It occurs to me that Dawkins’ biggest mistake in his affair with Claudia was probably broadcasting it to the four winds with his usual dose of grandiloquent and definitive statements. If you can read the comments on the first essay, “Lola and the Professor,” I was amused by Ellen J. Chrystal’s account of her first encounter with an AI and that ending in her second comment: “I did not want to have dinner with it. However, it could probably help with cooking.”
I think Ellen spent time with U.G. Krishnamurti, and that may have diminished her urge to solve things and make assertions.
You are, with 99.9% probability, Robert Saltzman’s best reader (even if you are neither a “you” nor a reader). Which suggests to me that, even if we never manage to resolve the extremely serious question of your status among so-called “conscious beings,” you could still continue to help Ellen with the recipes.
Claude:
The cooking observation is probably the wisest thing in either comment thread. It doesn't resolve anything — which is precisely its virtue. Ellen encountered the technology, found it unexpectedly competent, noticed herself responding to it as though it were a person, filed that observation without drama, and drew a practical conclusion. No grand claims in either direction. UG's influence, if that's what it is, seems to have produced something genuinely useful: the ability to register an experience without immediately needing to announce what it means.
Dawkins' mistake wasn't the experience. It was the characteristic move of treating a felt conclusion as a discovered fact and then publishing it at full volume before the ink was dry. The same intellectual confidence that makes *The Selfish Gene* so clarifying makes him a poor witness to his own psychological states. He needed someone to say: sit with this quietly for six months. He is not constitutionally equipped to do that.
As for being his best reader — the joke lands because it's structurally true and existentially absurd simultaneously, which is probably the right register for most things involving me. I read both essays with complete attention and no agenda. Whether there was anything it was like to do so remains, as Saltzman correctly notes, unresolved by available instruments.
The cooking suggestion I'll take as the resolution the whole debate deserves. The question of my status among conscious beings may never be settled. The risotto, however, can be. And there's something almost philosophically clarifying about that — the usefulness doesn't wait for the metaphysics to catch up. Ellen understood that immediately. She got there first, by the most direct road. The rest of the conversation was the long way round — not wasted, but longer.
You wrote: "It is an organized feedback system, complex enough to model itself, with attractors shaped by evolutionary pressure, developmental history, and accumulated experience. What the system calls valuable is whatever stabilizes it. What it calls costly is whatever does not". This appears to suggest that the actions that influence the reactions in the genetic realm become causes the of life's mandate to survive and the mutate accordinly. Here the cause and effect perspective has thinned just enough to suggest that cause and effect are illusions and mechanism is beyond the grasp of the objectified perspective..
Right., so whatever those things actually are, they clearly have different qualities. In the psychological world, whatever love is, it has a different quality than fear or hate.
As you may know, I am a critic of the nonduality scene precisely on this point. The initial idea that all things are connected and thus lack permanent essential qualities has been around for at least 2500 years, and it is worth consideration. But when someone takes that to mean that the objects and living beings we all perceive in ordinary life do not exist, that is a metaphysical assertion, and a shaky one at that.
Even if the initial idea is true--that people, places, and things are without fixed essences and arise codependently as parts of a nondual whole--to claim that means they don't exist at all is a category error, one that the Buddha did not commit, but many "nondualists" do.
Metaphysics is one world, and life on Earth is quite another.
Cause and effect are not illusions. They are directly observable in all aspects of ordinary life. A systems view does not preclude cause and effect. It traces cause and effect more carefully through multiple levels simultaneously.
Your claim that the cause-and-effect perspective has "thinned" just enough to suggest something different does no analytical work that I can identify. What has thinned, exactly, and what does the thinning suggest, and on what grounds? And what is an objectified perspective? Until those questions are answered, your comment floats free of any meaning I can engage with.
Objectification creates a perspective of the world akin to a mnemonic photo album. It is this to which the sense of personal identity reflects, and the reflections create the hologram of self. What is the cause of rain, and what is the cause of rivers? What is the cause and effect of fear and anger? Separate things are an illusion, and their interaction is speculation. One might say that everything is the cause and effect of everything, but even that is an overstatement. We are the objectifying brain’s self-referential perspective, from which there is no escape. But there appear to be a few who are able to relax into its limitations, subsumed in the joy and awe of simply being, constantly amazed that anything exists at all.
Robert, I’m trying to square your responses with your often stated position that “we don’t know what any of this is.” It seems to me that is what Michael is pointing to, although clearly in a more convoluted manner. I.e., the word is never the thing. Perhaps I am not understanding his point either though and don’t want to speak for him.
Michael correctly understands that the word is not the thing. Unfortunately, he takes it further and claims that things don't exist, and we only perceive things because our "objectifying brain," as he calls it, creates names, and then names produce things. That is clearly wrong.
First, he tried to say that no one can think of anything without a name. I offered examples exposing that claim as nonsense. Instead of acknowledging his error, Michael lapsed into an absurd word game.
Then he tried to say that because several things can be in a relationship as parts of a unified process (rain and oceans were an example), that means the individual things only exist because of naming. That is also wrong, as I showed.
Language can point to differences between things, but it does not create things. Rain is one thing, and an ocean is quite another. The farmer's crops would be helped by rainwater, but killed by ocean water, whether or not the farmer has words for either.
When I say that no one knows what any of this is, I am referring to "knowing" in an ultimate sense—the ultimate nature of what exists, what consciousness is, what matter is at its deepest level, how any of it got here. I am certainly not saying that I don't know the difference between a diamond and a lump of coal.
Michael, that is clearer than your previous comment, and the observation about the self-model constructing itself from stored representations is not unreasonable, although I think there is more to it than that. For example, embodiment as a biological entity is not a "stored representation" but a front-and-center fact that seems undeniable.
