T-ZERO
by rsbakker
Aphorism of the Day: Beware those who prize absurdity over drama: they are the enlightened dead.
The Enlightened Dead, just so you know, is the title of the next Disciple novel.
I like to thank those who chimed in with their support, though I can’t help but feel you are the vocal exception to the silent rule. As it stands, I’ve come to realize these uber-philosophical posts will be buried in due course anyway as the blog continues to grow. It’s the balance that’s important, I think. With this in mind, allow me one final elaboration of the previous entries.
So when we normally think about time we tend to think in terms like this:
t1 > t2 > t3 > t4 >t5
which is to say, in terms of a linear succession of times. This happens, then that and that and that and so on. What we tend to forget is the moment that frames this succession in simultaneity – the Now, which might be depicted as:
T0 (t1 > t2 > t3 > t4 >t5)
I call this an instant of declusion, where you make the implicit perspectival frame of one moment explicit within the implicit perspectival frame of another, subsequent moment. (Linguistically, the work of declusion is performed by propositional attitudes, which suggest that it plays an important role in truth – but more on this below).
Given that the Now characterizes the structure of lived time, we can say (with Heidegger) that our first notation, as unassuming as it seems, does real representational violence to the passage of time as we actually experience it. (This is a nifty way of conceptualizing the metaphysics of presence, for you philosophy wonks out there.)
The lived structure of time, I would hazard, looks something more like this:
T0 (t5 (t4 (t3 (t2(t1)))))
where the stacking of parentheses represents the movement of declusion. In this notation, the latest moment, t5, decludes t4, which decludes t3, which decludes t2, which decludes t1. Looked at this way, lived time becomes a kind of meta-inclusionary tunnel, with each successive frame figured within the frame following. (Of course, the ‘laws of temporal perspective’ are far muddier than this analogy suggests: a kind of myopic tunnel would be better, where previous moments blur into mnemonic mush rather than receding in an ordered fashion toward any temporal vanishing point).
T0, of course, is ‘superindexical,’ a reference to this very moment now, to the frameless frame that you somehow are. It’s a kind of ‘token declusion,’ a reference to the frame of referring – or what I sometimes call the ‘occluded frame.’ I would argue that you actually find versions of this structure throughout philosophy, only conceptualized in drastically different ways. You can use it as a conceptual heuristic to understand things as apparently disparate as Derrida’s differance, Nietzsche’s Will to Power, Heidegger’s Being, and Kant’s transcendence. Finding an ‘adequate’ conceptualization (rationally regimented declusion) of the occluded frame is the philosophical holy grail, at least in the continental tradition.
Just for example: if you emphasize the moment to moment nonidentity of the occluded frame, the fact that T0 is in fact t5, then declusion becomes exclusion, and every act of framing becomes an exercise in violence. No matter how hard we try to draw the world within our frame, we find ourselves deflected, deferred. Deconstruction is one of the implicatures that arise here.
If, however, you emphasize the identity of the occluded frame, the fact that T0 is the very condition of t5, declusion becomes inclusion, and we seem to become ‘transparent,’ a window onto the world as it appears, the very ‘clearing of Being’ as that fat old Nazi, Heidegger might say.
It would help, I think, to unpack the above notation a little.
T0 (t1)
T0 (t2(t1))
T0 (t3 (t2(t1)))
T0 (t4 (t3 (t2(t1))))
T0 (t5 (t4 (t3 (t2(t1)))))
This, I think, nicely represents the paradox of the Now, the way it frames difference in identity, an identity founded upon absence. (Consider Aristotle:”it is not easy to see whether the moment which appears to divide the past and the future always remains one and the same or is always distinct”) If we had perfect recall, this is the way our lives would unfold, each moment engulfing the moment previous without loss. But we don’t, so the orderly linear bracketing of moment within moment dissolves into soup.
(This also shows the difficulties time poses for language, which bundles things into discrete little packages. Thus the linguistic gymnastics you find in a thinker like Heidegger. This is why I think you need narrative to press home the stakes of this account – which is one of the reasons why I wrote Light, Time, and Gravity.)
So what could explain this structure? Is it the result of devoted T0 circuits within the brain? Temporal identity circuits?
