Church of the Churchless

Enlightenment: the Cosmic View vs. the Local View (I go with local)

Whew. What a relief. So good to know that I was mistaken.

After reading Paul Breer's first book about the illusion of free will, The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will, I decided to dive even deeper into the Breer waters and bought his follow-up book, Beyond Self-Realization: A Non-Sectarian Path to Enlightenment. 

This second book has a different structure that I wondered about when I began reading it, but is turning out to be appealing. The book starts by saying that a local library has announced a course about -- no big surprise -- Beyond Self-Realization. 

Eight people sign up. The course is led by Richard, described as 88, tall, slender, receding white hair, steel-rimmed glasses, bears a resemblance to the author. Each chapter consists of a talk given by Richard on some subject relating to the illusion of free will and a non-sectarian path to enlightenment, and the resulting dialog between Richard and his students about that subject.

I was enjoying the book until some mentions of how the course was about "direct consciousness of our true nature -- that is, a consciousness unmediated by language" got me concerned that even though secular was in the title, maybe Breer had embraced some supernatural or religious notions after writing his first book.

Since the second book is 495 pages long, I didn't feel like reading all that and then getting to the end and having a what the fuck!? moment caused by Breer reaching a conclusion that didn't make any sense to me.

So I read one of the concluding chapters in hopes of reassuring myself. Which, I did. As you can read below, Breer holds a Local View of enlightenment rather than a Cosmic View. Since I agree with most of his Local View, I felt a sense of relief that the book wasn't going to lead into a supernatural dead end.

It just appears to lead to a conclusion about enlightenment which, while firmly within the bounds of modern neuroscience, isn't proven.

Namely, that a state of pure consciousness prior to being conscious of any internal or external entity is possible. Sam Harris, a noted atheist and neuroscientist, seems to believe in pure consciousness. I've argued on this blog that I'm skeptical about this, since consciousness always seems to have some content, something we're conscious of other than consciousness itself.

But compared to The Cosmic View, Breer's take on The Local View is hugely closer to how I see things. Have a read and see how you feel about the two views.

The Cosmic View
The majority of people who write about their enlightenment experience believe they have gained access to Reality. Pure Consciousness for them is a window into that realm of Being which constitutes the bedrock of All That Is.

It is that undifferentiated, unchanging state out of which the world of forms emerges, a state that transcends both space and time and has neither beginning nor end. As such, it precedes even the Big Bang. In Tolle's view, as you just pointed out, it is a "Presence that fills the cosmos."

Cohen is more precise: "Consciousness in this primordial state is the 'I' of the entire universe -- the subjectivity or interiority of everything that exists." Both are saying that the real you (the I AM of Pure Consciousness) is the "mother" (to borrow Lao Tzu's term) of every form we perceive -- every blade of grass, star, stone, or trash can.

Although the language varies according to the religious context in which it appears, we find similar statements among the Gnostics of Jesus's time, the medieval Christian mystics, the Sufi's of Islam and the Kabalists of Judaism. Even Zen Buddhists (known for their reluctance to theorize) subscribe to a similar view. 

...What these schools of thought have in common is a belief that in enlightenment we gain access to an indefinable THAT which constitutes the very foundation of reality. It is this unformed and undifferentiated THAT (read Pure Consciousness) which precedes the formation of the universe and everything in it. When we awaken from our ego-saturated dreams, we discover THAT is who we really are.

...We can agree when he [Deepak Chopra] says that "You are the light of awareness that gives rise to the experience of the universe." -- but must disagree when he concludes that consciousness and the universe are equivalent. When he makes that claim, he's conflating two different things -- as if he were arguing that the sensation of eating an apple is no different from the apple itself. 

...The way individuals have traditionally interpreted their personal enlightenment has a lot in common with the two cases (the geocentric theory and free-will) just described. I refer first to the fact that in both cases what appears to be true turns out on closer examination to be illusory; like those two previous beliefs, the belief that we are the universe or that in our role as the Absolute we created the material world out of nothing is unsupported by either common sense or logic.

...To see what I mean, let's take a look at an alternative interpretation of the enlightenment experience. 

The Local View
There is a minority of writers, even within Buddhism, who offer a more modest interpretation of what enlightenment means (the Local as opposed to the Cosmic view). They argue that in enlightenment we gain access not to an undifferentiated realm that pervades everything in the universe, but to one that exists solely within the consciousness of the individual observer.

They're saying, in other words, that enlightenment resides in the individual rather than the cosmos. The experience of Oneness may appear to have a universal character, but again this is deceiving. It only appears to exist in all things seen or heard (every stone, every blade of grass, etc.), when it actually resides in the brain of the perceiving individual -- not as awareness of discrete objects but as Consciousness Itself as it illuminates those objects from within. 

If all things appear to participate in a single Whole, it is because they are perceived through the lens of a Consciousness free of any differentiation. It follows, then, that the felt experience of Oneness originates in the individual observer, not in the objects being observed.

...The difference between the two interpretations is significant. While the first interprets the Pure Consciousness experience as a discovery of universal Reality, the second argues that it is a discovery not of Reality but of that which exists in the individual -- namely Consciousness before it becomes aware of something.

While the Local View says nothing about Reality, it says something important about individual consciousness. It says that embedded in our perception of things is a state of Awareness that is unlike anything we experience while orienting to our environment.

In contrast to the world of everyday life -- the world of sensations, objects, and thoughts which we grasp with our minds and five senses -- this inner world presents itself as an invisible Presence that has no form, no boundaries, never changes, and is neither spatially nor temporally divided, yet arises in a specific place -- the brain.

...In the Cosmic View enlightenment implies the discovery of THAT out of which the material world of things has emerged. In other words, it precedes the creation of matter -- e.g., of stars, moons, and planets. So, even if all material objects were destroyed, it would continue to Be.

Not so according to the Local View which argues that the experience of enlightenment depends on having a physical brain. If that brain, along with all other material things, were to be destroyed, enlightenment would be impossible.

Sartre's view of consciousness makes a lot of sense

When I was at San Jose State College from 1966 to 1971, I enjoyed my reading in existentialism. That happened when I was a student in the Tutorials in Letters and Sciences program, which was a way-cool experimental approach to learning.

Instead of taking the usual required courses in my freshman and sophomore years, I had a single 12 unit Tutorials class each semester where a small number of us students, eight to ten or so, would meet with a professor and discuss from the perspective of four key periods in human history: Ancient Greece/Rome, the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, and Modern Times.

So we wrote a lot of papers, and did a lot of discussing. 

At least, that's how I remember the periods. The idea was that instead of studying literature, history, and science of a period in human history, we'd look at the period as a whole, attempting to link the tenor of the times into a cohesive picture.

Existentialist writings were assigned when we got to the 20th century. I recall Camus, Kierkegaard, Sartre. After I graduated from college, I must have bought Sartre's Being and Nothingness, since the copy I have has a printing date of 1975. 

A few days ago I dug out my copy. I don't feel like re-reading all of the 798 pages of fairly dense philosophizing.

But after coming across a mention of Sartre's distinction between reflective and non-reflective consciousness in an essay I wrote about recently, I wanted to remind myself how Sartre viewed the world -- being curious about how I'd view his brand of existentialism now, at the age of 74, in contrast to how I looked at Sartre when I read his fiction in college. 

Being and Nothingness, according to the translator, Hazel Barnes, is Jean-Paul Sartre's 1943 attempt to systematize the philosophy that he expressed earlier in his fictional writing. The translator's introduction, which runs for 44 thoughtful pages, is what I'll be quoting from here in reference to how Sartre viewed consciousness. 

What he says makes a lot of sense to me.

Which I guess isn't all that surprising, since like Sartre, I too am an atheist. Barnes points out that Sartre is concerned with ontology, what is real, in contrast to metaphysics, which she says focuses on the why of reality. For Sartre, there is no why, since we provide our own meaning, no god required. 

To begin with, and I'm following the translator's order in which she presents an overview of Sartre in her introduction, Sartre disagrees with Descartes.

Most important is Sartre's rejection of the primacy of the Cartesian cogito. He objects that in Descartes' formula -- "I think, therefore I am" -- the consciousness which says "I am," is not actually the consciousness which thinks.

...But Descartes' cogito has posited this consciousness itself as an object; the Cartesian cogito is not one with the doubting consciousness but has reflected upon it. In other words this cogito is not Descartes doubting; it is Descartes reflecting upon the doubting.

"I doubt, therefore I am" is really "I am aware that I doubt, therefore I am." The Cartesian cogito is reflective, and its object is not itself but the original consciousness of doubting... These conclusions led Sartre to establish the pre-reflective cogito as the primary consciousness, and in all of his later work he makes this his original point of departure.

In other words, when Descartes doubted that everything he knew could be mistaken because a Cosmic Joker could have misled him (sort of like what goes on in The Matrix movie, or the notion that we might be living in a computer simulation manufactured by alien beings), but he can't be mistaken that he exists, because he is able to think "I doubt," Descartes could have left out the "I" and simply focused on the blunt fact of his pre-reflective consciousness.

The very nature of consciousness is such, he [Sartre] says, that for it to be and to know itself are one and the same. Consciousness of an object is consciousness of being conscious of an object. Thus by nature all consciousness is self-consciousness, but by this Sartre does not mean that the self is necessarily posited as an object.

When I am aware of a chair, I am non-reflexively conscious of my awareness. But when I deliberately think of my awareness, this is a totally new act of consciousness; and here only am I explicitly positing my awareness of myself as an object of reflection.

Well, there's more that the translator says about how Sartre views consciousness, but this is enough for one blog post. 

In a way it's obvious that in any act of consciousness we are simultaneously aware of an object within consciousness and of consciousness itself, since it isn't possible to be aware of anything without being conscious.

However, we tend to overlook this when pondering the largely unexplained mystery of consciousness. For Sartre, and also for me, consciousness, albeit mostly unexplained as to how it arises, is quite simple -- at least in its raw non-reflective guise.

Again, when we're aware of something, consciousness isn't separate from the awareness. As noted above, Sartre says that all consciousness is self-consciousness, since there is no one who can be directly conscious but us.

I've never understood the notion that it is possible to be aware of awareness. I've read books about meditation that claim this is both possible and desirable, but it makes no sense to me. Awareness simply is awareness.

Sure, we can make an object out of our subjective awareness by thinking "I am aware," but it's much more accurate to simply say "there is awareness" or even better, say nothing at all, given that awareness is directly known to us just by being awareness.

In this regard, Sartre sometimes seems more like a Zen master than an existentialist philosopher.

Feeling religiously special can be enjoyable, but it's dangerous

Before I criticize a comment on a recent blog post by Spence Tepper, a frequenter commenter on this blog, I want to start off on a warmer note.

I've never met Tepper in person, but I like him through his words. He's intelligent, a good writer, and often makes a good case for his beliefs -- which are more sympathetic toward the supernatural and mystical experience than my own, but since I used to believe in much the same way he does, I understand where he is coming from.

It's good to have a mixture of religious believers and religious skeptics commenting on this blog. Definitely makes for more entertaining comment discussions than if everyone had the same views. 

So when I criticize Tepper's perspective on how the brain works, I'm not judging him. As I often note on this blog, if people who embrace God and supernatural entities simply said, "This is what I believe," I'd have little or no problem with that, since I used to believe the same thing.

But when statements of facts are made without evidence to make them up, or when someone changes the subject when they're pressed to provide evidence about an assertion about our shared objective reality (as opposed to their personal subjective reality), then I feel a duty to challenge that person.

Here's what Tepper said that kicked off what I view as a defense of objective truth as currently understood by modern neuroscience.

And if we can go to that place of awareness within ourselves free of filters, a place where filtering and conceptual reconstruction do not function, who knows what we may experience? Maybe God? But no label would work there. Maybe reality directly. Maybe pure experience of the moment. Maybe the moment is eternity.

Those four "maybe's" don't bother me much. What caught my eye was the first sentence, an assertion that awareness can be free of filters and concepts. This simply isn't true. Again, using "true" as meaning the best understanding of neuroscience at this moment in 2023.

Andy Clark, a highly experienced and respected professor of cognitive philosophy puts it this way in his book, The Experience Machine, which I've been writing posts about recently. Clark buttresses his 228 page book with many references to neuroscientific research.

What we see, hear, and feel -- even when everything is working exactly as it should -- is never a direct reflection of the state of our own body or the wider world. Instead, the world and body we experience is always part construct: a product of your conscious and nonconscious predictions.

So there's no doubt that Spence Tepper was wrong when he claimed that awareness can be free of filters and concepts. But you might be thinking, what's the big deal with him being wrong? Here's my answer.

Tepper shared some later comments about how meditation changes the brain. Sure, it does. But neither meditation nor any other sort of spiritual practice can completely change the nature of the brain. Every experience changes the brain, not just meditation. Yet Tepper is claiming a sort of special superiority in religious experience that I find very troubling. That attitude leads to dogma and prejudice.

There's a real danger when people believe they have a special relationship with reality or God that other people lack. That's what Tepper was promulgating, and I consider that this goes against the laudable belief in equality that should be the hallmark of human culture.

By "equality," I mean that without exception, each of the eight billion humans has the same basic constituents of life. Yes, our bodies and brains differ. Some people have highly functioning brains and bodies; other people have problems with how their brain or body functions.

But we don't think that Albert Einstein had a completely different brain than anyone else. Nor do we think that a highly skilled runner who can complete a marathon in record-breaking time has a completely different body than anyone else.

And unless we're deeply infected with a religion virus, we don't assume that some people have an extra supernatural addition to their being that allows them to perceive reality from a higher perspective that us ordinary people lack.

Yet that's what Spence Tepper was assuming, apparently about himself, when he said that awareness can function without filters or concepts, and that maybe, just maybe, this special capacity allows someone with that sort of awareness to know God.

Let's consider how unlikely this is.

For in order what Tepper said to be true, the foundations of modern science would need to be overthrown. Given what neuroscience understands about experience always, not sometimes, being filtered through a mesh of our past experiences and present predictions, pure awareness of the sort claimed by Tepper would have to be supernatural, non-physical. 

And there's simply no evidence of this. Sure, there's lots of talk about consciousness being separable from the body and brain, but no proof of this.

Lastly, it is false that meditation or any other practice can prevent nonconscious influences from affecting how we perceive the world, even if it is possible to become more aware of conscious influences. Clark writes:

Expectations, many of them unconscious, are always at work as our brains construct our experiences. Such effects are inevitable and can be extremely helpful. 

This is obvious. What kind of life would we have if all we possessed was the sort of unfiltered non-conceptual awareness that Tepper not only wrongly believes exists, but is desirable? 

You wouldn't recognize a loved one, because you'd have no concept of "this is my spouse" (or child, or friend, or whoever). You wouldn't be able to drive a car or use any sort of device, because you'd have no concept of what it was for or how it worked. You wouldn't have any sense of the past or future, since those require memory or anticipation, both of which involve concepts.

But religious believers don't think much about the implications of their crazy beliefs. Because those beliefs cause them to feel special, and superior to the poor unenlightened humans lacking their divinely inspired understanding, religions prosper by setting themselves up as places where ordinary people are transformed into Very Special People.

This isn't all that different from forms of prejudice that we're all familiar with. Which is why religiosity is so dangerous. Instead of embracing the truth that all humans are part of the same Homo sapiens family, faiths founded on supernatural myths foster division in much the same way that African-Americans have been viewed as inferior.

Whenever certain types of people are viewed as inherently different than other types, prejudice and discrimination have a fertile field to grow in. That's why I feel so strongly that religious beliefs which assume some humans have a special relationship with God or the supernatural, while other humans don't, are so dangerous.

Bluntly put, I don't see myself as anything special, because that's the truth. Spence Tepper does see himself as possessing special mystical knowledge, and almost certainly that isn't true. Again, I don't think Tepper is a bad person for feeling this way. I used to feel that way myself.

I just view Tepper as having bought into a perspective where he, and I gather others like him, have a superior way of knowing that's off limits to the rest of us. But maybe I'm wrong about this.

I'll change my mind if Tepper states that his brain and awareness are just like everybody else's: imperfect ways of understanding reality that nonetheless do a pretty damn good job of letting us live life pleasantly most of the time without anything supernatural about them.

Drugs as an avenue to exploring consciousness

First, I've made some progress in understanding what Sam Harris means when he says "Consciousness is not inside your head," a semi-perplexing statement that I wrote about recently. 

After writing that post, I've listened to a couple of other guided meditations by Harris on his Waking Up app. In one, he talked about how consciousness is akin to the familiar metaphor of waves and the ocean. The waves aren't separate from the ocean, just as consciousness isn't separate from the things that we're conscious of.

In the guided meditation I heard today, Harris made a similar point about being aware of our breathing. He said that we shouldn't feel that we're observing the breath from a conscious vantage point up in our head, since the breath isn't separate from consciousness. It's within consciousness.

Everything is, given that nothing exists for us if we're not conscious of it. So the way I see it (not sure if Harris agrees with this), it's a mistake to look upon consciousness as if it were a thing -- like water or air. Consciousness is better viewed as a process, the brain in action. 

Thus it makes sense to say consciousness is not inside the head, even though the brain is. Consciousness is an emergent process of the brain that allows us to be aware of the world inside and outside of us. When I see a tree, the seeing of leaves, trunk, branches, and such isn't separate from my consciousness that makes seeing possible.

It's all consciousness, just as waves that can appear very different are all ocean.

I also want to share some thoughts about an article in the April 24/May 1 issue of The New Yorker, The Forgotten Drug Trips of the Nineteenth Century: Long before the hippies, a group of thinkers used substances like cocaine, hashish, and nitrous oxide to uncover the secrets of the mind.
Download The Forgotten Drug Trips of the Nineteenth Century | The New Yorker

The technology of nineteenth-century drug exploration, in both professional scientific circles and amateur intellectual ones, was the self-experiment. Since the seventeenth century, scientists had considered this the best method to understand substances that affected moods and perceptions: trying them on other human subjects was a risk, and animal experiments could provide only external indications of mental changes.

By the end of the eighteenth century, when Davy inhaled his first dose of nitrous oxide, the self-experiment was an established practice, with its own protocols and reporting conventions. Its Achilles’ heel, for some, was the way it mixed competing kinds of observation. As the young Sigmund Freud, investigating cocaine as a medical student in the eighteen-eighties, realized, it involved a self-splitting, an impossible assertion of two types of truth at once—that of the researcher and that of the experimental subject.

This tension defined the psychonauts’ project.

Along with many others, I carried on in this spirit during some of my college years, 1966-1971, at San Jose State College in the San Francisco Bay area. Since San Jose wasn't nearly as cool a city as San Francisco or Berkeley, me and my hippie friends identified more with those locales, which we visited often in various states of drug-induced highness.

I'm not going to claim that we were dedicated to exploring the nature of psychedelic consciousness under the influence of LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin, or the non-psychedelic influence of marijuana (which I'm still engaged in "research" with here in Oregon). Often we were just out to have a good time.

But some of us combined Eastern philosophy with psychedelics. The Tibetan Book of the Dead was a particular favorite, since it described various levels of consciousness experienced by dying or dead people.

I ran into a young guy who was traveling around the country, hoping to be able to enter the light spoken of in the Tibetan Book of the Dead that he'd seen while on a psychedelic trip, yet was reluctant to move toward out of fear of the unknown.

This guy was the friend who accompanied me on a trip to the Santa Cruz mountains where, under the spell of mescaline, we simultaneously concluded that the universe is a paper bag turned inside out.

That experience points to the issue that is talked about in The New Yorker article about nineteenth century drug explorations. It's difficult, if not impossible, to be a dispassionate observer of your psychedelic trip while you're in the midst of doing the "psychonaut" traveling. 

He and I deeply felt the truth of the paper bag turned inside out nature of the universe while we were high. The next day, as now, that notion seems vacuous and meaningless. So which is true? The inspiration while under the influence of a drug, or the later sober assessment of the inspiration? 

I'd say that both are true, since set (one's mindset) and setting (where one is using a drug) combine to produce a certain experience. Here's a pertinent excerpt from The New Yorker article:

To a stubborn handful of psychonauts, though, the most “objective” data about drugs were precisely those culled from experience. Jay foregrounds Jacques-Joseph Moreau, a mid-nineteenth-century French psychiatrist who encountered hashish—the concentrated, hallucinogenic extract of the cannabis plant—while travelling in the Middle East.

Hashish was then known to Westerners mostly secondhand, its effects filtered through the lens of fictions such as “The Arabian Nights.” When Moreau took a strong dose in 1840, however, he found that it was uniquely educative in the psychiatric context.

Each of the effects he experienced could be read as a symptom of mental illness: the nervous excitement, the distortion of space and time, the hallucinatory perceptions. Hashish took him to a place that looked and felt like insanity, then led him, temporarily, inside it. It allowed him to understand his patients with greater nuance: he could now recognize what “the ravings of a madman” were like, having “raved himself.” “Personal experience,” he wrote, “is the criterion of truth here.”

Reading this, I was reminded of my first LSD trip. A college friend who had used LSD before took it with me. However, he wasn't able to handle the situation when I convinced him that the psychedelic experience we were having proved that we were insane.

We talked about what this meant. The best we could come up with was that yes, we now were insane, but being crazy wasn't all that bad. In fact, maybe it was good. We had no conception that our LSD trips were going to end soon and we'd be back to normal.

Oregon, where I live, has become the first state to legalize the therapeutic use of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. The initial class of facilitators graduated recently. Fairly soon it will be possible for people to pay for a supervised psilocybin trip under the guidance of a facilitator. 

Psilocybin offers benefits for those with PTSD, a fatal illness, serious depression, and other problems. I'm unsure if I'd want to use it, but I would seriously consider it. Especially since someone would be there to keep me from thinking that I was insane.

Sam Harris says "consciousness is not inside your head." Huh?

Today I heard Sam Harris say on a guided meditation on his Waking Up app, "Consciousness is not inside your head. Everything is just appearing."

I've heard Harris say this many times. I don't understand that notion. 

The brain is inside the head. The brain generates consciousness. If you doubt that, have general anesthesia. Have someone hit you on the head with a baseball bat, hard. Have your brain surgically removed.

No brain, no consciousness. But we can lose an arm, a leg, or some other non-essential organ and still be conscious. 

If someone can make a good argument for how consciousness is not inside the head, leave a comment about this. Maybe you can convince me Harris is right and I'm wrong.

I found a post on Quora that could explain what Harris really means by this, which makes a lot of sense.

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Marcus Geduld

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Studied at School of Theatre at Ohio UniversityUpdated 1y

He is speaking metaphorically. He’s a neuroscientist. He knows the brain generates consciousness*, and he knows that the brain is an organ inside the skull.

But he’s trying to help you cut through a persistent illusion: that when you look at a tree, that tree is outside of you and you are a few feet away from it, observing it from a spot just above your nose.

He’s not saying there’s no tree. There is a tree. But you can’t directly perceive it. Data about it enters your brain via your sense organs, chiefly your eyes in this case, but what you’re actually “seeing” is a mental model, built by your brain. It’s a simulation of some sort of external reality.

So is the little bit of your nose that maybe you can see in your peripheral vision. You’re not actually seeing it. It’s just another part of that same mental model as the tree. So is the sight of your hand, if you look down at it or bring it up to your face. So is your sense that you’re breathing. So is your pain when you have a headache.

Your brain has built a simulation—based on real data—that includes the tree, your nose, your breaths, the feeling of your feet on the ground, your ideas, and so on. All are existing in the same “space,” which is consciousness.

So maybe Harris could have said “Everything is in your head,” but what he’s trying to do is get you to see that this sense of yourself being a separate object from the stuff you see “all around you” is an illusion.

