooperation can be temporary, as in a group of people who decide to cooperate for a particular work. But the association itself can be represented in the system by a more complex object N, which 'binds' the objects of the pattern and acts by itself as the whole pattern, in the sense that its links to any object N' are in 1-1 correspondence with the collective links from the pattern to N'.

In a category, the object binding the pattern (if it exists) is modelled by the colimit (or inductive limit) of the pattern. An object N is the colimit, or the binding, of the pattern P if it satisfied the two conditions:

1. there exists a collective link (ci) from the pattern to N,

2. each collective link (fi) from the pattern to any object N' binds into a unique link f from N to N', so that fi = cif for each i.

If a pattern has a colimit, it is unique (up to an isomorphism). In this case, we also say that the pattern is a coherent assembly and that its colimit represents a higher order object which subsumes the activity of the assembly.

The colimit actualizes the potentiality of the objects to act together in a coherent manner by integrating the pattern in a higher unit (for example, the protein as such). In a natural system where the links have a given 'strength', the formation of a colimit is characterized in two ways:

1. 'locally and structurally', a strengthening of the distinguished links of the pattern restricts the degrees of freedom of the objects to ensure a more efficient cooperation among them;

2. 'universally and functionally', the actions of the colimit on the other objects of the system subsume the activity of the whole pattern (they correspond to its collective links).

For example, a molecule is the colimit of the pattern formed by its atoms with the chemical links defining its spatial configuration.

Roughly, the colimit forgets the precise organization of the pattern and records only its collective actions, and these can be the same for more or less differing patterns.

The rôle of the distinguished links of the pattern P is paramount: they determine the 'form' of the colimit and allow for the emergence of collective actions, transcending the individual actions of the objects. The coherence and the constraints introduced by these links can be measured by comparing the colimit to the simple amalgam of the objects Ni of the pattern, obtained if the links are forgotten, which is modeled by their sum.

The sum (or coproduct) S of the family (Ni) is the colimit of the pattern P' formed by these same objects but without any distinguished link. It classifies the individual actions of the objects, while the colimit of the pattern P classifies their collective actions made possible thanks to their distinguished links in P. (Think of the difference between the behaviour of an unorganized mob, and the behaviour its members adopt under the direction of leaders.)

There is a comparison link c from the sum S of the Ni to the colimit N of P, which binds the canonical links from the Ni :to N. It measures the constraints imposed to the objects by their distinguished links, hence by their participation to a collective action. The links from S to an object N' which factor through c correspond to the emergent properties of the complex object N compared to the properties of its components Ni.

Now we could say that a series of 'instants' P, which we could call {P} could occur as part of an ordered set or otherwise but we do not have to do this. And each 'instant' has its own past-present-future. And a series of instants will exist in some category Cp, say.

The specific 'instants' are not like a series of beads to be hung on a string, but form significant but differing parts of a whole. In a sense each instant could be taken as a past-present-future representation of some whole. The whole could form a specific structure, possibly a category we might like to call MacA. We bear this in mind as a structure, which like so many others, needs further definition in due course dependent on circumstance.

But to sum up, I realised before too long that McTaggart's paradox, far from being well understood - and indeed it now almost seems to some to be like an effete toy for philosophers - still had not been resolved. There is in fact both a McTaggart A series and a McTaggart B series, even if philosophers try to pretend it has all been sorted out. We know that Zeno's paradox, for example, still has much to say, and so indeed has McTaggart's paradox. I will press on for the moment rather than to justify in detail. Philosophers still make a lot of money by dicussing the pro's and con's of McTaggart's paradox, so I will not add further to the agony at the moment. (Chalmers, 2006)

So we have an A series and a B series, and we need to know what to do with them. Just an A series, just a B series, or two separate series which do not seem to map properly onto each other.

The A series in more detail

So what is really wanted now is something which gives solid physical prospects, such as more detailed dream experiments (as I tried to point out in Yates (2008)) or OBEs (out of body experiences) or NDEs (near death experiences). The mathematical and physical prospect of many worlds type interpretations is better than those of much of today's physics, in fact a useful quantum computer is likely to be built by 2020 (Ball, 2006), and this may help the process of such lines of understanding or intuitive interpretation. As these things go, the present supposed restrictions of any MWI is certainly likely to evolve in that time, and of course we have as yet no details as to how. But the A series for instance will probably turn out to be be a proper class (Note 1) and to begin with we may have to map a pseudo A series onto a mock B series to get results, and in effect I recently suggested something like that in my blog, Yates (2008). The 'block universes' of the B series type have been relatively easy to handle so far, though philosophically and to the intellect not altogether satisfactory, without an A series.. When we look at the A Series and the work of, for example, Varela and Ehresmann, but consider problems such as (and only "such as", certainly not exclusively) that the A series may be a proper class (that is, roughly, a class which is not a set) we are left with at least two obvious approaches, the first being to examine further immediately the A series properties of time and consciousness in terms of the work of Varela, Brown and Ehresmann for example.

Preliminary plans for a detailed MacA (or Category Theoretic Mactaggart A series)

Chalmers (2006) said : "The Time and Consciousness conference in Sydney yielded a lot of food for thought. The talks focused on a number of different connections between the phenomena .....There's obviously a lot of room for further work here, and I'm looking forward to seeing how things develop in coming years."

Chalmers is right about the conference providing a lot of food for thought and he is even more right in that there is a 'lot of room for further work'. In fact a lot of ideas but nothing solid yet. And I am hoping to provide something a bit more solid, as I have already tried to do in my blog, especially involving 'specious time" and category theory

To be more explicit about the last paragraph: What I am finding from the conference details, and from earlier work, is that in problems being in and relating to the 'specious present', philosophers are frequently putting forward interesting discussions and concepts nowadays but that these on closer examination seem to have a circular or self-serving element. I choose as an example Kelly (2006) I quote "...the specious present, by nearly all accounts, lasts only a relatively limited time. Recent estimates generally agree that it is in the area of three seconds or so. But we often experience things to be moving for periods that are longer than this. If you watch an airplane taking off from the runway you can follow its continuous motion for several minutes before it disappears."

Great concept! Kelly then discusses the Retention Theory and its relation to perception experiments and philosophy. Well, for me the whole manifesto of such lucubrations to date seems encapsulated in Alexander Pope's doggerel. "Remembrance and reflection - How allied ! What thin partitions sense from thought divide." In fact Kelly goes on by discussing Kant and Husserl and ends with "What we would like is a standard set of examples that give us the feel for what it is to experience something now as just-having-been." A good idea perhaps - but how? So I am left with the view that a more satisfactory category-theoretic interpretation has to be made and this will come closer to giving us a correct mathematics. When you think of it, perhaps he is looking for an extended A series here but may end up by conflating the lot with a B series, or something other writers may see as a B series.

In sum, a simple B-series interpretation of the world involving the physics of Galileo or Newton/Leibniz or Einstein is very adequate for some predictive descriptions. If we need to we further note that there is as yet no apparent compulsion (as in Le Poidevin (2006)) to consider Relativity (special or general) in any detail to start with, during our own continued lucubrations. Hopefully it will not add to time-ordering problems in our A series or can be dealt with when it does. These problems, which Kelly and others mention, should either fall from our existing simple A series work, but very clearly manifest themselves in the A series discussions.

