What if consciousness is not what drives the human mind?
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theconversation.com
My consciousness-- the surface most of us have access to, tries to make sense of these conversations and form them into a cohesive illusion/narrative in which I am a single "thing" of which I am in control.
A few times I've reached states where I can connect or disconnect these entities for a few minutes, or have a conversation with them directly.
Prior to attending a week-long ayahuasca retreat in Peru, a psychiatrist friend decided to use ketamine to induce a controlled state of dissociative identity in which one detached aspect of her psyche could observe the machinations of another. Curiously, after returning from Peru following a mentored DMT regimen she reported experiences similar to those reported by oceanghost. Buddhist mystic types contend that one's psychology is a function of 'atmanah' (some sort of co-minds) interacting with a individual's 'prajnatma' (one's self) [Dhammapada text]. Interesting. IF valid (BIG IF) then nobody would be what they seem.
Sometimes its easier to hand off control to my monkey brain, I'm not sure who it is inside me, but they find it easier to ignore the fear that holds human me back.
I feel like there is Mr Low-level (maybe lizard brain?) who takes over when I'm super sleepy or driving or walking and listening to podcasts. There is monkey brain who is reckless and doesn't mind what happens to the physical self. Then there is me, I'm usually in charge.
The interactions are more complex and nuanced than I can write here.
Instead of lizard / monkey / the 'me' try physicalistic / vitalistic / mentalistic
My thought is that the brain stores something analagous to a kind of a big fuzzy hierarchical hash table between sensory inputs and nervous system response (pleasure/pain). LSD/DMT allow us to traverse these hashtables in ways that are not usually possible. (DMT especially...)
A friend of mine who did meditation seriously told me he had heard of this as an "advanced technique", but I really don't know. :)
Moreover, what you describe can also be found in western mystery schools and traditions that go back hundreds of years. Terms such as "knowledge and conversation with the holy guardian angel", "crossing the abyss", "ego death", "ascending the Tree of Life" refer to profound, iconoclastic experiences that can forever shatter one's assumption of being a monad in space-time. Realizing that in one's mind exist various superintelligences, normally inaccessible, with their own motives and goals, can be quite distressing to say the least.
There is a huge, polar gap between the process and results of the meditation taught in modern spiritual practices (such as Zen Buddhism) and what Gautama Buddha taught to his students.
For whatever reason, foreign religious figures such as the Dalai Lama have more cachet than Christian figures in the minds of many modern people, and from what I understand he has stated the same thing:
"Whenever I give a large teaching, I always make clear that it is safer to follow your own traditions, rather than change to another tradition," he said. "There's less confusion. Here in the West, I do not think it advisable to follow Buddhism. Changing religions is not like changing professions. Excitement lessons over the years, and soon you are not excited, and then where are you? Homeless inside yourself."
Some folks get so tied up to their anti-Christian sentiment that they'll try to join foreign religions they have no understanding of instead of just reading what the doctors of the Church have to say about the interior life, and admitting that maybe they were a bit hasty in writing off such a complex and beautiful tradition.
It's absolutely ok to be anti-Christian (i.e critical of Christian doctrine). I agree with you that the enthusiasm towards other traditions of spirituality is perplexing, but I would disagree that Christianity offers any sort of more valuable refuge.
One thing I've come to believe is in line with (what this article presents as) the paper's thesis, and that is the following:
Consciousness is best described as a highest order observation process that is non-continuous. Somewhat like a serverless or virtual instance, it can pop in and out of use as needed, any maybe many times a second.
These brief 'flashes' of highest order observation, when observed by the person, blend to form a continuous experience, but it's really just a smoothing function, and an illusion.
Consider how you can be tricked into believing something was there in a memory that helps explain a story, even when it wasn't. The mind is not as precise as we want to believe!
Consciousness is therefore not the root, and persistent experience! It's weird, but it actually ends up explaining a lot of personal life experiences a little better.
This implies that there is someone ("the person") observing the highest order observation -- making it not the highest order.
And to be an illusion there needs to be someone to fool in the first place.
Try to get that language out of your stataments and then see if you can say ANYTHING AT ALL about consciousness! :-)
Or think about it this way: We simulate a reality (the illusion).
Or how about this. We are pattern recognizing feedback loops (illusion)
Do we really need to know what consciousness is as a thing or have we perhaps by now realized that question doesn't really make sense because consciousness is not a thing. It doesn't exist somewhere. It's a concept we use to describe phenomena but which through language can always only be a reduction of reality.
Same thing with the idea of "existence". It actually requires consciousness to make any sense. The two concepts are actually dual of each other!
Thought experiment: if I told you about a parallel universe which you would never be able to detect, or deduce from any phenomena in this one ... how is then saying "it exists" different from saying "it doesn't exist?"
