Dialogue 2.5: Beyond the Room

The morning air was exceptionally clear, with that special sort of clarity that is only seen in the hours following a sharp frost. In the field of the Cistercian monastery, Haplous was sitting on one of the ancient stone benches along the path leading to the sprawling oak. The monastery cat was sitting in a patch of sunlight nearby, licking its paw, while Haplous focused his gaze on the vast fields of wheat to the west.

Presently, Synergos came ambling along the path, and sat down on the stone bench slowly, placed his papers beside him. He sat with his hand resting on the stack, and for a few moments he stared in the cat’s direction, with a heavy, pensive expression.

 “You have a look as though you had just audited a failing account,” Haplous said, his voice warm. “What is weighing on you?”

Synergos heaved a sigh, his gaze remaining on the cat. “You’re right. Since our last talk, I’ve been thinking, and it has really put me into a spin. You know that I love animals.”

“Yes, that much is obvious by how often you are playing with our feline fellow here,” Haplous smiled, “but this should not be a cause for sadness. They bring us joy, don’t they?”

“They always did,” Synergos continued, “but since our conversation yesterday, I’ve been thinking, if your framework is correct – if subjective experience only arises through this ‘looping’ of the PTD – then this cat, and every creature like it, must be... well, dark inside. You know, functioning and everything, but without the inner light that we have.”

Haplous fell silent for a moment, watching the cat. Then a slow smile spread across his face, and he burst out laughing. “Ah, Synergos. Sorry to laugh, but you are demonstrating how looping can often make a person needlessly sad. In fact, you have fallen headlong into the Looping Prestige Error.”

“The Looping Prestige Error?” Synergos looked up, startled. “You have a formal term for these things I am thinking?”

“Yes, and many people fall into it the first time they are introduced to the BAL-looping ideas,” Haplous explained. “It describes exactly what you just did: you considered that the cat does not have the same PTD loop that you have, and then automatically assumed that the cat was missing something of absolute importance. But this is actually a number of errors all rolled up into one.”

Synergos looked up with an air of puzzlement. “How so?”

“Ah,” said Haplous, taking a seat on the ancient stone bench on the other side of the narrow path, “where to begin?”

“Maybe you could start with why this is called the prestige error.”

“Oh yes,” Haplous began. “This is the natural course of human vanity. We first enthrone our own specific form of inwardness, and then we pity any creature that we think doesn’t have the same thing. It is a hidden chauvinism. People do this in consciousness studies all the time: aiming to be generous, they strive to demonstrate that animals might have the same consciousness as we do.

“Wait. So you are saying that by trying to be nice they are simply revealing their vanity.”

“No, I would not be so harsh. They are truly trying to be nice, and perhaps I went too far to say they are vain. Maybe it is better to say it is necessary to think all this through carefully, before setting off down some particular path toward the defense of animal minds.” 

“OK, so enlighten me. But it is a logical conclusion from the viewpoint of the framework, is it not, that the inner experience of cats, if they have one, is different from ours? After all, if they have some loop, they do it through their feline expressive and receptive channels, which certainly give results very different from what we get, via the channels of the human language faculty,” Synergos pressed.

Haplous leaned forward. “Most certainly. And it is a good point to begin our analysis. Let’s look at the cat’s functional reality. He has an output channel – his cries, his posturing, his scents. And he also has an input channel to interpret those same signs in others. He gives signs; he reads signs. If he is hurt, does he stay silent?”

“No,” Synergos admitted. “He yowls. Don’t you remember last week when our feline buddy was lying too close to the roofers and got his tail squeezed under a stack of shingles one of them set down on it?”

“And if another cat hears that sound, does it ignore it?”

“No, it reacts with understanding. It interprets the distress.”

“Exactly. So the cat has an expressive channel and a receptive channel, but they lack characteristic semantic formatting provided by the human language faculty.”

But Synergos did not look convinced. “Who is to say they are communicating? Maybe they yowl and emit every other gesture and sign by reflex.”

“The cat BAL would not care about this, it would learn to loop, or not, regardless of the intention of the outputs, or lack thereof.”

Synergos leaned forward. “So you’re saying... it’s plausible that the cat loops?”

“I think it is entirely plausible. A creature with expressive signs that matter deeply to it is a primary candidate for looping. His room might be narrower, focused on the raw essentials, such as pain, fear, affection, and so on, but that does not make it a lesser reality. Smaller is not the same as trivial. A room with sparse furniture is not inherently less valuable or significant than a room with a lot of furniture. And in any case, when I say the cat’s room is narrower, I am only describing what the contents of it might be – pain, fear, affection, loyalty and so on. I am not measuring the inhabitant of the room, who is arguably more significant than the furniture. We will come to that.”

