Church of the Churchless

Meditators need to avoid mistaking subtle dullness for meditative joy

As noted in a previous post, I've been re-reading the first part of a book by Culadasa (John Yates), The Mind Illuminated: A Complete Meditation Guide Integrating Buddhist Wisdom and Brain Science for Greater Mindfulness. 

I'm almost back to where I stopped my reading about six years ago for a reason I can no longer recall. The book is an amazingly detailed and comprehensive approach to Buddhist meditation. I find it refreshing, because there's hardly any mention of Buddhist scriptures, Buddhist terms, or Buddhist stories. 

The whole focus is on guiding the reader through ten stages of meditative practice. So far I've read about  the first five, each of which I'm fairly competent at. Which shouldn't be surprising, since I've been meditating every day for about 55 years.

Stage One: Establishing a Practice
Stage Two: Interrupted Attention and Overcoming Mind-Wandering
Stage Three: Extended Continuity of Attention and Overcoming Forgetting
Stage Four: Continuous Attention and Overcoming Gross Distraction and Strong Dullness
Stage Five: Overcoming Subtle Dullness and Increasing Mindfulness

There's also Interludes in-between some of the stages where Culadasa discusses general principles that apply to various stages. I've read these.

First Interlude: Conscious Experience and the Objectives of Meditation
Second Interlude: The Hindrances and Problems
Third Interlude: How Mindfulness Works
Fourth Interlude: The Moments of Consciousness Model

I find the discussion on dullness both interesting and helpful. Here's how strong dullness is described.

Dullness occurs when we turn the mind inward, which reduces the constant flow of thoughts and sensations that usually keep the mind energized and alert. Therefore, the overall energy level of the mind drops. With less stimulation, the brain winds down toward sleep, and the mind grows dull. This normally happens when we're fatigued or at bedtime.

In meditation, it's not just turning inward that decreases mental energy, but when we focus on the breath too intensely and for too long, we are also excluding the thoughts and sensations that usually keep the mind alert. This is another reason why "looking beyond" the meditation object with peripheral awareness is so important. When we stay aware of things in the background, we continue to stimulate brain activity and won't sink into dullness.

This helps explain why some meditators practice with their eyes open, and why it isn't important to block out noises, like in my case, the sound of our heat pump blowing air into the room or a dryer/washing machine operating in the nearby utility room. When I'm meditating, those sounds are part of my peripheral (background) awareness, while my main focus is on my breath.

Subtle dullness is, not surprisingly, not as easy to recognize as strong dullness. That makes it more difficult to deal with. This is discussed in the Stage Five chapter.

This new level of stable attention is precisely what makes us more vulnerable to slipping into a deeper state of sustained subtle dullness. That's because the mental agitation that stimulated the mind and helped keep us awake in the earlier Stages has subsided. As subtle dullness deepens, it causes both peripheral awareness and subtle distractions to fade. 

If we don't recognize this as a sign of subtle dullness, it can easily be mistaken for the strong exclusive focus of Stage Six. The pleasant feelings that accompany subtle dullness can also be misinterpreted as first signs of the meditative joy of advanced stages. Without guidance, meditators often confuse a deeper state of subtle dullness with having achieved the more lofty states of later Stages.

We can sustain this type of subtle dullness for very long periods. It's often described in these kinds of terms: "My concentration was so deep, an hour seemed like only minutes." Or, "I don't know where I went, but I was just gone, and felt so peaceful and happy." 

When the pleasure of dullness is particularly strong and our peripheral awareness of thoughts and sensations fades completely, our meditation can even seem to fit the description of a meditative absorption (jhana). We can quickly get attached to such experiences, prizing them as proof of our meditative skills. Yet, relative to the practice goals in this book, they are complete dead ends. It's crucial we learn to recognize and overcome subtle dullness to progress in your practice. Therefore, do not skip this Stage!

...At first, it may be difficult to distinguish between the wholesome pleasure of stable attention and the pleasure of subtle dullness, but in time, you will recognize the warm, soft, quiet pleasure of subtle dullness as something quite different from the bright, alert enjoyment of being in the flow of mindfulness.

There are various ways to detect and combat subtle dullness. Here's a couple of them.

Remember, dullness arises when perceiving moments of consciousness become non-perceiving mind moments. A strong intention to perceive actually reverses this process by producing more perceiving moments of consciousness. By just setting the intention to observe the breath clearly and vividly while sustaining introspective awareness, you directly influence the root cause of dullness.

Sharpen up your observation of the meditation object when you notice a decrease in the quality of awareness and attention. Use the techniques of following and connecting. Follow the sensations of the breath while intending to perceive the details as clearly and vividly as possible. It's especially important to connect changes in the breath with the degree of alertness or dullness of the mind.

When you're more alert, does the breath tend to be deeper or shallower, longer or shorter, and how do the pauses change? What about when you're dull?

Another way to counter subtle dullness is by expanding the scope of your attention to include the sensations of the body. This works to energize the mind because we automatically use more conscious power to observe sensations in a larger area. You will even find that your scope of attention tends to spontaneously expand at this Stage. 

For instance, you might find yourself observing the sensations of the breath in both the chest and abdomen when you were intending to focus only on the nose.

...You've mastered this Stage when you're able to consistently sustain a high level of intense and clear perception -- of both attention and introspective awareness -- during most or all of your session. 

Attention will gain intensity, making all the details of the meditation object quite vivid. It will also gain in clarity, so you experience the actual arising and passing away of individual breath sensations.

If consciousness is immaterial, why does ultrasound boost mindfulness?

I realize that those who believe that consciousness is immaterial are pretty much immune to the evidence that it is a physical phenomenon. 

That evidence is ubiquitous, as I've pointed out many times in blog posts. Anesthesia makes us unconscious. So does being hit on the head with a baseball bat. Caffeine makes consciousness more alert. MDMA ("Ecstasy") makes consciousness feel more loving. 

The October 2024 issue of Scientific American has a short article that presents more evidence for the physical nature of consciousness. Being a daily meditator for most of my life -- I started meditating in 1969 -- I know how difficult it can be to keep the unruly mind under a semblance of control.

The article describes how ultrasound stimulation of a certain part of the brain was able to produce a state of heightened mindfulness.

Again, this isn't exactly breaking news, aside from the ultrasound part. I experienced heightened mindfulness when I worked the night shift at a San Jose fruit cannery one summer during my college years. I hated my job of hosing fruit pulp that dropped from overhead conveyor belts into floor drains. It was wet and messy work.

But after "lunch" at midnight, or whenever it was, I'd take a Benzedrine tablet. This amphetamine changed my mood completely. Now I found my job to be highly enjoyable. All that had changed was a chemical that affected my brain by enabling it to focus much better.

Ultrasound can affect the brain also. Here's the article.

Even when you aren’t doing anything, your brain is relentlessly active—daydreaming, ruminating, contemplating the past or future. How this mind wandering functions can significantly shape a person’s internal conscious experience.

In a recent study of 30 participants, researchers applied low-­intens­ity ultrasound waves to a brain region associated with introspection and off-task mind wandering. Participants who underwent five minutes of ultrasound stimulation reported significantly heightened mindfulness—the ability to be fully present in the moment, without judgment toward others or the self. The results were published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

“I haven’t seen ultrasound technology used in this way, but this type of neuromodulation has significant potential to change how we think about and enhance mindfulness,” says University of Wisconsin–Madison social psychologist Hadley Rahrig, who also studies that state of mind.

The researchers targeted the brain’s default mode network (DMN), a constellation of interconnected areas that become particularly active when the mind disengages with the outside world and drifts into activities such as reminiscing or envisioning the future. Abnormal DMN activity and connectivity have been linked to anxious rumination and depressive symptoms. “You get stuck, where your mind just keeps going and you can’t stop it. We hypothesized that we could use ultrasound stimulation to remove some stickiness and let the network cool off,” says the new study’s lead author, Brian Lord, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Arizona.

Since the DMN was described in 2001, scientists have sought to manipulate itthrough broad-brush methods such as meditation and psychedelic drug therapy. But it remained difficult to precisely adjust DMN function because of its deep-brain location.

To overcome this challenge, Lord and his team used transcranial-focused ultrasound, a technique that converts electric current into concentrated and localized acoustic waves. (Half the participants received sham ultrasound as a control.) These waves can penetrate brain regions with millimeter-level precision and with greater depth than other noninvasive stimulation methods, which typically use magnetic fields or scalp-attached electrodes to induce electric currents spread over several centimeters.

Functional MRI scans showed that the researchers successfully inhibited activity in the posterior cingulate cortex, a key area in the DMN linked to emotional regulation and concentration during meditation. Through questionnaires and an interview, participants in the treatment group reported at least 30 minutes of subjective effects akin to entering a deep meditative state: a distorted sense of time, fewer negative thoughts and an improved ability to detach from their feelings. Other scientists at the University of Arizona are testing this technique to treat mood disorders such as depression.

“One of the greatest barriers to meditation and mindfulness is the steep learning curve. Brain stimulation can act like training wheels for the mind, helping people achieve that deep state of consciousness,” Lord says. “That’s our larger goal.”

Nondual awareness could be closest to the scientific worldview

In my previous post, We're all having an "out of brain experience," I said there was more to say about a lengthy chapter in Thomas Metzinger's book about pure awareness, The Elephant and the Blind. 

Here's that saying. More accurately, here's what Metzinger says, because his ideas are so subtle and often expressed in philosophical language, I figure that it's best if I use his own words here, rather than trying to restate them in my own language.

Don't be surprised if some, or much, of what Metzinger says in these excerpts isn't crystal clear. It isn't always clear to me, either, and I've finished his entire 500 page page book.

Our inner model of the space of pure awareness is a medium, like a window. You can look at a window, or through a window. And as we all know, sometimes you can somehow do both at the same time.

...Just like a window, our inner model of the space of pure awareness, and epistemic openness (which may be what MPE [minimal phenomenal experience] is) can be more or less transparent. If it is fully transparent, we typically do not notice it.

We see through it, but it reappears as the experiential realness of what we take to be the external world. It reappears as the all-pervading subjective confidence that things are there and we know about them. It reappears as the certainty that something has been known, the nonconceptual knowledge that knowledge exists. It reappears as the background experience of openness to the world. 

Only through meditation practice do we sometimes become aware of the window itself, quite often while still looking through it at the same time. Then we begin to notice something that has been there all along. 

...Let me first explain what "phenomenal transparency" means. This philosophical concept has a lot to do with what, in meditation research, is often called "reification." Phenomenology is described as transparent when certain contents of experience (e.g. perceptual objects, the body, and sometimes even the content of thought) are experienced as thinglike, mind-independent, ultimately real, and immediately given.

We don't see that they are processes anymore because, phenomenologically, they have become frozen or "solidified" into something objective and real. You experience the tree in front of you not as a holographic construct, but simply as a tree, out in front of you, irrevocably real and as if immediately given.

This is because normally your introspective attention does not penetrate the earlier processing stages in your brain that construct the visual scene, bind different visual features into a gestalt, resolve ambiguities, and separate the tree from the background.

...In my book Being No One, I said that transparency is a special form of darkness. There is something that you cannot see -- namely, the fact that most of the content of your experience are constructs, the brain's best guesses, representations not experienced as representations. They are probability distributions, predictions, mere possibilities -- but represented as realities.

...Some aspects of experience "seem to vanish" as a result of exercising attentional agency, actively trying to "fix our attention" onto them. Nondual awareness is highly evasive because any sense of exerting mental effort to attend to it or any attempt to meditate on it immediately destroys it by creating an epistemic agent model and contracting the phenomenal signature of knowing into this model.

...One of my main claims in this book has been that pure awareness is not literally contentless, but that it actually represents something. It is of something, but in a way that makes it completely natural to describe it as devoid of content, as entirely empty, as not like anything, or even as a kind of nothingness.

...In some sense it is an embodied image occurring in a biological organism. You can see an image in two different ways: You can recognize it as an image, or you can look right through it, as it were, and mistake it for a direct experience of reality itself. Drawing on Moore, we can now say that in the first case the image would be called "opaque," and in the second case, it would be "transparent." 

This is merely a visual metaphor. But if it's pointing in the right direction, then pure awareness itself also could be sometimes opaque and sometimes transparent. Sometimes we might be able to look at it, and sometimes we might be looking through it. And sometimes we are it. 

...The transparent VR [virtual reality] in our heads has been highly parsimonious and computationally efficient in helping us survive and copy our genes to every next generation. However, meditation practice can make the medium "opaque," so we sometimes become aware of the medium while still perceiving the world. 

And in a full-absorption episode, we have nothing but the autonomous recurrent activity of the medium itself, creating an internal model of mere epistemic capacity, of the abstract space of awareness as such. Epistemic openness is all there is. 

...I think that conscious beings are precisely those who have a model of their own space of knowledge -- they are systems that (in an entirely nonlinguistic and nonconceptual way) know that they currently have the capacity to know something. 

...The space itself can be almost empty, containing only a clear, abstract image of the mere capacity for knowledge and experience. Or it can contain images of actually ongoing actions, perceptions, feelings, and thoughts. In this account, MPE [minimal phenomenal experience] itself is a model of the entirely unobstructed empty space in which all these different processes of knowing something can occur. 

...Nondual awareness, on the other hand, is a state in which the model is there and has become salient, and in which something actually is known -- but the structural feature of subject/object duality (by means of which the embodied brain normally explains what is happening to itself) has been attenuated. Now the experience of knowing is no longer contracted into an ego, into an epistemic agent model -- now "everything knows," but selflessly. 

...Astonishingly, very few people seem to have realized that we have continual access to the richest, most robust, and closest-to-perfect VR [virtual reality] experience currently imaginable: our very own ordinary biologically evolved form of waking consciousness. 

...Have you ever imagined that you were a visionary who could see into the future? Well, your ordinary conscious experience is an (often reasonably successful) attempt to do just that, because what you see is the most likely future state of the world. 

Scientifically, phenomenal content (the brain-based content of conscious experience) is the content of an ongoing simulation; it is a prediction trying to model the probable causes of a sensory signal. It is not a veridical representation of the actual environment, and it is useful for precisely this reason, because it helps the organism reduce the uncertainty about what will happen next.

This is what conscious experience and VR [virtual reality] have in common: They provide us with a counterfactual image of the world. Waking consciousness is a complex hallucination constrained by the senses, and -- as sketched out earlier in our discussion -- it makes something possible become real.

As opposed to today's VR, biological consciousness is about successfully anticipating the future. This is the reason why we could even say that ordinary consciousness is an action-oriented kind of visionary experience. 

...This raises the interesting question of whether some global modes of conscious experience are closer to the emerging scientific image than others -- whether their underlying ontology maps more closely onto the scientific worldview than does ordinary waking consciousness, which is strongly shaped by biological imperatives. 

I think that nondual awareness could be a high-convergence mode in exactly this sense: a form of conscious experience that is suboptimal from a biological perspective but is closer to our best scientific understanding of what the conscious brain really does and what the deeper causal structure of the world actually is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Douglas Harding sees God where most people see consciousness

It's a familiar feeling. I'm enjoying a book about spirituality, because the author makes sense to me and doesn't go overboard on religious mumbo-jumbo. 

Then... I reach a chapter where I fill the margins with question marks, because what's being said doesn't make sense to me and sounds like religious mumbo-jumbo. That doesn't stop me from enjoying the previous part, but it makes me wonder how the author could shift so suddenly into religiosity. 

That's what happened to me today with Douglas Harding's Face to No Face: Rediscovering Our Original Nature. I wrote about my initial reading of it in "Love is keeping your mind open for other people and things."

