The Paradox of Progress – Dr James Willis

After several reprints, the latest publication of Dr James Willis (1995) “The Paradox of Progress” is as an e-Book (2022) here at PayHip.

I first reviewed and recommended it back in 2003. At that point I was only a couple of years into my own quest for “a better world model” and Willis as a practising GP was one of the few (non-academic) professionals I found making positive reference to Robert Pirsig “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” in his day job.

The paradoxical perspective we shared was that despite ever more science-led technology and management practice, there was a real sense that we humans were in fact coming off worse.

When I started work at the Middlesex Hospital my senior medical registrar told me that our job in life was to make sure the patients died with their electrolytes balanced. Joking apart, when doctors work to rule there is a grave danger that the rules will do better than the patients.

Here we are at the crux of the paradox. We want to define clear solutions to the problems we can see in the world. But as we do so we progressively destroy the essence of life itself. It seems to be an unavoidable rule that the precise definition of human affairs has the effect of killing humanity itself.

According to Pirsig: “The crisis is being caused by the inadequacy of existing forms of thought to cope with the situation. It can’t be solved by rational means because the rationality itself is the source of the problem.”

Rather than treating rules as “tablets of stone” to be enforced by technological implementation it was clear in human terms that rules really were there to be broken, with care. That “rules are for guidance of the wise, and the enslavement of fools” has become a mantra of mine. That, and the fact the problem lies in the received wisdom of our own rationality, misunderstanding ourselves, has been a driver of my own research and writing ever since.

The seriousness and scale of that problem for humanity as a whole has done nothing but grow in the two intervening decades. Yet Willis book is highly readable & witty and, with a career’s worth of practical learning through anecdotes between doctor, patients and caring colleagues, both moving & funny. Still highly recommended.

Master and Margarita – Reloaded

I am at last re-reading Mikhail Bulgakov (1929 / 1966) “The Master and Margarita”. The first time I started (and failed to complete) reading it in April 2017 I said this:

All I can say so far is M&M’s seriously weird and compelling. Some cross between Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses” and Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods” but written in 1930’s Soviet Russia!

Mentioned it in October 2019 again in a Salman Rushdie context, but still had never read it. Strangely my first mention of it was back in December 2007 on a singularly unimpressive recommended book list. (Note: it was only published in 1966, first translated into English in 1967, mine is a 1995 Picador version of a 1993 translation, but it was originally written and constantly revised under censorship from 1929 until his death in 1940. The published version is stitched together from multiple credible drafts. Wikipedia.)

I’m beyond where I got to before, and recognising the humour amidst the weird “Russian Gods” ghost story. Wish me luck.

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[Spoilers alert.]

OK, so having read the whole over ~5 days, I have to say it is very good, even though I’m ultimately disappointed in terms of gleaning much new for my own agenda.

It’s clever and witty, and easy to see why it was subversive and blasphemous under Soviet political constraints, not to mention the ladies regularly divested of their underwear?

As I read it, the real hero in this alternative reality is Pontius Pilate who had the empathy and nous – and power and connections – to save the vagrant philosopher from his crucifixion and avoid the need for supernatural (ie. it never happened) reincarnation and ascension, though the writing of this possible outcome remains unfinished within the plot. Art & Literature is full of variations on how the good prophet would have done better without his supernatural ending. Anyway, as the epilogue points out most of the satanic back-magic of the plot never happened either, almost all can be explained by trickery. Slightly annoying over-use of the multiple accidental and deliberate fires meme to destroy documentary evidence (or not?) along the way. Lots of allusions to Faust and Dante. The perspective of flying over the scenes. Fairly obvious tension in the recurring “the devil must exist” – how can there be good without evil, etc. Everyone reporting the supernatural risking being carted off to the asylum, etc. The historical, political and cultural satire in the characterisation and naming of the cast of cats and ghosts, and in the locations from Yalta to St Petersburg via Kyiv and Moscow, is apparent.

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Reading the commentary notes afterwards, I don’t think I missed many?

As a cult novel, you can also see the use of the location names and quotations from the text in popular culture. “Sympathy for the Devil” being the most quoted. Many dramatisations exist.

Here an interesting BBC R3 Forum discussion. – actually a very comprehensive discussion of all the main themes with lots of spoilers – skip the trailers and news at 23 to 26 mins – highly recommended listen.)

The devil in the details may be the only aspect I can take away into my own agenda. It being literally true that:

“The devil is in the details,
the angels are in the abstractions”

What did I miss? Not much it seems.

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The Hidden Spring – Round-Up

The night before last, I completed
Mark Solms (2021) “The Hidden Spring
– A Journey to the Source of Consciousness“.

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The Preamble / Previously on Psybertron

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The Review

That Conscious Feeling

Human exceptionalism? I’m not one of those that deny the human species being special. We are very special in terms of our roles and responsibilities in the cosmic ecosystem. However, what has tended to happen, even amongst those scientists that see humanity as a temporary local difficulty amidst their gods-eye view of the whole of objective reality, is that we get blinded by the obvious fact that the ascent of man has been accompanied by development of the relatively enormous cerebral hemispheres in our great-ape lineage.