Synergos watched the cat stretch its front paws. “OK, I’m trying to imagine that, and I have heard that philosophers will ask questions like what it’s like to be a bat... but it’s still hard for me to picture.”

Haplous nodded. “You just said something very perceptive, and very fundamental. Do you see? It’s not just hard to picture, it’s impossible to do so – because your imagination is working with your own sort of loop, with its own characteristic formatting.”

“And so?”

“Meaning that by the Coterminous Principle, what you can imagine is restricted to what your own sort of looping can produce. That is what you get, and you cannot possibly get something outside of that.”

Synergos looked a bit bewildered. “You mean our imagination is not limitless?”

Haplous laughed. “In a sense it is. But it is like saying, can I watch any movie on my home TV set. Yes, I can. But I can never use it to know what it is like to swim a river, to stand amidst the nave of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, or to fight a forest fire. I could only really experience those things by doing them.”

Synergos nodded. “Yes, I see. On my home TV, I can watch any film or program, but I cannot use it to feel myself moving through water, or to experience other things that are not on TV.”

“Exactly, and a metaphor might make it clearer – just think of it like your subjective experience is an inner experience that happens in you, something like being inside of a room. And you can’t just go stepping into the bat’s room when you’re actually inside your own. As long as you are in your room, you will not be in the bat’s.”

“No, but wait, I feel like you might have just almost tricked me. Because I understand about the room and about the TV set, but it seems like with my imagination, I can imagine other rooms, I could imagine standing within the Notre Dame Cathedral, I could imagine swimming across a river.”

“But it’s not me that is tricking you, it’s your own certainty that your own imagination is unlimited, that’s what is tricking you. In truth, it is what I was saying, your own imagination has its own format, and that format simply cannot reproduce the formats that would be within the mind of another species.”

“OK, taking you at your word, how would such a situation come about? Why wouldn’t human imagination be limitless?”

It’s not limitless for the same reason that the chess player, qua chess player, is limited. Yes, at any point he can make any legal move, but he can only play chess. And if the BAL looping framework is true, your imagination is driven by incipient output in your PTD, which is to say the output channel of your human language faculty.

“And why would that be limited? After all, can’t I say anything I want? And so I could think whatever I wanted, couldn’t I?”

“You can, but words are limited. They are like the rational numbers in mathematics, and they seem infinite, and yet mathematicians tell us that for any two rational numbers, there are an infinite number of irrational numbers between them. So you simply cannot begin to express the entire realm of all values using rational numbers.”

“Well I use numbers all the time in my work, but number theory is not my forte, you need to be more specific.”

“Human language was developed as a means for dealing with the external, functional world – to mark objects, dangers, social coordination, and practical needs. We built a lexicon for ‘sharp rocks,’ ‘approaching storms,’ and ‘shared grain.’

“No, but wait, I can also talk about justice, I can talk about beauty, there’s many things that are not just material objects or tools.”

“But all of these things have to do with human experience. Humans have a gestalt for beauty, and in our social relationships we need a word for justice, you see? These are all human concerns.”

“OK, I will grant you that we only have words for human concerns, but what about our imagination? I understand it arises by looping, which uses the two channels of the human language faculty, but you did say that looping is at a semantic level, so wouldn’t that allow us to obtain much more content than just words?”

Yes, of course it does. But notice that again, there are two strict limitations. One is the activation of neuronal proxies. There’s no way to activate neuronal proxy configurations out of proxies you don’t have. And the other thing is in the semantic components. Yes, they are more plentiful than words, but they are parts of words; they are not infinite either.”

“OK, now you’re talking sense, yes, I can see, the words are limited, and the components of the words are limited and so are the functional neuronal properties that we have. OK, I can basically see it, yes, we are limited to our own apparatus.”

“But why are we even talking about this? My question was about my sadness concerning this cat here, thinking it might be dark inside,” Synergos said, just as the monastery cat, by complete coincidence, jumped up onto his lap.”

“It’s because you’re imagining he’s dark inside, and I’m showing you as a general rule you cannot imagine what’s inside of another species.”

Synergos was quiet for a moment. His eyes had drifted from the cat to the open fields beyond the gate next to the old oak. “But there is something that still troubles me,” he said. “You said that animals might loop in a different way, and that it’s impossible for us to even imagine what it must be like for them, but still, even if they are not totally dark inside, wouldn’t they be much… poorer, could we say?”

“I would not call them poorer, no,” Haplous replied. “They loop the content that is meaningful to them. That is just right for them. To say otherwise would be the same as saying that a set of clothes made with ten yards of fabric is inherently better, richer, more stylish or more significant than a garment made with just two.”

