No-Self, Antonio Damasio, and NonDuality

Non-Duality is the term for a view or experience of the world as not two and not even one—not the duality of a person and the world outside him or her, but instead that which is neither subject nor object nor a  unity.  The term derives from Eastern teachings, principally Hindu advaita, which literally means without duality. It also finds support in Buddhism (Zen, for example, in which the Heart Sutra declares that form is emptiness, emptiness form). The teachings are that we live in nonduality right now and we can find out for ourselves but not through intellect. (Zen koans are designed to teach the futility of intellect and reason in understanding it.)

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.

Neurons: Necessary But Not Sufficient For Consciousness

For the advance of human knowledge, science is based on paradigms, as observed by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolution. By paradigm, he meant a conceptual lens, a worldview, that helps us explain what we observe.  Kuhn pointed out that while paradigms allow advancement of knowledge they also exclude other ways of looking at the world--ways that can also yield understanding.

A vantage point thousands of years old is currently discounted by scientists, except for perhaps those quantum physicists who have sought elsewhere to explain phenomena such as the wave function collapse. Erwin Schrödinger comes to mind as one of them. He could make no sense of the collapse unless consciousness somehow participated in observation. "Some of you, I am sure, will call this mysticism," he said, but for him, so be it.

Antonio Damasio: How Can Somebody Be Both Awake and Not Awake?

In Descartes' Error (1994), neurologist Antonio Damasio argued that we should not try to treat reason and emotion as separate. Rather, both are essential to decision-making. Our choices are not wholly rational.

The classical dichotomy is of head and heart, reason and emotions. Good decisions, according to classical thinking result from good reasoning. Instead, Damasio says good rational decisions depend on feelings.

His patient, Elliot, had prefrontal damage, and was smart, pleasant, and engaging. He scored normal on a battery of personality tests. Yet he made horrible, life-ruining decisions. Why? Because his intellectual capacity was severed from his emotions, so to speak.

In The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999), Damasio takes a different argument--that the key to consciousness lies with the body's ability to sense and react to its own processes and its environment. The problem of consciousness, he maintains, has two related components. One is the question of how the "out there," the outside world, finds a parallel imagery in the brain. The other is how a sense of self arises from a "map" that correlates inside with outside.

He gains his theory from practice. His examples derive from real people with serious problems, He wants to understand how we know things about the world through our senses and also how at the same time we are aware of a self experiencing things. This is part of what he calls "the feeling of what happens."

In dealing with patients with brain damage, he developed insight into questions he had. As Damasio puzzled over effects to a patient's brain during an epileptic seizure, he sought an answer to a classic question among scientists and philosophers: What is it about the human brain and its networks of neurons that give rise to consciousness?

In The Feeling of What Happens he concludes that consciousness is layered. At its base lies a vague, animalian sense of self arising from the brain's "diagram" of the body. This proto-self props up the higher layers.

Even snails, have proto-selves, says Damasio, but they aren't really conscious. As to the seat of consciousness, the brain is a parallel processor, designed with redundant neuron networks. No single region of the brain has the seat of consciousness. Consciousness, he says,"is the feeling of knowing that we have feelings."

If his theory gains from practice, his practice was frought with troubled questions over real people. When young, he had a patient who was both there and not there, both conscious and not conscious. The man's consciousness became so empty that he could not respond to his name. At the same time, he recognized a cup of coffee and picked it up to drink it.

"This incident occurred more than three decades ago, when Dr. Antonio Damasio was a medical student in Lisbon, Portugal, and he has never forgotten it. How was it possible, he wondered, for someone to be there and yet not be there, to be awake and yet not be awake, to be aware of his surroundings and at the same time be oblivious to them?" More

Antonio Damasio: Consciousness Is Not Beyond The Reach of Human Intelligence

Yesterday's post had Colin McGinn, in which he asserted that the gap between brain and mind will never be bridged. Not so says Antonio Damasio, who believes that we have the rational ability to understand consciousness in its relationship to the brain.

Damasio has written Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Noted for his hypothesis on somatic markers. Damasio argues that all decision-making involves an emotional component. In fact, when faced with alternatives of high uncertainty and ambiguity, our cognitive processes can become overloaded. At such times, somatic markers can kick in to help us. These markers are chemically stored in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and provide us associations to help influence our decisions.

As for his view on consciousness, he believes that we should not regard it as an enduring mystery. "Some philosophers maintain that solving the problem of consciousness is beyond the reach of human intelligence. This is very odd and, I believe, untrue. It fits a sensible intuition that the mind is something special and different, separable from the brain, but the fact that the intuition is sensible does not make it right." More

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.