journey to the center of the laptop

The last time I described how ideas from my software career shaped my present thinking, the topic was the interdependency between the meanings of data and code. The effective meaning of data was rooted in the details of "information systems" behind it: purposeful sequences of computer code and human labor to methodically record it, construct it, augment it, alter it, mix it with more data, etc. But the same observation could be reversed: the effective meaning (and correctness) of the information system was no more than its demonstrated transformations of data.

This viewpoint appeared to apply in other domains as well. For a wide range of candidate concepts, probing the equivalent of the concept's supporting "information system" usefully sifted its detectable meaning. How did the concept originally arise? How could the concept's definitions, verifications, and interpretations be (or fail to be) repeated and rechecked? Prospective data was discarded if it didn't have satisfactory answers to these questions; should pompous concepts face lower standards?

However, not all the software ideas were at the scale of information systems. Some knowledge illuminated the running of a single laptop. For instance, where does the laptop's computation happen? Where's the site of its mysterious data alchemy? What's the core of its "thinking"—with the precondition that this loaded term is applied purely in the loose, informal, metaphorical sense? (Note that the following will rely on simplified technological generalizations too...) The natural course of investigation is from the outside in.

• To start with, probably everyone who regularly uses a laptop would say that the thinking takes place inside the unit. The ports around its edges for connecting audio, video, networking, generic devices, etc. are optional. These connections are great for enabling additional options to transport information to and from the laptop, but they don't enable the laptop to think. The exceptions are the battery slot and/or the power jack, which are nonetheless only providers of the raw energy consumed by the laptop's thinking.
• Similarly, it doesn't require technical training to presume that the laptop's screen, speakers, keyboard, touchpad, camera, etc. aren't where the laptop thinks. The screen may shut off to save power. The speakers may be muted. The keyboard and touchpad are replaceable methods to detect and report the user's motions. Although these accessible inputs and outputs are vital to the user's experience of the laptop, their functions are like translation rather than thinking. Either the user's actions are transported to the laptop's innards as streams of impulses, or the final outcomes of the laptop's thinking are transported back out to the user's senses. 
• Consequently, the interior is a more promising space to look. Encased in the walls of the laptop, under the keyboard, behind the speakers, is a meticulously assembled collection of incredibly flat and thin parts. Some common kinds of parts are temporary memory (RAM), permanent storage (internal drives), disc drives (CD,DVD,Blu-Ray), wireless networking (WiFi). By design this group receives, holds, and sends information. Information is transported but not thought about. So the thinking must occur in the component that's on the opposite side of this group's diverse attachments: the main board or motherboard.
• To accommodate and manage the previously mentioned external ports and internal parts, the motherboard is loaded with hierarchical circuitry. It's like a mass of interconnected highways or conveyor belts. Signals travel in from the port or part, reach a hub, proceed to a later hub, and so forth. As a speedy rest stop for long-running work in progress, the temporary memory is a frequent start or end. The intricacy of contemporary device links ensure that motherboards are both busy and sophisticated, yet once more the overall task is unglamorous transportation. There's a further clue for continuing the search for thinking, though. For these transportation requests to be orderly and appropriate, the requests' source has to be the laptop's thinking. That source is the central processing unit (CPU).
• Analysis of the CPU risks a rapid slide into complexity and the specifics of individual models. At an abstract level, the CPU is divided into separate sections with designated roles. One is loading individual instructions for execution. Another is breaking down those instructions into elemental activities of actual CPU sections. A few out of many categories of these numerous elemental activities are rudimentary mathematical operations, comparisons, copying sets of bits (binary digits, either zeros or ones) among distinct areas in the CPU's working memory, rewriting which instruction is next, and dispatching sets of bits in and out of the CPU. In any case, the sections' productive cooperation consists of transporting bits from section to section at the proper times. Again setting aside mere transporting, the remaining hideout for the laptop's thinking is somewhere inside those specialized CPU sections completing the assigned elemental activities.
• Also considered at an abstract level, these CPU sections in turn are built from myriad tiny "gates": electronics organized to produce differing results depending on differing combinations of electricity flowing in. For example, an "AND" gate earns its name through emitting an "on" electric current when the gate's first entry point AND the second have "on" currents. Odd as it may sound, various gates ingeniously laid out, end to end and side by side, can perfectly perform the elemental activities of CPU sections. All that's demanded is that the information has consistent binary (bit) representations, which map directly onto the gates' notions of off and on. The elemental activities are performed on the information as the matching electric currents are transported through the gates. And since thinking is vastly more intriguing than dull transportation of information in any form, the hunt through the laptop needs to advance from gates to...um...er...uh... 

This expedition was predictably doomed from the beginning. Peering deeper doesn't uncover a sharp break between "thinking" and conducting bits in complicated intersecting routes. No, the impression of thought is generated via algorithms, which are engineered arrangements of such routes. The spectacular whole isn't discredited by its unremarkable pieces. Valuable qualities can "emerge" from a cluster of pieces that don't have the quality in isolation. In fact, emergent qualities are ubiquitous, unmagical, and important. Singular carbon atoms don't reproduce, but carbon-based life does.

Ultimately, greater comprehension forces the recognition that the laptop's version of thinking is an emergent quality. Information processing isn't the accomplishment of a miraculous segment of it; it's more like the total collaborative effect of its abundant unremarkable segments. An outsider might scoff that "adding enough stupid things together yields something smart", but an insider grasps that the way those stupid things are "added" together makes a huge difference.

Readers can likely guess the conclusion: this understanding prepares someone to contemplate that all versions of thinking could be emergent qualities. Just as the paths in the laptop were the essence of its information processing, what if the paths in creatures' brains were the essence of their information processing? Laptops don't have a particular segment that supplies the "spark" of intelligence, so what if creatures' brains don't either? Admittedly, it's possible to escape by objecting that creatures' brains are, in some unspecified manner, fundamentally unlike everything else made of matter, but that exception seems suspiciously self-serving for a creature to propose... 

an illusionary problem

Time for another common and intentional distortion of materialistic naturalism, despite the simplicity of its two short premises. First, anything supernatural doesn't exist...or if it does, then it's utterly undetectable and extraneous. Second, anything that exists is composed of matter, i.e. physical materials/energies/forces.

Before, I commented about the distortions that materialistic naturalism necessarily reduces human life to totally insignificant or predominantly negative. A third is that it carelessly discounts vital inner human experiences as illusions. "Inner experiences" refers to the broad gamut of essentially subjective phenomena: sensations, desires, fears, pleasures, pains, tales, dreams, ideals, identities, social ranks, memories, plans, judgments, inferences, and many more. Despite undeniable immediacy and relevance/salience, these don't appear to be objects composed of matter. These are on the "soul" side of the conventional dichotomy of soul vs. matter. In a single convenient word, these are examples of the category of mentality: mental occurrences which are often at least as vivid as any other reality.

Supposedly, mentality forces the potential followers of materialistic naturalism into an inhuman dilemma. Option one is to be "logically consistent" and concede the unsatisfactory far-fetched notion that mentality's existence is fake. Option two is to concede that mentality exists and be "logically inconsistent" with the premises. Neither option is appealing.

Of course, I reject this dilemma altogether. Consistent with past blog entries, my ongoing viewpoint is that mentality doesn't perfectly fit either of the clumsy classifications. First of all, it can't be purely fake or spiritual because it's too tightly enmeshed with plainly observable bodily matter, such as sensory organs and muscles that serve as its routine external inputs and outputs. And even its own "internal" work coincides exactly with the turbulent activity of still more bodily matter, such as nervous systems—especially brains. In no way is it disconnected or independent from realities composed of matter. To the contrary, unceasing dangers show repeatedly that healthful mentality is frighteningly vulnerable. It's equivalently disrupted or damaged whenever these bundles of matter are. (I once told a story about inflicting analogous destruction on a compact disc to establish that its matter encodes the data.) It can't be a mirage that somehow floats inside or above or around matter.

Nevertheless, I also recognize that a thoroughly materialistic substrate for the category of human mentality doesn't ensure that everything in it corresponds closely to materialistic realities. Specifically, its substrate is an organism. Therefore its form springs out of the same origin as the organism's form: evolution. Naturally, it didn't evolve to act as an excellent all-purpose tool for systematic investigation of microscopic minutiae or faraway galaxies; it evolved to levels of precision and accuracy that are "good enough" for the pertinent details of its organism's environmental niche. Its hastily applied generalizations, shortcuts, biases, and simplifications result from the usual evolutionary pressures for greater efficiency. Overall, its design isn't planned and organized but, well, organic. It showcases the usual tactic of reusing, reshaping, and recombining an existing set of primitive albeit time-tested parts. Its incoming flow of information is confined to "sensors" with ranges limited by cheapness—but admittedly ingenuous within the limits.

