Identity is Unity

There is a connection between the berjillions of berjillions of elementary particles in the universe and the many self-aware humans on this planet.

Not everyone subscribes to the Big Bang Theory, but any creation story will suffice for my argument. I do believe that the Big Bang Theory could be correct, but that it explains only a tiny bit of creation.

Anyway, picture the Big Bang. Out of nothing energy is spewed, most of which is eventually coalesced into what we consider to be matter. Really matter is just specially configured little sparks of energy, but we don’t need to go into that right now. Here is the question: berjillions upon berjillions of berjillions of absolutely identical electrons (or pick your own particle) populate the universe. How did that happen?

Yes, John Wheeler did half-jokingly suggest to Richard Feynman that they might all be the same electron, and if you meditate on that, you can see that in an important sense, that is exactly right. Without the context of environment, location ceases to make sense, and there is no other way to distinguish these particles. And since the environment is just other particles, maybe it fades into insignificance.

But let’s back up to the creation of these particles. Whatever actually happened, somehow all those electrons came to have the same mass, and the same electrical charge. Did a first electron appear or get created, and then the others popped into existence as copies? How ever it happened, if electrons are copies of each other, some concept or idea guided the process. Some program of some type instructed: “GOTO primal electron. CREATE perfect copy. CHECK for accuracy.”

If instead all electrons bubbled into their perfect identical form because some previous state of the young universe generated them that way, then this also presupposes the existence of a pattern or plan. There is nothing logical about electrons that determines their charge or mass, unless these constants follow from some other fact, which in turn is random.

So did all those electrons burst into existence simultaneously? If so, then the proto-universe that birthed them had its own uniformity going on. Or if electrons were spawned sequentially, we must wonder how the Mother of these particles managed to remain unchanged from the first electrons to the last.

You see my point. However the building blocks of the universe came to be, whatever they are, their uniformity implies the pre-existence of idea. That’s huge. I don’t care what your cosmology says, it must recognize that idea guides creation.

But pure idea does not push around or create matter, which is an entirely different category of existence. That is an assumption I cannot avoid. So I am forced to realize that matter is not hard stuff—matter—at all. Everything is idea.

There is only one electron because there is only one idea of an electron—in this universe, anyway.

And what does all of this have to do with self-aware human beings?

That spark of spiritual self-awareness—pure witness, observer, Atman—after you strip away all of its “environment” in the form of ego, feelings, personality and memory, is the same in all of us. As with electrons, our subjective consciousnesses are identical and of a separate category from every physical thing that we believe exists. There is one idea of a pure witness and, by following the same argument I used for identical electrons, we get to the conclusion that there is only one subjective consciousness.

We are One.

In a post coming soon I would like to tell the story of how I came to understand the conjunction of that realization and my own (and your own) compelling experience of separateness.

P.S. I have been absent from this blog for many days because all my writing time has gone to another blog:  savebriggsroad.blogspot.com. That blog deals with an entirely different concern. Perhaps you will take a look…   

Dyads

Some days ago, as I was reflecting on recent work, I noticed that dyads showed up rather frequently in my recent work. Take a look at these:

The Parking Lot

The Homestead

Look at this painting of a single item:

The Blue Bicycle

           Two wheels! Also object and shadow.

            My most recent:

Ed's House

Pairs of pairs, for Heaven’s sake!

What does it mean? Is there a secret significance here, something symbolic? Does it represent, for example, a wish to be part of a pair? Or an awareness of being part of a pair?

Other paintings appear to represent something about choices.

The industrial or the natural:

Leaves and Steel

                In The Bridge we can choose to enter the dark door or we can gaze out into the green trees.

The Bridge

        The lit building or the dark copse:

The Grove

        The canoe or the dock:

The Yellow Painter

        We follow the zig-zag railing in The Patio to a point where we choose, again, a door or a little natural area at ground level. And look, there are two pipes in the ground.

The Patio

These pairs could characterize choices, some of which are fraught with meaning, some not so much. We could go on and on about choosing the canoe or the dock and what each choice represents in a life. What does it mean if we enter the door or go into nature? Three paintings juxtapose architecture and nature, most dramatically in the choice between dark trees and a brightly illuminated building.

I can assure you I was not thinking about choices or dyads when I created these compositions. I was looking at colors and shapes, as I was when conceiving the compositions of the many other, non-dyadic paintings I am not showing you here.

And yet, it is engaging to think this way. We do enjoy pondering possible meanings and significance to our own lives of these apparent symbols, intended or not. Here again is that recurring theme of self-reflection. When you think about it, symbolism functions only with self-reflection. For a symbol to operate as a symbol, awareness of both the symbol and its meaning is necessary, as well as the realization that their relation is symbolic! 