I was cruising along in the second chapter, enjoying how Harding looked upon the "faceless" aspect of him as being a capacity for knowing, which is pretty much how Thomas Metzinger describes pure awareness in his book The Elephant and The Blind.

Harding uses anxiety as an example of how consciousness has space for anything that can be known.

Look, just as I find myself Capacity for you, just as I find myself faceless Here for your face, colorless Here for your color, formless Here for your form, so I find myself Space Here, Capacity Here, for anxiety. I'm Space for it.

This Space, this Capacity for the changing feelings, is always me, always available. So what I'm on about is not a case of feeling. It's a case of fact. I should have said this right at the beginning of the evening. We are not on about feelings. We are on about where they come from, what is upstream of feelings, the facts. 

It's facts which will bring us relief from our anguish. Feelings will not.

Music to my ears. I love facts. I'm not always capable of distinguishing fact from fiction, but I aspire to being as factual as possible in my life. This is a big reason why I've come to dislike religion, which all too often is fact-free.

I guess I should have paid more attention to all the capitalized nouns in the excerpt above from Harding's first chapter. That's often a giveaway when a spiritual writer elevates everyday words to a meaning that is anything but obvious, as in Capacity, Here, Space.

Because it turned out in the second chapter that Harding somehow concludes that our usual human consciousness is God. And this from a guy who just said a few pages before that he was all about facts. Here's some excerpts that show what I mean. 

Harding says that if we're to see God Here and find God Here, "we have to know what we are looking for so that we can tell whether those mystics and sages got it right... something very specific, not something vague."

Well, this makes little sense. After all, there's no proof that God even exists, much less that God has certain well-defined characteristics. Religions heartily disagree on both fronts. (I call Buddhism a religion that has no god.) Harding then says:

And I would say that which we can name God provisionally (or if we prefer, Atman-Brahman or Reality or Essence or even No-thingness -- I don't care what you call it) has five characteristics. 

The first characteristic is that it has no boundaries, no fence around it, no edges. It's absolutely unlimited in all directions. The second characteristic is that it is absolutely clear, clean, empty of contamination. It is utterly simple, totally transparent, empty of everything but itself, empty even of itself, clearer than glass, cloudless, an infinite sky.

The third characteristic is that it is also full of the world. Because it's empty, it's full -- full of the scene, whatever the scene is, absolutely united with it. The fourth characteristic is that it is awake, it's aware, it's conscious. And the fifth characteristic is that it is right where you are. 

The only place you will find Her Majesty is nearer to you than everything else. That's her throne room, her royal palace, right where you are. The Kingdom is within you.To sum up, there are five characteristics of Her Majesty: she is infinite, empty, full of the world, awake, and right where you are. Now that's a description of God. But doesn't the description also fit you?

This is an amazing bit of bad philosophizing from someone who claims to be factual, but obviously is deeply religious in a Christian sense, which is the religion he was brought up in by a fundamentalist father. 

First of all, Harding makes the mistake that Thomas Metzinger warns about repeatedly in his own book about pure awareness. He uses the phenomenology of how awareness appears to us humans to draw unwarranted conclusions about the actual reality those phenomenal experiences point to. 

Metzinger calls this theory contamination, which is exactly what Harding does in the excerpt above. Harding describes how consciousness appears, then claims that those characteristics are those of God, so, using horribly twisted logic, our consciousness is God. 

Circular reasoning gone wild.

Harding neglects to mention that God also is considered by major world religions to be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent -- qualities that definitely don't apply to human consciousness, since he only focused on those that match up with how our limited consciousness appears to us. 

Here's some additional quotations to show further how Harding equates God with human awareness.

We should have the humility to be a little bit traditional here and realize that for two thousand years great saints have been working at this, and the common feature of their discovery is: "Not I but Christ liveth in me." Paul goes on and on: "I am crucified with Christ." Father Gerard Hughes, author of the book, God of Surprises, says, "God calls on us to become Christ." Not Christs, but Christ. When I hold out my arms, I see the pattern of the Crucifixion. We're built to that incredible pattern.

It is really true that Who you are is the Origin of the world, everywhichway you look at it. Just think! You never moved an inch. You are the unmoved mover of the world. You are timeless. You have no boundaries.

The big thing for me, a development over the last few years, is the realization of the Incarnation. To put it very, very simply, if it is true what Tennyson says, what the Koran says, that God is nearer to me than my hands and my feet and my breathing, then God is Here and This is where he lives...These feet go on the errands of God, and this voice speaks his words. They are the instruments of Who we really, really are.

I really, really disagree. Harding's first book, On Having No Head, appealed to me because it was almost entirely based on what I considered to be facts about our human consciousness. However, somewhere along the way, Harding merged the Christianity of his youth with his headless perceptions. 

The result isn't useless, but it contains way too much gibberish for my taste.

I rediscover Douglas Harding's "headless" rediscovery of the obvious

Douglas Harding's classic book, On Having No Head, has the subtitle of Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious.

Well, as I said in a 2018 post, "'On Having No Head' has a few simple truths," I'd bought the book quite a few years prior, given it away because I wasn't overly impressed with it back then, then bought a revised edition after I heard Sam Harris talk about it on his Waking Up app.

The past few days I've been re-re-reading the book that I re-bought and re-read six years ago. That's a lot of "re's" for a book that is about the rediscovery of the obvious. Guess I've got a problem with obviousness.

Which isn't entirely true, since I liked the book in 2018 and I'm liking it even more now, assuming I can tell the difference between those likings. 

If you're not familiar with Harding's headlessness, here's an excerpt from my 2018 post about his book:

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.

My post of a few days ago was about looking without, not within, being the best spiritual advice. I mentioned Harding in that post, which spurred me to take another look at his book, since I really like the idea of having the world be my head as much as possible.

Of course, this is always the case, which is why Harding says his insight, and Zen, is so obvious. There's no world for us, or for anyone else, without consciousness. That's a given. It's how our consciousness and the world relate that is the interesting question.

Harding seems to have it right when he says that our adult consciousness looks outward at the world, but falls short when it looks inward in a falsely self-conscious manner, "aiming your arrows of attention at that insubstantial some-body, at that human appearance of yours which daily became more substantial for you, and soon was your identity card, our identity itself."

By contrast, as the seer with a more refined understanding, "you are again truly Self-conscious: but this time you penetrate that ring of appearances more deliberately and consistently, and begin to rest in What they are appearances of, in your Reality, which is your true Identity, your Presence-Absence, your Core and Source."

More and more often your arrows of attention, simultaneously aimed inwards and outwards, hit their mark. You are becoming adept at two-way looking -- at once looking in at No-thing and out at every-thing.

Of course, given how complex the human brain is, about a hundred billion neurons with trillions of connections, that "No-thing" is anything but, since our mind is the result of intense neurological activity, most of which is outside of our conscious awareness.

So it's more accurate to say that looking inwards, we find nothing substantial, unchanging, and independent. In the 2018 post I said that Harding's "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."

I like how Harding describes some of the changes in our everyday lives from his headless realization in a single lengthy sentence.

Typically, these will include an enlivening of the senses (raising the screen which muffles the plangency of sounds, dims the glow of colours, blurs forms, and filters out the loveliness shining in the "ugliest" places) and (to go with the sensory awakening) a complex of interrelated psychophysical changes -- including a sustained "whole-body" alertness in place of the "heady" intermittent source (as if one were poised through-and-through to run the race of one's life), a reduction of stress, particularly in the regions of the eyes and mouth and neck (as if one were at last letting them go), a progressive lowering of one's center of gravity (as if losing one's head were finding one's heart, and guts, and feet, which are now rooted in the Earth), a striking downward shift of one's breathing (as if it were a belly-function), and in fact a general come-down (as if all the good things one had vainly strained after in the heights were awaiting one in the depths).

"Theory contamination" is a big problem in spirituality

What is real? This is one of the toughest questions to answer, because to a large degree, reality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. 

I'm mainly speaking about subjective realities here, the province of spirituality, religion, and mysticism. But to a lesser degree, objective realities, the province of science, also appear different to people with varying theoretical assumptions.

A classic example is observations of the motions of the planets in the middle ages. For quite a while it was assumed that Earth was at the center of what we now call the solar system, with the Sun and the planets known at the time orbiting Earth.

To make the observations fit with that assumption, Ptolemy and others came up with the notion of epicycles -- basically circles within circles that, with enough fiddling, could fairly accurately mirror motions of what was observed in the heavens. 

Of course, once the Sun-centered assumption took hold, the epicycles weren't necessary. Well, actually they were to some extent, since it was assumed that planetary orbits were circular, rather than elliptical as they actually are, so some fiddling still was required.

My point is that the interpretation of observations or perceptions rarely, if ever, take place in a theoretical vacuum.

The smell of coffee is much more appealing to someone who enjoys the beverage than to someone who can't stand the taste of it. How big a problem the number of undocumented immigrants entering the United States is depends on how valuable someone considers the immigrants are for this country.

In Thomas Metzinger's book, The Elephant and the Blind, which is about the experience of pure awareness reported by meditators, he speaks about "theory contamination" as being an issue for every scientific approach.

I'd add that it's an issue for non-scientific approaches also. It's really tough for a group of people to decide on a restaurant to go to when some of the deciders only eat organic food, others are vegetarians, and still others are on a paleo all-meat diet. How they value a restaurant depends on what food they prefer.

Metzinger writes:

In Tibetan Buddhism, pure awareness has long been beautifully described as "the natural state" (rang bzhin gnas rigs). The existence of a label like this may seem unremarkable, or it may be straightforwardly useful. But it also presents us with one example of a methodological difficulty, a major obstacle that every scientific approach has to face.

In chapter 2, I called it the problem of "theory contamination": Theoretical assumptions and belief systems may have strongly colored the reports that we received, and the conceptual instruments available to a practitioner inevitably shape the way she communicates her own experience.

We find many example of such contamination in this book. Our meditators spontaneously and more or less innocently use ancient concepts charged with implicit bias, like "suchness" (chapter 9), "emptiness" (chapter 17), "luminosity" (chapter 18), "witnessing" (chapter 19), "nonduality" (chapters 26 and 27), and "nonmeditation" (chapter 32).

Here's some of the conclusions Metzinger draws from the problem of theory contamination.

But if we adopt an intellectually honest and methodologically sound perspective, then "phenomenality" as such -- the subjective sense of appearance itself, the bare and nonconceptual character of "awareness" or "pure consciousness" -- is only a phenomenal quality too, just as redness, greenness, sweetness, and epistemicity are.

Today, the way to go is not to jump to strong metaphysical conclusions in a naively realistic manner, as if the structure of reality could be directly read from the structure of certain kinds of conscious experience.

Our new model of consciousness must not be constrained only by the phenomenology because other forms of evidence count as well. The elephant approach must involve a multiplicity of perspectives, because it is attempting to satisfy a whole range of constraints entailed by multiple levels of analysis.

Nothing is given here -- no direct form of inner perception. The directness, transparency, and experiential immediacy all belong on the level of appearances, as later reported verbally.

Hard to argue with. Color and taste, as Metzinger observed, aren't part of physical reality, but of human sense organs and brain. Some people are color-blind. Some people are able to taste flavors that others can't. (A professional wine taster, for example.) 

He's saying that experiences of pure awareness are similar. But here it isn't a physical perception that is experienced differently by various people, but the character of awareness or pure consciousness.

Most Buddhists will describe their experience in a different way than most Christians will. An atheist may describe their experience as an embrace of being, while a religious person may describe it as the presence of God.

Metzinger's quest, which he says will take much more research than he's been able to do so far, is to arrive at a phenomenology of pure awareness where the "actual" experience (a problematic word) is separated from the conceptual overlay meditators give the experience via theory contamination. 

It's a noble goal. I'm just skeptical that it's possible to achieve. But that's an assumption of mine which surely suffers from a form of theory contamination.

Pure consciousness isn't an experience. It's the capacity to experience.

I've gotten back to reading Thomas Metzinger's new book, The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness. The title isn't entirely accurate, nor is it entirely inaccurate.

I say this because one of Metzinger's chapters is called "It is Not an Experience." He writes:

Here, what we are trying to approximate is that for some meditators, the phenomenal character of pure awareness also includes the self-evident fact that somehow, in a way that is very hard to express in words, what is occurring is not merely what philosophers call a "phenomenal experience" -- something that subjectively appears to us by coming and going in the mind.

Rather, pure awareness may feel like something that reveals the timeless possibility for all conscious experience itself, and, somehow, its true nature as well.

Makes sense. After all, how could consciousness or awareness (same thing, according to Metzinger) be an experience when consciousness or awareness obviously is required to have any sort of conscious experience?

I've been skeptical of the idea that it is possible to be conscious without some conscious content. I could be wrong, an ever-present possibility, but I find it difficult to imagine how someone could simply be conscious, period. 

No sensations. No perceptions. No thoughts. No emotions. No anything except being conscious. For someone to know that they were in a state of consciousness without conscious content seemingly would require, at minimum, a capacity of being aware that one is simply being aware.

Which would be pretty damn close to consciousness without conscious content, but that extra "aware that one is simply being aware" is a subtle addition to consciousness. And that, pleasingly, seems to be close to what Metzinger is saying in this passage.

Admittedly, it takes some effort to grasp what he's getting at, since Metzinger is a philosopher, and often writes like one.

All physical processes have certain conditions that make their existence possible. But only very few physical systems model and track these conditions. Self-organizing systems like ourselves exist by persisting in dynamic environments, following, as Hohwy explains, an inner norm by which they model the conditions that make their own physical existence possible.

...But what about pure awareness? Can we also internally model the conditions of possibility for knowing -- in meditation, non conceptually, without words, in a state of silence?

If we view the experience of pure awareness as an internal model of epistemic openness, and if the same principle of continuously tracking the conditions of possibility holds not only for whole organisms, but also for conscious processes unfolding in their nervous systems, then it is conceivable that the actual functioning of the principle can sometimes be detected by the model itself (e.g., in exceptionally clear and silent nondual states).

It could be detected by meditators in states of dual mindfulness, but it could perhaps also detect itself in what, in the preceding chapter, we called "reflexively aware mindfulness" or "self-knowing empty cognizance." The currently running model would be continuously tracking its own condition for existence -- epistemic openness, the very possibility of knowledge -- thereby autopoietically re-creating itself over and over.

If this physical process had a conscious correlate (or if it were not correlated with, but were simply identical to, pure awareness "coming alive"), then our predication would have to be that a bare and empty form of wakefulness emerges, a state that cannot be easily compared to any other kind of conscious experience.

The phenomenological prediction would be that it has the experiential quality of continuously refreshing itself, of autonomously holding itself in existence -- and, plausibly, of knowing itself. 

Our dog clearly is aware. But I doubt that she is aware of her own awareness. If she is, this is a much less sophisticated form of self-awareness, or of knowing herself, than we humans possess.

Metzinger seems to be saying that in addition to knowing ourselves as an object, from the outside as it were, humans also are capable of knowing ourselves as a subject, from the inside as it were. Which basically is pure awareness -- a non-conceptual knowing of our capacity to know.

It's temping to draw metaphysical conclusions from this capacity. Soul! Universal consciousness! Enlightenment! Buddha-nature! All that stuff that religions derive from conscious experiences that, in themselves, don't possess any inherent meaning along those lines. Metzinger warns about this.

Conclusions are also easily jumped to when it comes to "phenomenality per se" actually being something nominal, being the "thing in itself" behind all appearances. The C-fallacy arises whenever someone falsely concludes that just because something feels like the true and timeless nature of consciousness itself -- or not like an experience at all -- we have actually found some metaphysical bedrock or ultimately understood consciousness itself. 

