Man's Search For Meaning

Not every conflict is necessarily neurotic; some amount of conflict is normal and healthy. In a similar sense suffering is not always a pathological phenomenon; rather than being a symptom of neurosis, suffering may well be a human achievement, especially if the suffering grows out of existential frustration. I would strictly deny that one's search for a meaning to his existence, or even his doubt of it, in every case is derived from, or results in, any disease. Existential frustration is in itself neither pathological nor pathogenic. A man's concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease.

There is much wisdom in the words of Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."

[...] mental health is based on a  certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to  accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what  one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental  well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about  challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, "homeostasis," i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. What man needs is not homeostasis but what I call "noödynamics," i.e., the existential dynamics in a polar field of tension where one pole is represented by a meaning that is to be fulfilled and the other pole by the man who has to fulfill it. And one should not think that  this holds true only for normal conditions; in neurotic individuals, it is even more valid. If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together. So if therapists wish to foster their patients' mental health, they should not be afraid to create a sound amount of tension through a reorientation toward the meaning of one's life.

The existential vacuum is a widespread phenomenon of the twentieth century. This is understandable; it may be due to a twofold loss which man has had to undergo since he became a truly human being. At the beginning of human history, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal's behavior is embedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like Paradise, is closed to man forever; man has to make choices. In addition to this, however, man has suffered another loss in his more recent development inasmuch as the traditions which buttressed his behavior are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).

The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom. [...] there are various masks and guises under which the existential vacuum appears. Sometimes the frustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated  for by a will to power, including the most primitive form of the will to power, the will to money. In other cases, the place of frustrated will to meaning is taken by the will to pleasure. That is why existential frustration often eventuates in sexual compensation. We can observe in such cases that the sexual libido becomes rampant in the existential vacuum.

What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a  given moment. To put the question in general terms  would be comparable to the question posed to a chess  champion: "Tell me, Master, what is the best move in  the world?" There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one's  opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life.  Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in  life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.

By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the  world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. I have termed this  constitutive characteristic "the self-transcendence of  human existence." It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself - be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself - by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love - the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.

[...] there is a danger inherent in the teaching of man's "nothingbutness," the theory that man is nothing but the result of biological, psychological and sociological conditions, or the product of heredity and environment. Such a view of man makes a neurotic believe what he is prone to believe anyway, namely, that he is the pawn and victim of outer influences or inner circumstances. This neurotic fatalism is fostered and strengthened by a psychotherapy which denies that man is free. To be sure, a human being is a finite thing, and his freedom is restricted. It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions.

Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.

I speak of a tragic optimism, that is, an optimism in the face of tragedy and in view of the human potential which at its best always allows for: (1) turning suffering into a human achievement and accomplishment; (2) deriving from guilt the opportunity to change oneself for the better; and (3) deriving from life's transitoriness an incentive to take responsible action.

[...] happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to "be happy." Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy [...] This need for a reason is similar in another specifically human phenomenon - laughter. If you want anyone to laugh you have to provide him with a reason, e.g., you have to tell him a joke. In no way is it possible to evoke real laughter by urging him, or having him urge himself, to laugh.

As to the causation of the feeling of meaninglessness, one may say, albeit in an oversimplifying vein, that people have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning. To be sure, some do not even have the means.

The third aspect of the tragic triad concerns death. But it concerns life as well, for at any time each of the moments of which life consists is dying, and that moment will never recur. And yet is not this transitoriness a reminder that challenges us to make the best possible use of each moment of our lives? It certainly is, and hence my imperative: Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.

In fact, the opportunities to act properly, the potentialities to fulfill a meaning, are affected by the irreversibility of our lives. But also the potentialities alone are so affected. For as soon as we have used an opportunity and have actualized a potential meaning, we have done so once and for all. We have rescued it into the past wherein it has been safely delivered and deposited. In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured. To be sure, people tend to see only the stubble fields of transitoriness but overlook and forget the full granaries of the past into which they have brought the harvest of their lives: the deeds done, the loves loved, and last but not least, the sufferings they have gone through with courage and dignity.

From this one may see that there is no reason to pity old people. Instead, young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that. Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past - the potentialities they have actualized, the meanings they have fulfilled, the values they have realized - and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past.

Viktor E. Frankl - Man's Search For Meaning

Diminishing Returns

[...] the human bias to keep doing more of what worked so well in the past leads to doing more of what failed even as results turn negative. The dynamic in play is diminishing returns: the yield on the policy that worked so splendidly at first diminishes with time.

Credit offers a cogent real-world example. When credit becomes available in a credit-starved economy, it generates a rapid, sustained expansion as credit-worthy borrowers borrow and spend on new productive capacity, consumer goods, housing, etc., all of which further drives expansion. But once credit has saturated the entire economy, the only pool of borrowers left are uncreditworthy (i.e. at risk of default), and the only projects left unfunded by credit are laden with risk. Either way, credit expansion stops: either lenders prudently refuse to issue credit to risky borrowers and ventures, and credit expansion grinds to a halt, or they foolishly lend money to borrowers and ventures which predictably default, triggering a credit crisis that brings imprudent lenders to their knees and triggers cascading defaults as declining asset prices push marginal borrowers into bankruptcy. Doing more of what was successful [...] -- expanding credit -- is now doing more of what's failed. Expanding credit in a credit-saturated economy only sets up cascading defaults.

The human response to the failure of what worked so well is disbelief: the problem, we reckon, is we didn't do enough the first time. So the answer to the failure of extending more credit is to extend even more credit and lower lending standards so anyone who can fog a mirror can get a loan. At this point, diminishing returns become negative returns: doing more of what's failed is now not just unhelpful--it's actively destructive. Cramming more credit down the throats of risky borrowers and ventures guarantees a full-blown credit crisis when the defaults start taking down lenders and crushing asset prices that were dependent on credit expanding into eternity. -- Charles Hugh Smith

And even more maps

It's like trying to find the treasure in the pirate's map.

Maps and more maps

A Chinese Tale

Once upon a time, there was a man who was riding in a horse drawn carriage and traveling to go take care of some affairs; and in the carriage there was also a very big suitcase. He told the driver to of the carriage to drive non-stop and the horse ran extremely fast. 

Along the road, there was an old man who saw them and asked, “Sir, you seem anxious, where do you need to go?” 

The man in the carriage then replied in a loud voice, “I need to go to the state of Chu.” The old man heard and laughing he smiled and said, “You are going the wrong way. The state of Chu is in the south, how come you are going to to the north?” 

“That’s alright,” The man in the carriage then said, “Can you not see? My horse runs very fast.” 

“Your horse is great, but your path is incorrect.” 

“It’s no problem, my carriage is new, it was made just last month.” 

“Your carriage is brand new, but this is not the road one takes to get to Chu.” 

“Old Uncle, you don’t know,” and the man in the carriage pointed to the suitcase in the back and said, “In that suitcase there’s alot of money. No matter how long the road is, I am not afraid.” 

