Part 2 – Imagine

Dennett begins chapter 2 with a little justification, almost an apology. “If the concept of consciousness were to ‘fall to science’, what would happen to our sense of moral agency and free will?” Personally, I think the whole sentiment is silly, but then I’ve been in contact with non-dualistic ideas since I was a child, so I tend to underestimate the confusion an Abrahamic influence in upbringing can cause. I still wonder why people care so much about free will, but Dennett is right both in anticipating the response and in disarming it. Even experts in cognitive science often believe in dualistic concepts, like Descartes’ mind vs. matter, or a more toned down version Dennett calls the “Cartesian theatre”, i.e. the idea that somewhere in their brain there is a central place where consciousness happens, a seat of the “I”, if you will. It is unfortunate that we still have to deal with this (even though it has been dismantled by Greek, Indian and many other thinkers for at least 2000 years), but the illusion is still powerful and has to be addressed.

But let’s continue with more meaty stuff. Dennett outlines the following rules for his approach of explaining consciousness:

(1) No Wonder Tissue allowed. I will try to explain every puzzling feature of human consciousness within the framework of contemporary physical science; at no point will I make an appeal to inexplicable or unknown forces, substances, or organic powers. In other words, I intend to see what can be done within the conservative limits of standard science, saving a call for a revolution in materialism as a last resort.
(2) No feigning anesthesia. It has been said of behaviorists that they feign anesthesia — they pretend they don’t have the experiences we know darn well they share with us. If I wish to deny the existence of some controversial feature of consciousness, the burden falls on me to show that it is somehow illusory.
(3) No nitpicking about empirical details. I will try to get all the scientific facts right, insofar as they are known today, but there is abundant controversy about just which exciting advances will stand the test of time. If I were to restrict myself to “facts that have made it into the textbooks,” I would be unable to avail myself of some of the most eye-opening recent discoveries (if that is what they are). And I would still end up unwittingly purveying some falsehoods, if recent history is any guide. [...]

I find (2) particularly funny, given that I have criticized him for this very thing before. But then, he really might not have had these kind of experiences he dismisses so easily, just as not too long ago it was “obvious” to some that people don’t really see things when they visualize them in their mind, just as it was “obvious” to others that everyone does. Until Francis Galton actually investigated this and found out that, you might have guessed it, some people do (and they assumed everyone does) and some don’t (and assumed nobody did). In fact, Dennet then provides a “phenomenological garden”, i.e. a wide catalogue of experiences that are considered as “part” of the mind, like vision, hunger or fear. In this garden, he emphasizes vision the most and among his examples, he demonstrates just this large variety among humans how and when mental images appear. Personally, I found several of his examples to be entirely non-visual, like:

For instance, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could get some jokes without the help of mental imagery. Two friends are sitting in a bar drinking; one turns to the other and says, “Bud, I think you’ve had enough — your face is getting all blurry!” Now didn’t you use an image or fleeting diagram of some sort to picture the mistake the speaker was making?

I didn’t. Humor, or stories in general, tend to be non-visual for me. They happen “as language”, not “as vision”, if that makes any sense. But for other experiences he doesn’t emphasize the visual component and I wonder, doesn’t he have one there? He talks a lot about music and tones, but never mentions seeing music, which I do, to a degree. Different tones look different to me, but they don’t sound different – and least not in any meaningful way.

Now, this in itself is not a problem – different parts of the brain doing the parsing and so on, which (for a multitude of reasons) is very different among individuals (and can be changed through training, somewhat, or drugs). I just find it weird that Dennett seems to assume that, in general, we all work the same. Sure, there might be blind people that have fundamentally different experiences, or someone might “prefer” mental diagrams to faces, but if I “see” a person when I’m thinking of them, you do too, right? Well, no. The differences can be profound, seemingly arbitrary and often go unnoticed for a long time, maybe even for life. Just compare what mathematical statements and explanations are “obvious and trivial” to some people and “confusing and impossible to understand” to others upon first hearing them. Or go into the Mythbusters forum and watch multiple people arguing that, of course!, X is true or false, it’s so obvious!, but everyone with a different argument, often all contradicting each other.

Personally, I don’t even feel that it is justified to assume that there even is such a thing as an “experience” in any non-individual way. To say that there is such a thing as “a mental image of a face”, in general, instead of saying “that what John Doe calls a mental image of a face”, is very counter-intuitive and needs strong evidence to back it up. There probably is a unique brain pattern, a specific firing of neurons perhaps, that can be called a specific “experience”, but those are unique to each brain. It might be true that there are common patterns among people, at least in some cases, but those have to be established – which Dennett simply doesn’t do. The very idea, that like we mean the same animal when we say “dog” (with small caveats), we mean the same mental state when we say “think of a dog”, is, to me, almost absurd. There is some functional equivalence going on, sure, otherwise communication would be impossible, but the exact implementations vary so much that such a catalogue is doomed from the start. There is a common advice among users of strong hallucinogenic drugs: If you feel something discomforting and can’t figure out what it is – like you never had this experience before? Almost certainly, you just have to pee. “When in doubt, go to the toilet.” has so far never let me down, even though the same thing has felt very different every time.

I studied Kurzweil’s analysis and finally realized – by gods, the man is right! If you plot major milestones, you can clearly see a trend! Unfortunately, Kurzweil’s plot is a little outdated and some details are wrong, so I updated it.

Here is his version:

Here is the fixed version:

I can see it now! The Sincowlarity is near! Transbovines are already emerging!

Kurzweil, you are a genius!

Kurzweil is amazing in that he is wrong even after only half a decade! Clarke at least is sometimes correct when predicting stuff half a century away, but Kurzweil couldn’t even design a five-year-plan for a socialist utopia. He even gets his own data wrong in determining the date for the singularity. That’s mind-boggling. It’s really takes a special kind of intelligence to be so stupid.