Is it interesting to wonder what was in the artist’s mind, especially if he claims not to have been thinking in terms of dyads at all? Possibly, but not for that long. Such pursuits are the work of art history, which is very different from the creation or the contemplation of art.

Once a painting is hardened into its final form, the important dialogue is between the viewer and the painting. The purpose of visual art is to engage the viewer and provide stimulus for contemplation, hopefully for a very long time. Symbolic content may be there, but its true value lies in what it does for the viewer, and the viewer has more important things to wonder about than the mental state of the artist.

I hope. 

Brahman and Idea

We can equate God with the sum collection of all self-awareness.

The trouble with imagining God as a personality working with physical reality is that in anthropomorphizing Him in that way, we trivialize Him. I have wondered about arguing that we are made in God’s image, and so we must resemble Him, but the resemblance must not be so strong as to include our weakness. No, we resemble God in our self-reflective consciousness.

God, therefore, looks out at us through every pair of human eyes we encounter. The owner of those eyes may or may not be aware of her own God consciousness, but she is conscious and she does have the capability to self-reflect, and so she carries God consciousness.

Sufis say that humanity is the lens through which God observes the world, a beautiful way to put it.

 For a long time I have been wondering, why would God need a lens? Why would God need the eyes of people?

The secret is that there is no reality. Reality is not real. We cannot prove that anything exists outside of our senses and so for all intents and purposes there is nothing outside our sensory sphere. Sure, physicists and mathematicians have proved that there are ten dimensions to reality, but those dimensions exist only as idea to them. And so, since we have no outside-of-senses reality to back them up, our sensory experiences are just as transparent, just as flimsy, convincing only because that is part of the construct.  

Would it be fair to say, then, that reality exists because God wishes it to exist? Yes, sort of, and yes, duh. An infinite consciousness is capable of conceiving infinitely many ideas, many of which (infinitely many) are capable of self-reflection and self-reference. Here, then, we have our multi-verse, hypothesized by quantum physics. I need to think about this more, but it seems right to suggest that a self-referent idea or program needs something to refer back to, something complicated enough to support self-reflection. Since to be truly self-reflective requires the capability of an infinite regress, that complicated structure must needs be very complicated. For such an idea to be so capable, it must appear to have some durability, and, hence we have reality with people in it. 

Note that this is all in the realm of idea. We think we are living a hard life, but we and everything "around" us is idea.

The Word was in the Beginning because self-reference has something of a linguistic nature, even if it is in the form of some sort of symbol.

As this is just the beginning of a train of thought that began for me today, I need time to flesh out some of the assumptions contained in my argument.

Surely others have thought the same thoughts as I express here, and the scriptures of many spiritual disciplines treat of the same concept. I just need to figure out the correlations. I am putting together some pieces I have not seen put together before.

For what it's worth, I picture idea springing from Brahman like plumes of snow blow from a great mountain, like the whorls of tiny cyclones spin away from a whistle. Not creating the snow, not making the sound, but its nature and their nature somehow the same.

I know, I know! I thought I was going to be posting my art on this blog and all I am posting is this dang philosophy!

So now you know. This is my internal world, all I really care about.

Goodbye to Qualia

Cartesian Duality

The fallacy of the Cartesian duality is not in the partition of personhood into two categories, but that the division was taken between mind and body. To say, “I think, therefore I am,” is to suggest that my thinking is non-physical. Philosophers have argued successfully that the act of thinking is based in the material world, the action of a physical organ—just as would be the throwing of a baseball. The mind is part of the body. 

What is outside the physical is self-awareness, pure and unattached to thoughts, memories, or feelings. The proper separation of categories distinguishes the entire body of the person, including the mind, ego, emotions, ideas and memories, from the self-awareness of the person.

There is no difference between your pure self-awareness and mine. We can agree with Hindu theologians and posit an ocean of consciousness. If one center of awareness is indistinguishable from another, then who is to say there are multiple consciousnesses? Personally, I prefer to think of consciousness as something like a life force that injects itself where it can into the world. The picture in my head—maybe somewhat silly—is of a grove of cypress in a swamp, all inter-connected under the water and mud. The network of cypress is the force of consciousness, pushing into the world. The trees and the knees push up through the surface of the water and make themselves known, entering our physical reality in many places.

If qualia are the experiential part of our conscious life, then memories and feelings are qualia too, just as much as colors and cold. We may not be able to describe a particular type of quale to a person who has never experienced it, but we can “point” to the notion, with language. “When you think about something and your throat tightens and your nose and tear ducts tingle, that’s sadness.”

