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.

Teach the Children--What?

Everything changed for me in a moment. It was in the kitchen. My son was there; he was the catalyst for my transformation. Up to that moment I had believed that we acquired our personalities through experience. We were born as lumps of soft clay, and the obstetrician’s fingers made great and permanent impressions. Our parents continued to mold us as our clay-stuff hardened, until sometime late in childhood we became unmalleable. But now, standing in our kitchen, trying desperately to get through to my sixteen year old, I watched as he argued back, setting up distracting roadblocks exactly as his mother often had—and yet I had been his single parent since he was small, raising him since the divorce!

Maybe children of child-beaters become child-beaters not because of their experience but because they inherit the child-beating gene. Children of alcoholics are predisposed to alcoholism because they inherit that predisposition. It has long been understood that we inherit our dispositions, but we inherit so much more specific tendencies than those.

Why is it so mysterious and surprising that identical twins raised separately buy similar cars, work similar jobs, even marry women with the same names? If you are convinced that we are what we are because of our experiences, of course those coincidences are unexplainable. But when we understand that we were born as very specific individuals, then we can easily see why identical twins would live parallel lives.

And speaking of direction, have you watched a flock of birds swoop around the sky like a great living cloud, or a school of fish turn abruptly in the same direction? It’s because they were born that way, and they are all the same bird, all the same fish. (Those birds that were different and those fish that were different went their own way and were picked off by predators.)

So what can we do as parents? Many of us have experienced frustration with our children, because they are who they are and will not bend to our corrections. But maybe we have neither the ability nor the divine right to impose corrections. Maybe it is best to allow our children to develop into the people they were destined from birth to be—within reason.

There are two qualities that I believe are necessary for a young person to cultivate: kindness and consciousness. The term kindness, I believe, is unambiguous, perhaps because it is visible to others. 

Not so easy to discern in others is consciousness, by which I mean mindfulness, self-monitoring awareness, remembering oneself, being here now. I find it quite difficult to make the concept clear, as apparently also do many authors. It may be too simple to be believed. 

There is being conscious in the sense of being awake as opposed to being in a coma, and there is consciousness of self in the sense of being self-conscious, or preoccupied with one’s image. I mean neither of these, nor any of several other possible misconceptions. The subject is worthy of a book-long discussion, and such books do exist. I’ll not attempt to write one here.

Anyway, kindness and consciousness don’t violate any decent character, and they are teachable.

Of all the things my father tried to impress upon me, three versions of the same admonition survive in me today as eminently worthwhile:

Pay attention

Think about what you are doing

Try to put yourself into the other person’s shoes

Other lessons were intended to socialize me and inculcate common courtesy into my behavior, and most of those took, over time. And many lessons were useless to me, even destructive, such as “do not be an engineer,” because he didn’t enjoy his profession, or stay away from Black people (he said colored), or do not aspire to be an artist, or don’t tell anyone your mother is dead. Those instructions went against my nature and were ugly.

But those first, big three—Pay attention; Think about what you are doing; Try to put yourself into the other person’s shoes—I remember those often, and thank my father keenly for them.

Every one of us has the capacity for kindness and consciousness—I see evidence of it everywhere—but we do need teaching and reminding. That, I believe, is the proper work of a parent.

Identity is Unity

There is a connection between the berjillions of berjillions of elementary particles in the universe and the many self-aware humans on this planet.

Not everyone subscribes to the Big Bang Theory, but any creation story will suffice for my argument. I do believe that the Big Bang Theory could be correct, but that it explains only a tiny bit of creation.

Anyway, picture the Big Bang. Out of nothing energy is spewed, most of which is eventually coalesced into what we consider to be matter. Really matter is just specially configured little sparks of energy, but we don’t need to go into that right now. Here is the question: berjillions upon berjillions of berjillions of absolutely identical electrons (or pick your own particle) populate the universe. How did that happen?

Yes, John Wheeler did half-jokingly suggest to Richard Feynman that they might all be the same electron, and if you meditate on that, you can see that in an important sense, that is exactly right. Without the context of environment, location ceases to make sense, and there is no other way to distinguish these particles. And since the environment is just other particles, maybe it fades into insignificance.

