Hi again, faithful readers. Have I mentioned lately how much I love you? ‘Cause I do.

Had one of those days where I sleep a lot and have intense dreams and wake up sweaty and messed up and blah, blah, blah. It happens all the time, and yet, I always feel like I should write about it because it all feels so important, somehow.

Perhaps I experience these intense dreams in a way similar to the sort of frontal lobe seizures that cause religious visions, and thus, like said visions, it leaves me with a sense of something “realer than real” because that part of the brain that decides how “real” something is becomes hyper-activated.

Whatever the cause, I wish I remembered the dreams long enough to write them down. I have the feeling that sharing my dreams with others, externalizing them, is an important psychological step. I know that other times, when I have managed to hold on to enough of a dream to write it out here, I have felt a profound sense of release, like I am letting something go that was, in a sense, too large for my head.

Perhaps I should keep a notebook by my bed to jot down impressions when I wake up.

Moving on, I recently came across a Wikipedia entry for something I did not know existed : the concept of a philosophical zombie.

No, this is not a zombie that, while all the other zombies are shambling forward moaning “Brains!”, take a moment to pause and moans “Brains…?”.

It is, if I am comprehending the entry rightly, the concept of an entity that is indistinguishable from a human being in that it responds in all ways to stimuli exactly like a person, but does not actually have sentience, a soul, consciousness, or whatever else you want to note that makes someone “human”.

It is used to argue against the idea that all we are is meat, flesh, and bone. The argument goes that if that were true, then you could have a “zombie”, or automaton, that reproduced all human responses but would, in fact, not “human” at all.

I suppose we are meant to recoil in horror at the thought of a zombie or robot fooling us into accepting it as a person when somehow it is not, and hastily concede our materialism because the alternative seems all creepy and weird now.

But that is mere emotionally manipulative rhetoric, not true philosophy. I am a materialist without exception. We are truly nothing but our physical selves. Even that which we hold most dear is the result of chemicals in our heads and not some completely nonsensical magic substance that by definition we can’t prove exists, because if we could, it would become physical.

However, the fact that we know the method by which all our hopes and dreams are encoded does not diminish how important, special, rare, and true they are. Knowing a book is only paper and ink does not mean a book is “merely” paper and ink. The method of storage does not define the content. The fact that we are “merely” physical does not make us zombies.

We simply need to discard our belief in magic. There is no escape hatch to reality, no non-real realm where the rules no longer apply, no force outside reality which can act on reality.

Something is real, or it is not. There is no third option.

And no amount of saying “There has to be something MORE…” is going to change that. Perhaps you want there to be something more. But that does not mean it has to oblige your desires by existing.

Another note on the philosophical zombie kick : to my way of thinking, we are all zombies. You cannot definitively prove that anyone is sentient (or real, or human, or whatever) than yourself. Even in this era of the fMRI, where we can watch the electrical activity of the brain in realtime, we cannot construct a philosophically bulletproof argument for the sentience of others.

And once you realize this, the door is open for you to realize that if it acts exactly like a human being, to us, it is a human being, and thus the whole philosophical zombie construct becomes meaningless. The whole idea posits what it purports to prove, that there is some magic ingredient that would distinguish a perfectly replica of a human being from a “real” human being.

But there is no difference between reality and a perfect illusion of reality. If we cannot tell it from reality, it is real. We have equal proof for X being real as we do for a “really really real” thing.

We might be temporarily fooled into accepting one kind of thing as another kind of thing, but if it is even theoretically possible, via means not even conceived of yet, to tell this is not a “real” thing as we have come to accept it, then the illusion is not perfect and hence the thing in question is not “real”.

Let alone the phenomenological argument that it is impossible for a non-real thing to cause any effect on a real thing, including causing us to perceive it, and therefore whatever we perceive is “real” in the sense that it is a real object which is impinging upon our senses somehow.

We might be entirely wrong about what we are perceiving, but the object of perception is still real.

Otherwise, once you take magic out of the equation, what else can it be but something real? The entire philosophical concept of “illusion” is therefore suspect.

There is no perceiving that which is not real. There is only being wrong about what you perceive.

On a totally different note, I am intrigued by the development of devices like these.

It is a “lifelogging” device that takes two pictures a minute for an entire year at a time. That is 1,051,200 pictures, which is a heck of a lot. Each picture is geotagged with your GPS coordinates so it will give you both the time and place of when it was taken.

It is meant to be worn around the neck at all times, and hence, you would end up with a year’s worth of pictures to look through and remember the year.

I am very interested in this “lifelogging” concept. Documenting your entire life has been a dream of mine for a while, and it is becoming increasingly feasible. Imagine being able to expand your biographical memory into the digital realm, where you can use the power of computers and digital media to call back any moment of your life with perfect clarity.

Some people think that sort of thing is narcissistic, and I suppose that is true in a sense. But I am intensely curious as to what happens to the minds of people who do this. Do they become intensely self-conscious about everything they do because it will all be recorded, as though they have their own personal panopticon? Does their natural biographical memory weaken, like how your ability to remember phone numbers disappears once you have them all programmed into your phone?

Could you end up with a person who can’t even remember what happened half an hour ago, but when you ask them, they just say “Wait, let me look that up…. “?

But what interests me the most is the potential for these lifelogs to provide an absolutely unprecedented data set for the study of human behaviour. No self-reporting error, no laboratory conditions error, no observer bias, just the straight up truth of what people actually do.

To me, that is an astonishing prospect, and it would only take a relatively small number of volunteers to provide valuable insights when the quality of the data is that high.

Right now, gizmos like that are a wee bit too expensive to fit into a psychology department;s budget. But the price is bound to come down with time, and when it does, I can easily imagine a trial of a thousand of these sorts of things going on with people of all walks of life, and resulting in a data set that could be mined for theses and conclusions for decades.

And that would be simply… amazing. I bet a lot of comfortable theories would be overturned by access to the literal truth of what people actually do in various situations.

Going back to the personal, I imagine that a lot of lifeloggers will find out a lot of things about themselves that they might not enjoy learning.

What we think we do and what we really do might turn out to be radically different. I can’t imagine what this extension of the metaconscious knowledge of self could do to a person.

I would like to think that people are always better off knowing the truth.

But I am not idealistic enough to say that I know that is always the case.

It is just, in general, the best policy.