...Intellectual honesty is an integral, indispensable part of spiritual practice and it is what connects such practice with modern philosophy and science. 

If you're trying to control your mind, who is the "you" doing the trying?

English has some confusing ways of putting things when it comes to the mind, consciousness, attention, and all that. 

For example, we may say, "I couldn't stop myself from eating a second piece of cake." Okay. But what's the difference between "I" and "myself"? Don't each of these words refer to the same entity? So isn't that sentence just a matter of grammar, not of reality? 

In other words, maybe what the sentence really means is "I ate two pieces of cake, but now I wish I'd only eaten one." Now we just have "I" without the extraneous "myself." 

This sort of issue, or problem, pops up frequently in Thomas Metzinger's book about pure awareness, The Elephant and the Blind. In a chapter I read today, "Ego dissolution," he talks about the epistemic agent model, which typically creates the notion of a knowing self.

I realize that epistemic agent is an unfamiliar term for most people. It certainly is for me. These examples help us understand what Metzinger means by this.

Let us consider a few examples of times when we have an epistemic agent model: the conscious experience of (1) being a thinking self, (2) being a self in the very act of attending, and (3) being a meditator attempting to "have an insight" (e.g., to recognize her true nature).

Let's begin with the first example. Whenever you try to to mentally calculate, to think logically, or to actively form a new concept, you experience yourself as an epistemic agent, as a thinking self that wants to understand something, as an entity that wants to create new knowledge. 

You have a goal, and you act to reach the goal. Mental calculation is effortful, as is forming a new concept or attempting to create a novel philosophical argument. When you do it, you feel like you must control your own mind, and -- if you're successful -- an inner experience of ownership and agency arises.

This experience results from a special form of deliberate, goal-directed mental action, which in turn leads to the transient combination of experiential qualities: a feeling of mental effort, plus a sense of ownership and agency. Perhaps falsely, this combination of experiential qualities can be described as a specific, nonbodily sense of self.

...What about the second example of a context in which we have an epistemic agent model? If you are not thinking at all, but instead carefully attending to the sensations in your feet as you slowly walk, to the sound of a bell vanishing into silence, or to the self-generated sound-shape of a mantra in your mind doing the same, then you have an epistemic agent model.

There is something that you want to perceive and experience as precisely as possible. Again, you try to gently control the dynamics of an inner process, but this time by optimizing for precision. There is also a quality of motivation, maybe even earnestness. In the carefulness of your attuning, there is a sense of effort, which may be more or less subtle.

A goal state has been selected, and the conscious self in the act of attending actively pursues this goal state -- this is our second example of what it means for the self to be an epistemic agent. The self is active, and it wants to know something. It wants to realize the goal state in its own mind. 

And here is the third example. If you are a meditator and have read about fancy theories involving recognition of the "true self" or the effortlessness of spacious awareness, if you're expecting to learn to see your own true nature and "let go" in some profound way, if you intellectually know the difference between dual mindfulness and nondual mindfulness, then you are in serious trouble.

You have become infected with a new kind of goal state, something that can apparently be known and realized. Now it is almost impossible to prevent the birth of a new and particularly clever epistemic agent model in your mind. This time, it purports to want to know pure, nondual awareness -- it is trying to touch the elephant as directly as possible while still cleverly sustaining the blind toucher's own existence.

I realize that the passages I've shared above aren't the easiest reading. But they're important reading. Because what Metzinger has done here -- he's both an experienced meditator and an academic philosopher -- is show that the sense of self or ego is present when thinking logically, when perceiving mindfully, and when seeking one's true nature in meditation.

During the 20 years since I started this Church of the Churchless blog, I've been told many times by commenters that I think too much and that's why I haven't succeeded in my meditation. This assumes, of course, that there's a big difference between thinking and meditating successfully.

Metzinger doesn't see that difference. He's focused on what is typically common to thinking, perceiving, and meditating: the presence of a self that seeks to know something.

The closed-eyed meditator sitting motionless in the lotus posture on a cushion may seem to be engaged in a very different activity from a wide-eyed mathematician scribbling equations on a blackboard, but what unites them is a self that seeks to know something. 

There's an alternative, says Metzinger on the chapter's last page. He says that sometimes the experience of pure awareness leads to a state of "ego dissolution."

In many cases, what dissolves is precisely the inner image of the knowing self, the earnest meditator, or the epistemic agent model in your brain. In almost all cases and for almost all human beings, this epistemic agent model functions as the unit of identification. 

Whenever we have one, we automatically experience ourselves as being this thinking self (just as Descartes did), as being the invisible entity that controls the focus of attention, as being the entity that is curious and longs for pleasant surprises, and as being an informavore who always wants to know more.

The phenomenal character of MPE [Minimal Phenomenal Experience], by contrast, lacks the craving for novelty and the two elements of dynamic knowingness and egoic identification. MPE's frequently seem to break their inner connection, weakening the process of identification with the fictitious knowing self.

If there is knowledge, it is no longer egoic knowledge.

Our mental experience isn't always in accord with the mental reality

Descartes famously wrote that even though we could be mistaken about everything else, since God could be a cosmic joker who hides the truth from us, the one thing we can't doubt is that we are a creature who doubts -- and thinks, and in general has conscious experiences. 

You know, the "I think, therefore I am" thing.

It's hard to argue with that. Sort of. Because we can imagine what Descartes could not, given when he lived: that, among other 21st century possibilities, we are creatures who are characters in a computer simulation crafted by an advanced alien civilization.

Part of the simulation includes the capacity to imbue certain characters, human beings in our case, with a conception that they are having conscious experiences. Also, that they are free to choose one thing -- a thought, action, whatever -- rather than another thing, even though the simulation is both doing the choosing and creatingnthe sensation of free will.

Which, in characters like Robert Sapolsky, Sam Harris, and other deniers of free will, is overridden by a sensation of not having free will, just to make the simulation more interesting.

But even if we don't believe that we're characters in a simulation (I consider this unlikely), there's still good reason to consider that much of what we mentally experience isn't actually what is happening in our deeper mental reality.

Thomas Metzinger explains this in the "Meditation and Nonmeditation" chapter in his provocative book, The Elephant and the Blind, which is about the experience of pure consciousness. 

According to the reports of about 500 people who described such an experience in sufficient detail to be included in Metzinger's book, pure consciousness or pure awareness (same thing) happens spontaneously. It can't be forced, since any forcing introduces a subject-object duality that destroys the possibility of experiencing pure awareness in its simple unified clarity.

In other words, we can be it, but we can't observe it. 

However this raises the question of where an experience of pure awareness comes from if it is uncaused, which is what's implied by the notion of spontaneity. Metzinger says:

On a physical or functional level of description, to call something "spontaneous" means to describe it as uncaused and lawless -- and therefore doing so without argument or evidence could be seen as a form of hand-waving or deliberate obscurantism. 

If we try to be intellectually honest, set all metaphysics aside, and stay as close as possible to contemplative experience itself, then the term "spontaneity" can only refer to a phenomenological kind of spontaneity.

There is an experience of spontaneity, and this is what has to be taken seriously. As always, jumping to strong metaphysical conclusions is a way of not taking your own experience seriously.

That last sentence is interesting. It deserves careful consideration.

I'm not capable of doing that right now. So I'll simply agree with Metzinger in an intuitive fashion that he does seem to be correct in saying that when we make more of our direct phenomenal experience than is contained within the experience itself ("I felt a great sense of peace. That must be the presence of God!") we're discounting our experience in favor of a metaphysical or conceptual conclusion.

Here's what Metzinger says in the following paragraphs. This fits with my understanding of why we believe we have free will, though there's no evidence of this other than the belief.

The phenomenological fact that nondual MPE [Minimal Phenomenal Experience] often appears spontaneously and effortlessly, that it has an "ahistoric" quality and cannot be fabricated by applying a mental technique, can be explained with reference to the fact that most of its enabling conditions in the brain are fully unconscious.

We do not experience them. Science may be able to find and isolate these causally enabling conditions, but the brain itself doesn't represent them in its conscious model of reality. There is a parallel case in the phenomenology of volition, of suddenly "willing" something.

Many people proceed from the phenomenological fact that, say, the consciously experienced intention to now move their right arm and reach for a beautiful flower seems to spontaneously occur in their mind, "out of the blue" as it were, and interpret this as proof of free will in a strong sense: as demonstrating the existence of what philosophers call "ultimate origination."

Ultimate origination would mean the capacity to start a new causal chain of events in your mind by an uncaused act of will, an act coming from outside the network of dependent origination. But for the experience of free will, as well as for the experience of spontaneously occurring pure awareness, the same principle holds: 

From the fact that you experience something as uncaused, it does not follow that it actually was uncaused.

...Some intelligent systems control their own behavior based on a model of themselves as agents in a strong sense. To successfully control their own behavior -- which may be bodily or mental -- they use a conscious image of themselves as an entity that possesses the capacity for goal selection and ultimate origination. 

Other intelligent systems don't do this. The difference is important. 

We can think of embodied systems intelligently moving through the world, automatically updating and constantly improving their inner portrait of reality, controlling what they will know and what they will not know.

But some of these systems -- for example, self-aware human beings -- sometimes may use a model of themselves as an epistemic agent, now achieving the same goal by using a special computational device. They would experience themselves as possessing free will, as being agents capable of initiating new causal chains out of the blue.

These systems would have an ego in a strong sense. 

You can't know your "true self," but you can be it

I readily admit that Thomas Metzinger's new book, The Elephant and the Blind, often isn't easy to read. This detailed examination of pure awareness involves a lot of philosophy, a lot of neuroscience, and a lot of sophisticated arguments.

All that is challenging. But every chapter rewards me with insights presented in simple language that make me pleased I bought this lengthy book -- which as I've noted before can be downloaded for free from the publisher, The MIT Press. (I prefer reading books on paper, not a screen.)

Metzinger does a great job separating precepts of Buddhist, Advaita, and other teachings that talk about pure awareness from the phenomenology, the actual experience, of people who report an acquaintance with this aspect of consciousness.

His thesis, which makes sense, is that we'll have a better chance of understanding the nature of consciousness if we can reduce consciousness to its barest, simplest form. That's pure awareness, where "pure" doesn't necessarily mean being without content, since pure awareness can be recognized as a backdrop to everyday sensory perceptions.

Metzinger likens this to how we may feel upon awakening from sleep. There's a moment just after our eyes open, or a bit before, when we're unsure who we are, where we are, or when we are. All there is, is the potential for knowing those things later: I'm Brian, in my Oregon bedroom, early in the morning on a July day. 

He writes:

Pure awareness knowing itself is an entirely nonconceptual affair. "Recognizing" pure awareness is not a form of active, conceptual thought, and it does not involve the quality of ownership. In and of itself, it is entirely silent, free of mental action.

...There is no accompanying thought like "Now it is aware of itself!" or "Now I actually am pure awareness that directly knows itself." The phenomenology of pure awareness knowing itself also never contains some knowing self quietly saying "I think this must be it!" to itself, or asking "Is this really it? This is too simple..."

So the beauty of pure awareness is that it involves zero effort to realize it. There is nothing to do. In fact, any effort at all during meditation or at any other time destroys the possibility of realizing pure awareness. It's like a bird that alights on your hand only if you do nothing to make this happen. 

This means that every attempt to willfully fix attention on the quality of awareness per se destroys its originally nondual nature, the baseline quality that William James called 'sciousness,' simply because it reintroduces subject/object structure.

Pure awareness recedes from attention.

We can now see more clearly why this must be the case, and how the underlying principle also holds for reflexive MPE [Minimal Phenomenal Experience]. Every effortful attempt to fixate attention on MPE, thereby turning it into a reified target of introspection, automatically creates a subtle hallucination, an inner image of a goal state to be reached -- and an epistemic agent model that is directed at this goal state. 

Imagining pure awareness knowing itself is not the same thing as pure awareness actually coming to rest in itself because the latter lacks any form of agency whatsoever. 

...But that which reports experiences, that which perhaps boasts about things that happened during meditation, that which may be slightly complacent when speaking about "stages" and "states" that it has known -- that entity is always something else.

It is an ego; it has personality traits, psychological conditioning, and emotional needs -- and it has had important insights that it feels an urge to share. Perhaps the urge and the complacency are parts of some last-ditch escape strategy?

Maybe there is even a new personality disorder to be discovered, "spiritual teacher personality disorder."

...Be that as it may, my main point is that because verbal communication is something that happens between egos, in a space that opens up between embodied selves in a social context, the nonegoic quality of "pure awareness that knows itself" would never find a place in it.

Makes sense. Consciousness obviously can't know itself, since consciousness is how we know everything else. If consciousness could know itself, actually it wouldn't be consciousness, but a separate object. Awareness and consciousness are the same thing.

So if the true self (Advaita) or true non-self (Buddhism) are considered to be pure awareness, then it isn't possible for us to know the self, but only to be the self. 

The quality of mental agency is really the one that leads to contraction; the sense of effort that comes from hallucinating a goal-state -- the specific experiential quality emerging from the process of quashing prediction error on the mental level -- is what counts.

Whenever you identify with pure awareness, none of this is the case: In a way, you are like a conscious organism running a new operating system. This organism is now employing a different kind of ontology for segmenting reality, navigating the world under a nonegoic unit of identification. If this is correct the remaining MPE [Minimal Phenomenal Experience] mode should be characterized by an all-pervading quality of effortlessness.

Using our new tools, we can also say that the phenomenology sometimes described as "true self" is one in which the experience of knowing is no longer contracted. It is one example of the shift from the first-person perspective of an active, information-hungry self to the zero-person perspective of knowingness itself -- that is, to an uncontracted version of the phenomenal signature of knowing.

The first-person perspective is the perspective that you take when you ascribe conscious experiences to yourself using the first-person pronoun: I myself am having this thought, I hear music from a distance, I am observing my breath, or I am trying to meditate.

...Your first-person perspective, on the other hand, is your very own, individual perspective on the world; it is what makes conscious experience subjective, what makes it seem to be intrinsically tied to a single, knowing self. 

...Pure awareness, whenever it has transformed into the all-encompassing nonegoic unit of identification, strongly resembles what Thomas Nagel called "the objective self" or the "true self," which he described as "the subject of a perspectiveless conception of reality."

...Thus, what was previously outside becomes a new inside. World and body gain a certain quality of virtuality and interiority, for they are no longer independent of consciousness.

Narrative self-deception is one way we fool ourselves

Each of us is the hero or villain in a story of our own making. That's admittedly a simplistic summary of a psychological principle, but it isn't far from the truth.

I'm certainly aware of this in regard to myself. I have a way of looking upon my 75 years of living that, by and large, puts me in a positive light.

Which isn't surprising, since I prefer praise to blame, so why would I choose to view the events of my life in a fashion that draws attention to my weaknesses instead of my strengths? Of course, some people do this for their own psychological reasons.

Philosopher Thomas Metzinger addresses this subject in one of the longer chapters in his book, The Elephant and the Blind. It's titled "Emptiness and Fullness."

Emptiness, by the way, is defined by Metzinger in its usual sense of voidness, not in the Buddhist sense of things lacking inherent existence. He makes this clear early on in the chapter. So emptiness can mean an openness to knowing in the context of pure awareness, the subject of his book.

Many of the meditators who completed Metzinger's survey about their meditative experiences claimed that they were able to overcome past patterns of knowing and thinking, arriving at a state of "epistemic openness" or emptiness.

In this chapter, Metzinger talks at length about an obstacle to this, narrative self-deception. He notes that our search for meaning is a foundation for that sort of self-deception. For we imbue events with a flavor that doesn't exist in them as they are in themselves.