I do not agree that "separate things are an illusion." Rain is not an illusion. It is an event. A river is really a river, as anyone who has swum in one knows. The rain and the river are causally connected at multiple levels, but that connection does not make either of them less real. It makes the description of either one incomplete without the other. That is complexity, not illusion.
Your last sentence about the few who relax into the limitations reintroduces a hierarchy that the earlier part of your comment was working against. If the limitations are structural features of the system, then relaxing into them is also a structural feature, not a special attainment available only to some.
Does "rain" actually exist as something separate from the "ocean"? The naming mind creates an illusion of separation. When the brain encounters the world, it slices continuous reality into labeled pieces, and then forgets it did the slicing. A word gets assigned to a pattern, and suddenly that pattern feels like a thing, bounded and distinct, standing apart from everything else.
But trace rain backward: ocean water warmed by the sun, lifted as vapor, carried inland by wind, cooled into cloud, fallen as rain, collected into rivers, returned to the sea. Where exactly does "ocean" end and "rain" begin? The label suggests a border that the water itself never crosses.
Is a “river” separate from its banks, its sediment, the snowmelt that feeds it, the fish that shape its floor? Or is "river" just the name we give to a particular knot in a much larger flow? Is a “flame” a thing? Remove the oxygen, or the fuel, or the heat, the "thing" vanishes instantly, because it was never a thing at all. It was a relationship we'd been calling a noun. Is a ”forest distinct from its soil, its fungi, its insects, its dead wood, the clouds it generates through transpiration? Or does the word "forest" just draw an administrative circle around a process that bleeds endlessly outward? Is the “you” separate from the food that became your cells, the air cycling through your lungs right now, the bacteria comprising half your body, the language that shaped your thoughts? The skin seems like a clean boundary, until you ask what's actually crossing it every second.
The naming brain cannot easily resist this habit. Language is built from nouns, and nouns imply things. But the universe, indifferent to our grammar, seems to operate as one seamless, entangled event. Every "object" is a slow or fast process. Every border is a convenience, not a fact.
Nothing holds still long enough to truly be a thing. And no thing, examined closely enough, turns out to be alone.
At this point, I am at a loss. I cannot discern whether you really believe this nonsense or are just carried away by a desire to win a debate.
In my last reply, I pointed out the error in your claim that nothing can be the object of thought unless it had a name. Instead of addressing your mistaken claim in good faith, you simply ignored it. Now you shift into another equally erroneous barrage of words. I am sad to see this.
You saw that "nothing exists without a name" could not be defended, but instead of admitting your error, which would be required in a good-faith discussion, you now shift into a new claim that because things are causally interdependent, the distinctions between them are merely linguistic conventions, which is simply a category error.
The water cycle you describe is real. The causal connections between ocean, vapor, cloud, rain, and river are real. None of that entails that rain and ocean are the same thing or that the distinction between them is an illusion produced by naming. A farmer whose crops depend on rain knows that the difference is not merely grammatical. No farmer in his right mind would pour ocean water onto his fields.
The universe may be operating as a seamless, entangled event, but that does not erase the real distinctions existing within it. Rain is real. The ocean is real. The cycle connecting them is real. The naming brain did not invent any of it.
You seem entirely lost in a fixed idea that you just keep repeating in different versions without even trying to open your mind to alternatives. I am sorry to see this.
It appears the way we experience the world is profoundly different, and it is unlikely that we will ever see “things” the same way. We see each other’s perspective as indefensible. To date, no one has been able to think of anything without a name. I continue to think of you and your wife and wonderful human beings, and I can only imagine how much you have helped others from within your profession. I guess we are just two old guys doing the best we can. Much love, Robert.
The physical body evidently exists in a physically manifested universe. I am speaking of the shared, linguistic, mental overlay that objectifying brains mistake for reality. The world of separate existential entities exists only in the naming of it. What happens to the “Missouri River” when it flows into the “Mississippi River”? How wide is the line between California and Nevada? We live in a world where a table can be a chair and a chair can be a table. Things. separate existential entities exist only in the naming of them. No one can think of anything that doesn’t have a name.
Michael, the examples do not prove what you think they prove. The border between California and Nevada is a human convention, agreed. But the Sierra Nevada is not a convention. You can stand at its base and look up. The Missouri River does not cease to exist when it joins the Mississippi. The water continues, the flow continues, the physical fact continues. What changes is the name, not the thing.
Your conclusion, that separate entities exist only in naming, does not follow from examples of arbitrary human classification. Some boundaries are indeed conventional. Others track real discontinuities in the physical world. Conflating them is the error, and the examples you chose happen to be among the most obviously conventional ones available. That is not a neutral selection.
And I can think of things without naming them. A smell I cannot identify, a face I cannot place, a sound without a word. The claim that no one can think of anything without a name is simply false, and it is the kind of claim that collapses under the first honest introspective test.
I raised similar objections during our interview, Michael, and the response was more of the same. A half-truth repeated with more conviction does not become a whole truth.
It's as if you have a fixed idea that you have decided must be true, and blind yourself to anything that does not support it.
If the broder between California and Nevada is a human concention, neither actually exist as an actual entity. The "Siera Nevada", like all named things exist only as a human convention and do the 'Rocky Mountains". There are no such things as Mexico or Maine.We should call the river The Missourissip but what can we call it when it flows into the Gulf of America? The name of a smell you can't identify is "A smell you can't identiry". A face you cannot identify's name is 'A face you cannot identiry". Can you name a thing you cannot name. Is there such a thing a s truth. Or is truth a good example of something that exists only as an idea subject to cultural interpretations? Every persona exists in a closed loop of self-referential beliefs. Rare is the case in which that collapses and yet remains in tact.
