Jan, 2016
“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” -Heart Sutra
What is the Self? What gives rise to the sense of “I” that we each experience? Is it the product of neural activity? Is our material form the manifestation of an intangible “spirit” or “soul” that transcends the physical? Who or what is it that is asking these questions? What acts as the seat of this perceived mind or will? These questions are perennial, tying inextricably to a wider question: what is the nature of reality? My interest in the nature of reality and its implications remains largely driven by a fundamentally religious inquiry. How we conceive of the Self has profound philosophical and religious implications. Notions of judgement, both religious and societal, presume an autonomous, free-willed Self that bears personal responsibility. In Christianity, a discrete, self-existent, transcendent Self (i.e. “Spirit” or “Soul”) is fundamental to the meanings ascribed to salvation and afterlife. To find a metaphysically self-determined Self absent entails dismissing the Christian doctrine of judgement (as related to salvation) and interpreting the teachings of Jesus in a dramatically different light than is commonly understood, or just dismissing his teachings outright. In my previous essay, I interpreted the teachings of Jesus as aligning with Eastern wisdom traditions that teach a doctrine of no-self. I should pause here to clarify, because the term “self” is awfully ambiguous. To me, what Buddhism calls “no-self” (anatman) is akin to what Hinduism’s Upanishads call the universal “Self” (atman). Both of these ideas are rooted in the idea that what we consider the “Self” is not self-existent, or individual and discrete in any eternal sense. In both traditions, our experience of “self” is considered a provisional and temporary appearance of sorts (an illusion, in some sense), even through many reincarnations, and this “self” is a facet of a more fundamental and transcendent singular Reality (typically described as “God,” “Brahman,” or some roughly equivalent title). Since the appearance of “Self” is conditional, impermanent and not self-existent, Buddhists say there is “no-self.” In contrast to the underlying unity and monism or nonduality of eastern philosophies, the evangelical Christian worldview I grew up with is fundamentally dualistic (even pluralistic), and that is what motivates this essay. Unlike Christian mystics who might say we ‘merge with God’ in a manner similar to eastern philosophies, mainstream Christianity suggests that individuals are judged as self-determined beings, whose fate is eternal upon judgment. This suggests to me that there are billions of “souls” that exist alongside God (and whatever else) for all of eternity. This has one God in the beginning, but a plethora of discrete “souls” (and whatever else) that “exist” in some sense in a temporal concept of eternity. The notion that reality is not what it seems, and that the “soul” has some meaning beyond the material is found in every religious traditions. It is also suggested by paranormal research, NDE studies, psychedelic research, and a variety of other traditions. Plus, as I think I’ve said, I am deeply skeptical of the physicalist monism that dominates the scientific paradigm. So I tend to agree that the word “soul” is meaningful and useful in some sense. What eventually “becomes“ of “souls” is a question for another time. This is essay is meant to explore the meaning of “soul” and “self” as related to the doctrine of an eternal “judgment.” For the idea of personal responsibility and eternal judgment to have meaning or make sense, we must be sufficiently self-determined. So in what sense are we self-determined? To what extent are we free-willed beings? To what extent is our mind independent of our body and our environment? Can it be said that we are “fully responsible” for all of our own actions? A self-existent, self-determining, metaphysical “soul” or “spirit” is what I mean by the “Self” in this essay. I contended in the Part 5 essay that Jesus taught this impression of an individual metaphysical “Self” is an illusion and a root cause of our suffering. This essay is an exploration of the psychology and biology of the “Self,” and what that suggests in relation to theology.
Let me start by attempting to define the term “Self.” Merriam-Webster proposes: “the person that someone normally or truly is.” The Oxford dictionary defines ‘self’ as: “a person’s essential being that distinguishes them from others, especially considered as the object of introspection or reflexive action.” In both definitions, we find the notion of a true, ‘essential,’ and persisting core within each person that is fundamental to defining Self. This intuition, that I am a free-willed, rational agent interacting with my environment as a discrete organism, is perhaps the most powerful root intuition that we experience as humans. It suggests the the Self is self-directed, autonomous, and self-existent in a sense. I recognize the value and even necessity of using terms that describe “myself” in language, like “I,” “me,” “mine,” and so forth. However, the purpose of this essay is to look past these terms as mere descriptions, as opposed to the commonly inferred meaning as an ontological or metaphysical status.