As we have seen, the first of these deep needs is to develop a successful and sustainable strategy of meaning-making -- to find a more permanent solution to the constant struggle to make sense of life events. This need is shared not only by meditators, but by all those who are not existentially indifferent.

...One simple conceptual point to make at the outset is that words and sentences have meaning, but events don't. Events just happen. Events as such, as well as whole chains of events connecting birth and death, are intrinsically meaningless  -- but not in the emotionally negative sense that we may attribute to the idea of life as a whole being meaningless. 

So we humans have to supply the meaning to events in our life. The basic way we do this is through telling stories to ourselves.

Human beings are storytellers, and they stabilize the fabric of their long-term self-model by creating a permanent inner monologue. They identify themselves with Harding's "little one" (chapter 8), the entity constantly chattering on about all its extremely interesting and important perceptions and thoughts and emotions to keep the long-term self alive. There is no better way to understand this fact, to observe its continuous fight for survival under the microscope of mindfulness, than to participate in a silent meditation retreat.

For many people, their spiritual or religious path becomes an important part of their life story.

A story encourages us to hallucinate cause-and-effect relationships between events in our narrative ("Nothing ever happens by chance!") and detect patterns in the way they affected us ("I have always been interested in this!"). 

Most of all, a life story offers a chance to insert a single, overarching theme that holds everything together, a normative metacontent that allows us to morally evaluate ourselves and others with the goal of enhancing and sustaining our sense of self-worth.

The romanticism of "being on a path" is a good example of this. Now we can judge, negotiate, plan for the future, and thereby continuously stabilize the long-term self model. There is a way of life, a general theme. The story has a beginning and a possible end; it has characters, episodes, a setting -- and like a dream that has become fully lucid, it even has a plot that can apparently be controlled.

Metzinger says that for spiritual seekers, all this gives rise to a sense of having found something.

Many of us try to find something: something that allows us to live in an insane world without going insane ourselves. Something that creates coherence.

...My first point is that, for many committed practitioners, the core motivation allowing them to sustain a regular practice over many years may consist to a considerable degree in the fact that they have found something, that they have adopted a certain belief system (or joined a group or spiritual movement, identified with a certain lineage or teacher, etc.), and not solely in the intrinsic force of the pure-awareness experience itself. This belief system, the sense of community, the acceptance of an authority, and the ongoing project of making-meaning may be among the major sources of motivation. 

All that is fine. It helps us to feel grounded in a world that often seems to lack any firm foundation. But there are some downsides, including narrative self-deception.

In meditation, as elsewhere in life, what we experience isn't some mythical "things as they actually are," but things as we conceive them to be in the context of the story that our mind fashions about the life we've lived, are living, and will live in the future.

The autobiographical self-model is not a thing, but rather a process. It is also not a little man in the head. This process is mostly subpersonal: to a large extent, it is not something that you do, but an automatic process taking place under the hood, in your unconscious brain. The process constantly tries to minimize surprise and to keep a certain layer in your self-model as coherent as possible (namely, the layer that portrays your life as a whole).

...The model expands into time, creating a past and a future. Whenever this layer is conscious, it can function as what we have termed the "unit of identification." You may think that you simply are your life story, which springs from the ongoing search for thematic stability. But you may also begin to hallucinate an observer, an active narrator, or a stable protagonist within the story itself -- an entity that reflects on and monitors the whole process.

...The good news is that there is probably no better tool than the practice of meditation itself to help us really understand the mechanisms of self-deception that continuously express themselves as the subtle workings of one's own mind.

...Classical insight meditation, for example, consists in nothing other than observing the actual process of narrative self-deception at work: Every single thought arising is an attempt to generate a new self-model, to become "temporally thick," to escape the wholeness of the present moment. 

...Life just happens -- and meditation practice is a perfect way to become aware of that fact.

 

Feeling you know isn't the same as knowing

One of the benefits of reading a book about pure awareness by a philosopher, instead of someone who identifies with a religion or spiritual practice, is that you get a more realistic perspective.

A good example is that Thomas Metzinger, the author of The Elephant and the Blind, speaks in an early chapter about the difference between a feeling of knowing and actual knowing.

This should be obvious to anyone, which really is everyone, who has confidently believed that something was true until they learned that it wasn't. 

Metzinger calls this the E-fallacy. His glossary defines it this way:

A logical error consisting in falsely concluding that a consciously experienced feeling of knowing is a reliable indicator of actually possessing knowledge. 

As such, verbal reports referring to a phenomenal signature of knowing or an intuitive sense of "just knowing" do not imply or license any theoretical claims about consciousness itself, the metaphysical nature of reality, the "true" self, and so on, because all such claims need an independent epistemic justification. 

A related error is the C-fallacy.

A logical error consisting in falsely concluding that just because something feels like the very essence of consciousness, it is also a reliable indicator of actually being in touch with consciousness per se. 

As such, verbal reports referring to having experienced an "essence" or "pure consciousness in and of itself" do not imply or license any claims as to the actual existence of such an essence because all such claims need an independent epistemic justification.

This is a theme I've harped on many times over the years, though not in the rather rigorous way Metzinger describes the fallacies. The simpler way I like to put it is along these lines.

Everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, but not their own facts. If someone has an experience of God, spirit, soul, heaven, angels, higher consciousness, or whatever, wonderful. Tell us about it. Personal stories are interesting. But don't claim you've grasped an aspect of objective reality unless you can back up that claim with demonstrable evidence. 

A corollary is that you shouldn't get annoyed if someone else asks for that evidence after you've made an objective truth-claim that's based only on your subjective personal experience. 

Metzinger says this in a chapter on "Suchness," a familiar Buddhist concept of what is. 

Before we move on, please recall how the phenomenal experience of knowing does not entail that one really possesses knowledge. A strong and robust experience of knowing, even of absolute certainty, can occur during hallucinations, in dreams, and during psychiatric diseases or epileptic seizures. In chapter 7, we termed this the "E-fallacy."

Equally, the exerience of having "direct" or "immediate" knowledge of what is does not imply any kind of justification or directness from an epistemological perspective. Epistemologically, there is no certainty here. All we have is the phenomenal experience of immediacy, and "suchness" is being used here solely as a phenomenological concept. 

In connection with the experience of suchness, Rob Burbea also has made clear for contemplative practice itself that any remaining form of intuitive realism is an obstacle that must be overcome.

In interpreting all the reports in this chapter, therefore, we must be careful not to jump to overly naive and simplistic interpretations of "direct perception" and the reported phenomenology of nonconceptually seeing what is. The experiences themselves are simply much too interesting.

Experiences are real. For the person having them. For other people, there's no way to know either (1) what the experience really was like for the person having it, or (2) if the experience points to a fact about objective reality.

Someone who is a big fan of Taylor Swift likely will have a marvelous time at one of her concerts. Their experience has a strong chance of being highly memorable, something to be cherished for a lifetime. Someone who can't stand Taylor Swift likely will have a horrible time at one of her concerts. Their experience has a strong chance of being highly forgettable, something to be banished from memory as rapidly as possible. 

It would be crazy to argue that a Taylor Swift concert is either objectively pleasurable or painful. That depends on the experience of every attendee. Same applies to conclusions about the appeal of religions, mystical practices, or spiritual paths. That depends on the experience of every devotee. 

Consciousness is the cosmos awakening to itself

Though in the past I've dismissed sentiments such as the title of this blog post as being unduly New Age'y, today I changed my mind. I guess it depends on the context of sayings such as Consciousness is the cosmos awakening to itself. 

So here's the context for my newfound positive feeling toward those words.

A few days ago I saw a mention in the book I've been writing about recently, The Elephant and the Blind by Thomas Metzinger, of a book by David Hinton, Awakened Cosmos: The Mind of Classical Chinese Poetry. Since I'm attracted both to Chinese philosophy (Taoism and Zen, mainly) and poetry in general, I decided to order the book from Amazon.

I started reading it today. The book starts out with:

Poetry is the Cosmos awakened to itself. Narrative, reportage, explanation, idea: language is the medium of self-identity, and we normally live within that clutch of identity, identity that seems to look out at and think about the Cosmos as if from some outside space.

But poetry pares language down to a bare minimum, thereby opening it to silence. And it is there in the margins of silence that poetry finds its deepest possibilities -- for there it can render dimensions of consciousness that are much more expansive that that identity-center, primal dimensions of consciousness as the Cosmos awakened to itself.

At least this is true for classical Chinese poetry, shaped as it is by Taoist and Ch'an (Zen) Buddhist thought into a form of spiritual practice. In its deepest possibilities, its inner wilds, poetry is the Cosmos awakened to itself -- and the history of that awakening begins where the Cosmos begins.

Hinton then spends a couple of pages describing that beginning, and what came after the beginning, in pleasingly scientific terms that struck me as almost completely accurate (maybe I'm wrong about the "almost"), given our current understanding of the Cosmos -- or at least that possibly limited corner of the Cosmos that is our universe. The multiverse is a distinct, though unproven, possibility.

In the beginning, there was neither light nor space -- and for consciousness, they are the essentials. During its first moments, the Cosmos was a primordial plasma of subatomic particles. The particles expanded and cooled until the particles could bond to form the lightest atoms, hydrogen and helium, whereupon the Cosmos became transparent to radiation such as light.

Eventually, hydrogen and helium began condensing into proto-galactic clouds under the gossamer influence of gravity, and chance fluctuations in the density of those clouds led some local areas to intensify their condensation until pressure and heat became so fierce that hydrogen atoms began fusing together. 

In that process, which can only be described as magical, stars were born. And with those stars came the elemental dimensions of consciousness: space and light and the visible.

Those dimensions began to evolve. The stars grew old, like anything else, and died. In the furnace of their old age and explosive deaths, they forged heavier elements and scattered them into space, forming nebular clouds that in turn condensed into new stars.

It is the heartbeat of the Cosmos, that steady pulse of stellar birth and death, gravity's long swell and rhythm of absence and presence, presence and absence. And in the third star generation, our planet was formed, rich in those heavy elements. It cooled and evolved until eventually water appeared: hydrogen, created during the original cosmic expansion, combining with oxygen, one of those heavier elements created in the cauldrons of dying stars.

Water formed mirrored pools in hollows on the planet's rocky surface, and in these pools the Cosmos turned toward itself for the first time here. It became "aware" of itself in those mirrored openings deep as all space and light, deep as the visible itself. 

Living organisms evolved and eventually developed receptors that allowed them to sense whether or not light was present. Those light receptors provided decisive selective advantages and so developed into more and more sophisticated forms. The lens evolved as a means to concentrate light on receptor cells, thereby making creatures more sensitive to weak light. 

This innovation eventually led to image-forming eyes, which combine a lens with highly specialized receptor cells. And with that, the Cosmos turned toward itself once again, eventually giving shape to consciousness, that spatiality the eye's mirrored transparency conjures inside animals.

It was a miraculous development: the material universe, which had been perfectly opaque, was now open to itself, awakened to itself!

Although ancient Chinese poets and philosophers didn't describe it in these scientific terms, this same sense of consciousness as the Cosmos open to itself was an operating assumption for them -- though perhaps here existence is a better word than Cosmos, as it suggests the sense of all reality as a single tissue.

...The abiding aspiration of spiritual and artistic practice in ancient China was to cultivate consciousness as that existence-tissue Cosmos open to itself, awakened to itself: looking at itself, hearing and touching itself, tasting and smelling itself, and also thinking itself, feeling itself -- all in the singular ways made possible by the individuality of each particular person.

This is consciousness in the open, wild and woven into the generative Cosmos: wholesale belonging. As we will see, it was recognized as our most essential nature in Taoist and Ch'an Buddhist thought, the foundational structure of consciousness for artist-intellectuals in ancient China: poets, painters, calligraphers, philosophers.

And it seems a beautiful, even essential alternative -- both philosophical and ecological -- to the disconnectedness that structures consciousness in the West.

Nobody is watching the movie of your life, or mine, or anybody's

Every morning I try to read one of the short chapters in Thomas Metzinger's fascinating book, The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness -- Philosophy, Science, and 500+ Experiential Reports.

I particularly enjoy passages that intuitively appeal to me, yet rationally challenge my ability to comprehend exactly what Metzinger is saying. Below I'll share an example from the "Nonidentification" chapter. 

First, though, this introductory mention in the chapter of the traditional movie theatre metaphor.

One classic metaphor for this process [of de-identification], found in many places in the popular literature on meditation, is the image of being fully immersed in a movie and then suddenly realizing that you are not the hero, disengaging from the perspective from which the story seems to be told.

Metzinger then says "we can also imagine another scenario," offering a possible variation on the classic metaphor.

Imagine the cinema is dark and completely empty. All the seats are empty. Running on the screen is a movie of someone watching a movie, a person who is deeply immersed in the plot of this movie-in-the-movie most of the time, but who sometimes has glimpses and vague intuitions that she might actually not be the protagonist, but might instead be a passive viewer in some sort of cinema.

Or that she might even be the whole cinema itself. Not seated in the middle, but somehow everywhere. From time to time, the viewer in the movie even has fleeting and slightly complacent philosophical fantasies that she might be some sort of empty space in which the movie becomes aware of itself, or that she might be the beam of light coming from the projector.

Suspended in the dark, as it were, this movie containing the movie-in-the-movie is the only thing that can be seen. But nobody is watching. Now, very slowly, the light is being turned on, in slow motion as it were. The cinema as a whole emerges out of the darkness, slowly fading in, empty seats and all. Now the lights are on. The movie is still running. Nobody sees it. 

I'm not sure if this additional passage from the "Nonidentification" chapter bears on the above modified metaphor, but it sure is provocative. Turns upside down some common assumptions meditators have.

Perhaps you have already discovered how, phenomenologically, it is not we who get identified or fused with some content (e.g., an arising thought)? In my own experience, I find that it is awareness that gets identified.

"We" -- as the agentive sense of self -- come into existence only after the fact, after awareness has already contracted into a specific content (like the mental image of a future goal state to be reached, a subtle feeling of mental effort, the ensuing sense of control, etc.) -- after, as it were, open awareness has already been lost to itself. 

The breakdown is not your fault. You are not the cause, but the effect. You are the way in which the brain explains away something that was slightly unexpected. That "something" is the surprise of suddenly being able to control a part of the world -- your body, your attention, your thoughts. 

Might as well throw in one more passage relating to this theme.

From a scientific perspective, "being conscious" or "appearing" is a property of a complex, internal model in the brain: What really is conscious is simply a certain part of an organism's model of the world, a specific processing layer in its internal model of reality -- which typically also includes the organism itself plus other agents in the world... At the very least, this is a rational and evidence-based theory, one possible view from the outside.

But from the organism's inner perspective, things are very different. The model is transparent; therefore, the representational medium is invisible. Yet this model is all the organism has. This means that what it experiences is experienced not as a world-model or some sort of inner image, but simply as the world itself.

Consciousness is the appearance of a world; there is full immersion, plus the phenomenology of direct realism. In addition, because the internal model is not being experienced as a model, it now is the organism that seems to be conscious, not the world as a whole or some complex image in the organism's head.

Phenomenologically, the property of "being aware" has been contracted. Now, consciousness is something personal. Now you are conscious.

The Elephant and the Blind -- a provocative book about pure consciousness

Proving my dedication to the study of consciousness (or maybe my addiction to books), a few days ago my $80 copy of Thomas Metzinger's 600 page book, The Elephant and the Blind, arrived. 

I had to buy the paperback version because I can't read a nonfiction book without a pen and highlighter in hand. But the book can be read for free via a download from the publisher, the MIT press. Just click on the Open Access tab.