But there will only be relatively generalised answers at least to begin with, and this is not necessarily bad either. Consider the Baez example of a beautiful and possibly prehistoric use of category theory (Note 2). So we are trying to be like the shepherds of old, but not just inventing the B series as we could assume they did, but the A series!

Smith (2006) is probably also worth chewing on as the dynamic nature of time does seem to come out rather roughly in a scheme which proposes individuals existing at independent 'specious presents" ie a row of ...p0, p1, p2,..... etc. The idea of dynamic following is the hard one to include in the category and there is no reason why we are obliged to spell it out in terms of B series physics. However it exists as individuals exist in the frames ... p0, p1...etc. for each individual and the fact that we have mapped them on to a kind of ersatz (using Chalmer's (2006a) B-series word) A series or 'fallen' A-series does no harm.

The point is here that the MacA has to include dynamism whether or not some decategorified or set theory version does. At the same time, present day mathematics has no simple format for providing dynamism within category theory statements or proofs. Certainly, the proof could be presented for example in the form of a video or even a notional mental headup display but this would not seem to present more actual mathematical content than the more normal pen and paper. Bearing in mind that at this point we are trying to present an A series in B series terms, this is not surprising.

And it is as well to remember that, say, the B series equation representing a ball rolling down an inclined plane does not need to be rolling down some inclined plane itself to be of immediate use. But this obvious fact is not the same as our current problem.

Indeed the obvious way is to try to write down a decategorified version of MacA in terms of some decategorified element pa where pa is a member of ...p0, p1,...is possibly to let pa be a presentism's p at time ta. This may help to eventually write the matter down in more detail in category theory terms. It sounds like a cumbersome multistep way to do things but may be appropriate. It should perhaps be pointed out that this process is not simply intended to result in an unnecessarily tautologous form of presentism but ultimately for enough positive description to allow an A series.

What to do then? From Chalmers (2006a) we could try to sort out the two-stage model (Note 4) and maybe relate it to Velmans'(2002) work - bearing in mind Chalmers claims to allow different models (presumably including Velmans' model with required justifications i.e. provisionally as I might do). The result may eventually be a new or a mutual model which could be multi-stage. However Note 4 is only an indication of possible proceedings; certainly the result should be expressible in terms of category theory.

On the face of it there clearly can be some form of mapping from 'real time' (or 'eden time' or whatever it might be) to a B series time as such mappings have given many of our results in physics to date. To say that is almost tautology. Whether such a mapping presents a suitable or adequate representation or not is another matter. And certainly we may be now encumbered with an 'eden time' A series and an 'apparently observed' A series. Whether this will be a simpler or better way to handle things, as yet we cannot be sure but one way would be to bear in mind a 2-stage representation as a possibility until the matter is more specifically concretised. I think we will need the A series even with the two stage model in any event. It could be that a 'de-Edenised' A series will not look very different to a 'de-Edenised' B series. The process which I would have in mind would be similar to or perhaps equivalent to obtaining categorification by first decategorifying and the categorification again, really not too different to what could normally be used in category theory anyway to obtain suitable categories from naive mathematical results in a fairly transparent way. (Note 5)
So I get to a point that a reasonable physical assumption seems to be that the A series is a Proper Class. Bays (2001), in "Reflections on Skolem’s Paradox " says "if we start with a proper class which “satisfies” some finite collection of sentences, then the Skolem hull construction lets us find a countable set which satisfies the same collection of sentences".
Briefly what I am saying, and obviously there are many provisos, hedges and restatements, is that I consider a form of A series and a form of B series - but the A series is probably a proper class (like the somewhat similar class of all automata for example is a proper class (Adamek et al, 2004 )) and probably cannot be effectively mapped, certainly not one to one, onto the B series. We only need to look at say Goldblatt (1984). In other words time is a rather complicated entity and when we get down to the mathematics or even the logic of time, we are using at least two different and not one to one mappable onto each other (mathematical) categories, A and B say (Note 4). And McTaggart had thus considered that he had found unreality in time when he was actually trying to compare two different things - though it is possibly not necessary to follow through his precise reasoning here, particularly on the C and D series. Clearly when considering a complex entity like 'time', there may ultimately be many more matters to consider but that does not remove the fact that McTaggart had found at least two such entities, the A and the B series.

In other words, I can use conventional complexity theory mathematics to study the A series as long as I remember that I am no longer in "block time" or B Series time. Now authors like John M. Gottman (2002) have used simple enough mathematics for years to solve psychological problems and seemingly eventually tried to shoehorn their ideas rather without thinking into a "block time" scenario where they will not properly work. And the heartbreaking discussions amongst proponents of tensed and non-tensed time may never again have to carry so much weight, (at the Sydney conference, (2006) they mainly did carry weight) in a situation where a tensed time (A series) is used where convenient for people, and a non-tensed time (B series) where convenient for objects. And the maths can be great in both cases. Though of course that does not say it will be straightforward or easy.

Also the fact that we are using not a real A series but a pseudo A series mapped into the B series, undoubtedly changes the mode of operation and the character of any work we may do. And in sum, the above tends to dispose of the somewhat short sighted idea, which I feel may have been despised by such as Emmy Noether, that we only need deal with the B series anyway. Then we would not have a past, present and future, but only idealised 'block time', which is in no way a complete description of the universe though it has served physics in a limited fashion for generations.

The Many Bubble Interpretation

The ‘Many Bubble Interpretation”or MBI, (Yates, 2008a) appears by means of a model of the McTaggart A series. Without being intially sidetracked into the fascinating coherentist theories of epistemic justification, we simply loosely define A series bubbles for present purposes as being entities inside which a person, persons or whatever are for the moment severally confined, each at some personal present (which we know from as far back as the work of Kleinhuber, Libet, etc., is not readily defined as a single point in time, but more usually is taken by psychologists and others to have at least some ongoing ‘duration’), and with a past, a present and a future, in accord with the spirit of the McTaggart A series. The work of LePoidevin, Quentin Smith, Dean Zimmerman and many others is borne in mind. And as Dyke has said, we may not be forced to countenance plurality of further worlds in such circumstances – although we can. The A series is treated as a large category, intrinsically unmappable one to one onto the B series. There is also a B series and this can often be represented by a quantum mechanical description of the universe.

So we have both an A series and a B series, and McTaggart’s work and Zeno’s work, (and/or their modern counterparts), can pose no problems. Now in practice, since the A series will almost certainly be a proper class, we still have not pinned it down in great detail and indeed may because of its nature, never to be able to do, so we are using a pseudo A series written in the B series. Obviously there will be lacunae and these lacunae may exhibit themselves partly in the form of the quite hard to describe Berkeley Madonna equations we will be immediately confronted with.

Outline of the MBI

A relatively simple basic mathematical model for a “bubble” in the MBI (’Many Bubble Interpretation’) discussed earlier, can be constructed. For a 'look and feel' description, see Note 5. Many bubbles – and there would be many – could be much the same, in principle, and given by Berkeley Madonna, for example. And in the simpler cases of the model there need not exist episodic memories to retain many of the apparently intrinsic features of human thought (Egan, 2007). Even total loss of personal memory made no difference in subjects tested. Indeed Rosenbaum (2007) goes so far as to say: “We found that if you’re trying to put yourself mentally in someone else’s shoes, you don’t need to put yourself in your own shoes first.” We do not even need, of necessity, to consider mirror neurons to ‘have a life’. We can even, in terms of level of simulation simplification, try to emulate Winfree. And no complex ‘Theory of Mind’ is required (Ramsay, 2007).