“You have lots of money, but do not forget, The direction which you are going is wrong. I can see, you should go back the direction which you came from.” 

The man in the carriage heard this and irritated said, “I have already been traveling for ten days, how can you tell me to go back from where I came?” He then pointed at the carriage driver and said, “Take a look, he is very young, and he drives very well, you needn’t worry. Goodbye!” 

And then he told the driver to drive forward, and the horse ran even faster.

-- Chinese Tale

Don't think of an elephant (2004)

Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world. As a result, they shape the goals we seek, the plans we make, the way we act, and what counts as a good or bad outcome of our actions. In politics our frames shape our social policies and the institutions we form to carry out policies. To change our frames is to change all of this. Reframing is social change. [...] Reframing is changing the way the public sees the world. It is changing what counts as common sense. Because language acti­vates frames, new language is required for new frames. Thinking differently requires speaking differently. Pg .1

When I teach the study of framing at Berkeley, in Cognitive Science 101, the first thing I do is I give my students an exercise. The exercise is: Don't think of an elephant! Whatever you do, do not think of an elephant. I've never found a student who is able to do this. Every word, like elephant, evokes a frame, which can be an image or other kinds of knowledge: Elephants are large, have floppy ears and a trunk, are associated with circuses, and so on. The word is defined relative to that frame. When we negate a frame, we evoke the frame. [...]  This gives us a basic principle of framing, for when you are arguing against the other side: Do not use their language. Their language picks out a frame-and it won't be the frame you want. Pg .3

Framing is about getting language that fits your worldview. It is not just language. The ideas are primary -- and the language carries those ideas, evokes those ideas. Pg.4

The myths began with the Enlightenment, and the first one goes like this: The truth will set us fee. If we just tell people the facts, since people are basically rational beings, they'll all reach the right conclusions. But we know from cognitive science that people do not think like that. People think in frames. The strict father and nurturing parent frames each force a certain logic. To be accepted, the truth must fit people's frames. If the facts do not fit a frame, the frame stays and the facts bounce of. [...] Concepts are not things that can be changed just by someone telling us a fact. We may be presented with facts, but for us to make sense of them, they have to fit what is already in the synapses of the brain. Otherwise facts go in and then they go right back out. They are not heard, or they are not accepted as facts, or they mystify us: Why would anyone have said that? Then we label the fact as irrational, crazy, or stupid. That's what happens when progressives just "confront conservatives with the facts." It has little or no effect, unless the conservatives have a frame that makes sense of the facts. Pg.16,17

There is another myth that also comes from the Enlightenment, and it goes like this. It is irrational to go against your self-interest, and therefore a normal person, who is rational, reasons on the basis of self-interest. Modem economic theory and foreign policy are set up on the basis of that assumption. [...] This view of rationality comes into Democratic politics in a very important way. It is assumed that voters will vote their self­ interest. Democrats are shocked or puzzled when voters do not vote their self-interest. [...] People do not necessarily vote in their self-interest. They vote their identity. They vote their values. They vote for who they identify with. They may identify with their self-interest. That can happen. It is not that people never care about their self-interest. But they vote their identity. And if their identity fits their self­ interest, they will vote for that. It is important to understand this point. It is a serious mistake to assume that people are simply always voting in their self-interest. Pg.18,19

Orwellian language points to weakness -- Orwellian weakness. When you hear Orwellian language, note where it is, because it is a guide to where they are vulnerable. They do not use it every where. It is very important to notice this, and use their weakness to your advantage.

A very good example relates to the environment. The right's language man is Frank Luntz, who puts out big books of language guidelines for conservatives only, which are used as training manuals for all conservative candidates, as well as lawyers, judges, and other public speakers -- even high school students who want to be conservative public figures. In these books, Luntz tells you what language to use. For example, in last year's edition, the section on global warming says that science seems increasingly to be going against the conservative position. However, conservatives can counter the science using right language. People who support environmentalist positions like certain words. They like the words healthy, clean, and safe because these words fit frames that describe what the environment means to them. Therefore, Luntz says, use the words healthy, clean, and safe whenever possible, even when talking about coal plants or nuclear power plants. It is this kind of Orwellian weakness that causes a piece of legislation that actually increases pollution to be called the Clear Skies Act. Pg.22,23

But Luntz is about much more than language. He recognizes that the right use of language starts with ideas -- with the right framing of the issues, a framing that reflects a consistent conservative moral perspective, what we have called strict father morality. Luntz's book is not just about language. For each issue, he explains what the conservative reasoning is, what the progressive reasoning is, and how the progressive arguments can be best attacked from a conservative perspective. He is clear: Ideas come first. 

One of the major mistakes liberals make is that they think they have all the ideas they need. They think that all they lack is media access. Or maybe some magic bullet phrases, like partial­ birth abortion.

When you think you just lack words, what you really lack are ideas. Ideas come in the form of frames. When the frames are there, the words come readily. There's a way you can tell when you lack the right frames. There's a phenomenon you have probably noticed. A conservative on TV uses two words, like tax relief. And the progressive has to go into a paragraph-long discussion of his own view. The conservative can appeal to an established frame, that taxation is an affliction or burden, which allows for the two-word phrase tax relief. But there is no established frame on the other side. You can talk about it, but it takes some doing because there is no established frame, no fixed idea already out there.

In cognitive science there is a name for this phenomenon. It's called hypocognition -- the lack of the ideas you need, the lack of a relatively simple fixed frame that can be evoked by a word or two. Pg.23,24

It is a general finding about frames that if a strongly held frame doesn't fit the facts, the facts will be ignored and the frame will be kept. Pg.37

When conservatives speak of the "defense of marriage," liberals are baffled. After all, no individual's marriage is being threatened. It's just that more marriages are being allowed. But conservatives see the strict father family, and with it their political values, is under attack. They are right. This is a serious matter for their politics and moral values as a whole. Even civil unions are threatening, since they create families that cannot be traditional strict father families. Pg.48

We all have to put our ideas out there so that candidates can readily refer to them. For example, when there is a discussion in your office, church, or other group, there is a simple response for someone who says, "I don't think gays should be able to marry. Do you?" The response is: "I believe in equal rights, period. I don't think the state should be in the business of telling people who they can or can't marry. Marriage is about love and commitment, and denying lovers the right to marry is a violation of human dignity."  The media does not have to accept the right wing's frames. What can a reporter ask besides "Do you support gay marriage?" Try this: "Do you think the government should tell people who they can and can't marry?" Or "Do you think the freedom to marry who you want to is a matter of equal rights under the law?" Or "Do you see marriage as the realization of love in a lifetime commitment?" Or "Does it benefit society when two people who are in love want to make a public lifetime commitment to each other?" Reframing is everybody's job. Especially reporters'. [...] It is a duty of reporters not to accept this situation and simply use those rightwing frames that have come to seem natural. And it is the special duty of reporters to study framing and to learn to see through politically motivated frames, even if they have come to be accepted as everyday and commonplace. Pg.50,51