Death and Experience

 When we die we separate from the qualia of life, and can no longer experience the colors, smells, and sounds of this world. The reason for this is the loss of the function of the sense organs. We lose brain function as well, when we lose the brain. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that we lose the ability to recall memories. If atman consciousness is eternal—and it may well be—still with no qualia to be conscious of, self-awareness must lie dormant in some way.

The discontinuity of death is, at best, a jump discontinuity, not a removable one, borrowing here from the terminology of mathematics. What this means is that at death, a change occurs in the nature of the experience of the individual. It is not like a temporary loss of consciousness, in which we wake to the identical experience we left a second or minute ago. Instead the continuous experience of our conscious life has abruptly taken a brand new course, with a completely different starting point. No filling in of experience will make the transition smooth and unnoticeable.

In the case of remembering our own history and assuming continuity of life experience, all we really have is memory. And memories are qualia, which give us information about nothing other than themselves.

The Theory of Survival

 What can survival after death possibly mean? To believe that I will survive death is to say that there will be a person of some sort with my memories. I have no connection to that person. Actually, I have no sensory connection to any person who might be living tomorrow, but I trust that one person tomorrow will have a continuity of experience—or at least the conviction of continuity—with memories of experience that I have now. To be a believable and believing future me, the person must have memories of past feelings and experiences that match his present. I can expect no such matching in the case of a person who appears after my death, whether that appearance is of an infant in another family, or a ghost in this world, or a new inhabitant of Heaven.

I find it problematic that physical causes can interrupt or halt neural functions such as memories, feelings, and personality. Total anesthesia creates a glaring discontinuity in our awareness, albeit a removable discontinuity. This means that we could restore the continuity of consciousness by dropping in the missing experience—i.e. withhold the anesthesia. Still, I find the blank stretch philosophically and experientially troubling, as incontrovertible evidence that our consciousness depends absolutely on physical structure. Anesthesia is much more convincing than sleep, during which I continue to have experience. Disease and injury can cause brain damage that unalterably affects personality. Does a person’s “real” personality survive Alzheimer’s, a stroke, or a fractured skull, even though the original personality never again appears in this life?

Unless there is another duality, such as between a physical and an astral body, the theories of reincarnation or Heaven have big problems here. (I am using the term “astral” strictly as a convenience, and not necessarily as mystics might. Physicists seem convinced these days that “reality,” whatever that is, is composed of ten dimensions, if we count time as a dimension. This makes it conceivable that there is more to our existence than meets the eye here in the classic four dimensions. For convenience, I resort to calling the non-worldly part of us “astral.”) If we confine our examination to the important distinction between atman and the rest of the person, there is no memory function to carry forward, and reincarnation is meaningless. On the other hand, if there is a division between astral and physical bodies, and the astral body survives, then both meaningful reincarnation and taking up residence in Heaven are conceivable.

I make no claim that any of this is groundbreaking. My sole purpose is to report the thoughts I enjoy.

The Photo Essay That Doesn't Belong

Here is a little photo essay presenting my daughter Angela and me.

It is important in a photograph to depict something about the deeper feelings of the subject. Here you can see that Angela and I are serious contemplators of Universal Truth.

But it is important also to be lighthearted. In this next photo Angela smiles to think of our fortunate position at the intersection of quantum inspired multi-verses.

Angela says, “C’mon Dad, look into the many versions of your future. Look deep, deep.”

“Yeah, Dad,” she says. “Work it!”

 “Now you get it, Dad. You can come back now!”

We showed these to my wife Ann, Angela’s mom, and she said that they were not appropriate for this blog. I am very grateful for that comment, because it gives me the perfect excuse to say:

Yes they are!

If this blog is going to be authentic, it must treat of more than philosophical ruminations, more than the thought behind the production of art, more than all that high falutin’ serious stuff. This blog is a bit of my art, a performance piece if you will.

To exemplify its own theme, this blog must include what is real to this consciousness—even emotion, as in the post “Betrayal;” or silliness; or odd subjects that don’t seem to belong. If it is perceptible to this witness, it belongs.

This post is another example of the self-reflective, thanks to Ann’s remark and my opportunity to respond. And this paragraph is self-reflective on its self-reflection. As such, it epitomizes the very ascending spiral of self-awareness that I have been saying underlies everything meaningful that I do.

A computer could not do this and mean it. If a computer could do this, still it could not talk about being able to do this. Or else about doing that which just preceded this sentence.

A human composed this essay. And, though these words are pretty good evidence that a self-aware creature is experiencing himself in their production, there can be no proof for the reader. A computer can be programmed to mimic anything. A person, not self-aware, can say anything she is taught to say. But there is no need to present proof. I am observing the proof. I am the proof.

As such, I am inaccessible to you, who are your own proof, because just now you remembered to be self-aware.

Angela asks, “Are you going to tell what really happened when we took those pictures?’

