Digesting Searle: Is Consciousness a Higher Level Biological Process?

I was just reading some of John R. Searle’s remarks on the nature of consciousness in his book, “Mind.” The relevant part for my post is on pp. 116-120 where he says consciousness is a higher level biological process, like digestion, or the secretion of bile from the gall bladder. Of course, digestion and secretion are indeed higher-level processes which are decomposable into more micro-level activities, and on that smaller scale, digestion and secretion are not apparent, just as the overall form of a chair is not evident when examining a speck of wood with a scanning electron microscope. He goes on to suppose we would find a similar situation with brain-thingies, that while consciousness can be observed on an organismic level, at the detailed level of neuronal firings, there’s no sign of consciousness to be seen.

Without attacking this position of his directly, I was thinking about other kinds of processes and their higher-level abstractions. Would it be fair, for example, to ask how the electronics of a calculator gives rise to arithmetic? Admittedly you can punch in numbers and hit operator keys, and use the device to solve arithmetic problems, but I dare say, monkeys pressing keys randomly would mostly not get sums out of it. In fact, “arithmetic” as such does not arise from the calculator’s electronics or parts, not at all, even though they are the substrate for its operation.

A more poignant example: can you ask how life emerges from the biological processes of cells? Maybe not, because viruses are usually considered a life form rather than a toxin, and yet viruses are mostly devoid of biological or cytological processes. Even with cells, though, it’s a common claim in the biological sciences that the study of biology has dispelled the old myth of “elan vital,” the life force. There is no such thing in cells. There are only chemical processes. So we have problems trying to define “life” in the modern scientific world; on close examination, nothing that is life as such can be found, so we have to make up criteria, like respiration, ingestion, reproduction, etc., in order to try to identify it.

Or try one more silly little example: does the succession of still images on a movie film give rise to motion? Is motion actually a process of still images played rapidly?

These are just thinking points, right now, but we can see that supposing consciousness must be a biological process is a chancy proposition, rather like supposing motion is a composite of still frames, or arithmetic is a higher-level view of electronics.

 

Is the Observer Essential?

I mentioned in #Philosophical yesterday in a conversation with Niniane that the observer is an essential part of scientific reality, nowhere more pointedly than in Quantum mechanics, the current heart of physics. Reality is defined by the observer’s interactions with the wave equation, and not by the wave equation itself. Certainly philosophers have rid themselves of the troublesome problem of subjectivity, having relegated it by now to one corner of philosophy of mind. Apparently, to go by Searle, it no longer has any meaningful effect on our epistemology. But if science is unable to avoid subjectivity in its definition of reality, and if our own involvement in the world is the strongest evidence of an external world that we have, then isn’t it more the case that objective contents are inferred from subjective experience, rather than vice versa?

I think it is. And although I don’t wish to use this argument to dismiss an objective universe, I think it’s clearly time for philosophy to give up its newtonian physics and catch up. Physical phenomena are relative, not absolute, and they are relative to — guess who? The observer. So maybe consciousness is something more than a coincidental side effect of biological processes. Maybe it has something to do with the existence, possibly even the basic nature of the Universe.

 

Cardinality of the Natural Numbers

Cardinality of sets is a basic concept of set theory, but Georg Cantor extended the range of the idea when he applied it to infinite sets. Cardinality, simply explained, is just the count of elements in a set. The cardinality is expressed as a natural number, such as two, or five. It can also be zero for the empty set, even though zero is not usually considered a natural number. The integers make a wider set, consisting of all the natural numbers, and all the negative numbers. Natural numbers and integers are all “whole” numbers (numbers having no fractional part).

There is a cute little proof I worked up (thought of it myself, I did) to show that the cardinality of the natural numbers is exactly the same as the cardinality of the integers, and it goes like this:

Make a two-column list. In the left column, list the row number, starting at 1. In the right column, if n is odd, write (n+1)/2. If n is even, write -(n/2). That is, let the right column list the natural numbers and their corresponding negative integers, in alternating succession. In the left column, keep a tally of the entries.

n	Value
1	1
2	-1
3	2
4	-2
5	3
6	-3
…	…

Clearly the list can be extended ad infinitum, and it establishes that the natural numbers are sufficient to count all the positive and negative whole numbers.

It’s also clear from the list above that we can set the natural numbers into a one-to-one correspondence with the odd numbers. But the odd numbers are a subset of the natural numbers. Therefore the set of naturals contains itself.