Most Islamic would-be martyrs not only share these beliefs but have also grown up in a culture of despair; they have nothing to lose, Eliminate such poverty and you eliminate the breeding ground for most terrorists -- though the September 11 terrorists were relatively well-to-do. When the Bush administration speaks of eliminating terror, it does not appear to be talking about eliminating cultures of despair and the social conditions that lead one to want to give up his life to martyrdom. Princeton Lyman of the Aspen Institute has made an important proposal -- that the worldwide antiterrorist coalition being formed should also address the causal real-world conditions. Country by country, the conditions (both material and political) leading to despair need to be addressed, with a worldwide commitment to ending them. It should be done because it is a necessary part of addressing the causes of terrorism-and because it is right! The coalition being formed should be made into a long-term global institution for this purpose. Pg.60

The idealistic claim of the Bush administration is they intend to wipe out all terrorism. What is not mentioned is that the United States has systematically promoted a terrorism of its own and has trained terrorists, from the contras to the mujahideen, the Honduran death squads, and the Indonesian military. Will the U.S. government stop training terrorists? Of course not. It will deny that it does so. Is this duplicity? Not in terms of conservative morality and its view of good versus evil and "lesser evils." If the administration's discourse offends us, we have a moral obligation to change public discourse! [Ghandi:] Be the change you want! If the United States wants terror to end, the United States must end its own contribution to terror. And we must also end terror sponsored not against the West but against others.  Pg.66

One of the central metaphors in our foreign policy is that a nation is a person. It is used hundreds of times a day, every time the nation of Iraq is conceptualized in terms of a single person, Saddam Hussein. The war, we are told, is not being waged against the Iraqi people, but only against this one person. Ordinary American citizens are using this metaphor when they say things like "Saddam is a tyrant. He must be stopped." What the metaphor hides, of course, is that the three thousand bombs to be dropped in the first two days will not be dropped on that one person. They will kill many thousands of people hidden by the metaphor, people that we are, according to the metaphor, not going to war against.  

The nation as a person metaphor is pervasive, powerful, and part of an elaborate metaphor system. It is part of an international community metaphor, in which there are friendly nations, hostile nations, rogue states, and so on. This metaphor comes with a notion of the national interest: Just as it is in the interest of a person to be healthy and strong, so it is in the interest of a nation-person to be economically healthy and militarily strong. That is what is meant by the "national interest." Pg.69

One of the most frequent uses of the nation as a person metaphor comes in the almost daily attempts to justify the war metaphorically as a "just war." The basic idea of a just war uses the nation as a person metaphor, plus two narratives that have the structure of classical fairy tales: the self-defense story and the rescue story.

In each story there is a hero, a crime, a victim, and a villain. In the self-defense story the hero and the victim are the same. In both stories the villain is inherently evil and irrational: The hero can't reason with the villain; he has to fight him and defeat or kill him. In both, the victim must be innocent and beyond reproach. In both, there is an initial crime by the villain, and the hero balances the moral books by defeating him. If all the parties are nation-persons, then self-defense and rescue stories become forms of a just war for the hero-nation. Pg.71

Framing is normal. Every sentence we say is framed in some way. When we say what we believe, we are using frames that we think are relatively accurate. When a conservative uses the "tax relief' frame, chances are that he or she really believes that taxation is an

affliction. However, frames can also be used manipulatively. The use, for example, of "Clear Skies Act" to name an act that increases air pollution is a manipulative frame. And it's used to cover up a weakness that conservatives have, namely that the public doesn't like legislation that increases air pollution, and so they give it a name that conveys the opposite frame. That's pure manipulation.

Spin is the manipulative use of a frame. Spin is used when something embarrassing has happened or has been said, and it's an attempt to put an innocent frame on it-that is, to make the embarrassing occurrence sound normal or good. 

Propaganda is another manipulative use of framing. Propaganda is an attempt to get the public to adopt a frame that is not true and is known not to be true, for the purpose of gaining or maintaining political control. Pg.100

If you remember nothing else about framing, remember this: Once your frame is accepted into the discourse, everything you say is just common sense. Why? Because that's what common sense is: reasoning within a commonplace, accepted frame. Pg.115

Never answer a question framed from your opponent's point of view. Always reframe the question to fit your values and your frames. This may make you uncomfortable, since normal discourse styles require you to directly answer questions posed. That is a trap. Practice changing frames. Pg.116

George Lakoff - Don't think of an elephant

Bateson - Mind & Nature (1979)

[N]othing has meaning except it be seen as in some context. [...] Without context, words and actions have no meaning at all. [...] It is the context that fixes the meaning. (p.14ff)

There is a parallel confusion in the teaching of language that has never been straightened out. Professional linguists nowadays may know what's what, but children in school are still taught nonsense. They are told that a "noun" is the "name of a person, place, or thing," that a "verb" is "an action word," and so on. That is, they are taught at a tender age that the way to define something is by what it supposedly is in itself not by its relation to other things. Most of us can remember being told that a noun is "the name of a person, place, or thing." And we can remember the utter boredom of parsing or analyzing sentences. Today all that should be changed. Children could be told that a noun is a word having a certain relationship to a predicate. A verb has a certain relation to a noun, its subject. And so on. Relationship could be used as basis for definition, and any child could then see that there is something wrong with the sentence " 'Go' is a verb." (p.17)

Science sometimes improves hypotheses and sometimes disproves them. But proof would be another matter and perhaps never occurs except in the realms of totally abstract tautology. We can sometimes say that if such and such abstract suppositions or postulates are given, then such and such must follow absolutely. But the truth about what can be perceived or arrived at by induction from perception is something else again.

Let us say that truth would mean a precise correspondence between our description and what we describe or between our total network of abstractions and deductions and some total understanding of the outside world . Truth in this sense is not obtainable. And even if we ignore the barriers of coding , the circumstance that our description will be in words or figures or pictures but that what we describe is going to be in flesh and blood and action-even disregarding that hurdle of translation, we shall never be able to claim final knowledge of anything whatsoever. (p.27)

Knowledge at any given moment will be a function of the thresholds of our available means of perception. The invention of the microscope or the telescope or of means of measuring time to the fraction of nanosecond or weighing quantities of matter to millionths of a gram all such improved devices of perception will disclose what was utterly unpredictable from the levels of perception that we could achieve before that discovery. [...] Science probes; it does not prove (p.29)

All experience is subjective. (p.31)

The division of the perceived Universe into parts and wholes is convenient and may be necessary but no necessity determines how it shall be done [...] Explanation must always grow out of description, but the description from which it grows will always necessarily contain arbitrary characteristics. (p.38)

If I throw a stone at a glass window, I shall, under appropriate circumstances, break or crack the glass in a star-shaped pattern. If my stone hits the glass as fast as a bullet, it is possible that it will detach from the glass a neat conical plug called a cone of percussion. If my stone is too slow and too small, I may fail to break the glass at all. Prediction and control will be quite possible at this level. I can easily make sure which of three results (the star, the percussion cone, or no breakage) I shall achieve, provided I avoid marginal strengths of throw.