No.

Electrons!

I’ve taken this post from a memoir I hope to finish soon of a canoe trip my daughter Angela and I took on the first 340 miles of the Mississippi River. It provides a good introduction to the material I want to talk about in the post to follow:

So much water!  I try to get my head around the notion that all this water is made up of molecules, two little hydrogen atoms clinging to a large oxygen atom like a miniature cartoon mouse head, all tumbling over each other.  Of course the molecules are not really solid, nor are the atoms, nor are the parts of the atoms.  It’s all about forces and big ideas. 

The molecules are so tiny and there are so many of them.  I wondered how many there were in this bit of river.  According to the Avogadro constant, there are 6.02 × 10²³ molecules in a mole.  The atomic mass of oxygen is 16, I remember that from high school chemistry, and the mass of hydrogen is a shade over one, so the atomic mass of water is almost exactly 16 + 2 = 18.  A mole of water is that number of grams, eighteen.  Since a gram of water has a volume of one cubic centimeter, thanks to the French, who set these units that way on purpose, a mole of water takes up about eighteen cubic centimeters.  This little section in the river was about 30 meters wide by a hundred meters long, and I guessed two meters deep.  That made 6000 cubic meters of water right there.  Since there are 100 centimeters in a meter, a cubic meter is 100 × 100 × 100 = 1,000,000, a million cubic centimeters.  Every eighteen of these is a mole, so there are a million divided by 18 moles in a cubic meter—about.   Ten over 18 reduces to 5/9, and I know the decimals for ninths just repeat the top, so that makes 55555.5… moles in each cubic meter.  We’ll call it 60,000, rounded to the nearest ten thousand, because I just wanted to know how many zeroes my number has. 

I did not share my thoughts with Angela.  It would annoy her, but this is just arithmetic and high school science, and I was curious.  So many people would run from a calculation like that, but it’s interesting.  It gives me perspective about life and the world and the universe when I think about that, and to never ponder such things is to lead a life I would have to call impoverished.

Okay, 60,000 moles in a cubic meter and 6000 cubic meters in this bit of river gives me 60,000 × 6000 = 360,000,000 moles in this section of river, or so.  Close enough.  In scientific notation we have 3.6 × 10⁸, and that makes multiplying by the Avogadro constant easier.  But I needed pencil and paper for this. 

Later I figured 3.6 × 10⁸ moles times 6.02 × 10²³ molecules per mole makes about 2.16 × 10³² molecules of water just right there, give or take an enormous number.  In standard notation, that’s 216,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.  I wonder how many there would be in the whole river.  You’d probably only have to tack on 5 or 6 zeroes but I’m not going to do it.

Electrons are more general; every substance has a specific pattern of electrons, so I turn my attention to them. Each oxygen atom has eight electrons, each hydrogen atom one. So every water molecule sports ten electrons, and in this patch of river there were 2.16 × 10³³.

How did all those electrons come to be?  And each one indistinguishable from the next!  John Wheeler’s suggestion that maybe all electrons are just one electron showing up all over has an odd plausibility when you think about it.

But it is astounding to think, as many electrons as there are in a drop of water, as many electrons as there are in a world, in the sun and all the planets, that for light years and light years across empty space are other clusters of identical electrons, that the universe is full of all of these identical particles.  What an absolutely astounding thought!  If all of those electrons are identical in all of their properties, including their mass and their charge, and all the protons and neutrons as well, what are we to make of that?  Could they have been different?  How do we know they are not different here from some other galaxy far across the other side of the universe?  The thought that electrons and protons have no such physical properties at all, but are dependent on some kind of pure idea, some kind of logical necessity springing from mathematical/digital properties makes it possible to imagine that our universe is necessarily as it is, and does not vary from one region to another.

Or what if there is something implausible and arbitrary about the universe in which we live?  I can buy quantum theory and the arbitrary nature of subatomic matter, but I have a lot more trouble conceiving of a variegated universe.  A variegated universe is even more inconceivable to me than the notion that every one of its approximately 10⁸⁰ electrons is identical to the next.

We talk about particles but an atom is not like a tiny solar system.  It has layers of fog that hold different discrete levels of energy that are necessarily digitized in some way.  An electron, like a photon, can be viewed either as a wave or as a particle, but there is something necessary about the amount of energy in an electron or in a photon.  An atom, being comprised of layers of fog or energy which repel the layers of fog of other atoms, is categorized just by those spheres or spheres of influence or layers of fog energy, all the way out to the full periodic table of the elements, and it is those layers of fog, those necessary digital layers or spheres of energy that for mathematical reasons determine the properties of the elements, the way they look, the way they behave, the way they like to link to each other, and these are determined by something necessarily mathematical and not just because they “want” eight electrons in their outer orbit, as we were taught in high school chemistry. 

