Mind Shadows      Brain in A Vat

Assume that a brain could live in a vat of chemicals and, wired by external electrodes, it would have all the normal experiences: childhood, sex, falling in love, parenting, even skiing, or sky diving. It imagines itself a person capable of a full range of activity. It has beliefs: it is a person with a name, say, Harvey Smedlap; it has a family; it enjoys food; it has orgasms; a god created it and protects it. It regards all this evidence as reliable.

Now, a question: how can one differentiate his own beliefs from that of the brain in the vat? How can one say that his evidence is more reliable than that of the brain?

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Terence Grey/Wei Wu Wei

Here is a radically different note on happiness, by Wei Wu Wei (literally, "doing without doing"). Born as Terence Grey, an Irish aristocrat, later become a Taoist/Buddhist philosopher, his profound essays reveal a life-long quest for answers:

"Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9% of everything you think, and everything you do is for your self, and there isn't one."

Between 1958 and 1974, Grey published a series of eight books under his nom de plume, Wei Wu Wei. Profound in their insights, the books indicate somebody who had extensively studied Eastern and Western thought. They suggest a man who not only knew the teachings but was adept at living them.

Although born in Ireland in 1895, he was raised in England on an estate outside Cambridge, and studied at Oxford University. He became interested in Egyptology, and in 1923 published two books on ancient Egyptian history and culture. During the 1920s and 1930s he was an arts theorist and theatrical producer. He also created radical dance-dramas, and published several arts magazines, as well as books. His cousin Ninette De Valois was a founder of the Royal Ballet, which originated from Grey's dance troupe at the Cambridge Festival Theatre, leased by him from 1926-33. He died in 1986.

This excerpt is from Ask The Awakened, 8 and is titled That I Am:

"When I have looked at a jug I have supposed that eye-subject was looking at jug-object. But eye-subject is itself an object, and one object cannot be the subject of another object. Both eye-supposed-subject and the jug are objects of I-subject. That is apparent transcendence of subject-object.

But only when we realise that, in split-mind, I-as-subject must always be itself an object while it also has its own supposed-object, do we understand that this constitutes an infinite regression, and that final transcendence is the understanding that I am not-subject, for, since in reality there are no objects, there cannot be a subject.

No-objects and no-subject constitute impersonality, the resultant of the negation of each member of every pair of opposites, or No-Entity.

Only whole mind can know this, and that is 'that I am'."
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Hong Kong University has an extensive collection of his works, which had been publicly available, although I can no longer confidently ascertain its location. The link on the sidebar may not be its site, but click on Wei Wu Wei to visit some extracts from his books.

Home______Descartes & Prozac

Descartes split the modern world into mind and body. He imagined thought as an activity apart from the non-thinking body. The modern variants of that notion: the mind as the software program run in its computer, the hard-wired brain; or the view that brain and body are related but only in that what's above the neck cannot survive without what's below it.

The most famous statement in the history of philosophy: I think, therefore I am. Or, Cogito,ergo sum. This suggests that thinking and awareness are fundamental to being.

But what about beings before the dawn of man? When did elementary consciousness begin? What about the first simple mind? Only as layers of brain developed did it become complex enough to enable thought. Consider, too, that babies begin with being; adults think. Not I think, therefore I am, but I am, then I think.

But I think, therefore I am: this has the ring of certainty. How can it be doubted? It has been adopted by generations as the first principle of philosophy.

Compare it to St Augustine's Fallor ergo sum: I am deceived, therefore I am. Both he and Descartes indicate an awareness, a consciousness, that precedes the logical proof of existence.

Descartes took it further, however, by asserting that his being, what he was, was distinct from his body. This, his true being, was easier to know than Brother Ass, as St Francis of Assisi called the body. In it lay the seat of soul, and even if the body is buried, the soul continues.

To modern minds, this view has caused a fundamental disjuncture in philosophy, one that many modern thinkers have come to regard as a mistake. In particular, the view imparts to the body a mechanistic category and to the mind an exalted category in which suffering, morality, emotions, and pain occur. Biology was severed from psychology.

His modern legacy is the view of mind as a software program energized by binary circuitry in the brain. Many today still believe that Descartes' Cogito is self-evident and nothing remains but to pursue its logic. Think, too, of neuro science where many believe that mind can be investigated without accounting for anatomy. Brain events are explainable without the rest of the mouse, or rabbit, or human being.

