Tag: Highlight

Simple code in the mind of God

Reading | Computer Science

River Kanies | 2023-06-04

The core tenet of metaphysical idealism is that only consciousness exists irreducibly. It follows that all of reality is generated within, and experienced by, a universal consciousness. We may call this universal consciousness ‘God,’ provided that we avoid anthropomorphizing it. Under idealism, because anything conceivable is possible within imagination—an inherent and spontaneous activity of consciousness—instead of asking ‘what is possible in nature?’ we must, instead, ask ‘why do things seem to follow such rigid laws?’ And ‘why does God seem to be playing dice?’ (as in microscopic quantum phenomena). The purpose of this essay is to hypothesize intuitive answers to these questions, by leveraging Stephen Wolfram’s concept of the ruliad. After all, at the end of the day, it is our intuition that we act upon, not so much our beliefs; and certainly not some sort of ‘objective’ truth, which we as mere humans cannot access directly.

Wolfram defines the ruliad as

the result of following all possible computational rules in all possible ways … it’s something very universal—a kind of ultimate limit of all abstraction and generalization. And it encapsulates not only all formal possibilities but also everything about our physical universe—and everything we experience can be thought of as sampling that part of the ruliad that corresponds to our particular way of perceiving and interpreting the universe.

As such, insofar as we can model the universe as a computational system, the ruliad is the maximum expression of its potentialities.

If we go back to the ‘beginning of the universe’ from the perspective of idealism, we start with the mind of God in the form of infinite untapped potential. We can conceive of the nascent God-mind imagining at whim, no holds barred. Then, at some point, God becomes interested in creating a (computational) structure within which realities can be constructed. There is still infinite potential, but now there are constraints at least within this ‘slice’ of the activity of the God-mind. In a sense, we could say that the idea of computation itself is a sort of structure, or a class of structures (there can be different types of computation, but they all have structure and constraints). If we accept Wolfram’s claim that the ruliad is an “inevitable” formal construct that follows directly from the existence of computation, and must therefore “necessarily exist” (as a concept in the mind of God, let’s say), then as soon as God decides to create a structure, that structure is the a nascent version of the ruliad by default: the collection of all possible computations run on all possible states.

This is still a very amorphous view of the nature of reality. However, Wolfram’s work has more to say on the subject, particularly the concepts of computational equivalence and computational irreducibility, which are related. Wolfram has been able to demonstrate that there is a class of very simple programs that generate truly complex behavior—behavior that cannot be predicted with any formula and can only be determined by running the program in full. For this reason, we can say that the patterns generated by such programs are computationally irreducible. This means that, once we have the ruliad, the next step is to trim it down to the most ‘interesting’ parts—i.e., the computationally-irreducible patterns. Wolfram also demonstrates that all such complexity-generating programs are essentially equivalent in terms of the complexity of the patterns they generate. This means that we can focus on any one of these complexity-generating programs and expect to get comparable insights as with any other.

Furthermore, Wolfram and his team were able to demonstrate that these programs are able to generate high-level patterns that correspond, in certain ways, to both quantum mechanics and general relativity. So we can hypothesize that physical reality is just a high-level construct of one such a program being run at a much lower level of reality. This provides huge insight into the nature of emergent phenomena by demonstrating that a trivial program, when run long enough, can produce patterns that seem fundamentally unrelatable to it and its initial conditions (when viewed by a human observer). If we think of the world we experience as being the pattern that such a program generates, we can understand reality in terms of layers of emergence. We start with a simple program, run it until we get the foundations of physics, and then run it until we get physical reality as we know it.

Looking at the ‘timeline’ of the ‘evolution’ of reality, we start with the infinite potential that is the mind of God. Then God creates some structure—the basis for computation—and we get the ruliad. As God ‘plays around’ with the ruliad, God focuses on the programs that generate complexity. Then let’s say that God picks one and runs the program until an entire universe is generated through layers of emergence, and so we get reality as we know it.

But, as you might suspect, there’s more to the story.