In the end, it has approximate projections which compromise between low cost and sufficient correctness. It projects temperatures as harsh visceral relative impressions for swiftly guiding an organism through its surroundings, not as exhaustive quantitative data for distinguishing and interpreting the complicated particle physics responsible. It projects acute injuries as sharp unmistakable bursts of unpleasantness, not as lengthy lists of minute diagnostic facts. On behalf of competitive evolutionary fitness, metaphorical hazy shadows on a cave wall are fine...provided the shadows have adequate fidelity to the source realities. (This point rehashes the past entry on the accuracy of an evolved brain.) If any "distorted" or "highly processed" or "incomplete" representation qualifies as an illusion, then illusion is all around; humans encounter and understand realities through the lens of mentality. The term "illusion" becomes worthless. Mentality is packed with illusions according to that overly broad definition.

Frankly, the definition of illusion doesn't need to be that uselessly broad to capture compelling examples. A narrower definition of blatant fiction will do, because human mentality isn't bounded by unoriginal reporting. It can be unreal, i.e. counterfactual. It can fantasize falsehoods. And it can ignorantly digest falsehoods just like realities, either accidentally or through malicious exploitation of its predictable inborn weaknesses. Yet falsehoods come in countless kinds that enrich lives too. Nonrepresentational works are priceless cultural artifacts. Novel inventions start as imaginings.

Thus some examples of mentality might have little resemblance to verified material stuff, while mentality itself nonetheless continues to be the result of material stuff. For instance, a particular house is the occasional setting of my dreams. It's an old wooden three-story house. Its exterior is too small to plausibly contain its numerous trinket-filled rooms and secret passageways. Since this house is in my dreams, it's not like a house that consumes space at a location. It's not a structure with a history or a future. It doesn't interact with anything else at all. I never remember sensing it while I'm awake and alert. It fails the mundane confirmations that sift realities from illusions—it's an illusion of the blatant fiction variety.

Regardless of its fictitiousness, this house illusion is actually embedded in the precious matter of a non-illusory object I like to call myself. That matter is arranged in a way that leads to the occasional, er, reconstruction of the house during sleep. The reconstruction is a process, and the house's lack of confirmed existence is incidental to the process as it's operating. A process that produces abundant distinct examples of realistic mentality can certainly produce examples of lesser realism as well. A mentality maker is a potential illusion maker. Suppose that the active matter is like a keyboard, and mentality is the music it emits. Then waking mentality is the tune played when assorted waking influences press the matter "keys". I drive to my residence, rays of light and sound waves reach my eyes and ears, and I perceive my familiar residence in my mentality. Cycles of dream-sleep, or any altered state, have differing influences pressing differing keys in abnormal patterns. Why couldn't the mentality "tune" be different? Why couldn't the tune be unusual....or discordant?

Ultimately I persist in following materialistic naturalism, notwithstanding my unpredictable dream visits to a counterfeit house. It and its fellow examples of mentality are matter masquerading as non-matter. Humans face everything via the sole point of view they have and cannot escape: their individual instance of mentality. But mentality is an imperfect exceedingly complex effect of the work of evolved but ordinary error-prone matter, so it's susceptible to wildly varying amounts of authenticity. That's why mentality or thoughts work best in a triangle of checks and balances along with actions and objects.

If, like earlier, projection can be a flawed but useful metaphor for mentality, then the house is an image on a metaphorical filmstrip (reminds me of a Sunday installment of Calvin and Hobbes that played with the idea that a weird dream is a sloppily spliced film). The projector, filmstrip, and the image on the filmstrip are all matter. Yet the image might be properly considered an illusion, depending on whether it came straight from a camera placed in front a house (eyes), a skilled impressionist painter (dreams), or the in-between case of a photograph that has been retouched and/or shoddily copied (aged memories). Materialistic naturalism doesn't blindly invalidate mentality as a whole. But it could cast reasonable doubt on mentality's customary overconfidence and self-importance: "I see things this way in my soul, and my soul outranks and thereby reinterprets every other source of information."  

ubiquitous priming

Speculation about the operation of the brain is tricky. It defies easy analogies. But perhaps ubiquitous priming is a worthwhile one. In psychological studies, priming refers to the effect of stimuli on future responses to related stimuli. The earlier stimuli "prime" the psychological subject like priming a water pump or an engine. For a short time after priming, subjects respond more readily to similar stimuli.

In contrast to the brain's complex computations, priming has an easier analogy available: context. In human thought and behavior, the importance of context shouldn't be underestimated. Priming/context tailors results according to the situation. It's more complicated than a one-to-one mathematical function or a row of light switches. It's closer to sowing many seeds in proximity and allowing the plants to entangle. 

In the same way, priming/context could be ubiquitous, occurring at differing levels. As reductionist as it sounds, pieces of brain have surrounding pieces to act as context. One brain activation "primes" its counterpart because it contributes to overcoming its activation threshold in the "present" or in the "near future"—keeping in mind that these slivers of time are much smaller than the smallest human-perceptible instant. And thereby a small cluster of brain activations primes the clusters connected to it. And larger clusters prime larger clusters, and so on into greater sizes.         

Also, ubiquitous priming is an analogy of the value of the brain's structure. An item of information isn't just encoded in isolation but encoded to be additional priming for more items. From inborn instincts, information primes the brain for behaviors that are advantageous for natural selection. From cultural lessons, information primes the brain for the culture's focal points. From language, information primes the brain for the grammatical distinctions to match tense/mood/aspect/etc. From memories since birth, information primes the brain for recall of crucial episodes. Indeed, pushing the analogy into hyperbole, exactly how much of a human's identity, such as their preferences and goals and coping styles and experiences, can be thought of as their largest context, meaning their whole unique set of brain structures for ubiquitous priming? 

orderly abstract intelligence is a highly principled remix

When arguing against the natural evolutionary origin of humanity, flattery doesn't hurt. Consider the entire class of arguments which praise the uniqueness of humans in comparison to other biological organisms. For if humans are so incredibly special, then how could they be products of natural processes? How could their distinctiveness arise from an evolutionary continuum?   

Most often, the topic of human uniqueness focuses on intelligence and behavior. Does any other animal do _____? Is any other animal motivated by ______? Can any other animal easily solve puzzles like _______? And if not, then how are humans different? Expressed in a single debate-ready question: what is the mechanism behind the human flair for abstract intelligence, as opposed to the earthy intelligence demonstrated by "lower" animals?

Of course, in the context of evolution denial, mentioning this mysterious question probably isn't intended to lead to physical answers; the questioner is probably insinuating that the question has an equally mysterious metaphysical answer. However, regardless of the intent behind it, the question is still intriguing for anyone who accepts materialistic naturalism. Clearly there isn't yet a proven definitive answer to it—everyone will notice when there is one, because it will lead to unmistakable artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, informed speculation is necessary to fill the gap.

So speculate I shall. I concede that humans' abstract intelligence must operate somehow. My current thinking is that the question is framed to be subtly misleading. It deliberately hints that abstract intelligence is an additional centralized semi-independent ability which only human brains possess. In this view, the non-abstract, i.e. concrete and animal-like, portions of the brain receive and refine sense data and primal drives. Then those results flow into the supplementary "humans are awesome" brain part (e.g. the antiquated hypothesis of the pineal gland's function), where abstract intelligence performs miracles on the information.

This simplistic paradigm is unlikely. My current impression is that abstract intelligence acts more like an energetic remix of concrete intelligence. It's a complex set of coordinated interactions with all the types of concrete intelligence; it reuses, repurposes, redirects, even reprograms. It achieves unprecedented combinations. Although it's certainly a novel innovation in brain design that obviously produces drastically exceptional output, it's not built as a completely distinct type of intelligence. This more complicated paradigm is compatible with the known structure of the human brain, which indeed includes lengthy and numerous interconnections among the various parts that are devoted to identifiable types of concrete intelligence. The prefrontal cortex is a famous site for the junctions of these prominent interconnections, thereby creating excess routes.

It's not difficult to imagine the routes guiding the flow of data. But what if abstract intelligence also consists of routes for the flow of delegating reasoning? What if it's partly a metaphorical engine for translating data from one type of concrete intelligence to a second, and enabling the second's specialized processing on the initial data? What if the primary strategy is to "summon help" from diverse intricate types of concrete intelligence that have evolved for eons? For example, invoking the visual cortex to examine an abstract image as if it had originated from the eyes. If this were accurate, then it's an amusing instance of inversion of control, like the tail wagging the dog. When the triggered "lower" intelligence sends the solution back to the dispatching junction, the solution itself triggers yet another flow. I suppose this abstract give-and-take could last for a while, as intermediate solutions provoke further intermediate solutions.

On the other hand, unhampered conscious remixing of both data and reasoning would be chaotic. Under normal conditions the operation of abstract intelligence isn't a subjective experience of total bedlam, so presumably the remix obeys any number of organizing principles. The first could be the presence of fresh salient external data. Perhaps such data interrupts and overpowers most abstract loops of brain activity. Evolution surely has rewarded brains which prioritize sudden pertinent events in the organism's surroundings.