There is no need to deal at this juncture with the problems posed by Honderich or by, for example Trevena and others, to the work of Libet (2003), and its defence by Haggard, Klein and others. Libet’s results, or others, will just be part of the Madonna formalism within the bubble, which can be “pseudo A series” in its formulation, I think.

Obviously, more complex contents can be given to the MBI and this is being done.

Applications of the MBI (example only)

A concrete case of the application of the application of the Many Bubble Interpretation appears in Complex System Theory. I used the standard Dynamical Systems methods as described in Hannon and Ruth (1997). Whilst that book recommends the use of the program STELLA, I in fact used BERKELEY MADONNA (8.3.11) but the results come out in a somewhat similar format. In fact I used a Romeo and Juliet type model (Sprott, 2004) (Yates, 2008b).

There are many potential uses of such a model, and various examples have been considered. A very striking example, though one out of many, is the example of what may happen when we dream. This seems much more flexible than many other cases - synaesthesia, for example, is a difficult though potentially rewarding one, and this as well as other cases is being documented in the literature. (Yates, 2008, 2008c)

Clearly one direct entry to a study of the unconscious could be by studying dreams, without any necessary preconception as to what these dreams are, or what they mean - if anything. A brute fact about dreams is that they exist, and can thus be studied. Studying dreams is what the shaman did (Charlton, 2002) , and we can do the same. As Charlton (2003) pointed out "The altered states of dreaming consciousness enables hunter-gatherers to cross further boundaries of time and space in pursuit of high-level insights that synthesise and integrate complex knowledge of many kinds ", but he then goes on to say that using systems theory would make this difficult. In fact, to date most studies of dreams look relatively speaking rather basic, to those who want an early quick explanation of such matters. There are interesting exceptions and I mention the experiments of Stickgold, and the Stickgold effect (also perhaps better known in the vernacular as "Tetris Dreams", because of the frequency it was noticed anecdotally, and "Tetris Dreams" even gave over 1500 Google results including a T shirt, but of course the effect can be located in many other cases than simply playing Tetris, and it has interesting neurological implications also).The Stickgold effect (1999, 2000) is a pretty simple idea, in essence - one performs a simple task like playing a computer game, and then dreams about it. So apparently the Stickgold effect induces dreams. We found that there also seems to be a reverse Stickgold effect, where the dreams are dreamt and subsequently the acts dreamt are performed, within the confines of a controlled experiment using double blinds, for example the subjects are kept in the dark about the experimental details during the experiment.

Now there are real problems in assuring reproducibility of results and I for one will not be happy until at least we reach the high levels of experimental reproducibility obtained in the early Milgram (1974) experiments in general psychology. Preliminary experiments are proceeding at our Vasai, India address at the moment but we are also considering setting up a Science 2.0 style site which will allow the comparison of varied psychological experiments, some of which may contain physical data like DT-MRI data as well as the normal psychological profiling data. Such sites are now relatively common in genome experiments and there seems no reason why the idea cannot be usefully extended to many psychological experiments such as those on the Stickgold effect and the possibly newly discovered reverse Stickgold effect. Perhaps modified versions of the Science 2.0 idea can be described as Psychology 2.0 or in the case where applications could be said to 'transcend' or supplement science, and experimental philosophy results are in the offing. then it can be described as Philosophy 2.0., where we might wish to consider such workers as Chalmers and Knobe (2008). In the present context of the Many Bubble Interpretation there are already possible equations of constraint obtained using the modelling tool Berkeley Madonna and the simplified form of the equations in the present mode, described in more detail on the website of Yates (2008b), is

dR/dt =a*R +b*J*(1-|J|)+e*Z
dJ/dt =c*R*(1-|R|)+d*J +f*Z
dZ/dt =h*S +g*R (S is Heaviside step functions :in N003a,g=f=0)

The next step may we involve the refinement or replacement of the present equations in Berkeley Madonna using methods of Self Organised Criticality,and in particular the use or incorporation of a mode like the sandpile mode may help. If these equations can be improved and/or accurate limits set on their parameters,they could be used for yet more tests and even more accurate results,in for example the mode,duration and timing of stimuli. We bear in mind Winfree’s work as a parallel example of such methods. In the above equations, very roughly, R ('Romeo') and J ('Juliet') represent the 'unconscious' and 'conscious' mind or equivalent representations in other philosophical approaches,and Z the applied impulse. The notation is like that of Sprott (2004). The improvement in the equations will likely be carried out along with attempts at semi-empirical assessment of the physical factors under consideration.

In Quantum Theory:

After a consideration of the MBI, the Schrodinger Cat Paradox ceases to seem like a paradox and in a poster (Yates, 2008d) I illustrate this and further examples of the simplification of an understanding of quantum theory and related topics like quantum computing, even including Kwiat's work. The Schrodinger Cat description is in Note 6, equations are as in Yates (2008b) plus conventional quantum theory..

A Specific Application:

A problem involving some applied mathematics and philosophy.

The Many Bubble Effect described herein, together with other factors like McTaggart’s paradox and Zeno’s paradox, allowed a formulation in terms of differential equations of Stickgold’s dream experiments and my interpretation and furthering of them. This led to a number of equations and graphical results. In particular to equations like that described as N003b on my website at http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/ (RSS feed available) and on the CD.

Very briefly, as the ‘pseudo A series’ might describe it, there could be tiny pushes and impulses to the mind at a given time, from both past and future stimulations, but at a particular time it could be said that the mind is in some kind of dynamic balance which Stickgold altered in the ‘Tetris dream’ by a push from the past, relatively easy in retrospect. In my case I alter the position of the push from the future to the present, and this worked too. Experiments and trials are still under way, and could show conclusively the merits of the MBI, though their success is not essential to it. And a sandpile Madonna model is considered in Note 7.

Notes

Note 1. Goldblatt's 'Topoi' refers to a 'proper class' as 'a class which is not a set'.

Note 2. arXiv: math. QA/ 9802029 v1 5 Feb 1998 Categorification John C. Baez. This says: "Long ago, when shepherds wanted to see if two herds of sheep were isomorphic, they would look for an explicit isomorphism. In other words, they would line up both herds and try to match each sheep in one herd with a sheep in the other. But one day, along came a shepherd who invented decategorication. She realized one could take each herd and `count' it, setting up an isomorphism between it and some set of `numbers', which were nonsense words like `one, two, three, . . . ' specially designed for this purpose. By comparing the resulting numbers, she could show that two herds were isomorphic without explicitly establishing an isomorphism! In short, by decategorifying the category of finite sets, the set of natural numbers was invented."