But within the conditions which produce the star-shaped break, it will be impossible to predict or control the pathways and the positions of the arms of the star. 

Curiously enough , the more precise my laboratory methods, the more unpredictable the events will become. If I use the most homogeneous glass available, polish its surface to the most exact optical flatness, and control the motion of my stone as precisely as possible, ensuring an almost precisely vertical impact on the surface of the glass, all my efforts will only make the events more impossible to predict.

If, on the other hand, I scratch the surface of the glass or use a piece of glass that is already cracked (which would be cheating), I shall be able to make some approximate predictions. For some reason (unknown to me), the break in the glass will run parallel to the scratch and about 1/100 of an inch to the side, so that the scratch mark will appear on only one side of the break. Beyond the end of the scratch, the break will veer off unpredictably.

Under tension, a chain will break at its weakest link. That much is predictable. What is difficult is to identify the weakest link before it breaks. The generic we can know, but the specific eludes us. Some chains are designed to break at a certain tension and at a certain link. But a good chain is homogeneous, and no prediction is possible. And because we cannot know which link is weakest, we cannot know precisely how much tension will be needed to break the chain. (p.41)

[G]radual growth in a population, whether of automobiles or of people, has no perceptible effect upon a transportation system until suddenly the threshold of tolerance is passed and the traffic jams. The changing of one variable exposes a critical value of the other.

A pure description would include all the facts (i.e., all the effective differences) immanent in the phenomena to be described but would indicate no kind of connection among these phenomena that might make them more understandable. For example, a film with sound and perhaps recordings of smell and other sense data might constitute a complete or sufficient description of what happened in front of a battery of cameras at a certain time. But that film will do little to connect the events shown on the screen one with another and will not by itself furnish any explanation. On the other hand, an explanation can be total without being descriptive. "God made everything there is" is totally explanatory but does not tell you anything about any of the things or their relations.

In science, these two types of organization of data (description and explanation) are connected by what is technically called tautology. Examples of tautology range from the simplest case, the assertion that "If P is true, then P is true," to such elaborate structures as the geometry of Euclid, where "If the axioms and postulates are true, then Pythagoras' theorem is true. " Another example would be the axioms, definitions, postulates, and theorems of Von Neumann's Theory of Games. In such an aggregate of postulates and axioms and theorems, it is of course not claimed that any of the axioms or theorems is in any sense "true" independently or true in the outside world.

Indeed , Von Neumann, in his famous book, expressly points out the differences between his tautological world and the more complex world of human relations . All that is claimed is that if the axioms be such and such and the postulates such and such, then the theorems will be so and so. In other words , all that the tautology affords is connections between propositions. The creator of the tautology stakes his reputation on the validity of these connections. 

Tautology contains no information whatsoever, and explanation (the mapping of description onto tautology) contains only the information that was present in the description. The "mapping" asserts implicitly that the links which hold the tautology together correspond to relations which obtain in the description. Description, on the other hand, contains information but no logic and no explanation. For some reason, human beings enormously value this combining of ways of organizing information or material. [...] An explanation has to provide something more than a description provides and , in the end , an explanation appeals to a tautology.

Now, an explanation is a mapping of the pieces of a description onto a tautology, and an explanation becomes acceptable to the degree that you are willing and able to accept the links of the tautology. If the links are "self-evident" (i.e., if they seem undoubtable to the self that is you), then the explanation built on that tautology is satisfactory to you. (p.81ff)

Information consists of differences that make a difference. If I call attention to the difference between the chalk and a piece of cheese, you will be affected by that difference, perhaps avoiding the eating of the chalk, perhaps tasting it to verify my claim. Its noncheese nature has become an effective difference. But a million other differences-positive and negative, internal and external to the chalk remain latent and ineffective.

Bishop Berkeley was right, at least in asserting that what happens in the forest is meaningless if he is not there to be affected by it.

We are discussing a world of meaning, a world some of whose details and differences, big and small, in some parts of that world, get represented in relations between other parts of that total world . A change in my neurons or in yours must represent that change in the forest, that falling of that tree. But not the physical event, only the idea of the physical event. And the idea has no location in space or time---Only perhaps in an idea of space or time. (p.99)

The Ethical Method

"[...] it’s remarkably common these days for people to insist that their values are objective truths, and values that differ from theirs objective falsehoods. That’s a very appealing sort of nonsense, but it’s still nonsense. Consider the claim often made by such people that if values are subjective, that would make all values, no matter how repugnant, equal to one another. Equal in what sense? Why, equal in value—and of course there the entire claim falls to pieces, because “equal in value” invites the question already noted, “according to whose values?” If a given set of values is repugnant to you, then pointing out that someone else thinks differently about those values doesn’t make them less repugnant to you. All it means is that if you want to talk other people into sharing those values, you have to offer good reasons, and not simply insist at the top of your lungs that you’re right and they’re wrong.

To say that values depend on the properties of perceiving subjects rather than perceived objects does not mean that values are wholly arbitrary, after all. It’s possible to compare different values to one another, and to decide that one set of values is better than another. In point of fact, people do this all the time, just as they compare different claims of fact to one another and decide that one is more accurate than another. The scientific method itself is simply a relatively rigorous way to handle this latter task: if fact X is true, then fact Y would also be true; is it? In the same way, though contemporary industrial culture tends to pay far too little attention to this, there’s an ethical method that works along the same lines: if value X is good, then value Y would also be good; is it? Again, we do this sort of thing all the time.

Consider, for example, why it is that most people nowadays reject the racist claim that some arbitrarily defined assortment of ethnicities — say, "the white race" — is superior to all others, and ought to have rights and privileges that are denied to everyone else. One reason why such claims are rejected is that they conflict with other values, such as fairness and justice, that most people consider to be important; another is that the history of racial intolerance shows that people who hold the values associated with racism are much more likely than others to engage in activities, such as herding their neighbors into concentration camps, which most people find morally repugnant. That’s the ethical method in practice." - John Michael Greer

Truth had never been a priority

All those gut feelings, right or wrong, that had kept the breed alive on the Pleistocene savannah—and they were wrong, so much of the time. False negatives, false positives, the moral algebra of fat men pushed in front of onrushing trolleys. The strident emotional belief that children made you happy, even when all the data pointed to misery. The high-amplitude fear of sharks and dark-skinned snipers who would never kill you; indifference to all the toxins and pesticides that could. The mind was so rotten with misrepresentation that in some cases it literally had to be damaged before it could make a truly rational decision—and should some brain-lesioned mother abandon her baby in a burning house in order to save two strangers from the same fire, the rest of the world would be more likely to call her a monster than laud the rationality of her lifeboat ethics. Hell, rationality itself—the exalted Human ability to reason—hadn’t evolved in the pursuit of truth but simply to win arguments, to gain control: to bend others, by means logical or sophistic, to your will. Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart. Peter Watts - Echopraxia

Invisible Tigers

[...] fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain, and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger, and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy, he thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and a tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations — and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren’t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid. Even here in the twenty-first century you can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now, we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us. 