Based on JBR’s scoring system, I’ll award between 0 to 1 point per prediction, depending on how good it was. Of course, I only rate predictions that can already be judged (and exclude those that are so vacuus that they don’t say anything at all, like “The rate of paradigm shift (technical innovation) is accelerating, right now doubling every decade.”). “Partially borrowed” from Wikipedia.

1. “We will have the requisite hardware to emulate human intelligence with supercomputers by the end of this decade.” Not even a single component of the brain can be emulated. 0 points.
2. Automatic Speech-Recognition Software with good accuracy in 2000. Muahaha. This one is a postdiction and yet, “good”? Yeah, right. Well, it isn’t entirely awful, but “good”?! 0.5 points.
3. Computers will start to disappear as distinct physical objects, meaning many will have nontraditional shapes or will be embedded in clothing and everyday objects. No. I still don’t have a fridge that orders new milk and I’ve been promised one since I was born! 0 points.
4. Full-immersion audio-visual virtual reality will exist. No. In fact, entertainment systems are rapidly moving away from “immersion” (thank gods!). As far as I know, there isn’t any full-immersion for training purposes either. 0 points.
5. Glasses that beam images onto the users’ retinas to produce virtual reality will be developed. Alright, “developed” is correct, but in actual use? Personally, I expect VR to be integrated into phones instead. 0.5 points.
6. Real-time language translation in which words spoken in a foreign language would be translated into text that would appear as subtitles to a user wearing the glasses. Muahahaha! The smartest company on the planet, Google, can’t even correctly generate subtitles in the same language. 0 points.
7. Cell phones will be built into clothing and will be able to project sounds directly into the ears of their users. Yeah, right. 0 points.
8. Exoskeletal, robotic leg prostheses allow the paraplegic to walk. Ok, prototypes exist and work well. The reason they are still rare isn’t so much the robot, but rather the energy source. 1 point.
9. Telephone calls are routinely screened by intelligent answering machines that ask questions to determine the call’s nature and priority. If only! 0 points.
10. “Cybernetic chauffeurs” can drive cars for humans. Even humans can’t drive well, but robots are going to do it before they have mastered vision?! That’s… optimistic. 0 points.
11. The classroom is dominated by computers. No, just no. Laptops might have replaced paper notebooks by now, but it’s very rare for a teacher to be even aware of useful software, like SRS. 0 points. Personal prediction: this won’t be true, ever. School will go extinct before teachers apply science to their job.
12. A small number of highly skilled people dominates the entire production sector. Yes and no. Specialization is going strong, but companies are larger than ever. 0.5 points.
13. Tailoring of products for individuals is common. To a degree and for a price, yes. 0.75 points.
14. Drugs are designed and tested in simulations that mimic the human body. Nope. 0 points.
15. Blind people navigate and read text using machines that can visually recognize features of their environment. Nope. Unless you count “dogs” as machines. Because, face it, that’s how good you have to be to compete on this market. 0 points.
16. PCs are capable of answering queries by accessing information wirelessly via the Internet. 1 point.
17. By 2020, there will be a new world government. While there is still some time, just think of all the paperwork! The UN is breaking apart, the EU is becoming irrelevant and there aren’t any two superpowers speaking with each other. I think we can judge this one. 0 points.

Alright, that’s about it. 3.75 out of 17. I especially like that he is still convinced that translation software is just around the corner.

Yes, futurology will fill the void left by science fiction nicely. *chuckles*

Part 1 – Hallucinations

The Brain in a Vat

They say you only get to make first impressions once and oh boy did Dennett  make some! The book starts off with a little introduction to the old “brain in the vat” thought experiment. Just 5 pages in and I’m already raging about Dennett’s sloppiness and faulty reasoning. Let’s take it one mistake at a time:

He begins by differentiating between “possible in principle” and “possible in fact”. (As a little side note, he did the same thing when arguing that “free will” still exists in a deterministic world, another topic I completely disagree with him. Our world is not deterministic (it is, at best, probabilistic) and his re-definition of a concept of free will that is useful in practice is very weak. That’s like arguing that, while impossible in principle, I can still measure the momentum of an atom with enough accuracy I would ever need in practice, therefore I can ignore all the implications of quantum physics. A weak excuse to save his own world view instead of facing the weirdness of reality. Also, Aaron Swartz pretty much says what I think already.)
Anyway, he goes on, saying that while an incredibly (or even infinitely) powerful entity could keep your brain in a vat and fool you into believing their illusion, any remotely plausible being couldn’t do so, therefore we can safely dismiss the argument. I’m going to address the plausibility next, but first something about the argument itself.
If you are the prisoner of a powerful trickster, then you can not tell what tools they have available. You don’t know anything about their universe. They main idea of running a convincing simulation is exactly that you do not give the victim any external reference! You do not get to assume that “yesterday was real”, but “today looks different, maybe I was kidnapped by mad neurologists?”. Any information you have ever been given can be part of the simulation; that is exactly the point of running one.
Maybe they have access to infinite energy? Their universe could very well be infinite. You have no way of knowing how many resources they have because, by definition, you can not see their universe. You can estimate a lower bound, but that’s about it. You can not even tell if any property of your simulation is like the world the trickster is in. They can impose any logic, any amount of resources (provided they have more) they want. Want to run the simulation as a finite world? No problem. Impose fake concreteness, enforcing quantization of any property? Makes the source code a whole lot easier! Let information travel only at a limited speed to simplify the calculations? Sure. Because you don’t even have to run it in real time, you can enforce any speed you want, even a faster one than you have in your world! The “real” world could look so utterly alien to us that we would have to call it supernatural. And then all bets are off. But Dennett doesn’t even pretend to address this. In fact, it looks like he isn’t even aware of the literature. This is a staple of gnostic teaching, at least 3000 years old, and he gets it fundamentally wrong. The book certainly doesn’t start on a good note.