Let’s talk about the concept of an observer. To Wolfram, an observer is a persisting pattern within the ruliad that can be associated with some form of identity, but is not so cohesive as to resist influence from outside of itself. So it takes in external information in the form of representations of other local sub-patterns in the ruliad. Although the pattern as a whole is irreducibly complex, there are pockets of locally-reducible sub-patterns that can be observed and represented by a model inside of an observer within the ruliad. All patterns that we, as observers, can recognize are forms of local reducibility.

Idealism has a few things to say about this interpretation. One would be to emphasize the importance of the distinction between conscious and non-councious observers. If we consider Bernardo Kastrup’s interpretation of quantum mechanics, we understand physical reality as being manifested in relation to a conscious observer. There can be non-conscious observers in the loop, such as measurement devices, but ultimately they are just part of the relationship between the conscious observer and what is being observed.

One could claim that the existence of conscious observers within the ruliad means that consciousness naturally emerges from mere computation. To an idealist, however, this rationale is reversed: consciousness is the original ontological primitive, and computation is a subset of what is possible within the activity of consciousness. So an idealist will interpret Wolfram’s work as suggesting that there are sections in the computationally-generated patterns that represent consciousness, but not that consciousness itself emerges from that pattern. The idealist understanding is that it was the God-mind that generated the pattern in the first place.

One of the implications of Wolfram’s work from a philosophical perspective is that there is a case for faith and optimism in viewing the universe as emerging from a computationally-irreducible pattern. When observing these patterns as they evolve in layers of emergence, over time they only become more complex, not less. This suggests that nature will only continue to grow and expand. There is no suggestion, in Wolfram’s work, that the universe will, for instance, ever collapse in on itself. Furthermore, it seems that every step in the evolution of the universal pattern is necessary for the emergence of higher-level patterns. If, for example, there were some apocalyptic scenario in which all humans were wiped out, that would be a step in the creation of a yet more complex reality.

Wrapped up in this discussion are the implications of computational irreducibility and the interplay between that and optimism. If we understand all of reality, including people, to be computationally-irreducible and computationally-equivalent patterns, then it follows directly that all perspectives are valid, valuable and even necessary. As with all emergence, the higher-level patterns are dependent on all the nuances of the lower-level ones. All perspectives are valid because they are God living through us, as us, and so are inherently divinely interesting.

Perhaps the most powerful concept for bridging the gap between Wolfram’s work and idealism is what Wolfram refers to as universality. Wolfram demonstrates that any of these complexity-generating programs can be set up to simulate any other one. This means that, if we find a complexity-generating program that produces the laws of physics, that program can always be reduced—in principle—to another one, by having the latter simulate the former. No matter what pattern you are looking at, there can always be a deeper pattern from which it is being generated. Computationally speaking, no pattern is then fundamental.

For the idealist, this gives insight into the nature of the relationship between individual consciousness and the patterns generated in the ruliad. We could postulate that the job of individual consciousness is to observe the patterns of reality—identifying their regularities and constraints—and then choose a lower-level pattern to reduced them to, in a manner that conforms to the observed constraints but also enables the fulfillment of other, arbitrary constraints, as determined by the conscious being. This can be understood to be the process of manifestation: from the infinite conceivable realities potentiated within the ruliad, the job of individual consciousness is to actively make choices that steer the development of the patterns of interest.

There is a sense in which this interpretation suggests that every decision made by a conscious being adds an entire new layer to the ‘bottom of the stack’ of our emergent reality. But this should not be understood literally. Although the complex patterns we observe in nature do provide deep insight into its emergent character, they are still only a representation of reality. The claim is thus not that ‘reality is a cellular automaton,’ for example; instead, the purpose of my argument is to provide some intuition for the nature of reality at a deeper level than elementary subatomic particles. My interpretation seeks to reconcile the rigid regularity of nature’s behavior that we experience—i.e., the observed ‘laws’ of nature—with the inherently creative and generative processes of consciousness.

In summary, idealism is entirely consistent with Wolfram’s findings. Furthermore, Wolfram’s work seems to go a long way in answering some of the most difficult questions for the idealist, such as ‘if all is mind, then why do things seem to follow rigid natural laws?’ and ‘why does there seem to be an objective physical reality?’ For someone entrenched in the popular physicalist metaphysics, the goal of this argument is to show that all of physical reality can be explained within the possibility space of the ruliad, which can ultimately be embedded in a universal mind.