There is another interesting result which comes from Cantor himself: The cardinality of the set of natural numbers I, called Aleph-null, is a natural number, and it is the smallest infinite natural number. In other words, the set of integers has a cardinality, which is the number of integers in the set, and that number is Aleph-null. But that set has an infinite number of members. Therefore Aleph-null is a natural number of infinite magnitude.

We had a discussion about this in #philosophical several days ago, and it upset some people inordinately, to claim that some integers have an infinite magnitude. I don’t know why, unless it was some confusion of the set of natural numbers with things that physically exist.

 

Nagel’s Bats

Over the past couple of days I’ve listened to extensive arguments between Manapatra and Freelance concerning whether it is like something to be a bat, and whether Mary the psychologist can figure it out from studying the brain anatomy and connection diagrams of the bat’s nervous system. There was a lot of hand-waving going on. There was some quoting of Dennet (which always works to destroy the logic of any question). There were some sparks. Not surprisingly, nobody’s opinions were changed by the discussion, and nobody was able to prove their point to the other party’s satisfaction. I think that’s good. If we could change each others’ opinions just by making some quick and extemporaneous arguments, we would probably all be victims of TV advertisements, too. And that’s clearly not the case.

But Dennett is wrong on this one, and Nagel has a good point. The biggest con game in the whole philo of mind business is the assumption that minds are one-to-one encodings of brains (mind states = brain states) and nothing could be further from the truth.

For one thing, the relation of mind to brain is similar to that of program to computer. Programs involve a level of semantics that can’t be encoded in machine language, and that is stripped out and discarded by the compilation process. In other words, the meanings of symbols are never the symbols themselves, and if the brain is all there is to human cognition, then it is, and must be, inherently meaningless. Which is ridiculous.

The question of where to put the meanings of symbols is always difficult to resolve. For years, people have been putting them in brains, saying that it’s all just in our heads. But when we begin a study of heads and brains, we get symbols that don’t speak for themselves: we need someone to interpret them, and barring asking somebody what theyre thinking, the only alternative is to ask the brain scientist what his subject is thinking. Except that that just interposes an interpreter, saying the meaning of somebody’s brain lies in someone else’s. That’s ridiculous, too.

The only chance for a non-mystical resolution of all this is to suppose the meanings of brains lie in the society where that brain lives, just as language is relative to the people who speak it. We can then find definitions for symbols, expanations for peoples’ behavior, and contexts to contain such abstract objects as careers and scientific theories, by looking about at the relations between people that define these things and create their frame of reference. Take a brain out of its society and you have nothing but signals.

It isn’t my job, at this particular juncture, to explain how societies are any more material than the meanings that can never appear explicitly in brains, but then, I never claimed materialism was the sufficient answer to all questions, either.

In conclusion, the reason why Mary can’t figure out what it’s like to be a bat, is because the answer isn’t in the bat’s brain.

 

Consciousness and Reality

This is the last part of a series on The Philosophy of Dots. In the course of these pieces, I’ve looked at the kinds of structures that can be built between particles of matter, surveying everything from simple relationships like distance and separation, to perceptions and sensations, such as the illusion of solidity developed around the electrostatic charge potential of surface electrons of an object. Originally the purpose of this survey was to challenge our notion that reality is basically physical, but now, at the conclusion of it, it seems that we have to derive our notions of reality from consciousness and its observations, rather than directly from matter.

Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, in his Tractatus, that the value (meaning; sense; form) of the world has to lie outside the world. In his words,

6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside of the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it, no value exists–and if it did exist, it would have no value.

The quote is the source of a lot of misunderstanding. A simple reading of it concludes that, for Wittgenstein, mind, awareness, our senses, and the meanings we see in language, people, and phenomena, are all illusory, somehow not part of reality. Another reading allows that Wittgenstien is granting the “World” to the physical sphere of measurement and empirical observation, an objectified space sufficient to satisfy the needs of scientists, but obviously inadequate for real people and real life. For there is a divide here, a divide between that which can be directly observed by anyone, and that which can only be observed personally. This divide exists for the sake of convenience, for the convenience of a technological research, and not for the convenience of the larger sphere of human affairs.

Simple examples of the spurious nature of this divide are easy to find: the tax levies of governments are burdens of responsibility, where the terms of money are socially constructed by agreements between people to adopt forms of representation; governments are abstract constructs made of people who act in rules, and construct rules; and yet these affairs are nonetheless real, and of pressing importance, despite their lack of definitions in physics textbooks. As I like to say, if you take away his clothes and put him on an examining table in a doctor’s office, how could you distinguish a president from a banker? Their roles and social relationships are not made of bones or chemicals, which are the same in their qualities between both men.

