Chapter V

Philosophy and science

Conclusion

          In the final chapter of the Problems of Philosophy Bertrand Russell wrote: “…If you ask a mathematician, a mineralogist, a historian, or any other man of learning what definite body of truth has been ascertained by his science, his answer will last as long as you are willing to listen.  But if you put the same question to a philosopher, he will, if he is candid, have to confess that his study has not achieved positive results such as they have been achieved by other sciences.  It is true that this is partly accounted for by the fact that, as soon as definite knowledge concerning any subject becomes possible, this subject ceases to be called philosophy and becomes a separate science.  The whole study of the heavens, which now belong to astronomy, was once included in philosophy; Newton’s great work was called “The mathematical principles of natural philosophy.”  Similarly the study of the human mind which was, until very lately, a part of philosophy, has now been separated from philosophy and has become the science of psychology.”

We can still accept Russell’s century-old remark but, to begin with, we may entrust philosophy with a new task: the task of directing a multitude of natural sciences towards the problem of the mind.  Sciences that apparently have nothing to do with the mind may be illuminating in two ways.  First, because they reveal a pattern that may well be a path forced by the mind itself, a common structure to other branches of science.  Second, a more direct reason, they may serve the old dream of the reduction of mind to body.  Philosophy may redefine the science of psychology by allowing it to embrace whatever discipline may bring ideas to the study of mind.  For many, up to this point, my claim is a platitude; some of the sciences I have mentioned are already grouped in the interdisciplinary corpus called “cognitive sciences” nowadays.  But science, once again, in general is relevant to the study of mind not only because it may have it as its direct object of investigation, but because, as just said, whatever its object of investigation is, the universe, the computer, or living matter, different theories in different areas may show a similarity of structure that may tell us something about the structure of the mind itself, the existence of constraints that force the mind to create paradigms, similar models, a uniformity that cannot be escaped thanks to the nature of the mind itself.  And philosophy must detect and study whatever an amplified science of psychology may submit to its attention.  But it is still the task of philosophy to tell us apriori what the mind may comprise and how to direct the research.  We have been talking about the mind, the self, consciousness, and to a lesser extent about our ability to reason.  But, in spite of their intuitive sense, we must lay a preliminary background, a tentative approach to clarify whether these notions are redundant, connected and/or independent, or illusory.  So far I have dealt with the general notion of mind as the virtual operative space of the consciousness in a general intuitive way, and the notion of the ‘I’ separately, only hinting at the notion of the ability to think, to reason, or solve problems rationally (in a word, ‘intelligence’)[1] without attempting any connection among these notions; I will now offer a philosophical attempt to clear them up a little better, explaining how they can be dealt with separately and how they may be connected.

In the following argument I will use ‘I’ standing only for a grammatical symbol in lightface, and ‘I’ in boldface whenever I am referring to the mental entity.  I am sitting at my desk working at a mathematical problem.  My mind is completely focused on the problem, it has occupied my mind totally, and I may say with some level of certitude—that you the reader can share—that the “I” may be there but in a latent way.  Another way of putting it could be to compare the mind to a mirror in which only the mathematical problem can be seen at that very moment.  Is the ‘I’ dormant, latent, or absent?  If somebody asks me, “what are you doing?” I do not need to look for the ‘I’ to answer immediately: “I am working at…”, which seems to suggest that the ‘I’ is there in the shade.  My answer not only reveals that I am aware of what I am doing, but I am also aware of myself.  It couldn’t be otherwise, as every step of my work demands that I must know what I was doing in the recent past, covering at least the time since I have started working at the problem, and all those short experiences must be collected as my experiences.  But suppose I am asked, “who are you?” I must decide what synthetic way of describing  myself is going to be a satisfactory answer.  The ‘I’ I offer as an answer to the question is not the same ‘I’ I am talking about so far, but it is rather an image I construe of myself for individuation.  Individuation is certainly a post-litteram notion, and while it has a virtual dimension, the ‘I’, that private thing that silently and invisibly collects everything that is intrinsically mine, it has no dimension.  It, the ‘I’, may well be the last unchanged relic of the primordial monoblock.  I am inclined to think that while consciousness, being always relative to something, is better described as a state of mind, the inscrutable ‘I’ is the mysterious gismo responsible for drawing from time to time the limit of the entity I am.  And while consciousness and the ‘I’ are hard to account for, intelligence is less so, as it can be objectively dealt with as a problem solving system. 

We may undoubtedly talk about the intelligence of a computer. We are used to talk about intelligence as something intrinsically belonging to human minds.  If intelligence is a tool used by the mind to solve problems of different kinds, a computer may be said to be intelligent even if the mind is yours and not inside the computer.  So intelligence is not to be considered an intrinsically connected tool of the mind itself.  One can still be conscious, inhabited by the ‘I’, and have very little intelligence, one different from human’s intelligence or none at all.[2]  Consciousness seems more dependent on the ‘I’.  What about consciousness during sleep?  It may well be that deeper forms of consciousness take over and some form of ‘I’ must be present during dreams.  You may dream of being different from what you are, older or younger, fatter or skinnier, more handsome or ugly, dead or alive, but all these forms still demand that there is a separation between what you think you are during the dream and the external world, no matter how absurd it may be.  If there are no dreams, automatic activities like breathing or keeping the body temperature at a constant level may still have their source in the brain, which in turn is the location of the mind and also of additional physiological, non-mental tasks.  So my conclusions are that the mind, the self or the ‘I’ as I have been calling it, can be kept separate and their connection studied. 

