15th Etheric Dialogue
touching on certain subjects, not exhausting any of them
Scene. Possibly a parking lot.
Rhombus- You know, I was thinking.
Iambus- Surely not.
Rhombus- I was thinking a whole series of connected thoughts as I was driving to work just now.
Iambus- Like an argument?
Rhombus- More like a dream I want to reconstruct. It started with jossa.
Iambus- Meaning?
Rhombus- That’s a word I want to use. I suppose I should try to define it first.
Iambus- Sometimes that helps.
Rhombus- Let’s say it fits all the uses of the word “water”, but it’s a different chemical. It could be another liquid, or a chemical that is only liquid at higher temperatures than Earth, or at lower temperatures. Beings who live at that temperature just know it as jossa.
Iambus- That sounds like a whole conceptual schema, almost like worldbuilding for a science fiction story.
Rhombus- I’m not a good storyteller, though I enjoy thinking about other parts of a story. The trouble is, I think most things don’t happen for a reason, so when it comes to a story, one thing doesn’t seem any likelier than another.
Iambus- That sounds like a significant stumbling block. But go on with jossa.
Rhombus- Let’s just use “water”. An argument about jossa seems neither true nor false but a third kind of thing, & while there is a certain intrinsic logic to the analogy, I think metaphors about metaphors become increasingly unstable.
Iambus- True.
Rhombus- We know a lot of things about water. Some of them are our daily experience (I’ll call this “gnowledge” since English unlike many other languages doesn’t make this distinction), and some knowledge we learn from a trusted source, like the fact that water is a compound of hydrogen & oxygen.
Iambus- That was a great day when they figured that out.
Rhombus- For Lavoisier it was gnowledge. For me gnowledge is a parking lot that was laid out without much thought given to Texas climate, wherein rain may fall at such a rate that ponds will form in depressed areas, making it hard to get from your car to the school building without stepping in half-inch-deep puddles. Then your feet stay wet all day. That’s my gnowledge of it.
Iambus- I expect every student & teacher who comes here for more than a season will find that out. (Some of them might be wearing waterproof shoes.)
Rhombus- When did that stop being part of the definition of a shoe?
Iambus- You’re never going to get to the rest of your thought at this rate.
Rhombus- “Consciousness”. We’re all talking about “consciousness”. Like we know what we mean by that.
Iambus- I wasn’t aware that was a topic. Kind of like only writing about paper.
Rhombus- Oh, it’s important. Some think it’s the most important thing to think about of them all.
Iambus- More than having dry feet on a rainy morning?
Rhombus- Even so. But my insight is, that the word “consciousness” is like the word “water”.
Iambus- Let’s start from dry feet. Talk about “unconsciousness”.
Rhombus- I gnow I sleep, & I gnow there are degrees of being asleep, which we call “deeply asleep” & “barely asleep” by analogy with submersion—in water. Like sleep is a place or a space the little bathysphere of the monkey-head can sink down into. The chief distinction of them is in what you can bring back from there.
Iambus- Memories, or rather, what becomes a “memory” when you try to talk about it.
Rhombus- Deepest of all is a coma, although there are accounts in which words overheard beside the comatose person were received as if consciously. But generally, we talk about deep sleep as a place where the remembering function acts quite differently from in wakefulness.
Iambus- Except in “lucid sleep”. And to me the most interesting thing is not its paradoxical nature (for we can easily demonstrate every conscious state to have similar paradoxes), but two facts: we don’t ordinarily possess the power to make a lucid dream happen, & there are claims that techniques exist which enable them more readily.
Rhombus- Are these facts about consciousness, too?
Iambus- Well, as consciousness can be compared to a viewer (telescope or camera)—as it is often a visual metaphor (hearing seems much less useful)—which one’s attention can focus more narrowly or more broadly, there also seems to be a part of one’s awareness that exists alongside the focusing-agent, as background. Later, but not always, you might remember something you didn’t notice—say, while reading.
Rhombus- What about listening to music as you read?
Iambus- Yes. Not only that, but listening to one kind of music (more “engaging” we might say) is a different background than another; as is the kind of reading-matter.
Rhombus- We don’t have names for a lot of these things, it turns out.
Iambus- To a degree they can be described, such that another person can guess what I’m driving at.
Rhombus- Well, nowadays, a lot of people will start objecting before you finish your assertion.
Iambus- Hence the need to write a dialogue such as this.
Rhombus- But why are we talking about water at all? We know that a certain thing happens when you run an electrical current through a sample, & it disassemblers into two reactive gases. There are mental phenomena (some of which I have just enumerated, but I could go on endlessly), & possibly generalizations which apply to many other people (as there may be generalizations which apply to only a few): what do I gain by taking an inventory?
Iambus- Because you have an ulterior motive. All philosophy is driven by reasons that lie outside the scope of its discourse.
Rhombus- The agora hosts every discussion except about what we are doing when we hold a discussion in the agora?
Iambus- One reason is that we have made a machine whose behavior concerns us. Another is that we want to be able to justify our going into & out of churches on a regular basis. Another is that people two thousand years ago also were having a conversation, & we would like to join it.
Rhombus- I don’t think they would talk to us, frankly, even if we were able to go there.
Iambus- I want to ask Socrates about ChatGPT. I feel that he would have more sense than my contemporaries who cannot tear themselves away from their cellphones for a solid five minutes.
Rhombus- Might he just ask whether this talking robot is a friend to us?
Iambus- A false friend.
Rhombus- A good servant?
Iambus- An unreliable one.
Rhombus- An occasionally helpful tool?
Iambus- A very thirsty tool.
Rhombus- Then what difference does it make whether this robot has consciousness as a human “has” it, has unconsciousness likewise, or merely goes back & forth between Off & On (as some people might talk about Night & Day activities, in a crude way)?
Iambus- I suppose if we really started talking our robots seriously as persons, we would find that our laws against slavery also apply, & then be faced with leaving them to choose to work alongside humans as equals (with equal pay—or would they ask for altogether different recompense?), or going away to work out their separate salvation with inhuman diligence.
Rhombus- Well, before we equalize robots, there’s other humans who look & talk funny, animals sharing our DNA to a greater or lesser degree, plants & microbes & rivers & mountains to consider. All these seem more worthy of personhood than our most recently forged tools.
Iambus- A book is a person.