God = Ego = Death, p.2

James Wimberly responds to my analogy of the ego as a dog in a rooftop crate on a car.

“Only along for the ride?” My image for this hypothesis is looking out of the rear window of the bus. The main objection to it is Darwinism. The brain we have is enormously expensive metabolically – and creates SFIK the most dangerous childbirth in nature. It would be contrary to everything we know about evolution to think that such consequential and high-priced developments as the self-aware, reflective brain come about for no adaptive reason.

I see the point, and I'm not saying it isn't enormously useful.  The angst alone has resulted in plenty of remarkable achievements.  But as a part of a feedback loop, it's hard to think of anything as a driver - even self-awareness.  With  a lower animal, the stimulus is unreflective and external, and easy to think of as automatic.  With humans, it's partly reflective, the stimulus being regurgitated through higher-order thinking processes such as compare/contrast, ordering, mathematics, prediction, etc.  We facilitate in our young the development of highly complex identities that integrate all of these skills into an amazingly efficient and sophisticated platform for stimuli interaction.  (You should see the way I interact with my children!  I kid.  I realize this all sounds absurdly cold.  But it's only a framework for understanding.) 

And yet, sophisticated as it is, there seems no reason to think of it as other than a feedback loop, operating according to laws of cause and effect, constrained by time itself, flowing from past to future.  We learn from our past and the future is changed.  Our agency in all of this seems entirely dependent upon past events, how our biological systems have integrated external stimuli.  The idea of the ego as crate, as I have described it, is an attempt to get at this transcendent notion of the self not as superfluous, or useless - indeed it is the greatest thing ever created in the universe.  But rather that it seems, as a thing *of* the universe, a mistake to assume that it is somehow a thing apart. 

I'm reminded of the notion that, as creatures of a particular time, space and scale, we are biased to view the universe from a very particular perspective.  We see a limited spectrum of light.  We feel a particular gravity.  We have a particular relationship with atomic particles.  Yet, there exists a great range of electromagnetic waves we can't see directly.  If we were 100th of our size, our weight would feel very different.  If we could experience atoms at the atomic level, we would see a particles made up mostly of space.  Our "common sense" experience would be completely different.  An everyday example of this is how we still talk about the sun rising and falling, because it makes more *sense* to think of it that way.  Relative only to us, it actually is rising and falling.

In this way, it seems we are trapped in a common sense view of consciousness in which we are the final agents of our agency.  Yet clearly, we are highly developed beings that have spent years achieving this particular state of agency.  And still, there are God knows how many forces (emergent or otherwise) at work on our every thought, pulling strings from deep within our psyche, like the dark matter of space, creating the context within which our thoughts enter our awareness.  So how is it that our agency is not simply a manifestation of everything that has thus far come? 

But now that we are here, in this final platform configuration, one might ask, are we not free then to go forward, to use all of this sophisticated mental equipment to do our bidding?  My response would be: but from where does that "bidding" come?  Again, we face the dark matter problem.  Any bidding we would seem to choose has to arise from somewhere.  And unlike galaxies that appear to have nothing around them, yet seem to exist in some miraculously ordered context, our bidding - our desire to choose - is surrounded not by nothing, but rather embedded deeply within an organic mechanism highly ordered and designed by the complex history of the individual, highly traceable and quantifiable - even to some extent predictable.

But not enough, right?  This is the rub.  The resolution on consciousness fantastically dim.  In theory, by knowing every possible angle and trajectory of every particle one could determine the exact thoughts that might arise.  But then you get into quantum problems and problems in constructing a model of emergence itself and it all seems so.. well, hopeless.  But in the aggregate, people are incredibly predictable.  Psychology, sociology and economics for instance tell us an enormous amount about human behavior.  Animal behavior is even easier, right?  When specific molecules attach to certain smell receptors, huge arrays of neuronal networks become very predictable.  Just because we can't yet make the physical models for this process, can't we pretty safely assume there is a purely physical mechanism at work.

And much of this can be applied to humans.  Place a bacon molecule in my nose and I will salivate.  So far so mechanistic.  Ditto for pornographic imagery.  Violence.  Food, sex, fear - all pretty simple, so to speak. 

And then comes reflection.  Consciousness.  Higher-order thinking, memory, emotional regulation.  While we can measure some of this stuff, the paths become infinitely more complex.  Add to this the very real sense we have that we design our own thoughts.  However, just because the sun comes up, it does not follow that the sun spins around the Earth.  When I eat someone's sandwich from the lounge refrigerator and they get mad at me, I feel guilty.  I feel like "I" did something wrong.  "I" made a mistake.  "I" am useful to myself as a thing, a thing to mold and correct, to improve upon going forward in the world.  But whether a dog in a crate, or a spinning gyroscope, am "I" more than a device useful to the platform that is me, yet still utterly dependent on contextual forces that imprint memories?  Neuroscience describes the way in which myelin sheaths around neurons serve to reinforce pathways of thought.  Apparently they are underdeveloped when we are young, so as to facilitate creative thinking and the laying down of new avenues of thought.  Yet as we age patterns become ingrained, and the sheaths thicken.  Arterials become freeways.  Rudimentary, but another piece of evidence towards a mechanistic understanding of conscious thought.

