On the nature of being

The Question of Self

What am I? Who am I? Why am I? Are these questions a meaningless pursuit of an emergent illusion, or the doorway to our life’s purpose? The fact that I can even wonder is itself absurd. How can I not know who I am? How can I seek to “know myself”?

Ultimately, I am nothing; I came from it and I’m going towards it. I am an insignificant fluctuation. Yet, in an undeniable way, the universe happens through me. I create it as much as it creates me. How can I be both creator and created? Am I nothing, everything or something in between? Maybe the question of Being (with a capital B) is too much to ask, or its terms too ill-defined, but the absurdity of not knowing who I am is too important to ignore.

Am I physical or non-physical? Am I finite or infinite? Am I timeless or ephemeral? Am I necessary or contingent? Am I the mind or the body? Am I abstract or concrete? Am I a process or an entity? Am I an emergent symbol or an embodiment? The question of consciousness lies in the midst of it all. But how can I answer a question of an entity I can’t even begin to define? Whatever assumptions I choose as the foundation for a model of consciousness, they always rely on emotions and facts that I assume to be true for everyone, but can only be verified for myself. That’s the thing about consciousness: I’m on my own. And, I guess, so are you.

Even if we don’t admit it, life is driven by our yearning to know who we are. We are constantly in search of something or someone to affirm our existence and to bring meaning to our lives. We look for fulfilling jobs, romantic relationships, supporting families, caring gods, successful careers; all self-defining endeavors. We constantly wrestle with our identities. What am I, and what am I not? Am I my thoughts, my feelings, my body, my family, my community, my nation, my species or my entire world? Where is the boundary and why is there one in the first place? Being realistic, we try to answer the big questions with smaller projects; maybe glimpsing more authentic versions of ourselves from time to time. But we’re often misguided by contradictory beliefs that drive us farther rather than closer to the answers. Sometimes, we’re so far that we forget that “I” even exists. Maybe if we knew where to look, we wouldn’t forget.

My motivation to pursue these questions is my desire to resolve the fundamental paradox of being: the coexistence of self and non-self. I believe that this paradox is manifested in our surrounding reality; and that self-ignorance lies at its heart. While I don’t claim to have any answers, the question of being drives both my scientific and philosophical curiosities. I suspect that the answer cannot be objective; described with language or math. Yet, my inquiring mind can’t help but question established assumptions, rediscover them on my own and look for emerging patterns. I found that some of the answers were helpful to my search; and I hope they could be helpful to you too. At the end of the day, we’re all in this together. The goal of this article is to propose a few directions for answering the question of being. I try to build a perspective with the least assumptions possible and create philosophical and scientific principles of being. Some ideas are speculative but most are simply proposals for future exploration. While my ideas are clearly related to the philosophy of mind, ontology and computational neuroscience, I am an expert in none.

The Paradox of Being

I am a contradiction:

a singular present:
- An intersection of past and future.
- A source (via actions) and sink (via perceptions) of my surrounding reality.
and its surrounding non-present:
- A synthesis of past perceptions.
- A free agent acting upon and expecting the future.

I exist in the very present, but am only manifested in its surrounding non-present, perceiving the past and acting upon its future. My reality is a combination of my actions and perceptions. Yet, I am the ultimate source of my actions (a free agent) and the ultimate perceiver of my reality.

Any scientific or philosophical attempt to answer the question of being will have to first address its paradoxical nature. Am I the present or what is around it? Am I a combination of my actions and perceptions, or an entity that exists at their intersecting ends? Am I the initial cause of my actions and the final destination of my perceptions, or simply a means of space-time evolution? Why do I exist in the middle of an asymmetrical psychological and ontological duality of past and future (the arrow of time), as well as action and perception (output and input)? What’s the structure of this duality?

The present-non-present duality of being in time is complementary to that of self-non-self duality in space. In fact, the action-perception (input-output) field is a dynamical process that constantly projects the self upon the non-self (via actions) and vice versa (via perceptions).

