The rise of DIY rituals in the 21st century

YouTube:

Can Rituals Save Us? | Robert Wright & Bruce Feiler

0:00 Teaser
0:52 Bruce’s new book on ritual, A Time to Gather
3:12 The "Lifequake" that led Bruce to study ritual
8:10 The current "shadow ritual" renaissance
12:42 What is a ritual?
15:26 The origins of the shadow ritual renaissance
18:25 Forest bathing and the essence of ritual
26:11 Ritual as the original human algorithm
31:39 Honor walks: a quintessentially modern ritual
36:23 Rituals across Christianity
42:07 What rituals do
46:47 Heading to Overtime

* * * * * 

I discuss ritual in my book on music, Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture, pp. 79-82:

Subjectivity is an aspect of neurodynamics, and neurodynamics is open to the world through sensory organs and through the motor system. When people are coupled with one another through musicking, each steers her own raft of subjectivity in the collective sea of neurodynamics. The motions of each raft are transmitted to the others through the sea, as Huygens’ clocks transmitted vibrations to one another through the walls. These subjectivities thus adjust themselves one to the other, for they are all components of the same process.

Let us reconsider, then, the musicking with which we opened this chapter. We were at a party where lots of musicians were jamming. Near the end of a jam on Bob Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” several people spontaneously joined in on the refrain. It wasn’t planned ahead of time, nor did those singers discuss it among themselves while the rest of us were playing.

When I originally told the story I talked of my deliberate intention to “drive” the group by playing a simple line and “bearing down.” That decision was a conscious one, though not as clear and differentiated as it may seem when I spell it out in words, and it resulted in a certain shift of my consciousness. “Bearing down” is something I do quite often when playing. It involves attending to and adjusting the tension in my trunk musculature but has no specific differentiated effect on the music beyond a certain intensity and emotional tone. In this case I was playing a very simple melodic line, but I will also bear down while playing the most complex lines. In that situation, my fingers and tongue may be spitting out 10s of notes per second, but they’re on their own; I’m still attending to muscles in my abdomen, shoulders and back, and my buttocks. Those are the muscles that most strongly affect the overall airflow, and that’s what I care about when I’m bearing down.

And that, by our conception of consciousness, is where my nervous system is reorganizing and making minute adjustments. I have no introspective awareness, of course, of just what neural areas are reorganizing, but I’d guess that we are dealing with circuitry involving both emotional expression and voluntary control of large muscles. Even as I am attending to those muscles, I am always listening to the sound, not just mine, but the group’s. I’m bearing down just so in order that the sound I hear may also be just so. But my sound is only a part of the group sound and, at this particular point, it was a subordinate part. What this means is that my nervous system’s reorganizational activity is responsive to the sound made by each and every person in the musicking group. I am attuning my motor and emotive system to the sound that is the joint activity of this group. And each one in the group is, in turn, doing the same thing. Each one, merely by being a conscious musician, is making minute adjustments to his nervous system in response to the sounds that all are creating.

We are now in territory explored by Walter Freeman in a recent essay on music and social bonding. Freeman is interested in those rituals where a core group of celebrants move from one status in society to another, as from child to adult or single to married. In these rituals, as individuals are conveyed from one social status to another—recall our discussion in the previous chapter—they require changes in the collective neuropil. Funerals, of course, are also in this class. As the bodies of the dead are conveyed to a final resting place, the living must disengage from their attachments to those who are no longer among the living. In this case, and entire persona (see Figure 1 in the previous chapter) must be disengaged from active use in the collective neuropil. Conversely, when a child is born, the group must undertake a ritual that creates a new persona in the collective neuropil.

In all of these situations the bonds between individuals must be altered in fundamental ways that require considerable neural reorganizing. Freeman suggests that such rituals involve a neuropeptide called oxytocin. He asserts that oxytocin "appears to act by dissolving preexisting learning by loosening the synaptic connections in which prior knowledge is held. This opens an opportunity for learning new knowledge. The meltdown does not instill knowledge. It clears the path for the acquisition of new understanding through behavioral actions that are shared with others.” As the oxytocinated individuals are moving to the rhythms of well-established ritual, their synaptic connections are restructured in patterns guided and influenced by the events in the ritual. Obviously, the microdynamics of each individual will be unique; but they will be shaped by rhythmic patterns common to all . These rituals provide a space in which individuals can mold themselves to one another as the infant molds her actions to those of her mother.

Such ritual would likely have benefits on less extreme occasions than those requiring the restructuring of social relations—think of our little jam session. Social life is difficult and taxing. Hostilities build up. Such ritual may well help take the edge off of growing tensions, reconciling individuals to one another and allowing them to “reset” their relationships on more favorable terms.

Thus we have another core hypothesis:

Freeman’s Hypothesis: By attending to one another through musicking, performers attune their nervous systems to one another, restructuring their representations of others. This results in more harmonious interactions within the group.

Each individual consciousness may be an island of Cartesian subjectivity, but in the close coupling of musicking, those subjectivities are intimately and delicately conditioned and regulated by one another.

Perhaps such rituals play a role in helping to establish and maintain the subjective continuity of the neural self. By entering into a wide variety of emotional states (with their various neurochemical substrates) in a socially controlled situation, individuals in a community ritual create an "equal access zone" in mental space where each can experience and contemplate extremes of joy and anger, tenderness and hate, and know that all these feelings have a place in their shared world.

Xanadu, GPT, and Beyond: An adventure of the mind

I've posted a new working paper. Title above; links, abstract, table of contents, and introductory material below.

Download at: 

Academia: https://www.academia.edu/106001453/Xanadu_GPT_and_Beyond_An_adventure_of_the_mind
SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4553351
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373433939_Xanadu_GPT_and_Beyond_An_adventure_of_the_mind

Abstract: This article recounts an intellectual journey that began in curiosity about the structure of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” in the late 1960s and has led to an interest in large language models at the present time. A close analysis of the poem revealed its two parts each to have a nested structure (think of a matryoshka doll) that suggested the operation of an underlying computational process (nested loops). That led to the study of computational linguistics (semantic networks), followed by neuroscience (Karl Pribram’s neural holography), and cultural evolution. In the 2010s I began following work digital humans had been doing with machine learning. When GPT-3 was released in 2020 I was ready, though it took me awhile to establish a link, however tentative, between that conceptual universe and that of “Kubla Khan.”

Encountering Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” 3
Romantic states of consciousness 3
Matryoshka dolls and the escape from Xanadu 5
Semantic networks and a Shakespeare sonnet 8
Karl Pribram, neural holography, and the brain 10
The wandering years 11
Through GPT to the future 13
Mind and world in text 15
The Text of “Kubla Khan,” including Coleridge’s prefatory note 17
A note about the cover image 19

Encountering Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”

I became hooked on Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” in the Spring of 1969, my last semester as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins. Three years later “Kubla Khan” had become the standard against which I measured my understanding of the human mind. That is why I am telling a story about how my interest in the mind has evolved through “Kubla Khan” to include, most recently, ChatGPT. Strange as it may seem, that poem is the vehicle through which I am coming to terms with this new technology and arriving at a sense of its potential.

There is a sense in which the story of that great poem can be traced back to the 11th century invasion of Britain by the Norman French, for that culture-crossing is what gave rise to the English language. A century or so later that story encountered a tale born of an encounter between an Italian merchant, Marco Polo, and a Mongolian warlord, Kubla Khan, which, when enlivened by the East India Company’s trade in opium, set fire to the mind of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. We need not trace that trajectory in any detail. I mention it only to give a sense of the scope of this 36-line poem, which is one of the best-known poems in the English language, and is perhaps unique in the annals of Western literature. It has made its mark on popular culture, from Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, where it names Kane’s estate, Xanadu, thereby establishing the matrix for the whole film, to a hit song and film by Olivia Newton-John, Xanadu, subsequently made into a Broadway musical. It even provided that most vulgar of real-estate barons, Donald Trump, with the name for the nightclub, Xanadu, in his now defunct Atlantic City casino.

