Mind and Matter — Sentience
Modern scientific thought owes itself to the ancient Greeks philosophers. The scientific method of inquisition into Nature and her derivatives was practiced and perfected by these early mathematicians and scientists. The first crusaders for Nature from the west. The founding principles of scientific thought still hold to this day, with few ‘contaminations’ to its resourcefulness. The scientific foundations of learning rely on the principle of Objectivation.
Objectivation is the mapping of a theory or an abstraction to a worldly object, and the object being the focus of further study. Theories of Classical mechanics, electricity and magnetism, etc. stand firm on this approach of research with accurately verifiable results. The physical world is comprehended as it exists. However, at atomic scales, the observation involves the presence of the Subject, for the purpose of observation interposing the situation of the object under study — such as the predicament of what is known as Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. The involvement of the Subject introduces the instrument of observation, quanta of light energy, which intermixes with the observed records. The contamination on the scientific approach! On a much ‘higher’ level, the involvement of the Subject introduced interactions with Object, the Subject holding the seat of consciousness and being the wellspring of feelings, sensations, and experience. In other words, the state of awareness. We need words to come to a consensus as to what consciousness is.
Mary’s Room — The thought experiment
A thought experiment is where we think through, to evaluate the consequences, without experimenting and validating. Mary’s Room is a thought experiment that attempts to establish that there are certain properties associated with, and knowledge attainable only through, ‘conscious’ experience. This, as proposed by Frank Jackson in 1982, is as follows:
Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like “red”, “blue”, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence “The sky is blue”. … What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?
Mary’s room experiment provokes us to think beyond ‘mechanical’ learning, where the device of ‘conscious’ learning is involved. Mary here is exposed to knowledge that utilizes the phenomenon of consciousness — which cannot be in any manner emulated by other modes of learning.
Mary introduces us to a neglected and understudied attribute in us — Sentience.
Sentience
Sentience is the ability to feel. Of knowing something subjectively. The drill of mechanical learning of knowledge is objective, quite the manner of operation of our scientific method inherited from the Greeks. We have endeavored to study Nature excluding the ever-pervading Subject of Cognizance. In our studies of Physics and other sciences, we have assumed the role of the disenchanted onlooker who apart from observing and taking down records never appears in the world we chose to study. Of course, in sciences like classical mechanics, and molecular biology, there is no necessity for dealing with the Subject of Cognizance, which we shall henceforth refer to as mind, sciences like psychology or even quantum mechanics is sensitive to this kind of approach. Our methods of investigation fail in these respects.
Subjective analysis of the sciences may seem more intricate and complicated, because of which we chose to keep the subject out and simplify the proceedings. However, we need to understand how much the external world under investigation a construct of our own mind is. What would the world be without our mental lens which projects the image of the world into ourselves? It would be cold, mute and colorless, and as irrelevant and unimportant it could be, without the mind that sees, and discerns and interprets. As Carl Jung states it:
All Science (Wissenschaft) however is a function of the soul, in which all knowledge is rooted. The soul is the greatest of all cosmic miracles, it is the conditio sine qua non of the world as an object (the world as an object itself is but for the mind). It is exceedingly astonishing that the Western world (apart from very rare exceptions) seems to have so little appreciation of this being so. The flood of external objects of cognizance has made the subject of all cognizance withdraw to the background, often to apparent non-existence.
Jung emphasizes on the emergency of the subjective analysis of objects and spheres of study and the momentous impact it would have on them.
Two writing desks
To demonstrate the subjective and objective approaches, let us recollect the analogy of the ‘two writing desks’ by A.S. Eddington. One (subjectively) is the familiar writing desk, colored, textured, resting his arms on it, and the other desk (objectively), existing as we break it down into its derivatives, the scientific body which not only lacks all and every sensual qualities, but in addition is riddled with holes; by far the greatest part of this empty space but nothingness, interspersed with innumerable tiny specks of something, the electrons and the nuclei whirling around, but always separated by distances at least 100,000 times their own size. The first desk is experience and the second desk is information. Observing this contrast, he says:
In the world of physics, we watch a shadowgraph performance of familiar life. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows on the shadow paper. The frank realization that physical science is concerned with a world of shadows is one of the most significant of recent advances.
We realize we have been missing the element which added the texture, the color, the sound to our analytes, our own minds in our methods of investigation. But it has taken us close to 2000 years to get a closer to the deadlock we have been constructing ahead on our quest for knowledge. Quantum mechanics was conceived early in the 20th century, but scientific experimentations are far from reliable still to come to any guarantee to take it further.
So, to speak, we are standing at the brink of scientific or rationality bankruptcy. It is about time we sat down to rethink our methods. Sure, what we see around us is the results of scientific exploration, science is, but only closer to, Truth. The necessity is not to start on a blank slate, it is contemplating possible extensions to our scientific methods. Our crusade over land is near to over — we are staring into the deep.
Coda
- Sentience is not a high frequency word in the field AI — however, considering our previous discussions, if there can be anything analogous to a universal Turing machine, it would be the sentience machine. And the methods of which are subjective, both in conception and in operation.
- Erwin Schrödinger has been a phenomenal scientist, sometimes even raked and rash with his beliefs and ideas. A true Guru. We outline in our research, much of the contents of his ‘Mind and Matter’ — The Tarner Lectures, delivered at the Trinity College, Cambridge, 1956. And much more. We recommend reading his ‘Mind and Matter’ for an unbiased approach in the quest for Truth.
Next week: Mind and Matter — Consciousness
Previous week: Big Brother Is Watching You
First week: Can Machines Think?
References:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236985257_Mind_and_Matter