Over 2300 years ago, Aristotle called mankind zoon logikon, which roughly translates to ‘rational animal.’ Aristotle followed the tradition of his mentor, Plato, who also believed man has an eternal Soul which is separate from the body, and these two parts – rationale and animal – come together in human form. In the 17th century, philosopher Rene Descartes affirmed this dualism and the rational autonomy of man with his famous assertion, Cogito ergo sum, or ‘I think therefore I am’ in Meditations on First Philosophy [1]. To reach this conclusion, he first rejected the notion of emptiness: “I had the persuasion that there was absolutely nothing in the world, that there was no sky and no earth, neither minds nor bodies; was I not, therefore, at the same time, persuaded that I did not exist? Far from it; I assuredly existed, since I was persuaded. …Thinking is (an) attribute of the soul; and here I discover what properly belongs to myself. This alone is inseparable from me. I am—I exist: this is certain.” To Descartes, it is thinking that defines existence. “I exist… but how often? As often as I think.” Furthermore, the thinking belongs to a thinker. This is the logical and grammatical manner in which Self arises, almost necessarily, as an object. Descartes separates the ‘thinking’ Self from the ‘extended’ material organism that embodies the thinking Self. This arrangement is called ‘Cartesian Dualism’ wherein mind and matter are considered separate ‘substances.’ This separation is essential to the religious idea of an eternal Self that transcends the physical. Consider the critical role that grammar plays in constructing this perception of thinking versus thinker, doing versus doer. Philosopher Alan Watts writes, “the difficulty is that most languages are arranged so that actions (verbs) have to be set in motion by things (nouns), and we forget that rules of grammar are not necessarily rules, or patterns, of nature. This, which is nothing more than a convention of grammar, is also responsible for absurd puzzles as to how spirit governs matter, or mind moves body. How can a noun, which is by definition not action, lead to action? …Everything labeled with a noun is demonstrably a process or action, but language is full of spooks, like the ‘it’ in ‘It is raining,’ which are the supposed causes of action.” The observation of causality is a primary driver of this convention (and we will look at it more closely later), and Descartes, who was a brilliant scientist and mathematician, wholly trusted the inevitability of causality and the rational analysis provided by the ‘thinking’ portion of himself. How did he know that the perceptions experienced by his thinking Self are trustworthy? “I can never be deceived;” declares Descartes, “because every clear and distinct conception is doubtless something, and as such cannot owe its origin to nothing, but must of necessity have God for its author— God, I say, who, as supremely perfect, cannot, without a contradiction, be the cause of any error; and consequently it is necessary to conclude that every such conception or judgment is true.” In short, he said, since God is perfect and God is the author of my perceptions, my perceptions must be trustworthy. In the centuries since, we have learned how inaccurate human perception and analysis can be in constructing the world. But Descartes’ conception of separate substances of mind/spirit and inanimate ‘extended’ matter has remained ingrained in the mainstream intuition of reality. The thinker that experiences thinking is associated with mind/soul/spirit, and is taken to be discrete from non-thinking inanimate matter. Thus the ‘mind-body’ problem (i.e. how the ephemeral thinking mind interacts with a non-thinking material body) is a paradigmatic byproduct of Cartesian Dualism. As I see it, Descartes provided the ontological foundation for both modern theism and modern atheism by separating mind/spirit from matter/energy, and declaring them to be separate ‘substances.’
