SO WHAT DO YOU THINK?

AEON magazine is part of my online world, so I check it often.  My biggest problem is that their questions are good ones but the answers and the ordinary essays make me impatient.  There’s so much they don’t seem to see.  Maybe they just don’t have the luxury of time to read that I have.

Nigel Warburton, NOT that red-headed journalist on "House of Cards."

This morning at 3AM, waked up by the cats shifting around which is usual and part of our routine, I went to Aeon and was surprised to see a message from Al Gore.  Yup.  THAT Al Gore.   The question was (generated by Nigel Warburton, the in-house “popular” philosopher) “What is consciousness for?”  I was an early commenter and rather blown away by the idea that my name was close to Gore’s.

Warburton’s blog is http://www.nigelwarburton.typepad.com

Gore’s website is https://www.algore.com/

At the same time, the issue of animal euthanasia came up, framed as the fault of puppy mills, and my email soon got notifications that comments were mounting up.  Pretty predictable.  I commented, but it was useless.  People frame everything in terms of their own experience and since many of the Aeon readers are affluent and educated, there were plenty of tales about thousands of dollars (really!) spent on pet store kittens who were fatally ill.  (I get my cats mostly by accident when they discover the cat flap in the kitchen.)  I got the impression that sick kittens interest “thinkers” far more than the nature of being human. 

Rescuing or capturing?

So I’m not bothering with this question anymore.  When they address Tim’s awareness of what’s happening in the Mediterranean to those made vulnerable by desperate migration (the short answer is that mothers and children are being separated, trafficked, and killed), then I’ll think about sad pet stories again.

https://medium.com/@timbarrus/pimps-and-traffickers-b41be4353048#.5liy6h9ja

I went back to the Al Gore question.  Since no email notifications about it had arrived, I assumed that there were few comments.  Now — 10AM Mountain Standard Time in the US — I see that there are 131 fellow commenters.  I’ll read them.

https://aeon.co/conversations/what-is-consciousness-for?clear_cache=%2Fresponses%2F2864#response_2864

I’m pursuing the issue in several contexts:

1.  That it is an emergent capacity of the human brain related to its role as the dashboard, sorting and remembering qualia (which some propose is the basis of memory, the index, re Proust) and manipulating them as metaphors which underlies all language, written or spoken or just “thought.”

2.  That its evolutionary value lies in the enabling of relationships and the formation of groups that share values and capacities.  The evidence in discussion is the jump to humans with bulging pre-frontal forebrains at the same time as art appears, evidence of larger groups, and what might be a pre-cursor of religion, pre-institutional, like burial.  We are just now beginning to shift emphasis to group, because of empathy, which is consciousness of others.  Groups can be painfully global, full of suffering Others.

At the same time, if one accepts the word “qualia”— which is a little slippery for “five-sense” people — then the door opens to the aesthetics of the transition to metaphor and elaboration which seems to have given today’s human the survival advantage.

3.  Many people seem to think that only what is conscious, which they define in terms of speech and literacy, has any value or existence.  In fact, the brain and its connections throughout the body are always in operation so long as you are alive.  Breathing, heart beat, digestion, and so on, which become a general “mood” report, then subconscious thought and THEN consciousness.  Maybe people are reluctant to lose the line between animals, who can achieve empathy but not verbal communication, and humans.

Will Fraker

When I get to the end of the comments, they have increased to 134, but now I notice the time stamps and realize that comments from months ago, still relevant, have been added by the AEON staff.  In fact, some of them are FROM the AEON staff.  Will Fraker, for instance, is the Social Media and Community Manager for Aeon, so what does it mean when he “likes” my comments?  Does it carry more or less weight, and why should I care anyway?  When I google him, I get Vimeo vids on YouTube.  They are about rock climbing, accompanied by the metaphor of MAC’s new operating systems, Yosemite and El Capitan.  I find them relevant to this discussion.  Qualia.

