Let's Read: The Ego Tunnel (Part 3)

Chapter 4: From Ownership to Agency to Free Will

Review

In chapter 3, Metzinger used OBE and other disruptions to self-consciousness to sketch out a 3-part model of consciousness:

• Physical body model. This is a model of the physical body, with joints, bones, meat, weight, velocity, shape, etc. It is put into a model of the physical world, and it cannot occupy the same volume as other solids. So for example, the arm of the body cannot sink into the desk.
• Astral body model. This model has the same shape as the physical body model. However, it has no weight, is not affected by gravity, has no organs, and though it has a volume, it cannot exclude anything else from the volume (it's like turning off collision in a game). It is basically a ghost in the shell of the physical body model. It is usually a bit smaller than the physical body model.
• Viewpoint model. A point in space augmented with a Cartesian frame, to represent the orientation of your viewpoint. It represents your "true location". It is perched between the eyes of the astral body model, facing straight forward. 
  It is used to model where the sound you are hearing is coming from. So for example, if you hear a noise on the left, that would be modeled as a sound source to the left of the viewpoint. 
  It is also used to model where what you are seeing is. So for example, if you see a ball straight ahead, that is modelled as a ball straight ahead of the viewpoint.
  Note that even in a blind-deaf person, there is still a viewpoint model. It is simply not used to assist in inference of audio and visual input. Even a blind-deaf person must feel like they are somewhere in spacetime. That "somewhere" is the location of the viewpoint model within the world model.

Metzinger further contends that to create a thing that feels, it is necessary and sufficient to make a "minimal phenomenal selfhood". A minimal phenomenal selfhood is made of these parts:

• A model of spacetime.
• A point in the spacetime model, indicating "here I am".
• A model of the body (usually humanoid) centered around the viewpoint.
• A global workspace, that is, a buffer memory unit like the RAM. 

And to augment a minimal phenomenal selfhood into a minimal subject, it is necessary and sufficient to add:

• A self-attention control module. The three components of the minimal phenomenal selfhood should appear in the global workspace, and the self-attention control module's function is to emphasize/deemphasize parts of the self-body-model into focus in the global workspace.

This whole system for making a minimal subject is called a phenomenal self-model. It is reasonably easy to construct even with today's technology. It is probable that the self-driving cars in 5 years will have phenomenal self-models.

Let's Read: Where Be His Quiddities — Jordan Chase-Young

I hate dealing with stories that don't say exactly what they mean. Every fiction-reading is a struggle to cut out the author's nonsense words and get to the place where words mean instead of merely happen.

The worst offenders are parts where people make expressions and speak with their personal idiosyncrasies. It's a story, an idea-container, not a psychological sketch, so cut them out!

Today we read Where Be His Quiddities (Jordan Chase-Young, 2020), and cut out all the humanistic crap, and leave behind only the ideas and meanings.

There are three main humans in the story: Steve, Dan, Geoffrey. They were professors of economics. The story starts.

Chalmer's Meta problem of consciousness

The meta-problem of consciousness (2018).

• The easy problem of consciousness is explaining how conscious biological creatures can do their third-person observable functions. That is, how a brain works and how it might be replicated.
• A system is phenomenally conscious, that is, has qualia, if there is something it is like to be that system, from the first-person point of view.
• The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why and how we have qualia or phenomenal experiences.
• The meta-problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why we think that the hard problem of consciousness is a problem.
• Eliminative materialism (or illusionism) is the theory that there is no qualia, so the hard problem doesn't exist.

Chalmer proposed that the meta-problem is a good research topic: it is an objective problem about something that exists and is objectively measurable: that humans talk about their consciousness and how it is immaterial and hard to understand and other things. There are several approaches:

• Psychologists can study how humans intuitively understand consciousness. They have already done plenty on that, such as some researches on how children often think that the body and the mind are separate.
• Philosophers should clarify the meta-problem and relate it to the hard problem.
• AI researchers and programmers can try to implement systems with cognitive modules, and see if they actually behave in a similar way as humans concerning conscious beliefs. See if they would say things like "I am not a material thing." or "I cannot be described by a fully material physics.".