Now imagine this world with no conscious observers. How is its existence any different from that of the hypothetical parallel universe?
In short - our very concepts of existence and consciousness are really influenced by the language we use.
Now an interesting question: can you pose ANY question about consciousness or existence that doesn't have a trivial answer, if you are CAREFUL to avoid all ambiguity in your language?
I believe that, from an atheist point of view, there IS no root you can get at. Everything is relative. When you are careful to state the subject and object of a sentence everything becomes trivially obvious.
The trouble is when you take a ternary relation (eg A should do B if A wants C to happen) and omit one of the terms. Then you get mystical wondering "How do we ground the moral imperative that A should do B?" Once you are careful to include all the input variables, morality and everything else becomes relative and the statements are merely relations. Then you get something like logical positivism.
The main question still remains - WHY are things the way they are, so consistent? And atheists may never know! :)
And then the real question IMO becomes what are useful questions to ask, rather than what is the answer.
Albert Einstein
My first memory of that experience was a cacophony of noises, specific images, and what I can only describe as colored static. Then, over what subjectively felt like 10 seconds, I realized at some stage that I was ‘awake’ and the various sounds and images sort of faded until I had one coherent thought and then started to get awareness of my surroundings and then finally opened my eyes.
It was a very unsettling, but also very interesting experience and sort of made me curious to investigate if this is what people experience with hallucinagens.
Another time when I had to make a trip to the ER they gave me nitrous oxide when they tried to reset a broken bone and I had very interesting aural hallucination where sounds became chopped up/echoey. When the gas stopped I asked the nurse how long it had been and she said about 5 minutes but it had felt like 30 mins.
Both of experiences left me fascinated how malleable our perceptions are :)
Being sedated tends to just "turn your brain off" in my experience. To make an analogy to computer vision: fainting lowers the resolution and increases the noise in the original image, psychedelics change the decision threshold for detection of objects.
The 'cacophony of noises, specific images' (which you refer to) were generated by the 'fast, efficient, non-conscious systems in [your] brain' (which the article refers to).
But when you woke up fully the cacophony was joined up into the 'coherent whole'. That's what consciousness is, I think: the joining of things or processes together so that they interact and new things (new patterns) can emerge. These things can now be adopted and utilized by 'the narrative' and as a result the narrative itself changes.
So, though it works indirectly, consciousness is really immensely powerful. It's misleading to think of it as 'passive'. The mind may be driven by desires and fears, but without consciousness there'd be no material to work with.
My consciousness prefers to think that it is the one in control, and any suggestion to the contrary makes my consciousness uncomfortable.
> My consciousness prefers to think that it is the one in control, and any suggestion to the contrary makes my consciousness uncomfortable.
Maybe you should rather say "My awarenes is aware of thoughts about myself being the one in control, and it is also aware of feelings of discomfort that accompany ideas about myself not being the one in control".
Experience/qualia is only involved when brain wants to think. This seems to suggest that free will indeed exists(otherwise why bother with all this machinery), but it is pretty limited.
Though this view is certainly odd, I've always struggled to see how it isn't true. How could our behavior not be entirely determined by the physical state of our brain? In some ways this strikes me as obviously true, if unintuitive at first.
If consciousness were just a by-product (like steam in your example) then there would be no physical drive to talk about it.
It could be that consciousness is simply an emergent property (a by-product) of the communication of billions of neurons that are connected in trillions of ways. Where neurons are emergent of chemical phenomena which are emergent of atomic phenomena and so on.
I'm probably greatly simplifying the dependencies of phenomena, but I think that consciousness is most definitely based upon physical processes. The current evidence makes me believe that consciousness is a by-product of evolution, which is a by-product of the conditions on our planet.
So it goes.
Touch hot flame -> Feel sensation of pain -> Move hand
It's...
Touch hot flame -> brain processes event and sends signals to move hand -> You experience all of this but it had no relevancy to the chain of events.
EDIT: This does beg the question 'why do we have consciousness, then?' or slightly related 'how could we talk about it?'. Which are interesting questions, and probably explained by darwinian processes, but don't really get at the heart of it. My thoughts anyhow.
All of this is at least intuitively easy to explain with added language and complexity in the brain. So like the chain would become:
Touch hot flame -> brain processes event (and then does complicated language processing, and complicated memory and emotion processing) and THEN sends signals to move hand or not move hand -> You experience all of this but it had no relevancy to the chain of events.
Where I would ponder the relevancy of consciousness is when it comes to attention and remembering things. Just from personal experience, I can read a book, watch a movie or listen to music and I will not remember a thing if I wasn't aware of it. Is awareness and consciousness the same thing? I don't know, but at least we are conscious of everything we are aware of, by definition, and not necessarily vice versa.
