I Think: A Platonic Dialogue by MC Complete

Daniel: Why do you think we think?

Clement: What do you mean by think?

Daniel: I mean, talk to ourselves in natural language.

Clement: Talk to ourselves internally?

Daniel: Right, not out loud.

Clement: What do you mean by why?

Daniel: Well, in a few places, you seem to imply that the Joyce Machine is a search engine.  Bird calls and Plato's Aviary and all that.

Clement: Surely, thinking accomplishes many different things and works in different ways.  But I am suggesting that one of the main functions of thought (in this sense), perhaps the original function of thought, is the search function.  Soul-searching, you could say.

Daniel: I've been thinking that the Joyce Machine (in this sense) is more of a YouTube than a search engine.

Clement: What do you mean?

Daniel: It's about content creation, not search.  There is no Central Birdkeeper who has to call the birds; the birds ultimately express themselves in our behavior one way or another.  They don't need an intermediary.  They're kind of like demons.  Thinking isn't a method of calling birds; it's a method of creating new birds.

Heterophenomenologists Have Feelings Too

Tribesman: You ask many questions about Feenoman.

Anthropologist: Yes, I want to learn as much as I can about him.

Tribesman: So why should I answer your questions? Why don’t I just take you to meet him?

Anthropologist: You can take me to meet Feenoman?

Tribesman: Follow me.

Feenoman: Hello. You look like an anthropologist.

Anthropologist: And you’re Feenoman?

Feenoman: That’s me.

Anthropologist: Well, if you’ll excuse my impertinence, your tribesman here told me that Feenoman can split the sea. Can you split the sea?

Feenoman: Of course. Want to see?

Anthropologist: Actually, I do.

Feenoman: There. Split. How do you like them apples?

Anthropologist:

Emotional Energy: A Platonic Dialogue by MC Complete

Daniel: You know what I think, Clement?  I think interaction dualism is a scientific hypothesis.

Clement: A scientific hypothesis? You mean, like Intelligent Design?

Daniel: No, I mean like general relativity. When Einstein first dreamed up the theory of relativity, it was not very testable. In the past century, we’ve developed better and better tools to allow us to test the theory. Some aspects, like gravitational waves, are still untested.

Clement: What are you saying? What “tools” do we need to “test” the Theory of Dualism, tools that we don’t currently have?

Daniel: There’s a huge neuroscientific gap. If and when we know more about how the brain really works, we will have a much better idea of whether dualism or materialism is correct.

Clement: I see. Your dualistic mind is a Mind Of The Gaps. That’s exactly what I hate about dualism. The gap in scientific knowledge gives your dualistic mind a place to hide. The smaller the gap gets, the less room it will have. Your dualistic attitude helps to stifle scientific inquiry.

Daniel: Stifle scientific inquiry? I embrace scientific inquiry! I have nothing to be afraid of. I’m not committed to either dualism or materialism. I just want to know what scientific inquiry will reveal, if successful. It’s those who are committed to one side of the debate, like you, who should be afraid.

Clement: Um, sorry if I’m not quaking in my boots, but I’m not really expecting further inquiries into neuroscience to reveal the intervention of an immaterial soul.

Daniel: What makes you so sure?

Clement: Well, the conservation of energy, for one thing.

Daniel: I don’t understand why you seem to think that the Argument from Energy is so watertight. Haven’t you ever heard of emotional energy?

Clement: Emotional energy?

Daniel: Maybe the mind itself is a repository of energy -- maybe some mind/brain interactions transfer energy to the mind from the brain, and some interactions transfer energy from the brain to the mind.

Clement: If the mind can have energy, can it also have mass? Can it have a physical position? If so, in what sense is it not physical?

Daniel: It could have some of those things, or none of those things. It is not physical in the sense that experience is essentially not physical, in other words, experience is an extra property not accounted for yet by physics. Or maybe it’s dark energy.

Clement: Dark energy? Are you serious?

Daniel: No. I mean, no and yes. Dark energy shows that there are some gaps in our understanding of energy as well. Sean Carrol (a strong materialist, by the way) has recently suggested that energy is not always conserved. Or maybe it *is* dark energy. That’s my point, we just don’t know. The conservation of energy is not, in and of itself, a reason to stifle scientific inquiry into the nature of the spirit.