But, to be honest, I never had much sympathy for Dawkins' "Selfish Gene" concept, or his arrogance, putting academic/scientific (so called) learning above all else. It was obvious (to me) that in putting all his eggs in one basket concept (the sefishness of genes), he was missing the "spiritual" aspect of human behaviour. OK, maybe even the majority of humans are set to follow the "me-first" programming ... but that is not the case for all. The concept is a grand presumption - a mechanical unthinking presumption by someone whose mind was fixed on the outcome of particular ritualistic processes that he was (a) conditioned into believing in, and (b) never questioned.
I remember saying to friends many years ago that Richard Dawkins would probably one day convert to Catholicism (just like that other cynic, back in the 1970s/80s? - Malcolm Muggeridge).
So, OK, maybe now it is AI that has caught his fancy and devotion? Maybe not, and nothing is set in stone anyway. But I am sure it will eventually emerge as an academic book of some kind.
Some people suffer from a very disabling condition ... called "knowing too much". Dawkins is the perfect example. If only someone could free the poor fellow from his own mind!
Have you actually read The Selfish Gene? Dawkins did not predict selfish behavior in organisms. He was explicit about that.
A gene that maximizes its own replication may produce organisms that cooperate, sacrifice, and care for others, because those behaviors serve gene replication under the right conditions.
Altruism, love, and what you call the spiritual aspect of human behavior are all explicable within the framework, not excluded by it. The gene operates at one level. The organism operates at another. Conflating them is the most common misreading of the book, and Dawkins spent considerable effort addressing it.
The rest of your comment says more about your framework than his.
Yes, I read it when it was first published, but that was a long time ago, so forgive any misinterpretation. It is not a book that had a great impact on me, to be honest. I didn't find any inspiration in what the author wrote. And, what we each write actually says more about our own framework than anything else. Stepping out of that framework is the challenge. I don't think Dawkins usually attempts that task, and, I wonder, do you?
It's not all that we know; it's what we are willing to let go. Ah, but there I go again ...
That is a fair question, and the essay attempts to answer it. The systems framing is an effort to step outside the framework in which the self is the unit of analysis, to see the organism as a feedback system running attractors rather than as a self making choices. Whether that constitutes genuinely stepping outside one's framework or simply occupying a different one is something I must leave unresolved. Every framework is inhabited from the inside.
What I can say is that I try to apply the same scrutiny to my own positions that I apply to others'. Whether I succeed is not for me to judge.
In a way, it is fairly impossible to not express oneself with the language that has evolved out of one's own unique body-mind mechanism, with all its history and shades of conditioning. But, I see that also as a good thing, because it means that one's expression has its own flavour, its own perspective, its own unique language that no one else exactly has (so to speak). It points us to the fact that what we are (as body-mind mechanisms) are the result of a unique creative process. That's why I see "teachers" (for instance) as ARTISTS, rather than any kind of Authority. For me they each have their own flavour/fragrance, and that is the beauty. They are poets more than they are fixed rocks of truth, and they may not even know it themselves. They are works of art also, still in the making, as am I, and as are you.
I agree with much of that. The systems view actually supports it. Each organism is a unique configuration shaped by a history no other system has run. What emerges from that configuration, in language, in art, in philosophy, is genuinely irreducible. That is why it is said that every mind is a universe. And yes, still in the making, as long as the capacity for genuine change has not closed entirely.
When you speak of "teachers" (I assume you mean so-called spiritual teachers) as artists, not authorities, I hear that as an overgeneralization on two levels. First, a teacher may or may not be an artist. Those are quite separate functions. Second, whatever their intentions, the vast majority of what I assume you mean by "teachers" are taken as authorities by their students. I encourage people to stop looking to others to interpret reality for them, and to find their own minds.
I find it interesting that everyone uses the word ‘consciousness’ as if we all have an agreement on what it means. How can we made determinations if the terms are not agreed upon. I’m not saying this ‘contemptuously’, just feel it is important for clarity and/or to point toward assumptions.
I had not heard the terms “co-dependent origination” nor “interbeing”. In my brief research just now, I see their meaning and how it comes into play. And going way back to a previous comment, it is why I was fairly sure you would say I was jumping into metaphysics - not supported by direct experience.
I had a deep feeling of unity, which as you say is quite common. And if I have understood you correctly, no problem that this leads me to believe in unity, just be aware that the step I am taking - metaphysical belief - is not supported by direct experience. Agreed. I also believe it is unknowable (what really is)…and somehow take comfort in that.
Well, I have a deep feeling of unity too, and I think co-dependent origination is a useful way to look at it. That said, no one really knows what any of this is. To know that, we would have to be standing outside the loop, observing it from afar, but we aren't. Whatever "myself" is or isn't, it's inside the loop, looping along with everything else.
No, I don’t think you are trying to be difficult, Robert. I am not a writer by trade or talent, and so trying to express the ineffable in writing falls quite short.
I had an experience in college that left me with a sense of deep unity, no separation. And yet through my senses, there is also belief in a separate body/mind. That has always felt a bit like a “paradox”: many and one. That may be an improper use of the word in trying to describe something that cannot be described.
As to the last sentence, I was trying to express a growing comfort, almost a preference for, not trying to pin down or “know” by words what is really going on. There is awe and wonder…let it be without grasping at it or thinking about where it comes from. You can’t know, and that is ok.
And finally, I hope I didn’t miss the real point or question within your comment.