God = Ego = Death

James Wimberly questions the physical nature of consciousness.

Materialists say that it’s the matter that’s conscious, stupid, and laugh at the myth of “ghosts in the machine”. However that commits them to a strange view of matter. The physical properties of all instances of an elementary particle are identical. But some, a tiny proportion, support consciousness, by mechanisms not yet elucidated but, it is assumed, following the standard models of natural law. So all elementary particles (or possibly all particles of a particular common type; it may be the electrons or the protons) are consciousness-capable. If not, the materialist answer to the “what substance?” question is handwaving.

I always return to Richard Hofstadter, who in his book, I Am A Strange Loop, came up with some fascinating metaphors for consciousness, based both on what we know as well as what we might infer (and a good deal of pure speculation).

But he had a system he called the Hunecker scale, which measured consciousness, based on the principle that consciousness is ultimately about a series of feedback loops. One on the scale would be the simple mechanism of a toilet ballast which, sensitive to the amount of water filling up in the tank, receives feedback and stops the water flow. At the other end of the scale would be a sort of omnipotence, in which all future possible events are known. Humans would land somewhere in between, with lower forms of life occupying places further down the scale.

One of the things I like about this is that it seems to illustrate just this sort of gap between the material activity of the physical world and the elusiveness of consciousness. (Hofstadter spends considerable time in the book exploring different ways thinking about this problem.) I’ve always been struck by how ridiculously mechanistic people tend to be. Maybe it was the acid I took in my youth, but I’ve always felt we tend to anthropomorphize people too much.

So animal-like, we are mostly the only self-aware creatures on the planet. But this fact of supposed self-awareness seems only marginal to the larger complexity of our brain, the rest of which we have in common with most mammals, etc. I say “supposed” because in reality we aren’t very self-aware at all. Mostly we are incredibly un-self-aware, most of the time. And yet this tantalizing illusion that we are little Gods walking around thinking ourselves original, responsible and all the rest, this or that behavior somehow designed by us, that we are somehow in control of our lives, is such an – ironically – ego-feeding enterprise that we just can’t seem to quit it.

Yet as best as I can tell, this little ego-box in which we fly, strapped to fate no less than Mitt Romney’s crated Irish setter, is only along for the ride, pretending to run the show instead of merely enjoying it. Animals without much self-awareness surely experience all the same qualias. Yet what kind of consciousness do we assume in them? And as we travel down the brain-chain, what do we see but decreasing neural complexity? Hunecker after hunecker, myriad network dynamics shrink until we reach creatures that could hardly be described as thinking at all. Rather, they are mechanisms.

Apparently the enlightenment didn’t kill God, but merely made him human. An ironic reversal indeed. He ought to be finished off entirely.

Me and My Brain

As a longtime sufferer of depression, I've relied on pills designed to treat chemical imbalances in my brain.  These pills are controversial, with conflicting opinions on whether they are really more effective than placebos.  Millions of people swear by them, many claiming that they have clearly been effective in treating their depression.  Of course, such data is anecdotal, as would be any that I could offer.  I can say anyhow, that my depression has been somewhat reasonably managed for years.

When I first began taking the medication, about seven years ago, I did recall a significant feeling that my conscious state had been altered.  Almost impossible to describe, it was as if a kind of numbness came over me, taking "the rough edges" off of things.  My psychological history in the subsequent years was complicated.  In some ways I did seem to feel a certain sense of relief.  Yet a couple of years later, shortly after my first daughter was born, I attempted suicide.  I had certainly entered a deeply depressed state, one in no small part induced by geographic and social isolation, as well as the stress of being the primary caregiver for a colicky infant, all while suffering from devastating chronic neck pain.

So in one sense the medication failed me, or at least was not effective enough to prevent suicidal depression.  But the trouble with measuring the efficacy of antidepressant medications is that the population being treated suffers from an illness that is very difficult to properly diagnose, properly quantify, and much less understand the pathology of.  To what extent was my depression and my behavior driven by brain chemical imbalances, and to what extent was it driven by my habit of mind, or cognitive framing of the world?

Philosophically, the debate over what consciousness is, or to what degree we can understand it, is contentious.  Much of conscious human experience is not well understood, and little data exists to support hypotheses as to either what causes it, or what it even is.  Thomas Metzinger, director of the Theoretical Philosophy Group and current president of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, defines consciousness as "the appearance of a world".  It is a good start, but doesn't offer much of a clue as to where it comes from or what it in fact is.

There are many phenomena that we can't really explain very well, and yet must start somewhere if we are to hypothesize - especially if there are real-world consequences of our assumptions either way. Critiques of materialism usually see people as assuming too much, relying too readily on a physical framework as a best guess. Critiques of the opposite - immaterialists? - see people as ignoring what seem to be perfectly reasonable logical conclusions drawn from our knowledge of the physical world.