Some scientists from different areas, from neurobiology to artificial intelligence, tend to talk about the multiple mind and some of them incur in the naïve claim that we don’t have one mind but many minds.  The minds are in the number of thousands if not millions and have folkloristic names, like ‘devils’, or more technical names, such as ‘agents’ or ‘competences’.  They are subsystems of what we call ‘mind’.  Of course scientists are free—thanks to the flexibility of the ontology and the vagueness of the term ‘mind’—to call such subsystems “minds.”  Still, I think they are incorrect to do so, as such subsystems have no consciousness and this is, in my view, an integral of our intuitive concept of mind.[3] 

Psychology as a separate study

In the beginning psychology, also known as structuralism, consisted primarily in an analysis of subjective experience in the form of linguistic reports.  Because of this, psychoanalysis may be considered a development of psychology, although its primary interest was not the cognitive sphere, but rather an inner and deeper sphere inhabited primarily by instincts and unconscious drives, like libido or modifications and substitutions of objects of libido, in an unconscious process not recognized by the conscious mind.  Of course, if anything like that takes place, it is extremely relevant to the understanding of the mind, as an unconscious mind would possess the causal power to generate behavior. 

In order to understand certain behaviors one must understand the mechanisms that have caused them.  It is an interesting fact that the mind, as it is speculated on in psychoanalyses, resembles chemistry or physics in so much as it hides unifying principles that need discovering and are not immediately evident.  However, both structuralism in psychology and psychoanalysis were vulnerable to the criticism that, being based on oral reports and introspection, they showed evidence of beliefs rather than evidence of what it is.  People may lie, see things that are not there, make up answers under the pressure of questions that generate uncertainty, and so on.

It was this apparent weakness that paved the way to eliminative materialism in the form of behaviorism and, later on, the identity theory.  These theories are based on the assumption that whatever is worth analyzing is physical in nature; whether it is a brain or an action, they are overt public scrutable facts.  I think that there is no reality that is not an object of belief, and this suffices to allow psychoanalysis, in the form taken in chapter IV, to be a valid field of investigation.  Introspection, in some form or other, is fundamental to any knowledge.  Introspection is the subjective way to investigation, and behind any objective knowledge the subjective mind lurks.

The behaviorist, in the very moment that she is illustrating her theory, is introspectively privileging one belief over others; when she sees a relation between stimulus and response, she is expressing a belief!  The cognitive sphere of the mind and the deeper emotional soul must be connected by any serious theory of the mind;[4] in my proposal, the principle of regression to the monoblock (emotional) is shaped by a rational reconstruction of unity (cognitive).

Without any pretense of completeness I will hint at some ideas of sciences that are to be included in psychology in my approach.  But before going into that let me reexamine the notion of mind I have been talking about in this chapter.  No matter how hard I have tried, in chapter one, two and beyond, the notion is still an intuitive one based on common sense.  But what are minds?  I have used the notion of universe to explain mind.  But minds as universes is less a metaphor that it may look.  After all I live in the universe that I know, not yours.  Of course your universe may contribute to a better or worse development of mine, but mine is still the only universe I have access to.  Suppose that one day I find myself traveling towards a black hole and I find out that, as I approach the horizon, I do not get elongated, nor do my atoms collapse, but something else happens and I survive the experience.  My experience may contribute to a radical modification of my universe, modification that I attribute to the physical reality out there, but all this does not change the fact that the new universe is my mental notion of it.

Another apparently metaphorical way of putting it is that minds are mirrors in which the matrix, the real universe out there, reflects itself; this much I am willing to concede to an external reality.  But the image is a modification of whatever goes into the perception of it.  The universe out there is a synchronic one, the mind/universe is a diachronic reconstruction of it; it includes past, present, and future; and time is, as far as I know, a mental notion.  Physicists may brilliantly show how time is a measure of change, but they do not provide any definition of time.  Therefore a diachronic universe is a subjective perspective.  If you are living in Australia you may remember what happened yesterday in your universe, I remember what happened today in mine, living in the US, and we may both share the same notion of gravitation.  A meticulous analysis of reality must recognize that an objective reality is a forced reconstruction of a subjective one. 

I now want to hint at some natural sciences that are directly relevant to the understanding of the mind.  Neuroscience is an integral part of my notion of psychology; the fact that brains cannot be identical with minds, as we know them now, does not prevent us from considering the strong correlation, where it must be seen as a form of supervenience or perhaps one day as a form of identity; still, the present difficulties which seem insurmountable may later find a solution in natural science.

DNA, the genetic code in human cells, serves a number of functions, including reproduction of cells and repair of damaged cells.  Now it is known that nerve cells have a limited capability to reproduce (some olfactory cells do reproduce), but the majority of cells in the brain tend to die and do not get replaced by new ones. One reason could be that the evolution of the brain is in a temporary stage and one day it will be able to take care of damage to itself and other parts of the human body.  Or neurobiology may one day manipulate DNA to the extent of implementing its reparatory function.  One more important reason for our purposes is that the presence of DNA in neurons could be that of explaining language acquisition.  The mystery of language acquisition by humans could  be explained by the fact that in the brain there are unities that contain a process very similar to learning and understanding; DNA is a code, and living organisms possess the tools to translate that code in instructions for certain actions performed within individual cells.  Language would become less a mystery if science could one day find out that DNA in the brain has a didactic function.  DNA could be the model, or the template so to speak, on which the mind shapes its ability to learn the fundamentals of language.  Reprogrammed DNA in experimental computers may be significative of what DNA is already doing in our brains: some sort of disposition to automatic manipulation of DNA in the brain may serve the purpose of language, where not individual cells but a system of them may be responsible for our ability to speak and understand a natural language.

