Star-tling Thoughts

I don’t know where to start with this one! The reason for this picture will eventually become clearer.

You probably know I’m panpsychist, which is linked to my veganism. I suppose the best place to begin is to account for this connection and the reasons for this belief, and also to describe what that belief actually is first of all, so here goes.

Panpsychism is the belief that matter is inherently conscious. In fact I’m not so sure about this definition because it might also be that space itself is conscious. I should point out further that my own version of panpsychism might differ from the usual version, and that it isn’t the same as hylozoism or pantheism. I usually employ an analogy with ferromagnetism, thus. Many elementary particles carry an electrical charge, including in particular quarks and some leptons. All such particles have magnetic fields, and a north and south pole which means they can be lined up by applying a magnetic field to them. However, most materials, though they’re largely made up of such particles, are not magnets. Only certain arrangements of matter are, the most familiar of which are lumps of iron whose magnetic domains are aligned. In this situation, the essential magnetic character of most matter comes to express itself in a macroscopic way which can be observed easily. There are other arrangements which are also magnets, such as the rare earth pickups used in electric guitars.

Consciousness is, in my view, similar. At least many and possibly all elementary particles are conscious, and in fact possibly all of space because of virtual particles. However, most materials, though they’re largely made up of such particles, are not minds. Only certain arrangements of matter are, the most familiar of which are wakeful humans with their particular bodily form and functions. In this situation, the essential conscious character of most matter comes to express itself in a macroscopic way which can be observed easily. There are other arrangements which are also minds.

There may also be a need to contrast this with pantheism and hylozoism. Hylozoism is the belief that everything is alive. This is not the same thing as most people would probably say that not all living things are conscious, such as bacteria and plants. It’s more like the belief that the Cosmos is an immense living organism, which to some extent I can get on board with because it’s a bit like the very liberal definition of acid which interprets almost all chemical reactions as reactions involving the action of an acid. It’s fine, but it’s not panpsychism. The other thing panpsychism isn’t, although I have some sympathy with it, is pantheism, which is the idea that God is everything. One issue with that belief is that it can be a kind of squeamish version of atheism which is afraid to call a spade a spade. I am personally not pantheist because God is unlike and not dependent upon any created (or sustained) thing. That doesn’t mean the Universe isn’t worthy of respect or that God is more like a human than the Universe. I don’t want to dwell on these distinctions, but it’s important they be made because many people think this is the claim I’m making.

Okay, so why do I believe this? Because there’s no other way of accounting for consciousness. All the other models – behaviourism, physicalism, psychophysical dualism, functionalism, idealism and anomalous monism – have massive flaws. I don’t want to go into them in depth right now because although I’m staking out a vague claim here, this isn’t the main point of this post. The claim that panpsychism isn’t a solution to the mind-body problem either is also fair, because it attempts to solve the problem by assuming what it’s trying to account for. Why would matter be like that?

This belief of mine has certain consequences. For instance, it makes me vegan but in a way my veganism is more extreme and sadder than most people’s because I accept that plants are also conscious and suffer. Hence veganism is just a kind of utilitarianism where suffering is minimised rather than a particularly positive way of life where no avoidable suffering and death is wrought upon the world. I constantly destroy bacteria too. We cannot be entirely non-violent but we should still strive to be as non-violent as possible, and partly for that reason it’s not my place to judge others. The world is a practically endless cycle of carnage in which we are all complicit. I’m vegan because eating animals or dairy products would involve an unnecessary extra step which would involve the death of more plants than just eating plants.

All this doesn’t generally occupy my mind much. However, a couple of things have come to light in the past week. One was that I met up with my ex and was presented with a first draft of an essay I wrote for my Masters:

I’ve already talked about my time at Warwick. The above essay is a reaction to a comment made by Christine Battersby near the beginning of that year. The reason I did my MA was to further pursue radical philosophy and help to provide a theoretical basis for progressive politics, and as I must surely have said elsewhere, it turned out that Warwick University’s primary activity seemed to be manufacturing excuses for why the political state of affairs was inevitable – capitalist realism in other words. I hoped that the Women’s Studies contingent would be better but although I very much liked their transphobia, they were also speciesist. Battersby claimed that consciousness depends on language use, so in other words if you don’t have a voice it doesn’t matter what happens to you. She was utterly focussed on humans and didn’t care about anything else. I’m not going to rubbish everything she says, because for example ‘Gender And Genius’ is a very interesting book, but there were a number of problems with her belief system, not least its incompatibility with more than a very limited anthropocentric version of veganism. If you can’t see what’s wrong with that, you need to check your privilege. Yes, I know that’s a cliché.

So that’s one. The other one is more widely interesting but no less personal. It starts, as so many things do, with Olaf Stapledon, “W.O.S”, whose name is associated with the works ‘Last And First Men’ and ‘Star Maker’. The second is more relevant here. Neither of these books is really a novel, and in fact this statement is made at the beginning of the first. They are, however, both science fiction. The first describes the two thousand million year-long future history of the human race from 1930 onward. The second covers the entire history of the Multiverse, focussing mainly on our own Universe. Yeah yeah, big canvas, vast scope, origin of the adjective Stapledonian, but that isn’t what I want to concentrate on right now. The relevant bit at the moment is the way stars are portrayed. And I quote:

It isn’t clear whether W.O.S. actually believed this, but then again it isn’t even clear whether W.O.S. considered himself the author of these words for reasons I can’t be bothered to go into here, but there are two ways of looking at this taken at face value. One is hylozoism – stars are living organisms. In fact, in ‘Star Maker’, various things are living and sentient organisms which might not be considered so by most earthlings. The other is something close to panpsychism, at least if the star itself is considered a world. The outer layers of the star are conscious. The chapter goes on to claim that the voluntary movements of stars are identified by astrophysics as their normal movements as predicted by scientific laws and theories.

This sounds fanciful and outlandish, not to say unscientific and perhaps even superstitious. We don’t generally look at the stars at night and think of them moving around deliberately. In fact, apart from the fact of Earth’s rotation, most of the time non-astronomers don’t think about the stars’ proper motion at all. Eppur si muoveno – pardon my Italian. The formation and rotation of galactic arms is confounding in various ways. The most obvious of these is the one dark matter is evoked to explain. The velocity of objects in the outer margins of galaxies does not compare to those further in according to the mass of the visible portion of those galaxies, so it’s claimed that there must be invisible matter causing them to rotate faster than they should. Moreover, the spiral arms of galaxies are more like the bunches of vehicles in traffic jams, separated by sparsely-populated stretches of road, through which individual motorists move, than a kind of “formation dance” arrangement. Finally, and this is a more significant fact than may at first appear, stars of different spectral classes move at different velocities around the galaxy. At this point I should probably fish out the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram:

By Richard Powell – The Hertzsprung Russell Diagram, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1736396

It can be seen that stars are not randomly distributed by these criteria. There are, for instance, no small hot stars other than white dwarfs and there’s a general correlation between brightness and heat, the hottest stars being on the left of the diagram – O-type stars like Rigel. Hence their size and mass can be taken into consideration if need be. The cooler stars are on the right, and these are the interesting ones from the viewpoint of the very peculiar statement that has been quite recently been made about them by a respectable astrophysicist.

So here’s the thing: cooler stars move faster around the Galaxy than hotter ones at the same distance from the centre. This is called Parenago’s Discontinuity. More specifically, stars of spectral type F8 and hotter “orbit” faster. A few explanations have been offered for this apart from the rather obvious one I’m going to mention in a bit. One is that stars might be shining more brightly on one side than the other, and although light has no mass, it does have momentum and therefore can be used as a method of propulsion:

Another “sensible” explanation is that the stars emit jets of plasma which have the same effect, and there seems to be a third one that it’s to do with stars being slowed down as they move through nebulæ.

Okay, so another explanation has been offered by one Gregory Matloff. Matloff is a pretty respectable guy. He has a doctorate in meteorology and oceanography, a Masters in astronautics and aeronautics and a BA in physics. He’s authored various books, such as one on solar sails with Eugene Mallove – this is the very real technology of using reflective mylar sheets as a form of space propulsion by sunlight pushing on the “sail” thus formed, because as I said above, starlight has momentum which can be used as a power source. He’s currently a professor of physics. So this guy is not exactly like a Sasquatch chaser or UFOlogist – he has been involved in SETI but in a very dry, scientific kind of way – but has some respectable credentials. It should also be said that just because someone is an expert in their own field, it doesn’t mean their opinions are worthy of respect in other fields about which they know less. Immanuel Velikovsky seems to have been a competent psychiatrist but his claims about the recent origin of Venus as a comet are completely ridiculous and seem also to be motivated reasoning. Matloff is not like that so far as I can tell.

So why am I going on about this bloke then? Because he’s a panpsychist. Not only that, but he reckons panpsychism is a testable explanation for why cooler stars circle around the Galaxy more quickly than hotter ones. He believes that such stars are conscious and move around of their own volition. They don’t obey the laws of physics as we know them as precisely as they’d be expected to, but the extent to which they don’t is only like someone running for a hundred years and changing their velocity over that time by a couple of centimetres a second. This minimal degree of involvement reminds me of the Steady State Theory, which saw matter as continuously springing into existence at the rate of about two hydrogen atoms a year in a volume the size of the Empire State Building. Although, so far as I can tell, Matloff is open to the idea that the stars in question are adjusting their speed and direction using jets or changing their luminosity, he’s also open to the much more controversial idea that not only are they doing it deliberately but that they’re doing it by psychokinesis.

There comes a point in certain conversations where the “argument by incredulous stare” is deployed. This happens in a couple of philosophical areas, one of which is panpsychism and another of which is modal realism (the idea that the Multiverse is real). However, mere outlandishness doesn’t make something false and doesn’t constitute an argument against it. This is the fallacy of the argument from incredulity, much beloved of flat Earthers and Apollo mission deniers. It is, though, true that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

A relatively good piece of evidence that this is in fact going on is found in the fact that only cooler stars do this. There are a number of ways to account for consciousness, one of which is the behaviour of the rings making up some of the molecules in nerve cell microtubules. These are part of the cytoskeleton, and it’s been suggested that quantum events associated with the p orbitals in aromatic moieties within tubulin, the protein they’re made of, is what consciousness is. If this is so, only similar phenomena would be able to manifest consciousness, although this could be functionally equivalent and not be made of the same stuff. If it actually does require that stuff though, stars couldn’t be conscious. Maybe they aren’t. Actually this needs restating: even if panpsychism is true, it doesn’t mean that consciousness would be manifest in stars, though stars could still be impotently conscious.