The subject beyond the ‘I’: On structural psychoanalysis

Reading | Psychology

Dr. Ludwig Sachs | 2023-05-28

The challenge of this article will be to create an awareness of the unconscious from the perspective of structural psychoanalysis, which was developed by the French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan¹ in the 20th century based on the insights of Sigmund Freud. Ideally, it should also be visually appealing, so to cater to modern vision-oriented sensitivities.

But is it not an impossible task to try to illustrate unconscious structures in any way? Yes, it is! We literally see this impossibility of visualization every day, if we just look closely. And precisely because of this paradoxical circumstance, we can almost ‘see’ the unconscious.

 

The three registers of structural psychoanalysis

Look around you; what do you see? You naturally assume that objects are out there and that you, as an ‘I,’ a human observer with a body, are somehow ‘in your head,’ at a certain distance from the objects. If you’re outside or looking out the window, you may see the blue sky. You know and have learned that you are on Earth, surrounded in all directions by the vastness of the universe, along with your fellow human beings and other living creatures. You also know, of course, that you and everything else exist in a three-dimensional space, which surrounds you and in which you can move. You can simply turn around and see the space that was just behind you, and when you turn back in the original direction, you see the same space again. Perhaps you also have a mirror nearby, in which your body, your ‘I,’ can be reflected. And while you see all of this out there, a certain amount of time passes, which runs independently of you, just as the objects around you and the space in which you move exist independently of you. With this familiar, pictorial conception of space, time and self-consciousness, we have just described the first of three registers or orders of structural psychoanalysis: the Imaginary.

Next step: the things out there will mean something to you. The whole situation is part of your life story and somehow it all relates to you; maybe it even makes sense to you. You can tell your life story using the language you have been taught. You have also been taught what the words and sounds of that language mean. So, the objects out there have names and meanings for you: table, wall, window, magazine, laptop, light, sky, tree, etc. These words, in turn, have further meanings that can be explained with words, which themselves have meanings that can be explained with further words, and so on. For you to be understood, you must follow rules when speaking. In general, everything you see out there seems to be subject to order and structure. Some of these structures may also be hidden or not fully accessible to our descriptions. And yet, what is subject to these orders and laws apparently does not have to be aware of this order itself. One could say that nature has a knowledge of the laws of nature while not being aware of them.

We, too, obey the laws of nature without having to know them. We are subject to the reference system of designations and meanings described above, without knowing its endless network. It is therefore a knowledge of which one is not aware: an unconscious knowledge. There are structures and laws in societies and interpersonal relationships, in living beings, nature, and matter, but also in language, with which we can then speak about these structures. Structural psychoanalysis calls these never-ending structures of words, designations and meanings, which in turn create words, designations and meanings, the Symbolic.

Let’s take a step further. Forget for a moment what you think you know about your situation in space and time, the structure and functioning of your eyes, your brain, and so on. Look again closely. What do you really see? What do you perceive when you simply describe what appears in your consciousness? In front of you, you see an image that looks like a space with certain things in it. But what is behind you? Can you see it without turning around? It is neither dark nor bright, it is simply not conscious to you. Only when you turn around can you observe this image and become aware of it. But what is there before that?

Now imagine that you might not actually be in a three-dimensional space that exists independently of you. After all, you don’t see space as a whole, from all sides. Stay with what you really perceive, not what you supposedly know. As a first approximation, you might imagine that you are in a dark room and your eyes are like flashlights that only illuminate a part of the darkness. What lies in the darkness before you look remains hidden from you. Perhaps the image of space only arises in the moment you look or direct your consciousness towards it. At least this idea would correspond more to what you perceive: an image in front of you that becomes blurrier towards the edges, and behind you, in the dark, a ‘nothing’ or a ‘something’ that is not conscious to you.

But is it really true that there is a front and a back? Or an inside and an outside? And am ‘I’ really in between front and back? Or inside? Let’s take a closer look.

