Your Many Minds

This is a continuation of the previous post. Although it does not deal with the problems of consciousness that are my main focus in this web site, it includes reflections about the mind that are philosophically relevant. I am also posting this entry on some of my other sites. For more about many-mindedness, see chapter 15 of my book, Your Living Mind: The Mystery of Consciousness and Why It Matters to You.

ILLUSION NUMBER ONE, PART TWO

Your Many Minds

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Sunnyvale

June 12, 2022

            Two weeks ago you and I managed to eavesdrop on a lecture which was presented on another planet. Isn’t wireless technology amazing these days? The space alien who gave that lecture was actually willing to come here today and speak with us for free, but he wanted 50 cents a mile for travel which is an amount somewhat larger than the National Debt.

            This space creature was an intergalactic anthropologist who had recently visited Earth to study human beings. He ended up being quite puzzled by the human concept of “self,” for three different reasons. First, he said that Earth people seemed to think each person is separate from the world around them – as if their skin is a wall, with the “self” on the inside and everything else on the outside. Second, humans imagine that they continue through the passage of time, as if there were some personal essence that stays the same from the moment of conception onward. And third, Earthlings believe that each body contains a single personality, even though our inconsistent and even contradictory actions show that there are many, many minds inside every human head.

            So do I agree with the spaceman? No – and yes. I do think our human concept of “self” is useful and fits a lot of the time, but sometimes it misleads us and gets us into trouble.

            It’s easy to assume that the concepts we use must be either right or wrong. If an idea is right, keep it. If it’s wrong, throw it out. But concepts are only tools for helping us deal with our lives. Our little beliefs about the world do not match its complexity, and reality can be described in many ways. Instead of asking whether we do or do not “have a self,” we should ask in what ways this idea is useful and in what ways it is not.

            Sometimes we should actually accept two contradictory beliefs, because each one gives us part of the truth. Think of the way physicists talk about light. In some ways light is like a wave; in some ways it’s like a particle, and neither of these is exactly right. Saying my own personality is separate from yours, endures through time, and is internally consistent is also helpful, but not exactly right. So we can ask in what ways the idea of self is useful or is not.

            I mostly agree with the spaceman about the way our supposedly separate selves are interpenetrated by the world around us, especially the social world of culture and relationships. It has been said that the basic unit of humanity is not the individual. The basic unit of humanity is two or more people in relationship. We are born into relationship, and even a long-time hermit cannot live or die alone. Other people will always be inside of us. A rabbi once commented,

“If I am I because you are you, and if you are you because I am I, then I am not I, and you are not you” (Alan Watts, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, p. 102).

            So I mostly agree with the spaceman that our supposedly separate selves are interpenetrated by the world around us. But I don’t entirely agree with him about continuity and consistency. I’ll talk about these issues now, and then I’ll mention some implications for UU theology.

            The speaker from the planet Centros last week claimed that instead of continuing through time, we are actually being born again each moment. I partly agree, but some aspects of us stay the same for long periods of time. Each of us is like a flame, always changing and yet somehow retaining its shape. Or think of a river. A river’s flowing waters never hold still, yet the river is always there. Just like a river, people both are and are not the same from moment to moment. We needn’t argue about which side of the paradox is “correct.” And most all of us have sometimes wished we could change, wishing we could outgrow some old habits or emotional patterns.

            My favorite way to picture both personal change and continuity is to imagine myself as a sequence of beads on a string. If you think of this day as a long string of moments, the various states of mind you will experience today are like beads threaded onto your life-string, one at a time. Right now you may be feeling curious, the next minute confused, then interested, then irritated, then amused. Each of these attitudes uses different parts of your brain, as different beads slide into place on the long strand of time. To a great extent, each of us draws upon the same collection of beads, but in various quantities and in varying sequences. Your pattern of beads is different from mine, and therefore it’s a different necklace. Because each of us has a unique pattern of small, transitory minds, each of us is unique. Spiritual growth involves changing the beads on our string so that some of them appear less frequently and others appear more often. When that happens, we have changed.

            Becoming aware of our own mind-shifts can help us realize our close kinship with each other. For example, when I’m angry, I am probably much more similar to the way you are when you’re angry than I am to myself when I’m not upset. That’s obvious, but it has important implications. For one thing, it gives us realistic hopes for human progress. If each person contains various sub-personalities, various colors and shapes of beads, we can find ways to call forth the more positive sides of ourselves and each other, calling forth love instead of hate, compassion instead of aggression. And if a destructive sub-personality is currently in control of someone, we may be able to awaken and mobilize a more positive sub-self that is momentarily hidden behind anger or mistrust.

            So perhaps the spaceman was a little one-sided in emphasizing our changeability. But I admit that over time many small changes may add up to major transformations, so that we are surprised as we look back at the way we were. And as a psychotherapist I found that people often underestimate the extent of their own positive changes. We should give ourselves credit for these improvements. Sit down some time and think about how you were 20 or 30 years ago. One way to do that is to get out an old photo album and gaze at pictures of yourself. This may remind you of old attitudes and behaviors that you have outgrown.

