Acknowledge Consciousness!

I recently finished reading a book by Stanislas Dehaene titled Consciousness and the Brain. This was the third book bearing a seductive title that had disappointed me to the point of anger. The other two are The Mind’s I by Douglas Hofstadter and Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett.

Each of these three books bludgeoned me with information about brain function and about how one or another kind of electrical stimulation creates this or that conscious feeling. Researchers have used all kinds of fancy technology to map the active part of the brain or plot brain waves and correlate these data with the experiences reported by the patient. The implication is that feelings and ideas and the subjective sense of self are not the stuff our consciousness is made of; they are nothing more than electrical impulses beeping around among neurons and dendrites and synapses.

 

The Brown Jacket, Oil, 1965, 32 x 24

The conclusion, which each author holds off until the end, is that consciousness is just an illusion. And they’re so smug about it!

Let’s assume for now that these three eminent scholars are using the word “consciousness” in the same way, referring to that subjective sense of awareness of self. This is a difficult thing to name; all the standard English terms are ambiguous. “Consciousness,” “awareness” and the like are most often used to describe mere wakefulness, and so are insufficiently clear for the purposes of this discussion.

There are terms that do work. The best among these, because it cannot be hijacked by folks that don’t understand it, is atman, a Hindu term. “Witness,” as used by the followers of Gurdjieff, is also clear, but only so long as we agree that we are speaking in terms of The Fourth Way. There are other possibilities, but let’s stick with atman.

If I can call an item “mine,” then it is not “me.” (Forget grammar for a moment.) “My” car is not me. I say “She ran into me” when another driver collides with my car, but she didn’t hit me. My clothes are not me. My body is not me. It’s an object I drag around but it’s not me.

More subjectively, I have feelings but they are not me. They are my feelings. My ideas, my thoughts are not me. I observe them. If I claim them, I am objectifying them.

Finally, my mind is not me. It is mine. “I have a good mind.” “I’m losing my mind.” Spending some time in silence, I sit and watch the mind cavort, tug at my heartstrings, worry me, chastise me. That mind is not me.

There is something that is truly I that watches what the mind and perceptions present. Well, I can’t really call it watching, because this atman does nothing, feels nothing, thinks nothing—just witnesses. That whatever-it-is is always the very last stop on any journey to the depth of introspection, but I can never get there, because even if I convince myself that I am identifying with atman, it is actually atman that is observing my mind thinking about identifying with atman.

Everything in our world could function just the same without atman witnessing. These days especially, with ever advancing technology of artificial intelligence, we can imagine a world of mosquitos and dogs and people programmed to do what they do, even to think about what they do, even to think about thinking, and yet never have this sense of “I-ness.”

And that is what these three authors are claiming is happening. They present the scientific evidence that the mind and feelings are brain functions, as if the brain is an extremely complex computer and no more. Well, maybe it is, and this research is profound and fascinating. But they go too far, inferring that since every feeling and idea can be theoretically explained in electrical terms, with no reference to an atman, then that must be all there is.

They conclude that consciousness—atman—is an illusion.

Look, I don’t know how or why this well-oiled human machine comes with atman, such an ineffable connection. I read books like these in the hope that someone else brighter than I has some insight into this difficult problem, but to say there is no such thing as consciousness, that it is an illusion?

“Illusion: an unreal vision presented to the bodily or mental eye” (Webster). Right, so to whom is the illusion presented? I know! Atman! Consciousness! The mere mention of illusion negates their entire argument.

These books just pissed me off.

I think they were written by robots.

Watching Myself Watch Myself Watch Myself

Well, I’ve been trying all day to remember to view my self as the perceiver of body and brain sensations. I have been working at this for a while—years. Decades.

It’s not easy. If I don’t have a mechanism in place to remind me, I can go weeks without observing myself as perceiver; without, in short, recognizing my true self.

But wait. I was awake. I was watching things, hearing things, feeling things. I was aware, conscious, whatever you want to call it.

Or maybe not. From those times when I was just operating in the world and not being the observer, I have no recollection of having that fully awake feeling I get when I do identify my self as observer. Now, when I am thinking about it, I do have that feeling, and I have that feeling as I recall experiences. I am self-aware as I remember; I was not self-aware back then.

It would seem that I have two levels of awareness. I can walk around in the world, do things and feel things. I am conscious then, sentient, mentally alert. But when I reflect on myself, pay attention to myself, I step up to another level of consciousness. This may be the state William James called spiritual self-awareness. Gurdjieff and Ouspensky called it remembering oneself.

