Jason Wells

Last night I happened to watch the second episode of the documentary How Art Made the World, hosted by Nigel Spivey. It’s a fantastic documentary. The second episode explores the origins of the human ability to represent our world in images, particularly as seen in prehistoric cave art. Part of the episode examines what’s going on in the brain that does this and introduces the work of Dominic ffytche, a British neuroscientist. (Pronounced “fitch”, and yes, it’s not capitalized.) Using a special experimental apparatus–a pair of goggles with flashing white LEDs connected to a control box–ffytche was able to make Spivey hallucinate. Basically he put on the goggles, closed his eyes and after a moment, he began to describe his hallucinations.

I was impressed. Hallucinations induced reliably and immediately, with nothing more than lights? I hadn’t known that was possible. And judging from what I saw in the documentary, it didn’t even look that hard to do! This morning I reviewed that segment of the documentary and paused it to examine glimpses of ffytche’s hardware. I saw nothing magical; it all looked pretty straightforward. I thought to myself: why couldn’t I build something like that?

So I did. I began by looking up ffytche’s research online. In 2008 his paper “The hodology of hallucinations” was published in the journal Cortex. This paper describes the operating neurological principles and the experimental setup. I read it and in it found all that I needed to reproduce the hallucinations of his experiments. Basically it’s about high intensity repetitive light: flashing bright enough lights into someone’s (closed) eyes at specific frequencies. This kind of visual stimulus causes you to see hallucinations known as Purkinje patterns, named for Jan Purkyně, a pioneer of neuroscience. Varying these parameters (basically brightness and flashing speed) in specific ways changes what these patterns look like.

This morning, armed with this knowledge, plus what I’ve been learning of electronics and hardware I happened to have at hand, I created my very own prototype machine for producing Purkinje patterns. It’s surprisingly simple. It took me all of four hours, including a trip to Radio Shack to pick up some resistors. (I’ll describe the machine in detail in a future post.) The bottom line? It really works! I can produce hallucinations in my own head, and it works for Heather too. They’re a little hard to describe. There are various pulsing patterns, lines and dots, different shapes and all the colors in the rainbow. In my (limited) personal experience, I get the most vivid colors with a 5ms on/40ms off frequency and the most interesting patterns at 5ms/25ms. It works best in a darkened room after your eyes have adjusted. You can get different hallucinations if you use one eye instead of both. It’s really cool.

I want to give mad props to Dominic ffytche and his research, as well as the creators of How Art Made the World, for making this possible. Building this system and having it turn my mind into an iTunes visualizer is one hell of an experience. Going forward I’ll develop this basic prototype into a programmable platform–a simple hardware specification plus a basic “Purkinje pattern API” to go with it. In effect, a way to hack your mind’s eye. I have many projects in mind leveraging this technology… stay tuned.

Science is cool. In recent centuries, it’s become a profoundly transformative force in the world. Just think of all the electronic toys, space stations, skyscrapers, you name it. Naturally, math is a key part of this. It’s really hard–essentially impossible–to imagine physics without math. Not without justification is it called “the language of science.”

But sometimes, scientists and mathematicians get a little too cocky about the ontological status of their claims, confusing reality with our cognitive simulacra of reality, in other words, our knowledge of reality. Take a look at this article from New Science, “Mathematics: The only true universal language.” It claims:

If we ever establish contact with intelligent aliens living on a planet around a distant star, we would expect some problems communicating with them. . .However, the surest common culture would be mathematics.

Why? Because, the argument goes, the one and only thing we can be sure that we have in common with aliens, if they are out there at all, is that we’re real. Everything else about them may be a total mystery, but if they exist, and we exist, then both we and they are undeniably real. If math describes reality, as the article’s author suggests, then they would have to have the same math we do. They might know more or less math, but the nature of their math would be identical to ours. Probably with different symbols, but it would be the same underlying concepts. So we could at least count on that.

Is this right? No. Here’s why.

In presuming that we and the aliens share at least math, we’re making an unwarranted assumption that their minds are like ours in at least one other respect, besides the fact that they are real. The assumption is that they do the kind of symbolic reasoning that is the basis of our math. But why presume that? Abstract reasoning is supposedly the seat of our intelligence, the basis of logic, math, and language; but why insist it be the only possible one? Extrapolating that from a sample of one–us–hardly seems scientific. No trend there.

