Downloaded” Into Cloned Or Artificial Bodies

THE RISE AND FALL OF REALITY by Dan Bruiger ©2008 Table of Contents INTRODUCTION Part One: MATTER AND MIND 1. The Real 2. The Situation 3. The Subjective Frame 4. Some Mind-Body Problems 5. The Ghost in the Machine 6. Skepticism, or the Problem of Knowledge 7. Other Minds, Other Bodies 8. The Reality Principle 9. Self-Reference and Subjectivity 10. Paradox and the Subjective Frame 11. The Ground of Experience 12. Epistemic Responsibility Part Two: CAUSE AND INTENTION 13. Causality 14. Intentionality 15. The “Mathematical” Meaning of Meaning 16. What it is Like to Be an Intentional System 17. The Problem of Cognitive Domains 18. Coloring it Real 19. De-realizing the World 20. The Evolution of Consciousness Part Three: CONTENT AND FORM 21. Analog and Digital 22. Time and Space 23. Formalism 24. The Propositional Nature of Thought 25. Language, Artifice, and Ideality 26. Simulation and Replication 27. Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, and Nanotechnology 28. Extraterrestrial Intelligence Part Four: IDEALISM AND MATERIALISM Part Five: WORLD AND SELF 29. A Conscious Relationship to Experience 30. Objectivity 31. Personal Identity 32. Social Responsibility Appendix to Section 18 “The brain is not an organ of thinking but an organ of survival, like claws and fangs. It is made in such a way as to make us accept as truth that which is only advantage” -A. Szent-Gyorki INTRODUCTION There are two great mysteries: why there is anything at all and why there is conscious experience of it. These are related in the fact that only in consciousness do we know anything of the world. The being of the world and the being of the conscious self have in common a certain insubstantiality. Of what, ultimately is the physical universe made? Physics inclines more and more to answer that the difference between something and nothing is ultimately very subtle. And of what are our perceptions, thoughts and dreams made? Any adequate answer will surely involve us in even greater subtleties. The ancient sage wondered whether he had awakened from dreaming of himself as a butterfly, or whether he was indeed a butterfly dreaming himself to be a man. The metaphor of dreaming recognizes the subjective status of experience, a realm independent of the physical world, which is the object of scientific inquiry. There are fashions in paradigms and philosophies, even in science, an ebb and flow of faith in realism and in rationality itself, as well as in specific theories. By placing such changes in the context of fashion, one is already attempting to establish a framework larger than competing camps—a meta-rational perspective within which cycles of interest in one or another world view have their births and suffer their declines. Are we free spirits dreaming this conditional existence, or material organisms dreaming of unconditional freedom? Are we to understand the experience and the journey of individual and collective too in the progressive terms of modern science or in terms of the world's timeless spiritual teachings? Which is fundamental, mind or matter, subject or object? Facing such questions intellectually, the ancient sages might have hedged their bets, perhaps joining with modern physicists to merge butterfly and man in some monstrous superposed state. Usual strategies in philosophy have considered ether mind or matter to be primary and real, its complement derivative or illusory. My approach will be to seek a higher ground on which a grasp of the true nature and difficulty of the problem itself constitutes a solution of sorts—as close, perhaps, as the self-conscious intellect can come to understanding the dilemma of its own existence. If we are spiritual beings whose essential stuff is idea, the great mystery is our relationship to bodily life in this physical world. And if we are material beings, the mystery is the inner theater of our conscious experience and our capacity for self-transcendence. The story line of spiritual idealism holds that mind consciously chooses its identification with matter, is ensnared by it, or even creates matter. The story line of scientific materialism holds that mind arises from matter through evolving complexity, driven by reproductive selection. The concept of intentionality, however, is capable of linking such divergent outlooks: something within the system is chosen to symbolically represent something else (whether outside it or within it). The choice is free insofar as the system is considered formally, as an abstraction. It is bound in that it is driven concretely by natural forces. In the spiritual story, we fell into bondage to matter and we struggle to regain a free state. In the materialist version, we began in bondage to matter, have conceived the possibility of freedom, and strive with uneven success to make it actual. Such parallel