i stand
on the moon
and know
your heart
like one
who has died
and found
a home
For consciousness to be what it is the brain must be able to take its own activity as an object. The brain must have a meta-mechanism by which it partially re-represents its interaction with its environment. This re-representation creates a feedback loop to the original activity. It is this feedback loop that makes possible the experience, if not the reality, of free will. The re-representation is accomplished through language, such that if there is no language there is no consciousness -- as the split-brain research reveals. Language in its re-representation creates a self to whom the activity of the brain belongs. It is that creation of the self that makes us feel that there is something it is like to be me because that is the story that the brain tells itself. Consciousness itself is that story. There may also a proto-consciousness, a potentiality or readiness state, anticipatory of the word, a state of simple synchrony between the original brain activity and its re-representation.
She died today
broken but strong.
Where are her songs?
Heard by none.
There is a constellation named for you,
named Miss Blood, named Fear --
there is no lack of names --
you breathe in the hollow spaces
between the stars.
And yet I miss the little you
the girl in you before you became
the fear in all of us,
the little hope, the little dream
that little look that says,
"Help me, please."
Were the heart round -
and it ought to be -
its echoing sounds
would keep me company.
Is there a secret
to so small a place?
The universe resides
in just such a space.
Why is there something, why not nothing? Whence comes love or conscience? Do our lives have any meaning? . . . It makes no difference that the answers we discover to such questions are ones that we have created for ourselves alone, provided they have been created out of the necessity of our own experience. The questions must so press themselves upon us that we scorn self-deception and refuse to take another’s truth as our own. When questions are so fervently asked, the answers come indirectly and in many forms: in art, in poetry, and, strangely, often in the very questions themselves. For some the answers come as prayers. In silence. And very often, in despair. But always, always out of the necessity of our own experience. Thus is Truth discovered, such as it is, whether it be yours or mine.
It's but a drop of rain -
However slight its sum -
It will dissolve the sky
and swallow up the sun.
If we apply Schrodinger's concept of objectification to emergence theory, the consequence profoundly shifts the nature of the problem that emergence was intended to solve. Emergence always occurs to an observer and the observer therefore must be included in the matrix of the event. Once the observer is included, the phenomen of emergence is at once more complex and less magical. My suspicion is that emergence theory has become a backdoor for spiritualists.
There are no disciples of Nietzsche. There are those, however, who believe they are thinking for themselves when they are not. These pseudoists are the siblings of those who believe they know something true and fine but in fact do not. What is most deplorable about these creatures is that they objectify Nietzsche’s philosophy and endlessly toil over the meaning of eternal recurrence and the ubermensch yet ignore or neglect the creative subjectivity that everywhere expresses itself in Nietzsche’s writing. They believe if they could understand these ideas once and for all their spirit would somehow touch that of Nietzsche. What is this but the objectification of the spirit? The deadliest philosophical mistake possible. Rather, we should see Nietzsche as exploring, provoking, playing, feeling his way along with the touch and exuberance of an artist, profoundly destabilizing his own world and ours and in so doing finding a vitality that springs up with existence itself. If there were a Nietzschean philosophy, it would be summed up in three words: Think for yourself. A great improvement over Know thyself, which is but a sad sort of masochism. Think for yourself. Nothing else in life requires so much courage. Nothing else brings so much suffering and delight. Nothing else is more likely to end in self-deception and false complacency. Why do we read Nietzsche? Because he chides and provokes and demands that we do as our very own life demands: that we exist for ourselves. And for companionship along the way. For companionship, Jean-Paul. Though the solitude is complete.
Don't think for a moment I don't include myself among the pseudoists. And with this, I am going to put Nietzsche behind me until I shall discover him once again on the road ahead.
Words
like rivers flow
like rock. What else
is soul but the vein
in the stone
alive
like fire
like blood that runs
to the sun
like this line
breathing, dying, burning.
What else can hold back the sea
but this line?
His clothes were patchwork, held together by dozens of safety pins. As he came on the bus, carrying all his belongings in a burlap bag, others looked away -- he smelled badly. He sat down next to a man in a business suit, but the man got up and moved to another seat. Suddenly, there was a fight: the old man in safety pins and burlap was screaming at the man in the business suit, throwing fists: "I could have had your life, your suit; you are not too good to sit next to me." The bus driver separated them and at the next stop the man in the business suit ran out of the bus and up the street, disappearing into the night. The man in safety pins came and sat next to me. He showed me a silver revolver. He flashed it and told me he was Matt Dillon and had killed many bad men. He said, it's a struggle between the good guys and the bad. I sat in silence trying desperately to be a good guy.
Reality is more fluid and elusive than reason, and has, as it were, more dimensions than are known even to the latest geometry. --George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty
"Wer will was Lebendigs erkennen und beschreiben
Sucht erst den Geist herauszutreiben,
Dann hat er die Teile in seiner Hand,
Fehlt, leider! nur das geistige Band." (Goethe, Faust I)
Hugh: Have you read the Stephen LaBerge conversation in Blackmore’s Conversations on Consciousness?