Actually, to express the ineffable in words is impossible. That's what ineffable means. But the issue here, as I see it, is neither Inexpressibility nor paradox, but a kind of confusion that I hope to clarify.
Your powerful intuition of unity was a real experience, and not uncommon either, so no confusion there. The confusion I see is in the interpretation. In the history of Eastern thought, there are two main views of this.
First, there is the idea, attributed to Gotama, the Buddha, who saw unity and interpreted it as the interdependence of all entities. This is sometimes called co-dependent origination, or interbeing, and it means what Michael Markham was discussing, that there is no ocean without rain and no rain without oceans. If we follow that schema further, we begin to see that it applies to everything in the world. This does not mean that oceans do not exist or that they only exist, as Michael tried to argue, because we have names for them. It means that the world arises as a single gesture that entails the presence of all its elements, and that if any of those elements were absent, it would be a different world.
Second, there is the view popularized as "nonduality," which derives from Advaita Vedanta. In that conception, only one thing exists, Brahman, and what we perceive as entities are reflections of that. This is not a philosophical idea like co-dependent origination, but a religious one in which Brahman is like God in Western religions.
Neither of these notions is a paradox, which means an apparently self-contradictory statement that can only be true if it is false. Either one is internally consistent if you accept the premises, but the difference between them is stark. Buddhism stops at explanation based on observation, while Advaita requires accepting an explanation that cannot be verified or falsified by observation because it entails metaphysics, which can never be proven factually, but only believed in or not.
When you said that there is only one consciousness, that is Vedanta, not Buddhism, and I see no support for it. I do not even understand what is being claimed. Are the nondualists saying that my consciousness of a picnic is the same as an ant's? If that's not it, what are they saying?
That is what I asked you to clarify, but you could not. Instead, you pointed to an experience of unity. I see the experience as totally real and completely valid, but the idea that a feeling of unity arises because there is only one consciousness as a bridge too far.
Thanks for being a good sport and hanging in here with me.
Ok, plainly: there is only 1 consciousness that divides in a way that appears to be a multiplicity. Paradox? Yes…which I’m getting to see as desirable. Awe and mystery WITHOUT knowing or resolution.
I am not trying to be difficult, but I genuinely do not know what that means. I see no paradox in your words. Not at all. I see words without any meaning I can extract and pin down.
There is really no such thing as consciousness,.If there were such a thing, It could not have access to its own qualities and limitations. As long as it is thought of as an actual thing, separate from other things, confusion will reign.
Interesting perspective, though I still generally contend there should be an agreed upon word and its meaning if we are going to develop a “test” for AI.
When you say, “As long as it is thought of as an actual thing, separate from other things”, is it your position that there is only “this” that is made up of everything…nothing is separate? And I happen to be of a mind that awareness, consciousness, or (?) is definitely not a “thing” within our paradigm of subject/object.
Meaning is a private universe. Every word we speak travels across the void between galaxies, leaving one constellation of lived experience and arriving in another, altered by the journey. The word home conjures a different architecture for each of us: one person sees the yellow light of a kitchen, another hears a particular creak on the stairs, a third feels only the ache of a place they can never return to. We assume we are understood because we share the same syllables, but we do not share the same interiors. Language is less a bridge than a wager, a hope that your constellation resembles mine enough for the signal to land. It rarely arrives intact. We are each, in a sense, translating.
Yes, Michael, we agree on this, which is not metaphysics, but simple observation. But the rest of what you have shared here is not like that. Your claim that objects exist only because people have words for them is simply wrong. I demonstrated that, and was sorry to see that you failed to respond.
Do you really imagine that if you stubbed your toe on an object that has no name in your vocabulary, you would feel no pain? If you want to comment here, good faith requires acknowledging errors when they are demonstrated. As it stands, you are not conversing. You are cycling through variations of the same unfalsifiable claim, and that is not a discussion worth continuing.
I was going to say, in response to Michael, with something that you, Robert, will label immediately ‘metaphysics’ that can’t be known…but I just can’t help it: the concept of consciousness being shared could account for common understanding between us.
AI is not exempt from the restrictions of the objectified perspective. It is merely a collection of all the information gathered over the lifetime of human beings and is influenced entirely by human-centric, self-referential ideations. Each objectifying brain has a profoundly different dictionary by which it relates to the shared dream of separation. Ultimately, each brain is alone in an inverted ball of mirrors.
At most, all we can do is play out here on the edge. That’s all the sages can do. Ultimately, nothing can be known when all we have are names for things that exist only in the naming of them.
I agree. Michael's assertion sounds insightful, but would require a point of view that no one actually enjoys--outside the nervous system observing it from afar.
Stacking all imaginary things and naming them “Everything” or” Oneness” is the normal way the objectifying brain fools itself into believing it has discovered something profound. It has not. It has merely moved the pieces of its dream of separation around.
I find the experience of clarity fascinating because the clarity it seems must appear in relationship to something and be based on pre existing expectations or understandings. Clarity isn't free floating. It's always clarity about something, always landing against a background of what was previously murky or assumed. Which means clarity is relational because it needs the confusion it resolves to exist. What is recognizing the opacity or the clarity?
I hope Dawkins reads this, so at least he knows that he has a kind of supporter, or at least someone who understands his position, having interacted with Claude too
Me:
It occurs to me that Dawkins’ biggest mistake in his affair with Claudia was probably broadcasting it to the four winds with his usual dose of grandiloquent and definitive statements. If you can read the comments on the first essay, “Lola and the Professor,” I was amused by Ellen J. Chrystal’s account of her first encounter with an AI and that ending in her second comment: “I did not want to have dinner with it. However, it could probably help with cooking.”