The second organizing principle could be the bonds supplied by narratives. Narratives furnish a strongly coherent context for abstract intelligence, and the importance of context shouldn't be underestimated. In fact, I suspect that narratives are extremely influential and versatile tools for steering human thought at all levels of abstractness. Narratives derive strength from three features. First is language. The decoding of language systematically and rapidly activates swarms of ideas. So any organizing principle that harnesses language already has extensive access to the brain. But note that strong narratives can also be nonverbal. The second strong feature of narratives is episode. Like episodes in reality, episodes in narratives can have wide-ranging effects simultaneously. An episode isn't one thing, sensation, or concept. It's a blend of many in a momentary span of time, and the blend can cause any number of cascading reactions in the brain all at once. And in effect the blend reinforces the mutual association of all the data in the specific episode, according to the proverb for behavioral conditioning: "neurons that fire together wire together." The third strong feature of narratives is sequence. Narratives present the episodes in a particular sequence, and thus sequencing is an indispensable clue for comprehending and extracting relationships among episodes. The sequence is raw material for countless examples of abstract intelligence. It may tie together otherwise disparate data items: the sequence of merging any collection with a count of two and any collection with a count of three yields a collection with a count of five. It facilitates replaying or reciting: even a familiar telephone number demands more effort to state in reverse. I'm deeply interested in the precise representation of sequences in the "massively parallel" brain, because generally parallelism and sequencing are hard to reconcile.    

The third organizing principle could be timing. This includes forms of external synchronization such as tempo, rhythm, and repetition. Perhaps insistent timing effectively filters brain activation patterns, through direct disruption of patterns that don't match the timing. Moreover, timing seems like an unavoidable factor in the brain's coding of information. Nerve cells need to activate in timed groups—each nerve cell is too simple to encode information by itself. Each cell's contribution to the "meaning" is interdependent on other cells activated at that time, like a single minuscule display-dot that at one time is part of a "B" and at a later time is part of a "6". Timing shows up significantly in more ways, too. Overall brain activity has a customary timing, such as alpha waves or beta waves. During conversation, unexpected timing of phrases is considered highly distracting...and a sign of non-native speakers. During abstract data handling, timing is related to the boundaries between separate items: the start of the following item shouldn't be timed before the end of the preceding item. I wonder if it might encode data containment as well, via several coinciding timings of differing lengths. The larger enclosing unit could have a long timing, and the smaller enclosed units could have shorter timings that begin and conclude within the longer timing of the larger unit. Needless to say, music of all kinds is a prime example of the operation of this organizing principle.
          
The fourth organizing principle could be remodeling: restructuring the brain in order to act as a better-fitting model of specific information. As previously mentioned, remodeling ultimately occurs at cell level, when each cell's selective activation has lasting (or should I say memorable?) side effects by activating another cell. At coarser levels of detail, remodeling is merely a cumbersome synonym for learning—not just learning greater motor-nerve control over the body but also over inaccurate abstractions. Brain remodeling is like continuously redrawing a map by trial and error, whether that entails erasing mistakes or adding more information. Drastic changes are less possible at older ages, of course. Meanwhile, at a still-coarser level of detail, remodeling is societal and cultural. Explicitly and implicitly, culture introduces fundamental abstractions and then introduces more and more elaborate abstractions by remixing its fundamentals. Naturally, the preceding three organizing principles are effective tools for brain remodeling. For instance, a ritualistic chant may be a sensory experience that expresses a narrative and is always repeated according to predetermined timing. Remodeling nurtures and vitalizes abstract intelligence's potential. From generation to generation, remodeling ensures that the total cultural products of abstract intelligence are communal. The teaching, modification, and preservation of culture comes from a long-lived population of humans who remodel each other's brains.

After accounting for the constraining influence of organizing principles, it's more plausible that orderly abstract intelligence could occur through remixes of brain impulses. In this way, the mass of unintelligent pieces is neither a disjointed mob nor a rigid clockwork. If it were the disjointed mob, then it couldn't make any coherent cumulative progress. If it were the predictable clockwork, then it couldn't adapt to imperfect or surprising data. The inner workings of a principled remix lies in the middle between these extremes. That mode in the middle really isn't any more obscure than the two extremes, so perhaps it's unhelpful to use the magical-sounding term "emergent" just to describe its large-scale pattern effects. Something similar occurs all the time in other huge dynamically-structured groupings which incorporate small interactions among individual items or subgroups: colonies of eusocial insects, Internet routers, political movements in democracies, buyers and sellers in economies, cells in multicellular organisms, air masses in weather. For these common groupings, usually nobody objects to the simultaneous existence of the whole and also every item. Strictly speaking, the whole itself is an extant grouping and therefore it and its effects aren't emerging. The appearance of emergence is a side-effect of enlarging the viewing scale. The contents of abstract intelligence "emerge" from a large-scale view on innumerable synaptic teams.

Then the relevant follow-up question is how this applies to the experience of emergence in the brain. The other cases of large-scale observation have obvious observers and methods, such as an economist collecting many surveys or a weather satellite tracking many clouds. The counterpart in the brain could be one more organizing principle: resistance. If a cell at a somewhat central position resists activation until it receives a multitude of synchronized signals from other cells, then it distinguishes between small-scale and large-scale activation. Its activation "represents" a trending pattern. The resistant cell "ignores" a tiny impulse sent by lone cells but it "observes" a relatively wide signal sent by cooperative cell groups. And this setup could be repeated again, with entire groups of somewhat central resistant cells chained in turn to other groups of resistant cells. In effect, the cumulative resistance builds and builds, until the cells near the end of the chain only activate whenever the sending group of cells is especially plentiful. The active cell groups overcome resistance by forming the necessary alliance, acquiring the necessary key, lowering the necessary drawbridge, switching on the necessary transistor gate voltage. Some of the most influential coalition cells could be the ones which are tied to pain and pleasure, so that relatively neutral sensations or ideas are less likely to dominate overall brain activity. Resistance produces a selective result. Chaotic cell activations normally lose and are filtered out. Normal consciousness is infamously narrow because there can only be few popular victors. On the other hand, the competition is held a multitude of times, so it's also possible for past losers to overcome resistance later. At first, half-baked thoughts might have difficulty leaping the hurdles to consciousness, but once those thoughts have developed further, the resurfacing i.e. "emergence" could be sudden—the half-baked subconscious thought grew into an unconventional intuitive insight which broke into consciousness.

However, for emergence in particular, I realize that resistance and my other organizing principles are more complicated and/or unpoetic in comparison to metaphysical explanations. It's more comforting to propose that orderly abstract thinking is imposed reliably on the disarray from "above", rather than confronting the proposal that it's constructed from out of the "below" disarray using inherently fallible strategies. Unfortunately, reality on its own continues to refuse to conform to human preferences. 

the accuracy of an evolved brain

I've encountered more than a few philosophical arguments for faith beliefs. Clearly, I'm no longer convinced by any of these. In fact, I've since realized that the field of apologetics isn't as deeply appreciated by unbelievers as it is by doubting believers, who are quicker to welcome its thin justifications. Nevertheless, like other impractical philosophical topics, these are adequate points for the purpose of frivolous discussion. And a blog is an adequate medium for the purpose of frivolous discussion...

Today's example: "Unlike materialistic naturalism, my religious beliefs assume that the right set of human ideas is utterly accurate. Utter accuracy is possible because human souls aren't vulnerable to the normal imperfections and limitations of physical matter. Also, reality is comprehensible to humanity because both originated from the same source: one or more unearthly souls that value accuracy and think like a human's soul. My explicit basis for accuracy is tidy and comforting and trustworthy. It's a better fit for my preferences than the alternative notion of human ideas existing as mere physical events in a brain. A brain is just a smallish body organ originating from evolution, and evolution obviously isn't a soul which painstakingly engineers accurate thinkers. It's the impersonal tendency to maximize rates of survival and reproduction. So how can anyone be as satisfied with the accuracy of an evolved brain?"

What makes this argument so fascinating to me is that, well, I sorta continue to agree with part of it. I readily concede that evolution hasn't resulted in a brain that always extracts accurate information and then arrives at appropriate inferences. Instead, one common thread in the systematic study of human perception/memory is that humans don't leave information as-is. Nor do they typically analyze information with unassuming mathematical logic. Humans ignore and embellish and filter and overgeneralize. They apply patterns so hastily that they routinely perceive/remember whatever they expect. The importance of context shouldn't be underestimated.

This finding is consistent with a survival "goal" of rapid efficient tactical responses. These only require vague short-cut answers which are reached through scarce energy-consuming bodily resources. Without cultural training, an evolved brain isn't an unbiased and dispassionate investigator. Its first question is, "How will the new information affect me here and now?" Humans may proceed to laboriously sift information at advanced levels of reason, but those levels don't replace the primitive level. Hence the religious argument isn't too far off the mark when it expresses anxiety about the basic fallibility of an evolved brain; to the contrary, its mistake is its failure to also acknowledge that its anxiety has been confirmed countless times by real behavior. And those confirmations support evolved brains over aloof souls.

More amusing still, the argument itself amounts to a complaint about the emotionally unsatisfying implications of the opposing conclusion. "I don't like a challenging conclusion very much, so I refuse to think it's accurate." It's undisguised motivated reasoning. But the existence of motivated reasoning is a decisive clue in favor of evolved brains as opposed to aloof souls. As mentioned earlier, it's consistent for an evolved brain to attempt to obtain answers by measuring with an egocentric standard such as "How does this conclusion affect my feelings?" It's not consistent for the same egocentric standard to be measured by an alleged aloof, impartial, abstract, deep, spiritual soul. Generally, according to one of its definitions, faith is a specimen of motivated reasoning: accepting an idea to serve some purpose, regardless of factual proof. Why would humans crave religion's psychological payoffs, such as promises of utterly accurate information, if not due to impulses shaped by evolution? It's subtly self-contradictory when the argument entices the hearer's belief with a relative emotional reward...given that reward-seeking evolved brains are likelier to be, uh, persuaded by such relative emotional rewards.