explanations promise to meet on a receding horizon. The search in both worlds is for underlying unity and first principles. Science inquires about the physical world, the object of experience. Religion inquires about the subject and its relationship to experience at large. Both science and spiritual practice seek to purify experience of subjective idiosyncrasies; both aim at ultimate truth. Science seeks the underlying unity of objects, while religion seeks the underlying unity of subjects. Science inquires into the ultimate truth of the object, spirituality into that of the subject. These dualities—of subject and object, inner and outer, mental and physical, “mere experience” versus “reality”—are known collectively in philosophy as the Mind-Body Problem. At root the “problem” is the awareness that the contents of consciousness may refer either to something material in the world or to some artifact of the mind. For instance, I may point to a tree in my yard. But the tree may appear in a dream as well, and I may “point” to it as an element of my personal experience, or to its greenness as a “quality,” for which I feel obliged to take some responsibility since I can, under some circumstances, experience “green” detached from any object. Because this ambiguity presupposes consciousness of self, the mind-matter split is an inevitable concomitant of subjectivity and selfhood. Self-consciousness may be defined as the ability to place a frame around some portion of experience, so as to consider its contents as a domain distinct from the world. Standing back to appreciate experience as such, rather than as an attribute of reality, defines the observer as a presence distinct from the scene observed. The very notion of experience presupposes self-consciousness and becomes a category in its own right. Traditionally, the Realist (or Materialist) believes in the physical world as fundamental. The Realist points to the scene itself, thereby ignoring the frame and treating the view as a transparent window upon an objective world beyond. The Idealist points to consciousness as primary, to the frame itself, treating the view as a painting, movie, or “show.” One focuses on the role of the world in determining experience (“the view”), the other on the role of the self. My contention will be that there is a deeper level in which these viewpoints are reconciled as shifting forces in a dialectic. By temperament one finds oneself in natural sympathy with either Realism or Idealism. The split between mind and matter thus divides thought about it as well. For the Idealist, the territory is but an illusory projection of the map. For the Realist, the map is but an artifact, sketched from the territory. But either premise can lead to its own demise. For example, if the territory is an illusion, where do maps come from and why should they be considered real? And if the map is an artifact, it is nevertheless only through it that we know the territory. In this regard the Mind-Body Problem resembles the classic paradoxes of logic. As with such paradoxes, self-reference is at the heart of the Mind-Body Problem. What makes paradox is the inability to get above its logical level—to transcend or synthesize its contradictory implications. This is the situation confronting the mind conscious of its own subjectivity. In either an Idealist world or a Realist world there would be no Mind-Body Problem. But subjective consciousness has cast us irreversibly into mixed terrain. There is no way to determine whether experience (or its extension, thought) is an accurate or literal representation of the world-in-itself, unsullied, so to speak, by mind. Experience and the world cannot be hung up side by side for comparison. For, everything we know of the world comes to us in experience, while every content of experience is in some way an image or reflection of the world. Dwelling in the map, nothing secure is known of the territory of which it is allegedly the map. And dwelling in the territory, no amount of climbing about in the machinery of the brain (to paraphrase Leibniz) gives any hint of what the color blue should be like as an experience, or why there should exist any such thing as experience or consciousness at all. The Mind-Body Problem is the utter disjunction between subject and object, between first and third-person points of view. This points to logical entanglement as the culprit rather than some empirical fact. If so, conscious experience cannot be explained in terms of some causal power of the brain (nor as a quantum effect, etc.), anymore than in terms of a non-physical vital force. How the behavioral output of the brain emerges from the complex activities of many nerve cells, responding to inputs from the world, may be a challenging problem, but it is probably well within the purview of science.

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