This has led to a prejudice – the cortical fallacy – that all the important aspects of our undoubted higher intelligence, rational capabilities and social complexity as a species must be primarily associated with these hemispheres, or at least as the default place to start to look for explanations. It’s not that modern neuro-scientists don’t actually understand this, simply that this perspective is baked into so many resources. Some of the alternatives are equally caricatures – that our animal instincts are built into lower / animalian / limbic / reptilian brain structures – and that these emotions are therefore somehow inferior (bad) relative to our “higher” (good) rational cortical capabilities.

The first six chapters of Solms’ book thoroughly nail this:

Our intelligent consciousness, on which we rightly focus as key to our highest intellectual capabilities and our models of how we work as intelligent beings, is thoroughly embedded in our mid-brain structures. Specifically Solms identifies the Mid-Brain Decision-Making Triangle (after Merker) – the “periaqueductal grey” (PAG), the “superior colliculi” (SC) and the “reticular activating system” (RAS) in the “mid-brain locomotor region” as the very source of our sentient being (after Panksepp). This subsystem is constantly processing a three-way Bayesian appraisal and orchestration of priorities of inputs (in SC), with feelings (in PAG), with available options (in RAS). Where of course, the great majority of component inputs are actually the results of our internal simulations of the options, and the great majority of the processes are subconsciously (semi-)automated. The elements brought to our conscious attention are the exceptions (surprise departures from prior expectations a la Bayes) which we sense as feelings – qualitative / categorical / good / bad – and which guide those decisions.

Consciousness “is” affect.
It’s feeling all the way down.

How do I feel
about what I know
and what, if anything,
should I do about it?

For the science – the biology, the neuroscience and the psychology – that really ought to be it.

[Post Note Jan 2024 – this Dr James Cooke video conversation with Mark Solms is a pretty comprehensive summary of his position. Cooke’s own summaries “absolutely pivotal” says Solms.]

All Solms’ empirical resources and rational arguments follow the orthodox and thoroughly referenced considerations of those sciences over several decades. Now, having demoted the hemispheres and promoted the subjective, there a quite a few corollaries and loose ends he goes on to resolve.

The Point of Life Itself

The first avenue is that whilst the whole of the above stands fine with neuroscience and psychology as biological sciences, it is fully supported by the more fundamental sciences of physical systems generally. How life itself arises from the self-organisation of non-living systems and how the basics of conscious intelligence are a natural part of that evolution. Prompted by the work of Karl Friston (since 2010) and working together with him (since 2017) Solms elaborates in this biological neuroscience domain the arguments rehearsed over many decades in the information science domain. (For that reason I can only skim over the topics here, but if the terms are not already meaningful to you, Solms provides as good a case as I’ve seen outside information science.)

Life as the battle against entropy.
Entropy as an informational property.
Consciousness as part of the armoury in that battle.

Homeostasis: The efficient minimisation of free-energy. The self-organisation of a system, an organism, as an entity bounded by a so-called Markov-blanket, with as many sub-systems as may similarly emerge ad-infinitum. The independence of each system / sub-system processing its internal resources yet “sensing” external information at its boundary. The irony of this information processing line of thinking – a computing machine with algorithms –  which appears to reduce life and consciousness to mechanistic processes and yet it is these Markov-blankets separating the levels which ensure the qualitative categorical existence of the emergent entities.

Solms provides an excellent extended metaphor of an engineering organisation set-up to maintain a leaky dam protecting a local community – the little Dutch boy (girl in Solms’ case) comes of age.

If that weren’t impressive enough, having emphasised the “feeling” nature of consciousness as affect in the first half of his book, Solms shows that – considered as such a subsystem – the mid-brain decision triangle providing these intentional, intelligent capabilities of consciousness is itself our subjective experience of it. It’s worth dwelling on that.

We have an explanation of
how our consciousness works
and
we have an explanation of
our subjective experience of it.

Having effectively disposed of qualia and the hard-problem en-passant, he does pay much respect to David Chalmers influence on his earlier thought journey throughout as well as spending a full 30 pages on arguments arising from Chalmers’ work.

The Home Straight

He sets the record straight on the cortical fallacy and this from the opening of Ch10 probably says all that needs to be said:

“As we have seen repeatedly throughout [the book], the cortical fallacy has a lot to answer for. Had the pioneers of behavioural neuroscience not been so impressed by the large expanse of our cortex or been so blinded by the philosophical idea that mental life arises from associating memory images, we might have discovered the real source of consciousness a good deal earlier. It is a tantalising irony of the history of mental science that Freud possessed so many pieces of the puzzle more than a century ago. The clues, both neurological and psychological, were staring him in the face. But when it came to consciousness, even he fell prey to our collective fixation with the cortex – an obsession whose cost, in case we forget, may be measured in more than just wasted time.”