I have contended in previous essays that Cartesian Dualism (reality = matter/energy + mind/spirit) and reductionist Materialism (reality = only matter/energy) and are both inaccurate or incomplete paradigms, though they are the dominant paradigms in western society (Dualism for religions, Materialism for science). I find the most compelling paradigm to be Nondualism, wherein mind and matter are considered two sides of the same inseparably intertwined fabric (that is more than one but less than two in ‘substance’). Perhaps it is best described as ‘information.’ For thousands of years, Eastern philosophers have asserted that the discrete Self is a falsely conceived object. They have argued that the Self is not a metaphysical or even stable thing, as typically conceived in the west, but rather a process that is, like all of nature, ever-changing. This view has come to be embraced by a large and increasing number of secular western philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists in the 21st century. In challenging the conception of a stable, discrete and existent ‘Self,’ I will frame my answer dualistically by examining the internal (‘subjective’) mind, and the external (‘objective’) body. In Part One, I will assert that the internal perception and identity of Self emerges from a self-referencing network of sub-systems (e.g. the central nervous system in humans). As layers of this system are experimentally stripped away or altered, the conception of Self changes and can even disappear altogether. I will present evidence from neuroanatomy, physiology, and psychology. In Part Two, I will contend that physics, biology and environmental science all suggest such deep interconnectedness between environment and organism that the notion of discrete Self-existence becomes unrecognizable, or at best somewhat arbitrary [12]. Essential to both Parts is the notion of self-referencing loops, and a protest against the inclination to objectify the world into component parts through naming and identification, a process that both separates us from the world, and creates the Self that is a stable point of reference within our world. In Waking, Dreaming, Being [7], philosopher Evan Thompson writes, “We experience our self both as an object of awareness and as the subject of awareness… These terms refer not to two different entities but to two ways of experiencing yourself—two modes of self-experience.” In Part One, I will look at these two modes of self-experience: the one experiencing each moment I will call ‘The Experiential Self,’ and one compiling and narrating our story over time I will call ‘The Narrative Self’ [30]. The two parts work in tandem, informing and shaping each other. Over the coming pages, we will explore the inner and the outer, emptiness and form. The emptiness of the inner Self, and the form of the outer Self.
Part One: Emptiness as The Self
An Anecdotal Account
In 1996, Jill Bolte Taylor experienced a stroke. As a Professor of Neuroanatomy at Harvard, she had a uniquely informed perspective as the left hemisphere of her own brain deteriorated over the course of four hours. She recounts the story in her book, My Stroke of Insight [2]. It is noteworthy that, though not religious, her account is very typical of deeply mystical experiences (both religious and nonreligious). She explains, “The harder I tried to concentrate, the more fleeting my ideas seemed to be. Instead of finding answers and information, I met a growing sense of peace. In place of that constant chatter that had attached me to the details of my life, I felt enfolded by a blanket of tranquil euphoria. As the language centers in my left hemisphere grew increasingly silent and I became detached from the memories of my life, I was comforted by an expanding sense of grace. In this void of higher cognition and details pertaining to my normal life, my consciousness soared into an all-knowingness, a ‘being at one’ with the universe, if you will. In a compelling sort of way, it felt like the good road home and I liked it. By this point I had lost touch with much of the physical three-dimensional reality that surrounded me. My body was propped up against the shower wall and I found it odd that I was aware that I could no longer clearly discern the physical boundaries of where I began and where I ended. I sensed the composition of my being as that of a fluid rather than that of a solid. I no longer perceived myself as a whole object separate from everything. Instead, I now blended in with the space and flow around me… I saw myself as a complex composite of dynamic systems, a collection of interlacing cells capable of integrating a medley of sensory modalities streaming in from the external world. And when the systems functioned properly, they naturally manifested a consciousness capable of perceiving a normal reality. I wondered how I could have spent so many years in this body, in this form of life, and never really understood that I was just visiting here.”
The Subjective Self
Consciousness itself is the most profound enigma known to science. As research in psychology and neuroscience has plumbed the topic with increasing detail over the last thirty years, the link to an ephemeral Self that is the essential ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ of a person has proven elusive. These words remain useful as shorthand descriptions of a person’s ‘essential’ nature, but seem increasingly unlikely as metaphysical truths that undergird ‘reality.’ Philosopher Alan Watts sums up the situation pretty well in The Book [3], where he writes, “the more resolutely you plumb the question ‘Who or what am I?’—the more unavoidable is the realization that you are nothing at all apart from everything else.” The sense of Self seems to work like an onion, with layers that can be peeled away. At the foundation is what we call ‘memory.’ But memory can be broken down into many different types [28] that each play a different role in creating our experience of the world. Implicit (unconscious) memory can be separated from explicit (conscious) memory, and within explicit memory, semantic memory (facts, language) can be separated from episodic memory (events, pictures), and so forth. Disabilities (strokes, amnesia, so forth) often affect one or more form of memory, but not other forms of memory. Mechanical changes (e.g. brain lesions or trauma, like the famous case of Phineas Gage [29]) or chemical changes (e.g. drugs, schizophrenia, psychosis, etc) can cause us to experience profound changes in mood, personality, perception, and more. This is a first clue that our ‘essential’ Self is itself profoundly malleable. In I am a Strange Loop [4], philosopher Douglas Hofstadter writes, “‘I’ involves a very tight team consisting of your left and right half-brains, each of which is fed directly by just one of your eyes and just one of your ears. The communication between your team’s two members is so strong and rapid, however, that the fused entity — the team itself — seems like just one thing, one absolutely unbreakable self.” Psychologist and brain researcher Michael Gazzaniga has extensively studied the cognition of patients with a severed corpus-callosum (the left and right brain hemispheres cannot communicate). Instead of the two brain hemispheres working redundantly to function as a whole, as is typical, each hemisphere is isolated. In A Divided Mind [5], Gazzaniga observes that “Each hemisphere in (patient) P. S. has a sense of self, and each possesses its own system for subjectively evaluating current events, planning for future events, setting response priorities, and generating personal responses.” In other words, each hemisphere seems to have its own independent Self. The left hemisphere can (and did) report different sentiments than the right hemisphere when asked questions about various likes and dislikes. Each hemisphere can also express different wishes, like fighting over whether a zipper goes up or down! These left/right conflicts are typically (though not always) resolved before reaching our conscious awareness. In his book, Incognito [6], neuroscientist David Eagleman observes, “Because of these internal multitudes, biological creatures can be conflicted. The term conflicted could not be sensibly applied to an entity that has a single program.” These pre-conscious internal conflict resolutions are happening throughout the brain for every different mode of perception all the time, and provide a clue to the astonishingly simplified version of reality that reaches our conscious awareness.
The Experiential Self
Evan Thompson sums up consciousness as “a kind of irreducible primacy. This primacy is first and foremost existential. Consciousness is something we live, not something we have. Consciousness is our way of being, and it cannot be objectified, that is, treated as just another kind of object out there in the world, because it is that by which any object shows up for us at all.” In What is Life? [8], quantum physicist Erwin Schrodinger writes, “The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it.” Max Planck, another of the fathers of Quantum Physics, writes, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing postulates consciousness.” In Being in Time [9], 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger echoes both, writing, “Everything we talk about, everything we have in view, everything towards which we comport ourselves in any way, is being; what we are is being, and so is how we are. Being lies in the fact that something is, and in its Being as it is.” This is critical. It is foundational. What consciousness perceives cannot be separated from how consciousness perceives. Evan Thompson writes, “How the world shows up for us depends on how we imaginatively perceive and conceptualize things. What we experience cannot be separated from how we experience. The thoughts, images, and emotions we bring to whatever we encounter, as well as the meanings we mentally impose, condition what ‘reality’ can mean to us.” Or, as David Eagleman puts it, “You don’t perceive objects as they are. You perceive them as you are.” If I have one philosophical take-away from the last five years of study, this merging of subject and object is it.
How does this experience of ‘being’ or consciousness come to be? There are dozens of theories. Western philosophy has long held an idea like Cartesian Dualism, wherein a “soul” or “spirit” “controls” a material body. This view still undergirds much religious thought and mainstream intuition about the relationship between mind and body, but there has never been a conduit or mechanism discovered to explain how these two separate domains interact. So the most commonly accepted view of science is reductionist materialism, which suggests that consciousness is an emergent epiphenomenon. In other words, consciousness is impressive to experience but has no role in the deterministic causal chain that enacts human behavior. However, though common among neuroscientists, this view fails to address how or why the qualitative nature of consciousness (e.g. the redness of red) emerges. In evolutionary terms, why would “nature” expend enormous amounts of energy to develop and sustain a complex sub-system like human cognition if it provides no evolutionary benefit? Why would a system evolve that demands huge amounts of energy if it provides no survival benefit? I have found no decent physicalist answer to this question. So, in short, it remains a grand mystery to neuroscience within the physicalist paradigm. But a great many clues have been compiled in recent years that whittle away at what seems more or less likely. The entire field of neuroanatomy (the anatomy of the brain) is less than 50 years old, so though much has been discovered and disclosed about human consciousness, there is still a long way to go, and very little of this relatively new insight has been incorporated into the mainstream understanding of human cognition. Though the nature of consciousness remains hotly disputed, there is a growing consensus that agrees with what religious mystics have said for thousands of years: our intuitive sense of Self is a constructed illusion of sorts. In The Ego Tunnel [10], philosopher Thomas Metzinger writes, “Consciousness is inwardness in time. It makes the world present for you by creating a new space in your mind—the space of temporal internality. Everything is in the Now. Whatever you experience, you experience it as happening at this moment… Now-ness is an essential feature of consciousness. And, of course, it is an illusion. As modern-day neuroscience tells us, we are never in touch with the present, because neural information-processing itself takes time. Signals take time to travel from your sensory organs along the multiple neuronal pathways in your body to your brain, and they take time to be processed and transformed into objects, scenes, and complex situations. So, strictly speaking, what you are experiencing as the present moment is actually the past… At this point, it becomes clear why philosophers speak about ‘phenomenal’ consciousness or ‘phenomenal’ experience. A phenomenon is an appearance. …the temporal inwardness of the conscious Now is an illusion. There is no immediate contact with reality. This point gives us a second fundamental insight into the tunnel-like nature of consciousness: The sense of presence is an internal phenomenon, created by the human brain. Not only are there no colors out there, but there is also no present moment.”