In one of Ben Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, Calvin is looking through a photo album, and says to Hobbes, “This is a photograph of me when I was two. It’s strange. I know that’s me, but I don’t feel any connection to this image…. Isn’t it weird that one’s own past can seem unreal? This is like looking at a picture of somebody else.”

            Hobbes looks at the photo and agrees: “A slobbering nudist with legs like link sausages.”

            And Calvin adds: “You know, now I can’t stand to wad a soggy blanket in my mouth.”

            Sometimes we find ourselves clearly moving from one phase of life to the next. We have rites of passage for some of these changes–graduations, weddings, retirement parties, religious vows, and coming of age ceremonies. But there are many other transitions that alter personal identity: getting divorced, switching careers, moving to another town, confronting or recovering from a serious illness, seeing our last child leave home, or committing ourselves to breaking free from some addictive behavior. When you enter a new phase of life, why not create your own rite of passage to mark this transition? Unitarian Universalists have full permission to invent their own rituals, and I’ll bet some of you have done that and benefitted.

            So last week the spaceman emphasized how humans change, and I would balance that by recognizing our continuity. He also criticized us for thinking we are internally consistent, and I agree that we often underestimate our inconsistency. From moment to moment, we may change so much that it’s as if another personality took charge. I’m not saying we have what psychotherapists call multiple personalities. For one thing, with multiple personalities, the different personalities are often unaware of each other’s existence. But even with “normal” individuals, inside each person’s head is not just one mind, but many. It’s as each of us contains an enormous theater company, performing a drama in which only one character can be on stage at any moment. The various actors keep stepping in and out of the spotlight. And these little selves are so nimble that they can hop on and off stage in just seconds. Listen to this reading, adapted from the writings of a spiritual teacher named P. D. Ouspensky.

A person has no … single, big I, but is divided into a multiplicity of small I’s. And each separate small I is able to call itself by the name of the Whole, to act in the name of the Whole, … to make decisions, with which another I … will have to deal. This explains why people so often make decisions and so seldom carry them out. Someone decides to get up early beginning from the following day. One I, or a group of I’s, decide this. But getting up is the business of another I who entirely disagrees with the decision and may even know absolutely nothing about it. Of course the person will again go on sleeping in the morning and in the evening will again decide to get up early … it is the tragedy of the human being that any small I has the right to sign checks and promissory notes…. People’s whole lives often consist in paying off the promissory notes of small accidental I’s” (P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous, cited in Elizabeth O’Connor, Our Many Selves: A Handbook for Self-Discovery, pp. 36-37).

            So those are some thoughts about what the visitor from Centros told us. I also want to say a little about theological aspects of this multi-dimensional view of self. Two weeks ago the spaceman noted that “some … religions … teach that God judges each person as either good or bad … They then project this limited and ignorant understanding onto their gods.” Of course I completely agree. And since we contain many little minds, our philosophies of life may very well contain contradictions. Many believers have doubts, and skeptics may have sub-personalities that pray. But traditional religions often say it’s sinful to have more than one religious viewpoint. That can be a problem, in a mixed-faith marriage. But if both spouses can realize that there are lots of good ways of looking at reality, that may help them become more accepting of each other’s beliefs.

            Unitarian Universalism allows theological inconsistency. When I was minister at Mission Peak UU in Fremont one of our members told me, “In other churches I always felt like I had to suppress part of my own spirituality, But here I can talk about all of my religious ideas, even if some of them clash with each other. And if I change my beliefs, no one calls me a heretic or a backslider. I have finally found a place where I can feel at home with every side of my personal philosophy of life.”

            So human personality is full of paradoxes. In some ways I am separate from the rest of the cosmos, but in other ways I am part of all that exists. In some respects I persist through time, but I can also imagine myself being born again each moment. Sometimes it helps to think of myself as one organism, but other times it’s better to see myself as a committee, or an entire congress.

            One more idea: Self-acceptance is selves-acceptance. And if we learn to notice and welcome and become acquainted with our many minds, guess what happens? Another sub-personality begins to appear more and more frequently, a special sub-personality that sees all the other little minds, noticing them just as they are without judging them. The spiritual teacher Ram Dass called this inner observer the witness. The witness knows that change and multiplicity is our natural condition. We can “turn on” this inner observer when we notice that a destructive part of us has taken control. In most people this meta-viewpoint barely exists, but the more we observe our minds, the more powerful the witness becomes. This enables us to see ourselves more clearly, minimizing self-deception. And as this fair witness watches without judgment, it speaks an impartial and unending benediction of acceptance – “Blessed be, blessed be, blessed be.”

ILLUSION NUMBER ONE, PART ONE:

Report from Planet Three

I have not been on this site for a while, but I now may have time to begin posting occasionally – perhaps even regularly. Here is a talk I presented at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Sunnyvale, June 5, 2022. It does not deal with philosophical problems of consciousness that are widely discussed today, but it reflects on the mind in ways that are philosophically relevant. I am also posting this entry on some of my other sites.