But let’s back up to the creation of these particles. Whatever actually happened, somehow all those electrons came to have the same mass, and the same electrical charge. Did a first electron appear or get created, and then the others popped into existence as copies? How ever it happened, if electrons are copies of each other, some concept or idea guided the process. Some program of some type instructed: “GOTO primal electron. CREATE perfect copy. CHECK for accuracy.”

If instead all electrons bubbled into their perfect identical form because some previous state of the young universe generated them that way, then this also presupposes the existence of a pattern or plan. There is nothing logical about electrons that determines their charge or mass, unless these constants follow from some other fact, which in turn is random.

So did all those electrons burst into existence simultaneously? If so, then the proto-universe that birthed them had its own uniformity going on. Or if electrons were spawned sequentially, we must wonder how the Mother of these particles managed to remain unchanged from the first electrons to the last.

You see my point. However the building blocks of the universe came to be, whatever they are, their uniformity implies the pre-existence of idea. That’s huge. I don’t care what your cosmology says, it must recognize that idea guides creation.

But pure idea does not push around or create matter, which is an entirely different category of existence. That is an assumption I cannot avoid. So I am forced to realize that matter is not hard stuff—matter—at all. Everything is idea.

There is only one electron because there is only one idea of an electron—in this universe, anyway.

And what does all of this have to do with self-aware human beings?

That spark of spiritual self-awareness—pure witness, observer, Atman—after you strip away all of its “environment” in the form of ego, feelings, personality and memory, is the same in all of us. As with electrons, our subjective consciousnesses are identical and of a separate category from every physical thing that we believe exists. There is one idea of a pure witness and, by following the same argument I used for identical electrons, we get to the conclusion that there is only one subjective consciousness.

We are One.

In a post coming soon I would like to tell the story of how I came to understand the conjunction of that realization and my own (and your own) compelling experience of separateness.

P.S. I have been absent from this blog for many days because all my writing time has gone to another blog:  savebriggsroad.blogspot.com. That blog deals with an entirely different concern. Perhaps you will take a look…   

Goodbye to Qualia

Cartesian Duality

The fallacy of the Cartesian duality is not in the partition of personhood into two categories, but that the division was taken between mind and body. To say, “I think, therefore I am,” is to suggest that my thinking is non-physical. Philosophers have argued successfully that the act of thinking is based in the material world, the action of a physical organ—just as would be the throwing of a baseball. The mind is part of the body. 

What is outside the physical is self-awareness, pure and unattached to thoughts, memories, or feelings. The proper separation of categories distinguishes the entire body of the person, including the mind, ego, emotions, ideas and memories, from the self-awareness of the person.

There is no difference between your pure self-awareness and mine. We can agree with Hindu theologians and posit an ocean of consciousness. If one center of awareness is indistinguishable from another, then who is to say there are multiple consciousnesses? Personally, I prefer to think of consciousness as something like a life force that injects itself where it can into the world. The picture in my head—maybe somewhat silly—is of a grove of cypress in a swamp, all inter-connected under the water and mud. The network of cypress is the force of consciousness, pushing into the world. The trees and the knees push up through the surface of the water and make themselves known, entering our physical reality in many places.

If qualia are the experiential part of our conscious life, then memories and feelings are qualia too, just as much as colors and cold. We may not be able to describe a particular type of quale to a person who has never experienced it, but we can “point” to the notion, with language. “When you think about something and your throat tightens and your nose and tear ducts tingle, that’s sadness.”

Death and Experience

 When we die we separate from the qualia of life, and can no longer experience the colors, smells, and sounds of this world. The reason for this is the loss of the function of the sense organs. We lose brain function as well, when we lose the brain. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that we lose the ability to recall memories. If atman consciousness is eternal—and it may well be—still with no qualia to be conscious of, self-awareness must lie dormant in some way.

The discontinuity of death is, at best, a jump discontinuity, not a removable one, borrowing here from the terminology of mathematics. What this means is that at death, a change occurs in the nature of the experience of the individual. It is not like a temporary loss of consciousness, in which we wake to the identical experience we left a second or minute ago. Instead the continuous experience of our conscious life has abruptly taken a brand new course, with a completely different starting point. No filling in of experience will make the transition smooth and unnoticeable.

