Introduction
Many of the ideas presented here were originally developed for a proposed contribution to the debate about
consciousness at the
Essentia Foundation. The submission, sent in May 2023, was of course politely rejected.
At the time, I had decided that the time had come to try to nail down some of my personal beliefs. These depend, of course, on my own history and experience, but its all too easy to be misunderstood and/or dismissed when trying to cross interdisciplinary boundaries, and my first attempt obviously failed...
All personal experience, while indisputable, is relative. All we can do is compare notes and try to find common ground. If done properly, that can be a good way to make progress. As mentioned again below (apropos mathematics): evolution is absolutely the name of the game.
The two types of time, described below, also relate to C. P. Snow’s famous 1959 Rede lecture about The Two Cultures.
It was, I think, the failure to understand that there are two distinct types of time that lead to the humanities and sciences drifting so far apart by the middle of the 20th century.
Its also the reason why the concept of observation has been difficult to integrate into current physics.
We should never forget that we are actually part of the Universe observing itself.
We are not outside observers.
My beliefs have been fundamentally shaped by two epiphanies:
The first happened in 1982, and was related to my own speciality, the 20th century music notation crisis.
(See below and Retrospective 2024.)
The second happened in 2016 while watching a
TED talk in which Donald Hoffman described his
Interface Theory of Perception.
Hoffman’s desktop interface analogy came as a revelation because, while I had long believed that “time is a brain strategy for reducing complexity”, I had never before seen how that idea could be further developed.
The discovery, in November 2022, of Bernado Kastrup’s equivalent
dashboard hypothesis and philosophy of
Analytic Idealism, finally led me to suspend work on other projects in order to take a closer look. (My beliefs were rather vague at the time, but owed a lot to
Logical Positivism.) So, between November 2022 and May 2023, I embarked on a period of intense philosophical revision, re-reading books in my library, watching YouTube videos and
making extensive notes.
This investigation lead to a new appreciation of the importance of writing:
YouTube videos are a great place for revision and to get quickly to relevant ideas, but reading and writing remain supremely important.
As many wise people have noticed:
If you are not writing, you are not thinking.
This insight applies not only to temporary notes, but also to texts that are intended for publication (like this one): Writing is a process. It takes time, time in which ideas are tested and refined to make them as powerful as possible before they are made public (static).
Something similar can also be said about reading: Reading takes time, time that the reader controls. The ease with which readers can go back and re-read passages that they have not yet properly understood is in stark contrast to the situation in transient media, such as film or video. And its important that the time it takes to revisit ideas does not get in the way of a transient train of thought, so printed media have a distinct advantage, especially when communicating complex ideas.
Apropos “
time is a brain strategy for reducing complexity”:
This is an idea that relates closely to Bernado Kastrup's observation, in his
Analytic Idealism Course, that the brain would dissolve into a hot entropic soup if it had to contain all the information from the outside world. He means, of course, contained
at the same time.
For me, the idea was process-related: The brain would never be able to cope if unlimited amounts of information were allowed to be
processed at the same time. This is an example of perceived time’s typical ambivalence: It both moves and does not move. It is both static and dynamic.
The connection between writing, time and the evolution of ideas is important.
Human culture itself begins with reading and writing.
Their invention was a liberation from the tyranny of now.
Time itself began to be thought of as a process.
It is therefore worrying, that we are currently (2024) witnessing a decline in literacy among school children. Especially here in Germany. There seems to be much confusion about why this should be, what the consequences are going to be, and what, if anything, can or needs to be done about it.
The first step to removing these confusions must be to reach some kind of consensus, at least among descision makers, about what writing does, and what it is for. That means taking a look at its roots. In other words, this essay hopes to promote literacy by first describing the fundamental reasons for its importance.
My first thoughts are that the problems are related to recent rapid changes in the media landscape:
Revolutionary new technologies have come upon us so fast, that it has been difficult for the education system to know how to react. As a result, mistakes are being made: knowledge of human developmental psychology is being ignored, and large amounts of money are being spent buying computers for school children, even though this is pedagogically counter-productive.
Such money would be much better spent on improving the number, quality and status of teachers. Excellent, well trained and respected teachers are indispensable if we want our culture to evolve positively. Cutting the education budget is not an option. Quite the contrary!
The 20th century music notation crisis
My own speciality is music notation. This is where the cultural standstill associated with illiteracy first became noticeable, so I'm hoping that the lessons learned there can also help with the more general case.
Standard music notation had been in crisis since the beginning of the 20th century, and it finally collapsed in 1970. There were both external and internal reasons for this:
Externally: The late 19th century invention of audio recordings lead to a declining need for music to be performed live, and so to a declining need for sheet music and the need to read it.
This is similar to the current crisis in general literacy, in that it was triggered by the introduction of new technologies.
Internally: standard 19th century music notation conventions were both badly understood and unrealistic,
leading to wasteful use of time in rehearsals.
Those conventions needed to be re-thought from scratch. Here are some of my conclusions:
- Written music symbols are like the words of ordinary language, not like the symbols of mathematics. (So they shouldn't “add up” or be “divisible”.)