            [I walk to the lectern, wearing antennae.] How very strange and wonderful to be back on my home planet! Two years is a long time to be gone, and it certainly seemed like ten years to me. In case any of you are unfamiliar with my expedition, I should explain that I traveled to Planet Three in Solar System 3079. For two years I lived on that planet among the Northern Californians to study their peculiar humanoid ways of thinking, speaking, and acting.

            Now that I am back on our beloved planet Centros with you, my fellow participants, I am ready to report my findings. (But first, if you don’t mind my being a bit casual, I’d like to remove my formal antennae. Ahhh, that’s better.)

            This morning I will discuss a concept that is used every day among Earth people, but which is quite difficult for us here on Centros to understand. This concept is expressed by a word that is spelled S-E-L-F, pronounced, “self.” This syllable is combined with other words that refer to persons – myself, yourself, ourselves, and after two years on Earth I will probably lapse into using these terms “myself.” Earthlings use the word self in referring to who they are – to themselves, as they would say. We have translated this word into our term centerspace, because you and I think about who we are in terms of centerspace – we are centers of consciousness, centers of feeling and thinking and activity. Such a translation could not possibly have been more misleading! The term centerspace and the term self, as used on Earth, are totally different.

            Center implies that the center is part of something else. If I hold up this paper and say to you, “Show me the center of the page,” you point toward the middle of it. Obviously this central area is continuous with the rest of the paper; it is not something separate. But the Earth idea of self actually implies separateness, as if humans were free from outside influences. One of their most famous poems reads, “I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul” (From “Invictus,” by William Earnest Henley).

            The line of demarcation between the self and the “outside” world is presumed to be the human skin. Seriously! You and I are vividly aware that our skin is interpenetrated as we breathe and eat. Cosmic particles pass through us all the time, and perceptions penetrate us as well. My voice enters you through the ears; your faces enter my eyes. Earth people know this too, because their bodies are quite similar to ours, and just as permeable. Yet they still imagine that whatever is inside of the skin, is them.

            Some of their scientists are now questioning this myth of the separate self. While visiting California, I went to a lecture by a minister – his name was Dr. Shiner or Schrimer – who talked about “Family Therapy.” In the past few decades psychotherapists on Earth have discovered that members of a family interpenetrate each other psychologically – imagine that! – and that the best way to change the behavior of one member of a family may be to gather the whole clan and work on the family system. This is an example of what they call “systems thinking,” and Dr. Schrimmer was so charmingly excited about this idea. I endured his little sermon, smiling to think that this is apparently a new insight for Earth people.

            Systems thinking seems to be catching on in this fellow’s church, the Contrarian Universalizers I believe it was called. I heard their choir singing about the interdependent web of existence, but I doubt that Schimer and the others really understand this idea.

            One Earthling who actually seemed to see through the illusion of separateness was a writer named Alan Watts, now deceased, and I’m going to quote him a lot. Listen to this wonderfully ironic passage from a work of his called, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.

Society … pulls [a] trick on every child from earliest infancy. … the child is taught that he is … a free agent, an independent origin of thoughts and actions – a sort of miniature First Cause. [The child] … accepts this make-believe for the very reason that it is not true. He can’t help accepting it…. (P. 65)

We seldom realize … that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, … We copy emotional reactions from our parents … we do not exist apart from a society. Society is our extended mind and body.

[And Watts concludes:] Yet the very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that he [or she] is indeed separate! (P. 64)

            But – even as some humans are questioning the illusion of the separate self, others are reinforcing and exaggerating this idea. Certain popular psychotherapists not only say that each so-called “individual” is like a little walled city, they imply that our personal walls are tall and strong enough to withstand any outside force. One should take total responsibility for one’s own fate. So obviously if people have financial problems, it must be their fault. If someone catches a cold, a pop-psychologist might ask, “Are you in touch with how you created that cold? Why did you want to get sick?”

            Here’s another problem. Since they don’t realize how much they are influenced by outside forces, humans are dismayed that their so-called social media are warping people’s political beliefs, pushing them into extreme camps that are all confident of their own righteousness. Here on Centros, most of us make the default assumption that “I can be manipulated.” This helps us guard against those who want to pull our strings, conning us into feeling fear and anger, fear and anger, warping our ability to look at personal and political issues calmly and compassionately.

            So the first key difference between our concept of the personal center, here on the planet Centros, and the human concept of self that I discovered while visiting Earth, is that Earth-people see the self as separate from the rest of reality, whereas you and I know that our personal centers are continuous with everything that surrounds us.

            A second remarkable oddity about the Earthling idea of “self” is that the self supposedly continues through the passage of time. When you and I speak of the way we “were” in the past or “will be” in the future, this is just a convenient way of speaking. Obviously I’m not the same person I was five or ten years ago. Earth people dimly realize this, and yet they actually maintain that they’re the same person when they were conceived as when they die. I’m not making this up!

