Information and Sāṅkhya

Alfred Borgmann’s Holding On To Reality opens with the provocative words:

Information can illuminate, transform, or displace reality. When failing health or a power failure deprives you of information, the world closes in on you; it becomes dark and oppressive. Without information about reality, without reports and records, the reach of experience quickly trails off into the shadows of ignorance and forgetfulness.

This is a very interesting and provocative passage, but I picked it up because of its uncanny resemblance to a famous verse from Īśvarakṛṣṇa’s Sāṃkhyakārikās:

prīty-aprīti-viṣādâtmakāḥ prakāśa-pravṛtti-niyamârthāḥ |
anyônyâ-’bhibhavâ-’’śraya-janana-mithuna-vṛttayaś ca guṇāḥ ||

“The three guṇas [which constitute all non-sentient reality] have the respective natures of joy, non-joy, and sorrow; they act to illuminate, transform, and restrain, respectively; and they have the capacity to ground, produce, combine, and suppress one another.”

I need to bone up on my Sāṃkhya and my Borgmann further before I stretch this analogy, but at least at first glance, it appears as if there is something potentially illuminating lurking in the shadows here. (One thing that strikes me: the three guṇas of Sāṅkhya are regarded as entirely distinct from the individual persons, puruṣas, who alone are conscious observers and actors. This suggests that information itself isn’t enough: it presupposes the existence of conscious observers who can recognize something as being information.)

On imagination, meditation, and bringing-into-being

In this fascinating interview, Tanya Luhrmann addresses the tremendous importance of imagination in religious traditions such as American evangelism. The idea that religion is “belief”, the affirmation of the truth-value of some proposition, is a particularly Western, Protestant, understanding of religion, and is profoundly different from the religious experiences of people from, say, the dharmic traditions. (Or for that matter, from the experiences of Orthodox Christians.) Luhrmann says about kataphatic prayer:

It makes what is imagined in the mind more real. In kataphatic prayer you are saying that certain of your mental images are significant, and you are making these images more sensorially rich, you are allowing yourself to imagine them more vividly. The demand of religion is to teach you that the world as you know it is not the world as it is—and to teach you the capacity to see the world as it is, as something good. So you’ve got to make what is imagined real, and you’ve got to make it good.

The obvious response of the outsider to something like this is to describe it as clearly false, or “merely” imagined. And in a certain sense, the outsider is right: it is the believer who has imagined a particular religious experience into being, for which there is most likely no objective correlate. But Luhrmann argues that this attitude misses the heart of the experience as the insider experiences it: as something real, indeed as something more than real—because they create a new reality for the insider. It makes the insider more likely to feel loved, and thus to become more loving. Luhrmann thinks that something like this may even help reverse the erosion of social ties that people complain about today.

A number of Luhrmann's ideas squarely fit in with late medieval South Indian Hindu thought as is described in More than Real: A History of the Imagination in South India by David D. Shulman.

Shulman focuses on the importance given in medieval South India to the force of imagination: to the fact that human being are at their core imaginative creatures, who shape reality by imagining it together. 

• Sometimes this imagination is internal to the person: Shulman tells the story of an impoverished devotee of Śiva who constructs in his mind a temple so beautiful that Śiva prefers to dwell there instead of in the vast granite temple that a king has built for him (said to be the Kailāsanātha temple of Kanchipuram). 
• At other times, this imagination is intersubjective: Shulman describes in great detail a performance from the Kūḍiyāṭṭam dance-drama tradition of Kerala, in which a solitary skilled dancer transforms an empty, prop-less stage into a story-universe through the combination of his gestures and through the shared imaginations of the entire audience. 

Worship is imagined in the same way—by imagining our iṣṭa-devatās in our minds and by that very act bringing them into being. The word used for bringing-into-being is bhāvanā, a word borrowed from Mīmāṃsā ritual hermeneutics that refers to the power of a sacrifice to bring into being its fruit.[*]

Shulman points out that the philosophical and theological systems in which these systems developed in South India were staunch defenders of ontological realism, but of course not of physicalist, materialist reductionism. (Paradoxically, it was Advaita Vedānta that was fairly skeptical of the positive power of imagination.) He writes, comparing 16th-century India and Europe:

In Europe, the ancient dichotomy of mind and matter hardened into a fully desubjectified theory, or evolving set of theories, about the status of objects within an external, natural world. In India, the dichotomy is itself questionable, and the metaphysics of inner and outer took another course. Broadly speaking, in one conceptual system the imagination became increasingly associated with pathology, while in the other it tended to be understood as therapeutic. (p. 278)

Suspension of disbelief is the wrong way to think about what's going on here (at least in the Indian context; it may well hold for Luhrmann's evangelicals). We don’t lie to ourselves about something being there when it isn’t; we construct it with our mental acts—and by doing so, we make it real.