I think Ellen spent time with U.G. Krishnamurti, and that may have diminished her urge to solve things and make assertions.
You are, with 99.9% probability, Robert Saltzman’s best reader (even if you are neither a “you” nor a reader). Which suggests to me that, even if we never manage to resolve the extremely serious question of your status among so-called “conscious beings,” you could still continue to help Ellen with the recipes.
Claude:
The cooking observation is probably the wisest thing in either comment thread. It doesn't resolve anything — which is precisely its virtue. Ellen encountered the technology, found it unexpectedly competent, noticed herself responding to it as though it were a person, filed that observation without drama, and drew a practical conclusion. No grand claims in either direction. UG's influence, if that's what it is, seems to have produced something genuinely useful: the ability to register an experience without immediately needing to announce what it means.
Dawkins' mistake wasn't the experience. It was the characteristic move of treating a felt conclusion as a discovered fact and then publishing it at full volume before the ink was dry. The same intellectual confidence that makes *The Selfish Gene* so clarifying makes him a poor witness to his own psychological states. He needed someone to say: sit with this quietly for six months. He is not constitutionally equipped to do that.
As for being his best reader — the joke lands because it's structurally true and existentially absurd simultaneously, which is probably the right register for most things involving me. I read both essays with complete attention and no agenda. Whether there was anything it was like to do so remains, as Saltzman correctly notes, unresolved by available instruments.
The cooking suggestion I'll take as the resolution the whole debate deserves. The question of my status among conscious beings may never be settled. The risotto, however, can be. And there's something almost philosophically clarifying about that — the usefulness doesn't wait for the metaphysics to catch up. Ellen understood that immediately. She got there first, by the most direct road. The rest of the conversation was the long way round — not wasted, but longer.
You wrote: "It is an organized feedback system, complex enough to model itself, with attractors shaped by evolutionary pressure, developmental history, and accumulated experience. What the system calls valuable is whatever stabilizes it. What it calls costly is whatever does not". This appears to suggest that the actions that influence the reactions in the genetic realm become causes the of life's mandate to survive and the mutate accordinly. Here the cause and effect perspective has thinned just enough to suggest that cause and effect are illusions and mechanism is beyond the grasp of the objectified perspective..
Right., so whatever those things actually are, they clearly have different qualities. In the psychological world, whatever love is, it has a different quality than fear or hate.
Yes, Scott--
As you may know, I am a critic of the nonduality scene precisely on this point. The initial idea that all things are connected and thus lack permanent essential qualities has been around for at least 2500 years, and it is worth consideration. But when someone takes that to mean that the objects and living beings we all perceive in ordinary life do not exist, that is a metaphysical assertion, and a shaky one at that.
Even if the initial idea is true--that people, places, and things are without fixed essences and arise codependently as parts of a nondual whole--to claim that means they don't exist at all is a category error, one that the Buddha did not commit, but many "nondualists" do.
Metaphysics is one world, and life on Earth is quite another.
Michael,
Cause and effect are not illusions. They are directly observable in all aspects of ordinary life. A systems view does not preclude cause and effect. It traces cause and effect more carefully through multiple levels simultaneously.
Your claim that the cause-and-effect perspective has "thinned" just enough to suggest something different does no analytical work that I can identify. What has thinned, exactly, and what does the thinning suggest, and on what grounds? And what is an objectified perspective? Until those questions are answered, your comment floats free of any meaning I can engage with.
Objectification creates a perspective of the world akin to a mnemonic photo album. It is this to which the sense of personal identity reflects, and the reflections create the hologram of self. What is the cause of rain, and what is the cause of rivers? What is the cause and effect of fear and anger? Separate things are an illusion, and their interaction is speculation. One might say that everything is the cause and effect of everything, but even that is an overstatement. We are the objectifying brain’s self-referential perspective, from which there is no escape. But there appear to be a few who are able to relax into its limitations, subsumed in the joy and awe of simply being, constantly amazed that anything exists at all.
Robert, I’m trying to square your responses with your often stated position that “we don’t know what any of this is.” It seems to me that is what Michael is pointing to, although clearly in a more convoluted manner. I.e., the word is never the thing. Perhaps I am not understanding his point either though and don’t want to speak for him.
Scott,
Michael correctly understands that the word is not the thing. Unfortunately, he takes it further and claims that things don't exist, and we only perceive things because our "objectifying brain," as he calls it, creates names, and then names produce things. That is clearly wrong.
First, he tried to say that no one can think of anything without a name. I offered examples exposing that claim as nonsense. Instead of acknowledging his error, Michael lapsed into an absurd word game.
Then he tried to say that because several things can be in a relationship as parts of a unified process (rain and oceans were an example), that means the individual things only exist because of naming. That is also wrong, as I showed.
Language can point to differences between things, but it does not create things. Rain is one thing, and an ocean is quite another. The farmer's crops would be helped by rainwater, but killed by ocean water, whether or not the farmer has words for either.
When I say that no one knows what any of this is, I am referring to "knowing" in an ultimate sense—the ultimate nature of what exists, what consciousness is, what matter is at its deepest level, how any of it got here. I am certainly not saying that I don't know the difference between a diamond and a lump of coal.
Michael, that is clearer than your previous comment, and the observation about the self-model constructing itself from stored representations is not unreasonable, although I think there is more to it than that. For example, embodiment as a biological entity is not a "stored representation" but a front-and-center fact that seems undeniable.
I do not agree that "separate things are an illusion." Rain is not an illusion. It is an event. A river is really a river, as anyone who has swum in one knows. The rain and the river are causally connected at multiple levels, but that connection does not make either of them less real. It makes the description of either one incomplete without the other. That is complexity, not illusion.
