Being In The World is a new movie by Tao Ruspoli, and, as is common these days, there’s a website devoted to it.

This is not a review, of either the movie or the website. It’s just my reaction to some of the things said on the site, and you should definitely have a look at it, whether before or after reading the rest of this post.

The main message of the film is very humanistic and very positive. It’s about finding meaning and happiness in skilled activity, as well as in relation to other people. I’m all for it, what they have to say in this regard is not only very true but very important. That’s why I say that the film’s heart is in the right place, but as for its head…

The philosophy seems to come mainly from Hubert Dreyfus (@Wikipedia), a high profile critic of artificial intelligence from the 1960s to the present day. This is not place, nor do I have the resources, to deal with Dreyfus as he deserves. But the Wikipedia page on his best known book seems to me reasonably even-handed, if you read the whole thing.

The movie seems to consist largely of clips of “talking heads” and performers, edited together. Philosophers and what are called “masters” appear, the philosophers talking and the masters performing their particular skill, and also talking. Remember, I’ve seen only what’s on the website, and not all of that. The following quotes are from a luthier (guitar maker).

Why are guitars that aren’t handmade so bad?

Are they really? I understand that some people of a romantic disposition would like to think so, and I’m sure that most handmade guitars are better than most machine made ones, but consider this: machines are much cheaper to keep than people, and so instruments that are designed down to a target price are made using them, whereas those that are designed up to a target quality are made by hand, so a machine-made guitar is generally a cheap one. But here’s another thing: is it reasonable to suppose there has never been a bad handmade guitar? I’m sure there have been many, and I’d go so far as to suggest that, of all the guitars made in the world during any particular period, the best machine made ones will always be better than the worst handmade ones. And, as the technology continues to improve, the proportion of machine made guitars that are better than some handmade ones will continue to increase. In my opinion, if somebody insists that everything handmade is inherently superior to everything machine-made, all they’re telling you about is their own mind. “That’s the sort of person I am, you know, a born romantic!” (And I’m sure the fact that this luthier makes his guitars by hand has absolutely no bearing on what he says about machine made ones. )

When a table is made by hand, the food eaten off it tastes different.

Oh really? Well, for some people, if, as they roll the food around in their mouth, they’re also rolling around in their mind the idea that, yes, the table is handmade, as is all the furniture in this beautiful little old bistro in the heart of the old town—yes, the food will taste different, and probably better than anything they’ve eaten in ages! That’s psychology for you, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it, as long as you don’t start rolling your eyes and (wonderful, wo-onderful!) insisting on the mystical influence of the genuinely handmade table, as against the one that’s merely designed to look handmade but succeeds in convincing you. (And you’d get the same effect on your sense of taste, or better, without all the emoting, by practising mindfulness while eating.)

Or take a plate that’s machine made, and compare it to a plate made of clay that comes from the earth and was touched by human hands

Presumably the food off the latter plate tastes better, though he doesn’t actually say.

Why, because there’s dedication… The machine is distinct from the human in that… precisely by virtue of the fact that a man is not a machine.

OK, so it’s the dedication of the table and plate makers that makes the food taste better. Now, I’m quite prepared to believe the making of tables and plates and all kinds of things by hand is better than by machine in lots of different ways. An obvious one is to give presumably rewarding employment to someone, but there may be many more, I haven’t given that much thought, and maybe I should. But I don’t believe it makes the food taste better!

Now, if this was just an advert for handmade tables and plates, maybe it wouldn’t matter much. (Or maybe it would, and I should probably think about that!) But this film has the imprimatur of a well known philosopher, and it’s full of crap!

OK, I probably shouldn’t have said that, I’ve seen so little of it, and it’s hardly what you’d call a philosophical response, but it is an honest expression of my spontaneous reaction, so I’m going to leave it in, just like a good romantic should do. Authenticity, you know.

Anyway, if you haven’t already, go have a look at the site and see what you think. All these quotes come from the New Trailer. As I say, the main message is great, it’s just a pity they used mumbo jumbo to back it up. And this is not the place to mention Continental Philosophers!

By the way, I’ve yet to find any mention on the site of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (@Wikipedia), who said most of the positive things they have to say many years ago. (Later: used Google to do a site-specific search, still no mention.)

• A bright is a person who has a naturalistic worldview
• A bright’s worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements
• The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview

That’s from the website’s home page. Naturalism is “the doctrine that the world can be understood in scientific terms without recourse to spiritual or supernatural explanations” (@WordNetWeb).