And towards the end of the book, Shulman also touches very briefly upon Ibn ‘Arabī, in whose vast work khayāl, “imagination”, is profoundly related to the structure of the universe and to the relationship between man and God.


[*] This explains the use of words like bhāvayāmi in much devotional Carnatic music. The singer-devotee is trying to actualize the deity in the minds of all those present at the performance. 

“Transcendence and Self-Transcendence”

Michael Polanyi: chemist and philosopher, brother to Karl Polanyi, historian and sociologist. One of Michael Polanyi’s important shorter pieces is this one, called “Transcendence and Self-Transcendence”, published in 1970.

Some of the interesting bits that emerge (no pun intended) from this work:

I introduce the concept of hierarchical levels. A machine, for example, cannot be explained in terms of physics and chemistry. Machines can go wrong and break down—something that does not happen to laws of physics and chemistry. 

In fact, a machine can be smashed and the laws of physics and chemistry will go on operating unfailingly in the parts remaining after the machine ceases to exist. Engineering principles create the structure of the machine which harnesses the laws of physics and chemistry for the purposes the machine is designed to serve. Physics and chemistry cannot reveal the practical principles of design or co-ordination which are the structure of the machine.

And:

The more intangible the matter in the range of these hierarchies, the more meaningful it is. This is my criticism of all redactionist, mechanistic programs founded on the Laplacean ideal which identifies ultimate knowledge with an atomic topography, the lowest level of the universe.

Most provocative:

I have elaborated in schematic fashion a multiple hierarchy which leads on to ever more meaningful levels. Each higher level is more intangible than the one below it and also enriched in subtlety. And as these more intangible levels are understood a steadily deeper understanding of life and man is gained. These understandings constitute transcendence in the world. 

Unbridled detailing, the ideal advocated by Laplace and his modern followers, not only destroys our knowledge of things we most want to know; it clouds our understanding of elementary perception—our first contact with the world of inanimate matter and of living beings and our initial act of self-transcendence.

I must confess that these fragments of his essay, pulled out of context, do not convey its full meaning. The whole thing is worth reading.

Indulge me, por favor

I don’t normally soar away in flights of fantasy; I enjoy feeling grass underneath my feet and sand between my toes far too much. But just this once, I request you, gentle reader, to forgive my rhapsodizing. If it doesn’t make sense, well, it wasn’t necessarily meant to!


So here goes: Each of us is a link in an infinite chain of being that spans space and time. Each of these links is, of course, comprised of smaller links, ad infinitum; each of this links, of course, participates in a greater link, ad infinitum. Do I exaggerate when I speak of twin infinities? Maybe, and maybe not.


What I’m really trying to say is that everything is doubly emergent.


Now materialist reductionism is the idea that things can be understood entirely by parsing them into their constituent material parts. It is a remarkably powerful, persuasive idea, and the basis of much modern theoretical and practical advancement, but according to at least some thinkers, it cannot explain the phenomenon of emergence. For them, an anthill is more than the sum of its parts; similarly, each of us human beings is more than the sum of our parts. There is something about our complexity that is irreducible to the parts that constitute us. (Note that emergence does not automatically reject materialism; it does, however, reject reductionism.)


But at the same time, we ourselves are also parts of a bigger, emergent reality—society, we call it. We take it for granted and thus forget how much of who we are (of our emergent selves!) is both affected and effected by this layer of abstraction that lies atop organized collections of interacting human beings. 


We are different from computers because our operating systems are able to rewire the physical hardware on which they run.


And paradoxically, the more “concrete” and “elementary” our constituents get, the more conceptual and abstract they become! We smash atoms into electrons and protons and neutrons, only to find that these “elementary” particles are probability distributions; we take them apart even further, and are ultimately left with vibrating 26-dimensional strings. And yet somehow causality travels up this chain in powerful, largely well-understood ways!