Furthermore, this duality seems to be irreducible. An internal (self) and an external (non-self) are in perpetual tension with an undefinable and constantly shifting boundary. This internal-external boundary is a rather continuous hierarchy that depends on the level of entanglement between the present-self and its surrounding non-self (i.e. I am more my mind, than I am my body, than I am my community, than I am the human race etc.). This boundary is illusive and hard to define. Some philosophies argue that boundaries are illusions and that enlightenment is the realization that this boundary doesn’t exist.

When I speak of an internal-external duality, I am not referring to the mind-body problem where mind and body are assumed to be different in nature and separated by a sharp boundary. Here, internal and external are loose terms that only assume duality in self-hood: I am inside and interact with the outside. The question reduces to this: why is there such a separation in the first place? And what is its nature? What is the structure of this multi-dimensional multi-scale action-perception past-future self-non-self internal-external duality?

The Attributes of Consciousness

In this article, I want to focus on the structure of the internal-external duality. Before I do so, I’d like to briefly address the problem of consciousness, because what I call the internal is often associated with being conscious.

Like other qualia (happiness, pain etc.), consciousness is a psychological state that slips through one’s fingers as soon as one attempts to comprehend it. While any philosophical inquiry about consciousness requires rational and linguistic description, pure self-awareness is best achieved when one’s mind is void and clear; a meditative state. But this is only my own definition of consciousness. Some might refer to consciousness as the external representation of one’s own body and mind; a symbol rather than a feeling. It is not clear how far rational inquiry can go in defining and describing consciousness, given its “fluid” nature. Contrary to Descartes’ observation, for me, cogito ergo non sum, but maybe that’s just me.

For example, when consciousness is characterized logically, the qualitative/emotional side of its nature is inevitably downplayed. When consciousness is described as a bounded ‘object’ with well-defined properties, it takes the form of the action-perception functional chosen to describe it. Not being aware of these linguistic limitations, one might be led to the conclusion that consciousness doesn’t exist altogether. This is why, I prefer describing consciousness as part of an ‘internal’ whose existence is self-evident in contradistinction to the ‘external’, and whose boundary varies continuously from nothing to everything. In adopting this perspective, I want to exposes the wonder: “how come I exist in one point of space-time bounded by so many physical layers (mind, body and beyond like an onion) with which I interact”. In doing so, I wish to focus my attention on ontology in general, rather than the psychological state of consciousness as an isolated phenomenon. Most attempts to explain the internal-external duality are done by projecting the internal upon something external or vice versa. Just as in the mind-body problem, a complete projection of the internal on the external results in physicalism (i.e. the scientific approach), and a projection of the external on the internal results in idealism (i.e. the physical world is an illusion). In both cases, either the internal or the external is chosen to be necessary and the other contingent upon it. Both extremes have their shortcomings and seem unjustifiable.

The problem of choosing $x_{i}$ might always prove to be elusive because even if we know how consciousness emerges physically, the existence of the internal-external duality will always be dependent on a subjectively more necessary experience, and thus remain an unresolved question in the subjective (idealist) realm.

In any case, whatever attributes $A_{c o n}$ contains, they must be more fundamental than consciousness itself. Do those attributes even exist? If yes, what is their nature?

My first postulate is that, if there is such a set of attributes, it is somewhat paradoxical. being-in-the-world is an irreducible paradox, manifested in space-time dualities; that is, action and perception, past and future, as well as self and non-self. In seeking the properties that are more fundamental than consciousness, I expose the common drives of the internal and the external, the dynamics of the boundary that separates them, and their unique characteristics. I approach the problem by describing the external as a projection of the internal, as well as the internal as a projection of the external, and then try to find their synthesis.

The second postulate is that the fundamental properties that unify internal and external are (i) the drive to unification itself and (ii) the cyclical (feedback) nature of their interaction. For the lack of a better alternative, I give it the name Philenosis: The {drive, will, tendency} to {unification, union}. From the Greek “philos”, meaning love of, and “enosis”, meaning union.

