Author: Anand Philip

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Thoughts about Minds 1: What is consciousness?

Posted on by Anand Philip


The whole of life is just like watching a flick.. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it all out yourself from the clues. And you never, never get a chance to stay in your seat for the second house.

― Victor, from Terry Pratchett’s, Moving Pictures

This post summaries my personal understanding of consciousness, I have not read widely in the topic, beyond the SEP pages on some theories of consciousness, and a few papers. I am not sure I understand most of what’s going on in those entries, and so I have not made an attempt to compare and contrast my ideas with those that are more formally defined. My attempt is to explain to myself and to those who read this, what I understand and believe, and to build on this, learn from its weaknesses etc.

In a sentence, my belief is that consciousness is identical to sensation; distinguishing ‘experience’ from ‘sensation’ adds no predictive or explanatory value in the domains we can study.

This is not a grand unified theory of every kind of consciousness. It is not about everything consciousness could or could not be. This is about what it appears to be in the reality we know. It is about explaining the physical, not the metaphysical.

What IS Consciousness

I think of consciousness as the experience of being. It is the ability of a living thing to sense itself and the environment around it. This is not an illusion, nor is it a separate non-physical entity. It is the physical reality of sensation. I do not know of any properties of consciousness that require anything other than sensations to explain it.  Both these factors are important. Life is needed because without it there is no need or even ability to react. Life wishes to continue to live, and this is at odds with the reality it is in, which has no needs. Sensations allow life to navigate existence. A thermostat does not react, it produces a fixed outputs given a set of fixed inputs and it desires neither the input nor the output. Disconnect the electricity and the thermostat will not panic. Reduce the amount of glucose in a bacterial culture, and boy you’re going to see some frantic activity. This is the simplest model I can think of that explains as much as possible.

In my view, the sensation of being is the same as the experience of being. When I say ‘sensation,’ I’m not referring to a third-person, observable process that can be measured from the outside. Sensation is, by definition, the first-person, ‘felt’ capacity itself. We can write down what sensations feel like, or reproduce the stimulus that causes them, but the sensation itself is the organism’s private, physical reaction. When an organism experiences something, it is sensing that thing. Sensations take some time, limited by biology and physics, to make themselves known or heard, and so this experience might appear at a different time than an event, and this has its own ramifications.

There are also abstractions that life builds on top of the sensation that allow it to sense or feel or experience other things, but all of that is (mediated by) the ability to sense. Every experience is sensation, the organism’s stimulus detection and response.1

What is the purpose of sensation?

The purpose of anything life produces is ultimately the propagation of life. But this is often not immediately obvious because the discovery of what helps continue life is an empirical one. Integrating sensations allows for life to find food, joy, mathematics and many other wonderful things that make life want to flourish. It is a recursive process. I think the invention of sensation, of that which is sensate, was the beginning of life. It is the ability to sense along with the ability to manipulate or interact with its environment that made life as we know it on earth possible.

Why does something feel like that?

The specific character of any sensation is a product of life interacting with the world. Different frequencies of light have different properties2, they convey some information that is specific to them. Discovering these is beneficial to life. Over millions of years, we have learned to identify that specific feeling (e.g., redness) because it best serves the organism’s survival and propagation. I think of these as discovered constants. We have discovered constants in the world via language and observation, similarly, biology has discovered constants and figured out how they can cause sensations because we can only ever use information that we can sense.3

The same environmental stimulus can drive very different functions across organisms and even in the same organism, and conversely, similar functions can be achieved using different physical stimuli and receptors. The diversity lies in receptor biophysics, transduction cascades, and neural decoding, not in any change to the stimulus’ physical nature.

The philosopher’s question ‘Why does P feel like E?’ is a misunderstanding of biology. They are searching for a universal, necessary law when the answer is contingent and evolutionary. The ‘feeling’ of redness is the specific mechanism of recognition that our lineage found useful. That’s it. We know this mapping is contingent because other creatures have solved the same problem differently.4 The function is recognition; the sensation is the biological method of achieving that function. To ask ‘why’ it feels like anything is to ignore that the feeling is the solution.

There is no universal “redness” or “pain.” These are highly individualized, biologically useful constants that are unique to each biological system and perhaps even an individual. The identity of red as we sense it is a constant that allows our “machine” to build abstractions and navigate the world effectively.

This also explains why not all of our sensations are accurate, they are useful even when they are not accurate. For e.g. Our ability to see the color purple. In the human brain for, a constant that we react to are edges. There are neurons which fire when they sense edges, and the current exploration with CNNs show that this is beneficial even for an ANN to be able to differentiate things and classify objects. Qualia are the sensation of biologically or socially learned constants.

How is sensation organized?

The “self” is a real, composite functional entity, an integrated machine of sensations, memories, and reactions, like pixels of different colors representing different objects in a photograph. The whole is almost never verbally or symbolically represented or represent-able; it is changing, and reactive. Different sensory mechanisms react in different ways to different sensory inputs and what we feel as a self, is a self-other differentiation, and this is not particularly strong, but it is measurable in fMRI studies. This differentiation is a sensed fact, which allows us to draw boundaries around our selves, providing a feeling of unity. I don’t think any human has ever experienced  themselves as a perfectly synchronized One. We are legion and that is our experience also.

But this doesn’t mean we’re just a chaotic, unbound collection. We’ve come a long way from Kant. Lessons from complexity theory and neuroscience show us the actual mechanisms for integrating this information. The ‘it’ that unifies the ‘pixels’ is the self—the learned, composite system itself. The actionable, unified event (the ‘photograph’) is created by the system’s learned drive for a specific outcome: replication and continued existence.

