Oscillation, Part 2
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To review ... Three realms: mental, physical, spiritual. Mental is where life happens. Culture is a shared mental realm; cultural artifacts are like frozen orange juice. People are sentient pixels; pictures make us happy.Next question: ethics. Where does oughtcome from?
Everything I know about the shared mental realm of culture, the physical realm, and the spiritual realm—it all exists to me only ever in my personal, private mental realm. And it's all flat. Every mental object is fundamentally the same as another, just like every computer file is "really just" a bit-pattern.
Take the following picture of Lena Söderberg.
This image is from aPlayboycenterfold, and since the early 1970's it has been a standard sample image in technical work on image processing. Clearly, this imagehas a dense mat of cultural meanings. But as a computer image, it is "really just" this bit-pattern:
So if the mental realm is fundamentally flat, where does ethics come from?
When you start a computer, you have a chain reaction of simpler systems starting more complex ones, where a system is a set of processes. Very roughly, whenever power is applied to the computer, it takes the bit-pattern stored in its first memory slot, and runs it. This first bit-pattern finds another bit-pattern on the hard drive, and runs that. Etc., etc., until eventually the computer is running a bit-pattern called "Firefox" to display a bit-pattern called "YouTube."
When you wake up in the morning, something in your subconscious is triggering a whole set of processes—space/time, quantity, quality, relation, modality—that together constitute consciousness. To continue the analogy, consciousness is our operating system. Culture is what we do with it. Culture is our MS Office, our iLife, and our Firefox. It's also our spreadsheets, our videos, and our lena.jpg.
Now we're approaching David Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness: what are the subconscious processes that bootstrap consciousness, and how did they get there? I'm going to hang a louie, however.
Where does identity come from?
Consciousness is not identity. Identity—personhood—comes from participation in a culture, in a shared mental realm. Belonging. Tribe. Family. Clan. Pixels want pictures.
But culture is a mental object, an abstraction; it is distinguished. All distinction trades low-level detail for high-level power, so cultures must diverge and mutually contradict. The logical possibilities at each level of abstraction are forks in the road, and someone will take each path. So while all people share bare consciousness, we must identify with necessarily exclusive, totalizing cultures in order to gain personhood. Personhood is a mental object.
Secularism and fundamentalism are the same. The humane, erudite secularist both demonizes and evangelizes the fundamentalist. Who doesn't think they're right? And yet who can avoid it, this thinking you're right, this identification with a culture? You make culture and culture makes you.
This image is from aPlayboycenterfold, and since the early 1970's it has been a standard sample image in technical work on image processing. Clearly, this imagehas a dense mat of cultural meanings. But as a computer image, it is "really just" this bit-pattern:
1111111111011000111111111110000000000000000100000100101001000110010010010100011Likewise, the image for me, in my own personal, private mental realm, is "really just" a mental object. All my reactions to it are "really just" mental objects. All my value judgments about it are "really just" mental objects. The value judgment implicit in the phrase "really just" is "really just" a mental object. Like everything else, ethics is "really just" a mental object.
0000000000000000100000001000000010000000001100000000000000110000000000000000000
0011111111111011010000000100110100010100000110100001101111011101000110111101110
0110110100001101111011100000010000000110011001011100011000000000000001110000100
0010010010010100110100000011111011010000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
1000000000000010010000000000000000000000000000000000100000000000000100000000001
0010000000000000000000000000000000000100000000000000100011100001000010010010010
1001101000000111111001100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000100000000...
So if the mental realm is fundamentally flat, where does ethics come from?
When you start a computer, you have a chain reaction of simpler systems starting more complex ones, where a system is a set of processes. Very roughly, whenever power is applied to the computer, it takes the bit-pattern stored in its first memory slot, and runs it. This first bit-pattern finds another bit-pattern on the hard drive, and runs that. Etc., etc., until eventually the computer is running a bit-pattern called "Firefox" to display a bit-pattern called "YouTube."
When you wake up in the morning, something in your subconscious is triggering a whole set of processes—space/time, quantity, quality, relation, modality—that together constitute consciousness. To continue the analogy, consciousness is our operating system. Culture is what we do with it. Culture is our MS Office, our iLife, and our Firefox. It's also our spreadsheets, our videos, and our lena.jpg.
Now we're approaching David Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness: what are the subconscious processes that bootstrap consciousness, and how did they get there? I'm going to hang a louie, however.
Where does identity come from?
Consciousness is not identity. Identity—personhood—comes from participation in a culture, in a shared mental realm. Belonging. Tribe. Family. Clan. Pixels want pictures.
But culture is a mental object, an abstraction; it is distinguished. All distinction trades low-level detail for high-level power, so cultures must diverge and mutually contradict. The logical possibilities at each level of abstraction are forks in the road, and someone will take each path. So while all people share bare consciousness, we must identify with necessarily exclusive, totalizing cultures in order to gain personhood. Personhood is a mental object.
Secularism and fundamentalism are the same. The humane, erudite secularist both demonizes and evangelizes the fundamentalist. Who doesn't think they're right? And yet who can avoid it, this thinking you're right, this identification with a culture? You make culture and culture makes you.
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Feed back to Chad Whitacre.