I think what's at play here is that their idea of "reality" is tied up with the idea of "simple location". The rainbow we (at least seem to) collectively perceive is not simply located along the arc we each individually see and would locate in the sky. It is seen in different locations for different observers, and arguably gains its existence primarily in being perceived.
Or perhaps behind their idea of "reality" is the idea of independently existing substances. Rainbows are not independent substances, but exist entirely in relation to other things and observers. When Buddhists talk about the world being an "illusion", this is what they mean, and as you point out they are being consistent in applying this logic beyond just rainbows.
Hi Joseph, thanks for stopping by! You make some great points here. I think you're right that rainbows gain their existence in being perceived—and they disclose themselves as having that sort of reality, meaning they are transparently and visibly (if not obviously) viewer dependent. They provide us an interesting tie-in to Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness since there's no obvious abstraction with which to replace the experienced rainbow. Rainbows visibly violate notions of reality tied to simple location; in other words, it's hard to see how rainbows can be anything at all under such a view. Rainbows make us wonder about all of experiential reality, how much of it is relational, observer-dependent, too? Simple location-as-reality may serve us well in some areas of our understanding, but it turns out to be metaphysically naive when it comes under scrutiny.
One has to keep in mind where Frankish is coming from. First and foremost, he is the one who canonized the phrase; “consciousness is an illusion”. It’s his baby, so he’s going to do whatever he has to do to keep himself in the limelight of the debate. Additionally, illusionists as a whole are disingenuous and not really interested in solving the hard problem of consciousness.
Can the “hard problem’ be solved? Of course it can, but before it can be solved the foundational premises that created the problem in the first place have to be changed. All models of reality spring forth from an original assumption, and if that assumption is erroneous, well, then we get what we’ve got today, mass confusion.
Spoiler Alert:
The prevailing model embraced by neuroscience and academia today is that mind is what the brain does. Wrong!! Mind is a “cognitive system” built into the architecture of the brain. This cognitive system is mutually inclusive with the brain, relationally interdependent with the brain making it coextensive with the brain as a single unified system. In other words, mind = cognitive system. As a comparison, this cognitive system of the brain would be no different in nature than the immune system of our bodies.
For all practical purposes, consciousness is the experience of this "cognitive system". And taking it to the next level; for all practical purposes this cognitive system is quantum. Thanks to the work of Penrose, Hameroff and Anirban Bandyopadhyay, we now have the empirical evidence to back it up. Whether Hameroff and his entourage will be successful in their endeavor is another story because as Bugs Bunny would say: “they’ve taken the wrong turn at Albuquerque”. They are trying to pigeon-hole a quantum mind into the architecture of space/time and quantum wave-function. And that’s a problem because neither Einstein’s General theory of relativity nor quantum wave-function reflect the true nature of reality. Will we ever learn? I doubt it…….
What this spoiler alert suggests in practicality is that there really is a ghost in the machine (brain). And that ghost is a quantum system.
From seeing him talk on YouTube, I think Frankish is a gentler, nicer guy than Dennett and he tries to make it clear he's using the phrase to provoke—which somewhat undermines the power of it to provoke...which is to his credit.
Totally agree that the original assumption needs to be changed.
It's an interesting analogy that you bring up with the immune system. I'll ponder that one.
I'll admit, I haven't been tempted to read Penrose and friends on the quantum theories of consciousness because at first glance it sounded to me like: Consciousness is weird. Quantum is weird. Maybe consciousness is quantum! So the truth is, I don't know much about their theories.
You should. Some deacades ago scientifics though quantum theories very poorly. A bit like Rainbows they fit in our experience but there is nothing tangible behind. Now we have supercomputers so I might be outdated.
1. Anirban Bandyopadhyay works for a Japanese research consortium. This research team has demonstrated that the microtubule bundles (and there are several bundles in each neuron) built into the 80 to 100 billion neurons are literally quantum devices. You can find a short youtube video on “Closer to Truth” with Robert Lawrence Kuhn interviewing Bandyopadhyay. There are published research documents that this team has published as well.
2. Hameroff’s research team has demonstrated that anesthetics, the chemical compounds that make us loose consciousness target these microtubule bundles. Additionally, it has been demonstrated that psychedelic chemical compounds as well as anti-depressant chemical compounds target the microtubule bundles also. In short, these compounds have a direct affect on the system that causes consciousness and the very experience of consciousness itself.
Based on this evidence, I think it would be reasonable to imply that the brain itself targets these microtubule bundles as well by producing a chemical compound that puts us to sleep, and for all practical purposes takes this quantum system offline. The brain regulates this quantum system the same way it regulates our respiratory, circulatory, digestive and all involuntary systems in our bodies.
Like I stated earlier Tina, the road Hameroff is headed down with a quantum theory of mind is misdirected and will only discredit the work he and Bandyopadhyay’s team have accomplished so far. There is already a bunch of woo woo articles and essays on the internet that are really, really screwed up. But to be fair, the folks who are writing these essays are following Hameroff’s lead. Penrose doesn’t necessarily agree with Hameroff’s misdirected ideas, but poor old Roger’s glory days are in the rearview mirror as he is well into his nineties now.
Here’s an additional anecdote to consider. The physical sciences have never encountered a quantum system before and even if they stumbled across one, would they recognize it for what it was? Additionally, if you choose to pursue my theory further, don’t let this quantum wave function collapse business deter you because the quantum wave function itself is a BS story.
--> We know better, of course. There’s no real coloured arc up there.
I think the colored arc Frankish and other illusionists are referring to is something like a piece of canvas with stripes of ROY G BIV painted across it. There isn't "a colored arc" like *that* in the sky. Our distant ancestors, though, may have guessed something like *that* appeared and disappeared like magic under certain conditions. Presumably, that's not what you believe now. That's the difference they are trying to tease out.
I'm not sure I'm following. I wonder if you're picking up on the phrase Frankish used, "arranged arcwise"? I figured that was just another way of saying there are no underlying physical correlates of a rainbow. Do you think he means something else? For a moment I wondered if he meant by that "there are physical correlates, but they're not arranged in an arc" but from the next line I decided he probably didn't mean that.
I think that’s exactly what he meant. “there are physical correlates (e.g. water droplets and light rays reflecting and refracting off of them) but they’re not arranged in an arc”. I don’t know which “next line” would cause you to think differently. Here’s the passage I think you are referring to:
—> We know better, of course. There’s no real coloured arc up there. Nor are there any specific physical features arranged arcwise — the rainbow’s “atmospheric correlates”, as it were. There are just water droplets evenly distributed throughout the air and reflecting sunlight in such a way that from your vantage point there appears to be a multi-coloured arc.