The old Chomskyan tenet that language is a biological faculty is gaining some support from the scientific community.  Francis S. Collins, the head of the human genome project, writes in his book, The Language of God (2006), “…much interest has recently surrounded the gene called FOXP2 because of its potential role in the development of language.  The story of FOXP2 began with the identification of a single family in England where members of three generations had severe difficulties in speaking.  They struggled to process words according to grammatical rules, to understand complex sentence structure, and to move the muscles of their mouth, faces and voice boxes, to articulate certain sounds.

In a tour de force genetic sleuthing, the affected family members were found to have a single letter of the DNA code misspelled in the FOXP2 gene or chromosome 7.  The fact that a single gene with a subtle misspelling could cause such profound language deficits, without other obvious consequences was quite surprising.

The surprise quite escalated when it was shown that the sequence of this same FOXP2 gene has been remarkably stable in nearly all mammals.  The most dramatic exception, however, is humans, where two significant changes have occurred in the coding region of the gene, apparently as recent as a hundred thousand years ago.

The hypothesis suggested by these data is that these recent changes in some way contributed to the development of language in human beings.”  The primary question concerns the modality with which linguistic specialized genes operate at the level of the brain development, and this is yet to come. 

Evolutionary psychology

This discipline has triggered the interest of philosophy because pertinent to it are vital questions like, “when did consciousness emerge?” in connection with another fundamental question, “when did language emerge?”  This discipline may be seen as a history of the development of the human mind driven by adaptation or natural selection.[5]

Evolutionary psychology plays an important role even in the establishment of mental types of the kind contained in chapter four.  But I am not referring to mental types in the sense of functionalism.  If I am correct, functionalism is wrong in maintaining that there are mental types (pain type, for instance) that can be instantiated by different systems.  Types in this sense are post-litteram reconstructions with no grasping power at the level of introspective investigation needed to shed light on the psychological types I have hinted at.  Evolutionary psychology could answer questions like, “is the possession of a human consciousness relevant to the instantiation of pain?” or “are what we call pains in a human being cognate of what is instantiated by an octopus or a snake, under similar circumstances?”  A pain, combined with some awareness of non-available, escapable behavior or/and awareness of inevitable death, may be quite a unique feeling.[6]  Evolutionism, supported by the presence of DNA in every living creature, has forced thinkers to admit of the existence of a hierarchy of minds, a revival of Saint Anselm’s hierarchy of beings, but a mind ignorant of itself, lacking self-reflection, may have little to do with a human mind that is shaped by language.

Artificial Intelligence is divided in two main schools (and variations on them) at the moment I am writing:  symbol manipulation systems, on the one hand, and connectionism on the other.  The former approach consists, roughly speaking, in a language of which a grammar is specified with syntactic and semantic rules.  The semantic rules are abstract specifications with no connection to a representational domain they refer to.  Some scientists believe that an abstract model of manipulation of symbols is enough to model a human mind, regardless of how the language is encoded, and how and where a domain is stored.  Nor do they believe that a representation of the external world is necessary.  These machines are not capable of learning, they are simply programmed.  This is one of the main criticisms to symbolic AI, as human minds are dynamic systems evolving according to a continuous process of learning.  My personal reservation concerns the fact that symbols are treated not as analogues but merely signs, and I believe that they fuse with a dynamic domain of internal representations in an evolving continuum of enrichment or impoverishment due to age and other factors.  In the end, in any human mind symbol is not arbitrary anymore.

Connectionism, at least in the form that interests us, is a model of a neural network and tries to represent neurons, synapses and connections among these unities in the spirit of a biological realism.  Connectionist models are designed to learn, and that makes them interesting devices, although everything they can do can be done by symbolic AI systems.  Of course they are criticized as reductionists, and we know the problems of reductionism of mentality from chapter II.  But the main positive aspect of connectionism from my point of view is that in their approach there is the awareness that the objects and their relations are mental constructions, not given in reality.  This is the starting point of a deep interest in the functioning of the human mind, and from what they say we may infer that there is an interface, probably unconscious, a unique model or a template whose structure is the same for different fields of knowledge, from religion to science.

Artificial intelligence, at the present moment, is silent with respect to the question whether mental events may be instantiated by different systems that are not carbon or protein based, although they speculate on it.  A computer can be implemented to an unforeseeable level of complexity and yet not being able, now or later, to tell us if the system is endowed with consciousness.  I have already said that a human being can do exactly what it does without possessing a consciousness, which we know about as first persons.  Consciousness, the self, is the ghost in the machine, and the most elusive notion of all.  Similarly highly implemented computers could, one day, do exactly what a human being does and the question of consciousness remains unanswerable.[7]  In the ultimate analysis it will be a question of opinion whether machines that show no difference from a human being possess consciousness.  This issue falls under the label of Wittgenstein’s problem of other minds.

Functionalism, Hilary Putnam’s thesis about mentality, spread from Church Turing thesis or an extension of it.  Computability could be a generic term for some operations, and yet could not cover what a mind really does when it computes.  Or computability could be common to different systems, but mental events are more than any form of computability.