            Perhaps this illusion of personal continuity is reinforced by the strange custom of using the same name throughout their lives. On our planet. you and I are identified by a code-cipher. But by adulthood each of us has acquired well over a hundred names, which would be quite confusing to humans with their lower intelligence. We have fun with this diversity, but on Earth, there is one name, and they take that little identifying tag so seriously! If you want to irritate Earthlings, just mis-pronounce their names or make fun of them. They get so upset. And this ties into what I said earlier about their delusion of separateness. As Alan Watts put it, “Confusing names with nature, you come to believe that having a separate name makes you a separate being” (The Book, p. 63).

            Because they assume that their identity persists, many humans feel great pride or shame about what they did or did not do in days long gone by. They also obsess about death, wondering whether their continuous stream of personal identity will keep going in an afterlife. Here on Centros we also treat death as a mystery, but it is just one small aspect of the greater mystery of change; we’re changing all the time. But Earth people find it almost impossible to see that all creatures are dying and being reborn every second.

            Again Alan Watts tries to help them see the obvious. He writes that,

A human body is like a whirlpool; there seems to be a constant form, called the whirlpool, but it functions for the very reason that no water stays in it. (P. 43)

            Watts was influenced by a religion called Buddhism, which declares that “all things are impermanent, all is without a self.” But I wonder how many Buddhists truly grasp this teaching.

            So humans think their skin separates them from the rest of the world, and they believe that the contents of this bag of skin persist through time. The third and final difference between our view and theirs is that they conceive of themselves as internally consistent. Inside their skin there is a single united personality. Of course, you and I are keenly aware of having many, many “selves” – hundreds of potential ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. We expect to experience internal conflict and ambivalence, and we set up our lives and our society in ways that reflect this reality. Earth people have even more inner conflict than we do, but they will not admit that this is their natural condition. There’s something wrong with them if they have mixed feelings and contradictory thoughts. They become particularly upset if their government leaders show any sign of inconsistency; they call this flip-flopping. You and I would assume that any leader who is unable to “flip-flop” must be mentally defective.

            If humans thought twice about it they would realize that they undergo radical personality shifts from one situation to another. The very same individual may be a doormat at the office, a tyrant at the dinner table, and a whimpering child in the dentist’s chair.

            One of their psychologists, Robert Ornstein, seems to realize that each person has many facets, and he cites examples of human inconsistency. He wrote about an experiment in which people role-played guards and prisoners, and took on those roles to an unsettling extent, and also a study in which people made obviously false statements about the length of a line, after several other people – who were actually actors who were lying about how long the line looked – had made such statements. Here’s one more example from his book, Multimind:

Imagine that you are alone in a room and hear someone cry for help … Would you help? Probably. Now, imagine that you are sitting with a few other people when you hear a cry for help. Would you go to help? … No, probably: you are three times less likely to help if there are six people in the room than if you are alone. The group we are in has a profound effect on us, more than we would like to think. … we compare our attitudes with those of the group; we make decisions we never would have made if we had been alone. (P. 88.)

            Thinking every person has a single unified personality blinds Earthlings to the possibility that if circumstances change, they may change, and change radically. For example, Americas have a horrible problem with gun violence, and many say the solution is to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and those with serious mental illnesses. Of course, that is important. But on our planet we realize that in the right circumstances ordinary individuals may do terrible things. That is also true of humans, and many who kill with guns are not criminals or obviously mentally ill. Even though they were “normal,” they had the potential for violence. Here on Centros, one of our default assumptions is: “I may be dangerous without knowing it.” If normal humans have the potential to become dangerous to others or themselves, should Americans own so many firearms?

            We here on the planet Centros also understand that even if someone commits a terrible crime while one aspect of the personality is in control, other aspects of that person may be positive and even compassionate. But some of the most influential religions on Earth teach that God judges each person as either good or bad, and sends the good ones to paradise and the bad ones to eternal damnation – as if each person were consistently good or evil. They sometimes sense that there’s a saint in every sinner and a sinner in every saint, but usually their view of the goodness or badness of each center of consciousness is astonishingly one-dimensional. They then project this limited and ignorant understanding onto their deities.

            Earth people are insightful in some ways, and deluded in other ways, but I think this idea of self is human illusion number one. They imagine that the self is separate from what is not-self, endures through the passage of time, and is internally consistent. And unless one realizes that Earth-people really believe these three ideas, one cannot begin to understand what it is like to dwell on Planet Three of their solar system.

             If I could give any gift to the Earthlings, it would be the gift of a multi-dimensional sense of “self.” I’ve even imagined giving this talk where I saw Dr. Schweimer speak, to those University Contrarians, since they seemed rather open-minded. After the talk, I would have asked them to think about these issues for perhaps a week; noticing that the outside world does penetrate their skin, that they do change from moment to moment, and that their minds keep shifting so that various aspects of their personalities take turns running the show. After that we could gather and talk about these ideas further. And now, due to a remarkable breakthrough in intergalactic hyper-zoom, today Dr. Shreener has been listening to my lecture and he will respond to it this time next week. Please come back in seven Earth days to see what he has to say. It should at least be entertaining.