If, instead of viewing the rainbow from afar, you were to be transported into those “water droplets evenly distributed throughout the air”, there would be no discernible arcwise arrangement of them. You could draw your own imaginary arc around any of them (because there are physical correlates there) but nothing from that vantage point would suggest which ones you should choose to make “a rainbow”. I think Frankish would say choosing which neural correlates are “consciousness” is something like that.
I was focusing on the "from your vantage point there appears to be a multi-colored arc", which I combined with "no atmospheric correlates" to mean rainbows simply are observer-dependent...there is no "rainbow in itself" or "observer-independent rainbow". But that's just my interpretation. For all I know he could have meant there are physical correlates, just not arranged in an arc. But that would be bizarre since it would mean invisible rainbows are everywhere in an observer-independent reality. Another commenter thought that was what he meant, though, so you may be right.
Contra Frankish, there is something arranged arcwise in a rainbow: it is the set of raindrops which are refracting some portion of the visible spectrum into your eyes. With a half-silvered mirror, more than one person could see the same rainbow.
It is a set determined by a position - the observer's position - which is outside of the positions of the raindrops forming the set, but the same can be said of the center of gravity of a ring, for example. It is a constantly-changing set, but then the same can be said for the set of water molecules on the crest of a wave.
Frankish apparently wants to call our phenomenal experiences illusions in order to avoid the question of what the physical correlates of consciousness are, but his way of looking at things, if adopted consistently, will foreclose on us ever being able to explain the mental as the result of physical processes. I say this because it seems clear to me that any such explanation would make considerable use of abstractions, with the concept of information probably being the greatest. There is nothing special about this: at least since Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, our understanding of the world has been inescapably abstract (here's a short and thought-provoking essay on the topic: Freeman Dyson's 'Why is Maxwell’s Theory so hard to understand?'
In trying to avoid this question, Frankish has apparently been captured by a different illusion: the impression that finding the physical correlates of consciousness is a hard problem that could not be solved by solving the 'easy' problem of explaining how the brain produces the mind through its activity. While it is not certain that the latter can be done (and it has certainly not been done yet), if it could be done, then there would be no more a hard problem of consciousness than there is a hard problem of the weather (we are not puzzled by the question of what the physical correlates of cold fronts are, because we can explain how they come about, and how they affect the weather, in physical terms.)
I have to admit, I was a little surprised he didn't take your position on the 'real' rainbow by calling it that 40-42 degree arc in relation to the viewer with the sun directly behind. A functionalist could say the rainbow simply IS those relations—what's left after you subtract colors from the rainbow. There's still a lot of relations going on there, after all. That would have been my go-to move, if I were a physicalist or functionalist. Of course then you'd have to discount what the viewer views as well, but that's nothing new really.
"Frankish apparently wants to call our phenomenal experiences illusions in order to avoid the question of what the physical correlates of consciousness are..."
I would say he needs to say what consciousness is (whether that involves saying consciousness is such and such physical correlates or pixies playing tricks with our minds or whatever) in order to be justified in calling our phenomenal experiences illusions. But he doesn't say what consciousness is, or rainbows, at least so far as I know. So his account leaves me confused as to what believers in colorful rainbows such as myself are under illusions about.
And yes, it struck me as strange at first that he denied that there are physical correlates of consciousness, but I suspect he wants to keep open the possibility that consciousness can be in machines or aliens or whatever, so his motivation there might be that he doesn't want to tie consciousness down to biological brains. But this is pure speculation on my part. I just can't think of another reason why he would do that.
I'm not sure I agree with you on the hard and easy problems, but I'm not too keen on the way the whole debate has been framed either, so I'll just leave it at that.
"...our understanding of the world has been inescapably abstract..."
Isn't that the truth! Thanks for the article. I'll check it out.
Our ghost in the machine is far from perfect. Or too much efficient. Simply in some cases what we see is not produced by a reliable tenis player sending us photons. In some cases air or water can send us some photons as well inducing our brain to false conclusions.
The question is ....do really they exist in some form?.
They do but like dreams tend to be disappointing.
What about our conscience?. It's as the first comment says our mind experience. Or the experience of our mind can be as well deceitful....I really can't tell
My take is the manifest phenomena of the rainbow is real, but many of the naive extrapolations about what it might be aren't. When evaluating Frankish's argument, we have to remember that we grew up in the scientific age, learning very early that the rainbow wasn't any of those naive theories. What's obvious to us wasn't obvious to people before this age. Consider the role of rainbows in various pre-scientific cultures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow#Culture_and_mythology
Of course, Frankish's overall point is that there is an appearance / reality divergence here, which he argues is the same for consciousness. I'm not always wild about the way he sells this. I much prefer my own manifest vs fundamental consciousness distinction, or other approaches along those lines. But I think his overall point here is valid.
Maybe pre-scientific cultures were more naive than we are. But keep in mind, Plato believed visible objects were an interplay of light being received by our eyes and minds, and constructed a very famous metaphor around those relations. I think sometimes the scientifically-inclined (for lack of a better way of putting it) have a tendency to think "folk psychology" is more naive than it is (as is shown in the articles that imply, "Can you believe rainbows aren't solid and there's no end of the rainbow!") but of course in cases going much further back in time, there's no way of knowing. And I'll grant that it's not completely obvious that rainbows follow you while you move. But again, that doesn't say rainbows themselves are illusory.
"Frankish's overall point is that there is an appearance / reality divergence here, which he argues is the same for consciousness."
I get that, but what I'm curious about is what is the reality, then? What is a real rainbow? Do you know what he means by that?
Tina , not sure I follow you. I read "Frankish" blog and he states that Raibows are real but Rainbows as a "just water droplets evenly distributed throughout the air and reflecting sunlight in such a way that from your vantage point there appears to be a multi-coloured arc". His words.
The external reality we call Rainbow is just that. Obviously it means that same water droplets observed from another point produce such skilled photons but not for your eyes. Most likely if you play with your garden hose a sunny day there will be plenty of rainbows that you can not see.