Metzinger is a philosopher who wrote a book about the mind, The Ego Tunnel, that I enjoyed. Here's some of the blog posts I wrote about the book (the last one has links to all the posts).

Stuck in "The Ego Tunnel" without a self 
Laying bare how the ego tunnel is dug
My review of "The Ego Tunnel" -- 5 stars

I've just started reading The Elephant and the Blind. It looks really interesting. This is the Amazon description of the book.

An engaging and insightful journey into human consciousness.

What if our goal had not been to land on Mars, but in pure consciousness? The experience of pure consciousness—what does it look like? What is the essence of human consciousness? In The Elephant and the Blind, influential philosopher Thomas Metzinger, one of the world's leading researchers on consciousness, brings together more than 500 experiential reports to offer the world's first comprehensive account of states of pure consciousness. Drawing on a large psychometric study of meditators in 57 countries, Metzinger focuses on “pure awareness” in meditation—the simplest form of experience there is—to illuminate the most fundamental aspects of how consciousness, the brain, and illusions of self all interact.

Starting with an exploration of existential ease and ending on Bewusstseinskultur, a culture of consciousness, Metzinger explores the increasingly non-egoic experiences of silence, wakefulness, and clarity, of bodiless body-experience, ego-dissolution, and nondual awareness. From there, he assembles a big picture—the elephant in the parable, from which the book’s title comes—of what it would take to arrive at a minimal model explanation for conscious experience and create a genuine culture of consciousness. Freeing pure awareness from new-age gurus and old religions, The Elephant and the Blind combines personal reports of pure consciousness with incisive analysis to address the whole consciousness community, from neuroscientists to artists, and its accessibility echoes the author’s career-long commitment to widening access to philosophy itself.

After reading the initial chapters, I decided to head to the final chapter, "The Elephant: What is Pure Awareness?" It turns out that it isn't exactly pure, so it'd be more accurate to say Purer Awareness. Here's five possible answers Metzinger gives. I've shortened some of the answers.

P1 Contentlessness MPE [Minimal Phenomenal Experience] can occur in full-absorption episodes as the only kind of phenomenal character that can later be reported; in these cases, pure awareness appears as a stand-alone, singular feature.

P2 No-thought The second less radical, but equally canonical reading of "purity" refers to the absence of all mental conflict, noise, and perturbation. In a simplified reading, it is the absence of all discursive thought, memory, planning, and "spontaneous-task unrelated thought" like daydreaming or mind-wandering.

P3 Clarity In this answer, pure awareness is the experience of a clear and unobstructed space of knowing... The clarity feature has been described for centuries and is simply the nonconceptual experience of one's own epistemic capacity per se, of an inner space that is pure in the sense of being wide open and lucid at the same time.

P4 Suchness This interpretation refers to the phenomenology of "pure perception"... Here, the conscious experience is of perceptual content spontaneously arising, but with a complete lack of conceptual overlay, including time experience and implicit judgments as to the "existence" or "nonexistence" of what is perceived. It is this lack that makes perceptual awareness pure.

P5 Nonduality In chapters 27 and 29, we saw that one way of defining "purity" is as conscious experience lacking subject/object structure. In this sense, pure awareness is a nondual mode of experience that lacks an epistemic agent model and any sort of egoic first-person perspective.

Why "being at the eye center" isn't possible

In my preceding post, "Joan Tollifson on the Imaginary Vantage Point. Brilliant observations," I shared quotations from one of her books that clearly demonstrated why it makes no sense for a person at one of her talks to claim that they were able to concentrate their mind at a vantage point that enabled them to be aware of the world from a detached distance that they considered to be positive for them.

Just a bit of clear thinking illustrates why this couldn't actually be the case. Meaning, this person wasn't really concentrating their mind at a certain point in their consciousness. All they were doing was thinking or believing that this was happening, and that thought or belief provided them some comfort.

Awareness, or consciousness, is the only way we know anything about the world inside and outside of ourselves. Absent awareness, there's no world for us. And so far as anyone knows -- neuroscientists, mystics, meditators, anyone -- awareness is singular, not plural, for every individual. Meaning, you and I don't have several independent awarenesses or consciousnesses. 

Sure, split brain patients do have their awareness divided in a certain sense, because if the connection between the two halves of the brain is severed, each half has a somewhat different perception of the world. Since language is primarily in the left half of the brain, if a image is presented to the right half, the patient won't be able to describe that in words.

But my understanding is that the split-brain patient still has a single consciousness that enables them to live pretty much normally. Meaning, they have a split brain, but not split consciousness. So says a 2017 research study.

So Tollifson is on solid ground when she points out that any notion of being aware of awareness, or of being conscious of consciousness, or of having a mental vantage point to observe the mind, is just conceptual thinking, not anything real in the brain/mind. This makes a large share of religious and mystical teachings a bunch of bullshit.

For example, the religious group I was a member of for 35 years, Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), taught that meditation should be practiced by concentrating at the eye center. You know, that supposedly sacred spot in the forehead between the eyes, often termed the Third Eye.

This is similar to the person Tollifson engaged with believing that they could focus their mind at a vantage point. The problem with this is the same problem with believing it's possible to concentrate at the eye center. Since awareness is singular, not plural, everything we experience is as that singular awareness. Repeat, everything. 

You can't focus your mind at the eye center. There's no such thing as the eye center. That's a concept within awareness. Again, you can believe you're focusing your mind at the eye center, or fantasize you're doing this. But that believing and fantasizing is occurring within awareness, as is everything else you experience. 

If it was possible to be aware of awareness, obviously there would have to be (1) awareness, and (2) another awareness that's aware of the first awareness. Of course, if we then wanted to be aware that we were aware of awareness, we'd need a third awareness that's aware of the awareness that's aware of the other awareness.

The problem with this is that it leads to a never-ending cascade of multiple awarenesses, something that doesn't exist, since I've just shown that awareness is singular, not plural. The same problem arises with believing that it is possible for the mind to be focused at the eye center. Who or what is doing the focusing? Another mind? 

Sam Harris, who has a Ph.D. in neuroscience and a wealth of experience with meditation, primarily of the Dzogchen variety, speaks on the guided meditations in his Waking Up app about this issue. He'll frequently ask if it seems that consciousness is inside the head, which is much the same as it seeming that consciousness is inside the eye center.

Harris points out that the sensation of consciousness being inside the head is part of the contents of consciousness. In other words, each of us is simply conscious. We're conscious, or aware, of many different things. One of those things is that consciousness appears to be inside the head, that we're looking out at the world from a vantage point that seems to be at the eye center or forehead.

But again, this sensation of a vantage point is part of the contents of consciousness. Thus Harris agrees with Tollifson that any sense of awareness or consciousness being localized, here rather than there, is within awareness or consciousness. Meaning, we can't look at our awareness or consciousness as an object that can be manipulated, like an apple or rock. 

Awareness or consciousness is how the world is experienced. There's no "we" or "me" outside of awareness. A simple true idea with profound implications. Tollifson writes:

We imagine "me trying to merge with the flow, or be in the flow, or understand the flow. But actually there is only flow. There's no way in or out and there's nothing separate to be in or out. But it doesn't seem that way because the very nature of thought is to divide up and freeze what is actually indivisible and fluid. 

Consciousness is mysterious, but it's almost certainly not supernatural

Consciousness seemingly should be easy to understand.

After all, every living human with a normally functioning brain experiences consciousness from the inside, so to speak. Meaning, everything we know, including what we know about ourselves, has to be consciously experienced or it doesn't exist for us. 

That includes the entire universe, with hundreds of billions of galaxies, each containing on average about a hundred billion stars. If there was no consciousness in the universe, all that would be a big bunch of nothing.

Assuming it could even be called "nothing," given that it's impossible for conscious beings like us to understand what, if anything, the universe would be like if no consciousness was aware of it.

There's plenty of ideas about consciousness, but no consensus about either what it consists of or how it comes to be. This description by philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel in his book The Weirdness Of The World does a pretty good job of describing consciousness. 

To be conscious is to have a stream of experience of some sort or other -- some sensory experiences, maybe, or some affective experiences of pleasure or displeasure, relief or pain. Possibly not much more than this.

To be conscious is to have some form of "phenomenology," as that term is commonly used in twenty-first century anglophone philosophy. Using Thomas Nagel's famous phrasing, there's "something it's like" (most people think) to be a dog or a monkey and nothing it's like (most people think) to be a photon or a feather.

If garden snails are conscious, there's something it's like to be them in this sense. They have, maybe, simple tactile experiences of the stuff that they are sliming across, maybe some olfactory experiences of what they are smelling and nibbling, maybe some negative affective experiences when injured.

Garden snails are mentioned because this passage is in a chapter called "Is a garden snail conscious?" Schwitzgebel doesn't draw a firm conclusion, being content to describe the reasons for thinking Yes, No, or Who Knows?

There's a lot we don't know about consciousness, so it isn't surprising that it's difficult to decide whether a garden snail is conscious. It's easier to decide that dogs, cats, other mammals, and our fellow primates (monkeys, chimpanzees, etc.) are conscious.

However, Schwitzgebel raises the interesting question of whether self-awareness is necessary for consciousness. Or at least, for the awareness that one is conscious. He writes:

Whenever you are conscious, it seems that you are aware that you are conscious; consciousness seems to come along with some sort of grasp upon itself. This isn't a matter of reaching an explicit judgment in words or attending vividly to the fact of your consciousness; it's more like a secondary acquaintance with one's own experience as it is happening. 

But one thing that Schwitzgebel doesn't question, nor does virtually every other scientifically-minded writer about consciousness that I've come across, is whether consciousness is supernatural. 

It just seems obvious that consciousness is physical. I've noted this obviousness many times in blog posts, noting that if someone doesn't believe this, they can conduct a painful experiment: have someone hit you on the head with a strong blow of a baseball bat and see how that affects your consciousness. 

(Gentler approaches: have a surgery with anesthesia; imbibe some alcohol, marijuana, or any other psychoactive drug; drink caffeinated coffee.)

Physical causes alter consciousness. So this decidedly points toward consciousness being a physical phenomenon.

Those who believe that consciousness is supernatural -- I used to entertain this notion, in large part because I don't like the prospect of being dead and gone forever -- are unable to reconcile this hypothesis with the clear and convincing evidence that consciousness arises from goings-on in a brain or brain-like structure (I'm open to the idea that artificial intelligences could be conscious one day).

As difficult as it is to fathom how consciousness arises in humans from brain neurons connected in sufficient complexity, it's much more difficult to imagine how supernatural soul or spirit could (1) manifest consciousness, and (2) do so in a manner accessible to people who exist as physical beings with a physical brain. 

I've never seen a cogent explanation about how these things could be possible.

If anyone is able to share such an explanation, do so in a comment on this post. Like I said, I'd love it if consciousness existed after the physical body is no more, but I've come to the conclusion that this is wishful thinking, not reality.

To be real, consciousness must cause something. Sorry, supernatural believers.

People throw around strange conceptions about consciousness. On this blog, and elsewhere. Most of the strangeness comes from those religiously and supernaturally inclined, who put forward notions of consciousness that bear no resemblance to reality.

I'm familiar with this sort of w00-woo, because I used to engage in it myself.

I've finished reading neuroscientist Christof Koch's latest book, Then I Am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It.  Not surprisingly, he frequently views consciousness through the lens of integrated information theory, a theory that Koch has embraced and contributed to.

Here's passages from a concluding chapter where Koch describes what consciousness is, and isn't. This will challenge those who see consciousness as something supernatural, non-physical, or ethereal to describe why Koch is wrong and they are right.

Consciousness is not a clever algorithm. Its beating heart is intrinsic causal power, not computation. Causal power is not something intangible, ethereal, but something physical -- the extent to which the system's recent past specifies its present state (cause power) and the extent to which this current state specifies its immediate future (effect power).

And here's the rub: causal power, the ability to influence oneself, cannot be simulated. Not now or in the future. It must be built into the system, part of the physics of the system. 

To illustrate this intuitively, consider computer code that simulates the field equations of Albert Einstein's celebrated theory of general relativity, relating mass to spacetime curvature. The software accurately models the supermassive black hole, called Sagittarius A*, located at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

This black hole exerts such extensive gravitational effects on its surroundings that nothing, not even light, can escape its attraction. To absolutely no one's surprise, the astrophysicist simulating the black hole doesn't get sucked into their laptop by the simulated gravitational field. 

Of course they don't. Why should they? This seemingly absurd question emphasizes the difference between the real and the simulated. For if the simulation is faithful to reality, spacetime should warp around the laptop, creating a black hole that swallows everything around it. But it doesn't. Why not?

The answer is that gravity is not a computation. If it were, then the physics simulation engine should affect the gravitational field around the computer. Gravity has extrinsic causal powers, attracting anything with mass. Imitating a black hole's causal powers requires an actual superdense sphere about four million times the mass of our sun.

Causal power can't be simulated; it must be constituted. Aspects of gravity can be simulated but not its raw causal power.

The different between the real and the simulated is their respective causal powers. That's why it doesn't rain inside a computer simulating a rainstorm. The software is functionally identical to weather, yet lacks its causal powers to blow and to turn vapor into rain drops. Causal powers, the ability to make or take a difference, must be built into the system.

...A human brain simulation running on a digital computer can, in principle, do anything a human can do. However, it would not experience anything. It would be an intelligent zombie.

Once again, it is important to emphasize that the brain experiences life not by dint of a soul-like substance but by its massive intrinsic causal power.

"Facts and the law" applies to religiosity as well as the justice system

I don't know much about how the justice system works in other countries, but here in the United States one of the most frequently heard phrases is "facts and the law." 

Those words were used a lot by commentators on the criminal trial of Donald Trump, which ended last Thursday with a 12 person jury deciding unanimously, as is required in criminal trials, that Trump was guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in order to disguise the fact that a $130,000 payment to a porn star was to keep her quiet just before the 2016 presidential election about a sexual affair with Trump that occurred four months after his wife, Melania gave birth to their son, Barron.

Prosecutors had to convince the jury that both the facts and the law merited a conviction, while the defense team tried to cast doubt on the facts presented by the prosecution. But here's an interesting thing: the defense couldn't argue that the law was wrong or doubtful, because the law is what it is, until it is changed.

There's something beautiful about this.

The justice system, when it works correctly (it has flaws, just as every social system does), is a marvelous way of resolving disputes in a reasonable, measured manner. Each side presents its case, the facts of the matter as they see them, before a judge or jury. Then the judge or jury decides the extent to which those facts are believable, and applies that assessment of the facts to the appropriate legal standard. 

To my mind much of the beauty here is akin to why sporting events are so pleasurable to watch. Every sport, such as baseball, has rules. Those are the "law." Umpires or referees observe what players are doing, the "facts." Then they rule on how the facts apply to the law. For example, if a pitcher misses the strike zone four times, the batter being pitched to is entitled to a walk, putting them on first base.

While players and coaches may disagree with a decision, usually they don't, or the disagreement is mild. By contrast, what drives me and others crazy about politics is how Donald Trump, an extremely poor loser, has complained about the 2020 election that he lost to Joe Biden being rigged against him, even though there's no evidence, no facts, that this is true. 

When it comes to religiosity, both the facts and the law typically are disputed. As I have noted many times on this blog, and will surely do so again many times in the future, there's a lack of demonstrable evidence that a supernatural realm even exists, much less that it has certain characteristics claimed by every religion -- all of which describe the supernatural in their own unique fashion. 

So both facts and the law are a matter of debate in religiosity. There's no way to adjudicate claims and counter-claims -- Jesus is the Son of God sent to absolve our sins; no he isn't! -- in such an amorphous situation. This leaves religions in the realm of personal belief, not impersonal facts. 