Note 3. Chalmers (2006a) states: "It is a further question how this model should be extended to the representation of time and motion. I am inclined to say that the two-stage model can be extended to time as well as to space, though this turns on subtle issues about the metaphysics of time. A natural suggestion is that the Edenic content of temporal experience requires A-theoretic time, with some sort of true flow or passage. Our own universe may not instantiate these perfect temporal properties, but it may nevertheless instantiate matching B-theoretic properties (involving relative location in a four-dimensional “block universe”) that are sufficient to make our temporal experiences imperfectly veridical, if not perfectly veridical. The representation of motion could be treated in a similar way." and

"One might go so far as to suggest that Eden is a world with classical Euclidean space, and an independent dimension of time, in which there is true passage and true change. Our own world is non-Euclidean, with time and space interdependent, and with pale shadows of perfect passage and change. On this view, Einstein’s theory of spacetime was one more bite from the Tree of Science, and one more step in our fall from Eden."

Note 4. Chalmers (2006a) on two-stage: "the two-stage view yields natural answers to the objections to the Fregean view that were grounded in phenomenological adequacy. On the relationality objection: the two-stage view accommodates relationality by noting that there are certain specific and determinate properties—the perfect color properties—that are presented in virtue of the phenomenology of color experience.

When Jack and Jill both have phenomenally green experiences in different environments, the two experiences have a common Edenic content, and so both are presented with perfect greenness. This captures the intuitive sense in which objects look to be the same to both Jack and Jill; at the same time, the level of ordinary Fregean and Russellian content captures the intuitive sense in which objects look to be different to both Jack and Jill. By acknowledging Edenic phenomenal content in addition to Fregean phenomenal content, we capture the sense in which perceptual phenomenology seems to be Russellian and relational."

Note 5. In my mind, I tend to think of the A series as being like a lot of bubbles floating freely, each of which representing a person or sentient object, and his or her past, present and future at some time, and we could hopefully index the persons in the bubbles as (Pn,Tm), this being person Pn at time Tm. By now the apparition has degenerated to a pseudo A series (almost nearer to being a B series). But in principle we are mapping an A series to some model we can understand. And if we want we can follow memes through the bubbles by now, and index like (Pn,Tm,Mi) where Mi is some meme which may occur as part of one or more bubble. But this is intended as a guide rather than mathematics or metaphysics.

And whilst as presented above, the A series has a "future" along with each "present" and "past", in the individual bubbles. This is only a model and not a metaphysical description of the universe. It is however by the nature of the model, many world in structure. The claim is not made that these many worlds have to exist in actual fact. So the MBI ("Many Bubble Interpretation") seems to be in basic distinction from the MWI of Price or Deutsch or indeed the MCI ("Many Computations Interpretation") of Mallah (2007). The latter two are in origin B series, and to aid consistency should possibly be assumed to exist, in some sense, at least in the sense that the quantum mechanical results in Hilbert spaces exist. In the MBI, the many bubbles of time, each with its own past, present and future, are as real as the person or conglomerate observing them, and only exist in a model of the A series. The A series itself, in some metaphysical sense at least, can be taken to exist. So the Baldwin (Note 5b) style bubble referred to above, will contain the person (TRB) at the indexed time in the bubble in York, with a past somewhere else, perhaps partly in Leeds, and presumably a future somewhere else again, perhaps partly in Blackpool. This will simply be at the 'time' referred to above for TRB, and the bubble is only part of a model which contains many more bubbles. But this is only part of a model of the A series.

And, without even invoking quantum theory, Quentin Smith (2002) explains how some models of the A series can seem to have B series concomitants, even in special relativity. In fact if we wish, we could consider our A series bubbles corresponding to different Tm values to be linked to one another by a spider web of gossamer chains. The spider web could now seem to be very clearly savouring of the B series, although we had started with a model based on the A series. Given suitable provisos, that spider web might well suit STR (Special Theory of Relativity).

Furthermore, the Schrodinger Cat riddle seems to give no essential problems in the MBI, and the MBI has the additional virtue of flagging up the obvious apparent anomalies that the Cat paradox has seemed to show to some, in the B series (Note 6 gives more details).

Note 5a. Professor T. Baldwin said "This point connects with a deep distinction between practical and theoretical points of view. The practical point of view is essentially ‘first-person’ (‘subjective’): it assumes knowledge of who I am (TRB), where I am (York), what time it is (today’s date). The theoretical point of view is essentially impersonal (‘objective’). It doesn’t require this first-person knowledge. So the A-series/B-series distinction is a case of the distinction between these two points of view, the practical and the theoretical."

Note 6. In the case of the Schrodinger Cat Paradox, as shown on the poster (Yates, 2008), instead of having the epomymous Cat in a room with a bomb and a puzzled query in the mind of persons outside the box, this neatly splits into roughly into three cases, in the present treatment.
(1) A series: Cat and observer, each in their own bubble, no way that we know of so far that the 'observer' bubble can get at the 'cat' bubble. So no paradox.
(2) Pseudo A series: We might try to simulate the cat ideally in the observer bubble, for example. Category theory suggests how. We try procedures as in "Applications of the MBI in the main text above.. N.B. May use 'B' series maths.
(3) B series: cat and observer have the same math structure so far. Not a complete descriptiom but mathematically OK.

Note 7. We can now consider further simple ideas like using the sandpile analogy as it has been tried, for example, with software development, without the physics actually disappearing from the system as the actual software used for development does in the paper (Wu, 2002). That contained an excellent analogy:

Driving force / sand drop /change request
Response / sand slide / change propagation
System state / gradient profile / release, iteration plan
Relaxing force / gravity / stakeholder satisfaction

but plainly "the mathematics was not the territory" just as "the map is not the territory" to a geologist. Even if a geologist goes along with the mathematical fractals approach, it does not get the dirt under his fingertips. But with the MBI approach in physics, we seem to be as close to a physical simulation of the real world as we can be at the moment. Importantly, for example, we have not simply beaten off McTaggart's paradox but on the contrary, we we have used it as strongly as we can.

This may well give us the ability to prepare a more precise or even a new and better Madonna model than the model N003b suggested in an earlier entry, using for instance some of the methods of Dhar (2006) particularly as described in Dhar's section 3 onwards and other such SOC methods, as well as what we are using to date.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Deepak Dhar and Navin Singhi, both of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai for their helpful advice, encouragement and discussions, and Deepak Dhar for the chance of having a fine lunch at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai. I would also like to thank David Chalmers, Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, for his helpful advice and encouragement .

References

Adamek J., Herrlich H., Strecker G.E. (2004), "The Joy of Cats", p15, John Wiley , and katmat.math.uni-bremen.de/acc/acc.pdf

Buber, M., (1959) Between Man and Man [1947], trans. Ronald Gregor Smith, Beacon Press, Boston.

Ball P., (2006), 'Oxford University reckon that "A useful (quantum) computer by 2020 is realistic,"' Nature 440, 398-401

Bays T., (2001), Ph.D. Dissertation. "Reflections on Skolem’s Paradox" p86, UCLA Philosohy Department.

Brown R., (2006). For example Brown R., Paton R., Porter T., "Categorical language and hierarchical models for cell systems", to appear in Computing in Cells and Tissues - Perspectives and Tools of Thought', Springer Series on Natural Computing. More preprints of material like (Brown, 2006) such as 05.13 are on Brown's home page at http://www.bangor.ac.uk/~mas010/ or at http://www.informatics.bangor.ac.uk/public/mathematics/research/preprints/

Chalmers, D. (2006) http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2006/07/time_and_consci.html

Chalmers, D. (2006a) "Perception and the Fall from Eden" (T. Gendler & J. Hawthorne, (eds) Perceptual Experience. Oxford University Press, 2006.)