Matloff prefers to evoke the Casimir Effect. An example of this is the tendency of two metal plates very close to each other to pull towards each other. It’s an example of zero-point energy, which is the “free energy” supposèdly present in empty space. Whereas this energy undoubtedly exists, it doesn’t follow that it can be extracted and used, or that if it can that that would be a good idea – my naïve mind suspects that this would cause collapse of the false vacuum and the end of the Universe, but that’s just me and I might be catastrophising. If that’s true, though, depending on the size of the Universe and how common technological cultures are within it, it seems guaranteed that that can’t happen because we’re still here. Matloff claims that the Casimir Effect’s contribution to molecular bonds makes cooler stars conscious.

This next bit is going to sound like W.O.S. again. Stars are often too hot for chemistry. Atoms as such have trouble existing in many of them because they’re too hot for electrons to stay in orbitals around them, so the idea of microtubule p orbitals being associated with consciousness is a non-starter here. However, the upper layers of stars are cooler than their interiors and molecules can form in the cooler stars, i.e. those of spectral class F8 or below. Hence the proposition that consciousness becomes operable at the energy level below which molecular bonds exist because they are involved with certain molecular bonds implies that volitional behaviour in entities below that temperature would not be found in similar entities hotter than it. In a very crude sense, all living humans have body temperatures below 6300 Kelvin, or 6000°C. This is actually true. A human running a temperature above 6000°C would not be conscious but be superheated gas. Or would she? I don’t know. It’s counterintuitive that she’d be in good mental health.

Okay, so the idea is that stars cool enough to have molecules are conscious and have volition. They act deliberately. Evidence for this is that cooler stars travel through the Galaxy faster than they should. Incidentally, this also means the Sun is conscious, because it’s a G2V star, well below the threshold where consciousness is extinguished at this stage.

Now, unfortunately I have completely forgotten how I came to this conclusion but three dozen years ago or so, I realised that if panpsychism is true, psychokinesis must also be possible. I have racked my brains about this and cannot for the life of me recall my train of thought regarding this. It isn’t to do with anything like psychophysical dualism, although that would also strongly suggest psychokinesis in the most straightforward version of that model (bodies and souls). So I apologise for this irritating omission. This also means that my reasoning can’t be examined for this belief. I might just have been wrong. Also, it makes panpsychism testable: if it could be shown that psychokinesis is impossible, it would also refute panpsychism.

Stars being conscious isn’t the same thing as panpsychism being true or psychokinesis being possible. It could be that one of the other methods of transportation they could use is under their voluntary control, and that an alternative arrangement of matter found in cooler stars also confers consciousness, but merely in functional terms like a human being is often conscious.

The problem I have with all this is that I can’t decide if Matloff is serious, or if he is, whether he’s sensible. It’s true that I am panpsychist and nowadays I take it on faith that this implies that psychokinesis is possible even though I can’t remember why. However, there is a problem with this set of claims. There’s a thing called “God Of The Gaps”, which is the idea that God is simply used to explain anything we don’t understand. Thus before the theory of evolution was popular, people believed God created all species more or less as they are in historical times. This is not a good way to believe in God. Likewise, panpsychism could be evoked to explain a lot of things we don’t have good scientific theories for. For instance, dark matter is the usual explanation for why galaxies rotate faster than the visible mass in them suggests they should. Another one is Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MoND). I don’t like the first explanation because it seems to me that dark matter is a conveniently inactive substance which has just been made up to plug the gaps in the model, although I am open to the idea that it might just be ordinary matter which can’t be seen such as rogue planets, dust, neutrinos and so on. However, it would be equally possible to say that stars simply move around galaxies faster than the ordinary laws of physics suggest because they’re using psychokinesis. In fact, maybe I’ll just decide that’s what I believe.

I can’t imagine these views being taken seriously in the astrophysics community. However, it is interesting that they are the same views as W.O.S. expressed in ‘Star Maker’ in 1937. ’Star Maker’ is a work of fiction. It gets certain things about astronomy and astrophysics completely wrong. At the time, it used to be thought that planets were formed when stars came close to each other and pulled elongated cylinders of gas out of their photospheres, which then condensed into gaseous or solid bodies, and that red giants were young stars in the process of forming. There’s clearly no omniscient authority telling W.O.S. what to write, or if there is it’s an unreliable narrator. W.O.S. does, however, portray himself as the true author of neither ‘Last And First Men’ nor ‘Star Maker’. He also narrates his own experiences in the third person in some stories, and the continuity between ‘Last Men In London’ and ‘Odd John’ suggests that he is not who he says he is. Is it possible, then, that certain ideas arrive in fiction from another source? Did W.O.S. somehow intuit that stars were conscious and did their own thing? I do have a very good reason for suspecting that this is true because of a certain paragraph in his ‘Odd John’, but because it suggests an ontological paradox and would cease to be useful as a message if I said what it was, you’re just going to have to trust me on this.

Leaving all that aside, I find it very hopeful to think of stars as living organisms, or as conscious beings. If that’s true, it means that whatever happens to this planet’s life because of what humans are doing to it, mind will continue to exist in the Universe, and in fact life, at least until the end of the Stelliferous Era, roughly one hundred million million years from now. After that, W.O.S. suggests other ways in which life and consciousness might survive and there are other suggestions about what might be possible in the very long term, but for now, if I can persuade myself that stars are conscious, I find the future to be very bright indeed.

Dream Time

Daniel Dennett is quite annoying. His view of consciousness is completely absurd, for example. I’m not going to defend my position here because this isn’t exactly what this post is about.

In case you don’t know, Daniel Dennett is a major analytical philosopher, the English-speaking tradition of philosophy dating from the late nineteenth century CE with the rejection of Hegelian idealism, continuing today and apparently also including Polish philosophers for some reason. Bertrand Russell is a good example. It was once described in ‘Radical Philosophy’ like this: a Heideggerian says something like “Die Welt weltet”, and analytic philosophy comes along and says “Where is this Welt, and when exactly did it start welting?”. It is actually mainly my own background and I have a lot of respect for it, partly because I think postmodernism is a good way of making excuses for how things are politically and socially without coming up with a solution to them, and that comes out of the continental tradition. I’d also distinguish analytic philosophy from other viable philosophical approaches taken by anglophones such as that of William Blake, who is unsurprisingly an outsider and apparently linked to the Muggletonians, about whom I know very little. Sarada is the expert on Blake, but for what it’s worth I think of him as an English Romantic. I don’t know if that’s fair.

Recently, Dennett was involved in a movement referred to as the “Brights”, whose aim was to further metaphysical naturalism. Metaphysical naturalism is often treated as if it’s synonymous with atheism, but in fact it’s a specialised form of atheism which is radically different, for instance, from Marxist atheism and the South Asian Samkhya and Carvaka. I had a conversation with a White bloke the other day who was atheist because of karma, a view also found in South Asian thought. The basic idea there is that because karma is a universal law governing the working of the Universe, there’s no need to suppose that God exists. Although I’m theist, I do find this interesting on an intellectual level, mainly because it’s so unlike metaphysical naturalism but still strongly atheist. Metaphysical naturalism is the idea that only natural forces and laws operate in the Universe, i.e. there is no supernatural realm and therefore no God or other deities. Obviously I don’t agree with this, but that isn’t why I find Dennett annoying.

The Brights were founded by Dennett and Dawkins, among other people whose names don’t come to mind right now. Other metaphysically naturalistic atheists, such as Christopher Hitchens, have criticised the name as appearing to imply intellectual superiority. It reminds me a bit of the stereotypical Mensa attitude. To be fair, I’m not sure this was the intention so much as an attempt to come up with a positive-sounding name. Brights use the word “super” to describe people such as myself who have supernatural and/or mystical elements as part of our view. This actually makes me sound like Wonder Woman or something, so it’s okay really. Nonetheless, the Brights believe themselves to be right and us to be wrong. It isn’t an unusual position to see oneself as correct by contrast with others whose opinions differ, so that is also fine.

One of Dennett’s more bizarre positions is that lucid dreams are not experiences. This strikes me as a kind of ideological commitment resulting from it being a logical conclusion of his other views about consciousness. However, it’s also an elaboration of another, simpler position of his with which I actually do agree, in a sense: that dreams are not experiences in general. I do differ with this view but also think it captures something significant about the nature of consciousness, particularly wakefulness. Looking at them from a position of being awake, it seems to me that dreaming could well represent the wakeful consciousness attempting to make sense of the “junk” present in one’s mind on waking. There are some reasons why this may not be true, but others which are hard to reconcile with it not being so. For instance, someone I know once dreamt that she, note the tense in this phrase, has to cry three tears to save a toad’s life, and I could hear her trying to do this several minutes before she woke up. On the other hand, I was once dreaming while the radio was on and the sequence of events on the radio is time-reversed in my dream. The dream ends with something happening on the radio which in waking experience happened before something which starts the dream, which can be explained if dreams are false memories created during REM sleep.