 And it came to pass that certain people figured out how to use that. They painted their faces or they wore funny hats, they shook their rattles and waved their crosses and they said, Yes, there are tigers in the grass, there are faces in the sky, and they will be very angry if you do not obey their commandments. You must make offerings to appease them, you must bring grain and gold and altar boys for our delectation or they will strike you down and send you to the Awful Place. And people believed them by the billions, because after all, they could see the invisible tigers. Peter Watts - Echopraxia

Now, consciousness. That's a fun thing, isn't it? Product of an arms race between predators and prey. If you watch a cat creeping up on a mouse, you'll be able to impute to the cat intentions that are most easily explained by the cat having a theory of mind concerning the mouse – an internal simulation of the mouse's likely behavior when it notices the predator. Which way to run, for example. And the cat will use its theory of mind to optimize its attack strategy. Meanwhile, prey species that are complex enough to have a theory of mind are at a defensive advantage if they can anticipate a predator's actions. Eventually this very mammalian arms race gave us a species of social ape that used its theory of mind to facilitate signaling – so the tribe could work collectively – and then reflexively, to simulate the individual's own inner states. Put the two things together, signaling and introspective simulation, and you've got human-level consciousness, with language thrown in as a bonus – signaling that transmits information about internal states, not just crude signals such as 'predator here' or 'food there.' -- Charles Stross, Accelerando

Magic

Philosophy in The Flesh II

the mind is embodied, not in any trivial sense (e.g., the "wetware" of the brain runs the software of the mind), but in the deep sense that our conceptual systems and our capacity for thought are shaped by the nature of our brains, our bodies, and our bodily interactions. There is no mind separate from and independent of the body, nor are there thoughts that have an existence independent of bodies and brains. (pg.265)

the assertion that empirical knowledge of our moral cognition can have no normative implications, is based on a false dichotomy between facts and values. Owen Flanagan (Cl, 1991) has demonstrated the relevance of moral psychology for moral theory by showing that no morality can be adequate if it is inconsistent with what we know about moral development, emotions, gender differences, and self-identity. Johnson (Cl, 1993) argues that facts about human conceptualization and reasoning place normative constraints on what we can morally demand of ourselves and others. For example, any view of morality that involves absolute moral principles defined by literal concepts cannot be cognitively realistic for human beings, whose moral categories often involve radial structure, conceptual metaphor, and metonymy. Damasio's (B1, 1994) work with brain damaged patients who have lost the ability to perform certain kinds of practical reasoning because their emotional experience is impaired suggests that moral deliberation cannot be the product of an allegedly pure reason. Moral deliberation always requires emotional monitoring and an interplay of affect and reason. (pg.326)

Philosophical theories, like all theories, do not and cannot spring full-blown from some alleged pure, transcendent reason. Instead, philosophy is built up with the conceptual and inferential resources of a culture, even though it may transform and creatively extend those resources. These cognitive resources are not arbitrary or merely culturally constructed. They depend on the nature of our embodied experience, which includes both the constraints set by our bodily makeup and those imposed by the environments we inhabit. (pg.341)

It is natural to ask questions about the nature of things. As Aristotle said at the beginning of the Metaphysics, "All men by nature desire to know." We desire to know, for practical reasons, if the mushroom we are about to eat is poisonous. We desire to know, for ethical reasons, if there is some natural difference between men and women. We desire to know, for purely intellectual reasons, whether the universe will come to an end someday. 

The very project of seeking knowledge assumes that the world makes systematic sense, that it is not just a random collection of individual phenomena. It is not just determined by the capricious whims of gods who are fickle, mischievous, and cruel, but, rather, it is a "cosmos," a rationally structured whole. In other words, to seek knowledge, we must assume that the world is not absurd. It also assumes that we can gain knowledge of the world. 

These two assumptions together define what has come down to us as a commonplace folk theory that we take for granted any time we seek any kind of systematic knowledge:

THE FOLK THEORY OF THE INTELLIGIBILITY OF THE WORLD

The world makes systematic sense, and we can gain knowledge of it.

Thus it is natural for us to ask what things are like and why they behave the way they do. Moreover, we seek general knowledge, knowledge about kinds of things, not just particular knowledge that pertains only to a single entity. We want to know whether this mushroom is edible, but our knowledge of it depends on our knowledge of the general kind of mushroom it is. We want to know whether men and women are somehow fundamentally different and not just whether this man differs in certain particular ways from this woman. And we assume that such questions have answers, that if we can formulate such a question, there is a fact of the matter that answers it. In other words, much of the time we assume two particular folk theories about things in general:

THE FOLK THEORY OF GENERAL KINDS

Every particular thing is a kind of thing.

THE FOLK THEORY OF ESSENCES

Every entity has an "essence" or "nature," that is, a collection of properties that makes it the kind of thing it is and that is the causal source of its natural behavior.

The Folk Theory of Essences is metaphorical in two ways. First, the very idea of an essence is based on physical properties that compose the basis of everyday categorization: substance and form. For example, a tree is made of wood and has a form that includes a trunk, branches, leaves, roots, bark, and so on. It also has a pattern of change (another kind of form) in which the tree grows from seed to sapling to mature specimen. These are the physical bases on which we categorize an object as a tree: substance, form, and pattern of change. Where an essence is seen as a collection of physical properties, it is seen as one or more of these things. In the case of abstract essences, these three physical properties become source domains for metaphors of essence: Essence As Substance, Essence As Form, and Essence As Pattern Of Change. 

The second way in which the concept of essence is metaphorical concerns its role as a causal source. The intuition is this: If a tree is made of wood, it will burn. Because it has a trunk and stands erect, it can fall over. The idea is that the natural behavior of a tree is a causal consequence of the properties that make it the kind of thing it is: The tree burns because it is made of wood. We have the same intuition about abstract essences, like a person's character. Honest people will tell the truth. Their essence as honest is the causal source of their truth telling. In such cases, we are clearly in the domain of the metaphorical, because we are attributing to a person a metaphorical substance called "character," which has causal powers. An immediate consequence of these two folk theories is the foundational assumption behind all philosophical metaphysics:

THE FOUNDATIONAL ASSUMPTION OF METAPHYSICS

Kinds exist and are defined by essences.

It is important to see how a natural desire to know leads so easily to metaphysical speculation, for as soon as we believe that kinds exist, what we shall call the metaphysical impulse takes over. We can apply the Folk Theory of Essences to kinds themselves, from which it follows that there are kinds of kinds and that these kinds of kinds themselves are defined by essences. This iteration is a fateful step; it is the first step toward metaphysics in Western philosophy.