When I see, it feels like my eyes are windows through which my mind has direct exposure to the external world. My ears feel like microphones through which my mind can directly hear the external world. It is a powerful and convincing phenomenon. But sensory perception is best understood as a construction of reality, and that construction can take various forms. How reliable is our construction, and to what extent does it match how others perceive the world? Most human beings experience the perception of photons with a wavelength of 475 nanometers as ‘blue’, and wavelengths of 650 nm as ‘red’. But for about 4% of the human population, the “color-blind,” these are what others would call ‘shades of ‘grey’. As we will see later, human perception can differ dramatically. In nature, we also find modes of perception that differ vastly from the human experience [33]. Humans have three light-perceiving cones for vision, but the mantis shrimp has sixteen, enabling it to differentiate exponentially more colors. Humans typically hear sound from about 64 Hz to 23,000 Hz, but different animals can hear different frequencies [34]. The porpoise, for example, is believed to hear from about 75 Hz to 150,000 Hz. A cricket ‘hears’ by detecting air vibrations with its legs. An earthworm’s entire body is covered with taste receptors. Birds have vision that far exceeds the range and detail of human vision. The variety of perception and response mechanisms extends beyond what we might typically consider ‘sentient’ life. Evan Thompson notes that “Bacteria identify certain kinds of molecules as attractants and others kinds as repellents. …This kind of behavior depends on a rudimentary form of memory. In short, bacteria discriminate and remember physically distinct elements of the environment; they respond to these elements as either favorable or unfavorable; and they incline either toward or away from these elements.” Trees use sensitivity to light and molecular activity in the environment to alter growth paths and positioning. As a curious aside, the roots of a tree grow differently – less aggressively – when beside a seed ‘sibling’ than a random ‘stranger’ seed [35], indicating far more conditionally nuanced responses than ever imagined. In forests, there is also evidence that large “mother” sequoia trees serve to protect and help feed younger and smaller saplings [55]. It seems clear that there is incredibly rich diversity in how existence is experienced and navigated by different life forms. Experience appears to be fundamentally embodied, and the form of the embodiment shapes and determines the manner in which reality is experienced by the organism. Philosopher Martin Heidegger emphasized this point by noting that ‘being’ is only-ever ‘being in the world.’ Existence is never without context. So, how reliably can we trust that the human experience of the world represents reality as it “really is”? Neuroscientist David Eagleman cautions, “your mental life is built to range over a certain territory, and it is restricted from the rest. There are thoughts you cannot think. You cannot comprehend the sextillion stars of our universe, nor picture a five-dimensional cube, nor feel attracted to a frog. If these examples seem obvious, just consider them in analogy to seeing in infrared, or picking up on radio waves, or detecting butyric acid as a tick does… Nothing seems more natural than desire, but the first thing to notice is that we’re wired only for species-appropriate desire. This underscores a simple but crucial point: the brain’s circuits are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate to our survival… The same principles of hardwired thought guidance apply to all of your deeply held beliefs about logic, economics, ethics, emotions, beauty, social interactions, love, and the rest of your vast mental landscape. Our evolutionary goals navigate and structure our thoughts. Chew on that for a moment. It means there are certain kinds of thoughts we can think, and whole categories of thoughts we cannot.” Eagleman released a six-part series on PBS in 2015 that covers much of the material in this essay, and in his accompanying book, The Brain he writes, “Self doesn’t exist in a vacuum… The brain takes in all the senses through different channels, and constructs a unified reality from that. How it does this is an unsolved question in neuroscience, known as the binding problem… The physical signals from the body give a quick summary of what’s going on and what to do about it. To land on a choice, the body and the brain have to be in close communication. …The state of your body helps you in this task: it serves as a summary of the situation… And that helps your brain decide what to do next. …Because the conscious mind has low bandwidth, you don’t typically have full access to the bodily signals that tip your decisions; most of the action in your body lives far below your awareness.” This points to the deep and profound interconnection between our physical state and mental experience and the role emotion plays in our cognitive experience. It