Charlton B.G., (2002) , "Alienation, Neo-shamanism and Recovered Animism ", http://hedweb.com/bgcharlton/animism.html

Charlton B.G, Andras P. , (2003), "What Is Management and What Do Managers Do? A Systems Theory Account" , Philosophy of Management , Vol 3, p3-15

Dhar D, (2006), "Exactly Solved Models of Self-Organized Criticality", http://theory.tifr.res.in/~ddhar/leuven.pdf

Egan L. C., Santos L.R., Bloom P. (2007), “The Origins of Cognitive Dissonance: Evidence from Children and Monkeys”. Psychological Science, 18, 978-983.

Ehresmann A., and Vanbremeersch, j-p. (1999) "Memory Evolutive Systems", http://cogprints.org/921/ ; also see Ehresmann C., http://perso.wanadoo.fr/vbm-ehr/Ang/W24A5.htm , http://perso.wanadoo.fr/vbm-ehr/Ang/W208.htm

Feynman R. P., (1982), "Simulating physics with computers", International Journal of Theoretical Physics, 21:467-488.

Goldblatt R, (2008), "Topoi", p10, Dover

Gottman J.M., et al., (2002), "The Mathematics of Marriage", MIT Press , ISBN : 0-262-57230-3

Hannon, B. and M. Ruth. (1997) Modeling Dynamic Biological Systems. Springer-Verlag, New York City, New York.

Kelly S.D. (2006) The Puzzle of Temporal Experience Sean D. Kelly Princeton University To appear in Philosophy and Neuroscience, eds. Andy Brook and Kathleen Akins (Cambridge).

Knobe, J, (2008), "What is Experimental Philosophy?" The Philosophers' Magazine, (Forthcoming). Viewable at http://www.unc.edu/~knobe/ExperimentalPhilosophy.pdf.

Lawvere C.W., Schanuel S.H., (2005) "Conceptual Mathematics", Cambridge. and see Note 4.
Le Poidevin, R. (2006) "The Experience and Perception of Time", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2004 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =. states: "I ignore here the complications introduced by the Special Theory of Relativity, since tenseless theory—and perhaps tensed theory also—can be reformulated in terms which are compatible with the Special Theory." Well the matter can be argued either way but it is fair to say, with Le Poidevin, that special relativity is probably easiest left out of it provided we tie a proverbial piece of string to our finger to remind us of it if actually need be.

Libet B.,(2003). “Can Conscious Experience affect brain Activity?”, Journal of Consciousness Studies 10, nr. 12, pp 24-28 ; and many others.

McTaggart J M E, (1927), "The Nature of Existence" , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mallah J.,(2007), arXiv:0709.0544 "The Many Computations Interpretation (MCI) of Quantum Mechanics".

Maxwell N., (2004), “The Ontology of Spacetime”, Conference in Montreal, 14 May 2004

Milgram, S. (1974) "Obedience to Authority", Harper & Row, USA

Ramsay T.Z. , (2007), Science and Consciousness Review, November 26, 2007

Rosenbaum R.S.,Stuss D.T.,Levine B., Tulving E.,(2007),”Theory of Mind Is Independent of Episodic Memory”, Science, 23 November 2007:Vol.318.no.5854, p. 1257 DOI: 10.1126/science.1148763

Savitt S., (2002) "Being and Becoming in Modern Physics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2002 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .

Smith, Q. (2006) http://www.qsmithwmu.com/reference_to_the_past_and_future.htm , Time, Tense and Reference (eds. A. Jokic and Q. Smith). M.I.T. Press, forthcoming

Smith Q., (2002), "The incompatibility of STR and the tensed theory of Time", Published In: "The Importance of Time", editor, L. Nathan Oaklander. Kluwer: Philosophical Studies Series.

Smullyan R., (1961), "Annals of Mathematics Studies", Study 47, "Theory of Formal Systems", especially Chapter 3, Princeton University Press, L.C. Card 60-14063

Sprott J.C., (2004), "Dynamical Models of Love", Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences, Vol. 8, No. 3, July, 303-314 ; and many others including Aks, D.J., Sprott, J. C. (2003), "Resolving perceptual ambiguity in the Necker Cube: A dynamical systems approach", Journal of Non-linear Dynamics in Psychology & the Life Sciences, 7(2) 159-178.

Stickgold, R., Malia, A. & Hobson, J.A. (1999) "Sleep onset memory reprocessing and Tetris. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience" 11(supplement)

Stickgold, R., et al , (2000), "Replaying the Game: Hypnagogic Images in Normals and Amnesics" Science 290 (5490), 350. [DOI: 10.1126/science.290.5490.350]

Sydney conference (2006), "Time and consciousness Conference", http://fragments.consc.net/djc/2006/07/time_and_consci.html

Uchii S., (2003) http://www.bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~suchii/mctaggart.html

Varela F.J. , (2000) "Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science" Edited by J. Petitot, F. J. Varela, B. Pachoud and J-M. Roy, Stanford University Press, Stanford Chapter 9, pp.266-329

Varela F.J. , (2000a) "The Specious Present : A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness Francisco" in: J.Petitot, F.J.Varela, J.-M. Roy, B.Pachoud "Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science", Stanford University Press, Stanford

Velmans M., (2002) "How could Conscious Experience affect Brains ?", JCS, 9 (11), Special Issue, Imprint Academic, UK & USA, ISBN 0907845 39 8

Wu J., Holt R., (2002) "Seeking Empirical Evidence for Self-Organized Criticality in Open Source Software Evolution", Available Research Reports, David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Yates J., (2008) ,"TSC 2008", April 29, 2008, and throughout site, http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/ ; and "Towards a Science of Consciousness", p147-8, April 8-12, 2008, Tucson Convention Centre, Tucson, Arizona, Center for Consciousness Studies, University of Arizona.

Yates J., (2008a), work to be archived or published elsewhere and in part in ttjohn.blogspot.com ; in fact the Many Bubble Interpretation, proofs for the importance of its use, and current applications, are to be discussed in more detail in separate papers.

Yates J., (2008b) , ttjohn.blogspot.com , especially including "Work in Progress on application of dynamic systems theory to the A series (1) and (2)" at http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/search?q=dR%2Fdt&x=45&y=8 etc

Yates J., (2008c) , http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2006/07/precognition-dreams-and-mctaggarts.html#links "Can dreams predict the future ? : Experiments and considerations of them". (The answer to the question is "It is not easy but I am working on it" as per the top paper here). http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2006/04/do-we-dream-of-future.html and elsewhere in this blog. This is not a simple 'precognitive' effect and that is not claimed. Point 4, "Self-Organised Criticality - a possible tool for the MBI " on January 26th, 2008 for example, illustrates this point.

Yates J., (2008d) , Poster at http://ttjohn.blogspot.com/2008/04/tsc-2008.html and elsewhere in blog

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

TSC 2008

"Towards a Science of Consciousness" for Tucson 2008 was a most interesting conference and a large number of papers were submitted. The large 8 feet by 4 feet poster for the Institute for Fundamental Studies is located here. (Download the PDF version). It attracted interest to the point where 100 CDs of current work on the Many Bubble Interpretation were given out. It is believed that the Many Bubble Interpretation has progressed an understanding of the Science of Consciousness considerably, as explained on the poster.