If the meta-problem is solved, then maybe that's the end of he hard problem. Maybe if we can explain why we feel so puzzled about consciousness, that'd be the end of our puzzlement. We would see that our puzzlement is really based on an evolutionary mistake, an illusion. 

It would be like us discovering the earth is not flat. The earth is not flat: that's an illusion. We see it is flat, due to our short eyesight. In this way, the answer to "the meta-problem of flat earth" dissolves the hard problem of flat earth.

Similarly, the answer to the meta-problem of consciousness can straight up dissolve the hard problem of consciousness. That is the triumph of eliminative materialism!

Even if you don't believe in eliminative materialism, thinking about the meta-problem can still help. In particular, if you have a theory of consciousness, then you should try to think about whether the theory would predict that creatures endowed with consciousness would talk about consciousness as if it is an immaterial and puzzling thing. Chalmers claims that the Integrated Information Theory has defect here, since under the IIT, conscious beings don't seem to talk about consciousness as if it is an immaterial and puzzling thing.

Let's Read: The Ego Tunnel (Part 2)

Chapter 3: Body Image, Out-of-Body Experiences, and the Virtual Self

This Chapter is fairly easy. It studies some disruptions of human self-consciousness and explain their meaning. The disruptions include OBE (Out-of-Body Experiences), autoscopy, heautoscopy, rubber-hand illusion, full-body rubber-hand illusion, phantom limbs.

Let's get the conclusion first:

You are never in direct contact with your own body. What you feel in the rubber-hand illusion, what AZ feels, or what Philip feels when his left arm is “plugged in” is exactly the same as what you feel when you attend to the sensation of your hands holding this book right now or to the feeling of pressure and resistance when you lean back in your chair. What you experience is not reality but virtual reality, a possibility. Strictly speaking, and on the level of conscious experience alone, you live your life in a virtual body and not in a real one.

Yes, everything we experience is virtual. We never experience reality directly, but only the brain simulation.

So what is the self in this simulation? The self is a complex construction of several parts, all of which usually stays together, but might come apart. The components are:

• Model of the physical body: the arms, the legs, the joint-angles, the head...
• Model of the inside of the physical body (interoceptive self): temperature, fullness, heartrate...
• Model of the viewpoint: a "camera" in the model of the world. It is usually sitting between the eyes of the physical body model, but it can move around.
• Others.

Metzinger wants to get to the bottom of things: find the "minimal phenomenal selfhood", the bare essentials for making a self.

We know more: A seeing self also is not necessary. You can shut the windows in front of the little man behind your eyes by closing your eyelids. The seeing self disappears; the Ego remains. You can be a robust, conscious self even if you are emotionally flat, if you do not engage in acts of will, and also in the absence of thought. Emotions, will, and thoughts are not necessary to the fundamental sense of selfhood. Every meditator (remember chapter 1) can confirm that you may settle into a calm, emotionally neutral state, deeply relaxed and widely alert, a state of pure observation, without any thought, while a certain elementary form of bodily self-consciousness remains. Let us call this “selfhood-as-embodiment.”

Minimal self-consciousness is not control, but what makes control possible.

Examples of self-doubling illusions like autoscopy, heautoscopy, and out-of-body experiences (OBE)

Three kinds of self-models

Keep these three kinds of self-models in mind as you study the odd states of self-consciousness.

