We're all having an "out of brain experience"

At long last, I'm reaching the home stretch of reading Thomas Metzinger's meaty/tofuy book, all 500 pages of it, The Elephant and the Blind, about the experience of pure consciousness that's based on more than five hundred experiential reports from meditators.

There are 35 chapters. I've just got two left to read. I thought about skipping some, but after finishing the "Transparency, Translucency, and Virtuality" chapter this morning, I'm glad that my rather obsessive reading style -- usually I read every page in a book, unless I'm really not enjoying it -- paid off in this instance. 

Because Metzinger makes some fascinating points in this chapter. I'm sure I've been exposed to similar thoughts in other books by Metzinger that I've read, along with other neuroscience books, but his basic thesis seemed fresh to me.

He starts off the chapter, #28, with this overview:

This is a special chapter. I want to draw your attention to three particularly interesting phenomenological aspects, and therefore I offer more extensive commentary than usual, in addition to our selection of experiential reports.

In chapter 27, on nondual awareness, I said that ordinary consciousness is a nonconceptual mode of knowing one's inner model of reality. However, any time that this way of knowing is contracted into an ego and falsely experienced as direct and immediate, a large part of the model appears as an outer reality to us. 

We then have what the Finnish philosopher Antti Revonsuo has called a built-in "out of brain experience"; we experience ourselves as an embodied agent situated in some external environment.

This makes good evolutionary sense: Our biological ancestors successfully learned to use different parts of their inner model as a proxy for parts of their environment. According to our ancestors' subjective experience, models of trees turned into trees and models of wolves into real wolves.

Their brains also learned to use the model of the body that carried them, including sensations like hunger, thirst, breath, and heartbeat, as a proxy for the body itself, improving the organism's capacity for self-control. 

This is what it means to have a "transparent self-model" -- that is, a conscious model of yourself as a whole that has become so reliable that you are unable to experience it as a model -- and we will learn more about all this in the second half of this chapter.

To stay alive, there was a boundary that had to be protected, or re-created from moment to moment. Conscious experience often includes an explicit representation of inside and outside (e.g., of the interior parts of my body, of inner feelings and emotions arising from them, and also of what appears as my "own" mind) -- plus an outside world of mind-independent objects. 

What meditation practice shows is that awareness can also occur with no explicit representation of inside and outside. This can lead to a conscious model of reality in which, according to verbal description, everything is inside and outside at the same time -- or in which it has neither quality.

There's a lot to unpack here, which is why the chapter is unusually long, 27 pages. I'll have more to share about it in other blog posts. For now, I'll be content with some basic observations about the "out of brain experience" thing, a term I like a lot, which is a play on the much more familiar "out of body experience."

With an out of body experience, someone has the illusion (almost certainly that's what it is) that their consciousness has left a body and entered the world. That's pretty damn dramatic, so it gets a lot of attention. 

An out of brain experience, by contrast, is what almost everybody has at each waking moment. It's so commonplace, few people even know that's what they're experiencing, neuroscientists being an exception, along with Buddhists and others in the know about how the human mind works.

For we have an intuitive sense that there is (1) our internal consciousness and (2) an external world that consciousness is aware of. In other words, consciousness perceives a world that is independent of our perceptions of it.

But this isn't true. It can't be true. It just seems to be true. 

The brain has no direct connection with external reality, the world outside of the brain. The brain is locked inside our skull. All it knows about the world comes through the five senses -- sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste. 

Those sensations undergo a great deal of processing within the brain before they appear in consciousness. That's part of what Metzinger means by a conscious model of reality.

So in truth we never have an "out of brain" experience of an outside world. We have what our conscious model of reality presents to us, which ordinarily is constrained by mostly accurate sense perceptions that allow us humans to generally agree on what the world is like. 

"Beautiful sunset," we may say to a stranger. "Sure is," they may reply. 

This is a manifestation of the transparent nature of our conscious model of reality. Usually we aren't aware of the model that, somewhat akin to the programming of an AI (artificial intelligence), leads us to wrongly believe in dualism: that there is a physical world out there that's separate and distinct from the mental world in here. 

Metzinger says that understanding the nonduality of reality is what both modern neuroscience has been able to achieve, along with ancient wisdom traditions such as Buddhism.

We are now beginning to expand our understanding of what the phenomenological concept of "nonduality" means. One of the most fascinating aspects is that some experiences of nondual awareness given by our participants quite directly match our best current models of what consciousness might really be from a neuroscientific, computational, or mathematical perspective, while at the same time cleanly mapping onto phenomenological descriptions given by scholar-practitioners more than 1,000 years ago.

