A-Blogging we will go

I've started a new blog, The Invisible Eye. There is some potential for confusion, because both that and this one are about my ideas, but the new one is much more tightly focussed on presenting the main ideas as well as possible—like the book, perhaps even as a substitute for the book—while this is more of a notebook, recording my thoughts, as much about the writing as the ideas, and veering off-topic sometimes. It could even be argued that the new blog isn't a proper blog at all, and it might revert to being a relatively static site at some point, but there's no need to rush that decision.

This blog is now publicly accessible. I've decided that I really need to stop worrying about people stealing my ideas, and just go all out to get them out there. Though the fact that publishers no longer seem to worry about material having been previously available on the web helps too.

Contradiction can be good (unlike contraindication)

Just to contradict Later the same day..., I'm now thinking about reinstating the subjective and objective states, and the chapter on Psychology, but the latter, at least, in very different form (probably the former too).

The reason being that we do need some basis in psychology for objectivity and inter/subjectivity, saying, as we are, that these need to be considered modes of human operation. So Psychology is no longer about the implications for that discipline of my findings, but vice versa, support for my findings from psychology. As such, the section on states fits nicely in there—or will do once thoroughly re-written—as does Empathy, and probably the developmental stuff currently sited within Conscious and Unconscious Minds, too. So Subjective and Objective is about the philosophy of it, and Psych, the psych of it. Well, S&O was beginning to seem a bit unwieldy anyway.

I'm now thinking about going public with this, in order to build up some interest generally, and some website traffic specifically (see My Links, on the right). The reason I didn't do so from the start was, of course, because I'm worried about people stealing my ideas. I don't think there's an easy answer to that dilemma, but the better I feel about progress on the book, the happier I am to publicise the ideas, on the assumption I can capitalise on them before anyone who gets them from me. Also, of course, there's the fact that big names, though they can get into publication more easily than me, are not generally trawling the web for ideas, while little people like myself will have the same difficulties as I do. Which means that I should be OK as long as I keep my nose to the grindstone. Well, I'm not going to do it immediately, anyway. I'll give it until tomorrow morning at least, and ponder it some more meanwhile.

Big cuts

Some biggish developments today, cutting out loads of stuff, and making a decision on something that I've vacillating over for months (or years).

As well as states and minds (see previous posts), the chapter provisionally called Psychology is gone now too. It was intended to discuss the significance of dual aspect theory and intersubjectivity in psychology, but much of it wasn't really very good, and the general idea seems highly optional now. These days I tend to feel I can leave quite a lot unsaid, leave the implications for others to work out. The one section from that chapter that I'm keeping, Empathy, will fit well in Subjective and Objective (though it might have its name changed, or be merged with another section).

I've decided to commit to inter/subjective realism. It's the most solid possible foundation for my pro-inter/subjectivity stance. And it works well with the anti-reductionism of Patterns, so I won't be tempted to cut another chapter! But it makes a nice slogan too, along with inter/subjective panpsychism.

Here's another nice slogan, though maybe not directly related to the book: Persistence of Vision. I've decided it's what I have to aim for, not so much in philosophy and the book, as in life generally. Almost literally. Attention under will, giving what's really important its due, that kind of thing. Yes, another very nice slogan, if I say so myself.

Later the same day...

...intuition intervened, suggesting that this is not me. Too many new things, dissing Occam... which makes no immediate difference, but it now seems less likely states and/or minds will be resurrected.

The Zone, Flow, States and Minds

This is a think-piece, intended to help me decide whether I need certain bits of the book as it stands.

In the chapter called Subjective and Objective, there's a section that originated many years ago (over 10), called Subjective and Objective States. The objective state is an ideal, never fully realized, in which a person (or whatever) manages to be perfectly objective. It is what science aspires to. Even though the objective state is unreachable, the concept is implicitly very prevalent, not to say dominant, across British/American philosophy and culture generally.

The subjective state is the same as "the zone" in sports jargon, in which action is spontaneous and performance is optimized, and it is related to elements in some Eastern philosophies, particularly Zen. My hypothesis (to put it no more strongly) is that these two states represent the extremes of a continuum between which we operate at all times, shifting backwards and forwards as circumstances demand and permit. Rationality takes us towards the objective state, for instance, and empathy, towards the subjective. More recently I've come across the concept of flow, which seems very similar if not identical to the zone, ie the subjective state. This view is necessarily a simplified picture of reality, but I think it could be quite useful. The question here is: is it useful within the context of this particular book?

The original intention of this section was to help elucidate subjectivity and objectivity generally. I put a lot of effort over the years into understanding what subj and obj "really" are, and this is that. Except that I no longer cling to such reductionist, or essentialist, tendencies, and I'm now wondering whether this isn't a can of worms, better left unopened. The stuff on the zone and Zen makes it look a bit new-agey. On the other hand, I want both to appeal to, and to enlighten and support, people who tend towards inter/subjectivity, who might not be put off by that, and might even be attracted by it. This is partially, therefore, a marketing issue, but I do need to work out what I get from this set of concepts, exactly what I'd lose by ditching it, before I can make the decision.