            I want to close with a speculation. Perhaps the root of their odd idea of self is just a simplistic desire for neatness and order, a tendency to force reality into tidy little compartments. . But I hope that some humans have flashes of lucidity in which they realize that every conscious moment possesses such open potential and such delicious complexity! For to see through the illusion of the separate, continuous, and consistent self is to expand that little centerspace and join the larger self, the vast interconnected community of all that has breath.

Core Mysteries of Consciousness – A New Paper

I’ve just learned that another paper of mine has been accepted for presentation at a major conference, the Eastern Division gathering of the American Philosophical Association (Savannah, Georgia, January, 2018). I want to talk about the paper on this blog, but it’s highly technical. My clever, catchy, compelling title is: “Sensory Experiences Are Ontologically Opaque.”

Here’s the abstract, which I’ll follow with some comments in English:

Abstract: This paper critiques the claim that introspection reveals the ontology of sensory phenomena. If we lack such ontological access, several problems of consciousness become easier to solve. For example, one of the most challenging explanatory gaps between experiential states and brain states disappears if we do not subjectively detect ontologically puzzling phenomena. Similarly, Frank Jackson’s well-known “Mary” scenario depends on the intuition that color experiences are ontologically remarkable. If that intuition is false, Mary’s new experiences are philosophically unproblematic. The paper offers five arguments supporting the claim that introspection fails to disclose the ultimate nature of sensory experiences. It concludes by considering the plausibility of this skeptical stance. [End of abstract.]

Actually it’s easy to offer a simple summary of this paper’s theme. At one time many or most philosophers thought that we directly and infallibly “apprehend” our own conscious experiences. We know them just as they are. In recent decades this idea has lost a lot of support. Even though introspection – paying attention to our own mental processes – may seem simple, it’s actually quite complex and subject to error. The beliefs we form based on introspection arise out of a labyrinth of complex, poorly understood, and mostly-unconscious mental processes. In this paper I am questioning whether introspection-based beliefs about the ultimate, basic, fundamental nature of sensory experiences are well founded. I claim that the answer is no.

You can play with this general idea by going back to my February 1, 2016 post, An Aggravating Mystery Named Mary. After you think about this famous thought experiment, ask yourself whether Mary’s new color experiences show her the ultimate nature of colors – their ontology. That’s what I’ll be grappling with in my paper next January. I’ll add more comments as the time approaches.

Roger Christan Schriner

P.S. I recently mentioned that I’ll be speaking at The Science of Consciousness, in Shanghai, but this event has been moved to San Diego. My talk is slated for June 6.

For my main web site, click http://www.schrinerbooksandblogs.com

“Illusionism” – Is Consciousness Real? My Upcoming Talk in Shanghai

I’ve just been notified that my proposal for a presentation on consciousness has been accepted by organizers of The Science of Consciousness, Shanghai, China, June 5-10. As I begin to draft my paper, I’ll share some passages on this site. Here’s the abstract of my paper, Dueling Skepticisms: Strong Fallibilism Versus Illusionism:

Are conscious experiences real or illusory? In particular, are sensations and perceptions such as pains and visual phenomena actual or fictional? Daniel Dennett and other eliminativists argue that these “qualitative” sensory experiences simply do not exist. Dennett’s eliminative materialism, along with several related approaches, has now been re-christened illusionism. A recent issue of Journal of Consciousness Studies was entirely devoted to this topic, featuring a lead article by Keith Frankish.

Frankish distinguishes strong illusionism, weak illusionism, radical realism, and conservative realism. I will support a version of realism that is radically skeptical and ontologically conservative – strong fallibilist realism. Although fallibilist realism maintains that qualitative sensory experiences are introspectively accessible, it also contends that we make important errors in thinking about such phenomena. Some of these errors may generate seemingly insoluble conundrums, such as the hard problem of consciousness and various explanatory gaps.

In advocating fallibilism I will show how this approach can close two particularly challenging explanatory gaps: (1) explaining how qualitative differences among our experiences could be constituted by differences among neural states and (2) explaining how neural states could constitute any sort of sensory experience whatsoever. In dealing with the second gap, I will consider some intriguing possibilities that involve the conscious interpretation of language. I will specifically consider the conscious cognitive states within an English speaker and a Mandarin speaker when they hear, respectively, the English sentence, “Welcome to Shanghai” and the similar Mandarin greeting, “Huānyíng guānglín Shànghai.” Surprisingly, reflecting upon language-interpretation sheds light on some of the deepest puzzles about the nature of consciousness.

Roger Christan Schriner

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What If Dogs Had Human Intelligence?

I’ve recently read a fascinating book called Fifteen Dogs, by André Alexis. In this fanciful, rather sobering tale, two Greek gods make a bet with each other about what dogs would experience if they were given human intelligence.

Although this story doesn’t focus on the issues I’ve addressed in this blog, it does highlight the fact that every mind shapes reality in its own way. Their new brain power radically alters their world-view, and this is quite disturbing to some of these canines. In fact one dominant dog named Atticus insists that those in his pack mostly suppress their new intellectual gifts.

