Beyond Hive Consciousness, Part 1

Jaron Lanier begins his long awaited first book, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by trying to explain his day job as a technologist of the late 20th Century. In doing so, he cannot help but allude to Marshall McLuhan:

We make up extensions to your being, like remote eyes and ears (webcams and mobile phones) and expanded memory (the world of details you can search for online). (5)

This would have been yesterday's news to McLuhan, whose 1964 opus, Understanding Media, is subtitled "The Extensions of Man." McLuhan understood well that Lanier and his technologist coworkers were merely extending human organs in new, virtual ways.

Lanier, however, is aware of his ironic position, and takes pains to separate himself from the hive mentality that dominates Web 2.0 and all of its adherents (including contributors to the blogosphere). And since his own subtitle is "A Manifesto," which would seem to indicate a high level of public importance, Lanier provides a self-help list of do's and don'ts for those addicted to the superficiality of Web 2.0 reductionism:

• Don't post anonymously unless you really might be in danger.
• If you put effort into Wikipedia articles, put even more effort into using your personal voice and expression outside of the wiki to help attract people who don't yet realize that they are interested in the topics you contributed to.
• Create a website that expresses something about who you are that won't fit into the template available to you on a social networking site.
• Post a video once in a while that took you one hundred times more time to create than it takes to view.
• Write a blog post that took weeks of reflection before you heard the inner voice that needed to come out.
• If you are twittering, innovate in order to find a way to describe your internal state instead of trivial external events, to avoid the creeping danger of believing that objectively described events define you, as they would define a machine.
(21)

That's some good advice. If we all adhered to Lanier's dicta, we would be spared the vituperative trash that infects topical forums, Wikipedia would be useful background to the real story, websites would be windows into our souls, YouTube would be worth watching, more blogs would be worth reading, and Twitter might actually be interesting. Imagine the kind of Singularity we could then produce!

In 1991, Brian Eno famously quipped that "Future TV will be made with simple equipment, unqualified people, small budgets, and bad taste." Lanier sees the fulfillment of that prophecy in a section called "Schlock Defended." Again, he can see the irony of YouTube, and suggests that, while it could--and should--be of much higher quality, the motivation to create schlock is inarguably human.

Lanier then takes on computationalism in his chapter titled "I Am a Contrarian Loop," an obvious spoof on our own Doug Hofstadter's work. Lanier critiques the three "flavors" of computationalism that are supposed to result in the Singularity--the awakening of the web. First there's the notion that sheer quantities of data held in databases such as Google's will somehow wake up to some kind of cosmic consciousness. A second flavor--that proferred by Hofstadter--requires self-aware recursion--a "strange loop"--in order to qualify as consciousness. Finally, there is Web 2.0 computationalism, which holds to a new twist on the Turing test: if you buy music based on the recommendations of the hive "then the hive is effectively a person" (156). Lanier then suggests that human evolution is, in fact, realistic computationalism, and we could construct a myth, a creation tale, "to think computationally that isn't as vulnerable to the confusion brought about by our ideas about ideal computers" (157). For McLuhan, myth "is the mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects" (McLuhan, 1962, 266). This "complex group of causes and effects" is simply another way to express Lanier's realistic computationalism.

To be continued...

[NOTE: This blog post was four weeks in the making. Part 2 could be four more. :dj]

The Metaphor Maker

People who hope to thrive in the Conceptual Age must understand the connections between diverse, and seemingly separate, disciplines. They must know how to link apparently unconnected elements to create something new. And they must become adept at analogy--at seeing one thing in terms of another. There are ample opportunities, in other words, for three types of people: the boundary crosser, the inventor, and the metaphor maker. (134)

-- Daniel H. Pink
A Whole New Mind

Pink has, here, hit upon the crux of metaphor as a wellspring of creativity -- the ability to "understand one thing in terms of something else" (139). Note the authors we admire in this blog:

• "The Hero's Journey" of Joseph Campbell is a metaphor;
• The Gutenberg Galaxy by Marshall McLuhan is a metaphor;
• "The medium is the message" is obviously a metaphor;
• as is I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter

It is always the metaphor maker who shows us a new reality -- an "imaginative rationality" (139) -- whether it's Pink Floyd "Learning to Fly" or a tone poem such as Brian Eno's "Stars."