In humans, it is the nervous system, as far as we can tell, that provides the integration of sensation.  Although each cell possesses the ability to sense its own surroundings and interiors, and react  and make choices, the consciousness of the individual cell is not directly accessible to us. We have developed a system dedicated to sensing and reacting. The nervous system take in the billions of sensory inputs and integrate these into something that is coherent and useful.

Who has consciousness?

Any living system that detects stimuli and reacts with flexible choices possesses consciousness, including bacteria (e.g., chemotaxis in a single bacterium), plants, simple animals, and  humans. Degrees may vary by complexity: simpler systems have basic sensations, while humans have composite selves from integrated sensations/memories. Inanimate matter (e.g., rocks) or fixed-reaction machines (e.g., thermostats) lack it. I think the kind of consciousness that different organisms possesses depend on the kind of sensations they have access to, the kind of actions they have access to and the kind of map they need to build to survive. This means that the qualia of bacteria are nothing like the qualia of man.

Consciousness therefore is the product of life and sensation. Life furnishes needs and evolution builds mechanisms to meet them: stimulus–response, time tracking, internal states, maps of the external world, learning, and flexible action selection. The integrated, need-driven sensing and control keeps an organism going.

Some people require a certain amount of complexity to be present before they call something conscious, I do not see the need for this. If there is evidence that a biological entity is able to sense its environment, then it is sensate, and therefore conscious.

If a non-biological system genuinely has needs (not just designer-imposed goal functions, but intrinsic requirements for its continued existence), develops sensory mechanisms to detect relevant stimuli, and exhibits flexible, adaptive responses, then in my view, it would be conscious. But I have not thought enough about this to have a more organized view. So I will stop here.

Consciousness is often detected through observable behavioral markers: a system’s ability to sense stimuli and react with a range of choices. This is empirically tractable via neuroscience, psychology, and biology e.g., testing chemotaxis in bacteria or neural correlates in brains. But it is possible that there are conscious systems that we cannot assess or verify as being conscious, as sensation and reaction might both be just too fleeting or different from what we generally understand them as.

Mary’s Room

Mary’s Room is a famous philosophical thought experiment about knowledge and experience. Mary is a scientist who knows everything there is to know about the color red from books and descriptions but has never actually seen red herself because she has lived only in a black-and-white environment. All this is rather sad, and then one day she goes out one day and sees red light. Philosophers like to ask what happened when this happened.

When Mary leaves her black-and-white room and sees red for the first time, what does she gain? She gains a new sensation, her visual system now responds to 700nm light in a way it couldn’t before. This is real learning, but she’s learning what it feels like for her sensory system to detect red light, not learning some mysterious non-physical fact.

Reading about red told her what causes the sensation and how it works in other people. Seeing red lets her sense it directly. These are different types of physical information. Different ways of knowing, both entirely physical.

On Zombies and the Hard Problem

Philosophical zombies, also called “p-zombies” are imaginary beings invented by philosophers. In thought experiments, a p-zombie is physically and behaviorally identical to a real person but supposedly lacks any conscious sensation or subjective feeling. The idea is used to suggest that it’s somehow possible to have all the physical workings of a mind without experience or “what it’s like to be” that mind.

All the imaginations of zombies in popular culture and fiction imagine them as thinking, sensing beings, with a hyper fixation of some kind or an automatism overriding their experience. However, their actions in the philosophical epic Zombieland demonstrate how they can only ever be realized as feeling beings.

I think a p-zombie is conceivable but impossible.5 If consciousness is the sensation of detecting and reacting to stimuli in service of biological needs, then duplicating all the physical sensing and reacting necessarily duplicates consciousness. There’s no “extra ingredient” called phenomenal experience sitting on top of sensation; the experience is the sensation.

We can imagine zombies because language lets us separate concepts that reality doesn’t separate. I can imagine water that isn’t H₂O,6 but that doesn’t make it possible. Once you understand that the feeling of redness is the specific way our sensory system detects and responds to 700nm light, zombies become impossible. If you copy the sensing, you copy the experience, because they’re the same thing. There’s no gap between the sensing and the experiencing because all experience is sensation from the perspective of the system doing the sensing.

There is no hard problem of consciousness, there is only the hard problem of not being able to disprove the utility of preposterous thought experiments.

This is an attempt at a parsimonious, empirically tractable account of consciousness in living systems without importing metaphysical impedimenta.

Footnotes

  1. The response varies vastly in complexity and I should write some more about what kind of a response would qualify as conscious, etc. For later. ↩︎
  2. sensable, physical properties that can be used to identify them, thats the information, an identity, not a use or some fundamental redness. ↩︎
  3. Maybe we discovered them because they cause sensation, but that is a chicken-egg problem and I won’t go there. ↩︎
  4. [^3]: Magnetotactic bacteria build internal magnetite chains (magnetosomes) that torque cells to align with Earth’s field lines, passively steering them to preferred depths. Cephalopods express opsins and light-sensitive machinery in skin; dermal photoreception locally guides chromatophore expansion for instant camouflage without routing through the eyes. ↩︎
  5. And it irritates me no end that it took me more time to understand the technical difference than take a stance. ↩︎
  6. Actually, I can’t but David Chalmers could ↩︎

Astrology is more freeing than Science

Posted on by Anand Philip

i think belief in astrology is really about expanding the boundary of ones free will. In this bed talk I will

Our free will is bounded by physics, people1, and genetics2.

