Unexpected changes

Alan Brain has been a close friend for about thirty years. We met at the wargaming group that used to meet at Lindfield. We've shared many interests and activities – wargaming, role playing games, science fiction, a general interest in science and technology, history especially military history. We shared some computer science classes at Sydney Uni. I was there at his and Carmel's wedding. When I lived in Canberra we were frequent visitors to each other's houses.

A bit over two months ago I heard some boggling news from him. Alan was undergoing a spontaneous terrifyingly rapid sex change. The speed of the change was greater than that of any similar change recorded in the literature. The cause was unknown and still is. The known possible causes that were examined were found to be false. There was for while fear that a cancer might be involved. The mood swings associated with this change were unpleasant to put it mildly.

Most of us think of our sex and the sex of those around us as a fundamental part of our identities. We also think of the sex of someone as being clear cut – male or female. The biologist in me knew that sexes were fuzzy sets (no sharp boundaries) but this seemed to be something with little bearing on the life of me or anyone around me. Well this wasn't so.

Fortunately Alan is adjusting to this as well as anyone possibly could -certainly far better than I could have. I found that he always had been slightly intersexed and would have slightly preferred to have been a girl. His sexual identity was not as central a part of his identity as it is with most people. He decided to see the transition as an adventure to look forward to. He believes that he will come out of this feeling better about himself than before. At least once the uncomfortable intermediate stages are passed.

Zoe now thinks of herself as a woman. She is the same person as Alan was but just looks different and dresses differently. Every time we talk it's obvious that the real person hasn't changed. So far I'm still confused and unsettled of course. There is a voice saying "This can't be real." But of course it is.

It has become impossible to conceal the changes so she recently revealed them on her blog and started dressing differently. There has been massive support from her friends. This is going to continue. She is on a difficult but unavoidable path and we're all there to help her. Narrow minded and insensitive dissenters have been savaged. (Attack dogs Tex and Ninme, I congratulate you.)

And then there are the people who are strongly affected by these events but who I haven't mentioned so far. I am referring to Alan's wife Carmel and son Andrew. It is hard for me to imagine what is going on with them. We just have to give them our support too.

Nothing about our friendship has changed. It's been a good and interesting thirty years. I look forward to at least that period further. It will be interesting.

Osama, Fred and the Devil

Has anyone noticed how much Osama bin Laden and Fred Phelps are like some of their respective religions' concepts of Satan? (For those unfamiliar with his reputation, Fred Phelps is the head of the tiny but rabidly anti-homosexual Westboro Baptist Church and behind their websites God Hates Fags and God Hates America.)

The video of bin Laden holding court that was found in Afganistan shows him basking in the adulation of his followers, preening himself. The man just oozes egotism. To the best of my knoweldge muslims see Iblis their concept of Satan is seen as being motivated by egotism. His sin is said to be disobedience to God in refusing to prostrate himself before Adam.

If you visit Phelps' website you can see the pure spite that motivates him. He is an obvious sociopath who gets off on hating everyone. His websites are like freakshows of the psyche. What he reminds me of is a character in C. S. Lewis' Perelandra trilogy. I forget his name but this character becomes a mouthpiece for the Devil and towars the end is reduced to simply communicating spite most of the time

I don't think they'll just wake up

Science fiction often deals with artificial intelligence. Usually machines are self-aware by design. Sometimes they are self-aware by accident. As an artificial intelligence becomes more complicated it passes some critical threshold and wakes up. This is what happened in the Terminator movies and in a more benign form what happened to Mike in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
I think that if and when we create an artificial self-aware intelligence it won't be by accident.
Life and consciousness are often described as emergent phenomena. That is they are phenomena that occur in systems. They are not properties of any individual part of a system. This is certainly the case for life and almost certainly the case for consciousness.
They depend on complexity in the systems that generate them but complexity by itself is not sufficient to generate them. It has to be complexity in the right structures. For life this is things like DNA molecules , cell membranes etc. The idea that complexity gives rise to life is a misunderstanding of emergence. Complexity is necessary but not sufficient for life.
The same is probably the case for consciousness. It probably depends on specific structures and interactions and is not an accidental consequence of complexity.
In humans and great apes we may be beginning to identify some of the crucial structures involved in consciousness. Biologists have recently found that humans and great apes have a type of nerve cell that no other animals possess. These recently discovered spindle cells are found in two parts of the brain. The concentration of them is highest in humans, then in bobonos, then chimpanzees, then gorillas, then orang otangs. They appear in humans at four months after birth. There is a great increase in their number in the second and third years.
The speculation is that they tie together different parts of the brain. It has been suggested that they are the channel between emotional and cognitive regions of the brain. They make possible connections in the brain that cannot occur in other animals.
I suspect that self-awareness is part of the same phenomenon as mind modeling. For creatures with complex social interactions it is an advantage to be able to reproduce what is going on inside another's mind as a way of understanding another's behavior. The ability to inspect ones own mental processes gives mind modelers something to compare another's behavior to and helps predict the reactions of others to one's own actions.
Self-awareness certainly made the development of symbols and syntactic language easier. It may be an essential requirement for the ability to attach meanings to symbols. Humans and great apes are the only animals that any one has been able to teach a syntactic language to.
It looks as if consciousness developed incrementally in humans and pongoids. It didn't just appear like some sort of phase change. I don't think it will just happen in machines either.

