Intellect and The Parable of The Poisoned Arrow

What do I know? This. Something sees a dissected brain on a laboratory table and what sees is not an object like the thing cut open on the table. Can I explain beyond that? No.

Sure, I can talk about brain neurons and the optical cortex, and that does provide an objective correlative to explain the processes involved in seeing. But it does not explain the seeing itself.

I found the study of consciousness through brain science quite helpful in providing objective explanations about mind.  There is, for example, neuro-plasticity, which provides evidence that intention (roughly, the "will" part of free will) can help the brain change itself. (See Paul Bach-y-Rita, who taught his father to walk after a stroke). But that was as far as it went.

In The Parable of The Poisoned Arrow (more later), Buddha was in effect talking about intellect but not the kind brain scientists used to discover neuro-plasticity. So this article is about what he meant and what he did not mean.

As I already knew would happen, none of my readings in neuroscience and the philosophy of consciousness got me any closer to seeing as seeing.  Buddha meant that I start with experience. Not my everyday experience, although I could use it, but instead what reveals itself in deep meditation.

A sensation arises in a leg attended by a sensation of the leg itself. The sensation comes with the leg as something "there." The edges of this body are sensations of a location. But all arises in the empty space of consciousness. The space can have faint, wispy boundaries but they too are sensations. Sensations arising and falling away, to be followed by new ones arising and passing.

Are You Made of Matter or Consciousness Itself?

To explore whether you are made of matter or consciousness raise the index finger on your right hand. There, that was easy, wasn't it? You just told the finger to lift and it did. Now I have something not so easy, a question. How did the finger get raised? So what is your answer? Read on for an explanation.

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.

Down The Rabbit Hole: Self-Transcendence, Brain Cancer, NDEs, & Consciousness

Raise the index finger on your right hand. There, that was easy, wasn't it? You just told the finger to lift and it did. Now I have something not so easy, a question. How did the finger get raised? You did it, you tell me. Sorry, but that's not good enough. Your finger is a physical object. In terms of cause and effect, a physical effect, your finger, can only be acted upon by a physical cause--you? Are you only physical, a lump of matter? To say your brain is physical and it lifted the finger is an acceptable answer, but what is the difference between you and your brain? Are you, your consciousness, physical?

You can say yes--that, at least, is a perfectly rational viewpoint, and one that has been developed by those who argue for emergent non-reductive physical systems. (Of course, others argue for it as reductionists.) The perspective is rational because it answers the problem of causal closure--a non-physical thing, consciousness, should not be able to act upon a physical thing, your finger. The answer from this vantage is that consciousness is a physical system and can be regarded as an emergent phenomenon, emergent from biology.

Obviously, if you accept this proposition, then you must also accept that you have no soul, no spirit, no ghost in the body machine. Your "you" along with your body is a lump of dust, so to speak.

Maybe, though, you don't accept the answer, or at least not so easily. If so, then you have company. Most people would share your viewpoint, but that is because they are what philosophers call naive realists--they really haven't thought about it.

Whether you accept or not, now that you are thinking about this, I want to take you on a trip down the rabbit hole, the same one Alice fell into. I must warn you, though, that once you start thinking about this kind of thing, Alice's pills won't help you. You will find yourself deep in the rabbit hole and will have to find your own way out if you seriously ponder the evidence of neuroscience and of those who have had feelings of transcendental unity, or experiences of Near Death. If followed relentlessly, the question of consciousness leads you to quantum physics and right back into metaphysics that a physicalist would avoid in order to have a rational, discussable model.

First this. People sometimes experience feelings of transcendence when their brains have been damaged by cancer. This can be construed as a wholly physical phenomenon. Feelings of transcending the physical world--as parts of religious experience, or other forms of spirituality--may find their explanation, then, in scientific evidence.

I quote: "The brain region in question, the posterior parietal cortex, is involved in maintaining a sense of self, for example by helping you keep track of your body parts. It has also been linked to prayer and meditation.

To further probe its role, Cosimo Urgesi, a neuroscientist at the University of Udine in Italy, turned to 88 people who were being treated for brain cancer."

Urgesi suggests that removal of neurons from the posterior parietal cortex--also responsible for personality change--may increase feelings of transcendence. According to this view. the sense of higher consciousness is only a biological phenomenon.

But could their removal simply widen the brain's bandwidth to attune with something it receives much as a TV set receives? I mean that there is another possible interpretation and it is this: Our brains do not produce consciousness--as suggested by non-locality in quantum physics.

Rather, consciousness is in the world. Just as there are photon particles there may be an undiscovered consciousness particle. (Strange things have been indicated by quantum theory, such as the Many Worlds theory.) This view would support an analogy between the brain and a television or radio receiver. The brain is attuned to what is out there and the "external" world complements the "internal," both being necessary for consciousness. *

Although not to the above point, an interesting argument can be made of a kind of interactive cognition with the world. For that, see an article on Extended Mind, a theory posited by Andy Clark and David Chalmers. An interesting perspective is that of Stuart Hameroff. (Find him in the sidebar.)

