A Conscious Eureka Moment

I have endless debates about things that appear to be purely philosophical, but to me are now applicable. Sometimes this is a reach. Recently my great friend (who is welcome to identify himself but it would be impolite for me to do so) was discussing via Facebook the issue of consciousness. I have been prodding this friend to start a blog and he, likely half jokingly said, “when I figure out consciousness I will start it.” Pointing out that I may have to wait awhile to read his blog, he felt that figuring this out was not a matter of science, in that it likely didn’t involve more experimentation. Instead he felt a Eureka moment may occur, and therefore an ancient question resolved, and his blog launched. Until very recently I would have said that he was 100% wrong. Now I think there is that possibility, though my thoughts on why are likely different than his.

 It is possible that consciousness is not to be found, but rather conceptualized. An excellent book by Thomas Metzinger called “The Ego Tunnel” deals with this directly, giving evidence that consciousness itself may be an illusion. I am sympathetic to this theory, as it fits very nicely with my well documented (and likelyboring to my friends and family) strong belief that free will is an illusion. If you are interested in this, look here and here for my views, and here for an opposing view by Massimo Pigliucci. The ideas of a no free will self are hard enough to digest. It means that we are complex parts of nature, but no different than anything else in nature itself. We can be predicted in theory if we had enough information. There are only two possibilities, either everything is determined, which is the large stuff, or involves quantum fluctuations, which are random, with the small stuff. Either way there is not free will.

I have taken this debate past the philosophical to help engineers and myself who are interested in artificial intelligence learn how to create it. That is to allow a system to have options, but only one right answer. A machine that has feeling is more complicated of course. How does a machine feel that it is choosing, like we feel that we are choosing? I don’t have an answer but assume that it can be accomplished the way I think it is accomplished for people. The reasons for the perception of free will must be somehow tied to an evolutionary need at some point to feel free. Perhaps this is why we care for our children, or for the purpose of creating technologies. I have no idea, yet any of those things can be programmed.

 So what if the same is true for consciousness itself, and why should we not think that it is? This is an open question to myself, and more importantly to people who know something about this. It is also my shot at a simplistic Eureka to beat out my friend.

 Ha! Eureka, I get consciousness. It doesn’t exist! Or maybe I am wrong...

Evolving Archimedes

There are moments in parenting that are not so different than moments in science; where a eureka type moment is really just an incremental progression of previous experiments, but feels all the same like a momentary revelation. Actually it is not so much parenting, but observing my children when this happens. I am an inactive guest at the museum of discovery.

My daughter Juliette has had 2 complete sets of foam letters and numbers in her bath for 3 years. She is in kindergarten so has progressed significantly as a reader and writer. The letters were used for pure abstraction last year. Earlier this year she went through a period of using them as tools for vocabulary. Now she has inventively moved them back to artistic and mathematical expression. First it was interesting groupings, and patterns, and as of last night she took the colored foam and arranged them as fascinating abstract sculpture, somehow without knowingly embracing the lessons off both Dadaism and abstract expressionism. Of course I likely exaggerate the import of the art itself, but the mental process of the 3 years to come to the formation of these sculptures is truly interesting to me, and when I consider it, not different at all than most things that I do unconsciously.

It occurred to me that there is something very much like foam letters in my life, and I am sorry if this thing is even less interesting than the letters. That is one of the only things in science that I think I know a lot about, dispersion of nanofillers in a rubber matrix. Not surprisingly I didn’t start out life with the goal of being an expert in this. In fact I still don’t really care that I am, except that by becoming proficient in something, it allowed me to see beyond the traditional uses of it. The measurement and comprehension of my subject is something that I started work on nearly 12 years ago, when my family business, Tech Pro, acquired a product called the disperGRADER from a Swedish firm called OptiGrade. Since my Dad and others at our company had a much better grasp of the rest of the instruments that Tech Pro made than I did, I spent most of my time trying to be the expert on this one. That time of my life was very much like Juliette with the foam before she could read at all. She was interested, and somehow could experiment with shape, but did not understand any symbolic meaning behind them. The disperGRADER is at first glance a simple instrument. It is a microscope that takes images of cut filled rubber samples, and does analysis on them. Of course to create something like this is not so simple, and now that I have worked in the microscope business I certainly give Optigrade a lot of credit. Still, the science seemed straight forward, yet the more I dug into it, the more I realized that there was still a lot to be learned about the way that particles behave in polymers, and there were not many people in the world working on these problems. Though this may sound boring, it wasn’t at all. It required me to learn quantum physics, and optics, and a number of other fascinating subjects. In a way it pushed me into grad school to get my Ph.D. because I wanted and needed to learn more. This was not so different than Juliette learning to use the symbols for what they were intended for. She knew how to create a word, and I knew what a filler aggregate was, and how to image it. Yet we both had not yet made a connection from these objects and the literal uses to more advanced thinking. For me it occurred because I actually did start to know enough about the basics of the subject. Actually that is not true, as I still have a lot more to learn, so it would be more accurate to say that I had started to see beyond the basics of the subject. Likewise Juliette can’t read Proust yet, but she is fairly proficient in foam letter words. So I took the experience with dispersion and developed an algorithm for a new microscope. This algorithm seemed like a eureka moment but was not. The entire time I had worked on imaging and filler dispersion I knew that if better tools existed, more could be known. I just didn’t know that I was seeking that solution. Juliette's sculptures to me are much the same. An evolution and a revelation, and to stick with tradition I have encouraged her to jump out of the bath and run around screaming Eureka.