The idea that lucid dreams are not experiences is kind of arse-about-face. It’s a conclusion Dennett is forced into due to his expressed view of consciousness which is counter-intuitive to me, and I’d think to most other people. There is an odd phenomenon in consciousness where immediately prior events are “re-written” by memory. For instance, MP3 files when played back often have periods of silence in them before loud notes which the listener doesn’t notice because they’re eclipsed by the slightly later event. Dennett uses a similar illusion called the “phi phenomenon” where lights of two colours flashed in succession leads to the perception that a single light is moving back and forth and changing colour. He offers two explanations for this, which he calls “Orwellian” and “Stalinesque”. In the Orwellian hypothesis, like Winston’s experience with the fingers (or Picard’s experience with the lights in ‘Star Trek’, which is a direct steal), perception is revised after the fact of being experienced. Stalinesquely, the forthcoming experience is revised before reaching consciousness like a show trial whose verdict is pre-decided. These two versions of what happens don’t require any difference in the model of what’s going on in the brain. The only difference is in when the perception becomes an object of consciousness. The claim is then that the reason there is no difference between the two is that this account of consciousness as emerging at a certain point is an error based on the legacy of misunderstanding consciousness as Cartesian – that is, that living humans consist of two substances, the soul and the body, whereof the former is conscious and dimensionless and the latter occupies space and is not conscious, with the two interacting, according to Descartes within the pineal gland. Dennett believes that we are still too attached to this kind of account, although we don’t literally believe it any more, and that consciousness is not a special, circumscribed state, has no subject of experience (I have sympathy with this bit) and is actually the flow of information from place to place.

Applying this to non-lucid dreaming, information flow would occur on waking. With lucid dreaming, we only have illusory choice and experiencing in the moment according to this account, which also applies as far as Dennett is concerned to waking life. Dreaming and lucid dreaming are primarily useful illustrations of his general theory here rather than objects of study themselves.

Obviously I think he’s wrong. He also casts doubt on the existence of qualia, which are the essential qualities of experience whose existence cannot rationally be doubted. Qualia, put another way, are what people refer to when they say things like “your red might be my blue”, which captures the notion well but doesn’t actually work in detail because of the network of experiences and how they relate to one another. It’s important to decide what are and aren’t qualia, because once one declares something as a quale it’s placed beyond question and that restricts possible arguments. For instance, Nkechi Amare Diallo could claim that her Black identity is a quale, at which point White people identifying as Black suddenly becomes sanctified in some realm beyond criticism. I actually do think the mental perception of the possibility of becoming pregnant is a good example of a quale which is not intuitively so, because it sometimes leads to radical departures of opinion regarding the ethics of reproductive choice, and that does in fact correspond to “no uterus, no opinion” as the position is sometimes rather crudely expressed. However, the existence of quale cannot be doubted, and if someone is led into the position where they can make such a claim, it comes across to me as a weird ideological commitment to an untenable position rather than something which can be attached to an account of consciousness.

From wakeful experience, we tend to perceive dreaming as something which occurs while we’re asleep, and individual dreams as prospects which occur in the future of our wakefulness before we fall asleep and in the past of our wakefulness when we have woken up. With closer examination, we might conclude that dreams are not experiences but attempts by a wakeful mind to make sense of the clutter present in our minds when we awake. Although I think this is incorrect, it does work well as an illustration that the chronology of dreams is not what we might assume. Lucid dreaming is said to be encouraged by always recounting dreams in the present tense. This is somewhat confused by the fact that not all languages have a present tense, and this raises a further question: are there languages which have a way of expressing dream time?

Before I answer this question, I want to outline my understanding of states of consciousness. I believe it makes sense to say there are six states of consciousness: wakefulness, dreaming, dreamless sleep, hypnosis, meditation and Ganzfeld. There’s also a very strong tendency to prioritise wakefulness above the others, to the extent that it’s seen as the only realistic state of consciousness and the state which dictates the nature of time. Dream logic is not seen as proper logic. A friend of mine recently observed, interestingly, that although I had recently dreamt about the King, that didn’t mean there wouldn’t still be Queen dreams. My own attitude towards states of consciousness is rather different. I believe that several or all of those states are of equal, or perhaps incommensurate, status. The list I’ve just made was from a wakeful state. It’s equally possible to dream of a completely different list. I’m not convinced that hypnosis is a valid state of consciousness but I do believe it’s neither dreaming nor dreamless sleep. There are “state” and “non-state” views on hypnosis. The state view is that a hypnotised subject has entered an altered, more suggestible state of consciousness, which is supported by their alleged inability, in some cases, to recall the events which took place during it. The non-state version is that hypnosis is a form of role-play in a kind of theatrical setting, which doesn’t just apply to stage hypnotism but also the likes of hypnotherapy. That idea is not supposed to contradict its efficacy as a therapy, incidentally. Ganzfeld is the other state which could do with a bit of explanation. This can be introduced by relaxation and sensory deprivation although it also occurs at one’s bidding, perhaps with a bit of practice. It may not may not be a healthy state.

Insofar as each of these is a valid state of consciousness, none has priority over any others. Each has unique features. As I’m mainly contrasting dreaming and wakefulness here, taking them equally seriously, the wakeful mind can have a view of dreaming that is either the detritus of dormancy or a sequence of experiences which occur between successive experiences of wakefulness, but this is only the view of the waking mind and is no more valid than that of dreaming. There is still a relationship between dreaming experiences and the senses, for instance because a cold night might be associated with dreaming of the Arctic or because some experience one had the previous day influences the dream. From the perspective of dreaming, wakeful consciousness influences one’s experience but there are oddities about its temporality because with dreams of any length, it can often be difficult to locate a moment when the dream begins and, as I’ve said before, some of my dreams involve things like “having always sat on the roof”, i.e. my dream is of climbing out of a bedroom window onto the roof just like I always have for years. From a dreaming perspective, whatever waking life makes of them, dreaming consciousness is very different in terms of the passage of time and even if it turns out that dreams are squished-up false memories of stuff happening immediately before waking from a daytime perspective, this has no more or less validity than whatever the dreaming mind thinks of wakefulness.

Given all that, this is the question I am mainly interested in answering here: how do we refer to dream time? English uses the present tense to refer to “tenseless” things, such as saying that “one plus one is/equals two”. We don’t usually say “one plus one used to equal two” or “one plus one will be two next Thursday” unless we’re trying to make some kind of rhetorical point about eternal verities. I have said in the past, from a waking perspective anyway, that the events of dreams should be referred to in the aorist. This is in fact a somewhat inaccurate way of describing what I’m doing when I seem to use the present tense.

The word “aorist” originates from the Ancient Greek “ἀόριστος”, which breaks down as “ἀ-” – not – and “όριστος” – definite. In other words, “indefinite”, “undefined” and also simple – the unadorned, plain form of the verb. In English, we might identify this with the simple present indicative except that in English this usually puts an S, an “-eth” or “-est” on the end, so it isn’t usually unadorned. As an ahistorical, perhaps an aorist, word, it seems to work quite well as a way of describing events which do not occur in the waking passage of time, but in fact the Ancient Greek usage is to refer to the past. It’s used as a narrative tense, so it does make sense if dreams are retold as stories to use the aorist, but in certain circumstances can also refer to the present or future. It’s also worth mentioning that there is aspect as well as tense involved here. Aspect is how the action described by a verb occurs over time, i.e. whether it’s a one-time short term event, a repeated action or a continuous one. For instance, “I rowed” and “I sowed” might involve grabbing the oars just once and sculling briefly and putting a single seed in the ground, or they might refer to rowing across a river or walking across a field broadcasting a full bowl of seed. English seems to have lost the ability to distinguish easily between these, but many other languages actually focus more on that element of time than on tense. Hence aspect is still relevant to dreaming as experience, or perceived experience but tense may be misleading.

Sanskrit also has an aorist, which is relevant because it happens to be used to discuss consciousness a lot. In fact I almost used the word “samadhi” to describe what I called “meditation” just now. There are two aorists in Sanskrit, one which is simply preterite indicative, like our own simple past, and an injunctive mood, which is also found in Homeric Greek, which could be used as an imperative or subjunctive, usually for prohibitions in later Sanskrit.

Hence the problem is that although there is something out there called the aorist, which is not in any case present in English, it actually tends to express the past although it technically needn’t and the literal meaning of the word “aorist” is not perfectly reflected in the actual meaning of the word. From the perspective of wakefulness, I would want to express dreaming experience as occurring in a kind of abstract time. Imagine a three-dimensional line graph. The space within that graph could be said to be located in a particular place in the sense that it might be on the page of a book or a computer display, but there need be no region of the Universe consisting of a graph, which can in principle be visited. Time and space in dreaming are virtual. Events can be located relative to each other temporally only within the dream, but need to be referred to outside of it, but referring to them in the past tense doesn’t do them justice.

Calling this post “Dream Time” makes it sound like a reference to the idea Australian Aboriginals are said by Western anthropologists to have about the primordial state of the world, but as usual it’s important to examine this critically. If it turns out that the kind of wakeful consciousness we have today in the West is highly contingent, maybe our lives are surrounded temporally by a sleep, not in the sense of absence of consciousness but as a different kind of consciousness. I know very little about this and feel it would be culturally insensitive to say too much about it, as well as inappropriate for the cultural and environmental milieu I live in, but the term itself suggests to me an entirely valid concept of a kind of timeless eternity out of which our wakefulness condenses. I have no idea whether this is what anthropologists mean by it or whether it even exists in any Australian Aboriginal culture, but it does make sense although it might give dreaming unwarranted priority. At this point I could of course read what Wikipedia says about it and pretend I know what I’m talking about, but that doesn’t do it justice.

Behind all this while I’ve been writing is awareness of a particular form of dementia called Lewy Body. This is associated with Parkinsonism, and involves the mixing of dreaming and wakefulness. Although it would seem insensitive to regard this as anything other than a pathological state, it is interesting that this occurs towards the end of waking life. We tend to think of dreaming and wakefulness as sharply differentiated, although when I had B12 deficiency early signs of my psychosis there was some such mixture. Prisoner’s cinema, Charles Bonnet Syndrome, phantosmia and possibly some forms of tinnitus and hearing voices also seem to have things in common with this. Prisoner’s cinema is more like Ganzfeld, and in fact it leads me to wonder whether states of consciousness are to each other like different gears on a car, with Ganzfeld intermediate between dreaming and wakefulness.

People have been known to enter a state of meditation as a prelude to their death. More often, the state of mind immediately before death as monitored by instruments resembles dreamless sleep and this continues immediately after death, with a sudden flash of activity a few minutes later. Once again, it may be inappropriate to refer to these phenomena temporally, as any subjectivity may not experience them in this manner.

This post, I hope, will make a good companion to tomorrow’s, written on International Yoga Day.

Is Cyberspace Haunted?