Let me introduce the notion of functionalism as I understand it, something long overdue.  The dominant philosophical theory  before Putnam was reductionism in the form of the identity theory.  When Putnam introduced the idea of the multiple realizability principle (in the late 60s), it had immediate positive effects: the identity theory had been perceived as wrong in many respects, although it seemed the more scientifically updated theory of mind than philosophy could provide, after the demise of behaviorism, due to Chomsky’s largely accepted criticism.  Second but not less important, it swept away the old Cartesian dogma that animals are just machines and as such immune to pain and suffering, the Cartesian tenet, which seemed ethically repugnant to many.

But functionalism arbitrarily elevated computer machines to the status of thinking devices, confusing thinking and computing.  The notion of computer machines was in the background of this new doctrine that, contrary to any previous doctrine, connected mind and body in a new way, which was not Cartesian but at the same time did not promote a rigid notion of physicality to the rank of ultimate configuration of the mental.  It was a mild reconstruction of what Descartes tried to avoid: a mechanization of the mind.  For functionalism, minds are machines, and different designed machines may serve the same purpose: just as different engines may provide the same function, say locomotion, or other devices—based on different physical natural laws may provide telephony—so different living or non-living physical systems may instantiate mental properties.

The definition of mind in the functionalist terms is highly conceptual, and as such it is subjected to all the objections of the second chapter: the definition of the mental is mental in nature!

Artificial intelligence in some forms only supports functionalism, and does not endorse it.  AI is an important contribution to our modern technology and a great aid to human mental activity.  For, think of the most modest calculator that adds 3+2 and gives 5 as a result.  As long as there are sentient humans, that result is interpreted and valued.  In a world after people, those symbols are meaningless. They are such even to people who never learned arithmetic.  Symbols need interpreters, and further symbolic apparent coherence is no sign of real interpretations.[8]

            But AI, in the attempt to construe minds, sheds lights on problems like binding and blending (see chapter II) as no philosophers, or few of them, have done before.  Perception of multiplicity and unities in the environment, memory, and solving problem strategies are investigated and therefore they bring new ideas about the structure of the mind.  Once again, it is an interesting fact that a new generation of computers is using DNA to store information, instead of silicon microchips: would a yet to come better computer, built necessarily around living matter, mark the end of the brain as a machine?  Probably not, but an ever better understanding of genetics may illuminate aspects of the brain functioning in unexpected ways.  And, just as it was dreamt for centuries, physics may tell us about some mechanism of mind, notably what puts mind in motion, weather the triggering factor comes from the outside world or is internal to the system.      

Physics 
The brain and electromagnetism     

          The brain is related to electromagnetism (and therefore to physics of quantum mechanics) in several ways:

1) The human body generates a magnetic field; this is so just because matter in any form does it, but the magnetic field of a human body is modestly implemented by the electrical activity of the brain; an example of the magnetic field provided by the brain is the case when a number of quanta of light hits the retina and an electric pulse or signal in the form of an electrically charged ion travels along the nerve all the way to the terminus nerve; from there on, the signal is transmitted to the next neuron via chemical neurotransmitters.  But presently hidden electromagnetic activity could be responsible for putting in motion mental activity within the area of genetic material.  Let me call it the natural active reason.  

2) If Artificial Intelligence should ever provide an acceptable model of the human mind and quantum computers evolve to the extent of being the computer used to provide that model, there is a connection that, however indirect, will be worth investigating.  I am not concerned with this aspect of the problem, having also no competence to speculate on it; let me just call it the indirect passive connection. 

3) There exist techniques of picturing the brain in vivo—while the organism is still alive—that are based on quantum mechanics.  Let me call this third reason the direct passive connection.

          I have already hinted at PET (Proton Electromagnetic Tomography) which is, as of this writing, the latest evolution of a series of neuro-imaging techniques that have substituted the obsolete EEG (electroencephalogram).  The technique consists in effecting hydrogen protons in areas of the brain with a magnetic field created by a magnet, on which the head of the subject is placed.  The protons, from a state of total freedom of direction, end up by pointing towards the magnet.  These protons, further stimulated, emit a signal that is translated in pixels by a computer that construes an image of the area investigated.  This approach has revealed that many mental diseases, like schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, dementia and serious depression may be characterized by hyper or hypo activity in certain areas of the brain.  They have used electromagnetic methods, like TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) to regulate the activity in these areas of the brain, with great interesting results.

          However advanced these techniques are, they are still not fine enough to provide a detailed understanding of what happens in the human brain in the moment it analyzes information in the form of language and thoughts.  But we can speculate that it is still something that may be explained in terms of electromagnetic exchanges, or other yet to be discovered forces.  Suppose, for example, the subject reads a message on a computer or speaks to someone.  According to either view above, different particles than photons, but still messengers of a different force, may be involved.  Or in the brain, sound waves and/or light waves are registered and send to the right area of the brain where a chemical transmission begins; it reaches neurons containing the ideas of the hearer.  There is no semantic content exchange in my proposed model, just sound stimulation recognized as language, and therefore semantic elicitation local to the brain, in the form of entities, which I call ideas.  The reconstruction of the message is a combination of ideas belonging to the subject and not to the speaker.  It may or may not happen that the speaker’s original ideas are similar up to a point to those of the hearer, and this is probably the case of everyday language; in such a case similarity of minds would be the silent messenger, so to speak, and communication does not take place according to some external code to which each mind adheres.  But what, in a neurobiological sense, are ideas?  Stored in neurons, in the form of manipulated original sequences of DNA, corresponding images and combinations of them are elicited by sounds.  Images may differ from one mind to another, but similarity and common algorithms, if they underlie human cognition, may prevent combinations that are semantically vacuous.