The problem with “Everything is in your head” is it creates an image, at least of me, of this normal-sized head with lots of little things inside it. Even if that’s kind of what’s going on, it doesn’t create the visceral feeling that the stuff you see over there is part of consciousness.

If you’re inside a room right now, imagine consciousness as a space wrapping around it, wrapping around the entire room. And that thing in the center of the room that seems to be “you” is just one part of consciousness. It’s just as much inside the wrapper as everything else in the room, as the room itself.

In the real world, there is a separation. There’s you and a tree, two distinct things, but in your consciousness, they’re all part of the same thing—the same simulation. And that tree “over there” is just as much a part of you as that hand “over here.”

Really, when you’re looking at a tree, you’re not seeing a tree, you’re seeing colors and shapes. “Tree” is a concept you’re laying on top of that. (And that concept is also part of the simulation.) And the same is true with “your” hand. When you look at it, you’re seeing shapes and colors. When you look in general, you’re seeing a bunch of shapes and colors, and your brain is layering the concept “tree” on some of them and “hand” on others. But they’re all part of consciousness. Equally.

Imagine a character in a movie suddenly realizing the truth. “Oh my God! I’m in a movie. That car over there is part of a movie. It’s just pixels. That building … pixels! There’s no difference between them. They’re all just colored pixels!”

He’s forgetting one thing, right? He too is just colored pixels. He’s making a false separation between himself and the car, himself and the building. All are part of the same movie. (When the movie was shot, cameras were pointed at actual things, but now what’s being projected is pixels.)

I’m not trying to say nothing is real or it’s all an illusion. And I don’t believe Harris is saying that either. He’s a materialist. I’m saying that when you look around the room, everything you see is equally inside your head and equally close to you. That thing “across the room” is just as close to you as your fingernails, because everything you see and sense is “just pixels,” which is to just your brain’s representation of what’s actually out there.

If that thing over there is a simulation inside your head, it’s not really “over there.” The thing it’s a simulation of might be over there, but you can’t directly perceive that thing. What you’re seeing is a part of you and you’re a part of it.

The data which is telling you that “the thing thing is across the room from you” may be very useful data. It may help guide your actions, if you want to experience going to it and picking it up, but that doesn’t stop everything you see, hear, smell, touch, taste, and otherwise sense from all appearing in the same space, along with your thoughts and feelings.

All of this can be sophomoric, dorm-room “Oh, wow! Trippy,” but mindfulness meditation can gradually train you to have a visceral sense of it. Over time, you learn to see consciousness as a “space” in which all sorts of things appear, and they’re all equally items-in-consciousness: tree, sense of self, sad feeling, memory of yesterday, solution to problem, sound, sense of distance, etc.

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* The truth is more nuanced. Turns out, Harris is agnostic about the relationship between the brain and consciousness. Thank you, User-11317941740410993461 for correcting my errors. For more info, see the videos in the exchange between me and Benjamin, below.

 

Important truth: what we need isn't God, but our own being

Well, today I finished a book I've been blogging about for a while, Seth Gillihan's Mindful Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. As is the case with most books I read, I liked almost all of it, finding just a few parts annoying.

I'll mention the annoying parts first, to get them out of the way.

Gillihan doesn't mention religion or his own faith very often in the book. But given his subject, even a few times seemed too many to me. I was OK with him using "spirit" as a way to describe the deeper aspect of life.

Here he describes his take on spirit.

We don't have to add anything extra or overtly "spiritual" to find deep connection with another person. Spirit emerges in our relationships through our everyday words and actions when our attention is in the present. 

We go beyond minds and bodies by fully present with our own body and mind. When we completely inhabit the shared here and now of this world, we find connection that transcends here and now, beyond space and time.

OK. I doubt that Gillihan means this literally, since being in the present doesn't really take us beyond space and time. I'll grant him that literary license, though, since it can seem like we're beyond space and time.

What bothered me much more was how he felt the need to say this on the final page of his book, which obviously won't resonate with the many readers who don't share his devotion to God.

The integrated approach of Think Act Be that emerged from the intersection of my trials and my training has been discovered by innumerable people across the millennia. Thomas Merton captured it beautifully in New Seeds of Contemplation:

"The 'spiritual life' is then the perfectly balanced life in which the body with its passions and instincts, the mind with its reasoning and its obedience to principle and the spirit with its passive illumination by the Light and Love of God form one complete [person] who is in God and with God and from God and for God."

I suppose Christian readers of his book will like that sentiment. I sure didn't, especially since it contradicts Gillihan's statement that spirit emerges when our attention is in the present -- no need for any illumination by God.

However, as I said, on the whole I enjoyed his book a lot. I especially liked his emphasis on not expecting to gain anything from mindfulness and meditation other than a better relationship with our experience of the life we already have.

Gillihan writes:

Most of us seek security and belonging in a home outside ourselves. We look for it in relationships, in work, in acclaim or material things. In reality, the home we long for is always right here. It doesn't exist anywhere else.

"This is a country whose center is everywhere," wrote Thomas Merton in New Seeds of Contemplation. "You do not find it by traveling but by standing still."

But that doesn't stop us from searching for it everywhere except where it is, as if we were tearing the house apart trying to find the keys that we're holding in our hand. The answer must be out there somewhere, something more than just ourselves, because we're convinced we're not enough.

...So much of our suffering comes from struggling to find something more. More than myself. More than the person sitting across from me. More than this house, this table, this meal, this spoon. More than this moment.

I've also been reading a book by physicist Alan Lightman, The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science. In a chapter about consciousness and the brain, he describes an experience that was thoroughly materialistic, yet spiritual in one of the ways Gillihan uses that term. 

Near the end of my conversation with Professor Koch, I described an experience I had some years ago. I was out on the ocean alone in a small boat, late at night, coming back to my home on a small island. It was a clear night, and the sky bristled with stars. No sound could be heard, except for the soft drone of my engine.

Taking a chance, I turned off the engine. It got even quieter. Then I lay down in the boat and looked up. 

After a few minutes my world dissolved into the star-littered sky. The boat disappeared. My body disappeared. Awareness of my self and my ego disappeared. And I found myself falling into infinity. I felt an overwhelming connection to the stars, as if I were part of them.

And the vast expanse of time -- extending from the far distant past long before I was born and then into the far distant future long after I would die -- seemed compressed to a dot. I felt connected not only to the stars but to all of nature, and to the entire cosmos. I felt part of something much larger than myself.

After a time, I sat up and started the engine again. I had no idea how long I'd been lying there looking up. I asked Professor Koch whether he thought such an experience could arise from mere atoms and molecules.

"First, it is a true experience," he said. "I call these mystical experiences. You can get them in near death experiences, you can get them with a drug called 5-MeO-DMT, you can get them when you meditate. We know that our brain can produce love and hate. This is another experience that the brain can have. And experience shows that our brain can produce all the feelings of love and hate, of ecstasy, of feeling connected."

Absolutely. The brain does this with no God, with nothing supernatural. Just with 100 billion neurons interconnected with about 100 trillion synapses. 

Anesthesia with propofol raises interesting consciousness questions

Because I'm prone to getting non-cancerous polyps, which could turn into cancer if not removed, I've had colonoscopies every five years or so since I was around fifty.

The most recent ones have involved anesthesia with propofol, a frequently-used drug with few side effects but potential for abuse. Because it induces euphoria in many people. One study found about half. 

In 2011 I wrote "Finding enlightenment through a colonoscopy (and propofol)."

After talking about a disturbing conversation I had with a nurse about whether propofol truly prevents a patient from feeling discomfort/pain, or merely takes away the memory of discomfort/pain, I shared how propofol made me feel.

Some pleasantries were exchanged with the doctor and the nurses. Then the nurse anesthesiologist said she was starting to inject the propofol. For about fifteen seconds I felt completely normal. I was mildly concerned that the sedative wasn't working.

Next thing I knew, the nurse was telling me "We're all done."

My instant intuitive reaction was disappointment. I was disturbed to be back in everyday reality. It had been a lot more pleasant wherever I'd been, consciousness wise. I sort of felt like I'd jumped into ice water after basking on a warm beach.

Doing some Googling on propofol before writing this post, I learned this sort of reaction is why the drug is illicitly used non-medically.

There are reports of self-administration of propofol for recreational purposes. Short-term effects include mild euphoria, hallucinations, and disinhibition. Long-term use has been reported to result in addiction.  

I felt completely alert and awake. The only side effect, so far as I could tell, was that feeling of I wish I could have stayed in that pleasant propofol place longer. My first words to the nurse were, "I had some nice dreams. Mostly of having a colonoscopy, but with absolutely no pain, as if it was happening to someone else."

Later, after some reflection, I realized that calling what I experienced a "dream" wasn't entirely accurate.

Yes, it seemed like a dream at the time. But what are the chances that my brain would choose to dream about a colonoscopy, complete with thoughts of the endoscope wending its way here and there through my colon, while I was actually having an colonoscopy?

More likely is that I was minimally aware of what was going on, but the propofol created a feeling that it wasn't really happening to me.

So it's fascinating, but obviously old news, as old as human history probably, that a drug can alter someone's consciousness so completely, while they're under the influence of propofol reality not only seems much more pleasant than in normal life, that reality appears natural rather than artificial.

This raises the familiar question of how it is possible to know what really real reality actually is, if we humans are able to be in various sorts of subjective realities -- all of which seem to be true to the people experiencing them.

I got to thinking about this yesterday when I had eye surgery related to a glaucoma diagnosis that entered my life about eighteen months ago. I wrote a blog post about the surgery last night: "My eye surgery went well, though not a load of fun."

That wasn't the greatest title for the post, since the 30 minutes or so of the actual surgery was the most pleasant part of a long day. (The surgery was in Portland, about 75 minutes from Salem, where I live.) Here's what I said about the anesthesia. The UPDATE was written this morning.

Another stress reducer was my surgery starting on time. My hernia surgery [in 2021] was delayed. I found it tough to be all prepped and ready to go, then be told that because a previous surgery took longer than expected, mine wouldn't start for an extra hour.

But today I was wheeled into the outpatient operating room a few minutes early.

And it was good to be awake through the eye surgery, though I'd told the anesthesiologist that I enjoy propofol when I've had it for colonoscopies. He said that he'd put a small amount in my IV tube. Don't know if that happened, though, since I felt pretty much the same during the surgery.

UPDATE: I need to change my "pretty much the same" claim after idly scratching my chest while watching TV last night and feeling a strange lump. A big lump. Checking it out, I found that it was a square of adhesive with a metal connector thingie on the top. And not just one, there were three of them on the top of my chest where they were hard to see without looking in a mirror. Must have been put there in the surgery room to monitor my heart.

I have no memory of that happening, nor, as I thought more about it, of being wheeled into the recovery room. So now I believe that while I was conscious during most of the eye surgery, I wasn't for all of it, and the "pretty much the same" feeling I had while the eye was being operated on could have been a propofol effect where propofol reality feels more real than actual reality (and more pleasant).

Also, I forgot to credit the anesthesiologist with a clever question. He asked me, "So what did you have for breakfast today?" Quick-witted senior citizen that I am, I replied, "Ha, trick question! I didn't have anything to eat after midnight, as I was told to do by the pre-op instructions." He must feel this gets a more honest answer than "Have you had anything to eat after midnight?"

Again, the interesting thing is that for most of the eye surgery I could hear my doctor, a fellow in ophthalmology who was assisting him, and a nurse talk about some arcane medical subjects unrelated to my surgery that I couldn't understand very well, yet listened to with considerable interest.

As I noted in my blog post, I felt so calm, natural, and relaxed during the surgery, at the time I thought "The anesthesiologist must not have given me propofol, and maybe not even a sedative."

Meaning, the state of consciousness I was in felt like it was the really real reality mentioned above, even though my update to the post explained why almost certainly I was in an artificially-induced reality.

Anyway, I'm prone to find interesting philosophical questions in all kinds of places. Yesterday it was an outpatient surgery room at Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland.

Experience is part of physical reality

Sometimes -- well, actually, quite a lot of times -- I find people arguing on this blog, and in other places, that science doesn't know how to deal with personal experience.

Further, that because experience seems to be something ineffable, as is consciousness (likely there's no difference between experience and consciousness), this means that the most intimate part of our being is outside the domain of science, which deals with physical reality.

Galen Strawson, a philosopher, disagrees. I wrote about his take on consciousness in "The hard problem isn't the nature of consciousness, but of matter." 

Many make the same mistake [as Leibniz] today -- the Very Large Mistake (as Winnie-the-Pooh might put it) of thinking that we know enough about the nature of physical stuff to know that conscious experience can't be physical.

We don't. We don't know the intrinsic nature of physical stuff except -- Russell again -- insofar as we know it simply through having a conscious experience. 

We find this idea extremely difficult because we're so very deeply committed to the belief that we know more about the physical than we do, and (in particular) know enough to know that consciousness can't be physical. 

In Strawson's book, "Things That Bother Me," he makes a similar point as regards experience.

So what do we know for sure? When we ask this question we get, first, an old answer. We know, each of us individually, that we exist, as Descartes pointed out. We also encounter another more general certainty, as Descartes also pointed out

We encounter the fact of consciousness, conscious experience, experience, the fact of the subjective qualitative character or "phenomenological" character of experience. The existence of experience is a certainly known general fact about concrete reality.

It is, therefor, for anyone who takes the concrete real to be entirely natural, a certainly known natural fact. It is therefore, for any realistic naturalist, a certainly known physical fact. So we have our starting point. 

The necessary, inevitable starting point of genuine, realistic  naturalism, real naturalism, as I call it, is outright realism about experience, conscious experience. 

...It's true, of course, that experience seems utterly and bewilderingly different from toe-stubbing physical stuff as it is ordinarily conceived of in everyday life. But this doesn't give us any reason to think that experience isn't wholly physical.

It's also true that experience seems bewilderingly different from physical stuff as it is usually conceived of in the physics laboratory. But this, again, doesn't give us any reason to think that experience isn't wholly physical.

The hard problem isn't the nature of consciousness, but of matter

The Portland Oregonian sometimes has the New York Times Book Review section in its Sunday online edition. Looking it over last weekend, I noted an ad for a book containing 133 essays from the Times' award-winning philosophy series.

I gave "Question Everything" to myself as a belated Christmas present. It arrived recently, and I read one of the essays by Galen Strawson this morning: Consciousness Isn't a Mystery. It's Matter.

Wow. Really interesting and thought-provoking.

Strawson presented a fresh view of consciousness that I'd never come across before. This is the power of philosophy, which to me simply means clear thinking -- not the academic version of modern-day philosophy that in large part is devoted to linguistic games, in my decidedly personal opinion.

Here's excerpts from the essay that capture Strawson's main points.

Every day, it seems, some verifiably intelligent person tells us that we don't know what consciousness is. The nature of consciousness, they say, is an awesome mystery.

...I find this odd because we know exactly what consciousness is -- where by "consciousness" I mean what most people mean in this debate: experience of any kind whatever. It's the most familiar thing there is, whether it's experience of emotion, hearing, touching, tasting, or feeling. 

It is in fact the only thing in the universe whose ultimate intrinsic nature we can claim to know. It is utterly unmysterious. 

The nature of physical stuff, by contrast, is deeply mysterious, and physics grows stranger by the hour... Or rather, more carefully: The nature of physical stuff is mysterious except insofar as consciousness is itself a form of physical stuff. 

This point, which is at first extremely startling, was well put by Bertrand Russell in the 1950s in his essay "Mind and Matter": "We know nothing about the intrinsic quality of physical events," he wrote," except when these are mental events that we directly experience."

In having conscious experience, he claims, we learn something about the intrinsic nature of physical stuff, for conscious experience is itself a form of physical stuff. I think Russell is right: Human conscious experience is wholly a matter of physical goings-on in the body and particularly the brain. 

...We know what conscious experience is because the having is the knowing: Having conscious experience is knowing what it is. You don't have to think about it (it's really much better not to). You just have to have it.

It's true that people can make all kinds of mistakes about what is going on when they have experience, but none of them threaten the fundamental sense in which we know exactly what experience is just in having it.

...So we all know what consciousness is. Once we're clear on this we can try to go further, for consciousness does of course raise a hard problem. The problem arises from the fact that we accept that consciousness is wholly a matter of physical goings-on, but can't see how this can be so.

We examine the brain in ever greater detail, using incredibly powerful techniques like fMRI, and we observe extraordinarily complex neuroelectrochemical goings-on, but we can't even begin to understand how these goings-on can be (or give rise to) conscious experience.

...Many make the same mistake [as Leibniz] today -- the Very Large Mistake (as Winnie-the-Pooh might put it) of thinking that we know enough about the nature of physical stuff to know that conscious experience can't be physical.

We don't. We don't know the intrinsic nature of physical stuff except -- Russell again -- insofar as we know it simply through having a conscious experience. 

We find this idea extremely difficult because we're so very deeply committed to the belief that we know more about the physical than we do, and (in particular) know enough to know that consciousness can't be physical. 

We don't see that the hard problem is not what consciousness is, it's what matter is -- what the physical is... Physics is silent -- perfectly and forever silent -- on this question.

This point was a commonplace one a hundred years ago, but it has gotten lost in the recent discussion of consciousness. Stephen Hawking makes it dramatically in his book A Brief History of Time. Physics, he says, is "just a set of rules and equations." The question is what "breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?"

What is the fundamental stuff of physical reality, the stuff that is structured in the way physics reveals? The answer, again, is that we don't know -- except insofar as this stuff takes the form of conscious experience.

We can say that it is energy that breathes fire into the equations, using the word "energy" as Heisenberg does when he says, for example, that "all particles are made of the same substance: energy," but the fundamental question arises again -- "What is the intrinsic nature of this energy, this energy-stuff?"

And the answer, again, is that we don't know, and that physics can't tell us; that's just not its business. This point about the limits on what physics can tell us is rock-solid, and it arises before we begin to consider any of the deep problems of understanding that arise within physics -- problems with "dark matter" or "dark energy," for example -- or with reconciling quantum mechanics and general relativity theory.

...So the hard problem is the problem of matter (physical stuff in general). If physics made any claim that couldn't be squared with the fact that our conscious experience is brain activity, then I believe that claim would be false. 

But physics doesn't do any such thing. It's not the physics picture of matter that's the problem; it's the ordinary everyday picture of matter.

It's ironic that the people who are most likely to doubt or deny the existence of consciousness (on the grounds that everything is physical, and that consciousness can't possibly be physical) are also those who are most insistent on the primacy of science, because it is precisely science that makes the key point shine most brightly: the point that there is a fundamental respect in which the ultimate intrinsic nature of the stuff of the universe is unknown to us -- except insofar as it is consciousness.

God, like money, is real only because of the human mind

As I noted in a previous post about Lisa Feldman Barrett's book, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, I'm enjoying the book more now that I'm past the introductory chapters.

One reason is that Barrett doesn't just describe how emotions are made. She embeds that description in larger issues. For example, her "Emotions As Social Reality" chapter starts off with the classic question, If a tree falls in the forest and no one is present to hear it, does it make a sound?

Even though I should know better, when I ponder this question my first intuitive reaction is to visualize a big tree falling in a forest with no one around, and it sure does make a sound. 

But that's my imagination talking, not reality. Meaning, I forget that the question says no one is present to hear it, and that includes me -- even though I'm just visualizing the tree falling, not experiencing it in physical reality.

It's easy to make this sort of mistake. After all, for each of us, the only way we know anything about the world and our surrounding universe is through the human brain. So for us, reality basically is synonymous with "how we experience reality."

This is true even on the cosmic level, though scientists likely are less prone to this thinking error. 

I wonder, how would the universe appear if there was no consciousness in it? I wrote about this back in 2007 in Consider a cosmos with no consciousness. 

I try to imagine a cosmos with no consciousness. No human awareness. No animal awareness. No plant awareness. No alien life form awareness. No angelic awareness. No awareness of any kind. None at all.

(Note: I consider “consciousness” and “awareness” to be terms pointing to the same mysterious phenomenon, as this Wikipedia article implies).

Now, this is where the thought experiment should end, because it’s already failed. For I’m aware. And awareness, or consciousness, obviously can’t envision a cosmos with no awareness, for the same reason I can’t picture what the world would be like without me in it.

Nevertheless, I keep forging ahead because the experiment is so intriguing, ignoring the impassible existential abyss that’s stopped me in my tracks.

I consider a universe with no life, no awareness, no sentience. It’s easy to do. I think: “What a marvelously simple thought experiment!” The universe appears to me just as it does now, planets, stars and galaxies filling the fabric of space, yet with nobody conscious of it.

Obvious questions then crash the party of my thought experiment: Who is doing the considering of this cosmos with no consciousness? From what perspective is this entity contemplating the universe?

It dawns on me that this entity, namely me, is equipped with eyes that translate a certain wavelength of electro-magnetic radiation into perceptions of which I’m aware. Photographs of distant galaxies, for example, from which I derive some of the raw imaginative material for my thought experiment.

Yet what if I had the body of a bat and sensed with sonar? Or that of a snake with heat-sensing capabilities? The world would look entirely different.

So my envisioning of the cosmos as illuminated by light is terribly anthropomorphic, a fact I’m reminded of every time I walk the dog and watch her spending enthralled minutes sniffing a bush that my smell-impaired brain considers to be nothing special.

So not surprisingly, Barrett's answer is:

A falling tree itself makes no sound. Its descent merely creates vibrations in the air and the ground. These vibrations become sound only if something special is present to receive and translate them: say, an ear connected to a brain...Even after the brain receives these electrical signals, its task is not complete. The wave must still be interpreted as the sound of a toppling tree. For this, the brain needs the concept of "Tree" and what trees can do, such as fall in a forest.

A tree is indisputably real, though. So is a forest. And so is the cosmos, or universe. While these things appear the way they do to us only because of how human consciousness operates, there's little or no doubt that something would be there whether or not humans or indeed any other form of awareness is.

This is similar to how Barrett views human emotions.

A third and final riddle is, "Are emotions real?" You might think this question is ridiculous, a classic example of academic indulgence. Of course emotions are real. Think about the last time you were thrilled or sad or furious. These were clearly real feelings.

But in fact, this third riddle is like the falling tree and the red apple: a dilemma about what exists in the world versus in the human brain. The riddle forces us to confront our assumptions about the nature of reality and our role in creating it. But here, the answer is a bit more complex, because it depends on what we mean by "real."

Barrett explains that some things fall in a perceiver-independent category, such as subatomic particles. If there were no humans, there would still be subatomic particles. (Such was the case for virtually every moment of the universe's 13.7 billion year existence, until very recently.)

She goes on to say that "Emotions are real, but real in the same manner of the sound of a tree falling, the experience of red, and the distinctions between flowers and weeds. They are all constructed in the mind of a perceiver."

So these are examples of social reality. Human civilization, Barrett says, is literally built with social reality. Money, to offer another example, only has value because we human give it value. Otherwise money is just a piece of paper or electronic digits.

Yet this doesn't make money less important to humans (though it is utterly meaningless to our dog and other animals, or to a person who lacked the concept of "money"). 

Likewise, I see the notion of God as akin to that of money. It has immense value to people who imbibe the concept of "God" with meaning. But for those of us who don't embrace that concept, "God" is just a word that, like "money," only has meaning to those who create that meaning in their own mind. 

Unlike a tree, there's no evidence that God exists outside of the human mind. Thus God has even less significance that a tree falling in a forest with no one present to hear it, since that tree possesses an independent reality while God doesn't.

Tools for reducing undesirable mental chatter

Having finished Ethan Kross' book, Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It, I want to share some tools listed at the end of the book for dealing with the voice in our head when it gets too annoying.

