Wave Machine

Wave Machine

Just getting to grips with soundcloud...

A recent Horizon programme on the BBC in the uk considered the nature of the unconscious mind. As of the date of this post, it is still available on iPlayer. This was a very interesting account of recent evidence on our unconscious, but I found one aspect problematic. The narrator posed the question: "Are you in control of your unconscious, or is it in control of you?"

I think this is a false dichotomy. My subconscious is part of me, so if a lot of my cognition is handled by systems in my brain that are not accessible to conscious awareness that does not mean I am not in control. It is just that the majority of my control is not conscious, and that is probably just as well. The speed and efficiency of our unconsious mind is essential for our functioning in real time in a complex environment. If we had to consciously deliberate about every aspect of our behaviour, we would be overwhelmed by information, and the burden of decision making would preclude all but the simplest tasks.

I think the role of conscious control in our lives is small but important. We should not be unnerved too much if science reveals that our conscious rationalisations of our thought processes in the solution of real world problems are often inaccurate. We might just be bad at guessing the insides of our unconsious strategies, but they are still ours. I think the best way to defend our cherished notion of free will is to avoid overstating its importance in our daily lives. If we think of a small rider on a large stubborn elephant then that might help to get our measure of control in perspective, but I think it would be a mistake to identify with the rider alone rather than the elephant-rider pairing.

Perhaps some people found this programme disconcerting because they drew the inference that free will is a kind of user-illusion, that our experience of controlling what we do is just a fabrication in the service of another illusion- that of self. I think the science has been forcing a reassessment of the nature of self and free will for a while. It is now almost 30 years since Benjamin Libet did his famous experiment after all. However, even if some of our common sense ideas about consciousness and free will seem to be mistaken, I don't think science has rendered these concepts redundant so far.

The same god?

I was talking to a friend the other day who teaches young children, and she told me that one of her pupils had said that there were lots of gods. My friend corrected her, saying that we all worship the same god, but in different ways. As an atheist, I can see a sense in which this is true from my point of view, since all nothings are the same. On the other hand, if there is a god, does it make sense to say that Ganesh is the same as Allah? Perhaps this is a case of "Hesperus is Phosphorus", the sentence used to illustrate the distinction between 'sense' and 'reference' due to Frege.

I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free

Here's a very short version of this Billy Taylor tune played by me on a Heritage semi solid guitar through a Rivera valve combo amp.

Musical Semantics

I used to think that music had only elaborate and emotionally evocative syntax but unlike language, no denotive semantics. Looking into recent work however, it looks like the picture is a bit more complicated. The American musicologist L. B. Meyer made the distinction between designative meaning and embodied meaning. The former involves a reference to things outside the musical domain and the latter is about the significance that a passage of music can have for a listener in virtue of its own dynamic unfolding structure and its relation to the listener's musical knowledge and expectations. This is meaning in relation to parts of musical structure referring to other parts of itself or the whole. Expectations (implications) can be created and their fulfilment can be delivered, delayed or thwarted.

I had thought the designative component to be totally parasitic on the natural language and culture of the community of listeners. Certain motifs in music come to be associated with objects or events, for example a few notes of the 'Jaws' theme and we think of a menacing shark. This is a long way from the full blown semantics of natural language, since you cannot convey novel concepts and meanings via musical syntax without a direct association first. However, recent work by Stefan Koelsh suggests that music transfers much more semantic information than was previously thought: "Our results indicate that both music and language can prime the meaning of a word, and that music can, as language, determine physiological indices of semantic processing." from Nature Neuroscience 7(3), 2004: Music, Language and Meaning: Brain Signatures of Semantic Processing.

Dogma versus Defeasible Belief

I think this is a distinction which avoids some of the debates between atheists and believers in which the participants just talk past each other. You know how they go, the believer wants to portray the atheist as occupying a faith position. The motivation seems to be a perception that atheists are trying to argue from some kind of rational high ground. Keen to resist the portrayal, atheists sometimes attempt a distinction between a lack of belief in god and a belief that there is no god. I don't think that really works, but if instead the atheist concedes that they can't be certain that there is no god, then sometimes they are characterised as agnostic, which causes confusion. So consider the analogy with your drinking water. Assuming you live in a country where it is safe to drink, it is still the case that you can't be sure that the water supply hasn't been contaminated or poisoned without your knowledge. This doesn't mean you are agnostic about whether the water is safe, at least not according to the normal usage of the term. If you were, you wouldn't drink it. Nor are you dogmatic in your view that the water is safe, if evidence becomes available that suggests otherwise, you'll stop drinking it. So what you have is a defeasible belief that your drinking water is safe. Similarly, the atheist can argue that given a specified god, they have a defeasible belief that this god does not exist.

'Sure and certain hope'

Which is it? Cetainty or hope? Does this phrase arise from Hebrews 11:1? The New International Version translates as: 'Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.' That makes more sense to me. So perhaps the sense of 'sure and certain hope' is an affirmation of faith, a declaration of assurance that things hoped for will come to pass. Does that sound right?