The second most objectionable vice

The worst vice is cruelty. I think most people would agree with this statement. Most people will also agree most of the time whether an act is cruel. (At least about the worst acts against human beings.)

The second most objectionable vice is self-righteousness. It is perhaps the most dangerous vice – the vice of fanatics. It is so dangerous because it can be hard to recognize while it undermines the conscience. The combination of self-righteousness and cruelty is especially loathsome. Vice claiming the rewards of virtue. An Islamist terrorist is a perfect example of this sort of monstrosity.

One reason we find it so offensive is that the self righteous person insults you. One way or another they convey the message that you are their moral inferior.

The problem is that it is easy to recognize self-righteousness in an opponent. It is harder to spot in oneself or in ones allies. People often condemn an opponents self-righteousness in a manner that is even more self-righteous than that of their opponents.

So how do we describe it? How do we recognize it? Especially, how do we recognize it when it is there in those we agree with or in ourselves?

The dictionary definition is "An excessive belief in one's own righteousness". This does not completely cover what we mean when we call someone self-righteous. What we really mean is that someone is trying to feel and appear virtuous rather than be virtuous. They are trying to use morality for purposes that have little to do with morality.

The self-righteous person could be seeking the pleasure of feeling virtuous or they could be seeking a cause to provide meaning to their life or they could be seeking a feeling of moral superiority over others. The trouble is these are not things we should expect morality to provide.

You see what we have is not a sense of right and wrong but a sense of right and a sense of wrong. Unfortunately the same act can trigger both at the same time.

Our sense of right is the pleasant feeling we have when we do an act of kindness or correct a wrong. Generally we feel good when we do something that we don't have to do but is a good thing or when we do something that we feel obliged to do but is difficult to do. We don't feel virtuous doing something easy which we feel obliged to do.

In fact we tend to admire most the people who feel obliged to do things which we don't think they actually are obliged to do. These are the people for whom doing something good is second nature. They are the ones who say "What else was I to do?". These are the people who do not feel particularly virtuous when they are doing something good. Often we also feel a bit sorry for them, that they didn't really have to do something, that they might be taken advantage of.
In fact for most of us most of the time the emotional rewards of doing good are serendipity. They are seldom our primary motive or intentionally sought. More often our motive is concern for another and feeling good about it is a desirable byproduct. The good feeling we get from doing right is not something that we feel all that often and is not really missed when it is absent.
What is actively sought more often is something that is related, a sense of accomplishment. This usually comes from achieving personal goals. One does not necessarily think of these goals as acts of virtue. They might be or we might see them as morally neutral, but most of the time we are not thinking about morality when we are accomplishing our goals. We could regard the satisfaction of doing good as a special case of a feeling of accomplishment.

Our sense of wrong is our conscience, the thing that stings us when we do something that we shouldn't or don't do something that we should. I do not know what the ultimate basis of morality should be. I can say that some form of morality is necessary for a society to avoid self destruction. A society cannot work unless most of its members behave morally most of the time. Our sense of wrong is also a protection against things which primarily harm us rather than others.

Again the ideal is to unselfconsciously avoid doing wrong. Surely it is best to see through evil, evaluate it as worthless and not be tempted. This is the ideal, resisting temptation is enough.
For most of us our conscience is formed by a combination of training (or indoctrination), intuition and reasoning. There have been many attempts to derive morality from first principles. I have not seen one that I was completely happy with. For many people morality is a set of rules that they are given by a supernatural source. I don't believe that any supernatural source has done so and even if it had an edict by a supernatural power is not necessarily right. I believe that if God is the source of morality it does so by determining the nature of reality not by issuing edicts. I think there is some absolute reality somewhere behind morality but I don't know what it is. Like most people my ethics are a combination of what I am used to, what feels right, what works and what makes sense. I do not believe that right and wrong can be completely captured in one sentence simple statements other than tautologies. (The tautologies I am thinking of are statements that an act is wrong when wrongfulness is part of the definition of the act. For example if murder is defined as intentional wrongful killing then a statement that murder is wrong is true by definition.) I am not saying that there are not acts which are unequivocally good or evil. Helping the victims of last year's Indian Ocean tsunami is unequivocally a good act. The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem was unequivocally an evil act. I am saying that most simple rules have exceptions. I think of morality as more a matter of approaches and attitudes than as a matter of rules.