But how hard is it really to lie to a human brain? Imagine some human scientists wanted to pull this off, could they do it? Well, sure. Maybe not today, but easily in 20 years. One great simplification they could employ, that Dennett never even mentions, is taking senses away. If you have never experienced something, then you won’t miss it! If I take a fresh brain without memories and never provide it with visual feedback, then it won’t develop vision and never miss it. The necessary complexity of the simulation has just gone down a lot. We know that blind people are just as consciousness as the rest of us and I don’t think Dennett would dare argue against it, so why doesn’t he address this? Nonetheless, there is a limit here, as demonstrated by Helen Keller. If you cut away too many senses, no consciousness will develop. But we don’t need movement, we don’t need vision and we don’t need pain. Sound and speech, plus a few easy parts like smell, should be enough. We could also add touch as long as we limit movement. The human brain is also quite flexible and will adapt to new senses, like magnetism, as long as we can input it. Some body hackers have achieved neat things in that regard.
Even better, you can do this even after the person has experienced a “real” world, as long as you modify their memories as well. There are plenty of documented cases of people losing parts of their brain and not noting it. Losing a whole direction, like “left”, is not that unusual for a stroke victim. They don’t notice at all that they don’t see anything to their left, the very concept is gone. Ask them to get dressed and they only put on one sock. So if vision is too complex for you, just cut it all out. Once technology has improved, you can add it back in again.
To lie convincingly, we really only need to be consistent. If movement and touch is only binary (I touch you or not; you push or not), then the brain will think of it as normal.
Furthermore, we already have brains in vats! There are already complete simulations of neurons. Some primitive animal brains (worms, mostly) have already been simulated! As of 2010, the best we can do are small parts of a rat’s brain, but in less than 30 years, we will be able to do human brain’s as well. So his claim of this being “beyond human technology now and probably forever” is utterly ridiculous.

Strong Hallucinations

Because brains in a vat are impossible in fact, we have a problem with strong hallucinations, he continues. He defines a strong hallucination as “a hallucination of an apparently concrete and persisting three-dimensional object in the real world – as contrasted by flashes, geometric distortions, auras, afterimages, fleeting phantom-limb experiences, and other anomalous sensations. A strong hallucination would be, say, a ghost that talked back, that permitted you to touch it, that resisted with a sense of solidity, that cast a shadow, that was visible from any angle so that you might walk around it and see what its back looked like”. My first reactions to this was: “I had such hallucinations! Multiple times!” But he concludes that they must be impossible, as the brain is clearly not powerful enough to create them. This puzzled me, to say the least. I can understand him here, but my own experience seems to contradict this. In fact, because my hallucinations were so convincing, I was often reluctant to call them hallucinations at all. They were the primary reason why I was a gnostic theist. If I talked to a god, saw it, touched it, had it transform the whole world and so on, how could I possibly have hallucinated that?

Before I address this, a little side note. I didn’t notice it at first, especially when reading Breaking the Spell (a more sensible, but too careful book), but Dennett mentions Carlos Castaneda as an example of someone describing such strong hallucinations and how that fact “suggested to scientists that the book, in spite of having been a successful Ph.D. thesis in anthropology at UCLA, was fiction, not fact.”. And then it dawned on me: Dennett is an exoteric thinker. Let me explain what I mean by this. The terms esoteric and exoteric, in this context, refer to where knowledge comes from: esoteric knowledge is derived from within oneself, while exoteric knowledge is drawn from the outside world. The perceived duality is false, but this is irrelevant. What I mean when I say that Dennett is exoteric is that he looks at consciousness as an outside phenomenon, something you approach like an anthropologist, taking notes of other people’s behaviour and so on. This approach is utterly alien to me. I have always favored the esoteric approach, in which you think of consciousness (and related phenomena) as something that can only ever be addressed in your own mind. The insights of any other person are, ultimately, useless to you. This is similar to the difference between orthodox religions, that value history, authority and literalism (You can only learn about God from his Chosen.), and gnostic religions, that value personal revelations and experiences (You can only learn about God yourself.).
The consequence of this difference is that Dennett seems to me so completely inexperienced about the topic of consciousness. As far as I can tell, he never took any drugs, never meditated, never learned any spiritual teaching or anything like this. How could anyone not do this? I would never trust a chemist that never tried to build a bomb, nor would I ever trust an engineer that didn’t took apart a complex machine (like their microwave or car engine) for fun (and to see if they could put it back together again). Those would be the most natural first impulses for anyone remotely interested in the fields (and not just doing it for the profit), and they would be valuable first insights and opportunities to learn essential skills (like, “don’t get burned” for all three fields I mentioned). For example, Susan Blackmore has extensive drug and meditation experiences, as has Sam Harris and almost everyone else I know that is interested in some aspect of their own mind. I find it really hard to imagine the mindset of a person that wants to understand minds, yet doesn’t start hacking their own one right away. The term “ivory tower academic” never seemed more appropriate.

But back to the book itself. As I mentioned, I was still, at least partially, convinced I had experienced strong hallucinations before. So is Dennett’s conclusion just bullshit? Well, no. He goes on to explain how they actually might come about, and provides a great analogy in the form of a party game called “Psychoanalysis”:

In this game one person, the dupe, is told that while he is out of the room, one member of the assembled party will be called upon to relate a recent dream. This will give everybody else in the room the story line of that dream so that when the dupe returns to the room and begins questioning the assembled party, the dreamer’s identity will be hidden in the crowd of responders. The dupe’s job is to ask yes/no questions of the assembled group until he has figured out the dream narrative to a suitable degree of detail, at which point the dupe is to psychoanalyze the dreamer, and use the analysis to identify him or her.
Once the dupe is out of the room, the host explains to the rest of the party that no one is to relate a dream, that the party is to answer the dupe’s questions according to the following simple rule: if the last letter of the last word of the question is in the first half of the alphabet, the questions is to be answered in the affirmative, and all other questions are to be answered in the negative, with one proviso: a non-contradiction override rule to the effect that later questions are not to be given answers that contradict earlier answers. For example:

Q: Is the dream about a girl?
A: Yes.
but if later our forgetful dupe asks
Q: Are there any female characters in it?
A: Yes [in spite of the final t, applying the noncontradiction override]

When the dupe returns to the room and begins questioning, he gets a more or less random, or at any rate arbitrary, series of yeses and noes in response. The results are often entertaining. Sometimes theprocess terminates swiftly in absurdity, as one can see at a glance by supposing the initial question asked were “Is the story line of the dream word-for-word identical to the story line of War and Peace?” or, alternatively, “Are there any animate beings in it?” A more usual outcome is for a bizarre and often obscene story of ludicrous misadventure to unfold, to the amusement of all. When the dupe eventually decides that the dreamer — whoever he or she is — must be a very sick and troubled individual, the assembled party gleefully retorts that the dupe himself is the author of the “dream.”

This is, in a way, very close to how some parts of the human brain actually work. Most processing doesn’t start with the facts and derives a hypothesis that it then tests (as science should work), but rather is overeager to find patterns. Instead, you get a face recognition system that is totally convinced that this is a face, no doubt about that! Oh, it was just some toast, oh well. But it totally look like a face! Like the Virgin Mary, even! You just need to slightly disorient this part, or feed it random noise, and it will see faces everywhere, in the walls, the trees, your hand, everything. Or nowhere, of course, depending on the exact disturbance.
And I began to think, if you just disturb a few crucial areas involved in parsing important objects (like faces, intentions, geometric patterns and so on), and this isn’t particularly hard, you really only need to cut off the regular input (as when sleeping), then the narrative parts of the brain are in quite a tricky situation. Their job is to make sense of all that, rationalizing both the outside world and your own behaviour. This is crucial in social situations; you really wanna figure out fast who is plotting against you and whom you can trust. In fact, it is so useful, that even quite a bit of false positives isn’t so bad. Some paranoia or thinking your PC hates you isn’t so bad and can even help you analyze situations (like thinking that “the fire wants to eat up all the oxygen”). Dennett calls this particular analysis the “intentional stance”.
Now, if the narrator is only given (pseudo-)random noise, it will impose any story it thinks is most natural, i.e. most of the time other human(oid)s, recent emotions and so on. This is exactly how dreams work and, in fact, most drug-induced hallucinations as well. The exact distortion and resulting flexibility in making up a good story depends on the drug, of course, and is quite interesting in itself.
But does this really explain my own strong hallucinations? I was reluctant to accept this at first, but now have to agree with Dennett here. Thinking back, and based on the most recent experiments, I am forced to concede this point. I never met an agent, or phenomenon at all, that was able to act against my own will. James Kent, of tripzine.com, describes this well:

However, the more I experimented with DMT the more I found that the “elves” were merely machinations of my own mind. While under the influence I found I could think them into existence, and then think them right out of existence simply by willing it so. Sometimes I could not produce elves, and my mind would wander through all sorts of magnificent and amazing creations, but the times that I did see elves I tried very hard to press them into giving up some non-transient feature that would confirm at least a rudimentary “autonomous existence” beyond my own imagination. Of course, I could not. Whenever I tried to pull any information out of the entities regarding themselves, the data that was given up was always relevant only to me. The elves could not give me any piece of data I did not already know, nor could their existence be sustained under any kind of prolonged scrutiny. Like a dream, once you realize you are dreaming you are actually slipping into wakefulness and the dream fades. So it is with the elves as well. When you try to shine a light of reason on them they dissolve like shadows.

And so I gave up on believing in them, as reality, as Philip K. Dick said, “is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away”.

One last thought one the topic, though: Dennett contradicts himself here. If it is so relatively easy to lie to the brain, to convince it to see patterns that aren’t there – and he even provides a mechanism: don’t lie to the senses, lie to the interpreting part – how can he still dismiss the brain in the vat so easily? He has just described, in detail, how you would go about setting up a relatively easy simulation! He really hasn’t thought about the simulation argument nor does he have much experience with hallucinations, and it shows. But the mechanism is clever and I hope he will elaborate more on it.

This covers the Prelude. Chapter 1 will follow soon.

This is a really neat idea in principle, but unfortunetaly, the execution is rather lacking. The enforced simplicity (every programm has to fit on one page) ignores many realistic kinds of bugs. None of the examples require much background knowledge, which at first looks like a good idea, but again is rather unrealistic. If I’m writing a level generator for a game and my random number generator has a bug, then I’ll probably only see it in some cases and finding it may require a bit of statistical knowledge. Just because I dislike statistics doesn’t mean I get to ignore them.

Especially bad is the fact that there are no performance optimizations. The code is always as clean and simple as it can be to solve the problem, but that’s not what real code looks like. In some cases, this is alright, but there are plenty of low-level function like memory allocation, string parsing or sorting and those normally have the hell optimized out of them. A “clever trick” is exactly the kind of thing that is widespread, evil and buggy.

Also, the examples sometimes aren’t really typical. The Python and Perl code in particular looks nothing like normal code.
The Python code is way too low-level, uses no list comprehension and barely anything of the extensive library. In short, it’s rather unpythonic and looks a lot more like quickly converted C code.
The Perl code has multiple comments and meaningful variable names, something no self-respecting Perl hacker would ever use. :>

It’s a bit hard to avoid because you can’t throw around all the neat little features everyone familiar with the language would use while still assuming that the reader has at best a passing knowledge themselves. It would have been a lot better to either stick with a common and small language (like C) or use pseudo code instead. Most bugs aren’t language specific anyway, so this wouldn’t have hurt the book.