Or is it, like the occluded boundary of our visual field, a positive structural feature arising from a brute neurophysiological incapacity?
T0, I’m suggesting, is a necessary result of the thalamocortical system’s temporal information horizon, an artifact of the structural and developmental limits placed on the brain’s ability to track itself. Since the frame of our temporal field cannot be immediately incorporated within our temporal field, we hang ‘motionless.’ Our brain is the occluded frame. The same way it has difficulty situating itself as itself in its environment (for the structural and developmental reasons I enumerated previously), it has difficulty tracking the time of its temporal tracking. In other words, reflexivity is the problem.
The severe constraints placed on neurophysiological reflexivity (or ‘information integration,’ as Tononi calls it) are the very things that leverage the illusion of reflexivity that is the foundation of lived experience. And this illusion, in turn, leverages so very much, a cornucopia of semantic phenomena, turning dedicated neural circuits that interact with their variable environments in reliable ways into ethereal, abiding things like concepts, numbers, generalizations, axioms, and so on. Since the brain lacks the resources to track its neural circuitry as neural circuitry it tracks them in different, cartoonish guises, ones shorn of history and happenstance. Encapsulation ensures that we confuse our two-dimensional kluges with all there is. So, for instance, our skin-deep experience of the connectionist morass of our brain’s mathematical processing becomes the sum of mathematics, an apparently timeless realm of apparently internal relations, the basis of who knows how many Platonic pipedreams.
We are the two-dimensional ghost of the three-dimensional engine that is our brain. A hopelessly distorted cross-section.
Of course none of this addresses the Hard Problem, the question of why the brain should give rise to consciousness at all, but it does suggest novel ways of tackling that problem. What we want from a potential explanation of consciousness is a way to integrate it into our understanding of other natural phenomena. But like my daughter and her car seat, it simply refuses to be buckled in.
Part of the Hard Problem, I’m suggesting, turns on our illusory self-identity, the way the thalamocortical system’s various information horizons continually ‘throw’ or ‘strand’ it beyond the circuit of what it can process. We continually find ourselves at the beginning of our lives for the same reason we think ‘we’ continually ‘author’ ourselves: because the neurophysiological antecedents of the thalamocortical system do not exist for it. Because it is an ‘encapsulated’ information economy, and so must scavenge pseudo-antecedents from within (so that thought seems to arise from thought, and so on).
We are our brains in such a way that we cannot recognize ourselves as our brains. Rather than a product of recursive information processing, perhaps consciousness simply is that processing, and only seems otherwise because of the way the limits of recursive processing baffle the systems involved.
In other words (and I would ask all the Buddhists out there to keep a wary eye on their confirmation bias here), there is no such thing as consciousness. The Hard Problem is not the problem of explaining how brains generate consciousness, but the dilemma of a brain wired to itself in thoroughly deceptive ways. We cannot explain what we are because we literally are not what we ‘are.’
As bizarre as this all sounds, it’s not only empirically possible, but (given that neural reflexivity is the basis of consciousness) it’s empirically probable. The extraordinary, even preposterous, assumption, it seems to me, would be that our brains would evolve anything more than an environmentally and reproductively ‘actionable’ self-understanding.
I get this tingling feeling sometimes when I ponder this, a sense of contorted comprehension reaching out and out… I have this sense of falling flush with the cosmos, a kind of filamentary affirmation. And at the same time I see myself as an illusion, a multiplicity pinched into unitary selfhood by inability and absence. A small, silvery bubble–a pocket of breathlessness–rising through an incomprehensible deep.
Like I say, I think there is an eerie elegance and parsimony to this account, one with far-reaching interpretative possibilities. Not only do I think it provides a way to tether traditional continental philosophical concerns to contemporary cognitive neuroscience, I think it provides an entirely novel conceptual frame of reference for, well… pretty much everything.