This reminder of how much damage has been done by misunderstanding and misapplying our own received rationality in the past century or more is similarly echoed in Iain McGilchrist’s recent work “The Matter With Things”. Like Solms, McGilchrist also documents the damage caused by the cortical fallacy. Entirely complementary to Solms’ focus on the higher(newer)-lower(older) distinction, McGilchrist’s focus is on the left-right brain differences mediated by the lower(older) structures. Both bring a fundamentally systems architecture perspective to understanding how our minds work and how our misunderstandings of our minds’ subsystems are leading us astray.

Given the scale of such a change in human understanding, it is perhaps un-warranted icing on the cake that Solms also demonstrates that the same arguments can be applied to the creation of artificial minds. However, I can only echo the existing blurbs for “The Hidden Spring”

“A remarkable book.
It changes everything.”
– Brian Eno

Solms’ vital work has never ignored  the lived, felt experience of human beings. His ideas look a lot like the future to me.”
– Siri Hustvedt

The big challenge is precisely there, and Solms acknowledges it.

Crossing that Rubicon

He calls it inviting the scientific sceptics to “cross the Rubicon” with him. Without that it will change nothing and the future will look the same as the past.

“[Mind is primarily affective, felt subjectively.] To rule the subjective perspective out is to exclude from science the most essential feature of the mind.”

Solms (and I too, having called this hurdle “Catch-22” for decades) invite you to take that perspective of subjective self-hood, the one you already “have in mind” into your scientific considerations of mind.

“I am asking you to replace the third-person objective perspective we have taken so far on the dynamics [of the neuro-science] with a first-person one: with the subjective perspective of the self-evidencing system itself. I am asking you to adopt the system’s point of view, to empathise with it.”

Without accepting that shift of perspective, we are indeed ruling out scientific progress in understanding our minds.

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[Post Note (May 2023): In response to a thread where otherwise intelligent people were simply denying in ignorance that Solms could possibly have any explanation of such things as consciousness and pain / colour / qualia, Solms interjected this:

“Dual-aspect monists (like me) don’t believe that these correlated subjective & objective phenomena *cause* each other, in either direction. Rather, they’re the products of two observational perspectives upon one & the same part of nature. Nociceptive neural transmission and neural responses to it are one perspective; feelings of pain are another perspective.”

Me too. End.]

Before Returning to the Cortex

Just completed Chapters 7, 8 & 9 of the Hidden Spring, having been looking forward to 7 when I finished 6, here. Wow, this is good stuff from Solms.

The contents / subjects …

    • Free Energy Principle – Homeostasis, “self-evidencing” in self-organising systems, statistical thermodynamics, entropy and information, efficiency. Markov-blankets between self-organised layers, two-way / circular causality.
    • Predictive Hierarchy – exploits these layers – more efficiency. The emergent objects (wrapped in their blankets) really are part of the functional / causal processes, without elemental reductionism. The contents of any Markov blanket are highly self-contained. (As an engineer myself, this is pure systems thinking.)
    • Consciousness Arises – subjective consciousness too(!) – *BOOM* – how could it be any other way?

So much to agree with just a few meta / detail points & questions:

Efficiency as a driver? (Tim Kueper was sceptical about this in a previous exchange. The kinematic teleology is in the self-organisation, the homeostasis, free-energy efficiency is simply the mechanism. Does that help Tim?) “All the ‘quantities’ in a self-organising system that can change will change to minimise free energy”.

That “self-evidencing” is so important – counter intuitive like the directions of information flows in the first 6 chapters – most “information” about the outside world comes from inside our heads. It really does.

This is all very recent from Solms. Up to Ch6 it is mostly his career experience in “neuro-psycho-analysis“. But these chapters all arose out of seeing Karl Friston give a “Life as we know it” presentation at Wellcome / UCL in 2017, working with him on a joint paper thereafter and creating / publishing this book in 2021. Astonishing how quickly things fit into place. Even starting with an information systems bias I’ve been navigating this minefield for 20 years. (I’ll come back to the minefield / Rubicon / catch-22 / leap-of-faith element later. It never goes away.)

As well as dedicating the whole book to Panksepp, Solms credits Friston by prefixing his name to several of the effects he names here (eg “Friston’s Free Energy Principle”, Friston’s Law, etc).

Having been aligned on so much up to Ch7 he reports that Damasio parted from the mechanistic / reductionist implications of “algorithms” that flow through 7, 8 & 9 (& the Solms-Friston paper itself). It’s a common fear.

QUESTION to Mark Solms :- I wonder if Damasio might reconnect with this thesis if he sees the qualitative / categorical nature of the algorithms (p193) as opposed to long causal reductionist chains of classical objects? More heuristics than formal algorithms?