Complicating things even more, believers in the supernatural are unable to come up with a coherent explanation for how an immaterial entity, such as God, is able to interact or communicate with material entities, such as we humans. In my first book, I observed that this is akin to supposedly immaterial ghosts being able to show signs of their presence by turning on a light or knocking on a door.

As much as I'd like the supernatural to exist (reality would be a lot more interesting if it did), the laws of nature as they're currently understood by science fail to show any solid evidence, any facts, that this is the case. Thus both the facts and physical laws argue against believing in the innocence, so to speak, or religiosity.

Today I read this passage in neuroscientist Christof Koch's book, Then I am Myself the World: What Consciousness Is and How to Expand It. This is from a section on near-death experiences.

There are persistent reports in the popular media that patients who undergo near-death experiences have "flat-lined," with their electroencephalograms (EEGs) showing no significant electrical activity. A completely inert brain would indicate a brain in a deep coma, a brain that had lost its causal powers and that certainly wouldn't feel anything.

Therefore, according to this narrative, "conventional medicine" (voiced with dripping sarcasm) fails to explain their visions. Instead, we just have to accept that these patients have been granted a vision of the Afterlife.

I am extremely skeptical, as I've never seen a patient with a flat, isoelectric EEG soon thereafter wake up and claim to have been conscious. A key difficulty is aligning the clock time of the near-death experience with the EEG record, given the patient's confused recollections hours later, often under sedatives.

Remember what I called the neuroscientist's dictum, "No brain, never mind"? Neuroscience operates under the hypothesis that all thoughts, memories, percepts, and experiences are an uneluctable consequence of the natural extrinsic and intrinsic causal powers of the brain -- not supernatural ones. 

Unless there is extraordinary compelling evidence to the contrary, I see no reason to abandon the principle that a silenced brain does not support consciousness. 

Note that Koch called this a hypothesis. That's the openness of science. If compelling fresh facts come along that argue for overturning our current understanding of the laws of nature, then some of those laws may need to be modified. 

That's how the justice system works also. It's fairly common to have a guilty verdict overturned when new evidence, such as a DNA test that wasn't available during the original trial, shows the innocence of someone who was convicted of a crime.

But simply saying so doesn't make it so. Not in the law, and not in religiosity. Facts matter. A lot.

The mystery of consciousness actually isn't so mysterious

The history of science shows us that many inexplicable phenomena, which often were considered to have supernatural causes (Thor makes thunder!) actually have natural causes. 

I strongly suspect that the same will prove to be true of consciousness. While most scientists view consciousness to be a product of the brain, some, especially those with a philosophical bent, have a dualistic perspective where mind and body are separate entities.

This, of course, was how Descartes saw things way back in the 1600s, believing that the mind was nonphysical. Most religions share that opinion, though soul sometimes is substituted for mind, or added to it as another nonphysical entity.

I think it'd be great if the mind or soul was nonphysical, as that'd markedly increase the odds that when we die, we're not dead and gone forever. Our body is, but we'd live on. (Hopefully in a more pleasant state of existence, though that's not guaranteed by religions.)

Today I came across an interesting story on Neurosciencenews, "Rethinking the mystery of consciousness." Here's the summary that starts the story off.

Summary: A new study challenges traditional views on consciousness, arguing that our perceptions of mind-body separation are influenced by psychological biases.

The researchers used experiments involving the well-known thought exercise “Mary and the Zombie” to illustrate how our intuitions about consciousness are shaped by innate dualism. Participants’ responses suggest that while we often view consciousness as a mystical, separate entity, it significantly registers in physical brain activities.

Findings contend these biases mislead us into perceiving consciousness as more mysterious than it truly is, advocating for a reevaluation of its roots in simple brain functions.

Key Facts:

(1) Berent’s experiments reveal that people’s perceptions of consciousness can dramatically shift, suggesting that consciousness may not be the ethereal phenomenon we often consider it to be.

(2) She argues that evolutionary psychology and inherent dualistic tendencies shape our views on consciousness, making us believe it exists beyond the physical.

(3) The study highlights that even profound experiences, like Mary seeing color for the first time, have tangible effects on brain activity, reinforcing the physical nature of consciousness.

Source: Northeastern University

Now, to be clear, "Mary" and "Zombies" are actually two separate thought exercises. I find the case of Mary discussed in the story to be more interesting, but here's my take on Zombies.

These are (obviously) hypothetical creatures who outwardly are indistinguishable from humans. They talk like us, they act like us, they behave like us. In other words they're a lot like a highly advanced Artificial Intelligence in a human body. The only difference between them and us is that they lack consciousness. 

So some philosophers take this to mean that consciousness must be nonphysical, since it is an add-on that really isn't needed to do everything we conscious humans do. To my mind the main argument against this view is pretty damn simple: Zombies don't exist!

The Rationally Speaking blogger, a philosophy professor, expresses that sentiment more expansively in a post, "I just don't get it. More on Mary and the Zombies."

None of the above should be construed as a dismissal of thought experiments (which, incidentally, have a place also in science), but rather as a clarification of what thought experiments are about. Hypothetical scenarios simply do not have the power to discover new facts about the world. If that were the case, then we wouldn’t need empirical science, or at the very least the role of empirical science would be greatly diminished in comparison with what it actually is (I’m looking at you, string theorists...).

Rather, thought experiments are helpful to bring to the fore our assumptions about certain matters, as well as to unpack the logical entailments of those assumptions. When well done, they represent good philosophy (or good science, depending on the experiment). But when one uses them beyond their scope to reach grand conclusions about what practitioners of another field can and cannot do, one ends up just looking silly.

Regarding Mary, she's a neuroscientist who knows everything how we humans perceive color. However, she's colorblind, so Mary has never actually seen the color red. She just understands how red is seen. Then one day Mary is able to see a rose in all its vibrant redness. This makes some people believe that the consciousness of red lies outside physical explanation. 

The experimenter named in the summary is psychology professor Iris Berent. The story says:

Influential philosopher David Chalmers famously won a bet in 2023 for claiming consciousness exists beyond the merely physical, Berent says.

But she says the question of where consciousness exists is a false one—and she has a new paper that presents her position.

In an article published in the Neuroscience of Consciousness, she argues that the debate stems from the delusional—albeit natural—biases in the way humans think about the separation, or lack thereof, between body and mind.

“One of the biases is dualism, intuitive dualism—the fact that we perceive minds as separate from our bodies.”

“The extent to which we look at consciousness and think that it is this really mysterious thing could very well arise from how we see it rather from what consciousness really is,” Berent says.

“Consciousness isn’t hard. Psychology is,” she says.

Berent found that when people are asked to think about how Mary is able to see color for the first time, they realize that some physical changes must have occurred in her brain. Neuronal wiring must have shifted so that whereas before she just saw in black and white, now she can see in color. 

Not mysterious at all. At least, the mystery of how Mary could come to see red is purely physical.

Berent says she decided to challenge these conclusions with two additional questions.

“The first question is kind of a reality check question, which is do they think Mary’s case is significant? Is it transformative? And everybody said, ‘Sure, it’s super transformative,'” Berent says.

“We also asked how likely is it that this experience will actually show up in her brain? If we scan her brain, will it light up? And it turns out that that’s exactly what people said. It will significantly register in the brain.”

“The point being, in the condition of the zombie people say, ‘no,’ (consciousness) is not physical,” Berent says. “And in Mary’s condition, people say it’s physical.”

“If people change their mind in this way, it can’t possibly be that in reality consciousness has changed. It must be that there is something within the human psyche that colors how we see consciousness.”

“For me, this means that we need to be really careful before we assume that there is any real mystery going on.”

One theory about what that something within the human psyche is, apart from wishful thinking that our mind or soul will live on after we die, and the sensation we have that our consciousness feels ethereal while our body feels physical, is that evolution favored the survival of creatures who could understand that other creatures have intentions just like they do, leading to the capacity of a "theory of mind" where we not only can observe what another creature is doing, but can grasp with a decent amount of accuracy what is on their mind, and so the foundation of future action. This fosters mind-body dualism.

Which leads to the final sentence in the story.

Consciousness likely comes down to electrochemical functions in the brain, she says. “It’s hard for psychological reasons.”

The delusion of believing in gurus and other gems from Joan Tollifson

In my daily morning reading, I bounce back and forth between books about science and books about spirituality/philosophy, because consuming too much of either is less pleasant for me than a balanced diet.

I've been enjoying several of Joan Tollifson's books for my spiritual/philosophical reading. She's become my favorite contemporary writer on Zen, Buddhism, nonduality, meditation, and such. I don't agree with everything she says. Which isn't surprising, since I don't agree with everything I say. 

For example, Tollifson considers awareness to be the Key Thing. (The quotes in this post are from Painting the Sidewalk with Water: Talks and Dialogues About Non-Duality.)

Awareness has no goals, no strategies. It seeks nothing and goes nowhere. It simply illuminates what is. Awareness is our True Nature -- the groundless ground that is always Here/Now.

I don't really disagree with this sentiment, but I wouldn't say awareness is our true nature. To me it is simply how we perceive reality. Without consciousness, reality doesn't exist for us. (I consider awareness and consciousness to be the same thing.)

I doubt that awareness is a thing, though, notwithstanding that last sentence. It's how we know things, without being a thing itself. So in that sense, I guess you could say it is indeed our true nature, since absent awareness, we'd have no nature at all. At least, to ourselves.

When she talks about dogmatic religiosity and gurus, on the other hand, I'm essentially 100% on board with what Tollifson says. Today I read this right-on passage about gurus.

There is a great deal of spiritual mythology about enlightened people who are imagined to be totally beyond ego.

I am not saying that there are not some remarkably clear, very awake people, but they all have poop chutes, as a friend of mind once astutely pointed out, and all too often these gurus who are supposedly so fully enlightened are also molesting young girls or embezzling money or drinking themselves to death or sending out hit men to kill or terrorize ex-devotees, and of course, the faithful devotees manage to convince themselves that all such behavior is either untrue or else it's some form of "crazy wisdom" that the guru is doing deliberately as some kind of teaching.

But really, what difference does it make who has more egoic moments or fewer egoic moments -- who cares about this? It's the phantom me again. All we can work with is what is actually arising right now. What good does it do to worry about how enlightened or deluded someone else is?

Given the title of my previous blog post, "Science says we are all vibrations in the same invisible oceans," a quote from a noted particle physicist, I was struck by this response Tollifson gave to someone who asked her if there really was a difference "between all of us and Ramana Maharshi, that we are all as deeply realized as he was."

I'm pointing out that this question is a form of suffering, rooted in delusion. It assumes that Ramana and you are separate, bounded entities, rather than different waves in a single fluid ocean. Both waves are equally water, equally ocean. It was to this wholeness, this emptiness, this nondual reality that Ramana was always pointing. No one owns wholeness. Wholeness appears as everything, including me and you and Ramana.

Lastly, I like Tollifson's expansive view of meditation. I used to narrowly define meditation as concentration upon a single object. But that's just one form of meditation. There are countless, according to Tollifsion, since awareness and meditation are synonymous to her.

True meditation as I mean it is simply awareness... Instead of our habitual attempt to get what we want or to get rid of what we don't like, meditation is an invitation to not move toward anything or away from anything, but simply to discover what actually is -- even if it's something we find unpleasant or painful or something we think is "not very spiritual."

Instead of trying to get away from it and get to something better, what if instead there is complete openness to what is? Openness is the heart of true meditation. This isn't some grueling task I'm talking about. It's the opposite of a task. It's not doing anything at all. It's not seeking a result. It's what Here/Now is -- the open space of awareness beholding everything just as it is.

So I would recommend sitting quietly if this invites you, if it interests you. You don't have to be sitting, you can be lying down -- sitting is not the essence of it. And you certainly don't need to in any special posture. You can be in a recliner or on a park bench or on an airplane or anywhere at all. You can move when you feel like it -- you don't need to be motionless, rigid, or bolt upright.

There is a natural stillness that occurs by itself, and a naturally open, relaxed and grounded posture that the body finds. There are no special hand positions. You don't have to close your eyes or open them or keep them half closed or anything in particular.

This isn't about forcing your mind to stop thinking and focus instead on your breathing. It isn't about visualizing deities or repeating a mantra. It's nothing more or less than being silently present, doing nothing other than being here.

And if this attracts you, as it does me, then I encourage you to take time and make space to be still, to do nothing, to simply be aware, to explore and enjoy the present moment, exactly as it is.

Becoming confused about illusionism, I shift to the simpler topic of many selves

So, I was happily reading along in Eric Schwitzgebel's book, The Weirdness of the World, getting to the last few pages of a chapter where he tries to define consciousness in a defensible fashion, when my attention was captured by a passage about illusionism -- though that term wasn't used by Schwitzgebel.

Some philosophers have argued that consciousness, or phenomenal consciousness, does not exist. Keith Frankish is the most visible recent advocate, but others include Paul Feyerabend, Jay Garfield, Francois Kammerer, and maybe early Patricia Churchland. The argument is always a version of the following: 

The ordinary concept of (phenomenal) consciousness ineliminably contains some dubious metaphysical or epistemic assumption at odds with the mainstream scientific or materialistic world conception. In this way, "consciousness" is like "ghost" or "Heavenly spirit" or "divine revelation." 

You can't remove the immaterial metaphysics from the concept of a ghost or spirit; you can't remove the religious epistemology from the concept of divine revelation. Therefore, all these terms must go; there is no such thing. 

Frankish in particular offers a lovely list of dubious commitments that consciousness enthusiasts sometimes adopt. Let me now disavow all such commitments. Conscious experiences need not be simple, nor ineffable, nor intrinsic, nor private, nor immediately apprehended. 

They need not have non-physical properties, or be inaccessible to "third-person" science, or be inexplicable in materialist vocabulary. My definition did not, I hope, commit me on any such questions (which was exactly Desideratum 1). My best guess -- though only a guess (see chapter 2) -- is that all such claims are false, if intended as universal generalizations about consciousness.

Okay, that wasn't crystal clear (philosophers usually aren't), but I got the basic point. Frankish and his fellow illusionists, as they're called, consider that the way consciousness typically is viewed contains unproven assumptions that have an other-worldly, non-physical leaning. 

I really hadn't thought that, based on the many neuroscience books I've read about consciousness and the brain, but I can understand how Frankish, et. al., consider that their illusionist perspective corrects for those, well, illusions. 

I then embarked on what I thought would be a brief quest to find a fairly short easy-to-understand of what illusionism is all about. I chose to ignore Wikipedia, though in retrospect, this description of illusionism on the Keith Frankish page is pleasingly understandable. 

Frankish is known for espousing the view that phenomenality is an introspective illusion. "We humans have learned a variety of subtle but powerful tricks — strategies of self-control, self-manipulation, and extended problem-solving — which vastly extend the power of our biological brains and give us the sense of having a unified, phenomenally conscious mind, self, or soul."^[1]

Early in his career he took a “robustly materialist stance” and attempted to rebut the zombie argument popularized by David Chalmers. In 2007, when he wrote the "Anti-Zombie Argument," he endorsed a weak form of realism about qualia.^[6] In later work, however, he rejected phenomenal realism altogether, arguing that “materialists should be thoroughgoing eliminativists about qualia.” He called this stance “illusionism.”

I tried to make sense of a piece Frankish wrote called "The consciousness illusion," but had trouble comprehending it. Which seemed strange, since usually I have a high tolerance for esoteric arguments. The first paragraph was about as clear as Frankish got in the piece, from my confused perspective.