So to create the world we must live in, the abstract relationships that we superimpose over matter are essential to our functioning and survival, and this is neither new nor technological. This structure of abstract relationships was as important to the primitive hunter-gatherer tribespeople who had to distinguish sorts of animals and their uses, or to classify people according to their tribes, their uses, skills and abilities.

The question we really have to deal with is not whether there is anything other than matter that we have to understand, but rather how many kinds of things, and what are their properties. Some of these kinds are intangibles, such as the qualia of sensations. We must understand that people see colors, sense textures, and hear sounds in ways that are not strictly physical — sound varies in intensity in a simple way, but people hear loudness on a logarithmic scale, for example. This means that we have to add terms and concepts to our vocabulary that describe sounds in that way. Decibels is one such measure. Decibels are not unreal, it’s just that they have no justification from a purely physical standpoint.

A more typical question philosophers debate is the reality of mathematics. Some, mathematical realists, consider that mathematics is a real part of the universe that affects it just as much as gravity, maybe more. Others consider such a view not only silly but dangerous, since it invites platonic idealism and a belief in … well, we can’t say something unscientific, can we, for there would be no science without mathematics.

I think there is sufficient justification by now, in our advanced civilization, to accept that mathematics is an inherent part of the universe, and that our use of it to describe the properties and the behavior of matter is not merely quixotic or conventional; it’s supported by its own success. Indeed, we can even make a case that in learning to catch a thrown ball, our minds must have some innate ability to grasp mathematical relationships.

Consciousness is part of the basic ground of form and structure. It is through our awareness of things, and our ability to put them into relation, in other words to form meanings, that we gain the ability to interact with the universe. Science is a function of consciousness. Every field of study in university is a construct of consciousness. Human history is a construct of consciousness. The products of consciousness include not only our perosnal lives, but all our societies, our organizations, and our conventions. None of them would or could exist without minds to serve as their foundations.

Matter, nor even matter augmented with energy and forces, the basic cookbook of physics, can make things that aren’t matter or energy. How do you get stuff out of nothingness? The space between the dots is empty — of matter, but not of stuff. It is full of the spirit of structure and relation, i.e., mathematics. It is mathematics and logic, not just in symbols or even the types of mathematics that we know, but the essence of mathematics, that lies between the dots.

We live in the world of the equation, of which physics is merely one expression.

 

A Note on Theory of Practices

I spent over an hour today trying to dismiss the theory of practices as a useful theory. Someone remarked that the idea of “practices” is not a theory, it’s just a descriptive concept to denote a kind of social phenomenon, which (I suppose) could also be called a tradition, a convention, a cultural ritual — any number of terms, all of which just means “something people do.”

But the idea of practices is not so simple. As it was pointed out, this was a concept advanced by Wittgenstein and others of the Ordinary Language Philosophy group, and it was meant, originally, to perform a philosophical function. It has been taken up by pragmatists as a resolution to the “problem” of theory, which is repugnant to pragmatists because theories aren’t tangible and don’t have a proper place to reside. A theory-less sytem would supposedly be much more realistic.

The theory of practices is a theory, though, and not a very attractive one. Searle, in his book, “The Construction of Social Reality,” takes another path by analyzing the nature of social consensus, its emergence, operation, and effects. It’s evident from the way Mr. Searle describes the operation of institutional practices (he uses the example of a football game, but we could cite any number of conventions such as “rules of the road”), that institutions must perforce set up some theory that has a normative role. This theory might be the rules of the road, or the rules of a game of chess, or the rules of football, but in any case, we can’t just allow people to play the game any way they want. So you can’t get away from theory.

And as I recall, Wittgenstein’s description of language games suggested that there has to be some agreement about the game being played, and how can you do that if there’s no abstract understanding of the rules and parameters of the game?

At any rate, I’m afraid I wasn’t very receptive to process theory.

 

Even More Dots: Process Philosophy

People seem to have an unlimited ability to create new ways to abstract and conceptualize physical relationships. One of the less common approaches is the idea of a process. Although the idea of processes is very old, it didn’t reach a very formal realization until the work of Alfred North Whitehead, a mathematician who became associated with Bertrand Russell and eventually constructed a philosophy of his own called Process Philosophy.