There is also another vantage. Instead of a material explanation for transcendent experience, isn't it also possible that our brains are wired to tap into invisible realities? In his The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley wrote of the brain as a dimensional filter that reduced the world to what we can deal with. In this view, sometimes the filter does not work as well and we get glimpses of a greater way of being.

Near Death Experiences (NDE) with Out of Body Experiences (OBE) occur when a patient is flat-lined or brain-dead on brain monitors. Occasional and accurate instances of remote viewing are reported. If consciousness arises from neurons and they are not firing, how can a patient recover to describe accurately what instrument the surgeon was holding, what he said, and what the patient saw on another floor of the hospital, a floor which he or she had never seen before? In a study of over 600 NDEs, the majority regarded theirs as a life-changing experience. They lost their fear of death and became more compassionate toward others.

As Hamlet said, There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
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* Nothing is lost from the rigor of scientific inquiry by accepting this point of view. (Its findings have proven and objective predictive value; on the other hand, self-transcendence experiences are unique and subjective. Moreover, no objective replication and verification is possible for NDE patients, although they report astounding observations of the operating room and hospital while they were brain-dead.)

There are those, however, who are less than objective when they insist on as superstition that which holds views of other-dimensional reality. Of course, I include Richard Dawkins among them, but must include neuro-scientists who share his view. I am reminded of the so-called Expert Bias: The more expert one becomes in a field, the greater the resistance to assimilating information that can undermine her expertise.

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.

David Chalmers' Book The Conscious Mind

David Chalmers' Book The Conscious Mind and The Hard Problem

Although called the father of modern philosophy, René Descartes became challenged in the last century for the split he created between body and mind, the mind-body dualism, or subject and object. For him, body became one thing; mind, another. This presents a problem. Why? Hold out your hand. Open the fist. Now close it. How did the gap get bridged between your hand, the object, and mind, the subject, if the two are split? Yet, the one and the other are somehow in relationship. This is one problem for understanding consciousness and it implicates other problems. In particular, David Chalmers has become widely-known and quoted for a key issue he presents to philosophers and neuro-researchers in the field.

Well-known for his phrase on the "hard problem," as in the article title above, Chalmers’ ideas can be found in his The Conscious Mind: In Search of A Fundamental Theory, among other books. In that work, he puts the hard problem in this manner: "Why is all this processing accompanied by an experienced inner life?" Put differently, he seeks an objective explanation for subjective experience. Some would argue that he can't get there from here--"here" being subjectivity. They would say that physical models can help elucidate consciousness processes, but ultimately "what it feels like to be me" cannot be explained. I am one of them. Still, he offers an interesting and intelligent discussion. Here is part of it.

He introduces processing this way: “Many books and articles on consciousness have appeared in the past few years, and one might think that we are making progress. But on a closer look, most of this work leaves the hardest problems about consciousness untouched. Often, such work addresses what might be called the ‘easy’ problems of consciousness: How does the brain process environmental stimulation? How does it integrate information? How do we produce reports of internal states? But to answer them is not to solve the hard problem: Why is all this processing accompanied by an experienced internal life?”

The problem is compounded by the term consciousness. It is rather slippery and must be handled with care. He observes that sometimes it refers to

• “cognitive capacity, such as to introspect or to report one’s mental states;
• “awakeness”;
• “our ability to focus attention and to voluntarily control behavior”;
• “to know about something.”

He points out that each of these are “accepted uses of the term, but all pick out phenomena distinct from the subject I am discussing, and phenomena that are significantly less difficult to explain.” When he refers to consciousness he means “the subjective quality of experience; what it is like to be a cognitive agent.”

That is truly a hard problem.

Not satisfied with Daniel Dennett’s explanations (Consciousness Explained, Elbow Room, and other titles), he has this to say: "Dennett spends much of his book [Consciousness Explained] outlining a detailed cognitive model, which he puts forward as an explanation of consciousness. On the face of it, the model is centrally a model of the capacity of a subject to verbally report a mental state. It might thus yield an explanation of reportability, of introspective consciousness, and perhaps of other aspects of awareness, but nothing in the model provides an explanation of phenomenal consciousness. . . . "

Note phenomenal. In the book's chapter "Two Concepts of Mind" he extensively distinguishes between phenomenal and psychological concepts.

In his closing comments of the book, he indicates the viewpoints he favors. Here are two of them, both in the same paragraph:

• “I resisted mind-body dualism for a long time, but I have now come to the point where I accept it, not just as the only tenable view but as a satisfying view in its own right. It is always possible that I am confused, or that there is a new and radical possibility that I have overlooked; but I can comfortably say that I think dualism is very likely true.”
• “I have also raised the possibility of a kind of panpsychism. Like mind-body dualism, this is initially counterintuitive, but the counter-intuitiveness disappears with time. I am unsure whether the view is true or false but it is at least intellectually appealing, and on reflection is not too crazy to be acceptable.”

Dualism was briefly explained at the opening of this article. One explanation of panpsychism is here.  In physics, the Einstein-Podalsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox and John Bell's experiments suggest that consciousness is not local (not just inside the skull).