Why we should reposition how we think of the mind.
Published in TRIBE
Apr 12, 2024 (Medium.com)
The theory that consciousness is epiphenomenal is pretty much assumed by much establishment science today. In spite of the fact that no one has ever proposed the faintest inkling of a solution to David Chalmers Hard Problem that points out that even if we mapped every atom in the brain we would not actually arrive at consciousness, the view that we will inevitably stumble upon a feature of the brain that offers us an explanation for consciousness remains strangely persistent.
In spite of apparently banishing metaphysical speculation there are ironically metaphysical reasons for this, which is to say that science has siloed much of its work in a materialist position from which other kinds of solutions to the problem of consciousness sound far too much like spirituality to be taken remotely seriously.
The question though is still one that science has to have some role in considering. And there are some fascinating insights into which we can shed light into an alternative way of viewing consciousness.
The epiphenomenal view of consciousness essentially assumes that the brain “emits” consciousness. That is to say the material of the brain contains a set of processes that somehow conspire to produce consciousness ‘upwards’ causally, like air coming out from an air conditioner vent. This seems like the default position, especially to those who are materialist or scientifically minded, but it has some significant problems.
The first is what consciousness itself is actually doing if the brain itself exists on a level of unconscious processes, but more importantly it has the basic problem of failing to explain where out of reality consciousness comes from. Since consciousness seems to be virtually by definition a reality different in kind, almost ontologically different, from what we class as material or natural reality, how does a biological process simply come to produce it unless it is already a property of the material it has to work with?
So this takes us to a second way of viewing consciousness, not as something the brain “emits” but as something the brain “permits”.
In this way of viewing consciousness, consciousness itself is a fundamental substance of reality, perhaps the fundamental substance of reality, and the brain rather than emitting consciousness like a lightbulb being turned on and generating it permits consciousness in your particular experience in the same way a voice constrains air in order to create your particular voice.
Is there any evidence for this? One of the most reliable ways to elicit at the very least a feeling of this intuition is psychedelic drugs, in fact many of those early pioneers of psychedelics in the twentieth century who experimented with psychedelics were convinced of consciousness as primary and universal after the experience of egoless consciousness that drugs such as LSD or psilocybin can elicit. One of these was Aldous Huxley whose book The Doors of Perception was named after a quote by William Blake:
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
Interestingly studies of the brain on psychedelics seem to show something in common with the brains of experienced meditators. Although it remains mysterious to some extent, most significant seems to be a reduction in blood flow to an area of the brain called the default mode network, something that is interestingly the inverse of those experiencing rumination and depressive disorder which are associated with increased connectivity in the DMN.
It seems that this is a part of the brain that operates as scientist Robin L. Carhart-Harris has put it as something like the orchestra conductor, constraining, inhibiting and limiting other parts of the brain. By shutting this down psychedelics seem to unconstrain cognition allowing an increase in connections across the brain that explain the synesthetic and hallucinogenic qualities of the psychedelic experience.
The DMN seems to be associated with something like the ego. It is not present in early childhood and seems to be a later evolutionary development, and its deactivation is associated with the loss of self experienced by meditation practitioners and psychedelic trips.
Yet the loss of self does not reduce consciousness, rather it seems to expand it. In a paper The entropic brain Robin L. Carhart-Harris and others suggest that the brain is essentially balanced between ordered and disordered states, from high-entropy, which they associate with infancy (essentially Harris seems to see the expansive love of the psychedelic trip as a return to the state of consciousness on your mother’s breast) to low entropy such as depression. (1)
Part of what, say, a psilocybin trips seems to be able to do is shake the snow globe of the mind by turning off the DMN enough to allow some resetting of those low entropy states the mind can become encased in, in other words it at least temporarily lets down the prison walls of the ego.
Naturally though this theory, while fascinating, still has a kind of problem with consciousness. It begs the obvious question, why is there this infant conscious that seems to essentially not be created by the self but constrained by it? In other words what the DMN seems to be doing, or what the self or the ego or whatever is doing is actually limiting consciousness in order for us to function properly in the world.
So do the experience of meditators, mystics, poets, visionaries or psychedelic trips allow us to witness a more universal consciousness unconstrained by the mind? It seems to me the alternative is eminently less likely, which is that consciousness is emitted by the brain from childhood and the rest of life is spent constructing a functionality that constrains it increasingly restrictively as we get older. Why does the consciousness need to be there? What on earth is it doing?
Interestingly poets and artists have had this insight long before science wrestled with these ideas. Wordsworth in his poem Intimations of Immortality wrote of the loss of an apparent sense of joy or transcendence as he moved away from childhood:
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem / Apparelled in celestial light…It is not now as it hath been of yore; — / Turn wheresoe’er I may, / By night or day. / The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
Wordsworth sees this as a reflection of hints of a pre-existence that has a strange resonance to the theory that the mind increasingly constrains a more universal infant consciousness:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: / The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, / Hath had elsewhere its setting, / And cometh from afar: / Not in entire forgetfulness, / And not in utter nakedness, / But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home.
This idea is found elsewhere in literature, in Ben Okri’s 1990 Booker Prize winning novel The Famished Road the narrator is Azaro, a ‘spirit child’, who in the African tradition is a child who comes from the blissful world of spirits and is reborn countless times in the world, always wishing to die young in order to return to this happy realm of love where there is no suffering. A quote from the first chapter echoes Wordsworth’s poem “There are many reasons why babies cry when they are born, and one of them is the sudden separation from the world of pure dreams, where all things are made of enchantment, and where there is no suffering…to be born is to come into the world weighed down with strange gifts of the soul, with enigmas and with an extinguishable sense of exile.”
More recently in his 2018 book The Poem, poet Don Paterson suggests that part of what poetry itself can do is enable us to relate to the form of our consciousness that emerges in early childhood, before language. Poetry for Patterson allows us for a moment to take language to its very limits, find momentary glimpses of higher unity, of the universe as it is. Paterson, drawing on the word of Chilean psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte Blanco, describes this “atemporal and infinite connection” as something that still exists, “like an operating system upon which the more recently acquired software of perceptual category and language sits.”
All this seems to cry the suggestion that viewing consciousness as “permitted” by the mind seems to offer far more space for actually accommodating both a material conception of the brain as well as allowing for an explanation of how consciousness could have any role in something that can be objectified, and the nearest answer to the hard problem it seems like we can produce. Unless the materialist position can offer some serious explanation for how the brain produces a non-objective substrate objectively, it seems the most obvious, elegant, and familiar to experience.
For the scientist, this poetic speculation is naturally unhelpful. But it is worth the observation that at this stage the idea that consciousness is a pure epiphenomenal product of the brain is one that falls far short of possessing any explanatory scope. The poets are and have been observing their experience far longer than our clumsy instruments have been, and to my mind nothing we have found contradicts them. Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. Or as Blake put it, again:
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
Written by Matthew
·Editor for TRIBE
Let’s meet the mountains and see what they heard. https://linktr.ee/mattw1596Follow