Romantic states of consciousness

I may well have read the poem prior to taking Romantic Literature with Professor Earl Wasserman in 1968-1969. But I have no memory of that. Though we didn’t study Coleridge until the second semester, it is probably best if I start my story with the first semester.

The course started with Keats. I decided to write my paper about a minor poem, “To–[Fanny Brawne],” and had delayed writing until the night before it was due. I was tired and my mind snapped. All of a sudden, I was typing a passage from one of Keats’ letters to Fanny, but I experienced the act of typing as though the words were my own. When I finished that passage, my mind was astir and found its way to the second stanza of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” – you know “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter...” I read those words as though they were my own.

I finished the paper, turned it in, got a grade, and...

I had a problem: What was that!? I didn’t know. But this was the 1960s and altered states of consciousness were all the rage, drug induced, but also meditation, and now it seems, the influence of late-night poetry on a tired mind.

Next up: Percy Bysshe Shelley, he who had declared poets to be “the unacknowledged Legislators of the world.” Again, I delayed writing my paper until the last minute. I was tired. The damned paper wrote itself, through me. But I didn’t experience anything of Shelley’s as though I had written it. It was different from the experience I had writing about Keats. The words just lined themselves up, one after the other and flowed down my arms, through my fingers, from the typewriter and onto the page. It was easy. No sweat. It was a good paper too.

Wordsworth was up in the Spring semester. That was the best paper I’d written as an undergraduate. Wasserman remarked that it “was a mature contemplation of the poem” – though I forget just what poem it was. There were no mental hijinks. I wrote it with the standard task-assemblage of a sentence or three here, a paragraph there, pace the room a bit, make a note or three, look up something, back to the typewriter, rinse, repeat, and so forth....it’s done.

And so it went with my “Kubla Khan” paper. The poem itself presents a number of problems. The first is: What is it about? There is no narrative. It has often been dismissed as word music. Word music it is, but that is no ground for dismissal.

Then we have Coleridge’s preface. He said the poem was incomplete. He had become lost in an opium reverie when two or three hundred lines came to him – “all the images rose up ... as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort” – which was dashed when he was interrupted by a man from Porlock. When the Porlockian had gone, so had those two or three hundred lines. All that was left were the 54 lines of this, one of the most extraordinary poems in the world. In fact, nothing is obviously missing. If it weren’t for that preface, no one would even suspect that the poem was incomplete.

Critics have had various ways of dealing with the disparity between the poem itself and Coleridge’s claim. I invented another solution to the problem. It is easy and natural to interpret the second part of the poem as asserting that the poem is incomplete (I’ve appended a complete text to the end of this essay). The speaker says “Could I revive within me” (l. 42), clearly implying that he can’t, but if he could he would “build that dome in air” (p. 46). The dome is assumed to be Kubla’s pleasure-dome from the first part and is here being used as figure for the poem itself. That’s a perfectly respectable reading of those lines.

I pushed it a step further. I asserted that the poem paradoxically completes itself by asserting that it is incomplete. That kind of reading has it all. The wealthy English of Coleridge’s time were fond of placing newly built but incomplete or dilapidated structures in their gardens – “follies” they were called. An exquisitely dilapidated poem fit right in with that aesthetic. Moreover, such paradoxical readings fit right in with the rising tide of structuralist, post-structuralist and deconstructionist readings in American literary criticism. Despite all that that, Wasserman, who was more traditional in his conceptual leanings, Wasserman loved it.

A note about the image

The portrait of “Kubla Khan” was made by Araniko, a Nepalese artist, shortly after Kubla’s death in 1294. The image is from Wikimedia Commons and is in the public domain.

Araniko: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Araniko.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4126240.

I have overlaid it with an image I made in MacPaint on a Classic Macintosh in 1985.

Two more thoughts on ChatGPT: Conceptual spaces and system time-steps

The mere fact that I’ve posted a substantial article, How ChatGPT tells stories, does not at all imply that I’ve stopped thinking about those issues. Not at all. The process of writing at then distributing an article is simple a device for bringing my thinking to a certain level of maturity. But the thinking continues.

Here are two further thoughts. The first is about conceptual spaces and might in fact find its way into a later version to some article, assuming I decided to produce one. The second is considerably more speculative and requires more work and, in any event, would go in a different kind of paper.

From a note to Gärdenfors on conceptual spaces

The procedure I have been using is derived from the analytical method Claude Lévi-Strauss employed in his magnum opus, Mythologiques. He started with one myth, analyzed it, and then introduced another one, very much like the first. But not quite. They are systematically different. He characterized the difference by a transformation – a term he took from algebraic group theory. He worked his way through hundreds of myths in this manner, each one derived from another by a transformation.

Here is what I have been doing: I give ChatGPT a prompt consisting of two things: 1) an existing story and 2) instructions to produce another story like it except for one change, which I specify. That change is, in effect, a way of triggering or specifying those “transformations” that Lévi-Strauss wrote about. What interests me are the ensemble of things that change along with the change I have specified. It some cases it’s quite striking, as you can see from the table in the article.

Though I mention your work in the paper, I don’t explore it. Now that the paper is (more or less) done, I’ve been thinking, and it seems to me that conceptual spaces provides a ‘natural’ way to account for the results of these experiments.

Most the times I directed ChatGPT to change the protagonist. But sometimes I focused on the antagonist. The protagonist I use in the source stories is princess Aurora. In one case the new protagonist was Prince Harry. Except for gender, these are similar people, requiring minimal changes in the new story. In another case, however, the protagonist was William the Lazy. Since ChatGPT is operating on the assumption that characters have an intrinsic ‘nature’ and their actions must follow from that nature. ChatGPT had to come up with a way that a Lazy man could defeat a dragon. That required more extensive changes in the new story. William the Lazy had to summon his knights and get them to do the work. Still more changes were required when I had to transform Princess Aurora into a giant chocolate milkshake. ChatGPT had no trouble doing it and the resulting story was quite different from the original. The whole mise-en-scène had changed.

So, let's create a conceptual space in which we place the protagonist of the original story and the protagonist of the new story. They will be at different positions in that space reflecting the fact that they have different values on the dimensions that define the space. Now, let’s take the difference between those positions and use that difference as an off-set that we apply to the whole story, thus shifting its trajectory is semantic space.

It’s probably not quite that simple. In the case of William the Lazy, I doubt that the shift if semantic space would automatically produce the act where he summons his knights. ChatGPT had to do a little work to come up with that. But on the whole it seems to me that this is the way to go.

In note that, in particular, this is quite different from what you would have to do if you used a story grammar based on symbolic systems. Though I never worked with story grammars, I was trained in symbolic systems (and analyzed a Shakespeare sonnet using a semantic network) and read the literature story grammars. I dare say none of them could have done that task, much less done it so easily and naturally. It would have required extensive machinery.

It seems to me that metaphor and analogy could be handled in a similar fashion.

System time steps in brains and GPTs

This is a comment I posted to the semiotic phyics post at LessWrong:

Have you thought of exploring the existing literature on the complex dynamics of nervous systems. It’s huge, but it does use the math you guys are borrowing from physics.

I’m thinking in particular of the work of the late Walter Freeman, who is a pioneer in the field. Toward the end of his career he began developing a concept of “cinematic consciousness.” As you know the movement in motion pictures is an illusion created by the fact the individual frames of the image are projected on the screen more rapidly than the mind can resolve them. So, while the frames are in fact still, they change so rapidly that we see motion.

First I’ll give you some quotes from Freeman’s article to give you a feel for his thinking (alas, you’ll have to read the article to see how those things connect up), then I’ll explain what that has to do with LLMs. The numbers are from Freeman’s article.

