From Bacteria to Bach and Back Again: Difference between revisions

This would have been a rich line of enquiry. But, despite the hat-tip to Hofstadter, the recursivity of consciousness barely comes up in Dennett’s book.

Dennett instead heads in the opposite direction.

Surely, this is to surrender before kick-off. It leaves a big question hovering an inch above the ground: An illusion on whom? Whatever magic is working to convert a Turing Machine into me deserves a better explanation than “don’t ask silly questions”.

“I” am my own personal narrative device. I build an apparently continuous, permanent, enduring, four-dimensional universe out of my sensory data, in which I can arrange “things” — including me — in a workable order. This universe, along with the everything in it — and me — is a [[metaphor]]: no better a representation of my brain state than a visual display is of a central processing unit.   

So when you toss out introspection, [[metaphor]], qualia, all those clunky [[metaphor]]s by which philosophers of yore thought about consciousness, you tosses out natural language, [[metaphor]]and meaning itself with them. That might be quite tempting, because these things are hard to jam into an eliminative materialist view, but it’s still an expensive trade.

This abstraction between data and language puts a back on the table a bifurcation between the “self” and the brain that generates it which Dennett has been very keen to banish. Isn’t this dualism? It might seem like it but, to co-opt another of Dennett’s coinages, it’s not greedy dualism. It doesn’t impose a supernatural creator or any other kind of sky-hook. It just observes something special is going on: if you want to go from binary code to rice pudding and income tax, you’ve got a bit more explaining to do.   

Dennett barely mentions language or [[metaphor]]. He spends a great deal of time talking about words and memes (in their technical sense: gene-like replicating units of cultural transmission, as opposed to cat videos on YouTube).

It is easy to overlook [[metaphor]] when reducing sentences to words and cultural experiences to abstract data replicators. A meme is a [[metaphor]]viewed from a mechanic’s perspective, with the casing removed: no user-serviceable parts on display.  

This is, par excellence, the machine’s eye view.

Like consciousness — like all layers of golden eggs — a [[metaphor]]’s magic evaporates when you examine it on a chopping board. A meme may be a free-floating integral unit, with fixed qualities, detached from any “carrier” and able to hop from mind to mind, but that’s not what’s interesting about it. Its continued existence depends on its fitness, and that depends on what its “carrier” does with it.

The thing that carriers do to recycle memes is to find meaning in them. But “find” is the wrong word, for it implies a meme is a kind of objet trouvée — pre-coded with meaning which the carrier ingests whole and which replicates itself.  

But that is neither how memes work nor how they mutate. They are dynamic collaborations between an external “text” and the home-made, four-dimensional universe the user brings to the conversation. The meaning of a meme subsists entirely in the user’s mental world: the very one {{author|Daniel Dennett}} says is an illusion, which is bounded by the user’s imperfect private language.

So, how do we recognise a [[metaphor]]? Common sense tells us “Love is a rose” is one — because its literal meaning is incoherent — but nothing in the text does. Someone lacking our “common sense”, or having a different vocabulary might take it literally. (A botanist, for example).

And how do we understand it? We can’t, without at least a conception of love, roses, and the features they have in common: (say) beauty, fragrance, ephemerality, freshness, delicacy, vulnerability and the pain they inflict if handled carelessly. Our own personal experience of the [[metaphor]] will be coloured by our personal experience of love and roses.  

Now, note two things: firstly, there is no canonical meaning of a [[metaphor]]. How could there be? It is a linguistic device which reconfigures away from a canonical meaning.  

Nor can the “coiner” be sure her intended meaning will be the one ultimately received. Steven Pinker claims in {{br|The Language Instinct}} that, with language, we can “shape events in each other’s brains with exquisite precision”. But all we can do is hope we get close, by coining [[metaphor]]s that will appeal to an experience we believe we share.  

Secondly — and this might be another way of saying the same thing — any language in which [[metaphor]] is a legitimate device is, by nature, ambiguous. It is impossible to communicate unequivocally. To derive any meaning from such a language — even the literal one — you have to interpret: create a [[metaphor]], and if you can think of more than one, arbitrarily select the best one. That is a creative act. A listener is partly responsible for creating meaning of a communication. What the listener takes away might be subtly or starkly different to what the speaker intended.  

In the vernacular, the ambiguity of the human language is not a bug but a feature: it comprises the human condition. To understand a [[metaphor]] is to bring to it one’s entire worldview.  

This stands in complete contrast to code. Code allows for the unequivocal execution of instructions and complete synchrony between transmitter and receiver. The text is all there is. There is no ambiguity, no scope for misunderstanding, no interpretation. There is no disembodied dualist realm where “meaning” floats free of the code itself. Code has no use for [[metaphor]]: there is no tense, no future, no past and no need to infer continuity or contiguity. There is no recursivity. Code does not require its user to create an imaginary world. This robs it of the infinite figurative richness of natural language, but that is the price of total certainty.  

This is not to say that machines could never acquire figurative natural language, but to date none have got a scheme which could even accommodate [[metaphor]], let alone use it.

How would a machine, whose code has no room for self, no tense, no past, no future, no ambiguity, no room for doubt, jump up to a language in which all of these things are not just possible but essential?

It is hard to see how. In the current environment, acquiring a natural language would offer a “flawless rule-follower” few adaptive benefits at all. The current environment favours reliable, flawless, rapid execution over poetic indolence: that is why we are even having this debate. When it comes to slow, indecisive, unpredictable but imaginative workers, it is a sellers’ market. Machines are displacing humans precisely because machines don’t do [[metaphor]].  

Maybe consciousness will turn out to be a blind evolutionary alley. Perhaps we will evolve into Turing machines, and not vice versa?  

This has been a long review. Let me finish it with a [[metaphor]]:

The modern world seems to be polarising. {{author|Daniel Dennett}}’s reductionist disposition is of a piece with that. But the conscious world is an ambiguous, ambivalent, imaginarium of a place. Alternative accounts of it and the things in it are just additional tools in the box you are free to use them or not as you wish. But if we hold on to them as alternatives we will not have to philosophise with a hammer when a soft cotton cloth was what was needed.

After all, who knows which tool will be fittest for tomorrow’s environment?