- One has to learn how to play any written music properly, be it Machaut, Bach, Mozart, Mahler or Stockhausen.
- There is no temporal ether.
- Performance time is indivisible.
The story, which also relates to other branches of 20th century philosophy, goes like this:
Chaos broke out in many disciplines at the beginning of the 20th century.
In music, composers had lost control because performers were no longer taking the written symbols seriously. Many composers of written music, Stravinsky for example, reacted pragmatically with neoclassicism. This was a way to go back to basics by dropping the arbitrarily complex tuplets that had been invented in the 19th century, and insisting on a straightforward, quasi mathematical, interpretation of the remaining symbols.
In fact, the problem lay deeper than that: It was the whole idea that experienced (perceived) time could be described as “mechanical time plus expressivity”. This paradigm goes back to the Cartesian mind and matter dualism, and had become common sense, at least since the classical period in the mid 18th century. It was still dominant after 1945, when a new generation of composers came on the scene.
Instead of questioning received wisdom about standard music notation, they perpetuated the 19th century
idea that tempo is fundamental and that experienced time is divisible. Performance practice traditions continued to be ignored.
Tempo was a particularly difficult problem, being equivalent, in the paradigm, to a temporal ether. The notation only made sense in the presence of tempo, but composers were trying to make tempi imperceptible: Obvious tempi had been seriously overworked by the previous generation.
Because, as they thought, standard music notation described time precisely, avant-garde composers also tried to invent alternative, “less precise” notations.
Stockhausen’s article ...wie die Zeit vergeht... (1957) and Boulez’s Penser la Musique Aujourd’hui (1963) illustrate their generation’s attempt to be both logical and scientific. But they ultimately failed, and the approach collapsed in 1970. Pragmatism ruled the day: All the major avant-garde composers gave up trying to create alternatives to the standard notation, leaving the underlying philosophical problems unsolved. Written music was left with two alternatives: neo-Romanticism and minimalism (a form of neo-classicism). Electronic music, produced directly in sound studios, and not needing a written score that had to be performed, was also a viable way forward.
Standard music notation actually assumes traditions of performance practice, and works by synchronizing vertically aligned symbols with other players and/or visual cues provided by a conductor.
It also contains hints about phrasing, patterns of emphasis etc.
After the 1970 collapse, many composers continued to clutter their scores with meaningless symbols, and needed inordinate amounts of expensive rehearsal time in order to get what they wanted. Even if they did get what they wanted, audiences couldn’t, even in principle, reconstruct the score from the audible result. Score and performance were disconnected. Composers could not expect relations that are visible in the score to become audible. Audiences could not know what, in the score, they were supposed to be listening for. In this situation, its impossible to develop higher level, composed musical grammars.
Another
way to state the audience’s problem is to say that they were unable to chunk
the information correctly — which is where I cross paths with Hilary Lawson.
I agree with Lawson completely about the importance of
Closure, but have always used the word “chunk” for this idea. (See, for example, Lawson’s recent talks at the IAI
here and
here.) Chunk is easier to use as a verb, and in music, “closures” are special kinds of chunk (like cadences) that occur at the ends of other chunks.
Whatever one calls them, chunks are everywhere in both spatial and temporal music analysis. In space, we are talking about the way we chunk the visible information on the page in order to read efficiently. In time, its the way we chunk the audible vibrations in the air in order to recognize musical objects and events such as timbres, themes, cadences etc. Chunking (closure) is a fundamentally important idea: All objects and events, including written and spoken words, and the
mathematical objects we use to describe the fundamental particles of physics, are chunked information.
Interestingly,
current audio recordings (on unchanging, external physical media) store all the mechanical (physical, clock) information necessary for re-creating a performance, leaving all the chunking to be done by the listener at playback time. Recording and playback need to agree on a constant, standard speed that is the replacement for a temporal “ether”. Of course, it’s only a convention that is related to our perceptions of physical objects (the dashboard): Its not a fundamental property of the external world, but it does mean that recorded and performed durations appear to be identical.
Raw, physical data does not include “expressivity”. That can only be found in resonances with the listener’s experience. Musical experiences are all related to chunking, memory and subjective, non-verbalisable experiences such as speech rhythms, crying, singing, dancing. Such experiences, I believe, all involve qualia.
Writing
As I said:
Human culture itself begins with reading and writing.
Their invention was a liberation from the tyranny of now.
Time itself began to be thought of as a process.
More precisely:
- The “time” used when reading and writing is perceivedTime, not physicalTime.
- The process came into focus because the one that writing revealed was much larger than the one contained within now or human memory.
There are fundamentally two types of writing:
- Music and ordinary text
- Mathematics and computer programs
These
both have sub-types, of course, but it would be useful to take a look at their basic differences.
Music and ordinary text
Written music symbols, and the written words of ordinary text, have meanings that depend on their context.
That context includes both the reader and the other symbols nearby. The reader has to have learned the relevant performance practice (in the case of music) or the language (in the case of text) in order to interpret the symbols properly.