Process philosophy seems mystical to many, and indeed Russell was never very fond of it. Whitehead was platonic in his thinking rather than strictly materialist, setting him at odds with the ethos of his day, which, enlightenment and renaissance in its foundations, hoped to explain everything by material causes. For Whitehead, matter and substance were secondary components, evanescent and changeable, and shaped by their evolution through time. He would see a table in the kitchen, not as a simple object in purely three dimensions, but as a momentary glimpse of a process that had a beginning, when the table was made, and had an ending, when the table was eventually discarded and destroyed. The table of yesterday, young, unmarred, still glowing with fresh varnish, could not be reclaimed from the march of time, and the table of today, while similar, is nevertheless different, marred, worn, and ineluctably degraded.

I was never comfortable with the idea of process philosophy because it seemed to deny the intransigent durability of matter. After all, rock is hard, and surely its material must be the foundation of any concept of reality, yes?

But process philosophy is just another way of drawing lines between dots.

In my previous articles on dots, A Theory of Dots and More Dots, I explored how solid form is constructed over the gaps between material particles. Geometry, especially solid geometry, is more than an abstract type of mathematics, it also describes how we see things, and it’s undeniable that geometrical rules underly the physical structure of many aspects of the material world. Even atoms arrange themselves in crystals in geometrical ways. The distances between particles, and the structures that particles are arranged in, are all elements of conceptual form that is distinct from, yet includes, the particles that define the vertices of the shapes around us.

Process philosophy is nothing more than drawing the connections between particles in time rather than space. The line of geometry becomes the path of history, the course of evolution, of particles and their larger structures.

And just as, with geometry, we can draw an arbitrary number of curves through any selected group of points, so, too, in identifying processes, we can construct the paths of dots through time in any number of different conceptual views. Life, for example, is a kind of death; a process of emergence, and a process of decay. Life brings forth diversity and generates new objects, but it depletes the environment of raw materials and impoverishes the land. What processes exist are all in how we choose to relate the changes the process entails, and which specific changes we choose to notice, and those that are ignored.

None of this is to say processes aren’t real. It only means processes aren’t physical. They are an abstract view of metamorphoses in time, in the same way that geometry abstracts relations in space. Both are useful, and both have meaning, and the fact that they are not purely material is not very important. As we’ve seen before in these talks, any logical structure is a language L formed of elements of two sets, V and R,

L = {V,R}

where V is a vocabulary of elementary objects, and R are rules of relations between them. You can make a chess game by inventing the pieces and defining their possible moves, or you can describe a process for making steel by combining ores in a series of refining steps. Both are equally arbitrary, and equally valid.

The conclusion we continually reach in this study of dots, is that the world we live in is only partially material. It also contains abstract and conceptual components which are just as important, because they provide the form and structure of our world, without which we could not survive in it.

 

The Non-representativity of Consciousness

At this point in the development of the theory of dots, I owe a couple of articles that haven’t been written yet, one to discuss the abstract nature of time-wise sequences called “processes,” and another to ground mentality in the ontology of rules. These are simple tasks which I will get to in the next few days, but I am anxious to launch the discussion of Consciousness, a major theme in the philosophy of mind and neurosciences these days. These remarks are an introduction to my position on the subject.

First of all, consciousness is a term borrowed from the medical profession, used to denote the condition of a patient being awake, aware, and responsive. In its medical usage, the term isn’t advancing any theories about internal mental constructs or processes, it is only meant to identify a medical condition that can be noted by external observation. For example, post-operatively, the sedated unconscious patient will be monitored for the onset of return to consciousness: he wakes up. This can be determined by observing his behavior. He speaks. He moves about. He responds to questions, his eyes track movments. All these conditions indicate the patient is returning to a normal state of taking care of himself. That’s all that consciousness means to a general medical practitioner.

The term has been borrowed to refer to what philosophy essentially calls subjectivity, namely the existence of an internal mental perspective we have in which we view the world as something external to and separate from us. It has become conventional to associate these subjective mental processes with the brain, even though the brain continues to function whether or not the subject is conscious. The first interesting thing to note about this usage of the term consciousness is that there is nothing particular about brain anatomy that suggests there is any mental perspective inside them. The only reason we suppose there is subjectivity in brains is because you, me, apparently everyone claims to have internal mental experiences consisting of thoughts, emotions, and memories.

