Adding perception of an object’s distance of separation, speed, resilience, and a bit of ultrasound to the overall “vision” equation, and removing color, alters reality in far-reaching ways.
Black’s Beach is the closest beach to the University of California, San Diego, where I went to college. North of the point, Black’s unofficially welcomes naked people. South of the point, few people expose their undercarriages or mammary glands to sunlight and the view of others.
One sunny spring day during my sophomore year, I was reposed south of the point in baggy shorts while reading Heidegger’s Being and Time when a particularly attractive naked woman and two similarly attractive naked men frolicked past. The woman pranced into the surf and grabbed a long seaweed vine. She spun it above her head and threw it in the manner of a lasso at one of the men. The other man took a piece of seaweed from the beach and threw it at the woman. The three of them continued this dance for several minutes, cavorting in and out of the ocean, wrapping themselves and each other in seaweed, running to and fro—all while the two men were clearly competing for the attention of the woman.
In the course of their cavorting, one of the men produced an erection and the other did not. My first thought was that the man jumping around the beach with a hard-on must be embarrassed—after all, the woman reacted by staring at his penis and laughing with both hands over her mouth. I turned back to my book, but then it occurred to me that, no, perhaps the man without the woody was more embarrassed.
Can you imagine walking into a bar where the patrons are acutely aware when your gaze sweeps past them? Where everyone can see through clothes and skin? Culture would be drastically altered.
If we had a bit of outer puppy just as we have plenty of inner puppy, that is, if we had tails, society would be quite different. Flirting would take a totally different turn. As it is, if the target of your flirtations has refined social skills, there’s no way to know how receptive they are to your advance until you become increasingly obvious. But what if you could see their tail wag?
People key on vision; dogs key on scent. When someone leaves the room, their image goes with them, but their scent lingers. Imagine how fashion would change if, upon leaving a room, we left our shadow behind for a few minutes.
At another extreme, consider the reality of General Sherman, a 275-foot-tall (84 meters), 2,500-year-old giant sequoia in Sequoia National Park, California. If you look at the tree every day, you don’t see much change. If you look at it a few times every year, you see it go through the cycle of winter, spring, summer, and autumn. A year to a tree is sort of like a day to a person. Spring is morning, summer day, autumn evening, and winter night. Trees don’t have neurons, axons, dendrites, or any obvious processors that we can identify as brain-like, but they do have sensory detectors; they respond to sunlight, wind, and rain. They inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen at a rate so slow that it’s hard for a mammal to think of them as breathing. They reach out for nutrients and then wick them from the ground up to their canopies. They distribute water from the soil and leaves through artery-like channels in both trunk and twig.
A tree experiences a reality that differs from ours in almost every way. To say that a tree experiences anything might seem silly. You and I have very similar senses. Our perceived realities have much in common, but we differ around the edges and don’t agree on everything. The reality of a tree, though, is as far beyond our grasp as absolute reality itself.
While I risk sounding unscientific, I’m unwilling to condemn a tree to an experience-free existence, at least until my own experience has transcended the pure subjectivity of my perceptions. As scientists, our greatest tool is knowing the limits of our understanding, both as fuel for curiosity and, as we’ll see in certain terms by the time we get to chapter 9, as a way to dispel prejudice and open our minds to avenues of new research.
Here’s an overused philosophical question: Is the red that you perceive the same as the red that I perceive? I suspect that our reds are nearly identical because the color detectors in our eyes are quite similar, and we process that information in very nearly identical regions of our brains.
I will never know if your red is the same as mine, but I do know that blue is a superior color.
2.6 THE POWER OF PERSPECTIVE
The realization that we have pretty much the same emotional processing equipment as animals contradicts assumptions people have made for thousands of years. We’re driven by emotions like other animals—not just other primates, but dogs, cats, rats, whales, and birds too. Unlike most of the other animals, and maybe all of them, we have the ability to realize that sometimes our emotions might not be our best guides. Perhaps we could even measure our own enlightenment by how often we practice this ability.
A particularly amusing result of being animals capable of understanding that we’re animals is that we also have the capability of denying that we’re animals. We’re about evenly split on the issue. Now, for me, if something eats like an animal, excretes like an animal, has sex like an animal, suckles from its mother, experiences fear, anger, affection, love, and hate like an animal, well, it just might be an animal.
Every step we take in expanding our worlds is born of simple electrical excitations, networks that reach across the 3-pound (1.5 kg) organs in our heads. The more associations we make, the further our minds can reach. One feedback loop germinates another and another, and so on, a feedback loop of feedback loops, expanding our realities with each increment until we’re wide awake with consciousness.
We create our own realities from the simplest sensory input all the way to the most abstract constructs. From light and dark to danger and security to choosing what color earbuds to get for our smartphones, we create everything, and a big slice of our reality pie is baked so fast that we end up with just a sliver. Animals create their realities too, but people do it to a crazy extreme.
