TLDR: The difference between a spirit and a zombie can be defined in terms of a ratio between metaphysical and physical complexity.
The Color Wheel
The other day I was contemplating the interesting fact that while wavelengths of light exist on a continuum, the colors that we perceive exist on a wheel. One result of this is the odd fact that we insert a new color (a shade of purple) to connect red and blue, when those two colors aren’t really connected in the “real” world.
This led me to start thinking in more generality about the way in which the physical world maps onto our perceptions. Specifically, our consciousness is definitely not a perfect map of the physical world, and in some cases, a physical line can get mapped to a meta-physical circle.
The Mind Body Problem
Shortly thereafter, I read an article by Paul Austin Murphy, a philosopher/blogger that I follow on Medium. Although I can’t even find the article now (after a full two minutes of googling), I swear he wrote something about Des Cartes and the mind body problem.
I am no Des Cartes expert, but from what I recall, he was interested in the idea that the physical world seems to have extension, whereas in some very important sense, our consciousness seems to be located at a point. Since a thing that has extension cannot be the same as a thing located at a point, the mind and the body cannot be the same thing.
I am going to take this idea and run with it for a bit. If something is literally a point, it cannot be very interesting. Not only does it not have extension, a literal point cannot have any other properties at all.
So, I ask myself, what is it that can have properties, but is kind of, in some very meaningful way, located “at a point”. My answer: a hypersphere.
Hyper-spheres and Epi-spheres
In what way does a sphere have no projection? Image that our “self” is at the center of a sphere. Our perceptions are like a field of values on the sphere. Each point on the sphere is equally distant from the point. Thus, we can kind of collapse the sphere by taking the limit as the distance goes to zero. Nothing really changes to our perception when this happens.
So I am going to make the following definitions:
Physics: A description of what happens in extended space
Metaphysics: A description of what an individual point in space looks like
That’s right. I am going to assume for a moment that every point in space is actually a “spirit.” (Although we may want an alternative definition that allows spirits to be extended in time like an observer in special relativity). Basically, I’m talking about something like panpsychism.
I am going to assume the Cartesian constraint on spirits is that they have to be essentially spherical so that they can exist, at least in some sense, “at a point”.
Consider an experience where we view some majestic image:
The theory is that in our consciousness, this is whole thing is somehow projected onto a sphere. It has long been known that a 2-dimensional plane can be projected on a sphere, like this:
But what about the colors? They are like little epi-circles that exist on each point of the sphere. In math terms, the 2D coordinates are mapped onto S² and the colors are mapped onto S¹, and the whole thing can be described as S² x S¹.
Note that the hyper-spherical coordinates of our consciousness can have any number of dimensions, and they can be “crossed” with any other number of epi-spheres having any number of dimensions, like the little epi-cycles of pre-Copernican astronomy, or the wrapped-up extra dimensions of Kaluza-Klein theory (a precursor to string theory):
The main point here is that a “point” can be pretty complex if we allow it to have some kind of internal “spherical” structure., and as long as we limit it to a sphere, in some important sense it can exist “at a point.”
Point-like Connections
All this talk of point-like entities reminds me of one of the most transcendental experiences of my life, which occurred while I was in the Air Force deployed to Kuwait. Because we sometimes had to fly at night, my sleep patterns were very messed up. Once night I couldn’t sleep so I went out and took a walk around the air field. I look up at the starts and realized that from the perspective of a photon reaching my eye from each star, no time had passed in that journey.
Since no time passes from the perspective of a photon, it is also meaningful to think of that photon as a single point-like entity, kind of like our consciousness. In other words, we can think of a photon as a point-like causal connection between two different points in space. But since my eye is connected to the start via a single point with no extension, in some meaningful sense I am directly connected to the stars without any separation.
It turns out that there is an interesting topology on space time based on this concept of photons as connecting points…but that is beyond the scope of this post.
Spirits and Zombies
Ok, so now imagine we can have a field of values in our space, and a metric which tells us how close points on the sphere are to each other. Remember, even if they are all equally close to the center, they aren’t necessarily equally close to each other if our metric doesn’t allow them to take shortcuts through the center.
This is cheating just a bit, since real numbers aren’t spherical, and maybe it isn’t strictly necessary. But for now I’m just going to run with it. If we have a field of values, and we have some measure on our space, we can take the integral of all our values. This gives us some total measure of consciousness, C.
The reason I want to take a total measure of consciousness is that it so going to help us determine whether something is a Spirit, a Person, or a Zombie.
What we are going to to is take a total measure representing some measure of physicality (say, mass, M) and a total measure of consciousness, and then take the ratio of them.
Let’s normalize our measure of consciousness so that the ratio C/M for an average human being is equal to 1. Then, if C/M < 1 we can say the object is “zombie-like”, if the ratio is about 1 the object is “person-like” and if the ratio is greater than 1 we say the object is “spirit-like.”