Finally, some of the example code is just… strange. There is one Java example that wants to find out whether a year is a leap year or not. The relevant logic is this:

// A leap year is a multiple of 4, unless it is
// a multiple of 100, unless it is a multiple of
// 400.
//
// We calculate the three values, then make a
// 3-bit binary value out of them and look it up
// in results.
//
final boolean results[] =
    { false, false, false, false,
     true, false, false, true };
if (results[
    ((((yearAsLong % 4) == 0) ? 1 : 0) << 2) +
    ((((yearAsLong % 100) == 0) ? 1 : 0) << 1) +
    ((((yearAsLong % 400) == 0) ? 1 : 0) << 0)]) {
    throw new LeapYearException();
} else {
    throw new NotLeapYearException();
}

If I ever meet anyone who uses something like this, then all my promises of non-violence will be void. However, it is a rather typical example of the twisted and mad code a Java programmer would write, so kudos to the author. It’s still an abomination, though.

Anyway, a lot of wasted potential. *sigh*

I’d like to say “It’s not you; it’s me.”, but this wouldn’t be true. It is you. You just suck beyond reason, suck more than I could have ever imagined.

You know, Perl. It’s the year 2010. Unicode is almost 20 years old. Do you speak it? Of course not. So why do you pretend you do?

You lie to me. “man perlretut” tells me:

\w matches a word character (alphanumeric or _), not just [0-9a-zA-Z_] but also digits and characters from non-roman scripts

But you don’t. “\w+” doesn’t match any Japanese string whatsoever. Not even “Freischütz”. Like, really.

I tell you, explicitely, to use Unicode. You don’t. You match what the fuck you want to match. You really don’t care at all.

Nor can you handle Unicode in a string anyway. You don’t understand how long it is. Or how to print it correctly. Or how to split it. Nothing.

Perl, it’s over. I’m leaving. And I’m not coming back.

What conclusion am I talking about? “Music is a parasite.”, or in practical terms, “Music is bad for you and exploits you.”. This is a very radical statement, so initial skepticism is very much understandable. If it comforts you, let me get one thing out of the way: I do not object to music out of “spiritual” or “religious” reasons, which, unfortunately, seems to be the most common case. Most likely, music does not “corrupt your character” or “lead you away from God” or any such nonsense. It is also not really an argument for asceticism. No, my main argument comes from memetic theory and a cost/benefit analysis. It is, in principle, a very similar argument broad forward by atheists against religion. The Four Horsemen of Atheism (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, all truly awesome) have argued very much alike, but against religion. I will try to show that their reasoning extends to more fields, one of which is music. This is not meant to falsify or parody their position (I in fact agree with it), but to explore and demonstrate the real ramifications.

Before I get going, let’s clarify 3 things. Firstly, I will build on memetic theory, so you will probably need to know what it’s about to understand some of my reasoning. You may want to read “The Meme Machine” by Susan Blackmore or some of Daniel Dennett’s recent books, like “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”, or at least google it. The arguments aren’t really very technical, but if you aren’t familiar with basic evolution or what a meme is, then my points may seem alien to you. To understand the perspective of replicators, it will also help greatly to read “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins.

Secondly, let’s establish a few terms. I will refer to “not having music” as amusicality, analog to “not believing in god(s)” being atheism. This is totally different from being tone-deaf, disliking music or the like. To be honest, I was a great fan of music, so this is also not a “disgruntled outsider” kind of argument. Furthermore, I take it as a given that music is a highly advanced memeplex (i.e. group of memes that support each other), in the same way as religion or language, and as such is a replicator and subject to evolution, but independent of genes.

And lastly, why I will bring no argument for amusicality. It might seem odd that I only attack arguments for music, but have no strong argument of my own why “not having music” is too be favored. This follows the same logic of atheism: the one’s making the claim are the one’s in need of evidence and arguments. The Null Hypothesis (i.e. “there is no correlation between A and B” or “A doesn’t exist” or similar) is the default position of science. We start off with an empty set of assumptions and every one we want to add has to be substantiated. To successfully defend the skeptic position, I only have to dismantle all the evidence proponents show, not actively prove the impossibility of the claim. Atheists are used to it in terms of religion: You only show there is no reason to believe in god(s), you don’t need to show there is any evidence against god(s). This is logically evident, as disproving such claims is often impossible or simply impractical.
However, my position isn’t exactly that bleak. I actually can make one simple argument for “not having music”: it eats up your time. Replace any time you spend listening to music with something actually beneficial and you are in a better position. But even if music were “free” (as in, would use up no resources), my position would still be the rational one.

So let’s go and see all the arguments in favor of music. To be clear, it is rare for anyone to defend all of them. But they are, as far as I know, all proposed seriously and the list is complete. Here we go:

The Argument from History.

Humans have been playing music for, at least, thousands of years and probably millions of years. It is completely natural for us to do so. Evolution has shaped our brain to encourage this.

This is true, but a fallacy: what “is” can never inform us what “ought” to be. Evolution has also made men good at killing and raping, for example. (And also enabled us to use language and science, of course.) What has happened in the past can inform us, but can not be our sole guide. You must provide actual, current benefits.

In fact, I suspect there is a strong correlation with “being spiritual” and “liking music”. The link is probably the ease with which memes can enter your brain – your memetic immune system, if you want. This holds true for me (I was a gnostic theist for a long time, having personally talked to several gods and all. It was a hard struggle towards logic and reason for me.) and many people I know. But in the end, it is just a suspicion, and I wouldn’t commit to it.

The Argument from Social Integrity.

Human society is, among other things, united by music. People engage in collective music, like festivals, camp fires or choirs. They define their own identity through it (“Are you a metalhead, too?”). It is one reason why human society is so stable and productive. Do you want to advocate chaos and anarchy?