The other James T. Kirk

I’m thinking that this may be a consciousness project, with AEON trying to find out who’s “out there” and to put us into conscious conversation with each other so that suddenly and briefly I see what Al Gore thinks about this issue — not whether he’s right or wrong, but how he investigates the issue.  (I don’t consider consciousness a “problem.”)  And it may be a surprise to the readership to hear what an old woman in a small high-prairie town has to say.  I only ran across two other females in this morning’s comments so far.  And Gore and I were the only obvious Americans, unless one counts James T. Kirk.  Maybe Gore came along to wake Americans out of their media trance, all of it personal introspection.

Sir John Templeton

Though I sneeze at the tendency to be Brit-centric and class-limited, I certainly welcome this project.  It makes me much happier than the constant pursuit of money over at medium.com and their fantasy that the perfect tech platform will trigger a cascade of saleable content.  That will accumulate over time, but by then someone will invent something totally different and all the writers will migrate over to it, the same as when the “Montana” trope wore out, they all went to Portland.

Most of this kind of conversation is invisible to people who aren’t in big cities or on university campuses.  This is a merchandizing society and it runs along the narrow-gauge railroad of venture capital.  Somehow it is the unpaid commenters who are the fuel for the paid platform managers, though considerable venture capital must have been needed for startup and even for now.

On investigating elements of some issue for posts on my blog, I often discover interesting but semi-relevant things.  One here is that Al Gore was involved in starting up a news network that failed and was sold to Al Jazeera, which I follow.  Or did.  It’s closing down at the end of April.  Kenner’s Question:  “What does this mean?”  Well, that takes us back to consciousness, which Gore defines in terms of Free Will.  But how free is it when the capitalists control the money and money is the key to hard core reality?

YOU DIRTY RAT!

The white rat released the hooded rat in the tube.

Late Fifties “white rat” experiments were sneered at in the romantic Sixties where people insisted on free will.   But even hippies had to admit that a stimulus to a living creature led to a response of some kind.  Skinner and his notorious boxes in which a cat could learn how to trip the latch have by now led to far more elaborate experiments in which rats had to cooperate with each other like Air Force guys down a missile silo, both tripping switches together.  Or, even more intriguingly, rats would actually throw the lever to free their fellow rat from a transparent tube.

http://phys.org/news/2014-01-social-empathetic-pro-social-behavior-rats.html

Stimulus/response plus conditioning have, since those early days, been joined by a host of ingenious experiments that teach chimps to talk, cause you to buy things you don’t need, and twist your mind politically.

At first the conditioning was pretty obvious:  ring a bell when you feed the dog and pretty soon the dog slobbers when you ring the bell, even if there’s no food.  But then the SR conditioning went into the subconscious.  So much of the mind is subconscious.  FAR more than is conscious.  SR conditioning works even at the level of the knob at the top of the spine that is the earliest precursor of brain.  But it’s not conscious.  “Why do I do what I would not do?” asked Saint Paul.  (I shudder at the possibilities of just what that might have been.)  Why do I go on a diet and then find myself standing in front of the refrigerator holding half a ham sandwich without any memory of how I got there.  SR conditioning.

Reference Ranges for Blood Tests

We can see operant conditioning on an fMRI.  Neurons love to travel on the paths they know, a repertoire of connectome patterns.   And they’re not necessarily conscious.  Anyway, neurons aside, much of consciousness and thought is at least influenced and possibly the product of hormone messaging.  We know enough about testosterone to make jokes and enough about street drugs to realize how much they change behavior, but not everyone thinks about the hormones their own bodies necessarily and constantly make until they get out of whack.  Luckily, we can monitor them with frequent blood draws and chemical assays and compensate with med antagonists.  Of course, it’s a drag to test blood all the time, even if it’s just a blood glucose test at home.  If you’re rural, you’ll have to drive.  Often.  Calibration of meds is now a given of many treatments.

Certainly organs can be taught schedules and expectations:  how do you think your stomach knows to growl when you miss a meal?  But we think of the molecules themselves as being inert, just passive substances.  Now we begin to realize that our situations change our responses which change our secretions which affect our minds but not CONSCIOUSLY.  Fertile and pregnant women have such drastic changes in their body chemicals that their resulting behavior becomes obvious to themselves and others.  In the best of cases, after the baby is born or after the woman has aged past menstruation, everything returns to normal -- whatever that is -- but not always.

