Known Unknowns

I can thank Donald Rumsfeld for the term "known unknowns." Indeed, there are known unknowns.

That much I know, though I can never show it to you.

But think about this. Thoughts come as perceptions. They are perceived.

The perceiver cannot be found. Whatever is located when searching is only another object of thought. Perception remains, out of reach as that which is aware of the search and the thought object.

To establish a model for discussion, consider this. We cannot see black holes but we can see the gravitational lensing they cause around astronomical objects. Black holes are inferred phenomena.

Michael Gazzaniga: The Mind's Past

In The Mind's Past, Gazzaniga reminds me of age-old teachings in Buddhism and Advaita. Of course in this he is not out of tune with other neuroscientists.   I am reminded of Benjamin Libet,  I am also reminded of neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger, who publishes opinions reminiscent of ancient Eastern views of self and mind. (Not that neurophilosphers intend it, although some borrow from the teachings without acknowledging their sources.) Neuroscience also provides evidence that corroborates some of the teachings.

A Review of Michael Gazzaniga's The Mind's Past

In The Mind's Past, Gazzaniga reminds me of age-old teachings in Buddhism and Advaita. Of course in this he is not out of tune with other neuroscientists (e.g, Benjamin Libet) and neurophilosophers (Thomas Metzinger, for one) who increasingly publish findings and opinions that are reminiscent of ancient Eastern views of self and mind. (Not that they intend it, although some borrow from the teachings without acknowledging their sources.) Neuroscience also provides evidence that corroborates some of the teachings.

David Chalmers and The Hard Problem of Consciousness

David Chalmers and The Hard Problem of Consciousness

Form is emptiness, emptiness form. (The Heart Sutra)

Existence occurs at the merger between form and emptiness. In Buddhism, this situation is expressed by the Heart Sutra. In Advaita, it is called Awareness. In either case, emptiness recognizes itself as what arises within it. Those are merely words but are the best language can do although the subject has no doubt of what they signify, the foundation of conscious life.

This realization goes to the core of "The Hard Problem of Consciousness," as termed by David Chalmers. (Among various explanations of it as a problem one is, Why do you have such a rich inner life?) Those who research and think about consciousness cannot truly understand the Hard Problem without this realization.

Daniel Dennett explains it all away by saying Chalmers' proposal is a non-problem. Dennett, though, is a proselytizer at base. He doesn't engage issues that do not fit his agenda. Instead, his strategy is often to downplay the opposition.

The realization of true issues surrounding The Hard Problem cannot occur without "experiential expertise." That is, it will remain inaccessible so long as there is insistence on a level playing field--tools, techniques, and concepts available to everybody engaged in consciousness philosophy and research.

One might argue that this experiential expertise does not fit the scientific model in that the solution cannot be assessed, falsified, or verified by a community of peers. That is not the case. The community of peers need not be a democracy--that is, a large pool of peers. The Special and General Theories of Relativity are still not profoundly understood by most physicists.

The discussions and debates about The Hard Problem of Consciousness will continue, but the real field of study is at hand, and those who don't see it are rather like the boy who proclaimed that the emperor had no clothes.

Like quantum theorists with the findings of people such as Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and Bell, perhaps the consciousness community will eventually develop consensus that the standard concepts and techniques simply can not yield an answer to The Hard Problem. In the meantime, let us hope that a few will take an approach considered to be slumming by some of their peers.

I refer to an intensive skeptical search (not this, not that), probably lengthy, for who they are by using a Dzogchen Buddhist or Advaitan discipline--while separating wheat from the chaff of teachings until--as supposedly phrased by St Francis of Assisi--they find out that they are what is being looked for, and this realization takes over their lives, both as a contributing peer and as a private person. It is not spiritual. It is not religious. It simply is.

Of Selves and Cars

Of Selves and Cars

In the 1 January 2006 article John Allen Paulos asserts that a major shift in society and culture would occur once the public widely understood that the self is non-existent. That is one view of the self. Only one.

For thousands of years Buddhists and Hindus have asserted that the self does not exist. Disciples are taught to look for the self. The simplest Zen koan can be, Who am I? Once the disciple learns that the question cannot be answered in terms of a locus for the "I," he is on the road to enlightenment. Basically, the finding is supposed to be that the "I" cannot be found. Instead, there are various forms of sense impressions--thoughts, feelings, perceptions. The absence of solid evidence for self becomes hitched to a belief--that if nothing can be found, the self is an illusion and does not exist.