This is probably the strongest argument in favor of music. It is true that music is a very important social “glue” and it might very well be true that society as we know it would not function without it. But the same thing can be said of religion. There is not a single historical case of a society that got from family-sized tribes to city-states without major help from religion. That, however, doesn’t make any religion particularly true. And even if this were true in the past, it doesn’t have to be true for the future.

I’ll have to admit that I can not completely disprove this argument. I would not advice on any changes to society, like outlawing music, but I can point some things out.
First, there are societies without music. The most famous one are the Taliban, who are thriving and have a stable history. They certainly are a competitive and strong society. Also, the deaf community is active and very tight-knit. The claim is probably overstated, but might have some justification.
Second, I do understand the danger of trying to experiment on this. What if the argument is right and we accidentally do harm civilization? Is it really worth the risk?

Those are powerful ideas, but in the end, I accept the risk for my life. I only advocate self-experimentation and personal growth, not necessarily a revolution. Even if society can only tolerate “some” abstinence, it would be an improvement. Any freed mind would increase our collective mental capacity.

The Argument from Pleasure.

Humans take great joy from music. It invokes many emotions, from happiness to anger to sadness. It gives their life meaning, but also just passes boredom.

This one is easy to argue against, but hard to understand. You do not enjoy music because of benefits, but because music is shaped (and has shaped you) to be enjoyable. It (ab)uses your reward system, your fear response, anger response and so on, to pass itself on. It is self-perpetuating, making you feel good so you listen to it so you feel good so you listen to it… Memetic evolution predicts this: brains that are “bored” without music will propagate it more, so any successful music will incorporate selection for this property. This is obvious to any outsider, as it is with any drug, but not for the afflicted. Observe anyone under the effect of a drug, during a panic attack and so on, while you yourself are neutral, unaffected. They will be blind to it; their brain pays no attention to this fact.

Arguing that pleasure in itself is a good thing, is tautological at best and addictive behaviour at worst. If you propose this, then you should also strive for direct stimulation of your reward center. Electrodes can be inserted, a little switch can be attached and you can sit there all day, feeling great! This is what this argument is really saying.

The Argument from Morals.

Music can influence our moral behaviour. Playing wholesome and delightful music to children will shape their character for the better!

This is a bold statement, especially because it has no evidence whatsoever. There is no psychological study supporting this, no disproportionately large chunk of deaf people in jail, no connection between crime rate and music education. If there is any link, it is minuscule.

There is, however, a strong connection between indoctrination and music. Almost every cult, religion or otherwise strong ideology will use music for its purposes. Music’s strong  potential to move people’s emotion can easily be exploited to instill fake unity, bliss or aggression. I would not go so far to disqualify music for this reason, but reject any moral claims as at least neutral. If it has positive effects, it might as well have negative ones. You can not advocate only the one part you profit from.

This argument is sometimes used negatively, e.g. “Modern music corrupts our children!”. If you believe it, you must accept this conclusion as well. Music censorship, at least partially, would be the only responsible thing to do.

The Argument from Profits.

Billions of dollars are involved. Music is a very profitable industry.

So is heroin. I don’t feel I have to say more about this; it is such an empty argument.

The Argument from Benign Symbiosis.

Music is useful to us. It enhances our ability to recognize patterns. It supports the learning of languages. It improves our ability to adopt other memes. It has been documented that children that learnt an instrument perform better in school. Music can help to treat mental illnesses.

There exists barely any valid research for any of those claims. The strongest is probably the learning of languages. Basically, this uses musics strong reproductive capabilities by hijacking it. You take language memes, like a poem, or just some words, and apply them as text to some music, thereby making them “stick” a lot better. This seems to work, as far as we can tell. There is, of course, no conclusive evidence. (This is mostly because of the failure of language education and linguistics, and unrelated to music, in my opnion.)

But is this worth its price? Are you able to contain it? Recall that you are using music exactly because it is so fertile. It seems like the opposite of a safe operation to me. Also, is it really effective? Instead of using music to get small benefits in school or elsewhere, read books. Learn critical thinking. Solve puzzles. Address the problem directly, instead of trying to do it through some remote synergy with a symbiant.

However, it can be argued that music was a major driving force behind the development of our big brains. We needed more and more capable meme machines to spread music more reliably, so we were selected for it. We profit from this because the human brain is largely a universal machine, not specialized for any particular meme and so all kinds of useful memes spread better as well. Everyone wants a better memetic “soil”, if you want. But if this is true (I suspect it is), then there is a fiendish little twist to it: We can exploit the parasite now! Sure, music used us for its own purposes, endowing us with bigger brains to get a better chance itself, but now that we have those brains, we don’t need to have any affiliation to music anymore! What do we care if music survives? Let’s use those brains for something good! So long, and thanks for all the neurons!

The medical use of music might be justified. Psychotherapy is in a terrible state right now, but the existing studies seem to support effectiveness of music in some cases. While I personally would prefer other methods, I would nonetheless agree that a reasonable case can be made for music in the hands of a professional. And this is the crux: we are talking about serious illnesses and therapy, certainly not recreational use.

Finally, I feel that this argument is very dishonest. It is really a rationalisation. No one sits down, thinks “Hey, singing those songs would get me better test scores in 10 years!” and then does so. You listen to music because you like it. Later on come the “reasons” and “beliefs” on why it really is good for you. If I showed studies disproving all such claim, would it change the argument? Most likely not. You would still listen to music, those scientists be damned. They are probably frauds anyway!

Conclusion

In the end, you will have to admit one thing: your attitude towards music, and your rationalizing of it, are indistinguishable from memetic addiction. You are being exploited by it. Music has shaped your brain for its reproductive advantages. Sure, you may have won some sexual selection yourself, but this is of little concern to music. The memeplex has all characteristics of a virus. It eats up as much of individual resources as it can without disabling its host. You are constantly encouraged to listen to more music, get more music, recommend it to your friends and so on. It spreads for the sake of spreading. Good music is judged not by its inherent benefits to individuals or the species, but by how popular it is, that is, how good it is at spreading. Being an ear worm is a good thing for music to be. If someone states he doesn’t listen much to music, then the most common response is one of disbelief, utterances of “How empty and meaningless my life would be without music!”, of “What is wrong with you? Are you depressed?”, followed by hundreds of recommendations because “There has to be some music out there that you like! Just listen more to it!”.