[20] EEG evidence shows that the process in the various parts occurs in discontinuous steps (Figure 2), like frames in a motion picture (Freeman, 1975; Barrie, Freeman and Lenhart, 1996).

[23] Everything that a human or an animal knows comes from the circular causality of action, preafference, perception, and up-date. It is done by successive frames of self-organized activity patterns in the sensory and limbic cortices. [...]

[35] EEG measurements show that multiple patterns self-organize independently in overlapping time frames in the several sensory and limbic cortices, coexisting with stimulus-driven activity in different areas of the neocortex, which structurally is an undivided sheet of neuropil in each hemisphere receiving the projections of sensory pathways in separated areas. [...]

[86] Science provides knowledge of relations among objects in the world, whereas technology provides tools for intervention into the relations by humans with intent to control the objects. The acausal science of understanding the self distinctively differs from the causal technology of self-control. "Circular causality" in self-organizing systems is a concept that is useful to describe interactions between microscopic neurons in assemblies and the macroscopic emergent state variable that organizes them. In this review intentional action is ascribed to the activities of the subsystems. Awareness (fleeting frames) and consciousness (continual operator) are ascribed to a hemisphere-wide order parameter constituting a global brain state. Linear causal inference is appropriate and essential for planning and interpreting human actions and personal relations, but it can be misleading when it is applied to microscopic- microscopic relations in brains.

Notice that Freeman refers to “a hemisphere-wide order parameter constituting a global brain state.” The cerebral cortex consists of 16B neurons, each with roughly 10K connections. Further, all areas of the cortex have connections with subcortical regions. That’s an awful-lot of neurons communicating in parallel in a single time step. As I recall from another article, these frames occur at a rate of 6-7 Hz.

The nervous system operates in parallel. I believe it is known that the brain exhibits a small world topology, so all neurons are within a relatively small number links from one another. Though at any moment some neurons will be more active than others, they are all active – the only inactive neuron is a dead neuron. Similarly, ANNs exhibit a high degree of parallelism. LLMs are parallel virtual machines being simulated by so-called von Neumann machines. The use of multiple cores gives a small degree of parallelism, but that’s quite small in relation to the overall number of parameters the system has.

I propose that the process of generating a single token in an LLM is comparable to a single “frame” of consciousness in Freeman’s model. All the parameters in the system are visited during a single time-step for the system. In the case of ChatGPT I believe that’s 175B parameters.

Thus the assertion that ChatGPT generates one token at a time, based on the previous string, while true, is terribly reductive and thus misleading. The appearance of a token is in fact more or less a side-effect of evolving a trajectory from the initial prompt.

Physical constraints on computing, process and memory, Part 1 [LeCun]

Yann LeCun recently posted a major position paper that has been receiving quite a bit of discussion:

Yann LeCun, A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence, Version 0.9.2, 2022-06-27, https://openreview.net/forum?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf

This post is a response to a long video posted by Dr. Tim Scarfe which raised a number of important issues. One of them is about physical constraints in the implementation of computing procedures and memory. I’m thinking this may well be THE fundamental issue in computing, and hence in human psychology and AI.

I note in passing that John von Neumann’s The Computer and the Brain (1958) was about the same issue and discussed two implementation strategies, analog and digital. He also suggested that the brain perhaps employed both. He also noted that, unlike digital computers, where you have and active computational unit linked to passive memory through fetch-execute cycles, that each unit of the brain, i.e. neuron, appears to be an active unit.

Physical constraints on computing

Here’s the video I was talking about. It is from the series Machine Learning Street Talk, #78 - Prof. NOAM CHOMSKY (Special Edition), and is hosted by Dr. Tim Scarfe along with Dr. Keith Duggar and Dr. Walid Saba.

As I’m sure you know, Chomsky has nothing good to say about machine learning. Scarfe is not so dismissive, but he does seem to be a hard-core symbolist. I’m interested in a specific bit of the conversation, starting about about 2:17:14. One of Scarfe’s colleagues, Dr. Keith Duggar, mentions a 1988 paper by Fodor and Pylyshyn, Connectionism and Cognitive Architecture: A Critical Analysis (PDF). I looked it up and found this paragraph (pp. 22-23):

Classical theories are able to accommodate these sorts of considerations because they assume architectures in which there is a functional distinction between memory and program. In a system such as a Turing machine, where the length of the tape is not fixed in advance, changes in the amount of available memory can be affected without changing the computational structure of the machine; viz by making more tape available. By contrast, in a finite state automaton or a Connectionist machine, adding to the memory (e.g. by adding units to a network) alters the connectivity relations among nodes and thus does affect the machine’s computational structure. Connectionist cognitive architectures cannot, by their very nature, support an expandable memory, so they cannot support productive cognitive capacities. The long and short is that if productivity arguments are sound, then they show that the architecture of the mind can’t be Connectionist. Connectionists have, by and large, acknowledged this; so they are forced to reject productivity arguments.

That’s what they were talking about. Duggar and Scarfe agree that this is a deep and fundamental issue. A certain kind of very useful abstraction seems to depend on separating the computational procedure from the memory on which it depends. Scarfe (2:18:40): “LeCun would say, well if you have to handcraft the abstractions then learning's gone out the window.” Duggar: “Once you take the algorithm and abstract it from memory, that's when you run into all these training problems.”

OK, fine.

But, as they are talking about a fundamental issue in physical implementation, it must apply to the nervous system as well. Fodor and Pylyshyn are talking about the nervous system too, but they don’t really address the problem except to assert that (p. 45), “the point is that the structure of ‘higher levels' of a system are rarely isomorphic, or even similar, to the structure of ‘lower levels' of a system,” and therefore the fact that the nervous system appears to be a connectionist network need not be taken as indicative about the nature of the processes it undertakes. That is true, but no one has, to my knowledge, provided strong evidence that this complex network of 86 billion neurons is, in fact, running a CPU and passive memory type of system.

Given, that, how has the nervous system solved the problem of adding new content to the system, which it certainly does? Note that here is their specific phrasing, from the paragraph I’ve quoted: “adding to the memory (e.g. by adding units to a network) alters the connectivity relations among nodes and thus does affect the machine’s computational structure.” The nervous system seems to be able to add new items to memory without, however, having to add new physical units, that is neurons, to the network. That is worth thinking about.

Human cortical plasticity: Freeman

The late Walter Freeman has left us a clue. In an article from 1991 in Scientific American (which was more technical in those days), entitled “The Physiology of Perception,” he discusses his work on the olfactory cortex. He’s using an array of electrodes mounted on the cortical surface (of a rat) to register electrical activity. Note that he’s NOT making recordings of the activity of individual neurons. Rather, he’s recording activity in a population of neurons. He then made 2-D images of that activity.

The shapes we found represent chaotic attractors. Each attractor is the behavior the system settles into when it is held under the influence of a particular input, such as a familiar odorant. The images suggest that an act of perception consists of an explosive leap of the dynamic system from the " basin" of one chaotic attractor to another; the basin of an attractor is the set of initial conditions from which the system goes into a particular behavior. The bottom of a bowl would be a basin of attraction for a ball placed anywhere along the sides of the bowl. In our experiments, the basin for each attractor would be defined by the receptor neurons that were activated during training to form the nerve cell assembly.

We think the olfactory bulb and cortex maintain many chaotic attractors, one for each odorant an animal or human being can discriminate. Whenever an odorant becomes meaningful in some way, another attractor is added, and all the others undergo slight modification.

Let me repeat that last line: “Whenever an odorant becomes meaningful in some way, another attractor is added, and all the others undergo slight modification.” That the addition of a new item to memory should change the other items in memory is what we would expect of such a system. But how does the brain manage it? It would seem that specific memory items are encoded in whole populations, not in one or a small number of neurons (so-called ‘grandmother’ cells). Somehow the nervous system is able to make adjustments to some subset of synapses in the population without having to rewrite everything.