“So sparser content does not necessarily equate to lesser significance or value,” Synergos said.

“Of course not,” Haplous answered. “Consider a poem of ten lines by Emily Dickinson compared to a hurriedly written essay of five pages by a middle school student who did not even study for the test. More is not assuredly better in every case.”

“Yes, I see,” Synergos nodded. “So animals that loop in their own way cannot be said to have a less significant inner life than humans. There is no way to rank them.”

“Not so fast,” Haplous said with a slight smile. “There actually could be a way to rank them, where they come out as more significant.”

Synergos looked up, surprised. “Wait, how is that?”

“Human language, which serves us so well for exchanging information about manipulating our environment, is notoriously poor inwardly. We struggle to describe even our own simplest feelings without resorting to metaphor, approximation, or cliché. Take the vociferous engineer or scientist, who can describe the outer world with the utmost skill and accuracy, and ask her to describe grief, or joy, or the texture of a memory, and she is often suddenly at a loss for words.”

Synergos nodded slowly. “It’s true.”

“And it is not only grief or joy. Even our most ordinary sensations defeat us. I can say that red differs from blue, but I cannot begin to say how it differs, except maybe by association, saying, ‘Well red seems warmer because it’s like a fire…’ but that doesn’t really describe the difference in color. I can classify, compare, and name; but when asked to use words to describe the difference itself, human language has no way to do it.”

Synergos looked again toward the fields, where the wind was moving softly through the grass. “Then perhaps we have been unfair to the animals in a second way,” he said.

A look of focused interest now flashed on Haplous’s face. “Go on...”

“So we must at least entertain a possibility,” Synergos said, testing the thought as he spoke. “What if the communicative systems of certain animals – dolphins, whales, perhaps others – are better optimized than ours for discussing these sorts of things that we find quite ineffable?”

Haplous folded his hands over his knee. “Hmmmm.... I would say this hypothesis is not absurd. It seems like they would use their communication to talk about things functionally important to them like water columns, salinity, the location of food, etc. And we know that they have strong social bonds so it seems they would talk about the things that matter socially. And yet… Animals do play… They sometimes do things that are not purely functional. It does seem like at some point some species might have begun to take pleasure in talking about their own inner life, something like human philosophers do.”

“Do you think so?” Synergos sat upright, with keener interest.

“It’s just a hypothesis, of course, but while we have developed a language that describes the outer world with astonishing precision, it seems that we do have a crude instrument for discussing or even imagining about the inner one. And here I want to be careful, Synergos, because I do not want to slip into ranking. I am not saying their loops are richer than ours, or that their content is more valuable than ours. If another species evolved a different balance – less resolution for outer things and more resolution inward – then, who knows what they might say to one another? And it may not be only the cetaceans. The corvids remember faces for years and seem to plan. The octopus, with its distributed nervous system, may be doing something so unlike anything we know that the very word ‘experience’ will need to be stretched to denote it.”

“And so they might be… more conscious than we are?”

“I would never say that; it would be tipping the scales in the opposite direction. In fact, you have just walked into the same trap from the other side. A moment ago you seemed ready to rank cats below us, for having a narrower lexicon, and now you seem ready to rank dolphins or octopi above us. But the ranking itself is the error. There is no surefire scale on which more or less conscious can be measured, because it is not even clear that consciousness is a sort of thing that comes in amounts. But I would say this: if you define consciousness by the richness of what can be reported in human terms, then of course we win. Simply because we wrote the definition. But if you loosen that grip – even slightly – then you see it is necessarily an open question.”

“And we no longer find ourselves at the top.”

“Not exactly. In fact, we just realize there is no top. It’s not something that can be arranged from top to bottom. There are different kinds of inwardness, suited to different kinds of lives. Whether the cat’s, the dolphin’s, the octopus’s, or our own, none of them sits above another. The whole project of arranging them in order was a project of self-flattery dressed up in the clothes of science and philosophy. For its part, the framework makes no attempt at playing that game.”

The two sat in silence for a moment, as Haplous watched a hawk circle above the wheat field, and Synergos petted the cat in his lap. The cat, for its part, was eyeing a butterfly flitting among the lavender.

It was Haplous who spoke first. “But here we have been talking about comparing the possible looping of humans to that of other species, when the question you really want to ask is much more basic than that.”

“How so?”

“The question is, where does the value lie: in the content itself, or in the relationship between your content and the agent that is attending to that content, or in the agent itself?”

Synergos exhaled in a sputter. “Whoa! Now you’ve got to slow down there.”