Forget for a moment what you think you know about your body in space, optics, the structure of your eyes, and so on, and assume that you have no problems with seeing. Then the image that appears in front of you is reasonably sharp in the center, directly opposite you, and becomes less clear, less sharp and blurred towards the edge. In contrast to the edge of the image, you can focus on individual objects in the center and thus isolate them from the overall image. One could also say: your ‘I’ is in the center facing the isolated object. If you look at the image more closely, you will also notice something peculiar: the image converges exactly to this center. You can observe this particularly well if you position yourself exactly in line with an elongated object, such as a straight path or the end of a long table. No matter where you look, there is always a central point in the distance, a point towards which everything seems to converge, exactly opposite you.

But wait a minute; that’s strange: ‘I’ should actually be the center of my perception, the (central) point from which I perceive space and the image, not that point over there, in the distance! Why does the image always center there, exactly opposite my ‘I’?

Stay with your perception, not what you think you know about distances and optics. So, if the image converges at that point over there, and not here, then maybe ‘I’ am not really where I thought I was. ‘I’ am actually another—another point, not here, but over there!

But then isn’t inside also outside? Isn’t here and there actually one point, which converges with the one in the distance, in infinity? A place where ‘I’ repeatedly face different objects? And what about the ‘I’ of others? Doesn’t that also mean that we are all one ‘I,’ at the same point, in the same place, in the same hole? But that’s impossible! And with this somewhat frightening approach to the impossible, we have experienced the third register of structural psychoanalysis: the Real.

The three registers or orders (the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary, abbreviated as RSI) are not independent of each other but, from a psychoanalytic perspective, are interconnected like the so-called Borromean Rings. These three rings are so interconnected that their links fall apart when one ring is opened. In an analogous manner, all human experiences irretrievably disintegrate into this RSI structure.

Given these frightening impossibilities and abyssal infinities, you will quickly retreat into your habitual conception of space, time and self-consciousness, that is, into the Imaginary, using your psychological defense mechanisms. But try to linger for a moment with these paradoxes and impossibilities. What does all this mean? Can it also be visualized?

The human—in psychoanalytic terminology, the subject—is apparently decentered. One might say, ‘I’ am not where I actually am, where I myself am; in a sense, ‘I’ and ‘self’ are disconnected. Let’s stay in the visual field to illustrate this again. We must focus only on what we really see and set aside our beloved knowledge for a moment. Can you see yourself when you see? No, you cannot see yourself. You may see parts of your body, your legs, arms, etc., but all of these are only objective parts of you, not yourself. Usually, one would say, “I have arms, legs, etc.,” and not “I am arms, legs, etc.” But perhaps we can see ourselves through detours? For example, you could stand in front of a mirror to see your reflection. But that is not you either! That is only your reflection, an image that you identify with and say, “That’s me!” So ‘I’ am actually someone else. And when you are standing in front of a mirror, very close to the mirror, do you see what gradually emerges there, in your pupil, in this black ‘hole’? What is looking at you from the darkness, from within you, from this hole? What appears when you want to see yourself very clearly? Your reflection! I am someone else! And in that person’s eyes, your reflection appears again, in which you are reflected again, and so on.

So ‘I’ am condemned to be someone else. Again and again, facing other objects, reflecting in them to reflect them, trying in vain to fill the hole in the same place, this impossibility; the hole in the same place where I cannot be myself; an infinite mirror cabinet without ever coming to myself.

How did we come to this inherent sense of lack? What traumatic event assailed us in our past? Is there perhaps a story about it? Yes, there is. Most people will know it. This story has been told since ancient times, whispered from generation to generation, to tell of the unimaginable, the trauma of humanity in distant times.

Once upon a time, people were completely themselves and one with what made them whole and holy. So they lived in peace with themselves and in harmony with life, and knew the word and name of everything alive. But then the unthinkable happened, a traumatic experience so terrible that humans had to repress the memory of it for all time. It was said to be a fatal mistake, a great guilt that humanity took upon itself. And so humans were banished and expelled from themselves. Since then, one wanders through space and time like Isis in search of the dismembered Osiris, hoping for redemption, driven by an unconscious knowledge to find the lost and remedy the lack.

