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…   

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.

Baseballs and Underpants

I promised to explain Russell’s set of all sets that are not members of themselves. This is great for me because I really have to struggle to make it clear, and I really enjoy a challenge.

Let’s limit ourselves to one room. In our kid’s bedroom we find four baseballs. A mathematician would call this collection of baseballs a set. This bunch of baseballs is not itself a baseball, so this set of baseballs is not a member of the set of baseballs.

Now we turn to underpants, stacked neatly in the dresser drawer. Is this stack, or set or underpants itself a pair of underpants? Of course not.

We do the same for socks, shirts, toy cars, pencils and paper clips until we empty the room.

Being of an artistic nature, we make an installation in the local art museum, and in the space the museum gives us, we stack the baseballs, underpants, socks, shirts, toy cars, pencils and paper clips. This fascinating artistic installation is a collection of sets—a set of sets. None of these sets is a member of itself—the group of toy cars is not a toy car—so the installation is the set of all sets (from our kid’s bedroom) that are not members of themselves.

But wait a minute. This installation, this set of sets—is it a member of itself? Well, it is a set, a collection of piles of underpants and paper clips, piles that are not themselves underpants or paperclips.

So what do we decide? If this is a set that deserves to be included in a description of the installation, then that would mean it was a member of the installation—a member of itself. But if that is the case, it can’t be in our installation, because the installation includes only sets that do not contain themselves.

On the other hand, if we banish the set of sets, then it is a set that does not contain itself, and so it is included—only to be excluded.

This argument dashed the hopes of mathematicians who set out to find and prove all theorems. And don’t feel too bad if you had trouble following the argument above. The implications drove some mathematicians crazy.

Every language, including mathematics and logic, has a sentence that says, “This sentence is false.”

Russell found a way out of his paradox by separating logical statements into types. 

A self-referent declaration is a different kind of assertion from true theorems and from false statements. A simple logic program would not know what to do with such a statement, but would most likely get tangled in an endless loop. We ourselves see that endless loop starting up, and that is the difference. We are capable of transcending endless loops, puzzling over them, and laughing them off. The computer has to run around in circles for a while until its software says, “That’s enough of that. Stop now.”

What does all this have to do with you and me? We self-aware creatures are unique the same way. Our self-reference just does not fit in a physical world of simple logic. When we are tootling along and not reflecting on the quality of our awareness, we fit in the physical universe. We are doing the same mental work as a computer would.

But our self-awareness, our ability to remember ourselves—when we exercise it—lifts us right out of the world.

Descartes argued that there were two types of entity—mind and body. This idea is called the Cartesian duality, and contemporary philosophers love to refute it with all sorts of models of consciousness based on structure. And they are right, and they completely miss the point.

It is true that there is no real split between mind and body. In theory a computer can do everything a mind can do, the vast majority of the time. But my self-awareness, my experience of my awake state, when I exercise it, is absolutely different from the sensible world. (You would say the same thing—I hope!—about yours.)

The only way the reductionist philosophers can be right—and they may well be—is way, way spookier than the duality they are trying to escape.

I love this stuff.

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.