“OK, let me move through it stepwise. Here we get into an area where the BAL-looping framework ideas help us to sort things out. We have talked about subjective experience, but you will admit that there is something like subjective content, right?”

“Well, yes,” Synergos said, “now that you mention it, it seems like normally where there’s an experience you have two things, you have an experiencer and you have something experienced. So I suppose the same would be true for subjective experience.”

“In BAL looping, we consider the redness of the apple, the roundness, the number of them that are on the table, the shape of the table, all of these things, as the content of the subjective experience. We consider that this content arises from the PTD, and it is the BAL that is attending to that content.”

“OK, that makes sense, so it’s the BAL that’s the agent, right? The one that’s doing the experiencing?”

“Exactly. So now you can already probably see where I’m going with this. It’s not the subjective content that’s important in this equation. It’s the experiencer. What we normally call ‘subjective experience’ is merely the content. The redness of the apple, the roundness, the shape of the table… that’s just content. It’s the appreciation of that content, it’s the agent that’s experiencing it, that’s where the value is. And this, Synergos, is the third error I told you to expect – the deepest one of all. We have not only enthroned our own form of inner experience while overlooking that we can only fail to imagine other experiences produced by other architectures of looping. We have gone one step further: we have also confused the content of experience with consciousness itself. This is like a visitor to an art exhibition pointing at the paintings, and claiming that they are him, the visitor. He confuses himself with what he is seeing.”

Synergos assumed a thoughtful air. “So you are saying it is the BAL that attends to the content produced by the PTD. The content is not the agent. The BAL is the agent.”

“Precisely. And I want you to feel the full weight of this, because it offers a totally different angle on a lot of what consciousness studies has been doing for a long time. The redness of red, the warmth of the sun on your face, the throb of grief, the lift of joy – all of these, every one of them, is just content. Just what happens to be appearing in front of the BAL at a given moment. None of them is consciousness. Consciousness is the BAL doing the attending.”

Synergos’s gaze drifted back to the cat, which had jumped down from his lap and was now resting in the patch of sunlight. “And what does this have to do with my question about the cat?”

“It means that the question we have been worrying about all morning – does the cat loop, does he loop in the same way as us, does he loop richly enough to count – is not the real question. Even if the cat does not loop at all, even if his interior is filled only with raw sensation and no looping of any kind, there is still a BAL attending to that sensation. And that BAL has the same intrinsic worth as ours. The cat is an attender. That is what matters. What he attends to, and how, is incidental to the fact that he is attending.”

“Oh, so now I see it,” Synergos said. “You’re saying that, even if animals don’t have any looping at all, they are still agents, with experience. And if the nature of that experience does not have the semantic formatting that we get from the PTD, so what?”

“Yes, now, by Jove, you’ve got it!”

Synergos beamed. “It goes back to what you said, that we tend to enthrone the content of the PTD as something all important... and now we are seeing it is just one of the possible sorts of content that can be experienced?”

“Exactly. And I must add, that this is not just about the difference between humans and cats, or bats, or octopi… because there are all sorts of other kinds of content that our own BAL can experience that are outside looping.”

“How so?”

“Yes. Well, a metaphor can serve us well here. Let’s say that all the content from the PTD constitutes something akin to a section of the mind. Or we could even say it’s like a room. And this is the same room, Synergos, that we were speaking of earlier when I said you cannot enter the bat’s room. It is the looping room. It is where everything we can name and recall and report takes place. When you’re in that room, you are attending to the semantically formatted activity of the PTD. And that is an important room, because the PTD is what we speak with, it’s what we listen with, it’s what we write with, it’s what we read with. It’s also what we recall things with. And what we imagine things with. Our conscious experience.”

The monastery cat was on its back among the clover, batting at a tassel of clover above him, as Synergos leaned forward, with a very intent look on his face. “And when we leave that room, what do we experience?”

Haplous sat for a moment, relaxed, his face and robes lit by the late afternoon sun. “That brings us back to what we were talking about in terms of other animals. Just as we cannot imagine what it’s like to be them, it is likewise impossible for us to imagine what it’s like when we are outside that room.”

“But why not? In the case of other animals, you were saying it was because we had a different sort of looping, but here we’re talking about ourselves.”

“Yes, but here’s the thing. When it comes to imagining or learning any sort of experience outside the room, we can only do that from inside the room. And when we are inside the room, we only can see what things are like inside the room.”

“So wait a minute,” Synergos said, “you’re saying that even if we could recollect an experience we had outside the room, we would not see it as it was when we were outside the room. It would be completely formatted like everything else that’s inside the room?”