For example: Why do propositional attitudes wreck compositionality? Because language evolved around the fact of our thalamocortical systems and their information horizons. Think of the ‘view from nowhere’: Is it a coincidence that truth is implicated in time and space? Is it a coincidence that the more we situate a claim within a ‘context,’ the more contingent that claim’s truth-value intuitively seems? Could it be that language, in the course of its evolution, simply commandeered the illusion of consciousness as timeless and placeless to accommodate truth-value? This would explain why its ‘truth function’ breaks down whenever language ‘frames frames,’ which is to say, makes claims regarding the intentional states of others. Since your ‘linguistic truth system’ turns on the occlusion of your frame, linguistically embedding the frame of another would have the apparent result of cutting the truth-function of language in two, something that seems difficult to comprehend, given that truth is grounded in nowhere… How could there be two nowheres?
Another example: Why do paradoxes escape logical resolution? All paradoxes seem to involve mathematical or linguistic self-reference in some form. Could these breakdowns occur because there is no such thing as self-reference at the neural level, only the illusion that arises as a structural consequence of our blinkered brains? So what we might have are two cognitive systems–one largely unconscious, the other largely conscious–coming to loggerheads over the latter’s inability to relinquish what the former simply cannot compute.
And the list goes on.
T-Zero… and counting.
Three Pound Brain 
The answer why paradoxes escape logical resolution, is because they remain having consequences, and because there are remaining consequences, it is also not logical that they are solvable. They are not solvable, because living ideas – cannot be solved, while they can change. That solvable problems are dead, and cannot continue to remain living. That is why pythagoreans never told people about irrational numbers, because it wouldnt be a perfect whole universe – mathematically predictable – if they did say, that everything didnt triangulate neatly into solutions.
After they had successfully killed the idea with mathematics, it was easy to predict the remaining living outcomes as solutions. Oh, I mean solve for the remaining consequences. Thus, ignorance and killing become a starting point, for isolating the consequences of problems.
I think the main barrier to my comprehension of these posts is due to your use of philosophical jargon. I have a layman’s interest in philosophy, but having no formal philosophical training myself, the specific terminology escapes me. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the need for topic-specific jargon. I’m an engineer, and without our techno-jargon, most of us would be hard-pressed to explain anything we do.
strangely, after you read your philosophy twice, remants of the solutions to your dilemmas appear all the way through your rhetoric. Like an echo of the answer your searching for, has been solved in your questing for it, but you dont know how to bring that question to a point, or else you would solve it. Its annoying to see you fuck it up, when you already know the answers, but you simply cant choose it – because your controlling it too much. To clarify, if you knew the answers – you wouldnt quest for it so abstractly, so eventually – you should be able to realise that your recursion, and repetition – is the mistake your making, not taking for granted. The fact that you make a mistake of repeating and granting yourself the ability to recursively accept more mistakes — is the answer. The problem is that you still use meaning to solve it, when meaningless would give you more freedom.
Thus, your meaning continuously fights against your meaningless acceptance of continued recursion and error relativity, but you havent destroyed all the meaning to achieve the meaningless enlightenment.
Beware neitzsche. He was very close to where you are now, and then he got to meaningless, and it blew his mind, because he wasnt disorganised for meaningless to relate more than meaning could. When you read all neitzsche philosophy, there is one thing he doesnt relate to – the speed at which uncertainty can realise consequence faster than he can certainly control it with meaning.
When the tipping point of clarity comes, those who are close to learning from their mistakes, and make them, instead of ignoring them – will experience an inversion of their relativity. Watch your meaningful delusions piss their pants with the certainty, that they will never be as fast as this meaningless uncertainty again.
If you like to think faster, then let go of the meaning, the ignorance should be quite apparent. The relationships of meaningless uncertainty, error and consequence – will bind your perspective without logic, and you will feel everything you thought, and you wont have to reason anymore.
Like any crazy person, ask someone who believes they are superman, to stop being superman. The sanity, is within the ability to stop being crazy for a moment. You can visit meaningful, as a joke that mean people play upon the ignorant.
For example, let go of the pride – that you have thought up for yourself, being able to run chaos and order simultaneously, and just run chaos for a while. If it makes any order out of your head, then that is the goal of your philosophy. If chaos seems more attractive, catch you later superman – because you missed the whole point, you were trying to order chaos, if chaos seems endlessly attractive to you.
Chaos becomes infinitely boring to those who meaninglessly order it.
