Archive: Knowledge v2 - 2008 + Intro

Intro musings.

It was thinking about this at school that gave me my first experience of the SRH. Reading it back it is actually a good illustration of how the SRH steps outside the formal systems of Godel and Tarski et al. and that their proofs are based upon something that we experience as a fundamental part of our lives and enquiries.

Hofstadter's explains the whole point much clearer in his use of the "Drawing Hands" in G.E.B. - that of course M.C. Escher can't be ignored when we see the drawing hands - they cannot have drawn themselves!

It is amazing how close this comes to the standard insight for God (that the world can't have made itself) and it amazes me how Positivists like Dawkins haven't run into this problem and quite how they would/have handled it. Even D.Dennet (the intellectual hard man of the God-busters team) seems oblivious to the problem in "Consciousness Explained". And actually even Hofstadter seems oddly oblivious - even despite his G.E.B. itself being a selfconscious multilevelled loop - he still fixates on the brain as being somehow "outside" the loops. God is the only thing that qualifies for being outside, but sadly human minds mostly can't grasp that because we immediately try to produce an image of the thing which by definition is outside the image. That means that almost everyone - scientists and faithful fall short of an accurate respect of God, which is, that we are always finite in and infinite world - at least recursively in the sense that any body of belief or any image implies a larger picture for its very existence/consistency/meaning.

Just to clarify the current view in this blog: the SRH is not searching for a fixed realm of transcendence, a place beyond all others, but simply the recursive realisation that any attitude to the world contains the seeds of its own undoing and thereby points to greater realities that cannot b constructed within the system. Essentially Hegelian dialectics without the fixed ontological Spirit underpinning them, or the direction of History which I don't believe in either see the PsychoSocioEcoPolitical posts.

Another parallel between Dennet and Hofstadter is that in both the books referred to here they take the attitude that they are opening up an incomplete work which they hope others may complete. What is it about self and consciousness that humbles even the experts and makes them lose confidence. I'm not so humble I'm gonna smash it... but my humility instead lies before G-d: I'm just changing the name back to its more traditional signification (which is no signification if you understand the ancient way the referring worked).

Knowledge

A problem with Vision.

This is the standard picture of how the brain "sees". But there is a big problem with it.

The man is looking at a ladybird. There being a ladybird physically present is not enough for him to see it however. Light from the ladybird must enter his eye and stimulation must travel from his eye to his brain before he sees it. It seems that brain stimulation is the key ingredient here. If his eye nerves were cut, or a screen was held up to stop the light (experiment I played in the pub a lot), so that no messages ever made it to his brain then the man would not see the ladybird. The diagram illustrates all this by drawing the real ladybird, and then various other ladybirds in the brain corresponding to the component qualities that the brain picks out like movement, shape, shade and colour.

If we imagine for a moment that we are that man in the picture then we have a tricky problem. To us we just see a single ladybird but in the diagram which ladybird do we see? Do we see the real ladybird or is it the brain stimulation that gives us vision? If we think we see the real ladybird how do we know that we are not in some Matrix (like in the film), where the brain stimulation comes from a computer and not an eye looking at a real ladybird. If we think our vision comes from brain stimulation then how does the brain know that the stimulation means a ladybird since there is no window in the brain for it to have a quick look at the real ladybird to check it has got its interpretation right. If we think that the brain-stimulation actually is the ladybird, and we don't actually see the real ladybird only the brain stimulation, then we never know what a real ladybird is.

I have begun to realise that the whole process from real ladybird to light entering the eye to brain stimulation, all of this is the ladybird. The ladybird in this diagram does not exist only outside the brain nor only inside the brain - the man in the picture needs the whole thing together for him to see anything. It is an interesting reflection that in the diagram his "consciousness" is in no one place but everywhere and nowhere. Consciousness, or awareness, does not have a particular location, it does not manifest itself in any material location, and is not the product of any particular matter (say brain tissue or soul), nor is it the product of particular structures of these matters. Our experience of the world exists nowhere, because the somewhere is created within that very experience! Time to stop thinking out "me" being at some particular place and time, I "am" that particular place and time!