At the moment there's a chapter called Conscious and Unconscious Minds, mainly about habits and skills, to show the prevalence and importance of "the unconscious". The link is the unconscious initiation of action in the zone, and my idea that subjectivity always has an unconscious element. It seems likely that, if the states are dropped, the minds would go with them. This unconscious/subjective idea seems a bit essentialist, and even if there's something in it (which I do think there is), that could well be unnecessary and even distracting in the context of this book.

There's an easy way forward here, which is to cut out states and minds but preserve the text carefully (meaning findably), so it can be re-introduced if and when it turns out to fit well with the rest of what I need to say. So I don't really need to work out all the implications first. And that's a decision.

Misc etc.

Things are people too. And people are things. But the inter/subjective implications of adopting either of these slogans are very different.

Objectivity is death. In principle. I mean, really, death is a psych/spiritual implication of the objective state.

In addition to being The Blindspot of Science, consciousness is also The Invisible Eye. The former is the book's working title at present, the latter is not in use.

Just wait until it makes sense.

All performance is acting, of some sort.

The Blindspot of Science

My confidence that I have something new to say was slightly dented this morning when I came across this blog post on The New Mysterians. It's mainly about relationships between the ideas of Owen Flanagan and Ken Wilber. Flanagan coined the term "mysterians" for those philosophers (mainly) who are skeptical about a scientific explanation of consciousness. Wilber suggests that a full solution to the "hard problem" comes only with Enlightenment but I was interested to learn that Flanagan's a Buddhist too. (As well as Wilber? Don't know, but he's certainly a fellow-traveller at least.) And there're some good points made about intersubjectivity in the comments on The New Mysterians - Part Deux.

But that was just a short-lived dip. I'm sure that, by combining a Nagelian take on subjectivity and objectivity with a really good appreciation of the significance of intersubjectivity, I'll have something that people will find worth reading. The title of this post is the new working title of the book. Using "science" instead of "philosophers" or "philosophy" sharpens it up. In fact it's probably not the case that scientists are necessarily more hard-nosed than philosophers on this issue, but titles and blurbs have to deal with perceptions as much as reality. And, in fact, it's the strictly objective approach that fails to find consciousness, so this title is more accurate in that sense.

Book versus article(s) & Intro

In the last post I said intentionality as use isn't that trivial, but I think I've changed my mind about that. Not that it isn't important, but rather that it's at least clearly implicit, and maybe somewhere made explicit, in Dennett's intentional stance. Here again we're in danger of wading into the scholarly bog, dealing with what people say about philosophy rather than doing philosophy. So it's looking like the article(s) will be going into the freezer, not just on a back burner, and the book will be getting all my time and effort for the foreseeable. Which is fine by me, I'm feeling quite re-enthused about it now. I've written an new introduction and moved Information to the back, as an example of what's possible using the concepts developed earlier—or rather, to be accurate, what's possible without the burdens that earlier chapters lifted. Here's the current draft of the Intro (sorry about the LaTeX markup):

I am most definitely not the first person to understand consciousness, what it's ``made of,'' how it interacts with the physical body when we feel pain or make a deliberate movement, for instance---but I might well be the first to explain it using Western concepts and language.

In other traditions such understanding goes back at least 2,500 years, but it was available only to those who had studied and meditated for years. I believe that Western ways of thinking have now developed to the point where, with very minor adjustments, they can be used to explain consciousness in a way that makes it understandable to most intelligent, educated, open-minded people. The trouble with the philosophers, though, is that they have so much invested in their current ways of thinking that they're not willing, perhaps not even able, to make these minor adjustments. They're certainly intelligent and educated, but they're not open-minded, at least not in this context.

As an undergraduate I was trained in British/American style analytic philosophy, but before going to university I had read quite a lot on Eastern philosophies and religions, so I was always aware that there were other approaches.

I managed to get an honours degree in philosophy and psychology, but it was only a lower second, not good enough to let me go on to postgraduate studies, because I just wasn't sufficiently committed to put in the work required. In retrospect, I might have chosen different courses or a different institution, but I was far from clear in my own mind what I wanted to do with my life.

As it turned out, though, I'm now ideally placed to write this book. If I'd ``stuck in'' and become an academic philosopher I doubt whether my thinking would have developed in the way it has. Instead, I've worked in many different jobs, including research, got another degree, this time in IT, and, perhaps most importantly, made a fairly serious study of Buddhism and become a long-term regular meditator. The latest development is a chronic knee problem, preventing me from working, but giving me at last the time to write this book, which I've wanted to do for many years.