What do we do when an act has both good and bad effects? When its purpose is something that feels good and desirable but there is something about it that feels wrong or at least disturbing? Well there are three things that you can do. You can decide that the bad outweighs the good and not go ahead with whatever you were considering. You can decide that the good outweighs the bad but you wish there was another way. You go ahead but you pay a price in moral discomfort. Or you can go ahead and persuade yourself that what felt wrong about it wasn't really wrong at all. The last alternative may sometimes be the right choice but I think it usually isn't. It is certainly always a dangerous choice.

An example of a justified but disturbing act would be killing an insane person in order to protect another person. It might be the right thing to do but most people would not feel good about doing it. They would always wish there had been another way. Doing the right thing should not always be expected to bring satisfaction or peace of mind. Sometimes there are no good choices.
A sense of proportion is a much neglected quality. It is so undramatic. But it is our main guide when good and bad are mixed and we can't completely unmix them.

I have heard hypocrisy described as the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Self-righteousness could be described as virtue in the service of vice.

Actually self-righteousness and hypocrisy tend to be opposing vices. Self-righteousness at its worst is found in dreadfully sincere people. Their beliefs may be self-contradictory and incoherent but they cannot truly be described as hypocrites. One of the signs of self-righteousness is how ready someone is to describe opponents or one's less zealous supporters as hypocrites.

Hypocrisy tends to protect against the worst excesses of self-righteousness. Hypocrites after all tend not to be excessively zealous.

I have seen arguments that we need conflicts with other groups as a means of affirming our identities as members of a group. The group could be a tribe or a nation or a social class or a religion or a corporation or something more amorphous. I don't know whether this is a built in tendency or something we acquire from our societies or a bit of both. It is certainly something that people do. It is something that we must keep under control. It is wrong to pick fights so we can have a feeling of group solidarity but people do it. The self-righteous person uses morality as a pretext for and a weapon in conflicts. Morality is used as an identifier of in and out groups.
Another bad effect of using morality as a group identifier is that it stops you from seeing opponents and their positions clearly. It leads to opposing everything that an opponent supports because of who supports a position rather than what that position is. No one is wrong all the time.

While desiring to feel virtuous or important is not a bad thing it is generally wrong to suppress mixed feelings about one's actions. The self-righteous person trivializes the harm caused by actions that they approve of. Turning blind eyes to Gulags is a classic example.

Seeking a feeling of moral superiority is always bad. Letting oneself enjoy a feeling of moral superiority is questionable. If you believe you are morally superior to someone else surely your primary reaction should be disappointment and possibly anger over their failure. It certainly should not be smugness over one's own comparative virtue.

What do you do to get a feeling of moral superiority? It's hard to outdo others in morality. The main way that people try to feel better than others is to interpret the actions of opponents in the worst possible manner. To attribute malign intentions to those who disagree with you.
You want to feel virtuous? See those who oppose you as not merely wrong but evil. That way you become fighter against evil.

Oh, while you're at it become part of an elite group, the wave of the future. Or perhaps just those who God favors.

While self-righteousness about personal matters is obnoxious, self-righteousness in political matters is dangerous. To everybody! They are not just dangerous to those who disagree with them. They can be trouble when they are on the same side as you. They discredit you by association and they underestimate the opposition. They might be able to spot an opponent's weaknesses. They tend to not spot an opponents strengths. To do so they would have to be able to see their own weaknesses and the real reasons why people oppose them. A good example of this tendency was Adolf Hitler. I think he understood his pre-war opponents. He misunderstood and badly underestimated his wartime enemies especially the Americans and the Russians.

The self-righteous elements of the political left and right generally have different motives. The self-righteous on the left seem to be driven by conceit and the desire to feel good. The self righteous on the right seem to be driven by fear of uncertainty. This is probably because the left tends to emphasize feelings as a basis for morality and the right tends to emphasize rules. These are only tendencies and most conservatives and most progressives do not base morality entirely on either rules or intuitions.

The self-righteous elements of the right tend to be the more religious elements. They are the people who want certainty and want their beliefs to be given to them by a source that they cannot doubt. They want morality to be encapsulated in simple rules that have no exceptions. They suppress empathy for those that fail to live up to their standards. They refuse to recognize or they trivialize the cost of following their rules. They lack a sense of proportion. They refuse to live with uncertainty about the righteousness of their acts. The rules become an end in their own right not just a means to an end. I find some of them more obnoxious than their left-wing counterparts but see them as less dangerous. Following inflexible rules does put some limits on the harm that they can do. The problem is that human beings and human behavior are complicated. It is not reasonable to expect principles governing human behavior to be simple.
What is particularly objectionable is people gaining gratification from punishing those they see as wrongdoers. It isn't vengeance that creeps me out. It is people who see punishments as an assertion of the righteousness of their position.