 

The unconscious is structured like a language

Humans are characterized by an insurmountable lack. This lack of being is referred to as the splitting/dissociation of the subject and is constitutive of human existence. This means that the subject is not capable of grasping itself or being itself, but only ever being another. The split leads to the fact that the subject has no access to a part of itself. This part, which Freud called the unconscious, is however indispensable for the constitution of the subject and its psychic structure. Paradoxically, the human subject can only constitute itself as a subject through its split or dissociation.

The split or dissociation of the human subject is based on a traumatic experience that is fundamental to human existence. However, this experience has been irreversibly repressed and was referred to by Freud as Urverdrängung, the primal repression. The primal repression remains unconscious and cannot be interpreted, therefore it makes no sense.

Structural psychoanalysis regards the split of the subject to be a consequence of its submission to language. The subject is not language itself but arises through the loss or lack that language brings about. The linguistic structures that constitute the subject are called signifiers. Unlike a sign, the signifier does not simply represent something for someone, but is what represents the subject for another signifier. In short, the subject is represented by the relationship between signifiers.

Thus, structural psychoanalysis does not describe the subject as being characterized by a particular meaning, but rather by an infinite referral of meaning and significance. This referral structure is called the Symbolic and consists of an infinite, mostly unconscious structure of designations and meanings. Structural psychoanalysis calls the elements of this structure signifiers, which means that the transitions between them are discontinuous, i.e., abrupt or discrete; in the language of quantum physics: quantized, rather than continuous.

Structural psychoanalysis asserts that the signifiers influence and transform the subject’s natural needs into the so-called signified: the designated or object of meaning. It postulates the primacy of the signifier over the signified, a concept that was adopted by the French ethnologist and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. This means that the signifying element precedes the signified and that the signified cannot exist independently of the signifying element.

The transformation of needs by the signifier has an overall effect: the lack. In psychoanalytic theory, this lack is symbolized by the phallus signifier. Therefore, the subject has an interest, a desire, a longing for the signified, i.e., the object of meaning.

The chaining of signifiers creates a dynamic of lack and desire that refers back to itself without coming to a halt, without coming to itself. This iterative, self-referential search leads to emergence, self-similarity and self-organization, or fractal patterns/geometries as observed in complex systems.

This dynamic arises from the fact that the signifier is not identical with itself; instead, it is always distinguished from itself. Therefore, the signifier cannot repeat its original meaning. However, the subject desires to rediscover the original meaning, that is, ‘itself,’ since it is represented by the relationships between the signifiers. Consequently, the signifier is repeated, and only through this repetition—which must occur at least once—does it become a signifier at all. Nonetheless, the repetition is futile because the same thing is impossible due to the marking of the subject by the signifiers. Hence, the repetition is repeated again, creating an endless loop of repetitions.

Structural psychoanalysis refers to this impossibility, that which is impossible to symbolize, as the Real. The Real is the traumatic, the causeless, the unfathomable, and the logically impossible, which cannot be imagined or symbolized. The Real is also what ‘keeps coming back in the same place.’

The Real can also be found in the sciences, where in every formalized, symbolized field, such as mathematics, logic, or physics, there are areas that cannot be proven but must still serve as a basis. In these areas of knowledge, the Real functions as an axiom. The Real can also be accessible through logical contradictions that may arise during formalization. In quantum physics, the Real manifests itself as a random event. And in psychoanalysis, it appears at the points where the procedure of free association and interpretation fails.

 

The Phantasm

Imaginary objects serve as illusory compensations for the subject’s unconscious lack of being. In psychoanalytic terminology, the subject split/barred by signifiers desires an object. This object designates and represents what is missing and is therefore desired by the subject. The search for the object in physics can thus be understood as a prototypical expression of this desire.

These objects have an imaginary character, as they are oriented towards the idealized body image. Structural psychoanalysis calls the order of the body image the Imaginary. By referring to the idealized, closed and unitary image of the body, the split subject can conceive of itself as an imaginary unity, as the ‘I.’ We rely on this ideal of wholeness. It is necessary for us to mask our fragmentation/dissociation, which we could not bear.

