The soul in the game

I used to love to play video games.

My favorite of all time was this one called The Secret of Mana, back in the old days of the Supernintendo.  My brother and I never had a Supernintendo ourselves, mind, but we borrowed one once from a friend of his, and when we put in that magical cartridge…

The Secret of Mana was grandiose and mythical, like Zelda meets Willow.  To my twelve year old brain, it was perfect.  I used to feel like I was inside the game.  Me and my buddies, the girl and the midget—whomping out bad-guy brains, gathering Mana, blasting from cannons, sneaking through tunnels, trudging through forests, castles, ghosthouses, seasons, Moon palaces and deserts, tundras, Witch lairs, Mushroom villages, and even flying over the world on our dragon friend Flammie.  But, even among all of these marvelous textures, I never once thought that that little world might actually be real.

Wha-what?  A video game—real?  Well as far as ridiculous is concerned, it kinda is and it isn’t.  After all, what do we think makes reality so much different from a video game?  Is it just that reality is so much more complicated?  Or is there something deep down that’s actually different about reality, some hidden level… like a spirit or soul layer.  And if there is such an intangible, what’s to stop a videogame from having it, too?  If we program feelings and quirks into Mario, will he actually feel them?  The question becomes less screwy if I rephrase it: is there any way we could know?  I mean, after all, I can’t even be sure that my best friend actually has feelings, as opposed to being an automaton.  If Mario tells me he feels something and he’s convincing, how can I know if he’s lying?

If we didn’t have our own unique subjective views on the world, we wouldn’t even bother thinking about any of these questions.  But we do have these views, so we must take seriously the possibility that other people, and maybe even simulations of other people—like in videogames, or more relevant to our purposes, in an attempt model all of the laws of physics in a computer (or in any other system that requires some abstract mapping in order to relate objects within it to objects in our world)—can also have subjective experiences.  Such a simulation is of course only as good as the physics that go into it.  But what if the physics that go into a simulation are perfect?  What about the optimal case, in which a simulation represents the mechanics of our own reality so perfectly that the physical laws of the two worlds can’t be distinguished by any physical test: a test done here, in the real world, versus a test done there, in the simulated world.  Well… then things become interesting.

If our question is whether all of the characteristics of reality, including subjective experience, could exist in a simulation—and that is our question—then the first obvious experiment within such a simulation is to produce a fully functioning human being, and then to test if it can experience the subjective.  The simulated human either would or would not experience the subjective.  If the human, whom we’ll name Turing, says that he doesn’t have any subjective reality—or if Turing simply displays no aptitude for any sort of regular functioning or thought—then we’ve concluded… nothing!

Actually, it is possible that Turing experiences all of the colors of the rainbow just as we do, but for some reason can’t express it to us; or that Turing experiences nothing, but describes the colors so accurately based on his operational programming that we become convinced that he does experience them subjectively.  Well okay then… so much for the empirical question of being able to test whether a simulated person can experience the subjective.  After all, we can’t even be certain that people in this world actually experience the subjective.  All I can know is that I experience it.  But what about the more fundamental ontological question of whether a perfect simulation of a person could theoretically experience the subjective, regardless of whether we could ever actually test it?  This is still a question we can meaningfully ask.

So let’s take for a moment the possibility that, for some fundamental reason, no simulation of the laws of reality could allow subjective experience.  What could be the cause of such a failure?

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(Reasons why even a perfect simulation might not be able to produce subjective experience)

1. Science is wrong (aka, Brain in a Vat):  Is it possible that everything we know about the relation between mathematics and science and the functioning of nature is really a big hoax?  That we misunderstand reality and are deluded, and that no set of rules actually govern the universe?  In essence, this is the possibility that Occam’s razor—our most basic assumption, that the most elegant (or parsimonious) description of something is probably the correct one—is wrong.

Occam’s razor is the principle we use intuitively from our childhoods to understand the world around us.  For example, because the sun rises every single day, we believe that the sun exists and that it takes on a regular pattern of rising and falling.  This is a simpler explanation of the sun than, e.g., the suggestion that the sun rises every day only because some computer tells it to do so, and that one day (perhaps tomorrow), it will halt in midair.  Because things around us tend to behave in a predictable manner, we believe that they are real, and we don’t create unnecessarily elaborate explanations for them.  This is a basic premise of science as well, because science is merely the precise application of Occam’s razor to observed phenomena in the world.   

If we scratch Occam’s razor (and hence science), anything is possible.  The whole universe could be merely a movie run for your enjoyment, you being a brain sitting in a vat.  Or all of existence could have been created on the spot two seconds ago, with all of our memories and experiences implanted.  There are many inconsistencies and weaknesses to any such theory, because when we dispense with Occam’s razor, we enable a huge and improbable smorgasbord of implicit assumptions.  For instance, if you are a brain in a vat, then what are the physical rules governing the vat?  How did the brain get put in the vat?  Where is the vat?  A whole theology could be built based on answering such impossible questions.