A good example of what I am complaining about is the War on Drugs. Stopping drugs becomes a cause, an obsession not just a means of preventing harm. Some people oppose needle exchange programs becauause they want to use the fear of AIDS to discourage drug use. Disproportionate punishments are imposed. Some people start to gain a sense of importance from imposing these punishments. Justice and a sense of proportion are forgotten.

The left tends to place more importance on empathy and on the context of actions. They are less likely to try to reduce morality to simple rules. Unfortunately they there is a tendency to reduce it to feelings. This is more dangerous than over simplified rules because feelings do not put limits on acceptable behavior and because it can blind people to some of their own motivations.

The problem comes when empathy becomes everything. The danger is that the focus can shift away from empathy with others to how empathy makes them feel about themselves. "If I feel empathy for this poor and oppressed group then I must be a good person." People look for causes that they can adopt. They gain an interest in seeing wrongs that they can oppose.
Allowing for the context of an action can degenerate into excusing the inexcusable. "They are victims of oppression. We can't blame them." If you excuse someone's atrocities you can feel good about taking their side. More opportunities to feel good about helping the oppressed. They refuse to recognize that some actions are beyond the pale, no matter what cause they are in.
An example of this sort of behavior is making excuses for Palestinian suicide bombers. Setting off a bomb in a cafe or on a bus is wrong. It doesn't matter whether the Palestine an cause is just or not. Such acts are just wrong. They say the Palestinians have no other options. This is not true. Non-violent resistance has not been tried to any great extent and probably would have been more effective than the bombings. Israel is a democracy and susceptible to public opinion. The point of the Ghandi approach is to change public opinion. Excusing the bombings allows people to turn the Palestinians into a cause that the sensitive and virtuous can adopt without reservation.

The self-righteousness of the Islamists seems to spring both from fear and conceit. Fear of uncertainty and conceit about their place in the world.

Morality is not a means of counting coup or getting warm fuzzy feelings. These are immoral uses of morality. The attempt to use morality this way undermines morality both weakening society and corrupting the people who see themselves as oh so moral.

This essay was not meant as preaching or a rant. These are things that I had to say. Unfortunately the people that I would want most to reach probably won't recognize their behavior in my descriptions. I just hope I've provided some ammunition for the rest of us.

Revelation and hearsay

I'm a deist. I believe that this universe has probably been designed to allow the emergence of life. I am not certain of this û if the atheists turn out to be right I will not be shocked. I agree that the burden of proof is on those who claim that God exists. I won't go into the details of my reasons for believing this now. They are partly argument and partly hunch.

I do not know the nature of what has designed the universe and I do not believe anyone else does either. I do not believe that God wants to be worshiped or has been communicating with us -at least not through revelations to prophets. I do not know what Its reasons for creating the Universe are. I can only speculate for now. (I use the neuter pronoun because I believe that God is at least in part outside space and time. Male and female are descriptions not applicable to something outside space. Living and non living are categories that are not applicable to something outside time.)

What I am sure of is that the behavior that many religions attribute to God does not make sense. I do not believe that God wants us to believe in Its existence on the basis of what prophets claim to have experienced.

What I am criticizing is Judaism, Christianity and Islam, their prophets, their scriptures and their idea of God. Some of my comments may also apply to some other religions' concept of God. The supposed behavior of aliens abducting people for experimentation etc. is an argument against intelligent life out there. (It sure isn't intelligent behavior.) The behavior that monotheists claim that God exhibits is not that of a wise or completely just or benevolent deity.

If God is omnipotent then It can communicate with us directly. It can do what It is supposed to have done with Saint Paul. "Hey, you! What do you think you're doing?" So why do we have to believe in Its very existence on the basis of what others have experienced? Why are Its commands communicated through priests and prophets?

I do not know whether religious experiences are real. They cannot all be true. The religions do contradict each other after all. But could there be a common true core to many religious experiences that gets filtered through the recipients own pre-existing beliefs? Don't know but it sounds possible.

Most people who follow a religion accept the religious beliefs of those around them. If they had been brought up in a different place most religious people would be following a different religion. Religion provides comfort and a sense of purpose. People want these and if they they choose to get them from religion they will usually reach out what is close at hand. They also usually want to fit in to a community.

So you cannot use the feelings of Its believers as evidence of the truth of a religion. The followers of other religions are making similar claims. There is no way for an outsider to choose between them on this basis.

After all there are bribes and threats attached. "Believe this and you will live forever in bliss." "Disbelieve this and you will be tortured forever." Not exactly something that increases their credibility. (Yes, I know many believers do not believe in the threats. All of them believe in the enticements.)

They claim that God revealed himself to various prophets in the past and others wrote it down. Why should we trust the writers? There has been a lot of opportunities for the story to become distorted. Chinese whispers. This is evidence that a court would throw out as hearsay on hearsay. (I don't believe hearsay evidence should actually be excluded from trials. I believe it should be included and given a very low weight.)