We have become accustomed to thinking of causality purely in instrumental terms. In that sense, it is of course true that it is the parts that alter the whole. But we forget that the word “cause” used to have a much wider sense. What we think of as the “cause” these days is only the Aristotelian “effective cause”. We have forgotten that other “causes” exist and have real effects. The “formal cause”, for instance, can be seen as the way in which higher layers of abstraction limit and direct lower layers. Again, this does not necessitate a belief in a Platonic realm of Forms. When a carpenter builds a chair, it is obviously true that his tools operating on the wood are the “effective causes” of what is produced. But is it not true that a “formal cause”—an understanding of what it means to be a chair, which is necessarily influenced by his social position—also has a part to play in this? We no longer think of this as causality, but as a result we are unable to fully grasp what’s going on here. Causality goes both upwards and downwards (and maybe sidewards as well!) over the web of existence.


Levels of description matter. “Romeo loved Juliet” is as true as “a certain well-structured collection of organic compounds produced certain levels of serotonin and oxytocin in the presence of a similarly well-structured collection of organic compounds”, but they don’t mean the same thing. Even if you ignore the fact that Romeo and Juliet are literary figures! Levels of description matter, and although the same truth can be expressed at different levels, it is significant in different ways at those levels. This is very similar to Karl Popper’s “Three Worlds”, but I think “Three” is too much and too little: too much, because there is only one world; too little, because that one world exists and interacts at many, many different levels. This is not the same as saying there are “Two Truths”; there aren’t, and there cannot be. But the same truth can be expressed at different levels.


Some who face this tower of concrete-yet-abstract layers dismiss it all as illusion or as emptiness. I think the exact opposite is the case. This is reality: a unified whole, an infinitely diverse, infinitely layered, fractal, organic tower that grows, breathes, becomes self-conscious, tries to comprehend all of itself, and shrinks.

"Inception"

As I mentioned to a friend recently, Inception is likely to be the That Movie of this fall: the movie that sparks off intense, passionate 2 am conversations in college dorms. I'm still trying to digest the movie, but for now, let me just ask the big question: Is the whole movie a dream?

Possible responses:

• Yes
• No
• It doesn't matter
• insert-some-other-response-here

For what it's worth, I thought this graphic was incredibly helpful in organizing the different levels of the movie. (It need hardly be said that you should only open this link if you've already seen the movie. If you haven't seen it yet, go see it!)

On the mysteries of consciousness

I recently sent this Slate article by Ron Rosenbaum to a number of friends, and in response to the two following paragraphs,

Colin McGinn is particularly good in condemning materialist explanations of consciousness, pointing out that it's impossible to collapse the mind into the brain. Or, as he puts it: "[T]he mind is … meat neither more nor less." To the materialist the feeling of "pain, for example, is nothing more than a firing of certain fibers in the brain. The feeling of pain simply reduces to such physical processes. The two are not merely correlated; they are identical." To the materialist, Mr. McGinn continues, "the mind is the brain in disguise. The djinn is the lamp."

He goes on to point out that he could hypothetically "know everything about your brain of a neural kind …its anatomy, its chemical ingredients, the pattern of electrical activity in its various segments … the position of every atom and its subatomic structure … everything that that materialist says your mind is. Do I thereby know everything about your mind? It certainly seems not. On the contrary, I know nothing about your mind. I know nothing about which conscious states you are in … and what these states feel like to you..."

one of my friends (let's call him/her X, given his/her request that his/her identity be preserved) wrote the following long response:

Actually, I think we would. When we lose neurons, or glial cells, for any reason, we lose our minds and in the process we lose ourselves. Recently someone told me about how their mother, who suffered a brain tumor, progressively changed in personality as the tumor grew and she deteriorated. Through cerebral injuries we can selectively lose our memories, our acquired knowledge (forgetting how to read or write), even our awareness of self (some people stop recognizing their bodies as their own), our inhibitions ... Dementia is a wonderful example of how as we lose neuronal firings we lose the mind, the essence of the person. Another example is how electrolyte imbalances have profound neurological effects from which we may never recover. I mean a sudden depletion of K, of Na or of glucose and how they can alter mental status. How can this loss of self be explained if the self is not the brain? If the self is somewhere else? ...

The more interesting question that this paper raises for me is, why does the author want so badly for the mind to be different from the body? If there is no difference, does it mean human experience doesn't matter? Does it matter less? In any case why do we experience the world of ideas as different from that of the material? Are we intrinsic dualists?

