Consciousness is like a performance with no audience

The illusion of a separate self or soul dies hard.

It's just so convincing, because this is how it feels to each of us: that someone, an "I," is looking both outward to the world and inward to our own consciousness from some privileged lofty place.

Much, if not most, of religion, spirituality, and mysticism is founded on this belief.

Supposedly our true self is distinct from the brain's goings-on. It survives bodily death. It stands apart from our physical nature in some sense (even though a baseball bat to the head belies this assumption).

I wish it were true. I'd rather be a "me" that isn't limited to a single human lifespan. I'd like to look forward to an other-worldly existence after I die. 

But I also am a lover of science, of truth, of reality as it is, not as how I'd like it to be. So I regularly read neursoscience books that describe what researchers have learned about the human brain and consciousness. 

Like, Stanislas Dehaene's "Consciousness and the Brain: Deciphering How the Brain Codes Our Thoughts." I blogged about the book previously here. 

Today I read a chapter that echoed the conclusion of many other neuroscientists and psychologists: the brain is us; there is no separate "I" inside our head. Like I said, this seeming fact is at odds with how our consciousness appears to us. 

However, appearances can be deceiving. It appears that the Earth is flat. It appears that the Sun goes around the Earth. It appears that stars are tiny points of light.

And it appears that we are the audience in a theatre of consciousness, watching the show put on by our brains. The truth, says Dehaene, is quite different. 

The philosopher Daniel Dennett reminds us that we must be wary of the theatre allegory, for it can lead to a great sin: the "homunculus fallacy." If consciousness is a stage, who is the audience? Do "they" too have little brains, with a ministage and all? And who, in turn, watches it?

One must constantly resist the absurd Disney-like fantasy of a homunculus standing in our brains, peering at our screens and commanding our acts. 

There is no "I" who looks inside us. The stage itself is the "I."

There is nothing wrong with the stage metaphor provided that we eliminate the intelligence of the audience and replace it with explicit operations of an algorithmic nature. As Dennett whimsically states, "One discharges fancy homunculi from one's scheme by organizing armies of idiots to do the work."

...Consciousness is not an outsider added to the nervous system but a full in-house participant.

This, of course, is entirely compatible with a Buddhism or Taoism stripped of its supernatural elements. Reality is interrelationships. Dynamism. Flows of energy, materials, and information. Everything is interdependent. No entity is an island, complete unto itself.

After many years of pondering this modern scientific worldview -- which has ancient philosophical overtones -- I find it more and more appealing.

I resisted it at first.

Even though I no longer was explicitly religious, I found it difficult to give up a belief in a separate "I" distinct from the physical brain. Damn it, I wanted to be Me beyond my last breath! I deserved to be more than my timebound bodily self!

Now, though, I find a lot of beauty in the thought expressed above: The stage itself is the "I."

Those 100 billion neurons inside my cranium, all interconnected in marvelously complex ways, churning up the awarenesses that comprise my consciousness, in a fashion that gives the lie to a separate and distinct "me" even though habits of language lead me to keep on using that word (as I just did) -- there is something mysteriously and marvelously appealing about this vision of reality.

It's difficult to say more. Perhaps you feel somewhat the same way. Perhaps you don't. Regardless, the truth as provisionally known to neursoscience is what it is.

And I'm more than OK with that. 

Comments

[Laura]

This post explains things in a way I'm better able to understand and accept.

[cc]

I am the illusion of a person who exists independently of the brain that is constantly recreating I. Just as the sun seems to rise and set and revolve around the earth, the illusion I am persists whether I know I'm illusory or not.

[Willie R]

You've traveled so far
The wind in your face
You're thinking you've found
The one special place
Where all of your dreams
Will walk out in line
And follow the course
You've made in your mind

Hey, it isn't gonna be that way
It isn't gonna be, that way

I came on my own
And felt much like you
I thought I was king
And knew what to do
But everything burned
And fell from my hand
I had to turn back
Or build a new plan

Cause it isn't gonna be that way
It isn't gonna be, that way
No, it isn't gonna be that way
It isn't gonna be, that way

If I were a god
I'd give you a clue
This minute would crack
And I could go through
And walk out in time
Where no one has been
I'd come back to you
And tell what I'd seen

Oh, but it isn't gonna be that way
It isn't gonna be, that way

You'll just have to live
And see what you find
And take it from there
And follow the signs
Yeah, you think you can live
And dream your own fate
You think you can wish
And walk through the gate

Oh, it isn't gonna be that way
It isn't gonna be that way
And n-n-n-no
It isn't gonna be that way
It isn't gonna be-ah-e, that way
Oh oh oh oh no, ooh

Steve Forbert - you can probably guess the song title

From one illusory self to another, as we capitulate to our collective cluelessness.....

[june schlebusch]

Willie R, lovely beautiful song, thanks.. cc you reprise me once again, very cool quote.

[june schlebusch]

oops cc befor you correct my English once again I know "reprise" means a repeat in music, I actually meant "surprize" but I think "reprise" is OK, perhaps our songlines are not so different after all.

[test]

OK but what about all the people that have been clinically brain dead but still had experiences to report?