Combining the rational brilliance of our inner Feynmans with the irrational passion of our inner puppies has allowed us to set goals, to plan, to worry, and to evaluate. Our ability to associate ever higher levels of thought, from instinctual comprehension of fanged threats to concepts of the fundamental rules of how stars and atoms form, has led to our greatest achievements in art and science and everything in between.
We have been unleashed by our tacit understanding of our own limitations. Can’t see through someone’s skin to check a broken bone? Use x-rays. Want to transmute lead into gold? Learn chemistry and see why you can’t.
We can use tools to get different perspectives, but the most powerful tool is our brains. Wondering about the ways of things? Tools from poetry to mathematics bring us closer to the answers. Our ever-widening creation of reality, spurred on by tools made of silicon, of horsehair, or by the Fender Corporation, along with tools built from thoughts written on scratch paper, spreads our lives across longer timescales and larger spaces.
The challenges we face demand new perspectives. If we could solve our problems with the same old perspectives, they wouldn’t be challenges. By thinking about how other people, other animals, and other life-forms perceive a challenge, we can see it in a new light. Innovations emerge from new perspectives.
To get the perspective we need in order to ponder consciousness— how it comes about, what its limits are, and why it hurts so much when someone we love loses theirs—it’s best to think like an alien.
3
LIFE & DEATH
PRETEND YOU ARE A SILICON-BASED LIFE-FORM from Andromeda, the galaxy that’s a mere two-and-a-half-million light years from here. Life on your planet evolves in a completely different way than it does here. Earth’s carbon-based life is just as foreign to you as your silicon-based life is to SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence over here on Earth.
One day, while you’re lounging around eating rocks and drinking a frothy sand cocktail, you get a message from SEAL, the Search for Extra-Andromedan Life. The message says that intelligent life could form on the third plan
et from a modest star in the Milky Way. SEAL provides you with an in-depth analysis of Earth’s chemical makeup and geology. Your job is to predict the forms of life that have evolved on Earth. Fortunately, you have a complete grasp of physics and chemistry.
“It’s an impossible task,” you tell the supreme commander.
The supreme commander, who isn’t paying particular attention to you, says, “All righty then,” and walks away.
You sigh and stare at your workstation, dust off your monitor, and realize that it’s not an impossible task; it’s an improbable task. So improbable that it might as well be impossible, but if I were intimidated by “might as well be,” I wouldn’t be talking to a made-up life-form in Andromeda.
The reason people search for carbon-based life in outer space isn’t because they reject different forms of life; it’s because we are a living proof-of-principle that carbon-based life exists. It’s all we’ve got. You, on the other hand, in your ultra-advanced stone glory, aren’t so prejudiced. You realize that your understanding of stone-ology (it would be biology, except for, you know, the silicon-ness of it all) might be completely useless in this search.
To accomplish the improbable task, you assemble a computer program that includes all of the atoms on Earth according to the geology and geography that SEAL recorded. Then you flip the switch and simulate the interactions of those atoms.
Since computers have been around, simulations have become the most effective way to understand complicated systems. Rather than trying to figure the whole thing out in a nice, tidy way, you assign every atom on the planet a position, direction, and speed. Then you advance time by a tiny fraction of a second, moving each atom according to the laws of physics. At the end of that time interval, you alter the directions, positions, and speeds of each atom according to what they encountered during that time. With the new positions, directions, and speeds, you advance time again, and so on. If (if!) your physics theories are close enough to the truth, the smaller the time interval, the more accurately your simulation reproduces reality, which is, after all, just stuff moving in space. The big advantage of simulating systems is that we can let the computer do all the work while we hang around in bars.
Since every measurement has uncertainty, including your geology and geography measurements, there are an infinite number of possible initial starting points. To account for the possible courses of evolution, you’ll need to run about a gazillion separate simulations, but that’s okay because you Flintstones in Andromeda have more computing power than you know what to do with.
After each of your gazillion simulations have worked through about four billion years, you check the results. Life never formed in some of the simulations, but it did in most. If you’ve ever lived in the tropics, you probably have a feel for how well suited this planet is for supporting life. A few of the simulations produced silicon-based life similar to what’s in Andromeda, but most life came out quite differently. Because of Earth’s composition, you got many different carbon-based, water-dependent biological life-forms.
When your supreme commander comes back the next day and asks for your predictions, you provide a list of 392,035,816,185 different possible types of life. Included in that list are seventy-eight versions that are similar to what really exists here on Earth, though none of the simulations reproduces exactly what we have here.
The supreme commander says, “Which one is it?”
And you provide a list of probabilities. Well down on that list is the 0.00000002 percent probability of human beings with trees, dogs, frogs, and birds. Even if it is the highest probability result on the list, it’s not a very useful prediction.
Your boss is pissed off.
3.1 EMERGENCE
Emergent phenomena are those that seem to defy prediction. Starting with the chemical makeup of Earth four billion years ago, your existence could not be predicted, much less that you’re sitting where you are reading this book. But here you are!