A weak definition that allows that right now, while reading this answer there is a rainbow that you can not see just in front of you. :)
Thanks for that quote. Notice: "...from your vantage point there appears to be a multi-coloured arc". There he seems to be taking observers into account, and later he seems to be alluding to the fact that there is no observer-independent way to pick out a rainbow, no 'atmospheric correlates'. So if a rainbow IS an observer-dependent phenomenon, and that's what we think a rainbow is, then where's the illusion? This is was what I was trying to get at in my post.
I considered the possibility that he might be thinking invisible rainbows exist everywhere, but he avoids going there. My guess is that's because he realizes there would be way of differentiating invisible rainbows from nothing—invisible rainbows existing everywhere all the time would makes 'rainbow' meaningless. Although I have to admit, there is a certain appeal to the idea of invisible rainbows being omnipresent. :)
I think folk psychology is as naive as folk physics, such as thinking the sun actually rises and sets, that the world is flat, that animals are designed and humans separate from nature, that time and space are absolute, etc. It's the normal difference between the more manifest image of reality and the more scientific one. It's worth noting that manifest images are usually robust enough to get us through daily life, but if they accurately reflected reality, we wouldn't have needed centuries of science.
You made me go back and read the actual post. (My comment above was from your quotes and memory.) I think he means the real rainbow is this:
"There are just water droplets evenly distributed throughout the air and reflecting sunlight in such a way that from your vantage point there appears to be a multi-coloured arc."
Strictly speaking, he should have mentioned refraction and/or dispersion, but he's basically talking about the scientific understanding of the phenomenon. The real rainbow is not a giant arch, the bow of Yahweh, a bridge to the spirit world, or many of the other things it might historically have been thought to be, but this interaction between the atmosphere, sunlight, and our perspective.
Thanks Mike. I like the phrase "folk physics". I think you're onto something about folk psychology nowadays being as naive as folk physics, and maybe at times they're same. Folk physics trickles out into popular scientific articles, which is what we're seeing in those bizarre accounts of rainbows. Folk physics clashing with a mythical folk psychology clashing with actual folk psychology clashing with actual physics makes for some entertaining reading, even if it makes no sense.
Another commenter pointed out that bit from his blog as well. I think Frankish is being confusing there because he's taking our perspective into account—as he knows he must do, otherwise there is no such thing as a rainbow. Yet later he says "there is no multicolored arc" and calls that phenomenon an illusion. But that multicolored arc IS the observer, it is the perspective. So does he want to take perspective into account or not?
After all, there's a difference between saying "rainbows don't really exist because they depend on our perspectives" vs. "rainbows are real but they're illusions". He says the latter. I'll go out on a limb and guess that what he means is: "rainbows are real but they're illusions because they depend on our perspectives". I didn't include this guess of mine in my post because he never actually says it, but I don't know what else he could mean.
The first, "rainbows don't exist because they depend on our perspective", is at least coherent (but wrong in my opinion). The second, "rainbows are illusions...", awaits an explanation as to what a real rainbow is. If he really does mean "rainbows are illusions because they depend on our perspectives", then he can't tell us what a real rainbow is without appealing to the very thing that he claims makes them illusory—perspective. But he dodges this error, leaving the question of what a real rainbow is "up in the air", so to speak.
I confused things by using the word "perspective". I only meant vantage point. Frankish used "position" which I think conveys the same idea. Our consciousness is not the key thing, because rainbows can be caught on camera.
Another example I've used before is star constellations. Consider that we see the constellations, the patterns in the sky, that we do because of the location and time that we are looking at them. If we were looking a million years ago, the patterns would be different. Likewise if we were on a planet 100 light years from here, the patterns would also be very different. The constellations we see only exist from our location and time in the universe. This is true whether we're observing them directly or with cameras or other scientific instruments.
Star constellations as patterns in Earth's sky are real. It's just that the scope of those patterns, where they are apparent, is much more narrow than ancient observers assumed, who thought Earth was the center of the universe and that stars were holes in a physical celestial sphere. But we know that two stars right by each other in our sky might be hundreds of light years apart from each other. Their closeness could be considered an illusion based on our location.
The concept is also illustrated by the sculptures in this video. Hope it helps.
That artist's work is amazing. Especially impressive that he can include more than one message in a single installation. That seemed like a mind-boggling number of components to juggle. I've spent a bit of time disentangling yarn, but I usually give up after a few minutes. 20 hours that would make me go postal.
I'm not sure a camera will get us out the observer perspective problem, since images in photos are also viewer dependent. A rainbow exists insofar as it is viewed, whether it's in a picture or in real life. I don't think there's a coherent way to talk about a viewer-independent rainbow. There's nothing specific that we can pick out, nothing to enable us to distinguish rainbows from non-rainbows; a mind-independent 'rainbow' turns out to designate nothing whatsoever.
Star constellations are an interesting comparison. In talking about constellations we're talking about the pattern or arrangement of stars as viewed from earth: the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, Orion, etc. This is different from talking about the stars themselves. Surely such patterns are nothing if not dependent on our conscious perspectives? These seem to me even more dependent on us than rainbows (which presents itself as given). Patterns are our way of organizing the stars we see in the night sky. Kind of like mnemonic devices for keeping all those points of light straight in our heads. Plus, I could look up at the sky and pick out various figures or groupings that are entirely different from the recognized constellations. There's no 'constellation in itself', no pattern aside from people deciding to name groupings of stars as viewed from earth.
That said, I can see where an illusion comes about if someone thinks the stars that make up constellations are really closer to each other than they are or even side by side as little punctures in the heavenly sphere. In doing so they don't know about the vast distances between the stars, and like you said, if we think earth is sitting inside a giant ball with puncture holes that make up the points of light we see in the night sky, that will change the way we conceptualize the constellations. In that case it would be the proximity of stars to one another and to us that's the illusion. Something like that could happen with our understanding of rainbows too. If we think rainbows don't depend on our perspective, or if we don't realize it depends on our viewing it from a particular position in relation to the light and moisture in the air, the illusion in this case would be we thought it existed independently of our perspective, but it really didn't. In this case we wouldn't say 'rainbows are illusions'...unless, of course, we mean "only perceiver-independent entities exist, so rainbows don't really exist." As I was saying before, I don't agree with this view, but at least it's a coherent position.
I think this is why most people who criticize illusionism automatically assume illusionists are saying consciousness doesn't exist. It's a strange sort of 'principle of generosity' at work (albeit most likely subconsciously) where people are interpreting illusionists to make their view coherent. For instance, I was surprised to see this today on Schwitzgebel's blog: "Recent "illusionists", such as Keith Frankish and Francois Kammerer, deny that consciousness exists."