In the case of remembering our own history and assuming continuity of life experience, all we really have is memory. And memories are qualia, which give us information about nothing other than themselves.

The Theory of Survival

 What can survival after death possibly mean? To believe that I will survive death is to say that there will be a person of some sort with my memories. I have no connection to that person. Actually, I have no sensory connection to any person who might be living tomorrow, but I trust that one person tomorrow will have a continuity of experience—or at least the conviction of continuity—with memories of experience that I have now. To be a believable and believing future me, the person must have memories of past feelings and experiences that match his present. I can expect no such matching in the case of a person who appears after my death, whether that appearance is of an infant in another family, or a ghost in this world, or a new inhabitant of Heaven.

I find it problematic that physical causes can interrupt or halt neural functions such as memories, feelings, and personality. Total anesthesia creates a glaring discontinuity in our awareness, albeit a removable discontinuity. This means that we could restore the continuity of consciousness by dropping in the missing experience—i.e. withhold the anesthesia. Still, I find the blank stretch philosophically and experientially troubling, as incontrovertible evidence that our consciousness depends absolutely on physical structure. Anesthesia is much more convincing than sleep, during which I continue to have experience. Disease and injury can cause brain damage that unalterably affects personality. Does a person’s “real” personality survive Alzheimer’s, a stroke, or a fractured skull, even though the original personality never again appears in this life?

Unless there is another duality, such as between a physical and an astral body, the theories of reincarnation or Heaven have big problems here. (I am using the term “astral” strictly as a convenience, and not necessarily as mystics might. Physicists seem convinced these days that “reality,” whatever that is, is composed of ten dimensions, if we count time as a dimension. This makes it conceivable that there is more to our existence than meets the eye here in the classic four dimensions. For convenience, I resort to calling the non-worldly part of us “astral.”) If we confine our examination to the important distinction between atman and the rest of the person, there is no memory function to carry forward, and reincarnation is meaningless. On the other hand, if there is a division between astral and physical bodies, and the astral body survives, then both meaningful reincarnation and taking up residence in Heaven are conceivable.

I make no claim that any of this is groundbreaking. My sole purpose is to report the thoughts I enjoy.

The Photo Essay That Doesn't Belong

Here is a little photo essay presenting my daughter Angela and me.

It is important in a photograph to depict something about the deeper feelings of the subject. Here you can see that Angela and I are serious contemplators of Universal Truth.

But it is important also to be lighthearted. In this next photo Angela smiles to think of our fortunate position at the intersection of quantum inspired multi-verses.

Angela says, “C’mon Dad, look into the many versions of your future. Look deep, deep.”

“Yeah, Dad,” she says. “Work it!”

 “Now you get it, Dad. You can come back now!”

We showed these to my wife Ann, Angela’s mom, and she said that they were not appropriate for this blog. I am very grateful for that comment, because it gives me the perfect excuse to say:

Yes they are!

If this blog is going to be authentic, it must treat of more than philosophical ruminations, more than the thought behind the production of art, more than all that high falutin’ serious stuff. This blog is a bit of my art, a performance piece if you will.

To exemplify its own theme, this blog must include what is real to this consciousness—even emotion, as in the post “Betrayal;” or silliness; or odd subjects that don’t seem to belong. If it is perceptible to this witness, it belongs.

This post is another example of the self-reflective, thanks to Ann’s remark and my opportunity to respond. And this paragraph is self-reflective on its self-reflection. As such, it epitomizes the very ascending spiral of self-awareness that I have been saying underlies everything meaningful that I do.

A computer could not do this and mean it. If a computer could do this, still it could not talk about being able to do this. Or else about doing that which just preceded this sentence.

A human composed this essay. And, though these words are pretty good evidence that a self-aware creature is experiencing himself in their production, there can be no proof for the reader. A computer can be programmed to mimic anything. A person, not self-aware, can say anything she is taught to say. But there is no need to present proof. I am observing the proof. I am the proof.

As such, I am inaccessible to you, who are your own proof, because just now you remembered to be self-aware.

Angela asks, “Are you going to tell what really happened when we took those pictures?’

No.

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.