On the other hand, I might not be expressing the argument most effectively. Perhaps it's intended to present a straightforward logical contradiction: "Unlike my religious beliefs, materialistic naturalism isn't as dependent on the notion of utter accuracy. Therefore it cannot be true because it implies that all statements are false." To which I reply: er...no. Non sequitur. I'll repeat my usual refrain. Real accuracy is a measurement resulting from many various mental and/or physical actions—perhaps more than one, to alleviate the effect of each action's possible defects. Some accuracy is already as "utter" as anyone could ask; despite my lack of an aloof soul I can determine with utter accuracy the quantity of future days in the present month. Meanwhile some accuracy isn't utter but everyone copes; I don't know every last digit of today's balance in all my interest-accruing bank accounts, but I'm sure the amount is greater than ________.

Similarly, the accuracy of the proposition "Human thought is a product of an evolved brain" is measured by actions. When someone observes X, do they observe Y too? Utter accuracy is certainly a pleasant goal, but its frequent absence doesn't eliminate the achievement of lesser accuracy. In practice we don't foolishly presume that any human constructs and emits perfect representations of reality. That's why we take measurements known as "expertise", and why we demand to know what someone means when they speak. It's awfully suspicious whenever someone tries to circumvent their evaluation by saying, "Accept my utterly accurate information because it somehow arose without the action of evolved human brains, unlike every other less grandiose item of information."

the case of the brain code

As a general rule, a philosophical stance is shaky if one of its most well-respected rationales is an argument from ignorance. In the case of an immaterial soul, the argument from ignorance refers to the mystery of the brain code for information. Defenders of an immaterial soul may try to reckon that this ongoing mystery implies the impossibility of a soulless brain that operates according to boring theories of physics/chemistry/biology. As they may say, if everyone is currently ignorant of precisely how a brain composed of matter encodes the entire range of conscious experience, then isn't it more reasonable to revert to the ancient proposal that a soul is the mechanism instead?

I don't think so, but I willingly acknowledge that a soul could feel more satisfying. I've previously admitted that every objective explanation of conscious experience suffers from a "gap in immediacy". It's like the objective explanation that normal heat is infrared light, regardless of whether humans experience the two categories through differing senses or conscious experiences. In the same way, no matter how much human knowledge discovers about the brain code, the knowledge won't be an "intuitive" match. Broad reality isn't obligated to fit narrow human preconceptions. It's plainly ridiculous to demand that accurate discoveries about the brain code must be as easily teachable as all faith-based explanations.

On the other hand, I also acknowledge that this argument from ignorance is built upon a straightforward hypothetical question: is it possible for an ignorant but open-minded investigator to verify that information is coded somehow in an arrangement of matter like a soulless brain, despite their partial or total ignorance of the code it uses? Of course! Moreover, the number of illustrative metaphors from across human civilization is virtually limitless, especially now in the much-hyped Information Age. In an effort to select a common one that's neither too old nor too new, consider the compact disc. A clever and spectacularly uninformed investigator will attempt to determine whether information is coded on a compact disc. I'll call the investigator by the surname "Japp" (no relation to any other inspectors).

The most obvious solution is for Japp to place the disc in a corresponding machine that's manufactured to 1) read such discs and then 2) produce the encoded information and all its associated effects. Perhaps Japp has access to a laptop computer. As soon as Japp has a conscious experience of the information, such as a high-fidelity audio recording, Japp may report that the disc encodes the information. To be more certain that the information is encoded on the disc rather than in the disc reader, Japp could try repeating the experiment with other discs and other disc readers. This first attempt is like talking to a subject in order to confirm that they can describe the desired information whenever they're asked the right questions; if they can, then the questioner accepts that the information in the subject is coded by the subject's brain.

At this point, Japp might announce success in the small-scale investigation. But in a surprise twist, an objector suggests to Japp that perhaps the information isn't coded in the material of the disc itself. After all, it's evident that the disc is "only an object" and not a conscious experience of information. What if the information mostly consists of a ghost in another "plane" of existence altogether, but it happens to "coincide" with the disc? And the information ghost of the disc manifests because it temporarily possesses the disc reader? (Feel free to substitute "long-lasting quantum effect" for "ghost".)

Ever careful and patient, Japp responds by analyzing the internal structure of the disc and its reader in closer detail. Clearly the reader has a laser component. Japp tries temporarily obstructing and then exposing the laser component, perhaps with some opaque tape. These sneaky manipulations affect the information output of the reader via an extremely close correlation. Next Japp announces that if there is an information ghost, then it's affected by temporarily tampering with the materials of the disc and the reader. Whatever ghostly form that the information has, it's nevertheless dependent on the smooth operation of the material of the disc that's hit by the laser. This second attempt is like feeding a subject a chemical dose that affects the nervous system, such as alcohol; if the subject's ability to produce information is affected, then the outcome indicates that the information in the subject is dependent on the smooth operation of something material, i.e. the nervous system.

However, this demonstration isn't drastic enough. A second objector suggests a more nuanced interaction between the information ghost and the disc. What if it's dependent on the disc because it "flows through" the disc, and therefore the disc acts solely as a channel or conduit? In effect, the matter of the disc still doesn't predetermine the ghost, but the ghost requires the disc anyway.

Japp shrugs and remembers one of the details from the recent analysis of the disc's structure: it contains a definitive sequential order. Some sections of the disc come first, others are in the relative middle, and others are at the end. Japp grabs a tool, mentally divides the disc into seven sequential sections, and wrecks just the fifth of the seven sections. Then the information is reproduced from the disc once again. Unsurprisingly, the conscious experience of the sequence of reproduced information is mostly intact...except for when the information sequence has progressed to about five-sevenths of the whole. Japp notes that not only does the information as a whole correspond closely to the disc as a whole, but a part of the information corresponds closely to a part of the disc. This third attempt is like examining the recently traumatized brain of a subject who has a highly specific problem in their mental capabilities or memories; if the subject's brain shows problems in the corresponding area of that capability or memory, such as an abnormal growth, then the outcome indicates that the information (or behavior) in the subject is encoded bit by bit in the subject's brain. 

Finally, after reviewing the previous discussions, a third objector suggests that Japp hasn't convincingly shown anything important about the original question. What if the contribution of the information ghost is yet more puzzling? Perhaps most of the information, or even almost all of it, is coded by the matter of the disc, but the ghost's role is to furnish an essential core or "organizing principle"? In effect, the ghost is responsible for making the information coherent and interesting. Unless it's proven directly that the material of the disc accounts for every last jot of information, the ghost could be a factor.

Japp groans and proceeds to learn about the engineering of the disc and the reader as well as the computations to transform the bits on the disc into the final information output. Japp delivers a series of lectures. The third objector complains that Japp is obscuring a topic that should be simple: a mundane sequence of information and a mundane circle of cheap material.

Google Translate met my challenge?

In the last footnote of the previous entry, I wondered if the infamous ambiguity of natural language would easily defeat algorithms that don't have deep comprehension of the symbols. I contrived two different English sentences with distinct meanings despite sharing many words: 1) "I'm quitting my run because I can't stand the sun directly overhead," and 2)"Too much overhead is required to run a stand". I'm feeling chagrin after I stuck the two into Google Translate. It produced French translations that don't appear to have grievous errors. Then again, my first language is English and my French is...limited. But my consultations of online French-to-English dictionaries haven't shown any serious problems. For an English speaker who doesn't know any French, the words' discernible resemblances aren't hard to see.

• J'arrête ma course parce que je ne peux pas supporter le soleil directement au-dessus.
• Trop de frais généraux est nécessaire pour faire fonctionner un stand.

I'll admit it. I'm impressed by Google Translate's use of context. Will Google's automated cars do well on Canadian roads?


UPDATE later: And...here's a counterexample of GT not working as well. "The child put the toy in the pen" is a classic conundrum for machine translation. "Stylo" is not the appropriate French word in this case. Changing "pen" to "playpen" works better, though. L'enfant mis le jouet dans le stylo.

the renovated Chinese Room

I have already posted about the Chinese Room two times. But after reading some comments in The Symbolic Species by Terrence W. Deacon, I think I can offer some more clarification or express the same perspective in a different way. Although Deacon states his belief that artificial intelligence is possible, he also opines that the Chinese Room casts doubt on the equivalency of sentience and algorithms for manipulating dissociated symbol tokens. These algorithms belong to systems of logical deductions, which function well in many domains but not as realistic models of brain computations. I agree with him. In fact, I shall renovate the Room around his observation.