As well as Friston & Damasio – every other source in there. Markov (& Tolstoy), Shannon, Sacks, Wheeler (it from bit), Kant, Darwin, Wiener (cybernetics), W Ross-Ashby(!), Gibbs, Helmholtz (but not Boltzmann or Mach), Freud (but not Maslow), Varela. Wonderful stuff.

Ergodicity – it’s been my favourite concept since 2017 – he uses ergodic and non-ergodic a couple of times in a long  Friston quote (p162/3) without any definition or clue to intended meaning. (2017 a coincidence, no parallel connections). Mentions it again in another Friston quote (p170) with “An ergodic system occupies limited states”. And then relies on this to conclude that all (biological) self-organising systems:

      1. are ergodic
      2. have a Markov blanket
      3. exhibit active inference
      4. are self-preservative

Apart from questioning whether that is the whole intended meaning of ergodic here (?) the active inference is absolutely key. Internal models / algorithms are constantly checked against external sense data, to improve the ongoing model (as well as fix the current homeostatic error)! (This is taking me back to 1989-ish.)

(Whether that’s all there is to ergodicity may not matter here, the key thing is it supports the limited qualitative / categorical options available to our sub-system rather than quantitative resources from across an entire population of all fine-grained options over the map.)

Anyway, joining up these free-energy / homeostasis arguments with the previous six chapters:

“The mistake most cognitive scientists make is that they assume most incoming data is ‘exteroceptive’. They forget that expectation errors (sensory inputs) that matter most to us come from within.

These signals generate ‘affects’ not perceptions. As Freud said, the forebrain is a ‘sympathetic ganglion’. Confusion on this score is the perennial price most cog-sci’s pay for adopting the cortical fallacy. Consciousness is endogenously generated, all of it. Consciousness at source is affect.”

“Affective valence – our feelings about what is biologically ‘good’ and ‘bad’ for us – guides us in unpredicted situations. We concluded that this way of feeling our way through life’s problems using ‘voluntary’ behaviour is the biological function of consciousness.”

That leaves me with one clarifying thought

QUESTION to Mark Solms: – those feelings of affective valence are about what is good or bad for us biologically including psychologically / mentally? ie Useful work for free energy includes thinking (feeling) about our thinking as well as as thinking (feeling) about our acting in the world?

There’s a good deal of rehabilitation and building on Freud – beyond the usual caricature of dreams and parental influence (where Solms started in fact) – in areas where he really was ahead of his time on how brains / minds work. Solms (and Friston) developed formal set of equations (using Freudian notation) to describe the algorithmic information behaviour between the various brain states in play, neatly summarised in “Fig 17” where that “mid-brain decision triangle” behaviour is laid bare. It does look bonkers to “reduce” mind to such a simple graphic information flow diagram of a few equations(!) no less – see eg Damasio’s reaction earlier – but with the right perspective on the affective categorical variables in play, and accepting the infinite sub-divisibility of the reality of sub-systems within any Markov-blanketed system we choose – it really is credible and convincing (it’s the delegated / permissive supervisory control system I described at the end of the previous post.).

(c) Mark Solms.
(I need to create a slide version of that with more labelling in the graphic itself.)

THE PROBLEM, as Solms elaborates in the closing pages of Ch9, is what he calls inviting scientific sceptics to cross a Rubicon. As noted earlier this tricky step never goes away from this debate, philosophical or scientific. I’ve been calling in Catch-22 for two decades, but whatever language you choose:

“[Mind is primarily affective, felt subjectively.] To rule the subjective perspective out is to exclude from science the most essential feature of the mind.”

Solms (and I) invite you to take that perspective of subjective self-hood, the one you already “have in mind” into your scientific considerations of mind.

“I am asking you to replace the third-person objective perspective we have taken so far on the dynamics [of the neuro-science] with a first-person one: with the subjective perspective of the self-evidencing system itself. I am asking you to adopt the system’s point of view, to empathise with it.”

DO NOT PASS GO.

(A little under 100 pages to go.)

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Post Notes:

In that year-old post where I first referred to Mark Solms – as something that looked important even if I didn’t find time to read – I was clearing out lots of bookmarks that were choking off any sense of making progress. One of those book marks was to this piece by Karl Friston et al on the switch from Cartesian Dualism to “Markovian Monism” – and it includes variations on that Fig 17 above. It’s all connected!

Also had a response overnight from Solms on the two questions above:


That later Damasio reference:
Man, K. and Damasio, A. (2019) “Homeostasis and Soft Robotics in the Design of Feeling Machines”. In Nature Machine Intelligence, I: 446-52, doi.org/10.1038/s42256-019-0103-7
If he’s OK with “feeling machines” it sounds like he’s lost his aversion to the risk of reductionism in mechanistic algorithms 🙂 Yay!

(Earlier 2010 Friston reference in there too – unfortunately the Nature Reviews – Neuroscience papers are not free access.)

On to a fuller review of Solms.