• Physical body model. This is a model of the physical body, with joints, bones, meat, weight, velocity, shape, etc. It is put into a model of the physical world, and it cannot occupy the same volume as other solids. So for example, the arm of the body cannot sink into the desk.
• Astral body model. This model has the same shape as the physical body model. However, it has no weight, is not affected by gravity, has no organs, and though it has a volume, it cannot exclude anything else from the volume (it's like turning off collision in a game). It is basically a ghost in the shell of the physical body model. It is usually a bit smaller than the physical body model.
• Viewpoint model. A point in space augmented with a Cartesian frame, to represent the orientation of your viewpoint. It represents your "true location". It is perched between the eyes of the astral body model, facing straight forward. 
  It is used to model where the sound you are hearing is coming from. So for example, if you hear a noise on the left, that would be modeled as a sound source to the left of the viewpoint. 
  It is also used to model where what you are seeing is. So for example, if you see a ball straight ahead, that is modelled as a ball straight ahead of the viewpoint.
  Note that even in a blind-deaf person, there is still a viewpoint model. It is simply not used to assist in inference of audio and visual input. Even a blind-deaf person must feel like they are somewhere in spacetime. That "somewhere" is the location of the viewpoint model within the world model.

These three self-models are meant to synthesize different kinds of sensory data. Here, I am speculating since I can't find papers about this.

• Physical body model synthesizes sensory input on the body: location of localized pain, heat, coldness, touch, pressure.
• Astral body model synthesizes proprioceptive input, vestibular input, and active motor output. 
• Viewpoint model synthesizes location of visual and auditory sources. Basically, if you hear something from the left, and sees something 
  Your viewpoint model is updated continuously by sensory input. There is a constant inference loop between your viewpoint model and the visual sources and audio sources in the world model, as your brain tries to integrate all visual, auditory, vestibular, and other senses into one consistent model of the world with a viewpoint.
• If the ear senses an acceleration upwards, that would tend to move your viewpoint model up. 
• If the eye sees most of the scenery moving to the right, that would tend to move your viewpoint model to the left, or turn it to the left. 
• If the eye sees most of the scenery staying still, but a small blob moving to the right, you would keep your viewpoint model stable, but move the model of the blob.
  

The art of ventriloquism is all about confusing the viewpoint model, so that the sound source is incorrectly modelled.

Let's Read: The Ego Tunnel (Part 1)

The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (Metzinger, 2009)

Start with six questions.

1. One-World Problem, or the unity of consciousness; 
2. Now Problem, or the appearance of a lived moment; 
3. Reality Problem, or why you were born as a naive realist; 
4. Ineffability Problem, or what we will never be able to talk about; 
5. Evolution Problem, or the question of what consciousness was good for; 
6. Who Problem, or the issue of what is the entity that has conscious experience. 

One-World Problem

Metzinger is a philosopher that can really read, and he once set out to 

photocopy all existing encyclopedia articles on the topic I could find and track down the historical references. I wanted to know whether in the long history of Western philosophy there was a common philosophical insight running like a thread through humanity’s perennial endeavor to understand the conscious mind. To my surprise, I found two such essential insights.

The first is that consciousness is a higher-order form of knowledge accompanying thoughts and other mental states... in an important sense, consciousness is knowing that you know while you know.

This, Metzinger skips over.

The second important insight seems to be the notion of integration: Consciousness is what binds things together into a comprehensive, simultaneous whole. If we have this whole, then a world appears to us. If the information flow from your sensory organs is unified, you experience the world. If your senses come apart, you lose consciousness.

Why do we see one world only? Why can't we consciously multitask? Why can't we consciously multi-see, multi-feel, multi-think? (Certainly, we can multitask unconsciously, as in, talking while bicycling while balancing the groceries in one hand, but only one task might occupy the consciousness at one time.)

Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher

This post is a translation of a review of Après la finitude (After Finitude), the debut book of Quentin Meillassoux. The original is Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher (Graham Harman, 2009).

Meillassoux is sometimes funny and witty, as a continental philosophers aspire to.

It offers bold readings of the history of philosophy—Aristotle is not realist enough, Hume not skeptical enough. It shows bursts of scathing wit, as when drawing wry parallels between the anti-Darwinian reveries of creationism and major schools of present-day philosophy.