Crazyism and Consciousness

This week I attended a talk sponsored by the Center for the Explanation of Consciousness at Stanford University on “Crazyism about Consciousness and Morality,” by Eric Schwitzgebel. Eric is a philosopher at the University of California at Riverside. I’ve appreciated his work for some time, and I quote him in Your Living Mind: The Mystery of Consciousness and Why It Matters to You.

“Crazyism” about consciousness is the claim that to understand consciousness we will need to accept some idea that currently seems bizarre (bonkers, ludicrous, off the wall, ‘round the bend) and that has not yet been proven to be true. We do not yet know which crazy idea about consciousness will solve its deepest mysteries. We may not have even thought of it yet! But until we accept it, we will be totally unable to understand conscious experience.

As Schwitzgebel wrote in Perplexities of Consciousness, “it became evident in the late twentieth century … that all metaphysical accounts of consciousness will have some highly counterintuitive consequences. … Something apparently preposterous, it seems, must be true of consciousness.”*

Eric told us that he likes to open up new possibilities, to expand the range of alternatives. Many philosophers try to do the opposite. They concentrate on eliminating incorrect ideas, so as to zero in on The Truth. I tend to do this myself. I want to keep “cutting to the chase,” pushing to the bottom line, aiming for the bullseye. This attitude is often helpful, but Schwitzgebel’s work helps keep me from being too confident about my own pet theories.

I haven’t space to recap the arguments he marshalled for crazyism, but they were impressive, and I mostly agree with them. In my own work I’ve emphasized the idea that we make crucial mistakes in understanding our own minds, and that these errors make consciousness seem stranger than it really is. More broadly, we need to re-evaluate the relationship between:

What’s so

Our beliefs about what’s so

The words we use to express these beliefs

Many of our beliefs about consciousness are based on introspection. If there’s something kooky about our concept of consciousness, perhaps something has gone awry in our introspection-based judgments. So in what ways does introspection inform us about consciousness, and in what ways does it mislead us? In Your Living Mind I wrote:

 

For now, it seems likely that we usually do well at detecting, recognizing, and noticing changes in conscious sensory perceptions, including particular qualia. Sometimes we also make helpful comparisons among qualia. But we often make mistakes about other aspects of our experiences. Here are some errors that are particularly common and pernicious:

1. Confusing our experiences with our judgments about experiences
2. Thinking introspection reveals the internal structure of experiences
3. Thinking introspection reveals the essential nature of experiences**

 

What do you think? By re-assessing introspection can we deliver ourselves from crazyism about consciousness? Your comments are welcome!

Roger Christan Schriner

*Schwitzgebel, Perplexities of Consciousness, p. x.

**Schriner, Your Living Mind, p. 155.

An Aggravating Mystery Named Mary

For the past few weeks I’ve been posting comments about some of the deepest mysteries of consciousness. I’ve been focusing particularly on “qualia,” the qualities of sensory experiences such as colors, sounds, tastes, and pains. In 1982 Frank Jackson published a paper called “Epiphenomenal Qualia,” following up in 1986 with “What Mary Didn’t Know.” In the past three decades more than a thousand scholarly papers and several books have responded to these articles. Jackson’s two little essays seem to have hit a very big nerve.

Jackson eventually decided that his argument was flawed, but many believe he was right the first time and should never have recanted. So here is Jackson’s conundrum, as I understand it:

Imagine that we can peer into the distant future, hundreds of millions of years from now. Science has advanced so far that many fields of study are essentially complete. And biotechnology has expanded our memory and intelligence so that a single individual can understand everything there is to know about some complicated subject. One of these people is Mary, a neuroscientist who knows all that can ever be known about color experiences by studying their physical aspects. Mary has soaked up everything about the physical aspects of color perception that books, teachers, and information technology can possibly tell anyone – but Mary has never seen a color. She grew up in a black-and white room, she was prevented from looking at her own skin, etc. Then one day she is released from her colorless home, free to see the whole range of hues for the very first time.

Let’s say that the first colorful thing Mary sees is a garden full of dazzling red roses. And here is the crucial question: When she sees a red rose for the first time, does Mary gain new knowledge? Jackson claimed that she does, and he cooked up the Mary scenario because at that time he was a dualist. Dualists believe that mind and matter are two very different sorts of stuff, and Mary helped Jackson argue that mind is not matter. He claimed that after her release Mary gains new knowledge over and above the complete physical knowledge she already possessed. She learns what colors are as we experience them.

If all things are physical, including our visual experiences, and Mary already knew everything about the physical aspects of color perception, then she would not have learned anything new when she walked into that garden. But if she did learn something new when she actually experienced color, then our experiences of color are not physical. They are not made of matter, and do not occur within the brain. This also implies that qualia in general are not physical.

“Physicalism” (sometimes called materialism) claims that everything that exists is made of physical matter, and so any facts about things that exist are facts about physical things. But Jackson’s argument implies that knowledge of physical facts is not complete knowledge, because after her release Mary learns new facts over and above the complete physical knowledge she already possessed. Therefore, physicalism is false.