As always, the bemused human alone in the closed room receives a sequence of unknown¹ tokens (i.e. symbolic representations), applies a preexisting set of manipulation rules onto that sequence to form a response sequence, and finally sends back the response. However, this time, the testers outside the room are shrewd in their determination to detect the presence or absence of a sentient conversationalist. They carefully note the close correspondences of questions and responses. Gradually the growing collection of notes resembles the collection of originating rules in the room, which the unknowing manipulator can neither disobey nor adjust.

Eventually, the testers select and "combine" two suitable questions from out of the notes. By "suitable" I mean that via the syntactic and semantic structure of the unknown language, one of the selected questions modifies the meaning of the second. The meaning of the combined question isn't a "lossless sum" of the two questions' independent meanings². Therefore an appropriate and believable response to the combined question isn't in the set of acceptable responses to either of the two independent questions. If the testers receive a believable response, then they may try combining two other questions. Or combine the combined question with a third. Or combine it with another combined question. For mischievous testers, the possibilities multiply.

For instance, since the algorithm in the room is intended to mimic a human³, it surely has a prepared response to the question, "What food does your father like to eat?" The alleged algorithm somehow uses the tokens of that question to produce the tokens of a response like "Licorice". Again, the algorithm surely has a prepared response to a distinct question of the same general category, "What food do you like to eat for breakfast?" Will the algorithm produce a reasonable response to the modified question, "What food does your father like to eat for breakfast?" Or, "What food does the father of your father like to eat for breakfast?" Or, "What food does your father not like to eat and you like to eat for breakfast?"

Regardless of the questions' triviality, the interpretive complexity can increase dramatically through tweaks that are rather simple (for humans!). As always, the Chinese Room asks, "Assuming that the fraud in the room achieves a perfect outcome from the testers' perspective, isn't it a self-contradiction for them to claim that anything in the room understands?" But after my renovation of the testers' methods, successful deception is much more difficult for the proposed algorithm! No matter how long the algorithm's finite list of prearranged question and responses, the testers can still escape it through valid combinations of any suitable questions in the list. And recall that the tokens of the right responses for the combinations aren't derivable from the tokens for the responses for the independent questions. If the algorithm is one big list of token transformations, then the testers can confound it by constructing an explosive quantity of more and more questions. It cannot yield passable words in response to the combined question by transforming passable words of the responses to independent questions⁴.

Thus the algorithm cannot successfully defeat the challenge unless it consists of more than a preset list of token manipulations. Instead it must think of the tokens as symbols (and qualify as Deacon's second "Symbolic Species"). It must expand and condense information. It must translate: 1) from the source sequence to reconstituted isomorphic reference "content", 2) from the restored "content" to an appropriate response, 3) from the response content to an adequate sequence of symbolic tokens to represent it.

My own past reactions to the Chinese Room have assumed that the algorithm in the room was doing these tasks in order to work convincingly: hence my view that the meanings, i.e. isomorphisms, of the unknown language simply resided in the smart algorithm as opposed to the algorithm's human "scribe". With a renovated Chinese Room in which the testers exploit the tireless elaboration permitted by language, the algorithm is forced to take the form of symbolic thought which I assumed; direct token transformation is a hopeless strategy⁵.


¹ As other commentators have remarked, the unknown characters are "Chinese" in order to emphasize mystery for native speakers who use Latin-derived alphabets, so Aurebesh and Tengwar would fill the role too. In any case, with the right talent, tools, and educated skills, a linguist in the Room might speculate accurately about the unknown language itself after study of the algorithm and a large quantity of sample sequences. Nevertheless, the experience of archaeologists demonstrates that lack of context would prevent discovery of the majority of the tokens' meanings.
² Grammatical modification is a significant characteristic of natural/unbounded language. Changes to tense, mood, gender and so forth are less like addition or multiplication and more like shifting ("rotating" or "translating") a vector's direction along many axes. The testers outside the room can certainly perform these language operations because they're fluent humans without the restriction of pure token manipulations. Unfortunately, they couldn't mechanize this type of processing until AI has a long-sought breakthrough: guided re-combination of old ideas is one of the leading definitions of creativity.
³ It's questionable whether mimicry of humanity is an essential proof of intelligence. I chose this instance to highlight that aspect. "Thinking like me" is a narrow and shallow definition of intelligence. Deacon acknowledges that this definition is already applied to answer the similar and basic question, "How do I know any human besides me has the same intelligence, sentience, and consciousness?"
⁴ In more formalized language, if the algorithm requires an explicit individualized mapping from every source sequence of tokens to a response sequence of tokens, then the algorithm is not computable. The combinatorial capability to create new meaningful source sequences implies that no theoretical algorithm can enumerate or count all the source sequences or contain a novel response sequence for each. (Nobody really speculates that human brains handle natural language in this way.)
⁵ Perhaps ambiguity would stymie direct token transformation sooner than I suggest. Without deep information about all the numerous definitions, the initial categorization of words as "nouns" or "verbs" could be problematic. For example, what if the question were to guess the speakers of the following quotations? 1) "Too much overhead is required to run a stand." 2) "I'm quitting my run because I can't stand the sun directly overhead." The first is an entrepreneur pondering where to sell, and the second is a dehydrated athlete.

immediacy gaps

The quest continues to defend materialistic naturalism from malicious distortions. This entry is a natural extension to its predecessor, which was a natural extension of its predecessor. Where I last left off, I suggested that it's no loss of information to relinquish the philosophical idea of "real" minds. The tangled contents and events of consciousness correlate precisely (albeit cryptically) to the tangled contents and events of the brain. Ultimately, the set of physical operations that the brain performs to compute the "inner world" will certainly turn out to be at least as bewildering as the apparent experience of consciousness. My guess is that the set of brain operations will be far more bewildering; one vexing question among many is how exactly the summarized and sanitized "window" of mentality is synthesized out of the glaring discord of myriad neuron firings.

Unfortunately, the advance of knowledge about the brain's functioning has an intrinsic credibility problem, which is an immediacy gap. Within pure experience, not all parts are equally immediate. The coldness of ice water has great immediacy. Planning when to go buy more envelopes has less immediacy - the need might be urgent but the planning itself is not engrossing. A phone in my hand has great immediacy. A phone that I remember using several years ago has less immediacy.

Differences in immediacy motivate differing instinctual reactions. Parts of pure experience that have immediacy provoke rapid evaluation and firm belief in the parts' existence. Immediacy implies difficulty to ignore. It depends on few conceptual intermediates, unlike the lengthy chains of reasoning which link abstruse logical statements. Sparse intermediates are consistent with nonverbal character. Symbolic communication only comes "later", after suitable descriptions and metaphors are chosen. The nonverbal character is in turn consistent with frequent idiosyncrasy. For instance, individuals experience varying degrees of favor for particular smells or tastes.

Hence, humans cope constantly with substantial gaps of immediacy. It's a factor in good psychological health. Intellectual labor and social cooperation help to disentangle raw immediacy from "true" importance and/or reality. Maturity includes the recognition that experiences with immediacy often have in-depth impersonal causes, which by comparison have little if any immediacy. An empty blue sky is certainly of greater immediacy than envisioning the divergent molecular scattering of electromagnetic wavelengths. A typically effective strategy is to split pure experience into subjective and objective domains and reconcile the two in ways that can be...uh...complicated.

Yet this two-part organizational scheme collides with all propositions about the real origin of the subjective domain. By definition, everything that's categorized into the subjective domain has great immediacy, but propositions belong in the objective domain with less immediacy. Whenever the topic has greater immediacy than the proposition itself, it crosses the immediacy gap. The challenge is convincing someone that propositions about objects can be satisfactory explanations for experiences which have greater immediacy than propositions or objects.

For example, what quantities of what things add up to the "sensation" of an emotion like contentment? None of the possible answers to that question (serotonin?) evoke intuitive satisfaction because of a gap of immediacy between the answer and the question. Humans simply don't experience emotions as sums of quantities of things, so they struggle to equate emotions with even the most thorough analysis. This communication obstacle is quite irrevocable. Crudely put, even if a meticulous teacher in plain view took out the working brain of a determined dissenter and then presented exhaustive and lucid observations of the diligent exertions taking place in direct present correspondence with ongoing thoughts, the exasperated retort might just be, " 'Brain' and 'brain'! What is 'brain'? How can that pulsing ugly thing have any relevance to the vivid beautiful images in my mind's eye?"

Of course, the dissenter's insistence on an "objective" immediacy gap has a cost of assorted systemic brainteasers (so to speak). If origins aren't expressible in propositions about objects, then how does the subjective domain originate? How do real stimuli landing on the real senses enter into the subjective domain? How do intentions in the subjective domain exit to voluntary muscle movements in the objective domain, and how do severed nerves intercept those intentions? How can head trauma affect the content of the subjective domain so drastically? Upon consideration of all these practical facts illustrating the pervasive domination of the objective domain over the subjective domain, on what basis could someone persist in the notion that the two are either independent or that the mere immediacy of the subjective domain implies its superiority?

Immediacy is a consequence of a brain-based point of view. In other words, greater immediacy is no more than greater prominence in the egocentric "universe", constructed by an object called the "brain", using data that arrived via mediated contact with surroundings. It's the preeminent bias. "I think, therefore I am" belongs with a counterpart, "I am what my brain thinks."