This metaphysical impulse lies at the heart not only of Western philosophy but of all Western science, leading physicists to seek a general field theory, or as it has come to he known, "a theory of everything." In biology, there is a similar quest for a theory of life. Such theories seek to find some essence that characterizes the behavior of things in some general domain of study: physical phenomena, life, the mind, language, and so on. Questions like "What is the mind?" or "What is life?" presuppose the meaningfulness of such a quest for general knowledge. 

Whether we like it or not, we are all metaphysicians. We do assume that there is a nature of things, and we are led by the metaphysical impulse to seek knowledge at higher and higher levels, defined by ever more general categories of things. Once we have started on this search for higher and higher categories and essences, there are three possible alternatives:

1. The world may not he systematically organized, or we may not he able to know it, above a certain level of generalization, which might even he relatively low in the hierarchy of categories. In other words, there may be a limit to the systematicity of the world or to its intelligibility.
2. The hierarchy of categories may go on indefinitely, with no level at which an all-inclusive category exists. In this case, the world might be systematic, but not completely intelligible. The process of gaining knowledge of the world would be an infinite, and hence uncompletable, task. 
3. The iteration up the hierarchy of categories and essences might terminate with an all-inclusive category, whose essence would explain the nature of all things. Only in this case would the world he totally intelligible, at least in principle. 

This third alternative is what we call:

THE FOLK THEORY OF THE ALL-INCLUSIVE CATEGORY

There is a category of all things that exist.

From the Folk Theory of Essences, it follows that this all-inclusive category has an essence, and from the Folk Theory of Intelligibility, it follows that we can at least in principle gain knowledge of that essence. This all-inclusive category is called Being, and its essence is called the Essence of Being.

This third alternative, that the world is completely systematic and knowable, is the most hopeful, least skeptical attitude that someone concerned with seeking general knowledge can take. However, such optimism brings with it a substantial ontological presupposition, that there is a category of Being, and that, since it must have an essence, there is an Essence of Being. As we will see below, there is a profound problem that arises from this ultimate metaphysical impulse, as defined by these four commonplace folk theories. They lead us to ask a set of questions that may not be meaningful. And they give us a view of the world and of knowledge that may he misleading.

To see why this is so, we propose to apply the tools of embodied cognitive science to the emergence of explicit metaphysical thinking in the Western philosophical tradition. The foundational metaphysical projects of Western philosophy were formulated by Aristotle. In early pre-Socratic philosophy, there are hints of this way of thinking about nature that, in Aristotle, finally and explicitly become the quest for an understanding of Being as the ultimate form of knowledge. This sets the stage both for Western science and for theological interpretations of God as Ultimate Being. (pgs 346-9)

George Lakoff & Mark Johnson - Philosophy in The Flesh (1999)

Philosophy in the Flesh I

[...] philosophers have asked whether time in itself is bounded or unbounded; whether it is continuous or divisible; whether it flows; whether the passage of time is the same for everyone and everything everywhere; whether time is directional and if so whether its direction is a consequence of change, causation, or possibility; whether there can be time without change; whether it loops back on itself; and so on. How we happen to conceptualize time has been seen as irrelevant to such questions. It is assumed that philosophical inquiry can proceed without knowing or caring about the details of how human beings happen to conceptualize what is being studied. (pg.135)

[...] the metaphorical nature of our conceptual system, if unrecognized, can lead philosophers astray. Two things lead to such philosophical errors. First, a philosopher may fail to recognize conceptual metaphor and hence may see metaphorical sentences as literal and take them at face value. Once one takes a metaphor as being literal, the second error is to assume the correspondence theory of truth and therefore to regard the objective world as structured by the metaphor. [...] Augustine dramatized these errors in the eleventh chapter of his Confessions in his discussion of what constitutes a long time. Just when, he asks, is a time long? Is it long when it is present, or when it is past or future? [...] As a literal, metaphysical question about time, there is no answer, since only a short part of a process can occur at any present time. Augustine's answer is interesting. Past, present, and future, he says, do all "exist in some sort in the soul, but otherwhere I do not see them." A cognitive scientist who speaks about minds instead of souls might echo Augustine in contemporary terms, saying that the very idea of "lengths of time" is conceptual, and indeed metaphoric. Our very notion of a "long time" or "long process" is a product of our use of spatial metaphor.

Zeno's paradox of the arrow can also be seen as pointing out the mistake of taking a metaphor to be literal (though he didn't understand it as such). Suppose, Zeno argues, that time really is a sequence of points constituting a time line. Consider the flight of an arrow. At any point in time, the arrow is at some fixed location. At a later point, it is at another fixed location. The flight of the arrow would be like the sequence of still frames that make up a movie. Since the arrow is located at a single fixed place at every time, where, asks Zeno, is the motion? Time, Zeno argues, is not divided up into instants. In our terms, the idea that time is a linear sequence of points is metaphorical, a consequence of times seen as locations in the Moving Observer metaphor. The mistake, once again, is to take what is metaphorical as literal. [...] The appearance of paradox comes from attributing real existence to metaphorical point locations. Zeno's brilliance was to concoct an example that forced a contradiction upon us: literal motion and motion metaphorically conceptualized as a sequence of fixed locations at fixed points in time.

Such observations by Zeno and Augustine are not mere conundrums dreamed up in ancient and medieval philosophy, conundrums that are irrelevant today. They are early insights into the fact that our conceptual systems are not literal. They show that the most common concepts that we use every day and in terms of which we state our truths cannot he taken as literally fitting an objective reality. (pgs.156-158)

many of us would take a sentence like "Time is flowing by rapidly" to be true. Suppose you take this metaphor as being literal; that is, you assume that there really is a "flow" of time past us. This entails that the future is flowing toward us from somewhere and that it presently exists at the future "place." In short, it implies that the future, at least some of it, must exist at the present. [...] If you do not realize the metaphorical nature of the question, you might be led to ask, as some philosophers have, "If time flows, it has to flow at a rate relative to time. Mustn't there be some higher-order time relative to which time itself flows? " The question arises from taking the metaphor literally. To treat it as a deep metaphysical question would be silly. (pg.159)

Philosophers have observed that taking the theory of general relativity as literally true entails that the past, present, and future all exist "at once." That is, the theory seems to suggest determinism and the impossibility of free will or even random probabilistic events, as required by quantum mechanics. Of course, if one recognizes that general relativity uses our common metaphor for conceptualizing time metaphorically in terms of space, one need not reach such metaphysical conclusions. One can see general relativity as metaphorical. This does not make general relativity either false or fanciful or subjective, since its metaphors can still be apt. That is, they can entail non metaphorical predictions that can be verified or falsified. In general, to say that a science is metaphorical is not to belittle it. Because metaphors preserve inferences, and because those inferences can have non metaphorical consequences, one can often test whether or not a scientific metaphor is apt. Indeed, metaphor is what allows mathematical models to be linked to phenomena in the world and to be regarded as scientific theories. (pg.160)