These are the tools that Kross says can be implemented on your own. They're in order of how easily each can be implemented when chatter strikes. A basic theme is that they're aimed at stepping back from the echo chamber of our own mind.

The last two involve embracing a superstition or performing a ritual. All perfectly fine for even us atheists, since there's no need to believe in the supernatural to do these things.

(1) Use distanced self-talk. One way to create distance when you're experiencing chatter involves language. When you're trying to work through a difficult experience, use your name and the second-person "you" to refer to yourself. Doing so is linked with less activation in brain networks associated with rumination and leads to improved performance under stress, wiser thinking, and less negative emotion.

(2) Imagine advising a friend. Another way to think about your experience from a distanced perspective is to imagine what you would say to a friend experiencing the same problem as you. Think about the advice you'd give that person, and then apply it to yourself.

(3) Broaden your perspective. Chatter involves narrowly focusing on the problems we're experiencing. A natural antidote to this involves broadening our perspective. To do this, think about how the experience you're worrying about compares with other adverse events you (or others) have endured, how it fits into the broader scheme of your life and the world, and/or how other people you admire would respond to the same situation.

(4) Reframe your experience as a challenge. A theme of this book is that you possess the ability to change the way you think about your experiences. Chatter is often triggered when we interpret a situation as a threat -- something we can't manage. To aid your inner voice, reinterpret the situation as a challenge that you can handle, for example, by reminding yourself of how you've succeeded in similar situations in the past, or by using distanced self-talk.

(5) Reinterpret your body's chatter response. The bodily symptoms of stress (for example, an upset stomach before, say, a date or presentation) are often themselves stressful (for instance, chatter causes your stomach to grumble, which perpetuates your chatter, which leads your stomach to continue to grumble). When this happens, remind yourself that your bodily response to stress is an adaptive evolutionary reaction that improves performance under high-stress situations. In other words, tell yourself that your sudden rapid breathing, pounding heartbeat, and sweaty palms are there not to sabotage you but to help you respond to a challenge.

(6) Normalize your experience. Knowing that you are not alone in your experience can be a potent way of quelling chatter. There's a linguistic tool for helping people do this: Use the word "you" to refer to people in general when you think and talk about negative experiences. Doing so helps people reflect on their experiences from a healthy distance and makes it clear that what happened is not unique to them but characteristic of human experience in general. 

(7) Engage in mental time travel. Another way to gain distance and broaden your perspective is to think about how you'll feel a month, a year, or even longer from now. Remind yourself that you'll look back on whatever is upsetting you in the future and it'll seem much less upsetting. Doing so highlights the impermanence of your current emotional state.

(8) Change the view. As you think about a negative experience, visualize the event in your mind from the perspective of a fly on the wall peering down on the scene. Try to understand why your "distant self" is feeling the way it is. Adopting this perspective leads people to focus less on the emotional features of their experience and more on reinterpreting the event in ways that promote insight and closure. You can also gain distance through visual imagery by imagining moving away from the upsetting scene in your mind's eye, like a camera panning out until the scene shrinks to the size of a postage stamp.

(9) Write expressively. Write about your deepest thoughts and feelings surrounding your negative experience for fifteen to twenty minutes a day for one to three consecutive days. Really let yourself go as you jot down your stream of thoughts; don't worry about grammar or spelling. Focusing on your experience from the perspective of a narrative provides you with distance from the experience, which helps you make sense of what you felt in ways that improve how you feel over time.

(10) Adopt the perspective of a neutral third party. If you find yourself experiencing chatter over a negative interaction you've had with another person or group of people, assume the perspective of a neutral, third-party observer who is motivated to find the best outcome for all parties involved. Doing so reduces negative emotions, quiets an agitated inner voice, and enhances the quality of the relationships we share with the people we've had negative interactions with, including our romantic partners.

(11) Clutch a lucky charm or embrace a superstition. Simply believing that an object or superstitious behavior will help relieve your chatter has precisely that effect by harnessing the brain's power of expectation. Importantly, we don't have to believe in supernatural forces to benefit from these actions. Simply understanding how they harness the power of the brain to heal is sufficient. 

(12) Perform a ritual. Performing a ritual -- a fixed sequence of behaviors that is suffused with meaning -- provides people with a sense of order and control that can be helpful when they're experiencing chatter. Although many of the rituals we engage in (for example, silent prayer, meditation) are passed down to us from our families and cultures, performing rituals that you create can likewise be effective for quieting chatter. 

I'm pretty sure Sam Harris' "pure awareness" doesn't exist

As much as I like Sam Harris' approach to meditation, which basically is Buddhism (Vipassana variety) minus the Buddhist part, I'm still left with a key question.

Which if asked of a Zen master likely would earn me a smack on my head or kick of my butt -- or more mildly, a quizzical look and an admonition to return to my meditation mat and seek more diligently for the true nature of my self.

That self, of course, doesn't really exist in Buddhism, nor in Sam Harris' guided meditations on his Waking Up app.

So whoever it is who has this question about meditation isn't an enduring standalone Soul or Self with a capital "S." That who is something else. Which means my question might be unanswerable, since an answer seemingly would have to come from an entity that doesn't exist.

Confusing? Absolutely. So let's leave those thoughts behind and focus on the question.

Who or what is aware of the contents of my consciousness?

Harris, echoing the Buddhist notion of emptiness, that everything in existence is dependent on causes and conditions existing in a vast web of interdependency, likes to say that everything in a human mind is a modification of consciousness.

This includes the idea, everything in a human mind is a modification of consciousness.

Or, the feeling of being a self that has such an idea. No matter where you turn in the mind, no matter what elevated sensation of this'ness or that'ness that makes you think, ah, unvarnished truth, it's all just a modification of consciousness in Harris' view.

OK.

This assumes a dualism that sort of bothers me, since we have (1) consciousness and (2) contents of consciousness, even though I'm not aware of ever being purely consciousness, and can't imagine what this would be like or how one would know they were pure consciousness since Harris says that consciousness isn't something we possess but what we are.

Nonetheless, in his Waking Up book Harris claims to have attained a state of pure consciousness without any content during a lengthy meditation retreat.

But his consciousness must at least have contained the sensation, or memory, or perception, or something that allowed him to conclude that he experienced consciousness without any content. In other words, at minimum Harris' consciousness must have included the content of I'm not experiencing any content.

Which returns me to my question.

I doubt there is such a thing as pure awareness, or pure consciousness. Anyone who claims to have experienced such a state, including Sam Harris, almost certainly is mistaking a feeling or thought of pure awareness for the actual thing. 

So my attitude is that one part of my conscious brain is aware of other parts of my conscious brain, which could include a sensation of Wow, I'm experiencing pure awareness! My meditation rocks!

This leaves mindfulness as an activity, or ability, to be aware of the contents of consciousness, with mindfulness being part of those contents. Thus Harris is on the right track when he says that mindfulness practice leads us to see that the contents of consciousness are constantly shifting and changing within our mind.

Where I disagree with him is his assumption that somehow we are clear pure consciousness. This is at odds with modern neuroscience, as I wrote about in Brain's "dark energy" casts doubt on pure awareness. 

I wrote about my problem with Harris' claim of pure awareness in this post. What I said in 2016 still makes sense to me now.

But as I said in the previous post, I can't grasp what Harris is getting at when he writes about what he experienced while meditating:

There were periods during which all thought subsided, and any sense of having a body disappeared. What remained was a blissful expanse of conscious peace that had no reference point in any of the usual sensory channels. 

Many scientists and philosophers believe that consciousness is always tied to one of the five senses -- and that the idea of a "pure consciousness" apart from seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching is a category error and a spiritual fantasy. I am confident that they are mistaken.

Hmmmm. I'm just as confident that they are not mistaken.  It seems obvious that everyday consciousness isn't limited to sense experiences. Dreaming is a conscious act. It doesn't involve seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or touching via the five senses. 

Likewise, I can believe that in a state of deep meditation, Sam Harris did indeed lose any sense of having a body, and wasn't thinking in any ordinary sense. But Harris was still conscious of something, right? He speaks of this as "a blissful expanse of conscious peace." 

That doesn't sound like "pure consciousness." It sounds like consciousness of a blissful expanse of conscious peace. No thought. No sensory impressions. But there were contents within Harris' consciousness: bliss, an expanse, peace.

Harris appears to view consciousness as something separate and distinct from what the brain does. Yet Harris makes clear that brains are us. For example:

We know, of course, that human minds are the product of human brains. There is simply no question that your ability to decode and understand this sentence depends upon neurophysiological events taking place inside your head at this moment. But most of this mental work occurs entirely in the dark, and it is a mystery why any part of the process should be attended by consciousness.

This passage makes good sense. Aside from the final part of the last sentence. 

Harris sees a mystery where there doesn't have to be one. He distinguishes between (1) brain processes and (2) consciousness. But if consciousness is a product of the human brain, not something separate and distinct from the brain, then consciousness is part of what the brain does.

Consciousness is a brain process.

Our inner voice is linked to our various selves

Most of us have an inner voice speaking to us inside our mind.

It can either be voluntary, as when I read "Most of us have an inner voice" and can hear those words silently echo within my brain. It can also be involuntary, as when I do something wrong and hear "You're an idiot" admonishing me without my consciously willing those words.

This inner voice generally is taken for granted. It's just part of our mental background. 

But a few years ago, when I was into vaping cartridges filled with concentrated cannabis oil (marijuana is legal here in Oregon), I overdid a new cartridge that was more potent than what I'd used before.

After a few inhales, I started to feel strange. Well, let's make that stranger than usual. In my high state of mind, the thoughts being spoken by my inner voice suddenly seemed really bizarre. Who the heck was doing that speaking inside my head? 

I didn't exactly freak out. However, I was hyper-conscious of my inner voice, which now felt more like a mental intruder than a companion that was part of me. It took an hour or two before I felt like my usual self again.

The July 9, 2022 issue of New Scientist has an article called "Internal affairs" in the print edition and "How to understand your inner voice and control your inner critic" in the online edition. Here's a PDF file.
Download How to understand your inner voice and control your inner critic | New Scientist

It turns out that my marijuana-induced experience of my inner voice pointed to a probable psychological truth. The voice inside our head reflects not just one self, but many.

Early theories of consciousness suggested that we each have one “self”, with distinct likes, dislikes and motivations. Yet while we generally feel like one coherent person, many psychologists now consider the singular self to be an illusion. Instead, they argue that we are made up of many selves, each with a different set of motivations and standards.

This means that our inner chatter may be a result of the different roles that form our sense of self. “I as a mother”, for example, would live by a different set of standards than “I as a friend”. And “I the deadline-meeter” has a different set of goals to “I, who likes a bit of celebrity gossip”.

So when I felt that my inner voice was an intruder, that may have been because the thoughts being spoken within my mind were at odds with the wordless sense of self that would have found the intense marijuana high more enjoyable without all that mental chattering.

A sidebar in the article talks about what happened when a woman lost her inner voice.

A silent mind

Losing your inner voice is an experience that neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor understands well. In 1996, a stroke knocked out her ability to talk to herself in her head for five weeks. Now recovered, she describes the aftermath of her stroke as a “blissful silence” without the cacophony of internal speech. It created a feeling of being untethered from her sense of self in a way that left her feeling peaceful. “It was liberating to not maintain the pressure of my ego self,” she says.

But it also had downsides. Bolte Taylor says the lack of a coherent inner narrative left her unable to function. Among other things, she couldn’t determine where her body was positioned in relation to the world around her, was unable to retrieve autobiographical memories and had a lack of self-conscious emotions, most notably embarrassment.

A typology of inner voices makes pretty good sense to me, though based on my own personal mental experience I'd quibble with the nature and number of these characters.

In getting to know our inner voice, it may also be helpful to identify who is actually doing the talking. Puchalska-Wasyl attempted to do this by asking hundreds of people to rate their most common inner speakers based on a variety of emotional outcomes.

Her analysis boiled down their inner speakers to four basic characters: the Faithful Friend, the Proud Rival, the Ambivalent Parent and the Helpless Child.

The Faithful Friend is an advocate: caring and positive and always on hand to provide encouragement. In Puchalska-Wasyl’s sample, this was the most common inner voice experienced. Second was the Proud Rival, a high-fiving positivity coach who challenges a person to up their game. The Ambivalent Parent offers love, support and, at times, a hefty dose of criticism. The Helpless Child is the most negative, arriving with a feeling of powerlessness and a need for support.

Determining which voice pops up most often can be difficult. One option is to pay attention to your inner dialogue and notice which version of your inner voice is talking and how it makes you feel. Given that internal dialogues are a useful tool in psychotherapy, identifying which type of voice predominantly guides you may help you to reframe the conversation for the better, writes Puchalska-Wasyl in a paper on the subject.

We delude ourselves into believing we're a conscious "I"

Going through a stack of unread magazines, I came across a Scientific American from September 2018 that was a special issue devoted to the subject "Humans: Why we're unlike any other species on the planet."

All of the articles are interesting, but I found Susan Blackmore's Decoding the Puzzle of Human Consciousness: The Hardest Problem to be especially so.

Blackmore has an affinity for Zen, which is reflected in the concluding excerpts from her article that I've shared below.

I resonate with her leaning toward the illusionist theory of consciousness. Meaning, we certainly do have subjective experience, but our sense of free will and being a separate conscious self is an illusion with evolutionary benefits.

I also feel that many other, if not most or all, animals are conscious. Anyone who lives with a dog or cat has a strong sense that they have an inner life just as we humans do -- which is one of the best moral arguments for vegetarianism.

Enjoy...

Yet the more biology we learn, the more obvious it is that we share not only anatomy, physiology and genetics with other animals but also systems of vision, hearing, memory and emotional expression. Could it really be that we alone have an extra special something -- this marvelous inner world of subjective experience?

The question is hard because although your own consciousness may seem the most obvious thing in the world, it is perhaps the hardest to study. We do not even have a clear definition beyond appealing to a famous question asked by philosopher Thomas Nagel back in 1974: What is it like to be a bat?

...The crux here is this: If there is nothing it is like to be a bat, we can say it is not conscious. If there is something (anything) it is like for the bat, it is conscious. So is there?

...Even worse is the "hard problem" of consciousness: How does subjective experience arise from objective brain activity? How can physical neurons, with all their chemical and electrical communications, create the feeling of pain, the glorious red of the sunset or the taste of fine claret?

This is a problem of dualism: How can mind arise from matter? Indeed, does it?

The answer to this question divides consciousness researchers down the middle. On one side is the "B Team," as philosopher Daniel C. Bennett described them in a heated debate. Members of this team agonize about the hard problem and believe in the possibility of the philosopher's "zombie," an imagined creature that is indistinguishable from you or me but has no consciousness.

Believing in zombies means that other animals might conceivably be seeing, hearing, eating and mating "all in the dark" with no subjective experience at all. If that is so, consciousness must be a special additional capacity that we might have evolved either with or without and, many would say, are lucky to have.

On the other side is the A Team: scholars who reject the possibility of zombies and think the hard problem is, to quote philosopher Patricia Churchland, a "hornswoggle problem" that obfuscated the issue. Either consciousness just is the activity of bodies and brains, or it inevitably comes along with everything we so obviously share with other animals.

In the A team's view, there is no point in asking when or why "consciousness itself" evolved or what its function is because "consciousness itself" does not exist.

...This is the well-known, though much misunderstood, claim that consciousness is an illusion. This approach does not deny the existence of subjective experience but claims that neither consciousness nor the self are what they seem to be. 

Illusionist theories include psychologist Nicholas Humphrey's idea of a "magical mystery show" being staged inside our heads. The brain concocts out of our ongoing experience, he posits, a story that serves an evolutionary purpose in that it gives us a reason for living.

...This illusory self, the complex of memes, is what I call the "selfplex." An illusion that we are a powerful self that has consciousness and free will -- which may not be so benign. Paradoxically, it may be our unique capacity for language, autobiographical memory and the false sense of being a continuing self that serves to increase our suffering.

Whereas other species may feel pain, they cannot make it worse by crying, "How long will this pain last? Will it get worse? Why me? Why now?" In this sense, our suffering may be unique.

For illusionists such as myself, the answer to our question is simple and obvious. We humans are unique because we alone are clever enough to be deluded into believing that there is a conscious "I."

What hitting a fastball tells us about the brain

I'm not sure what to make of this seemingly correct fact, but I find it so interesting, I feel that it must have some deep significance to those of us who aren't professional baseball players.

In the course of rereading a chapter in Robert Burton's book, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not, I came across his analysis of baseball pitchers and hitters in the "When Does a Thought Begin?" chapter.

Here's the crux of the issue:

Professional baseball pitchers throw with velocities in the range of 80 to 100 miles per hour. Elapsed time from the moment of release to the ball crossing home plate ranges from approximately 380 to 460 milliseconds.

Minimum reaction time -- from the instant the image of the ball's release reaches the retina to the initiation of the swing -- is approximately 200 milliseconds. The swing takes another 160 to 190 milliseconds.

The combination of reaction and swing time approximately equals the time it takes for a fastball to travel from the pitcher's mound to home plate.

So how is a batter ever able to hit the baseball?

It can't be by following the path of the ball with their eyes, deciding it is a hittable pitch, and then swinging their bat at the ball. Physics and human biology don't allow for that. Burton explains what actually happens.

Once the ball is in flight, it is too late for detailed deliberation. The batter sees the release and the beginning of its path, and then goes on automatic pilot. Sounds suspiciously like an inner machine at the helm, some robotic neuronal clumps that are responsible for a hitter like Babe Ruth or Barry Bonds.

Yet we all know that a hitter's skill, beyond mere athleticism, is dependent upon prior practice and extensive study of the game. Great hitters keep extensive notes on the tendencies of opposing pitchers, including what type of pitch and where it will be thrown in various conditions.

A 3-0 pitch with the bases loaded is more likely to be down the middle than a 0-2 pitch with the bases empty. The combination of circumstances is infinite, yet each hitter develops a probabilistic profile of the speed, trajectory, and location of the next pitch. It is in this realm that great players have a greater accuracy than novice players.

The act of hitting the ball involves two fundamentally different strategies inextricably linked together -- conscious analysis prior to the event, and reliance upon nearly instantaneous subconscious calculations at the onset of the event.

The cortex sets out general guidelines for when to swing and where, then hands the controls over to quicker subcortical mechanisms. 

A simplified schema provided by a computer scientist-engineer after extensive study of the physics of a pitch:

"We divide the pitch into thirds. During the first third the batter gathers sensory data; during the middle third he does computations (predicting where and when the ball will collide with his bat); during the last third he is swinging. During the swing he could close his eyes and it would not make any difference. He can't alter the swing. The most he can do is check the swing." (Italics mine.)

Lastly, Burton explains why an onlooker thinks the batter should have been able to do better with a pitch, and how conversation is a lot like pitching a fastball and trying to hit a fastball.

To further complicate the problem of the timing of perception, consider how different the approaching baseball looks to the batter and to you, an observer sitting behind home plate. The pitcher fires three successive ninety-five-miles-per-hour blazers.

The batter whiffs the first and fouls off the next two. He prepares himself for another smoker. Instead, the pitcher lobs a deceptive sixty-five-miles-per-hour change-up. The batter swings far too early and strikes out. You watch in amusement and ask yourself how the batter can make five million a year and so misjudge a ball that, to your uninvolved eye, a Little Leaguer could hit.

The difference is that while the batter's decision to swing begins prior to his full conscious appreciation that the pitcher has thrown a slow pitch, you have the luxury to see the ball's entire path toward the plate. By not being forced to immediately decide whether or not to swing, you see a batter being badly fooled by a pitch that doesn't fool you.

The basic neurobiological principle is that the need for an immediate response time reduces the accuracy of perception of incoming information. Though most of aren't involved in high-speed sports, we all experience these limitations in the most crucial of daily activities -- normal conversation.

In fact, conversation is as much a high-speed competition as a top-flight table tennis match. 

First, consider the act of listening. We are bombarded with the rapid presentation of individual phonemes strung together to make words, phrases, and sentences. Processing takes time. A word may not be initially decipherable; only with further speech is it clarified.

...Now visualize conversation as a means for the exchange of complex ideas with each participant's response dependent on whether or not he believes the idea is correct. Instead of throwing a fastball, each discussant is throwing an idea at the other. 

If the listener judges the idea as correct, he will not swing (he will accept the idea as is). If he thinks the approaching idea is incorrect, he will swing (formulate an immediate rebuttal and/or interrupt the speaker to interject his correction).

Here's the windup, and here's the thought. The listener's decision as to the thought's correctness will be based upon a quick glimpse of the idea leaving the other's lips, snap judgements of body language, sighs, gestures, facial expressions, and all the various verbal and nonverbal contributions to interpretation of the spoken word. 

If the listener is forced to make a quick response, the decision as to the thought's correctness will be subject to the same physiological restraints as a batter's assessment of an incoming pitch.

...How different conversation sounds when we don't feel obliged to respond. As uninvolved spectators luxuriating in our more leisurely processing time, we easily see the shallowness, evasiveness, and lack of real exchange of ideas in most dialogue.

...Sadly, the problem is at least in part a matter of the physiology of conversation. As we move from silent observer to active discussant, we become mired in the very processing problem we're trying to overcome.

How neural networks operate in the hidden layer of our brain

ln my previous post, I referred to the hidden depths of the brain without including much of a description of what goes on in those depths.

Neuroscience is still working on that problem. But even though Robert Burton, a neurologist and neuroscientist, wrote the book I spoke about in the blog post (On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not) in 2008, the basic points he makes are still valid.

(Neuroscience doesn't evolve that fast.)

Here's passages from his chapter on Neural Networks that will give you a good feel for how the hidden layer of the brain operates. Fascinating stuff. 

As you can read below, the brain operates very differently from how most people believe it does -- as a reliable instrument for knowing reality as it is, a phrase that often pops up in spiritual books that aren't grounded in neuroscience.

Yes, in large part we humans agree on the basics of how the world is. If that wasn't the case, traffic signals would be useless. Most of us see red as red, green as green, and know that red means stop and green means go.

But as Burton says in these excerpts, there's a tremendous amount of personal subjectivity in what our brain presents to us as reflective of reality. And this isn't a bad thing, not that we can do anything about it. Life would be boring if we all experienced the world in the same way.

In the human brain, a typical neuron receives incoming information from approximately ten thousand other neurons. Each bit of information either stimulates (positive input) or inhibits (negative input) cell firing. 

The neuron acts like a small calculator.

If the sum of the inputs reaches a critical threshold level, an electrical charge travels down the nerve fiber (axon) to the region where neurotransmitters are stored. The transmitters are released into the synaptic cleft -- a tiny gap between adjacent neurons. If a neurotransmitter finds  a receptive site (receptor) on the adjacent neuron, the process will be repeated on this adjacent neuron.

...Despite a veritable symphony of interacting mechanisms, the neuron ultimately has only two options -- it either fires or it doesn't. At this most basic level, the brain might appear like a massive compilation of on-off switches. But the connections between neurons are not fixed entities.

Rather they are in constant flux -- being strengthened or diminished by ongoing stimuli.

Connections are enhanced with use, weakened with neglect, and are themselves affected by other connections to the same neurons. Once we leave the individual synapse between two neurons, the complexity skyrockets -- from individual neurons to a hundred billion brain cells each with thousands of connections.

Although unraveling how individual neurons collectively create thought remains the Holy Grail of neuroscience, the artificial intelligence (AI) community has given us some intriguing clues as to how this might occur.

Using the biological neuron and its connections as the model, AI scientists have been able to build artificial neural networks (ANN) that can play chess and poker, read faces, recognize speech, and recommend books on Amazon.com.