 

Philosophizing about physics    and more.

But there is another interesting relevance of physics to philosophy: some modern physicists, in order to resolve the conflict between relativity and quantum mechanics, have envisaged mathematical theories that force the mind to postulate strings as ultimate elements of matter.  Strings, characterized by a geometric difference from point particles, are atoms of matter born from the mind of physicists; because we do not see them and because there are present technical difficulties to verify or reject their existence, at the moment they must be taken as pure speculation.  (As you may know, Einstein’s general relativity included time among the dimensions that shape space; time was not an absolute entity outside of space, but an element of it.[9])

There are four known forces of nature: gravitation, electromagnetism (electricity and magnetism were separate forces before Faraday and Maxwell unified them in a single force) and strong and weak atomic forces.  Theodore Kaluza, a German mathematician, wrote down Einstein’s gravitational field equations by adding an additional imaginary fifth dimension that was accounted for by equations that are exactly Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism.  So by adding an additional dimension there was a further unification: gravitation and electromagnetism could be explained by one single theory (keep in mind that science has never abandoned the project of a TOE, a theory of everything, but maybe just neglected it in the face of enormous difficulties at some moments).

But with the discovery of strong and weak atomic forces physics abandoned the idea of a unification of all the forces: there were too many of them with too many differences.  Deep differences seemed to characterize electromagnetism and atomic forces: the long range of electromagnetism and the massless of the messenger particles like photons active in this field did not seem to level with the heavy masses and short range of atomic forces and the particles involved.  However, the idea of a hidden symmetry emerged, and they went back to work on a possible unification of all the forces; mathematics helped to construe theories where symmetries are still there and their violation is a spontaneous effect of acquiring mass on the part of hadrons, the subatomic particles in the nucleus.  But these theories postulate the existence of particles that are string-like, as opposed to point form, and we have no evidence of their existence.  Not only are the majority of symmetries geometrical in nature, but different fundamental particles resemble the different musical notes on a violin string, for instance.  As we get a closer look at Einstein’s gravitation notion, we see that it is rather a property of the geometry of space than a force.  Pythagoras was inspired by a mathematization of music in positing numbers as ultimate elements of nature.  And string theory is totally based on mathematics so far.

But Pythagoras’ philosophy contained another notion that seems to explain the strong connection between modern physics and his cosmology based on numbers.  He was certainly aware of the eternal return, a philosophical notion whose roots are present in ancient Egyptian thinking; the scarab was a symbol of the reiteration of the same life event.  An analogous concept was present in Empedocles and the Stoics’ doctrines.  Cultures with no imaginable interaction with one another forged a similar concept: the ancient Mayans[10] and Aztecs[11] also believed in a cyclical view of events.  In Gian Battista Vico, an Italian philosopher of the 17^th century, the idea comes back as a law of history and the alchemists of the Renaissance supported a cyclical view of events.  The concept of reiteration of events in the universe as well as in our knowledge of them is largely present in Indian religions (in Hinduism and Buddhism, among others).  Life is not represented by a vector moving in a direction, but rather by The Wheel of life,[12] and a wheel, a circle, is symmetrical under mirror reflection; its motion cannot be detected (see string theory).  In Tantric Buddhism,[13] a wheel of time concept known as the Kalachakra[14] expresses the idea of an endless cycle of existence and knowledge.  The dragon devouring its own tail is the symbol of the alchemists of the 16^th century, representing reiteration of events.  It was present in some form in Arthur Schopenhauer’s[15] philosophy and it is not only postulated in the form of vital cycles and reincarnation of souls, or metempsychosis, but also as a principle governing the whole universe and knowledge, and finally it was the pivotal concept in Nietzsche’s doctrine. 

Are modern physicists, who, through mathematics have reached the possible conclusion that reality is a vibrating string like a musical cord emitting different sounds, saying what Pythagoras said more than two thousand years ago (without having the intellectual means to express it in the terms modern physics of today)?  Is this a case of eternal return as Nietzsche and others conceived it?  Too many thinkers share this apparently arbitrary notion, and too many cultures are entrenched with it.  There are even a number of cycling cosmological models proposed since the discovery of relativity, the most known of which was put forward by Richard Tolman of the California Institute of Technology in 1930, who suggested that the present expansion of the universe may be followed by a cycle of contraction, going back to expansion without imploding on itself. Is the mind constrained in such a way as to reach analogous metaphysical solutions in its investigation of reality when pushed to the limits of that investigation?  Does the mind read its own structure, or are these eternal returns real?  In other words, is the mind capturing what reality hides, or is the mind forced to compact data provided by a more complex inaccessible reality in preexisting schemata, peculiar to itself?  A mind incapable of capturing the real differences and variations?  Is it accumulation of simple induction (sun rises every day, people are born and die) the triggering factor in such widespread philosophical concepts?  In the case that real knowledge is forever precluded to us, is there a God who is playing with our minds, tricking us into believing evidence that is delusional?  As if the mind were a pan with too large holes in it to capture the essences of things?  