Some of these boundaries are well defined3 and wars are on to make these less bounded. eg. gender, caste, class, money etc. and some are things that are essential and so war is not the right approach, but they could come up in therapy, eg. parents4.

The default boundary we grow up with is too limiting. in order to go about our business as people we need to do a lot of things that are outside our current free will. to face the world, we need permission or a belief that we can be more and are allowed to be more because of our unique characteristics.

this has individualist as well as collectivist solutions.

the collective ones are about being a member of as many groups as can be. safely. We become members of various groups outside of the immediate family all through our life. We join social media groups, we join things for ethical reasons, we become part of sports teams, wear t shirts about niche things, identify as a nerd etc etc.

The individualistic solutions are the nuclear family, career pride, getting fit, eating clean, learning origami etc. they’re about you and how you are now, and that means you can do more things, behave differently, you have created abilities to expand your boundary.

This might make more sense to me who grew up in India, which is very authoritarian in its epistemic, than to someone who did not. “do you allow your wife to go to work?” someone asked me once, in exactly those words. in my culture, there’s stuff people are allowed to do or not based on their physical and other properties, and what the person **wants** to do is not seen as originating in themselves but the result of prescriptions. There’s food, for eg. that some people in India cannot eat, not allowed, only the म्लेच्छ have free will in this regard, the स्वच्छ and the सात्विक have their free will curtailed at this boundary 5.

And i dont think any of those solutions I mentioned above are all that different from being INTFJP, Libra or Chaotic Neutral. Astrology, Tarot, MBTI etc. all help us create new functions, new capabilities, by expanding our free will map. I think this is true in both “I made this decision because I am intuitive” and “I will listen to my inner child today” ways.

Free will, an aside:

you’re wondering, what on heart do i mean by free will and what in bell is a boundary of will. Let me get into that a little more.

your free will is the person you are, mediated by the tools you have. i say this because if your choices originate within you, they must originate in your personality and be expressed via your skills using the tools available to you6.

We learn to be the people we are based on our environment and most of our environment is other people. This is probably why personality is parent-loaded7, because they contribute both the genetic and, since they create the childhood environment, the early epigenetic.

Our skills & tools are often less parent loaded, they are more the result of later interactions between our environment and our personality. and I think our current environment, money, people,etc. that we can access and use to affect a choice, they are largely temporal loaded and they change a lot from time to time.

Back to Astrology:

all this is exactly the opposite of what science does. science, because of its addiction to the verifiable, presents a universe that is much more tightly bounded than our imaginations. And in the absence of religion/caste/whathaveyou, we often turn to reason, and science, a modern component of reason, becomes our way to be. this is kinda stupid because science is not a way of life. it’s a methodology for answering a very specific type of question leading to a very specific type of answer. and it has no answers for most of the questions we have. Which is why we often turn to other things like belief systems8.

Astrology though, describes you not as a collection of dos and donts (be it scientific ways of sleeping or ethical ways of buying) but a collection of possibilities. These are vague enough to be freeing without being too sparse to offer support when needed.

For pushing our boundaries, we need both permissions, or justifications and explanations. I see Permissions/Justifications as being forward looking. We act almost always out of necessity, inner and outer. what we can do is what is possible in the environment, and when you do something new, we are guided by what we are permitted to do, justified in doing, and then, we explain, guided by where these permissions come from.

which is why, the title.

An Aside about Indian Astrology and The featured Image:

The image is taken from Madhugantagnja. “Tajika Neelakanthi original text with translation and commentary” (1976 ed.). Varanasi: Chaukhamba Amarbharati Prakashan.

What we call astrology today seems to have been a medevial times “personalized predictive analytics” invention. The predicting and learning about the heavens project that scholars were trying to do back in the day goes way back, there are mentions of how to track the movement of stars in several vedas and the oldest indian book we have a copy of is Vedanga Jyotisha which dates back to hundred years BCE. And that book is all about making a sensible calendar, measuring days, equinoxes and stuff that we today call astronomy. How the science became the pseudoscience is still being hotly debated, but it might look a lot like how online advertising began as a branch of mathematics.

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Diggers

  1. species > biology ↩︎
  2. chemistry ↩︎
  3. Margin of a lesion ↩︎
  4. To be clear, the boundary of parents isn’t a bad thing it is the best way to learn how to be a person and some of us, like me, lucked out and were taught very fun and useful boundaries. This isn’t an antinatalist rant. Those people got issues (about having issues). ↩︎
  5. Mlechha ↩︎
  6. if you believe that your choices do not originate from within you, then I’m guessing you already believe in astrology or determinism or something ↩︎
  7. a phrase demonstrative of my statistics envy https://nextjournal.com/pc-methods/factor-loading ↩︎
  8. If your belief-boundary is concrete, like “eating for ethical reasons”, has it really pushed your boundary outwards? I don’t know, you would. ↩︎

एक तरह से देखा जाए

Posted on by Anand Philip

तो we should not create sentient life. or life. because to live is to suffer, to exist is to be in pain1.

but then, if we do not, there is no joy, there is only being. a stone *is*

is joy better than being?

in many schools of thought, the way out, the solution, the answer, is to learn *being*. to others, it seems silly to expect the living to know how to *be*.

But that is the model we have for animal minds, that somehow, they are closer to stone than we are2, which is why we are all allowed to objectify them. Not for medical experiments, but for social. Close, but not a stone.