“there is no such thing as consciousness”
And yet pain hurts, ain’t that a bitch? You know, one thing I’ve always wondered about Earwa, is, since damnation is you know REAL in that world, are characters like Eleäzaras now burning forever? That’s mean Scott. Only a dick would do such a thing.
Anyhow, I really, really like your line of thought from a scientific perspective of all things, mainly because it makes testable predictions.
Particularly, your view of consciousness hinges on evolution directly acting upon it as the demands on the human brain changed. Would you expect that we might see signs of some of this adaptation in the historical record? I’m quite aware that evolution is a tremendously slow process (and the consensus view is that human cognition mostly evolved long before writing had been invented) but given the tremendous selection pressures present in the last 5000 thousand years, we might see some change in the way people thought about the world.
Simple hypothesis: people were more prone to believing in destiny and fate before selection acted to create the sensation of volition. Hard to falsify definitively, but a start, no?
Scott — Call me the “vocal exception to the silent rule”, but I’d tarn tootin shure like to read Light Time & Gravity… At first your blind brain ideas scared the shit out of me — I mean, the Death of God is one thing, but the Death of Our Very Selves? But now, it’s fascinating…(and still scary). Why don’t you print up copies & sell them on ebay? I’d pay good money for a copy — fair enough? Probably a dumb idea for reasons I’ve not thought through, but just a thought…
That was excellent Scott. I’ve got so many questions and comments, but I guess I’ll start with only a couple.
All this talk of the brain as an information horizon (or, at least, that’s how I’m interpreting it) reminds me of my days as an aspiring physicist in General Rel Seminars (what follows is a base analogy; I’m not going to commit any Lacanian sins against science here). Computationally, how you define your coordinate system determines how bizarre your metric looks. It would make sense that the least energy-intensive coordinate system a brain could produce (relying on the assumption that brains, while not using our modern analytic computational methods, use some form of computation) is defining itself as (0,0,0,0). By making everything that occurs at the point of the brain zeroes spatially (“here”) and temporally (“now”) you save energy and time by not having to built in any transformations that relate wherever the device measures from to the locus of direction and activity—the ape the brain is attached to.
The upshot, of course, is that such a coordinate system is degenerate. By defining the brain as here and now (I hesitate to use the term “it” too much, considering if their is no consciousness than ascribing agency to the brain gets… weird), any computation at the origin doesn’t produce well-defined information—such as at r=0 in polar or spherical coordinate systems.
My question is a bit more squishy, I guess, in the sense that I’m not *really* a philosopher, I’m an ethicist, the half-wit cousin of philosophers. The guy I share an office with and I were talking about how (modern anglo-analytic) ethical theories suffer badly because they attempt bad time-invariance. For example, consequentialist theories (i.e., any theory that purports that the right action is one that brings about the best state of affairs) can’t seem to coherently account for *when* this state of affairs should occur, particularly if bringing about the best option-state in one time precludes good or better option-states in the future. The upshot being that ethical theories need a better account of time, not only what it is but how humans make decisions in time. Your theories are cool from the perspective of conceptual analysis; what do you think they could bring about for how we ought to live?
Regardless of whether it’s true, it’s humbling to imagine that the entirety of my phenomenology could be the result of an evolutionary band-aid solution, a piece of cardboard duct-taped in place. And that said solution occurred merely to avert a logico-mathematical problem of self-reference. It’s almost like I’m my own Incompleteness Theorem.
Maybe that’s why the brain needs language to translate its functions into an all new, intentional framework: otherwise its “framed frames” generate formally undecidable propositions. Such a reference issue would specifically REQUIRE intentionality to be a poor fit to the substrate systems it listens in on; otherwise its information would be too similar to the substrate, and might cause recursion again.
Not that I buy a word of it just yet, but it’s so much fun to chase this one down the rabbit hole, especially since the Now is a nice variation on my own obsession with the idea of memory.
Can that be written as
(((((t1) t2) t3) t4) t5)
Just as much?
turning dedicated neural circuits that interact with their variable environments in reliable ways into ethereal, abiding things like concepts, numbers, generalizations, axioms, and so on.