Consciousness is a brainy action. The immediacy of some parts of pure experience doesn't falsify this principle. I could construe it as subtle supporting evidence: if the immediacy is meant to be a clue that I have a mind independent of my body, then why is it so rare to have immediate experience of stuff outside my body? Why isn't overt clairvoyance/ESP a common practice? (Vague sensations, probable educated guesses, and unverified fictional explorations like dreams, don't qualify.)

materialistic naturalism is not behaviorism either

This is an addendum to the preceding entry. I tried to draw distinctions between comprehensive materialistic naturalism and the simplistic forms of reductionism or relativism. Materialistic naturalism is the stance that all of reality is natural, and all of it consists of variants of the same material/physical stuff. In particular, if materialistic naturalism is true then it casts doubt on the reality of a ghostly mind, because the usual concept of minds is much too poorly-integrated with proven physical theories. Compared to minds, dark matter's effect on observable parts of reality has more concrete definition and substantiation.

Materialistic naturalism's incompatibility with minds may inspire opponents to equate it to an unappealing philosophical stance known as ("radical") behaviorism. Behaviorism in the bogeyman sense is the proposition that accurate analysis of human thought and decision-making doesn't require any knowledge beyond the plainly-seen external interactions between the human and everything else. In this alleged caricature, minds aren't necessary at all. Most of the proposed attributes of minds aren't easily analyzed or predicted through manifest behavior, so the behaviorist assumes that the attributes are pointless distractions. Humans may assert complex reasons, but their claims are post hoc rationalizations to cover up the real rationales. Behaviors are either inborn or shaped through training. Even a free-will-like rejection of a specific training regimen in the present is probably due to the direct opposing influence of past training regimens which are more strongly ingrained.

Thus bogeyman behaviorism is portrayed as a dehumanizing stance which is self-evidently inadequate to explain the entire range of human experience. Opponents of materialistic naturalism present the dilemma of embracing either the full reality of the mind or the distasteful alternative of behaviorism. I deny the dilemma altogether. Once again the universe is not simple enough to accommodate the old debates.

Indeed, the same detailed evidence that discredits shadowy minds also supports an astoundingly intricate chain of causes for both humans' behavior and inner "mentality". I'm alluding to ongoing research about the brain. The more that we learn and decode what happens in this dense internal space, the less plausible it becomes to revert to either mind-based or behavior-based explanations. Knowledge isn't anywhere near complete, but the trend is suggestive. Brain-based explanations are the future. Minds explain human behavior from the inside-out. Behaviorism explains human behavior from the outside-in. By contrast, brains inside human bodies inside environments are a unitary system of physical behavior.

Having said that, the pragmatic status of these competing explanations is a tricky mixture of qualities. Unlike brains, devices or surgical procedures cannot verify the presence or absence of minds. In that way, minds cannot be as real. Nevertheless, whether the context is the interpretation of another human's behavior or the "location" of conscious sensations, minds work well enough as approximations for the casual purposes of communication and introspection. In that way, the usefulness of the idea of minds is like the usefulness of "real" stuff, i.e. stuff that's verifiable by the multitudinous methods that don't work for minds.

To be more specific, minds are useful to serving the function of intangible inferences. A companion's expressed drowsiness may provoke the comment, "You're feeling sleepy." The comment is an inference about the companion's fictional mind as opposed to a measurement of the quantity of melatonin in the companion's nonfictional body. As long as the state of the "mind" corresponds closely to "real" stuff, it suffices for some aims. The intangibility of drowsiness doesn't destroy its meaningfulness.

Furthermore, within the category of pure human consciousness, other phenomena have similar meaningfulness. "Subjective" thoughts have been shown to have correlates in brain activity. Stimulation of the brain is reflected by occurrences in a subject's "mind", and the currently-predominant factors in a subject's "mind" are reflected by patterns of brain activation. As I mentioned earlier, the amazing mind's material replacement isn't an organic switchboard of behaviorism's straightforward inputs and outputs. It's an equally amazing brain packed with mind-correlates.

loopier and loopier

Aware that truth doesn't arrive gift-wrapped on the doorstep, a pragmatic thinker should be willing to consider ideas from any source. In particular, sources of false ideas can be more useful than anticipated. The source could have true ideas intermixed, if not often. False ideas themselves could be stepping-stones or flawed clues to the real truth. Still more subtly, ideas could possibly be literally false and yet "true" through hidden correspondences to nuggets of truth.

For instance, the concept of the human mind, of a nebulous decision-maker that mysteriously controls the brain/body (not vice-versa), is a handy fiction. The self's "mind" provides the setting for an otherwise gaping hole in the categorization of human experience: the locale of subjective mental phenomena. These are actually real in the sense of being real effects of the real activity of the self's real brain. But from the self's perspective, which naturally doesn't include moment-by-moment observation of the originating brain, orienting ethereal thoughts in a dual mind domain is a tidy solution; when one "sees" things without eyes or "hears" sounds without ears, some explanation is warranted, no matter how far-fetched!

At a more advanced level of abstraction, a deepest ghostly "soul", which is distinct from the mind, scrutinizes and directs the gamut of human existence. The mind contemplates and manipulates objective items, but the theorized soul in turn contemplates and manipulates the mind. It thinks about thoughts. Events in the mind, as well as objective reality, are the raw material for the soul. Just as the idea of a mind is constructed to answer the fundamental question, "What and where are subjective mental phenomena?", the idea of the soul is constructed to answer the fundamental question, "What observes subjective mental phenomena?"

Besides having explanatory value, souls are instrumental in behavior modification. Specifically, all the many procedures for "transformation" recommend the triumph of the soul over the mind, although "soul" may not be explicit in the procedures' language. The sign is the treatment of the mind as an object rather than the subject: "calm your mind", "analyze your motivations", "recognize your negatively-charged aura". According to their accounts, transformed humans purposely change their minds. Afterward they cease their past actions and habits, because their new minds are incompatible. They will say that the old inclinations return occasionally, but each one is rejected and ignored not long after inception.

Such tales pose no problem for someone who believes minds and souls to be factual (my position less than six years ago). This isn't an option within the context of the belief that minds and souls are convenient human inventions for meeting some needs. Regardless of the deceptiveness of the impressions described in the stories, something must be behind the honest storytellers' impressions. Since everything occurs in the confines of one brain, the clear indication is that the illusion of hypothetical entity Q observing hypothetical entity M arises from out of a internal brain loop. That is, brain network Q interacts with brain network M. Activation of network M somewhat indirectly activates network Q.

Therefore, in effect human culture's encouragement of the dominance of the "soul" is encouragement of more sophisticated brain loops. Deliberate introspection ("meditation") is a loop in which thoughts appear, enter short-term memory, and then undergo processing. It requires training precisely due to its essential parallelism. Paying too much attention to momentary thoughts interrupts the arrival of new thoughts. Paying too little attention to momentary thoughts fails to accomplish the overall goal of "detachment", of treating thoughts subsequently as independent mental objects. Unsurprisingly, practitioners who are working to set up the brain loop benefit from periodically returning their attention to their breathing. Breathing is a sensation whose inherent rhythm aids in coordinating the brain network that acts as the "observer soul" and the brain networks that act as the "observed mind". (Reminiscent of the synchronizing "clock ticks" of a computer processor.)

Similar loops constitute the enhanced impulse control of the "transformed" human. Someone whose consciousness frequently returns to a moral standard (and/or an omniscient judge) will incidentally discover whatever shortcomings were in progress immediately before the return. Or, after spending extended time associating unpleasant reactions with "evil" impulses, a conditioned response of hesitation starts to accompany the impulses in the future. Alternatively an association could be built up between a strong desire for a positive aim and impulses consistent with that aim. At the ultimate extent, loops could be so ingrained, sensitive, and efficient that some parts of the brain virtually prevent other parts from intruding into decisions under normal circumstances. In any case, the human brain is amazing in its loopy ability to employ its incredible capacity to react to nerve signals that originate from "inside" as well as "outside".

the defining data structure

The human brain is a body organ of countless cells and regions, whose chemical/electrical work consumes considerable energy to affect microscopic matter and thereby think. But pictured within a more abstract realm of information, its efforts accomplish the arrangement of data into a workable structure. It redirects, recombines, and generally tames a storm of data in the form of nerve impulses. Crudely put, brains are the coin-sorters that efficiently separate the "coins" of data by biological value. Given that a datum is never alone, i.e. information can only be informative in concert with other information, then the brain acts as the defining data structure.

Moreover, the data structure has several parts and processing steps. First, each bit of data is accompanied by its contemporary bits, into a structure of context. Second, this larger hunk of data is classified by arousing similarities to stored past data, into a structure of remembrance. Third, the data is correlated with goals and desires, into a structure of significance. Fourth, it becomes part of plans and scenarios, into a structure of proposed actions.

Since each of these tasks of definition are distinct to some extent, and also segregated by type of sensory stimuli, it's not too surprising that the brain's structure is closer to a conglomeration of specialists than a single thinly-spread generalist. When a creature develops a sense, it's cost-effective to gain narrow advantages from it in the service of common situations, e.g. fight or flight. On a limited food budget, brain cells that are well adapted to extracting information from sense data are preferable. By contrast, unshaped cells that are supremely flexible and unassuming are also not immediately helpful. Evolution prioritizes richer data structures of perception. It's more vital to absorb and distinguish raw data than to perform an orderly sequence of advanced manipulations and transformations.