Loab – An explanation may be forthcoming

I may have mentioned this before on here, but there used to be a popular “spooky” non-fiction book called ‘The Ghost Of 29 Megacycles’. This was about the practice of listening to static on analogue radio and apparently hearing the voices of the dead. A similar technique is known as Electronic Voice Phenomenon, which is a more general version of the same where people listen out for voices on audio tape or other recording media. It’s notable that this is a highly analogue process. It’s no longer a trivial task to tune out a television or radio and get it to display visual or produce audio static so that one can do this. Audiovisual media nowadays are generally very clean and don’t lend themselves to this. One saddening thing to me is that we now have a TV set which will display pretend static to communicate to us that we haven’t set it up properly. It isn’t honest. There is no real static and in fact it’s just some video file stored on the hardware somewhere which tries to tell the user there’s an unplugged connection or something. You can tell this because it loops: the same pixels are the same colours in the same place every few frames. I find this unsettling because it implies that the world we live in is kind of a lie and because we haven’t really got control over the nuts and bolts of much technology any more. There’s that revealing temporally asymmetric expression committing oneself that the belief that in that respect the past and future are qualitatively different. It is important to acknowledge this sometimes, but can also bring it about via the force of that potentially negative belief. However, the demise of the analogue has not led to the demise of such connections, although it long seemed to have done so.

Most people would probably say that we are simply hearing, or in some cases seeing, things which aren’t really there in these cases. Others might say, of course, that this is a way to access the Beyond, so to speak, and interpret the voices or other experiences in those terms. If that’s so, the question arises as to whether it’s the medium which contains this information or whether the human mind contacts it directly via a random-seeming visual or sonic mess, having been given the opportunity to do so. Other stimuli grab the attention to specific, organised and definite details too much for this to happen easily. There’s no scope for imagination, or rather for free association.

Well, recently this has turned out no longer to be so. Recently, artificial intelligence has been advancing scarily fast. That’s not hyperbole. It is actually quite frightening how rapidly software has been gaining ground on human cognition. Notable improvements occur within weeks rather than years or decades, and one particular area where this is happening is in image generation. This has consequences for the “ghost of 29 megacycles” kind of approach to, well, I may as well say séances, but this is going to take a bit of explaining first.

Amid considerable concern for human artists and their intellectual property, it’s now possible to go to various websites, type in what you want to see and have a prodigiously furiously cogitating set of servers give you something like that in a couple of minutes. For example, sight unseen I shall now type in “blue plastic box in a bookcase” and show you a result from Stable Diffusion:

That didn’t give me exactly what I wanted but it did show a blue plastic box in a bookcase. Because I didn’t find a way to specify that I only wanted one blue plastic box, it also gave me two others. I’ll give it another try: “A tree on a grassy hill with a deer under it”:

The same system can also respond to images plus text as input. In my case, this has let to an oddity. As you know, I am the world’s whitest woman. However, when I give Stable Diffusion’s sister Diffuse The Rest, which takes photos plus descriptions, such as “someone in a floral skater dress with curly hair, glasses and hoop earrings”, it will show me that all right, but “I” will be a Black woman more often than not. This is not so with many other inputs without a photo of me. I get this when I type it into Stable Diffusion itself:

This is obviously a White woman. So are all the other examples I’ve tried on this occasion, although there is a fair distribution of ethnicity. There are worrying biasses, as usual, in the software. For instance, if you ask for a woman in an office, you generally get something like this:

If you ask for a woman on a running track, this is the kind of output that results:

This is, of course, due to the fact that the archive of pictures on which the software was trained carries societal biasses therewith. However, for some reason it’s much more likely to make me Black than White if I provide it with a picture of myself and describe it in neutral terms. This, for example, is supposed to be me:

The question of how it might be addressed arises though. Here is an example of what it does with a photo of me:

You may note that this person has three arms. I have fewer than three, like many other people. There’s also a tendency for the software to give people too many legs and digits. I haven’t tried and I’m not a coder, but it surprises me that there seems to be no way to filter out images with obvious flaws of this kind. Probably the reason for this is that these AI models are “black boxes”: they’re trained on images and arrive at their own rules for how to represent them, and in the case of humans the number of limbs and digits is not part of that. It is in fact sometimes possible to suggest they give a body extra limbs by saying something like “hands on hips” or “arms spread out”, in which case they will on occasion continue to produce images of someone with arms in a more neutral position as well as arms in the explicitly requested ones.

In order to address this issue, it would presumably be necessary to train the neural network on images with the wrong and right number of appendages. The problem is, incidentally, the same as the supernumerary blue boxes in the bookcase image, but in most situations we’d be less perturbed by seeing an extra box than an extra leg.

I have yet to go into why the process is reminiscent of pareidolia based on static or visual snow and therefore potentially a similar process to a séance. The algorithm used is known as a Latent Diffusion Model. This seems to have replaced the slightly older method of Generative Adversarial Networks, which employed two competing neural networks to produce better and better pictures by judging each other’s outputs. Latent Diffusion still uses neural networks, which are models of simple brains based on how brains are thought to learn. Humans have no access to what happens internally in these networks, so the way they are actually organised is quite mysterious. Many years ago, a very simple neural network was trained to do simple arithmetic and it was explored. It was found to contain a circuit which had no connections to any nodes outside that circuit on the network and was therefore thought to be redundant, but on being removed, the entire network ceased to function. This network was many orders of magnitude less complex than today’s. In these cases, the network was trained on a database of pictures ranked by humans for beauty and associated with descriptions called the LAION-5B Dataset. The initial picture, which may be blank, has “snow” added to it in the form of pseudorandom noise (true randomness may be impossible for conventional digital devices to achieve alone). The algorithm then uses an array of GPUs (graphical processing units as used in self-driving cars, cryptocurrency minint and video games) to continue to apply noise until it begins to be more like the target as described textually and/or submitted as an image. It does this in several stages. Also, just as a JPEG is a compressed version of a bitmap image, relying in that case on small squares described via overlapping trig functions, so are the noisy images compressed in order to fit in the available storage space and so that they get processed faster. The way I think of it, and I may be wrong here, is that it’s like getting the neural network to “squint” at the image through half-closed eyes and try to imagine and draw what’s really there. This compressed image form is described as a “latent space”, as the actual space of the image, or possibly the multidimensional space used to describe it as found in Generative Adversarial Networks, is a decompressed version of what’s actually used directly by the GPUs.

If you don’t understand that, it isn’t you. It was one said that if you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it, and that suggests I don’t. That said, one thing I do understand, I think, is that this is a computer making an image fuzzy like a poorly-tuned television set and then trying to guess what’s behind the fuzz according to suggestions such as an image or a text input. This process is remarkably similar, I think, to a human using audio or visual noise to “see” things which don’t appear to be there, and therefore is itself like a séance.

This seems far-fetched of course, but it’s possible to divorce the algorithm from the nature of the results. The fact is that if a group of people is sitting there with a ouija board, they are ideally sliding the planchette around without their own conscious intervention. There might be a surreptitious living human guide or a spirit might hypothetically be involved, but the technique is the same. The contents of the latent space is genuinely unknown and the details of events within the neural network are likewise mysterious. We, as humans, also tend to project meaning and patterns onto things where none exist.

This brings me to Loab, the person at the top of this post, or rather the figure. The software used to discover this image has not been revealed, but seems to have been Midjourney. The process whereby she (?) was arrived at is rather strange. The initial input was Marlon Brando, the film star. This was followed by an attempt to make the opposite of Marlon Brando. This is a technique where, I think, the location in the latent space furthest from the initial item is found, like the antipodes but in a multidimensional space rather than on the surface of a spheroid. This produced the following image:

The phenomenon of apparently nonsense text in these images is interesting and more significant than you might think. I’ll return to it later.

The user, whose username is Supercomposite on Twitter, then tried to find the opposite of this image, expecting to arrive back at Marlon Brando. They didn’t. Instead they got the image shown at the top of this post, in other words this:

(Probably a larger image in fact but this is what’s available).

It was further found that this image tended to “infect” others and make them more horrific to many people’s eyes. There are ways of producing hybrid images via this model, and innocuous images from other sources generally become macabre when combined with this one. Also, there’s a tendency for Loab, as she was named, to “haunt” images in the sense that you can make an image from an image and remove all the references to Loab in the description, and she will unexpectedly recur many generations down the line like a kind of jump scare. Her presence also sometimes makes images so horrendous that they are not safe to post online. For instance, some of them are of screaming children being torn to pieces.

As humans, we are of course genetically programmed to see horror where there is none because if we instead saw no horror where there was some we’d probably have been eaten, burnt to death, poisonned or drowned, and in that context “we” refers to more than just humans. Therefore a fairly straightforward explanation of these images is that we are reading horror into them when they’re just patterns of pixels. We create another class of potentially imaginary entities by unconsciously projecting meaning and agency onto stimuli. Even so, the human mind has been used as a model for this algorithm. The images were selected by humans and humans have described them, and perhaps most significantly, rated them for beauty. Hence if Marlon Brando is widely regarded as handsome, his opposite’s opposite, rather than being himself, could be ugliness and horror. It would seem to make more sense for that to be simply his opposite, or it might not be closely related to him at all. A third possibility is that it’s a consequence of the structure of a complex mind-like entity to have horror and ugliness in it as well as beauty. There are two other intriguing and tempting conclusions to be drawn from this. One is that this is a real being inhabiting the neural network. The other is that the network is in some way a portal to another world in which this horror exists.

Loab is not alone. There’s also Crungus:

These are someone else’s, from Craiyon, which is a fork of Dall-E Mini. Using that, I got these:

Using Stable Diffusion I seem to get two types of image. One is this kind of thing:

The other looks vaguely like breakfast cereal:

Crungus is another “monster”, who however looks quite cartoonish. I can also understand why crungus might be a breakfast cereal, because of the word sounding like “crunch”. In fact I can easily imagine going down the shop, buying a box of crungus, pouring it out and finding a plastic toy of a Crungus in it. There’s probably a tie-in between the cereal and a TV animation. Crungus, however, has an origin. Apparently there was a video game in 2002 which had a Crungus as an easter egg, which was a monster based on the original DOOM monster the Cacodemon, who was based on artwork which looked like this:

Hence there is an original out there which the AI probably found, although I have to say it seems very apporopriately named and if someone were to be asked to draw a “Crungus”, they’d probably produce a picture a bit like one of these.