Not necessarily so.

Consciousness research has determined that, yes, self cannot be located in a single place. It does appear, but not as an objective unity. Several areas of the brain can produce several events, none of which coalesce into a single objective presence on, say, an fMRI brain scan. Still, we feel only one.

The point: because a central, guiding self cannot be found does not mean that it is merely an illusion. When we look inwardly for the colonies of bacteria that digest our food we cannot find them. That does not mean they are illusory. Their presence is manifested by the fact of digestion. So, too, the self’s presence is manifested by its role in monitoring our activities. Even if we deny free will, we cannot deny the sense that something oversees our conscious affairs; this something can even participate in lucid dreaming.* We call it the self. It is part of the space that we call consciousness inside our head. Yet, if we looked inside the head, we would see only densely compacted grey matter, and no space. It and consciousness cannot be located but we believe both to be there.

Black holes provide an analogy. We cannot see them, but can infer their presence by their affects on nearby space.

As one example of the Eastern approach, advaita disciples learn that they cannot find the self by introspecting for it. Still, its absence does not imply that it is a creature of illusion. The inability to find it can be explained otherwise. It disappears under the flashlight of conscious focus. Try an experiment in perception. Stare at a blue dot lit against a yellow background. After a few minutes of focus the blue merges with the yellow. In Buddhist or Hindu meditation, the self dissolves into the background of consciousness. In Zen, this dissolution can initiate the experience of Big Mind, that one is a larger consciousness. But after the experience, self returns. Its earlier absence does not mean that it is illusory. In deep sleep, consciousness fades and self disappears but later returns.

Were self a tag-along phenomenon, a chimera, it would not have evolved through natural selection to play its prominent role in our minds. It has survival value, whether as a monitor of activities, their agent, or both. This does not mean it has independent "reality"--only that it has a function as do eyes, fingers, and orgasms.

Think of it this way. A tire is not a car. The steering wheel is not. Pistons are not. Put them all together and you have a car. You do not think of it as an illusion. Now imagine another situation. You sit on the couch. Drowsy, you dream a little. Then you awaken. You feel deep satisfaction at Mozart on the radio. You notice the cat purring on your lap. You think about a shopping list. You recall your boss's memo. With each of these, a different part of the brain "lights up," although if you had deliberately looked for a self you would not have found it. Yet you are aware of each event. Somehow, they harmonize into an "I" that is composed of them all. Although self is subjective, it gains explanations through comparison to a car. Even though the car is tangible as an object and self is intangible, the analogy is instructive once we allow that, for example, force at a distance (gravity) has an intangible "source," yet we recognize its affects.
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*(Yes, the word is "sense," and sensations do not prove reality. Nor do they disprove it. You can look at your chair. Your view, your skin, and the weight of your body against the chair are only perceptions/sensations which may be only that, with nothing "beyond" them, not even the chair, but you assume the chair to have shaped them. You can disclaim the objective reality of the chair if you want, but that is another argument.)

For thousands of years Buddhists and Hindus have asserted that the self does not exist. Disciples are taught to look for the self. The simplest Zen koan can be, Who am I? The disciple learns that the question cannot be answered in terms of a locus for the self.  It is that locus, that causes our problems. "They make me angry."  "I envy him."

Non-Duality’s No-Self and Antonio Damasio

Non-Duality’s No-Self and Antonio Damasio

Non-Duality is the term for a view of the world as not two, but one—not the duality of a person and the world outside him or her, but instead a subjective experience in which the perceiver and the perceived participate with one another in a sense, according to some experiencers, that all is part of incessant movement, a dance, so to speak. There is no experiencer, no experienced. All is experienc-ing. Everything is part of the subjectivity, with nothing outside. The view derives from Eastern belief, principally Hindu advaita, which literally means without duality and from Buddhism (Zen, for example).