Also, how would the ability to think evolve in our species, if our thoughts never had an impact on our behavior? Then they could not provide any evolutionary advantage.
It is possible (and quite likely) that some weaker version of that statement is true; e.g. that there are many things that brain does independently on our thoughts. But claiming that there is "no" impact is just trying to be edgy. Yes, such absolute statement sounds more interesting, but it is wrong.
Some questions can't be answered through language they can only be conceptualized through language and that's a very important distinction IMO.
I firmly believe that most if not all interpretations of the 'world' is processed and complete before it even reaches perception. How I recognize objects, how I feel at the moment, and my literal thoughts themselves. But I cannot deny that the brain activity that processes stimulus into interpretations into perceived experience is also very aware of the perceived experience.
Perhaps it's as though our brain has a functional programming style in that various stimulus is operated upon somewhat independently by different regions of the brain, but the operation of synthesis takes the previous perceived experience (that is, the output of the previous synthesis op) as part of the input along with the various outputs of newly processed stimulus to create a new synthesized state that has reliable continuity.
If my wife or friend is in a lousy mood, my mood may sour too. If my team scores, I cheer in excitement -- even when the team is playing hundreds of miles away.
The brain surely plays a role in each of these cases, but I would assign causality outside it.
If ephiphenonalism is true, those categorizations should be purely learned: otherwise it is hard to explain why (evolutionary) harmful things usually cause bad experience and suffering, while useful things usually cause pleasure.
For example: I could feel intense pain and suffering eating a cake, it would not count if my unconscious decision was to eat it. So either it is pure luck that I enjoy it, or I learned to enjoy a lot of (otherwise neutral) feelings.
Yeah, I just don't have a good answer for it other than to bite the bullet and say its just a crazy coincidence. The incentives of our unconscious brain are roughly aligned with what feels good. But it doesn't seem satisfactory to me either.
Every time you go up a level of management, the information that flows upward becomes more high-level and abbreviated, because that information is flowing to people that have to make very high-level decisions about things. The executive that everything ultimately flows up to is still exposed to a tremendous amount of information, but it's an almost comically simplified view of the whole picture. Everyone involved (including the executive) can only hope that every layer of simplification always retains the most important and most accurate information, to maximize the executive's ability to make good decisions.
Likewise our minds have layers upon layers of processing, from raw sensory input that gets collected into perceptions of discrete objects, up through the instincts and memories that decide which of those objects are threats (and if so, which of those threats should trigger the fight-or-flight response, etc.). That's not even getting to the more abstract processes that contribute to feelings of tribalism, thoughts on economics, religion, existentialism, and so on. Most abstract of all (IMO) is how the brain puts everything together to trick us into thinking that we can sense what's going on within other people's minds (empathy, basically, which gives us reasonable educated guesses about how other people are responding to us, while tricking us into thinking that we understand other people far more than we really do).
The conscious mind can only make decisions about high-level data that the endless layers of the subconscious prepares for it, like managers presenting their executives with high-level status reports condensed from mountains of low-level data. The quality of the executive's decisions are capped by both the the executive's own rationality, as well as the quality of the condensed data that gets passed up the chain.
A real life example is someone who feels threatened when they see someone of another race or religion. Such a person might be being rational in their own way, in that they're making decisions based on what they think are facts about the world and their place in it. But such a person doesn't realize that fear or other human flaws are causing garbage data to propagate up to their conscious mind. A racist's problem, for example, is that they're often just rationally responding to the garbage data that is being given to them by their subconscious. They fear people that look different from them because that's what's in the status reports that their subconscious prepares for them every week, but they haven't figured out yet that their own mind is an unreliable narrator for the world around them. We all are unreliable narrators for ourselves, and there's no way to avoid it- the best we can do is try to understand it and make our best effort to maintain a healthy level of skepticism and rationality about everything.
I don't pretend to know anything about any of this stuff on an academic level, this is just a view that I've come around to over the years. I'm just a lifelong armchair philosopher, and this is the best I've been able to come up with so far.
If such persons exist in the world (and we know they do), then it's not that irrational to fear "others" (race, religion). To the "other", you are also a different race and/or religion, and thus they might have negative thoughts about you, so it makes sense on some level to be more cautious around them even if you don't share those feelings.
You mean your experiences have no real impact. Your thoughts are not necessarily qualia.
>Though this view is certainly odd, I've always struggled to see how it isn't true. How could our behavior not be entirely determined by the physical state of our brain?
Who says your consciousness isn't physical?
