
The Kekulé Problem - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/the-kekul-problem
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Mitchhhs
Not sure how I feel about this statement - "All animals have an unconscious.
If they didnt they would be plants."

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manyxcxi
If I start with the presupposition that Mr. McCarthy is an intelligent and
broadly knowledgeable individual (given his corpus of work I think it's a safe
place to start), I can chalk it up to one of two things:

1\. It's a device to get the point across, though clumsy and innacurate to
people familiar with an evolving area of study

2\. He isn't up to date with the various studies that certainly show something
akin to a type of consciousness. But I bet he'd be open to the notion...

It may be a tad early to say that the statement is wrong. It might be
technically correct that plants don't have unconscious but they have something
we'd classify differently.

I just chalk up to a kludgy device, I get the point he was trying to make- at
least I think I do.

~~~
coldtea
I don't think you answer the parent's concern, which I think is "why assume
that all animals have a subconscious" instead of "why assume plants don't have
one".

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dkarapetyan
I think the trouble with stories, language, and symbolic meaning is that over
time people confuse the symbols with reality. Somehow the story becomes the
reality and people forget that they made it up. Conspiracy theories are a
really good example of stories and fantasies that people are convinced is
reality. When you keep substituting symbols for reality it is pretty easy to
confuse the two at some point.

Another example is fantasy literature. Much of it is concerned with magical
systems that revolve around saying the right things. As if the right words and
gestures can shape reality. I think this is the definition of magical
thinking. Even though saying the right words will not make them reality people
really like to think that is the case.

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mercer
> Even though saying the right words will not make them reality people really
> like to think that is the case.

I sometimes compare programming to these 'magical systems' because in both
cases 'saying the right thing' has a direct or almost-direct effect on
reality.

Other forms of writing obviously have an effect on reality too, but with
programming (and magic systems) it's much more obvious and 'literal'.

~~~
dkarapetyan
And notice how many flame wars there are in programming forums. It's almost
like the programmers forget that the tools they use are just tools and that
they are a means to an end instead of an end in and of themselves. The focus
shifts from solving problems and people start comparing the relative merits of
one tool against another instead of discussing the best way to go about
solving a problem.

In programming I think we substitute the language for the problem space and
forget that the problem space is primary and the language is secondary.

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carsongross
Interesting that the dream was of a snake.

Jordan Peterson makes the point that human sight is so excellent, we think,
because it evolved to detect predatory reptiles (snakes) and ripe fruit (hence
seeing color).

It puts this story and the story of The Fall in a different light when looked
at from this perspective: the snake as dangerous knowledge.

~~~
dekhn
The dream was not of any snake, but ouroborous (a snake eating its own tail),
which makes perfect sense because Kekule couldn't find any linear form that
satisfied the laws of chemistry, and the image of ourborous helped him realize
it was a cycle (at that point, nobody knew that organics could be cyclic).

~~~
carsongross
Reason/self-consciousness turning back on itself.

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apo
Kekulé's account has been challenged, partly on the basis that at least two
others reported very similar (and better organized) ideas right about the same
time. The speculation goes that Kekulé may have been trying to bypass the
priority controversy with something that couldn't be refuted - the dream
story.

[http://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/16/science/the-benzene-
ring-d...](http://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/16/science/the-benzene-ring-dream-
analysis.html)

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thriftwy
Maybe it's just miscommunication, where one part of their brain can't talk
directly to another, so it has to pass vague cryptic notes around. Doesn't
have to be desired behavior.

(Most of my insights these days are pretty direct)

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YeGoblynQueenne
Sometimes the "suggestion" comes when you're wide awake, at which point it's
got nothing to do with the unconscious. You see something, or you hear someone
say something, and suddendly you have a brainwave and rush to your desk and
write like crazy for a couple of hours- something just clicks. And it comes
entirely from outside, from the concrete, objective (haha) reality outside
your head.

So the unconscious mind doesn't have to send you any cryptic signals. In fact,
nothing needs to send you any signals. Just a bit of luck and the ability to
form associations is all you need.

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mijoharas
The biggest problem I have with the article is the supposition that language
was not evolved.

He seems to state this view a few times, but does not (to me) offer a
convincing explanation as to why.

~~~
metaphorm
ok, suppose language was evolved. what is the evidence of that? how would we
verify whether or not it is true that language evolved?

it seems like a reasonable assumption because we think of essentially every
attribute of an organism to be evolved, but is this really true? there is
evidence of physiological changes that support the production of speech but
the puzzle is really about why those changes would ever occur in the first
place. they are not adaptive (in fact, maladaptive) unless you can already
speak.

so what is the evolutionary ancestor of modern language? it doesn't leave a
fossil record. it's really hard to gather evidence that satisfies anything
about this. the cave paintings are some evidence of a mind that has a level of
symbolic abstraction consistent with being able to speak, but the oldest cave
paintings we find are not really on the evolutionary time scale.

basically we just don't have the robustness of evidence that we wish we had
when it comes to supporting the hypothesis that language evolved. it's
understandable why we make this assumption, but finding the evidence for it is
problematic.

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andrewflnr
Your argument of "it's hard to prove it evolved" is a far cry from TFA's "it
definitely didn't evolve". That's what GP was objecting to.

~~~
metaphorm
Cormac McCarthy's point can be summarized in this sentence that he wrote in
TFA

"...the inheritance of ideas remains something of a sticky issue. It is
difficult to see them as anything other than acquired."

which is an interesting way of putting it. we are very comfortable discussing
evolutionary history of body parts. what is language though? it doesn't really
seem like a body part (though certain structures in the brain, as well as in
the mouth and throat, are very important for language) and it does rather seem
like an idea. you can teach someone English. you can't teach someone Left Arm.

and yet, language is inherited. babies learn it automatically just by being
around it in the environment. that makes it something like a communicable
"disease", actually. the language-as-virus metaphor is one that McCarthy
referenced frequently in his discussion.

so what if it's not just a metaphor? what if it really is something
transmitted through the environment and that certain kinds of animals become
"infected" by it?

it's interesting to consider things like this specifically because of the
absence of clear evidence that language is like any other physical trait that
an animal might have. it's not like those traits. it's something different.
something stranger. we don't really have a clear understanding of what exactly
it is and so positions like McCarthy's are interested to consider. I don't
think you should mistake his own coherence for misplaced confidence though. He
isn't saying "it definitely didn't evolve". He isn't making any strong claims
like that, as far as I can tell. He's just exploring the interesting
differences between language and other things that mammals have/do.

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mijoharas
I spent a good few minutes googling around as I think I had heard a conflation
of the Kekulé dream and the initial idea from Crick that DNA was a double
helix.

The way I remember hearing it he had the vision of two snakes winding around
one another trying to bite one another's tail. I can't find much about it
online so I'm going to put this down to a conflation with Kekulé's dream.

~~~
najajomo
"Kekulé had another dream, in which he saw atoms dance around, then form
themselves into strings, moving about in a snake-like fashion."

[https://web.chemdoodle.com/kekules-
dream/](https://web.chemdoodle.com/kekules-dream/)

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jkestelyn
Reminiscent of Walker Percy's essay "The Delta Factor", in which he theorizes
that the essence of human-ness derives from the "linguistic triangle" (thing +
word + human brain).

