There is an essential something that makes us “us”.  Buddhism and other Eastern traditions say that all animals possess  a life essence that must be respected, if not treasured.  This leads followers to protect the life of the smallest insect or worm, on the theory that the spark of animal life carries sentience. Buddhism seeks to minimize suffering, no matter what being suffers the experience.

Sentience implies or perhaps is defined by  self awareness.  The ability to experience life, using  memory to flavor the experience with personal historical reference and emotion appears to give rise to sentience.  Western thought has begun to recognize that non-humans share some level of sentience.  Sentience implies understanding that there is something that is lost in death.  Other primates, elephants, whales and dolphins are recognized as having some level of sentience based upon the observation of their apparent emotional behaviors and their recognition of death.

Everyone is quite sure of their own sentience – it is a personal experience.  Sentience in other humans is evidenced by observing behavior and by communication.  When another person relates an experience similar to our own, it provides reinforcing data to our observations.  Other animals do not speak and cannot provide this confirmation, so the behavioral evidence of sentience is usually discounted.  In a previous post, I proposed that consciousness, a prime component of sentience, is actually an action or process, not a thing.  This, of course implies that we are sentient when we are conscious – and not so when in non-REM sleep.

Non-humans have different goals, needs and social structures than we do.  What is important to a chimpanzee is different from what is important to us, and also different from what is important to  bonobos or gorillas.  Importance focuses attention, the stage for sentience.

The importance of something may be measured by the resolution of the tokens (words) we used in language.  An example:  For the typical American frozen precipitation is just snow, sleet, freezing rain and that’s about it.  To a cross country skier there is blue wax snow, green wax snow and the dreaded klister snows, and stuff you can’t ski in.  To a Finn, there are forty different words to describe frozen precipitation.

To a  dolphin, the location of the members of its pod and the nearest school of its favorite fish are important.  What else a dolphin cares about is currently beyond human knowledge.  We know that their relationships with other members of the pod and play are important, but why, and in what ways?   The tokens of communication it uses are made up of sonar location information that isn’t very revealing to us.  Perhaps someone will program an AI to decode the sonar pictures that a dolphin uses to talk about its world and translate them to something that humans can understand.  That might help us share the “dolphin worldview”.  In any case, dolphin  society has the tools to communicate what is important within its own circle.  It is obvious we don’t well understand what they find important.  What is dolphin art or dolphin music?  Will we ever know, and if we do, can we ever appreciate it with them?  Perhaps, we have learned to appreciate whale song, although we don’t understand it.

When I reviewed Douglas Hofstadter‘s book I am a strange loop I discovered his unit of measure of sentience, the Hoenecker.  Doug coined the unit to designate sentience on a scale.  The Buddhist sees the value of life and sentience in a kind of binary scale – all animal life is to be cherished, from the lowly worm to humans without discrimination, while the vegetable world is unworthy of veneration.  Christians, on the other hand draw the binary sentience line crisply between humans – the image of God, and everything else.  Hofsteader sees an analog scale ranging through all life, depending on the complexity of the interaction between the organization and its environment.

Humans see the world through an anthropomorphic prism.  It is unfortunate  that we look at other life and presume that the reactions of other life can be measured on a human scale. When we look at our pets’ behavior it usually gets measured on human scales, not on the scale of the particular species.  Parrots are valued for their human speech, not their parrot communications.  Dogs are appreciated for the tricks, yet few humans understand the complex social structure of the pack.

Douglas Adams, in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe points out, with tongue in cheek,  that humans are the third most intelligent life on earth, coming after mice, who are actually the three dimensional representation of a higher multidimensional life form, and dolphins, who knew to leave earth before the Vogons demolished it, saying “So long, and thanks for all the fish!”, leaving the humans who ignored the dolphin’s warnings to their fate.   His humor makes the point that if we are not the most intelligent life form on the planet, our egos would obscure that fact from our consciousness.

At the risk of sounding heretical;  sentience can exist at different levels.  The sentience of beings is not only measured by the individual.  We can take the bee as an example.  The Hoenecker level of an individual bee is not very high, however the Honecker value of a hive is much higher than that of an individual bee.  The interaction between a bee and its environment is be reasonably sophisticated, compared to a slug or worm.  The honey bee’s brain, at 850,000 neurons allows a much greater resolution in its environment than the fruit fly with only 100,000,  but the combined brainpower of the eusocial hive up to 40,000 bees share a high level of communication that provides a combined behavior that might be compared with that of a mouse or snake.

This aspect of connected sentience can be applied to humanity.  Early humans shared information and decisions within a troop or tribe, as do chimpanzees and gorillas. As hominids left the forest canopy and inhabited the savanna and other environments, it became necessary to share information between tribes.  This required sharing technology (spears, fire etc.) between tribes to survive, and to promote neighborly peace.

Group sentience then extended beyond the 20 or so tribe members to others within the 30 km world circle of a tribe.  Daughters were sent for marriage to adjacent tribes, bringing skills, life patterns, genetic diversity and environmental understanding between tribes. Trading of tools, art and goods among tribes allowed all to improve their interaction with the environment.  The shared knowledge of tribes was greater than the sum each, increasing sentience within humanity.

Literacy further increased human sentience.  As the memory and knowledge of ancestors was shared across generations.  Forgotten lessons in a tribe, a country or across the world are rediscovered through reading.

we should recognize that it is sentience which is worth celebrating and valuing, not a physical body.  It is what we and all the other living creatures on earth DO with intention and attention that is important.