And that was after talking to Frankish for a while, so I was surprised by that. Frankish explicitly says in the comments, "I've never denied the existence of conscious experiences -- episodes of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling pain, and so on. Such episodes are -- of course! -- real, and we can recognize them when they occur in us. What I reject is a certain theory of how we recognize them."
Okay, what Frankish is saying here isn't so spit-in-your-face awful. So what's up with the "illusion" label? Why not just say, "qualia is not really experienced, it's an abstraction, it's a theory laden notion, it's not the self-evident experiential rock bottom entity you take it to be"? Or even, "Your notions of what experiences are like don't seem pre-theoretical to me." That's fair enough. In fact I would agree it's really really complicated. And I would agree qualia is theory-laden. Maybe everything we find through introspection is theory laden. Whatever the case, it's definitely not easy, and even harder to express, but not hopeless or impossible either.
For constellations and rainbows, I think we have to be careful in relegating them to conscious experience. It seems like the argument you're using could also be used for chairs (to use Eric S's example). Does a chair exist independent of our conscious experience? If no one is around to recognize a chair as a chair, is it a chair? It seems as dependent on our minds as constellations and rainbows do.
All of these have objective precursors to those perceptions, and if we reject the precursors of rainbows and constellations as criteria for mind independence, then it seems like we have to reject it for chairs, and much of the rest of the external world.
I'm sure for an idealist, this is just fine. But my point is that the rainbow and constellations aren't especially dependent on our minds.
Yeah, the "illusion" label isn't my preferred way of talking about this. It makes it easy for people to misunderstand, although I no longer think all the fault is on the illusionists for this. Almost all illusionists repeatedly and consistently insist they're not denying consciousness, and their critics consistently overlook or ignore those clarifications. (It's akin to most panpsychists clarifying they're not saying electrons have minds, another clarification consistently ignored by critics.)
Rhetorically, I think Frankish is on firmer ground with, "What I reject is a certain theory of how we recognize them." What is being denied is a *theory* of consciousness, not consciousness itself. Anyone who wants to say that the theory of fundamental consciousness shouldn't be denied should defend it with evidence or logic, not just express outrage when it is questioned. In that sense, I think the illusionist approach concedes too much ground upfront.
But that's why I prefer to call myself a functionalist, which emphasizes what I think is the case rather than what isn't, and let people try to convince me there's more.
If illusionists wanted people to understand their position they could merely say “When someone suggests that consciousness defies causal dynamics of this world in an ontological capacity, our naturalism leads us to call it ‘an illusion’”. So either my reduction of their position is incorrect, or my reduction of their position eludes them, or most likely, they’d rather not be understood.
The irony is that the consciousness position which Frankish and other illusionists do support, seems causally incomplete. The belief is that anything will create consciousness when the right information gets processed into the right other information — maybe certain marks on paper that are algorithmically processed to create the right other marks on paper. Thus something here would experience what you do when your thumb gets whacked. I consider this position non-causal because the second marked paper should only be informational to the extent that it informs something appropriate.
"our naturalism leads us to call it ‘an illusion’”
I think that's right, and that's the problem with illusionism; they take science to be metaphysics. Unfortunately, science makes for a paltry metaphysics, a metaphysics that undermines itself because no one can say what anything IS. But then, if you can't say what anything is, where's the evaluation of "illusion" coming from?
I hadn't realized Frankish was a computationalist. (I haven't read any of his papers, just a few blog posts...after stumbling on the intriguing rainbow blog post which I couldn't resist replying to.) Maybe he thinks the rainbow is information, then?
He’s not exactly saying rainbows are information, but rather that there are both spooky and non-spooky conceptions of rainbows. And of course again, he’s not being clear about this any more than with consciousness. If he wanted to be clear then he’d state things explicitly. Another clear path that he doesn’t take would be to explicitly differentiate ontology from epistemology. A naturalist can say that consciousness is private, irreducible, and so on if they do so epistemologically. To say so ontologically however would violate their premise of naturalism.
On people adding metaphysics to science, I’d love for that to end too! The only way that I know of would for a community of respected professionals to become established whose only purpose would be to found science metaphysically, epistemologically, and axiologically. For metaphysics I propose the observation that if causality ontologically fails, then science is rendered obsolete to that magnitude. Thus I think standard scientists would be mandated to presume there’s nothing spooky about consciousness or anything else in the end, and even if false. That would leave non-standard scientists to explore spooky conceptions of consciousness, rainbows, or whatever. It would be up to philosophers to decide if these new “founders of science” should be classified under “philosophy” or “science”. It makes no difference to me, though I do think science suffers heavily today given that there aren’t defined rules to follow in these regards so far.
Just wanted to say I really like the style of your audio presentation here. For some reason or other it reminds me of a podcast that I haven't listened to for years called "The Memory Palace."
Those videos are cool too! Nice work.
As a total aside, while trying to determine whether or not rainbows are illusions or not is a worthwhile pursuit, and while there's certainly value to studying them scientifically, I don't think we should overlook the Insane Clown Posse's assertion that they're miracles. Everybody has a good laugh at this absurd song, but experientially speaking, I think they're actually on to something.
Thanks for listening! Hope all is well with you too. And the compliment is very well taken on the videos, given what you do. I'm finding it much more enjoyable to produce these podcasts with music and video involved. When it's just me talking, meh. Not fun.
Oddly enough, I don't generally listen to podcasts, but I know a lot of people do. Still, The Memory Palace is such an intriguing name, I might have to look that up.
And that Insane Clown Posse video was hysterical! Love it. Thanks for sharing it.
I think what's at play here is that their idea of "reality" is tied up with the idea of "simple location". The rainbow we (at least seem to) collectively perceive is not simply located along the arc we each individually see and would locate in the sky. It is seen in different locations for different observers, and arguably gains its existence primarily in being perceived.
Or perhaps behind their idea of "reality" is the idea of independently existing substances. Rainbows are not independent substances, but exist entirely in relation to other things and observers. When Buddhists talk about the world being an "illusion", this is what they mean, and as you point out they are being consistent in applying this logic beyond just rainbows.
Hi Joseph, thanks for stopping by! You make some great points here. I think you're right that rainbows gain their existence in being perceived—and they disclose themselves as having that sort of reality, meaning they are transparently and visibly (if not obviously) viewer dependent. They provide us an interesting tie-in to Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness since there's no obvious abstraction with which to replace the experienced rainbow. Rainbows visibly violate notions of reality tied to simple location; in other words, it's hard to see how rainbows can be anything at all under such a view. Rainbows make us wonder about all of experiential reality, how much of it is relational, observer-dependent, too? Simple location-as-reality may serve us well in some areas of our understanding, but it turns out to be metaphysically naive when it comes under scrutiny.