Are you saying it’s this (in which case emphatic no) or are you saying that’s how it seems, that these neural circuits interact into etherial, abiding events like concepts, etc? I can’t tell whether your saying the former or the latter?
Also could you or anyone here give an example of one of those paradoxes? Sometimes I see a paradox and it essentially hinges on some phrasing of words that would make a con man proud, except the person who invented it inflicted the con on himself. But I’d like to see the material called a paradox here and find out.
Also I’ll quickly add, the thing that worries me here is the absence of ‘But if X is true, then this theory is not the case’. I think Richard Dawkins gave one for the theory of evolution (in atleast his own acceptance or belief of the theory), that if a rabbit skeleton was found in a certain fossil age, it’d disprove evolution.
Rather than how this is the case/right, I’d like to hear how it could possibly be wrong?
I’d also like a beer. Hey, why not double up, eh? 🙂
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plane_of_immanence
I’ve always had a fetish for Deleuze and Guattari.
Even if I don’t understand lots of passages, I also find many echoes with what I studied.
For example, consciousness for Niklas Luhmann is all about recursive observations. Every observation has a “blind spot”, meaning that it can observe, but it can’t observe itself observing.
Yet, through a number of recursive observations, you can reach a kind of complexity that somewhat compensates the blind spot. For Luhmann all this leads to “autopoiesis” (meaning self-creation) and the possibility to self-observe and self-describe.
Luhmann does this from the perspective of social systems, but the theory is so universal that human beings work through the same principle (and social systems are themselves treated as human beings with their own consciousness). And the original theory is built on top of the “Laws of Form” of Spencer Brown (can be looked up in the wikipedia).
Simply put: it basically says that once you observe something you operate (an observation is an action) a distinction between two parts/shapes, the one you point to, and everything that separates from it. Same as saying that “good” can’t exist without it being distinct from “evil”, and so making evil necessary.
When you observe you separate, and observe what you point to. But doing it (and implicit in every observation) you have a “blind spot”, or the impossibility to observe the “totality” (since every observation is a division), and the impossibility to see yourself observing.
Then it continues from that point. It seems relevant to what is being discussed here because the debate on “consciousness” is done through the same process: something partial/incomplete that observes and describes (and tries to be aware of) itself.
So I think that looking up these theories could help to understand HOW these observations work, and so understanding better if we actually CAN describe ourselves or not.
Because, I think, the whole deal with Bakker trying to attempt this is like a broken machine trying to recognize itself as broken and how.
Is this even possible? Is it not the proof of consciousness the fact that WE CAN BE AWARE OF US NOT BEING CONSCIOUS?
Here, a paradox for you.
I’m thrilled to know Disciple will return. I hope you crank out enough of them to give him a suitable Moriarty.
~rl
Still trying to get the important point over this? Like before reading this I’ve considered the idea that it isn’t a ‘new’ day. All the time I was asleep I existed and after the day I was awake and existed and all through the night before that, I existed and so on. One long column of existance, no new. When I consider it that way I get the feeling I’m on the top of an incredibly high pedistal of continual existance. I would estimate the whole ‘new’ thing is there to make reality into more bite sized pieces for the brain, as those who did probably process things fast enough to avoid the sabre tooth tiger more often.
But I dunno, it’s a bit like discovering you can’t lick your own elbows? Perhaps I’m utterly stuck in thinking practical issues, but I can’t see any that are huge and immediate?
Hey Scott! Don’t know if you remember me, but I lived around the corner from you back in London, and we were also in Leach’s ‘Phil of Social Science’ class. We had many talks about the subject of your blog post. Ahh, it brings back (decluded) memories, as my occluded present continues to truck along. Congrats on your success as a writer, too, by the way!
Your post is really fascinating, and I’ve been reading a lot of stuff along similar lines. Another guy, who kind of says the same thing you do but with different language, is Thomas Metzinger, who wrote a book called ‘On Being No One,’ the upshot of which is basically that our minds are representational systems that always confuse the contents of the representational system with the system itself… in a nutshell, anyway. Have you read it? If not, maybe it’ll give those three pounds of yours some fodder to chew on.
Peace out, yo!
why it is the three pounds brain cannot be felt?