Now, we have some serious ambiguity here. When we take this ratio, we must necessarily associate a particular extended “body” with a particular point-like “mind.” This might not be trivial. Perhaps the choice depends on some kind of meta-physical Axiom of Choice. Or perhaps we want to place some limits on the choice. For example, we may want to limit bodies based on some definition of what constitutes an object, or we may want to require that the mind we are associating with a body actually be located within the set.
Zombies
Let’s talk a little more in depth about zombies. By my previous definition, we might call a whole lot of every-day objects “zombies”. A mountain is a zombie. Me together with a mountain is a zombie.
This makes me want to consider an alternate measure of physical reality other than mass. Perhaps what I really want is some measure of behavioral complexity. When we talk about zombies, we aren’t really thinking about some massive thing that just kind of lays there because it doesn’t have a brain. that is just called a rock.
So let’s modify our definition a bit so that the measure of physical “reality” is a measure of behavioral complexity rather than just mass. One “zombie” candidate that I have been thinking about lately is Moloch…like the Moloch described here, in one of my favorite blog posts ever.
Anyway, Moloch in that sense is more of a phenomenon than a particular body. But perhaps with a little imagination we can somehow describe the behavioral complexity of this phenomenon, and somehow associate it with a center of mass so that it is identified with a particular mind. If that mind is less complex than the behavior it is associated with, it’s a zombie.
Another relevant thing to point out here is that it seems possible that our consciousness kind of “fakes” complexity. For example, it is possible to project a 3D object onto a 2D space…kind of like if you close one eye you are seeing something in 2D that you “imagine” is 3D.
Anyway, I’ve had this thought recently that our own physical brains are doing very complex things that we aren’t really aware of consciously. For example, imagine that our physical brain models the semantic complexity of language using something akin to a 1,000 dimensional space of meaning. Now consider that our conscious space cannot really truly accommodate all those dimensions, so we do some kind of dimensional reduction before becoming “aware” of what we are saying.
We kind of think we know what all those words mean, and our physical brain really does. But our consciousness might actually be incapable of truly understanding the words our mouth is saying. We think we are “aware” because we have some lower dimensional projection of the truth, but we don’t really understand what we ourselves are thinking.
So it might be possible to have some normalized measure of complexity that applies to both the physical and meta-physical realm, and by that measure, we are all zombies.
Spirits
I have always had a bit of a hard time understanding how a spirit could exist without a body. If a mind is an emergent phenomenon that derives from complex physical behavior (like the behavior of our neurons) than it doesn’t really seem possible. But what I am suggesting here is that the complexity of the mind can possibly be described independently of the complexity of the physical behaviors around it. Perhaps those physical behaviors (again, like the brain) contribute to the existence of the mind, but if we insist that the mind is something that happens at a point, like Des Cartes, then it really can’t be identical with the brain. And the fact that we kind of feel like the center of the universe is valid evidence for this view. I’m not sure it’s dispositive, but it is relevant.
In any case, it is not totally unreasonable to identify the mind with a single point, or r a single kind-of-point-like hyper-sphere somehow coupled to physical space (and let me point out that I don’t exactly know what the coupling looks like either…it might be to a single point, or multiple physicals points). If we do, a number of things become possible. Namely, that values in conscious space can self-propagate (at least for a little bit) without a physical super-structure.
The comparison I would like to make here is to electro-magnetism. How the HELL does a changing magnetic field cause a changing electric field? Answer, no one knows. It is just a freaking assumption that we make so that observable phenomena fit into our models. But the existence of this very strange thing leads to the existence of self-propagating electro-magnetic waves (or whatever photons are).
So would it be so very strange if, given the existence of a conscious field that existed at each point in some kind of strangely shaped conscious space made of a bunch of hypershperes and epi-spheres, that changes in the conscious fields occupying this space could somehow self-propagate, even just a little bit?
Answer: I don’t know. But the existence of self-propagating electro-magnetism at least makes it seem a little less strange. In fact, if we assume that conscious fields occupy their own dimensions, it almost seems likely. Anyway, if some physical patterns break down (say, our neurons stop firing), and the conscious fields propagate for some period of time, then that consciousness would be called a spirit.
A Final Thoughts
Another consequence of this kind of thinking is that it is very possible that more than one mind is associated with a particular body. In fact, if we postulate that every point in the universe is a mind (or perhaps a portion of some kind of universal mind), and our body includes a large number of points, then it follows that each of our bodies is associated with a large number of minds. Maybe they are quite similar to each other though, so that our free will somehow operates on our body in aggregate. I don’t know, and I won’t go into it too much more, but it seems very possible.
Ok, that’s about as much as I have for today. Bottom line, this new way of thinking about the mind-body problem leads to some very interesting possibilities. I don’t really think I can get too much further at this point by making any measurable predictions, but now I think it is at least conceivable at some point in the future to discover more about the coupling between physical and metaphysical realms and actually think of some way to conduct reproducible experiments.