While standard computer programs work line by line, yes or no, all eventualities programmed in advance, the ANN takes an entirely different approach. The ANN is based upon mathematical programs that are initially devoid of any specific values. The programmers only provide the equations; incoming information determines how connections are formed and how strong each connection will be in relationship with all the other connections (or weightings).

There is no predictable solution to a problem -- rather as one connection changes, so do all the others. These shifting interrelationships are the basis for "learning." The AI community has labeled this virtual space where the weightings take place as the hidden layer. 

...In the human brain, the hidden layer doesn't exist as a discrete interface of specific anatomic structure; rather it resides within the connections between all neurons involved in any neural network.

...The hidden layer, a term normally considered AI jargon, offers a powerful metaphor for the brain's processing of information. It is in the hidden layer that all elements of biology (from genetic predispositions to neurotransmitter variations and fluctuations) and all past experience, whether remembered or long forgotten, affect the processing of incoming information.

It is the interface between incoming sensory data and a final perception, the anatomic crossroad where nature and nurture intersect. It is why your red is not my red, your idea of beauty isn't mine, why eyewitnesses offer differing accounts of an accident, or why we don't put all our money on the same roulette number.

...Now let's up the ante and watch a human neural network in action. A bright light is briefly flashed into your eyes. The retina turns the flash of light into electrical data that travel along the optic nerves and into the brain (input).

But instead of a direct route to consciousness with a precise and unaltered duplication of the flash, the data first goes to a subconscious holding station where it is scrutinized, evaluated, and discussed by a screening committee representing all of your biological tendencies and past experiences. This committee meets behind closed doors, operating outside of consciousness in the hidden layer.

Consider each committee member as being one set of neural connections. 

One might represent a childhood memory of having seen a similar flash of light when a toaster shorted out and started an electrical fire; the second is a general alarm system that has recently become highly sensitive and vigilant to the possibility of terrorism; the third is composite memory of rock concerts; the fourth is a genetically based predisposition for a heightened startle reflex for bright lights.

Each member has his own opinion and each gets one vote.

After hearing all the arguments, each committee member casts his vote and they are tallied (weighted). At the most elemental level, a decision is made -- either to entirely suppress the flash or send it on to consciousness (output). The degree of awareness generated is yet another function of this decision -- ranging from a barely noticed flash at the periphery of vision to a bright flash, front and center.

The childhood memory votes yes: Send the flash into awareness. The terrorist alarm network, fearing that the flash could indicate an explosion, votes yes. The rock concert memory is blasé, has seen the same flashes a zillion times at rock concerts, and feels the flash should be ignored. It votes no. The genetic predisposition reflexively votes yes.

The third member is outvoted, and the flash is sent on high priority into consciousness. You look around, heart pounding, on high alert for everything from a gunshot to a terrorist bomb exploding. But you are at a wedding, and everyone is taking pictures of the bride. You sigh and tell yourself not to be so anxious.

...To get an idea of the magnitude of this process, imagine billions of committee members, each with at least ten thousand hands reaching out to shake hands, prod, poke, seduce, or fend off the other members. Miraculously, this orgy of utter chaos is transformed into a relatively seamless and focused stream of consciousness.

...The schema of the hidden layer provides a conceptual model of a massive web of neuronal connections microscopically interwoven throughout the brain. Such neural networks are the brain's real power brokers, the influence peddlers and decision makers hard at work behind the closed doors of darkened white matter. How consciousness occurs remains an utter mystery, but conceptually, it must arise out of these hidden layers.

The concept of neural networks also helps explain why established habits, beliefs, and judgments are so difficult to change. 

Imagine the gradual formation of a riverbed. The initial flow of water might be completely random -- there are no preferred routes in the beginning. But once a creek has been formed, water is more likely to follow the newly created path of least resistance. As the water continues, the creek deepens and a river develops.

...The brain is only human; it, too, relies on established ways.

As interneuronal connections increase, they become more difficult to overcome. A hitch in your golf swing, biting your nails, persisting with a faulty idea, not dumping your dot.com stocks in late 1999 -- habits, whether mental or physical, are exasperating examples of the power of these microscopic linkages.

A guided meditation by Sam Harris about the open sky of consciousness

Below is a transcript of a guided meditation by Sam Harris that I listened to recently on his Waking Up app. I enjoyed it a lot. His guided meditations last either 10 or 20 minutes, depending on how much non-speaking time you choose.

So the words by Harris should be experienced, not just thought about. Of course, there's quite a bit to ponder in how Harris views consciousness and its contents.

What he says reminds me of what I read about Descartes and his famous Cogito, ergo sum, I think therefore I am,  in an intriguing new book by David Chalmers that I'm reading, "Reality: Virtual Worlds and the Problems of Philosophy."

Chalmers writes:

More deeply, Descartes reasoned that he could not doubt that he's thinking. Even if he doubted that he was thinking, his doubt was itself a sort of thinking. To doubt that one is thinking is internally inconsistent: The doubting itself shows that the doubt is wrong.

Once Descartes knew he was thinking, it was a small step to knowing his own existence. Where there is thinking, there must be a thinker. So Descartes concludes: Sum! I exist!

Plenty of philosophers have tried to poke holes in Descartes's Cogito ergo sum. Some question the cogito part. How can Descartes be so sure that he's even managing to doubt? That is, how does he know that he's not a mindless automaton?

Others question the step to sum. Is it so obvious that thinking requires a thinker? According to the 18th century German philosopher Georg Lichtenberg, Descartes should have said, "There is thinking, therefore thought exists." 

That way, he could have known that thoughts exist, but he should not have been so sure about himself. 

...Speaking for myself, I don't think there's anything special about thinking per se. Descartes could have said, "I feel, therefore I am," or "I see, therefore I am." All of these are claims about his mind that he can be certain of and that aren't threatened by the evil demon.

At least, he can be certain about these claims if they're understood as states of consciousness, or subjective experience. If we understand "see" as referring simply to the subjective experience of seeing, then Descartes can be certain he is seeing.

In my view, the best statement of the cogito is "I am conscious, therefore I am."

Here's the guided meditation by Sam Harris. It echoes how David Chalmers views Descartes.

OK, just find a comfortable seat, and take a few deep breaths. See if you can recognize a sky-like nature of your mind, right at the outset.

There's just this vast, open, undefined, centerless condition in which everything is appearing, all by itself.

Sights, sounds, sensations, smells, tastes, thoughts, moods, emotions -- everything you can notice, along with the noticing itself, is simply springing into view in the space of awareness. 

Just drop back and rest as that. 

Any thought about the past is simply appearing in this space. Any thought about the future, any reaction to the present -- everything you can experience is a modification of this condition to which you are identical.

There's nothing to do here to meditate. There's nothing to focus on or to improve. Simply rest as this openness. Grasping at nothing, pushing nothing away.

It's as though you're watching a movie. And everything, including the watching itself, is on the screen. Just recognize as a matter of experience, you're identical to the screen.

You are the condition in which everything that appears, appears. You're not outside it. You're not on the edge of it. You're not merely observing it. 

You're it.

See if you can recognize what that feels like. That openness, that boundarylessness, that centerlessness. Notice how it transcends any object or process that appears within it. 

Does it feel like "I"? Or "Me"? How could it be a self? How could it be personal? How could it be happy or sad? 

At the moment you notice a thought, recognize the condition in which it already is unraveling. Rest as that. 

In the last minutes of the session, pay careful attention to the breath. See if you can refine your mindfulness, just for a minute. 

OK. Again, thank you for your practice. And I wish you much happiness for the rest of your day. I'll see you back here next time, for the next session of Waking Up.

Sam Harris on the riddle of the self

Figured I might as well continue on with how Sam Harris views meditation, spirituality, and the non-existence of an enduring self, even though I've previously written quite a bit about this.

As noted before, Harris is one of my favorite spiritual writers because he both recognizes the downside of religions and believing in a God for which there's no evidence, while also recognizing that there is much to learn about the human mind and how we can live more pleasantly through meditation and mindfulness.

Here's a footnote to my recent post about Harris and Dzogchen, the Tibetan form of Buddhism he's fond of.

I didn't mention in that post how Harris views the transmission of wisdom from a Dzogchen master to a disciple not as something mystical or supernatural, but as akin to someone showing how the eye's blind spot can be directly experienced instead of merely known intellectually. 

(I won't share those simple steps; this web page describes them.)

Harris' point is that a skilled teacher can do the same thing with regard to an intellectual belief in the non-existence of an enduring self.

In The Riddle of the Self chapter in his "Waking Up" book, Harris starts off by describing what happened during his visit to the Sea of Galilee where Jesus is believed to have preached his most famous sermon.

As I gazed at the surrounding hills, a feeling of peace came over me. It soon grew to a blissful stillness that silenced my thoughts. In an instant, the sense of being a separate self -- an "I" or a "me" -- vanished. 

Everything was as it had been -- the cloudless sky, the brown hills sloping to an inland sea, the pilgrims clutching their bottles of water -- but I no longer felt separate from the scene, peering out at the world from behind my eyes. Only the world remained.

The experience lasted just a few seconds, but it returned many times as I looked out over the land where Jesus is believed to have walked, gathered his apostles, and worked many of his miracles. If I were a Christian, I would undoubtedly have interpreted this experience in Christian terms.

I might believe that I had glimpsed the oneness of God or been touched by the Holy Spirit. If I were a Hindu, I might think in terms of Brahman, the eternal Self, of which the world and all individual minds are thought to be a mere modification. If I were a Buddhist, I might talk about the "dharmakaya of emptiness," in which all apparent things manifest as in a dream.

But I am simply someone who is making his best effort to be a rational human being. Consequently, I am very slow to draw metaphysical conclusions from experiences of this sort. And yet, I glimpse what I will call the intrinsic selflessness of consciousness every day, whether at a traditional holy site, or at my desk, or while having my teeth cleaned.

This is not an accident. I've spend many years practicing meditation, the purpose of which is to cut through the illusion of the self.

This passage contains the basics of how Harris views intrinsic selflessness. It isn't something to be attained, since there is no self to be gotten rid of. It is something to be experientially realized, either spontaneously or as the result of a meditative practice.

As Harris says in the first paragraph, the key is silencing of thoughts. Or at least, keeping them to a whisper rather than a shout. Thoughts make us feel like we have a self because we assume that thoughts require a thinker, some little guy or gal inside our head who is in charge of us.

Of course, writing that last sentence the way I did shows the absurdity of believing that we have a self. What the heck is the difference between "we" or "I" and the self that we/I have? If I have a self, does my self have its own self? 

It doesn't help much to say "I am a self." That still leaves "I" and "self" connected by a meaningless "am." Meaningless, because it is like saying a flash of lightning. The flash is lighting. 

So as Harris is gazing at his surroundings, he feels his "I" slipping away until there is just the outside world. This isn't a mystical experience. It is the normal experience when inner stillness replaces the mental motion that usually is present for most people.

I've been critical of those who claim that it's possible to attain a state of consciousness without conscious content.

At times Harris can sound like he's saying this, but I don't think he really is. Instead, there's conscious content -- such as a vision of the Sea of Galilee -- yet without the sense of a self inside our head who is separate from the contents of consciousness.

Has this ever happened to you? Probably it has.

Fairly frequently I'll wake up in the morning, open my eyes, and see the room where I sleep. For a few seconds all I'm aware of is my physical surrounding. Then, sort of like a computer with a flash drive booting up really rapidly, suddenly a worry, say, of a problem I was dealing with before I went to bed pops into my mind.

From simple clear relaxed consciousness of the outside world to complex foggy anxious awareness of my inner world in little more than an instant. This is a good example of how no-self becomes self. Harris writes:

From the contemplative point of view, being lost in thoughts of any kind, pleasant or unpleasant, is analogous to being asleep and dreaming. It's a mode of not knowing what is actually happening in the present moment. It is essentially a form of psychosis.

Thoughts themselves are not a problem, but being identified with thought is. Taking oneself to be the thinker of one's thoughts -- that is, not recognizing the present thought to be a transitory appearance in consciousness -- is a delusion that produces nearly every species of human conflict and unhappiness.

It doesn't matter if your mind is wandering over current problems in set theory or cancer research; if you are thinking without knowing you are thinking, you are confused about who and what you are. The practice of meditation is a method of breaking the spell of thought. 

...Long before reaching this kind of stability in meditation, however, one can discover that the sense of self -- the sense that there is a thinker behind one's thoughts, an experiencer amid the flow of experience -- is an illusion.

The feeling that we call "I" is itself the product of thought. Having an ego is what it feels like to be thinking without knowing that you are thinking. 

....What are we conscious of? We are conscious of the world; we are conscious of our bodies in the world; and we also imagine that we are conscious of our selves within our bodies. After all, most of us don't feel merely identical to our bodies.

We seem to be riding around inside our bodies. We feel like inner subjects that can use the body as a kind of object. This last impression is an illusion that can be dispelled. The selflessness of consciousness is in plain view in every present moment -- and yet, it remains difficult to see.

...No doubt most people in human history have been totally unaware of the optic blind spot. Even those of us who know about it go for decades without noticing it. And yet, it is always there, right on the surface of experience. 

The absence of the self is also there to be noticed. As with the optic blind spot, the evidence is not far away or deep within; rather, it is almost too close to be observed. For most people, experiencing the intrinsic selflessness of consciousness requires considerable training.

It is, however, possible to notice that consciousness -- that in you which is aware of your experience in this moment -- does not feel like a self. It does not feel like "I." What you are calling "I" is itself a feeling that arises among the contents of consciousness.

Consciousness is prior to it, a mere witness of it, and, therefore, free of it in principle.

You can't go beyond mind, because that's what you are

Yesterday Spence Tepper, a frequent commenter on this blog, responded to Appreciative Reader, another frequent commenter. I enjoy how Tepper thinks, even when I don't agree with him. Below I've shared in bold italics some observations on his interesting comment.

Hi AR
You asked
""Please explain in clear words what exactly you were trying to say."
Thank you for the clarity of your question.

It was a great question. And I appreciate the response from Tepper below, which is pleasingly direct.

Beyond mind meaning beyond your own conventional thinking.

OK, I agree that it isn't possible to go beyond the mind, because mind isn't something we can go beyond, since mind is what we are. At least, that's what all the neuroscientific evidence shows. When mental activity ceases, we're brain dead. In other words, dead.

From your perspective, all human experience is biologically based. If you start with that gooey bag called the brain and the intricate and delicate biochemical network of trees within it, and the active network of billions of interacting signals, you can reduce the brain to two levels of functioning, maybe three.
1. The brain itself as described above.
2.the programming / conditioning of the brain.
3.it's operating system programming

This is a dubious description of the brain and how it works. It assumes that the brain is akin to a computer. Some neuroscientists believe this, but many or most recent books I've read on this subject say that the mental activity, or consciousness, is inseparable from that amazingly complex network of neurons and the connections between neurons.

Meaning, the brain is a physical entity and mind can't be separated from that messy, gooey activity. Maybe one day mind and consciousness can be off-loaded to a computer or some other device. For now, though, there's no evidence that the mind is anything other than the brain in action. So (2) and (3) above also are the brain in action.

The view of consciousness can be viewed from this perspective.
Normally we are only conscious of item 2, and even then only a portion of that. .We therefore think there is nothing beyond it. We identify with it, personalize our experiences and identify purely with our programming.

The last sentence above is close to how mindfulness is viewed in Buddhism and secular versions of mindfulness. We can indeed be carried away by thoughts, emotions, and the like. However, once again, there's no evidence that the programming of the brain is separable from the brain itself. 

Sure, it is possible to make a verbal distinction, as when Alan Watts pointed out that "flash of lightning" actually refers to only one thing, since there's no difference between a flash and lightning. So naturally I'd agree that we can develop new mental habits -- that's a big part of what life is all about -- but I disagree that this involves going beyond the conditioning of the brain. The brain just can be conditioned to do new things.

Mystics claim that you can learn to withdraw from the senses and mind and look within and watch item 2. above functioning from a distance, as an observer.

Sure, they claim that. I used to believe that claim. Where, though, is the evidence that anyone has had an experience that didn't involve their mind, which again, I define as the brain in action? If there's a different definition, it would have to be a supernatural one, since as noted before, a brain is necessary for mind, and mind is necessary for awareness/consciousness.

If what's being talked about here is just mindfulness, I have no problem with the idea that it's possible to develop some distance between our thoughts/emotions and the part of mind that is able to be aware of thoughts/emotions. But mindfulness occurs as part of the mind, obviously. It doesn't involve going somewhere outside the mind/brain.

From a purely biological view, this isn't out of body. But it is real and a regular part of advanced meditation practice. Moving consciousness inward and upward through practice: Beyond mind. Beyond 2.

Agreed. It isn't out of body. However, since it isn't out of body, what does "inward" and "upward" really mean? We're always inward, because all experience occurs through the brain, which is encased in our skull. There's no outward to experience. It's all inward. There's no upward, unless this is meant in a metaphorical sense. How can you move up when the mind is a hundred billion neurons with a trillion or so connections?

That means seeing from a different vantage point, which I suggest is 3, the operating system. From that perspective we are entirely free of emotional drives, reactive conditioning. We are liberated from those and can watch them from that vantage point. That provides us with a new perspective, like the Space Telescope.

Well, the Space Telescope is in space, while the vantage point spoken of here is within the mind/brain. Perhaps it is possible to be entirely free of emotional drives and reactive conditioning, though I doubt it. What does seem entirely possible is to be more free of negative emotions and unproductive reactions than we are now. This is what mindfulness is all about.

That perspective offers completely different views and observations, and of course increases our objectivity. We see that we aren't our thinking, nor our emotions. We aren't even this body, because we can view these in action from a separate point. One that is reached through practice, such as those advocated by Buddha and his more advanced followers.

Again, we can be less attached to our body, but we're still a body with a mind/brain. So the separate point mentioned above is just a manner of speaking about a certain sense of detachment, not an actual point separate from the body/mind/brain. 

I'll end by sharing how Sam Harris, who is very knowledgeable about Buddhism and mindfulness, describes what was generally discussed above by Tepper and me. This is from the Spirituality chapter in his Waking Up book.

So what would a spiritual master be a master of? At a minimum, she will no longer suffer certain cognitive and emotional illusions -- above all, she will no longer feel identical to her thoughts.

Once again, this is not to say that such a person will no longer think, but she would no longer succumb to the primary confusion that thoughts produce in most of us: She would no longer feel that there is an inner self who is a thinker of these thoughts.

Such a person will naturally maintain an openness and serenity of mind that is available to most of us only for brief moments, even after years of practice. I remain agnostic as to whether anyone has achieved such a state permanently, but I know from direct experience that it is possible to be far more enlightened than I tend to be.

The question of whether enlightenment is a permanent state need not detain us. The crucial point is that you can glimpse something about the nature of consciousness that will liberate you from suffering in the present. 

Even just recognizing the impermanence of your mental states -- deeply, not merely as an idea -- can transform your life. Every mental state you have ever had has arisen and then passed away. This is a first-person fact -- but it is, nonetheless, a fact that any human being can readily confirm.

We don't have to know any more about the brain or about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world to understand this truth about our own mind. 

The promise of spiritual life -- indeed, the very thing that makes it "spiritual" in the sense I invoke throughout this book -- is that there are truths about the mind that we are better off knowing. What we need to become happier and to make the world a better place is not more pious illusions but a clearer understanding of the way things are.

Everybody's brain is producing a kind of hallucination

Today I finished reading the final pages of Anil Seth's book, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness." Here's a provocative passage from the Epilogue.

Everything in conscious experience is a perception of sorts, and every perception is a kind of controlled -- or controlling -- hallucination.

What excites me most about this way of thinking is how far it may take us. 

Experiences of free will are perceptions. The flow of time is a perception. Perhaps even the three-dimensional structure of our experienced world and the sense that the contents of perceptual experience are objectively real -- these may be aspects of perception too.

The tools of consciousness science are allowing us to get ever closer to Kant's noumenon, the ultimately unknowable reality of which we, too, are a part.

This idea that conscious experience is a perception of sorts fits with what Sam Harris often says in the guided meditations I listen to on his Waking Up app.

For example, he'll ask if it seems that we're perceiving the world from a place somewhere inside our head. Then Harris will say that this seeming is itself a conscious experience, in the same way that objects in the world are conscious experiences.

In other words, we can't get outside of what the brain is doing. There's no ethereal observer, or self, floating around somewhere in our cranium. What there is are many billions of neurons connected in trillions of ways, which end up producing our conscious experiences.

I thought about trying to explain this from what I've learned in Seth's book. Then I recalled that Seth had written an essay published in the Boston Globe, "Reality is what you make of it," where he explains how the brain hallucinates reality.

I've copied in the essay below, which covers key points in his Being You book. 

I open my eyes and a world appears. I’m sitting on a plastic chair on the deck of a tumbledown wooden house, high in a cypress forest a few miles north of Santa Cruz, Calif. It’s early morning. Looking straight out, I can see tall trees still wreathed in the cool ocean fog that rolls in every night, sending the temperature plummeting. I can’t see the ground, so the deck and the trees all seem to be floating together with me in the mist.

There are some other plastic chairs, a table, and a tray arranged with coffee and bread. I can hear birdsong, some rustling around in the back — the people I’m staying with — and a distant murmur from something I can’t identify. Not every morning is like this; this is a good morning. I have to persuade myself, not for the first time, that this extraordinary world is a construction of my brain, a kind of “controlled hallucination.”

Whenever we are conscious, we are conscious of something, or of many things. These are the contents of consciousness. To understand how they come about, and what I mean by controlled hallucination, let’s change our perspective.

Imagine for a moment that you are a brain. Really try to think about what it’s like up there, sealed inside the bony vault of the skull, trying to figure out what’s out there in the world. There’s no light, no sound, no anything — it’s completely dark and utterly silent. When it forms perceptions, all the brain has to go on is a constant barrage of electrical signals that are only indirectly related to things out in the world, whatever they may be.

These sensory inputs don’t come with labels attached (“I’m from a cup of coffee.” “I’m from a tree.”). They don’t even arrive with labels announcing their modality, whether they are visual or auditory or sensations of touch, temperature, or proprioception (the sense of body position).

How does the brain transform these inherently ambiguous sensory signals into a coherent perceptual world full of objects, people, and places? The essential idea is that the brain is a prediction machine, so that what we see, hear, and feel is nothing more than the brain’s best guess of the causes of its sensory inputs. Following this idea all the way through, we will see that the contents of consciousness are a kind of waking dream — a controlled hallucination — that is both more than and less than whatever the real world really is.

Here’s a common-sense view of perception. Let’s call it the “how things seem” view.

In this view, there’s a mind-independent reality out there, full of objects and people and places that have properties like color, shape, texture, and so on. Our senses act as transparent windows onto this world, detecting these objects and their features and conveying this information to the brain, whereupon complex neuronal processes read it out to form perceptions.

A red coffee cup out there in the world leads to a perception of a red coffee cup generated within the brain. As to who or what is doing the perceiving — well, that’s the “self,” isn’t it?, the “I behind the eyes,” one might say, the recipient of wave upon wave of sensory data, which uses its perceptual readouts to guide behavior, to decide what to do next. There’s a cup of coffee over there. I perceive it and I pick it up. I sense, I think, and then I act.

This is an appealing description. Patterns of thinking established over decades, maybe centuries, have accustomed us to the idea that the brain is some kind of computer perched inside the skull, processing sensory information to build an inner picture of the outside world for the benefit of the self. This picture is so familiar that it can be difficult to conceive of any reasonable alternative. Indeed, many neuroscientists and psychologists still think about perception in this way, as a process in which the brain works from the “bottom up” to discern features of things in the world.