You are asked to believe first and the reassurance will follow. You are offered a benefit for accepting an assertion and not using critical thinking. This is immoral. If someone was asking this of us for anything other than a religion we we suspect them to be a con artist. I don't believe in a God who behaves this way. Why should It?

Yes, I know that a lot of believers do a lot of critical thinking about their beliefs. A lot don't and there is a lot of pressure to just accept what you are told. I am not attacking religious belief itself. I am not criticizing someone whose beliefs are bases on their own experiences and reasoning and intuitions. I am criticizing people whose beliefs are based primarily on others say so especially when this conflicts with their experience of the World.

Sorry for the rant, but I had to get it off my chest. Also I wanted people to know just what my opinions are. As well I have not often seen the Mosaic religion challenged over the unbelievability of their claims about God's behavior.

Consciousness - what we don't know about it

Well, that's most things. We don't know its nature. We don't know whether it can be explained by the physics that we know now. We don't don't know if only the brain is involved or if there is some other entity involved as well. We don't know whether it can occur only in living organisms or it can occur in some computer-like machine. We don't know to what extent processes similar to those in a computer are involved. We don't know if something in the brain besides neural connections is involved. We don't know just what animals it occurs in and to what extent. We don't know if it is a special case of some more general phenomenon.

All I can do is to exclude some possibilities, summarize some of what we do know and do a little bit of speculating about what we don't know.

What we know about consciousness comes from three sources. The first is introspection, our ability to perceive part of the workings of our mind. The second is communication with other conscious beings. The third is the observation of other conscious beings.

Introspection is incomplete. How often have you had a feeling that you could not explain the reason for, even to yourself? How often do people lie to themselves? It is possible that some sensory information bypasses the conscious mind e.g. pheromones if such things do have an effect on humans. Nevertheless your own consciousness is the only one that you can directly perceive. There is information available from introspection that is not available from other sources. In fact we only that other people are conscious by inferring from our experience of our own consciousness. We perceive our own consciousness. We observe that other human beings are entities similar to ourselves. We observe that they behave in similar ways to ourselves. They communicate their conscious states. From this we know that they are conscious. Our perception of our own consciousness is an essential part of this inference. It is what we compare the communications and observations to.

The problem is others cannot directly perceive our consciousness, only our communications and actions. Introspection is a poor candidate for scientific experimentation. We cannot check what others are doing inside their heads and so it is difficult to demonstrate ones introspections to others and to verify them. There is the danger of seeing in oneself what one wishes to see. Thus scientific methodology tends to restrict itself to those introspections that we can be sure that everyone shares. These are the ones that we can clearly communicate to another person. This tendency leads to the temptation to reject introspection altogether as being unscientific. This can lead to communication and observation being regarded as by themselves providing all the information about consciousness that can be found. In the name of objectivity the subjective is ignored even when the subjective is what is being studied.

But we have to somehow include our self-perceptions in any complete study of consciousness. It has to be studied from the inside as well as from the outside. Either by itself will provide an incomplete picture.

Communication includes both languages and systems of signals. A language has a syntax and a set of symbols. Symbols are signs which have a meaning attached to them by the users' choice. This can be and usually is a collective and tacit choice. The same word can have different meanings in different languages. The syntax is the set of rules by which the symbols are combined to convey concepts that cannot be conveyed by any single symbol. Signals are unchosen signs e.g. a growl or a smell or so-called body language. (Body language does not have a syntax or symbols and hence technically it is not a language even though it is a structured communication system.)

Much of our communication of emotions is through body language and audible signals. We have enough body language and audible signals in common with some other terrestrial vertebrates to be able to read their emotions to some extent. We can do this reasonably well with other mammals and to some extent with birds and at least some reptiles. We can be sure that they have at least some emotions and hence are conscious. We know that there is something in there.

We can teach a syntactic language to the great apes. We know from communication with them and from observing their behavior that they are self-aware like us. I know of no evidence of self-awareness in any other animals and think they are the only self-aware creatures other than ourselves.

Some vertebrates are the only entities other than ourselves that we know are conscious to some extent. We know that because there is some communication with them. Consciousness could be found in a wider variety of animals but we can't be certain because we can't communicate with them.

Since the senses of fish and amphibians are similar to our own it is quite likely that the subjective perception of sensory data is similar. Since the senses and behavior of cephalopods are similar to those of vertebrates it is quite plausible that their subjective world is similar. But then again maybe not. The brain has been rewired a lot as vertebrates evolved. For instance more of the brain is involved in vision in a mammal than a fish's optic lobes.

For other animals we only have their behavior to go on. I don't know of any completely convincing evidence of consciousness in any other animals. I would not be surprised if there is a rudimentary form of consciousness in amphibians, some fish and some cephalopods. I would be surprised if it occurred in any animals other than the ones that I have mentioned. While many arthropods have complicated behavior it is very stereotyped and I believe that consciousness does not help explain it. The behavior of animals other than chordates, arthropods and molluscs is simpler and can be explained without consciousness.