Therefore, as a mirror of the brain's layout, general or abstract data structures are likely built from collections of specialty data structures. Thoughts about visual sensations, even if subconscious, happen via the brain sections that evolved to handle vision. Singers who recognize that a note's pitch is too low are using auditory specializations. Episodic memory, encompassing several senses at once, employs a wide-ranging slice of the brain. Words like "determination" or "below" or "nation-state" have connections that are more diffuse but nevertheless existent. Concepts rely on foundations, although the path can be long and twisting.

As complex as the entire mixture is, further complications apply. Instant initial sensations are not the sole data source that demands structure. For instance, incoming data can be persistent after the time of introduction, recurring by displacing recent items or fading to an activation level near sub-conscious. Either way, the long-lasting data structures have the possibility of meshing with seemingly unrelated structures to form unanticipated syntheses.

Another less traceable data source is unprovoked cell activity. Fully awake brains encountering sedate environments are nevertheless busy. Resting brains during a REM cycle are quite energetic, too. Clearly a measure of unpredictability and autonomy is built into the human organism.

Fortunately, mechanisms counteract the inherent chaos and competitiveness. Under normal circumstances data structures require consensus in order to continue having effect. No separate all-knowing judge is necessary to arbitrate. Matching data structures mutually reinforce and silence deviants, just like fitter organisms multiply and crowd out the less-fit in the absence of an overseer. A reasonable structure of data is strengthened through like-minded alliances with the expectations that it meets. A nonsensical structure of data is weakened because of its isolation.

Overall this bottom-up strategy is a gradient for progressively pushing data in the direction of verisimilitude. Inappropriate answers are often a mere starting point. Some variations on that start will link up with strong data structures in the brain, but some will not. Useful creativity is a trial-and-error enterprise that strains known constraints without breaking. Repetitive feedback establishes which prospective differences are a step forward or backward.

Hence the momentary restructuring experiments are anchored by relatively pivotal and dominant data structures. One category is urgent external reality. The freshest streams of experience are naturally vivid. Related data structures propagate by channeling the vibrancy. Remote data structures, like reveries, tend to dissipate quickly. Abnormal breaks in the division, triggered particularly by interference of ingested chemicals, can certainly reverse the usual hierarchy and produce disorienting confusion of whether data is "imaginary".

Besides urgent external reality, data structures may take a controlling role by belonging to the broad category of organism objectives. The power of basic evolutionary drives is sufficient to train a multitude of secondary aims and behaviors, perhaps resetting the original relative priorities. Emotive attraction or revulsion enriches corresponding data structures. Data that's been tied to such reactions is more likely to retain its structure. Marketers, politicians, and public-relations experts confirm the effectiveness of the tactic.

Thus the human brain begins with preexisting data structures for survival. Initially other creatures' brains are set up differently in as many ways as the creatures differ: less social creatures have lower proportions of data structures about empathy, creatures with advanced noses have more data structures devoted to recognizing smells, e.g. to discover claimed territory. Compared to the prehistoric time during which evolution encoded blunt instructions into the brain structures, not only into the human species but into its forebears, large-scale organized civilizations are the latecomers. While there isn't a biological way to transmit specific memories to offspring, inborn behavioral adaptations of general value in survival or reproduction are excellent traits for natural selection.

Sophisticated data structures produced and transmitted in human society are much more intricate and fine-grained than evolution's. However, one doesn't replace the other. The primal data structures are indispensable raw material and tools. Abstract structures can reuse earthy structures. In order to "understand" an abstaction, a concrete metaphor allows confident contemplation. Human brains are quite astute at extrapolating movement of an object; once the sequential levels of a quantity are visualized, the next level is the position the quantity would be if it were a moving object. AI data structures start from nothing. Defining data structures in the human brain start from an array of hard-won knowledge which meets a minimum standard of relevancy. Computers must be told exactly how to perform a task. Humans can be told a problem, and then they can twist their abundant data structures to define the problem and identify linked solutions.

symbol divergence

Often, the inner workings of something are clearest when it breaks. When it's functioning as expected, the details mesh into a sublime unit of successful cooperation. A big happy result overshadows the individual contributions; a jumbled unsettling result redirects attention to whatever broke.

Perhaps surprisingly, that holds for symbols. To determine what information corresponds to a symbol, consider all the ways to prove that differing symbols are mismatches in some fashion. For a symbol to have value, alternatives to it are to some extent inappropriate and inadequate. Which typical messages are judged "true" when the symbol is in place but judged "false" when other symbols are? Or "false" and "true" respectively, or "false" for either, or "true" for either? And veracity isn't the only message outcome to judge and compare. Within messages otherwise identical, does a symbol communicate relatively greater or lesser specificity, formality, emotionality, neutrality? Subtext is still information, as demonstrated by the difference in the recipient's potential reaction.

Then the divergence in message outcomes is a basis for inferring the information for the new symbol via the indirect route of other symbols, which act as points of reference. The true message "X is a telephone" narrows down the information that X could symbolize. Another true message "X is wireless" eliminates further possibilities. A symbol's information is a synthesis whose parts and connections themselves can be symbolically communicated. Divergence outlines the real boundaries of the synthesis, like how parallax bounds objects' real positions. For instance, "X is a telephone" implies a fairly restrictive range for the mass and volume information included in the synthesis that X symbolizes. All one's prior examples of telephones, being sufficiently alike to X to merit the symbol "telephone", are like lines of sight directed in the metaphorical vicinity of X's synthesis of information. X's particular synthesis of size and price and brand and usability, as judged from messages in which X appears, is different than those prior examples but is nevertheless metaphorically closer than the synthesis symbolized by "sasquatch".

At the extreme, symbols could more or less fail to exhibit divergence. When that happens, the superficiality of symbolism is most clear. Generally, humans are too easily impressed and preoccupied by this occurrence. "What if someone abruptly started using the word 'green' for the perception of the color red?" Given the above discussion of pragmatic symbol divergence, it's not that difficult to guess what would happen. If the person never expressed any messages containing that symbol, the mistaken substitution wouldn't matter since symbols are used in messages. He or she could still reach accurate unexpressed conclusions about colors. However, after communicating a message containing the symbol, the recipients would respond by rapidly pinpointing the divergence. Sender: "I got a wonderful green balloon whose color is as vibrant as my car." Recipient: "But your car is red." Sender: "No, my car is plainly green. Green like the round fake nose on the clown who handed me the balloon." Recipient: "Hmm. It sounds like you're calling 'green' what the rest of us call 'red'."

Moreover, the proposed thought experiment is in reality a quotidian event. Scholars of language evolution have tracked gradual divergence of the elements of language. Words replace or combine. Innovative distinctions emerge and outdated distinctions fade. Separate languages cross-pollinate. Creative experiments, intentional or not, sometimes spread and sometimes die. Many times "incorrect" popular usage tramples correctness over the long run. Old-fashioned yet memorable phrases live on in isolated contexts. Idioms break the usual procedures for interpretation. Throughout these changes, communicators employ diverging symbols constantly. Simply by not introducing or modifying every symbol simultaneously, the messages that either use or explain the modified symbol remain understandable. Symbols are the bridges that symbols cross to reach other symbols.

Symbols are the fiat currency of information. Like local price changes, adjustments to the meaning of a few symbols are healthy responses to outside shifts. Like widespread hyperinflation, too many adjustments to too many symbols are detrimental to comprehending the smallest piece.

a datum is never alone

The proposition that meaning is isomorphism has a partner: fundamentally, information is only informative in collaboration with other information. Thus, the importance of context shouldn't be underestimated. Examples abound. Pronouns need referents. Sentences need dictionaries, mental or physical, stated or inferred. Amounts need units of measurement. Hobbit heights need people nearby for visual comparison. No datum (singular of data) is useful in isolation. No datum is a "loner".

a bit is "this not that"

In a primal sense, communication is "meta-", with connections outside itself. Since direct telepathy neither is desirable nor is physically possible (the mapping from one brain to another is too complicated because of many differing neural connections), thoughts cannot be sent "raw". Every element of a message can only be symbolic. For the message's symbols to be understood, the sender and recipient must share common knowledge. They must already be aware of both the symbols actually in the message and the symbols' source set (i.e. vocabulary). The symbol cannot be independent of the participants' prior knowledge.

Furthermore, a comprehensible message is a series of selections from the symbols in the set. To choose one symbol is to reject other symbols. Part of a chosen symbol's meaning resides in its distinctions from the rest of the symbols in the set. It's vital that the communication of the symbol be unambiguous, to prevent confusing one symbol for another, and conventional, to avoid needing exotic media or equipment.

The most obvious tactic is to count the symbols in the set. The first symbol counted will be represented by communicating "1", the second "2", and so forth. In the resulting number sequence, it's always clear which number represents which symbol and the message itself doesn't require unusual communication capabilities. The set of symbols is in the form of a number line (like a ruler) with each symbol as a numbered point.