This may well be one of the most philosophically important results of our first interdisciplinary study. It is interesting to see how one can apply the idea of nonduality not only to the distinctions between subject and object and between inside and outside, but even to the distinction between what is "real" and what "does not exist."

 

Comments

[Ron E.]

I hope I have interpreted what Metzinger (and Brian) is saying and not according to my prejudices. Metzinger says that ordinary consciousness is a nonconceptual mode of knowing one's inner model of reality, and that this way of knowing is contracted into an ego and falsely experienced as direct and immediate.

It all fits in with my understanding where we fail to see by direct experience of what is, instead replacing reality with a conceptual model that has become so reliable that we are unable to experience it as a model.

This, as I see it is equal to the Buddhist (mostly Zen/Chan Buddhism) statement that ‘reality is the way things are prior to conceptualisation’. It also reflects writers like Joan Toliffson where she talks about ‘present moment awareness’ and being here now’.

How to drop or see this habit of overlaying present moment awareness with what Metzinger calls contraction into ego, is, as far as I can see the meditations of Zen and Chan Buddhism. I’ll be interested to see later where Metzinger talks about to have a "transparent self-model" -- that is, a conscious model of yourself as a whole.

[Appreciative Reader]

“There's a lot to unpack here”

You can say that again! …To be frank, I didn’t actually get this post. Not “didn’t get it” as in I disagree with anything about it, but “didn’t get it” in the sense of did not actually understand it!

Sure, there’s the whole model building thing of the brain. That’s old hat by now. We don’t apprehend reality directly, but via our brain-model, sure. …Beyond that: what? Didn’t get it, I’m afraid! Read through the article quickly once, like I tend to do; then I did that one more time, more slowly this time: but I still don’t get it.

Like you say, Brian, it’s a long chapter. And a very substantial one, in fact I suppose it comprises the whole meat of the entire book itself. …I’ll look forward to your further post/s on this last chapter, to properly make sense of what he’s saying there.

[um]

@ AR

Listen to some of his interviews on YouTube, if possible in German ..and you might understand sooner and better what he is up to.

[Appreciative Reader]

Metzinger's interviews? Sure, why not, um. Any specific discussions you'd recommend yourself? ...If not, then I'll go look myself, no issues. ...This Metzinger guy intrigues me, and I've enjoyed Brian's discussions about this book of his, and sure, I'd love to hear him talk about his ideas himself.

(It'll have to be in English, though. I do know a bit of German, but it's nowhere near good enough, not even close, to even begin to make sense of an involved discussion about philosophy and science!)

[sant64]

"For we have an intuitive sense that there is (1) our internal consciousness and (2) an external world that consciousness is aware of. In other words, consciousness perceives a world that is independent of our perceptions of it. But this isn't true. It can't be true. It just seems to be true."

There's no other way to say it: You have a decided habit of presenting outlier philosophical opinions as fact. You're doing it again here.

The question of whether the external world is real or an illusion is a classic philosophical problem that has intrigued thinkers for centuries. There are several perspectives on this issue:

Realism: This view asserts that the external world exists independently of our perception of it. According to realism, the objects and events we experience through our senses have an existence and properties that are not dependent on our perception.

Idealism: In contrast, idealism suggests that reality is fundamentally mental or spiritual. For idealists, what we consider the "external world" is a construct of our mind or consciousness. In this view, what we experience as an external world is a projection of our thoughts or perceptions.

Phenomenalism: This is a middle ground where the external world is considered to be a collection of perceptions or experiences. Phenomenalists argue that we can only know things through our sensory experiences, so what we think of as the external world is actually a collection of these experiences.

Solipsism: This is an extreme position that suggests that only one's own mind and perceptions are sure to exist. According to solipsism, the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside of one’s own consciousness.

Scientific Realism: Many scientists and philosophers adopt a view akin to scientific realism, which holds that the external world exists and is structured in a way that science can describe and understand. This perspective maintains that while our senses might be fallible, the scientific method provides a reliable means of understanding and interacting with the external world.

Ultimately, the question of whether the external world is an illusion or a reality is deeply complex and touches on epistemology (the study of knowledge) and metaphysics (the study of the nature of reality). Different philosophical traditions and scientific approaches offer various ways of addressing this question, and the debate continues to evolve as our understanding of consciousness and reality deepens.