Peter Fenner, Radiant Mind

Peter Fenner gives about as good, simple and natural an explanation to the space of consciousness as just about anyone I've come across.

A short dialogue, here.

A way of thinking about Dennett's theory of consciousness: a vote, and decision making.

I was just thinking about an article I wrote about here when I thought of a much better (and topical) metaphor for the way consciousness works in the human brain according to Daniel Dennett.

For the non-clickers:

(From Dennett:)

'"I claim that consciousness is not some extra glow or aura or "quale" caused by the activities made possible by the functional organization of the mature cortex; consciousness is those various activities. One is conscious of those contents whose representations briefly monopolize certain cortical resources, in competition with many other representations. The losers—lacking "political clout" in this competition—quickly fade leaving few if any traces, and that’s the only difference between being a conscious content and being an unconscious content."'

(From myself:)
"Basically, there is no "little man" of consciousness sitting in your brain, editing what comes in and then sending it up to "you," a separate medium, to become conscious content. It is the sum total of the activities of the neurological system that is consciousness itself."

It was the term "political clout" that got me thinking about this, along with a few weeks of staring at polls every day, and a metaphor popped into my head, more helpful perhaps than the negative example of the little man in explaining what (I think) Dennett means: the vote for president.

What Dennett is saying, with this analogy, would be, "the final determination of who becomes the next president of the United States (the outcome of the process, or "consciousness,") is not some extra capital "V" vote, (quale or aura,) it is the activities of millions of voters voting. This may seem like no more than a tricky accounting method, but the distinction is important. It is also fairly obvious when talking about a vote, but perhaps not so much when talking about our own consciousness. There is no president in your head, no controlling piece that decides what to do and what to show, what becomes conscious and what not, but millions of separate components all clamoring for attention (millions of voters with their own individual preferences and requirements.) When they reach a critical mass, they "monopolize certain cortical resources," and you become aware of something.

In fact, when we choose a president we are basically doing what everybody intuits we are doing
and what Dennett says we are precisely not doing: putting a "little guy" in charge of it all at the top of the head who makes the decisions. We choose an arbitrary point (the first Tuesday in November on a four-year cycle) to gather the input of all these little contributors, and then, ceremoniously and ritually assign, for the next four years, the one person that was able to align himself most broadly with the contributors, the voters, to the job of "decider."

There is some feedback, in terms of media and public opinion polls, but for the most part this is not what is happening in our brains: it's what we think is happening. What is really happening, according to Dennett, is more as if there were a constant election, not for a representative but on issues of state, and whenever a person decided to throw his or her vote in a different direction, her or she would do so, and whenever a voting level reached some critical threshold, it would be enacted, or changed, say, at 65% approval a new law would be passed, or at 30% disapproval something would be revoked.

In this way, the brain is a tyrannic democracy.

Some other random thoughts that sprang from this idea:

In this light it becomes much more apparent how ritualized government is, how we try to approximate power and make it more practical and benificial to the most people, and how that changes over time due to the evolution of social and religious (ritual) beliefs, as in how a King, standing in for God, makes decisions that are the best for everyone in the kingdom in aggregate top-down, versus how a president, standing in for a symbolic unity of the country and the opinions of the people, makes decisions informed by the will from below (the people) and not imposing them from above (this is an ideal, obviously a certain current president feels somewhat more like a king according to this way of thinking, at least at times.)

Similarly, what we call the "ego," is no more than a fiction we put in place as a shorthand way of understanding the millions of little bits of information inside, outside, and created in the relation between inside and outside. As noted in my earlier blog, this is why I think buddhist philosophy would be quite comfortable with Dennett's work.

This is why government is ritualistic, the ultimate power is never coming from it, it is legitimized only in so far as it reflects the will of God, or the will of the people, the ultimate powers. What we call the ego is a puppet standing in for the real thing, standing in for "will," (wherever you think that is coming from, an entirely different discussion) acting out ritually as if in a play. It is, first and foremost, an abstraction.

This idea of a threshold being met that changes everything is rather prevelent in nature, and seems to be one of the key ways in which things work. (Chronicled from a slightly different angle in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink.) Neuron firings are a good example. Neurons constantly exchange ions coming in and out of their cell bodies, and electrical gradients are constantly changing, without triggering a change in the cell. But as soon as a critical charge is reached, as soon as the electrical gradient is overwhelmingly positive, for example, the electron fires.

Anyone who has watched a baby grow or learned something new him or herself (especially as an adult, when you tend to be more aware of these types of things) would likely be familiar with this as well. Practice (as discussed in the book Mastery) alternates between brief periods of incredible progress, followed by long plateus where nothing seems to change. I have noticed this playing the guitar, and also learning Chinese, as well as in practicing tai ji/ qi gong. Every day for four months it seems like I can't string two freaking sentences together, and then, as if by magic, two weekends ago, I'm babbling along without stopping, my accent got better exponentially, and my accessible vocabulary improved. I had, of course, been working on all of these things the whole time, but they didn't show any tangible improvement, or any steady improvement, until they all did all together all at once.