Susan: I have. He seems to be saying that lucid living appears to entail understanding the illusion of the self and its separateness. I like his idea that blending the Eastern spiritual and Western scientific perspectives will bring about a new understanding of consciousness. I haven't ever had lucid dreaming so I don't know how that would affect me, but I do know that dreams are an important part of experience and our consciousness has some control over our remembrance of dreams.
Hugh: What struck me about LaBerge is his idea that consciousness is a kind of dreaming from which we can wake up, e.g. Buddha. He suggests that we might achieve a lucid consciousness where we recognize that our attachment to things, including the self, is but a story. If this insight were achieved, how would it change our lives? Susan Blackmore has much to say about this question. My problem with consciousness being a story the brain tells itself is that my immediate perception of my experience as I type these letters and words, think these thoughts, feel the coolness of the keys, the collar too tight about my neck, the sharp ache in my heart for a loved one, this immediate sense of my own life shouts out "No, it ain't so." How do you reconcile what appear to be our abstract considerations about consciousness and your immediate perception of your own life?
Susan: I think there is merit in learning how to give up our attachment to things. If nothing else, it may help one to be relieved of miseries and heart aches, but there is something cold and not human about the attitude that this is all a "story." Perhaps I haven't looked deeply enough at Buddhist teachings to be saying this, but my take is that "being mindful" and aware of those miseries and heart aches is what helps us heal and that we must go through some necessary losses that are real in our lives. It ain't so. So, I agree with your "No, it ain't so" response to all of this. When I started reading Susan Blackmore's comments in response to the question "Who is asking the question?" and she reached some point in her meditation where she rejected her own body as part of her self because she couldn't see her own face, I reached my limit. I thought she was ridiculous and I was gratified to see that her own Zen teacher corrected her when he asked if she was in the room and she said "no". He said "yes, you are here." Of course she was in the room and of course she is asking the question. How else would she be getting royalties from her book about asking those questions?
Hugh: I do keep thinking, however, that if one could "wake up" from our normal waking experience, there would be an expansion in one's experience of existence, not as "my existence" but of existence itself. Something like the experience of love. LaBerge points to the illusion of consciousness as a false experience of isolation -- the true experience is identity with others and with the universe -- for LaBerge, consciousness itself is not an illusion. That speaks very much to my own intuitions and it's probably time I own up to my own mystical inclinations. How about your mystical inclinations?
Susan: I have my own mystical inclinations as well, and am hoping that with my retirement, I will have time to meditate and test out this hypothesis. Can we point to experiences that give us "identity with others and with the universe" without that waking up event? Have you had a sense of "hyper reality" that he implies?
Hugh: Not really. Just intuitions, though I wonder about that "just." Do you believe you have free will?
Susan: Yes. Insofar as we make choices (of mates, of schools, of jobs we take, of presidents we vote for, etc.) I believe in free will and I believe that my brain, even if it is "just" neurons firing, helps me exercise that free will with my "executive function" in my frontal lobes. The problem with addiction, as I gather from listening to the presentation today, is a difficult diminution of the will. In your case of smoking, you may have had trouble with will power, but you were always free on some abstract level to quit.
Hugh: Do you believe there is something in addition to brain function that makes free will possible? It sounds as if you are speaking of free will as an expression of some other reality than the biochemistry of the brain.
Susan: No, it's just an abstract illusion I like to believe in.
Hugh: I love that response. Picture me laughing even as I am writing to you now. Well, let's move on to the final question: How has our study of consciousness affected you?
Susan: In so many ways! I now walk around trying to be conscious of my consciousness. All the kinds of thoughts Susan Blackmore talks about have occurred to me (conversations with people, plans for tomorrow, awareness of pain, etc.) as well as moments of quiet (no thoughts, but not exactly "abiding tranquility" either). The idea of abiding tranquility appeals to me a great deal because I think it is one of the ways one might feel more in tune with or in unity with the universe. I am beginning to think of consciousness as a multi-layered entity because there can be different levels of electrical activity (alpha brain waves as well as other types of waves), different levels of metabolic activity (the unconscious person being at the lowest level) and different thought patterns (thoughts versus no thoughts). Because this is a hard problem to study, I will continue to read about consciousness with a new perspective on brain functioning, one which I owe mostly to you and your persistent questioning. I myself have another question: Is it not possible that Susan Blackmore's idea about how all of consciousness is an illusion an illusion as well?
Hugh: I admire Susan Blackmore. because she seems to me to be honest broker in the debate over consciousness. She has her own conclusions, of course, but she is exceptionally able to entertain opposing ideas. I think this mutes any charge that she may be succumbing to her own illusion. I feel as you do about our journey with our students through the mind and brain. It has left me literally wandering aimlessly about. When I think consciousness is an illusion, I seem to be trying to make myself disappear; when I think consciousness is a fundamental aspect of universe, I feel myself to be the grass waving in the wind. My final thought is that the only meaning is existence itself, illusion or no illusion.
Susan: I agree that "the only meaning is existence" and no matter how hard I try to think of all this as an illusion, my root canal reminds me otherwise.
Earth song I you night the kosmos
By God, it's all the same to me
One continuous orgiastic moment of delight
Dust rain snakes swans nymphs and satyrs
copulate in the air, make rain, and call out our names
yet nobody, nobody, not even me, cries out in ecstasy.