“Yes, you have the right idea. We live inside that room. Everything we know, all our subjective experience, is in that room. By definition, we cannot know what’s outside. Nor, as BAL looping teaches us, can we imagine it either, since imagination has the same restriction. It is driven by the PTD looping. It is the experiencing of activity in the input channel caused by activity in the output channel, and that activity in the output channel is limited by the basic semantic formatting we use in the language faculty.”

“So this sounds like the ultimate catch-22.”

“Yes, that’s a good way to put it. And take careful note of how the catch-22 actually works, because it is more significant and absolutely confining than it might at first appear. And yet an understanding of this is infinitely liberating. Because it seems we are always in the room, but we have to understand that at any moment our BAL can be simultaneously attending to other content, just as throughout the day there are many moments when it is oblivious to this one room, and is attending exclusively to others.”

“So we actually do exit this room?”

“Oh yes, we exit all the time. In fact, a large part of our BAL right now is outside this room. But it is a bit like the light in a refrigerator, you see. The refrigerator light gives the naïve person the impression that it is always on, even though it isn’t. And in the case of our looping room, it appears we are always in this room, though we are not. Because everything we know about is either our conscious perception of the present moment, our imagination, or recollection. They all use the semantically formatted loop. So it appears to us that all our experience is semantically formatted, in the way of human language. Whatever we ever bring back from anywhere, we bring back through the door of the room, and by the time it crosses the threshold it has been remade in the shape of the room. That is the catch-22 in its true form.”

From across the field, the bells announcing the 5 o’clock mass began to toll, as always, at 15 minutes to the hour. Synergos stood up. “You know, after talking with you, I feel less enlightened and more befuddled. But maybe I shouldn’t say that. Maybe I am enlightened, because I don’t have as many certainties. Anyway, I can see the basic things of what you were saying: I had set up myself as the standard, and then made the second mistake of equating my subjective experience with myself, when really it is one sort of content that my BAL attends to.”

“That’s quite a thought you just expressed, where befuddlement might be enlightenment,” Haplous said as he stood up.

They began their walk toward the chapel.

As they walked, Synergos said, somewhat sheepishly, “So it’s true, I guess, that our feline friend really is not ‘dark’ inside?”

Haplous chortled, “Ha! There you are again, Synergos. The old pull of the room. You are still wondering about that?”

“I know,” Synergos said. “But maybe old thought habits are hard to break.”

“Of course they are. The room keeps trying to make itself the measure of everything. If you insist on using a word describing qualities of light or its absence, you may call the cat’s interior transparent. You may call it extremely bright. You may call it the color of the back of your head when you have no mirror. But really, none of those will ever come close to describing it.”

Synergos took this in. “OK, I can see where maybe dark raises some gratuitous connotations, but suggesting that you might call it bright seems like a step too far. How can the lack of something result in brightness?  Brightness means more.”

“Have you ever been to the park on a summer afternoon? Which patches of grass are brighter, the ones that have shade, or the ones that lack it?”

Synergos was undeterred. “Oh sure, you can give that example, but how does it apply to the case of subjective experience?”

“Remember that in the framework, conscious perception is not streaming in from the outside as input, but rather first arising on the brain’s output channel, as incipient expression, which then loops back through the input channel, so you are really looking at what begins as output.”

“Okay..., and...?”

“So imagine a human being operating by blindsight. You have heard of that, right?”

“Yes, it is well documented in the neuroscience literature, where people who are blind in regard to conscious perception can still carry out visual tasks at a table, or even navigate well by vision along a hallway cluttered with obstacles.”

“Exactly. So there is where the BAL is attending to the raw, unfiltered input of light from its vision centers. Looping would be one step removed.”

Synergos nodded. “Point taken.”

Synergos became immersed in thought, and then offered, “but it is hard to imagine a case that cannot in principle be described.”

Haplous patted him on the arm. “Well, that’s just fine. Welcome to the club, Synergos. Now you know that there are things you will never imagine – not because they are unreal, but because your room was never built to contain them.”

“Large parts of my own house,” Synergos murmured.

“Especially those,” Haplous agreed.

Haplous placed a hand on Synergos’s shoulder as the second round of notes from the monastery bell began to chime.

“Come,” Haplous said. “The bell is calling the BAL back to the social office. We have rituals to perform, and those require the loop, at moments, and the absence of the loop at others. But as you walk, try to notice the cat, do you see? He has run ahead and is there next to the chapel. He isn’t worried about the prestige of his report. He is too busy being the house.”

Synergos looked ahead and saw the cat there along the side wall of the chapel, sniffing among some stalks of grass. “I think I understand, Haplous. I am the house. The room is just where I write the letters.”

Haplous nodded. “And once you know that, the letters become much more interesting.”