Author Archives: Suraj Sood

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About Suraj Sood

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AHXJ_oRZoKHgkqY8Tmso-rU-7S-N9_i3k7CPEiYh23Q/edit?usp=sharing aham manovignyanasya ph.d. yah bruhat svapnam pashyati! mam anyebhyah samajikamadhyamaprofilebhyah mam vishaye adhikam sangrahitum shakyate.

Reflections on gender vs. sex

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I view gender as mostly a cultural construct, though in more mainstream literature (as well as certain legal contexts) it’s regarded as a social one.

The concept of gender is “newer” than its biological analogue (sex) in both science and, seemingly, pop discourse. As such, the collective understanding of the former is less-developed in Western society.

As a socio-cultural concept, then, gender is closer to character (a social concept) than to temperament (biological). By definition, the idea of sex becomes more relevant to one’s temperament than to character.

 

Dr. Strange’s Foresight in Avengers: Infinity War

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WARNING: this post contains spoilers to Marvel Studios’ 2018 Avengers: Infinity War

About an hour and 20 minutes into Avengers: Infinity War, Dr. Strange looks forward in time to “view alternate futures…to see all the possible outcomes” of the battle raging between the Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, etc. and the evil Thanos. When Tony Stark/Iron Man asks how many such outcomes the good guys win in, Dr. Strange gives him a long look before simply replying: “one”.

Dr. Strange’s mental voyage into the future shows that the Avengers stop Thanos from wiping out half of the universe’s population in one out of over 14 million future scenarios.

As a lifelong student of philosophy and psychology—and, in more recent years, a futurist in-training—this moment of the movie disturbed me. Having Iron Man and co. triumph over the would-be destroyer of half of life in 0.000007% of possible futures is a rather bleak state of affairs (to say the least).

This got me thinking about the fantasy-based problem from a more concrete, futuristic perspective. To my mind, more positive possible futures than not equals better. I hope that this much would not seem controversial to most people.

Could one positive future be best for everyone?

Is your mind physical?

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That it is is a necessary assumption for those who accept that minds exist, but equate it with either the central nervous system or its encapsulating body.

Much of the issue around physicalism vs. the question of minds’ existences may have less to do with the nature of reality than with what we mean by certain words. If anything and everything is physical, then “physical” is a unifying rather than polarizing or distinguishing concept; there is no contrast class to it (that is: nothing non-physical exists). 

The project for physicalist cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind–those who, in short, believe that everything (including the mind) is physical–is, perhaps, simply to extend the language of physics to also accommodate “mind”. (And physicalism could well have to change, itself, in order to be able to do so!)

It may be convenient for a field like cognitive neuroscience especially to have a common framework for its studies of neural and cognitive (mental) systems, which have traditionally–a la Descartes and his successors–been regarded as more ontologically separate than they are, these days. Still, people’s mileages vary with respect to whether physicalism is the right unifying ideology for reality even aside from this possibility.

[The discussion from which this post arose took place on INTJforum, at: https://intjforum.com/topic/175287-if-physicalism-how-is-it-that-we-can-trust-our-cognitive-abilities/ ]

Science and Mysticism

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A good friend and I once had a lengthy discussion about the metaphysics of miracles. We agreed that they fit within a scientific conception of reality by simply being extremely improbable events (at least, at first), often of a good or even healing nature.

As for consciousness and reality, it is well-known that empirical science has difficulties with the former (and, relatedly in my framework, with half of the latter). I would argue that mysticism correspondingly does not handle materiality very well…its accounts often lapse too far into subjectivism, i.e. that perception alone is sufficient cause for reality’s entire existence.

Can we disprove that the brain causes the mind?

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Part of the problem involves explaining how we can know of other consciousnesses than our own. Say I were to remove another person’s brain. They would then be dead; does this mean that they’d suddenly lack a mind? What if they still retained their unconscious sub-mind and simply lost the ability to be conscious at all?

The only person who could absolutely verify that their own consciousness exists is him- or herself. But, in the above example, we could no longer ask our brain-less person if they were conscious and receive a response.

If we can’t perform this falsification meaningfully on another person, then how about on ourselves? Suppose now that, instead, I were to remove my own brain. No one else could be certain that my consciousness exists; could I still be, without a brain? Would “I” exist in any way that would allow me to check the status of my own consciousness? Only if I were conscious. There seems to be a circularity embedded in this approach that might render the whole matter unresolvable.

Descartes and Musk – On Dreams and Simulation

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I’ve just begun reading through a paper of Tom Campbell’s which appeared in this video [link redacted]. In this post, though, I only aim to liken the popular simulation theory with Rene Descartes’ older “dream argument”. The former states that at least some of us are living in a virtual simulation. The latter runs as follows:

Premise 1 – If I know that I am awake, then I can eliminate as false the competing hypothesis that I am dreaming.

Premise 2 – I cannot eliminate the dreaming hypothesis.

Conclusion – I do not know if I am awake.