Here’s how the bottom-up picture is supposed to work: Stimuli from the world — light waves, sound waves, molecules conveying tastes and smells, and so on — impinge on sensory organs and cause electrical impulses to flow “upwards” or “inwards” into the brain. These sensory signals pass through several distinct processing stages, and at each stage the brain picks out increasingly complex features.

Let’s take vision as an example. At first the brain might detect features like luminance or edges, and later it might detect the parts of discrete objects — such as eyes and ears, or wheels and side-view mirrors. Still later stages of this processing system would respond to whole objects, or object categories, like faces and cars.

In this way, the external world with its objects and people and all sorts of everything becomes recapitulated in a series of features extracted from the river of sensory data flowing into the brain. Signals flowing in the opposite direction — from the “top down” or the “inside out,” serve to refine or otherwise constrain the bottom-up flow of sensory information.

This bottom-up view of perception fits well with what we know about the anatomy of the brain, at least at first glance. Perceptual systems of all modalities are organized in the brain as hierarchies. In the visual system, for example, the primary visual cortex of the brain is close to sensory inputs, while the parietal and frontal cortices, where later stages of processing are believed to occur, are further away.

Studies of brain activity also seem friendly to this bottom-up view. Experiments going back decades — investigating the visual systems of cats and monkeys — have repeatedly shown that neurons at early stages of visual processing respond to simple features like edges, while neurons at later stages respond to complex features like faces. More recent experiments using methods like functional magnetic resonance imaging have revealed much the same thing in human brains.

You can even build artificial “perceiving systems” this way. Machine vision systems based on artificial neural networks are nowadays achieving impressive performance levels, in some situations comparable to those of humans. These systems, too, are frequently based on bottom-up theories.

With all these points in its favor, the bottom-up “how things seem” view of perception seems to be on pretty solid ground.

---

Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?”

Elizabeth Anscombe: “I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.”

Wittgenstein: “Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?”

In this delightful exchange between Wittgenstein and his fellow philosopher (and biographer) Elizabeth Anscombe, the legendary Austrian thinker uses the Copernican revolution to illustrate the point that how things seem is not necessarily how they are. Although it seems as though the sun goes around the earth, it is of course the earth rotating on its own axis that gives us night and day, and it is the sun, not the earth, that sits at the center of the solar system.

Nothing new here, you might think, and you’d be right. But Wittgenstein was driving at something deeper. His real message for Anscombe was that even with a greater understanding of how things actually are, at some level things still appear the same way they always did. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, same as always.

As with the solar system, so with perception. I open my eyes and it seems as though there’s a real world out there. Today I’m at home in Brighton, England, and there are no cypress trees as there were in Santa Cruz, just the usual scatter of objects on my desk, a red chair in the corner, and beyond the window a totter of chimney pots. These objects seem to have specific shapes and colors, and for the ones closer at hand, smells and textures too. This is how things seem.

Although it may seem as though my senses provide transparent windows onto a mind-independent reality, and that perception is a process of “reading out” sensory data, what’s really going on is — I believe — quite different. Perceptions do not come from the bottom up or the outside in, they come primarily from the top down or the inside out. What we experience is built from the brain’s predictions, or best guesses, about the causes of sensory signals.

There is a real world out there, but the way in which that real world appears in conscious experience is always a construction — a writing as much as a reading. As with the Copernican revolution, this top-down view of perception remains consistent with much of the existing evidence, leaving unchanged many aspects of how things seem, while at the same time changing everything.

---

This notion of perception is best described as “controlled hallucination,” a phrase I first heard from the British neuroscientist Chris Frith many years ago. The essential ingredients of the controlled hallucination view, as I think of it, are as follows.

First, the brain is constantly making predictions about the causes of its sensory signals, predictions that cascade in a top-down direction through the brain’s perceptual hierarchies. If you happen to be looking at a coffee cup, your visual cortex will be formulating predictions about the causes of the sensory signals that originate from this coffee cup.

Second, sensory signals, which stream into the brain from the bottom up, or outside in, keep these perceptual predictions tied in useful ways to their causes — in this case, the coffee cup. These signals function as “prediction errors,” registering the difference between what the brain expects and what it gets at every level of processing.

These bottom-up signals therefore serve to refine and calibrate the top-down predictions. By adjusting top-down predictions so as to suppress bottom-up prediction errors, the brain’s perceptual best guesses maintain their grip on their causes in the world.

The third and most important ingredient in the controlled hallucination view is the claim that perceptual experience — in this case the subjective experience of “seeing a coffee cup” — is determined by the content of the (top-down) predictions, and not by the (bottom-up) sensory signals. We never experience sensory signals themselves; we only ever experience interpretations of them.

Mix these ingredients together and we’ve cooked up a Copernican inversion for how to think about perception. It seems as though the world pours itself directly into our conscious minds through our sensory organs. With this mindset, it is natural to think of perception as a process of bottom-up feature detection — a “reading” of the world around us. But what we actually perceive is a top-down, inside-out neuronal fantasy that is reined in by reality. It is not a transparent window onto whatever that reality may be.

And — to channel Wittgenstein once more — what would it seem like, if it seemed as if perception was a top-down best guess? Well, just as the sun still rises in the east and sets in the west, if it seemed as if perception was a controlled hallucination, the coffee cup on the table — the entirety of anyone’s perceptual experience — would still seem the same way it always did and always will.

When we think about hallucination, we typically think of some kind of internally generated perception, a seeing or a hearing of something that isn’t actually there, or that other people don’t hear or see — as can happen in schizophrenia or perhaps during a psychedelic adventure. These associations place hallucination in contrast to “normal” perception, which is assumed to reflect things as they actually exist out in the world.

In the top-down view of perception, this sharp distinction becomes a matter of degree. Both normal perception and abnormal hallucination involve internally generated predictions about the causes of sensory inputs, and the two share a core set of mechanisms in the brain.

The difference is that in normal perception, what we perceive is tied to — controlled by — causes in the world and the body, whereas in the case of hallucination our perceptions have, to some extent, lost their grip on these causes. When we hallucinate, as considerable evidence from psychological and brain imaging studies is now indicating, our perceptual predictions are not properly updated in light of prediction errors.

If perception is controlled hallucination, then — equally — hallucination can be thought of as uncontrolled perception. The two are different, but to ask where to draw the line is like asking where the boundary is between day and night. You could even say that we’re all hallucinating all the time. It’s just that when we agree about our hallucinations, that’s what we call reality.

Anil Seth, a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, in the United Kingdom, is the author of “Being You: A New Science of Consciousness,” from which this essay is adapted, with permission from Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group. Copyright © 2021 by Anil Seth.

"Beast machine theory" explains consciousness well

Hate to break this to you, if you're a firm believer in immaterial consciousness, but we humans are animals. Specifically, mammals of the primate variety, close relatives of chimpanzees, gorillas, and such.

In his book, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness," Anil Seth lays out his well-informed view of consciousness. (He's a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex.)

Seth gave a TEDx talk about his beast machine theory. 

Here's some of what Seth has to say in his book about the beast machine theory.

The beast machine theory grounds experiences of world and self in a biological drive toward staying alive.

...The beast machine theory proposes that consciousness in humans and other animals arose in evolution, emerges in each of us during development, and operates from moment to moment in ways intimately connected with our status as living systems.

All of our experiences and perceptions stem from our nature as self-sustaining living machines that care about their own persistence. 

My intuition -- and again it's only an intuition -- is that the materiality of life will turn out to be important for all manifestations of consciousness. One reason for this is that the imperative for regulation and self-maintenance in living systems isn't restricted to just one level, such as the integrity of the whole body.

Self-maintenance for living systems goes all the way down -- even down to the level of individual cells. Every cell in your body -- in any body -- is continually regenerating the conditions necessary for its own integrity over time.

...This shouldn't be taken to imply that individual cells are conscious, or that all living organisms are conscious. The point is that the processes of physiological regulation that underpin consciousness and selfhood in the beast machine theory are bootstrapped from fundamental life processes "all the way down."

In this view, it is life, rather than information processing, that breathes the fire into the equations. 

...Seen this way, the fuss about machine consciousness is symptomatic of an increasing alienation from our biological nature and from our evolutionary heritage.

The beast machine perspective differs from this narrative in almost every way. In my theory, as we've seen, the entirety of human experience and mental life arises because of, and not in spite of, our nature as self-sustaining biological organisms that care about their own persistence.

This view of consciousness and human nature does not exclude the possibility of conscious machines, but it does undercut the amped-up techno-rapture narrative of soon-to-be-sentient computers that propels our fears and permeates our dreams. 

From the beast machine perspective, the quest to understand consciousness places us increasingly within nature, not further apart from it.

Just as it should.

 

The teletransportation paradox gives us clues about the "self"

Here's an excerpt from Anil Seth's book, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness." I found it fascinating, even though it echoes ideas Derek Parfit wrote about in one of his books. But Seth describes this thought experiment in an intriguing way.

After the excerpt, I'll share some observations about it.

Let's begin our exploration of the self with a quick trip into the future. A century or so from now, teletransportation devices have been invented which can create exact replicas of any human being. 

Just like the machines in Star Trek, they work by scanning a person in exquisite detail -- down to the arrangement of each individual molecule -- and using the information in the scan to build a second version of that person in a distant location, for example on Mars.

After some initial apprehension, people quickly become accustomed to this technology as an efficient means of transportation.

They even get used to the necessary feature that, once the replica is created, the original is immediately vaporized -- a procedure that had to be built in, in order to avoid creating an explosion of identical people. 

From the point of view of a traveler, let's call her Eva, this poses no practical problem at all. After some reassurances from the operator, Eva simply feels that she has disappeared from place X (London) and reappeared in place Y (Mars) in an instant.

One day, there's a hitch.

The vaporization module in London malfunctions and Eva -- the Eva who is in London, anyway -- feels like nothing's happened and that she's still in the transportation facility. A minor inconvenience. They'll have to reboot the machine and try again, or maybe leave it until the following day.

But then a technician shuffles into the room, carrying a gun.

He mumbles something along the lines of "Don't worry, you've been safely teletransported to Mars, just like normal, it's just that the regulations say that we still need to ... and look here, you signed this consent form ..."

He slowly raises his weapon and Eva has a feeling she's never had before, that maybe this teletransportation malarkey isn't quite so straightforward after all.

The point of this thought experiment, which is called the "teletransportation paradox," is to unearth some of the biases most of us have when we think about what it means to be a self.

There are two philosophical problems raised by the teletransportation paradox. The consciousness-in-general problem is whether we can be sure that the replica will have conscious experiences, or whether it will be a perfectly functioning equivalent but without any inner universe. 

I don't find this problem very interesting. If the replica is created in sufficient detail -- every molecule identical! -- then there's no reason to doubt it would be conscious, and conscious in exactly the same way as the original.

If the replica is not completely identical, then we're back to arguments about different kinds of philosophical zombie -- and there's no need to go over all that again.

The more interesting problem is that of personal identity.

Is the Eva on Mars (let's call her Eva2) the same person as Eva1 (the Eva still in London)? It's tempting to say, yes, she is: Eva2 would feel in every way as Eva1 would have felt had she actually been transported instantaneously from London to Mars.

What seems to matter for this kind of personal identity is psychological continuity, not physical continuity.

(Even without teletransportation, the cells in our body are continuously turning over, most being being replaced every ten years or so -- a biological Ship of Theseus. This doesn't seem to impact our sense of personal identity very much.)

But then, if Eva1 has not been vaporized, which is the real Eva? I think the correct -- but admittedly strange -- answer is that both are the real Eva.

That makes sense to me, both the Eva on Mars and the Eva in London being the real Eva. If there is no difference between them, with each having the same memories, personality, abilities, and such, how is it possible to say that one Eva is real and the other Eva isn't?

Sure, someone who believes in an immaterial soul could argue that the Eva who has a soul is the real Eva. However, since there is no evidence for soul, it wouldn't be possible to distinguish between the Eva who supposedly has a soul and the Eva who supposedly doesn't. 

Why, then, would the Eva in London object to being killed if she is identical to the Eva on Mars?

This is a difficult to answer question. Intuitively, I feel that since living beings have a preference for life over death, which is baked into the brain by evolution, this explains why the Eva in London would fear the technician with a gun. 

Also, even though the two Evas were identical at the moment of teletransportation, Seth points out that they soon would begin to differ.

Back at the teletransportation facility, Eva1 managed to avoid the technician's murderous intent, and is coming to terms with her new situation, while Eva2 remains blissfully unaware of the drama unfolding back on Earth.

Even though both Evas were objectively and subjectively identical at the point of replication, their identities have already started to diverge. As with identical twins setting out on their own life journeys, the process compounds inevitably over time. 

This shows that our sense of self is closely connected with our memories -- a sense of personal history that makes us feel "this is who I am." Of course, that sense is altered as we experience new things over a lifetime. 

Nonetheless, so long as we feel a psychological continuity between the person we used to be and the person we are now, that supplies us with a mostly stable sense of self. Seth writes:

The self is not an immutable entity that lurks behind the windows of the eyes, looking out into the world and controlling the body as a pilot controls a plane.

The experience of being me, or of being you, is a perception itself -- or better, a collection of perceptions -- a tightly woven bundle of neurally encoded predictions geared toward keeping your body alive. And this, I believe, is all we need to be, to be who we are. 

...Let's move on to matters of personal identity and to the emergence of the "narrative" and the "social" selves. As we saw with the teletransportation paradox, it's at these levels that an entity experiences itself as continuous from one moment to the next, from one day, or week, or month to the next, and -- to some extent -- across an entire life span.

These are the levels of selfhood at which it makes sense to associate the self with a name, with memories of the past, and with plans for the future. At these levels we become aware that we have a self -- we become truly self-aware.

We're conscious because we are beast machines

I'm enjoying Anil Seth's book, "Being You: A New Science of Consciousness." Consciousness is fascinating. Without it, we are nothing. Without it, we know nothing. Without it, we experience nothing.

So, yeah, consciousness is pretty damn important.

Here's passages from the Prologue. They offer a good feel for the approach Seth takes in his book, which is based on a solid grasp of modern neuroscience. 

The book jacket says: "Anil Seth is a professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, and codirector of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science."

This book is about the neuroscience of consciousness: the attempt to understand how the inner universe of subjective experience relates to, and can be explained in terms of, biological and physical processes unfolding in brains and bodies.

...A science of consciousness is nothing less than an account of who we are, of what it is to be me, or to be you, and of why there is anything it is like to "be" at all.

The story I will tell is a personal view, shaped over many years of research, contemplation, and conversation. The way I see it, consciousness won't be "solved" in the same way that the human genome was decoded or the reality of climate change established.

Nor will its mysteries suddenly yield to a single eureka-like insight -- a pleasant but usually inaccurate myth about how scientific understanding progresses.

For me, a science of consciousness should explain how the various properties of consciousness depend on, and relate to, the operations of the neuronal wetware inside our heads. 

The goal of consciousness science should not be -- at least not primarily -- to explain why consciousness happens to be part of the universe in the first place. Nor should it be to understand how the brain works in all its complexity, while sweeping the mystery of consciousness away under the carpet.

What I hope to show you is that by accounting for properties of consciousness, in terms of mechanisms in brains and bodies, the deep metaphysical whys and hows of consciousness become, little by little, less mysterious.

I use the word "wetware" to underline that brains are not computers made of meat. They are chemical machines as much as they are electrical networks. 

Every brain that has ever existed has been part of a living body, embedded in and interacting with its environment -- an environment which in many cases contains other embodied brains. Explaining the properties of consciousness in terms of biophysical mechanisms requires understanding brains -- and conscious minds -- as embodied and embedded systems. 

In the end, I want to leave you with a new conception of the self -- that aspect of consciousness which for each of us is probably the most meaningful. 

An influential tradition, dating back at least as far as Descartes in the seventeenth century, held that nonhuman animals lacked conscious selfhood because they did not have rational minds to guide their behavior. They were "beast machines": flesh automatons without the ability to reflect on their own existence.

I don't agree. In my view, consciousness has more to do with being alive than with being intelligent. We are conscious selves precisely because we are beast machines. 

I will make the case that the experiences of being you, or of being me, emerge from the way the brain predicts and controls the internal state of the body. The essence of selfhood is neither a rational mind nor an immaterial soul.

It is a deeply embodied biological process, a process that underpins the simple feeling of being alive that is the basis for all our experiences of self, indeed for any conscious experience at all. Being you is literally about your body. 

...With each new advance in our understanding comes a new sense of wonder, and a new ability to see ourselves as less apart from, and more a part of, the rest of nature.

Our conscious experiences are part of nature just as our bodies are, just as our world is. And when life ends, consciousness will end too. When I think about this, I am transported back to my experience -- my non-experience -- of anesthesia. 

To its oblivion, perhaps comforting, but oblivion nonetheless.

The novelist Julian Barnes, in his meditation on mortality, put it perfectly. When the end of consciousness comes, there is nothing -- really nothing -- to be frightened of. 

Quantum theory doesn't say consciousness creates reality

I'm no quantum physicist. That option closed down for me early on, when I was kicked out of my high school physics class because I was paying more attention to my girlfriend sitting behind me than to whatever the teacher was saying. 

But I've made up for that by reading lots of books about quantum theory, many of them in the course of researching my first book about the connection between ancient mysticism and the new physics, "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder" -- which I got back in print via a rewrite that took out the preachy parts. 

I no longer believe in most of the mysticism in that book, but the scientific stuff is still valid, by and large. I keep up with current developments in quantum theory through my subscriptions to Scientific American and New Scientist.

The August 28 issue of New Scientist is a special issue about Quantum Frontiers. The stories on this subject were all interesting and clearly written for non-physicists like me. 

What's crystal clear is that most people who claim quantum theory proves something mystical or spiritual about the cosmos don't know what they're talking about.

Quantum theory is mysterious, for sure.

So far science hasn't figured out how it relates to relativity theory, which explains how gravity works. The other forces of nature are amenable to explanation by quantum theory, but not gravity. This means that there's a good chance a deeper explanation of nature needs to be found that unifies relativity theory and quantum theory.

Frequently New Age types claim that quantum theory has shown that consciousness creates reality. This isn't at all proven. Yes, the quantum measurement problem is real. Somehow various probabilities of a particle having certain properties, like being in a specific location, are converted to a single actuality when a measurement occurs.

This is called the collapse of the wave function.

The mathematics of quantum theory are marvelously accurate. That's why modern technologies like computers and cell phones have become so ubiquitous. However, physicists don't agree about the philosophical side of quantum theory. Meaning, the explanation of what's going on behind the mathematics. 

Here's a graphic from the New Scientist special issue that does a great job of summarizing the various ways scientists have tried to explain what quantum theory means.

I like the objective collapse theory, in part because it doesn't involve a conscious observer collapsing the wave function. As the entry for this in the table above says, that explains how the universe was able to be real before consciousness came on the cosmic scene. 

Here's a story in the special issue on this subject: "Do we distil reality from the quantum fog, or does it exist without us?"
Download Do we distil reality from the quantum fog or does it exist without us? | New Scientist

QUANTUM stuff, whether single atoms, electrons or photons of light, is notorious for seeming to be here, there and everywhere – and indeed everything – all at once. It exists as clouds of possibilities, manifested in a beast you can’t get around when contemplating quantum mysteries: the wave function.

On one level, the wave function is just a mathematical expression that lets you calculate the probability a particle will manifest in a particular location, say. The mystery is the way the maths says that, once you look at it, the wave function “collapses” to leave something definite we can all agree on. This creates the picture of the world that our classically trained eyes see. But how does the mathematics relate to the reality before the measurement – and what exactly, if anything, does the act of measurement change?

Erwin Schrödinger expressed the unease we might feel about apparently “making” reality when he mused about a cat inside a box that might or might not have been killed by a random quantum process inside it. Before you look, he asked, is the cat dead and alive at the same time?

The orthodox take on quantum theory, known as the Copenhagen interpretation, says yes: the maths adds up, so just shut up and calculate. “From a practical point of view, it works perfectly,” says Angelo Bassi, a theoretical physicist at the University of Trieste in Italy. “But from a fundamental point of view, why should the wave function collapse?”

Some physicists argue that it all makes complete sense if you think of the wave function as a way to predict what might happen. It changes with time, just like a weather forecast. “The universe is not made of wave functions, just as it is not made of weather forecasts,” says Christopher Fuchs at the University of Massachusetts, a leading advocate for an interpretation of quantum theory known as quantum Bayesianism, or QBism.

For QBists like Fuchs, quantum theory is a tool for us to better navigate the world, not a description of the world as it exists independent of our presence. So of course the wave function collapses – and how could it be anything other than us doing the collapsing?

Or you can go to the opposite extreme and say that the wave function doesn’t collapse at all. In the many worlds interpretation, every possible outcome of a measurement encoded in the wave function happens in different universes. No one collapses anything at the point of measurement – the world just splits, carrying us with it into one particular branch.

If you prefer an answer that gives us a hope of understanding physical reality, and doesn’t invoke a multiverse that we can never hope to observe, there is yet another option: that wave functions collapse spontaneously, without the influence of observers. This “objective collapse” was first proposed in the 1970s, but has enjoyed a revival in recent years largely because it promises to submit to empirical testing. “The other interpretations simply aim at reinterpreting the wave function,” says Bassi, who is a proponent.

In this picture, the chances of an atom’s wave function collapsing on its own is so small that you might have to wait billions of years to see it. Group enough of them together, however, and it rises dramatically. The cumulative effect would be a kind of faint background “noise” of collapsing wave functions that a sensitive enough detector might pick up.

“Testing the large-scale limit of quantum mechanics”, or TEQ, is a project that aims to do just that, and perhaps write the observer out of quantum theory for good. Designed specifically to look for collapse noise, the project involves levitating a bead of glass a few nanometres wide using electric fields, watching its motion closely. The latest version was delayed, but Hendrik Ulbricht at the University of Southampton, UK, who is leading the experiment, expects results within a year. “We are all very excited,” he says.

Looking for noise isn’t something physicists typically do. “Usually, we suppress the noise as much as possible, because the physics is in the signal,” says Ulbricht. But there is an interesting precedent. When astronomers Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias first detected an all-pervasive background radio signal in 1964, they thought it might be coming from New York City, from other galaxies or even from nearby pigeons. Finally, they realised they had discovered the cosmic microwave background, relic radiation left over from the big bang. “There could be a similar story with these collapse models,” says Ulbricht. 

Brain and conscious mind are linked like two sides of a coin

Here's some excerpts from a story in the June 2021 issue of Scientific American, "The Brain Electric," by Christof Koch. 

Koch makes some great points about the current state of science's understanding of the brain/mind. There's no doubt that the mind is the brain in action. Meaning, no brain, no mind. 

But even though the physicality of mind is clear, there's plenty of mystery left to be explored in the highly complex three pound hunk of meat that resides between our ears.

-- You're headed toward a storm that's a couple of miles away, and you've got to get across a hill. You ask yourself, "How am I going to get over that, through that?"

-- You see little white dots on a black background, as if looking up at the stars at night.

-- You look down at yourself lying in bed from above but see only your legs and lower trunk.

These may seem like idiosyncratic events drawn from the vast universe of perceptions, sensations, memories, thoughts and dreams that make up our daily stream of consciousness. 

In fact, each one was evoked by directly stimulating the brain with an electrode. 

As American poet Walt Whitman intuited in his poem, "I Sing the Body Electric," these anecdotes illustrate the intimate relationship between the body and its animating soul. 

The brain and the conscious mind are as inexorably linked as the two sides of a coin. 

...As neuroprosthetic devices move through clinical trials, they will help people with visual impairments see and those with physical disabilities perform actions such as steering a wheelchair with their thoughts, like the mind-Pong-playing monkey.