International Conference

The first International conference for the Institute for Fundamental Studies may be held in about a year's time. Details, venue and topics have not yet been firmly decided, but are expected to include work particularly in category theory, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and theoretical physics, with special attention being given to applied virtual reality simulation and experimental philosophy.

Institute News

The Institute for Fundamental Studies has acquired a small branch in Mumbai (see first two photos) from which some of the work on this CD was done.

We are also in the process of obtaining a very large estate (see next four photos) in a charming region in the pleasant foothills of Goa quite near the beach, where it is hoped that much of the work of the Institute, particularly in virtual reality, may in future be done. Purchase of this property is by no means complete, and we are still considering the possibility of other sites, hopefully in equally idyllic surroundings. Suggestions welcome, remembering budget is strictly limited. Many improvements, including a swimming pool and helicopter pad, may be added in future. With some improvements in the 'reverse Stickgold effect', it is hoped that a new virtual reality setup may literally allow "the fastest and most thrilling ride in the entire Universe".

Dr. J. Yates, President,
Institute for Fundamental Studies Association [ uvscience AT gmail.com ]

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Why did God make consciousness ? Ways and means to find out.

Introduction

"Why did God make consciousness ?" That is a question which has been asked by many people, specifically including such people as Jerry Fodor (Humphrey, 2008) who seems to have assumed, as indeed almost everyone else does, that phenomenal consciousness must be providing us with some kind of new skill. In other words, it must be helping us do something that we can do only by virtue of being conscious, in the way that, say, a bird can fly only because it has wings, or you can understand this sentence only because you know English. Humphrey thinks rather that it could be to encourage us to do something we would not do otherwise: to make us take an interest in things that otherwise would not interest us, or to mind things we otherwise would not mind, or to set ourselves goals we otherwise would not set.

The difference between these two concepts is outlined and discussed in some detail by Humphrey. Perhaps in his terms consciousness comes closer to being part of a sandbox, allowing a temporary space for the holding of various forms of reality.

Even Jerry Fodor recently claimed, "The revisions of our concepts and theories that imagining a solution will eventually require are likely to be very deep and very unsettling."

Others comment (Mindhacks, 2008) : "We need a place to erase reality and redraw it or the procreative possibilities of our existence are limited by a far more slow process of biological adaptation to our environment. To experiment internally without display on the canvas of consciousness seems as impossible as experimenting in the real world without a real world. How do you test a hypothesis without positing a thesis somewhere? That somewhere is our phenomenological awareness.............I think the problem is that consciousness and unconsciousness are often thought as completely different processes, when in fact simply by focusing our attention to them we can become conscious of most of our unconsciousness processes (not all of them at once, of course, but any of them we choose to focus on). As implied in above quotes, I also think consciousness is clearly related to attention and learning new things. While adults can walks or drive a bike unconsciously and focus their attention to something else, children who are still learning these skills cannot...........It seems to me that psychologists and philosophers have come too much uncritically to accept the assumption that every biological development must serve a purpose and that all we need to do is dream some purpose and we have the explanation for the development in question. This is pretty haphazard reasoning. Evolutionary "purpose" thus becomes a substitute for Divine Will. In the case of consciousness, I don't see in what way assuming it serves a designated purpose contributes a jot to answering the putative hard question of how it arises from biophysical processes."

Recalling the 'Janus' paper by Dudai (2005) and the work of Suddendorf (1999 etc.), imagining needs use of the future and inevitably the conscious mind, thought of as part of the sandbox, must also entail the future. On the other hand, an example given by Humphrey, the triangle illusion, is one of many which do not seem to relate to the future at all, but more to a simple 'sandbox' of the mind. There could therefore be elements of truth in the views of both Fodor and Humphrey.

Now the work of Aks (2003) on self-organised criticality can almost certainly allow us to adduce a mathematical schema - or indeed several schemata - to fit the present position.

How is this related to our MBI ?

We should be able to find out by creating a test or an experiment, whether it be in psychology or in physics or indeed in both. In earlier work, experiments were done relating the 'conscious' (Juliet) mind and the 'unconscious' (Romeo) mind to impulses. These, in fact, were presented by means of a computer game which was 'Tetris' in the rough example shown, though 'Alpine Skier' may have made a stronger impulse, bearing in mind Stickgold's (Cromie, 2000) results. The experiment can be modified by altering the various parameters.

Currently, a larger series of tests of various sorts is being carried out by the Institute for Fundamental Studies in India.

As has been described earlier, one easy and direct way to do this could be rTMS. A very clear example of the strength of rTMS as a brain moulding tool is given in a simple video (Gazzaniga, 2006) and a typical example of its actual use in a somewhat cognate problem, synaesthesia, occurs in (Mattingley, 2004).

Seneker (2002) and Sagiv (2006) thus came to roughly the conclusion that neurobiological evidence shows that separate features of visual information are projected to different cortical regions of the human brain. Relatively early in the processing of visual stimuli, color and shape are separate, and the brain can encode these features without awareness. This work supports the idea of modularity in the human cortex.
It is possible that color-grapheme synaesthesia results from a flaw in the modular organization of the brain. Results agree with the possibility that cortical regions for processing shape and color are abnormally linked, but only during awareness. These findings suggested to them that attention signals associated with awareness are required to produce normal binding.

Leaving aside any theoretical problems with this idea, the practical fact is that here we have a use of brain abnormalities and TMS in order to - hypothetically at least - shed light on fundamental brain processes. Reflections on some of these ideas on brain processes have been discussed in earlier work on this website, but the point being made here is that we do have a real tool which might be able to determine quite a lot of what is going on in the brain

There are problems here. The use of rTMS is in no way a routine procedure, can be heavily invasive, and is known to lead to brain damage in its use in certain cases. A less invasive technique is probably hypnosis, which already has given some results for Mondrians (Kosslyn, 2000),and which in my view may ultimately be of value in the field of synaesthesia. In fact Kosslyn may have come somewhere near inducing a synaesthetic effect on non synaesthetes and whilst no firm current results have yet been obtained from synaesthetes our experiments on hypnosis of colour grapheme synaesthetes suggested that hypnosis seems in our experiments to have (possibly) made an improvement to the degree of synaesthetic ability, and it certainly seems to have worked at reducing alleged synaesthesia, at least temporarily, for those who desire to lose it. The latter result at least seems to agree with common sense, but we take care not to be in any way dogmatic about this.

So it may be possible to use hypnosis in the present series of experiments on the reverse Stickgold effect, since now it is felt that the 'numbing' effect (as it were) of rTMS has somewhat similar brain effects on specific brain areas, as has been illustrated by the mildly controversial work of Dudai (2008) who explains (Maxmen, 2008) "In normal memory retrieval there is a set of areas that are important so we suggest that the area in the left rostrolateral prefrontal cortex is abating this process early on, halting activity that would occur downstream."

The rTMS results seem to suggest a similar numbing, blocking or traffic jam result. I carried out few experiments in hypnosis on known/believed synaesthetes and the work looked promising. In other words, the area denies access to memory-related regions until the hypnotic cue to remember flips its switch. Now Dudai (2008) has done hypnosis experiments combined with fMRI scans to show qualitatively and quantitatively the effects on the brain during temporary imposed memory loss. It therefore may be possible to obtain results in the roughly cognate field of the reverse Stickgold effect and this may also be one way forward on the blocking effect of hypnosis.