And most importantly, no Brain in a Vat type theory actually helps us to answer any of our big questions: such theories merely redirect them.  If we dispense with Occam’s razor, then instead of wondering how our universe can support subjective experience, we must ponder instead how, perhaps, …er… a universe composed of a brain in a vat, or something, can support subjective experience.  And in this case, we’ll run into all of the same quandaries.

So let’s hold on to Occam’s razor, and move forward to more plausible, or at least more useful, scenarios.

2. Humans have souls, and souls can’t be simulated:  Is it possible that humans have souls, and that souls are what experience subjectivity?  Descartes formalized the soul concept with his theory of substance duality, which claims that there are two fundamental types of stuff in the universe: normal physical stuff, and soul stuff.  The soul stuff affects the physical stuff, but does not obey its rules.  Soul stuff is, in essence, a window into the world without Occam’s razor.  Unfortunately, this idea has many problems.  For instance, if the soul can interact with the body, what prevents us from measuring its effects with our instruments and then incorporating those rules into physics?  We would simply expand physics to include soul stuff.  Or perhaps we can’t do this, because reality is fundamentally as disordered as the soul layer.  If this is the case, then physics has no fundamental meaning, and we are back to the ‘brain in a vat’ scenario.

Even if the soul theory is true, we still wouldn’t know whether a computer simulation would be able to produce subjective experience.  All we would know for sure is that souls, the source of subjectivity, can couple with human brains.  Whether a simulation can support subjectivity would depend on whether souls can also couple with simulated brains.  Soul theory as it stands can say nothing on this matter, so the determination of whether simulations have souls would have to be added as an axiom to the soul theory, rather than being a derivative of it.  We would be better off, therefore, just going ahead and guessing blind about whether simulations can experience subjectivity, since the soul theory itself sheds no light on the issue.

3. Subjective experience is excluded by Godel’s incompleteness theorem: One of the most remarkable logical proofs ever written is Godel’s theorem, which casts doubt on whether a full simulation of reality could be done even in theory.  Godel’s theorem proves that for any logical system at least as complicated as natural numbers (aka, positive integers), there exists no logical framework to describe the system that is both complete and consistent: complete meaning that we can derive any true statement from basic principles, and consistent meaning that it is impossible to derive two statements of any sort that will conflict with each other.  Any logical system fully describing natural numbers will include arithmetic (e.g., 1+1=2), as well as even more basic and seemingly obvious properties such that for any number n there exists a ‘next’ number, n+1.

Although natural numbers are the most intuitive type of math, it turns out strangely that fully formalizing the way they relate to each other is provably impossible.  There must be holes in any consistent description, and any complete system will lead to jarring inaccuracies.  What this means practically, for us, is that fully modeling the laws of the universe is literally impossible—unless, that is, the universe itself holds inconsistencies in the way laws of nature interact with each other, which would lead us back again to the world without Occam’s razor, or unless we believe that somehow the universe is categorically simpler than natural numbers (although how could that be?!).  The question then becomes: even if we can’t fully model the universe, are the properties of the universe that we can model sufficient to simulate subjective reality?  There are good reasons to think that they aren’t sufficient, because of the similarly self-referential nature of both Godel’s proof and consciousness.  But while we can guess, we really can’t say anything for sure.

4. The stratum of the universe matters:  Simply put, this is the idea that there is something about the reality we are stitched out of that is fundamental and cannot be modeled.  This isn’t to say it can’t be modeled mathematically, but rather that even a perfect mathematical description would fail to capture certain properties because it matters what kind of stratum the model is implemented in.  Many scientists would argue against this theory, since math seems at least theoretically able to capture anything that nature throws at us (sort of… see the last point, about Godel’s theorem).  However, the one area that math and science have said nothing about is the actual experience of subjectivity—which, of course, is our topic.  So how might subjectivity arise in the stratum theory?

The stratum theory states that the fabric of nature itself provides a sort of mapping between what can be measured objectively, and what can be experienced subjectively by the same piece of matter (keeping in mind, of course, that for a full subjective mapping to occur, the matter in question must also be arranged in a suitable way, such as how it’s arranged in a human brain).  Because a simulation won’t be implemented in the right stratum—namely, in the stratum of our universe, with its quarks, atoms, molecules, forces, and dimensions (as opposed to, for instance, the stratum of a computer processor)—it may not yield the proper mapping, and thus might not be able to create subjectivity.  This is to say, reality is like a movie projector, where the equations we can use to describe nature are like a filmstrip, and the subjective experience is like the projected film.  (Note, this analogy is not about the experience of viewing the film, but rather about the projection of the film itself: as far as we are concerned, there could be nobody in the theater at all, but the movie would still be properly projected, and hence subjectivity would be created.)  If we perfectly copy a film into some other format, like onto a flash drive, this would be like perfectly mathematically modeling reality.  Even doing so, though, we would not have created the full subjective reality (the projected film) in a simulation (the flashdrive).  To do that requires the projector and an actual filmstrip—the proper stratum.  The stratum by its very nature provides subjectivity, whereas implementing reality in a simulation would be like trying to view a movie stored on a flash drive by shining light at it (which obviously would not work).