One has to keep in mind where Frankish is coming from. First and foremost, he is the one who canonized the phrase; “consciousness is an illusion”. It’s his baby, so he’s going to do whatever he has to do to keep himself in the limelight of the debate. Additionally, illusionists as a whole are disingenuous and not really interested in solving the hard problem of consciousness.
Can the “hard problem’ be solved? Of course it can, but before it can be solved the foundational premises that created the problem in the first place have to be changed. All models of reality spring forth from an original assumption, and if that assumption is erroneous, well, then we get what we’ve got today, mass confusion.
Spoiler Alert:
The prevailing model embraced by neuroscience and academia today is that mind is what the brain does. Wrong!! Mind is a “cognitive system” built into the architecture of the brain. This cognitive system is mutually inclusive with the brain, relationally interdependent with the brain making it coextensive with the brain as a single unified system. In other words, mind = cognitive system. As a comparison, this cognitive system of the brain would be no different in nature than the immune system of our bodies.
For all practical purposes, consciousness is the experience of this "cognitive system". And taking it to the next level; for all practical purposes this cognitive system is quantum. Thanks to the work of Penrose, Hameroff and Anirban Bandyopadhyay, we now have the empirical evidence to back it up. Whether Hameroff and his entourage will be successful in their endeavor is another story because as Bugs Bunny would say: “they’ve taken the wrong turn at Albuquerque”. They are trying to pigeon-hole a quantum mind into the architecture of space/time and quantum wave-function. And that’s a problem because neither Einstein’s General theory of relativity nor quantum wave-function reflect the true nature of reality. Will we ever learn? I doubt it…….
What this spoiler alert suggests in practicality is that there really is a ghost in the machine (brain). And that ghost is a quantum system.
From seeing him talk on YouTube, I think Frankish is a gentler, nicer guy than Dennett and he tries to make it clear he's using the phrase to provoke—which somewhat undermines the power of it to provoke...which is to his credit.
Totally agree that the original assumption needs to be changed.
It's an interesting analogy that you bring up with the immune system. I'll ponder that one.
I'll admit, I haven't been tempted to read Penrose and friends on the quantum theories of consciousness because at first glance it sounded to me like: Consciousness is weird. Quantum is weird. Maybe consciousness is quantum! So the truth is, I don't know much about their theories.
You should. Some deacades ago scientifics though quantum theories very poorly. A bit like Rainbows they fit in our experience but there is nothing tangible behind. Now we have supercomputers so I might be outdated.
Here’s some of the skinny:
1. Anirban Bandyopadhyay works for a Japanese research consortium. This research team has demonstrated that the microtubule bundles (and there are several bundles in each neuron) built into the 80 to 100 billion neurons are literally quantum devices. You can find a short youtube video on “Closer to Truth” with Robert Lawrence Kuhn interviewing Bandyopadhyay. There are published research documents that this team has published as well.
2. Hameroff’s research team has demonstrated that anesthetics, the chemical compounds that make us loose consciousness target these microtubule bundles. Additionally, it has been demonstrated that psychedelic chemical compounds as well as anti-depressant chemical compounds target the microtubule bundles also. In short, these compounds have a direct affect on the system that causes consciousness and the very experience of consciousness itself.
Based on this evidence, I think it would be reasonable to imply that the brain itself targets these microtubule bundles as well by producing a chemical compound that puts us to sleep, and for all practical purposes takes this quantum system offline. The brain regulates this quantum system the same way it regulates our respiratory, circulatory, digestive and all involuntary systems in our bodies.
Like I stated earlier Tina, the road Hameroff is headed down with a quantum theory of mind is misdirected and will only discredit the work he and Bandyopadhyay’s team have accomplished so far. There is already a bunch of woo woo articles and essays on the internet that are really, really screwed up. But to be fair, the folks who are writing these essays are following Hameroff’s lead. Penrose doesn’t necessarily agree with Hameroff’s misdirected ideas, but poor old Roger’s glory days are in the rearview mirror as he is well into his nineties now.
Here’s an additional anecdote to consider. The physical sciences have never encountered a quantum system before and even if they stumbled across one, would they recognize it for what it was? Additionally, if you choose to pursue my theory further, don’t let this quantum wave function collapse business deter you because the quantum wave function itself is a BS story.
I relly love your last paragraph. Thanks anyway.
Thanks for this explanation. I will check out the "Closer to Truth" video—I like those videos. They get right down to business.
"There is already a bunch of woo woo articles and essays on the internet that are really, really screwed up."
Don't forget, I myself might be considered pretty woo woo too. :)
"The physical sciences have never encountered a quantum system before and even if they stumbled across one, would they recognize it for what it was?"
I certainly wouldn't! I don't even know what a quantum system is or what it means.
--> We know better, of course. There’s no real coloured arc up there.
I think the colored arc Frankish and other illusionists are referring to is something like a piece of canvas with stripes of ROY G BIV painted across it. There isn't "a colored arc" like *that* in the sky. Our distant ancestors, though, may have guessed something like *that* appeared and disappeared like magic under certain conditions. Presumably, that's not what you believe now. That's the difference they are trying to tease out.
I'm not sure I'm following. I wonder if you're picking up on the phrase Frankish used, "arranged arcwise"? I figured that was just another way of saying there are no underlying physical correlates of a rainbow. Do you think he means something else? For a moment I wondered if he meant by that "there are physical correlates, but they're not arranged in an arc" but from the next line I decided he probably didn't mean that.
I think that’s exactly what he meant. “there are physical correlates (e.g. water droplets and light rays reflecting and refracting off of them) but they’re not arranged in an arc”. I don’t know which “next line” would cause you to think differently. Here’s the passage I think you are referring to:
—> We know better, of course. There’s no real coloured arc up there. Nor are there any specific physical features arranged arcwise — the rainbow’s “atmospheric correlates”, as it were. There are just water droplets evenly distributed throughout the air and reflecting sunlight in such a way that from your vantage point there appears to be a multi-coloured arc.