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The Mid-Brain Decision Triangle

Still working my way slowly through Mark Solms Hidden Spring, and barely half-way through, in Chapter 6 we have the seat, source or well-spring of consciousness, signified by his title.

(We really need one good anatomical brain map on which to project so many different writers’ resources – I mentioned before – every one published seems to annotate only those specific to that writer’s topic. This Browser version of the 3D Brain App looks most useful but needs more annotation layers. Anyway ...)

Although as a “systems thinker” I’m not particularly concerned with identifying a particular physical seat, it has great value from an “archaeological” perspective – digging down through the layers of brain evolution – higher and lower (generally) maps to later and earlier. Very good for understanding how, why, when and in what context capabilities arose. Apart from the occasional evolutionary cul-de-sac, form does tend to follow function. As ever all empirical evidence for which elements and connections do indeed support which capabilities and functions come from normal behaviours being physically or electro-chemically interrupted in abnormal cases – the lesion literature – with the masses of new neuro-correlate sensing now available to “see” what is happening, where and when.

(Any complex topic has at least one time axis – in real-time-living, individual-lifecycle-development and/or species-evolution time-scales. It was Foucault who first introduced me to the archaeological aspect of knowledge and Jorn Barger, the original blogger, who turned me on to timeline representations. But again I digress.)

Without getting philosophical or overly definitive about exactly what we mean by our consciousness or the volition to act according to our will, Solms with ample acknowledgement to Panksepp and Merker, thoroughly emphasises the feeling or affective subjective qualities in play. (As I said in the previous post – any “science” discounting these is cutting itself off from ever explaining consciousness or will satisfactorily. This is surely a given, but one nevertheless denied by so many orthodox scientists and scientific philosophers – and thus almost all popular scientist personalities)

Although Solms is circumspect in not overclaiming – at this stage half-way through his book – he really has also shown that the “qualia” half of the so-called hard problem is a non-event. Consciousness is all about subjective experience. (How hard can it be?)

In looking at “levels” of consciousness from comatose (or actually dead) to  maximally conscious (heightened engagement or mindful flow, say) he is at pains to notice more than one axis of wakefulness / awareness and attention / engagement, the latter he unapologetically dubs “arousal”. There are both scope and kind axes in the subject of consciousness. (In fact he has an appendix on this which “aroused” my interest enough to read first when I originally skimmed the book. I didn’t just “notice” it, I was motivated enough to engage in checking out that one small piece as part of my “decision-to-read” process.)

Anyway, not surprisingly our source of consciousness is a sub-system of the whole – the mid-brain decision triangle – where knowledge and affect are constantly compared and updated.

How do I feel about what I know and
what, if anything, should I do about it?

A sub-system evolved in all vertebrates, not just we humans, despite our massively developed cortex.

Para-phrase quotations of Ch6 The Source:

(Note two things. This is a massive spoiler in terms of copyright content, acknowledged, but also a massive risk of misrepresentation in the paraphrasing and in introducing my own / McGilchrist thoughts, also acknowledged. In paraphrase I’ve obviously left out many of Solms own qualifications and caveats. I’ve also kept in lots of technical specifics which I maybe don’t understand as Solms intended, primarily to allow me later checking against other resources.)

Most people with even a casual interest in the brain … have heard of chemical neuro-transmitters involved in individual synaptic – fire/not-fire – communications between neurons.

Fewer are aware of post-synaptic-modulation involving chemical neuro-modulators which more diffusely modulate the progress of signals – speed and intensity – in whole populations or bundles of neurons in localised areas of the brain. It’s this “level” of signal that drives the “arousal” axis of our awareness / engagement. It’s messy, non-binary and arises endogenously from not just the “Reticular Activating System” (RAS) but also from other sub-cortical and even non-neurological bodily structures.

(Depending how and where released some of these chemicals do both.)

5 important neuromodulators in the reticular brainstem system (there are more than a hundred slow-acting hormones and peptides involved around the brain and body) are:

    • dopamine
      – (sourced mainly in ventral tegmental area and substantia nigra)
    • noradrenaline
      – (sourced mainly in locus coeruleus complex)
    • acetylcholine
      – (sourced mainly in mesopontine tegmentum and basal forebrain nuclei)
    • serotonin
      – (sourced mainly in raphe nuclei
    • histamine
      – (sourced mainly in tuberomammillary hypothalamus)

The shift from vegetative wakefulness (minimal awareness) to affective arousal (intentional engagement) is driven by neuromodulators acting on a small knot of neurons called the periaqueductal grey (PAG).

The PAG is separate from, but lies right next to and is densely interconnected with, the RAS, therefore affected by the same neuromodulators, but crucially the direction of their connectivity is reversed: The RAS influence is upwards into the cortex, the PAG only receives communications downwards from the cortex.