I’m saying, be it human-made life or human-made intelligence, be it silicon or carbon, the choices, options, methods, motivations have enough overlap for transfer. What have we learned from parenting? we’ve been doing it for millions of years.

The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.

— Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

  1. For others it is because life is sacred, and the sacred is the domain of the divine, and that is a domain we were kicked out of for eating the wrong apple ↩︎
  2. But that is now not a cool thing to believe, because having a pet stone is fine, but if your life revolves around your pet stone, there’s something wrong with you, right? unless your stone has a very specific mineral composition: for some, carbon for others silicon ↩︎

Before we swallow the AI pill

Posted on by Anand Philip

Thesis: We're employing AI1 to fix problems in medicine we already know how to fix without it but can’t be arsed to.

For an ungainly amount of time now, regulators, scientists, clinical quality people, policymakers and others have been trying and failing at getting doctors to use antibiotic prescription guides to decide what first-line drug to give and what to use as second-line. no.one.cares.

every hospital and every department has their own way. I’ve seen places where different consultants in the same department had their own preference for the same diagnosis. And somehow it was the resident’s job to remember that Dr. Mehta wants ampi+genta for his appendicitis patients and Dr.Thomas would scream at you if you didn’t write cirpo+ceftriaxone+sulbactam for his appendices.

this is not limited to antibiotics; the first line anti-hypertensives used, choice of drugs for diabetes, basic investigations for low back pain and many many more things have very poor adherence to standards and evidence. reading a prescription audit paper from India is depressing. brothers and sisters, we are terrible at doing medicine according to standards or evidence.

this is because in India as in many other countries, many, perhaps most, doctors stand to make money from using specific drugs and from writing investigations2 and this, among other things, makes doctors poor governors of other doctors.

even when this direct economic benefit is not present, the science of medicine is influenced by the superstitions of medicine and the egos of the hotshots making life and death decisions. there is neither any accountability, nor any punishment3.

No amount of tech will fix this, for as long as the incentives remain broken.4

for a lot of people pushing the AI pill on to doctors, convincing us that this supposed superintelligence is to be trusted is a trick to get us to do the basics things right5. Don’t write antibiotics for someone with a viral cold FFS.

for others, it is because there is money to be made here. How many hospitals can really afford to build train and deploy their own models or even have a data-science team? In most of the world, and not just in hospitals, the datascientist is someone with an excel formula addiction and the database is the company google drive filled with weekly reports.

for a few it is about research. And, I think, that is the stage at which AI works best. that is the level of maturity of the tech itself. it is far too early to do AI (read: LLM) interventions in medicine that reach the bedside. for one, the stack keeps changing. for another, the entire tech industry is now all about how to make LLMs useful, which has nothing to do with how to make useful things.

the exception to this (no bedside rule) is probably computer vision, but still, the long road ahead there is about figuring out how it can be useful to the GP and the intern and the resident who hasn’t slept in two days and has 9 more patients to see before she gets to sleep.

Most of the work in computer vision in medicine seems to be in how to make it work for the radiologist. Which seems foolish to me, they already know how to read CT scans and MRIs, it’s the rest of us who need help. But the complexity of the operational aspects of this prevent the interventions from reaching the people who need it the most.

It’s like we’re installing more lights in well-lit areas because that’s the only place that has electricity connections.

sure, if tele-radiology can churn out more reports every day thanks to AI, this will help a lot of people everywhere, and there is a legit business opportunity and it should be taken. But it should not be confused with “democratizing healthcare”6.

The industry calls this the last mile problem; someone ought to tell them that in India as in life, the last mile is 90% of the distance7.

What I am saying is that before we swallow the AI pill, we must with brutal honesty answer the following questions.

  1. Will this help the care provider or the patient in a way that improves outcomes?
  2. Does this solve a problem the provider and the patient actually wants solved?8
  3. Is AI the right way to solve this?

And if the answer isn’t a resounding yes to the first two of those questions, maybe don’t do it.

Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.

Terry Pratchett, Hogfather (1996)

Footnotes

  1. I know AI isn’t just language models, but well, that’s what the industry is claiming, so why should we not treat chatgpt as the alpha and omega of AI? ↩︎
  2. because many if not most doctors get kickbacks or baksheesh or “referral fees” as it is called in India. And this can account for up-to a fourth of the doctor’s income ↩︎
  3. we’ve all seen the HOD’s favorite SR get away with more sins than politicians in India do. ↩︎
  4. Medicine isn’t unique in having ethical challenges, the world of AI has its own ethical issues, I recommend my slightly dated guide as a starting point: Ethical AI, Basic Readings ↩︎
  5. I am sympathetic to this camp. in fact, i think we should stop letting doctors decide first line medicines and dosages for most problems. doctors should only be allowed to tweak the prescription to the patient’s preferences or needs. ↩︎
  6. that term gives me reflux ↩︎
  7. also, we measure things in kilometers here because we are a civilized people ↩︎
  8. there are, of course any number of important questions to ask; will this intervention marginalize people who are already have a raw deal? what harms will this cause? is this sustainable? will this benefit the last woman standing in the line? ↩︎

note to self 1

Posted on by Anand Philip

Do unto others is a rule that applies in interpersonal actions.