Pink quotes Twyla Tharp, who "encourages people to boost their metaphor quotient, or MQ, because 'in the creative process, MQ is as valuable as IQ'" (139).

More importantly, metaphor is the basis of empathy, and, just as it allows us to understand others in terms of ourselves, it becomes the very foundation of consciousness, for "the more we understand metaphor, the more we understand ourselves" (140).

Q: What is I?

A: A metaphor. The question itself is metaphorical.

But the creative I is something more...

The creative I
is a metaphor maker.

Zen Physics

I'm a dualist -- can't help it, always have been -- no matter how eloquently Hofstadter tells me that I am a strange loop. And I just don't buy the bit about reincarnation. I've studied reincarnation from every angle, and it has simply never made sense to me.

Until now, that is.

I recently opened David Darling's 1996 book titled Zen Physics: The Science of Death, the Logic of Reincarnation prepared to defeat any and all of his arguments in support of reincarnation, but then he goes and blindsides me with this:

We are the products of our life stories. [...] So, inevitably, a lot of what we remember is not what actually happened--whatever this may mean--but rather a kind of myth or confabulation that helps us sustain the impression that we know what is going on. [...] We maintain a sense of continuity and so provide a basis for our feeling of personal identity at the cost of never knowing what is true. We are as much a myth as the stories we tell ourselves. (35-36)

This makes perfect sense from a Campbellian perspective, and from there Darling continues to chip away at every wall of incredulity. He goes on to show how the brain is a memory device, nothing more, and certainly not the source of consciousness as Hofstadter would contend. It is, in fact, a filter that limits our awareness of the singular consciousness that is the universe at large. Moreover, the brain seems to have a built-in storyteller that puts everything (i.e., the insignificant amount of data actually processed and stored by the brain) into a "single coherent narrative." With a nod to Hua-Yen Buddhism and Indra's Net of Gems, Darling advances into a discussion of Zen and quantum mechanics to show how upon death we will each undergo secular reincarnation into a new and previously unknown example of fragmented consciousness, each with a new story to tell.

If all the world's a stage, then the universe must be a multiplex theatre.

Maybe God's just a film buff.

Life after Life

In previous posts, we have noted that consciousness is a matter of recursive symbol processing in the brain. One of the most important symbols will be the one named I; moreover, as Hofstadter puts it, "your brain is inhabited to varying extents by other I's, other souls" (Hofstadter, 2007, p 248). The more faithfully your own consciousness represents and resonates with that of another soul, another I, the more affinity you are likey to share with that other soul.

And an affinity of souls means that the people concerned can rapidly come to know each other's essences, have great potential to live inside each other. (250)

So, what becomes of a soul after the physical body has died? For myself, that remains to be seen, but at minimum, the soul lives on within the consciousness of every other soul it has inhabited, or as Hofstadter puts it:

When the sun is eclipsed, there remains a corona surrounding it, a circumferential glow. When someone dies, they leave a glowing corona behind them, an afterglow in the souls of those who were close to them. (258)

Their myth--the story that gives so much meaning to the souls that they inhabit--lives on.

I Am a Myth

As I reviewed Hofstadter last week, I enjoyed rereading another of his Platonic dialogues, "A Courteous Crossing of Words," this one between SL #641--a believer in the ideas of I Am a Strange Loop--and SL #642--a doubter of the ideas of I Am a Strange Loop:

SL #641: Earlier, I described your "I" as a self-reinforcing structure and a self-reinforcing story, but now I'll risk annoying you by calling it a self-reinforcing myth [emphasis is Hofstadter's].