However, there's a better option. The set could be in the form of a "road" in which the symbols are "houses". To identify/reach a symbol is to travel down this road according to the directions, and since there's only one road the directions are no more than many answers to the sole repetitive question "Stop at the next house?" Instead of a unique number, each symbol's representation is a unique progression of yes/no answers.

This technique has considerable advantages. First, the directions for symbols have distinct stops. No spacing is needed between the adjacent symbols in a message. The last answer in a symbol's directions is always "yes", so the answer after it is part of the next symbol's directions. Second, since the "closer houses" have shorter directions, putting first the most probable symbols or "houses" makes it more likely that the whole message, i.e. a sample of symbols, will be shorter. Third, the media needs are even less demanding than sending (base 10) numbers. Now just "0" and "1" are enough. Two possibilities, repeated. Bits.

Does a bit have meaning? On its own, not much. But along with many companion bits, enough to meet any need.

a set is "what you get by following procedure"

Communicators can send piles of bits. Taken together, those bits in turn signify a specific chain of symbols. Those symbols in turn signify atomic members of a source set (or alphabet). Everything depends on something else, with one remaining exception at the end of the dangling thread. Doesn't it appear that the source set is now the true wellspring of meaning that needs nothing else?

Not remotely! Being a collection of symbols, the source set itself is symbolic. No matter how self-defining it seems, nevertheless it's about still other information. For example, a digital spin on the ever-popular philosophical discussion of color words.

Over the years, digital images have represented color through a range of strategies depending on the relative priority of conserving space. (This detail admittedly feels more and more quaint to the oblivious user who at the present time routinely dumps a multitude of "RAW" exposures from the camera into the computer's permanent storage.) One of the trade-offs is to reduce the number of distinct colors to employ in the image, called the palette. By this reduction fewer bits are necessary to identify a color; a smaller range requires smaller numbers or indexes for the colors. Especially for an untrained eye and images like a logo or icon, 256 colors often works well enough and may be overkill.

The digital image's color palette is certainly a close analogy for a symbol source set, and really a direct application of the concept. Assuming the raw image had a much wider array of colors, the palette is a purposely limited sample of that original array. It's an abstraction of it, an approximation, a pigeon-holing, a filtering. Moreover, for exceedingly colorful and detailed images that contain a lot of grades, the choice of palette becomes uncertain and debatable. In general, symbol sets aren't unmistakably derivative from the symbolized information. Symbolization starts with categorization, and categorization is an action.

For a set of symbols to be reproducible accurately, the steps to produce it should be spelled out with clarity and precision. Consequently the definition of a set is a procedure. It has the two sections previously listed, categorization and then symbol-assignment to the categories. Sometimes the procedure could be straightforward (by referencing another set), e.g. "integers greater than 10 and less than 30, each integer symbolized by the typical numerals". Sometimes the procedure could be complicated and even surprising in its results, e.g. the Mandelbrot set. Sometimes the procedure could be an exhaustive (finite) listing of all symbols with a per-symbol definition. At the extreme, a stream of symbols continuously produced through a "procedure" of pure randomness (not pseudo-random!) could be the basis for a perfectly mysterious and unbreakable representation of a message; what makes it usually impractical is that the stream has to be as long as the message and the recipient requires full copies of the message and the stream to be assured of correct decoding...

Indeed, the random set of symbols is an ideal illustration of a valid objection to the last few paragraphs: "It's fine that communication depends on bits, and bits depend on symbols, and symbols depend on a predefined set, but how can the set depend on a 'procedure'? How do you communicate a procedure? By your own reasoning, how can it be possible to communicate anything, let alone a procedure, before the set of communication symbols is known?"

Of course, in keeping with the theme "a datum is never alone", the predictable reply to that objection is "Communication of the set-defining procedure happens by reliance on still other symbols". Those other symbols are individual processing instructions. By assumption, the receiver already knows and can perform a set of elemental and easy processing actions, each of which has a fixed symbol. The procedure to construct the new set of symbols is one more message whose symbols happen to represent requests for action by the receiver.

For symbols for integers greater than 10 and less than 30, some of the steps are checking that an integer is greater-than and checking that an integer is less-than. For the Mandelbrot set, feeding the result of a mathematical function back into it. For the image color palette, storing the 256 colors one-by-one. In a computerized procedure, each action is literally minuscule: store information, load information, add two numbers, check if a number is less than zero. These actions and therefore symbols (i.e. processor instructions) seem quite pointless out of context. In the wake of a huge organized group of actions, a highly meaningful procedure takes shape and yields products.

a segment is "interest in raw experience"

Strictly speaking, a symbolic list of generalized actions isn't sufficient to communicate and obey an actual procedure. Like other information, actions aren't "loners". An action is only significant insofar as external information has effects on it and it has effects on external information. The exchange of effects may often be slight and subtle, producing a temporary result in preparation for succeeding actions. In any case, ultimately actions are changes to information: copies, creations, modifications, extensions, adaptations.

Such manipulations are the essence of the meaning of the generated symbol set.  From a surface perspective, symbolism is substitution, i.e. convenient shorthand names of potentially lengthy manipulations of information. "Let me introduce 'Martin', whose parents are ___, who lives in ___..."  Decoding the symbols is reversing the procedure. "I'm sure that you remember Martin." "The Martin whose parents are ____, who lives in ____?"

In practice, procedures for frequent symbols are rarely repeated in full. Instead, the excellent pattern-matching powers of the human brain notice rapidly that a symbol's procedure always terminates at the same external information. Once the pattern is seen, the brain devises a shortcut of the procedure by forming a pair out of the start and end, a direct line, a conditioned "reflex" of information. It happens with little effort. Eventually, a human can have trouble consciously recalling the procedure at all. Profound intertwining of a symbol and its external information leaves a familiar whole, with the illusion that the symbol isn't separate.

Symbols denote procedural bridges between information. The procedure probably manipulates information via previously known symbols, leading to a novel "macro" set of symbols whose meaning becomes a procedure of procedures of procedures. Presumably, no matter the heights of the overall edifice of labor that underpins all the symbols and the interconnections, there is irreducible information far down below, unmediated and unprocessed. Else the complex of symbols would be circular. The massive loop could still be intricate and interesting, perhaps also grammatically correct based on some standard, but to humans it wouldn't necessarily be any more informative than frimjun tollywobbits bersing shugbovs. Irreducible information that precedes and fuels symbols shall be named "segments".

Segments seem like the most raw and standalone information possible, but that impression too is mistaken. As suggested by the name, segments are selective portions of "raw experience". A human's raw experience is the sum of everything that affects the human, causing shifts in activity in nervous system cells, which propagate across axons and synapses. It's everything heard, everything seen, everything felt, everything smelt. A camera or microphone picks up some of the same physical phenomena, albeit through differing mechanisms.

Physical information of raw experience is the least subjective, the least egocentric. Well-known measurement and calculation limitations notwithstanding (e.g. intrinsic relativity and quantum uncertainty), information about the positions and movements of particles is the bottom line. Mythical complete information of a set of particles is the Axiom of that set; there's nothing further to speak of. Laying aside the theoretical and practical impossibilities, other messages about that set are derivatives of that Axiom. Hypothetically, "cold glass of water" is backed by untold quantities of "physic"-al information on the movements of molecules of dihydrogen monoxide. And an irrepressibly boring communicator who sends more than that many bits of (present-tense) information directly about just the water is being redundant.

Given the horde of physical information, arguably a brain's ingenuity is what it elects to discard. Focus is indispensable. Survival is closely tied to a creature's ability to attend and respond to information of interest. Brains transform raw experience into segments because a lot of information is quite irrelevant and monotonous. It's "background" that's worthy of "peripheral" monitoring alone. Segmentation is a primary component of perception.

Visual points, of similar color, moving in the same direction and speed at once, are a segment of raw experience that draws the attention of most creatures. So do segments of loud and sudden noises or tasty odors. Pains discourage and pleasures encourage. The common factor again is interest. Human brains are eminently trainable but inborn interests offer the first opinion and initiate the first constraints on the innocent tide of information of raw experience. Perceptual unity is useless to answer the foremost questions of a competitive, feasible organism. Segments simplify reactions that craft beneficial answers.

Thereafter, years of human social interaction and mimicry build on the "natural" segments. They learn verbal symbols for the most prominent segments: kin, food, body. Simultaneously they learn to learn and to seek feedback by trying out symbols. To start, the teaching proceeds by gestures and demonstrations for simple segments such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions in immediate shared perception. The actions that define this set of symbols are literal acts: the motions of the teachers enacted on segments that already have interest to the learner. Sooner or later, the repetitious well-established actions allow for teaching the symbols for segments that have weak to nonexistent natural interest; at that point, humans' untiring curiosity and desire to please are great motivational aids. The ability to identify with the speaker's perspective, to imagine what the speaker intends to say, is a vital skill.

After a "critical mass" of symbols and grammar, the actions for learning new sets of symbols become the previously-mentioned mental manipulations of information. Description, contrast, and metaphor are typical symbol-defining actions. Explosive growth of information ensues. Symbols trigger computations and then symbolize the outcomes. The cycle continues.