It is the behaviour of addicts. If you are not devoted to music, at least a bit, you must try harder! These are memes that ruthlessly exploit their hosts. Natural selection has shaped them to be highly resistant, persuasive and addictive. All of music theory and education is only occupied with how to make more popular music, how to spread it better, how it increase its impact. It conveys no message (or only an empty shell of one), it teaches nothing, it gives you nothing except pleasure. It circumvents the purpose of a reward system by directly stimulating it without giving something in return. It is a parasite.

But what now?

I thought, “Okay, calm down. Let’s just try on the not-believing-in-God glasses for a moment, just for a second. Just put on the no-God glasses and take a quick look around and then immediately throw them off”. So I put them on and I looked around.

I’m embarrassed to report that I initially felt dizzy. I actually had the thought, “Well, how does the Earth stay up in the sky? You mean we’re just hurtling through space? That’s so vulnerable!” I wanted to run out and catch the Earth as it fell out of space into my hands…

I wandered around in a daze thinking, “No one is minding the store!” And I wondered how traffic worked, like how we weren’t just in chaos all the time. And slowly, I began to see the world completely differently. I had to rethink what I thought about everything. It’s like I had to go change the wallpaper of my mind.

-Julia Sweeney, “Letting Go of God (which my title is, of course, an allusion to)

That’s a bit how I feel right now. Really, can my reasoning be right? It must be wrong! Dvořák’s 9th symphony, a parasite? ゆらゆら帝国’s “Sweet Spot”, detrimental? Demons & Wizards, really a satanic band? Impossible! And even if, can I ever be able to let go of them? Can I not listen to music? Will I not die of boredom, depression, isolation? Will it not cheapen my life to be amusical? Will nostalgia not overpower me?

But it begins to settle in. I remember the same thing, happening to religion. Not praying, not talking with the gods, not feeling this sense of mystical bliss, this was really hard for me. But it is the only honest thing to do. The only true understanding you can have. And after a while, the old way seems silly. You begin to truly understand the world a bit better, not making excuses, running down dead ends, but learning an actual powerful lesson.

No one said it would be easy. Letting go of those false attachments is hard, but it is worth it. I expect to get more comfortable with it over time. It will probably take weeks until I like my decision, and plenty of thought and meditation. The full implications of being a meme machine begin to settle in. My thoughts are not my possessions, I am just one of them. They are not “my” thoughts, not “my” believes, not “my” desires. I do not create them, or control them. There truly is no self. My brain is just a kind of computer, running all kinds of programs. And some of those – are viruses.

New habits will grow to fill the void, better habits. New memes will come. The world goes on.

But in order to [see itself], evidently [the world] must first cut itself up into at least one state which sees, and at least one other state which is seen. In this severed and mutilated condition, whatever it sees is only partially itself. We may take it that the world undoubtedly is itself (i.e. is indistinct from itself), but, in any attempt to see itself as an object, it must, equally undoubtedly, act so as to make itself distinct from, and therefore false to, itself. In this condition it will always partially elude itself.

To any person prepared to enter with respect into the realm of his great and universal ignorance, the secrets of being will eventually unfold, and they will do so in a measure according to his freedom from natural and indoctrinated shame in his respect of their revelation.

existence*
* ex = out, stare = stand. Thus to exist may be considered as to stand outside, to be exiled.

George Spencer Brown, in Laws of Form

I could quote the man all month. *gush*

But when I looked at my notebook (the paper one, that is), I realized what he really meant. The languages start to merge and the families and cultures start to develop new patterns. It’s the difference between a single switch and millions of them that make up a computer. You begin to understand people not in one particular mindset that your first language (and its culture) imposed on you, but soon develop alternatives (the second or third language) and then begin to see general patterns. You go from the perspective of the Romans, who realized that Greek had something to do with Latin, but they couldn’t quite figure out what exactly, to a more general view that understands the development of the Indo-European language as a whole, to maybe a global perspective.

Anyway, enough “make me one with everything”, I actually just realized I used German (using both the modern and old German Kurrent writing), English, Japanese, Ouwi and some ad-hoc pictograms on the same page in a coherent manner. You know you are a polyglot once you run out of space for all the languages to use.

I will not reflect on large parts of reality, but only a small one: window managers (WM). [1]

The most basic ignorance about WMs is the ignorance about their existence. The computer does not just show data to us, but it can show it to us in any way we want. It is this basic understanding that leads to the first conclusion: If the way data is shown to us is lacking, it is not our fault, but the computer is not doing it’s job properly. Furthermore, if we have to spend a lot of time just telling the computer how we would like to see something, we are actually doing someone (or rather, something) else’s work.

Therefore, tiling WMs. If you arrange your own windows, why are you using a WM at all? Wouldn’t it be more honest, instead of saying “I’m running Windows / KDE / OS X to show my windows”, to admit “Windows / KDE / OS X is running me to show it’s windows.”? Sure, the computer can not read your mind and some occassional hints might be necessary, but the less work you do, the better.

Desire creates suffering. This is maybe the most misunderstood of Buddhist truthes. People hear “desire creates suffering” and think “What? Is this going to be a moral how material possesions are bad for me? Money, cars, houses and so on lead to greed, obsession, and so on. I get it.”. This is not what this is about. The problem with desire is not the desire itself. It is not a problem that we want to be happy, to be rich and so on. The problem is, instead, that what we want is impossible. Our desires fail us. We are mistaken about the nature of reality and expect the wrong things. We think that money could make us happier, so we want more of it, but it ultimately won’t. From wrong assumptions you can only get bad results.