For everyone else, the benefits of highly invasive brain surgery are unlikely to outweigh the costs.

But the true Annapurna ahead involves understanding how three pounds of excitable brain matter is responsible for seeing, moving, and suffering.

Yes, the physical substrate of heaven and hell is rooted in bioelectric signals that obey natural laws. But that tells us precious little about how a trillion electrical signals spiking each second, streaming over networks of tens of billions of heterogeneous cells, constitute a sight, sound, or emotion.

Intracranial brain stimulation highlights the daily miracle of the brain's water changing into the wine of consciousness.

The question remains, though: What is it about the brain, the most complex piece of active matter in the known universe, that turns the activity of 86 billion neurons into the feeling of life itself?

Mind and consciousness through the eye of quantum physics

Here's additional excerpts from physicist Carlo Rovelli's wonderful new book, "Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution." (See here for my first post about the book.)

The passages below are from final chapters where Rovelli focuses on the nature of mind and consciousness in light of quantum physics. 

Rovelli's take on this subject is very much in line with a post I wrote in 2018, "Awareness is a process, not a thing." 

Consciousness isn't a thing. It is a process. Thinking of it as a thing makes us wonder what kind of a thing it is, whereas we should be asking, what sorts of processes and interactions give rise to consciousness?

Hope you enjoy these words from Rovelli as much as I do.

If the fine grain of the world is made of material particles that have just mass and motion, it seems difficult to reconstruct our perceiving and thinking complexity from this amorphous grain.

But if the fine grain of the world is better described in terms of relations, if nothing has intrinsic properties except in relation to other things, perhaps in this physics we can better find elements able to combine in a comprehensible way, to be the basis of those complex phenomena that we call our perceptions and our consciousness.

If the physical world is woven from the subtle interplay of images in mirrors reflected in other mirrors, without the metaphysical foundation of a material substance, perhaps it becomes easier to recognize ourselves as part of that whole.

...But there is no need to attribute photo-consciousness to elementary systems in order to get around a frozen "simple matter." It is enough to have observed how the world is better described by relative variables and their correlations.

This allows us to be released from the prison of a blunt opposition between the objectivity of matter and mental life. The rigid distinction between a mental world and a physical one fades. It is possible to think of both mental and physical phenomena as natural phenomena: both products of interactions between parts of the physical world.

...If the world consists of relations, then no description is from outside it. The descriptions of the world are, in the ultimate analysis, all from inside. They are all in the first person. 

Our perspective on the world, our point of view, being situated inside the world (our "situated self," as Jenann Ismael beautifully puts it), is not special: it rests on the same logic on which quantum physics, hence all of physics, is based.

If we imagine the totality of things, we are imagining being outside the universe, looking at it from out there. But there is no "outside" to the totality of things. The external point of view is a point of view that does not exist. Every description of the world is from inside it.

The externally observed world does not exist; what exists are only internal perspectives on the world which are partial and reflect one another. This world is this reciprocal reflection of perspectives. 

...I think that when we wonder about the relationship between the "I" and "matter," we are using two concepts that are both confused and misleading, and this is the origin of the confusion surrounding the questions about the nature of consciousness. 

Who is the "I" that has the sensation of feeling, if not the integrated set of our mental processes? We have an intuition of unity when we think about ourselves, but this is justified by the integration of our body and by the ways our mental processes work, of which the part we call conscious does one thing at a time.

The first term of the problem, the "I," is the residue of a metaphysical error: the result of the common mistake of mistaking a process for an entity.

...To ask what consciousness is, after having unraveled the neural processes, is like asking what a storm is after having understood its physics: it is a question that makes no sense. To add in a "possessor" of sensations is like adding Jove to the phenomenon of the thunderstorm.

It is like saying, after having understood the physics of the storm, that there still remains, as Chalmers would put it, the "hard problem" of connecting it with the anger of Jove.

It is true that we have the "intuition"of an independent entity that is the "I." But we also had the "intuition" that behind a storm there was Jove. And that the Earth was flat. It is not through uncritical "intuitions" that we construct an effective comprehension of reality.

Introspection is the worst instrument of inquiry if we are interested in the nature of mind: it is tantamount to looking for our own prejudices and wallowing in them.

Even worse is the the second term of the question, "matter." It is, as well, the residue of an incorrect metaphysics based on too naive a conception of matter as a universal substance defined only by mass and motion. This is erroneous metaphysics because it is contradicted by quantum physics. 

If we think in terms of processes, events, in terms of relative properties, of a world of relations, the hiatus between physical phenomena and mental phenomena is much less dramatic. It becomes possible to see both as natural phenomena generated by complex structures of interactions. 

...The best description of reality that we have found is in terms of events that weave a web of interactions. "Entities" are nothing other than ephemeral nodes in this web. Their properties are not determined until the moment of these interactions; they exist only in relation to something else. Everything is what it is only with respect to something else.

Every vision is partial. There is no way of seeing reality that is not dependent on a perspective -- no point of view that is absolute and universal. 

...Every time that something solid is put into doubt or dismantled, something else opens up and allows us to see further than we could before. Watching what appears to be as solid as rock melt into air makes lighter, it seems to me, the transitory and bittersweet flowing of our lives.

The interconnectedness of things, the reflection of one in another, shines with a clear light that the coldness of eighteenth-century mechanisms could not capture.

Even if it leaves us astonished. Even if it leaves us with a profound sense of mystery.

Motive of a mass murderer wrongly assumes conscious will

One of the things that comes through loud and clear in the many modern neuroscience and psychology books I've read is that we humans are lousy at knowing why we act a certain way.

Experiments on split-brain patients, for example, where the connection between the two brain hemispheres has been severed, shows that even when the left side of the brain (which controls language) is unaware of the reason the right side did something, the patient will make up a "why" story that has no basis in fact.

We don't like to admit that we don't know. So the brain makes up reasons in an effort to make sense of the world, even when those reasons lack a connection to reality.

The legal system is behind the times in this regard, as evidenced by the talk after every mass shooting in the United States about it being important to learn the killer's motive.

This assumes a direct link between (1) what we do, and (2) a preceding conscious thought or emotion that impels us to engage in that action. This assumption is highly suspect, since there's a lot of evidence that conscious awareness is a caboose at the end of an Action Train, not the locomotive that leads the way.

After Robert Aaron Long killed eight people in Atlanta, six of them Asian women who worked at massage parlors, many commentators saw the murders as racially motivated. But police reported that after they talked with Long, he said that his killings stemmed from a sex addiction, not racial hatred.

Well, the plain scientific fact seems to be that Long can't accurately say why he killed those people, just as nobody else can accurately say why they did this or that -- except, perhaps, for the simplest of actions.

Here's an excerpt from the book I've been writing about recently, Robert Wright's "Why Buddhism is True."

The split-brain experiments powerfully demonstrated the capacity of the conscious self to convince itself that it's calling the shots when it's not. However, this demonstration was done with people who don't have normal brains. How about the rest of us, whose two hemispheres aren't separated? Do our brains actually make use of this capacity for self-deception?

There is good reason to believe the answer is yes.

In one much-cited experiment, the psychologists Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson asked shoppers to appraise four pairs of pantyhose and choose the best pair. It turned out people had a strong tendency to choose the pair on the far right.

But when asked why they had chosen the pair, they didn't say, "Because it's on the far right." They tended to explain their choices in terms of the quality of the pantyhose, sometimes going into detail about the fabric, the feel, and so on.

Unfortunately for these explanations, the four pairs of pantyhose were identical.

...At a minimum, it seems fair to say that the role of our conscious selves in guiding behavior is not nearly as big as was long thought. And the reason this role was exaggerated is that the conscious mind feels so powerful; in other words, the conscious mind is naturally deluded about its own nature.

...From natural selection's point of view, it's good for you to tell a coherent story about yourself, to depict yourself as a rational self-aware actor. So whenever your actual motivations aren't accessible to the part of your brain that communicates with the world, it would make sense for that part of your brain to generate stories about your motivation.

There's good reason why the terms "implicit bias" and "systemic racism" are used so often in discussions of racial discrimination. People may consciously believe that they aren't racially biased, while actually they are.

Sometimes racism is subtle. Sometimes racism is so much a part of society that it goes unnoticed, being so familiar.

And sometimes, maybe most of the time, a mass shooter who kills a number of people of some race is unaware of why he did this. So I don't think investigators of the Atlanta shootings should put much credence in how Robert Aaron Long explains his murders.

Perhaps the law requires that a conscious motive be present for there to be a hate crime. But neuroscience and psychology don't require this -- quite the opposite, in fact.

My #1 problem with Steve Hagen's "The Grand Delusion"

I'm a big fan of Steve Hagen's books about non-religious Buddhism. "Buddhism Plain and Simple" and "Buddhism is Not What You Think" really resonated with me. 

But his new book, "The Grand Delusion: What We Know But Don't Believe" elicited a lot of question marks in the margins. 

One problem I had with the book is that while Hagen's other books were marked by humility, this one has a heavy dose of grandiosity. Hagen sets out to solve every issue perplexing humanity, or more accurately, scientists. 

Consciousness. Quantum theory. Free will. Existence of God. All these topics, and more, supposedly are subject to The Grand Delusion -- a belief in substantiality, that things actually exist. 

OK, emptiness is a core Buddhist notion that I'm fine with. Nothing has inherent existence. Interdependency rules the cosmic roost.

Anything we can point to, like a coffee cup, doesn't stand by itself but is the result of countless interactions involving countless entities extending all the way back to the big bang and the creation of our universe.

While Hagen respects the conceptual thinking of scientists, and everybody else, he views concepts as a poor guide to what is genuinely real. Which supposedly is known by perception, not conception. 

I part company with Hagen on this assertion. He often quotes Huang Po, a ninth-century Zen Buddhist. In John Blofeld's translation, Huang Po says "The ignorant eschew phenomena but not thought; the wise eschew thought but not phenomena."

So Hagen speaks over and over of simply seeing. That's what reality is, what is perceived with no effort in everyday life. Sure, this is a Zen notion in line with chop wood and carry water. Just live a normal natural life and you're in touch with big "R" Reality.

Problem is, Huang Po had no idea of how the human mind and brain really work (the mind is the brain in action, though as we'll see, Hagen disputes this). I don't think we should rely on the pre-scientific assertions of Huang Po over modern neuroscience. 

Hagen is familiar with a lot of modern science. However, he fails to speak about neuroscience in nearly as much detail as he does physics, probably because he can use physics as an example of how science is confused about reality, whereas the findings of neuroscience point to Hagen's confusion about how perception works.

There is no such thing as "simply seeing." Seeing isn't simple. It requires much learning. What is learned essentially are perceptual concepts: shapes, colors, shadows, perspective, etc. Huang Po may have thought that seeing, or perception in general, is like a mirror reflecting an image. 

But this is wrong. Hagen even has an example of this in his book. 

He relates a story told by Oliver Sacks about a man who had been blind for forty-five years, "having had little more than an infant's visual experience, and this long forgotten." The man had his sight surgically restored in middle age. While he could see, it was "all mixed up, all meaningless, a blur." The man never could see normally.

This shows how important experience is to seeing. Somehow Hagen misses the point of his own example, saying, bizarrely, "Simply put, conception, as useful as it might be, is no substitute for perception." 

Huh? Conception makes it possible to see usefully. It enables infants to move from perceptual confusion to normal seeing, where that shape of color and light is Mommy, not just a blob. Who would want to trade normal seeing for mixed up, meaningless seeing? Not even Hagen, I suspect.

I have an even bigger problem with how Hagen looks upon consciousness and the brain in "The Grand Delusion," because his take on this is decidedly at odds with his frequent admonition to just see. I suspect he falls prey to Buddhist orthodoxy here, which is disappointing. 

What I see, what I know from direct experience, is that when I've been given anesthesia in several colonoscopies that I've had, I lose consciousness almost instantly. I then wake up with no memory of what happened during the procedure. So it seems clear that a chemical administered by the anesthesiologist impacts my brain, which becomes unconscious.

Same thing happens when a football player, or whoever, has a strong impact to the head. Unconsciousness results. There are countless (almost) examples of how changing the brain changes consciousness. This isn't a matter of abstract conception. It is a matter of seeing what happens. 

Yet here's some quotes from Hagen's book about the brain and consciousness. My comments are in red. 

People have noticed since the middle of the nineteenth century that there appears to be a correlation between conscious experience and brain activity. Unfortunately, serious study of that correlation over many decades has brought us no closer to understanding mind or consciousness. In fact, the more we investigate this apparent correlation, the more elusive a genuine understanding has become.

Absolutely false. Hagen needs to do more reading in modern neuroscience. A lot of progress is being made in correlating brain activity with consciousness. For example, it is now possible to predict quite accurately whether a patient is in a vegetative state from that activity.

Physical processes in the brain have never been demonstrated to give rise to subjective experience. We only assume that they do -- because there seems to be a correlation. 

Well, I assume Hagen would be fine with having his brain removed, since he is skeptical that physical processes in his brain cause his subjective experience. More seriously, Hagen doesn't put forward any other explanation for subjective experience. Because there are mysteries waiting to be revealed about how consciousness functions, Hagen denies all that science does know about the brain and consciousness.

The fact is, we have no evidence that consciousness even has an origin, let alone that it originates in matter... Consciousness will always remain a mystery for those who continue in their attempts to construct it from matter.

These baseless assertions show how Hagen has gone all-in on religious dogmatism when it comes to consciousness and the brain. There is lots of evidence that consciousness arises from the brain. There is zero demonstrable evidence of consciousness existing apart from a brain. Again, this is obvious from simply seeing how consciousness is altered or lost by physical changes to the brain. Hagen should try LSD, or just a strong cup of coffee, if he doubts this. 

Consciousness is not a thing and nothing produces it. 

Again, this is anti-scientific dogmatism. It would be honest if Hagen would say that while consciousness appears to be produced by the brain, there is a lot to learn about how this happens. Instead, Hagen veers off into his version of Buddhist orthodoxy, which places Mind as separate and distance from Matter. (I'd say that this isn't at all what Buddhism teaches, just how Hagen views Buddhism.)

"Consciousness" might be a meaningless word

Below you can read a letter in New Scientist that raises a question I've pondered. Is there really such a thing as consciousness? 

It's clear that, along with other living beings, we humans are aware of both our external surroundings and internal states like hunger, thirst, fear, sexual attraction, thoughts, and such.

However, since that awareness is the brain in action when neurons reach a certain level of complexity, is it necessary to call that brain activity by a special name? Perhaps. Perhaps not. 

As the letter writer notes, at one point people thought that there must be some medium that allows light waves to move through space. But when electromagnetism came to be understood, the need for that medium vanished. 

Likewise, it is possible that what we now call consciousness is the product of our ignorance about how brains function. When the mechanisms of brain activity are more fully understood, "consciousness" may come to be viewed as a concept that no longer is relevant.

On a related note, today I listened to part of a dialogue Sam Harris had with Loch Kelly regarding dual and non-dual awareness. Because they are both deep into esoteric Buddhist philosophy, I'm finding their hour and a half discussion both interesting and irritating. 

Irritating, because both Harris and Kelly like to talk about how consciousness is unbounded, not being confined to the space within the head. I sort of get why they say this, but it seems obvious that (1) the brain is inside the head, and (2) the brain is necessary for consciousness.

Thankfully, today I heard Harris say something that went a long way toward alleviating my irritation. He noted that there is a difference between how we experience consciousness, and the ontology of consciousness.

Meaning, there is the reality of what consciousness actually is, how it arises, what its nature is, and all that, and then there is the felt subjective experience of consciousness or awareness. Harris and Kelly are mainly, if not entirely, speaking about the experiential aspect of consciousness, not how science currently objectively understands it.

So two things can both be true. Consciousness feels like it is unbounded, and consciousness also is the product of brain activity within the limited area of a human head.

Here's the New Scientist letter.

Consciousness could be another aether

Published 1 July 2020

From Ólafur JÓnsson, Mendrisio, Switzerland

I do enjoy the frequent letters and occasional articles on the subject of consciousness (Letters, 6 June). I am, however, bewildered by how the concept is defined. It seems to me that no two people can agree on what it is they are trying to describe.

Maybe because I have learned a spattering of languages in my life, I’m used to trying to guess a word’s meaning from its context, and the context seems to me to vary significantly in writing on the matter of consciousness. I wonder if the search for it is like that for the luminiferous aether, the proposed medium that would allow light waves to move through space. What reason do we have to assume consciousness exists, however much we “feel” it must?

Trump's new crazy idea to kill the coronavirus

Since quite a few people from countries around the world visit this blog, I decided to put this post here rather than on one of my other blogs, Salem Political Snark and HinesSight.

I'm doing this out of a cry for help. Not a prayer, because I don't believe in God. Just a request that wherever you are in the world, send some kind thoughts in the direction of the United States.

I ask for this because today it became clearer than ever -- and believe me, it was exceedingly clear before -- that our president, Donald Trump, is the dumbest, most clueless, and incompetent leader of any major country in the world.

And probably I should have left out that qualifier, "major."

So what did Trump do today that surpassed all of his preceding cringe-worthy statements? At the daily White House coronavirus briefing, our Idiot-in-Chief suggested in all seriousness that a COVID-19 infection could be treated by somehow injecting light and disinfectant inside the body.

No, Trump wasn't making a joke. Nor is this a satire from The Onion, though The Onion did just publish a piece along the same line, "Potentially Promising Covid-19 Vaccine Hits Roadblock After Testing Reveals It's Just Shotgun."

See for yourself. (At about the 1:40 mark.)

NBC News has a story about this newest Trumpian insanity: Trump suggests 'injection' of disinfectant to beat coronavirus and 'clean' the lungs.

President Donald Trump suggested the possibility of an "injection" of disinfectant into a person infected with the coronavirus as a deterrent to the virus during his daily briefing Thursday.

Trump made the remark after Bill Bryan, who leads the Department of Homeland Security's science and technology division, gave a presentation on research his team has conducted that shows that the virus doesn't live as long in warmer and more humid temperatures. Bryan said, "The virus dies quickest in sunlight," leaving Trump to wonder whether you could bring the light "inside the body."

"So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous — whether it's ultraviolet or just a very powerful light — and I think you said that hasn't been checked because of the testing," Trump said, speaking to Bryan during the briefing. "And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or some other way, and I think you said you're going to test that, too."

He added: "I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning? As you see, it gets in the lungs, it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that."

...Medical professionals, including Dr. Vin Gupta, a pulmonologist, global health policy expert and an NBC News and MSNBC contributor. were quick to challenge the president's "improper health messaging."

“This notion of injecting or ingesting any type of cleansing product into the body is irresponsible and it’s dangerous," said Gupta. "It’s a common method that people utilize when they want to kill themselves."

The president has repeatedly touted unproven treatments during the daily briefings on COVID-19, the disease associated with the coronavirus. For instance, he has touted hydroxychloroquine as a potential "game changer," but health officials have strongly cautioned against it.

What's almost as scary as Trump's astoundingly loose grip on reality is what I heard a Democratic pollster saying on MSNBC after the White House briefing. He didn't think that the 43% or so of Americans who approve of Trump would have their faith in him lessened by his notion of using disinfectant to do "almost a cleansing" of lungs infected with coronavirus.

People who embrace blind faith don't see what is really going on. This is as true for political blind faith as for religious blind faith. 

How the brain fools us into believing consciousness is immaterial

I love it! Because I loved The Matrix movie. There's something wildly appealing about our consciousness being deceived about the nature of reality in such a fashion that it is very difficult to escape the bounds of that deception.

The "it" that I'm loving is a book by Michael Graziano, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University. Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience is one of the best books I've read about the nature of consciousness, and I've read a lot of them.

Here's a 13-minute video where Graziano describes the key aspects of his Attention Schema Theory. 

And here's some excerpts from his book that provide a pretty good overview of the theory, especially if you watch the video first.

Graziano's approach explains why almost all people believe that they possess, or are, an immaterial consciousness. That just feels so real, so right, so immediately obvious. 

Which is exactly what the Attention Schema Theory predicts. A schema isn't the real thing. It is a simplified version of the thing. Evolution hasn't given us the ability to be aware of what the hundred billion or so neurons in the brain are doing.

Instead, the brain presents us with a view of the world, and of ourselves, that is functional, because it leaves out unnecessary details. Like, how the physical brain produces a metaphysical sense of consciousness and attention.

This passage describes why the Attention Schema Theory is believable. Covert attention refers to "a roving mental focus that can take in information apart from where the senses are pointed, like hearing sirens at a distance or recalling a memory." (from the book jacket)

In my view, the attention schema theory of consciousness has some inevitability to its logic. First, we know that the cortex uses covert attention. Second, we know that it needs to control that attention. Third, we know that the brain must have an internal model of attention in order to control that attention.

Fourth, we know that a detailed, fully accurate internal model is at best wasteful and at worst harmful to the process, and so, this internal model of attention would necessarily leave out the mechanistic details.

Therefore, and fifth, an attention schema would depict the self as containing an amorphous, nonphysical, internal power, an ability to know, to experience, and to respond, a roving mental focus -- the essence of covert attention without the underpinning details.

From first principles, if you had to build a well-functioning brain that had a powerful, cortical style of covert attention, you would build a machine that, drawing on the information constructed within it, would assert that it has a non-physical consciousness.

That cortical machine, of course, would not know that its subjective conscious experience is a construct or a simplification. It would take the nonphysical nature of conscious experience as a reality, because -- somewhat tautologically -- the brain only knows what it knows. It is captive to its own information. 

This passage describes why the attention schema in humans differs from that in computers, at least as they exist currently,

The human attention schema, having been shaped over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, has weird, biologically bumpy content.

It depicts attention as an invisible property, a mind that can experience or take possession of items, a force that empowers me to act and to remember, something that in itself has no physical substance but still lurks privately inside me.

The attention schema is more than a pointer to an object or a couple of lines of code. It builds a rich picture of attention and its predictable consequences. Build a machine with that kind of an attention schema, containing the weird, biologically messy lumps of the real one and you'll have a machine that can claim to be conscious in the same ways that humans do

No major technological hurdle stands in the way of an artificial attention schema. It is, arguably, the easiest and certainly the most circumscribed of all the components to build into the machine. 

And this passage gets at the objective nature of the Attention Schema Theory, in principle.

From the perspective of the attention schema theory, we can know, with objective certainty, whether a machine has the same kind of consciousness that people have. And direct personal experience is not the only way -- it's not even a very good way -- to know about one's own consciousness.

"Of course I'm conscious. I know I am, because I have a direct experience of it."

If that isn't the definition of a circular logic loop, I don't know what is. Consciousness is a direct experience. Therefore, the statement is tantamount to, "I know I'm conscious, because I'm conscious."

As I've said before, the machine is captive to the information it contains.

A particular internal model informs the machine that it has consciousness, and therefore it "knows" that it is conscious. The internal model informs the machine that its consciousness is without physical substance and forever private, and therefore it "knows" that its consciousness is unconfirmable by anyone else.

But an internal model is information, and information can be objectively measured. We don't need to rely on personal affirmation.

In the attention schema theory, to go about determining whether a machine is conscious, we should probe its innards to find out whether it contains an attention schema, and we should read the information within the attention schema.

We will then learn, with objective certainty, whether this is a machine that thinks it has a subjective conscious experience in the same way that we think we do. If it has the requisite information in that internal model, then, yes. If not, then no. All of this is, in principle, measurable and confirmable. 

Our essence is more iike a spider web than a diamond

Take a look at these images. Which do you feel best describes your essence? Is the real you more like a complex spider web with lots of gossamer interconnections, or a simple unitary, unchanging diamond?