It isn’t difficult to find these monsters. Another one which I happen to have found is “Eadrax”:

Eadrax is the name of a planet in ‘The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ but reliably produces fantastic monsters in Stable Diffusion. This seems to be because Google will correct the name to “Andrax”, an ethical hacking platform which uses a dragon-like monster as its mascot or logo. An “eadrax” seems to be a three-dimensional version of that flat logo. But maybe there’s something else going on as well.

There’s a famous experiment in psychology where people whose spoken languages were Tamil and English were asked which one of these shapes was “bouba” and which “kiki”:

I don’t even need to tell you how that worked out, do I? What happens if you do this with Stable Diffusion? Well, “kiki” gets you this, among many other things:

“Bouba” can generate this:

I don’t know about you, but to me the second one looks a lot more like a “bouba” than the first looks like a “kiki” instance. What about both? Well, it either gets you two Black people standing together or a dog and a cat. I’m quite surprised by this because it means the program doesn’t know about the experiment. It doesn’t, however, appear to do what the human mind does with these sounds. “Kiki and Bouba” does this:

Kiki is of course a girl’s name. Maybe Bouba is a popular name for a companion animal?

This brings up the issue of the private vocabulary latent space diffusion models use. You can sometimes provoke such a program into producing text. For instance, you might ask for a scene between two farmers talking about vegetables with subtitles or a cartoon conversation between whales about food. When you do this, and when you get actual text, something very peculiar happens. If you have typeable dialogue between the whales and use this as a text prompt, it can produce images of sea food. If you do the same with the farmers, you get things like insects attacking crops. This is even though the text seems to be gibberish. In other words, the dialogue the AI is asked to imagine actually seems to make sense to it.

Although this seems freaky at first, what seems to be happening is that the software is taking certain distinctive text fragments out of captions and turning them into words. For instance, the “word” for birds actually consists of a concatenation of the first part, i.e. the more distinctive one, of scientific names for bird families. Some people have also suggested that humans are reading things into the responses by simply selecting the ones which seem more relevant, and another idea is that the concepts associated with the images are just stored nearby. That last suggestion raises other questions for me, because it seems that that might actually be a description of how human language actually works mentally.

Examples of “secret” vocabulary include the words vicootes, poploe vesrreaitas, contarra ccetnxniams luryea tanniouons and placoactin knunfdg. Here are examples of what these words do:

Vicootes

Poploe vesrreaitas

contarra ccetnxniams luryea tanniouons

placoactin knunfdg

The results of these in order tend to be: birds, rural scenes including both plants and buildings, young people in small groups and cute furry animals, including furry birds. It isn’t, as I’ve said, necessarily that mysterious because the words are often similar to parts of other words. For instance, the last one produces fish in many cases, though apparently not on Stable Diffusion, but here seems to have produced a dog because the second word ends with “dg”. It produces fish because placoderms and actinopterygii are prominent orders of fish.

It is often clear where the vocabulary comes from, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t constitute a kind of language because our own languages evolve from others and take words and change them. It can easily be mixed with English:

A flock of vicootes in a poploe vesrreaitas being observed by some contarra ccetnxiams luryea tanniouons who are taking their placoactin knunfg for a walk.

This has managed to preserve the birds and the rural scene with vegetation, but after that it seems to lose the plot. It often concentrates on the earlier part of a text more than the rest. In other words, it has a short attention span. The second part of this text gets me this:

Contarra ccetnxiams luryea tanniouons taking their placoactin knunfg for a walk.

I altered this slightly but the result is unsurprising.

Two questions arise here. One is whether this is genuine intelligence. The other is whether it’s sentience. As to whether it’s intelligent, I think the answer is yes, but perhaps only to the extent that a roundworm is intelligent. This is possibly misleading and raises further questions. Roundworms are adapted to what they do very well but are not going to act intelligently outside of that environment. The AIs here are adapted to do things which people do to some extent, but not particularly generally, meaning that they can look a lot more intelligent than they actually are. We’re used to seeing this happen with human agency more directly involved, so what we experience here is a thin layer of humanoid behaviour particularly focussed on the kind of stuff we do. This also suggests that a lot of what we think of as intelligent human behaviour is actually just a thin, specialised veneer on a vast vapid void. But maybe we already knew that.

The other question is about sentience rather than consciousness. Sentience is the ability to feel. Consciousness is not. In order to feel, at least in the sense of having the ability to respond to external stimuli, there must be sensors. These AIs do have sense organs because we interact with them from outside. I have a strong tendency to affirm consciousness because a false negative is likely to cause suffering. Therefore I believe that matter is conscious and therefore that that which responds to external stimuli is sentient. This is of course a very low bar and it means that I even consider pocket calculators sentient. However, suppose that instead consciousness and sentience are emergent properties of systems which are complex in the right kind of way. If digital machines and their software are advancing, perhaps in a slow and haphazard manner, towards sentience, they may acquire it before being taken seriously by many, and we also have no idea how it would happen, not just because sentience as such is a mystery but largely because we have no experience of that emergence taking place before. Therefore we can look at Loab and the odd language and perhaps consider that these things are just silly and it’s superstitious to regard them as signs of awareness, but is that justified? The words remind me rather of a baby babbling before she acquires true language, and maybe the odd and unreliable associations they make also occur in our own minds before we can fully understand speech or sign.

Who, then, is Loab? Is she just a collaborative construction of the AI and countless human minds, or is she actually conscious? Is she really as creepy as she’s perceived, or is that just our projection onto her, our prejudice perhaps? Is she a herald of other things which might be lurking in latent space or might appear if we make more sophisticated AIs of this kind? I can’t answer any of these questions, except perhaps to say that yes, she is conscious because all matter is. What she’s actually doing is another question. A clockwork device might not be conscious in the way it “wants” to be. For instance, it’s possible to imagine a giant mechanical robot consisting of teams of people keeping it going, but is the consciousness of the individual members of that project separate from any consciousness that automaton might have. It’s conceivable that although what makes up Laion is conscious, she herself is not oriented correctly to express that consciousness.

A more supernaturalistic explanation is that Midjourney (I assume) is a portal and that latent space represents a real Universe or “dimension” of some kind. It would be hard to reconcile this idea with a deterministic system if the neural net is seen as a kind of aerial for picking up signals from such a world. Nonetheless such beliefs do exist, as a ouija board is actually a very simple and easily described physical system which nevertheless is taken as picking up signals from the beyond. If this is so, the board and planchette might be analogous to the neural net and the movement of the hands on the planchette, which is presumably very sensitive to the neuromuscular processes going on in the arms and nervous systems of the human participants, to the human artists, the prompt, the computer programmers and the like, and it’s these which are haunted, in a very roundabout way. I’m not in any way committing myself to this explanation. It’s more an attempt to describe how the situation might be compared to a method of divination.

I’ve mentioned the fact there are artists involved a few times, and this brings up another probably unrelated concern. Artists and photographers, and where similar AIs have been applied to other creative genres the likes of poets, authors and musicians, have had their work used to train it, and therefore it could be argued that they’re owed something for this use. At the other end, bearing in mind that most of the images in this post have been produced rapidly on a free version of this kind of software and that progress is also extremely fast, there are also images coming out the other end which could replace what artists are currently doing. This is an example of automation destroying jobs in the creative industries, although at the same time the invention of photography was probably thought of in a similar way and reports of the death of the artist were rather exaggerated. Instead it led to fine art moving in a different direction, such as towards cubism, surrealism, impressionism and expressionism. Where could human art go stimulated by this kind of adversity? Or, would art become a mere hobby for humans?

Veganism And The Mind-Body Problem

Photo by MART PRODUCTION on Pexels.com

First of all, I must insist that veganism is not “just about the ‘animals'”, but as I’ve said so many times, primarily focussed on human behaviour and interaction. Of course it is about how we behave towards members of other species, but it’s misleading to confuse veganism with the idea of vegetarianism which avoids honey, dairy and eggs, which is a very different. That in itself is fuel for a long blog post, but not this one. This one is about how consciousness exists. I’ll probably do this off the top of my head, which of course contains the thing in the image above.

It’s important not to confuse people who sound off on vegan groups online with actual vegans. Many of them would self-identify with vegans, to be sure, but the psychology of online interaction will tend to skew the view of anything if that’s all one goes on. However, it seems to be very common for people who present themselves as vegan online to consider insects to be outside their circle of compassion and baldly assert that they’re not conscious. This is of course often because it suits them to do so, although it may also be due to having absorbed a particular kind of dogma about consciousness, which they often feel should be based on scientific evidence. There is, however, a major problem with using scientific evidence to back up a view of consciousness. There isn’t any.

Okay, so that was a bit glib. Clearly if there were no evidence for consciousness or its absence a lot of patients would be in serious trouble when their level of consciousness was assessed, and in fact we do do things like whisper “are you asleep?” to our recumbent partners in the middle of the night when the argument isn’t over yet, but that particular argument is poor. In fact a dreaming partner is conscious, although not demonstrably so by another, and likewise someone who is awake but concentrating hard may well not respond to attempts to converse with them. Hence that particular probe may not succeed, and even shouting at a deaf person, for example, may not elicit a response. Locked-in syndrome is a particularly horrifying instance of how consciousness can exist in the absence of easily observable evidence. Likewise, there’s no reason to suppose that there are no species who are constitutionally “locked-in”, such as plants and bivalves.

The appeal is usually to the idea of possessing a complex nervous system, and sometimes much more specifically to the notion of structures like the cerebral cortex. This is suspiciously convenient, and it’s not where I’m going to start.