Immediately adjacent (behind) the PAG is the multi-layered superior colliculi (SC). Its layers provide mappings of the body in terms of motor maps and spatio-sensory aspects, together they assemble a massively compressed and integrated representation of the exteroceptive world, arriving both from the cortex and from sub-cortical sensory-motor regions.

The PAG is the centre for balancing, prioritising or segueing “needs” data according to its salience, orchestrating different coping strategies in response to sensory inputs. All affective circuits converge on the PAG.

The SC represents the moment by moment state of the objective (LH-cortex-modelled) sensory and motor body, in much the same way as the PAG monitors its subjective (RH-cortex-felt) need state. This affective / sensory / motor interface between the PAG, the SC and the mid-brain locomotor region is the “mid-brain decision triangle” (Merker); the primal self, the very source of our sentient being (Panksepp).

The deepest layer of the SC is a map (model) that controls eye movements – one that is intrinsically more stable than the other layers, since these others are calibrated against it, thereby establishing the unified “point of view” that characterises our perceptual experience, even though our actual eye movements are constantly flitting about the “scene”. “… a fully articulated panoramic 3D world composed of shaped, solid objects, the world of our familiar phenomenal experience” (Merker). This scene is our constructed view of reality which also explains why we experience ourselves as living in our heads.

Our here and now perceptions are constantly guided by predictions, generated (modelled) from our long-term memory. That is why far fewer neurons propagate signals from the sense organs to the internal sub-systems than the other way. The heavy lifting is done by the predictive signals that meet the sensory ones arriving from the periphery. We do not rebuild our whole world model constantly from the sensory inputs, thus saving enormous information processing / metabolic effort.

(Note the caveats at the start of that long paraphrase / quote.)

For me that all sounds entirely believable, however verifiable Solms claims and interpretations, which I may anyway have misinterpreted. I’ve subscribed to a Permissive Supervisory Control System view of the brain-mind for as long as I’ve taken any interest in it. A mix of feed-forward as well as feed-back with the vast majority of information and processes at autonomous “sub-conscious” levels for efficiency (attention) and tractability (effectiveness) reasons. Free will being just the right amount of free-won’t.

And my interest – in psycho-cybernetics – has always been about how we individually and collectively make and enact good decisions.

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PS My other interest at the metaphysical limits of physics is information itself as the complement of entropy (after Boltzmann) at the most fundamental level of physics.  The technical appendix on arousal – mentioned above – was actually entitled “Arousal and Information” referenced in the final sentence of this Chapter 6 as a “bridge” to the next. Chapter 7 is “The Free Energy Principle” – hopefully the “plus” in homeostasis-plus. We shall see Eddo?

Classifying Original Cybernetics

Cybernetics has been the clear root of Psybertron since I started this venture 20+ years ago, and I’m often at pains to point out it was about human systems from the outset, not about general electro-mechanical computing machines and automation devices, since they didn’t exist when cybernetics was first coined, beyond Shannon & Turing’s thought experiments.

The human system / organisation / communications side of it became known as “the second cybernetics” because despite the original intent, geeks linked computation to “computers” and monopolised its use as “the first cybernetics”. [Note, as well as first and second temporally, we have first second and third orders.]

Fascinating to see James Gleick tweet this letter from The Library of Congress, struggling to classify Wiener’s original Cybernetics:

Human Psychology or Electronic Computing?

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See also on Psybertron – Cybernetics #1, #2 & #3

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The Hidden Spring of Mark Solms

I’ve had Mark Solms (2021) book “The Hidden Spring – A Journey to the Source of Consciousness” since April last year.

[Post Note: Final round-up of reading “The Hidden Spring” here. Many more references to Solms since.]

Finding lots of content I recognised (eg. a major dependence on Jaak Panksepp and life as “homeostasis” – the whole book is dedicated to Panksepp in fact), I had previously satisfied myself with maybe never actually reading Solms amidst other priorities. Primarily – the cortical fallacy – a shift of focus away from the “higher” brain cortex to mid-brain / brain-stem sites of conscious activity. At that point McGilchrist’s Master and Emissary was already history and The Matter With Things hadn’t yet materialised. The two are complementary: a higher-vs-mid/lower emphasis as opposed to a left/right-mediated-by-mid/corpus-callosum, and despite the fact neither references the other (?), both share a lot of resources.

Both also share an emphasis of practical experience of not just the physio-neurology but the clinical psycho-analytical / psychiatric aspects of their human subjects too. Both also are to some extent rehabilitating fields that became unfashionable due to too many subjective “snags” in being taken entirely seriously by science (*). In fact Solms has effectively created his own subject area – neuro-psycho-analysis – out of the wreckage of cognitive neuroscience.

I guess I was a little prejudiced against Solms apparent wish to locate a specific physical site of consciousness located within the brain, since I already subscribe to a pan-(proto)-psychism. For me the brain – the whole extended nervous and hormonal system – is the transducer and/or orchestrator of our conscious experience, whichever directions we slice and dice the functional elements for analysis. Solms and McGilchrist are clearly both right. It’s the systems architecture that matters, the elements all play their parts.