In this connection it’s worth mentioning my favorite metaphors for the brain, as a hyperviscous fluid. What do I mean by that? A fluid having many components, of varying viscosity (some very high, some very low, and everything in between), which are intermingled in a complex way, perhaps fractally. Of course, the brain, like most of the body’s soft tissue, is mostly water, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about connectivity.

Perhaps I should instead talk about a hyperviscous network, or mesh, or maybe just a hyperviscous pattern of connectivity. Some synaptic networks have extremely high viscosity and so change very slowly over time while others have extremely low viscosity, and change rapidly. The networks involved in tracking and moving in the world in real time must have extremely low viscosity while those holding our general knowledge of the world and our own personal history will have a very high viscosity.

In the phenomenon that Freeman reports, we can think of the overall integrity of the odorant network as being maintained at, say, level 2, where moment-to-moment sensations are at level 0. The new odorant is initially registered at level 1 and so will affect the level 1 networks across all odorants. That’s the change registered in Freeman’s data. But the differences between odorants are still preserved in level 2 networks. Over time the change induced by the new odorant will percolate from level 1 to level 2 synaptic networks. Thus a new item enters the network without disrupting the overall pattern of connectivity and activation.

That is something I just made up. I have no idea whether or not, for example, it makes sense in terms of the literature on long-term potentiation (LTP) and short-term potentiation (STP), which I do not know. I do note, however, that the term “viscosity” has a use in programming that is similar to my use here.

Addendum: Are we talking about computation in the Freeman example?

I have variously argued that language is the simplest operation humans do that qualifies as computation. Thus, earlier in the commentary on LeCun’s piece I have said:

I take it as self-evident that an atomic explosion and a digital simulation of an atomic explosion are different kinds of things. Real atomic explosions are enormously destructive. If you want to test an atom bomb, you do so in a remote location. But you can do a digital simulation in any appropriate computer. You don’t have to encase the computer in lead and concrete to shield you from the blast and radiation, etc. And so it is with all simulations. The digital simulation is one thing, and real phenomenon, another.

That’s true of neurons and nervous systems too. [...] However, back in 1943 Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts published a very influential paper (A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity) in which they argued that neurons could be thought of as implementing circuits of logic gates. Consequently many have, perhaps too conveniently, assumed that nervous systems are (in effect) evaluating logical expressions and therefore that the nervous system is evaluating symbolic expressions.

I think that’s a mistake. Nervous systems are complex electro-chemical systems and need to be understood as such. What happens at synapses is mediated by 100+ chemicals, some more important than others. It seems that some of these processes have a digital character while others have an analog character. [...] I have come to the view that language is the simplest phenomenon that can be considered symbolic, thought we may simulate those processes through computation if we wish. That implies that there is no symbolic processing in animals and none in humans before, say, 18 months or so. Just how language is realized in a neural architecture that seems so contrary to the requirements of symbolic computing, that is a deep question, though I’ve offered some thoughts about that in the working paper I mentioned in my original comment.

If the phenomenon Freeman describes is not about computation, and it is NOT according to my current beliefs, then how does the problem brought up by Fodor & Pylyshyn apply?

And yet there IS a problem, isn’t there. There is a physical network with connections between the items in the network. Those connections must be altered in order to accommodate a new phenomenon. We can’t just add a new item to the end of the tape. That is, it IS a physical problem of the same form. So perhaps this technicality doesn’t matter.

Can cortical plasticity be retained into adulthood?

Rejuvenation of plasticity in the brain: opening the critical period (BTW, pay attention to the role of the thalamus, which is also critically involved in language processing) https://t.co/3LNCrrYfpI pic.twitter.com/vBDJLVcFbk

— A.Benítez-Burraco (@abenitezburraco) October 6, 2018

From the article: Mary H Patton, Jay A Blundon, Stanislav S Zakharenko, Rejuvenation of plasticity in the brain: opening the critical period, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, Volume 54, February 2019, Pages 83-89, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2018.09.003.

Highlights

• Critical (sensitive) period for cortical plasticity can be extended into adulthood.
• Neuromodulators reopen the critical period for cortical plasticity in adults.
• Neuromodulators operate through cortical disinhibition and thalamic adenosine.
• Cortical disinhibition is mediated by layer 1 interneurons.
• Thalamic adenosine production and A1 receptor signaling gate the critical period.

Cortical circuits are particularly sensitive to incoming sensory information during well-defined intervals of postnatal development called ‘critical periods’. The critical period for cortical plasticity closes in adults, thus restricting the brain’s ability to indiscriminately store new sensory information. For example, children acquire language in an exposure-based manner, whereas learning language in adulthood requires more effort and attention. It has been suggested that pairing sounds with the activation of neuromodulatory circuits involved in attention reopens this critical period. Here, we review two critical period hypotheses related to neuromodulation: cortical disinhibition and thalamic adenosine. We posit that these mechanisms co-regulate the critical period for auditory cortical plasticity. We also discuss ways to reopen this period and rejuvenate cortical plasticity in adults.

Note that this research is about the auditory cortex with an orientation toward language acquisition. What about music? I'm thinking, in particular, about Walter Freeman's hypothesis about intense music-centered ritual and bonding among adults, “A Neurobiological Role of Music in Social Bonding, in The Origins of Music, eds. N. L. Wallin, B. Merker, and Steve Brown (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 411-424.

Abstract: Music is regarded in biological terms as originating in the brain, so that most explanations concentrate on the ways in which brains process information. Recent studies of the nonlinear dynamics of the primary sensory cortices have shown that the patterns that are constructed by chaotic nonlinear dynamics in cortical neuropil replace stimulus driven activity. This finding supports the concept that knowledge in brains is entirely constructed within them without direct transfer of information from outside. As knowledge increases by learning, brains of individuals grow progressively apart. The separation results from the uniqueness of the knowledge that is constructed within each brain. The resulting condition of isolation is known among philosophers as epistemological solipsism. This view is reinforced by the tenets of aesthetics, which emphasize the deeply personal experiences of individuals, not as active listeners but as passive recipients of beauty in music and other arts. Neither conventional neuroscience nor aesthetics can explain the deep emotional power of music to move humans to action.

An alternative view is presented, in which human brains are seen to have evolved primarily in response to environmental pressures to bridge the solipsistic gulf between individuals, and to form integrated societies. An evolutionary origin is found in the neurohumoral mechanisms of parental bonding to altricial infants. A case is made that music together with dance have co-evolved biologically and culturally to serve as a technology of social bonding. Findings of anthropologists and psychiatrists are reviewed to show how the rhythmic behavioral activities that are induced by drum beats and music can lead to altered states of consciousness, through which mutual trust among members of societies is engendered.

The subjective nature of meaning

Note: You may consider this to be deep background for my ongoing examination of Michael Gavin’s recent article on Empson, vector semantics, and Milton [1]. But it may also be understood independently of that discussion

It seems to me that the meaning of literary texts, as studied by literary critics, is ineluctably and irreducibly subjective. But we must be careful about that word “subjective”, for it has come to imply (often wild) variation from one person to another. While meaning may well vary from one person to another – the meanings literary critics discover through so-called close reading certainly vary among critics – that is not what interests me here. By subjective I mean simply that it is a phenomenon that exists in the mind of, you know, subjects. Whether or not meaning varies between subjects is a different matter. Color is subjective in this sense, though it is pretty constant across different people, color blindness providing the major exceptions.

(You might want to consult John Searle on subjectivity and objectivity in the ontological and epistemological senses. I am here asserting that meaning is ontologically subjective and leaving its epistemological status out of the conversation.)

