Seeing Through Self: David Bohm & Krishnamurti's Ego

Quantum physicist David Bohm (1917-1992) was a protégé of J. Robert Oppenheimer and liked by Einstein. So impressed was Einstein, that he referred to Bohm as his successor. As for Bohm, he had deep interests outside science. This led to the day when Bohm met J. Krishnamurti and began studying under him until the two men had a falling-out.

V.S. Ramachandran: Consciousness, Qualia, & Self

Ramachandran has an ability to open up access to difficult subjects--not that he explains them away, but that he, well, he makes them more accessible to understanding. He has great stories about some of his patients, one being the son who, after an auto accident, called his mother an imposter when he saw her, but immediately warmed to her when he talked to her on the phone. (That is not part of this video. It is called the Capgras Delusion and can be watched here.)

Some of his talking points:

• What is consciousness? He and his colleagues want to understand the logic of consciousness. There are two important problems regarding it:
  
• One is qualia. Francis Crick and Kristof Koch championed the view that it is sensations you're conscious of. (My opinion: this seems tautological. The hard problem of consciousness is to explain in the third person what we all experience in the first person.)
• The qualia problem: You cannot communicate your experience of green to anybody else.
• The second problem is that of self. Not only do you experience qualia but you know that you experience qualia and you know that you know that you experience qualia.
• There is no such thing as a free-floating qualia without a self and there is no such thing as a self without a qualia.
• Ramachandran: The two co-evolved in evolution and are intimately linked to language. Self and qualia are two sides of a Möbius strip.
  

Right-Brain Strokes and "I"

This picture was drawn by a woman, PP, who suffered a stroke in the right hemisphere of her brain. Notice that the left side of the cat and the lady are not wholly filled in.

She is typical of right-brain stroke victims. So to speak, they lose one half their world. They will eat food on the right side of their plate and leave the left side untouched. When somebody turns the other half to the right side, they see it and will eat it.

If two people stand before them, they may only respond to the visitor on the right.

When we first learn about this phenomenon it surprises us. Surely we would not do anything so foolish as fail to see one half of our world. We believed there is a higher awareness, a consciousness, a self, an "I" that oversees it all and remedies our errors.

Right-stroke victims provide evidence that we might be mistaken to continue believing so.

But that does not make the issue of consciousness much simpler. The gap between brain and mind remains a chasm, despite claims of philosophers and neuroscientists that it soon will be narrowed. Those who doubt them often hold that a difference exists, one between worldviews. In one, physical laws are expected to explain consciousness processes. The other points out that in the community of advanced physics there is a growing sense that other dimensions are hidden from us and will forever remain so.

What implications does right-brain stroke behavior have for science writ large? In a sense, not much. Like Buddhism, the scientific worldview does not need an inner self, although most people are convinced they have one. (One exception was Suzanne Segal and the change in her profoundly affected her life.)

Most people also hold that belief in self is vital for social cohesion. Without it, they say, individuals lose motivation and the moral order is threatened.

Suzanne Segal & A Sudden Loss of Sense of Self

Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found and lost;
Black out; Heaven blazing into the head
(from Lapus Lazuli, by W.B. Yeats)

Waiting at a Paris bus stop, four months pregnant, Suzanne Segal was about to take a step that would change her life forever. It occurred as she boarded the number 37 line.

"I lifted my right foot to step up into the bus and collided head-on with an invisible force that entered my awareness like a silently exploding stick of dynamite, blowing the door of my usual consciousness open and off its hinges . . . All the body's signals seemed to take a long time to be picked up in this non-localized place, as if they were light coming from a distant star. Terrified, I looked around . . . All the other passengers were calmly taking their seats . . . I shook my head a few times, hoping to rattle my consciousness back into place, but nothing changed. I felt from afar as my fingers fumbled to insert the ticket into the slot and I walked down the aisle to find a seat. I sat down next to an older woman I had been chatting with at the bus stop, and I tried to continue our conversation. My mind had completely ground to a halt in the shock of the abrupt collision with whatever had dislodged my previous reality."

Her personal identity disappeared and she began to live in terror. Of her body she said it was "an outline empty of everything of which it had previously felt so full. " She also said, "Everything seemed to be dissolving right in front of my eyes, constantly. Emptiness was everywhere, seeping through the pores of every face I gazed upon, flowing through the crevices of seemingly solid objects. The body, mind, speech, thoughts, and emotions are all empty; they had no ownership, no person behind them. I was utterly bereft of all my previous notions of reality."

Although others acknowledged a change in her, she was puzzled that nobody else noticed what she saw so clearly: "as if there were an unseen doer who acted perfectly."