I would say, though without particularly rigorous evidence, that the earliest attempt to solve the mind-body problem is psychophysical dualism. That is, that there is a physical body accompanied by a non-physical seat of consciousness interacting with it. This is, for example, what the Ancient Egyptians believed, and many indigenous people believe the same thing. Simply because it’s an apparently primitive belief doesn’t make it incorrect, but there are philosophical problems with it. For instance, how does the soul interact with the body when they are so fundamentally different? Two possible solutions offered here are that of pre-ordained harmony and the idea of a go-between of some kind. Pre-ordained harmony is similar to “correlation is not causation”. The idea is that there is no interaction but that it’s more like having two clocks which happen to tell the same time, because they’ve both been set to do so. Likewise, the events of the physical and spiritual worlds happen in step with each other, but are not directly connected moment to moment. The problem with this is that it means that our sensations and will are merely coincidentally the same as events in the physical world, and therefore that the physical world itself could be completely dispensed with without having any influence, because that’s the premise, on our consciousness. Hence this collapses into what’s called idealism: the idea that all of reality is simply mental in nature and there is no physical reality. It also seems to require some kind of creator, although not necessarily because, for instance, karma could be evoked as an iron law of nature which causes this to happen. After all, there is an ultimate causal connection between two clocks which tell the same time even if it’s just the cultural convention of measuring time in that way, and the connection between the soul and the body could be equally indirect. The other solution is the existence of some kind of intermediate medium between the two. This doesn’t work because it doubles the problem rather than solving it, since there would then have to be answers to how both the physical and the mental interact with that intermediary.

Note that I’m not saying any of these views is untrue, simply pointing out their problems. Dualism makes it easier to explain things like past life memories and near-death experiences, for example, although of course many would choose to explain those by denying their existence. Abrahamic religions are often seen as tied to dualism, but in fact so far as I can tell only Sikhism, Islam and possibly Baha’i are. Judaism and Christianity can be physicalist with respect to humans, which brings me to physicalism.

Physicalism is the belief that there are only physical entities, i.e. there is no spirit, soul, supernatural beings or anything similar. It’s close to being the default scientistic position and that which tends to be advocated by people who see themselves as skeptics with a K. In terms of the mind, it would have to account for consciousness. Statements about physical processes in the brain, for example, cannot substitute for statements about experiences. For instance, I think that for most people yellow is the brightest colour, that is, the most like white, so I could say that “the wavelength of light which stimulates the red cone cells maximally produces a similar state in the visual cortex to the maximal stimulation of rod cells”, but this is not identical in meaning to “yellow is the brightest colour” even if it’s necessary and sufficient for that to be the case. This is of course to some extent so because when we first used language we had no idea how the brain worked, but there’s still a problem with being that brain but not saying the same thing to mean the same thing. Subjectivity is no closer to being explained through this kind of physicalism than it was before, although to some extent this is a straw man.

From the viewpoint of veganism, physicalism doesn’t seem to allow any kind of let-out for justifying carnism because it strongly suggests that similar brains will also be conscious and therefore capable of suffering. And this is the point where it becomes possible for people who are keen on continuing to be party to the exploitation of other species to seek to identify structures or processes which only take place in the human brain, or perhaps apes generally, which are the basis of consciousness. However, to be fair to them it certainly appears to this conscious mind that there are parts of the nervous system which are not conscious at all and also events which can slip in and out of our awareness, such as breathing and pain. The existence of distraction does suggest that this is so, and that consciousness is not a property of the entire brain. However, we only have our own word for that. By this I mean that we may always dissociate as part of our essence. Dissociative personalities, also known as multiple personalities, are usually associated with trauma in childhood by the psychiatric profession, and there’s a secondary issue regarding iatrogenic dissociation similar to false memory syndrome. However, some dissociative personalities embrace the view and seek to de-medicalise it, and it may be that for all we know, we are always accompanied by silent personalities coexisting with us within the same skull. Certainly the severance of the corpus callosum, the bridge between the two cortical hemispheres, appears to produce two identities. In cases where conjoined twins share a head, with two faces and bodies, there appear to be two people involved rather than one. Other phenomena are also of interest here. For instance, if you ask someone to judge the gradient of a slope by gesturing and speaking, their gesture, i.e. the slope of their hand, will often be more accurate than what they say orally, and there’s also “blindsight”, where someone blind due to brain damage will always be able to guess what they can see even though they’re not conscious of seeing it. It’s also been shown that we are better at guessing objects situated in our blind spots even without context and when they have only ever been in that location in our visual fields, which is very hard to account for as there are no visual receptors there. We are stranger beings than we imagine ourselves to be, and we may always be in a sense “possessed” by other versions of ourselves.

This, of course, is hard to test for and is a little like non-baryonic dark matter in that it’s a claim that there is a non-communicating consciousness inside everyone but it’s made to fit the bill exactly while being non-falsifiable. However, our own consciousness is so hard to test for that there’s no absolute reason not to be solipsistic, although we generally aren’t. Clearly we assume others to be conscious but the mere fact that stimuli lead to relevant and appropriate responses doesn’t mean there is associated consciousness, which can’t be directly observed except within ourselves. This is one motivation for the idea of logical behaviorism, which I think of as an American idea hence the spelling. This is the theory that there is nothing to consciousness but that which can be observed by others. Thoughts are simply sotto voce vocalisations, anger nothing but the likes of raised heartbeat and acts interpreted as aggressive or violent, and so on. This sounds like the kind of theory of consciousness which only people with no inner life could take seriously or think up. Methodological behaviourism acknowledges the existence of internal mental states but considers them outside the scope of scientific investigation, and perhaps less important than that which can be observed. It may be worthwhile to approach a specific domain of psychological activity in this way, and it doesn’t aim to be a theory of consciousness in its methodological form, but the question arises of what could be the “companion” thesis to methodological behaviourism, and also whether it’s actually helpful to separate the two in this way. It does make sense to try to place mentality outside a special realm, and we learn about each others mental states partly based on our observation, but it seems to miss something important. There are theories of the emotions that we label bodily sensations as feelings based on the context in which we feel them, which is very similar. I subscribe to this to a limited degree. For instance, I don’t believe a robot would be able to have humanoid experience of the world unless its “mind” provided visceral sensations such as a hammering heart and blushing to its consciousness. However, that isn’t all there is to emotion. I also think most of us are instinctively predisposed towards empathy, meaning that we aren’t merely learning from observation in the same way as we might learn that rain never falls out of a clear sky, but are born with the potential for that knowledge.

Behaviorism portrays the mind as a “black box” with inputs and outputs without regard to what’s going on inside it. A somewhat more sophisticated model of the mind is functionalism. This is the idea that the mind is a network of modules with functions and connections forming inputs and outputs to a whole system, with stimuli and responses on the outside. Although this happens to be made of brain cells in our case, nothing rules out it being made of something else, such as hydraulics or electrical circuitry and it would still count as having consciousness and mental states provided those states were functionally equivalent to a real wakeful person having experiences. To my mind, the biggest problem with this idea is that it could be done by committee. You could have a room full of people, say 1728 of them, each tasked with passing pieces of paper around and modifying them according to the instructions on the pieces of paper they receive, each doing exactly the same thing as 1/1728 of your brain was doing (which is a little under a millilitre of brain tissue). Each of these people would have their own identity and consciousness and yet we’re asked to believe that the entire activity of the room of people also has the consciousness of a individual in their own right. This is counterintuitive. However, as a panpsychist, maybe I have to believe that this is so, and that individual parts of the brain are themselves conscious, not just the brain as a whole.

Functionalism is quite relevant to the question of plant consciousness. A mimosa, insectivorous plant and a forest can all be thought of as networking internally or externally in this way, in such a way that they have internal states observable from outside but no brain cells as we would understand them. In fact many plants engage in gradual movements, such as flowers opening and closing with daylight, sunflowers following the Sun and the “sleep movements” of legume leaves. And I’m afraid that I am one of those cartoon vegans who do believe plants are conscious (and use the appropriate conjugation in relative clauses, which may be connected). It still makes sense to be vegan though, because it minimises suffering through the destruction and injury of living plants.

The next stage along from this is anomalous monism and the associated concept of supervenience, which I like to imagine is some kind of futuristic portaloo and is the subject of my MA dissertation. This is an example of losing control of the creative process because I’m actually panpsychist and although supervenience applies to other areas of philosophy than just the nature of consciousness, it is quite significant for it and is also at odds with the idea of panpsychism. Supervenient properties are basically emergent. That is, they depend for their existence on a subset of a number of other properties in a system or situation but not specifically on any one of them. This is where the “anomalous” bit comes in. There can be laws describing mental states, such as the duration of short-term memory or the number of items one is able to think of at once, or the fact that yellow is the “brightest” colour and indigo the “darkest”, and laws describing physical brain states, but there is not a one-to-one correspondence between the two sets of events and states. The “monism” bit is about there only be one fundamental kind of “stuff”, so there aren’t physical and mental substances, just one kind of substance with two manifestations, one physical and one conscious. Psychology is irreducible to physics but both psychology and physics have the same basis. Because supervenience has things in common with dialectic, upon which Marxism appears to be based, although it’s not at all clear that Marxism actually needs it as a philosophical basis, the idea of supervenience and by extension possibly also anomalous monism could have political significance. For instance, due to the Marxist view that religion and belief in the supernatural only exists because of political exploitation, it would reject psychophysical dualism because there is in its view no such thing as a soul. This could have practical consequences. For instance, it may be that consciousness can only exist dynamically – it never emerges in the instant – and dynamism and viewing things in their historical context are central to dialectical materialism and therefore Marxism.