Walter Freeman's neuroscience of meaning

The later Walter Freeman was interested in such things. I want to look at two paragraphs from a collection of his papers: Walter J. Freeman. Mesoscopic Brain Dynamics. London: Springer-Verlag Limited, 2000. 

These paragraphs are from the Prolog, which introduces the papers. One paragraph is fairly technical in its content while the following one is more accessible and can, in fact, be understood without having read the first one. So, I’m going to start with that second paragraph and then give you the first one. Moreover, I’m going to give you the first one twice. I insert some interpretive remarks into the repetition.

Here then is what Freeman has to say about meaning in the brain (pp. 9-10):

The point here is that brains do not process “information” in the commonly used sense of the word. They process meaning. When we scan a photograph or an abstract, we take in its import, not its number of pixels or bits. The regularities that we should seek and find in patterns of central neural activity have no immediate or direct relations to the patterns of sensory stimuli that induce the cortical activity but instead to the perceptions and goals of human and animal subjects. Far from being fed into our cortices in the way that we program and fill our computers, everything that we know and can remember has been constructed by the global self-organizing dynamics of activity within our brains.

That paragraph interprets this more technical and more specific one (p. 9):

... the bulbar AM patterns do not relate to the stimulus directly but instead to the meaning of the stimulus, as shown in several ways. The simplest way is to switch a reward between two odorants, so that the previously rewarded stimulus is no longer reinforced and vice versa. Both AM patterns change, though the two odorants do not. So also does the spatial pattern for the control segments in back- ground air. So also do all pre-existing AM patterns change when a new odorant is added to the repertoire. The AM patterns for all odorants that can be discriminated by a subject change whenever there is a change in the odorant environment. Furthermore, when rabbits are trained serially to odorants A, B, C, D, and then back to A, the original pattern does not recur, but a new one appears (Freeman and Schneider 1982; Freeman 1991a). This property is to be expected in a true associative memory, in which every new entry is related to all previous entries by learning, because the context and significance are subject to continual and unpredictable change.

Now I insert some interpretive remarks in italics:

... the bulbar AM patterns do not relate to the stimulus directly but instead to the meaning of the stimulus, as shown in several ways.

“Bulbar” refers to the olfactory bulb, a cortical structure involved with smell. “AM” is amplitude modulation. Freeman is recording electrical patterns from an array of electrodes touching the surface of the olfactory bulbs of “small laboratory animals”, Freeman’s phrase, generally rats or rabbits. Think of the AM patterns as signals.

The simplest way is to switch a reward between two odorants, so that the previously rewarded stimulus is no longer reinforced and vice versa. Both AM patterns change, though the two odorants do not. So also does the spatial pattern for the control segments in background air.

Note that the olfactory bulb is “upstream” from the olfactory receptors in the nasal cavity. Those receptors “relate to the stimulus directly”, while the bulbar AM patterns are suffused with meaning.

So also do all pre-existing AM patterns change when a new odorant is added to the repertoire. The AM patterns for all odorants that can be discriminated by a subject change whenever there is a change in the odorant environment.

That is to say, when a new odorant is learned a new pattern must be added to the existing array of patterns. But it is not merely ADDED TO array, leaving the existing one unchanged. All the preexisting patterns change.

Furthermore, when rabbits are trained serially to odorants A, B, C, D, and then back to A, the original pattern does not recur, but a new one appears (Freeman and Schneider 1982; Freeman 1991a). This property is to be expected in a true associative memory, in which every new entry is related to all previous entries by learning, because the context and significance are subject to continual and unpredictable change.

Digital computers do not use associative memory. Items in computer memory are accessed through their addresses. In associative memory there are no addresses independent of items in memory. Associative memory is said to be content addressed.

Note that Freeman thus has an objectively way of examining of phenomenon that is fundamentally subjective. But then students of color perception have been doing that for years.

Are all psychological phenomena thus (ontologically) subjective? How could they not be?

Calculating meaning in “Kubla Khan” – a rough cut

In the spring of 1969 I became interested in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan". In the fall of 1970 I began drafting a master's thesis on the poem, hoping to create the kind of theory necessary to make sense out of its underlying logic. The theory didn't happen, but I discovered that the poem had an elaborate structure, one that (extensive) prior criticism had utterly failed to notice. In the fall of 1973 I went off to graduate school, hoping to create the theory I had been unable to create for my master's thesis. While the work I did with David Hays in linguistics was deeply satisfying, it wasn't the theory "Kubla Khan" required.

But that time the poem had become the touchstone of my intellectual life. I returned to it from time to time, thinking about it often and publishing on it in the the late 1980s and then again in the early 2000s. That last article was an advance over the previous one, but still not what the poem required.

I now believe I know what the poem requires and have posted a sketch under the title of this post. Here's the abstract:

Abstract: "Kubla Khan" and "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison" are constructed on utterly different schemes, though they share some of the same underlying components. "Kubla Khan" is ontological and impersonal in character and makes extensive use of convolution in calculating meanings. It reveals the structure of Being. "Lime-Tree Bower" is narrative and personal and makes little or no use of convolution. It reveals the unfolding of subjectivity in Time. The two poems also differ in their versification, a differences which is related to their different strategies of meaning.

You can download the article here: https://www.academia.edu/35379665/Calculating_meaning_in_Kubla_Khan_a_rough_cut

If you're interested in discussing it, you can do so here: https://www.academia.edu/s/431cfa649a/calculating-meaning-in-kubla-khan-a-rough-cut

When I say, I know what the poem requires, what does that mean? It means that, as far as I can tell, the conceptual space we need for understanding that poem is now "closed". The article outlines the nature of that closure. It will require a book to do significantly better, a book that integrates the ideas in this article with my previous work. The task of actually constructing a deep and satisfying account of the poem within that conceptual space will require the work of investigators having intellectual skills that I lack.

Instrument Matter in the Musician’s Mind: Part 2, How to Construct a Spirit

Culture has produced some strange things. Supernatural spirits is one of them. I'm bumping this post to the top of the queue just to get it on my mind, as I need to think about these things a bit more while I contemplate writing a book on cultural evolution.

* * * * *

Call it “animism” if you wish, but it will no longer be enough to brand it with the mark of infamy. This is indeed why we feel so close to the sixteenth century, as if we were back before the “epistemological break,” before the odd invention of matter.
—Bruno Latour, An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”

In lieu of an environment that surrounds culture . . . picture an ontological field without any unequivocal demarcations between human, animal, vegetable, or mineral.
—Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things

About two weeks ago I posted some remarks on how one thinks about and plays very simple percussion instruments, claves and bells, and told a story about some mysterious tones that sometimes arise in bell choirs. I also promised a post in which I “attempt to construe those sounds as spirit voices.” This is that post.

The Magic of the Bell, Recap

The phenomenon that interests me is that of certain high frequency (around 2000 Herz and above) ‘twitters’ that arose during a certain rehearse I attended some years ago. As I explained in that post, there were four of us, each playing a different bell. Three of us play set patterns, time and again, while the fourth improvised freely over those patterns.

At a certain point, when energy was high and the music was rocking, we all heard these high twittering sounds. None of us was playing them. That is, they didn’t coincide with the patterns any of us were playing. Rather, they somehow arose through the interaction of the patterns the four of us played. We’d played together many times before, and many times since, but that was the only time we heard those sounds.

What were they? The purpose of this post is to explore what’s involved in asserting that they were some kind of ‘spirit.’

What phenomenon are we trying to name and explain?

This is a matter of drawing a boundary. Perhaps the easiest play to draw the boundary, dare I say it? the natural place, is around the sound itself. If we had had a recorder playing during that session, bounding the phenomenon in this way would be very easy. What we’re interested in would be what’s on the recording; nothing more, nothing less.