That’s all they are, atoms; just patches of energy-fog that we like to imagine as systems of particles because we know peas and marbles and sand particles, and because that energy fog will not allow itself to be divided or quantified differently without a huge protest.

I find myself contemplating very seriously the notion that all reality, each sub-atomic particle has existence only as idea.  Perhaps at some level religion and science will find common ground, but far deeper and far stranger than any of us has ever imagined.

Betrayal

I awoke this morning consumed with thoughts on betrayal.

I do feel betrayed. Right now that consideration seems to best define the atmosphere through which I am slogging.

I know that betrayal is not a feeling, but an action; but I am feeling what one feels when one is betrayed: loss of affection, loss of opportunity, anger, sadness.

The two primary ingredients of betrayal as I see it are a secret agenda and an abrupt termination of kindness. The dictionary says : “to act in a way that is contrary to a promise made.” Well, okay, but the promise need not be proffered overtly. And I can’t help feeling that some secret intention is involved.

Today it seems that everywhere I turn I find myself betrayed. Certainly that cannot be true.

But I do feel betrayed by parents and teachers whose sacred duty, as I see it, was to deliver young people into the avenue of happiness and success. Genuine happiness first; success, as defined by the parents and teachers, second. A personal sense of success, which may differ from the intentions of the guardians, would fall under the heading of happiness, it seems to me.

The custodians of my future ignored the clear signals that my happiness lay in the direction of the visual arts:

at age four, when I first said so;

at age nine, when my Grandfather gave me my first set of pastels;

at age eleven, when I first took up oil painting;

at age fourteen, when I made pen and ink drawings that swept across the page;

at age sixteen, when I asked for art lessons and was told, “Before you get art lessons you have to develop a style;”

at age eighteen, when one of my paintings caused a friend of my parents to exclaim to me, “You missed your calling!”;

at age nineteen, when I dropped out of Princeton and began painting ferociously and said I wanted to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (and my father said, “You will go back to Princeton or I will find another young man who wants to go and send him”);

again at age nineteen when, during my year out of college, I was sent to work as a math trainee at Rowe AC Manufacturing but soon maneuvered myself into the Art Department;

at age twenty when, back at Princeton, I put up shows at the student center and organized drawing groups when I found that there was a very minimal official arts program;

at age twenty-two, when I declined to sign up for a second year teaching math at a private school, opting even to risk the draft, in order to open a shop that sold my handicrafts and paintings;

at age thirty when I begged my father’s estate for help to go to art school and was turned down. My stepmother was incensed that I had asked. Because I already had a BA from Princeton, I was ineligible for student aid.

Sometime during my young adulthood my stepmother said, “I never knew you were particularly interested in art.” She married my father when I was seven, and adopted me when I was twelve, so I don’t know how she missed it.

Now I am a retired math teacher. I don’t want art lessons anymore. My painting is very well received, though it does not enjoy the typical indications of success, namely sales and prominent display. Yet.

Bitter? Yeah, sometimes. Today, yes. You see, the day before yesterday I started a painting that just looks boring, and I think, if I knew more about what I was doing I would not have wasted half a day on this piece of crap. I would have known better. I would have known what works for me. And what makes all this especially difficult is that I don’t have all that much time to figure it out. And then, instead of painting, here I am writing. More about that in a paragraph or two. But if you are going to give me one of those platitudes—any platitude—keep it to yourself. I don’t want to hear it because it’s crap, whose intention is just to plaster over some real misery. I am quite correctly despondent right now.

I’ve actually been thinking pretty hard about my most recent failure, and believe I have learned a good lesson, which I will not spell out here yet because it is technical. And fortunately I have a few painting ideas floating in my head right now, and will begin them soon. I am unhappy not because my inability to paint has surfaced again, because I can get over that. I am unhappy because I have been granted so little time to work on it, by people who were supposed to care enough about me to steer me toward my chosen strengths. I should have painted that mess when I was nineteen.

I’ll write about writing another time.

Be Strong!

There was a saying circulating in high school: “Small minds talk about things, average minds talk about people, great minds talk about ideas.” I was annoyed by that. First of all, it was a statement about people, and therefore the product of an average mind. Then what did that author know about great minds, or ideas for that matter?

I do not claim to have a great mind. It is a little nasty of me to be bored by most conversations, but I cannot help it. Once I have figured out how the brake pads fit into the calipers on my truck, I don’t care to discuss how other pads fit into other calipers, unless there is something revolutionary or ingenious about them. Sports talk, celebrity talk—I've just never been able to get into it. I feel a little inadequate on the fringes of such conversations, but there is absolutely nothing there for me.

