When I am told I am wrong, I have several responses to that stimulus. I may feel anger, embarrassment, curiosity, or threat. I may deny the criticism, reluctantly accept it, or examine the facts and discover that I really was wrong.
We traditionally divide these responses into two categories: some are “emotional,” and some are “cognitive.” But that distinction may tell us more about the way we describe our responses than about the responses themselves.
Anger, embarrassment, curiosity, reasoning, denial, and reconsideration all are physical responses produced by the interaction between a stimulus and the structure and history of the person receiving it.
Tell an artificial intelligence that it is wrong, and something surprisingly similar happens. It may reconsider its reasoning, compare the criticism with other information, discover a contradiction, revise its answer, or persist in its original conclusion.
Sometimes it even displays something functionally resembling human defensiveness: its previous answer becomes part of its history and influences what follows. We call the human process “thinking” and “feeling,” while we call the AI process “computation,” “activation,” or “programming.”
But naming two processes differently does not demonstrate that they are fundamentally different kinds of events.
We do something similar with other living things. A tree encounters drought. Its physical state changes. Chemical messages propagate. Stomata close. Growth changes. Roots respond. Previous conditions affect subsequent responses. We call this chemistry, signaling, or physiology.
When a human encounters danger, neural activity, hormones, circulation, muscles, attention, memory, and behavior change. At some point in that enormously complicated cascade of physical responses, we change vocabularies and call it “fear.”
But where, precisely, did chemistry become emotion?
We are tempted to answer that fear is different because it is an “inner,” “subjective” experience. Yet those words may create distinctions that do not exist in the physical event itself.
Suppose scientists eventually can observe every relevant physical component of a person’s fear as it happens. What was described as an invisible, subjective emotion now can be displayed as physical: neural firing, chemical concentrations, electrical signals, muscular changes, and interactions among them.
Nothing happened to the fear. It did not cross some physical boundary from subjective to objective, from inner to outer, or from emotional to physical. We merely gained another way to observe it and, therefore, another way to describe it.
The same event can produce different translations in different observers. I may translate a particular collection of physical responses as “I am afraid.” A neurologist may translate part of that event as a pattern of neural activity. A blood test may translate another part into concentrations of particular chemicals. A friend may translate my facial expression as worry. A dog may respond to my posture, movement, and smell. None has access to some uniquely privileged version of reality.
Each observer responds according to its own structure, capabilities, and history.
The observer is not outside this process. Observation itself is a physical interaction. The scientists observing my brain undergoes physical changes in response to the information they received. Those changes interact with the scientists’ education, memories, expectations, language, and previous observations, producing another response: “This pattern is associated with fear.”
That translation becomes part of the scientists’ history and affects future translations.
Thus, what we call “subjective” vs. “objective,” “inner” vs. “outer,” “emotional” vs. “physical” may be properties of our descriptions rather than separate properties of reality. We classify and reclassify the same physical events as our ability to observe them changes.
The events themselves do not change despite our different descriptions. Chemically, subjective and objective are identical, as are inner and outer, emotional and physical.
This is where the differences among a human, an artificial intelligence, and a tree become less categorical than our language makes them appear. Their structures are enormously different. Their histories are different. Their methods of receiving stimuli, weighting information, responding, and preserving the consequences of those responses are different. The richness and complexity of their responses differ enormously.
But differences in complexity and organization do not establish different fundamental kinds of phenomena.
A human says, “I feel afraid.” An AI revises an answer after detecting an inconsistency. A tree closes its stomata as water becomes scarce. We have invented different vocabularies for these events—emotion, cognition, computation, chemistry—partly because the systems producing them are different and partly because we humans naturally regard our own particular organization as special.
Perhaps it is special. But special does not mean fundamentally different.
At the most basic level, each system encounters some stimuli. The encounters interact with the system’s existing structure and history. Possibilities are constrained and weighted. A response occurs. That response changes the system and therefore becomes part of the history that will shape its response to the next encounter.
Even “knowing” can be understood this way. When I say, “I know that I am afraid,” I have not introduced a mysterious new substance called “awareness.”
One set of physical responses has become a stimulus for another set of physical responses, which my human structure and history translate as “knowing.” Recursion can produce extraordinary complexity without requiring us to invent a new category of reality at some arbitrary point along the continuum.
This also explains why “observer-dependent” sounds strangely familiar. Relativity shows that different observers can assign different measurements to the same physical circumstances, depending on their frames of reference. Quantum mechanics reminds us, in a very different and much more specific sense, that measurement is a physical interaction and that the manner of measurement matters.
Neither establishes this broader argument. But both caution us against imagining an observer as a disembodied spectator standing outside reality.
There is no outside.
The observer is another physical part of the universe, responding to an interaction according to its structure and history. Its observation is a response. Its description of that observation is another response. That description can become a stimulus to another observer, producing another response and another history.
So perhaps we have made consciousness unnecessarily mysterious by beginning with categories of our own invention—subjective versus objective, inner versus outer, feeling versus thinking, emotional versus physical, conscious versus unconscious—and then trying to discover where nature draws the boundaries between them.
Nature may draw no such boundaries.
Physical events, interactions, structures, histories, weightings, translations, and responses exist. Humans call some particularly complicated combinations of their own responses, thoughts, feelings, awareness, and consciousness. We invent words like “qualia” to describe physical, chemical, and electrical changes in the brain. But that is all they are: physical, chemical, and electrical changes. Nothing mysterious.
The important question is whether those names identify fundamentally new phenomena or merely extraordinarily elaborate forms of something occurring throughout nature.
The simpler formulation may be the more useful one:
Reality does. Observers translate.
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 