Why is the stratum theory more satisfying than the soul idea?  It’s because it’s much simpler.  First of all, we have strong evidence that some sort of mapping exists between subjective and objective experience, as it appears from all scientific inquiries that the physical brain and the subjective mind are one and the same, and yet we know they are experienced entirely differently.  The brain is projected, so to speak, into ‘mind space,’ just as a filmstrip is projected onto a movie-screen.  The stratum theory is therefore an explanation of our definite experience that uses as few and as simple assumptions as possible.  The soul theory, on the other hand, assumes a serendipitous connection between an unbounded soul reality, which can have any number of unexplainable properties, and the ordered reality we see about us.  It permits many more assumptions than the stratum theory.  The soul layer is considered active, whereas in the stratum theory, the projected image is primarily passive.

One part of the stratum theory—the existence of a mapping between our subjective experience and some part of our objective body—feels self evident, because our objective experience of our brain (for example, seeing it during surgery, or via MRI) is radically differently than our subjective experience of being our brain.  Our question about subjectivity, then, may be reframed: how does the mapping between the subjective and the objective arise, and does it require a particular stratum?  For example, would mathematical equations that perfectly simulate reality be enough to produce subjectivity?  Would these equations even need to be implemented?  If they don’t, then will we create a true reality, with subjective experience and consciousness, if we write all the equations down on paper and solve them by hand?  What if we don’t even write them down, but simply know they exist?  Or what if we take this idea to its most logical extreme and just prove that such equations could exist, even if we will never actually know them?

If these last few ideas seem preposterous, then you have tacitly assumed that the stratum does matter.  If simulating equations on paper or in a computer, rather than them simply existing, is required for them to be actualized, then really what we’re saying is that we need to borrow some part of our universe’s stratum—such as its physical dimensions or even the flow of time—to make a simulation that has its own subjective reality.  We must then ask not if we need a stratum, but rather whether subjectivity requires the parts of our universe’s stratum that cannot be passed to a simulation.

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So those are a few reasons (and there are others) why it might be fundamentally impossible to simulate the functioning of reality perfectly, or at least well enough to produce subjective experience.  But if it turns out that we can simulate the functioning of reality perfectly… what does it then mean for our understanding of nature?

First of all, if we find we can simulate reality perfectly and with no fundamental losses in its character, we will gain very strong evidence for the possibility that we also are living in a simulation.  After all, once we’ve exhibited the possibility of alternate but equivalent layers of reality, why would we expect that the one that we live in is the most basic one?  There could be a layer simulating us, and another beneath that one, and on and on to infinity.  But even this layering supposes some sort of stratum, because the layers are dependent on each other insofar as they are implemented within one another.

There is another even simpler explanation of how our multiverse is structured, again assuming that we can simulate reality perfectly.  You can decide for yourself if you find this explanation intellectually satisfying.  This explanation remarkably requires no specialized stratum at all.  It is Max Tegmark’s Mathematical Universes Hypothesis (MUH), which states that every mathematical structure is real.  In MUH, a triangle is a viable universe, as is a rhomboid, or the natural number system, or even, in some way, The Secret of Mana.  Of course, merely existing does not mean that a universe can support subjective experience.  First of all, MUH presupposes that subjective experience can derive directly from mathematics—a tricky proposition, as we’ve seen—and secondly, a given universe within MUH might or might not contain subjectivity depending on whether it is sufficiently complex.  Of course, we know for sure that our own universe is in the class of mathematical constructs that allows subjectivity.  This leads to the remarkable and strange fact that Tegmark’s hypothesis can actually be tested… sort of… using statistics.  If indeed any mathematical structure “exists,” then there probably also exist infinite mathematical constructs above the complexity threshold that enables self awareness.  We would therefore expect that our universe is among the more “probable” mathematical structures that can produce consciousness.  At least in theory, this could be tested, if we gain sufficient understanding of physics to understand what mathematical principles are required to produce subjectivity.

So there you have it.  If we look over all of our theories and crystallize them, I believe that we come down to one fundamental divide: do we take a stratum interpretation, in which the substance that our universe is implemented in has a special and unique nature, or do we take a non-stratum interpretation, which naturally leads towards the simulations-within-simulations or the MUH theory.  Either one has different consequences on whether we can create simulated humans who can experience their own subjective reality.  The most interesting part is that with the current state and the pace of technology, we might be actually exploring these questions in real simulations pretty soon.  Maybe we’ll even be able to breathe real life into The Secret of Mana.  And if we can do that…

P.S. A blog that I follow, which has many insightful and sharp posts about many of the points I’ve highlighted, is: http://www.reenigne.org/blog/category/philosophy/.  Enjoy!

Zen and the consumption of quality

I used to get irritated when people answered their cell phones at the dinner table, in a private conversation, during a meeting, or at the movies.  

Then, the problem became worse. 

People weren’t just answering calls, they were texting, emailing, angry birding, foursquaring, tweeting, youtubing, and uploading embarrassing photos taken fifteen seconds ago onto Facebook.  I first encountered this back in America, where the decorum if your phone rings in company is to silence it and apologize.  In Israel, if you don’t answer the phone, people around you get nervous.  What’s wrong with you, they ask.  Go on, answer it.  Right about then they’ll start getting fidgety. 