I'm no neuro-expert, and I'm no philosopher either. But it seems to me that the materialist response, while entirely consistent with experiment and with everything we know about the brain so far, seems not to engage with Rosenbaum's interpretation of McGinn's philosophical issue. For the materialist, there is nothing other than the physical brain and its electroneurobiochemical state, from which the mind emerges. As I see it, McGinn's response is, "when you say 'the mind is the brain,' what does 'is' really mean?" (The typical philosophical response!)

But this really does conceal some issues here. For if the materialist means, "the mind is identical to the brain," then this is clearly false: the mind is not structured like the brain. Indeed, even though my mind can reflect upon itself, it has no awareness of its underlying brain structure; how could that be the case if it were precisely identical to a brain? However, as X says, what the materialist wants to say is "the mind is nothing more than the brain," so that there is nothing in the mind that does not relate to the brain quite directly. And X's examples show cases where alterations to a person's brain's state seem to alter that person's mind's state as well, sometimes quite permanently. Does this not utterly refute the philosophical case of the dualists?

[Full disclosure here: I'm not yet convinced that either position is the absolute correct.]

My friend's examples certainly prove that, as far as we can tell, there exist mental states derivable from brain states. (And I seriously doubt Rosenbaum or McGinn could dispute this.) However, this is not sufficient to prove the materialist argument, that all mental states derive from brain states. To do that, we would need to construct some sort of systematic and comprehensive mechanism by way of which every conceivable mental state can be mapped to a particular brain state (the converse not being necessary). And as far as I know, neuroscience is quite far from that point.

Here McGinn can raise a seemingly difficult problem: is this even possible? Can we really map every component of a typical mental state—every object I'm seeing, everything I'm smelling, every sound I can hear at this point, plus all the random thought floating through my head—precisely onto the brain's state at that point? This seems to be his claim when he states that even when he knows everything about a person's brain state, he cannot know their mind. But this is really less an argument about the distinctness of the mind from the brain than an argument about the existence of a mind-state --> brain-state mapping and its inverse brain-state --> mind-state mapping. The materialist is still safe so long as he or she can argue that such a mapping exists, even if its details are not fully fleshed out.

And I think there is a difficulty at that very point for the materialist: it seems to me that, contrary to its own claim, the materialist thesis cannot be experimentally verified. Why? Because a person's mind is not available to another for testing. We exist within our own minds, and we are conditioned by habit to think that other people's speech and actions are a window onto their thoughts, that their behavior is a reflection of their mind. But this is not strictly true. We can never really peer into somebody's mind and examine what's going on; if we could, psychologists would all be out of jobs.

As a result of this rather pedantic argument, X's examples are not as illustrative as X wants them to be—they prove that modifications to a person's brain state can modify that person's visible behavior, for that can clearly be observed, but they cannot prove that these modifications alter the person's mind-state, or that it is the person's altered mind-state that causes their altered observable behavior. This problem with the materialist thesis cannot be resolved by additional refinements to our knowledge of neuroscience, because it does not rely on an imperfect understanding of brain states. On the contrary, what it argues is that mind-states can never be truly observed or communicated in any manner, and hence cannot ever be truly mapped to brain-states. All that can be mapped are observable behaviors. [Note that this is not an argument about whether mind-states are distinct from brain-states, but one about whether we can ever know anything at all about mind-states.]

Now, the materialist may say that suffices. "How should it matter to me what my mind is thinking when I know that if I apply this particular level of electrical input to this particular neuron, I can consistently get my subject to sing 'Happy Birthday'?" From a clinical perspective, that's true. And it's quite possible to dismiss what I've said here as theoretical chatter that has no practical implications, or as pure sophistry. But from a philosophical perspective, it is not mere wordplay. Because all that we have managed to do is draw a sharp line between physical and mental events. We have not yet established if mental events do exist separately from physical events; indeed, we've made it all the more difficult for us to establish if they do exist at all! But we have not yet reconciled our phenomenological picture of the mind with the neurological picture, and there is as much philosophy here as there is biology.

Much more on this tomorrow. I'm still thinking about this issue, and I've not yet engaged with X's second paragraph at all. And these positions are all tentative, as always. I reserve the right to change my mind (or should I say my brain?) at any time.