is this co-dependency of body and mind that I find insufficiently addressed by both Materialism and Dualism. To further complicate matters, the Central Nervous System, including the brain, is a closed system. In Autopoiesis and Cognition [11], biologist Humberto Maturana writes, “perception should not be viewed as a grasping of an external reality… because no distinction is possible between perception and hallucination in the operation of the nervous system as a closed network.” He continues, “living systems do not have inputs and outputs… and it is only in our descriptions… that we can say that they do.” As practically applied, this means the skin is not an organ that reports information about the external world per say, but instead reports about its own continually modified status, which we take to be indicative of the external world. But, most simply, this is why one person can be hot and another cold in the same environment. Thomas Metzinger writes, “Modern neuroscience has demonstrated that the content of our conscious experience is not only an internal construct but also an extremely selective way of representing information. This is why it is a tunnel: What we see and hear, or what we feel and smell and taste, is only a small fraction of what actually exists out there. Our conscious model of reality is a low-dimensional projection of the inconceivably richer physical reality surrounding and sustaining us.”
“’Real’ is the name we give to certain stable ways that things appear and continue to appear when we test them,” observes Evan Thompson. “It is not the name for some essence hidden behind or within appearances.” So how does consciousness determine what is ‘real’? Evolutionary Biologist Donald Hoffman asserts that constructing a ‘reality’ that suits survival needs is far more important than constructing a ‘reality’ that reflects the world more accurately [36]. He contends, “Current models of visual perception typically assume that human vision estimates true properties of physical objects, properties that exist even if unperceived. However, recent studies of perceptual evolution, using evolutionary games and genetic algorithms, reveal that natural selection often drives true perceptions to extinction when they compete with perceptions tuned to fitness rather than truth: Perception guides adaptive behavior; it does not estimate a preexisting physical truth.” So what is the relationship between internal (‘phenomenological’) perception and our environment (‘external’ reality)? Let’s just say it is much more complicated than once imagined. David Eagleman writes “Throughout the brain there is as much feedback as feedforward—a feature of brain wiring that is technically called recurrence and colloquially called loopiness. The whole system looks a lot more like a marketplace than an assembly line. To the careful observer, these features of the neurocircuitry immediately raise the possibility that visual perception is not a procession of data crunching that begins from the eyes and ends with some mysterious end point at the back of the brain. In fact, nested feedback connections are so extensive that the system can even run backward. …the brain generates its own reality, even before it receives information coming in from the eyes and the other senses. This is known as the internal model. The basis of the internal model can be seen in the brain’s anatomy… Visual information goes to the visual cortex, so there are a huge number of connections going from the thalamus into the visual cortex. But here’s the surprise: there are ten times as many going in the opposite direction. …The thalamus simply reports on differences between what the eyes are reporting, and what the brain’s internal model has predicted. In other words, what gets sent back to the visual cortex is what fell short in the expectation (also known as the “error”): the part that wasn’t predicted away. So at any moment, what we experience as seeing relies less on the light streaming into our eyes, and more on what’s already inside our heads. …perception reflects the active comparison of sensory inputs with internal predictions. And this gives us a way to understand a bigger concept: awareness of your surroundings occurs only when sensory inputs violate expectations. When the world is successfully predicted away, awareness is not needed because the brain is doing its job well.” He continues “So the first lesson about trusting your senses is: don’t… After all, we are aware of very little of what is ‘out there.’ The brain makes time-saving and resource-saving assumptions and tries to see the world only as well as it needs to.” Common illusions of all types prey upon this use of unconscious cognitive shortcuts. Eagleman concludes by echoing Maturana, “the internal data is not generated by external sensory data but merely modulated by it. …In this view, the difference between being awake and being asleep is merely that the data coming in from the eyes anchors the perception. Asleep vision (dreaming) is perception that is not tied down to anything in the real world; waking perception is something like dreaming with a little more commitment to what’s in front of you. Other examples of unanchored perception are found in prisoners in pitch-dark solitary confinement, or in people in sensory deprivation chambers. Both of these situations quickly lead to hallucinations. Ten percent of people with eye disease and visual loss will experience visual hallucinations. In the bizarre disorder known as Charles Bonnet syndrome, people losing their sight will begin to see things—such as flowers, birds, other people, buildings—that they know are not real.” Dramatic changes in perceptual experience can be affirmed by anyone who has been prescribed mind or mood altering drugs, or any recreational drug user. As a curious aside, some hallucinogenic drugs have been documented to induce powerful spiritual experiences that mimic mystical religious experiences [56], often with profound, life-changing effects. There are also hundreds of fascinating and well-documented conditions that involve alternate experiences of consciousness even without drugs of any kind [37]. A tour through the written works of psychologist Oliver Sacks offers a study in atypical forms of perceptual experience and consciousness. For instance, people experiencing Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) can experience an ‘alien limb’ which feels like it does not belong to their own body [39]. A missing limb can feel like it is still there (a “phantom limb”), or can even cause pain or discomfort in its absence [38]. There is a condition called Cotard’s wherein people believe they have no Self for a very different reason than the mystics: they believe they are actually dead [40]. In a condition called “blindsight” a clinically blind subject can correctly identify images that they have no conscious experience of seeing. This is just a small sampling of the myriad of codified conditions that testify to how specific and fragile our link to the particular brand of reality that we humans call “normal” is. Synesthesia is one of the most fascinating conditions. It is thought to affect about 4% of the population [41], and involves the mixing of perceptual senses: colors may be associated with a smell, or each color may be associated with a different musical note, or sounds may provoke the visual experience of certain shapes, numbers may consistently appear as certain colors, a day of the week may be felt as having a location in space, and so forth. David Eagleman is one of the world’s leading experts on Synesthesia. He writes, “Synesthesia is the result of increased cross talk among sensory areas in the brain. Think of it like neighboring countries with porous borders on the brain’s map. And this cross talk results from tiny genetic changes that pass down family lineages. Think about that: microscopic changes in brain wiring can lead to different realities. The mere existence of synesthesia demonstrates that more than one kind of brain—and one kind of mind—is possible… Synesthesia,” he writes, “in its dozens of varieties, highlights the amazing differences in how individuals subjectively see the world, reminding us that each brain uniquely determines what it perceives, or is capable of perceiving. This fact brings us back to our main point here––namely, that reality is far more subjective than is commonly supposed. Instead of reality being passively recorded by the brain, it is actively constructed by it.”
The way the mind maps to the body is no less remarkable than how the mind maps to itself. The psychical boundary of the Self does not necessarily match the physical boundary of its organism. The psyche can define and redefine its own boundaries. As humans, our minds routinely redefine our boundaries when wearing clothes, using tools, playing sports, even driving cars. Thomas Metzinger explains, “Your body image is surprisingly flexible. Expert skiers, for example, can extend their consciously experienced body image to the tips of their skis. Race-car drivers can expand it to include the boundaries of the car; they do not have to judge visually whether they can squeeze through a narrow opening or avoid an obstacle—they simply feel it.” Similarly, if a finger or hand or arm is cut off, my psyche redefines its physical boundary. We are perpetually revising our boundaries to include pens, clothes, cars, so forth. Metzinger explains “The rubber-hand illusion (where a participant’s mind is fooled into reacting as though a rubber hand is their real hand [42]) helps us understand the interplay among vision, touch, and proprioception, the sense of body posture and balance originating in your vestibular system. Your bodily self-model is created by a process of multisensory integration, based on a simple statistical correlation your brain has discovered. The phenomenal incorporation of the rubber hand into your self-model results from correlated tactile and visual inputs. …the brain automatically forms a new, coherent representation (of the rubber hands as your real hand). The consciously experienced sense of ownership follows.”