Most people have the feeling that they possess, or are, a core consciousness that often is termed the Self or Soul. This is the dominant religious philosophy, whether Western or Eastern (Buddhism and Taoism excepted).

So the goal of a "diamond" perspective is to get in touch with an unchanging essence that remains the same in the midst of an ever-changing world.

That perspective almost certainly is wrong. Modern neuroscience and psychology, along with the aforementioned Buddhist and Taoist teachings, hold that what we are is, to use a Buddhist term, empty of inherent existence.

In this context empty doesn't mean non-existent. Rather, it points to the fact of everything, including us, being part of a web of interconnections, causes and effects, relationships with countless other things.

Almost every guided meditation I listen to on Sam Harris' Waking Up iPhone app contains requests to look in a certain fashion. 

Look for the center of consciousness.
Look at that which is looking.

Finding nothing -- which is my experience, along with that of most meditators who attend to what is really there in one's psyche, rather than what is conceptually thought to be there -- is the point of the exercise.

Things simply appear and disappear in consciousness. There is no place from which we sit and observe what is transpiring within our awareness. The idea that there is, such as a mythical "eye center" or "third eye," is just another appearance in the spider web of consciousness.

I'm an avid reader in the fascinating area of modern neuroscience. The title of a cover story in the September 21, 2019 issue of New Scientist asks a big question, "What is consciousness?" 

Michael Graziano, the author of the article, has written a book called "Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience." Here's some quotes from his New Scientist piece.

Our attention schema theory explains why people think there is a hard problem of consciousness at all. Efficiency requires the quickest and dirtiest model possible, so the attention schema leaves aside all the little details of signals and neurons and synapses.

Instead, the brain describes a simplified version of itself, then reports this as a ghostly, non-physical essence, a magical ability to mentally possess items. 

Introspection -- or cognition accessing internal information -- can never return any other answer. It is like a machine stuck in a logic loop. The attention schema is like a self-reflecting mirror: it is the brain's representation of how the brain represents things, and is a specific example of higher order thought.

In this account, consciousness isn't so much an illusion as a self-caricature.

OK, if that isn't crystal clear, and I'm sure it isn't, let's take a look at a seemingly related conception of consciousness in a book that was the subject of my previous post, "The Feeling of Life Itself," by Christof Koch.

According to integrated information theory (IIT), consciousness is determined by the causal properties of any physical system acting upon itself. That is, consciousness is a fundamental property of any mechanism that has cause-effect power upon itself.

...The theory takes the five phenomenological axioms of experience that I introduced in the first chapter -- any experience exists for itself, is structured, is the specific way it is, is one, and is definite -- and formulates for each one an associated causal postulate, a requirement that any conscious system has to obey.

The theory reveals or unfolds the intrinsic causal powers of any system that obeys all five postulates. These causal powers can be represented as a constellation of points (distinctions) linked by lines (relations).

According to IIT, these causal powers are identical to conscious experience, with every aspect of any possible conscious experience mapping one-to-one onto aspects of this causal structure. Everything is accounted for on either side.

All these causal powers, including their degree of intrinsic existence, can be evaluated in a systematic fashion, that is, algorithmically. Figure 8.1 illustrates this structure by way of a visual metaphor, a byzantine tangled spider web.

Koch ends that chapter with an apt observation: "If you've made it through this chapter, congratulations, as the covered material stretches anyone's mind." For sure.

After I finish his book, I'll try to summarize this spider web'y theory in (hopefully) my own understandable language.

Quantum theory isn't needed to explain consciousness

If I wasn't an atheist I would have called out Thank God! when i read the following passages in Christof Koch's book, "The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can't Be Computed."

Koch, who is President and Chief Scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle, doesn't see any need to invoke mysterious quantum phenomena when attempts to understand consciousness are being undertaken.

As I noted recently, it irritates me when someone -- who almost always isn't a scientist -- tries to inject quantum theory into a discussion of meditation, consciousness, or such. As Koch says below, it is extremely unlikely (though not impossible) that quantum mechanics influences brain functions.

I'm enjoying Koch's latest book and will have more to say about it when I've read more of it. Here's what he had to say on the subject of quantum mechanics and consciousness.

That a conscious observer is required to convert the superposition of states of a quantum system into the single observable outcome has always troubled physicists. If QM [quantum mechanics] is really a fundamental theory of reality, it shouldn't need to invoke conscious brains and measuring devices. Instead these macroscopic objects should emerge naturally from the theory.

Many solutions have been proposed, but none have found acceptance. It is this dilemma at the root of such a successful theory of reality that has prompted Roger Penrose, a brilliant cosmologist, to propose a quantum gravity theory of consciousness that remains popular with the public.

Precious little evidence supports the idea that the brain exploits macroscopic quantum mechanical effects. Of course, the brain has to obey QM, as when photons of light meet retinal molecules inside photoreceptors. Yet the body's wet and warm operating regime is inimical to quantum coherency and  superposition across neurons.

Today's quantum computer prototypes need extreme vacuum and temperatures close to absolute zero to avoid decoherence, when so-called quantum bits disentangle and become regular bits of classical information theory. That's why quantum computers are so difficult to build.

Furthermore, it has never been properly explained why phenomenological aspects of consciousness or its neurobiological substrate require quantum properties.

I see no need to invoke exotic physics to understand consciousness.

It is likely that a knowledge of biochemistry and classical electrodynamics is sufficient to understand how electrical activity across vast coalitions of neocortical neurons constitute any one experience. But as scientist I keep an open mind. Any mechanism not violating physics might be exploited by natural selection.

What is it like to be you? Impossible to know.

I bought a book written by Sam Harris' wife, Annaka Harris, because the title appealed to me  (Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of Mind), and I wanted to see if she'd disagree with her husband -- a noted atheist neuroscientist whose Waking Up guided meditations I listen to every morning via an iPhone app.

As I suspected, this little (110 pages) book didn't contain much that I didn't already know. But Harris did discuss consciousness in an appealing fashion, and had an interesting take on the possibility of panpsychism. 

Here's how she distinguishes between prescientific notions of all matter being imbued with consciousness in some sense, and modern versions of panpsychism.

Some versions of panpsychism describe consciousness as separate from matter and composed of some other substance, a definition reminiscent of vitalism and traditional religious descriptions of a soul.

But while the term has been used to describe a wide range of thinking throughout history, contemporary considerations of panpsychism provide descriptions of reality very different from the earlier versions -- and are unenumbered by any religious beliefs. 

One branch of modern panpsychism proposes that consciousness is intrinsic to all forms of information processing, even inanimate forms such as technological devices; another goes so far as to suggest that consciousness stands alongside the other fundamental forces and fields that physics has revealed to us -- like gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces

Harris prefers the second idea, that consciousness is fundamental to matter. This is a simpler concept than assuming that consciousness emerges at a certain stage of complexity in information processing. 

After all, I find it hard to accept that the thermostats in our house are conscious, even though they do process information about the temperature in our home, comparing it to the temperature we desire, and "acting" accordingly. It's a bit easier for me to envision that my iPhone is conscious, though this also is a big leap of faith.

The main problem with studying consciousness is the definition Harris uses, which is founded on Thomas Nagel's famous paper, "What is it like to be a bat?" 

An organism is conscious if there is something that it is like to be that organism.

Now, obviously this doesn't entail a self, soul, or such. All that's required to be a member of the Conscious Club is there being something that it is like to be you. Or me. Or anybody. Or anything. 

Because we humans have a finely honed sense of what it is like to be ourselves, and love to describe that sense in words, music, poetry, and so many other ways, we reasonably assume that our fellow Homo sapiens also are conscious. However, there's no way that we can be sure of this, since there is no way any conscious being can know what it is like to be another conscious being.

(Thankfully, really. My wife and I have been married for 29 years. We're still learning about each other, which makes life interesting, given that neither of us has access to the other person's subjective side.)

This makes consciousness seem mysterious, even though it also is the most obvious and familiar thing we know, given that all of our experience, every bit of it, is known by consciousness. A robot could be programmed to answer "Yes" if asked the question, "Are you conscious?" Yet this wouldn't prove it was conscious.

Thus consciousness has to be inferred in every being other than the entity that directly knows what it is like to be what it is. 

I'm virtually 100% certain that our dogs are conscious. Ditto for the squirrels, deer, coyotes, raccoons, and other creatures that inhabit our neighborhood. In fact, I can envision almost every living thing being at least minimally conscious, even a starfish or an ant.

As Annaka Harris notes, the problem arises when we try to establish a firm dividing line between conscious living beings and unconscious living beings. Plants respond to stimuli and have an awareness of their surroundings. Is the oak tree in our yard conscious?

Maybe. But since I can't fathom what it like to be a bat, in no way could I even begin to fathom what is like to be a tree, assuming there is anything it is like to be a tree.

Rocks and other inanimate objects almost certainly lack consciousness in the What is like to be.. sense. Yet they are composed of atoms and molecules that obey the laws of nature. How are they able to do this? Or, does that question even make sense? It does if panpsychism is accepted.

Near the end of her book, Harris writes:

It's important to clarify a few points regarding the distinction I continue to draw between two categories of questions -- those pertaining to how deep in the universe consciousness runs and those about the brain processes that give rise to our human experiences - along with the value I place on each of them.

First, although I'm defending panpsychism as a legitimate category of theories about consciousness based on what we currently know, I am not closed to the possibility that we might discover, by some future scientific method, that consciousness does in fact exist only in brains.

It's hard for me to see how we could ever arrive at this understanding with any certainty, but I don't rule it out. Nor am I discounting the possibility that consciousness is something we will never fully grasp.

Those are pleasingly open-minded sentiments. I just wish religiously-minded people had the same uncertain attitude.

Science is our best guide to a possible supernatural reality

Here's another comment from David C. Lane on a recent post of mine that makes so much sense, I'm sharing it even before I've even lunch. Sometimes my hunger for transmitting truth is greater than my stomach's yearning for food. 

Didn't someone  once say, man does not live by bread alone? (or Trader Joe's meatless chick'n tenders).

Lane talks about his Remainder Conjecture in which supernatural claims should only be accepted after a rigorous examination of them through the lens of science.

This fits with David Hume's observation, which I wrote about yesterday, that we have a tremendous amount of evidence for the physical laws of nature, and extremely little evidence for any possible supernatural phenomena.

So any claim, for example, that someone was able to use ESP to predict a future event, or perform a miracle that violated the laws of nature, has to be viewed extremely skeptically absent very convincing evidence that the supernatural event actually occurred.

After all, we humans are mistaken all the time about what happens in our minds. We accept illusions as fact. We conjure up stories that fit with our desires and sense of self. We forget things. We lie to others and sometimes to ourselves.

Science generally wants to know how something happened, though this is less important when accurate predictions can be made about what is happening. For example, the basics of genetic inheritance were understood before DNA was discovered. And quantum physics is marvelously successful without understanding what exactly is going on at the quantum level.

But if someone makes a claim about having experienced a supernatural phenomenon, we need to ask how that happened. What in the human brain is able to contact a supposed supernatural realm? Of if that capacity isn't in the brain, then where is it? In an immaterial soul? OK, if that's hypothesized, then where is the evidence for soul?

Below Lane's comment I've shared an excerpt from an essay he shared in another recent comment, "The Virtual Reality of Consciousness." The basic message of the essay is that our consciousness doesn't reflect reality as it is, but as our mind makes it out to be. 

Enjoy. I really like Lane's contention that those who view paranormal phenomena as being real should welcome each and every explanation for those phenomena that utilizes the normal.

Spence,

The movie the "remainder conjecture" is to actually open up a blind spot, not hide one.

For instance, if we exhaust physical explanations first (for instance, trying to understand the neural correlate theory of consciousness) and we find after intensive and comprehensive research that it is insufficient to the task, then it opens up a window, what I call a "remainder", which gives us suggestive indications that something ELSE is needed beyond the physical parameters we explored.

So, ironically, those most in favor of the paranormal should be at the forefront of exhausting each and every explanation that utilizes the normal.

This in itself doesn't discount the supernatural in the least, but means that we won't be duped into confusing a purely physical event for a psychic one, which has too often happened in the past.

Science actually starts with ignorance since it doesn't assume (theologically or prematurely) to have any absolute answers and thus from this state then proposes guesses and models and then tests those to see which one best fits the situation and which one provides the greatest predictive value.

Therefore, science is always doubting, always questioning, and in so doing has been wonderfully progressive in terms of understanding that which before was misunderstood.

Also, what used to be seen as magical or mysterious or produced by a god, has often turned out to be generated by physical means. The sun and nuclear fusion (see Hans Bethe for more) is a good illustration of this.

Same with the idea of gravity. Einstein's general theory of relativity made predictions that could be tested.

However, some things like "gravitational waves" were so subtle that it took a 100 years for us to detect them, which was a great breakthrough that just came to light.

The same, of course, with the subatomic physics when physicists knew that there was a missing piece in the Standard Model..... In the early 1960s they theorized a missing Boson, later found and called (after one of its more well known theorizers) the "Higgs Boson."

The Nobel prize in physics was awarded for this breakthrough, though it took decades for the proof needed to verify it.

My point is a simple one. The more patient we are in science to look for physical causes first the better off we will be, since in that pursuit we won't be duped into magical and transcendental temptations too early.

I don't think it is at all absurd to try to find an explanation for all that we can. Indeed, that is why science is science, since it doesn't simply quit but rather chugs onwards..... and in so doing the most remarkable things can happen.

Often people forget that in the early 20th century there were many that felt that the secret of genetics would never be found and instead opted for Elan Vital..... thankfully, biologists and chemists such as Linus Pauling, Rosalind Franklin, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkings, and James Watson were not deterred in looking for physical causations.

Indeed, they were influenced by Erwin Schrodinger's book, WHAT IS LIFE, which argued for looking for a physical medium by which information (genetic and otherwise) could be universally transmitted.

And, lo and behold, the double helix structure of DNA was discovered in 1953..... and it has radically changed our understanding of how life works.

So, again, let us pursue the Wilsonian idea of Consilient reductionism first..... and if that exhausts itself and there remains a "remainder"..... then we have something to build upon.

Or as Blaise Pascal said (or was attributed in saying), which I think goes to the heart of how science proceeds:

little faith, little doubt
great faith, great doubt

and

infinite faith, infinite doubt.

Here's the video Lane made about the Remainder Conjecture.

And here's the excerpt from Lane's essay, "The Virtual Reality of Consciousness." 

Yet, there is a downside in possessing a higher form of consciousness since it allows its owner to ponder all sorts of improbable events that will never actually happen.

We too often can get ensnared with our ideas, our fantasies, our projections and begin believing all sorts of nonsense. For a robust virtual simulator to work it must conjure up a plethora of scenarios that mix and match incongruent narratives.

In other words, for imagination to work it must be massively elastic. The glitch is that sometimes our simulations over take us and we get entrapped within their corridors.

To the degree that we can test our imaginings in the empirical world and acknowledge their successes and failures we are regarded as somewhat sane; to the degree that we cannot we may be viewed as somewhat insane. It is a thin line indeed that separates the two.

Sam Harris shows my meditation is on the right spiritual track

There's many forms of meditation. They all have strengths and weaknesses, pluses and minuses. But only a few forms of meditation lead to an increased knowledge of reality, since most are based on unfounded religious dogma.

I'm confident that the meditation I've been practicing for about fifteen years -- after I wisely gave up a religiously-based form of meditation -- has me on the right spiritual track.

I explained why in "Real spirituality is realizing you aren't a soul, or self." Here's how that 2014 post starts out.

Just as predicted, I'm really enjoying reading Sam Harris' new book, "Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion."

I'm about a third of the way through. Which is far enough to have discovered the central theme. Harris writes:

My goal in this chapter and the next is to convince you that the conventional sense of self is an illusion -- and that spirituality largely consists in realizing this, moment to moment.

...Most of us feel that our experience of the world refers back to a self -- not to our bodies precisely but to a center of consciousness that exists somehow interior to the body behind the eyes, inside the head.

The feeling that we call "I" seems to define our point of view in every moment, and it also provides an anchor for popular beliefs about souls and freedom of will.

And yet this feeling, however imperturbable it may appear at present, can be altered, interrupted, or entirely abolished. 

...Subjectively speaking, the only thing that actually exists is consciousness and its contents.

Wow. 

Now, I realize that some people would say "Yeah, makes sense, no big surprise" to the above scientifically- and experientially-persuasive truths.

But I spent decades as a devotee of a mystical philosophy that, like many others, taught that we humans have, or are, an eternal soul. The soul supposedly could return to God through meditation at the "eye center" -- that place behind the eyes and inside the head Harris, a neuroscientist and Buddhist practitioner, says doesn't house a self or soul.

So it sure seems like those who claim that this world is an illusion, with soul-realms being true reality, are the ones who have gotten it wrong. 

There is no enduring soul or self to be liberated. As Harris says in his book, genuine spirituality is realizing this. Thus a belief in the existence of soul leads one farther away from the truth, not closer. This is basic Buddhism, yet even many Buddhists still harbor fantasies of living on after death as... something or other.

Other posts I wrote about my first reading of Harris' "Waking Up" are here, here, and here. I re-read the book in 2016 and wrote another post about it. I had some quibbles about how Harris views consciousness, but upon a closer reading of certain sections I was able to better grasp his viewpoint.

The past few days I've been reading "Waking Up" a third time. I switch highlighter colors with every reading. By now some pages are almost completely highlighted.

This book is my favorite in the spiritual but not religious genre. Harris is famously down on religion, yet decidedly up on understanding the nature of ourselves through Buddhist Vipassana (mindfulness) meditation that's aimed at dissolving the illusion that we are, or have, a self/soul.

Harris writes:

Unlike the doctrines of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the teachings of Buddhism are not considered by their adherents to be the product of infallible revelation. They are, rather, empirical instructions: If you do X, you will experience Y.

Although many Buddhists have a superstitious and cultic attachment to the historical Buddha, the teachings of Buddhism present him as an ordinary  human being who succeeded in understanding the nature of his own mind.

Buddha means "swakened one" -- and Siddhartha Gautama was merely a man who woke up from the dream of being a separate self. 

Compare this with the Christian view of Jesus, who is imagined to be the son of the creator of the universe. This is a very different proposition, and it renders Christianity, no matter how fully divested of metaphysical baggage, all but irrelevant to a scientific discussion about the human condition.

...Although the experience of self-transcendence is, in principle, available to everyone, this possibility is only weakly attested to in the religious and philosophical literature of the West.

Only Buddhists and students of Advaita Vedanta (which appears to have been heavily influenced by Buddhism) have been absolutely clear in asserting that spiritual life consists in overcoming the illusion of the self by paying close attention to our experience in the present moment.

Beautiful. 

What I love about this approach to spirituality is that it's solidly founded in modern neuroscience, which also says that our sense of being a "self" is almost certainly an illusion, so meditation needs to be aimed at realizing what we are not by paying close attention to what we actually are.

Namely, thoughts without a thinker; perceptions without a perceiver; emotions without an emoter; and so on.

Sam Harris writes:

The claim that we can experience consciousness without a conventional sense of self -- that there is no rider on the horse -- seems to be on firm ground neurologically. Whatever causes the brain to produce the false notion that there is a thinker living somewhere inside the head, it makes sense that it could stop doing this. And once it does, our inner lives become more faithful to the facts.

How can we know that the conventional sense of self is an illusion? When we look closely, it vanishes. This is compelling in the same way that the disappearance of any illusion is: You thought something was there, but upon closer inspection, you see that it isn't. What doesn't survive scrutiny cannot be real.

Harris uses this visual illusion as an analogy.

There appears to be a white box in the center of the figure. But, Harris says, "when we study the image, it becomes clear that there are only four partial circles. The square has been imposed by our visual system, whose edge detectors have been fooled."

Try blanking out all but one of the black figures with your hand. That makes it easier to see that what appears to be a white square actually is an absence, not a presence. 

Just like the self, or soul. It appears to be there, but this is an illusion. Look for it, and it's nowhere to be found. If that feeling of nowhere'ness persists, congratulations. You're enlightened! Or, awake.

We humans have selfhood without a self

Here's a big question, one of the biggest when it comes to understanding reality and how religions typically view what it means to be human:

Do we have a self? Or adding an (important) capital letter, Do we have a Self?

To kick off my discussion of these questions, here's some recent right-on comment observations from "JB."

Brian: "there is nobody having an experience. There is just experience, which usually includes an experience of being, or having, a self." Rather than no-body having an experience, I would argue that there is a body having an experience. More precisely, I would argue that the conscious brain is having the experience. That also seems obvious and rational.

Harding: "All you are is consciousness and its contents." Brian: "his insight also can be framed as a realization that there is no self..." If I am consciousness, then consciousness certainly seems like a good candidate for the self. Proclaiming no-self would be tantamount to proclaim no-consciousness, or no-conscious-being.

l agree with JB. And I also still hold that we don't have a self as it is commonly understood. It all comes down to what is meant by self. 

JB correctly observes that conscious beings have experiences. These experiences occur within a body. That could be a human body, a dog body, a whale body, a bird body, a bat body. 

Most neuroscientists and philosophers interested in consciousness say that the borderline between a conscious and unconscious being is that there is something like to be a conscious being. Thomas Nagel kicked off this train of thought with his famous, "What is it like to be a bat?" question. 

It sure seems like there is some answer to that question. It also seems like we will never know what the answer is, because only a bat can be a bat. Further, only a particular bat can know what it is like to be that particular bat. 

Maybe all bats have the same sort of conscious experience. But I doubt it. I'm virtually 100% certain that dogs have different conscious experiences, having been close friends with several of them. And I'm even more certain, basically 100%, that we human have different conscious experiences.

And when it comes to myself, I know for a fact that moment by moment, minute by minute, day by day, year by year, I have different conscious experiences. Sometimes -- as in deep sleep or under anesthesia -- I don't have any conscious experiences at all.

So it seems clear that if consciousness produces, or is, what we mean by "self," this self is changeable. It isn't anything constant, unchanging, imperturbable. That's why I suggested in the title of this post that we call it "selfhood," which has a more flexible and dynamic connotation than "self."

Yet, many, if not most, people have a very different idea of what "self" means. 

We often hear statements like, "I'm trying to find my true self," which implies that the self is like a buried treasure lurking somewhere under the obvious surface of consciousness. And religions look upon soul as being the spiritual or supernatural equivalent of a true self.

Meaning, soul is viewed as our eternal essence, while the body is viewed as temporary. (Christianity is ambiguous on this point, since bodily resurrection is part of Christian teaching; but ordinary Christians speak all of the time about soul and seem to believe that the soul survives bodily death.)

This certainly is the teaching of Hinduism and other Eastern forms of religion such as Sant Mat, since the soul (Atma) is supposed to be able to merge with God (Parmatma).

However, there is no evidence of a soul or Self -- with a capital "S" to indicate it's supposedly divine nature.

Further, there isn't even any evidence of an ordinary self, if "self" is construed to mean a permanent essence of ourselves that doesn't change. As JB indicated, the closest thing to something permanent in our psyche is consciousness, but this isn't what is generally considered to be a self.

The main reason we consider ourselves to be an enduring entity deserving of the title, "self," is memory. We have memories going back to early childhood. So when we think about ourselves, those memories are triggered, leading us to say things such as "It wasn't like me to have done something like that."

But if we had no memory of what we'd done in the past, we wouldn't be surprised at anything we did in the present, since that would simply be what we're doing now. 

So along with JB, I do believe that each of us is a self. (Note: is, not has.) Again, though, I think selfhood might be a better term, since this means individuality. Every person is undeniably unique. We just lack a permanent self, or Self/Soul.

"On Having No Head" has a few simple truths

On Having No Head is a book by D.E. Harding. I'd bought and read it quite a few years ago. Then, when I needed to weed out unwanted books to make room for more, On Having No Head was given away. 