So what do you think? Was Jackson’s argument correct? If not, what’s wrong with it?

Perhaps more importantly, do you see why this thought experiment is so challenging? Why has it stimulated so much discussion? When I have led workshops for the public on consciousness, many participants have a hard time understanding that it’s the qualities of conscious experience that are difficult to explain physically. Until one sees the depth of this problem, the mystery of consciousness may seem soluble, even trivial. Soluble it may be. Trivial it’s not.

Roger Christan Schriner

More on Zombies

In my last post I discussed David Chalmer’s idea of philosophical zombies – hypothetical creatures whose brains have precisely the same physical structures as ours and function in the same ways that our brains do, but without consciousness. Several people who read early drafts of my book, Your Living Mind, dismissed zombies as irrelevant. The whole idea is moot, one of them remarked, since it would be impossible for us to know that such a creature is a zombie. (Maybe the person sitting right next to you is one of them!) But Chalmers’ scenario is an example of both the value and the subtlety of thought experiments. If there actually could be such creatures, then conscious experiences are not brain events.

The zombie story asserts that if there could be a creature that is physically identical to you, but not conscious, then consciousness is not a state of your brain. We could dispute this claim by arguing that even though a creature physically identical to you could exist without being conscious, nevertheless consciousness is a state of your brain. But that won’t work. Let’s call your current brain state CBS. If your brain’s being in state CBS is sufficient for your being conscious, then if some other brain is in CBS, it would also have to be conscious. So you could not have a physically identical zombie twin. (What a relief!) On the other hand, if a brain’s being in state CBS is not sufficient for its being conscious, then consciousness is not a brain state. We would need a brain state plus something else to have consciousness – or we would just need the “something else.” So if zombies are truly possible, qualia are not brain states. Since there has been a strong trend toward saying that all real things are, in some sense, physical, that would be a revolutionary finding.

Michael Tye clarifies Chalmers’ idea with an omnipotent-being scenario. “One way to picture what is being claimed here is to imagine God laying out all the microphysical phenomena throughout the universe. Having done so, and having settled all the microphysical properties of those phenomena along with the basic microphysical laws, God did not then have to ask Himself ‘Shall I make lightning flashes or caterpillars or mountains … ?’ No further work was needed on His part.” Why? Because a lightning flash simply is a group of microphysical entities operating according to certain laws. By making all these particles and deciding how they would interact, the Creator would have ensured that lightning flashes, caterpillars, etc. would exist.

But what if consciousness is not physical? In that case zombies are possible. “Even if God had no further work to do in determining whether there would be a tree in place p or a river in place q or a neuron-firing in place r, say, having settled all the microphysical facts, God did have more work to do to guarantee that we were not zombies.”*

Tye is not trying to show that a deity created consciousness. That’s not the point. He’s just noting that this is one way of understanding Chalmers’ scenario. Conceivably, then, there could be an exact physical duplicate of you, right down to the last whirling electron, that does not enjoy a single millisecond of conscious experience.

Chalmers emphasizes that he is not trying to prove that a zombie duplicate of you or me could really exist in this universe – only that this sort of thing is conceivable. But what does “conceivable” mean? Now the fog drifts in. There are several types of conceivability, including a contentious notion called “ideal conceivability.” Philosophical professionals have not yet sorted out these intricacies.

In trying to solve the hardest problems of consciousness we seem to be perpetually stuck at square one. Nagel has stated bluntly that “we have at present no conception of what an explanation of the physical nature of a mental phenomenon would be. Without consciousness the mind-body problem would be much less interesting. With consciousness it seems hopeless.”** And William Seager concludes his book, Theories of Consciousness, with this dispirited admission: “It is indecent to have a ragged and unpatchable hole in our picture of the world. Cold comfort to end with the tautology that an unpatchable hole is … unpatchable.”***

To some it seems as if these scholars are worrying about trivialities, as irrelevant as asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. But some questions about the nature of reality actually are quite difficult. I have my own ideas about how to understand consciousness, but on some level I must also bow to this great mystery.

Roger Christan Schriner

*Michael Tye (2009) Consciousness Revisited: Materialism without Phenomenal Concepts. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press), pp. 25-26.

**Thomas Nagel (1974) “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review, October, 1984, Vol. 83, No. 4, p. 436.

***William Seager (1999) Theories of Consciousness: an Introduction and Assessment. (New York: Routledge), p. 252. Ellipses are in the original text.

The Philosophical Zombie

Can old bedraggled zombies reflect logically on their condition and calmly resign themselves to their fate? Perhaps, but that’s not what this post is about. In the study of consciousness, philosophical zombies were first described in a famous thought experiment by Australian philosopher David Chalmers. His discussion helps underscore the mysterious nature of qualia (the qualities of sensory experiences).