Then we could examine the recording to determine just what those pitches were like, their dominant frequency, just when they happened, and so forth. That is to say, we would be treating those sounds as nothing but mechanical vibrations, which we are examining in the standard ways. This is, of course, an entirely legitimate thing to do. It’s done all the time.

But THAT’s not the phenomenon that interests me. That’s not where I want to draw the boundary. That’s only one aspect of the phenomenon that interests me. It’s the aspect that tells me that THERE’S SOMETHING ELSE GOING ON.

Remember my description? I said that this happened when the energy was high and the music rocked. That doesn’t always happen. It’s not rare, but it’s not automatic, and for some purposes it’s neither necessary nor desired. So high rocking energy, that’s within the boundary of the phenomenon I’m talking about.

But drawn that way, the boundary isn’t tight enough, it’s not precise enough. For those twitterings didn’t always happen when the music rocked. They happened only that one time, though, as I indicated in the earlier post, Ade (the leader) recognized the phenomenon. He’d experienced it before, but the others of us had not. Ade was (and is) a very experienced percussionist. He’d toured and performed professionally in his youth and has a wide circle of musician friends, including drummers expatriated from West Africa. He knew those sounds, and simply called them “the magic of the bell.”

Other than the sounds themselves, what’s the difference between rocking music and magic music? Whatever that difference it, I’m going to call it spirit.

So, what do I think REALLY happened? Well, I don’t think some ghostly beings from another dimension entered our bodies and guided our playing. But I don’t have a positive account to offer. I think the place to look is in the micro-timings of our movements and in the neural activity in subcortical regions of our brains, perhaps even in the core of the core of the brain, the reticular activity system and, certainly, in the cerebellum. That’s where I think the action is, but that’s no more than an educated guess.

So in saying that those twitterings are manifestations of spirit, I am, in effect, projecting some subtle group-level neuro-muscular activity onto those sounds that serve as a diagnostic indicator of the phenomenon. To say that those twitterings are spirits, or voices of spirits, is to speak figuratively, where the figure is synecdoche, using the part (the twitter sounds) to stand for the whole (group locked in very intense musical activity).

This is pretty much what I’m doing when, in another context I talk of graffiti as manifestations of the spirit, or kami (in Japanese) of the site. When I do that, I’m NOT asserting that some being from another dimension comes through the wall, enters the graffiti writer, and directs his activity. Rather I’m saying that we cannot understand how and why graffiti ends up in this or that particular place without taking into account, not only the nature of the surface itself, but lines of sight and access, general location and neighborhood traffic, legal status (e.g. is it posted as no trespassing) and past history. All of that is important to the sight and I want to treat all of it as an indivisible gestalt. The easiest way to do this is to talk of the spirit of the site.

There are, of course, differences. The spirit of the graffiti site is, by definition, resident at the site. The twitter spirits don’t seem to have any residence at all. They just come and go. But there’s an overall similarity in the mode of construction, both are assemblages of heterogenous components: walls, paints, footpaths, laws, writers and viewers in one case; bells, strikers, and musicians in the other.

The Sound of Many Hands Clapping: Group Intentionality

I originally posted this in March 2014. I'm bumping it to the top of the queue as this topic is much on my mind these days.

* * *

In my earlier post on the busy bee brain I quoted some passages from Beethoven’s Anvil in which I discussed synchronized flashing among fireflies. Now I’d like to quote a somewhat longer passage, one about synchronized clapping (pp. 67-68):

You may be familiar with the synchronized clapping that routinely rewards a successful performances—music, drama, circus, etc.—in eastern European communities, but which is less common in western Europe and North America. Z. Néda and colleagues have investigated this phenomenon, recording applause for a number of performances in Romania and Hungary. The applause would start out randomly and then quickly become strongly synchronized. Synchronized clapping would continue for a short while and then disintegrate into random clapping, from which synchronized clapping would reemerge, and so forth.

Analysis of the recordings revealed two things:

1. The average noise level was greater during the random clapping than during the synchronized clapping.
2. During random clapping individuals clapped at roughly twice the frequency they used during synchronized clapping.

Clearly the greater volume during random clapping came because individuals were clapping faster. But during this phase, the time between individual claps varied more than when people clapped at the lower rate. That variability made it impossible for the group to synchronize at the higher rate—a result that has emerged in a number of studies of groups of globally coupled oscillators.

Néda concluded that audience members were caught in a conflict. On the one hand, they can express one value clapping as rapidly as possible, thereby making the loudest noise. If, however, they wish to express another value by synchronizing their clapping, then they have to clap more slowly, thereby lowering the volume. It is impossible simultaneously to maximize these two aims. The group deals with this conflict by switching back and forth between two different expressive regimes.

We would, of course, like to know what these two values are. The investigators assume that the loudness of the clapping reflects the audience members’ enthusiasm for the performance, while synchronous clapping expresses group solidarity. This seems reasonable enough. For our purposes, however, what is significant is the mechanism by which these two values, whatever they are, were expressed by the group. That mechanism is clearly self-organizing. No one leads audiences in this behavior. It just happens.

Walter Freeman has techniques for identifying and studying intentionality in the brains of individual animals. Néda and colleagues have demonstrated a method for studying group intentionality in this one very simple case—a simple case, however, that is grounded in coupled behavior. If we are to understand musicking we need techniques that work in more complicated cases, … , or the bell magic, or the jam session we turn to next. The important point is simply that group intentionality is amenable to empirical study.

What’s particularly interesting about this example is that we have two modes of behavior, synchronized clapping (expressing group solidarity) and loud random clapping (expressing enthusiasm for the performance), and they alternate with one another at quasi-periodic intervals. No one is directing this behavior. It just happens.

How? What’s the neural mechanism?

Walter Freeman: My Legacy: A Launch Pad for Exploring Neocortex

I had quite a bit of correspondence with Walter Freeman at the end of the last century and in the early years of this one. I was using his conceptions of neurodynamics in thinking about music and so discussed such things with him.

* * * * *

This is the keynote address and talk 3 (of 31) at the Conference on Brain Network Dynamics held at the University of California at Berkeley on January 26-27, 2007. Speaker is the late Walter J Freeman, Department of Molecular & Cell Biology, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720. http://sulcus.berkeley.edu/.

Slides for this talk (with transcript!) are available in both PDF and Powerpoint format at Freeman's lab HERE. Click on the link "Talk & Symposia Video MPEGs" and then "WJF UCB Brain Dynamics '07 Conference Talk: My Legacy: A Launch Pad for Exploring Neocortex". But then again, maybe this will take you directly to his talk. As indeed it does. But not as it's linked out of his website, but as it lives at Archive.org.

It's a challenging talk, assuming some familiarity with the material. I have some familiarity, just some (much of the technical material is above my pay grade), but still, there's something there, if only for the range of material Freeman covers.

Abstract: Fifty years ago EEG was widely regarded as noise, the roar of a crowd. It still is, advisedly, because cortical neurons form great crowds, and the task of systems neuroscience is to comprehend them. I perceived EEG as an opportunity to make a contribution. I chose to study three-layered allocortex in the olfactory system as simpler than neocortex yet closer to the senses than the hippocampus. I began by pulsing it with pairs of electric shocks in order to identify a small-signal near-linear range, in which I could model the dynamics with linear equations. From the patterns of relaxation on perturbation — evoked potentials — I modeled the system with differential equations, evaluated the parameters, solved them to simulate the evoked potentials, and deduced the mechanisms of stabilization. I summarized 20 years of linear analysis in my 1975 book, from which I concluded that I had reached the limits of linear analysis. Trying to understand brain function that way was like trying to cross an ocean in a dugout canoe. I conceived a boundary in the imaginary axis of the complex plane. Contemplating that, I felt as Isaac Newton felt, playing with pebbles on a seashore.