If, instead of viewing the rainbow from afar, you were to be transported into those “water droplets evenly distributed throughout the air”, there would be no discernible arcwise arrangement of them. You could draw your own imaginary arc around any of them (because there are physical correlates there) but nothing from that vantage point would suggest which ones you should choose to make “a rainbow”. I think Frankish would say choosing which neural correlates are “consciousness” is something like that.
No?
I was focusing on the "from your vantage point there appears to be a multi-colored arc", which I combined with "no atmospheric correlates" to mean rainbows simply are observer-dependent...there is no "rainbow in itself" or "observer-independent rainbow". But that's just my interpretation. For all I know he could have meant there are physical correlates, just not arranged in an arc. But that would be bizarre since it would mean invisible rainbows are everywhere in an observer-independent reality. Another commenter thought that was what he meant, though, so you may be right.
Contra Frankish, there is something arranged arcwise in a rainbow: it is the set of raindrops which are refracting some portion of the visible spectrum into your eyes. With a half-silvered mirror, more than one person could see the same rainbow.
It is a set determined by a position - the observer's position - which is outside of the positions of the raindrops forming the set, but the same can be said of the center of gravity of a ring, for example. It is a constantly-changing set, but then the same can be said for the set of water molecules on the crest of a wave.
Frankish apparently wants to call our phenomenal experiences illusions in order to avoid the question of what the physical correlates of consciousness are, but his way of looking at things, if adopted consistently, will foreclose on us ever being able to explain the mental as the result of physical processes. I say this because it seems clear to me that any such explanation would make considerable use of abstractions, with the concept of information probably being the greatest. There is nothing special about this: at least since Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, our understanding of the world has been inescapably abstract (here's a short and thought-provoking essay on the topic: Freeman Dyson's 'Why is Maxwell’s Theory so hard to understand?'
https://www.clerkmaxwellfoundation.org/DysonFreemanArticle.pdf)
In trying to avoid this question, Frankish has apparently been captured by a different illusion: the impression that finding the physical correlates of consciousness is a hard problem that could not be solved by solving the 'easy' problem of explaining how the brain produces the mind through its activity. While it is not certain that the latter can be done (and it has certainly not been done yet), if it could be done, then there would be no more a hard problem of consciousness than there is a hard problem of the weather (we are not puzzled by the question of what the physical correlates of cold fronts are, because we can explain how they come about, and how they affect the weather, in physical terms.)
Hi Drew, thanks for taking the time to comment.
I have to admit, I was a little surprised he didn't take your position on the 'real' rainbow by calling it that 40-42 degree arc in relation to the viewer with the sun directly behind. A functionalist could say the rainbow simply IS those relations—what's left after you subtract colors from the rainbow. There's still a lot of relations going on there, after all. That would have been my go-to move, if I were a physicalist or functionalist. Of course then you'd have to discount what the viewer views as well, but that's nothing new really.
"Frankish apparently wants to call our phenomenal experiences illusions in order to avoid the question of what the physical correlates of consciousness are..."
I would say he needs to say what consciousness is (whether that involves saying consciousness is such and such physical correlates or pixies playing tricks with our minds or whatever) in order to be justified in calling our phenomenal experiences illusions. But he doesn't say what consciousness is, or rainbows, at least so far as I know. So his account leaves me confused as to what believers in colorful rainbows such as myself are under illusions about.
And yes, it struck me as strange at first that he denied that there are physical correlates of consciousness, but I suspect he wants to keep open the possibility that consciousness can be in machines or aliens or whatever, so his motivation there might be that he doesn't want to tie consciousness down to biological brains. But this is pure speculation on my part. I just can't think of another reason why he would do that.
I'm not sure I agree with you on the hard and easy problems, but I'm not too keen on the way the whole debate has been framed either, so I'll just leave it at that.
"...our understanding of the world has been inescapably abstract..."
Isn't that the truth! Thanks for the article. I'll check it out.
That video's cool
Thanks!
I to liked the vídeo. Of the dog...
I hate to key in the cell so Ill try to be short.
Our ghost in the machine is far from perfect. Or too much efficient. Simply in some cases what we see is not produced by a reliable tenis player sending us photons. In some cases air or water can send us some photons as well inducing our brain to false conclusions.
The question is ....do really they exist in some form?.
They do but like dreams tend to be disappointing.
What about our conscience?. It's as the first comment says our mind experience. Or the experience of our mind can be as well deceitful....I really can't tell
I'm sorry to hear you find dreams (and rainbows?) disappointing. :(
I tend not to remember my dreams, but I find rainbows marvelous, all the more so for being ephemeral.
Rainbows are perfect....because they never become..real.
Youth dreams well it's not the same.
Ps really loved your dog.
My take is the manifest phenomena of the rainbow is real, but many of the naive extrapolations about what it might be aren't. When evaluating Frankish's argument, we have to remember that we grew up in the scientific age, learning very early that the rainbow wasn't any of those naive theories. What's obvious to us wasn't obvious to people before this age. Consider the role of rainbows in various pre-scientific cultures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow#Culture_and_mythology
Of course, Frankish's overall point is that there is an appearance / reality divergence here, which he argues is the same for consciousness. I'm not always wild about the way he sells this. I much prefer my own manifest vs fundamental consciousness distinction, or other approaches along those lines. But I think his overall point here is valid.
Maybe pre-scientific cultures were more naive than we are. But keep in mind, Plato believed visible objects were an interplay of light being received by our eyes and minds, and constructed a very famous metaphor around those relations. I think sometimes the scientifically-inclined (for lack of a better way of putting it) have a tendency to think "folk psychology" is more naive than it is (as is shown in the articles that imply, "Can you believe rainbows aren't solid and there's no end of the rainbow!") but of course in cases going much further back in time, there's no way of knowing. And I'll grant that it's not completely obvious that rainbows follow you while you move. But again, that doesn't say rainbows themselves are illusory.
"Frankish's overall point is that there is an appearance / reality divergence here, which he argues is the same for consciousness."
I get that, but what I'm curious about is what is the reality, then? What is a real rainbow? Do you know what he means by that?
Air, water and light being playfull. I think that he believes is nothing. Or nearly nothing. Rainbows only exist in our minds.
That's what I would expect him to say, but he says rainbows are real. That's why I'm wondering what he thinks a rainbow really is.
Tina , not sure I follow you. I read "Frankish" blog and he states that Raibows are real but Rainbows as a "just water droplets evenly distributed throughout the air and reflecting sunlight in such a way that from your vantage point there appears to be a multi-coloured arc". His words.