As an undergraduate studying philosophy and psychology, my ideological archenemy was an American philosopher called Daniel Dennett. I felt honour-bound to defend consciousness against the materialist philosophers who, in my view, tried to diminish its significance and even eliminate it because they could not explain it in material terms, and Dennett was their most formidable representative. Consciousness was not just the capacity to enjoy pleasure and suffer pain, vital as that is, but had more subtle, spiritual qualities, with altered states including religious experience. It had come to encompass all my ideals---I was very idealistic---and I felt that materialism was a serious threat to core human values. To diminish or deny consciousness was to reduce us to mere mechanism, to inhibit compassion for each other and for members of other species and to drain significance from spirituality.

I no longer feel quite like that, and in particular I no longer identify, as I did then, with the philosophers who are now sometimes called ``mysterians,'' due to their pessimism regarding the prospects of a ``proper'' explanation of consciousness. But what about materialism? As an undergraduate I became convinced that consciousness could not be explained in material terms, and I still hold that view. But I did not (and do not) believe in the supernatural, or in spirit as some kind of special, immaterial stuff. So what's the alternative? Any answer to that question would also, we might reasonably hope, help to answer these:
\begin{itemize}
\item How does consciousness interact with the body?
\item How do you know that other people are conscious, have minds of their own, experience their lives and make decisions, are not just bio{}-bots (biological robots) or hyperactive zombies?
\item Could a computer or robot ever have a mind of its own, make independent decisions for which it could be held ``personally'' responsible?
\item What is the essential difference (if any) between things that have the capacity for consciousness, like us, and things that don't, like rocks?
\end{itemize}

These are some of the questions I set out to answer here. It's rather a large remit, and I don't claim to cover every aspect. In particular, there is no attempt to survey the state of the art---this is about my view, and the views of others are mentioned only where they might help elucidate mine. If you'd like to know what (mainly Western academic) philosophers and scientists are currently thinking about these issues you should read Susan Blackmore's excellent books on the subject.\endnote{ Consciousness: An Introduction \cite{SB:C} and Conversations on Consciousness \cite{SB:COC}. }

I now see myself as occupying the centre ground of consciousness studies, with the mysterians on one side and who I call the ``mechanics'' (skeptics on the reality of consciousness and believers in its reducibility) on the other. But rather than compromising, I believe I've found a real synthesis, taking the best of each existing position (or set of related positions) and creating a genuinely new approach to consciousness in the West.

Part One describes and explains that position, and Part Two shows how it can be used to build a comprehensive account of matter, mind and meaning based on the concept of information.

Titles and Slogans

OK, privacy having been confirmed, here we go.

Some recent ideas for titles and/or slogans:

Information Evolution! What evolves is information. This refers to what genes and memes have in common, and the idea that maybe evolution would be better understood if information was put at the centre, being all that evolves, while genes and memes are just sub-classes, information evolving in particular contexts.

Consciousness, Philosophy's Blindspot Or The Philosopher's, or The Philosophers'. Analytic philosophy, the sort that dominates the English-speaking university philosophy departments, has a serious problem understanding consciousness, and that's my main intellectual interest. Consciousness, that is, and exploiting the gap in the market for writing about it that results from philosophy's problem. This has just become the current working title for my book, reflecting my renewed realisation that this is as much about analytic philosophy as consciousness. I've known for a long time that I need to cop an attitude, to optimise the marketing of my ideas, and this currently looks like the one to cop: aren't analytic philosophers silly! Of course few people know what "analytic" means there, so we might say academic philosophers, or Western ones, or whatever. Such details can be left for later.

Relativistic Consciousness This one is much more vague and speculative than the others. To explain it properly would mean pasting in bits of the book, and I'm not going to bother. No point, as this is just for myself, at the moment (though I'm obviously writing with the possibility of eventual publication in mind). It needed recording, though, and I'm still vacillating over an ideas database and/or mind mapping software for such records, which is the raison d'etre of this blog.

Regarding the Philosopher's Blindspot, the context of the renewed realisation was work on an article for the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and attempts to communicate with academics working in related fields (Susan Blackmore, Luciano Floridi, Patrick Grim) about my ideas. Sue, in particular, responded very positively but in very general terms, being too busy to actually consider what I wrote. She has a great excuse, but not one anyone would envy, in particular family problems. The others say they will have a look at my stuff when they have the time, though Patrick also said I should remind him if I haven't heard from him in three weeks. Anyway, having had similar responses from others in the past, I'm getting a bit tired of it all. If anyone suggests that I'm copping an attitude about philosophers due to personal feelings of rejection and frustration then I'll have to say, yes, that's part of it, but there's a lot more to it than that. And it will all be in the book! As for that article, I'm presently unsure whether I'll pursue that or not. I probably will do some more work on it, but maybe not much. My feeling at the moment is that the only ideas that will stand alone to the extent of constituting a proper journal article are relatively trivial: the formal stance and intentionality as use. Though the latter isn't that trivial. Or at all, even. Which is why I need to work on it some more, and maybe get a publication out of it yet.

This blog and privacy

This is intended as a private record of my ideas, mainly regarding philosophy and writing about it. It might be made public at a later date, but right now privacy is essential, so I'm just going to check that, and if it's not available, then there might be very little more added to this!