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.

Angela’s Nap

I started this drawing of my nineteen-year-old daughter Angela last weekend. As you can see, I was groping a bit. Each of those lines was drawn carefully, even if later abandoned. I am sure there are many who would scold me for showing this very vulnerable exploration on the blog now, before any of my finished work—first impressions and all, you know—but it makes my point more dramatically than the paintings or a finished drawing might.

This drawing is unfinished for a simple reason: Angela rolled over. But it accomplishes, very bravely for a drawing if I may say so, expression of the idea behind much of my work: we have a propensity to make sense out of what we see, even on the basis of the sketchiest information. We see dragons and cows in the sky; we see faces in wallpaper stains, grotesque figures in tree trunks, and the Virgin Mary in half-eaten pieces of toast. We’re happy about that, we accept it; but we barely appreciate the full implications of our extra-reality perceptions, and it’s really all about us.

Take a look at my little drawing, if you don’t mind. That left eye, for me, is absolutely Angela. Others, by the way, may disagree and that’s all right. What is important is that somebody, anybody, looks at some graphite scribbles on white paper and has that recognition sensation—Angela! If you don’t see Angela there in that eye, certainly you have had the experience of recognizing a person in a drawing. Even if you have never seen a drawing of a family member or friend, you have seen drawings of famous people in magazines or online and recognized them.

If you look closely enough at my rendering of Angela’s left eye, it will not look like an eye at all. Look closely and you will see scribbles. Look closely enough at a high definition photograph, even, and the image will collapse into patches of meaningless color. On the computer pictures turn out to be made of little squares. Artists have been aware of the dissolution of recognizable image into color patches—or the resolution of brushstrokes into image—for a long time.

I’m not telling you anything new, but I want you to think how we take this for granted. Even the loosest of Impressionists was making it easy for us to perceive brushstrokes as object. It amazes me that under even the most adverse conditions we turn things into recognizable images. Animals don’t do that. Most animals, anyway, do not see figures in drawings or photographs or piles of hay. So I just want to settle into a state of wonder about us for a while.

Look back at the drawing of Angela. The left eye was easy to recognize. The arms and hands are a little more challenging, but we still see arms and hands, even though I have not erased the lines I rejected. The hair looks nothing like hair—but don’t you see hair? The remaining facial features are not really there—those are just light notes to myself about placement—and yet we see the other eye, the nose, the mouth. We may not like what we see (I don’t!), because if those were accurately drawn they would be misshapen, but we do see features, and because one part of the drawing looks to be somewhat accurate, we fear these other features might be also.  And then look at the long wiggly lines away from the face and hands. You “see” a solid figure, clothes, a sofa in spite of the dearth of detail.

A lot of artists and teachers go to a lot of trouble to enhance an illusion in a painting, and others speak about destroying it. Please understand that I am emphasizing neither, that I want to marvel at the perceptual process, and that, to me, the most interesting experience I hope to provide my viewer is wonder in her own perception.