The external reality we call Rainbow is just that. Obviously it means that same water droplets observed from another point produce such skilled photons but not for your eyes. Most likely if you play with your garden hose a sunny day there will be plenty of rainbows that you can not see.
A weak definition that allows that right now, while reading this answer there is a rainbow that you can not see just in front of you. :)
Thanks for that quote. Notice: "...from your vantage point there appears to be a multi-coloured arc". There he seems to be taking observers into account, and later he seems to be alluding to the fact that there is no observer-independent way to pick out a rainbow, no 'atmospheric correlates'. So if a rainbow IS an observer-dependent phenomenon, and that's what we think a rainbow is, then where's the illusion? This is was what I was trying to get at in my post.
I considered the possibility that he might be thinking invisible rainbows exist everywhere, but he avoids going there. My guess is that's because he realizes there would be way of differentiating invisible rainbows from nothing—invisible rainbows existing everywhere all the time would makes 'rainbow' meaningless. Although I have to admit, there is a certain appeal to the idea of invisible rainbows being omnipresent. :)
I think folk psychology is as naive as folk physics, such as thinking the sun actually rises and sets, that the world is flat, that animals are designed and humans separate from nature, that time and space are absolute, etc. It's the normal difference between the more manifest image of reality and the more scientific one. It's worth noting that manifest images are usually robust enough to get us through daily life, but if they accurately reflected reality, we wouldn't have needed centuries of science.
You made me go back and read the actual post. (My comment above was from your quotes and memory.) I think he means the real rainbow is this:
"There are just water droplets evenly distributed throughout the air and reflecting sunlight in such a way that from your vantage point there appears to be a multi-coloured arc."
Strictly speaking, he should have mentioned refraction and/or dispersion, but he's basically talking about the scientific understanding of the phenomenon. The real rainbow is not a giant arch, the bow of Yahweh, a bridge to the spirit world, or many of the other things it might historically have been thought to be, but this interaction between the atmosphere, sunlight, and our perspective.
Thanks Mike. I like the phrase "folk physics". I think you're onto something about folk psychology nowadays being as naive as folk physics, and maybe at times they're same. Folk physics trickles out into popular scientific articles, which is what we're seeing in those bizarre accounts of rainbows. Folk physics clashing with a mythical folk psychology clashing with actual folk psychology clashing with actual physics makes for some entertaining reading, even if it makes no sense.
Another commenter pointed out that bit from his blog as well. I think Frankish is being confusing there because he's taking our perspective into account—as he knows he must do, otherwise there is no such thing as a rainbow. Yet later he says "there is no multicolored arc" and calls that phenomenon an illusion. But that multicolored arc IS the observer, it is the perspective. So does he want to take perspective into account or not?
After all, there's a difference between saying "rainbows don't really exist because they depend on our perspectives" vs. "rainbows are real but they're illusions". He says the latter. I'll go out on a limb and guess that what he means is: "rainbows are real but they're illusions because they depend on our perspectives". I didn't include this guess of mine in my post because he never actually says it, but I don't know what else he could mean.
The first, "rainbows don't exist because they depend on our perspective", is at least coherent (but wrong in my opinion). The second, "rainbows are illusions...", awaits an explanation as to what a real rainbow is. If he really does mean "rainbows are illusions because they depend on our perspectives", then he can't tell us what a real rainbow is without appealing to the very thing that he claims makes them illusory—perspective. But he dodges this error, leaving the question of what a real rainbow is "up in the air", so to speak.
I confused things by using the word "perspective". I only meant vantage point. Frankish used "position" which I think conveys the same idea. Our consciousness is not the key thing, because rainbows can be caught on camera.
Another example I've used before is star constellations. Consider that we see the constellations, the patterns in the sky, that we do because of the location and time that we are looking at them. If we were looking a million years ago, the patterns would be different. Likewise if we were on a planet 100 light years from here, the patterns would also be very different. The constellations we see only exist from our location and time in the universe. This is true whether we're observing them directly or with cameras or other scientific instruments.
Star constellations as patterns in Earth's sky are real. It's just that the scope of those patterns, where they are apparent, is much more narrow than ancient observers assumed, who thought Earth was the center of the universe and that stars were holes in a physical celestial sphere. But we know that two stars right by each other in our sky might be hundreds of light years apart from each other. Their closeness could be considered an illusion based on our location.
The concept is also illustrated by the sculptures in this video. Hope it helps.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BorcaCtjmog
That artist's work is amazing. Especially impressive that he can include more than one message in a single installation. That seemed like a mind-boggling number of components to juggle. I've spent a bit of time disentangling yarn, but I usually give up after a few minutes. 20 hours that would make me go postal.
I'm not sure a camera will get us out the observer perspective problem, since images in photos are also viewer dependent. A rainbow exists insofar as it is viewed, whether it's in a picture or in real life. I don't think there's a coherent way to talk about a viewer-independent rainbow. There's nothing specific that we can pick out, nothing to enable us to distinguish rainbows from non-rainbows; a mind-independent 'rainbow' turns out to designate nothing whatsoever.
Star constellations are an interesting comparison. In talking about constellations we're talking about the pattern or arrangement of stars as viewed from earth: the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, Orion, etc. This is different from talking about the stars themselves. Surely such patterns are nothing if not dependent on our conscious perspectives? These seem to me even more dependent on us than rainbows (which presents itself as given). Patterns are our way of organizing the stars we see in the night sky. Kind of like mnemonic devices for keeping all those points of light straight in our heads. Plus, I could look up at the sky and pick out various figures or groupings that are entirely different from the recognized constellations. There's no 'constellation in itself', no pattern aside from people deciding to name groupings of stars as viewed from earth.
That said, I can see where an illusion comes about if someone thinks the stars that make up constellations are really closer to each other than they are or even side by side as little punctures in the heavenly sphere. In doing so they don't know about the vast distances between the stars, and like you said, if we think earth is sitting inside a giant ball with puncture holes that make up the points of light we see in the night sky, that will change the way we conceptualize the constellations. In that case it would be the proximity of stars to one another and to us that's the illusion. Something like that could happen with our understanding of rainbows too. If we think rainbows don't depend on our perspective, or if we don't realize it depends on our viewing it from a particular position in relation to the light and moisture in the air, the illusion in this case would be we thought it existed independently of our perspective, but it really didn't. In this case we wouldn't say 'rainbows are illusions'...unless, of course, we mean "only perceiver-independent entities exist, so rainbows don't really exist." As I was saying before, I don't agree with this view, but at least it's a coherent position.
