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photocopy all existing encyclopedia articles on the topic I could find and track down the historical references.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.