Cogito

Because of my person predilections, I always feel compelled to start studies from scratch, trying to build the whole of my philosophical system from a single starting point — unrealistic and misguided though this may be. I am in the habit of thinking that the best insights come near the beginning (see The Multiplication Rule). However, this method tends to impede progress, to say the least. Well, here I go again.

My ultimate starting point may be the one Descartes made famous: I think therefore I am. It seems to me that people — those straw persons of my imagination — thoroughly misinterpret this statement. They think of it as supporting rationality over emotionalism or something — "thought/rationality is what makes me me." But "cogito ergo sum" merely affirms that there can be no better evidence of existence than the fact that one experiences stuff. I can doubt many things, but I seem unable to doubt that there is an I having an experience. I can have all sorts of doubts about what it is exactly that I'm experiencing or what the nature is of everything that is-and-isn't me and what the relationship is between me and the stuff that I experience. I can also wonder about the existence of other people experiencing things as I do, although I don't find that a particularly fruitful doubt to ponder. But even if the world is just a dream, there is still a dreamer dreaming it. Even if I'm a brain in a vat whose world is shaped by Martian scientists (speaking of unfruitful hypotheses), I still experience something and thus exist. Consciousness can't be an illusion, because only conscious beings can have an illusion.

That is as close to a sure thing as I can imagine. If the task is to build up a list of sure things from first principles, then this effort is well begun. As we try to reconstruct knowledge on a sound footing, where do we go from here? It's actually really difficult to move much beyond this super-sure statement. All the rest is presumption and conjecture.

But this start does strongly suggest some metaphors that I have found fruitful to ponder. As I said, I am less sure about the contents of my awareness, but I am pretty sure they represent something real and out there. The most abstract way to describe the "cogito" world view is as a separation, a cleaving of the world into me and not me — the experiencer and that being experienced. Mystics will claim that I've already made an error in lending reality to this separation, and I actually sympathize: not one to accept absolutes am I. That is, this separation is just a point of view, but that point of view is all I'm really sure of (see above). One way to regard the separation assumes there are maps (mental and physical representations) and territories (things being represented). I can't seem to do without this assumption. I believe, although without anything approaching certainty, that all maps — and yes I've reduced all of mental life to map-making — are based on assumptions or perhaps metaphors, just as mathematical proofs are based on postulates. If cogito is my first postulate, the map-territory distinction is my second.

This cleaving of the world further implies a boundary, a frontier, a perimeter to the I that separates it from whatever otherness might exist — the air, the desk, the continent, my wife, my species, etc. The maps develop from what source? Occurrences at this boundary, duh. The image that I'm most comfortable with is that the boundary is a sort of bubble that is subject to slings and arrows from the outside and potentially from the inside as well. All the maps are inside the bubble and the territories are everywhere (and nowhere since whereness is in maps and not in territories). Further, rather than identifying the self with the interior of the bubble, I tend to think of the self as this boundary itself; experience happens on the bubble, not in it, and experience is all I have to go on. The interior is as remote and inaccessible as the exterior and things are as weightless in there as they are in the hollow earth (Hollow Earth). The inside could be the home of unconscious stirrings and a million internet influencers (sub-bubbles?), but none of that quite deserves the label of self.

Okay, I'm an experiencing bubble. Geez! A bubble in the pudding, perhaps, rather than a pebble in the void.

What am I experiencing? I surprise myself by concluding that the best way to answer this question is not to say that I experience the outside world but that I experience only my own state or, more specifically, disruptions of my own state. Kind of solipsistic, but how could it be otherwise working from my bubble assumption? Any other way of saying it sounds like spooky action at a distance. At the very least I would have to violate my newly established boundary between me and the other to actually have direct access to the other. Perhaps it is fair and wise to say, within this metaphor, I experience the shape of my bubble. And I experience traces of the world outside or inside only to the extent that this other stuff deforms my bubble. You might think that I'm just talking about sense data here but no: Sense data sounds all digital and electronic with little detectors at discrete locations signaling the CPU rather than like the analog and messy thing that I picture. Also, reverberations from this morning's confrontation with your boss or alarming reports in this afternoon's news are disturbances to the bubble and have precious little to do with sense data. I haven't gotten to the level of machinery and senses yet and have deliberately left things abstract and metaphorical. I have a secret agenda here in describing it this way. I want to leave room for a sort of deeper level of reality that extends far beyond (or at least is distant from) the senses — like Bohm's implicate order or Leibniz's Monadology or Plato's world of ideal forms outside the allegorical cave. The bubble exists in an abstract place which isn't the space of physics (what Bohm would call the explicate order). The bubble space must relate to or give rise to physical space at some point but the two needn't be identical to each other. In any event, you don't have to take this imagery as seriously as I do. Just treat it as a toy model, a tool of imagination.