Anyway, I am now slowly reading Solms and getting plenty from it. As well as the obvious recurring idea – a given – that any science that discounts the subjective from its attempts to explain consciousness is discounting itself from any chance of doing so, Solms has a strong support (after Panksepp) for an ontology of feelings – the qualitative aspects of immediately sensed experience – as literally what constitute conscious experience. Very close to the Pirsigian quality of pre-conceptual, radical empiricism. Obviously Pirsig isn’t referenced, not even in the 2/3 I’ve not yet read, but I will complete it.

Again, still, highly recommended.

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(*) eg the jibe of sneering scientific orthodoxy against Oliver Sacks as “the man who mistook his patients for a literary career”.

4 Suicides and 2 Murders

A regular theme here is that those investigating the limits to knowledge often get close to “madness”, even tip over into paranoia or worse and do so either temporarily or irrecoverably depending on the kind of support and understanding they get, or the others that become collateral damage. Such a recurring theme, that I have a euphemism to refer to it as:

“There, but for grace, go we all.”

There is also an element that it is necessary to at least get close to the edge and to witness the source of madness, to experience it as part of truly understanding. But that comes with obvious risks. And, let’s be clear, this is not some kind of new finding. It’s as old as mythology itself that our genius / heroes go on quests for the source of all knowledge, get more than the enlightenment their epiphany bargained for and often don’t get out sane or even alive. And it’s as real in the formal pursuit of would-be scientific knowledge as it is in the romantic humanities. In fact the Romantics often took / take themselves deliberately close to the edge by artificial means. (Simon Schama – The Romantics, currently showing. David Attenborough(!) reading “Tables Turned” from which I often quote “We murder to dissect”.)

In my own personal quest, hearing that the brilliant Ludwig Boltzmann committed suicide is as old as Jacob Bronowski’s (1972) Ascent of Man. (The Auschwitz meme too, though I digress, but only slightly.) How mad can we get?

Boltzmann is just one of the self-inflicted deaths investigated along with those of Cantor, Gödel and Turing by David Malone in his (2007 BBC4 / 2008 BBC2) “Dangerous Knowledge“. (Playlist of 5 parts on Daily Motion arranged here by Richard Emerson at Ancient World Org. Original Vimeo version here.)

By a double coincidence Richard had pointed to that film in a comment about my reading of Karl Sigmund “Exact Thinking in Demented Times” and lo and behold, we see Sigmund as a contributor to the film in the first two minutes, briefly anonymous initially but more explicitly later in the Gödel episode and more. (Interestingly, Louis Sass is also a major contributor and he’s someone Iain McGilchrist pays particular credit to in his “The Matter With Things”)

[More coincidences – for Richard:

The ticket strip for my daily commute last time I was working in Oslo, was the bookmark for my recent read of McGilchrist – on which I wrote:

“*Add Sass to book list !*” ]

It’s the “denial” that creates the mental tension and crises – whether internally or externally (*) inflicted. And let’s not forget McGilchrist was / is a practicing psychiatrist. These are not “coincidences”.

Anyway, as I noted in my read of Sigmund, all these human stories – of suicides and murders, and of paranoias short of these – are pretty much the story of where “knowledge” went wrong in the 20thC. The denial of sacred nature beyond objective science. The whole of my 20 year blogging project. Approximately from Pirsig to McGilchrist via The Vienna Circle, calling all stations. Next stop Oxford.

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(*) The tension or denial can arise internally dealing with the two (L+R) views in our own heads and/or externally when our own internal intuitive & integrated (L+R) conflicts with the established received wisdom of the dominant (L) social pattern.

Other / Meta / Content:

David Malone is someone referenced here before. A regular host/interviewer at “How The Light Gets In” Hay on Wye, previous interviewer of Iain McGilchrist, and maker of “Why Are We Here?”

He refers to “the slippage” of thinking between the explicit and the intuitive. For me that’s Hofstadter’s “conceptual slippage” in “Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies” & “Tabletop“. And Hofstadter is the preface to Sigmund’s book, and a big interpreter of Gödel.

Loved the characterisation of Russell’s Principia as “like 10,000 tonnes of intellectual concrete poured over the cracks in mathematics and logic”. Brilliant!

Mentioned often before how things might have been different now if several people had grabbed the opportunity of their paths crossing at the 1930  (2nd) Königsberg conference on the exact sciences. The denial “Nobody wants to face up to the consequences of Gödel”. And that Catch-22 from Gödel – that humans have (RH) intuition beyond logical (LH) rules, but you cannot prove that to the satisfaction of LH rules. Gödel & Wittgenstein ships in the night, and more. Thank Johnny von Neumann for noticing or we may never have known even now.

It’s not “a problem” in need of a solution – it’s a capability we humans can use, and would use if only the LH will stop denying us – are we grown-up enough to face this or will we fall back on the (apparent) certainties of scientific logic?