Think of it this way, perhaps: you are on a certain "level" of your practice, and there are 100 buttons. You need to push 70 of them to move on to the next level, but you also need to learn a certain technique to push each one individually, and learning each takes time and practice, and the buttons only stay depressed a certain amount of time. As you get better and better at pushing certain buttons individually, more and more stay depressed, until finally it "clicks," you've gotten 70 of the buttons depressed simultaneously and suddenly you're in a whole new world, you're on another level, and you have to start all over again exploring from here. Of course, on this new level, the options open to you are much much wider. And, of course, this is a only a silly analogy, though there may be some truth to it.

The worry about global warming stems from this idea. People aren't concerned that gradually, over the next hundred or two hundred years, things will change. Those concerned are worried because in a comparative instant, thousands of species will go extinct, the earth will become five degrees warmer, sea levels will rise in the meters, and floods will inundate lands. Again, not in isolated and separate incidents, but basically all together. The havok that this will wreck on civilization is one thing, but it may knock out the whole species. We just don't know, we don't know what will happen after the moment of change.

There's a variety pack for you to chew on.

God and Science, and Daniel Dennett

***10-9 See an update to the below (concerning visualizing Dennett's theory) here.

I am using as a jumping off point for this post this interview of Daniel Dennett in the Magazine "Search."

From the article:

"I claim that consciousness is not some extra glow or aura or "quale" caused by the activities made possible by the functional organization of the mature cortex; consciousness is those various activities. One is conscious of those contents whose representations briefly monopolize certain cortical resources, in competition with many other representations. The losers—lacking "political clout" in this competition—quickly fade leaving few if any traces, and that’s the only difference between being a conscious content and being an unconscious content."

Basically, there is no "little man" of consciousness sitting in your brain, editing what comes in and then sending it up to "you," a separate medium, to become conscious content. It is the sum total of the activities of the neurological system that is consciousness itself. This summary is unfairly short, as Dennett says, so for those of you interested in reading more, you can go here, a site at Tufts University with many articles by Dennett that make this point more clearly and more in depth.

I think that Dennett is 100% right here, and yet I think he makes the same mistake that everyone else makes when talking about religion (which, while the quote above doesn't directly deal with, the article does,) confusing religion with the existence of "God." In the non-dual view of being the idea of a separate "God" that is above and beyond the world, transcendent to it, is seen as laughably impossible in the face of the fact that separation is a conception, an appearance. This, substituting "God" for "consciousness" and "the events of the universe" for "the activities of the neural system" could well give a post-post-modern conception of God. This, I think, is an idea that is emerging, and I do not think it conflicts with anything that Dennett says in this article, or the scientific materialists, though they would all dislike the word "God."

When he says that everything is open to the investigations of science, he is perfectly right, and when he calls "Darwinism a 'universal acid,' cutting through every aspect of science, culture, religion, art and human thought," he is also right. But, I still claim that he is wrong in rejecting religion. The spirituality (a word I dislike) of the future does not reject science, nor its findings. The spirituality of the future does not rely on dogma or myth or literal interpretations.

"Consciousness has arisen from the unwilled, unordained algorithmic processes of natural selection," or, in other words, not from the hand of God. Again, there's nothing to disagree with here, it is the historicity of the dogmatic and literalist claim that God is a real "thing," like a toaster, that necessitates the high board of science. God does not perform magic, and any God worth believing in would not need to.

When God is viewed or understood as simply "being," the metaphors of religion make a lot more sense, even ones as clearly literalist as "God created the world." Well, yeah, the world is here, so, being created it. Of course, the wording of this favors the mythology of God, that some giant man like thing created the world in the way you or I would draw a picture. Created here could be understood better as "the flood created a problem for getting through the center of the city." It's not like the flood meant to do this. It's impersonal.

Is God impersonal? Yes. And no. You're a person, aren't you? So God is personal. But the totality of everything, this is impersonal.

The irony is that, in attacking the idea of a separate unitary self-center of consciousness, Dennett is affirming something that the world's esoteric religions have said since the time of the Buddha, and perhaps earlier in Vedanta: "you," do not exist. What you think you are is only a thought, and the reality is much simpler than that.

When Dennett says that there is no truth that religion can claim as its own without science, he is both right and wrong. In the exoteric sense, he is right. Science has domain over everything in the material world. But in the esoteric sense, science has nothing to do to prove or disprove being. It can do neither, being is self-evident. But what it is, what we are, is so obvious that we miss it constantly. As Einstein said, the fish will be the last one to discover water. In the way I think Dennett is using the term, as in "objectifiable exterior phenomenon," I think he is incorrect. No matter what science gets to about the happenings inside one's brain, you cannot experience what someone else experiences. Even if you could "see" what someone else were seeing, or "feel," it, it would be different, because "you" are doing it, with all the different history and the different system for experience you have. Experience is not falsifiable, nor is it provable. This is precisely beyond the realm of science, and something which religion has always dealt with, in both exoteric (mythological) and esoteric (contemplative) strains.

