When a dog pees on a mountain, does the mountain care? Depends on the size of the dog, you might answer, but in general it won’t. General – what better segway than that to lead into my two cents on Sun Tzu’s Art of War, commonly hailed as the essential read for business strategists, soldiers, garbage collectors, and, really, everybody, for war is a metaphor for life, and we all have one of these, after all. In spite of that Master Sun’s strategic nuggets of wisdom were a bit lost on me. I don’t object to anything said, and the style of the translation, and, I presume, the original, is very concise and poetic in it’s condension, but what in this book I find applicable is obvious, and what isn’t obvious doesn’t seem applicable. On top of that this edition has been translated an edited by Thomas Cleary. Cleary follow every few sentences of Sun’s text with serveral different commentaries, and the sequence of Sun’s dense, poetic writing, and the commentators clumsy, wordy rephrasing makes this an odd comedic experience.

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There seems to be a rather curious disconnect between the people doing basic neuroscience research and philosophers of mind. While the former operate on the implicit assumption that mental phenomena are reducible to physical phenomena, and that fully understanding the latter will imply understanding the former, philosophers are struggling with principled objections against this form of materialistic monism.

I recently attended some of John Searle’s Philosophy of Mind lectures, where he introduced seven such objections to materialism, including of course his own Chinese Room argument.

On none of the seven did he manage to convince me, and I’ll present my counterarguments here. I’ll start with the cuddliest of the arguments, put forward by Thomas Nagel, who famously asked

“What is it like to be a bat?”

The argument’s core, as I understand it, is: suppose we knew everything knowable about bats. That is a big assumption, and we never might, but even if this were true, Nagel argues, we’d still lack one crucial piece: we wouldn’t know what it’s lile to be one. Our theories and descriptions of the bat would quantify everything, but they wouldn’t capture the quality of batness. This is known as the argument of absent qualia, for obvious reasons, and it seems convincing on the surface – no physical theory about bats can show us what it’s like to be one, so being a bat is not part of a physical theory.

This argument is erroneous, and I think it’s central problem is a confusion of hierarchies, which I’ll explain in a second. But first let’s have a look at an analogy. Suppose we knew everything there is to know about water. Would that tell us what it feels like to be wet? Of course it wouldn’t, because that is not, indeed cannot be the job of a theory. The theory can describe to us how adhesive and cohesive forces would work to cover our skin with a liquid film, it can tell us how the high specific heat capacity and evaporation will affect skin temperature, how all that combines to create certain nerve impulses, and so on. But to know what it’s like, we’ll have to jump into a river, or, lacking one, take a shower. Does that mean our theory of water is incomplete? No. All it means is that there is a difference between the theory and the real thing. Real water can be experienced, a theory of real water can’t. If there is a hole in a theory at all, it’s in the description of our own minds. But let’s not worry about that for a moment.

That took us off the bat, so let’s get back to it. A theory of the bat’s mind will not, indeed cannot, contain a description of what it’s like to be a bat, because that isn’t even part of the theory of bat minds. It’s part of the theory of human minds. We can perfectly describe what goes on inside the bat’s mind, relate sensory input to motor output via cognitive processes (if you like that way of describing things, which might turn out not to be too great in the end), without missing a thing.

So back to the description of ourselves. What I indeed can not obtain from the description of a bat is what it would feel like for me to be a bat. But there is two possible arguments against that being a problem. The first one is that is very probably a nonsensical question to ask. I am not a bat, and were I a bat, I wouldn’t be me, so it seems pretty close to being logically impossible for me to have the batness cake and feel it, so to speak.

But there is a more profound objection. What is it you want when you ask the above question? You want a theory that, in capturing the structure of the mind, enables you to implement that mind. In other words, you want a theory that produces that which it describes. Which seems even sillier than wanting to be a bat. It’s worse than complaining that your theory of water doesn’t make you feel wet; it’s like complaining that your water theory doesn’t make you wet other things, doesn’t make you emulate water.

Sounds silly. So why doesn’t the bat question sound equally silly? I think it’s because of the hierarchy confusion. The practical purpose of theories is to give you an understanding of it’s subject. So when the theory is one about mind, and thus about understanding, it seems natural to expect to obtain that understanding that is the subject of the theory, when in fact all the theory is going to give you is an understanding of that understanding.

In short: yes, qualia are absent from the theory. That’s because the qualia are not the substance, but the subject of the theory. It’s perfectly able to describe them, as much as any theory is able to describe anything. This is different from the real thing, of course, and that’s not special to the mind, nor is it a indication that more than the physical world needs describing.

Now go find some nuts. You must be hungry.

English, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Science | No Comments »

Johnny Cash was an amazing artist, and his recent death has been a great loss. I love the recent American Recordings series of records as well as his older stuff. Sadly, he is not quite as amazing an author, and Carr’s co-authoring didn’t fix the shortcomings. There are cool stories in this book, but they are often told in a laundry-list fashion, where people, events and facts roll by without much coherence or reflection. Biggest eye-rubber: Cash’s admission that he and June avoided shopping in towns that had no Wal-Marts and even graded them by the number of evil moneysucking behemoths (“tomorrow is a two Wal-Marter”). Biggest chuckle: to get out of a contract with a record company in the early nineties, Cash wrote a whole abysmal album, including a song called “Chicken in Black“. It worked.

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The story of lunar exploration, from Apollo 11 in July 1969 to Apollo 17 in Dezember 1972, in a beautiful collage, narrated from the original recordings and additional comments from the people who have been up there. Amazing footage gives you a glimpse of what it might be like to go where now man has gone before. It’s a bit unfortunate that they emphasized a seamless narrative over historic accuracy, blending the 7 missions into one long trip to Luna, but in the end, it doesn’t matter.Earth, floating in blackness, yet struck by the intense light from the sun, made me realize for the first time the intuitive oddness of space close to a star: dark and empty, not for lack of light, but for lack of illuminable things. That’s got to be an analogy for something.

English, Movies, Must See, Nonfiction, Science Fiction | No Comments »

If there’s anything meaningful that’s not sickeningly cute and mindlessly inspirational in this movie after the first fifteen minutes, feel free to knock up the rating to a solid “4/avoid”. We switched off when pabot told sonbot to follow his life’s dream, cause pabot never did and now sorely regrets it. Sniff. To think of all the cool gadgets that could have been made from the robot parts if the moviemakers (Two directors! Two writers! Ack!) would have done as father did, not as he says.

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This is a wonderful and concise introduction to all mayor aspects of karate, from the basics and kata to free sparring. What I found most fascinating – besides the insightfully detailed kata descriptions – was how meaningful those detailed notes become when you don’t read them as descriptions or recipes, but as commentaries on something you already know – or, even more interesting, know in a similar shape. Since I’ve been studying all the Kata’s in their Wado form, Funakoshi’s reasoning is most intriguing where he describes the rationale for doing something different from how we do it. The dialectics of form become apparent, the fact that one needs to be restricted, to see the unfoundedness of that restriction, and thus overcome it. Which makes me realize that Hegel was a very eastern kind of Swabe.

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A nice coincidence that this movie would be the next on our Netflix-list after Dirty Harry – this is the movie Dirty Harry should have been (of course that’s somewhat unfair, considering the time gap, but would Harry want me to be fair? There). Where Eastwoods cop sets out to right wrongs in a very private moral (or lack-of-moral) code, this movie unfolds as a giant tragedy, where we can have empathy with everybody, even as they do things that are wrong to begin with, and turn out even worse. “I know you’re a good guy” says the vengeful industrialist in the climactic scene, “so you’ll understand why I have to kill you”. So do we, caught in the same violent logic, and as unable to escape it as any of the characters. Terrific and terrifying.

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Probably one of the first science fiction novels to have the ecological threat posed by modern humanity at the core of its plot, this 1966 action drama puts all its effort into getting the message through, with very little meaningful plot. It’s an unfortunate choice, as the central premise – being under extinction pressure from an Orwellianly named International Ecological Agency, insects adapt by cooperating to form complex and conscious societies, capable of concerted action and motion – would have been fascinating to explore in depth. Instead, the book spends most of its time following a subplot of international politics and intrigue, and its protagonists down a jungle river, and ends when things would become interesting, with what feels like a compromise between a happy ending and gloomy doomsaying. The book leaves the distinct feeling that Herbert wasn’t quite happy with his setup, and didn’t want to put too much effort into working it through. Maybe that’s why he revisited the hive mind a few years later in The Hive.

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It’s a classic among vigilante movies, the best of the series it spawned, and it has Clint Eastwood in it, playing a socially disconnected moralizing force of one, dealing revenge and retribution without restraint. That setup works in Leone’s Man With No Name series, probably in part because of the cool, detached direction and abstraction of the old west setting, but also because we are never supposed to take Eastwood’s side in those. I wanted to rewatch Dirty Harry because it’s set in San Francisco, quickly realized I had never seen it before, and found myself distracted from the sweeping views of bay and bridge by the manipulative moralizing message that weaves through the film. Mores are crumbling, and with a weak justice system unable to keep the depravity in check, men like Harry have to clean up, and get dirty in the process, a dark avenger, protecting us all. Feel reactionary today, punk?

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I just revisited the second installment in the Oddworld series of games, and the last I played – the third and fourth, sadly, are only available for the Xbox. If you like platform games at all, this quirky mix of ironic oddness, fascinating story and character design, tough puzzles and fast paced jump and run episodes will entertain your for many, many hours. And even if you don’t, you’ll have to appreciate some of the lovely, innocative ideas in game design.

Also pretty cool is the list of influences the game designers list on their website.

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