Like everybody else, I want to join in the human celebration. But the stuff I find fascinating  does not interest that many people. In fact, some take on an attitude of superiority, and derogate cerebral activity and those who engage in it. But I have no shortage of very dear friends and a darling family, so I truly have no complaints about all that.

It’s just that I want to share some of these odd thoughts that float around in my head all the time. And so I started this blog. What a great device! I’m having a ball and can barely stay away from the computer.

And then I find myself allowing myself to get into more and more esoteric material (actually I've only just begun), and I realize that the ratio of blog readers who are interested in this stuff is likely the same as the ratio of people on the street who are interested. And then I find myself thinking this stupid thing: maybe I should write about more popular stuff so more people would be willing to read it. Maybe my own friends are tired of it already.

Now that, dear lonely reader, is exactly my dilemma and my downfall. I have done this to myself many times, with writing, with painting, with socializing. It is so easy for others to say, “Don’t worry about what other people think! Just do your own thing.”

I am quite positive that the people who say that do not find their minds awash in metaphysical ponderings over quantum mechanics in the brain. Perhaps they imagine I am debating over painting a tree or a car, when I am devising color relationships so subtle that critics think I have no color sense at all. It’s easy to tell me to wander off alone, but I am not that strong.

Still not complaining, not really.

Now I am going to complain. Those criticisms stop me cold. Please do not misunderstand. My complaint is not with the critics, it’s with me!

I wrote a book, a memoir, about the many canoe trips I have taken with my family. The book is finished but for two or three cosmetic amendments that would take me one afternoon.

Several people have read it and claimed to enjoy it. Some have offered suggestions and I have implemented a few of those and ignored others. But then there came a criticism with a rather unkind delivery, by a person who had slapped a template over the book. My memoir did not fit with this person’s dogma about what a book should be. Clearly my critic had made no effort to understand what my book was about—and didn't care. That person was as right as a teacher.

What did I do? I did not touch my manuscript again. I read three manuals about writing that troublesome material, and even though the guides said that there are different types of story, and that the book I had written fit one of the forms just fine, still I let my work lie. It remains untouched; even though I know I could easily finish it and send it off to Kindle.

The concepts I have been presenting in this blog are right close to the center of everything worthwhile that I do. Those ideas drive my painting, my memoirs (I've got four in various degrees of completion), my favorite activity (canoeing), and, most of all, my friendships with and love for other people.

I have to stay strong and keep on. I cannot take the advice of some of my friends and say “who cares what people say or like?” That attitude is just not in me, whether it “should” be or not. Instead I will say, “I hope there are many others who, like me, enjoy thinking about this stuff!”

I hope there are many others who, like me, enjoy thinking about this stuff!

Baseballs and Underpants

I promised to explain Russell’s set of all sets that are not members of themselves. This is great for me because I really have to struggle to make it clear, and I really enjoy a challenge.

Let’s limit ourselves to one room. In our kid’s bedroom we find four baseballs. A mathematician would call this collection of baseballs a set. This bunch of baseballs is not itself a baseball, so this set of baseballs is not a member of the set of baseballs.

Now we turn to underpants, stacked neatly in the dresser drawer. Is this stack, or set or underpants itself a pair of underpants? Of course not.

We do the same for socks, shirts, toy cars, pencils and paper clips until we empty the room.

Being of an artistic nature, we make an installation in the local art museum, and in the space the museum gives us, we stack the baseballs, underpants, socks, shirts, toy cars, pencils and paper clips. This fascinating artistic installation is a collection of sets—a set of sets. None of these sets is a member of itself—the group of toy cars is not a toy car—so the installation is the set of all sets (from our kid’s bedroom) that are not members of themselves.

But wait a minute. This installation, this set of sets—is it a member of itself? Well, it is a set, a collection of piles of underpants and paper clips, piles that are not themselves underpants or paperclips.

So what do we decide? If this is a set that deserves to be included in a description of the installation, then that would mean it was a member of the installation—a member of itself. But if that is the case, it can’t be in our installation, because the installation includes only sets that do not contain themselves.

On the other hand, if we banish the set of sets, then it is a set that does not contain itself, and so it is included—only to be excluded.

This argument dashed the hopes of mathematicians who set out to find and prove all theorems. And don’t feel too bad if you had trouble following the argument above. The implications drove some mathematicians crazy.

Every language, including mathematics and logic, has a sentence that says, “This sentence is false.”

Russell found a way out of his paradox by separating logical statements into types. 

A self-referent declaration is a different kind of assertion from true theorems and from false statements. A simple logic program would not know what to do with such a statement, but would most likely get tangled in an endless loop. We ourselves see that endless loop starting up, and that is the difference. We are capable of transcending endless loops, puzzling over them, and laughing them off. The computer has to run around in circles for a while until its software says, “That’s enough of that. Stop now.”