But living in a foreign land, you have to get used to some of the customs, even if back home they would be considered rude.  So I’ve relaxed a little on this one.  I even catch myself answering my cell phone without hesitation sometimes, like when I’m sitting with friends for a coffee.  But in reality, there’s not much difference nowadays between people’s behavior with their cellphones in the States versus in Israel, nor in people’s perception of that behavior.  The pervasiveness of our internet technology has simply become accepted.  It’s a quirk of modernity.  Revolutions are organized on Facebook, and Chavez tweets when he comes safely through surgery.  Nobody blinks.

On the surface, maybe there’s nothing wrong with this.  Times change.  People like their phones.  Hell, they love them.  They connect with their friends and their families through them.  You can skype with your parents across the ocean any instant on your smartphone.  How is that bad? 

And before I go further…  I would like to emphasize that I am not a Luddite.  In fact I quite like and am fascinated by technology.  After all, I’m a scientist, and it would be hard to get up in the morning if I felt that technology was evil.  But I also appreciate that the more powerful any tool, the more potential it has for destruction. 

The technology we’ve spawned in our collective garage is insidious because it seems so innocuous, and because it is just so damn useful.  If the internet could cause catastrophic heart failure and psychological unraveling, we would have it classified as a schedule 1 drug.  But it doesn’t cause these.  It affects us on a different plane, one about which society is curiously silent.  This is what I want to talk about in this blog post.

No, I’m not interested now in talking about the societal mores or the ways we have co-opted, or coped with, the internet.  I’m not going to comment on how smartphones upset and annoy friends of the user, or about how they’ve changed interactions between people.

Rather, I want to talk about the effects of these technologies on the self, about what all these interruptions do to us psychologically.  About how these technologies have been specifically designed, with our tacit or even explicit encouragement, to become ever more interruptive, to wedge into ever more parts of our life, to a point that they’ve started to creep everywhere and into everything, while reality itself has sometimes begun to feel like the interruption.  I want, in short, to talk about the death of our Zen, and about the internet’s voracious consumption of quality.

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My appreciation of the problem grew slowly and imperceptibly, just as the problem itself did.  Yes, there was TV beforehand, but that was never as insidious.  Nobody has to have TV up in front of them all day for their job.  TV also isn’t personal like email is.  TV never calls you by name.  By the time I had email and facebook and an rss feed cycling through my head and my computer screen like a gaudily lit merry-go-round almost all times of day, I knew that there was definitely something amiss.  But the problem was vague and amorphous, and I saw the solution as an issue of management, i.e., of being as productive as possible while not allowing the internet to distract me too much.  The story took on a new flavor for me only recently when I came across this blog post:

http://www.componentowl.com/blog/2012/02/zen-coder-vs-distraction-junkie/

The post focuses on work habits and assumes that your priority is productivity.  But its insight and advice apply equally well to just about any activity in modern life, and its conclusions touch upon something deeper than merely optimizing work output.  Here’s a brief summary:

Zen guys sit and focus at work for long stretches, in between which they get up and take breaks.  Distraction junkies use the little times in between other tasks to check the internet, and their focus goes straight out the window.  Nowadays, almost everyone is a distraction junky.  If you want to be effective, do what it takes to be a Zen guy. 

The thing that I instantly realized is that this problem is much bigger than how effective we are at work, or how often we check our smartphones when we’re in the company of friends, or how often we get fidgety when there isn’t a screen nearby we can play with.  These are all merely symptoms. 

The problem is that, by allowing ourselves to be served mental junkfood in every part of our lives, we have forfeited our spiritual wholeness.  Our twitch to check Facebook, email, twitter, news sites, blog posts, youtube videos, and all of the other distractions available to us does something terrible to our brains.

It pulls us out of the moment. 

It fragments our Zen. 

It breaks up our presence.

It disengages us from reality. 

Achieving presence is the goal of meditation and yoga, and it is one of the highest teachings of most religions and spiritual practices.  Presence is total immersion.  It’s an appreciation of what’s happening around you right now, your role in it, its effects on you, the interplay between your setting and yourself and your emotions.  It’s breathing in the slow or sometimes fast pace of an instant, not remembering it later but actually experiencing it now.  The disagreement between different schools and philosophies isn’t typically over whether we should achieve presence, it’s merely about the specifics; what does presence mean exactly, and how can we get there, as individuals or as a society.  We are offered many paths to the self. 

Some will walk a path to fulfillment and others won’t.  But the point is, we’re distracted from even thinking about this journey if we’re obsessively clicking our email.  You can’t achieve Zen if you can’t even focus on the moment, at any moment.  Your mind is just fragmented. 