I believe that self-awareness is restricted to humans and great apes. I believe that emotion is restricted to mammals, birds and reptiles. I believe that subjective sensation, true awareness is restricted to vertebrates and cephalopods. To put it mildly these lists are tentative.

The main argument I can think of for rudimentary consciousness in animals other than vertebrates and cephalopods is an evolutionary one. Consciousness evolved with the elaboration of the nervous system. Could there be some precursor or rudimentary form in more primitive animals? The main argument against this is that there is no apparent benefit of consciousness in lower animals and nothing in their behavior that needs consciousness as an explanation.

Could a computer or some other non living system become conscious? We don't know. I believe that a computer as we know them cannot. All computers are Turing machines. They are all purpose symbol manipulators. They can carry out any algorithm with any symbol set and set of rules for manipulating them. But an algorithm is just the symbols, the rules and a set of actions using them. Any symbol can have any meaning that we give it. Thus the meaning of what is done is not part of an algorithm. The same algorithm can have different meanings. For example we could calculate the mean weight of ten fruit. The fruit could be apples or oranges. The algorithm involved is the same. The meaning of what a computer does is assigned to it by us - it is not a property of the algorithm or the computer.

This does not mean that computable processes are not part of what is going on. Turing machines could be components of the machinery of consciousness. However they might be taking a role that could also be take by something acting in a non computable manner - say something using some random quantum process.

The ability of the neurons of the brain to modify themselves might be involved. This is only a plausible speculation. If this is the case then the hardware and software of the brain might not be distinct concepts. We will have to look at things another way - even self-modifying programs are probably not similar enough to conscious processes to offer us much insight.

MRI and other new techniques can pinpoint what areas of the brain are active when particular mental processes are going on. This still does not tell us what is happening. Just what is the relationship between the observed neural activity and the mental processes?

The nerves of vertebrates are different from those of other animals. The axons (long nerve fibers) are encased in myelin sheaths formed by of a type of cell called a glial cell. These allow much faster transmission of nerve impulses than in the unmyelinated nerve fibers of most invertebrates. (The giant motor axons in cephalopods allow even faster transmission of nerve impulses.) Are the glial cells involved in consciousness in ways other than as impulse accelerators?

Contemplate the colour blue. This is the sensation that we get when light of a certain range of wavelengths hits the retina. If the pigments in the cones were different we would gain this sensation from a different range of wavelengths. What we perceive is some mental representation of light not light itself. Our perception of the colour blue is not something that exists in the world outside our skulls. So just what is it?

This suggests that perhaps our perception of space and time is a representation rather than the real thing. We can directly visualize only three spatial dimensions but can mathematically handle any number.

We perceive our subjective selves as some sort of entities. Perhaps this is an illusion - a subjective representation and there is no thing at the core of us that does the perceiving. Perhaps the real us is just a process in a structure. But we certainly feel like we are some sort of thing. This is the strongest argument that I know of for there being something other than just the brain involved in consciousness.

People are usually vague when they talk about a soul. Is it connected to life or to consciousness? Life is well enough understood for us to say there is no need for any non physical entity to be involved. One can make a case for the soul as the non physical core of consciousness. But it cannot be conscious by itself. What affects the brain affects the mind. If the brain is inactive you are not conscious.

If the soul exists and is the core of consciousness then how can it be in a fetus before the parts of the nervous system that are involved in consciousness are active. If it is not involved in life and it is not the core of consciousness then what difference does having one make?

Is consciousness an special example of something happening around us that we are not recognizing? Yet when it occurs all its instances are isolated. As far as we know we have no direct contact with any consciousness other than our own. We only known them by communicating with them and by their effects.

We are certainly looking at something the wrong way. I believe that we are at least two major scientific breakthroughs away from understanding consciousness. I believe that something is going on that current physics cannot explain. And even after the required physical insights have occurred we will need another breakthrough to allow them to explain subjective experience.

I think that consciousness is an indicator of a major gap in physics in the same way that evolution and uniformitarianism indicated a major gap in nineteenth century physics. I believe that it will take decades or even a century or two before we understand consciousness to the same extent that we understand life now . Scientific advances do take time.

Life and not life

There are phenomena that have some of the properties of life but are not what we think of as life. There are also phenomena which we talk of as being life which actually are not life itself. I want to compare these systems with living systems.

The obvious examples of the first are viruses and prions. I would describe these as life-like rather than alive. They replicate and mutate like life (at least viruses mutate). But they do not maintain themselves and are not self-contained. They hijack the systems of living organisms. They do not use their own systems to replicate themselves. They do not manufacture their own components.