In the movie The Matrix (1999), Morpheus offers Neo a red pill. If he takes it, he will discover that reality as he knows it is an illusion created by machine overlords to keep humans enslaved. I am going to offer you a different pill, which – if it works – will convince you that your own consciousness is a sort of illusion, a fiction created by your brain to help you keep track of its activities. This view – which I call illusionism­ – is widely considered absurd (it’s been described by Galen Strawson as ‘the silliest claim ever made’), but it has able defenders (pre-eminently Daniel Dennett), and I want to persuade you that it isn’t absurd and might well be true. Are you ready to see how deep the rabbit hole goes?

After some pondering about my confusion about illusionism, it dawned on me that a core precept (as noted in the Wikipedia article) of this approach to consciousness appears to be skepticism about we humans having, or being, a "unified, phenomenally conscious mind, self, or soul." I share that skepticism.

Otherwise, from what I could tell from my admittedly brief reading about illusionism, Frankish agrees with mainstream neuroscience that consciousness is produced by the physical brain. But he denies that there is "something to be like" you or me or a bat or a dog or any other conscious entity -- perhaps because there is no independent stand-alone enduring entity that is conscious.

So I'll end this post by sharing an excerpt from a June 2023 Scientific American story, "The community of Ella," about a woman who showed 12 different personalities ranging in age from two to 16. Her therapist took an anthropological perspective in treating her over a lengthy period of time, writing:

What, I wondered, might happen if we took the "is she or isn't she" [faking her multiple personalities] off the table and instead questioned our own assumptions about what makes a healthy self?

In the contemporary West, we generally think of the self as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated center of emotional awareness, judgment and action that is distinct from other selves and from the world around us. 

This self is singular, personal, intimate and private: it is not directly accessible to anyone but us. The self is the core of a person, the center of experience, the fundamental aspect of us that makes us who we are.

...But this understanding of the self is far from universal. Anthropologists have long documented very different ideas about the self in cultures around the world. Indeed, the possibility of more than one entity residing in a body at a time is a widespread human belief.

...Dramatic accounts aside, having multiple parts, whatever we call them -- entities, selves, souls -- is a more mundane state than most people might think. Neuroscientist David Eagleman has described how the brain's complex system operates as a collection of individual "minds" that together produce the illusion of unified consciousness.

Internal Family Systems therapy, a burgeoning evidence-based approach, posits that the mind is inherently multiple -- that what we experience as "self" is really an internal system of subjectivities that shift in response to inner and outer cues and that can be engaged and transformed through therapy.

In other words, we all have parts. We even regularly talk about them without marking it as odd. As I'm writing this article, part of me is excited to share what I've learned. Another part of me is overwhelmed by other work and is mindful of all the things not getting done while I write. Another part is nervous about how my ideas -- and Ella -- will be received. Yet another part is eager for the engagement.

That I have all these different parts of me operating at once probably doesn't raise any alarms: we are all familiar with these kinds of complexities. In this sense, I don't think Ella is that different from the rest of us, except that she has barriers between her parts that disrupt the sense of continuous consciousness most of us take for granted.

Common sense doesn't lead very far when it comes to Big Questions

What is the ultimate nature of physical reality?
How do relativity theory and quantum mechanics relate?
Is our universe unique or one of many?
Do we live in a computer simulation?
What produces consciousness? 
How rare is consciousness in the cosmos?
Do humans possess free will?

These are Big Questions. Some bigger than others, but all are substantial when compared to lesser questions more amenable to being answered, if not now, at least in the not-so-distant future.

You'll note that I didn't include any questions about God, spirit, soul, heaven, and such. That's because while there's a non-zero chance supernatural entities exist, it's much more likely that -- given the lack of demonstrable evidence for them -- they're fantasies conjured up by the human mind.

So religious questions can't be Big Questions given that their subject almost certainly is a figment of the imagination. It's the same reason wondering How many angels can fit on the head of a pin? may be of interest to those who believe in angels, but for the rest of us, we've got better things to do.

Recently I wrote an initial post about Eric Schwitzgebel's book, The Weirdness of the World. It's an interesting philosophical examination into Big Questions about cosmology and the mind/consciousness.  His thesis is that every currently viable explanation of these areas ends up being (1) weird, and (2) dubious.

Meaning, basically, strange and unprovable. However, some explanations are less weird and dubious than others. Concerning consciousness, for example, Schwitzgebel says he leans toward materialism among the four broad types of explanations for the mind-world connection.

(1) materialist, according to which everything is fundamentally composed of mindless material stuff like quarks and photons,
(2) dualist, according to which material substances exist but so also do immaterial substances like eternal souls,
(3) idealist, according to which only immaterial substances exist, and
(4) a grab bag of views that reject all three alternatives or attempt to reconcile or compromise among them.

Common sense comes up fairly often in the first part of the book, which is as far as I've gotten. Common sense is both useful and useless when it comes to possible explanations of Big Questions.

Useful, in that common sense helps us discard excessively weird and dubious explanations such as those put forward by religious believers. Example: there's no need to wonder how the universe came to be, because the Bible says God created it in just a few days.

Useless, in that common sense doesn't have a great track record when it comes to Big Questions. Example: before Einstein came up with his theory of relativity, the notion that time slows down at high speeds would have seemed crazy, defying common sense. Yet, it's true. For a photon traveling at the speed of light, there is no time at all.

Here's some passages from The Weirdness of the World regarding common sense.

Of course, common sense is culturally variable. Societies differ in what they take for granted or regard as obviously correct. But this fact doesn't undercut my thesis. 

All well-elaborated metaphysical systems in the philosophical canon, Eastern and Western, ancient and modern, conflict both with the common sense of their own milieu and with current Western anglophone common sense.

Kant's noumena, Plato's forms, Lewisian possible worlds, Buddhist systems of no-self and dependent origination -- these were never part of any society's common sense.

...The argument in this section is an "adductive" one; that is, an inference to the best explanation of an empirically observed fact. 

The empirical fact to be explained is that across the entire history of philosophy, all well-developed metatphysical systems -- all broad-ranging attempts to articulate the general structure of reality -- defy common sense. Every one of them is in some respect jaw-droppingly bizarre.

An attractive possible explanation of this striking empirical fact is that people's commonsensical metaphysical intuitions form an incoherent set, so that no well-developed metaphysical picture can adhere to them all.

...Certain fundamental questions about the nature of the mind and its relation to the apparently material world can't, it seems, be settled by empirical science in anything like its current state, nor by abstract reasoning. 

To address these questions, we must build partly on commonsense foundations. If common sense, too, is no reliable guide, we are unmoored. Without common sense as a constraint, the possibilities open up, bizarre and beautiful in their different ways -- and once open, they refuse to shut.

The metaphysics of mind tangles with fundamental cosmology, and every live option is bizarre and dubious. 

...However, as I argued in chapter 2, common sense is a flawed and contradictory guide to questions about the relation between mentality and the material world. While it's not unreasonable to resist bizarre philosophical conclusions on commonsense grounds, such resistance should acknowledge that what initially seems bizarre can sometimes ultimately prove to be true.

Conflict with common sense alone cannot decisively warrant the rejection of group consciousness if enough other considerations point in its favor. [Schwitzgebel entertains the possibility that the United States as a whole is conscious, as unlikely as this may seem.]

Consciousness arises in the brain (no matter what you may read on this blog)

NOTE (to consciousness geeks): if you've already read this post, I've updated it with an admittedly geeky further description and critique of the "naturalistic dualism" espoused by philosopher David Chalmers. I did this after Googling that term and finding a blog post that I'd written in 2010 on this subject. If you're into zombies, you might find a mention of them interesting.

It's kind of weird that I have to distance myself from content on this blog in the title of this post.

That's due to me writing blog posts that I do my best to be scientifically and otherwise accurate, while the comments on those posts mostly come from other people -- some of whom either aren't as scientifically literate as I am, or purposely skew scientific truths to suit their religious ends.

One of the commenters in the purposely skew category would go nameless if I didn't name him, which I am: Spence Tepper. I respect Tepper in many regards. He is intelligent, a good writer, a regular visitor to this blog, and has contributed to lots of interesting comment conversations.

However, Tepper also has an annoying habit.

He is a master at avoiding direct questions that would prove him wrong, so he dissembles by trying to shift a comment conversation from the original topic where his position was on shaky ground to a different topic, apparently in hopes that no one will notice that when he was about to lose an argument, he starts anew with a fresh discussion.

I guess I respect this also about Tepper, but only in the sense of how I respect Donald Trump for his ability to entertain an audience and keep his approval rating up even in the fact of his constant lying, efforts to overthrow our democracy, two impeachments, and four indictments.

Tepper is a much better person than Trump, I want to be clear about that. It's just that I respect both men for using the qualities that I wish they didn't have in such a skillful fashion.

On the plus side, Tepper is a good example of someone who uses the God of the Gaps argument. Since I don't believe in God any longer, I've stopped being a God of the Gaps person, though I readily admit that in my true-believing days I acted much as Tepper does: using a limit of current scientific knowledge as an opportunity to fill that gap in understanding with.... God! 

Instead of the more intellectually honest, We just don't know yet.

One of those current limits that Tepper and I agree on is that science doesn't yet know how consciousness arises in the brain.

There are various theories about how the 100 billion or so neurons in the human brain result in consciousness, which enables me to write this post and you to read it. Searches continue for the neural correlate of consciousness, meaning the part(s) of the brain that, when activated, enable consciousness to arise.

In a comment today, Tepper noted that this year philosopher David Chalmers won a 25 year old bet with neuroscientist Christof Koch in which Koch wagered a case of wine that by now the neural correlate of consciousness would have been discovered. A Scientific American story tells the tale, ending with:

Back to the bet between Koch and Chalmers: They agreed that, for Koch to win, the evidence for a neural signature of consciousness must be “clear.” That word “clear” doomed Koch. “It’s clear that things are not clear,” Chalmers said, and Koch, grimacing, concurred. He stalked off the stage and reappeared with a case of wine as the audience laughed and applauded.

Koch then doubled down on his bet. Twenty-five years from now, he predicted, when he will be age 91 and Chalmers will be age 82, consciousness researchers will achieve the “clarity” that now eludes them. Chalmers, shaking Koch’s hand, took the bet.

“I hope I lose,” Chalmers said, “but I suspect I’ll win.” I suspect so, too. I bet consciousness will be even more baffling in 2048 than it is today. I hope to live long enough to see Koch give Chalmers another case of wine.

Here's the thing, though, in regard to me and Spence Tepper. I never said that science had learned how consciousness arises in the brain. My contention, which Tepper disagreed with (which amazed me, since I'm clearly correct about this), was that the consensus of neuroscience is that goings-on in the brain result in consciousness, with nothing supernatural involved.

"Goings-on" is shorthand for something to do with the activity of those 100 billion neurons, but it is unknown what that is. 

Again, this seems so obvious to me, given the many books about neuroscience and the current state of consciousness research I've read, along with articles in Scientific American and New Scientist that I subscribe to, I figured it would be easy for Tepper to agree that science considers the brain to be the source of consciousness.

I figured wrong, which led me to write a post decrying science denialism here on the Church of the Churchless: "Denying scientific truth isn't welcome on this blog." I didn't like how Tepper did the God of the Gaps thing, jumping to the completely erroneous conclusion that because science doesn't currently understand how consciousness arises, this opens the door to a supernatural explanation.

No, it doesn't. In fact, today I picked up a book I have by David Chalmers, the guy who won the bet with Koch, called The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. It was published in 1996, a few years before the bet occurred. In his Introduction, Chalmers speaks of three constraints that guided his development of an account of consciousness. Here's the third:

The third constraint is that I take consciousness to be a natural phenomenon, falling under the sway of natural laws. If so, then there should be some correct scientific theory of consciousness, whether or not we can arrive at such a theory. That consciousness is a natural phenomenon seems hard to dispute: it is an extraordinarily salient part of nature, arising throughout the human species and very likely in many others.

And we have every reason to believe that natural phenomena are subject to fundamental natural laws; it would be very strange if consciousness were not. This is not to say that the natural laws concerning consciousness will be just like laws in other domains, or even that they will be physical laws. They may be quite different in kind.

So what does Chalmers mean by "may be quite different in kind." Well, in chapter 4 of his book he speaks of naturalistic dualism. This is a complicated philosophical concept.

------------------------

NEXT DAY UPDATE: For sure it's complicated. This morning I started to reread that chapter, which is lengthy, but decided that would take too much time and effort. So I Googled "criticism of Chalmers naturalistic dualism." Among other results, a blog post that I wrote in 2010 popped up, "David Chalmers view of consciousness: naturalistic dualism." I was quite positive about the book, since it seemed in accord with science. Then I noted a comment on that post from David Lane who shared a link to a message from Chalmers about a New York Times review of his book by John Searle, along with a response from Searle. Interesting reading, if that link opens for you.

What struck me is that Chalmers bases his naturalistic dualism in part on a "zombie" argument. He imagines that zombies could exist that in a world that is just like ours, and where people act just like they do in our world, but don't have consciousness. This supposedly shows that consciousness is an add-on to the world, not an integral aspect of it. However, Searle makes some excellent arguments against this. Here's quotes from Searle:

In his argument for property dualism, he says, correctly, that you can imagine a world that has the same physical features that our world has—but minus consciousness. Quite so, but in order to imagine such a world, you have to imagine a change in the laws of nature, a change in those laws by which physics and biology cause and realize consciousness.

But then, I argued, if you are allowed to mess around with the laws of nature, you can make the same point about flying pigs. If I am allowed to imagine a change in the laws of nature, then I can imagine the laws of nature changed so pigs can fly. He points out, again correctly, that that would involve a change in the distribution of physical features, because now pigs would be up in the air. But my answer to that, which I apparently failed to make clear, is that if consciousness is a physical feature of brains, then the absence of consciousness is also a change in the physical features of the world.

That is, his argument works to establish property dualism only if it assumes that consciousness is not a physical feature, but that is what the argument was supposed to prove. From the facts of nature, including the laws, you can derive logically that this brain must be conscious. From the facts of nature, including the laws, you can derive that this pig can’t fly. The two cases are parallel. The real difference is that consciousness is irreducible. But irreducibility by itself is not a proof of property dualism.

...Chalmers resents the fact that I frequently try to remind him that brains cause consciousness, a claim he calls a “mantra.” But I don’t think he has fully appreciated its significance. Consciousness is above all a biological phenomenon, like digestion or photosynthesis. This is just a fact of nature that has to be respected by any philosophical account.

Of course, in principle we might build a conscious machine out of nonbiological materials. If we can build an artificial heart that pumps blood, why not an artificial brain that causes consciousness? But the essential step in the project of understanding consciousness and creating it artificially is to figure out in detail how the brain does it as a specific biological process in real life.

Initially, at least, the answer will have to be given in terms like “synapse,” “peptides,” “ion channels,” “40 Hertz,” “neuronal maps,” etc., because those are real features of the real mechanism we are studying. Later on we might discover more general principles that permit us to abstract away from the biology.

-------------------------

This passage makes it fairly clear, though not crystal clear.

It remains plausible, however, that consciousness arises from a physical basis, even though it is not entailed by that basis. The position we are left with is that consciousness arises from a physical substrate in virtue of certain contingent laws of nature, which are not themselves implied by physical laws. This position is implicitly held by many people who think of themselves as materialists. It is common to hear, "Of course, I'm a materialist, the mind certainly arises from the brain."

OK, so maybe if I reread the book, I'd realize that I'm open to naturalistic dualism. The key thing here, though, is that the guy who took the side of the bet against Koch considers that consciousness is a natural phenomenon arising in the brain, not a supernatural phenomenon.