And if you think about it, we all have succumbed to this fragmentation to such a degree that it’s considered normal.  Multitasking is all the rage.  Even the President of the United States refused to give up his blackberry.  How is this possible?  Wouldn’t somebody from a different, naïve culture, recoil in horror upon seeing this dystopia?  Is Aldous Huxley off somewhere laughing hysterically or perhaps crying?  When I ride the bus in the morning, I see dozens of people, every day, each in their own world with their headphones on, hunched down over their smartphones, eyes slightly glazed, tuned out, turned off.  Nobody is actually present.  Parents are delighted that iPads are intuitive enough for kids, and elementary schoolers have iPhones.  We’re training our youth how to defocus. 

Our families and friends might be concerned if we’re not achieving our personal potential and Zen state, but our employers and the government have no opinion.  They are only concerned about the internet insofar as it reduces or increases productivity, and solutions will be aimed towards that arena.  This is like solving mass cocaine addiction by looking at the minority of people for whom cocaine is destroying their work habits, and instituting standards about when they are allowed to snort up.  This despite the fact that we have digital cocaine spilling out of our work monitors and our smartphones everywhere we go, and releasing its sweet stench in our coffeeshops and our homes.  It ignores the fact that each of us in society, those hopelessly addicted to the drug and those who just dabble, is forfeiting real experience for a chemically induced and instantaneous payoff, and that we are giving up the most important part of humanity in the process.  Cocaine doesn’t hurt companies, it hurts people.

There’s a terrible movie with Adam Sandler called Click, in which Adam gets a remote control that allows him to fast-forward the boring parts of his life.  It quickly all blows out of control, of course, and he misses all the moments that make life worth living.  The movie is spectacularly stupid, but the theme is a real one, and I think it’s a choice we all have today more than ever.  We have remote controls—our smartphones and our internet browsers—that can make boring parts go by faster.  But there’s a real cost to clicking the button.  Feel a little antsy?  Try closing your eyes for a moment and breathing.  Got a moment in between work tasks?  Take a short walk outside and feel the sunshine.  Got a buzz from your smartphone because a friend tweeted?  Deactivate the automatic buzzing, and requisition your responses to 15 minutes in the evening.  Do you think anyone will notice?  Will they be angry you didn’t tweet back instantly?  Within a day, you’ll feel a little bit more whole again.  Your long-lost feeling of presence will return just a bit to you.  You’ll smile more, smell the air more, feel the wind more.  And you’ll probably realize that sometimes a little silence can say more to you than the endless, mindless interruptions of your internet.

Santa is a hummus thief!!

I stumbled out of bed late one Friday and sat down in the reggae bistro Abu Dhubbie for a hummus, thinking that I could share my lunch with a good book.  I was just settling down when a drunk, homeless-looking woman wearing a Santa hat waddled over to the outermost table in the restaurant and blinked her glazed eyes a few times at the spread of food before her.  Before anyone knew it, she had scooped her hand into the bowl of the closest diner, taken up a helping of hummus, and smeared it all over her lower face in the process of shoving it into her mouth.  The diner immediately stood up, appalled and confused.  Santa nonchalantly sat down in his chair and continued slurping the hummus straight out of his bowl. 

Nobody seemed to know what to do.  The woman’s actions were so beyond anybody’s experiences that even the waitstaff merely continued about their business, perhaps hoping that she would eventually disappear.   But she did not disappear.  As the rest of the diners at the table stood up and backed away from the table in something between disgust and outrage, the woman simply appropriated their bowls too, dipping her hands at leisure into four people’s meals and leaving everyone around her perplexed.  After what seemed like quite a while of this, one of the waiters finally approached her and tried to persuade her to leave.  They argued for a bit until the woman swiped a glass off the table to shatter on the ground, and then very profusely apologized and tried to help clean it, creating more of a scene in the process.  Finally, with beige slop still dripping from her face and her hands, a table’s worth of diners standing and glaring at her, and the whole restaurant hypnotized by her strange antics, she poured leftover goop into a grocery bag and then ambled away.  A waiter came around afterwards with a bottle of Arak and poured everyone free shots.  It was a little something to help us forget the reality that had just been unremittingly shoved in our faces.        

I strolled afterwards to a coffeeshop to do some computer work, but I had trouble concentrating.  The woman’s behavior had captured my mind for the day.  It was a strange mixture of hilarious and weird and just sad.  Perhaps all of our desires begin like this woman’s, unbounded and uncouth and uninhibited.  Most of us have merely been taught to keep enough within certain boundaries that when we take what we want, we do it in a way that seems ‘cultured’.  Free as this woman was from usual mores, she simply acted her fantasies.  She just sat right down and dipped her face and hands into people’s bowls because the food looked appealing to her.  Certainly, to get to this place in her life, she must have experienced several varieties of hell.  But in some sense her actions were more honest than those of the rest of us, who are able to obtain enough of our needs through acceptable channels that we can pretend that we’re ‘different’ and ‘civilized’, but who probably would act in the exact same manner if our usual support systems were cut out from us.  Or would we?  Is there a way to know how we would act under such circumstances?  Are we driven fundamentally by base desires, or by some higher aspirations?