Given this decision to ground subjectivity in the biological processes of brains, it has become a problem to both philosophy of mind, and the neurosciences, to try to understand and explain how internal mental experience is caused by synapses, electrochemical signals, and chemical agents. There is a gulf between these sorts of physical activities and what thinking feels like, and it is the hope of bridging this gulf that drives a lot of the discussion of philosophers and neuro guys these days.

The second interesting thing about current usage of the term “consciousness” is that it objectifies the whole subject. We treat it as a thing. We ask where the consciousness is located, how it’s generated, what its properties are, and, of course, how to manipulate it. We might almost think consciousness is an optional part of persons, in the same way a kidney or a gall bladder is optional to the survival of an organism.

John Searle discusses subjectivity in his book “Rediscovering the Mind,” (a somewhat tongue-in-cheek title where he jibes at the nuts-and-bolts physicalism of neuro researchers and philosophers who stake their positions on these biochemical sciences, apparently to remind us that, as inconvenient as it may be to say so, there are minds inside these brain thingies). He points out, early in his book, that subjectivity is inherently irreducible, not because of any magic nature of consciousness, but merely because there is nothing else that is like consciousness, so if you try to reduce it, what you get won’t be conscious. It’s rather like dissasociating NaCl (table salt) into its component elements, sodium (Na) and chlorine (Cl). The sodium is a combustible metal, and the chlorine is a poisonous gas. Neither one is “salty.” This fact, he notes, has no deep consequences; in other words, just because sodium and chlorine are not like salt doesn’t falsify the theory that salt is a combination of the two.

All of this is proceeding in a nice philosophical progression. We are about to concede Searle’s point and admit that, just because subjectivity is irreducible doesn’t mean mind-stuff doesn’t arise from brain-stuff. There is just one problem with this. (Maybe two.)

The basic problem is hinted at by Tom Nagel, another philosopher, who suggests that there is something it is like to be a bat. It’s a reference, not to the physiology of bats, but to the internal experience of being a bat. His point is taken up by David Chalmers, who notes that no amount of studying brain anatomy and the schematics of neural connections is going to give us any clue about what yellow lights look like, or what hamburgers taste like. These points are references to the phenomenology of mental processes. In other words, it is not enough to look at the wiring diagrams for brains. There is an inside to the currents and voltage changes. These biophysical activities represent something. They have a meaning, and the meaning is Consciousness.

To put it bluntly, most of the brain studies have objectified consciousness, and, out of all the vast profusion of stuff in the universe where objective analysis is relevant, consciousness is the one, perhaps the only, place where it isn’t. Consciousness is subjective. You can’t see my consciousness (in the modern sense of internal mental experience). Nor can I see yours. Hence any attempt to objectify it, destroys it. (This is reminiscent of Heisenberg’s principle, where observing an interaction modifies it.)

But it goes deeper than that. In the past, in Heidegger’s times, and earlier, philosophers were wont to discuss the subject of Being. This was to refer, not to the properties of stuff, but rather to the being-as-stuff. Instead of an atomistic approach, it’s a holistic approach. Consciousness is not just a brain process. It is Being. This is so strongly sensed by people that many have chosen to adopt a “Living Will,” a legal document that says in the event of brain death, you’re not to try to keep these people alive by artificial means. Life without consciousness is meaningless, and just a pain and burden to the surviving friends and relatives. (A point of view you may not share, but many do.)

So it is essential, I think, in contemporary philosophy, to return to that idea of Being, and sometimes to talk about Being rather than throwing the word “consciousness” around as if it’s just another property of biological materials. At least, surely, we should be aware of that dimension of it. Brains are not just another organ, dispensable or replaceable. If you were to undergo a brain transplant, who would you be? Yourself? I dare say not. This is not like any other organ. A heart transplant or kidney transplant does not fundamentally change who you are. Alterations to the brain, do.

Adopting a position of mind-as-being will have one other result. It’s that second shoe dropping that I alluded to earlier: consciousness is not the sort of thing where you can make a representation of it. Of course, we will try. All theory makes representations of things. But the basic problem will remain, that the only way to understand consciousness fully, is to be somebody, and that, as we all know, is not just an intellectual position.

The further development of the idea of Consciousness in my writings will stress the idea of consciousness as Being, and refer to it from that vantage point.

 

Quote of the Day

You can’t search for truth without being willing to sacrifice some sacred cows.

 

Negative Causality

Sometimes when I’m in a playful mood, I will explain my idea of “Negative Causality” to people. At first glance, the phrase always sounds like nonsense, so at least it tends to generate some interest. Despite the fun involved in this hypothesizing, though, there are some serious aspects to it, so I’ll set it out as briefly as I can.