Recently, though, I heard Sam Harris speak about the book in his Waking Up iPhone app, so I decided to re-buy and re-read it. Here's my review, which is of a second edition of the book that contains a "Bringing the story up to date" section that was written over forty years after Harding wrote the first edition.

My main problem with On Having No Head is the problem that I have with all books about personal spiritual breakthroughs or realizations. In the early days of my churchlessness, I was more interested in stories of how someone uncovered the Secret of the Universe. 

As late as 2006 I was recommending books that now I'm much more skeptical about. Why? Because I've got a better understanding of how the human mind works -- the result of both my own experiences with meditation, and a lot of reading about modern neuroscience and psychology. 

Here's the short version of what Harding experienced on a walk in the Himalayas, after he realized that he wasn't seeing his head (excerpt for a part of his nose).

It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything - room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snowpeaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.

It was all, quite literally, breathtaking. I seemed to stop breathing altogether, absorbed in the Given. Here it as, this superb scene, brightly shining in the clear air, alone and unsupported, mysteriously suspended in the void, and (and this was the real miracle, the wonder and delight) utterly free of "me," unstained by any observer. It's total presence was my total absence, body and soul. Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around.

Yet in spite of the magical and uncanny quality of this vision, it was no dream, no esoteric revelation. Quite the reverse: it felt like a sudden waking from the sleep of ordinary life, an end to dreaming. It was self-luminous reality for once swept clean of all obscuring mind. It was the revelation, at long last, of the perfectly obvious.

OK. I have no doubt that Harding had a breathtaking experience. But here's the thing: like he said, his revelation was of the perfectly obvious. Yesterday I jotted down a note about something Sam Harris said in lesson 28 of the guided meditations in his  Waking Up course.

You're the space in which everything appears. Everything is already happening. All you are is consciousness and its contents.

These three sentences are pretty much the gist of Harding's book. They indeed are perfectly obvious. Everything in the world, or indeed the entire universe, the Himalayas included, has to appear in our consciousness if we are to be aware of it. How else would we know anything?

But here's some facts about the human brain and mind (the mind is the brain in action, basically) that Harding doesn't address in On Having No Head, either because he wasn't aware of them, or chose not to mention them. 

(1) The brain has no feeling. This allows surgeons to operate on the brain while a patient is conscious. So we aren't aware of what our hundred billion or so brain cells are doing in the same way we feel our muscles contracting, our fingers touching something, or our stomach digesting a heavy meal. 

(2) In the quotation above, and elsewhere in his book, Harding speaks of a "vast emptiness" of consciousness. This may be how it feels to us, but that isn't reality. When Harding looked at the view of the Himalayas, his brain was busily piecing together data from his optic nerves, integrating it with past memories/experiences, and presenting him with what he calls a "superb scene." Visual perception isn't a passive mirroring of the world. It involves a lot of brain activity. 

In the updated part of his book, Harding does speak about some neuroscientific truths: there is no evidence for an independent "self" within the brain/mind, nor does it appear that we humans possess free will, which seemingly would require the aforementioned self that doesn't exist. 

Here's what Harding says in his Bringing the Story Up to Date section about his final stage of "The Eight Stages of the Headless Way." It's called (8) The Breakthrough.

This amounts to a profound declaration of intent. It is the realization at gut level (so to say) that one's deepest desire is that all shall be as it is -- seeing that it all flows from one's true Nature, the Aware Space here. 

How is this breakthrough actually made? What can one do to bring it nearer?

In a sense, nothing. It's not a doing, but an undoing, a giving up, an abandonment of the false belief that there's anyone here to abandon. What else is there to do?

After all, one's initial in-seeing -- no matter how "brief" and "shallow" -- was already total self-surrender: everything here went: or rather, it was clear there's nothing here to go. It was the essential quantum leap from the fiction of egocentricity to the fact of zerocentricity. 

And for sure the faithful day-to-day seeing put in since then -- the seeing that already one is Nothing and Everything -- is a most valuable preparation for the discovery that at the deepest level one already wills Nothing and Everything. 

Now, Harding goes on to talk about an unconditional surrender to God's will in which we welcome all that the world is bringing to us. But as noted above, his insight also can be framed as a realization that there is no self residing within our psyche, and there is no free will belonging to that nonexistent self.

Which is fully in accord with how Sam Harris understands the human brain/mind, which explains why Harris is a fan of Harding's book.

Modern science is more mystical than ancient mysticism

For many years, about 37, I was deeply attracted to mysticism. One of the reasons was that I loved how mystic teachings taught the self was an illusion and our sense of free will masked God's overarching control over all things, including human actions.

But gradually I realized the downsides of mysticism. There was no demonstrable evidence that God or anything supernatural existed. And my love of science eventually led me to embrace reality, rather than religion -- of which mysticism is an offshoot.

Now, though, I've come to a pleasing conclusion: modern science actually is more mystical than ancient mysticism, so scientific reality contains a big part of what I found so appealing in supernaturalism.

I've started re-reading Paul Singh's fascinating book, "The Great Illusion: The Myth of Free Will, Consciousness, and the Self." I was drawn to do this after seeing a mention of the book in a recent comment on one of my posts,  which caused me to order a copy from Amazon.

When the book arrived, it looked familiar.

Indeed, it didn't take me long to find a highly highlighted copy on a bookshelf. So I'm going to give the new Amazon copy to my wife for sharing with members of an atheist/freethinkers discussion group she's organized here in Salem, Oregon.

I decided to re-read the book even though I'd written several blog posts about it in 2016:
No dragon in the garage. Also, no God in heaven.
Free will exists. Freedom of the will doesn't.

I've found that because my views on science, the world, and reality keep evolving (good thing!), often I'll get fresh insights from a book I've enjoyed even if I read it fairly recently. 

Such is happening already with The Great Illusion after re-reading only the Preface and the first chapter, Only God's Will. What struck me today is how modern science is able to dispel illusions (maya, if you like) in a much more powerful and convincing way than mysticism.

Here's how Paul Singh describes himself:

Paul Singh is a biochemist, mathematician, surgeon-physician, and a urogynecologist. He is a scholar of eastern and western intellectual traditions. He is a professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology in the College of Medicine at the University of Science, Arts and Technology at Montserrat, British West Indies.

And here's some excerpts from his book about how us humans are deceived about the true nature of free will and the self:

My lifelong research has confirmed what modern science has shown -- that free will, consciousness, and the self are illusions... Consciousness is any qualitative first-person experience. The feelings that you get when you pinch yourself, drink a glass of water, or feel bored are examples of consciousness.

Consciousness is certainly a fact (you who are reading this sentence are obviously conscious at this moment), but modern brain research suggests very strongly that consciousness cannot exist without a brain.

...Although it is correct to say that we have barely touched upon the perplexing complexity of the human brain, we have come far enough in our understanding that we can declare with confidence that these three entities -- free will, consciousness, and the self -- do not have any independent existence of their own independent of the human brain. 

Their illusory existence is dependent upon the brain just like a mirage is dependent upon the brain and possesses no independent reality of its own. 

Singh then talks about how evolution has given rise to our sense of individual identity, which includes the false notion of "souls" or "spirits" that supposedly enable our identity to live on even after the death of the physical body. Of course, religious and mystical beliefs also are products of the brain. So the brain generates the illusion that consciousness can exist without the brain.

It's impossible to escape from this hall of mirrors by any means other than modern science. Singh writes:

First, the beliefs, that have been found to be illusions by science, are essential for human survival. Since we cannot think any other way than to believe that we are, somehow, independent of our bodies, such a belief must have played an important role in our evolutionary past.

We don't know where the "I" or "self" resides, but we all feel there is such a self. That is what led philosophers for thousands of years to think there is a "ghost in the machine." Ancient Hindus wrote thousands of treatises on this subject and they are still writing them today. But science has demonstrated that these philosophers and religious thinkers were all wrong.

What scientists discover through the scientific method is often counter-intuitive. In the absence of science, we often draw unwarranted conclusions, based on simple observations, frequently mixing our emotions with our observations... The brain determines subjective experience in exactly the same way it determines all other bodily functions. 

...We like to think of ourselves as being something other than our bodies, but actually, as modern science has shown, we are our bodies, You are your body; you wouldn't be you without your body wired together with your brain. Without your brain, you wouldn't be you. 

Everything about you as a person can be explained by what goes on in your brain. Who you are and what you are like, all of your emotions and every one of your ideas, how you think and what you think about, and our own personal story, come from your brain. You would have no idea of your own existence without your brain.

The body you will leave behind when you die will carry your name, because it was your body, and not someone else's. The very possibility of imagining that you can float free of your body is conceivable only because it is your brain that thinks these things. 

...Your inner self, your soul, and the god you worship are nothing else but your own brain interconnected with the rest of your body.

So what's the way out of this brain maze, which sometimes leads us to a correct understanding of reality, yet also leads us astray when it comes to believing in God, soul, spirit, free will, life after death, and the nature of consciousness? Science!

The brain doesn't have the job of "speaking up" and revealing what it does, and the conscious awareness that the brain does produce cannot automatically seem organic or even physical. Only through studying the brain scientifically can we explain why we aren't normally alerted to innumerable details about what our brains are doing as we go about living our lives.

In a way, projecting what is sensed and thought into an alternative sort of reality was something that the human brain had to do as intelligence grew. 

...Because science arrived late to the human scene, non-scientific explanations had plenty of time to get entrenched in so many stories that humans have been telling themselves, and the concepts in these stories got embedded in the languages we all learn to speak as children,

...For people, "mind" has most of the same meanings that "spirit' had millennia ago, and most people today expect mind to share in the same destiny as spirit. 

But what seems like undeniable common sense, confirmed by our intuitions and assumed by the ordinary words we speak, is really just a built-up web of imaginative notions that developed over the long course of ordinary human events, hardened by regular use as people lived out their mundane paths in life.

Those notions and fabulous stories conveying them have made many people feel extremely special, perhaps so special that it can seem as if the whole of creation is really about them.

Your brain is quite real. What the brain is busily doing in so many special ways must be largely hidden from awareness. Our innate curiosity can raise good questions about what is going on. After that, however, only science can responsibly investigate what the brain actually does and how it accomplishes all the special things it can do.

The true story of the human brain is more amazing than anything imagined before.

Nicely said, Dr. Singh.

What Singh talks about in his book isn't all that different from what I've read in many other books about neuroscience, the illusion of free will, and how consciousness arises in the brain. 

But reading the excerpts I've shared led to a more solid realization in my own brain that all of mysticism, all of meditation, all of religion, all of everything, is the product of nerve cells firing in the marvelously complex cranium of us Homo sapiens. 

Our clear understanding of reality, along with the illusions that confuse us -- all this arises from a single source: the human brain. There is no way a brain can understand itself, since most of what transpires in the brain occurs outside of conscious awareness.

So modern science is the only way to reveal the secrets that lie hidden within us. Not mysticism, because mystics are subject to the same illusions regarding free will, consciousness, and the self that everyone else is. Yes, meditation can result in different brain states. 

But so can drugs, extreme sports, a walk under the night sky, loving someone deeply, and so much else. There's no way out of the maze of the brain except through the collaboration of many brains working together to cut through illusion and reveal reality.

Which is a damn good description of modern science. 

"I' is consciousness itself, not a conscious being

I'm pleased to share another email message from JB, a frequent commenter on this blog who has an outstanding ability to write cogently about profound topics. 

I was tempted to say "philosophical topics," but as you will read below, JB's thoughts about consciousness really have little to do with philosophy -- at least, as most people regard this field. The ancient Greeks considered philosophy (literally, love of wisdom) to be a way of life, not an academic exercise.

So in that sense, what JB writes about is indeed philosophical, since there is nothing more intimately connected with life than our consciousness. No consciousness, no life.

Enjoy.

Hi Brian,

 

I noticed that you haven't taken part in much of the discussion about volition. On a separate but related topic, I notice that there is much talk about the term "I" supposedly representing something nonexistent. 

 

Years ago I spent some time examining this term and its usage and came to the conclusion that it does represent something real, at least as real as anything else in an existence where everything is temporary, relative, and conditional. Arriving at this conclusion seems logical but please correct me if there is something deficient with this use of logic.

 

I came to understand that the term "I" simply represents consciousness itself, not even a conscious entity per se, but consciousness itself. 

 

It should be noted at the outset that the assertion "I am consciousness" is not a spiritual or religious claim. I do not contend that consciousness is immaterial, will survive death, or can exist in any way apart from the brain. 

 

We use the term "I" and, rather than simply being a conventional artifact, it denotes a function.

 

Thus, it helps to examine and isolate the referent of this signifier. At first blush, one might conflate the term "I" with the totality of each individual being or an entity, but this would be a mistake. The symbol "I" ultimately refers to the seat of subjectivity, the seat of experience. "I" am the receiver-of-experience, the experiencer, or more to the point—experience itself. The seat of subjectivity is consciousness.

 

Experience necessarily entails consciousness.

 

There is no experience without consciousness, no consciousness without experience. They are at minimum coexisting and inextricable, if not identical (I presume the latter out of parsimony). Therefore, consciousness, subjectivity, and experience are all interchangeable terms and essentially synonymous.  

 

Why do I contend that consciousness itself is the referent of the "I" signifier?

 

I take the radical empirical and phenomenological route to arrive at this answer. I have had anesthesia twice in my life and I utterly disappeared during that time. I also entirely vanish each night in deep, dreamless sleep. I reemerge in dreams because a form of consciousness (dream-consciousness) emerges. 

 

The term "I" does not refer to one's body (save their brain) because one could have their arms and legs amputated and "I" would remain intact. "I" have nothing to do with almost all of my physiological processes. My heart circulates blood, food is digested, my hair grows—all without "I".

 

"I" is, quantitatively speaking, an infinitesimally small aspect of this organism. "I" is also a mere fragment of my mental processes.

 

But qualitatively speaking, "I" is vital.

 

The very term "quality" itself necessarily implies experience/consciousness. Without consciousness, there is no experience. Without experience, there is subjective nonexistence. While consciousness may be a quantitative minority in terms of the totality of mental activities, it is absolutely imperative for experience and therefore, the awareness of existence. Experiential existence is entirely contingent upon consciousness.

 

Ask yourself this question: Do I have consciousness or am I conscious? It may seem like variations on the same question, but it isn't.

 

Having consciousness requires an entity that possesses consciousness, the corollary being that it could functionally exist in the absence of this capacity. If "I" have consciousness, "I" must be both prior to consciousness and able to be detached from consciousness and still functionally exist.

 

This doesn't hold up either under the phenomenological evidence. "I" doesn't appear without consciousness or apart from consciousness, so there is no basis for the argument that "I" is referring to anything other than consciousness. "I" doesn't have consciousness; "I" is conscious. "I" is consciousness itself.

 

Another example: When one says, "I feel nauseated", one could just as well say "the experience of nausea is happening." The differences are due to grammatical convention. The term "I" denotes something that is never divorced from experience. Consciousness is the only function that can never be divorced from experience. To be conscious is to be experiencing.

 

Consciousness is experience. Consciousness/experience and "I" utterly disappears with a blow to the head, with deep sleep, with anesthesia, and will permanently disappear with death. Death is the "deep sleep" from which one never reemerges.

 

Now, what about those that claim that "I" cannot refer to anything because there is no self? Proponents of this belief claim that there must be no self because there is no self that can be found. Coincidentally, or not, consciousness is also something that cannot be found. Consciousness is self-disclosing but cannot be directly apprehended by itself.

 

The author Douglas Harding's so-called awakening experience involved the perception of having "no head." The "no head" experience is strikingly analogous to the seemingly earth-shattering experience of "anatman," wherein the experience leaves one with the sense that they, and everyone else, have "no self."

 

As Walter Truett Anderson wrote, "You know you have a head, of course, but you do not have a head for yourself, in your own field of vision." Likewise, I would contend that you have a self of course, but you do not have a self for yourself. Just as one's head can never see itself and is sensed as either nonexistent or a "vast emptiness," people go looking for the self and find nothing.

 

They have concluded that the self is either nonexistent or is a vast emptiness/nothingness (read: Nagarjuna).

 

Just as one cannot directly see their head, one likewise cannot directly see their self, as the self is the "seeing" (is consciousness itself). This inability to directly apprehend consciousness has led some in the academic community to conclude that it too is not existent, but a rather persistent illusion (more on that below).

 

But to conclude that consciousness and the self are illusory and ultimately nonexistent would be as silly as believing that you literally have no head.

 

The moral of the story is: just because you cannot sense the self doesn't necessarily imply that there is no self, any more than not being able to see your head means that you have no head. If it is true, as Francis of Assisi said, that "what you are looking for is that which is looking," then of course it will never see itself.

 

Alan Watts said, "You don’t know yourself, because you never can. [Yourself is] never an object of its own knowledge. Just as a knife doesn’t cut itself, fire doesn’t burn itself, light doesn’t illumine itself. It’s always an endless mystery to itself."

 

Some theoreticians have, at one time or another, attempted to construct an argument postulating that consciousness is an illusion (read: Blackmore, Dennett, et al.). Most have retreated from this position due to its untenability,  as the argument quickly unravels itself when subjected to scrutiny. 

 

If it is the interaction of material structures that create the illusion of consciousness (and that consciousness is, in fact, non-existent), then it is by and through a non-existent faculty that we have come to discover and study these very structures that are said to be generating the illusion. Therefore, it would follow that these material structures (particles, molecules, neuro-chemicals, the brain) are also non-existent if they were apprehended via a non-existent function. 

Simply out, if consciousness is non-existent, then all information/experience gleaned by and through said non-existent phenomenon is, by logical necessity, also non-existent.

 

If consciousness does not exist, then the content of consciousness (sensory experience, for instance) must not exist. Thus, all sensory phenomena presumably experienced by and through consciousness (including any and all features of the material world) would not, in fact, exist. The universe does not exist. The earth does not exist. You and I don't exist. Neither do these theoreticians, their books or any of the ideas contained within these books.

If consciousness does not exist, then all mental phenomena -- thought, observation, analyzation, reason, logic, etc. do not exist, including the very thought that consciousness doesn't exist. The notion of something supposedly without existence making an assertion regarding the existence of anything, especially itself, would be the zenith of irony. 

 

Consciousness is self-disclosing and yet thoroughly and unequivocally indemonstrable. Ironically, that which makes all knowledge and experience possible can itself only be known or experienced "indirectly." It can never be a direct object of itself. 

 

And furthermore, while consciousness can never become its own object, the existence of consciousness in any experience is the only thing that can be known with certainly due to its self-disclosing and self-validating nature.

 

All of reality may be a "holographic projection" or a simulation, yet this wouldn't alter the fact there is consciousness of the projection. With the consciousness of reality or the consciousness of an illusion, consciousnes is the common denominator. While all of the objects of consciousness may in fact just be illusions, if one is conscious of these appearances, one can know that consciousness itself exists and is therefore not an illusion. 

 

Thanks for taking the time to read this. Let me know what you think if you have the time.

 

Here's what I emailed back to JB. His responses are shown in italics.

 

I agree with pretty much everything you said. The rest isn’t something I disagree with. I just need to ponder it more. Mostly I’m referring to the notion that if consciousness doesn’t exist, then nothing else does either. Maybe you’re right. It’s just a subtle, slippery argument.

 

Are you referring to this: "Experiential existence is entirely contingent upon consciousness." No, I certainly don't think that whatever exists is dependent upon consciousness for its existence. I just mean that the experiential component of life depends on being conscious. If we existed but were unconscious (like zombies), we wouldn't experience anything at all. It would be a black out - unconsciousness. 

 

I don’t think you’re saying that before consciousness existed in the universe, there wasn’t a universe. That’s a different issue. At least, maybe it is. Things exist even if no conscious being is aware of them, I’m quite confident of that. What you’re getting at seems to be how confident we humans can be about our take on the world if our consciousness is an illusion.

 

The way I see it, a masterful alien programmer seemingly could produce a sense of consciousness in the actors within the simulation we might be in. I don’t see how this would make a difference in the reality of the simulation. It would still exist even if, as is the case with human simulations/computer games, the actors had no consciousness. 

 

I'm not sure because, as I've said, I equate consciousness with experience. In my understanding, one necessarily implies the other. Can a character in a computer game actually internally experience that world? Each character would be having its own internal felt-experience, unknown to any of the other characters who would be having their own? 

 

I sort of agree that our sense of being conscious is its own validation.

 

But as noted in a previous post, and you seem to agree with this, what we’re talking about is “consciousness of” things, not consciousness as an independent entity. My question just is about the need for consciousness as a validation of what is real. I see the possibility of an advanced computer/robot being able to determine what exists in the world through its simulated senses (vision, touch, etc), even though it lacks consciousness.

I think such a robot could certainly compile data through simulated senses, but it would be a strain for me to submit to the notion that such objective data would be subjectively experienced. You could program the robot so that it was as if it experienced, but I don't  think it would. Maybe it's a question of the degree of advancement needed to reach that level of complexity.

 

We are like robots in every way except for one: experience.

 

 

 

Can there be consciousness without conscious content?

In regard to the question I asked in the title of this post, I'd say "No." For one thing, how could someone know that they are conscious without an extra something-or-other besides supposedly pure consciousness? 

I talked about this in "My (only) big problem with Sam Harris' 'Waking Up' book."

Let's be clear: Sam Harris considers that the brain produces consciousness. He doesn't show any sign of believing in a transcendent non-physical consciousness (like soul or spirit) which exists apart from the brain. So I have no problem with this aspect of Harris' view of consciousness.

But as I said in the previous post, I can't grasp what Harris is getting at when he writes about what he experienced while meditating:

There were periods during which all thought subsided, and any sense of having a body disappeared. What remained was a blissful expanse of conscious peace that had no reference point in any of the usual sensory channels. 

Many scientists and philosophers believe that consciousness is always tied to one of the five senses -- and that the idea of a "pure consciousness" apart from seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching is a category error and a spiritual fantasy. I am confident that they are mistaken.

Hmmmm. I'm just as confident that they are not mistaken.  It seems obvious that everyday consciousness isn't limited to sense experiences. Dreaming is a conscious act. It doesn't involve seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, or touching via the five senses. 

Likewise, I can believe that in a state of deep meditation, Sam Harris did indeed lose any sense of having a body, and wasn't thinking in any ordinary sense. But Harris was still conscious of something, right? He speaks of this as "a blissful expanse of conscious peace." 

That doesn't sound like "pure consciousness." It sounds like consciousness of a blissful expanse of conscious peace. No thought. No sensory impressions. But there were contents within Harris' consciousness: bliss, an expanse, peace.

A letter in the September 22, 2018 issue of New Scientist rings true to me.

From Ed Subitzky
New York, US

I much enjoy the ongoing discussion of consciousness in your pages (for exampled, Letters, 21 July). It seems to me that one cannot just be conscious: you have to be conscious of something, whether it is the scent of a rose, the internal feeling of being happy or sad, or the words you are reading now.

Consciousness, whatever it is, must have content in order to exist. Substituting the phrase "consciousness" with the phrase "consciousness of" makes the entire issue seem more tractable.

Good point. This still leaves open the possibility that consciousness is an actual thing, distinct from what consciousness is aware of. 

However, it also opens the door to consciousness being awareness of something, not a self-existent entity. It's sort of like saying that there is something termed "life" that is separate from every living thing. 

What would this "life" be like? Similarly, what would consciousness absent being conscious of something be like? Even if someone is only aware that they are conscious, that awareness is something, not pure consciousness devoid of any conscious content.

So it isn't all that crazy to say that consciousness doesn't exist in and of itself. Only consciousness of some content exists.