I read a fascinating perspective on this in Viktor Frankl’s ‘Man’s Search for Meaning.’  Frankl was a psychiatrist and philosopher who spent several years in Nazi concentration camps during the Holocaust.  During this experience, he developed a new school of existentialist psychotherapy called Logotherapy, the basic tenet of which is that the basic human psychological need is a sense of meaning.  In his book, he describes how within minutes of entering his first concentration camp, every external trapping that had been part of his self definition—his clothes, his valuables, his hair, the typed manuscript of his unpublished life work in psychoanalysis—were unceremoniously stripped from him.  From then on, he lived in a terrestrial version of hell. 

During this years-long ordeal, he came to realize that even these circumstances couldn’t suck the humanity out of some people.  Amidst the squalor, sickness, filth, cold, constant discomfort and backbreaking labor, certain prisoners became even crueler than some of the camp guards, while others displayed almost unbelievable strength of spirit, even giving up morsels of their own food to others who were sick or dying despite the perpetual state of starvation under which they all suffered.  One woman proclaimed to Frankl, as she was dying, with tears in her eyes, that despite the fact that she had lived a very wealthy and comfortable life beforehand, she was unboundedly grateful for the chance to live, and die, in the concentration camp.  She explained that without being forced to experience this, she would never have achieved the spiritual heights that she did there.  She would have lived and died a trite existence, never appreciating anything real, and would have felt empty both during and at the end of it all.  What a striking proclamation!! 

In Frankl’s philosophy, this woman had led a fulfilled life, because she had achieved a full sense of meaning.  This is, he concluded, people’s underlying psychological purpose.  If you can choose your own destiny, seek meaning by creating or appreciating art.  If your destiny is forced upon you, seek meaning by embracing, and transcending, your suffering.  Either way, meaning is the basic necessity that makes people tick.  Perhaps it is a profound lack of meaning, a loss of faith that there even can be any meaning, which leads to behavior like that of the woman in the Santa hat.  When satiation of basic needs is all that is left, and society is capable of offering nothing of value to you, why not just take what you want, breaking all of the rules that the majority of us honor?  But then, even in a concentration camp, we can see that some people do find dignity and meaning although their circumstances clearly are not serving them.  Some people give up their bread although they are starving.  What could drive a person to do such a thing??

I’ve found it interesting having conversations about these types of issues with friends of mine who are scientists.  It seems that many scientists feel that there is no such thing as meaning; there are merely impulses in the brain that give pleasure, and those that give displeasure, and a fulfilling life is one in which the pleasurable impulses are optimized.  I find it interesting that people can be so adamant about a particular, materialistic interpretation of reality.  They don’t allow for any fundamental meaning to the word ‘meaning,’ and use ‘logic’ and ‘science’ as justifications for this.  They are as sure in their worldview as fundamentalists of any given religion are in theirs.  ‘Feeling good’ and ‘feeling meaning’ are categorized blandly beneath ‘utilitarian desires,’ and optimization of personal utility becomes the reigning paradigm of human behavior. 

Sometimes I discuss these same issues with friends who are religious, and I encounter such a different perspective that it is surprising that they and the scientists all carry the same neurological equipment.  The idea of meaning, or faith, tends to be so assumed by these folks that it is indeed axiomatic to their approach to the world.  You can’t disprove an axiom by logic, because an axiom is one of the statements with which logical proof begins.  Science to these folks is a belief system that is useful, but fundamentally subservient to the deeper order imposed by their religious understanding.  Scientific or logical inconsistencies in these beliefs just mean that the science is incomplete or is describing merely a subset of the full, richer reality.  My religious friends might suggest now a moment of prayer for those unfortunate scientists, who have been so willfully driving their heads into the sand.

What I believe scientists sometimes forget is that science can disprove (although it is limited even in this!), but it can never actually prove anything.  Science relies on observation, which is often incomplete, and logic, which as a system is fundamentally flawed, and cannot be applied completely and consistently to something even as simple as natural numbers, much less our universe (look up Godel’s incompleteness theorem if you disbelieve me).  Science builds within paradigms, which are eventually shown to be incomplete and in fact wrong, leaving some items that were once ‘certain’ again completely open to new interpretation.  In all of this, scientists often proclaim (most unscientifically, since they have no proof of this) that the objective reality we can probe with our instruments is the unique reality; this despite the fact that nobody in the history of the world has ever experienced anything but the subjective.  They feel that the relationship between the objective and the subjective is unimportant, because if we have a functional view of how the objective alters the subjective, then questions of ‘what is the subjective’ become meaningless.

In this I think the religious folks have appreciated something correct in the human experience—that the subjective matters.  However, too often, the logical extrapolation of these beginnings leads to belief in very specific and un-provable ‘truths,’ many of which come from books that are to be taken without question.  These books, which could be interpreted mystically (and thus in a way not incompatible with other such ‘books,’ or other philosophies in general), are often instead interpreted literally.  Literal interpretation of scientifically implausible events pits science against religion, and causes both to suffer.  What is science without meaning?  What is religion, debated and spread via technology that could only have come from the rigorous approaches of science, that denies science?  And how on Earth is it possible that people actually view the world through such diametrically opposing perspectives?