In the following 30 years I have explored the design of foundations for ocean crossings. You will hear five promising approaches in this Conference on Brain Network Dynamics. Steve Bressler will describe nonlinear metastability in terms of basin-attractor theory deriving in part from Hermann Haken’s synergetics. Robert Kozma will describe phase transitions in terms of neuropercolation, which he derives from random graph theory. Bert Dreyfus will describe the isomorphism he perceives between brain dynamics and the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Giuseppe Vitiello will describe the mapping of dissipative brain dynamics into quantum field theory, stemming from the pioneering work of Ricciardi and Umezawa. I will try to show how to map solution sets of nonlinear differential equations into a phase portrait in the self-organizing, far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics that leads from disorder to order: Ilya Prigogine’s ‘dissipative structures’ that feed on energy.

None of these five tools can be used alone with full success; each approach contributes necessary insights. Together they provide a launch pad for vehicles that will carry us arduously but freely to new discoveries across the ocean of nonlinear brain dynamics before us. Like other true explorers, we don’t know what we will find, and we don’t yet have the proper framework in which to describe whatever is there. This broad view from an open mind is my legacy.

Intention and Story-Telling: A Neural Explication

Originally published in The Valve, 10.24.07. I've tacked on some out-takes from the original post. Note that I had a long exchange with John Holbo over at The Valve that's worth reading and it's relevant to my current consideration of Dennett on intentionality. Glancing through it I think I've changed my views on this and that since I wrote this piece.

* * * * *

But in the night of thick darkness enveloping the earliest antiquity, so remote from ourselves, there shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind.

- Giambattista Vico

Consciousnesses present themselves with the absurdity of a multiple solipcism, such is the situation which has to be understood.

- Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Though I find myself perplexed over all the wit, intellect, and energy expended in contemplation of peculiar hypotheticals that, so far as I can tell, have yet to materialize - you know, Wordsworth on the beach and such - I nonetheless find myself thinking about intention from time to time. Most recently I've been thinking about the notion that all those present at the telling of a story - teller and audience alike - share the same “intentional frame,” where intentional frame is defined with respect to the operations of the nervous system. This would be true of the actors and audience of a play or the audience at a movie as well. I also think it true of all those who read a given novel, though that situation differs sufficiently from those face-to-face situations that the generalization cannot be casually granted.

My object in this post is to lay this out. First I'll use Walter Freeman to establish the use of intentionality when theorizing about the nervous system. Then I'll argue that people engaged in face-to-face conversation share the same intentional frame. Then I'll consider oral story-telling and develop a restricted notion of intentional frame to cover that situation. The point of this exercise is to come up with a way of thinking about story-telling at the neural level.

A Neural View

Let's consider how a neuroscientist, Walter Freeman, talks about intention. I first encountered Freeman's treatment of intentionality in his Societies of Brains, but I'm going to quote from an essay on The Self-Organizing Subject of Psychoanalysis (PDF):

The basic Thomist premise is the unity and inviolability of the self that is inherent in the brain and body. This unity does not allow the entry of forms (we would say information) into the self. The impact of the world onto the senses gives rise to states of activity he called 'phantasms', which are ephemeral and unique to each impact and therefore cannot be known. The function of the brain is to exercise the faculty of the imagination, which is not present in the Aristotelian view, in order to abstract and generalize over the phantasms that are triggered by unique events. These processes of abstraction and generalization create information that assimilates the body and brain to the world. Assimilation is not adaptation by passive information processing, nor is it an accumulation of representations by resonances. It is the shaping of the self to bring it into optimal interaction with desired aspects of the world. The goal of an action is a state of competence that Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945) called "maximum grip". It is the beginning for all knowledge. Sensory impacts that are attended by the brain are only those which can be assimilated on the basis of the pre-existing structure and capabilities of the body and brain, which have already been created through the prior experience.

Thus the manner of acquisition of knowledge is by thrusting the body into the world, from which our word 'intention' has come from the Latin "intendere" = 'stretching forth'. The thrust initiates the action-perception cycle, which is followed by the changes through which the self learns about the world, and ultimately about God, by assimilation (from the Latin "adequatio") of the self to the world. There is no transfer of information across the senses into the brain, but instead the creation of information within the brain under the existing constraints of the brain and body. In this respect cognition is related to digestion, which protects the integrity of the immunological self by breaking all forms of foodstuffs into elementary ions and molecules, that are absorbed and built into complex macromolecules, each now bearing the immunological signature of the individual self. Similarly, events and objects in the world are broken into sheets of action potentials like pinpoints of light, the 'raw sense data' of analytic philosophers and the phantasms of Thomists, and new forms emerge through constructions by the chaotic dynamics in sensory cortices. The explanation for this manner of function of both the neural and the digestive systems is essentially the same: the world is infinitely complex, and the self can only know and incorporate what it makes within itself. This is why neurobiologists using passive neural networks cannot solve the figure-ground problem, why linguists cannot do machine translation, why philosophers cannot solve the symbol grounding problem, why cognitive scientists cannot surmount the limitations of expert systems, and why engineers cannot yet build autonomous robots capable of operating in unstructured environments. The unbounded complexity of the world defeats those classic Platonic and Arisotelian approaches.

So, that's Freeman on intention. He's been investigating the nervous system considered as a dynamical system (he's been influenced by the physicist Hermann Haken among others). In particular, he's studied the olfactory system, looking at how the brain “stretches forth” to comprehend odors and how it assimilates its own structures to the activity patterns imposed upon it by odorants. We need not worry about the details of his models except to note that they are very much about the timing of impulse trains and how they propagate through the nervous system. [Note: FWIW, Piaget would talk of accommodation where Freeman talks of assimilation. Piaget uses assimilation for a different purpose.]

Notes Toward a Natural Philosophy of Cultural Evolution in the Music Domain

The title of my book about music, Beethoven’s Anvil, was suggested by my agent, Richard Curtis. I made up the subtitle (I think): Music in Mind and Culture. I am now thinking that the subtitle could have been the phrase I’m using as the title of this post: Notes Toward a Natural Philosophy of Cultural Evolution in the Music Domain. To be sure, I didn’t conceive of it as a study of the cultural evolution of music (“cultural evolution” has only five entries in the index), but in the context of my current efforts to figure out what cultural evolution is about, that’s a good way to think about Beethoven’s Anvil.

For it places the evolutionary aspects of musical phenomena in the context of substantial discussions of psychology and neuroscience, of interpersonal interaction and group processes, of origins and history, and of social context and function broadly considered. In particular, when I discuss the musical equivalents of the biological gene and phenotype, those discussions are embedded in discussions of neuroscience and perceptual, cognitive, and motor psychology that are well-thought out. I’m not just hunting for analogues to the biological notions and attaching terminological handles to them, which is, alas, what all too much discussion of micro-scale cultural evolution has been doing.

In the rest of this post I do two things: 1) justify the talk of natural philosophy, and 2) say a bit more about Beethoven’s Anvil.

Natural Philosophy

The term is of course an old one. But I have a specific contemporary source in mind, Massimo Pigliucci’s recent review of The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time: A Proposal In Natural Philosophy by Lee Smolin (a scientist by trade) and Roberto Unger (a philosopher). Smolin and Unger explain their use of the term and Pigliucci discusses that use, approvingly, quoting this passage from their book:

Today, natural philosophy has not disappeared completely. It lives under disguise. Scientists write popular books, for the general educated public, professing to make their ideas about the science that they practice accessible to non-scientists. They use these books to speculate about the larger meaning of their discoveries for our understanding of the universe and of our place within it. They also have another audience, however: their colleagues in science, addressed under the disguise of popularization. (p. 82)

While I’m a humanist by training, not a scientist, I suppose that I’ve become something of a natural philosopher in the sense of that paragraph and more or less for the same purpose.