That something would emerge is certain. What that something might turn out to be is uncertain. No matter how endless the possibilities, the sum of all the probabilities has to be one (100 percent). You might say that the possibilities are infinite, but the probabilities are finite.
People can get as wound up about the meaning of emergence as they do about religion. Pick any old random emergent system, like consciousness. Can it be reduced to its constituent parts? Can you imagine one hundred billion inanimate objects with one thousand trillion interconnections collectively fussing over what to wear to the prom? It’s especially hard to imagine when you’re using one hundred billion neurons with one thousand trillion connections to do the imagining. But no matter how low the probability is of that phenomenon emerging, if it’s possible and you’ve got the physics right, then when you simulate enough configurations of those constituents, eventually you will see that phenomenon emerge in your simulation.
But what if it is magic? Maybe some systems simply cannot be understood in terms of their constituents, cannot be understood in principle. I don’t know about you stoners in Andromeda, but over here in the solar system, we are a long, long way from having a clue of what we can understand, much less what we can’t. Until then, if you say that something like consciousness results from magic, I can always say, “When you have a better understanding of the system, you’ll realize that it’s just an emergent phenomenon that would arise in a sufficiently accurate simulation.” This confirms Miles Dylan’s belief that “all discussions of the supernatural eventually lead to either blind faith or smugness.”
Stepping away from my smugness, which, after all, is just prejudice with an arrogant veneer, I find it difficult to deny that the emergence of life and awareness, love and humor, hives and families is anything short of a miracle. If a miracle can be understood, is it any less miraculous?
Thinking itself is just such a miracle. Neuroscience has some clues about how we think. The tool within our craniums does a lot of pattern-recognition, model-building, and predicting. Understanding as much as we can about how our thought tool works can help us think more effectively. The flip side is that when you understand a little about thought itself, you have to face what it means to no longer think.
The theme of feedback and feed-forward loops—the ability to process a continuing onslaught of incoming and already processed information—applies to how things live and die on Earth.
Life is built on death. We have to eat other organisms to survive. More than that, though, the components of life require vast amounts of dead organic material.
Life is inseparable from death, but that doesn’t make dealing with it any easier.
3.2 BEING ALIVE AND AWAKE
Neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists like to separate thoughts into bottom-up and top-down processes. Bottom-up thoughts include the myriad unconscious processes involved in processing the continued onslaught of sensory data, including internal bodily data like aches and pains. At every instant, a huge number of bottom-up networks activate across your brain. Even when you’re kicked back, not paying attention to anything, your default network lights up your brain with more activity than when you concentrate.
For the most part, we’re aware of top-down processes and unaware of bottom-up processes.
Bottom-up processes reach across our brains and associate perceptions with experiences that have been stashed in memory. This association provides the background context that we need to assemble the ongoing stream of sensory information into predictions and expectations. Those predictions propel our most recent experiences into the future.
Top-down processes feel like a single thing, one consciousness, though everyone who talks to themselves knows that their self has more than one voice.
Rather than getting tangled up in the loaded term “subconscious,” we will use the word “unconscious” for all processes that happen in our brains without us noticing; that is, we are aware of conscious thoughts and unaware of unconscious thoughts. But we have to be care
ful because the line between the conscious and the unconscious can change; you can lift otherwise unconscious thoughts into consciousness by thinking about them. Try it: you’re looking at ink on a page (or lit pixels on a screen), right?
We have no working definition for the words consciousness or thought, yet we forge ahead, appropriately into a bar.
3.2.1 Your stupid, bottom-up, parallel, unconscious processors
You walk in and scan the beer taps. You want something hoppy but you also want something new. You zero in on a tap labeled IPA.
Let’s stop here and take a look at what’s going on.
Figure 8: A bar
The bar is packed with people including those on barstools sitting between you and the beer taps. You’re aware of them but not paying attention. Still, if your mother is on one of those barstools, you’d recognize her. You might even be surprised to see her in a bar (not me, though, my mom likes bars).
Sensory data pour in from every direction: People talk and move around; TV monitors show three different baseball games, a soccer match from Brazil, and a cooking show. But as you zero in on that IPA tap, you’re not paying attention to any of that.
Then someone says your name.
Even with all that ruckus, if someone says your name, you’ll hear it. Your name has at most a few syllables, but even with a dozen people nattering away within ten stools of where you stand and with no conscious direction, you will dig that miniscule signal out of the noise. It’s no trivial process, though it feels like one: Receive the sound, process it into a pattern, associate that pattern with a word, the word with your name and identity, associate that sound with a location, instruct your eyes to zero in on that location, process the several human faces into patterns, try to associate those faces and the timbre of that voice with memories, and bingo, you realize that it’s the guy who lived upstairs from you five years ago. All that work occurs in an instant, unbidden, yet you still can’t remember the guy’s name. You wave and ponder the notion of going over and hanging out with him.
The Left Brain Speaks, the Right Brain Laughs Page 5