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Tag Archives: thought of the day
Thought of the day: humans are fundamentally creatures of the present.
30 JulReality is not reducible to words.
Reality carries with it a dynamic background and a set of subconscious invisible factors. We are influenced in a myriad of ways that our senses do not detect. Even our very perception of self is merely a lazy shortcut that bypasses an extraordinarily complex issue. The reality that is encoded in our neural networks and later retrieved is, indeed, comparable in its incompleteness and inaccuracy to our similarly flawed comprehension of the future.
Humans are fundamentally creatures of the present.
We do not know the past, and more than we know the future. We guess at the contents of the past in much the same way that we guess the contents of the future: we search for signs in the present. Yes, signs of the past can be encoded in our very neural networks as memories. But the single largest chunk of our existence consists of our own actions. Our future actions are not known to ourselves any more than they are known to anyone else. But, they can be guessed at based on our present indicators of our past actions and our present indicators of the patterns of behavior that we exhibit which are likely to continue into the future. In other words, we look inside our minds to determine what actions we are predisposed to take in response to various possible alternate futures. We determine the likelihood of those future circumstances and actions based on signs that we perceive in the present, just as we determine the circumstances that we were once in in the past based on present perceptions of signs. For example, although we might have some strong independent memories of pieces of important events we once experienced, the vast majority of these memories serve supplemental functions only, giving access to certain details of a memory that is initially sparked by the perception of something similar in the present. Even then, the memories are extraordinarily susceptible to tampering from later experiences, and they gradually accumulate random errors to boot.
Why is human memory so terrible, and why are we so disinclined to recognize how terrible it truly is?
Humans are fundamentally creatures of the present. We don’t need videotape-style memories. All we need is to survive and reproduce, in order to serve the whims of our one true master, the Cruel Truism. Survival and reproduction depend primarily on recognizing and averting danger. You recognize and avert danger by spotting patterns, remembering them, and by engaging in logical thought.
So, it makes sense that we would remember semantically where we went to school, the names of the people who were mean or nice to us, and the formula for our successful social interactions with others while forgetting the precise shade of green of a beautiful tree in the forest.
Implications
My question, going out of this is: what about clones? A clone could exist at the same moment in time as the original. Identical twins are essentially genetic clones. To a lesser extent, our kids are our clones. But, they are different people. They presumably have their own distinct consciousnesses. Some identical twins report having extraordinarily close connections, but there is no clear evidence that they have more than a relatively high chance of guessing what the other is thinking based on optimized facial expression recognition and common past circumstances/physiology. If a clone doesn’t have the same consciousness as the original, then doesn’t that imply that maybe the original doesn’t have the same consciousness as itself at different moments in time? The present consciousness would have no way of knowing whether it in fact experienced all of the things that memories would suggest.
What if humanity isn’t entirely sentient? We assume that everyone is sentient because we are sentient. But, what if we weren’t always sentient, or aren’t always sentient? What if we popped in and out of sentience? Are we really sentient when we are asleep? I remember dreams sometimes, but we only dream for a short period of our sleep. The rest of our sleep-time, it is like we didn’t even exist. We have regular chunks of our memory that are completely missing. What does it really mean to be sentient?
For those readers who are not new to the philosophy wing of my blog, I am referencing the “Invisible Gods” idea, the idea that humans are non-living shells (super high-tech cameras, kindof) that provide windows through which supernatural beings can peer into reality. If sentience were a supernatural being peering into reality, then it would be entirely plausible to think that we were not always or all sentient. Perhaps only some of us are sentient, and only sometimes. Our bodies make perfect sense as non-living creatures of the evolutionary biology branch of physics, necessary non-living, but complex results of the big bang. The body would still behave in exactly the same way as a non-sentient non-living swirl in the pool of reality. It would still talk and breathe and think and store memories. Then, when the supernatural being peered through the window, all prior memories would yield the illusion of continuity.
These ideas also make it much easier to conceive of time as a fourth dimension, equivalent to the three physical dimensions we perceive.
Conclusion
It would be really nice to see and understand how reality really operated. Unfortunately, none of us will ever be likely to do so, if it is even possible from a human perspective. But, we can at least poke holes in our current understanding of reality and then enjoy the sight as the less mentally deft among us scramble to fill them in. The truth is that reality DOESN’T make sense as we currently understand it. I have never heard a satisfactory explanation of existence (including all of the ones including some version of God).
So, just be happy, and hit that subscribe button on the right to keep reading my blog if you want to stay up to date with the tiny inklings that my brain occasionally processes.
Sometimes Profound 