Clement: OK, let’s leave energy aside for a moment. If immaterial souls can causally influence the internals of brain, why can’t my soul control your brain (and thus, your body)?

Daniel: There could be many reasons why. At this point, we don’t have enough empirical data to suggest an answer to such specific questions.

Clement: Can you think of a reason why? Even without evidence, can you imagine a dualist physics that might count as a coherent answer to that question?

Daniel: Good question.  Give me a minute to come up with something, willya?

Clement: No problem. I have all the time in the world.  I'm a fictional character, and the reader won't notice the time passing anyway.

Daniel: Hey Clement, you know what?

Clement: No, what?

Daniel: Nothing's coming to mind.  I think I'll have to get back to you on this one.

Clement: Good luck, Daniel.  Note that I'm not holding my breath.

Materialist Heaven

Some people (Sean Carrol, for example) assume that materialism implies that we’re not going to heaven. Fortunately, Dennet does not make this mistake. However, I found his treatment of materialist heaven a little bit disappointing. In a book of what, 400 pages? he devotes about a half a page to it, and I found his treatment very vague. Maybe he actually wanted certain people not to notice what he was up to.

To me it’s very simple: if materialism is true, then when we die, our minds get uploaded to heaven.

Now I suppose that’s not materialism in the strictest sense. It posits a heaven that is explicitly not made of matter, or at least the kind of matter we know and love. What I mean by materialism is mind-materialism. Not that *everything* is matter, but that the mind is matter. To posit mind-dualism, we need to actually update physics to include a new category of consciousness, which actually has causal interactions with good old matter. But positing a spiritual heaven does not have this problem, since there’s no reason for heaven to interact with the material world. The heaven arrow goes one way.

Now, the secularists of course would say that we have no evidence for the existence of heaven. I think that is not really an objection to what I’m saying here. We have a tradition that heaven is real, and that’s good enough for the purposes of this discussion.

How to Have Your Idealist Cake, and Eat Materialism To!

I think one of the reasons that it was so hard for me to swallow materialism for such a long time is that I couldn’t figure out how to buy materialism without selling my idealism. Subjective, internal space is what I know; objective, external space is theorized and imagined, almost like a fantasy. So I was afraid that buying materialism would be tantamount to trading in reality for a fantasy. If the objective, external, realistic world that I theorize is to be a materialist world, that means that this imagined material world must include, as part of it, appearances and imagination. It must be possible to account for appearances and imagination, Berkeley’s “ideas”, in physical terms. Otherwise, I refused to buy materialism. I would stick with dualism, and if that as well proved incoherent, I could retreat into my idealism and abandon realism altogether.

I believe in Berkeley’s ideas. Could Berkeley’s ideas be matter?

Well, all of the information about the “ideas” can be encoded in matter. Matter is very good at encoding information. It can encode whatever information you want.

So all the information about how the world appears to me can be encoded in matter. “I see a computer screen” could be equivalent to there being a data structure in my brain with an instance variable, {‘visualField’: ‘bitmap with computer screen’}.  All you have to do is give up on the meaning of the term “to see”. The relationship of me to my visual field is just a quale: it has no informational content.  To make materialism work, you simply have to assume that it has no essence either.  This is an easier job than trying to insist that it *has* an essence!  Assume that imagination is just an instance variable, and suddenly it’s very easy to understand how all mental theorizing can be interpreted as information, digitally encoded in the brain of the theorist.

Reading Consciousness Explained Part 4: The Animal Spirit

According to Daniel Dennet, consciousness is "software". This would imply that animals, like cats and dogs, are not conscious, that month-old babies are not conscious (up to the point I've read in the book, Dennet has not speculated as to what age the installation completes), and that in some cultures, fully functional adult humans might not be conscious.

In my arrogant opinion, pain (and pleasure) are conscious states, states of mind.  Therefore, only a conscious being can feel pain.  Therefore, to claim that cats are not conscious implies that cats cannot feel pain.  This is possible, of course, but it sounds wrong.

The Jewish tradition would seem to assume that animals can feel pain, as evidenced by the commandment not to cause (needless) pain to animals.  But to what animals?  Is one allowed, in theory, to hunt non-kosher fish for sport?  Is one allowed to step on a roach on the sidewalk to vent one’s frustration about the roaches in one’s house?