I think this is why most people who criticize illusionism automatically assume illusionists are saying consciousness doesn't exist. It's a strange sort of 'principle of generosity' at work (albeit most likely subconsciously) where people are interpreting illusionists to make their view coherent. For instance, I was surprised to see this today on Schwitzgebel's blog: "Recent "illusionists", such as Keith Frankish and Francois Kammerer, deny that consciousness exists."
https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2023/04/there-are-no-chairs-says-illusionist.html
And that was after talking to Frankish for a while, so I was surprised by that. Frankish explicitly says in the comments, "I've never denied the existence of conscious experiences -- episodes of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling pain, and so on. Such episodes are -- of course! -- real, and we can recognize them when they occur in us. What I reject is a certain theory of how we recognize them."
Okay, what Frankish is saying here isn't so spit-in-your-face awful. So what's up with the "illusion" label? Why not just say, "qualia is not really experienced, it's an abstraction, it's a theory laden notion, it's not the self-evident experiential rock bottom entity you take it to be"? Or even, "Your notions of what experiences are like don't seem pre-theoretical to me." That's fair enough. In fact I would agree it's really really complicated. And I would agree qualia is theory-laden. Maybe everything we find through introspection is theory laden. Whatever the case, it's definitely not easy, and even harder to express, but not hopeless or impossible either.
For constellations and rainbows, I think we have to be careful in relegating them to conscious experience. It seems like the argument you're using could also be used for chairs (to use Eric S's example). Does a chair exist independent of our conscious experience? If no one is around to recognize a chair as a chair, is it a chair? It seems as dependent on our minds as constellations and rainbows do.
All of these have objective precursors to those perceptions, and if we reject the precursors of rainbows and constellations as criteria for mind independence, then it seems like we have to reject it for chairs, and much of the rest of the external world.
I'm sure for an idealist, this is just fine. But my point is that the rainbow and constellations aren't especially dependent on our minds.
Yeah, the "illusion" label isn't my preferred way of talking about this. It makes it easy for people to misunderstand, although I no longer think all the fault is on the illusionists for this. Almost all illusionists repeatedly and consistently insist they're not denying consciousness, and their critics consistently overlook or ignore those clarifications. (It's akin to most panpsychists clarifying they're not saying electrons have minds, another clarification consistently ignored by critics.)
Rhetorically, I think Frankish is on firmer ground with, "What I reject is a certain theory of how we recognize them." What is being denied is a *theory* of consciousness, not consciousness itself. Anyone who wants to say that the theory of fundamental consciousness shouldn't be denied should defend it with evidence or logic, not just express outrage when it is questioned. In that sense, I think the illusionist approach concedes too much ground upfront.
But that's why I prefer to call myself a functionalist, which emphasizes what I think is the case rather than what isn't, and let people try to convince me there's more.
If illusionists wanted people to understand their position they could merely say “When someone suggests that consciousness defies causal dynamics of this world in an ontological capacity, our naturalism leads us to call it ‘an illusion’”. So either my reduction of their position is incorrect, or my reduction of their position eludes them, or most likely, they’d rather not be understood.
The irony is that the consciousness position which Frankish and other illusionists do support, seems causally incomplete. The belief is that anything will create consciousness when the right information gets processed into the right other information — maybe certain marks on paper that are algorithmically processed to create the right other marks on paper. Thus something here would experience what you do when your thumb gets whacked. I consider this position non-causal because the second marked paper should only be informational to the extent that it informs something appropriate.
"our naturalism leads us to call it ‘an illusion’”
I think that's right, and that's the problem with illusionism; they take science to be metaphysics. Unfortunately, science makes for a paltry metaphysics, a metaphysics that undermines itself because no one can say what anything IS. But then, if you can't say what anything is, where's the evaluation of "illusion" coming from?
I hadn't realized Frankish was a computationalist. (I haven't read any of his papers, just a few blog posts...after stumbling on the intriguing rainbow blog post which I couldn't resist replying to.) Maybe he thinks the rainbow is information, then?
He’s not exactly saying rainbows are information, but rather that there are both spooky and non-spooky conceptions of rainbows. And of course again, he’s not being clear about this any more than with consciousness. If he wanted to be clear then he’d state things explicitly. Another clear path that he doesn’t take would be to explicitly differentiate ontology from epistemology. A naturalist can say that consciousness is private, irreducible, and so on if they do so epistemologically. To say so ontologically however would violate their premise of naturalism.
On people adding metaphysics to science, I’d love for that to end too! The only way that I know of would for a community of respected professionals to become established whose only purpose would be to found science metaphysically, epistemologically, and axiologically. For metaphysics I propose the observation that if causality ontologically fails, then science is rendered obsolete to that magnitude. Thus I think standard scientists would be mandated to presume there’s nothing spooky about consciousness or anything else in the end, and even if false. That would leave non-standard scientists to explore spooky conceptions of consciousness, rainbows, or whatever. It would be up to philosophers to decide if these new “founders of science” should be classified under “philosophy” or “science”. It makes no difference to me, though I do think science suffers heavily today given that there aren’t defined rules to follow in these regards so far.
Random point: the moon moves with you.
Are you sure? I think moon moves with YOU!
Hey Tina. Hope you've been well.
Just wanted to say I really like the style of your audio presentation here. For some reason or other it reminds me of a podcast that I haven't listened to for years called "The Memory Palace."
Those videos are cool too! Nice work.
As a total aside, while trying to determine whether or not rainbows are illusions or not is a worthwhile pursuit, and while there's certainly value to studying them scientifically, I don't think we should overlook the Insane Clown Posse's assertion that they're miracles. Everybody has a good laugh at this absurd song, but experientially speaking, I think they're actually on to something.
https://youtu.be/8GyVx28R9-s?si=YtRmyzBdVe-zi-3i
Courtesy of someone in the comments section:
'Beethoven: "Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy."
Insane Clown Posse: "I fed a fish to a pelican at Frisco bay, it tried to eat my cell phone, he ran away."'
Thanks for listening! Hope all is well with you too. And the compliment is very well taken on the videos, given what you do. I'm finding it much more enjoyable to produce these podcasts with music and video involved. When it's just me talking, meh. Not fun.
Oddly enough, I don't generally listen to podcasts, but I know a lot of people do. Still, The Memory Palace is such an intriguing name, I might have to look that up.
And that Insane Clown Posse video was hysterical! Love it. Thanks for sharing it.