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Denial in Demented Thinking

I completed Karl Sigmund – “Exact Thinking in Demented Times – The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science” over the weekend. I’ve mentioned the read a few times already, here for example:

The final line of the Afterword – a lesson attributed by Sigmund to  Hofstadter – is “Now I feel that I understand a wee bit better what Ludwig Wittgenstein meant by the phrase “the inexpressible“. In many ways my read of Sigmund is the latest in my own quest to understand not so much the Vienna Circle itself but the confusion of science with philosophy which the 21stC has inherited from the early 20thC.

This has more to do with thinkers associated (positively & negatively) with the activities of the Circle than those that were actually members. Russell,  James, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Gödel, Ramsay and Popper. Not to mention the actual physicists of course, who were busy undermining the foundations of science as fast as the more misguided philosophers were trying codify life according to its received wisdom. In fact a lot of my reading of modern historians of science & philosophy in the last decade has been part of this: Ray Monk, Dave Edmonds, Graham Farmelo, Cheryl Misak and Rebecca Goldstein for example. Karl Sigmund is an extension to this – a tremendously sympathetic human story of these imperfect – even occasionally demented -humans living through two world wars. From Mach and Boltzmann in the late 1800’s to Viktor Kraft the last chair of the Circle in the late-1940’s & early-50’s and the last of them – Einstein, Gödel & Popper – passing in the later 20thC.

With Hofstadter’s acknowledged help, Sigmund’s is the most comprehensive and readable history of the whole, with each of the other modern authors choosing to hang their stories around one or other of the star players. Highly recommended.

That closing line is key. What the quest of the Circle and its legacy miss is that it denies that part of the natural world which is beyond science is not supernatural even though it is intuitively mystical, spiritual, metaphysical, sacred or divine, but never definitively expressible, let alone objectively provable either way. The quest of getting close to this balanced – pragmatic – understanding, in a world more generally in denial, has driven many close to actual madness, some fatally so.

Denial kills.

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[Post Note – I mentioned once or twice before that it was theologian “Sam” – a practicing minister in the Anglican church – first suggested that this atheist take Wittgenstein’s “mysticism” seriously whilst we were both readers of Robert Pirsig. Coincidentally this Twitter thread arose this morning:

Several branches in that thread too, mentioning James as well as Misak / Ramsay and more. Small world.]

The Discovery of Heaven

The 2001 Jeroen Krabbé film of the 1992 Harry Mulisch (Dutch) novel.

I just watched it at the suggestion of Eddo that it had some value to our recent Pirsig / McGilchrist dialogues – the  divine or sacred right-brain view of reality obscured by the dominance of the received-wisdom “science-led” left-brain model of reality:

(Freedom runs on rails. Rules are for guidance of the wise and the enslavement of fools, so rules cast in stone are bad news. There is no absolute freedom in life and reality is more complicated than any rule-based model. The natural world is more than science’s model of it.)

Anyway the film: 20th C Humans have messed-up.
Heaven would like its tablets of stone back. (Why, no idea.)

The symbology is so transparent and unsubtle, the outline of the plot above is stated explicitly in the opening lines, and the layers of religious-symbology and supernatural-cliché are piled-on thicker and thicker thereafter. (But why, still no idea.)

As well as the film and book being 20 and 30 years old, the plot starts in and is inspired by the 60’s (60 years ago). So, after a bit of student anti-war & anti-military-industrial-complex protest, and some revolutionary-socialism, it’s blasphemous theology all the way. Possibly less clichéd if seen 20 or 30 years ago, but from a 2022 perspective:

We have Name of the Rose, American Gods, Satanic Verses, Da Vinci Code and La Comedia thrown in the blender. Oh, and a raven called Edgar (!) leading our blue-eyed angelic child – with supernatural powers of premonition – on his quest for “Daddy” even though he’s only “a shadow”.

Education, books, libraries, historical art, music and architecture are clearly the good guys. But finally, Heaven and Hell seem to be locked in a mutual conspiracy to keep humanity in the dark about the value of that divine or sacred something we can only glimpse obscurely.

[Also: Cosmic brotherhood. Sexual nudity (?) – we already knew where babies come from.  Symbols of all three monotheistic faiths on the lovers’ necklace gift. The puzzle of finding words to describe or define “the divine”. Auschwitz as our ubiquitous symbol of hell on earth. Coincidence of place. The centre of the centre / the holy of holies / the sanctum sanctorum. The arc of the covenant / the keys to the locks / the tablets of stone. Moses’ staff parting the red-sea. Three faiths meeting each other and the underworld in the Jerusalem of Mohammed, Jesus and the Jews. The freeing of the text from the tablets’ destruction. The ascension to the light, and yet ending in continued endarkenment of humanity. Why? Confusingly overdone with no “redeeming” message that I could see. Maybe the book fares better?]