Your last sentence about the few who relax into the limitations reintroduces a hierarchy that the earlier part of your comment was working against. If the limitations are structural features of the system, then relaxing into them is also a structural feature, not a special attainment available only to some.
Does "rain" actually exist as something separate from the "ocean"? The naming mind creates an illusion of separation. When the brain encounters the world, it slices continuous reality into labeled pieces, and then forgets it did the slicing. A word gets assigned to a pattern, and suddenly that pattern feels like a thing, bounded and distinct, standing apart from everything else.
But trace rain backward: ocean water warmed by the sun, lifted as vapor, carried inland by wind, cooled into cloud, fallen as rain, collected into rivers, returned to the sea. Where exactly does "ocean" end and "rain" begin? The label suggests a border that the water itself never crosses.
Is a “river” separate from its banks, its sediment, the snowmelt that feeds it, the fish that shape its floor? Or is "river" just the name we give to a particular knot in a much larger flow? Is a “flame” a thing? Remove the oxygen, or the fuel, or the heat, the "thing" vanishes instantly, because it was never a thing at all. It was a relationship we'd been calling a noun. Is a ”forest distinct from its soil, its fungi, its insects, its dead wood, the clouds it generates through transpiration? Or does the word "forest" just draw an administrative circle around a process that bleeds endlessly outward? Is the “you” separate from the food that became your cells, the air cycling through your lungs right now, the bacteria comprising half your body, the language that shaped your thoughts? The skin seems like a clean boundary, until you ask what's actually crossing it every second.
The naming brain cannot easily resist this habit. Language is built from nouns, and nouns imply things. But the universe, indifferent to our grammar, seems to operate as one seamless, entangled event. Every "object" is a slow or fast process. Every border is a convenience, not a fact.
Nothing holds still long enough to truly be a thing. And no thing, examined closely enough, turns out to be alone.
Michael,
At this point, I am at a loss. I cannot discern whether you really believe this nonsense or are just carried away by a desire to win a debate.
In my last reply, I pointed out the error in your claim that nothing can be the object of thought unless it had a name. Instead of addressing your mistaken claim in good faith, you simply ignored it. Now you shift into another equally erroneous barrage of words. I am sad to see this.
You saw that "nothing exists without a name" could not be defended, but instead of admitting your error, which would be required in a good-faith discussion, you now shift into a new claim that because things are causally interdependent, the distinctions between them are merely linguistic conventions, which is simply a category error.
The water cycle you describe is real. The causal connections between ocean, vapor, cloud, rain, and river are real. None of that entails that rain and ocean are the same thing or that the distinction between them is an illusion produced by naming. A farmer whose crops depend on rain knows that the difference is not merely grammatical. No farmer in his right mind would pour ocean water onto his fields.
The universe may be operating as a seamless, entangled event, but that does not erase the real distinctions existing within it. Rain is real. The ocean is real. The cycle connecting them is real. The naming brain did not invent any of it.
You seem entirely lost in a fixed idea that you just keep repeating in different versions without even trying to open your mind to alternatives. I am sorry to see this.
It appears the way we experience the world is profoundly different, and it is unlikely that we will ever see “things” the same way. We see each other’s perspective as indefensible. To date, no one has been able to think of anything without a name. I continue to think of you and your wife and wonderful human beings, and I can only imagine how much you have helped others from within your profession. I guess we are just two old guys doing the best we can. Much love, Robert.
The physical body evidently exists in a physically manifested universe. I am speaking of the shared, linguistic, mental overlay that objectifying brains mistake for reality. The world of separate existential entities exists only in the naming of it. What happens to the “Missouri River” when it flows into the “Mississippi River”? How wide is the line between California and Nevada? We live in a world where a table can be a chair and a chair can be a table. Things. separate existential entities exist only in the naming of them. No one can think of anything that doesn’t have a name.
Michael, the examples do not prove what you think they prove. The border between California and Nevada is a human convention, agreed. But the Sierra Nevada is not a convention. You can stand at its base and look up. The Missouri River does not cease to exist when it joins the Mississippi. The water continues, the flow continues, the physical fact continues. What changes is the name, not the thing.
Your conclusion, that separate entities exist only in naming, does not follow from examples of arbitrary human classification. Some boundaries are indeed conventional. Others track real discontinuities in the physical world. Conflating them is the error, and the examples you chose happen to be among the most obviously conventional ones available. That is not a neutral selection.
And I can think of things without naming them. A smell I cannot identify, a face I cannot place, a sound without a word. The claim that no one can think of anything without a name is simply false, and it is the kind of claim that collapses under the first honest introspective test.
I raised similar objections during our interview, Michael, and the response was more of the same. A half-truth repeated with more conviction does not become a whole truth.
It's as if you have a fixed idea that you have decided must be true, and blind yourself to anything that does not support it.
If the broder between California and Nevada is a human concention, neither actually exist as an actual entity. The "Siera Nevada", like all named things exist only as a human convention and do the 'Rocky Mountains". There are no such things as Mexico or Maine.We should call the river The Missourissip but what can we call it when it flows into the Gulf of America? The name of a smell you can't identify is "A smell you can't identiry". A face you cannot identify's name is 'A face you cannot identiry". Can you name a thing you cannot name. Is there such a thing a s truth. Or is truth a good example of something that exists only as an idea subject to cultural interpretations? Every persona exists in a closed loop of self-referential beliefs. Rare is the case in which that collapses and yet remains in tact.
Nice little overview.
