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  The ability to experience life, using  memory to flavor the experience with personal historical reference and emotion appears to give rise to sentience.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.

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.

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.

We all have a personal reality, shared throughout society, more or less.

In the early nineties The Boston Computer Museum and a magazine called The High Tech Times sold a derivative print of Hokusai‘s The Great Wave off Kanagawa called The Wave of the Future. The image begins at the left with the original Great Wave, and is color pixellated through the center, and another wave in wireframe is added to the right. An original Great Wave print hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, and in Claude Monet‘s house in Giverny, France. An original Wave of the Future print hangs opposite a print of the original in the staircase of my home. It appears that the full size digital rendition is out of print and unavailable from any source except a few copies in private hands. I was unable to find any indication of the artist’s identity or other information about this work.

The image contrasts the size and power of the wave with the skill and courage of the fishermen and with the strength of Mount Fuji in the background. The revised image continues this contrast of strength versus skill, in taking at first the woodblock print technology representing a natural scene, then pixelation as a computer monitor with very low resolution would produce, followed by a coarse wireframe model of a new larger wave than the original. Wireframe modelling is the underlying basis for 3d modeling as used in Pixar movies. The strength and power of the natural world is represented by the skill of the art of Kokausi, followed by the revised technological representations of his work – at first crudely and coarsely done, then refining to something that reflects or virtualizes nature. The Wave of the Future tends to bit pop art – adding color noise in the pixelation, and using a coarse wire frame in the added wave, but it made the point then, and can be seen with an additional perspective now. (more…)

Pythagoras showed that the golden ratio, phi ( φ) – 1.61814, used as the relationship of parts in a structure is amazingly pleasing. Physical dimensions in this relationship produce an order that is compelling and beautiful. The relationship of the successive chambers in a nautilus, the relative length of the tip of a finger to the tip to first knuckle, then to the length of the first two segments to the entire finger, then the hand, the relationship of successive vein length segments in a leaf all merge to the limit of φ . People know that symmetry is a characteristic of beauty, as you can see in my portrait, The Vitruvian Man by Leonardo da Vinci. φ is the “constant” of proportional symmetry in nature. Recognizing this constant and its derivation can bring order to a practical assessment of what makes things beautiful. (more…)

Throughout all of history, folks have tried to determine what it is that makes a person have consciousness. What is it that makes the light illuminating our mind with awareness of being?

No one has found a physical “thing” in a person that could be called a soul. In spite of the images in Harry Potter, Ghost and other works, no structure, vapor or essence has been identified as the soul or consciousness. I suggest that the reason is that the soul is an action, not a thing. In I am a Strange Loop, Doug Hofstadter makes a convincing case that human consciousness consists of a self referential strange loop.

I don’t think Doug completed his thesis. He left the nature of the strange loop as simply “something” within the cranium. The definition of a loop can be anything from a complete electrical circuit, anything round or oval that is closed or nearly closed, a curl or coil, or finally, a computer program sequence that repetitively executes a series of instructions. If one looks at a strange loop as an algorithm that recursively refers to both new input and itself, a clearer picture of what might be consciousness arises.

DesCartes said, cogito ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). He should have said “I think, and this makes me be”. Thinking is consciousness – while we are awake and aware the strange loop is the execution of thought. It depends on all the inputs from our senses, the state of our body and all the memories and associations or “tokens” we have developed through life.

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I waited with great anticipation for the release of Doug Hofstadter‘s new book, I am a Strange Loop. Doug has expanded on a central theme of his landmark book, Godel, Escher, Bach (known as GEB) to explore and expand his concept of the strange loop, and its implications on human consciousness. I call him Doug in this review because he has written both an enlightening and personal book that makes me feel that I have known him for years, in spite of only reading two of his books.
The book meets all my expectations and hopes. It is not to be approached without effort, as Doug makes reading a mental exercise – illustrating his points on self referential loopiness by wildly alternating between straight exposition, and restating others’ illustrative passages in barely recognizable forms. This strategy shows additional meanings by mapping classic themes to new symbols. He also masquerades new parables as quirky stories using a vocabulary of anagrams of the main points and names in his thesis.

These antics can fatigue your mind, especially because he seldom lets you know what he is up to until you are several pages along. You then have to go back to pick up the fourteen points that you have missed along the way. (more…)

I’m visiting Dublin in the emerald isle for the first time, realizing that this place was under British rule for 700 of the last 750 years. I can’t help but realize that colonial rule doesn’t end well. It isn’t good for the natives, and in the end it causes lots of problems for the colonial power. Northern Ireland is still a terrible sore spot for both countries.
The people of Ireland were poor and starving under British rule. In about sixty years of independance, they have made this a prosperous land. I expect that Ireland will be, over the next sixty years, a better trading partner with England than it ever was as a colony.

Only those few who got rich by the suffering of others made out well in the previous regime – at the cost of their souls.

Antonio Damasio has written two books in one: A tour of his field of active brain imaging science which provide new insights into the dynamic working of emotions and feelings, and a biography of Benedictus Spinoza who three hundred and fifty years ago published exquisite, but very disruptive insights into the nature of man.

The important thing is that Looking for Spinoza, in the end, brings its multiple theses together in a gratifying view of the human condition. It shows not only how much we now know about the function of feelings and emotions, and how they regulate the body. Damasio shows how exquisitely accurate Spinoza’s insights were.
At first, Looking for Spinoza seems a little disjointed – what do brain scans and symptomatic analysis of people with brain lesions have to do with seventeenth century philosophical writings? Well, it turns out, quite a bit. It seems that Spinoza, intuited the functional relationships between emotionally competitent stimuli, emotions and feelings that are only now are being rediscovered by neuroscience. (more…)