Fortunately in the Many Bubble Interpretation, all the ideas of our Introduction above emerge as part of an explication rather than as part of a problem. We use the tentative assumption of the existence of a so-called "conscious mind" (Juliet) and an "unconscious mind" (Romeo) and allow an interplay of both. As earlier blogs have indicated, this is not the only model but it seems to be one which constellates with our overall notions. Freud, Jung and very many others (obviously including by default, conceivably even Jerry Fodor) could well think such a representation to be real enough, so, allowing for later (perhaps extreme) restrictions and modifications, it should do for us here. In Pinker's terms this is something like 'emergence'.

O'Regan (2001) pointed out that he considered that the metric quality of V1 cannot in any way be the cause for the metric quality of our experience. It is as though in order to generate letters on one's screen, the computer had to have little letters floating around in its electronics somewhere. Further he pointed out that we really have little reason to believe that dreams are pictorial. Dreamlike experiences appear to be unstable and seemingly random, though Stickgold and ourselves have added a modicum of order to the apparent chaos. But a hallmark of dreams is this seemingly random character, particularly of detail, as where for example if there is writing on a card, it is likely to differ each time you look at the card. So there is a fair view that brain does not contain pictures of the detailed environment and even that the visual system per se lacks the resources to hold an experienced world steady. Again, with the MBI, this does not faze us, to whatever reasonable extent O'Regan's views hold.

A broader issue - Attention

Tibetan Buddhists, like various other Asian contemplatives, assert that it is possible to develop various forms of extra-sensory perception and paranormal abilities (Wallace, 1998), using attentional stability and vividness. Attention is a subject which is also currently of great interest in psychology. Some would say that attention is identical with consciousness, but others that this is not (Koch, 2006).

In the experiments of Lau (2007), using TMS, the perceived onset of intention depends at least in part on neural activity that takes place after the execution of action, which could not, in principle, have any causal impact on the action itself. An alternative view that is compatible with the data is that one function of the experience of intention might be to help clarify the ownership of actions (Wegner, 2002, 2003), which can help to guide future actions. This process could take place immediately after action execution. While Lau's conclusions need not disturb MBI enthusiasts very much, they still do seem to come from the use of TMS as a tool.

The extremely interesting article by Koch (2000) suggests how ways to manipulate attention could come closer to our efforts and to those of Stickgold (1999, 2000). Koch (2008) also insists that it is his view, amongst other things, that it is important to separate out the effects of attention from the correlates of consciousness in the search for NCC as he takes the view that it is plausible that some previously proposed NCC might have been contaminated by the neuronal correlates of attention, not consciousness. A process like their dual-task visual gymnastics seems to approximate to the sort of level of mental manoeuvres one would need to play a game of Tetris. We have already shown (and are proceeding to do further work) that such games, may have a time-reverse directional effect, in that the dreams may proceed the game playing. Obviously it would be nice to amplify this effect, amongst other possibilities. The Stickgold effect was very clearly present during "Alpine skier" games, as Stickgold pointed out, and full-scale virtual reality games and tests might be expected also to show a strong effect. By full-scale virtual reality games I am thinking of games like the 'virtual switchback' games that they have at leisure resorts, which offer quite real simulation, often up to the standards of say a Link Trainer (2008). There was such a ride currently in use at an amusement arcade at Blackpool, England and it should be possible to very significantly amplify such effects in such circumstances, and to vary them much more than is possible in reality. Some attempts to set up such virtual environments have already been carried out for other purposes, for example in the different field of attempting to pursue apparent claims of extrasensory perception (Wilde, 2006).

With an environment of that kind, many further experiments could be carried out, for example experiments somewhat like those of Eagleman (2008) or even rather simpler but with added general applicability. Second Life (Physics World, 2008) could also be under consideration but as very much a 'poor man's virtual reality', it clearly has even more restricted applicability and in some ways probably lacks the scope of even games like Tetris. As well as this there are many other parameters which can be adjusted, such as variation of waking up times, times at which sleep takes place, chemical supplements and additives, light and sound stimulations and so on. Further there can be the use of monitors such as Watch-Pat and the various 'lucid dream' monitors on the market, to perhaps alert sleepers, for example as to a suitable time to wake up and record dreams.

And then of course there is every psychological trick in the book, from those employed by Stanley Milgram to tricks on false memories. For example Loftus (2005) at the University of California managed to put participants off strawberry ice cream, pickles and hard-boiled eggs by implanting false childhood memories: "In the strawberry ice cream experiment a group of students were asked to fill out forms about their food experiences and preferences. Some of the subjects were then given a computer analysis which falsely said they had become sick from eating strawberry ice cream as children. Almost 20% later agreed in a questionnaire that strawberry ice cream had made them sick and that they intended to avoid it in the future." Future studies plan to implant positive memories of fresh vegetables. (Ethics ?)

But there is much more to adjusting parameters than the above, and as we have already described, there are physical and mathematical equations on hand to do so in our proposal.

References

Aks, D.J. & Sprott, J. C. (2003) Resolving perceptual ambiguity in the Necker Cube: A dynamical systems approach. Journal of Non-linear Dynamics in Psychology & the Life Sciences, 7(2) 159-178.

Cromie W.J., (2000) Harvard Gazette Online,/2000/10.26/01, http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2000/10.26/01-sleep.html

Dudai Y., (2005),"The Janus face of Mnemosyne", Nature, Vol 434, p567

Dudai Y., (2008), "Mesmerizing Memories: Brain Substrates of Episodic Memory Suppression in Posthypnotic Amnesia", Mendelsohn A., Chalamish Y., Dudai Y., Solomonovich A.,, Neuron 57, 159–170, January 10

Eagleman D.M., (2008), http://neuro.bcm.edu/eagleman/

Gazzaniga M. (2006), http://www.wwnorton.com/college/psych/psychsci/media/4_tms.html from: "Psychological Science", Second Edition, Gazzaniga M., Heatherton T., ISBN-10: 0-393-92497-1 • ISBN-13: 978-0-393-92497-8, Norton Books

Hameroff S.R.,(1998), "Funda-mentality: is the conscious mind subtly linked to a basic level of the universe?", Trends in Cognitive Science 2(4)119-127 ; also exchange with Spier and Thomas.

Humphrey N., (2008) "Seed Magazine" January 2008, http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/01/questioning_consciousness.php

Koch C., Tsuchiya N. , (2006), "Attention and consciousness: two distinct brain processes", Trends in Cognitive Sciences Vol.11 No.1, p 16

Koch C., (2000), "How to manipulate attention" ,
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Attention_and_consciousness/how_to_manipulate_attention

Koch C. Tsuchiya N., (2008), "The Relationship Between Top-Down Attention and Consciousness", Toward a Science of Consciousness, April 8-12, 2008 - Tucson, Arizona

Kosslyn S. M. et al, (2000), "Hypnotic Visual Illusion Alters Color Processing in the Brain", Am J Psychiatry 157:8, August, 1279

Lau H. et al, (2007), "Manipulating the Experienced Onset of Intention
after Action Execution", Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 19:1, pp. 1–10

Link Trainer (2008), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_Trainer ; but also see http://www.link.com/ or simply Google "Flight simulators at home".