Later in her narrative: "The first response that the mind had to this completely ungraspable experience was absolute terror; but that terror never changed the experience for a moment. In other words that terror never got the reference point back again. There was no personal self, but nothing stopped; the functions continued to function just as before. In fact, better than before. Speaking was still speaking and walking was still walking. I even went to graduate school and got a Ph.D."

"I experienced this fear for ten years. During this time, I consulted a lot of psychotherapists because it seemed like something I needed to be cured of. Every single one of these therapists considered this to be a problem. And they all had a diagnosis for it. They couldn't quite understand how it could be that there was such great functioning occurring, but they took the fact that there was a lot of fear to be a sign that this was a problem. "

This, on sex: "Sexuality still functions, but without the lust or longing that are self-referencing aspects. Sex serves no personal desire and has no deeper meaning that makes it anything but what it is at the moment. Like all other functions, the sexual function is engaged when the vastness deems obvious, for a mysterious, non-personal purpose. When lovemaking occurs, there is no one making love to no one. How could this possibly be comprehensible to the mind?"

Segal eventually stopped asking therapists for help and turned to spiritual teachers. "Towards the end of the ten years, there was a clear awareness that this was not something that was going to go away. It was time to start investigating other possible descriptions of what this was. It was time to investigate it with people who maybe knew more about it than Western psychotherapists. I started reading spiritual books. . . ."

American Buddhist teachers assured her that her absence of self was not pathological, which helped her understand it in a different light, whereupon her fear subsided. "I realized that the mind had been clinging tenaciously to the erroneous notion that the presence of fear meant something about the validity of the experience of no-self. Fear had tricked the mind into taking its presence to mean something it did not. Fear was present, yes, but that was all it was! The presence of fear in no way invalidated the experience that no personal self existed. It meant only that fear was present. Everything occurs simultaneously--form and emptiness, pain and enlightenment, fear and awakening. Fear's grip broke, and joy arose at once."

After this understanding a further shift occurred: "I was driving north to meet some friends when I suddenly became aware that I was driving through myself. For years there had been no-self at all, yet here on this road , everything was myself, and I was driving through me to arrive where I already was. In essence, I was going nowhere because I was everywhere already. The infinite emptiness I knew myself to be was now apparent as the infinite substance of everything I saw."

She had referred to her bus stop experience as a "bus hit." In summer 1996 a series of powerful hits occurred, which at first were pleasant, rapturous, then increasingly disturbed her, causing her to rest after especially strong ones.

In early 1997 X-rays revealed a brain tumor. She had surgery and died on 1 April 1997, age 42. Her book is titled Collision with the Infinite.

Post script. The skeptic might argue that her disease provides evidence for the materialist position-- that she merely hallucinated.

As a response to the materialist, consider this in William James' classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience: "Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic. It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. . . . And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined. . . . "

"According to the general postulate of psychology just referred to . . . scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see "the liver" determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. . . ."

"To plead the organic causation of a religious state of mind, then, in refutation of its claim to possess superior spiritual value, is quite illogical and arbitrary, unless one has already worked out in advance some psycho-physical theory connecting spiritual values in general with determinate sorts of physiological change. Otherwise none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our DIS-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of its possessor's body at the time."

Douglas Hofstadter:What Do We Mean When We Say "I"?

Douglas Hofstadter: What Do We Mean When We Say "I"?

Douglas Hofstadter has a vivid recollection of a pig's head on a table in a market. As a teenager he could see the severed neck that once had lines of communication with the body, that had once connected all the outposts of information with the headquarters in consciousness. He asked, "Who once had been in that head? Who had lived there? Who had looked out through those eyes, heard through those ears? Who had this hunk of flesh really been? Was it a male or female?"

He had a mid-life loss. "In the month of December 1993, when we were just a quarter of the way into my sabbatical year in Trento, Italy, my wife Carol died very suddenly, essentially without warning, of a brain tumor. She was not yet 43, and our children, Danny and Monica, were but five and two. I was shattered in a way I could never have possibly imagined before our marriage. There had been a been a bright shining soul behind those eyes, and that soul had been suddenly eclipsed. The light had gone out."

So what does all this mean? He tries to understand. "Deep down, your brain is a chaotic seething soup of particles. On a higher level it is a jungle of neurons, and on a yet higher level it is a network of abstractions that we call 'symbols.' The most central and complex symbol is the one you call 'I.' An 'I' is a strange loop where the brain's symbolic and physical levels feed back into each other and flip causality upside down so that symbols seem to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse.

To each human being, this 'I' is the realest thing in the world. But how can such a mysterious abstraction be real? Is our 'I' merely a convenient fiction? Does an 'I' exert genuine power over the particles in our brains, or is it helplessly pushed around by the all-powerful laws of physics?" From I Am A Strange Loop, by Douglas Hofstadter. Here is A Washington Post book review.