The ‘I’ is the representation of oneself as a body or consists in the identification with the image of one’s own body. This identification process—i.e., the consciousness of the ‘I’—can be impaired, as in the case of depersonalization or out-of-body experiences. As a simple experiment, the so-called rubber hand illusion² can be performed, in which one can experience an illusory spatial localization of the subject. This has been experimentally demonstrated by the philosopher and neuroscientist Thomas Metzinger.³

The relationship to the body image also structures our relationship to space, by orienting ourselves towards the opposition of inside and outside. This is also reflected in physical concepts, such as closed systems and internal/external observers. Freud initially described the psychological apparatus as a kind of sphere, in which the ‘I’ is structured as a modified surface of the id, shaped by the influence of the external world.

Structural psychoanalysis revised Freud’s concept of space in order to reduce the attachment to the Imaginary. Here, the spatial structure of the psyche is no longer viewed from the surface of a sphere, but is examined using topologies such as the torus, the Klein bottle, and the projective plane/sphere with a cross-cap, in order to critically question the imaginary inside/outside opposition. It is important to note that structural psychoanalysis does not view the topological structure as a mere metaphor, but instead understands the structures of the subject as the topological structure.

In topological structures that have self-referential properties, the Real becomes more apparent than in (imaginary) everyday life. The circle is the geometric paradigm for such a structure because, as we imaginarily draw a line to form a circle, we know that the line refers to itself from the beginning: the curve should close in the end, going back to where it started.

However, the circle is fraught with impossibilities that manifest themselves mathematically, as the Real, in the form of the impossibility of squaring the circle, as well as the transcendental number pi—the ratio between the circle’s perimeter and diameter—that encompasses an infinite sequence of digits, thereby being impossible to pin down with complete precision. That is why psychoanalysis does not illustrate the futile attempt to return to oneself as a circle.

Another example is prime numbers, i.e., numbers that are only divisible by one and themselves. From a psychoanalytic perspective, dividing by oneself is only possible imaginarily, because a repetition of the same is impossible.

The unity of the subject is only possible imaginarily, which is represented mathematically as the imaginary unit i: the impossible square-root of -1 in the space of complex numbers. And so the subject circulates in that space between the missing (the zero) and the unattainable unity (the whole number 1). The process unfolds around a center, namely the object of desire, which is lost and impossible to find, thus lying in the Real. In that center, prime numbers arise with every circling attempt to return to oneself. But they are impossible in terms of complete self-congruence and therefore lie in the Real, outside the number space. They can only be written imaginarily, in a continuous way of futile repetition.

Therefore, a purely symbolic, i.e., mathematical description cannot advance further here. A more comprehensive, holistic view is necessary, called a ‘biopsychosocial’ view in psychosomatic medicine.

 

The Apprentices of Sais

It remains to be hoped that “sisters of deep structures,” such as mathematics and psychology, will one day come together again and allow us to understand the mysterious cipher script that Novalis speaks of in The Apprentices of Sais:

Manifold are the paths people take. Whoever pursues and compares them will see strange figures emerge; figures that seem to belong to that great cipher script that one sees everywhere, on wings, eggshells, in clouds, snow, crystals, and rock formations, on freezing waters, inside and outside of mountains, in plants, animals, humans, in the lights of the heavens, on touched and stroked pieces of pitch and glass, in filings around a magnet, and in strange conjunctions of chance. In them, one senses the key to this miraculous script, its grammar…

 

Notes

1. e.g. https://www.lacanonline.com/ or https://lacan-entziffern.de/ (German)
2. e.g. Youtube https://youtu.be/xdxlT68ygt8
3. Lenggenhager B, Tadi T, Metzinger T, Blanke O. Video ergo sum: manipulating bodily self-consciousness. Science. 2007 Aug 24; 317 (5841): 1096-9. doi: 10.1126/science.1143439. PMID: 17717189.

Why evolutionary theory contradicts materialism

Reading | Evolutionary theory

Richard Oxenberg, PhD | 2023-04-30