One of the Enthusiastic Brights listed on the site is Daniel Dennett, but the organisers are not, unfortunately, philosophers. I contacted them to complain that they misuse the word “mystical”. They were good enough to ask me to explain what it means to me, and here’s my reply:

In your previous message you said “Being a Buddhist presents no problem to the Brights.” Presumably that’s because you understand that such an identification does not necessarily carry any implication regarding belief in “the supernatural”. You also mentioned other religious affiliations, so presumably we can broaden out the point to say that “religious” does not imply “non-naturalistic”. I would say that exactly the same consideration applies to “mystical”, and in support, here’s a quote from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

In the wide sense, mystical experiences occur within the religious traditions of at least Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Indian religions, Buddhism, and primal religions. In some of these traditions, the experiences are allegedly of a supersensory reality, such as God or Brahman (or, in a few Buddhist traditions, Nirvana, as a reality (See Takeuchi, 1983, pp. 8-9). [Missing parenthesis closure, presumably after "Nirvana", in the original.] Many Buddhist traditions, however, make no claim for an experience of a supersensory reality. Some cultivate instead an experience of “unconstructed awareness,” involving an awareness of the world on an absolutely or relatively non-conceptual level (see Griffiths, 1993). The unconstructed experience is thought to grant insight, such as into the impermanent nature of all things. Buddhists refer to an experience of tathata or the “thisness” of reality, accessible only by the absence of ordinary sense-perceptual cognition. These Buddhist experiences are sub sense-perceptual, and mystical, since thisness is claimed to be inaccessible to ordinary sense perception and the awareness of it to provide knowledge about the true nature of reality. (@Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Section 1.1 on that page. My emphasis.)

I hope you agree that there is nothing to contradict naturalism in “an awareness of the world on an absolutely or relatively non-conceptual level”. Even where deities are mentioned, such statements can be interpreted in a naturalistic fashion, such as Spinoza’s concept of God as reality-as-a-whole. That’s my own preference, not that I often think of it in these terms, and I certainly don’t worship it, but I do, as a practising Buddhist, seek to identify with it, and that, for me, is mysticism. Mystification is something else altogether, and I won’t bother to say anything about it, because I’m sure we see it the same way.

The brights net person replied saying that they were using “mystical” in the ordinary sense, not the philosophical one. Now, I’m not sure that there is an ordinary sense of “mystical”, besides the common but mistaken assumption that it must mean something like “mystificatory”, but this is not really about semantic squabbles.

Another, much shorter definition of “mysticism” that I ran across a while back but didn’t note the source for, is “the elevation of experience over the intellect”, and that works for me. This is, arguably, the main aim of meditation. Some people think it’s about stopping thinking, and that’s true as regards the result, but how the result is obtained is extremely important: ideally, at least, that state is reached effortlessly. But this is not about meditation technique either.

So what is it about? Well, at one level, it’s the usual, my main obsession (yes, I have a few) for some time now: is academic philosophy really what I want to be doing at this stage in my life? But people on the Buddhist/mystical/meditation path are supposed to become less selfish, and if there’s one thing that most or all of my on-line writings show, it’s my self-obsession (of which the one about studying is a sort-of sub-obsession).

This morning the sky here was a clear, light blue, and the sun was shining brightly on the snow all around. I took my camera, went out, and had a ball. I rediscovered the thing I used to like most about photography when I was deeply into it many years ago: the focusing. Of course, my current camera has autofocus, and that’s not what I’m talking about. I find the concentration required to get the best possible shot from a given situation takes me to another level, mentally. After I got back to the house and uploaded the pics to the computer, I discovered most were horribly over-exposed (I’d taken bad advice about compensating for the snow). But it didn’t matter very much: it was the activity of taking the pictures that mattered, not the results. I’d rediscovered photography—I even discovered things about the camera I never knew before, though I’ve owned it for a couple of years. And, for the first time in several years, I was sufficiently active in really cold weather to get really warm. (I used to do a lot of hill walking, until knee trouble got in the way.) I enjoyed it all immensely. And although some thinking was involved, I enjoyed it most when thinking least. Because that’s when I was most aware of the sun, the snow and the scenery. It was truly beautiful.

And when I was thinking, it wasn’t about myself. Because that’s one of the main things behind the academic activity: I want recognition for my ideas, and for my ability to come up with them. It’s all ego. That’s not to say I don’t find the ideas intrinsically fascinating, because I really do. But to do a proper academic job, you not only have to cultivate your own beautiful ideas, and show how good they are, you also have to shovel the shit of competing ideas, to show how bad they are, and that can be so tedious! (That’s a caricature, of course.) But it’s worth it, in some cases. If I was much younger, and looking for a career, the situation would be very different. To have an academic career, and all that goes with it, including being able to work on your own ideas, is a highly worthwhile aspiration. But that’s not me, I’m just too old now. And that’s not all: I want to spread my thinking as widely as I can, incorporating consciousness, information and mysticism, and I know how to do it, the outline is really quite clear. It involves Dennett plus empathy, simulation and imitation, memes as information, Blackmore, the self as memeplex and meditation to dissolve it. But I’d never get to work on more than one tiny corner of that at a time in academia.