More on Symmetry

Symmetry is a notion common to theories of strings and superstrings.  Behind laws of nature and differences, a kind of uniformity reigns according to the latest research in physics.  The universe at birth was overtly symmetrical, which is to say that there were no differences among whatever there was there at the beginning; the evolution of the cosmos may be described, according to the new physics, as a series of passages from an ever growing violation of symmetries; everything that exists is a transformation from a stage of uniformity to one of differentiation.  But not only are there still observable symmetries, but even those that have been violated are still there, hiding behind discrepancies.  An example of hidden symmetry already mentioned is the peculiarity of some particles with ½ spin that need to rotate 720 degrees before going back to the initial state; this difference is eliminated by a geometry that adds a fifth dimension.

The notion of symmetry entertained by physicists is tantalizing and stubborn, difficult to conceptualize outside of the realm of physics, where it enjoys the support of mathematical equivalences that are not explanations according to my view.  A metaphor, constructed outside of physics, may give a general flavor of it.

The days of the week (from Monday to Sunday) appear different to our perception of people living in a social context.  A Monday may be the worst of the days from the point of view of people who work or go to school, and each successive day a little less so in view of the weekend.  The differences among working days and weekend ones may be further characterized by change in traffic, overcrowded churches,  bars and so on.  But all these differences are not intrinsic to the days (disregarding differences due to weather and seasonal states of the orbit around the sun), they are superimposed on them by our culture. 

This is not to say that differences in physics are imposed by culture.  Rather, behind them symmetry lurks, which is not itself evident.  Some evident symmetries that physicists talk about, we have seen, are geometrical in nature: geometrical figures like squares, equilateral triangles, circles, once viewed in a mirror, show in varying degrees a symmetry between the original and its image.  The less structured is the figure, the more symmetry it possesses.  They call this ‘reflection symmetry’.[16]  Empty space is the utmost example of a  structureless  physical case of symmetry.  In empty space, as in the other geometrical examples, what establishes symmetry is the impossibility of distinguishing between up and down or left and right; symmetry extends to motion in empty space: you cannot imagine anything moving there since motion is always motion with respect to something else, nor can rotation be imagined under these circumstances since, in an empty space, it would make no sense to speak of rotation in one direction or the other.

In such an empty universe time also is symmetrical, as it would not make any sense to talk about before and after in a world where nothing happens.  They summarize all this by saying that the geometrical structure of space and time is invariant under rotations, translation, and reflection (for time of course only translation holds).  Therefore there is a clear connection between the geometrical symmetries of space and the dynamical behavior of material bodies, and this can be traced back to laws of physics like the conservation of momentum and angular momentum.  Even temporal symmetry can be traced back to the energy conservation law (these connections are mathematically proven).

One may wonder if all this talk about symmetry so far is not metaphysical in nature.  Physicists have taught us that space and time, to begin with, are just one single fabric and the laws of physics apply to a non-empty world where speed, acceleration, and masses are all interconnected.  Isn’t it thus more philosophically correct to say that in an empty universe, time does not exist because there is no empty universe?

Perhaps is a good idea to look at other kinds of non-geometrical symmetry that they talk about.  When physicists explain symmetry, they make a distinction between geometrical and gauge symmetry.  Remember that physicists believe in the existence of four forces in nature: gravity, electromagnetism, and strong and weak atomic forces.  Gravity and electromagnetism seem to respect the symmetries discussed so far.

But we find gauge symmetry also within electromagnetism, where the positron and the neutron are charge reflections of each other—so they say—having the same charge of opposite sign.  This may open the path to dangerous skeptical conclusions in other fields of knowledge once a couple of conditions are added.[17]  Their discussion goes on by investigating the other two forces of nature, strong and weak atomic forces, with respect to their obedience to symmetry and the general laws of nature.  We accept with an argumentum ad verecundiam that physicists are right in talking about symmetry, that they see everywhere, including antimatter: the electron and its antiparticle, the positron, are symmetrical with respect to mass and spin and differ in their electric charge, which is negative in the electron and positive in its antiparticle.  What has suggested symmetry to the physicist is the fact that, if one puts them together, the net value of the negative and the positive quantity (called a quantum number by physicists) carried by the pair of them is zero.  What they mean by symmetry is a class of phenomena conceptually heterogeneous, but all supported by mathematical reunification.

Whatever they have in mind is supported by mathematical reasons, and math is the departing point of their faith in symmetry.

Going back to the origins of our universe, we learn that in the beginning, while the universe was expanding—according to a notion of repulsion which is contained in that of attraction—so called Higgs fields filled the empty space, a sort of ether, a notion that had been expunged by modern physics, to come back in a different form and for different purposes (is the postulation of Higgs fields   another case of eternal return as it resembles that of the ether?). The Higgs field endowed matter with mass and other properties that made the difference, presumably according to stages or passages.  The Higgs field is a fifth field and, chronologically, in the birth of the universe, comes before the other four; its discovery if it exists, comes later than the other four forces.  At any rate, after a while, in today’s universe, some symmetries are still there, but the majority of them are hidden beyond appearances, and physicists know about them only through mathematical theorems.

          Now I want to go back to my original problem: can these five fields exhaust all there is, or we may suspect the existence of other forces?  In a more advanced form of symmetry called supersymmetry, there are 496 charges, of which electro charge is only one of them, together with weak and strong charges.  Do these unknown charges depend on field forces that hide my mentalsons?[18]

          If language cannot be simply explained in terms of DNA and the four forces, and physics must explain everything that happens in the universe, then it must explain language, as language is obviously a force moving and causing material (living objects) to act.  My proposed model of language sketched in chapter three  would be wrong, since it  I talk about elicitation of local meaning while this alternative model requires transmission of semantic content that is absent in my model.