In a system, especially a workplace1, your duty is to make things fair for you2. What is fair for you is not dependent on what is fair for every one. It is the system’s duty to make it fair for others. By the system i mean the other individuals and the processes and structures and whatnot. This is why we unionize, because it makes it easier to ask for fairness if a bunch of us are. But I don’t know if that will always work and work in your favor. I think collective action needs more energy and investment than I am willing to put into most work related things.

if you try to ensure that things are fair for you and for everyone else, you are making the assumption that you know what is fair for everyone and you don’t. You know what is fair to you.3

so you ask for that. and when something is unfair to you, you do not say OK, I will tolerate this because the system is unfair to other people also. because then you’ve just made one more unfair thing happen.

you can support things that other people want. you can speak up for those without a voice, and be transparent. all that is good. but making a system unfair for yourself because you feel bad for other people overall supports the system’s continued unfairness.

there is a malignant form of an inner-do-gooder that we are infected with, which i think of as Augustine’s influence on the world. and that is broken4. it is safe to ignore it.

  1. OK,fine, #NotAllWorkPlaces, you figure which one you’re in ↩︎
  2. within reasonable* limits ↩︎
  3. period ↩︎
  4. the world suffers from a particular form of christian morality that Augustine “invented”, and he stole a lot of it from Plato ↩︎

*professional ethics

seven things I read in 2024 that I think everyone should read; there’s no theme

Posted on by Anand Philip

Taking stock of open(ish) machine learning / 2023-06-15 by Luis Villa. A review of the good the bad the ugly the scary the confusing and the hopeful bits of open (ish) ML. Prescient too. Skip all the review papers on ML and the linkedin crap. Read this fellow.

Ur-Fascism by Umberto Eco I’ve had it with the term Fascism. Semantic and epistemic satiation has been achieved, congratulations, activists, you won. But Eco, he makes so much sense, and once you read this, the ur-facism of the online progressive is easier to spot.1

Is the love song d y i n g? By David Mora and Michelle Jia A quantitative and visual exploration of how the topics in western popular music has changed over the years. The pudding produces GREAT stuff.

Comparing cooperative geometric puzzle solving in ants versus humans 2 Some heroes wear capes, others make people carry pianos through mazes and see how ants carrying piano equivalents through mazes solve the puzzles. This paper is gold from start to finish. How do things that cannot envision 3 dimensions the way we can, do things in 3 dimensions? What strategies do humans take in solving problems when they have limited information and ability to coordinate? All your questions have answers and the answers lie in mazes filled with longhorn crazy ants.

Four Poems by Pamilerin Jacob They are all great. The first one is reproduced here, but you 100% need to read all of them.

screenshot of the poem Contradiction, available at the url above

The Baffling Intelligence of a Single Cell The story of E. coli chemotaxis By James Somers and Edwin Morris An illustrated and animated story that gives you a birds eye view and then takes you into slowly into ALL the details of exactly how these little beasts move and find food. As a bonus, in the process you also learn just how science asks questions, finds answers and how tough real science is. MIND was BLOWN

251 words you can spell with a calculator I was surprised, nay, ecstatic to learn boobies aren’t the only objects that can appear on a calculator screen.

  1. But see, all cultural criticism is astrology. It’s not meant to be science, and reading it like you would science is a mistake. ↩︎
  2. T. Dreyer, A. Haluts, A. Korman, N. Gov, E. Fonio, O. Feinerman, Comparing cooperative geometric puzzle solving in ants versus humans, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (1) e2414274121, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2414274121 (2025). ↩︎

is it not more cruel to eat plants?

Posted on by Anand Philip

we know that plants (Archaeplastida) are alive 1 2

we know they form memories 3

we know they can react to their environment in the short medium and long terms 4

we know they communicate 5

we know they have melatonin, serotonin, and a host of other chemicals that our own brain uses to convey information and do its sentience 6 7

we know they experience discomfort or some subjective experience 8 9 (counterpoint 10)

they are a living thing that has survived 2300 million years of evolution which is enough time and complexity to evolve sentience

it is possible they have language that we do not think of as symbolic representation.

in fact its entirely possible that they not only possess sentience in botanic terms, but also in neuronal terms.

it is possible they have volition and agency that does not fit the animal mechanisms of these, these are all possible and not all that difficult to imagine

all of these put together indicates that they are highly likely to be sentient even if not in the human/animal sentience spectrum or mechanism terms. 11 12

the thing that makes them different from animals, and animal sentience and their pain different from animal pain , is that we do not have sensory immediate direct empathetic (SIDEy) access to it.

empathetic access to animal pain is why we consider them sentient. there’s a model of pain in our selves that has an uncanny resemblance to the model of pain in almost all other animal bodies which we are able to access or simulate or react to via empathy (and experiments).

so the reason why we think its OK to eat plants is really that we feel no empathy for them that is automatic and hardwired the way a mirror neuron 13 is hardwired. (it’s not, i know, but you know what i mean)

we find it problematic when people and governments do not listen to those without a voice or the people without a voice that we understand, those who do not have guns, have the wrong germs and no steel. do we not have an entire industry or two built around just giving voices to those who do not have voices?

we do recognize that committing violence on them is wrong and reprehensible.

so do plants not have a good reason to have rights?

at the very least the right to be recognized as alive and possibly sentient

and the right to be not snuffed out thoughtlessly

and the promise that we will do everything we can to hear their voices and one day the confederacy will have voting plants and not just planted votes.

Note:

For non-facetious reading material from real professionals, consider the following instead:

Hansen, M.J. A critical review of plant sentience: moving beyond traditional approaches. Biol Philos 39, 13 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-024-09953-1

Myers, N. (2015). Conversations on Plant Sensing : Notes From the Field. Nature and Culture, 3, 35-66. Link to PDF

Hamilton, A., & McBrayer, J. (2020). Do plants feel pain?. Disputatio, 12(56), 71-98.