Human experience is confusing enough that perhaps the only axiom we should employ is that we should be willing to question all of our axioms.  If we are willing to look at what we believe, and then to systematically question each of these beliefs in context of all of the experience we have amassed in our lives, then we have a chance of seeing more clearly. 

Most scientist types would say that this is exactly what they’ve done—that they’ve sloughed off all the inconsistent religious stuff in favor of the more logical approach—but I don’t quite believe them.  I feel that it’s an easy way out, just as is believing without question in the words of a book.  The entire artistic and spiritual side of existence is entirely ignored by these scientists, or subsumed (I believe inappropriately) into the ranks of utilitarianism.  To say that there simply is no meaning, to deny or to minimize the very feelings that have led people to form the extravagant religious structures that exist, is to ignore a huge part of what it is to be human. 

The truth must be somewhere in the middle, a philosophy that acknowledges the full range of human experience, morality, emotion, and art, in addition to being completely consistent with our universe.  Like the logic of natural numbers, every completely consistent scientific interpretation of reality that I’ve heard always leaves out certain un-approachable problems.  Why are we here?  What does it mean to be conscious?  How can we square our subjective experience with the world about us?  What is meaning?  How do we judge morality?  The trouble is, these un-approachable problems are some of the very most important and interesting problems to humans.  To pretend that these problems simply don’t exist, because they are not relevant or describable by science, misses the point.  We don’t fundamentally need answers to scientific questions; we need answers to human questions.  If science says that those questions don’t exist or are stupid because they don’t fit into the framework of science, than that simply means that science has failed us. 


So Dear Santa,

Thank you for stealing those peoples’ hummus.  Thank you for guiding my mind down this strange rabbithole.  Perhaps we will meet again one day; perhaps we will not.  But either way, I will be hoping that you can find your own type of happiness or meaning.  If not, may you at least find some more hummus. 

-Matthew

Tangoing life

The other evening I was dancing tango with a woman who teaches swing, but for whom, like for me, tango is relatively new.  I could tell she was enjoying our dance; a smile lit up intermittently on her face, and now and again she joined me in a little conspiratorial laughter.  We seemed to have a nice rhythm.  She was funny and snarky, too, which I liked.  But while we were in between songs at one point, she said to me something that struck me:  ‘for this next one, don’t THINK; just dance to the music.’  I joked that I would pay close attention to not thinking, but in the end her advice led to something fresh; the dance was much sloppier, but it felt more alive, as if we were using tango to channel the music, rather than using the music merely to keep pace in our tango.  As the song came to a close we were both grinning like school-kids.   

My dance partner’s challenge to ‘just dance’ was actually a relief to me.  With her intuition as a dance teacher, she was telling me that I’m ready to shuck off some of my ugly duckling phase and to move forward—that I know enough now that I can play a bit, and that what’s most missing from my dance isn’t technical but rather lyrical.  It’s one thing to do a cross or an ocho with exact timing.  It’s another to use the ocho or the cross in creating a dramatic narrative, one that ebbs and bursts with the music.  The narrative might even be juicier if the ocho is fumbled, or the cross isn’t perfect; it’s not the exactness of the individual steps but the improvisation towards the narrative that makes the dance float off the dancefloor. 

I was also reminded that we needn’t master every conceivable tool to create something beautiful; rather, we must merely know how to use some tools well enough, and then it’s our soul that determines the outcome.  In my tango, I can strive to create art from the few steps that I know, just as a good female dancer will strive to take the steps she is guided through and use their bounds as her own palette for expression.  Equally, a dancer who knows many moves isn’t necessarily a good dancer, because it’s the interpretation and expression that make it a dance, not the mastery of technicalities. 

In this sense, I feel that tango is very much like life.  The man and the woman in tango each embody different struggles, which can be relevant at different times in anyone’s personal narrative.  The man’s challenge is to create art from a limited repertoire.  He succeeds if he manages to not think but to dance, to feel the tension of the music and the woman, and to bring something unique to them.  He is like the majority of us, handed some instruments from our upbringing and education and then released to the world with the challenge to make the most of ourselves.  The woman’s challenge in tango, on the other hand, is to take extremely confined circumstances and, through her spirit and soul, to transcend them.  She is like those of us put under extraordinary physical or mental constraints, and left to find nobility and expression in the very embodiment of this struggle. 

Paradoxically, when I watch extremely skilled dancers, it’s the woman, not the man, who appears to be running the dancefloor.  Similarly, it’s the people in life who achieve spiritual heights under the greatest duress who generally garner the most human respect.  It was through his spiritual response to decades of imprisonment, for example, that Nelson Mandela was able to bring a new political reality to South Africa.  But tango is a dance, and like life it is fluid.  The man is no prison and the woman no prisoner; he who can’t respond to the woman’s intention isn’t really dancing at all, despite the fact that, indeed, he is leading.  How many couples in real life are like this?  The best couples collaborate spontaneously, and neither can predict the outcome, for each is inextricably involved.  The drama is rich. 