          Whether the latter is the case or not, we may still wonder for both of these alternatives if semantics, or meaning—or to use a term that is more embracing all of them, the concept—exists only in brains or belongs to a rational mind of which we capture portions along our intellectual life.  If the latter, our minds would mirror a transcendent conceptual reality in bits and, if explained in a TOE, would be similar to Aristotle’s or Kant’s philosophy.  In quantum physics we learn that there are messenger particles, and likewise there are biological messengers, ribosomes.  Gluons (the messengers of weak force), gravitons (messengers of gravity), and photons (messengers of electromagnetism) may share similarities with mRNA, and scientists could one day find out that Higgs fields are programming systems with subclasses of them in the field of biology.  It could be that semantics is a system that has a substantiality that transcends the human mind (as might be claimed by some forms of panpsychism).  The universe, made of matter, communicates with itself at different levels, and we may come to know the origins of the universe through some elaborated communications of matter to matter, since we are matter (see “A Letter to Abhishek,” chapter 4).  This also entails the conclusion that everything that comes to be is also written somehow: the entire universe would exist on instructions: knowledge therefore would exist independently of us acquiring it, and the universe would be a large virtual machine instantiated into a physical entity. 

          I have already hinted at the notion of virtual machines, a complete explanation of which you may find in Giuseppe Trautteur’s article, included in previous notes, or Sloman’s lectures on virtuality.[19]  Virtuality means a variety of things, but the essence of the notion that concerns us is that certain programs or software, although “fully grounded” in physical machines, are not identical with, or in other ways reducible to, the physical side of them.  A word or a number in a computer are not written as in a book.  They consist of switches turned on or off by the operating system that you control on your keyboard sending signals that are finally materialized on your monitor as words or numbers by electrical devices that construe letters and words by configurations of pixels, it is my guess; you would find no trace of linguistic entities by opening your computer.  You may notice a strong similarity between the notion of virtual machines in computer science and the mind/body problem, where philosophers speak about supervenience of the mental on the physical.  See the analogy with my point on chapter III, on language, where I make the case that from a physical written language we cannot reconstrue the semantics of that language.

          Let me expand on this point by going back to physics.  We have seen that there are four currently-known “fundamental” forces in nature (electromagnetism, gravity, strong, weak).  Once again, let me remind you that physicists add that all phenomena observed in nature thus far can be explained in terms of these fundamental four forces, plus maybe a Higgs fields force (needed for a better formulation of a modern cosmology).  However, living beings, as physical objects of the universe, are not explained by any of these forces at the level of mental activity.  The modern view of these fundamental forces is that they become active by exchanging mediating particles.  For electromagnetism this is the photon.  For gravity the graviton not yet observed and posited for uniformity and so on.  How do they explain the ‘message’ (I can certainly use the phrase ‘the message’, as it stands for something done by what they call messenger particles)?  Within relativistic quantum theory field, that is meant to unify relativity and quantum theory, attraction and repulsion are explained in terms of spin properties.  When a spin -0 particle is exchanged an attractive force results.  When a spin -1 particle is exchanged, a repulsive force results.  When a spin -2 particle is exchanged, an attractive force results, etc.  So from these premises it follows that “The photon is spin -1,” and thus two like charges must repel.  (It then follows that for opposite charges, the force must be opposite to this, i.e., an attraction).  The graviton is spin -2, and thus two masses must attract.
          The force holding protons and neutrons together inside a nucleus can be thought of as a certain limiting case of the strong force.  In this limiting case, the exchange particles (so-called pi mesons) have spin -0 and thus this is an attractive force (as is observed).  

Is it an exhaustive explanation?  According to the point of view of a physicist apparently it is, notice the ‘follow’, ‘must, ‘as observed’ bolded by me, the scientist stands content with these differences causing different physical behavior, but let’s look at the problem closer. 

          We may ask the question: why may spin properties cause one or the other option?  We human beings, roughly speaking, have a mental life and of course a physical life.  At the level of mental we make choices, understand, and become aware of many things, but our physical life completely escapes us from the point of view of consciousness.  If we jump from a spring board, we head sooner or later for whatever is under us, something that does not depend on our decision, and it looks much different from what we believe  happens within the so called mental life.  These observations are probably the matrix of our later dichotomies between normativity and natural science, conventions and laws of nature, free will and determinism.  And yet a biological aspect of our physical existence is governed by exchanges that more resemble our social life, exchange of information, than the rigid physical laws as they are represented by scientists; I am thinking of DNA and its functions in the organism.  Something that we have discovered and was not an object of our non-mediated knowledge, object of perception, at least not at the conscious level.

          In the light of the long repetitive  preamble above we may question the explanations physicists give us of quantum events and not only of those.  It seems that once they have characterized objects involved in a phenomenon and those characteristics instantiate a law, their work is finished.  But what if there is more to it?  What if spin is just a collateral property of a deeper reality?  Why can’t we suppose that spins are just elements of a code and that messenger particles process and interpret information, sending control signals?  Are messenger particles virtual particles operating an exchange of information in a form similar to handshaking between computers and their connected devices?[20]  Although the problem of a limited number of choices (or none at all) at the level of superparticles marks a great difference between mental life and subatomic particles, couldn’t it be that reality is constituted by levels of ever richer options up to the mental life where free will reigns?  I have no idea if any anomaly will ever be found in quantum physics, but I know that already at the level of DNA, divergences from rigid instructions, errors, may take place.  Thus, the layer picture rejected in chapter two may find a place in our approach to the problem of mind in a formulation that is characterized as an ever growing levels of freedom, from the bottom up, from physics, organic chemistry, to mental life. 