But, to be honest, I never had much sympathy for Dawkins' "Selfish Gene" concept, or his arrogance, putting academic/scientific (so called) learning above all else. It was obvious (to me) that in putting all his eggs in one basket concept (the sefishness of genes), he was missing the "spiritual" aspect of human behaviour. OK, maybe even the majority of humans are set to follow the "me-first" programming ... but that is not the case for all. The concept is a grand presumption - a mechanical unthinking presumption by someone whose mind was fixed on the outcome of particular ritualistic processes that he was (a) conditioned into believing in, and (b) never questioned.
I remember saying to friends many years ago that Richard Dawkins would probably one day convert to Catholicism (just like that other cynic, back in the 1970s/80s? - Malcolm Muggeridge).
So, OK, maybe now it is AI that has caught his fancy and devotion? Maybe not, and nothing is set in stone anyway. But I am sure it will eventually emerge as an academic book of some kind.
Some people suffer from a very disabling condition ... called "knowing too much". Dawkins is the perfect example. If only someone could free the poor fellow from his own mind!
Roy,
Have you actually read The Selfish Gene? Dawkins did not predict selfish behavior in organisms. He was explicit about that.
A gene that maximizes its own replication may produce organisms that cooperate, sacrifice, and care for others, because those behaviors serve gene replication under the right conditions.
Altruism, love, and what you call the spiritual aspect of human behavior are all explicable within the framework, not excluded by it. The gene operates at one level. The organism operates at another. Conflating them is the most common misreading of the book, and Dawkins spent considerable effort addressing it.
The rest of your comment says more about your framework than his.
Yes, I read it when it was first published, but that was a long time ago, so forgive any misinterpretation. It is not a book that had a great impact on me, to be honest. I didn't find any inspiration in what the author wrote. And, what we each write actually says more about our own framework than anything else. Stepping out of that framework is the challenge. I don't think Dawkins usually attempts that task, and, I wonder, do you?
It's not all that we know; it's what we are willing to let go. Ah, but there I go again ...
Roy,
That is a fair question, and the essay attempts to answer it. The systems framing is an effort to step outside the framework in which the self is the unit of analysis, to see the organism as a feedback system running attractors rather than as a self making choices. Whether that constitutes genuinely stepping outside one's framework or simply occupying a different one is something I must leave unresolved. Every framework is inhabited from the inside.
What I can say is that I try to apply the same scrutiny to my own positions that I apply to others'. Whether I succeed is not for me to judge.
Thankyou for your honest reply, Robert.
In a way, it is fairly impossible to not express oneself with the language that has evolved out of one's own unique body-mind mechanism, with all its history and shades of conditioning. But, I see that also as a good thing, because it means that one's expression has its own flavour, its own perspective, its own unique language that no one else exactly has (so to speak). It points us to the fact that what we are (as body-mind mechanisms) are the result of a unique creative process. That's why I see "teachers" (for instance) as ARTISTS, rather than any kind of Authority. For me they each have their own flavour/fragrance, and that is the beauty. They are poets more than they are fixed rocks of truth, and they may not even know it themselves. They are works of art also, still in the making, as am I, and as are you.
Roy,
I agree with much of that. The systems view actually supports it. Each organism is a unique configuration shaped by a history no other system has run. What emerges from that configuration, in language, in art, in philosophy, is genuinely irreducible. That is why it is said that every mind is a universe. And yes, still in the making, as long as the capacity for genuine change has not closed entirely.
When you speak of "teachers" (I assume you mean so-called spiritual teachers) as artists, not authorities, I hear that as an overgeneralization on two levels. First, a teacher may or may not be an artist. Those are quite separate functions. Second, whatever their intentions, the vast majority of what I assume you mean by "teachers" are taken as authorities by their students. I encourage people to stop looking to others to interpret reality for them, and to find their own minds.
I find it interesting that everyone uses the word ‘consciousness’ as if we all have an agreement on what it means. How can we made determinations if the terms are not agreed upon. I’m not saying this ‘contemptuously’, just feel it is important for clarity and/or to point toward assumptions.
Thank you very much Robert.
I had not heard the terms “co-dependent origination” nor “interbeing”. In my brief research just now, I see their meaning and how it comes into play. And going way back to a previous comment, it is why I was fairly sure you would say I was jumping into metaphysics - not supported by direct experience.
I had a deep feeling of unity, which as you say is quite common. And if I have understood you correctly, no problem that this leads me to believe in unity, just be aware that the step I am taking - metaphysical belief - is not supported by direct experience. Agreed. I also believe it is unknowable (what really is)…and somehow take comfort in that.
Well, I have a deep feeling of unity too, and I think co-dependent origination is a useful way to look at it. That said, no one really knows what any of this is. To know that, we would have to be standing outside the loop, observing it from afar, but we aren't. Whatever "myself" is or isn't, it's inside the loop, looping along with everything else.
Warm wishes.
No, I don’t think you are trying to be difficult, Robert. I am not a writer by trade or talent, and so trying to express the ineffable in writing falls quite short.
I had an experience in college that left me with a sense of deep unity, no separation. And yet through my senses, there is also belief in a separate body/mind. That has always felt a bit like a “paradox”: many and one. That may be an improper use of the word in trying to describe something that cannot be described.
As to the last sentence, I was trying to express a growing comfort, almost a preference for, not trying to pin down or “know” by words what is really going on. There is awe and wonder…let it be without grasping at it or thinking about where it comes from. You can’t know, and that is ok.
And finally, I hope I didn’t miss the real point or question within your comment.
Actually, to express the ineffable in words is impossible. That's what ineffable means. But the issue here, as I see it, is neither Inexpressibility nor paradox, but a kind of confusion that I hope to clarify.