The minimal Intelligence lab – they try to figure out what intelligence is. Rigorous and philosophically exciting.

Footnotes

  1. Because they have an entry in the EOL: C Michael Hogan (Lead Author);Daniel Robert Taub (Topic Editor) “Plant”. In: Encyclopedia of Earth. Eds. Cutler J. Cleveland (Washington, D.C.: Environmental Information Coalition, National Council for Science and the Environment). [First published in the Encyclopedia of Earth July 19, 2010; Last revised Date August 15, 2011; Retrieved September 27, 2012. Encyclopedia of Earth. https://eol.org/docs/discover/plants ↩︎
  2. Also here: https://www.eol.org/pages/42430800 ↩︎
  3. Gabriela Auge, Valentin Hankofer, Martin Groth, Rea Antoniou-Kourounioti, Irja Ratikainen, Christian Lampei, Plant environmental memory: implications, mechanisms and opportunities for plant scientists and beyond, AoB PLANTS, Volume 15, Issue 4, July 2023, plad032, https://doi.org/10.1093/aobpla/plad032 ↩︎
  4. Baucom RS, Heath KD, Chambers SM. Plant-environment interactions from the lens of plant stress, reproduction, and mutualisms. Am J Bot. 2020 Feb;107(2):175-178. doi: 10.1002/ajb2.1437. Epub 2020 Feb 14. PMID: 32060910; PMCID: PMC7186814. ↩︎
  5. Farmer EE, Ryan CA. Interplant communication: airborne methyl jasmonate induces synthesis of proteinase inhibitors in plant leaves. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1990 Oct;87(19):7713-6. doi: 10.1073/pnas.87.19.7713. PMID: 11607107; PMCID: PMC54818. ↩︎
  6. Ramakrishna A, Giridhar P, Ravishankar GA. Phytoserotonin: a review. Plant Signal Behav. 2011 Jun;6(6):800-9. doi: 10.4161/psb.6.6.15242. Epub 2011 Jun 1. PMID: 21617371; PMCID: PMC3218476. ↩︎
  7. Baluška, F., Mukherjee, S., & Ramakrishna, A. (Eds.). (2020). Neurotransmitters in plant signaling and communication. Springer. ↩︎
  8. Appel, H.M., Cocroft, R.B. Plants respond to leaf vibrations caused by insect herbivore chewing. Oecologia 175, 1257–1266 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-014-2995-6 ↩︎
  9. Anda-Larisa Iosip et al, DYSCALCULIA, a Venus flytrap mutant without the ability to count action potentials, Current Biology (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.12.058 ↩︎
  10. Draguhn, A., Mallatt, J.M. & Robinson, D.G. Anesthetics and plants: no pain, no brain, and therefore no consciousness. Protoplasma 258, 239–248 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00709-020-01550-9 ↩︎
  11. Trewavas A (2016) Intelligence, Cognition, and Language of Green Plants. Front. Psychol. 7:588. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00588 ↩︎
  12. Baluska, Frantisek. (2016). Should fish feel pain? A plant perspective. Animal Sentience. 1. 10.51291/2377-7478.1052. ↩︎
  13. Lamm C, Decety J, Singer T (February 2011). “Meta-analytic evidence for common and distinct neural networks associated with directly experienced pain and empathy for pain”. NeuroImage. 54 (3): 2492–2502. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2010.10.014. PMID 20946964. S2CID 6021487. ↩︎

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin 1986

Posted on by Anand Philip

This is an essay about what fiction means to humanity, and how it might have been critical for our evolution.

In the temperate and tropical regions where it appears that hominids evolved into human beings, the principal food of the species was vegetable. Sixty-five to eighty percent of what human beings ate in those regions in Paleolithic, Neolithic, and prehistoric times was gathered; only in the extreme Arctic was meat the staple food. The mammoth hunters spectacularly occupy the cave wall and the mind, but what we actually did to stay alive and fat was gather seeds, roots, sprouts, shoots, leaves, nuts, berries, fruits, and grains, adding bugs and mollusks and netting or snaring birds, fish, rats, rabbits, and other tuskless small fry to up the protein. And we didn’t even work hard at it — much less hard than peasants slaving in somebody else’s field after agriculture was invented, much less hard than paid workers since civilization was invented. The average prehistoric person could make a nice living in about a fifteen-hour work week.

Fifteen hours a week for subsistence leaves a lot of time for other things. So much time that maybe the restless ones who didn’t have a baby around to enliven their life, or skill in making or cooking or singing, or very interesting thoughts to think, decided to slope off and hunt mammoths. The skillful hunters would come staggering back with a load of meat, a lot of ivory, and a story. It wasn’t the meat that made the difference. It was the story.

It is hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrestled a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats… No, it does not compare, it cannot compete with how I thrust my spear deep into the titanic hairy flank while Oob, impaled on one huge sweeping tusk, writhed screaming, and blood sprouted everywhere in crimson torrents, and Boob was crushed to jelly when the mammoth fell on him as I shot my unerring arrow straight through eye to brain.

That story not only has Action, it has a Hero. Heroes are powerful. Before you know it, the men and women in the wild-oat patch and their kids and the skills of makers and the thoughts of the thoughtful and the songs of the singers are all part of it, have all been pressed into service in the tale of the Hero. But it isn’t their story. It’s his.