Beethoven’s Anvil assumes no particular specialized intellectual background and so is broadly accessible both to “civilians” if you will, but also to a broad range of intellectual specialists in a variety of human sciences (the phrase, “human sciences” is European and encompasses the humanities as well as the social and behavioral sciences). The book also assumes, and I hope rewards, a fair level of intellectual sophistication and adventurousness.

Some Propositions from Beethoven’s Anvil

How then to present the contents of a moderately dense 280 page book (plus notes and references) in a compact form?

In the course of writing the book I composed a handful of short paragraphs to which I gave specific names. These key propositions are not distributed uniformly throughout the book – half of them are in chapters 2 and 3 (out of 11), which I’ve put online HERE – and so don’t represent the full scope of the book. But they indicate enough of it to show why the book would be valuable for students of cultural evolution.

To be embarrassingly blunt, if you want to see cultural evolution discussed in a rich interdisciplinary intellectual context, I know of nothing else quite like Beethoven’s Anvil. If you are thinking of cultural evolution as a vehicle for consilience in the human sciences, Beethoven’s Anvil makes a good complement to e.g. Alex Mesoudi, Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory can Explain Human Cultural and Synthesize the Social Sciences but is itself free of broad claims about intellectual unification of that sort. I am making some such claim in this post.

To be sure, music is not the whole of human culture, not by a long shot. But it is a significant chunk of human culture. I would like to think that a detailed albeit speculative account of it has something to offer those with no particular interest in music, but with some interest in human culture and its evolution.

The Mind is What the Brain Does, and Very Strange

Having now clearly established memes as properties of objects and events in the external world, properties that provide crucial data for the operation of mental “machines,” I want to step aside from thinking about memes and cultural evolution as such and think a bit about the mind. I want to set this conversation up by, once again, quoting from Dennett’s recent interview, The Well-Tempered Mind, at The Edge:

The question is, what happens to your ideas about computational architecture when you think of individual neurons not as dutiful slaves or as simple machines but as agents that have to be kept in line and that have to be properly rewarded and that can form coalitions and cabals and organizations and alliances? This vision of the brain as a sort of social arena of politically warring forces seems like sort of an amusing fantasy at first, but is now becoming something that I take more and more seriously, and it's fed by a lot of different currents.

A bit later:

It's going to be a connectionist network. Although we know many of the talents of connectionist networks, how do you knit them together into one big fabric that can do all the things minds do? Who's in charge? What kind of control system? Control is the real key, and you begin to realize that control in brains is very different from control in computers. Control in your commercial computer is very much a carefully designed top-down thing.

That’s the problem David Hays and I set ourselves in Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence (Journal of Social and Biological Systems 11, 293 – 322, 1988). While we had something to say about control in our discussion of the modal principle, we addressed the broader question of how to construct a mind from neurons that aren’t simple logical switches.

It is by no means clear to me how Dennett, and others of his mind-set, think about the mind. Yes, it’s computational. I can deal with that. But not, as I’ve said, if it’s taken to mean that the primitive operations of the nervous system are like the operations in digital computers, not if it’s taken to imply that the mind is constituted by ‘programs’ written in the ‘mentalese’ version of Fortran, Lisp, or C++. THAT was never a very plausible idea and the more we’ve come to know about the nervous system, the less plausible it becomes.

The upshot is that we need a much more fluid, a much more dynamic, conception of the mind. In Beethoven’s Anvil I talked of neural weather. Here’s how I set-up that metaphor (pp. 71-72):

Musician’s Journal: Free-Drumming and Visual-Motor Space

This is from an email I wrote to Walter Freeman (neuroscientist, UCal Berkeley) and Ralph Holloway (neuroscientist, Columbia U) on April 6, 2002. This is a sequel to an early post on learning to play 3-against-2 but does not depend on it.

Walter and Ralph,

I noticed something interesting the other day that has to do with “free drumming” (to be defined). I seemed to be making choices in visual-motor space rather than auditory space. This is quite different from what I do when improvising on the trumpet, where I seem to make choices in auditory space. That is to say, when playing the trumpet I make choices in terms of what I want to hear rather than in terms of what I want my body to do. I’m not sure whether or not this is because I’m considerably more expert on the trumpet than on my drum.

Let me begin by describing my drum. It’s what’s called a tongue drum or slit drum. It’s a wooden box about 24 inches along its greatest dimension (which is oriented horizontally and transverse when playing) and 8 inches along the other dimensions. It has six “tongues” cut into the top (playing) surface arranged in three rows with two tongues in each row. The tongues are of different lengths but are not precisely tuned. While you can, in most cases, easily hear which tongue in any pair is higher, you cannot assign any particular interval to the pitch difference. I should note, however, that you can get different sounds from any given tongue depending on where you hit it. Thus you can hit a long tongue in such a place that the tone will sound higher than that you get when hitting a shorter tongue. The major point, however, is simply that the tongues are not precisely tuned and, in consequence, you cannot play melodic lines and riffs. This is a drum, not a six-toned marimba.

So, the melodic and harmonic imagination I employ when playing the trumpet isn’t very useful here. Rhythm, of course, remains. But we do need a term for the higher and lower aspect of the sound. Brain imaging data does suggest that interval perception is different from pitch perception and that, in turn, suggests that our ordinary sense of melody is really the joint produce of interval and pitch perception. Thus interval perception by itself tells you whether one tone is more or less higher or lower than another and gives some sense of the magnitude of the difference. But the ordinary sense of melody combines that with perception of the pitches of the individual tones in the melodic stream. My drum patterns are thus based on rhythm, interval, volume and, to a limited extent, timbre.

In most musical situations drums play repetitive patterns. That is certainly the case, for example, with African polyrhythms. Each player has a certain pattern to play and she plays it more or less without variation for the duration of the performance, or performance segment. There may be some variation here and there, but it’s not large and not systematic. In a given performance the master drummer may signal a change, at which time everyone will switch to a new pattern. This doesn’t happen often, and it always happens in prescribed and well-understood ways. The master drummer is the only one who’s free to play something other than a repetitive pattern. Even then, he’s generally not doing the sort of thing a jazz drummer or a tabla player does when they are soloing; the range of variation is generally more restricted.

When I talk of free drumming I mean anything other than playing the same pattern over and over and over without (significant) variation. Free drumming requires that you make a lot of choices. So, how are those choices made?

Of Intentionality and Nervous Systems

Of course I mean intentionality in the philosophical sense, a notion that Franz Brentano imported from medieval thought to modern. As Harman puts it in The Quadruple Object, “what distinguishes the mental from the physical for Brentano is that mental acts are always directed toward an object” (p. 21). When Fido sees and smells chopped liver in his food bowl he intends them—assuming, of course, that you are willing to grant a mind to Fido, a dog. His visual and olfactory perceptions are intentional objects, though Harman, not liking the “antiseptic sterility” of the term, prefers to speak of sensual objects.

In Harman’s philosophy sensual objects stand in contrast to real objects, such as the bowl and the chopped liver. Fido’s brain, body, and sense organs are also real objects in this sense. As I understand Harman’s usage, he could even talk of a larger object inside of which we would find Fido, the bowl, and the chopped liver as proper parts.

It follows that while Fido is contemplating the chopped liver, there is a real process in his brain that is his perception of that chopped liver. Let us say that that process too is an object. What is the relationship between that real neural process, that evanescent and fluctuating object in Fido, and those other real objects, the bowl and the chopped liver, that participate in, but do not dominate, that neural process?

Tricky Questions

I find that to be a very tricky question, and tricky in the nasty way that involves matters of mere definition and matters of substance that must be teased apart. I want to locate intentionality somewhere in that relationship, but just where I’m not sure. Is the sensual object another name for the intentionality that exists between a nervous system and the world? Or do we say that intentionality is the relationship between the nervous system and the intentional object? Or something else entirely? How do we talk of the relationship between a perception considered as a sensual object and the real nervous system without which that sensual object would not exist?