The important example of the second is consciousness. It appears to be a life-dependent process but is not life. We only know of it in animals with complex nervous systems. All known examples are dependent on brain activity. Damage to the brain or disruption of its activity by drugs affects the mind.

We do not know what the physical basis of consciousness is. We do not know if it can be explained by the actions of a network of neurons or whether there are as yet unknown physical principles involved. Our knowledge about consciousness now is comparable to our knowledge about life before the discoveries of the 1950s and 1960s.

We do not know whether life is necessary for consciousness. Perhaps it could happen in some computer-like machine. (I say computer-like because I doubt that it can occur in computers as we know them.) Perhaps the brain's ability to modify itself is involved. In that case a conscious system would have to be life-like in some respects.

However we do know that consciousness is not necessary for life. A seaweed is alive but not conscious. A human being in a coma is still alive as an organism, not just as a collection of cells.

The trouble is that we have no word for consciousness as an activity. We talk about the act of living, implicitly acknowledging that life is an activity. But we have no word for the act of being conscious. So we end up talking about life when we really mean the activity of consciousness. When we talk about human life we usually mean human consciousness. Brain death is the irreversible end of consciousness not the end of life.

This confusion has serious ethical consequences but I don't want to deal with them in this article.

We have only one known case of the formation of life from non-living systems. It probably happened on Earth or Mars over 2 billion years ago but after planetary formation 4.5 billion years ago. Eucaryotic cells first formed from prokayotes over a billion years ago. Animals , plants and fungi separately formed from protists at times from over three hundred million to probably about eight hundred million years ago. It looks like it is easier to form a new level of autopoetic organization from existing life forms than it is to form the base level of life from non-life.

There are several possible origins for viruses. They could be remnants of pre-cellular stages in the formation of life. They could be example of extreme parasitic degeneration. (When a life form becomes parasitic it tends to simplify and loose structures needed by free-living forms but not by parasites.) They could be rogue host genetic material and proteins. I think the pre-biotic remnant speculation is unlikely. I suspect that most of them originated as rogue host material. (Not necessarily material from their current host species. Viruses do jump from one host species to another.)

If you want to read further on the nature of life I recommend What is life? by Magulis and Sagan.

Life and life

Life! You know it when you point at it but you find it difficult to say just what it is. I am going to try to pin down the characteristics of an entity that make you say "That's alive.". I want to look at other systems that have similar properties but which we do not normally think of as alive. Then I will look at the differences between these systems and systems which we think of as alive.

In my next post I will look at things which are described as life but are arguably not. These are mostly activities which are dependent on life.

What I am doing in this article is trying to clarify my own thinking on the subject. I hope that readers might find my ideas worthy of contemplation and discussion.

The first question about life is "Is it a process or an entity, an activity or a thing?". Is life a substance or force permeating living beings which is not present in non living entities? Or is life the activities that go on in living beings?

Well, the way you know if something is alive is by what it does. If it is inactive and unchanging one identifies it as being dead. This suggests that one should think of life as what goes on in a living being. One should only propose the existence of a life force if there is no other way to explain what is going on.

In the 1950s and 1960s we uncovered the physical bases of heredity and the energy transport mechanisms. Inheritance turned out to be coded on the nucleic acids, ribonucleic acid (RNA) and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Energy was found to be transported by adenosine triphosphate (ATP). While much of the mechanism of life is not understood, there seems to be no reason to believe that any unknown principles of physics or unknown forces are involved.

(An aside. In the nineteenth century developments in biology and geology did suggest that there were energy sources unknown to contemporary physics. Evolution in biology and uniformitarianism in geology required a vast age for the Earth. Known energy sources could not explain how the internal heat of the Earth or the heat of the Sun was maintained over such a long period. This problem was solved with the discovery of nuclear energy.)

Life is a property of a system not of any individual part of a system. You cannot point to a molecule in a cell and say "That molecule is alive.". A protein or lipid or carbohydrate molecule is the same inside or outside a living cell. One cannot look at any particular chemical reaction and say "This is life.".

OK. So what is it about a system that has us saying "This cell or this organism is alive."?

One answer I have seen is reproduction. However this by itself is not it. A sterile organism can still be alive. A worker bee is not dead. Neither is a pet that you have had sterilized.

The best candidate that I have seen is autopoiesis. This is self maintenance. An autopoietic process brings about its own continuation and the maintenance of the structure in which the process occurs. An autopoietic system replaces its components with new ones that it has created. This description fits cells and it also fits organisms. However it can be argued that it also fits organizations such as corporations, states and ant nests. These are not exactly what one thinks of when one talks about life.

I think we can say that all living systems are autopoietic but not all autopoietic systems are alive. Systems that we describe as alive are self-contained bounded physical systems rather than systems linked by a network of concepts. Thus life is a property of a definite physical body whose individual components were created by that body. I am not sure just what properties as well as autopoiesis are required for a system to be described as alive.