What is this wry parallel? We will see.

The very title After Finitude will be enough to  startle  present-day  continental  thought, since human finitude has been perhaps the central credo of the field from the time of its birth.

Okay. How does that work? Basically, "continental philosophy" has been based on the idea that humans are finite and can know nothing absolute, since absolute knowledge should be true everywhere, everywhen, and to know that requires one to check it for an infinite amount of time, at an infinite amount of places, and after thinking an infinite number of thoughts about it.

But what about math?

No Platonism! Math is just thought-patterns that humans have managed to reproduce faithfully through the years. It does not point to a higher reality, and it does not lead to absolutely true knowledge, only knowledge that is currently useful.

"After Finitude" means just "Get over this talk of finitude! Humans can know absolute things.".

One of the typical features of recent continental  thought  is  its  contempt  for  so-called “naïve  realism.”  The  human  being  is  now firmly established as the point of entry for all serious philosophy... The notion of an objective world-in-it-self  seems  to  elude  our  grasp.  Nonetheless, few authors have faced this predicament with full-blown absolute idealism à la Berkeley—if not  quite  “naïve,”  such  extreme  idealism strikes  most  of  us  as  gratuitous  and  bizarre amidst the undeniable blows of the world. This leaves philosophy in an ambiguous position, neither realist nor idealist.

How to be happy

The equation of happiness

Let's imagine a happiness meter, calibrated so that if we measure the happiness of everyone on earth, the average happiness is exactly 0. If you get -1, you are sadder than average, and if you get +4, you are much happier than average.

Then we can imagine an "equation of happiness": given a person P's genes, memories, current job, current activity, friends, etc, predict what their happiness is.

Happiness(P) = ?

Well, to start with, we can do the laziest thing possible:

Happiness(P) = 0

After all, that's the global average. Can't be too wrong! But that's boring. What is interesting is to account for the variation of happiness level between people. So let's try that. What accounts for variation in happiness?

Next, remember that people seem to have a set level of happiness that they return to after a while. Good things make them happier than the set level, and bad things make them less, but they always return to it.

Happiness(P) = SetLevel(P's personality) + EventsHappiness(P's history)

Next, remember the general lesson: for personality traits, usually half is based on genes, half based on environment. 

Happiness(P) = 0.5 GeneScore(P's genes) 

+ 0.5 EnvScore(P's environment) 

+ EventsHappiness(P's history)

And we have a fairly workable model of happiness! 

Actually, the current best model for happiness is roughly this:

Happiness(P) = 0.5 GeneScore(P's genes) 

+ 0.1 CircumstanceScore(P's circumstance) 

+ 0.4 ActivityScore(P's activity)

where "circumstance" stands for

the national, geographical, and cultural region in which a person resides, as well as demographic factors such as age, gender, and ethnicity. Circumstantial factors also include the individual’s personal history, that is, life events that can affect his or her happiness, such as having experienced a childhood trauma, being involved in an automobile accident, or winning a prestigious award. Finally, circumstantial factors include life status variables such as marital status, occupational status, job security, income, health, and religious affiliation.

and "activity" stands for things that you do intentionally, non-automatically. Some activities particularly useful for happiness include meditation, exercise, practicing a valued skill, helping others without asking for reward.

The uniform infinite Newtonian universe (the standard solution to the Seeliger paradox)

When Newton contemplated what the universe is like, he considered three possibilities:

• Aristotle's idea: the universe is finite 
• Stoicism's idea: the universe is a finite island of stuff floating in an infinite vacuum.
• Epicurus's idea: the universe is infinite and uniformly filled with stuffs.

He settled on the infinite uniform universe.

Now he faced a question: what is the gravitational force felt by a test mass in this infinite uniform universe? He thought that, by spherical symmetry, it has to be zero, because if the force isn't zero, it would break the spherical symmetry.

