by Sven Nilsen, 2021
In this blog post, I discuss ideas about cognition and how cognition is related to subjectivity.
Before astronomy, humankind watched the stars and told each other stories about them. These stories became myths and foundation for wisdom, but also superstitious beliefs. After astronomy, the telescopes revealed that we did not know everything there is to know about these distant, shining points in the sky. Yet, by our ability to scale up resolution and inference about the sky, we have started searching for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence. It is as if one story about the stars, has been replaced with another story.
Our telescopes are not good enough to observe intelligent life like our own among the trillions of stars in the sky. However, what about looking for signs of cognition in general? How would it be like if the universe performed some kind of information processing at astronomical scales, which could be observed in the telescope?
I argue here that the problem is not the resolution of images we capture from telescopes. The problem, as I see it, is within ourselves. We do not understand cognition very well yet. There is no mathematical definition that we can use to tell how much cognition is going on anywhere, no matter how well we capture information. The most common forms of cognition that people recognize is of the one typical to humans and the one typical to lesser intelligent animals. Slowly, scientists have started to map cognition happening in trees and fungus. There are also studies on insects, e.g. ant colonies. Piece by piece, our understanding of cognition increases.
The problem of recognizing cognition is not primarily a problem of gathering data. It is about discovering patterns in data that is related to information processing or intelligent behavior. Naturally, this form of analysis is a very hard computational problem, which in the terminology of computer science might be thought of as undecidable. For example, have you noticed the word “cognition” in the word “recognition”? It has been there all along, but most people do not think about it because “recognition” seems to be unrelated to “cognition”. Like, as if the cognition happening is merely subjective and not something to be observed. However, when we use the word “recognize” in the context of making contribution to society, there is always a form of cognition that was previously blind to the general public, which now sees the person in the role that made the contribution.
I think that cognition is fascinating because it shows how subjectively we perceive the world. There are many forms of cognition and not everyone recognize all of them. We often think about there being no cognition present, just by failing to notice a familiarity of the form of cognition. For example, unconsciousness is a general label of a multitude of various forms of cognition, where only a handful of them are typically thought of. Emotions are also a form of cognition, which have a bad reputation of being “irrational” or “impulsive”.
Sometimes people arrange forms of cognition by preference, like when emotions are seen as acting in a role of rationality. We see emotions as taking up a position where rationality ought to take place. Like somebody parking their car in your private parking spot! Of course, by rationality we tend to think about abstract reasoning, or more specifically Platonism.
Platonism is the philosophical position that abstract object exists. This idea has led to a debate of whether mathematics is discovered or invented. At first sight, Platonism seems to be a cute and innocent idea. Obviously, there are some objects that are abstract, like the number 3, which has its meaning based on something non-physical, despite being able to use physical objects to reason about the number 3. However, when you extend your notion of abstract objects to account for more and more patterns and structures, where does it end?
Physics uses mathematics to describe the world in incredible detail. Using an approximation of General Relativity together with the Standard Model, physicists can describe the universe to an accuracy which requires conditions present in the early universe or near the event horizon of black holes to deviate from experiments under common assumptions. The Large Hadron Collider attempts to find new physics by smashing together particles at extreme high energies, to create new ones and simulate what happens under these extreme physical conditions.
Apparently, when we go the route of Platonism, there is no end to which phenomena in the world that can be described as abstract objects. All of a sudden, the world becomes like a mathematical object in itself, a theorizing substance separated from the immersive experience of reality. This is why we tend to believe that abstract reasoning is the king of science and rationality.
However, the more knowledge is seen as something static, the less motivation people have to study it. In principle, it should be easy to hit a target that stays still. In practice, static knowledge becomes like a doctrine that is passed down from generation to generation without understanding the context of how the knowledge is created or adopting it to new purposes. Platonism can have the opposite effect of reproducing knowledge by eliminating knowledge as a craft in the general public. There is a saying that the more Platonism succeeds, the more it fails.
Seshatism is the dual of Platonism. In Seshatism, knowledge is credited by causality instead of abstraction. When a person develops a skill, a lot of knowledge is encoded into the very activity of the person, which can not be easily transferred from one person to another without interaction. This resembles the difference between traditions where a master teaches a student his way of living, instead of merely teaching a long list of doctrines to memorize. Once the training is complete, the student becomes a master and teaches other people who become students. That way, knowledge is reproduced in generation after generation, constantly changing like how language changes over time, yet better preserved because it can adopt to new contexts and situations that were not part of the original creation.
If Platonism is the king of science and rationality, then Seshatism is the queen. Together, they rule all forms of inference in mathematical languages. They also create offsprings, languages that are combinations of the two and not merely a clone of one of the parents. When I think of Platonism in mathematics, I think of stuff like theorem proving. When I think of Seshatism, I think of stuff like machine learning. You can have both and combine them in non-trivial ways.
In Platonism, cognition is not easily recognized, because systems and processes are merely occupying positions where the abstract mathematical objects ought to be. Despite systems and processes being intrinsically dynamic, they are treated by Platonism as if they are static. The reason this works is by the person who use abstract reasoning, has an element of dynamic within changing perspectives, which makes it possible to move through this lifeless and abstract landscape of ideas, bringing it to life like a movie creating an illusion of motion showing frames in quick succession.
In Seshatism on the other hand, cognition is present all the time. A person is not having a static identity but always changing, so recognizing cognition of the self is part of the process of living. People who like Seshatism might be labeled by society as “irrational” or “impulsive” by having a broader acceptance of their emotions. However, there is nothing more rational about abstract reasoning than emotions, at least in principle. One should think about abstract reasoning as neither good or bad, just as one should think about emotions as neither good or bad. Instead of seeing emotions as acting in the role of abstract reasoning, one can see emotions as acting in their own role, which is by billions of unconscious probability estimates that the body performs every day.
When you feel afraid, you notice it in your chest. This is how the limbic system is using your mental model of the body to communicate with the rest of your brain. When you touch your arm, the feeling of being touched is generated by the brain analyzing and mapping senses onto the mental model of the body. In fact, your entire world of subjective experience is just as much part of “you” as the sense of the “I” that you think of yourself. All your experiences are subjective. It is fascinating to think about this subjective world as being a result of cognitive processes. This means that cognition is present in many forms in the very process of seeing the world.
Our ability to recognize cognition, is not majorly a problem of gathering enough data. It is a problem about the understanding of oneself, an improvement of the inner eye. This undecidable problem is beautiful to me personally to think about, despite the extreme difficulty in complexity.
Perhaps astronomers one day makes a new discovery, not because of new data collected, but because of a new method of analyzing data revealing that the universe has forms of cognitive processes at astronomical scales. Will this happen? I do not know.
However, sometimes, it is not the search for intelligent life among the stars that is important, but the new eyes we use to look when returning our attention home again. In some sense, a failure to find an answer can often be necessary step towards success. In your Platonic search for the ultimate wisdom, do not be scared of Seshatism. Create a new riddle for each riddle you solve. History is not about other people remembering you, but what you mean to other people through their own interpretations and created skills. This is a form of cognition in the future.