Reproduction of living systems uses the mechanisms of autopoiesis. New organisms are created by the living organism using components that it has created and organized into another autopoietic system. However a self replicating system does not have to be autopoietic. It can simply create copies of itself without maintaining itself or doing anything much except replication. It can also replicate itself by taking over another system and making that other system replicate it. Examples of this behavior are the activities of viruses and prions.

Living organisms do not live forever. To allow a kind of life to persist some members of a kind have to be able to reproduce that kind. Thus self-replication is a property of all entities that we normally think of as life forms. However not all members of a kind have to be able to reproduce. An organism can produce both sterile and fertile offspring. Bees and ants provide good examples of this.

Living cells are the most obvious examples of living systems. They are elaborate structures made up of organic matter, water and inorganic materials (mostly as ions in solution). They are maintained and replicated by physical and chemical interactions among the components.

However the components of an autopoietic system do not have to be organic molecules or organic structures that are not alive by themselves. (A cell membrane is a universal part of all known living cells. Isolated from a cell it cannot be described as alive.)

The components of an autopoietic can themselves be autopoietic systems. This is the case in multi-cellular animals, plants and fungi. These originated as multi-cellular colonies. The cells became differentiated into many types and organized into structures in new autpoetic systems. The cells can be isolated from an organism and grown by themselves in unorganized tissue cultures. The culture is not an autopoietic system though the individual cells that it is made up of are. A mouse is autopoietic system and the cells that it is made up of are also autopoietic systems.

Thus life can be recursive. It can exist on multiple levels. The life of a mouse is not the life of its cells though it depends on the life of the cells. One can make a case for even higher levels of autopoietic organization. For example a bluebottle (Portuguese man o'war) is a colony of multicellular polyps. There are several specialized types of polyp in a colony and an overall structure.

If autopoietic systems organize into a higher level system the individual components can loose the ability to maintain themselves. They can become dependent on their interactions with the other formerly independent systems. That is, living organisms can organize into a higher level living system and the lower level of life can then be subsumed into the higher level of life. This appears to be what happened when eucaryotic cells were formed. (Life can be divided in procaryotic and eucaryotic organisms. Procaryotes have relatively simple cell internal structures. Eucaryotes have elaborate membrane bound cell internal structures. Procaryotes are the bacteria. The eucaryotes are the protists, the animals, the plants and the fungi.) The eucaryotic cell probably formed as a symbiotic association of several different types of bacteria. Examples of cell organelles that were once independent organisms are mitochondria, plastids, flagella and cilia and the nucleus. I would not regard these as being autopoietic systems in their own right any longer.

Another possible example of a higher level autopoietic system composed of autopoietic sub-systems is the biosphere of the Earth as a whole. The Gaia hypothesis regards the entire biosphere as a self regulating system. The hypothesis is that action of living organisms maintains the planet in a condition suitable for life. A system of feedback loops stabilizes the climate and and atmospheric composition etc. The main components of the system are bacteria. Other living organisms, the atmosphere, the hydrosphere and the outer layers of of the lithosphere could also be regarded as components of the system. Under this hypothesis the Earth would be an example of an autopoietic system that does not reproduce. The Gaia hypothesis is sometimes criticized as being a fuzzy mystical approach. I see it as a useful way of looking at a complex of feedback loops. It is a plausible, probably correct but unproven hypothesis.

All the known examples of life ultimately depend on aqueous organic chemistry. In principle this does not have to be the case. One sees many examples in science fiction of other kinds of life. Life with liquid ammonia or other solvents instead of water, life based on silicon rather than carbon compounds, metallic life forms, life based on nuclear reaction and so on. Some of these alternatives could be possible. Some probably aren't. But this is a problem for another generation to solve.

Most of the material in this article is not original. I suspect that many of the original ideas have also occurred to others. The assembly, organization and assessment is mine.

Why am I doing this?

A bit of introduction first.

I am a statistician who has worked on a wide variety of projects. The majority have been environmental, agricultural or medical but I have also worked on some social statistics. I also have qualifications in biology.

My interests include such things as science fiction (both written and on the screen), role playing games, war games, art, bush walking, good food and wine, comics and reading about all sorts of things.

My knowledge about some of these things is a bit spotty. Other things I have a good layman's knowledge about. Some of the things above I know a lot about. All in all I have acquired information about an unusual assortment of subjects. This sometimes leads to seeing things a bit differently. Ideas about quite a few subjects have been stewing for a long time and now I intend to serve them up.

To some extent these posts will be thinking out loud about some topics. There is also an element of tossing ideas up in the air for discussion. I hope this whole thing doesn't sound too vain. (Well, blogs are a form of vanity press.)

I will cover whatever takes my interest or whatever I feel strongly about. Science and politics are likely to be the subjects of most of the initial posts. Some of the viewpoints published here will be original, most will not. However much of the unoriginal material will be unfamiliar to many readers.