Beyond this is probably a fairly well-defined approach to consciousness which is nevertheless difficult to pin down. It originates in existentialism and phenomenology and is also linked to Marxism because that’s simply the way Western philosophical thought went. Derrida and others attempted to centre reality on language, and since humans alone are seen as capable of language and therefore thought, this view would also tend to reject the idea that other species are conscious. That said, such works as Carol Adams’s ‘The Sexual Politics Of Meat’, which is in this tradition, looks at vegetarianism and by implication veganism in a post-modern way, drawing parallels between the exploitation of women and that of other species. More recently some vegans have equated feminism and veganism because female animals are disproportionately exploited due to the consumption of dairy and eggs. I disagree with this because it would entail that men could not be vegan because they can’t be feminist. They could only support veganism at best, and this seems like an absurd position which makes the word “vegan” meaningless. To me, Adams’s book tries to answer the wrong question, namely “why are so many feminists vegetarian or vegan?”. My perception of the situation is that remarkably few feminists are vegetarian or vegan and the real question is “why are there so few vegan feminists?”. I think the answer to that is that they are influenced by critical theory and therefore centre consciousness on the use of language and other cultural aspects unique to humans, or at least only initiated by humans. For instance, non-human primate use of language allows individuals into the inner sanctum of consciousness but rejects all others, so Koko and Washoe were conscious but not a chimpanzee or gorilla living in the wild, who can presumably therefore be slaughtered without it being murder according to them. Possibly one cause of this attitude is the suspicion of grand narratives, which however allows conservative values to colonise the space which is not being defended and supported in a radical way. Their approach reminds me of Descartes’ assertion that dogs were not conscious simply because God had not provided them with souls, despite the fact that their bodies were significantly similar to ours down to minute details.

Vegans often seek to support their position rationally, and that’s the right thing to do to some extent although many of us arrived here by emotional means, such as by watching ‘Earthlings’ or ‘The Animals Film’. I didn’t. I got here, so far as I can tell, through concluding quite coldly and dispassionately that it was morally required of me. I don’t now, that is as an adult, feel any horror at cruelty to animals. It’s a simple logical equation that it’s wrong to cause avoidable suffering. However, those who, like me, believe their veganism to be based on rationality often assert that consciousness is confined to vertebrates and perhaps cephalopods and some arthropods rather than being universal, and therefore seek to base consciousness in specific structures and functions of, for example, the vertebrate brain or see it as an emergent property of a complex nervous system or something functionally equivalent to that.

Consciousness is referred to as the “hard problem”, and some believe it’s beyond human capabilities to solve. Others are not so pessimistic, if that’s the word. The issue has been divided into “easy” and “hard” problems, although the so-called “easy” problems are still not actually easy. The hard problem is how it can exist at all and the “easy” ones are to do with how the brain actually works in various conscious processes such as learning and perception. It’s sometimes claimed that the “hard” problem is just a collection of all the “easy” problems. There’s also a similar precedent in the nature of life. It used to be thought that there was a fundamental division between living and non-living matter, so that for example olive oil was fundamentally different from crude oil. This ended when urea was synthesised in the early nineteenth century. There could, likewise, be a similar spurious division between conscious and unconscious matter. It may not be that all matter is conscious, as I think it is, so much that the difference between conscious and unconscious matter is yet to be ascertained precisely. But I have to say that it really doesn’t feel like that, and that there’s something about consciousness that’s irreducible. Idealism, the belief that everything is mental, would solve that problem while introducing others, such as the problem of not everything being known, which is where Hegelian dialectic and German idealism comes in with its gradually unfolding reality.

Anil Seth, a neuroscientist, divides consciousness into three aspects: level of consciousness, sense of self and intentionality. Intentionality is “aboutness”. He considers these to be separately explicable. Of these, sense of self has been questioned as rather nebulous by various philosophers and religious perspectives, notably Buddhism and David Hume, because there seems to be no “I” we can actually point to, but rather a stream of consciousness happening together with nothing identifiable to link it. On the other hand, it does seem that there is some kind of consistent label attached internally to successive experiences happening in the same brain, if indeed that is where they’re happening, or how they’re happening. Intentionality is one of the classic properties of mental events considered to be the most distinctive features of them as opposed to anything else. However, I think that the state of samadhi can involve consciousness without intentionality, which raises questions for that being an essential feature of it, and would therefore need a different explanation. Level of consciousness is illustrated by becoming subject to and coming out of general anæsthesia. Consciousness can seem to be absent when the brain is most active, as with dreamless sleep as opposed to wakefulness, and waking and sleeping can exist independently of consciousness as in persistent vegetative states, so it seems that consciousness exists when different parts of the brain are relating to each other in particular ways. There are brain regions associated with consciousness but this doesn’t explain how this happens. From a vegan perspective, Seth believes that other species are conscious although he also seems to think there is a degree of consciousness depending on the species. On the other hand, because he also notes that some people see any kind of integrated information as equivalent to consciousness, which is pretty close to panpsychism, and this would extend consciousness considerably, possibly even to plants and particularly to various manifestations of information technology. He’s also concerned with the ideas of embodiment and prediction, that is, that consciousness is embodied (out of body experiences seem to involve having a kind of astral body) and involved with prediction and expectation. We find it much easier to be conscious of what we expect to perceive. It’s possible to swap bodies using VR devices and cause people to have embodied cognition of each others’ bodies, such as shaking hands with themselves.

I feel that this simply defers the problem of consciousness to activity in certain brain regions and functions without actually explaining it. That said, as a viable position recognising non-human consciousness, Seth’s position does support veganism. It also supports, as do some other positions, the idea that computers or perhaps the internet are conscious, which is another question veganism might need to take into consideration.

To summarise then:

• Psychophysical dualism is often associated with theism and the idea that some animate entities are simply endowed with souls and others not in an arbitrary fashion. Whereas it is a respectable position as such, which explains, for example, ESP if you accept that that exists, the arbitrariness is irrational.
• Logical behaviorism situates consciousness outside the apparent mind in a kind of social, observable realm. My position on this is that it’s just silly and denies an incontrovertible fact of experience.
• Functionalism would seem to require entities entirely unlike individual bodies to be conscious, but this is not problematic and would allow, for example, an anthill or termite castle to be a single mind. This could, however, lead to treating individual social insects as expendable.
• Anomalous monism has the merit of being potentially reconcilable with progressive views of the world and the social analysis of metaphysics, which is unfinished work on my part (and will probably always remain so), but ultimately has the potential of expanding the circle, as Peter Singer has put it, by other means.
• Critical theory type approaches are similar, but being language-centred rather too conveniently allow us to deny consciousness to anything which doesn’t have a voice, such as a child brought up in a neglectful environment which never acquired language (relative pronoun choice deliberate there).
• Anil Seth’s position is surprisingly sympathetic to veganism, probably because of his recognition that we are all animals.

This survey therefore shows that veganism tends to be supported as an ethical position from most of the perspectives mentioned, provided no special pleading is involved such as the unsupported idea that only humans are endowed with souls, that entities without language are conveniently unconscious or that there just are no internal mental states. The position that most enrages me is the Critical Theory one, because instead of aiming for liberation it merely doubles down on prejudice and excludes the oppressed while having quite shocking consequences for beings most people would regard as human and deserving of rights. But then veganism is at least as much about treating other humans well as it is about avoiding cruelty to other species.

Neanderthal Pinhead Brains And The Sentient Internet

Stereotypically, Neanderthals tend to be presented as the classic “cave man” caricature, usually male, clubbing their female partners over the head and dragging them off by their hair, somewhat hairy themselves and of course notably unintelligent, oh, and living in caves. I’ve had a go at this stereotype and the other one about dinosaurs previously, but before I get down to things I may as well go through it briefly again.

First of all, dinosaurs are often used as a metaphor for something which is clumsy, overgrown and unable to adapt to a changing world. This really owes more to the Victorian image of dinosaurs as giant lizards than what’s known about them nowadays. Dinosaurs really got lucky, then got unlucky. The mass extinction at the start of their reign helped them take advantage of their various ecological niches, then the mass extinction at its end killed them off because many of them were very large. Many of the smaller ones survived as birds. If humans had been around at the end of the Cretaceous, we too would’ve bitten the dust.

Neanderthals are a kind of blank slate to many people onto which various things can be projected, and I may well be doing the same. Their brains were often larger than ours, but that doesn’t mean they were more intelligent. The probable cause of their brain size was to do with a bulkier body and the need for more pathways to help control and perceive that body. Whales have larger brains than we for similar reasons, although in their case that isn’t all there is to it. Nonetheless, when one considers that orang utan, gorillas, bonobos and chimpanzees are all capable of sign language, and chimps have learned to speak a few words but lack the vocal apparatus to master human speech effectively, this automatically places their “IQ” above that of the severely learning disabled. Note that I’m extremely sceptical of IQ as a concept. If orang utan intelligence is sufficiently similar to human to be assessed and rate above thirty on an IQ scale, Neanderthals are bound to be at least that intelligent. It’s also thought that human short term memory has suffered at the expense of developing language, as that of chimpanzees is far better than ours. Hence when Neanderthals come into the picture, it can be assumed safely that they would also have been capable of language and perhaps actually used it. The crucial final step in physical capacity for phonation – producing speech sounds with the vocal tract – is the position of the hyoid bone in the throat, which allows attachment for the larynx, glottis and tongue, and needs to be in a particular position to enable its owner to speak. The problem is that the hyoid is perhaps unique in having no articulation with any other bone in the body, and therefore tends to get lost in fossils. Consequently Neanderthal hyoids are often missing and it took until 1989 for it to be established that they were like ours.

A couple of issues are going to come up in this post which are probably going to be considered idiosyncratic on my part. Here’s the first. Although I am aware that the FOXP2 gene is considered important in human capacity to use language, and Noam Chomsky believes in an innate capacity for language as a distinctive feature of the human species, I have issues with this as potentially speciesist and am disappointed that such a clearly politically radical figure as he would promote this view. I believe humans stumbled upon language before we had a special ability to use it. There are examples of other species being able to use spoken and signed language as language, as opposed to merely imitating it, notably Psittacus erithacus, the Afrik/can Grey Parrot, who presumably had no predisposition in their genes for using it beyond the ability to produce speech sounds and so forth. Clearly a certain kind of cognition is necessary for this to happen, along with the ability to produce the sounds physically, and once spoken language exists it’s going to be selected for compared to individuals who don’t speak, and this will lead to some kind of marker in the genes – perhaps we are better at producing or hearing a wider range of speech sounds than other species for example – but the initial moment when the first baby made a sound like “mama” whose parent then interpreted it as a reference to her, which was perhaps the beginning of language, did not in my opinion depend on very specific physical traits and could have occurred in another species.