There is an incredible amount of information integration involved in even the most simple perceptions. Jill Bolte Taylor explains, “our skin is our largest sensory organ, and it is stippled with very specific sensory receptors designed to experience pressure, vibration, light touch, pain, or temperature. These receptors are precise in the type of stimulation they perceive such that only cold stimulation can be perceived by cold sensory receptors and only vibration can be detected by vibration receptors. Because of this specificity, our skin is a finely mapped surface of sensory reception.” Various illusions, like the ‘thermal grill’ where alternating strips of moderate hot and cold result in the sensation of extreme heat, show how our system can be confused [30]. Like the skin, vision utilizes a variety of specialized sensors to build a composite impression. Taylor writes, “a visual image is built by our brain’s ability to package groups of pixels together in the form of edges. Different edges with different orientations–vertical, horizontal, and oblique, combine to form complex images. Different groups of cells in our brain add depth, color, and motion to what we see.” Like all other systems, the heavy lifting of defining, compiling and building visual perception happens far below conscious awareness. Psychology researcher Jan Brascamp reports, “the part of the brain that is responsible for seeing, for the apparently ‘simple’ of act of generating the picture in our mind’s eye, turns out to have the ability to do something akin to choosing, as it actively switches between different interpretations of the visual input without any help from traditional ‘higher level’ areas of the brain.” Blind adults who have physical sight restored require time (often years) to learn how to turn the flood of light into the shapes of three-dimensional ‘sight’ that we take for granted. But it turns out sight can be acquired even without eyes, in a sense. David Eagleman explains, “Here’s the idea: attach a video camera to someone’s forehead and convert the incoming video information into an array of tiny vibrators attached to their back. …When blind subjects strap on these visual-tactile substitution glasses and walk around for a week, they become quite good at navigating a new environment. They can translate the feelings on their back into knowing the right way to move. But that’s not the stunning part. The stunning part is that they actually begin to perceive the tactile input—to see with it. After enough practice, the tactile input becomes more than a cognitive puzzle that needs translation; it becomes a direct sensation. If it seems strange that nerve signals coming from the back can represent vision, bear in mind that your own sense of vision is carried by nothing but millions of nerve signals that just happen to travel along different cables. Your brain is encased in absolute blackness in the vault of your skull. It doesn’t see anything. All it knows are these little signals, and nothing else. And yet you perceive the world in all shades of brightness and colors. Your brain is in the dark but your mind constructs light. To the brain, it doesn’t matter where those pulses come from—from the eyes, the ears, or somewhere else entirely. As long as they consistently correlate with your own movements as you push, thump, and kick things, your brain can construct the direct perception we call vision.” Like sight, hearing is a form of encoded information. Jill Bolte Taylor writes, “our ability to hear sound depends upon our detection of energy traveling at different wavelengths. Sound is the product of atomic particles in space colliding with one another and emitting patterns of energy. The energy wavelengths, created by the bombarding particles, beat upon the tympanic membrane in our ear. Different wavelengths of sound vibrate our eardrum with unique properties. Similar to our retinal cells, the hair cells of our auditory Organ of Corti translate this energy vibration in our ear into a neural code. This eventually reaches the auditory cortex (in the temporal region of our brain) and we hear sound.” Like vision, the sense of sound can be constructed without audio input. There is technology which can use ultra-slow motion video to detect the vibrations of any object (e.g. a bag of chips, a window pane, etc.) and reconstruct the sound in a room using an algorithmic analysis of visible micro-vibrations [43]. Sound works in tandem with sight, and secondarily to it, for most humans. David Eagleman writes, “Simple illusions …serve as powerful clues into neural circuitry, telling us that the visual and auditory systems are densely tied in with each other, trying to relate a unified story of events in the world.” All of our senses are built up similarly by integrating a variety of specific sensory signals into a single coherent sensation, and those sensations are combined into a single temporal moment that is experienced in a particular format evolved to optimize our chances of survival. We call that format the ‘external world.’ Our experience of that world is fundamentally and invariably embedded in time. But time itself is a mysterious rabbit hole. The experience of a single present moment involves at least two points in time, since time is a measure of change (thus the term ‘duration’ is synonymous with ‘time’ for philosophers like St. Augustine and Henri Bergson). A single perceptible moment lasts about 80 milliseconds for the average human according to researchers [31]. There is also a lag between an event and our perception of it that appears to be another 80 milliseconds [32] for the average human, though it can be as much as 500 ms. Different senses (touch, sight, hearing) involve different lags depending upon axonal speed limitations and the distance to the brain. It seems likely that time is perceived differently for organisms at different size scales and with different nervous systems and neural architecture, as different sensory modes make for different kinds of experience. It creates in me a profound sense of awe for how mysterious, misleading and counter-intuitive our relationship to reality really is.
Perhaps the most important realization about our experience of consciousness in recent decades is that the overwhelming majority of what we do is compelled without any conscious participation at all.
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