Your powerful intuition of unity was a real experience, and not uncommon either, so no confusion there. The confusion I see is in the interpretation. In the history of Eastern thought, there are two main views of this.
First, there is the idea, attributed to Gotama, the Buddha, who saw unity and interpreted it as the interdependence of all entities. This is sometimes called co-dependent origination, or interbeing, and it means what Michael Markham was discussing, that there is no ocean without rain and no rain without oceans. If we follow that schema further, we begin to see that it applies to everything in the world. This does not mean that oceans do not exist or that they only exist, as Michael tried to argue, because we have names for them. It means that the world arises as a single gesture that entails the presence of all its elements, and that if any of those elements were absent, it would be a different world.
Second, there is the view popularized as "nonduality," which derives from Advaita Vedanta. In that conception, only one thing exists, Brahman, and what we perceive as entities are reflections of that. This is not a philosophical idea like co-dependent origination, but a religious one in which Brahman is like God in Western religions.
Neither of these notions is a paradox, which means an apparently self-contradictory statement that can only be true if it is false. Either one is internally consistent if you accept the premises, but the difference between them is stark. Buddhism stops at explanation based on observation, while Advaita requires accepting an explanation that cannot be verified or falsified by observation because it entails metaphysics, which can never be proven factually, but only believed in or not.
When you said that there is only one consciousness, that is Vedanta, not Buddhism, and I see no support for it. I do not even understand what is being claimed. Are the nondualists saying that my consciousness of a picnic is the same as an ant's? If that's not it, what are they saying?
That is what I asked you to clarify, but you could not. Instead, you pointed to an experience of unity. I see the experience as totally real and completely valid, but the idea that a feeling of unity arises because there is only one consciousness as a bridge too far.
Thanks for being a good sport and hanging in here with me.
Ok, plainly: there is only 1 consciousness that divides in a way that appears to be a multiplicity. Paradox? Yes…which I’m getting to see as desirable. Awe and mystery WITHOUT knowing or resolution.
I am not trying to be difficult, but I genuinely do not know what that means. I see no paradox in your words. Not at all. I see words without any meaning I can extract and pin down.
There is really no such thing as consciousness,.If there were such a thing, It could not have access to its own qualities and limitations. As long as it is thought of as an actual thing, separate from other things, confusion will reign.
Interesting perspective, though I still generally contend there should be an agreed upon word and its meaning if we are going to develop a “test” for AI.
When you say, “As long as it is thought of as an actual thing, separate from other things”, is it your position that there is only “this” that is made up of everything…nothing is separate? And I happen to be of a mind that awareness, consciousness, or (?) is definitely not a “thing” within our paradigm of subject/object.
Meaning is a private universe. Every word we speak travels across the void between galaxies, leaving one constellation of lived experience and arriving in another, altered by the journey. The word home conjures a different architecture for each of us: one person sees the yellow light of a kitchen, another hears a particular creak on the stairs, a third feels only the ache of a place they can never return to. We assume we are understood because we share the same syllables, but we do not share the same interiors. Language is less a bridge than a wager, a hope that your constellation resembles mine enough for the signal to land. It rarely arrives intact. We are each, in a sense, translating.
Yes, Michael, we agree on this, which is not metaphysics, but simple observation. But the rest of what you have shared here is not like that. Your claim that objects exist only because people have words for them is simply wrong. I demonstrated that, and was sorry to see that you failed to respond.
Do you really imagine that if you stubbed your toe on an object that has no name in your vocabulary, you would feel no pain? If you want to comment here, good faith requires acknowledging errors when they are demonstrated. As it stands, you are not conversing. You are cycling through variations of the same unfalsifiable claim, and that is not a discussion worth continuing.
I was going to say, in response to Michael, with something that you, Robert, will label immediately ‘metaphysics’ that can’t be known…but I just can’t help it: the concept of consciousness being shared could account for common understanding between us.
I won't label it. I don't know what you mean by "consciousness being shared."
AI is not exempt from the restrictions of the objectified perspective. It is merely a collection of all the information gathered over the lifetime of human beings and is influenced entirely by human-centric, self-referential ideations. Each objectifying brain has a profoundly different dictionary by which it relates to the shared dream of separation. Ultimately, each brain is alone in an inverted ball of mirrors.
“Ultimately, each brain is alone in an inverted ball of mirrors.”
Respectfully…we cannot know this.
At most, all we can do is play out here on the edge. That’s all the sages can do. Ultimately, nothing can be known when all we have are names for things that exist only in the naming of them.
“Ultimately, nothing can be known”.
Respectively disagree again. I believe some things can be known. I would agree that “no thing” can be known.
I agree. Michael's assertion sounds insightful, but would require a point of view that no one actually enjoys--outside the nervous system observing it from afar.
Stacking all imaginary things and naming them “Everything” or” Oneness” is the normal way the objectifying brain fools itself into believing it has discovered something profound. It has not. It has merely moved the pieces of its dream of separation around.
I find the experience of clarity fascinating because the clarity it seems must appear in relationship to something and be based on pre existing expectations or understandings. Clarity isn't free floating. It's always clarity about something, always landing against a background of what was previously murky or assumed. Which means clarity is relational because it needs the confusion it resolves to exist. What is recognizing the opacity or the clarity?
Trying to determine the realtionship between things that exist only in the naming of them can take a lifetime.
Perhaps many many many lifetimes such as humans have been busy doing lol?
Do you want to live forever?
Beautifully written.
Thank you, Scott.
I hope Dawkins reads this, so at least he knows that he has a kind of supporter, or at least someone who understands his position, having interacted with Claude too
I would love him to read it. He was a true influence fifty years ago, and I will always feel grateful.