This is the prevailing view of virtually every neuroscientist, which makes Tepper's refusal to admit this so perplexing and, yes, irritating. I think, Dude, I'm right about science viewing consciousness as arising from goings-on in the brain; what's so tough about simply saying, I agree?

I find it easy to admit when I'm wrong, in part because I've been married for 51 years (albeit in two chunks, 18 years in my first marriage, 33 years and counting in my second marriage), so I'm all too aware of how often my wife is right and I'm wrong.

I feel that it wouldn't hurt Tepper to do the same thing -- one reason why I persist in my possibly quixotic quest to have Tepper admit that the current conclusion of neuroscience is that consciousness arises in the brain.

Pleasingly, another commenter, Sant64, who thought he was refuting my position, actually helped strengthen it in his own comment today. Here's how I used that gift in my comment reply.

Sant64, thanks SO MUCH for sharing the link that EXACTLY supports what I've been arguing with Spence Tepper about. (I like capital letters also at times, just like you.)

Contrary to what you falsely claimed, my assertion in regard to Tepper is that there's a consensus among neuroscientists that consciousness arises from goings-on in the brain, not from some supernatural source. I've never said that neuroscience understands HOW this happens, just that brain stuff causes it to happen.

The quote you included in your comment says exactly what I've been claiming.
-------------------------
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2022.767612/full#:~:text=There%20is%20no%20consensus%20about,the%20action%20of%20the%20brain.

The following is from the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience Journal:

"Studies of how consciousness is generated, and why it has the characteristics it does, is nevertheless a focus of considerable interest and effort. There is no consensus about how it is generated, or how best to approach the question, but all investigations start with the incontrovertible premise that consciousness comes about from the action of the brain."
--------------------------
I love that clear statement. I'll repeat it because I love it so much: "All investigations start with the incontrovertible premise that consciousness comes about from the action of the brain."

That's just what I've been asking Tepper to admit is true. And now you've provided clear documentation that I'm correct in saying that it indeed is true that consciousness arises from goings-on in the brain. It's still a few days from Thanksgiving, but I'm really thankful to you for finding this quote. Hopefully Tepper will take it to heart.

Spence Tepper, thanks for your comment also. Naturally I was aware of the bet between Koch and Chalmers. It gets talked about quite a bit in stories and books about the nature of consciousness. My reaction to what you said is pretty much the same as what I just said to Sant64 above: I agree, and always have, that neuroscience hasn't learned how consciousness arises in the brain.

Where you and I disagree, and where I view myself as being right and you being wrong, is about whether the consensus of neuroscientists is that goings-on in the brain, so far unspecified, lead to the creation of conscious experience. (There's debate about whether consciousness is a thing or a process; I tend to prefer process, but it could be a thing.)

Do you agree with the quote Sant64 shared above? "All investigations start with the incontrovertible premise that consciousness comes about from the action of the brain." A simple YES or NO would be appreciated, no dissembling.

If you say yes, great, we're in agreement. If no, please supply evidence that serious peer-reviewed investigations of consciousness are taking place that DON'T have the premise that consciousness comes about from the action of the brain.

The situation is similar, in my opinion, to how physics is examining the unsolved question of how gravity works. Einstein's general theory of relativity says that gravity is the result of curved spacetime in the presence of mass. Quantum mechanics hasn't arrived at a theory of gravity yet, though several leading theories exist, in the same way neuroscientists are exploring theories of how consciousness arises.

But here's the thing: I've never heard of a physics theory that says gravity is the result of some supernatural force. Sure, maybe there is some unknown material/natural force involved, but not supernatural. Likewise, I've never heard of a respected (as opposed to crackpot) neuroscience theory that says consciousness is the result of some supernatural force.

Again, if you agree that consciousness, like gravity, is the result of natural/physical/material goings-on, then we see this area of science similarly. There's a lot to learn, but what will be learned will, with virtual near certainty, involve material laws of nature, not supernatural.

Some final thoughts on Paul Breer's books

Whew. I did it.

Finished all 495 pages of Paul Breer's second book, Beyond Self-Realization: A Non-Sectarian Path to Enlightenment. It was interesting reading, though it repeated some of the themes in his first book, The Spontaneous Self: Viable Alternatives to Free Will. 

I admire authors like Breer who put a lot of time and effort into writing about a subject that, given its nature, isn't going to land their book(s) on best seller lists. It's a labor of love, not of money. I speak as someone who has put a lot of time and effort into writing books of the same sort.

Breer is on solid ground -- according to both Buddhism and neuroscience -- in his contention that we humans lack both an independent Self that stands apart from the physical mind/body as well as the free will that such a Self is widely considered to be capable of.

I found Breer's assertion in his second book to be more problematic: that it is possible to become enlightened by coming to an experience of Pure Consciousness.

This supposedly is consciousness before it becomes identified with things in the world, though in a Zen-like assumption (he practiced Zen for five years) Breer says that Pure Consciousness never stands alone, but always is experienced along with the sensing of material objects.

So this explains why a Zen practitioner can become enlightened upon hearing a bell rung or seeing a bird flying. At certain moments Pure Consciousness is manifested as the ground upon which impure consciousness operates.

OK, I can bring myself to believe that. However, I'm more skeptical that if Pure Consciousness becomes a permanent part of our experience, then we are no longer bothered by bad things happening to us, like disease, pain, disability, financial ruin, and such.

It'd be nice if this were true. And Sam Harris, along with others who embrace Buddhist precepts, seem to believe something similar.

They argue that when we wake up to the true nature of consciousness, it is seen as akin to the clear sky that remains unaltered even as hurricanes, tornadoes, and thunderstorms form and dissolve in the sky. If I ever achieve such a state, I guess I'll know I'm enlightened when I can hear Donald Trump talk without feeling repulsed by his constant lies, hatefulness, and fearmongering.

There are passages near the end of Breer's second book that describe Pure Consciousness and enlightenment in terms that seem unobjectionable to me, even if I can't buy into them entirely. For example:

The Undifferentiated realm you refer to lies hidden beneath all this orienting. "IT" is there in everything we experience -- every  image, every sound, every smell. As I said earlier, according to Trungpa's hypothesis, we get a glimpse of Pure Consciousness every time we see a bird, hear a truck, or smell somebody's dinner cooking. 

That glimpse happens at the very beginning of each experience -- prior to any kind of orienting. It is so brief, however, (he argued that it lasts less than a millisecond), that it rarely reaches awareness. Almost immediately we begin to sort inputs into sensations, combine sensations to form objects and then name and evaluate what we have constructed. 

And it works. It works so well that we never get to see (or hear, smell, etc) what is actually there. We pick and choose those aspects of the stimulus that are important for our survival -- and pay no attention to those that aren't.

...Becoming enlightened involves peeling off all three layers of orienting so that we can grasp the "IT" that precedes every image, sound, smell, taste or touch. From the perspective of that fundamental Ground, we get to see the phenomenal world objectively for the first time, that is, we see freed of all the self-related add-ons that distort what's really going on.

For example, it becomes possible to look at a weed without dismissing it as a violation of one's personal concept of beauty or to smell a rotten piece of meat without recoiling in horror. It's breathtaking to discover what a scene (and I mean any scene) looks like when it is no longer seen from the biased perspective of an observer whose primary mission in life in self-survival.

Makes sense. I could use some of that sort of enlightenment. 

Lastly, I wanted to share a passage in Breer's second book where he speaks about the sex abuse/incest charges that led to him spending two years in prison. I like how open Breer is about his prison experience. Several times he describes experiences he had during that time that related to themes in his book.

Here he says that he was wrongly accused. 

Throughout my own time in prison and on parole, I tried to use Hakuin's story as a model of acceptance. In the beginning I had no success at all; in time what made a modicum of success possible was the constant reminder that there was no master controller inside my accuser that chose to fabricate a story.

While that reminder kept me from becoming bitter, it was not until I awakened to my deeper nature that I truly accepted what happened. 

As that acceptance arose, my negative feelings vanished, leaving in their wake a heightened awareness of the pain I had caused that led my accuser to lie. In the process my concern gradually shifted from self to other -- taking with it the last vestige of resentment. 

Don't watch yourself. Be yourself. In meditation, and in everything.

I usually listen to a daily guided meditation on Sam Harris' Waking Up app. But sometimes I enjoy other offerings on the app, which includes a section called Theory. There's also Practice and Life.

Now and then Harris correctly says in his guided meditations that listening to a conversation in the Theory section can be just as valuable of meditating. After all, meditation is about paying attention to what's happening in the present moment.

If that thing is an interesting conversation between Harris and someone else, and I'm paying close attention to it, then, hey, that's a form of meditation.

As is everything else in life, since Harris and most other meditation teachers emphasize that there's no real distinction between formal meditation and what we do the rest of the day. It's all about attention and experiencing life as fully as possible in the present moment.

This morning I only had time to listen to about ten minutes of a several hour conversation between Harris and André Duqum. I liked what I heard. Duqum has a video of the conversation on his Know Thyself web site. It's in the middle on the bottom row, "Sam Harris: A Rational Mystics Guide to Consciousness and Awakening."

It's a YouTube video, which I'll share:

In what I heard today Harris speaks about the familiar theme of how our thoughts can prevent us from genuinely experiencing reality. Obviously there's nothing wrong with thinking. It's essential for much that we do. However, thinking interferes with experience when it isn't needed.

Though we can become fully absorbed in thinking, which makes it a form of meditation, typically thinking creates distance between us and the world. We're paying attention to thoughts inside our head rather than attending to the outside world.

For a long time, 35 years, I practiced a form of meditation that aimed at "going within." This wasn't only closed-eye meditation. It also was closed ear meditation for much of the meditation session. Since, I've learned that the best thing I can do to feel more in touch with both myself and the world is to go without, not within.

When I meditate now, which includes everyday activities, since mindfulness has become my meditation, I try to focus on the sensations of what I'm doing and what's around me rather than thoughts. One thing at a time. Look out, not in. Those are two of my basic principles.

Harris spoke about how there can even be a watcher in meditation/mindfulness. By "watcher," he means the feeling, or assumption, that there's a person inside our head who is viewing reality like an air traffic controller in a high tower.

The watcher is mistakenly considered to be our true self, not the body/brain. But actually the watcher is an illusion. For when we try to find that person inside our head, the Self who is in charge of things, we come up empty.

It's better to experience life directly, not through a made-up watcher. We all know how pleasant it is to lose ourself in dance, music, walking, conversation, sex, work, or any other activity marked by a minimal distinction between us and what we're doing. 

This is a flow state, which is much different from a thinking or watching state, for those are marked by duality.

I find that usually it makes sense to trust my deeper mind or consciousness. After all, I heartily agree with Harris that both free will and an independent self are fictions. We don't need to worry that if we stop thinking, worrying, and fretting about the past and future, nothing will get done.

In my experience, I get more done when I simply trust that whatever I need to do will appear as something that needs doing. Yeah, I realize that sentence doesn't make logical sense. But it resonates with me. 

I do use to-do lists. I find them helpful in lessening my need to think, since I'm outsourcing some of my thinking to a piece of paper, my iPhone, or laptop. Often, though, some task that I've forgotten to jot down yet needs doing will pop into my mind unbidden, which strengthens my faith that a part of me beyond thinking can handle things just fine much or most of the time.

Tomorrow I'll listen to more of the conversation between Harris and Duqum. I find Harris to be my kind of spiritual teacher. He truly is a rational mystic. Harris has a Ph.D. in neuroscience, yet also is well versed in Dzogchen and other forms of Buddhist meditation. 

Pure Consciousness isn't what its name implies

I don't like the term pure consciousness. Or its identical twin, pure awareness. I've written about this dislike in some blog posts: here, here, here, and here. 

Obviously I've got no problem with talking about consciousness or awareness, which in my view are the same thing. If we're conscious of something we're aware of that thing.

It's the pure that rubs me the wrong way.

That word conjures us an image of something absolutely clear and transparent, nothing in it except consciousness/awareness. (From now on I'll just speak of consciousness rather than wearing out my laptop's slash key.)

Sure, I get the idea that consciousness is akin to an empty sky in which clouds, birds, airplanes, and such are contained. I jotted down a couple of ways Sam Harris describes consciousness in this fashion in his Waking Up app's guided meditations.

Consciousness is the space in which everything is arising on its own; rest as that... You are the condition in which everything is appearing.

So this seems to presume that what is most real about us isn't what we're aware of, but a formless that composed of pure consciousness. 

Well, it's a nice idea. It just doesn't make sense, though. Where's the evidence that consciousness ever can be experienced in such a pure state, there's no content of consciousness? 

And if this somehow were possible, how would someone know they've experienced pure consciousness? After all, there can't be a sense of "This is pure consciousness," for that sense clearly isn't pure, it's a sensation of this is pure consciousness. 

Thus if consciousness truly was pure, there would be no way for that purity to contain an experience of purity, for experience always is of something. After all, what would pure experience be like?

Nothing, I guess, for the experience would be of nothing.

I got to thinking about pure consciousness because Paul Breer talks about it quite a bit in some chapters near the end of his book, Beyond Self-Realization: A Non-Sectarian Path to Enlightenment. I've enjoyed his right-on take on free will (it doesn't exist) and the ethereal Self (nobody has one).

However, his frequent use of "Pure Consciousness" rubbed me the wrong way, at least until I read enough about how Breer uses this term to realize that when he's referring to isn't really pure.

Breer's book consists of dialogues between a group of people taking an enlightenment course at a local library led by someone who, not surprisingly, bears a lot of resemblance to Paul Breer. Here's some passages describing Pure Consciousness.

What I "see" is Pure Consciousness in the background of my perception of you; just as in an enlightenment experience you would see Pure Consciousness in the background of your perception of me. 

At the same time I see both you and me in the conventional sense, that is, as separate individuals, you over "there," me over "here." In the foreground, I see the two of us as separate individuals; in the background I see (with my inner eye) Consciousness Itself which serves as the Source for the distinctions I make in the foreground. The same would be true for you if the roles were reversed.

...Whenever you gain access to Pure Consciousness, you will experience it as a background to whatever you see, hear, taste, touch, or smell -- and that includes your awareness of me. I'm not saying, as your books apparently suggest, that everything in the universe contains Pure Consciousness. 

When I say that the world is One, I'm referring to the sense of Wholeness created by THAT which serves as background for whatever I perceive in my foreground. The experience of wholeness takes place "here"; it's not something that exists in blades of grass, bluebirds, trash cans or any other objects of perception.

Oneness, in other words, is a feature not of the universe itself nor of the objects in that universe, but of our own perception of the world when viewed from a background of Pure Consciousness.

...Most fundamentally, you are Pure Consciousness. As such, you are THAT which enables an organism with a brain and nervous system to make distinctions and use those distinctions to construct a perceptual field composed of objects and a subject.

Even after you have discovered your deeper nature (Pure Consciousness), you retain a limited identification with the part (as body-mind) you are playing in a particular perceptual construction. In other words, you are both the "movie" (the construction) and the context (Pure Consciousness) in which the movie is playing.

So when I burrow down into the nitty-gritty of what Breer is saying here, it seems to be quite simple and uncontroversial. 

Consciousness is necessary for perceptions of the world. From birth until death, being conscious is how we perceive everything inside and outside of us -- the contents of consciousness. I'm not sure how this realization translates into enlightenment, since it seems to be a basic fact of life.

But maybe that's what Zen masters are getting at when they keep pointing the student searching for enlightenment back to everyday perceptions. Cooking rice. Running water. Ringing of bells. 

I don't disagree with how Breer views Pure Consciousness. Just seems to me that what he's talking about is merely consciousness being the foundation of all experience. Which is damn obvious.

 

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.

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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.

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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.