Philenosis

Ultimately, I will attempt to show that consciousness lies at the heart of a more general property of being: the desire or tendency to unify two opposing fluxes (of causality in space-time); the external-internal projection via perceptions and the internal-external projection via a source actions. The source and sink are separate in physical nature (senses and muscles), as well psychological nature. Consciousness is an epiphenomenon created by the agent’s tendency to be both the perceiver and the actor. “I” is the unifier of the sink and the source.

More generally, philenosis is the drive of most human endeavors. My various interests in philosophy and science revolve around the desire to find unifying principles. We always find meaning in philenosis. Here’s a list of different facets of philenosis:

Understanding, done by analogy, clustering and repetition, is the unification of concepts and experiences (sense data). Understanding is the process of “reducing”, and thus bringing together, seemingly complex and random experiences to a simple and predictable pattern.
Words are unifiers of perceived objects by a hierarchical “measure of sameness”.
Philosophy is the desire to unify concepts in a single theory, as consistently as possible, choosing the assumptions that minimize contradictions.
Science is the drive to unify experiences as part of a single mathematical theory of quantifiable observables generalizing over (and thus unifying) all of space and time.
Mathematics is the tendency to unify as many true and consistent statements as possible with the least number of axioms.
Art is an interplay between symmetry within the piece of art on the one hand, and resonance between the observer’s internal world (emotional-intellectual complex) and the art piece on the other; a two way symmetry in which the observer takes part.
Music, in particular, is a unifier of sounds by synchronized vibrations at multiple scales of space and time: integer harmonics, harmonic ratios, melodic themes etc.
Peace, whatever it means, is a physical (emotional) state of harmony within one’s own mind and body and between the body and its surroundings.
Community is the tendency of people to unite in a collaborating social organism.
Social power is the desire to unify one’s surrounding (and world?) under one’s own control; that is, expand the boundaries of the internal to engulf the external.
A single God is a desire to unify being as a whole, including our human identity. Less ambitious, and probably more consistent, polytheists create different gods for different unifying concepts.

Philenosis is the natural drive of the internal to become one with the external at all scales. Such unification is achieved only locally in space and time for example by the experiences mentioned above.

Unfortunately, ultimate union is only desired but impossible to achieve. This is part of the paradoxical nature of being. Running counter to the desire to union is a feedback destructive dependence of the internal on the external; a seemingly inevitable trade-off. This includes:

Eating, a necessary means of survival, is the act of destroying/disintegrating plant or animal at multiple stages of the digestive system until its energy (ATP) is extracted as a fuel for keeping the body and mind running.
A rigorous dissection of concepts and observations with clearly definable boundaries is a prerequisite for any form of understanding.
Destruction of nature to acquire raw material for social and technological construction.
Competition and war with people outside a group as a means (and justification) of reinforcing bonds within a group.

Achieving any form of local unification often requires a certain level of dissection. Most forms of dependence enhancing our powers as individuals or as a society (e.g. technology, food, resources, etc.) seem to require some form of consumption or destruction. Are there conservation laws that impose a certain bound on the amount of disunion to be traded with an equal amount of union? For instance, is there a certain ‘conservation of understanding’ at play in the process of defining concepts and their boundaries as building blocks for consistent unifying principles/theories? Understanding the interplay between destruction and construction, union and disunion, stability and instability of unifying structures reveals certain properties of the interaction between internal and external that are both competing and trying to merge. Given that understanding is itself a form of philenosis, I will start with it. After all, everything that follows will rely on certain assumptions of what I consider to be understanding. Am I creating a model, objectively describing or providing an explanation?

Understanding

An action-perception system is capable of ‘understanding’ (or representing) its environment and interacting with it accordingly. The complexity of that understanding is demonstrated in an equally complex behavior ensuing a wider reach of one’s action-perception field (higher control of and power over the environment). Intelligence is a measure of that complexity. But what exactly is intelligence; and what is understanding? Is it a purely abstract faculty of the mind or something that emerges out of the body’s structure and its field of possibilities?