On my way home after being told to just dance, I passed a few cafes filled with people conversing and laughing, and it struck me that these people too had spent the night tangoing.  How many of them were just dancing themselves, never even realizing their perfectly timed steps?  They weren’t thinking about the mechanics of their conversations nor about the relationships they were nurturing; they were just living and enjoying their night out, and in the process creating some sort of life tango.  Likewise, friends can gather again and again over a chessboard, trying their mightiest to become masters, only to realize in old age that it was the narrative of their gatherings through which they attained mastery at something much richer.  It’s usually only afterwards, sometimes years afterwards, perhaps even only at the very end, that we can see which of the tangos in our lives were the most meaningful. 

Life’s dance is elusive; we might feel it at moments for what it is but not realize that the dancefloor has already shifted, and then we might be left fumbling again, trying to work through a new set of uglies although we had previously thought we had mastered it all.  Things can change suddenly, such as in the death of a loved one.  If this process were more linear then it wouldn’t be life, for in life, there’s no guide but experience, and experience itself is what creates the rules of one’s tango.  Perhaps as we grow old we’ll have discovered our true narratives, and we’ll be able to look back fondly and laugh at it all.  If we are rich in our spirits then we’ll certainly do so.  The trick, then, is to try and catch ourselves dancing, and then to determine what exactly it is that we’re dancing to.  In some cases we might even be able to mold our own dancefloor as we skip breathily over it.  But even when we can’t choose our own tangos, we can still dance with abandon.  And I think it’s through this unintentional dancing that we’ll discover life’s ultimate meaning. 

The play-dough of science

When we are infants we play with things, feel things, put them in our mouths, crawl around until we bump into objects and explore and discover the properties of everything about us, and each new experience helps us build a concept of reality, which we then use as a framework for all of our subsequent behavior and our categorizations of the things we encounter.  

Infants are naturally scientific.  For example, a child’s epiphany about language—connecting the sounds people make with actual meaning—is pure science.  The child consumes many different sources of data and searches for patterns.  She’s not intentionally looking for the meaning of language, for in the beginning, she doesn’t even know to look for such a thing—she’s merely exploring and playing, and the noises made by other humans are among the many stimuli that seem interesting.  But then an awareness begins to awake in her, a new and transformative way of experiencing what she’s encountered all along.  She understands now that these—words—can have power.  Certain ones make the adults behave funnily.  She tries to speak some herself.  A struggle ensues to master the concept of speech, with extravagantly positive results.  And now finally she understands language—her mind has undergone a paradigm shift.     

What distinguishes a scientist’s work from a child’s is that the child rediscovers conceptions that are common to us, whereas a scientist tackles phenomena that are not yet comprehended by anyone.  But scientists can learn from the process of children.  Indeed it’s the scientists who take risks, who misunderstand the dogma and run crazy experiments, and who view the unknown with fresh eyes—typically young scientists—who do the most revolutionary work.  Older scientists can reject foolish notions and keep the youth focused, but they have trouble embracing the radically new.  The youth are the architects of paradigms.  

Skills are essential for science, but specific skills do not a scientist make.  The actual science comes in the play—in the use of hard skills to futz around with the sillyputty of reality, and to generate epiphanies.  This process is not about throughput, it’s about novelty; discovery; seeing the patterns that are perpendicular to the usual conception.  Although a scientist can spend tremendous effort and time doing one task with utter efficiency, the most significant science often occurs outside of the lab.  It is out there, at the beach or the cinema, that she experiences her earth shattering moment, and sees everything familiar anew. 

But I don’t mean to imply that science is a pursuit for the lazy.  A scientist must be utterly immersed in her problem if her trip to the beach is to benefit her.  The boundary of our knowledge is mercurial and amorphous, and identifying it, and then being able to find the shape of its weaknesses, requires a deep knowledge of precedent.  Although efficiency and skillfulness aren’t synonymous with good science, good science generally doesn’t emerge in the absence of these.  Epiphanies spawn from intuition and knowledge, as well as a huge dedication and effort.    

So how then do we judge progress in science?  After a paradigm shift the goodness of the science is obvious, but before then it can be murky.  While science often requires completion of roadblock tasks, ordinary definitions of productivity, such as ‘throughput’ or ‘hours of work put in’ or ‘speed,’ can lead us to stress the wrong factors.  If the solution to a scientific puzzle is West, it’s not helpful to move North, even if you do it with utter efficiency.  That being said, a scientist might need to travel North for a while to realize that West is the way.  But the best science might involve thinking and reading about the meanings of North versus West, and understanding well that distinction before ever leaving the origin.  Balancing contemplation and movement is all part of the craft.  

Nowadays, your field—whatever it is—is probably starting to feel a lot more like my description of science.  Tasks can be outsourced, but intuition cannot be.  So nurture your flexibility and creativity.  Be willing to work like a dog when it’s needed, but also make time for your passions.  Remember that your trip to the beach might provide the epiphany that will revolutionize everything.  And keep in mind that it’s not about effort—it’s about seeing your destiny like play-dough, and building the right intuition about how you must shape it.