Different performers (musicians and actors) will perform the same text (score or script) in diferent ways. And the same performer will perform the same text differently at different times. The meaning of different instances of a particular graphical symbol (e.g. a particular word or, in music, a crotchet or a staccato dot) changes according to context even within the same performance of a particular text. Attempts to make ordinary language or music symbols globally precise are always going to fail.
Appreciating music, or any other of the performing or visual Arts, means consciously resonating with the non-verbal
experiences of one or more other human beings (in perceivedTime).
Listen, for example, to a performance of the Bach
Chaconne, a Chopin
Ballade, a Bruckner
Symphony, or any play by Shakespeare or Ionesco. Look at a Holbein, a Van Gogh, a Giacometti or a Rauschenberg. Here we are having the comforting experience of
what it is like to be someone else, and to be part of a common culture. (See Thomas Nagel’s famous essay
What is it like to be a bat?)
Mathematics and computer programs
Mathematical and computer programming symbols are
always written in perceived space.
Each symbol’s meaning is described axiomatically — independently of the world outside the system within which
it operates — and is closely related to the rules that govern its spatial behaviour.
Mathematical and programming symbols have precisely the same meaning wherever and whenever they are used in the system within which they are embedded. Such symbols include variables, whose value can change, but whose dimension(s) (underlying meaning) can not.
In mathematics, this means that, given the axioms, theorems are true, both externally (the theorem itself) and internally (the sequence of deductions inside the proof).
Similary, the fact that a computer program runs smoothly is proof that its symbols are being used consistently
but, before the program is run, it has to be checked line by line.
These similarities are the reason why computers have been able to change the way mathematics can be done.
These techniques thus transcend perceivedTime, and are therefore the best tools we have for exploring nature. They can make (possibly predictive) descriptions of the world beyond perception.
Using mathematics or computer programs to explore nature is possible, but not necessary: Mathematical objects don’t necessarily exist in the world beyond perception. Computers can easily be programmed to create fantasy objects (e.g. super-human avatars).
But mathematicians and programmers can attempt to develop their own fields, and/or model external reality, by developing new tools and axioms. Mathematical and computer simulations are wiritten in perceivedTime, but are themselves beyond time, so they have predictive power, and can be tested and improved. Simulations can therefore evolve (in perceivedTime).
Physical sciences such as cosmology, archaeology, paleontology, neuroscience or physics, can only make real progress using current observations and mathematics. Descriptions can, of course, be improved by creating a mathematics that better matches current observations, but
current observations change with cultural context, and our knowledge of the external world is fundamentally limited, so mathematics will never stop evolving.
But remember that we are part of the universe looking at itself. We are not outside observers. Everything we perceive, including mathematics, cultural context, and animal species (including ourselves) is evolving (in perceivedTime), so the universe itself must somehow be evolving (in perceivedTime) independently of any current model.
Our best modelling techniques can only approximate physicalTime, so we have no way of knowing what “evolution” might mean beyond perceivedTime. PhysicalTime is in principle unknowable, so it makes no sense to use the words static or evolving when talking about the universe itself. Beyond perceivedTime, those words are meaningless.
Two final remarks:
- recursion, inside a mathematical proof, can be considered to be beyond time. As such the “universe looking at itself” may well be a component of its “static evolution”.
- We know that even within mathematics, formal systems will always have their limits.
This is, I think, a further reason for believing the Hoffman/Kastrup desktop/dashboard hypothesis.
If the universe is “both static and evolving”, the Hard Problem of Consciousness is unresolved, and the world beyond our perceptions is ultimately inscrutable, then there seems to be no reason to expect our universe to be fully describable by any formal system at all.
In
“The Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences” Eugene Wigner is surprised by the fact that mathematics itself appears to evolve rather arbitrarily, as the result of creative thinking by outstanding mathematicians. This is however only a paradox if we assume that the world mathematics is trying to describe is
static. I think that’s a mistake. The world beyond our desktop can be described by mathematics, but it is
beyond experienced time. The world out there is neither static nor evolving in any way we can directly perceive with our senses. (See the current state of quantum physics, and
The Apollo Sunburst optical illusion towards the end of
Retrospective 2024.)
Conclusions
Again: Human culture begins with reading and writing. Their invention was a liberation from the tyranny of now. Time began to be thought of as a process.
And: We should never forget that we are part of the universe that is looking at itself.
This means that children should not be treated as little observers of the outside world, but as brand-new intelligences that need to be
trained using input from their sense organs.
My conclusion is therefore that all computers should be banned from classrooms until after the children are about 16 years old (O-Levels in England, mittlere-Reife in Germany). Until that age, children should be training their brains using their senses, including the fine muscles in their fingers that are used for writing with a pen or pencil, playing musical instruments, doing carpentry etc. (Pressing buttons and swiping in two dimensions only trains muscles at a more primitive level.)
Children should also be using their eyes to train their brains to understand the world in three dimensions. People who can’t really comprehend three dimensional space will never be able to control their movements in the real world (whether assisted or otherwise). People who never hear speech, never learn to talk...
Failing to give children the best opportunity to acquire these basic skills is a serious mistake.