Representation in an Action-Perception Field

The brain, if we assume understanding is created from a purely physical process, is primarily a complex network of oscillating and firing neurons. This network extends its boundaries continuously to the whole organism. The nature of its inputs and outputs plays a crucial role in its wiring and chemical programming. How does that network generate our complex understanding of our environment and ourselves? Cognitive scientists know some answers but there is still a big gap to be filled.

What I will present next is a bottom-up approach to modeling understanding as an interaction between its two fundamental properties: philenosis and the cyclical nature of internal-external interactions.

Understanding is a manifestation of philenosis; a desire to unify or reduce the complexity of experience to a space-time algorithm that can reproduce our observations. The basic postulate is that our internal representation of the external world is done by minimizing the difference between the internal and external mappings of action to perception. Both the world and the brain are time-dependent functions that map actions to perceptions. Representation is, by definition, the brain’s attempt to behave as similarly as possible as the world it interacts with it. The dichotomy between action and perception and their manifestation in the physical world can be understood in analogy to the magnetic field around a magnet. The magnetic field is the causal field of the actions leading to perceptions, the north pole is the motor cortex, and the south pole is the perception areas in the brain.

Note that this is described at the scale of the individual but in reality our body is made of billions of agents all with an action-perception internal-external interaction with their environments. In particular, cells breath, receive messages from their surrounding and send messages accordingly. They all refer to the same program (the DNA) but have different functions in a highly interconnected society working together to maximize survival; or union with their surrounding. Brain cells are each an action-perception system adapting to their environment just as an individual adapts to her social environment. Neurons also form communities that fire together, and somehow create abstract unifying concepts. The internal-external action-perception cyclical interaction between organisms and their environment happens at multiple scales of space and time, sometimes with fractal-like structures.

The orthogonality of the action-perception field and the internal-external duality

The drive to union (philenosis), results in a two-fold reduction of the space-time action-perception field:

The internal (brain) representation of the external (environment) happens by minimizing the functional difference between the internal and external action-perception relationship.
Within the brain, both action and perception responses can be tuned to create a unifying representation for multiple objects (i.e. a word).

Internal and external objects are functional transformations of output signals (actions) sent by the motor cortex to input perceptions applied on the senses. This functional mapping can be represented by the figure above. The mappings can be written as

$p_{e} = Ω_{e} (a_{e}; ϕ_{e})$

$p_{i} = Ω_{i} (a_{i}; ϕ_{i})$

$Ω_{e}$ is the external object that functionally transforms an external action, $a_{e}$ , to an external perception, $p_{e}$ , subject to external physics, $ϕ_{e}$ .
$Ω_{i}$ is the internal object that functionally transforms an internal action, $a_{i}$ , to an internal perception, $p_{i}$ , subject to internal physics, $ϕ_{i}$ (i.e. biochemical neural network).
Learning (or understanding) is a process of changing the operation of the internal physics $ϕ_{i}$ , in such a way to minimize the difference between $p_{e}$ and $p_{i}$ , for a given action $a_{e} = a_{i} = a$ , coming from the same source. That is, learning is the following functional minimization

${min}_{ϕ_{i}} | Ω_{e} (a; ϕ_{e}) - Ω_{i} (a; ϕ_{i}) |$

where the mind seeks to minimize the difference between the internal and external by changing the internal brain structure $ϕ_{i}$ that map actions to perceptions. Note however, that it’s also very likely that changing the external environment also contributes to better representations. We make the world simpler to understand and interact with.

Objecthood as a class of similar mappings

Two internal represented objects, $Ω_{i}^{(1)}$ and $Ω_{i}^{(2)}$ , are the same if the difference between their respective internal perceptions for a given action $a$ , is smaller than some ‘tunable’ tolerance $ε$ , that is:

$sameness ~ | Ω_{i}^{(1)} (a; ϕ_{i}) - Ω_{i}^{(2)} (a; ϕ_{i}) | < ε$

The similarity of two internal representations is multi-dimensional. Two objects are often similar in some properties but different in others. For example, two objects can have the same color but a different shape. They can be both spherical but different in size. The isomorphism between the objects being compared depends on the properties being considered; their measure of similarity depends on the ability to first separate their properties and then compare them. The question then becomes: how do properties arise and how are they compared?