When she was planning the book that ended up as Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf wrote a heading in her notebook, “Glossary”; she had thought of reinventing English according to her new plan, in order to tell a different story. One of the entries in this glossary is heroism, defined as “botulism.” And hero, in Woolf’s dictionary, is “bottle.” The hero as bottle, a stringent reevaluation. I now propose the bottle as hero.

Not just the bottle of gin or wine, but bottle in its older sense of container in general, a thing that holds something else.

If you haven’t got something to put it in, food will escape you — even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it’s cold and raining and wouldn’t it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn’t it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container.

A holder. A recipient.

The first cultural device was probably a recipient… Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier.

So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women’s Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper mur-der, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilize it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely fetus, a boy of course, drifting around the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any womb, any matrix at all? I don’t know. I don’t even care. I’m not telling that story. We’ve heard it, we’ve all heard about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news.

And yet old. Before — once you think about it, surely long before — the weapon, a late, lux-urious, superfluous tool; long before the useful knife and ax; right along with the indispensable whacker, grinder, and digger — for what’s the use of digging up a lot of potatoes if you have nothing to lug the ones you can’t eat home in — with or before the tool that forces energy out-ward, we made the tool that brings energy home. It makes sense to me. I am an adherent of what Fisher calls the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution.

This theory not only explains large areas of theoretical obscurity and avoids large areas of theoretical nonsense (inhabited largely by tigers, foxes, and other highly territorial mammals); it also grounds me, personally, in human culture in a way I never felt grounded before. So long as culture was explained as originating from and elaborating upon the use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing, I never thought that I had, or wanted, any particular share in it. (“What Freud mistook for her lack of civilization is woman’s lack of loyalty to civilization,” Lillian Smith observed.) The society, the civilization they were talking about, these theoreticians, was evidently theirs; they owned it, they liked it; they were human, fully human, bashing, sticking, thrusting, killing. Wanting to be human too, I sought for evidence that I was; but if that’s what it took, to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently I was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all.

That’s right, they said. What you are is a woman. Possibly not human at all, certainly defective. Now be quiet while we go on telling the Story of the Ascent of Man the Hero.

Go on, say I, wandering off towards the wild oats, with Oo Oo in the sling and little Oom carrying the basket. You just go on telling how the mammoth fell on Boob and how Cain fell on Abel and how the bomb fell on Nagasaki and how the burning jelly fell on the villagers and how the missiles will fall on the Evil Empire, and all the other steps in the Ascent of Man.

If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again — if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.

Not, let it be said at once, an unaggressive or uncombative human being. I am an aging, angry woman laying mightily about me with my handbag, fighting hoodlums off. However I don’t, nor does anybody else, consider myself heroic for doing so. It’s just one of those damned things you have to do in order to be able to go on gathering wild oats and telling stories.

It is the story that makes the difference. It is the story that hid my humanity from me, the story the mammoth hunters told about bashing, thrusting, raping, killing, about the Hero. The wonderful, poisonous story of Botulism. The killer story.

It sometimes seems that the story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all, some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we’d better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one’s finished. Maybe.

The trouble is, we’ve all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.

It’s unfamiliar, it doesn’t come easily, thoughtlessly, to the lips as the killer story does; but still, “untold” was an exaggeration. People have been telling the life story for ages, in all sorts of words and ways. Myths of creation and transformation, trickster stories, folktales, jokes, novels…

The novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story. Of course the Hero has frequently taken it over, that being his imperial nature and uncontrollable impulse, to take everything over and run it while making stern decrees and laws to control his uncontrollable impulse to kill it. So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the story isn’t any good if he isn’t in it.

I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

One relationship among elements in the novel may well be that of conflict, but the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd. (I have read a how-to-write manual that said, “A story should be seen as a battle,” and went on about strategies, attacks, victory, etc.) Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.

Finally, it’s clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato. That is why I like novels: instead of heroes they have people in them.

So, when I came to write science-fiction novels, I came lugging this great heavy sack of stuff, my carrier bag full of wimps and klutzes, and tiny grains of things smaller than a mustard seed, and intricately woven nets which when laboriously unknotted are seen to contain one blue pebble, an imperturbably functioning chronometer telling the time on another world, and a mouse’s skull; full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions; full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don’t understand. I said it was hard to make a gripping tale of how we wrested the wild oats from their husks, I didn’t say it was impossible.

Who ever said writing a novel was easy?

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic. “Technology,” or “modern science” (using the words as they are usually used, in an unexamined shorthand standing for the “hard” sciences and high technology founded upon continuous economic growth), is a heroic undertaking, Herculean, Promethean, conceived as triumph, hence ultimately as tragedy.

The fiction embodying this myth will be, and has been, triumphant (Man conquers earth, space, aliens, death, the future, etc.) and tragic (apocalypse, holocaust, then or now).

If, however, one avoids the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic, and redefines technology and science as primarily cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination, one pleasant side effect is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a mythological genre than a realistic one.

It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality.

Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast stack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story. In it, as in all fiction, there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things; there is time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them too, and sing to little Oom, and listen to Ool’s joke, and watch newts, and still the story isn’t over. Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.

Source of Document: The Anarchist Library

Citation: 

Le Guin, Ursula K. "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction." 1986. The Anarchist Library, theanarchistlibrary.org. Accessed 14 July 2024.

