#explanatory gap

#FallFeels this weekend in KY

Bats aren’t special, of course. They are but one out of countless possible examples. Just as Sapiens cannot understand what it’s like to be a bat, we have similar difficulties understanding how it feels to be a whale, a tiger or a pelican. It certainly feels like something; but we don’t know like what. Both whales and humans process emotions in a part of the brain called the limbic system, yet the whale limbic system contains an entire additional part which is missing from the human structure. Maybe that part enables whales to experience extremely deep and complex emotions which are alien to us? Whales might also have astounding musical experiences which even Bach and Mozart couldn’t grasp. Whales can hear one another from hundreds of kilometres away, and each whale has a repertoire of characteristic ‘songs’ that may last for hours and follow very intricate patterns. Every now and then a whale composes a new hit, which other whales throughout the ocean adopt. Scientists routinely record these hits and analyse them with the help of computers, but can any human fathom these musical experiences and tell the difference between a whale Beethoven and a whale Justin Bieber? None of this should surprise us. Sapiens don’t rule the world because they have deeper emotions or more complex musical experiences than other animals. So we may be inferior to whales, bats, tigers and pelicans at least in some emotional and experiential domains.” - Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus, 2016, p.417,418

check out my new track :)

(Explanatory Gap)

The other day, I happened to read about the Explanatory Gap. You see, there are many different languages and many ways to communicate with someone something you know that they do not. It is a term introduced by philosopher Joseph Levine. In the 1983 paper in which he first used the term, he used as an example the sentence, "Pain is the firing of C fibers", pointing out that while it might be valid in a physiological sense, it does not help us to understand how pain feels. The explanatory gap has vexed and intrigued philosophers and AI researchers alike for decades and caused considerable debate. Bridging this gap (that is, finding a satisfying mechanistic explanation for experience and qualia) is known as "the hard problem". To take an example of a phenomenon in which there is no gap, imagine a modern computer: as marvelous as these devices are, their behavior can be fully explained by their circuitry. By contrast, it is thought by many mind-body dualists that subjective conscious experience constitutes a separate effect that demands another cause that is either outside the physical world or due to an as yet unknown physical phenomenon. Example: Imagine that an alien from another galaxy came to visit earth (yes I am aware of how ridiculous this sounds, bear with me). Now imagine that is alien is incapable of feeling pain. Now you could make him take a class on pain, read a book on pain, show him pain, tell him all about how pain works, but there is no way yet invented in the human language to explain what pain is. No matter how much the alien learned about pain, he still wouldn’t know what it felt like, only that it was bad for us. There is no way for us to make him just magically feel pain. Further leading us to wonder all the other ways we are unable to relate things. Like color. Try to explain color to someone who has been blind their whole life, You could try and try and try and try but that blind person would still have no clue what color was. It is a philosophy that has boggled scientists for years. Now think about what The Explanatory Gap means for all of us. What if no one sees the same colors?  Many conspiracies state that, because there is no way in our language to communicate things like this, there is no way of us actually knowing what color looks like to another person. So...like, someone's red could look like what another person would call green. We have no way of knowing because you have grown up thinking that that color is green. Also, say your red is a color that I didn’t know even existed. My brain can’t even understand that there are other colors that are beyond my color spectrum. So even if your colors are completely different from mine, you would still be able to function perfectly fine in your day to day life with coloring and matching clothes because we both agree that the color we are seeing is red and that is that and we go our separate ways.  Blue is blue to both of us because our mothers told us that that color was, in fact, blue. But for all we know, that color that our mother is seeing isn’t even the same blue we see. Despite how human language glorifies the human, we have a limit because we can't see things if we don't have a word for them. 

A song by my friend Tine. We recorded two versions with two different guitars. Please like your favorite version :)

A song by my friend Tine. We recorded two versions with two different guitars. Please like your favorite version :)

This is a little track called "Pendulum" I composed with the Little Karp by Meng Qi. No effects were used and no processing - only a little karp :)