What does all this have to do with you and me? We self-aware creatures are unique the same way. Our self-reference just does not fit in a physical world of simple logic. When we are tootling along and not reflecting on the quality of our awareness, we fit in the physical universe. We are doing the same mental work as a computer would.

But our self-awareness, our ability to remember ourselves—when we exercise it—lifts us right out of the world.

Descartes argued that there were two types of entity—mind and body. This idea is called the Cartesian duality, and contemporary philosophers love to refute it with all sorts of models of consciousness based on structure. And they are right, and they completely miss the point.

It is true that there is no real split between mind and body. In theory a computer can do everything a mind can do, the vast majority of the time. But my self-awareness, my experience of my awake state, when I exercise it, is absolutely different from the sensible world. (You would say the same thing—I hope!—about yours.)

The only way the reductionist philosophers can be right—and they may well be—is way, way spookier than the duality they are trying to escape.

I love this stuff.

Watching Myself Watch Myself Watch Myself

Well, I’ve been trying all day to remember to view my self as the perceiver of body and brain sensations. I have been working at this for a while—years. Decades.

It’s not easy. If I don’t have a mechanism in place to remind me, I can go weeks without observing myself as perceiver; without, in short, recognizing my true self.

But wait. I was awake. I was watching things, hearing things, feeling things. I was aware, conscious, whatever you want to call it.

Or maybe not. From those times when I was just operating in the world and not being the observer, I have no recollection of having that fully awake feeling I get when I do identify my self as observer. Now, when I am thinking about it, I do have that feeling, and I have that feeling as I recall experiences. I am self-aware as I remember; I was not self-aware back then.

It would seem that I have two levels of awareness. I can walk around in the world, do things and feel things. I am conscious then, sentient, mentally alert. But when I reflect on myself, pay attention to myself, I step up to another level of consciousness. This may be the state William James called spiritual self-awareness. Gurdjieff and Ouspensky called it remembering oneself.

The assumption most of us make is that when we are awake, we are in this state continuously. Being able to reflect on our memories fosters this illusion, but we are just plodding around like robots most of the time. We can call up our memories and reflect on them, but even then we most likely do not feel our own awareness—and we don’t really call up that many memories anyway. We just know that we could if we wanted to, and so have convinced ourselves that we are thoughtful, self-aware beings.

Do you suppose it is possible to live an entire life and never attend to one’s own awareness? It may well be. I’ve known people who have made me wonder. When philosophers talk about a quale, which is a word for the experience of a sensation, they must be aware of the experience of self-reflection. When a philosopher avoids talking about qualia, or acts as if they don’t matter or exist, well, you have to wonder.

Without language, animals cannot ascend to self-reflection. Our favorite animals, our dogs and cats respond to us emotionally, and can be very intelligent—for dogs and cats—but all of that is quite possible without a moment of self-reflection.

I want to contend that we operate on either of two levels of consciousness. At the most common level we are observers, recorders, reactors. It is this level of consciousness that some philosophers explain in terms of brain structure and behavior. We may be self-conscious (in the sense of being anxious), or aware of the condition of our body or feelings or mind. We may be thinking about ideas, even working hard to learn something. But in this state, though we are observers, we are not necessarily aware of ourselves as observers.  

When we become aware of our own awareness we enter that more rare state of consciousness: we are here now, we remember ourselves, we live in the present. It is so easy to do, if I could just remember to do it!

Self-reference is a pretty powerful concept.  Playful examples include sentences like, “This sentence is false.” Bertrand Russell’s mathematical example was the set of all sets that do not contain themselves. (So what is the status of that set?) Kurt Gödel showed that every complete logical system contains such a statement, which is therefore true but unprovable, or false and provable. This means that no mathematical system can be entirely true and complete, which changes the way I look at the Universe I’ll tell ya. More on this paragraph next post.

And then us—sporting our self-reflective consciousness, when we remember it. That the Universe could contain such a thing is disorienting. If you don’t feel a bit disoriented by it, you haven’t been paying attention.

Decisions, Perceptions, Sensations

Who are you, really? I mean really, deep down?

When Scottish philosopher David Hume introspected in search of a self, he reported that all he found was a “bundle of perceptions.” He seemed to be disappointed, but I believe he was on to something; he was just looking in the wrong direction. Of course you are not going to be able to perceive the self, no matter how you try. The perceiver does not perceive itself, yet it can infer itself by acknowledging that it is none of these perceptions, and yet does perceive.

Should Descartes have said, “I perceive therefore I am”?