कुछ सूचनाएं by सुदामा पांडेय धूमिल

Posted on by Anand Philip

सबसे अधिक हत्याएँ
समन्वयवादियों ने की

दार्शनिकों ने
सबसे अधिक ज़ेवर खरीदा

भीड़ ने कल बहुत पीटा
उस आदमी को
जिस का मुख ईसा से मिलता था

वह कोई और महीना था
जब प्रत्येक टहनी पर फूल खिलता था
किंतु इस बार तो
मौसम बिना बरसे ही चला गया
न कहीं घटा घिरी
न बूँद गिरी
फिर भी लोगों में टी.बी. के कीटाणु
कई प्रतिशत बढ़ गए

कई बौखलाए हुए मेंढक
कुएँ की काई लगी दीवाल पर
चढ़ गए
और सूरज को धिक्कारने लगे
— व्यर्थ ही प्रकाश की बड़ाई में बकता है
सूरज कितना मजबूर है
कि हर चीज़ पर एक सा चमकता है

हवा बुदबुदाती है
बात कई पर्तों से आती है —
एक बहुत बारीक पीला कीड़ा
आकाश छू रहा था
और युवक मीठे जुलाब की गोलियाँ खा कर
शौचालयों के सामने
पँक्तिबद्ध खड़े हैं

आँखों में ज्योति के बच्चे मर गए हैं
लोग खोई हुई आवाज़ों में
एक दूसरे की सेहत पूछते हैं
और बेहद डर गए हैं

सब के सब
रोशनी की आँच से
कुछ ऐसे बचते हैं
कि सूरज को पानी से
रचते हैं

बुद्ध की आँख से खून चू रहा था
नगर के मुख्य चौरस्ते पर
शोकप्रस्ताव पारित हुए
हिजड़ो ने भाषण दिए
लिंग-बोध पर
वेश्याओं ने कविताएँ पढ़ीं
आत्म-शोध पर
प्रेम में असफल छात्राएँ
अध्यापिकाएँ बन गई हैं
और रिटायर्ड बूढ़े
सर्वोदयी —
आदमी की सबसे अच्छी नस्ल
युद्धों में नष्ट हो गई
देश का सबसे अच्छा स्वास्थ्य
विद्यालयों में
संक्रामक रोगों से ग्रस्त है

(मैंने राष्ट्र के कर्णधारों को
सड़को पर
किश्तियों की खोज में
भटकते हुए देखा है)

संघर्ष की मुद्रा में घायल पुरुषार्थ
भीतर ही भीतर
एक निःशब्द विस्फोट से त्रस्त है

पिकनिक से लौटी हुई लड़कियाँ
प्रेम-गीतों से गरारे करती हैं
सबसे अच्छे मस्तिष्क
आरामकुर्सी पर
चित्त पड़े हैं ।

Source: Hindi-Kavita.com

A call for radical Unforgiveness

Posted on by Anand Philip

Source: Azaad, Amba. “Fire to the Grass.” The Massachusetts Review, Volume 65, Issue 1, 2024, massreview.org/sites/default/files/10_65.1Azaad.pdf.

IN this essay Amba Azaad makes a strong and comprehensive case for radical unforgiveness.

It’s a gorgeous gorgeous essay and everyone should read it, the following are some quotations that spoke to me.

Resentment and bitterness are treated like bruise marks—evidence of a past crime, but of no further use, meant to be erased as soon as possible.

Victims of abuse have been told so often that true love is forgiving that it feels like a lie to state that their love and unforgiveness can coexist, equally authentic

Just as you cannot truly envision the complex reality of what abuse is without granting that a person can be both loving and abusive, you cannot begin to talk about battered love without talking about unforgiveness.

To love someone who has harmed you, and to fully name and recognize that harm, and to deem it unforgivable, and to continue living in some relationship with each other: that is what the vast majority of people in abusive relationships do. As we come to more open and investigative reckonings of abuse, it behooves us to treat unforgiveness as praxis of survival—not as a dirty byproduct of harm, but as a multifaceted philosophy worth theorizing.

Forgiveness certainly has a place in our social strategizing and mental toolkit; however, deglamorizing its status as a mark of born-again Bodhisattva will help to prevent abusive demands for it. To legitimize unforgiveness, it is necessary to start by toppling the idol of forgiveness: a virtue enshrined in several religious traditions and wielded with particular brutality by modern Christian ideologies against anyone with the temerity to hold the powerful accountable. If we remove divinity from the equation, it is clear that both “to err” and “to forgive” must be analyzed strictly in profane terms of power.

Radical unforgiveness renames your experience from acceptable, and therefore good enough for others, to unacceptable and not to be replicated.

We have been told that unforgiveness is useless so often that it can be hard to redefine what productivity looks like when marginalized and derided forms of labor are taken into account. Holding space, bearing witness: these are seemingly passive forms of productivity. It takes energy to stand still in a crowd that pushes you to move on. The unforgivers are the ones who stay petty, who don’t just get along, and they are the ones who force changes through in organizations where it is easier to let it go.

Here’s a freeing thought: What if one has a responsibility to unforgive, what if one is achieving some measure of restitution by being a stone against the flood that tries to wash away the evidence of wrongdoing? By not being able to forgive, you are not failing at humanity. You are reforming humanity—by being a record keeper, by bearing witness.

Unforgiveness is not the negative space of the absence of a thing; it is a concrete, voluntary action, a choice. Broken relationships are not failures; they are proof of the work of unforgiveness.

I really want to add more quotes but I think this is enough.

Amba ends the essay with acknowledging how unforgiveness has been misappropriated by revenge, and what we can do to prevent that.

Overall, I think this is a call I will be thinking about a lot.