Maybe, just maybe, the main issue here, though, is that the academic work involves too much thinking for me now. Yes, working on my own ideas involves thinking too, but not nearly as much as does the work of shovelling those of other people. So, instead of a PhD, and maybe also instead of completing the MSc, I want to write a non-scholarly, popular (I hope) book on my ideas. Yes, it’s still largely ego-motivated, and I might well drop the book as well after a while, but meanwhile, I think, it’s much closer to what I really want to do. And this post is ridiculously long, and I need to get some other things done today, so that’s where I’ll leave it for now.

References

• Griffiths, Paul J., 1993, “Pure Consciousness and Indian Buddhism,” in The Problem of Pure Consciousness, Mysticism and Philosophy, Robert Forman (ed.), New York and London: Oxford University Press, 121–159.
• Takeuchi, Yoshinori, 1983, The Heart of Buddhism, James W. Heisig (trans.), New York: Crossroad.

The last I heard about this, admittedly several years ago, was from a media studies academic, who insisted that no such link had ever been shown. However, Hurley cites many studies, including meta-studies (reviews of multiple studies), and the overall effect is very convincing. This bit particularly impressed me:

What is the magnitude of the effects of media violence? The effect sizes shown in the 1994 meta-analysis are larger than the effects of calcium intake on bone mass, lead exposure on IQ in children, or asbestos exposure to cancer… (p303)

So why isn’t this widely known? IMHO, the main reason is that there are connections between news and entertainment media businesses, and it’s not in their interests to publicise it. After all, what’s more important, to reduce the level of violence in society, or to maintain the profitability of big business? What do you think they think?

The main development yesterday was my realisation of the link between the MSc dissertation and what is now my main aim for a PhD project. So here’s my favourite expression of what I very much hope to do a PhD on:

It is tempting to suppose that some concept of information could serve eventually to unify mind, matter, and meaning in a single theory. Daniel Dennett and John Haugeland.

My thing always used to be consciousness, but having a much clearer view of the state of the art since starting the MSc course, I don’t believe there’s very much left to do there. Information is something else, and I have some very definite ideas, which remain intact even after studying Dretske and others last semester, and spending much of this week looking at philosophy of info on the web.

The link between the MSc dissertation (see the proposal) and the proposed PhD project is memes, as items of information. I’m now thinking that it might be possible to explain the difference between Blackmore’s and Dennett’s concepts of consciousness largely in memetic terms. That’s basically because Blackmore, unlike Dennett, provides a convincing account of how memes get going in the first place (though she didn’t make the link between that story and consciousness). That unfortunately reduces the emphasis on meditation (probably, I think), but you can’t study everything!

If that works out as I hope and expect it will, it’ll make a great jumping off point for the PhD project. The timing isn’t so great, though, because as yet I’ve no idea who might be willing and able to supervise it, so I’ll probably have to take a year out, and start the PhD in September 2011, which seems a long, long way away! But of course I don’t have to wait until then to get working on it…

[Later: I should maybe make it clear that my commitment to this plan isn't absolute, but any alternative would have to be very good to compete. Short of sheer fantasy, I can hardly think of anything better!]

Neuroscience, culture, empathy, eastern philosophy, etc, etc. All in about seven minutes. Amazing.

The heart-stopping thing about the new-born is that, from minute one, there is somebody there. Anyone who bends over the cot and gazes at it is being gazed back at. (1995, p99)

Dennett responds:

As an observation about how we human observers instinctively react to eye contact, this is right on target, but it thereby shows how easily we can be misled.

Last night I told a friend, a mother of three, about this and she was horrified—understandably so, I’d say. Viewing and treating a very young child as a “little person” is essential for their socialisation, but Dennett doesn’t seem to care about that sort of thing. In his quest for objectivity, he misses what’s absolutely crucial in the development of a mind: intersubjectivity. He is fixated by cognition to the virtual exclusion of affect. For him folk psychology is all theory and no simulation. That the attribution of personality could be based on the latter rather than the former seems inconceivable to him.

I’d like to pursue the idea that Dennett’s efforts to eliminate subjectivity and intersubjectivity from his own thinking were what caused him to miss their significance in what he’s thinking about: the normal human mind. Given the progress recently made by others, however (such as Vittorio Gallese (Wikipedia)), this issue seems to take on rather a historical tinge: Dennett as dinosaur. Hmmm, yes, I think so, one of the big ones, but…

Daniel Dennett, Kinds of Minds, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1996.
Elaine Morgan, The Descent of the Child: Human Evolution from a New Perspective, Oxford University Press, 1995.