Loftus E.F., et al (2005)," False beliefs about fattening foods can have healthy consequences", PNAS September 27, 2005 vol. 102 no. 39, 13724–13731 www.pnas.orgcgidoi10.1073pnas.0504869102

Mattingley et al (2004),Nature Neuroscience, Vol 7 (3), 217

Maxmen A., (2008), "Mind Control: Hypnosis offers amnesia clues", Science News, Jan. 12, 2008; Vol. 173, No. 2 , p. 20

Mindhacks (2008), http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2008/01/false_trails_in_the_.html

O'Regan, J. K., Noe, A. (2001) "A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness", Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(5)

Physics World (2008),"Doing physics in Second Life", Feb 1st, 2008 ; http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/32673 and sad comments at http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/32675;jsessionid=EB8F77783C2FB2484BD8B16775E45E49

Sagiv, N., J. Heer & L.C. Robertson (2006), "Does binding of synesthetic color to the evoking grapheme require attention?", Cortex 42 (2): 232-242, PMID 16683497

Seneker S.S., (2002) M.A. thesis, East Tennessee State University

Stickgold, R., Malia, A. & Hobson, J.A. (1999) "Sleep onset memory reprocessing and Tetris. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience" 11(supplement)

Stickgold, R., et al , (2000), "Replaying the Game: Hypnagogic Images in Normals and Amnesics" Science 290 (5490), 350. [DOI: 10.1126/science.290.5490.350]

Strogatz S.H., Mirollo R., (2007), "The Spectrum of the Partially Locked State for the Kuramoto Model", Journal of Nonlinear Science, Volume 17, Number 4, August, 2007, 309-347 (online)

Suddendorf, T. (1999). The rise of the metamind. In M.C. Corballis and S. Lea (Eds.), The descent of mind: Psychological perspectives on hominid evolution (pp. 218-260). London: Oxford University Press

Wallace B.A.,(1998), "Training the attention and exploring consciousness in Tibetan buddhism", "Toward a Science of Consciousness", Abstract No:748, "Tucson III" April 27-May 2, 1998 The University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona

Wegner, D. M. (2002), "The illusion of conscious will", Cambridge: MIT Press.

Wegner, D. M. (2003), "The mind’s best trick: How we experience conscious will. Trends in Cognitive Sciences,7, 65–69.

Wilde, D.J et al (2006), "The design and implementation of the Telepathic Immersive Virtual Reality System", Paper Presented at the 2006 Parapsychological Association Convention, Stockholm,Sweden.

Zhaoping L., (2006), "Theoretical understanding of the early visual processes by data compression and data selection", Network: computation in neural systems, December 2006, Vol 17, Number 4, Page 301-334

Zhaoping L., (2007), " A bottom up visual saliency map in the primary visual cortex --- theory and its experimental tests", Adapted from the invited presentation at COSYNE (Computational and Systems Neuroscience) conference, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. Feb. 2007 http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/Z.Li/prints/CosyneForPost.pdf

Zhaoping L., (2002), " Computational vision --- a window to our brain", Presentation CUSPEA conference on "Physics in twenty first century" in June 2002, Beijing. http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/Z.Li/prints/talk.ppt

Zhaoping L., (2008), ScienceDaily, Feb. 19, 2008 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080215103210.htm

Appendix: Computational neuroscience and some of its problems

Computational neuroscience as such, is an important subject insofar as it places itself to ask many awkward questions, and often expresses great dissatisfaction with some of the answers. Some of these difficult processes are often applicable in other contexts as well. I give the example of Zhaoping (2008) who recently apparently pointed out "When you see them throw a ball into the air, followed by a second ball, and then a third ball which 'magically' disappears, you wonder how they did it. In truth, there's often no third ball - it's just our brain being deceived by the context, telling us that we really did see three balls launched into the air, one after the other. .......... Mathematical modelling suggests that visual inference through context is processed in the brain beyond the primary visual cortex. By starting with a relatively simple experiment such as this, where visual input can be more easily and systematically manipulated, we are gaining a better understanding of how context influences what we see. Further studies along these lines can hopefully enable us to dissect the workings behind more complex and wondrous illusions". This simple sort of experiment, when redefined in terms of the neuroscience lab rather than those of the juggler, certainly looks like a excellent way to relate context to details and has a close correspondence with other more detailed lucubrations, well illustrated in Zhaoping (2002, 2006, 2007).
But we are not obliged to accept all of Zhaoping (2002, 2006, 2007) or indeed any of it, while we might still retain the brute 'common sense' of the idea about the three balls. Clearly we may accept some of Zhaoping's other reasoning in Zhaoping (2002, 2006, 2007) - and almost certainly might do so - but it is a far step to say we accept it all, or indeed accept in its entirety some such line of research in computational neuroscience. These are topics that philosophers argue about, each perhaps convinced that they are right. In our situation, with the MBI, we could stake the claim that we have ideas that are founded at the very highest level, that of McTaggart's paradox and large category theory - and then go ahead and use a great deal of computational neuroscience to further our work.

Anything like computational neuroscience must be 'down' from McTaggart's paradox and large category theory, we could argue, just as we could argue that simple sums are 'down' from Peano algebras though doubtless the whole philosophical idea of a hierarchy of thought could be quibbled at - but it is probably easier to look at specific facts in computational neuroscience, for example the possibility of overtraining. Now there are certainly checks which can be placed on that process, as there are several methods available to check the degree of generalization and/or to detect overfitting, for example cross-validation and the use of noise addition - and it is not suggested that Zhaoping has overtrained anyway. But the fact still remains that a lot of such 'small' factors could arise in an intricate scheme, and one way or another they usually do, at some point.

An example of where such a thing can admittedly happen is suggested through the work of Strogatz (2007) for example, where the elegant work of Kuramoto seems to have led to rather difficult complex system theory, even though Kuramoto's actual results seem to serve for useful models in many situations. Many attempted 'expansions' of Kuramoto's approach seem to go no further, for various good reasons. On the other hand the ideas of McTaggart's paradox and large categories stand well above all this, and are not specific in nature, even to the extent for example that we are not simply having a disagreement over the relative merits of neutral monism for example, which is about the sort of level to which argumentation over the Penrose/Hammeroff (Hammeroff, 1998) ideas at one time descended. The real crux of the Penrose/Hammeroff matter probably was that Penrose/Hammeroff was wrong about microtubules, superconductivity etc. etc. but right that the Eccles-Popper overall viewpoint of Penrose/Hammeroff could not be simply thrown over readily by (basically naive) computational neuroscience, whether rightly or wrongly, for a partial reason that it was defined and delineated in roughly Popper-Eccles terms. That level of 'philosophical' dispute is not what we are looking for.

Clearly then, what we must do is to use computational neuroscience to help our measurements but not accept it as necessity in any way in our descriptions. In other words we must use the results of computational neuroscience with reason, if we can relate them in a useful way to other claims. The Zhaoping example above, therefore, looks like we could use it somewhere in an experiment fairly readily but that does not mean that its context must, in essence, ruin other assumptions or views which we might have, or might wish wish to consider later.

21/02/2008 Institute for Fundamental Studies, Vasai, Maharashta, India

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