What if there is some cognitive activity or state that we can do, but they can’t? Or vice versa? Or both? Surely that’s a very real possibility. One species may insist the other isn’t truly intelligent, but on what grounds can either insist that? We have our kind of cognition, but how can we presume what aliens would have? It could be literally unimaginable.

It may be that there are real things that cannot be the object of our contemplation. A man named Gregory Chaitin may have successfully proved just that in the mathematical object known as Omega. This is a real number having complexity that goes beyond what any conceivable mathematical system–at least, math as we conceive it–can describe. Omega is a great example of visiting the edge of logos. Maybe the best example.

How can Omega exist if math was really the language of nature? How could some words of that language be beyond our ability to speak or write? And if there are things that are real that are beyond our comprehension, what’s to say that they are necessarily beyond the aliens’ ken as well? Maybe they have the right kind of mind for that domain of reality. Maybe they can get to Omega, even if we can’t, just as we have cognitive powers not found in cats. And conversely, maybe we can get to real things they can’t. What if they have language and consciousness–and are therefore able to communicate with us–but can’t conceive of natural numbers? How could their math be the same as ours without that? It would be naive to expect that their intelligence would map precisely to ours in every single respect. There’s no reason to think of cognition as an all-or-nothing phenomena; just think of how much mental phenomena we share, and don’t share with other animals. One might expect even bigger surprises with aliens that evolved elsewhere from a different tree of life.

The error is one of attribution: trying to make a metaphysical truth out of an epistemological one. Math may be the language of science, but science is a conception of reality. Science is what we know of reality, but it is not reality itself. So don’t confuse the menu with the food. Math is not the language of reality, so you can’t use it to pin down the aliens. It is the language of our scientific knowledge of reality.

Of late I’ve been thinking of dreams. For me it’s at least a mental space of internal perception where anything is possible (and certainly much more). Dream is as close as you can get to pure creativity. It’s a wonder that we get to do this at all, and how peculiar it happens only while we sleep. It suggests something very interesting is happening while we’re out.

In a dream, one has godlike powers. Not just of creativity or absolute control, but also the ability to pass right through the absolute boundary separating the possible from pure impossibility. And without even slowing down, like a neutrino through a stone wall. Once I dreamed that I was still living in an apartment I used to have in St. Louis. Yet at the same time it was my bedroom in the house where I grew up. It was not confused. It really was both, simultaneously, and I existed in both places, and they were a unity, and I was both myself as an adult and as a teenager. It was a clear violation of the principle of non-contradiction, yet there it was. It worked. When I woke up and remembered the dream, I was astonished.

Dreamspace is introspective, even when it is just the world recapitulated, because it is your world, no one else’s. Some dreams seem to carry such intensity and profundity, such an overload of meaning, that it’s as if you have accessed transcendent substance in some sense, that your mental fabric is, only briefly, of material too subtle and fine to be of this world. And yet, there you are. You haven’t left the natural world, but you’ve accessed some wellspring of meaning and symbol and even ritual deep within yourself. I’m completely dissatisfied with the two English words I know of to describe this experience: spiritual, religious. I think it is hypernatural, not supernatural. To be connected to the natural world–the cosmos, the totality of all being–not just rationally, but entirely. To be this way isn’t to go beyond the world; it is to be utterly of the world, and not off somewhere else.

What do dreams mean? I’ve stopped asking why. Why-questions are semantically vapid in dreamspace. It’s like asking why a tree. It need be nothing other than purposeless beauty, unharnessed to a causal story. On the other hand, maybe it’s part of being consciously aware.

Sometimes the dreams are lucid. This is a very special experience. I am aware that what I experience is not the waking world of objects–things thrown in my way–but a world of unitary subject–me and other things within myself, in a way. Though I am aware, the me-world is not consciously constructed. If it were, I would understand the mechanics, and I don’t. I do see that it’s a kind of reciprocity between my conscious cognizance of the dream experience and some subconscious process within me generating that-which-is-cognizable. There’s the me acting in the movie and the invisible me directing it. In lucid dreams, one is actor/director, though the relation is inverted: the actor commands the director. Somehow this presentation of dreamspace has exceptional vivacity, and rather than seeming somehow abstract or sensually attenuated, the experience is just as strong as anything I perceive while awake. These dreams are rare and never last long as I’d like. Once I realize what’s going on, I get excited, and then wake up.

I’m curious why evolution equipped us with this counterintuitive capability. Or does it have survival value? All the explanations I’ve read seem to me to be just-so stories, made up, as if with a shrug, starting with “I don’t know, maybe it’s because…” Dreamspace begs for scientific and introspective exploration.