You are sitting in your car in a parking lot. A driver attempts to pull into the space next to you, but his car hits your car.

“Hey!” you yell to your friend next to you. “That guy ran right into me!”

But he didn’t. His car hit your car, but he did not hit you.

A kindergartner spills paint on your shoe. “Careful!” you warn. “You’re getting paint on me!”

But she is not—not on you anyway.

Are our possessions part of us? What does it mean to own something? My pencil is a pencil that is associated with me, to the extent that everyone involved agrees that I get to decide what happens to that pencil.

In the case of my body, I don’t need consensus. Just the facts about how persons and bodies work with each other make body ownership pretty clear. When a person is not the one to control her body, either a crime or a peculiar illness has occurred.

Let’s change point of view. If this is my body, then what am I? I am not the body. I am somehow in the body, carried by the body, running the body. Sensory messages come to me from my eyes, my ears, my skin—I am not my sense organs. I can feel hot or cold, happy or sad, comfortable or in pain, but I am not those sensations; I feel them. I am the one who perceives.

Here’s something spooky. If you do something, i.e. if your body performs some particular movement, can we say that you are not only the perceiver, you are also the agent? It certainly feels that way, but consider this experiment. People were wired up for brain activity and told to make a very sudden, spontaneous decision to push a button, with no premeditation. They thought they did, but the brain scan said otherwise. Their brains had made the decision for them well before they acted, well before they thought they were making their decision.

I used to be very good at slapping flies (still am, I guess). I would hover my hand over a fly and move as close as I could until she stopped washing her hands. Then I would enter a meditative state, relax my mind and arm, and try to send the fly the telepathic message that everything was just fine--when SLAP down would come my hand before she knew what hit her.

What a disappointment to learn that during that last second when I imagined I was meditating and not planning a slap, my brain was firing away in preparation!

Decision-making is a brain sensation. The awake part of us is riding around in a body that sensations tell us is our own, feeling pain, seeing blue, and getting the sense (believing) that we are making decisions and performing actions.

I am going to try to remember that about myself as often as I can all day today.

Or perhaps I should say: I observe the brain sensation that I have the intention of observing the mind remembering itself all day today.

The Yellow Painter

A canoe is tethered to a dock with a yellow cord, called a painter. It is a light cord; it doesn’t take much to hold a canoe captive. A gentle breeze quickens the water, and the boat pulls gently at the painter, holding it taut.

Isn’t it like that for each of us? The ties that bind us to our moorings are mere strings and, for most of our lives, the tug to freedom is really quite gentle. And do we want that freedom? What happens to this canoe without the painter? What happens to me if I slip away? What happens to you? Do we truly want to be adrift, even though we tug?

The title of this work is a bit of a pun, and my intention was that the two definitions of the word “painter” each be meaningful. How does a painter hold two worlds together?

The composition of this image is strongly diagonal. Only the water has any semblance of horizontality. The boat is actively angled, but so is the dock—and so is the painter.

The side of the boat is a large mass of fairly bright red, and if we are sensitive to color, we are drawn to notice that the blue, out-of-date sticker (this was painted in 2013) is of a similar intensity. As is the painter. These three colors constitute the primary triad. Now we notice the muted colors of the world in which the canoe rests. Perhaps as we muse we match up the muted blues and greens, and then go for the grays. Next, if we are really into color, we compare the relationship of the triad of primary hues with the bundle of muted colors and the grays.

Or you might follow lines, or the masses. I leave further musings to you, though this image is a very poor substitute for the original.

This is why I believe that paintings belong on walls where people live and work, in houses and offices. I detest mausoleums—I mean museums—and attend them only out of necessity. Galleries make good orphanages for art—and you should know that the artist really does feel like she is abandoning her work—because a gallery provides a place where you can meet a painting that has a future for you, and then take it home and live with it.

A painting does worlds more than decorate your house, just as does your spouse. A painting offers one side of a conversation, and you keep up your end through reverie and contemplation. What you notice about a painting, if it works for you, was probably thought about and put there deliberately by the artist. You might be very surprised to know the care we artists take in the creation of a work of art. The intention is that your conversation with the painting will occupy you for hours and years—that is what makes a painting good, not so much that it “looks like a photograph” or is pretty or is any better than you could do.

There is no right set of things to notice about a painting, or to think about, or to muse upon. The only no-no, in my opinion, is to make up a back-story and impute it to the artist. If you had a teacher who led you to that practice, well, education is in a sorry state, isn’t it? The true back-story to this image is that my daughter Julia and I spent a week paddling the Everglades. Every evening we tied up to a wooden, roofed platform called a chickee. On the afternoon when this painting was conceived I sat and watched the canoe play at its tether, and watched the shapes and colors and began thinking about a new painting.