By the way, there's a reason I chose the image of a bubble rather than say a dome or a lump of clay or a shell or a wiffleball to stand for the self. A bubble implies not just a surface but also internal pressure that pushes back on deformations. More on that shortly. Perhaps it shouldn't be an airy, elastic, and delicate bubble but a heavy and fuzzy tennis ball. Or something in between.

The world deforms the bubble. What now? Where does experience come in? Well, at this point my assumptions and complications really start to multiply. And as assumptions multiply, uncertainties and divergences, sources of disagreement grow geometrically (not exponentially!).... We started a moment ago with a kind of certainty and already things are obscure and endlessly debatable. This follows from what I call the multiplication rule: Even if each layer of assumption has a strong 90% validity, the logical deductions based on three such layers would have only .9 to the third power (or 73%) validity. In no time one is down to near zero, but we may go on theorizing!

I could choose to identify the bubble with consciousness and say the awareness of my state is direct and simple, but intuition tells me otherwise. My deeper inaccessible being (beneath the surface ego) seems more related to the internal pressure than to the surface itself. If there is a sort of elan vital in my picture of reality, it is this bubble's internal pressure. In any event, my stand on the relationship between the surface of the bubble and consciousness is about to get a little more complicated.

I've already alluded a few times to the idea that maps are based on assumptions, and this is as good a time as any to say that I believe we have a certain amount of freedom in choosing those assumptions. And I don't mean freedom as in free will exactly. The freedom is more about lack of definiteness. The territory isn't especially particular and doesn't demand the use of specific or correct maps. All explanations are Ptolemaic (Ptolemaic). Most readers will be familiar with the idea of yin and yang. I will find it convenient to make two (or four or eight) versions of pretty much every idea that is to follow by occasionally swapping yin and yang orientations (Both and Neither). To oversimplify things, I will assume at some point that the world is at base quiet and unchanging, and I'll need to explain noise and change. Later, the assumptions and explicands will swap places, and it will be changelessness that must be explained. You'll get the idea once we run through a few of these.

Now I want to introduce a specialized use of three words — explain, describe, and express — that I will sometimes write as ex-plain, de-scribe, and ex-press to distinguish the usual versions from these nonstandard ones. The metaphor that these new words embody works off my bubble imagery and stakes a claim to a sort of etymology for the usual uses of those words. If awareness or consciousness or experience — these nebulous words that are so hard to define and to distinguish from each other — is tied up with changes to the shape of my bubble, so too are they tied up with ex-plaining, de-scribing, and ex-pressing. The metaphoric use of these words refers to smoothing things out. Ex-plain = flatten; de-scribe = unwrite; ex-press = remove what presses. The world ruffles my feathers, and, rejecting that disturbance, I try to smooth them out again. If you were not to smooth out the influences, the consequences could be dire; the bubble might burst or wobble out of control like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. The way I experience the world is by ex-plaining, de-scribing, and ex-pressing the effects the world has had on the shape of my bubble. So my consciousness is part of a homeostatic process that undoes what has been done to me, and my representation of the world is a doubly inverse version of the actual world: An outside event makes a sort of death mask impression or a seat-butt impression on my bubble; that's the first inversion. I push out the impression and get my image of that external cause from deconstructing it; that's the second. I imagine what could have made such an impression in the first place (a face or a butt, e.g.). There's detective work involved here and guessing and feedback and lots of biology. I.e., precious little certainty or absoluteness. The Prime Directive for the experiencer from this point of view is to preserve the self by preserving its steady state. That is, all of what I've described above is done in the service of keeping my bubble as it is. I am a bubble that gets distorted by bombardment from the world, and my conscious life is all about bringing things back to normal, like the pressure within an actual bubble does.