Now, a quick thought would show that there is a serious problem. It's known that a uniform, infinite slab attracts a mass with the same force, no matter how far.

So cut the universe into a infinite series of equally thick slabs, on the left and right of the test mass. We see that to calculate the total force on the test mass, we must do this infinite sum:
$$F + F - F + F - F ...$$

which is indeterminate.

In short, these three conditions are incompatible:

• The universe is infinite and uniform
• The universe is Newtonian (Newton's three laws of motion, plus Newtonian gravity)
• The Newtonian laws of physics should fix a unique solution.

This was what Seeliger argued in 1895. Since then, many solutions have been proffered, by giving up some of the conditions. One interesting solution is by Milne and McCrea in 1934, see Newtonian Cosmology (1955). It gives up the uniqueness, but shows that there are some very interesting solutions: an expanding and contracting universe with finite lifespan and a "center point" (despite being infinite and uniform), something that Newton could have discovered!

How true belief and useful belief can be contradictory

Introduction

Beliefs! There are so many ways to describe belief!

• True/False
• Well-founded/Poorly-founded
• Useful/Useless
• Good/Evil

When I feel fluffy and innocent (when I'm holding a friend close to my chest), these criteria are all the same: true beliefs are good, good beliefs are useful, useful beliefs are well-founded, and well-founded beliefs are true. The same for the opposite side.

Basically, there is a great harmony in the world of beliefs.

When I'm feeling a bit more critical but still hopeful (when I'm doing science), I recognize that they don't always match, but will converge as time goes on. As the years go by, what remains well-founded is true. True beliefs might not be convenient right now, but it is useful eventually. True beliefs might seem evil now, but a deeper understanding of morality will show it is actually good. 

Basically, he who laughs last laughs best, in the agora of beliefs.

But when I feel edgy and sad (most of the times), this criteria all fall into disharmony: important true beliefs can remain unjustified, because the evidence is lost forever. Some beliefs are simply unthinkable, no matter what evidence we get. Useful beliefs can be false. True beliefs can be evil. Good beliefs can be useless.

Translation of Making an argument (Luxun, 1925)

Making an argument (Luxun, 1925):

I dreamed that I was preparing a composition in the lecture hall of the elementary school, asking the teacher for advice on how to make an argument.

　　 "Very hard!" The teacher shot me a look, askance from the edge of his glasses. "Here's a story for you—"

　　 "A family gave birth to a boy, and the family was extremely happy. When the full moon came, they took him out and showed him to the guests. Presumably to get some auspicious tidings.

　　"One said: ‘This child will grow up to be rich.’ So he got a lot of thanks.

　　"One said: ‘This child will grow up to be a government official.’ So he obtained a few compliments.

　　"One said: ‘This child will grow up to die.’ So he was beaten up by everyone else.

　　 "Death is certain, while saying he is certainly going to be rich and noble are hopeful lies. But those who lie are paid well, and those who talk of certainties are beaten. You see..."

　　 "I am willing to neither lie nor to be beaten. So, teacher, what should I say?"

　　 "Then, you have to say: ‘Ahhhhh! This kid! You see! So... Ah! Haha! Hehe! he, hehehehe!’"

　　 July 8, 1925.

Trying to understand Thomas Metzinger

Who is Thomas Metzinger?

Wikipedia:

Thomas Metzinger (born 12 March 1958) is a German philosopher and professor of theoretical philosophy... active since the early 1990s in the promotion of consciousness studies as an academic endeavour... 

His homepage: 

• Analytical philosophy of mind
• Philosophy of cognitive science
• Philosophical problems of neuroscience
• Applied ethics (especially for neurotechnology, AI, and virtual reality; plus conceptual connections between ethics, anthropology, and philosophy of mind) 

He is mostly famous for two books:

• Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (2004). The definitive book on his theory of consciousness.
• The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (2009). The popularized version of that book.