Elon Musk seems sympathetic toward the type of conclusion above. However, Musk’s interest has been not in dreams, but in whether a given person’s reality is provably virtual or actual. Descartes’ dream argument could be adapted in light of Musk’s challenge that we don’t know whether we’re living in virtual reality (VR):

P1′ – If I know that I exist in actual (non-virtual) reality, then I can eliminate as false the competing hypothesis that I exist in VR.

P2′ – I cannot eliminate the VR/simulation hypothesis.

C’ – I do not know if I exist in actual reality (as opposed to VR).

Testing the simulation hypothesis would minimally involve two steps. The first would be running participants through VR simulations. Following, the essential question for these subjects would become: “Did you know when your reality shifted between actual and virtual?” Naturally, experimenters could not give anything away until the end of such a study for it to be meaningful. If participants were consistently aware of when their reality changed kinds, then Musk’s simulation hypothesis would not apply: for their case, it would have to be ruled out as false. On the other hand, if subjects were generally unaware of their reality becoming actual or virtual, then Musk’s simulation hypothesis would hold true.

Campbell notwithstanding, this question presently remains unresolved.

An Introduction to “Subject- & Object-Oriented Programming”

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“Do“, “while“, and “for” are what are known as “looping conditionals” in JavaScript. In this article, I propose a new such conditional: “be”.

Before we delve into be, a clarification and addendum are in order.  Be by itself is not necessarily a looping conditional (unlike do, while, or for).  Be may also to be accompanied by not-be in any (non-)existential platform: not-be shall henceforth be notated as “!be”.  As in Java, the ! operator here simply means “not”.

Be and !be may form a coupled loop, consisting of both consciousness and unconsciousness as these two latter terms refer to awareness and unawareness (respectively).  Practically, then, be denotes any possible state or trait of awareness, whereas !be corresponds with any such state/trait of unawareness. Be and !be may each interchange with consciousness and unconsciousness (for reasons I will leave out of this article; but, am happy to engage with otherwise).

The current project–which I will henceforth call “2be || !2be?” (or “to be, or not to be?“, for the more Shakespeareanly-inclined)–may be described also as an “enactive”, computational one. Enactivism (as described in, e.g., Francisco Varela’s work) and performativity (consult, e.g., Judith Butler) are necessary to invoke for the set Po of possibilities afforded by both the ubiquity and foreseeable reiterations of mobile computing.  Po, then, consists of (non-)existential computing possibility.  (It is trivial to add Pr for the present context, if such probabilities happen to be more relevant.)

Next, come the highly challenging questions of how we are to program consciousness and unconsciousness (see, e.g., Doug Hofstadter and Hubert Dreyfus’ works for the best overview understandings of the former project).  The subject- and object-oriented programming (SOOP™) paradigm I propose as an answer to these problems will be grounded around them.  Be and !be will serve as SOOP™‘s “primitive” values, standing in for consciousness and unconsciousness (again, interchangeably).  Consciousness and unconsciousness (or, in this case, be/!be) are simultaneously variables and constants of the more specific psychological state or trait class. In this particular way, SOOP™ could be considered a preliminary psychological extension of quantum computing.

To conclude this post, an example of 2be || !2be? code is provided:


     count = 1
     be
     {
document.write(count + “ times 7 is “ + count * 7 +    “
”)
     }    while (++count <= 7)

hypothetical be…while loop

The output of SOOP™ programs like the above will be considered in this article’s successor.

References:

  • David Bohm, 1951:  Quantum Theory
  • Eric Dodson, Ph.D.
  • Martin Heidegger, 1953:  Being and Time
  • Robin Nixon, 2015:  Learning PHP, MySQL & JavaScript with JQuery, CSS & HTML5 (4th ed.)
  • William Shakespeare, 1603 (approx.): Hamlet
  • Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, 2000: The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience
  • Judith Butler, 1990: Gender Trouble

* SOOP™ is a pending trademark of Suraj Sood.

A general tool for increasing critical reflexivity and awareness

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Critical-phenomenological method

“…How are people to become aware of their more destructive acts to begin with [e.g., of environmental disregard]—the fact that they, themselves, might be committing them regularly?

“The [phenomenological-critical] method can be performed mentally or verbally. Where individual privacy is of concern, the former would be preferred, and where other people can help one become aware of something less subjectively-accessible the latter would be. The step-by-step logical form I have chosen may dovetail neatly with efforts in schools to teach algorithmic thinking (e.g., through the instruction of computer programming), and it would likely prove most prudent to encourage such a habit of critical awareness from a younger age. However, the general method may just as well be practiced by any capable adult in any other realm or mode of existence.

“Naturally, people who think less linearly may find the method disagreeable, though it has been deliberately kept simple for early and general use. The method’s efficacy will also covary with individual differences in temperament, personality factors, attention-distributive tendencies, motivation, and health conditions, and would require appropriate adaptation for non-English speakers” (Sood, 2016).