Author: James Vornov

How do you abandon the illusion of control and embrace uncertainty?

We could be less anxious and less stressed if we gave up trying to control the uncertain future. Living in the now, choosing actions that increase the chances of a favorable state of affairs can be challenging and stimulating.

The uncertainty we live with every moment is hard to grasp. In fact, we tend to simplify the world down to something less complex and more manageable. But the simplicity and gain in control are illusions. So we stress about what will really happen.

Uncertainty is lack of predictability. Predictable situations are comfortable because we know what’s almost certainly going to happen. Surprises are just that- unexpected and unanticipated.

We know we can’t predict the future in part because  our knowledge of the world is generally incomplete. Since we don’t know what’s around the corner or what other people are thinking, that part of the world can’t be predicted.

Even with perfect knowledge, the world itself would remain unpredictable. The result of any particular choice is uncertain because it can result in a wide range of outcomes. We never know whether we made the right decision even in retrospect because we only know what happened after that decision was made. Speculating about what a different decision would have brought about is not very useful, because again the outcome can only be guessed at and never known. There are two many complex interactions and unintended consequences. Once the choice is made, the result is largely out of our control.

Interestingly, giving up the illusion of control is a core belief in religious and spiritual movements. Recognizing a greater power like God or Fate that controls the world is a great aid in abandoning illusions of determining outcomes. I don’t think spirituality is necessary to adopt an attitude of embracing uncertainty, uncertainty arises naturally in the world. But the attitude of humility gained by recognizing a power greater than ourselves seems to help in this embrace of uncertainty. Adopting this mental stance in making decisions provides reward in the  releases from the fear of unanticipated outcomes. It also provides a space for God or Fate to act even in a seeming clockwork world of cause and effect.

After all, the only truth certain is that the world is uncertain and truth can’t be fully known.

One of the most interesting chapters in Mark Bernstein’s The Tinderbox Way is on links- both in Tinderbox and on the Internet. Mark provides a personal and historical overview of the approaches and attitudes toward linking beginning with the early days of hypertext and leading up to our current environment.

Linking evolved, guided by the users of the net in a way suitable for navigation within and between sites for readers. It’s  now adapted and grown to enable search advertising and the social networking systems.

What’s interesting to me is how difficult it is to show the utility of linking in a Tinderbox document. One ends up pretty quickly with a spaghetti plot of links between boxes. Mark provides some illustrations that look interesting but don’t seem to mean much at all as a map. There’s actually a site that collects these pretty network pictures: Visual Complexity.

As I read Mark’s discussion, I was struck by the similarity between these links and the interconnections of metabolic pathways within a cell or the interconnections between neurons. Mapped, we see spaghetti. But there is an emergent behavior from the network that only arises from the functioning of those interactions. On the web perhaps these are communities of shared interest.

We need a large amount of computational power to visualize the emergent network. Its easier if its geographical:

Via GigaOm:

If there’s one thing you get when you have close to 600 million users the way Facebook does, it’s a lot of data about how they are all connected — and when you plot those inter-relationships based on location, as one of the company’s engineers found, you get a world map made up of social connections.

We’re used to seeing maps as geographical metaphor. Maps of meaning are not well developed as mental models. I submit that Google’s algorithms for advertising and ranking are providing semantic functions that are such maps. The actual movement of people through the network as measured by following user clicks across sites is another even more important map. The data is massive and difficult to display simply, but the emergent behavior can be detected and used.

This is a retraction. I no longer think that John Searle’s Chinese Room is trivial. It is a powerful demonstration of the failure of materialism to provide an adequate explanation for consciousness.

The Chinese Room is Searle’s most famous argument against materialism. He asks us to imagine that we are in a sealed room, communicating by text with the outside. We have a manual that allows us to respond to questions in Chinese even though we have no knowledge of the language. Or if asked in English we respond in the usual way.

Thus, we’d be answering English or Chinese appropriately. The outside observer can’t distunguish how we’re coming up with replies. But inside, the two are totally different. One is done mechanically, by rote, the other is done with awareness and thought. This is analogous to the observation of a person, obviously. Is there a mind responding or just mechanical response without consciousness?

Materialism says that only the physical exists. But such a view cannot account for the difference between response by some one who understands and mechanical responses. This seemingly most scientific and rational approach fails to admit the simple fact- we know that there is such a thing as awareness and consciousness because we experience it constantly. Any theory of mind that fails to account for it is incomplete.

Dualism accounts for consciousness, but in its separation of mind from material, it loses all of its explanatory power and becomes unacceptable.

Here’s what I wrote in the comments to Aaron Swartz’s description of the argument:

Searle’s Chinese Room experiment is a trivial misdirection. He focuses on the man in the room matching symbols rather than the creator of the semantic and syntactic translation rules. That designer was conscious. The man in the room is working unconsciously. When I speak my mouth and vocal cords do the translation from nerve impulses to sound patterns but it is entirely unconscious. You have to follow the trail back into the brain where you get lost because consciousness is an emergent property of the neural networks, not a property of the machinery at all.

posted by James Vornov on March 15, 2007 #

I don’t actually remember whether I wrote that before or after I read Searle’s The Rediscovery of the Mind, but at some point I did come to agree with him. The simple way out of the problem is to admit that mind does indeed exist. As evidenced by my comment, I had already decided that mind was real and it was emergent from brain activity. Interestingly, using different terminology, I think that Searle’s points out the same irreducibility in the later book, The Mind.