The assumption most of us make is that when we are awake, we are in this state continuously. Being able to reflect on our memories fosters this illusion, but we are just plodding around like robots most of the time. We can call up our memories and reflect on them, but even then we most likely do not feel our own awareness—and we don’t really call up that many memories anyway. We just know that we could if we wanted to, and so have convinced ourselves that we are thoughtful, self-aware beings.

Do you suppose it is possible to live an entire life and never attend to one’s own awareness? It may well be. I’ve known people who have made me wonder. When philosophers talk about a quale, which is a word for the experience of a sensation, they must be aware of the experience of self-reflection. When a philosopher avoids talking about qualia, or acts as if they don’t matter or exist, well, you have to wonder.

Without language, animals cannot ascend to self-reflection. Our favorite animals, our dogs and cats respond to us emotionally, and can be very intelligent—for dogs and cats—but all of that is quite possible without a moment of self-reflection.

I want to contend that we operate on either of two levels of consciousness. At the most common level we are observers, recorders, reactors. It is this level of consciousness that some philosophers explain in terms of brain structure and behavior. We may be self-conscious (in the sense of being anxious), or aware of the condition of our body or feelings or mind. We may be thinking about ideas, even working hard to learn something. But in this state, though we are observers, we are not necessarily aware of ourselves as observers.  

When we become aware of our own awareness we enter that more rare state of consciousness: we are here now, we remember ourselves, we live in the present. It is so easy to do, if I could just remember to do it!

Self-reference is a pretty powerful concept.  Playful examples include sentences like, “This sentence is false.” Bertrand Russell’s mathematical example was the set of all sets that do not contain themselves. (So what is the status of that set?) Kurt Gödel showed that every complete logical system contains such a statement, which is therefore true but unprovable, or false and provable. This means that no mathematical system can be entirely true and complete, which changes the way I look at the Universe I’ll tell ya. More on this paragraph next post.

And then us—sporting our self-reflective consciousness, when we remember it. That the Universe could contain such a thing is disorienting. If you don’t feel a bit disoriented by it, you haven’t been paying attention.

The Boundary of Tennessee

Fifty-one years ago, perhaps to the month, I was assigned to read this poem:
Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee, 
And round it was, upon a hill. 
It made the slovenly wilderness 
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it, 
And sprawled around, no longer wild. 
The jar was round upon the ground 
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where. 
The jar was gray and bare. 
It did not give of bird or bush, 
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Wallace Stevens

I was not, and am not, a Lit major, but I believed that I “got” this poem. The jar provides a boundary for Tennessee. It does not matter whether the jar is inside Tennessee or Tennessee is inside the jar. Through the magic of the mathematics of topology, we can imagine either to be the case. And by bounding the wilderness of Tennessee with this gray and bare surface, the jar tames it. 
What makes art good, in my estimation, is that it continues to engage its audience, and this poem has not disappointed me. I have returned to it many times, and it has supported a great deal of contemplation and interpretation. Among the many questions it has suggested are: 

“In just what respect is the entire state of Tennessee slovenly wilderness?” 
“Is all of Tennessee somehow chaotic? And isn’t this jar, as part of Tennessee, part of the chaos?”
“What’s so special about this jar? Aren’t there other jars in Tennessee?”

Most recently it has pleased me to consider the jar somehow special simply because we (as the placer of the jar) are looking at it. Of course there are other jars in Tennessee, but they are on the chaotic Tennessee side of the gray and bare surface. The jar, it pleases me to imagine, is analogous to Atman, the Witness, the great I Am, me-ness. And the Experiencer is impossibly different from the experience. 

Many philosophers—too many—have argued that consciousness (self-consciousness, self-awareness, or whatever you want to call it) is just brain structure, or behavior, or some other manifestation of how things work in the world. Well, as far as everyone else’s consciousness is concerned, it is. What these philosophers fail to take into account is my consciousness. (They should, speaking for themselves, certainly call their own consciousness “my consciousness”.) Those philosophers are actually talking about everyone else’s consciousness, and failing to recognize their own self-awareness as something that is like nothing else in Tennessee. 

Is it possible that anyone could choose to work at philosophy and never “remember himself” (in the words of Gurdjieff)? I’m not concerned at the moment with what a thinker might say about that pure witness, but not to mention it at all? 
Anyway, no one ever mentioned this interpretation of the Anecdote of the Jar in my Lit class.