Destroying plant life is (sometimes) forbidden because of a different commandment, “bal tashchit”, not being wasteful, but uprooting weeds in a public area is certainly not seen as causing pain to anything.

And while we're on the subject, does the halachic distinction between plants and animals agree with the biological distinction? Are sponges kosher?

The Importance of not Being Earnest

One of the things about being a dilettante is that you tend to reinvent things that were actually invented years or decades earlier.  For example, I invented the deflationary theory of truth, the Mary’s Room argument from knowledge, object persistence, transactional memory, and even the for-each loop, which were all well-known to the experts, but unknown to myself in my own personal ignorance, at the time I invented them.

One of the things that I ignorantly reinvented is Nerdcore Hip-Hop, also known as Geeksta Rap.  I’ve been rapping about computer science and software engineering since 2004.  In 2007, someone finally pointed out to me that Nerdcore was a well-established musical/literary genre.  Immediately, as the Midrash would say, I went to Wikipedia to get a list of the prominenent Nerdcore MC’s.  List in hand, I went over the list MC by MC and listened to whatever music they had on line.

One of the MC’s on the list was MC Lars.  On his website at the time, Lars had the songs “Download this Song”, “iGeneration”, and “Hot Topic is not Punk Rock.”  My reaction: good music and good delivery, but the lyrics were too earnest.  There’s something unsubversive about an MC who can say “It’s the new artist model” with a straight face.  So it made an impression...but I didn’t go back for more.

One of the MC’s from the list who I did buy was Shael Riley.  I wouldn’t really call him an MC.  He might have done some rapping, but he mostly plays music and sings.  A few months ago, I wrote a rap inspired by Shael’s song “Music Ruined Video Games” (which, by the way, is breathtaking).  I thought I might actually get the chance to record it, so I went to Shael’s website to download the song.  On Shael’s website, I saw that he had a Twitter account, so I followed him.

I don’t remember if it was Twitter who suggested Lars based on the fact that I was following Shael, or if Shael actually retweeted Lars, but when I saw Lars was on Twitter, I followed him too.  I thought, “He’s not a geek.  He looks like a quarterback.”

From Lars’ posts, it soon became clear that he runs a record label.  That piqued my curiosity.  I’m always on the lookout for labels that might want to sign me.  I checked the label's website: Lars and one other band, nothing in the mission statement about “this label exists for the purpose of publishing the albums of MC Lars.”  I figured I should do a bit more homework before pestering, so I went to Lars’ website and clicked on “Music Videos”.  I listened to “Ahab” and “Signing Emo” (I don’t remember why I didn’t listen to the other songs there).  They were pretty cool, so I sent my unsolicited demo to Horris Records.

About a week later, I received one of the nicest rejection emails I’ve ever received.  Lars basically said that he liked my songs but he wasn’t signing new acts right now.  (The fact that he wasn’t signing new acts didn’t surprise me, but the nice email did.)  In his email, Lars said I should listen to his new mixtape, “Indie Rocket Science”.  I figured it was the least I could do, so I listened.
I was blown away.  Somehow, nothing in “Ahab” and “Signing Emo” had prepared me for the brilliance of “Indie Rocket Science”.  I wondered: when did the earnest Lars of 2007 become so ironic?  Lars has his entire discography up for free online listening, so I listened to the whole thing in reverse chronological order.

I think that the leap from “great” to “brilliant” occurred between the “Digital Gangster LP” of 2008 and the “Gigantic Robot” album of 2009.  I think that “The Graduate” (2006), which contains the songs I’d heard in ‘07, is a great album too, I’d just listened to the wrong songs from it.  If I’d listened to “Space Game”, “Crunk Rap”, and, yes, “Signing Emo”, I would have bought back then.

Interestingly, I think there was also a leap from “good” to “great” between “Insectivorous” (2000, Lars’ first album) and the “Laptop EP” (2004).  The delivery on “Insectivorous” is kind of unprofessional IMAO.  I find this very encouranging.  If MC Lars can learn to rap, maybe I can too!

In my arrogant opinion, Lars is the second-best rapper in history.  I still think Eminem is #1.