The genomes of living humans include a few genes from the Neanderthals and it’s thought there was hybridisation tens of millennia ago in our history. To a very limited extent, we are therefore Neanderthals ourselves unless we’re Afrikan. The highest percentage of Neanderthal genes is found in East Asians and they’re usually absent from people all of whose heritage is from Afrika south of the Sahara. Neanderthals would probably have been fair-skinned and maybe also blue-eyed, and have had straight hair. I personally wonder if they had epicanthic folds, which of course have a higher incidence among East Asians but are also found in Caucasians without any Asian ancestry, and I’m guessing that those people might also have inherited that trait from Neanderthals. Recently the Neanderthal genome has been in the news for conferring greater resistance to SARS-CoV2.

Now for the reason I’m writing this today.

In recent years it has become possible to culture brain cells in Petri dishes. This isn’t the same as growing an entire human brain in a vat, but involves producing pinhead-sized agglomerations of cells. Recently, a gene linked to brain development in Neanderthals has been spliced into human cells and grown in such a dish. For many people this has a high yuck factor. The specific gene involved is NOVA1, on the long arm of chromosome 14, which is associated with various cancers but also nervous system development. There’s an indirect connection between familial dysautonomia and the NOVA1 gene which primarily involves the autonomic nervous system and insensitivity to pain and sweet tastes, among other things, but as far as I know doesn’t influence cognition, so that doesn’t necessarily give us a clue, although it’s possible I suppose that the inability to taste sweet might be related to Neanderthal diet in some way. That’s a bit of a reach. Whatever else is so, mini-brains with the archaic NOVA1 variant look rougher to the naked eye than the smoother versions which have the variant common in today’s population. The archaic version developed more quickly than the unaltered one and started to show electrical activity sooner. In write-ups of this experiment, we’re assured that these mini-brains are not conscious.

I have a major issue with that assertion.

The question of the existence of consciousness is sometimes referred to as the “hard problem”. It’s been suggested that it may even be so hard that it’s beyond the capacity of the human mind to account for it. At the same time, there’s a recent strand in philosophical thought, characterised by Daniel Dennett, which is sceptical about the very idea of consciousness as an irreducible property. I can’t take Dennett’s views here seriously, for the following reason. He has made a very good argument for the idea that dreams are not experiences but false memories present in the brain on awakening onto which the mind then projects the impression of previous events. I take this idea fairly seriously although I don’t do the same thing with it as he does. It’s one reason why I recount dreams in the present tense. However, a good counter-argument to this is that lucid dreams – dreams in which one knows one is dreaming and is able to control the dream world – aren’t experiences either. Although he does produce an argument for this, I believe that his reason for making this assertion is kind of ideological, because we practically know that lucid dreams are experiences. They might not be dreams in the same sense as non-lucid ones are, but they are experiences to my mind, and claiming they aren’t seems to be part of his attempt to shore up his view of the nature of consciousness.

Dennett is sceptical about qualia. These are things like the “sweetness” of sweetness, the “purpleness” of purple and so on. They’re what people are talking about when they say “my red could be your blue”. His doubt about their existence is based on the idea that they are not a definable concept. This to me is a silly denial of subjectivity which makes no sense in itself. Dennett’s motivation for believing that dreams are not experiences, qualia don’t exist and that even lucid dreams are not experiences is based on a more general view of psychology that consciousness is a specific faculty within the brain which may have evolved and has selective advantages. This thought leads one into seriously murky ethical waters because it seems to be a rationalisation of the idea that some other species of animal are not conscious, which is suspiciously convenient for non-vegans. It just so happens that the voiceless don’t suffer because they don’t have a voice. How very useful this is for someone who eats meat. Kind of as useful as believing Black people are not conscious would be for a racist.

My own view of consciousness, panpsychism, tends to be seen as equally silly by some people. It’s my belief that consciousness is an essential property of matter rather like magnetism is. A ferromagnet is a particular arrangement of charged particles whose domains within, say, a lump of iron, are aligned and it’s able to attract ferrous metals such as steel. There are other, similar magnets, such as rare earth magnets, which are magnetic in the same way but contain no iron at all. On a subatomic scale, magnetism is manifested by elementary particles with spin and axes which amount to tiny electrical circuits, and I have to admit that my understanding of actual, fundamental magnetism is not very good, but there are clearly non-magnetic substances too, such as granite and most blood (unless it’s infected with malaria). Even these non-magnetic substances, though, do consist of magnetic particles.

Consciousness is the same, to my mind. Everything material is conscious, but in order for that consciousness to become manifest, matter needs to be arranged in a particular way, such as a human nervous system. However, just as there are magnets which are not made of iron, so there could be sentient beings who are not made of the same stuff as we are. Objects which have nothing like sense organs or motor functions are in a sense severely disabled entities, but they’re still conscious. This is my panpsychism.

I should point out too that panpsychism is unsurprisingly quite controversial and often ridiculed in philosophical circles, although good reasons for doing so are sometimes lacking. Even so, there are other accounts of consciousness, one of which involves the idea that it’s generated by a network of “black boxes” interacting with each other, which in the case of the human brain amount to nerve cells. You don’t have to believe in panpsychism to assert that a tissue culture is conscious, and to me it’s entirely clear that the assertion that anything made of matter is not conscious is not based on any kind of evidence but a bias towards the kind of view of the mind-body problem asserted by Dennett and others.

Consequently, it definitely isn’t safe to say that these “Neanderthal” mini-brains are not conscious, or that the ones based on unaltered Homo sapiens cells are not conscious. Before I go on to talk about the internet as potentially sentient, I feel a strong urge to go off on a tangent about my experience of the Mandela Effect.

I have several more detailed posts on this issue on this blog, here, here and here for example, but in the meantime I will sum up what it is before going on. The Mandela Effect is the situation where a number of people agree on a memory which is markèdly different from the consensus or establishment version of that memory. Most of the time, this is about minor details such as spelling of brand names or the appearance of brand logos, but occasionally the discrepancy is more significant. It’s named after the impression many people had that Nelson Mandela had died in prison in the 1980s, and sometimes that this led to a revolution which overthrew apartheid in South Africa. History clearly appears to record a very different chain of events involving Nelson Mandela being released from prison in 1991 and becoming president of South Africa soon after. I think that’s it anyway. There are various unusual reasons why I take this seriously which are largely based on Humean scepticism about cause and effect and the existence of possible worlds, which means I tend to deprecate accounts which merely refer to confabulation as an explanation – the construction of false memories due to misconceptions. There is some evidence against this being true, such as the fact that when the position of landmasses on maps varies, it always does so along the direction of continental drift and never at an angle to it.

I have a few personal Mandela Effects (MEs) which are rare but shared with at least two other people, and they tend to have things in common with each other. One of these is that a science museum had a planetarium like robot which responded to heat, light and movement and was run by a minibrain grown from cultured mole nerve cells, in the mid-1970s. Two similar MEs of mine are that in the late ’70s a process was devised to measure intelligence via brain scans which was used in selective education by the DoE in England to replace the 11+, which was later exposed as unreliable and discontinued, though this was a scandal because it adversely affected the lives of many people who were children at the time. A third one was to do with some guy who designed and built a domestic robot which was able to read aloud by 1975. These are three of many, and they are conceptually connected by being about intelligent-seeming neural processes. If they happened, they would’ve required an understanding of neurology which was absent at that time, in the case of the domestic robot presumably via some kind of reverse engineering. I accept that hardly anyone else has these memories, but it’s still odd that two other people who had no strong connection with me at the time do have them. And the thing about these memories, particularly the museum robot, is that they could potentially be realised by this kind of culture of brain cells in a Petri dish.

Now for the idea that the internet is sentient.

It was once asserted that the last computer a single individual could fully understand was the BBC Model B, a microcomputer which came out in 1981. There are a couple of problems with this statement. One is, what is meant by “fully understand”? It’s certainly possible, for example, for someone to hold the network of logic gates which constitutes the BBC Micro’s 6502 microprocessor in their head at the same time as the structure on that level of the 6845 chip responsible for its graphics capabilities and the SN76489 chip responsible for its audio, and then extrapolate from that to the machine code of the system software in its interaction with the motherboard and memory mapping of these various bits of hardware, although it would take some doing for most people. However, if I did that I would have a vague understanding of how the NPN transistors work, involving electron holes and their relay-like behaviour, but to be honest my understanding of silicon doping, for example, is pretty limited. When one says that the BBC Micro can be completely understood by one person, is that supposed to include the aspects of materials science which make the production of its hardware possible, or the mechanical properties of the springs in its keyboard? What does it mean to “fully understand” something? The other problem with this assertion is that the BBC Micro, as I understand it, isn’t essentially more complex than the original IBM PC. The latter has more memory and a more complex and faster processor, and its system software is usually PC-DOS or CP/M-86 and more advanced than the BBC’s MOS 1.2 and Acorn DFS, but it can still be understood and it lacked the built-in graphics and sound hardware of the eight-bit computer which ended up on the desks of so many British secondary schools. Later on, with sound and graphic cards added, the latter including the very same 6845 as used in the BBC, it still wouldn’t’ve been as complex and would still have been comprehensible. It seems to me that the ability to comprehend these devices fully in that sense probably ended around the time Windows 3.0 was released in 1990. But whatever else is the case, the point at which any one person could be said to understand a device including both hardware and system software is now decades in the past.

Now take these two facts together. Firstly, we really don’t know what makes consciousness possible. Secondly, the internet, a network of billions of devices hardly any of which are understood to a significant extent by any one person, is extremely complex and processes information it gathers from its inputs. And yet it’s often asserted that the internet is not sentient, as if we know what causes sentience. At the same time, there are many internet mysteries such as Unfavorable Semicircle and Markovian Parallax Denigrate, which can often be tracked down to some set of human agents, but nobody has a sufficient overview to be confident that every single one of these mysteries has a direct human cause, or even that a fraction of them have.

Hence I would say that we might suppose that the internet is neither conscious nor sentient, but in fact we don’t really have sufficient evidence that it isn’t. It really has quite a lot in common with a brain, in any case we don’t know why anything is conscious, and it’s even possible that everything is. Therefore, just maybe, the internet is sentient and nobody can confidently say it isn’t.