Chalmers proposed the zombie idea to highlight the Hard Problem of consciousness, the problem of understanding how conscious experiences result from (or are identical to) brain activities. A philosophical zombie is a hypothetical creature whose brain has precisely the same physical structures as ours and operates in the same ways that our brains do, but without consciousness.

Here’s an important point that is often overlooked: This creature would be conscious in the ways that psychology understands the structures, abilities, and functions of consciousness. “He will be awake, able to report the contents of his internal states, able to focus attention in various places, and so on.”* Furthermore a psychologist studying you and your zombie twin would discern no difference in behavior. But even though it would be conscious in a certain sense, it would lack conscious experiences. It would be utterly devoid of qualia, and it would never be in any state that is “like something.”

Thus, as Philip Goff notes, when it screams it is not in pain. “Its smiles are not accompanied by a feeling of pleasure. Its negotiation of its environment does not involve a visual/auditory experience of that environment.”**

Although zombies would have thoughts, these thoughts would not involve conscious perceptions or sensations. A zombie that is screaming might think, “I’m in pain!” but it would have no pain qualia, no conscious sensations of pain. This is an example of the important difference between aspects of consciousness that do and do not seem “present.” The philosophically puzzling states are the ones that seem thus-there-now, and zombies don’t have them.

I’ll allow a few days for comments about these hypothetical organisms, and then journey further into zombieland.

Roger Christan Schriner

*David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 95. Technical note: Chalmers was suggesting that there is an ontological gap between conscious experiences and brain states, not just the sort of epistemic gap that Joseph Levine has discussed. In other words, qualia and brain states don’t just seem different; they really are quite different. In this way Chalmers was following in the footsteps of Saul Kripke, whereas Levine was trying to avoid Kripke’s ontological conclusions.

**Philip Goff, “The Zombie Threat to a Science of Mind,” Philosophy Now, May/June, 2013: http://conscienceandconsciousness.com/2013/06/14/the-zombie-threat-to-a-science-of-mind. Goff provides an engaging and detailed explanation of the zombie problem, graced with charming color illustrations of non-philosophical zombies.

The Dreaded “Hard Problem”

I’ve been posting thoughts about “qualia,” the qualities of sensory experience. Qualia figure prominently in one of the most baffling enigmas even discussed, and the history of this issue is wonderfully described by Oliver Burkeman. I’ll quote some of his essay, but I urge you to read the whole thing:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jan/21/-sp-why-cant-worlds-greatest-minds-solve-mystery-consciousness

“One spring morning in Tucson, Arizona, in 1994, an unknown philosopher named David Chalmers got up to give a talk on consciousness…. the young Australian academic was about to [discuss] a central mystery of human life – perhaps the central mystery of human life – and revealing how embarrassingly far they were from solving it.

“The scholars gathered at the University of Arizona … knew they were doing something edgy: in many quarters, consciousness was still taboo, too weird and new agey to take seriously, and some of the scientists in the audience were risking their reputations by attending. Yet the first two talks that day, before Chalmers’s, hadn’t proved thrilling. ‘Quite honestly, they were totally unintelligible and boring – I had no idea what anyone was talking about,’ recalled Stuart Hameroff, the Arizona professor responsible for the event. … ‘But then the third talk, right before the coffee break – that was Dave.’ With his long, straggly hair and fondness for all-body denim, the 27-year-old Chalmers looked like he’d got lost en route to a Metallica concert. … ‘But then he speaks. And that’s when everyone wakes up.’

“The brain, Chalmers began by pointing out, poses all sorts of problems to keep scientists busy. How do we learn, store memories, or perceive things? How do you know to jerk your hand away from scalding water, or hear your name spoken across the room at a noisy party? But these were all ‘easy problems’, … given enough time and money, experts would figure them out. There was only one truly hard problem of consciousness, … why on earth should all those complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside? Why aren’t we just brilliant robots, capable of retaining information, of responding to noises and smells and hot saucepans, but dark inside, lacking an inner life? …’

“What jolted Chalmers’s audience from their torpor was how he had framed the question. ‘At the coffee break, … everyone was like: “Oh! The Hard Problem! The Hard Problem! That’s why we’re here!”’

Here’s one way of considering this issue. Suppose in the distant future neuroscience has discovered precisely which brain structures and processes are correlated with specific conscious experiences. They can even read people’s minds: Experimental subject C79 reports that she is recalling a teenage love affair. But a brain scanning machine had already printed out a report, just before C79 spoke: “subject is remembering a high school sweetheart.” Isn’t it clear that we now understand the neural basis of consciousness? Aren’t the neural structures and activities that the scanner detected simply identical to the memory-experience that C79 reported?

Not necessarily. We need to know why this configuration of neural structures and activities constitutes consciousness. “Even if every behavioral and cognitive function related to consciousness were explained,” writes Chalmers, “there would still remain a further mystery: Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by conscious experience? It is this additional question that makes the hard problem hard.”*

Next: the menace of philosophical zombies.

Roger Christan Schriner

*Cited by Uriah Kriegel, Subjective Consciousness: A Self-Representational Theory, p. 271, emphasis added.