The problem is that anything "non-scientific" gets lumped in with "mythology," or, to put it slightly differently, any attempt at describing interiorality is seen as necessarily involving supernaturalism. There may be no "privleged center" in consciousness, something, again, esoteric branches of religion would be familiar with, but that doesn't discount subjectivism itself. The objectivist description of the world, perfectly legitimate at that, is not an explanation, and cannot exist without subjectivity. What is the sound of one hand clapping? If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? What's in a mirror when no one's looking?

This is not to say that reality needs intelligent aware and conscious beings, far from it, it is just to say that without subjectivity, there is no objectivity. Obviously this uses the word slightly differently than the conscious subjectivity we're used to , but it's none the less valid.

The direct experience of being without an object, the experience pointed at by the esoteric traditions, is shrugged off by science as being equivalent to boogeymen.

There is this fundamental problem between duality and what Dennett argues, that there is no Cartesian duality, and yet I would say that they are only two metaphors for looking at the same thing, like the heads and tails of a coin are actually still both only parts of the coin. There is an interiority in consciousness. But this does not make it dual, since it is entirely inseperable from the exterior occurances of consciousness. They do not arise separately, and they are not independent.

In a Vedantic sense of enquiry (or, for that matter, Cartesian,) the only thing that cannot be doubted, that can actually be proved and believed, because self-evident, is being itself, or, in the human mind, awareness of being. What was before the big bang? Whatever it was was the only thing real, the only thing unchanging, the only thing not subject to the laws of impermanence. What was it? Nothing. Nothingness. This is simultaneously everything, it is all that is real. And, the world is this as well. In the Hindu formulation, the world is illusory, Brahma alone is real, the world is Brahma. The argument between Cartesian duality and materialism is missing the point. Against the Cartesians, there is nothing special and separate, no "privliged center." There are not two things. But, against the materialists, that nothingness is not different from existence, is existence itself, and is the consciousness, the open space within which all else happens, and, it is not material.

There is a new world view emerging, one that believes as strictly as Dennett does in the rigorousness of science, and yet makes room equally for the interior experience of consciousness, the subjectivity that is impossible to describe or prove or disprove, except in the first-person perspective, where it is self-evident. I am. I have no proof that you have an interior, but at the very least, I am, or, rather, am-ness.

This worldview, as Dennett says, must pass through the tests of Darwinism, and science. The Religions of the future cannot be ones that believe in the things science shows are impossible. Oddly enough, believers of one mythological system find others absolutely ridiculous, and yet this does not shake their faith in their own ridiculous stories in the least bit. Lao Zi was not 900 years old when he was born. Mary was not a virgin when she gave birth. There is no Garden of Eden, especially not one that looks exactly like a 17th century English manor's garden.

The myths are beautiful, but they are not true. They are stories, rife with meaning, and are as such not exactly fiction, but they are not true.

The worry about science is not really that it can explain God, but that it can explain God away, and it has explained away quite a few things that believers in former times thought of as being sacrosanct, that is, they thought of as providing a pillar for belief of God, but it can never explain away being itself, which is the ground for all of the mythological religions, and the contemplative. The myths arose because there is no rational explanation for any of this, and again, science is really describing things more than explaining them, at least at the deepest levels. But there's no need for words in the contemplative experience. There's no room for them. Whatever form religion takes in the future, to be legitimate, will be centered on the contemplative.

This, it should be noted, is a far cry from what is called "new-aged spirituality" (a term from which my prickling disgust for the word "spirituality" likely comes.) New-aged "spirituality" is a reversion to beliefs in magic, more or less.

Another article, by Sandra Blakeslee, in the magazine "Science and Spirit," on the neurological basis for spiritual experience, highlights what I have been talking about.

There is still an over-reliance on the external viewpoint, and the point of view (I believe mistaken) that these external and objective interactions cause the experiences rather than correlate with them, but it is an improvement on several things. The structures of one's internal consciousness certainly impact your spiritual experience, so, where a Muslim will see Mohammed, a Christian may see Christ, even though what is happening to them is, at its base, and neurologically speaking, the same.

Of course, the science which crows so loudly (and correctly) as it trumpets, say, the fossil record, also trumpets when it sees neurological signs of meditative activity, as if the experiences undergone can be explained away by science. Yes, breakdowns happen, and this is what the meditative traditions have always asserted. The fact that there's a biological basis for this should have been obvious except for those that thought the literal hand of god reached down from his (likely rather large) throne in the sky and touched one's forehead with a golden finger. Of course, I am downplaying that this viewpoint may be prevalent, but still, the main idea is that the scientific proof of different and abnormal brain states during these activities certainly does not reduce them to being no more than "fireworks in the brain." But, it is not that the biological activity creates this, it is that the release of the constraints and constrictions of one's mind unveils this ever-present experience of reality. It is the same as the Buddhist tradition has always maintained; you're not reaching enlightenment, you're getting rid of everything else. Or, if your mind is a room, you don't need to add furniture to get what you want, you need to throw it all out of the room. Or, as Meister Eckhart wrote, "If you empty yourself, God has no choice but to fill you."

And, of course, there is no "God," as such.