Mind and Matter — Consciousness
‘Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari)’ is a German Expressionist film that was released in 1920. It later inspired the Film Noir movement of the 1940s and 50s in Hollywood. The film had a non-natural, graphic visual style, characterized by oblique lines, surreal lighting and twisted landscapes. The film is a psychological thriller, dubbed as the first made horror film. The story revolves around the psyche of its protagonist Francis, which runs thus:
Francis traces back his past, where he trails the psychological technique of Dr. Caligari to murder people by manipulating the psyche of a somnambulist patient, Cesar. Cesar is caught red-handed while attempting one of his murders and leads to Dr. Caligari’s involvement in the crimes. Caligari escapes off to a lunatic asylum, where he is understood to be the Institution Director by Francis. Later, it is revealed that the entire event chain is construed up by Francis himself, who turns out to be a patient at the same asylum, of which Dr. Caligari is the Director.
Francis’s mind has been as every human’s, coherent and complete in its beliefs. Never once is he seen dazed and foggy with his convictions. Yet the reality seems to be something else. There is an instance of an indistinguishable amalgam of two entities in Francis, his psyche and objective world.
Note: By objective world, we mean the world where mind has not been applied, i.e. the world ‘as is’. The world as we see, every one of us has our own mental construct of the same objective world.
Consciousness
There is more than one way in which consciousness is explained, to our discussion we will confine ourselves to this, that consciousness is awareness of the ‘self’. Where the ‘self’ as a being is coexisting in a world, with similar other beings. Consequently, the self has to its construction its relationships to the world it is part of, constituting the colors it sees or the voices it hears, in addition to its own intelligence which weaves itself, the concepts. In other words, the world is a projection of our thoughts out of what we perceive through our senses. In the story of Dr.Caligari, Francis has in his mind, his own version of the world. Though it looks different from (others’) reality, Francis’s world is perfectly conformant to the conclusions of his Sensorium.
Note: Sensorium is the apparatus of an organism’s perception considered as a whole, the ‘seat of sensation’ where it experiences and interprets the environments within which it lives.
The concepts of physical science and mental start cross-referencing each other in such a situation. Yet from the fineness we have achieved in our scientific methods, we get only as much as knowing (or unknowing) about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty or Pauli’s Exclusion Principles, beyond which we have a seamless transcendence into the mental. We may have the key to the Mind-Matter Integration mechanism transcendence here, in fact, we realize it is happening there, yet we don’t know. Our efforts will be to sort out this transcendence.
Legend — Relativity
Mind and Matter intractability has been bothering philosophers for quite some time, though the physicist may seem quite contented to what is available to him in meagre means. The 20th century has however seen advances in Physics with the subjective approach, rather than purely empirical investigations leading to well-formed Theories. A landmark that the mind-world approach of study granted Physics was when Einstein got to his revelation with the space-time relativity. Immanuel Kant, the philosopher had firm belief that space, and time were per se entities, that they were mutually independent, and existing ‘things-in-themselves’. The outlook came to be known as the ideality of space and time. The notions of ‘before’ and ‘after’ had demarcations at points on the absolute timeline. With the new approach, these notions of ‘before’ and ‘after’ from our day-to-day world however demarcate events not on the ideal (absolute) timeline but based upon a ‘cause’ and ‘effect’ relation — one depending on another. The occurrence of an event at point A in space has no effect at point B simultaneously. In other words, any effect of ‘A’ to reach ‘B’ must propagate through space, the fastest attainable at the speed of light for an (absolute) ‘t’ seconds, if ‘B’ is at the boundary of the circle with radius ‘ct’ (see below). So, the timelines at ‘A’ and ‘B’ are displaced at an absolute ‘t’ second.
If B is beyond, well then A and B are disjoint in time as much as they are in space — it is only a matter of B’s relative position in space to A. Or if the observer himself at B, is to travel at the speed of light, time relative to event A has no movement — the clock never ticks! This is like the pilot in a supersonic jet maintaining its Mach speed, not hearing its own engine. For the observing body travelling with a velocity ‘v’, time dilates instead of simple displacement with respect the cause.
The white lines, the lines of simultaneity, move from the past to the future in the respective frames ( frames alternating between velocity values of v = .03c, 0, and -0.5c). The lines of simultaneity are the locus of all events occurring at the same time in the respective frame.
In Einstein’s special train example, the light from A will arrive at X before that from B. Hence X will observe the lightning at A as happening before that at B. Y, however, will observer the bolts of lightning to be simultaneous. This is an example of how observations from reference frames moving at great speeds relative to each other reveal a different timing of events.
The Theory of Relativity is proof enough to the subjective approach, and hence the projection of the objective world or the mental world has in our quest. However, it remains a mystery as to where the consciousness itself lies in this projected world.
The Mind — Matter conundrum
There has been varied philosophies on the existence of mind over the centuries, however, there has not been anything solid as to a way out of it. Sir Charles Sherrington has something interesting in his book ‘Man and his Nature’, where he honestly searches to find an objective understanding of the interaction between matter and mind. However, he ends up with the following lines:
Mind, the anything perception can compass, goes therefore in our spatial world more ghostly than a ghost. Invisible, intangible, it is a thing not even of outline; it is not a ‘thing’. It remains without sensual confirmation and remains without it forever.
Mind itself is responsible to the objectivation of our perceptions, offering us the world we are part of. Itself it never appears nor gives away-it does not objectivate itself. As like the key to Einstein’s Special Relativity Theory, it requires a subjective study — the physical, rather spiritual framework of which needs to be laid. He adds further:
Physical science … faces us with the impasse that mind per se cannot play with the piano — mind per se cannot move a finger of a hand… …Then the impasse meets us. The blank of ‘how’ of the mind’s leverage on matter. The inconsequence staggers us. Is it a misunderstanding?
Well, mind has its seat on matter for sure. The requirement to know ‘how’ is finer refinement to our scientific approach or a revolutionary new one.
Coda
AI, for free willed independent entities, will need a thorough understanding of “how” the mind residing over matter. And we have reasons to believe we are on our way to unravel the mysteries of the mind. If there is a phenomenon, there needs to be a mechanism behind — we need not be so rigid in our principles like Kant had been with space and time. Subjective Physics will take us home someday.
Next week: The Adaptive-Habitual Intelligence
Previous week: Mind and Matter — Sentience
First week: Can Machines Think?
References
Mind and Matter, Erwin Schrödinger, Cambridge University Press.
Wikipedia — Special Relativity