Pat says we don’t know that the “hard problem” is really any more hard than many others (p50-52), and “we don’t know how consciousness is produced in brains” (p51). I know that it’s a pseudo-problem, and that consciousness is not produced.

(Added October 2009: Now that I’m an apprentice academic I shouldn’t say things like that, but what the hell…)

Paul says the brain working at a low level and psychology at a high level are “not two things embracing one another, they’re actually just one thing, looked at from two different points of view.” (p59)

So near and yet so far. . . If he’d just put this together with the fact that the brain is objective while consciousness is subjective, he’d have it. He might even be right that work on the “easy problems” will lead to this understanding, though I’d say it needn’t necessarily do so.

Pat: “. . . there really are these qualitative experiences. . . ” (p60)

But it depends what you mean by “really.” For years I insisted that consciousness was real, despite being subjective, and I’m still tempted sometimes to use that kind of language. But “really” really needs to be qualified. Naive realism just doesn’t cut it in such a subtle and complex context.

In Susan Blackmore’s Conversations on Consciousness [Bla05], Daniel Dennett says that a philosophical zombie “could cry at sad movies, be thrilled by joyous sunsets, enjoy ice cream. . . and yet not be conscious at all.” (p81)

This might seem a trivial point, but it’s a typical example of Dennett’s thinking, or at least his writing. To be thrilled, or to enjoy, of course, one has to be conscious. He should have said “appear to be thrilled” and “act as if enjoying.” These concepts are inter/subjective, even if Dennett thinks they should not be. Of course this is probably just a slip, but there are many other such slips in his writing, which some people, such as myself, find quite off-putting. If these are genuine mistakes, then they’re uncharacteristically sloppy, and if not, then this is the philosophical equivalent of sleight-of-hand, and intellectually dishonest.

Moving on to actual philosophical issues…

Here is how it [the intentional stance] works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then. . . you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs. [Den87, p17]

I believe what we usually do when trying to guess what someone else in a given situation might do is to say to ourselves “what would I do?” Rationality will often play a part in that, but projection of the self, identification with the other, is psychologically much more basic.

It could be argued that my story reduces to Dennett’s: that, with sufficient qualification in the way of beliefs, desires and context generally, we can all be treated as rational agents, and that is what we do with each other, in principle. The answer to that is that my view is more practical, on a more appropriate level, closer to the actual action, and has greater explanatory power.

Dennett’s zimbo “would think it was conscious, even if it wasn’t.” [Den91, p311] And Dennett thinks “Nobody is conscious—not in the systematically mysterious way that supports such doctrines as epiphenomenalism!” [Den91, p406]

There’s a very easy way to circumnavigate all such difficulties: consider the consciousness of any entity to be entirely a matter of opinion. Of course we want to say, if others consider us not to be conscious, that they’re wrong, but why? Isn’t it just because they might thus fail to consider our feelings? That’s a legitimate concern, but they’d not be factually wrong—if that’s wrong, then it’s morally so. Inter/subjectively, people are conscious, and so is anything else to which we find it useful to attribute consciousness, i.e. with which we might identify. Objectively, the word has no meaning, therefore nor does the question as to whether any entity is conscious.

Some might want to put “or desirable” after “useful” in the previous paragraph, but I would argue that the attribution of consciousness is only legitimate where it is genuinely useful to do so—that the concept is “naturally” instrumental, so usefulness is validity, and desirability is insufficient. Thus, attribution is not merely subjective, but intersubjective, because, as it concerns identification, we only find it useful where there are genuine similarities between attributor and attributee. Some opinions are more useful (and more natural) than others. See Intersubjective panpsychism.

“It is tempting to suppose that some concept of information could serve eventually to unify mind, matter, and meaning in a single theory.” [DH87] (emphasis in the original)

I do agree with this and in fact I think it’s quite easily achieved. The concept of physical information is now well established: it is the form or structure of matter, so every material thing is considered to embody its own description. So if we add what I call “the formal stance” to Dennett’s array of stances, in which we focus on form, i.e. information, rather than substance, i.e. rather than taking the physical stance, we get physical information. The common concept of information is intentional, being always about something, but it is always encoded in physical information, and what’s encoded is in the eye of the decoder, thus intentional information is inter/subjective. Meaning is basically intentional information. Mind is the user/processor/creator of intentional information. It could be considered a virtual processor, running on the hardware of the brain. More on this under Mind, matter, meaning, and information.

[Bla05] Susan Blackmore. Conversations on Consciousness. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005.

[Den87] Daniel C. Dennett. The Intentional Stance. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987.

[Den91] Daniel C. Dennett. Consciousness Explained. Allen Lane, London, 1991.

[DH87] Daniel C. Dennett and John Haugeland. Intentionality. In Gregory [Gre87].

[Gre87] Richard L. Gregory, editor. The Oxford Companion to the Mind. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987.