[In SRH terms the scientific view of material consciousness has bust outside itself here - but it has no machinery to construct anything outside itself so for scientists esp. Dawkins they are stuck with NULL]

No Objectivity

[This parallels Hofstadter's use of the Drawing Hands but in a much more complex, and so less clear, scenario. Essentially we can step outside the image.]

Having got that hopefully cleared up there is a second dimension to this. The reason for the initial confusion lies in the person who drew the picture, we might call him the researcher. Because the researcher can see both the ladybird and the patients brain at the same time all in plan view and can trace the movement of light and then electricity from ladybird to brain he is inclined to separate the elements of the process. However like a flowchart this is just a spatial representation of the dimensionless process of vision. If the researcher takes a different perspective during his observations he will notice that he is in the process of vision himself and it is his own process of vision which is determining the spatial characteristics and features of what he is observing and of what he drew above, like shapes and colours. Thus his own vision is intrinsically involved with the experiment, indeed it is an essential tool and part of the experiment. It follows then that the amount the researcher can discover about vision is limited because research depends upon vision itself. Maybe blind scientists would make better vision scientists then. It would be very interesting to "see" what tools they designed to investigate it and to see whether they were analogous to those used by sighted scientists. Quite how blind scientists would understand what they were investigating would be interesting also!

A perspective on Knowledge in general

Of course vision is not the only sense, but if we consider the whole package of senses and mind together we are left with the same problem. The scientist relies initially on this package to interact with his world, to inspire him and to live within his world. Like chicken and egg, or a telescope looking at itself, or a painting being made of itself we are always left without fixed external and objective foundations to our quest for knowledge. You cannot make something out of nothing so all knowledge must depends upon something prior. There cannot be a starting principal, a final principal, a theory of everything or a limit to knowledge. Knowledge like a rotating cloud in the sky is without fixed shape or direction. No idea or group of ideas can ever claim to be more than a perspective, they can certainly never claim to be founded upon something solid and irrefutable. Our insistence, or habit, of fixing our attitudes to the world leads us to overlook the fluidity and lightness of reality.

Absolute

If there were an absolute what would it have to be like. To be absolute it would have to be true in all times and all places. Thus it would have to be true of a red apple as much as a green pear. The absolute cannot come in any colour, shape or thing then because it wouldn't be true of other colours, shapes or things. If there is an absolute then it has no characteristics, indeed it is absolute precisely because it in present in all characteristics (and by virtue of which it is no particular characteristic). Thus if you are looking at a red apple you are looking at the absolute as much as if you are looking at a green pear. If you are looking at a sunny day as much as if you are looking at a rainy night. If you are looking at a happy life as much as if you are looking at a sad life or death. Actually this is what people call God. It is also what people call Buddha. It is the key to a religious life to gain a relationship with this absolute, and the benefit is enormous because it means that all the situations that life can throw at you take on the appearance of sameness in their difference. Religious people who can find this faith experience great peace and security in life and in death. It is clear that where (discursive) knowledge is concerned with the particular shapes and colours of things, faith cannot be grasped by knowledge and forms a higher level of awareness than knowledge. The sections above in this article were to identify the limits of knowledge to make way for faith.

Nature

Nature is almost exactly the same concept as absolute in this web article. It is that way of looking at the absolute which one might call originary. It is nature which first inspires our minds into awareness of knowledge. We can describe the world in as much detail as we like, and believe, once we have drawn pictures of everything in the world, that it is now known. But, we can never escape the fact that it still exists as mightily as it did when we sat down to draw it, and our drawings are only of meaning because they are of it. Any scientist who thinks the world can be absolutely explained is ignoring their total dependency upon the world that they are explaining. It is the power of the world to inspire the mind and fill it with awe. It is the creator of beauty. It is the energy that drives both the universe and life, which leads animals into conflict and struggle and which drives humans into appreciation and respect. It is a very hard thing to explain, at best only ever alluded to, maybe in the sparkle of morning due, a bird setting off from a tree, a star in the evening sky, a breath of fresh wind carry the scent of distant meadows to ones senses.