TED.com has the most illuminating presentation showing scientifically accurate animations of biological molecular engines.  You can watch now!

Remnant of SR 1572

Is time immutable, or is it subjective?  Philosophers have debated the nature of time, and whether it is intrinsically ordered and has tense.  I have devised a mind experiment to show that time depends not only on the observer, but the observer’s position, that before, after and simultaneous are subjective.

Visualize two observers on opposite sides of a town, one north, one south.   Both have clocks that were synchronized, and the observers moved slowly apart, so that relativistic effects on their clocks is insignificant, and flash detectors connected to the clocks to properly record the time of lightning flashes.

A storm comes up, and a lightning stroke hits in the middle of the town.  The two observer’s flash detectors record the time of the flash, and agree on the time.  The light from the flash travels to the flash detectors at the speed of light, producing a time delay of approximately 3.33 microseconds per kilometer.  Lets say the the observers are 6 km apart so the delay from the stroke until the observers detect it is 10 microseconds, and both of them agree on the time of the lightning stroke.

Lets now assume that there are two lightning strokes, one near the north observer and the other near the south observer, and from the “god’s eye view” (lets say, from the point of view of an astronaut on the moon) the north stroke took place at Time = T and the south stroke took place at Time = T + 5 us.  “God” would say that the north stroke took place first.  The north observer would agree, but would claim that the south stroke took place 25 microseconds before the south stroke.

The south observer would disagree, the south stroke took place 15 microseconds BEFORE the north stroke!

The speed of light is the limit of the rate of information flow in the universe, and is the basis for the visualization of the “time cone” where occurances at a distance from an observer are experienced at a later time than it would have been experienced by a proximate observer (more…)

Numbers are tough to learn as a child.  One, two – many.  That is how you first see the world, and as how lots of other mammals and birds see the world.  Then you learn the numbers and the idea of counting, then connecting the idea that you can count a large number of individual things which makes the number of things.  It might seem that we understand numbers as adults, but unfortunately we cannot easily deal with large numbers. Remember poor Carl Sagan with his “Billions and Billions” of stars, atoms, lightyears or whatever else he was talking about. – We had no clue how many suns, galaxies, base pairs, cells or light years he meant, just that it was a lot.

The goal of this site it to open minds. These are days of change, and the changes should be guided by fact and thoughtful consideration.

Please join in to illuminate the information found here. This is my site, and I want to hear opposing views. Two rules: All posts must be respectful of others and their opinions. No false witness – facts stated here must be true to the best of knowledge of the writer.

Reading Carl Sagan’s “The Dreams of Dragons” is like reading an ancient polymath’s writing – Bacon or Voltaire proposing their best insights from renaissance knowledge. Sagan draws on 1970’s knowledge of the human brain and consciousness to propose a broad vision for what was known from “recent” researches from the likes of Bronowski, Dement, Eccles, Gazzaniga, Gould, Leakey, Minsky, Sperry and Von Neumann. Many of their researches were cutting edge at the time, but have been overshadowed, modified or overturned by new work by themselves and others.

This is a seminal little book. Edwin A. Abbott‘s Flatlands, A Romance in Many Dimensions is what allows thousands of us to be able to visualize higher dimensions.
Flatlands is the story of a two dimensional person who has become aware of the existence of three dimensions.  He tells us, from a two dimensional perspective all about his world – its features, science, society, social classes, intriques.

What the story achieves within the first few chapters is to expose us three dimensional beings to what it means to live in a world constrained by the dimensions we inhabit. He lives in two and has learned about three.  We live in three dimensions universe and can be be aware of four or more additional dimensions by extrapolation.

For many, this is a difficult task – even with my hands free I cannot describe a four dimensional square, or tessaract.  Abbott has done this in an easy reading romp through our two dimensional friend’s world.

The world he describes is bizarre but understandable.  The first several chapters set up a framework to visualize higher dimensions, and these chapters should be required reading for every student planning to study solid geometry.

Abbott explores, in a matter of fact way, the social structure of his flat world.  Our flatlander friend’s description and opinions about his society also provide a framework for thinking about the society of our world – by extrapolation.  To understand this concept it is necessary to read the entire short book.  I am sure that his intention was to show that his flatlander’s class structure was just as arbitrary as Victorian society.

I read in Science Times in the New York Times today of some new discoveries about the “sexually deceptive” tongue orchids of Australia.

It is cool to find an inside joke about uncertainty, and everyone gets it! Check out this from icanhascheezburger.com!

I was discussing the basis of religion with a friend at a party. He is a serious theologian and a born again Christian. When the subject of existence of God came up, my friend said that the best argument was made by Saint Thomas Aquinas in his “The Five Ways”. I decided that it is best to go to the source and evaluate it.

St. Thomas was a pretty good logician, but the unscientific and erroneous beliefs held in his time makes many of his conclusions irrelevant now that we know the universe better. St. Thomas used the knowledge of the ancients, mainly that of of Aristotle to form his worldview. He did not have the benefit of modern science. The discoveries of DesCartes, Bacon, Newton, Einstein and other modern thinkers and experimenters had not been made.

One of St. Thomas’ most important theses in Summa Theologica is The Five Ways – considered by some as a conclusive proof of the existence of God. (more…)