          Sometimes physicists express opinions that are similar to philosophical ones in a completely different language, but the idea is roughly the same: a couple of decades ago, Gerard’t Hooft and Leonard Susskind, suggested that reality is not the hard thing everybody believes but something more abstract, contained within a two dimensional space, just as a two dimensional hologram, appropriately illuminated, projects a three dimensional image.  Their so called holographic principle, which would have made Berkeley’s day, is based on speculation on the notion of entropy, but in the end is an empiricist claim, making reality an illusion, while the real thing is mental! But notice finally that even if the whole universe exists on information, the argument that this unbelievable intelligent amount of messages must have been placed there  from the outside and hence the intelligent design gains support, is wrong. The argument, used by supporters of the intelligent design, faulty of re-prosing Descartes argument about the existence of God: we have the idea of perfection and yet we are imperfect, therefore the idea must have been implanted from the outside by a perfect being, i.e. God. The modern version of Descartes’ argument uses ‘intelligence’ in place of ‘perfection’, for the remaining part it is the same. But two  questions arises immediately (1)what prevents nature in its biological realm of evolution to be intelligent? Second question”   Intelligence according to what standard? The human intelligence? Since a God may be imagined much more direct and simple  in his creation several billions of DNA strings containing information don’t seem to be the work of a God. The argument seems to support rather my claim that  we see what our mind allows us to see or if you like the argument of the Indian thinker Atanu who  writes (see chapterIV) matter comes to know itself.

Conclusion   

          You must have noticed that this essay is a collection of antinomies and aporias.  Let me just mention a few of them in a form where the inconsistencies better emerge.

1) I am a universe and I live in the universe.  So the universe lives inside me and I live in the universe!! 

2) My mind creates the universe through language and God created the universe through language, and mind created God!!

3) Mind is not reducible to matter, but if the mind creates the universe now the universe exists and is made of matter, and minds are made of matter (different perspectives)!!

4) When we grow up we shrink!! 

          Antinomies were elected to the dignity of philosophy by Kant, without finding an acceptable solution to them.  Are my antinomies symmetries?  The electron and the positron are symmetrical under reflection, having the same mass and opposite charge, a substantial semantics may hide symmetries in propositions and their negations.  This would demote truth to a relative-to-a-universe in time notion.  Some thousands years ago a school of philosophers, the Sophists, stopped at the data of experience, at empirical and not rational knowledge, and from this point of view they wished to judge the world of reality.  With them, relativism of knowledge and skepticism were born, “the man-measure” of Protagoras, and the “nothing exists” of Gorgias.

          In the fragment of Protagoras which Plato has preserved for us, it is stated:

“Man is the measure of all things, of those that are in so far as they are,
and those that are not in so far as they are not.”

From this he deduces that the subjective phenomena of our sensations become judges of reality.  There is no reality of itself, but only reality as it appears to us:

“Man is the measure of what exists.”

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[1]              See chapters one, two, and   three.

[2]                Animals with lesser minds may qualify as good examples.

[3]              See chapter ten, “Multiplicity of minds,” in Stan Franklin’s Artificial minds, 1998 MIT Press.

[4]                 There are opposite opinions on this issue, especially among Artificial Intelligence scientists.

[5]              For those interested, read Daniel Dennet’s Kinds of Minds and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea.

[6]              This does not mean that we may tout court establish that different species do not experience pain in some form. 

[7]              Some scientists, however, believe that consciousness emerges from certain mental events that can be detected.

[8]              On pain of repeating myself, I think they are wrong. I presume they think that the number is defined by its relations with all the other numbers. But this is not a definition: you may better see it from a physics example, where time is viewed as a measure of change but not defined. But in the ultimate analysis understanding time from a theoretical point of view, depends on our intuitive notion, and so it is for the number.

[9]               For an exhaustive  description of the historical background of string theory see ‘Superstring’ edited by P.C.W. Davis and J. Brown, Cambridge, University Press 1995.

[10]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayans

[11]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztecs

[12]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_of_life

[13]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantric_Buddhism

[14]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalachakra

[15]  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schopenhauer

[16]              The mirror is not a necessary addition, it is just a tool to make symmetry accessible to observation.

[17]           See semantic symmetry discussed later.

[18]           The word is a neologism created by me (and introduced in chapter two) in order to introduce possible physical particles that explain mentality in a TOE if it may ever be achieved.  

[19]           You can find Sloman on the web at “Talk 66: Virtual Machines in Philosophy, Engineering & Biology (at WPE 2008)”, url = <http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/talks/#talk66>.

[20]           Aaron Sloman writes, “Words and phrases referring to information are now used in many scientific and non-scientific academic disciplines and in many forms of engineering.  This chapter suggests that this is a result of increasingly wide-spread, though often implicit, acknowledgement that besides matter and energy the universe contains information (including information about matter, energy and information) and many of the things that happen, including especially happenings produced by living organisms, and more recently processes in computers, involve information-processing.”  From “What's information, for an organism or intelligent machine? How can a machine or organism mean?” at url = <http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/cogaff/sloman-inf-chap.pdf>