This version of things, carried out on a larger scale, makes up what I call the Allegory of the Cafe or the World of Describers. The world is an Internet cafe, with people sitting at their tables absorbed by their screens and wearing noise-canceling headphones to enjoy their music. The clatter of plates, the street noises, the conversations of passersby, social concerns, etc. threaten to distract the patrons from their solipsistic enjoyment of self-selected influences — music, podcasts, cat videos, Twitter. The headphones counteract or smooth out the incoming noise by creating subtle noise of their own that cancel out the other sounds, at least in the vicinity of the patrons' own ears. That's how noise-canceling headphones work, if I need to mansplain it to you. Outside of those small regions near the ears, i.e., between the tables and among the wait staff, the noise is actually subtly increased by the anti-noise put out by the headphones, which is itself a slightly out of phase time-delayed de-scription of what was there already, like a weird game of telephone. And this second order noise created by the headphones necessitates increased noise cancellation among one's neighbors. Side-effect echoes of noise is a major part of the stuff of this world. The noise-antinoise interplay feeds back on itself endlessly. The inner worlds of the patrons are relatively quiet (the hollow earth again), but the outer world is a potential cacophony or plenum of influences. That's right, the territory is full of everything ever described! In this image, a big part of the stuff of the world is just a side effect, collateral damage inflicted by a process designed to quiet things down locally. To project back from this metaphorical world to the real world, substitute influence for noise and ex-planation/de-scription for anti-noise. By the way, the selves in this scenario aren't the people in the cafe; they are the headphones or the headphone/person system!

In the last few paragraphs, I have followed the yin assumption that the primary role of consciousness is to further the interests of the self by preserving the self by smoothing out or minimizing changes, but that's only half (?) the story. If that were the way the world truly were, it would be a timid, closed-off, mechanical place. But the yang aspect of the self also wants to further its interests, albeit in a complementary manner. It desires to be recognized, expand it's influence, reproduce itself, aggrandize itself, take over the world, become corrupted by power. Here the self is more beacon than bubble. We aren't patrons of a cafe; we're wolves on hilltops howling at the Moon, or teenagers perpetually taking selfies. "Here I am! Check me out. Be like me! Succumb to my will! Don't mess with me! Make way. Like my Instagram photo. I'm working on my brand. Like me!" This version furthers the interests of the self by creating disturbances to the bubbles of others. As one pushes one's agenda, there are new sorts of disturbances to the bubble (self-caused, internally caused) that need to be dealt with. That ambient cacophony at the cafe which I called a side effect of noise cancellation is now the whole reason we're at the cafe — to see and be seen — and the side effect is the relative stability or quiet of the self. Our explanations aren't about fending off the outside world here; instead they become justifications and rationalizations of the changes that we wreak. In the previously sketched World of Describers model, outside influence was a side-effect left over from cancellation. Here the side-effect is the self's influence on the self. That is, the result of my broadcasting "Be like me" is that I become more like me in bootstrap fashion; it reinforces the self and builds up the boundary between self and other. The constant thing spanning these two models is the internal pressure of the bubble. Constant pushing out both flattens the surface and influences the outside world by utilizing the energy of the incoming energy judo-style.

I want to emphasize that these two models — Bubble and Beacon — are both trying to depict the same territory using the same data points, but the orientations of the descriptions are inverse or complementary. That is, I'm not talking about two distinct pieces of the territory but two equivalent descriptions of a single piece. This will probably require a lot more explaining. All in due time.

In looking over what I've written here, a third major postulate/ingredient of the Joel Nanni universe —after cogito and Map-Territory — is influence; the primary currency of exchange between the various selves is influence. Me influencing the world and rejecting and/or accommodating influence from the larger world. I think of influence as the vector form of scalar information. Information is to influence as energy is to force. I'll describe this in more detail eventually.