Normally we think of a cause as an event, call it a, which will inevitably be followed by another event, call it c. The a event is the action. The c is the consequence of the action. And, for the sake of flexibility, we can add that a consequence c may be masked by other factors that prevent its observation, even though the action must nonethless influence the end results somehow. We would show this general relation as follows:

a → c

As you can imagine, calculating the final result of a complex set of actions using a complex set of rules can make it difficult to analyze real-world events in any exact way. This problem is apparent in the science of weather forecasting, where the behavior of each individual molecule of air affects the weather, yet there are uncountable billions of such molecules, all dashing around in every direction.

Nevertheless, people are remarkably adept at doing causal analysis — but they usually do it in terms of negative causes rather than direct causes. A negative cause is a factor that prevents some consequence c. For example, suppose Bill wants to start his car. When he gets in his car, he uses the normal causative model by shoving the key in the ignition and turning it. In Bill’s simplified view, this action causes the car to start.

But it doesn’t always. Sometimes, turning the key fails to make the car start, and even trying repeatedly and holding the key longer still doesn’t make it work. After a few repetitions of this simple-minded behavior, Bill may look out the window, contemplate the existential hopelessness of life, and then decide his car is probably broken. There’s only one thing to do: call a repairman.

Enter the mechanic. The mechanic, unlike the driver, is a very logical being. His job is to analyze the situation, to use tests if necessary, observation certainly, and to fiddle with the jiggly bits until the normal action (turn the key) will yield the normal consequence (the car starts). But what does he do? Watching the mechanic is highly instructive.

First he checks the gas gauge. If Bill has let his tank run out of gas, the car certainly will not start. It has to have fuel, otherwise the whole project is doomed. Finding that there’s ample petrol in the tank, the mechanic then checks the battery. Obviously if there isn’t enough juice in the battery, it won’t get the car started. Supposing the battery hasn’t been run down by Bill’s frantic key turning, the mechanic will check other conditions that could prevent the car from starting. The mechanic has applied a process of elimination, checking each condition that he knows must be satisfied for the car to start. In other words, it may not be apparent what you have to do to make the car start, but it will surely be obvious when something makes it impossible.

When the mechanic finds the cause for why the car won’t start, all he has to do is fix it. Then, wonder of wonders, when there is nothing to prevent the car from starting, it will start.

Notice that this is a complete inversion of the normal idea of causality. Instead of focusing on causes that start the car, we focus on conditions that will prevent it. But that’s negative causality, isn’t it.

Even more interesting is that the mechanic assumes that, whenever it’s possible for the car to start, it will start. But this is amazing. Ordinarily we think of possibilities as merely potential. They describe things that could happen. Not so with the mechanic, though. If turning the ignition key doesn’t start the car when there’s nothing wrong with the car’s components or assembly, it could only be magic, and you’d have to suspect demons or gremlins. If the car can start, and you turn the key, it must. And yet the way you arrange this to happen is simply by removing all the obstacles. When nothing prevents the starting, it will.

We use this kind of logic not only in repairing cars but in all sorts of things. When astronomers calculate the path of a planet through the solar system and find there are perturbations in the planet’s actual path that depart from the predicted, they don’t shrug their shoulders and chalk it up to random possibilities. If the planet zigs when it should zag, there has to be a cause, and research to find it leads to things like discovering a new planet.

In philosophy of science, the reversal of an experimental proposition is called a contrapositive. The idea is the same as what the mechanic does. In the classical example of a research project using contrapositives, we try to prove the proposition that all swans are white, but we do it by trying to show that no swan is not white. The base proposition is open-ended if you don’[t know how many swans there are. You’d have to examine all of them before you come to any conclusions. On the other hand, if you look for swans that aren’t white, as soon as you find one, your project is done. Oddly enough, it also helps when you find something that isn’t white, but it isnt a swan. This conforms with your expectations: things that are not white can’t be swans (if all swans are white).

Now, admittedly, there’s nothing remarkably new about discovering you can work causal relationships either way, but one thing about the assumption is not generally recognized as a law: Anything that can happen, must happen, and at once.

This puts theories of possibility in a new light. Possibilities cannot exist as real potentials; if something is actually possible, it can’t remain in abeyance. It has to happen. So possibilities can only be understood as mental reservations; an uncertainy in predicting events. That is to say, possibilities are only epistemological. Ontologically, there is only that which happens, and that which doesn’t.