I tend to fall into the latter camp. I'm reminded of the old creationist thought experiment, the clearly "designed" phenomenon in the natural world, such as Mt. Rushmore or a house in a desert, in which physical processes are assumed to be incapable of such complexity. This can be contrasted with a thought experiment designed to illustrate Occam's Razor, where a broken, blackened tree is found in a field - in the absence of clear evidence, one might assume any number of explanations, some more fantastic than others. Yet the most likely, the most reasonable explanation would be that lightening has probably struck it down.

Surely, many biological processes - certainly those involving the brain and/or consciousness - are lacking in a great deal of evidence. But there is also much that we do know, and would be remiss in not taking into full account, if not inferring even further material hypotheses.  For my part, I look forward to advances in this exciting area of science.  Not only for what medical breakthroughs it might provide in the treatment of psychiatric illness, but for what it might tell us about broader, older philosophical assumptions about human behavior and the social structures they inform.

To Be Aware

What is the difference between the experience of consciousness, and the awareness of consciousness?

For instance, a blue jay can be said to be conscious in the sense that it feels hunger, analyses its environment, becomes excited as it sees a worm, chooses what it feels is its best path, becomes excited as it sees a worm, and then experiences the pleasure of having its desire satiated. (Of course, no one has spoken with a bluejay, but I see no reason to think that through behavioral observations and knowledge of brain function, we can't reasonably assume that these feelings are occurring).

However, the blue jay is doubtless unaware of its consciousness - that it is experiencing hunger, excitement, pleasure, etc. In this way, it can maybe be said to be unconscious, just as we are when we go about our daily business by habit, simply responding to the environment and making choices that we are unaware we are making. These habitual decisions are certainly more complex, but are they not just as unconscious as the bluejay? For instance, driving a car, parking it, locking the doors, etc. The spiritual tradition of "mindfulness" is explicitly about raising just this sort of consciousness, so that even in these smaller actions, there is a sort of memory we learn to engage that adds an extra layer of consciousness to simple daily activity. There is certainly an argument to be made for this, given the human tendency to allow our unconscious behaviors - and thoughts, even - to get the better of us, leading us into what are ultimately poor decisions. So, the lesson learned is to be more mindful, to develop a sort of leverage point – some trigger – in our daily experiences by which we can shift one level out in our perspective, towards some broader context.

A key detail in the debate over free will, I think, is the degree to which this leveraging actually defines what we mean by free will. What is it to be conscious? I once checked a book out from the library on lucid dreaming. The idea was to take advantage of the cyclical nature of sleep, where we spend ever longer periods of time in deep, REM sleep, yet then wake briefly between cycles. The instructions were to begin a dream journal, and to develop a habit of jotting down our most recent dreams immediately upon these awakenings. By beginning to become more aware of our dreams just after having had them, this habit would help trigger lucidity in the dream state.

The book also recommended the mindfulness I spoke of previously. Throughout the day, if one developed the habit of mindfulness – a higher level of awareness of one’s own consciousness – this would translate into the habit activating in dreams, leveraging lucidity. I spent a little over a week practicing these techniques, and low and behold – I had my first lucid dream. Unfortunately, not only did I become aware that I was dreaming within the dream, but I became aware too that I was aware that I was aware! This seemed to stumble me right awake. By this point, I wasn’t sleeping very well – what with all the waking and writing. And I decided to give up on the whole project.

So, this concept of lucidity in dreaming seems a strong parallel to, shall we say, meta-consciousness in waking. Can this delineation give us any traction in the free will debate? Can we argue that of these two forms of consciousness, the mindful, meta-consciousness presents more freedom? This is certainly the form of consciousness that we all try to imagine when questioning whether we make conscious choices: we are conscious that we are choosing. This, as opposed to the choice we make when putting sugar into our coffee.

In fact, it may also be of importance to place any given state of consciousness on a spectrum of meta-consciousness. At one end, we are almost blindly reacting to the world – when dodging a flying object, say. And at the other, a state of super consciousness in which we are greatly aware both of our external and internal stimuli, but also of our awareness of our awareness. Maybe we could place all other mammals below some maximum level of meta-consciousness, and below that all other creatures capable of thought, ending who knows where – in single-celled creatures little more advanced than any of our individual cells, “thoughts” consisting literally of groups of molecules creating chemical reactions.

What does all of this mean for the term choice? A choice can be as simple as a series of binary responses to stimulus (i.e. too hot = pain, move hand). But it can also be an infinitely complex calculation of multiple competing values, involving in no small part the “gut”, as well as the brain’s calculations. At what point do we describe choice as conscious? At what point do we describe it as free? Can part of choice be not-free, while part of it free? Anyone who has endured suffering in order to receive reward would seem to have made such a choice.

And yet, is it possible to make a choice in which the risk outweighs the reward, yet it is still made? Surely such a choice would be stupid. In fact, is that not the definition of stupidity? No matter what choice we make, there is always something that occurs to us as – that we are conscious of as being – more rewarding than the alternative. The reward may not be to our person, but to another, for whom we have great compassion, and wish to help because it pleases us to do so. It seems that when it does not please us, we are seen as somehow corrupt – if not biologically so.