I am a human being. My identity is correlative to my body, from which it springs. The mind produces self, and my mind is just the cognitive action of my brain.

Yet the human being, what it does and what role it can and does play in reality, is a pattern of exquisite complexity within a vastly larger pattern of imponderable complexity. The pattern is continuous; a human being is distinct from his or her environment only by convention, which exists because it does a job. So why should a human make this distinction? For the distinction is made, and is almost always made: that I as self am distinct from all else as other. (Excluding Buddhists in a state of enlightenment, an exception that proves the rule.) What explains this distinction?

The identity of self (that is, my consciousness) and my physical body exists because self is a unit of control. That which is within the domain of my self is expected to be under my control. Self controls that from which it springs. It does so because in doing so, self is increasingly multiplied and empowered. It is a positive feedback loop, a virtuous circle.

Self is an answer to the question: what engenders the highest level of successful control now available?

It’s hard to say what success means here. The temptation is to say reproductive success, but that looks like one possible standpoint among many. One could just as well say success of the genes sporting the phenotypic expressions in question. A gene certainly is a unit of control, one that maintains the general tyranny of success over failure. But that doesn’t get at the heart of the matter either, because the control goes beyond biology; it even goes beyond self.

In the cosmos of chaos and order, the one we find ourselves in, control is the effort to impose order in chaos. Order imposed is success, at least for the time being; order lost, destroyed or replaced is failure. (Or so it is seen from the standpoint of order. The pattern is made beautiful by the interaction, and if physics is to be believed, chaos wins in the end. But I digress.)

A government is a unit of control over a collection of people and their machines. But it does not exhibit a consciousness. We can’t talk to a government; we can only talk to a representative of a government, who is a human being, or their machines, such as a web site. The pattern of control is beyond the scope of self, but it is an abstraction maintained by a collection of selves.

Self may be a bridge allowing control to extend from the purely biological on to kinds that go far beyond. Robotics is not a biological domain (or not as conceived currently, anyway); it is computerized control of metal and plastic, made by human beings. It is self, as within you and me, teaching the rocks to dance, just the way we do. But mere mimicry is only the beginning, the most modest start. Computers were first developed to replace human calculators; and shortly thereafter, blasted past the capability of even the most capable human calculator. Computation has been unshackled from biology; the system has raced far, far beyond that.

Control is ever thus. We are the self-bridge between sub-self control and super-self control. And look around, super-self arises everywhere. In a sense, it was always there, just as two or more selves could communicate to arrange a larger order; and that is just what language is for. It delivers culture, the body of super-self. The question is: when does the culture we’ve made become more important, more powerful, than its originators? It’s happened before. Fascism comes to mind, as its crudest form, and a highly unsuccessful form to boot. But we are all part of what has been termed the spectacle. At some point the spectacle will lift off, no longer requiring even rudimentary biological support, though it may continue to include it. Greater and greater pattern strives to create itself.

A question arose in my mind: what is the bulk of activity of Earth, as compared to other planets? By activity I mean mechanical work, which is the most abstract form of physical activity I know of. It’s not easy to get concrete answers, but I have three relevant conjectures.

I suspect that life doesn’t exist on the vast, vast majority of planets. Hundreds of planets have been discovered, and none (so far) are even in the running, and I suspect that’s representative. In those cases, planetary activity is limited to the geological and chemical: rock formation, plate tectonics, interactions of atmospheric gases and so on.

Here on Earth it is obviously very different. Geological forces clearly exist, but they can’t possibly predominate when compared to all the biological activity, which mostly boils down to protein synthesis: the day-to-day operations of a cell. All of the living world depends on it. This is my first conjecture: that the dominant activity on Earth is protein synthesis.

Now with the recent rise of biological organisms capable of symbolic reasoning and toolmaking (namely, us), there’s a new class of mechanical work being performed by designed machines. From bicycles to traffic jams, from the Internet to thermonuclear weapons, that’s quite a bit of action. Nevertheless, it’s the new kid on the block, and doesn’t dominate. Thus we get to my second conjecture: That despite being currently overshadowed by biological activity, machine activity is coming on fast and furious, and is currently the most rapidly growing slice of the activity pie.

Third conjecture: in the future, machine activity will either surpass biological activity or the two will cease being distinguishable categories of activiy. Because after all, biology is not just the origin of intelligent will; but thanks to technologies like artificial selection and genetic modification, it is increasingly a subject of designed activity as well.