What exactly was proved when Einstein's theory was "confirmed"? Einstein's theory claimed that a large body like the sun should create a significant space-time curvature in its immediate vicinity. If a light ray passed near the sun, it should follow a curved path. This was seen as providing for a test of the gravitational-pull theory versus the space-time-curvature theory. It was assumed that light had no mass; hence there should be no "pull" and the light should travel in a straight line by the sun. But if space-time was curved near the sun, such a light ray should travel along a curved path, mass or no mass. During an eclipse of the sun, the position was observed of a star that could not normally be seen next to the sun when it was shining. If space-time was curved, the light from the star should move in a curved path by the sun, and the star should appear shifted over a few degrees. The measurement was made during a 1919 eclipse, and Einstein's calculation of where the star should appear was verified. Einstein's theory was taken as confirmed-and interpreted literally: There is no force of gravity. What we've been calling that force is space-time curvature. 

Einstein's theory need not have been interpreted literally. One could have said: Einstein has created a beautiful metaphorical system for doing calculations of the motion of light in a gravitational field. The metaphor of space as a temporal dimension allows him to use well understood mathematics to do his calculations. That is a magnificent metaphorical accomplishment. But that doesn't mean we have to understand that theory as characterizing the objectively true nature of the universe. (pg.228)

In superstring theory, all forces-gravitational, electromagnetic, and strong and weak nuclear forces-are conceptualized as curvatures in ten-dimensional space. What this does is allow the same mathematics, Riemannian geometry, to be used to calculate all of what we ordinarily call "forces." But of course, if one takes this theory literally, no forces at all exist as forces. What we used to conceptualize as forces are now all curvatures in ten-dimensional space. If we take superstring theory literally, no forces exist at all. And we live in a radically multidimensional universe, one with ten dimensions! Do we "really" live in a world with ten or more dimensions, many of them very small, with no forces but lots of curvatures in multidimensional space? Or is superstring theory an ingenious and productive technical metaphor that allows all calculations of force to be unified using the same mathematics - Riemannian geometry? These are not mutually exclusive alternatives. From the perspective of the everyday human conceptual system, superstring theory is metaphorical, as is general relativity, as is Newtonian mechanics. To take any of these theories literally is to say that force, and therefore causation, is nonexistent. But to take these scientific theories metaphorically is to allow for the "existence" of causes from our everyday perspective. (pg.230)

One important thing that cognitive science has revealed clearly is that we have multiple conceptual means for understanding and thinking about situations. What we take as "true" depends on how we conceptualize the situation at hand. From the perspective of our ordinary visual experience, the sun does rise; it does move up from behind the horizon. From the perspective of our scientific knowledge, it does not. Similarly, when we lift an object, we experience ourselves exerting a force to overcome a force pulling the object down. From the standpoint of our basic level experience, the force of gravity does exist, no matter what the general theory of relativity says. But if we are physicists concerned with calculating how light will move in the presence of a large mass, then it is advantageous to take the perspective of general relativity, in which there is no gravitational force. It is not that one is objectively true while the other is not. Both are human perspectives. One, the nonscientific one, is literal relative to human, body based conceptual systems. The other, the scientific one, is metaphorical relative to human, body-based conceptual systems. From the metaphorical scientific perspective of general relativity and superstring theory, gravitational force does not exist as an entity-instead it is space-time curvature. From the literal, nonscientific perspective, forces exist. Now, if we take one scientific theory or another as being literally true, and if we insist that there is only one truth and it is the best scientific truth we have, then, as Russell observed, force does not exist, and so neither does causation. If, however, we can allow scientific theories to be recognized for the metaphorical conceptual structures that they are for human beings, then we can allow multiple ways of conceptualizing the world, including both the scientific and nonscientific. Allowing for the multiple perspectives indicated by cognitive analyses allows us to maintain both scientific perspectives, in which causation doesn't exist, and our everyday perspective, in which it does. (pgs.231-2)

When someone asks, "Does causation exist?" that person usually wants to know whether there is a single unified phenomenon (which is called "causation") objectively existing in the mind independent world and operating according to a single logic. Furthermore, he or she assumes that there is a straightforward simple yes-or-no answer. As we have seen, the situation is more complex than that. But the presuppositions lying behind this apparently simple question are massively false. First, causation is a word in a human language and it designates a human category, a radial category of extraordinary complexity. In that complex radial category, there is no set of necessary and sufficient conditions that covers all the cases of causation. Therefore, causation as we conceptualize it is not a unified phenomenon. It does not simply designate an objectively existing category of phenomena, defined by necessary and sufficient conditions and operating with a single logic in the mind-independent world. Because the presuppositions lying behind the question are so far off base, the question has no simple straightforward answer. This eliminates a simpleminded realism that assumes that our language is simply a reflection of the mind-independent world, and hence that such questions are simple and straightforward. But eliminating simpleminded realism does not eliminate all forms of realism, and it does not require either idealism or total relativism. What remains is an embodied realism that recognizes that human language and thought are structured by, and bound to, embodied experience. In the case of physics, there is certainly a mind-independent world. But in order to conceptualize and describe it, we must use embodied human concepts and human language. Certain of those embodied human concepts, the basic-level ones, accord very well with middle-level physical experience and therefore have an epistemic priority for us. It is here that we feel comfortable saying that causation exists for ordinary cases of the direct application of physical force in our everyday lives. The central prototypical case in our basic-level experience gives us no problem in answering the question. He punched me in the arm. He caused me pain. Yes, causation exists. (pg.233)

George Lakoff & Mark Johnson - Philosophy in The Flesh (1999)

Blindsight

Blindsight é um livro de SciFi do autor Peter Watts cujo principal tema é a consciência. Fundamentado em leituras de vários autores de ciência cognitiva -- em especial no trabalho de Thomas Metzinger -- é um livro que faz refletir o leitor sobre o que é ser humano. O livro pode ser lido online em www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm. Algumas citações (e eventuais spoilers):

[...] you had a point about language. When you get right down to it, it's a workaround. Like trying to describe dreams with smoke signals. It's noble, it's maybe the most noble thing a body can do but you can't turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something. It's limiting.

***

It's not about trust, Major. It's about location. Nobody gets a good view of a system from the inside, no matter who they are. The view's distorted."
"And yours isn't."
"I'm outside the system."
"You're interacting with me now."
"As an observer only. Perfection's unattainable but it isn't unapproachable"

***

There was a model of the world, and we didn't look outward at all; our conscious selves saw only the simulation in our heads, an interpretation of reality, endlessly refreshed by input from the senses. What happens when those senses go dark, but the model—thrown off-kilter by some trauma or tumor—fails to refresh? How long do we stare in at that obsolete rendering, recycling and massaging the same old data in a desperate, subconscious act of utterly honest denial? How long before it dawns on us that the world we see no longer reflects the world we inhabit, that we are blind?