Shockingly, I neither chose to forget to send my sibling a birthday card, nor chose to have a song from Moana lurking at the back of my head. Both of these have had strong causative influence on my subsequent conscious actions.
In other news, when I consciously try to catch a ball, I am limited by the length of my arms. This does not imply that consciousness is an emergent property of my arm bones.
So, you believe in free will.
Say you have complete disbelief in free will. Without free will, you just carry out a path which is already predetermined. In other words, you just carry out your destiny. It can be the case that you are destined to 'try to do good'. You do not choose to do good, you do good because it is in your nature.
More generally:
Regardless of belief, people are confronted with choice points where they have to choose A or B. Those who believe in free will believe that the choice is determined by an internal force which they associate with 'themselves'. Those who do not believe in free will believe that the choice is determined by some external force.
People make decisions in each scenario, the debate is over the ultimate force which drives the decisions.
This doesn't mean I don't want to do good or don't want to see murderers jailed.
It simply means that if the universe was rewound like a VHS tape and played again, nothing would change. That our actions are fully deterministic.
If free will existed then rewinding the universe and playing forward again would result in different outcomes.
I am very much aware of mental health issues as I am healing trauma, self harm in one way or another (internalized anger and even rage). I am healing a childhood of abuse and neglect. Lots of broken people in my family, generational trauma from the wars, I believe.
You're talking about ignorance. But it's better for people to understand inter-dependence then. Telling them they have no freewill will only meet resistance. Inter-dependence, ultimately, reaches the same conclusion.. but it can help develop a sense of connection and warmth to life. In theory I can see that for some people "no freewill" implies as much and is obvious but I suspect for most, it's not obvious that "no freewill" means "we are all one".
What is generally misunderstood about mental illness is the mechanism of dissociation. Dissociation goes hand in hand with suffering, and is behind much of the news of the world everyday.
From my experience healing trauma, I'd wager most mental health issues are related to an imbalance between the left and right brain hemispheres (cf. Ian mcgilchrist "the divided brain" for a lot of research on that). The left hemisphere deals with narrow attention and the "map" of the world. When traumatized, our nervous system is overwhelmed. Somehow, it causes a shift where we live life predominantly from the left hemisphere, because mind provides an illusion of safety through a known world. Why this happens I don't know.
This is dissociation at work. This is why dissociated individuals act in what seems completely irrational ways. They are acting from a map that has become their reality.
I make this connection because since doing trauma therapy, massage and yoga... last couple years... I started to "fall" sometimes back into silence. (edit: i should mention also, that "integrating" is a key aspect of trauma therapy which incidentally means.. to be with present experience.. the direct opposite of dissociation). It's as if the body starts feeling safe enough, to say, ok... no need for right hemisphere right now. This shift is not something you control directly. The individual needs to feel safe for this to happen AND somehow I think you also need the curiosity, the desire to fall into the silence because of exhaustion... you have to be really exhausted with thinking.
> And doesn't the idea of "free will" also do harm ?
Yes but it goes hand in hand with the materialist paradigm we are in. Our entire society is based on the notion that we exist, independently, as separate entities. That "oneness" is merely a feel good thought.
And honestly i don't know what the next paradigm is. It's a very peculiar question... we are wired quite clearly in our brains to experience life as individuals. Our conceptual mind inevitably sees cause and effect (its is after all said to be "dualistic").
Thats why I think right now the next big step forsociety is to undestand trauma, understand that it is the nature of suffering, that addiction and dissociation goes hand in hand. That dissociation is actually rampant in our society and unconscious developments in technology can become a further support to dissociate which doesn't help at all..
Revenge and feeling good when 'justice' is served are seen in a completly different light if we come to terms with our biology.
I think a society that treats someone who behaves badly as sick and not evil is a better place for everyone.
But... as I am healing trauma and have prior experience in the "spiritual seeking", it has become clear to me that the mechanism of dissociation is key to understanding human suffering.
For traumatized individuals and anyone with a long history of depression or anxiety, the teachings on "no self" and/or "no freewill" will almost certainly be grasped on by the conceptual mind, in order to further protect one self from pain. Where there is significant pain that needs to heal, there will be the compulsion to disengage from life that is threatening, especially from social engagement. Worse, a traumatized individual believing they have no free will, and can't do anyhing, may even abandon healing... which is pretty tragic.
I was a in a pretty confusing place myself for a couple years after some glimpses here and there. Whether that can be avoided I don't know. But I think if this were to be taught in larger circles, then it would be better to always pair this understanding with the notion of inter-dependence.
By the way - people have already argued that is not conscious, but meta-conscious that makes us different: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/consciousn...
It is argued that meta-conscious may reflect upon state of the conscious and attempt to readjust works in the other parts of the brain.