A central tenet of non-duality is that self—that which we call our self—does not exist. The evidence is offered by a methodology. The disciple is told to look for his self, and to do so relentlessly. Eventually, he concludes that he cannot find it. Only thoughts, feelings, and sensations are there. These are subjective—part of a world which is wholly conscious and without "external" objects. As for the chair in which he sits, all that is also subjective. The pressure of his body against the seat is sensation. His visual perception of it is also sensation. A sense of self-survival does not disappear. What fades eventually or vanishes abruptly is the autobiographical self, the sensation that "I am angry," or "I am upset," as examples. Sub-personalities remain. The predilection for mystery novels, as an example, does not go away. A liking of certain types of people remains. One still gets angry, etc, but the sensation passes quickly rather than lingering as fixed-cause for the autobiographical self ("They are always doing that to me.") Advaita and Buddhism have no problem with Damasio's arguments.

The reader would be unwise to dismiss all this as so much balderdash. Quite able intellects, including philosphers George Berkeley and David Hume, have been unable to disregard conclusions they reached. Hume, for example, concluded as much about the self—that insufficient evidence can be found for its existence. Berkeley posited that nothing is material, and to be is to be perceived. Esse est percipi. Speaking only about self, Antonio Damasio has a different take on the situation. Damasio, M.D., Ph.D., currently is Allen Professor of Neurology, and Head of the Neurology Department at the University of Iowa. In Descartes’ Error* he offers another way to look at the phenomenon of the self. (* Subtitled, Emotion, Reason, and The Human Brain) As an example of his point, he refers to neural signals from the elbow joint. Of these signals he says, they

“will happen in the early somatosensory cortices in the insular regions [of the brain].”

Of them, he also states,

“Note again, that this is a collection of areas, rather than one center.”

With this comment Damasio offers a point of view as to why the self cannot be found when we introspect for it, either through deliberate search or with meditation. We gain a simple inference from his remark. Introspection requires focus, and focus implies search for isolated neural phenomena. The self is not part of isolated phenomena. It is part of a collective. Picture the focused beam of a flashlight. Self cannot be found with such a search.

By again referring to the early sensory cortices in the brain, he elaborates and makes an important observation regarding the self. First, the build-up to his comments on the self, then what he has to say about the self. In the build-up to his points, he explains that the early sensory cortices generate topographical representations. That is, the cortices represent sensory input to other areas of the brain. But if that were the end of it,

”I doubt we would ever be conscious of them as images. How would we know they are our images? “

He states that they would mean nothing to us, these representations. We would not know what to do with them. He says something would be missing, subjectivity—a subject to make meaning out of them. Something else is needed. Here is his first point:

“In essence, those neural representations must be correlated with those which, moment by moment, constitute the neural basis for the self. “

That is, without a sense of self, they offer no utility for the organism, which must use them to survive in the moment or to plan ahead. It must make meaning out of them.

He lays to rest the homunculus, the little man inside, the intermediary, which somehow bridged Descartes’ gap between mind and the world outside. His second point:

“Self is not the infamous homunculus, a little person inside our brain, perceiving and thinking about the images the brain forms. It is, rather, a perpetually re-created neurobiological state. Years of justified attack on the homunculus concept have made many theorists equally fearful of the concept of self. [Emphasis mine—he does not lend support to the no-self camp] But the neural self need not be homuncular at all. What should cause some fear, actually, is the idea of a selfless cognition.”

In short, cognition cannot occur without a self to cognize things. Introspect, meditate, all you want but, according to Damasio, don’t use your findings as evidence of no-self. Given his explanation, the attempt to find a self implies cognition at work, with a self involved in the effort. Even though self cannot be found—because cognition involves focus and self is non-focused—the neural self is involved in the very attempt to find itself.

Damasio's thesis in Descartes' Error is that Rene Descartes mistakenly held that thinking can be separated from emotion. That can be found in Mind Shadows at Descartes' Error:Antonio Damasio, Somatic Markers, As-If Loops, and Moral Decision-Making, 11 April 2004.

Free Will and Time: Dennett, Libet, Penrose, Wheeler, Advaita

Notes on Time and Choice: Daniel Dennett, Benjamin Libet, Roger Penrose, John Wheeler,  and Advaita

Everything humanity thinks and believes about itself is predicated upon two concepts. One is free will; the other is self. Look wherever you will, whatever society you find, and all cultures contain a belief in some kind of will, and self. Civilizations, economies, legal systems, art, religion, all arise from them. Notes on Time and Free Will