***

"Not talking about case studies. Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing— irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don't experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default.

***

You invest so much in it, don't you? It's what elevates you above the beasts of the field, it's what makes you special. Homo sapiens, you call yourself. Wise Man. Do you even know what it is, this consciousness you cite in your own exaltation? Do you even know what it's for?

Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you've forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterwards, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody's told you that even waking souls are only slaves in denial.

Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricity's already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self 'chose' to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary—almost an afterthought— to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: it reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other.

But it's not in charge. You're not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn't share living space with the likes of you.

Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious

mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it.

Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.

Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents.

Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step. Oh, but you can't. There's something in the way. And it's fighting back.

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A vampire folk tale: "A laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there is no darkness, that light is everywhere."

Intuition Pumps quotes by Daniel Dennett

Giving an intentional-stance* interpretation of some sub-personal brain structure is like putting a comment on a few lines of code; when done well, it provides an illuminating label, not a translation into English or other natural language of some formula in Brainish that the brain is using in its information-processing.

(*) the level of abstraction in which we view the behavior of a thing in terms of mental properties [wikipedia]

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In general, the cryptographer’s maxim holds: if you can find one solution to a puzzle, you’ve found the only solution to the puzzle. Only special circumstances permit as many as two solutions, but such cases show us that the existence of only one single solution to a question like this is not a metaphysical necessity, but just the immensely probable result of very powerful constraints.

People are much more complicated than either crossword puzzles or computers. They have convoluted brains full of neuromodulators, and these brains are attached to bodies that are deeply entwined with the world, and they have both an evolutionary and a personal history that has embedded them in the world with much more interpenetration than the embedding of a crossword puzzle in a linguistic community. So Ruth Millikan (for instance) is right that given the nature of design constraints, it is unlikely in the extreme that there could be different ways of skinning the cat that left two radically different, globally indeterminate, tied-for-first-place interpretations. Indeterminacy of radical translation* is truly negligible in practice. Still, the principle survives. The reason we don’t have indeterminacy of radical translation is not because, as a matter of metaphysical fact, there are “real meanings” in there, in the head (what Quine called the “museum myth” of meaning, his chief target). The reason we don’t have indeterminacy in the actual world is that with so many independent constraints to satisfy, the cryptographer’s maxim assures us that it is a vanishingly small worry. When indeterminacy threatens in the real world, it is always just more “behavioral” or “dispositional” facts—more of the same—that save the day for a determinate reading, not some mysterious “causal power” or “intrinsic semanticity.” Intentional interpretation almost always arrives in the limit at a single interpretation, but in the imaginable catastrophic case in which dual interpretations survived all tests, there would be no deeper facts to settle which was “right.” Facts do settle interpretations, but it is always “shallow” facts that do the job.

(*)  Radical translation is a term by W. V. O. Quine to describe the situation in which a linguist is attempting to translate a completely unknown language, which is unrelated to his own, and is therefore forced to rely solely on the observed behavior of its speakers in relation to their environment. [wikipedia]

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How can meaning make a difference? It doesn't seem to be the kind of physical property, like temperature or mass or chemical composition, that could cause anything to happen. What brains are for is extracting meaning from the flux of energy impinging on their sense organs, in order to improve the prospects of the bodies that house them and provide their energy. The job of a brain is to “produce future” in the form of anticipations about the things in the world that matter to guide the body in appropriate ways. Brains are energetically very expensive organs, and if they can’t do this important job well, they aren’t earning their keep. Brains, in other words, are supposed to be semantic engines. What brains are made of is kazillions of molecular pieces that interact according to the strict laws of chemistry and physics, responding to shapes and forces; brains, in other words, are in fact only syntactic engines. [..] Don’t make the mistake of imagining that brains, being alive, or made of proteins instead of silicon and metal, can detect meanings directly, thanks to the wonder tissue in them. Physics will always trump meaning. A genuine semantic engine, responding directly to meanings, is like a perpetual motion machine—physically impossible. So how can brains accomplish their appointed task? By being syntactic engines that track or mimic the competence of the impossible semantic engine.

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Natural selection is an automatic reason-finder; it “discovers” and “endorses” and “focuses” reasons over many generations. The scare quotes are to remind us that natural selection doesn't have a mind, doesn't itself have reasons, but it is nevertheless competent to perform this “task” of design refinement. This is itself an instance of competence without comprehension. Let’s just be sure we know how to cash out the scare quotes. Consider a population with lots of variation in it. Some members of the population do well (at multiplying); most do not. In each case we can ask why. Why did this one have surviving offspring while these others did not? In many cases, most cases, there is no reason at all; it’s just dumb luck, good or bad. But if there is a subset, perhaps a very small one, of cases in which there is an answer, a difference that happens to make a difference, then what those cases have in common provides the germ of a reason. This permits functionality to accumulate by a process that blindly tracks reasons, creating things that have purposes but don’t need to know them. The Need to Know principle reigns in the biosphere, and natural selection itself doesn't need to know what it’s doing. So there were reasons before there were reason-representers. The reasons tracked by evolution I have called “free-floating rationales," [...] There are reasons why trees spread their branches, but they are not in any strong sense the trees’ reasons. Sponges do things for reasons; bacteria do things for reasons; even viruses do things for reasons. But they don’t have the reasons; they don’t need to have the reasons. There are reasons aplenty for these behaviors, but in general, organisms need not understand them. They are endowed with behaviors that are well designed by evolution, and they are the beneficiaries of these designs without needing to know about it. This feature is everywhere to be seen in nature, but it tends to be masked by our tendency, adopting the intentional stance, to interpret behavior as more mindful and rational than it really is.

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Then what might the self be? I propose that it is the same kind of thing as a center of gravity, an abstraction that is, in spite of its abstractness, tightly coupled to the physical world. [...] It may be a “theorist's fiction,” but it is a very valuable fiction from which a lot of true predictions can be generated. [...] What then is a center of narrative gravity? It is also a theorist’s fiction, posited in order to unify and make sense of an otherwise bafflingly complex collection of actions, utterances, fidgets, complaints, promises, and so forth, that make up a person. It is the organizer of the personal level of explanation. Your hand didn't sign the contract; you did. [...] In the same way that we can simplify all the gravitational attractions between all the parts of the world and an obelisk standing on the ground by boiling it down to two points, the center of the earth and the center of gravity of the obelisk, we can simplify all the interactions—the handshakes, the spoken words, the ink scrawls, and much more—between two selves, the seller and the buyer, who have just completed a transaction. Each self is a person, with a biography, a “backstory,” and many ongoing projects. Unlike centers of gravity, selves don't just have trajectories through space and time; they gather as they go, accumulating memories and devising plans and expectations.