In retrospect, I can see this clearly now on my journey to a better window manager. It was my unwillingness to let go of old habits, my wrong ideas about what I really need or want, that made adopting a new WM hard. So I went first to WMs that offered great configuralibity and many features. “You can do anything you want!” But this lead to useless features and distractions. It is only now that most WMs fail me because my hardware setup is a bit tricky, that I can understand. Only now when I understand better what my brain really needs, do I grow tired of those full of bad design.

Xmonad, in a way, is peace for me. It is mathematical in nature. The fact that it is written in Haskell might seem like a gimmick at first, but the connection is in fact very deep. I understand now that it could not have been written in anything else. Xmonad exemplifies the idea of purely functional programming. “Normal” programming is almost always imperative – the programmer tells the computer how to do something. But in functional programming, the hacker instead tells the computer what something is. This is a profound difference.[3]

In any other customizable WM I have ever used, I would create a complex configuration to tell it exactly what I wanted it to do in some case or another. I would do the bulk of the lifting, so to speak, either by constantly adjusting the windows the WM handled wrong or by writing elaborate procedures to automate this work. But with Xmonad, this is different. It is not my job to figure out how to arrange windows, so I should never have to tell my WM anything about this. The only thing I ever have to tell it is about what is. I should never write something like “to go to the next tag, you read in all tags, sort them, filter some out, find the current one and then shift to the next in the list”. I instead write: “I want the next non-empty, non-visible tag now”. I give Xmonad a few simple hints and that is it. “If it’s name is in this list, I want it floating. If I’m currently out of space here, try a different screen. There is a status bar I’m running, so be careful not to overlap it.”

For the first time, I feel like my WM is actually intelligent and wants to help me. It is not my slave, not my servant who follows my orders. It does not look down on me, thinking itself smarter than me, only an obstactle to its flawless performance. Instead, Xmonad is my friend. It understands window handling and can take care of it. I only tell it some personal preferences. If it doesn’t think I need something, it is probably right.

It is astonishing how easily we pick up delusions. We see something once and think it should always be that way. Rarely do we question “Is this really necessary? Is there no other way?”

For me, those are some of the delusions that clouded my judgement about WMs.

“I need space! I want to see my desktop wallpaper!” What for? Have I not something better to do than to stare at pretty pictures?

“I want to tell my WM what window is in the foreground and what in the background.” The very concept is wrong. There is no “foreground” with focus – you either see something or you don’t. A window you can not read might as well not be there at all.

“I understand now, I use a tiling WM. But I want to control what window is where!” Why? The very idea of a tiling WM is that the WM figures out what to show you and how. You simply tell it what application has your focus right now and what other applications belong to it (by giving them all the same tag / workspace).

“Xmonad has no stacked layout like wmii! I can not easily put dozens of windows in one column!” Why would you do this in the first place? You certainly can not read them all. Let Xmonad only show you the ones that matter and search for other ones if you need them. Or think about grouping them better. Why open 20 PDFs in separate windows if your viewer can take care of that?

“Xmonad has no title bars.[4] I will miss those!” Are you sure? What do you use them for? The window content itself tells you what the window is. If the content is not visible, then a title bar will only waste space. If you need to find something, let the WM do it for you. If you want status reports, use notifications.

By embracing not complexity, but simplicity, confusion ends. The best solution to a problem is to make it obsolete – as Gordon Bells said, “The cheapest, fastest, and most reliable components are those that aren’t there.”. By concentrating not on “how”, but on “what”, false desires disappear. By letting go off false desires, suffering ends.

[0] Yeah, I have been reading Buddhist philosophy and history again. Can you tell?
[1] The old monks have understood one thing: Truths about reality must be visible everywhere. There can not be any aspect of reality that is not permeated by them. Thus, we can improve our efforts by just focusing on one simple object. Traditionally, one’s breath, a candle or a rock have served this purpose. Some Zen traditions use 只管打坐 (shikantaza, “simply correct sitting”) for this. If you can’t understand reality just by sitting down and concentrating, then reality can’t be understood at all.  Therefore we must be able to see all those Buddhist observations in everything we use, including the most fundamental GUI software – our window manager.
[2] I will focus exclusively on *nix. There are tiling WMs for Windows, OS X etc., but they are all very lacking.
[3] The classical example to demonstrate this is Quicksort. If you have ever programmed something, Quicksort was probably among it, but just to help you remember, I’m gonna tell you again what Quicksort is. We define Quicksort recursively like so: An empty sort is always sorted. To sort a list with at least one element, we take the first element (called the pivot) in the list and then separate the rest into two lists, one containing all the elements that are smaller and one containing all that are larger than the pivot. Now, to get the sorted result, we simply sort the first list, than add the pivot and finally add the sorted second list. Think about how you would solve this in an imperative language. In C, it would go something like this:

void swap(int *a, int *b)
{
  int t=*a; *a=*b; *b=t;
}
void sort(int arr[], int beg, int end)
{
  if (end > beg + 1) {
    int piv = arr[beg], l = beg + 1, r = end;
    while (l < r) {
      if (arr[l] <= piv)
        l++;
      else
        swap(&arr[l], &arr[--r]);
    }
    swap(&arr[--l], &arr[beg]);
    sort(arr, beg, l);
    sort(arr, r, end);
  }
}

This is a typical example – we tell the computer exactly what to do to get the result we are interested in. But remember I said that in a functional language, we tell the computer what something is. I already told you what Quicksort is, so let’s write this down in Haskell:

qsort [] = []
qsort (x:xs) = qsort lesser ++ [x] ++ qsort greater
     where lesser  = [y | y <- xs, y < x]
           greater = [y | y <- xs, y >= x]

And that’s it.
[4]Technically, you can add them, but they are not normally there.