The mental algorithm for creating objects and properties

Here I propose the outline for an iterative algorithm for the formation of objects and their properties. Properties and objects are formed by an iterative process of union and intersection:

$π_{k} = ⋂_{i} Θ_{i}$

$Θ_{i} = ⋃_{k} π_{k}$

Where $π_{k}$ is a property with index $k$ , and $Θ_{i}$ is the object with index $i$ .

The intersection process happens as described above. That is, two representations are the same if they share action-perception pairs ${a, p}$ . These pairs give rise to the property that makes the objects in question similar. The more different the objects are, the more specific their properties. For example, many physical objects share the property volume. Physical dimensions used in sciences (like length, mass, position etc.) attempt to be intersections of “all of matter”, trying to find properties that everything shares. In this sense, physicists look for atomic (indivisible) properties that are common to as much of matter as possible. These atoms can be used to then reconstruct a representation of the world from the bottom-up by union.

The union process is a constructive process of adding various properties to recreate (or simulate) an object. Objects can be thus defined as bundles of properties, as described by Hume’s bundle theory. Those properties are deduced by observing multiple objects with similar properties, out of which emerges abstract classes. As these properties become better defined by intersection, they are used to reconstruct and simulate objects by union. The simulated object is then compared with the observed object (via its functional mapping in the action-perception field), and the properties are updated accordingly by intersection. This iterative process happens at the scale of cognitive understanding as well as at the social and possibly neural scales.

Monadology? A generalization of the internal-external duality

The world in which we live evolves in such a way to minimize the mapping between internal and external worlds (reality and brain) as we simultaneously change the world and get changed by it. As I tried to explain however, the duality is not really binary but a hierarchy or spectrum of dependence between self and non-self at multiple levels.

A generalization of the internal-external duality is a continuous transition from closest to farthest from self. That is, there are degrees of self-hood rather than a clearcut separation. The general principle governing the evolution of self-hood in space and time is dictated by laws of minimization of differences between the different action-perception layers. Those layers can be thought of as a continuous spectrum going from mind to body to world. We can postulate, by inductive reasoning, that there is a deepest source-sink Self that unifies all these layers (shown in the figure). The duality of being is not restricted to the structure of human existence. In other words, the brain and the body are particular cases of physical manifestations of the duality.

In the singular Self (with a capital S) frame of reference, the action-perception field of the brain and the world is both generated and absorbed by the Self. That is, both mental and physical processes, have the same source and sink.

This idea sounds a lot like Leibniz’s monadology. In this case, the Self is the ultimate creator and perceiver of the world in space-time and every single physical manifestation is a particular case of this cycle. Causality does not occur at the level of physical objects, but happens a priori at some ultimate source. This is of course simply an inductive extension of the action-perception field model and the assumed duality of self and non-self. There is nothing much that supports it, other than its elegance.

Conclusion

My interests in science and philosophy are diverse. I am not sure what field they squarely lie in, but I like the interdisciplinary part of the pursuit; and believe they all intersect at the question “who am I?”. There are some ideas I tried to explore in the past but so far they mostly remain ideas. I would like to work more seriously on them in the future. Here’s a few other topics I am interested in:

Philosophy of technology. The inherent trade-off between freedom and power. The tool as an extension of one’s body. Technology as addiction. Technology as the structure of the social organism. Education as social programming; as an extension of pregnancy.
Philosophy of science. Conservation of understanding; the necessity to divide in order to unify concepts. Analogy as the core of cognition. The relationship between determinism and randomness as observed in complex systems; Determinism as a statistical average of an underlying random process; Randomness as ignorance of a deterministic process. Increase in randomness as increase in information; Kolmogorov complexity; Understanding as information compression.
The nature of freedom. The contrasting difference between freedom-to and freedom-from. Technology and habit as addiction.
Modeling social dynamics as a self-organizing system with its own action-perception system, optimizing its own methods of survival. Ethics as emergent laws for optimizing social survival.