SL #642: A myth?! I'm certainly not a myth, and I'm here to tell you so. (291)

SL #641 then explains itself this way:

The "I" -- yours, mine, everyone's -- is a tremendously effective illusion, and falling for it has fantastic survival value. Our "I"'s are self-reinforcing illusions that are an inevitable by-product of strange loops, which are themselves an inevitable by-product of symbol-possessing brains that guide bodies through the dangerous straits and treacherous waters of life. (291)

Such dramatic language would seem to invite literary support, but first we find support from another take on the physics of thought -- Zen Physics:

We are the products of our life stories. [...] So, inevitably, a lot of what we remember is not what actually happened--whatever this may mean--but rather a kind of myth or confabulation that helps us sustain the impression that we know what is going on. [...] We maintain a sense of continuity and so provide a basis for our feeling of personal identity at the cost of never knowing what is true. We are as much a myth as the stories we tell ourselves. (Darling, 1996, 35-36)

Darling goes on to assert that "[t]he brain, in effect, appears to have a resident storyteller that works ceaselessly to link everything that comes to its attention into a single coherent narrative" (87).

A single coherent narrative. A myth. A monomyth. That's what Joyce called it in Finnegans Wake, and it would become the basis of Joseph Campbell's concept of the hero's journey:

The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation--initiation--return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth. (Campbell, 1949, 30)

Separation--initiation--return. We do it over and over; furthermore, we remember each iteration and use it to inform the next iteration of the set of strange loops we call life. And the lifestory that we construct becomes a myth with a single protagonist: I.

So what is myth?

For Marshall McLuhan, myth "is the mode of simultaneous awareness of a complex group of causes and effects" (McLuhan, 1962, 266). This "complex group of causes and effects" is simply another way to express strange loops of separation--initiation--return; therefore, McLuhan's definition of myth would certainly support both Darling and Hofstadter. But James P. Carse gives us, perhaps, the most concrete definition of myth:

Myths [...] are not stories that have meanings, but stories that give meanings" (Carse, 1986).

Without myth, life would have no meaning. That is why I am a myth.

What is I?

Last week, I spoke briefly to David Gilmour's emphasis on I in "Learning to Fly"; this week, I thought we could look at the I a bit more closely, beginning with a poem called "I".

I

what is I?

that which wonders aloud
wandering aimfully through
that which is familiar

is it a function of YOU?

the world that I sees
pondering endlessly clues
the light of mortal night

is it a fragment or the center?
a figment or a fact?

I wants to listen
but it won't stop screaming
somebody please
please listen for me

* * *

Since we've now been introduced to Hofstadter and his seminal concept of "strange loops as the crux of consciousness" (1979, 709), let's skip through his more recent work, I Am a Strange Loop, to see how his thinking has evolved over the past 30 years:

What I mean by "strange loop" is -- here goes a first stab, anyway -- not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive "upward" shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. [...] In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop. (102)

Hofstadter then follows with a wonderful discussion of "Drawing Hands," a lithograph by M.C. Escher that hung in my office at McCook Community College until I moved out of the faculty ranks and into administration last year. I kept "Drawing Hands" there as a metaphor for the writing process; Hofstadter uses it as a metaphor for thinking, itself--a "paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop."

So what does all of this have to do with I?

In any strange loop that gives rise to human selfhood, by contrast, the level-shifting acts of perception, abstraction, and categorization are central, indispensable elements. It is the upward leap from raw stimuli to symbols that imbues the loop with "strangeness." The overall gestalt "shape" of one's self -- the "stable whorl," so to speak, of the strange loop constituting one's "I" -- is not picked up by a disinterested, neutral camera, but is perceived in a highly subjective manner through the active processes of categorizing, mental replaying, reflecting, comparing, counterfactualizing, and judging. (187)

In other words, the I is made up of self-referential symbols that are constantly being re-examined by that same self-referential I. Because at least some of those symbols are the symbols used to represent other Is, that which we call I is unavoidably "inhabited" (to use Hofstadter's term) by those other Is; thus I is, to some extent, a function of YOU.

So how does Hofstadter connect this loopy I to consciousness? Like this:

Consciousness is the dance of symbols inside the cranium. Or, to make it even more pithy, consciousness is thinking. As Descartes said, "Cogito ergo sum." [...] This dance of symbols in the brain is what consciousness is. [...] Note that I say "symbols" and not "neurons." The dance has to be perceived at that level for it to constitute consciousness. (276)

Finally, gyrically, in his conclusion titled "I Am a Strange Loop," Hofstadter resorts to metaphor:

Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious, shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems [emphasis added] -- vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, and sometimes exceedingly beautiful. (363)

So there you have it: I is a poem.