So the self is both bubble and beacon. "Don't try to change me; in fact, why don't you act a little more like me." I claim that both these versions of the self are equally valid, representing only an exchange of foreground and background. That is, they may each be the basis for further deductions. But... they are mutually contradictory re the world of maps, so we must be careful to leave them in their separate realms, lest the contradictions manifest themselves in the deductions. Later, when the deducing is over, we may be able to superimpose or combine insights so gained and start to circumscribe the possibilities of reality or maybe selfhood, but only just start. That's my assumption switching concept in a nutshell.

I have just described a binary view of the self — bubble and beacon — but, unfortunately, one has ultimately to add another entire dimension. These two images of beacon and bubble put together still paint a picture of a lonely, isolated world which trades only in brute competing influences. What of sharing and communication, community, and empathy? In these latter cases, influence is still a primary commodity, but the stakes have changed. The influence is being accommodated, shared, and mutually developed rather than inflicted or applied or canceled out. To get to that fuller picture of reality, we have to understand selfhood in a broader, fuzzier way with nestings and collectives of selves. Ultimately there are more than just selves or at least more than just individual (human) selves. In what's been described so far in terms of monolithic bubble/beacons, we are complementarily pushing out influence and fending it off. In this next layer, we may be sucking in influence or sharing it or mutually producing it, subordinating the smoothness of one's bubble to the smoothness of a super-bubble. The unit of analysis will cease to be an individual self, and we individual selves cease to be fundamentally selfish. We begin perhaps to be part of a loving dyad where influence is exchanged and accepted. Or we begin to surrender to a larger self — one idea, one family, one tribe, one city, one nation, one species, all of existence (often at odds with other families, tribes, etc.). That is, I originally described conscious bubbles as if they were people. Well, that was because individual people are the things we think of as conscious beings. If a family, for example, qualified as a conscious bubble too, what sort of consciousness could it have? Lacking an integrated brain, how subtle could its actions and reactions be? Not very subtle, I guess. This fits my experience though. Dynamics within my own family are systematic and undeniable but weird, mechanical, and often foolish. That is, my family acts as if it had a mind of its own but only a rather stupid mind. The way I act is utterly different in my various roles as a child, sibling, spouse, parent, employee, teammate, citizen. Often, I find it difficult to behave as an intelligent, individuated self when I'm with various parts of my family. That is, the extent to which I surrender my sovereignty to a larger self is the extent to which my behavior becomes that of a roughly brainless drone. Or a hooligan at a soccer match. Certainly the metaphor of bubbles becomes less apt when incorporating families (.9 to the tenth power), and perhaps it breaks down utterly — bubbles aren't parts of other bubbles — but these bubbles never did exist in normal 3-dimensional space anyway. It's a metaphor! In a sufficiently abstract space, one can certainly say that a family is like a bubble, just as one can say that a person is like a bubble or a hydrogen atom is like a bubble, and that the people in a family are like bubbles within a larger bubble. That is, collective bubbles don't need to be made of individual bubbles but only to contain them. My subselves are bubbles in my bubble and I am in the bubble of my superselves' bubbles. Nesting Russian dolls of selfhood.

The issue of brains is a good one. A self worth its salt may need to have one, but it appears that all levels of selfhood lack one except the level of individual organism. Douglas Hofstadter and others have tried to paint a picture of an ant colony as a having or being a sort of brain where the individual ants themselves are sort of slow-acting neurons. Maybe. An atom of hydrogen may have a consciousness of a sort — I posit that it does. It may be a bubble and a beacon, but its repertoire of behaviors, de-scriptions, and ex-planations would necessarily be rather limited since is has no brains let alone language, memory, or hands. [Some collective consciousnesses do have metaphorical hands!]

And let's also focus for a moment on our relationship with our sub-selves rather than super-selves — organs, cells, perhaps even multiple personalities (or Minsky's society of mind or the bus-load of selves model). They sometimes cooperate with me and sometimes rebel against me (a la cancer), they accept my influence and reject it. They may apply their own influence on me — witness the heart transplant patient who undergoes a personality change or the person who stops eating pizza because the digestive system says no. Those who believe that genes are destiny may feel that those selfish little bastards are influencing me rather strongly. My sub-selves are bubbles within my bubble, and my super-selves are bubbles my bubble finds itself within.

How exactly one can surrender one's bubble to a greater bubble, I don't know. If I suggest it's through a kind of resonance, will you laugh?