ANY dimension necessary for function can go rogue and threaten survival.

Maintain homeostasis!

The “solutions” of the body’s dispersal of molecules in fluid in turn affect organs.  So in finding out whether or not metformin has given me a susceptibility to lactic acidosis -- which is a change in the acid/alkali balance of the fluids of the body -- the Ph.D. nurse practitioner gave me a lot of information about kidneys reacting to the base number.  I listened closely because when I did my clinical pastoral education, a young girl was brought in who died from drinking too much lemonade on a hot day -- the acid level of her blood was beyond the level that would allow function.  They keep telling us this is the same thing happening in the world’s oceans, which are becoming too acid to allow the formation of lime-based shells on the little marine creatures.

One’s acid/alkali balance is managed unconsciously but voluntary behavior can overcome it, causing us to do harmful things.  Is making the world’s oceans more acid a voluntary behavior or an involuntary behavior?   The medical/social research people tell us that only thirty per cent or so of patients are compliant when they are told what they need to do to say healthy:  pills, diet, exercise, both public and intimate behavior, may be involved.  Why is that?  The unconscious reaches up from our internal sea and grabs us.  We are conditioned to eat our neighbor’s pie at a church social.  Want to talk about smoking?  How about a steamy Saturday night?

It goes even deeper than that.  We creatures are really colonies of one-celled animals who cooperate to keep the complex process that is “us” surviving in the world.  And now that we can detect what goes on in a cell, each little blob turns out to have preferences and prejudices about what it will take in and what it will kick out.  Fold the proteins wrong, introduce strange molecules, alter the temperature -- you might or might not survive as a whole process.  Human planetary society is the same thing only larger.  This is called “fractal,” when one little part’s pattern is repeated by the whole.

A fractal pattern

So that implies that the behavior of the people of the planet is about thirty per cent of what it ought to be.  Is there a difference between the white powder of cocaine and the white powder of sucrose or the white powder of processed wheat flour?  The Ph.D. nurse practitioner said that the warning label on metformin, which is very definite about the danger of lactic acidosis, is so scary that it makes people obsess.  Therefore the medical community tries to resist testing people’s blood.  In fact, they’d just as soon keep the problem secret because it is “very rare.”  It’s such a nuisance to have to give the test.   At least this person filled me in on what conditions are likely to trigger the condition, mostly failure to hydrate or a suddenly high demand on muscles.  You know -- cramps.

It turns out that research devised to understand rat behavior is often more useful and interesting than research on their internal organs after they are cut open.  And since death is not involved in behavior research, much of what is learned will transfer to people when experimenting on them.  It is not reassuring.  You know the one about the person who thinks he is shocking a disobedient volunteer and takes the level of supposed shock to a life-threatening intensity?  You know the one about the person sitting in a room with others when the room begins to fill with smoke?  The others know it is an experiment and pretend nothing is happening -- so the person being tested just sits there as well.

But now the experiments have gone online.  Here are two to ponder.  
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/29/internet-human-experiment-facebook-dating-sites

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/06/facebook_unethical_experiment_it_made_news_feeds_happier_or_sadder_to_manipulate.html

They don’t call it experimenting.  They call it “tweaking the algorithm.”  Such funny business can make a person paranoid.  Pretty soon we think there’s an “evil cabal” planning all this stuff.  But the real danger is the conditioning that forms all by itself, the habitual behaviors we trigger over and over until they are part of our lives, though we never really intended either them or their consequences.  The laws of convergence, emergence, synergy and the like are not human-planned events -- they are the realities of interacting forces in the physical world.

No one planned ebola, but now we’re faced with the need for some kind of monitoring and counter-meds, just as we were with the World Flu epidemic and the present World HIV  -- and global warming.  The trouble is that so much is unconscious -- but our consciousnesses can only deal with so much at one time. 

So where is your free will now, Mr. Romance?  But, hey, I'm not ready for the return of John Calvin yet.  If religion is a way of guiding one's behavior so as to maintain homeostasis for one's self, one's society and one's planet, which religion is it?  Science?  Tao?  Some hybrid?  Start from scratch?