For that reason only recently has mental disease come to be seen as real as body disease. In fact, mental illness still carries stigma. If one has paranoia, schizophrenia, or obsessive compulsive disorder, he has a problem with will power and nothing else. With enough volition, the mind can cure itself, so conventional wisdom goes. This view is rebutted by the splendid help to mental patients by pharmaceuticals. If it were merely a case of will power, then why does adjustment of the brain's chemistry cause such marked improvement in so many?

Until Descartes, from Hippocrates to the Rennaisance, patients had been treated wholistically, as mind and body. Aristotle wouldn't have liked what Descartes did to philosophy.

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Home______We Are Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On

To understand how the outside of an aquarium looks, it is better not to be a fish. --Andre Malraux

What my net can't catch is not fish. --Sir Arthur Eddington, in satire of the mechanist position

Who can tell that when we think we are awake we are perhaps slumbering, from which slumber we awaken when we go to sleep.
--Blaise Pascal

Last night I dreamt I was a butterfly, or was I a butterfly dreaming I was a man?-- Lao Tzu

The mind's fate is, after all, a person's fate. We are drawn along by our private visions, but beyond them stretch almost indefinitely for each of us the vast and compelling mysteries of chance and circumstance. --Georges Bernanos.

I had a prophetic dream last night. I was arguing with a minor official to get my Volvo shipped back to the states. In the dream he told me that he wouldn't ship it. That's what happened today. An official told me that I hadn't completed the paperwork properly and it couldn't be transported until the forms were filled out correctly. --From Hal's Germany journal

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Looking for Self: Yogi Berra, Forks in The Road, Benamin Libet and Free will

Looking for Self: Yogi Berra, Forks in The Road, Benamin Libet and Free will

When you come to a fork in the road, take it! said Yogi Berra. Which fork? Why, the one we take. Which one should we take? Should? The question implies an assumption--that we have a choice. Do we?

In 1983 Benjamin Libet and other scientists reported experiments that shed rather interesting light on the issue.

Libet and his cohorts applied a stimulus to the muscles of subjects. What they discovered from subjects' reaction has far-reaching implications for understanding ourselves and our place in the universe.

The stimulus took 550 to 1050 milliseconds before muscles contracted, demonstrating a readiness to react.

Not until 350 milliseconds after contraction did the patient become aware of any will to act on the stimulus. In short, a muscular action occurred before any sense of decision to do it. The patient exercised will to act after the action took place. Muscle response preceded conscious will. Awareness of a decision came after the act had been performed.

In general, a half second must lapse before conscious will occurs.

What does this mean? That human sense of awareness lags stimulus. Put it this way: all events happen before we are aware of them.

So who chooses? That is, who is the chooser? The exerciser of will? By the time sense of will is felt, muscles have already responded.

The sense of will occurs too late, in the past. The I, or exerciser of will, must also be reflected in the past. Your "you" and my "I" then live in the past. We speak about living for the present moment, not the future, not the past, but we, our senses of self, are forever thrown into the past. (See Fait accompli, this same date, below.)

When we discuss the future all words fall into the past before completed. When we snap our fingers to signify the now, by the time snapping is recognized it, too, has fallen into the past.

Libet's experiment implies that we cannot be objective about the present and the future. We can’t be objective because they are beyond control of conscious will.

Responses occur without the sense of a volitional responder, which is another way of saying that doing happens without a doer.

Note, however, in the article, Free will: Goswami, Balsekar, Libet, that Goswami says "given the choice of negating the action, they could do it," and Balsekar explains the matter with the phrase "consciousness selects a particular thought." This suggests that some volitional ability remains.

So who is doing what to whom? Does the first baseman tag the runner out, or are they both part of some system that determines tagger and taggee?

Given Libet’s experiment, the first baseman doesn’t will that he tag the runner. Perhaps it is a "system" of stimulus and response, in this case a baseball game.

Home______When Is A Head Like A Rock?

Hamlet said that he could be bounded in a nutshell and count himself king of infinite space. And so we all can. We have a three pound universe inside our skulls. Some would argue that we don't stop at the porches of our eyes, ears, and skin, that these receptors are themselves only mental. A sensation, be it visual, tactile, olfactory, cannot refer to anything beyond itself--nothing "out there." Thus the question of boundary, of stopping, is irrelevant. Infinite space, old chap, infinite space is what we are.

"Out there" is itself an idea, some would say. They would add, Oh, sure, we can touch a table, kick a rock, hear a band, see a wall but the touching, the kicking, the hearing, the seeing are only perceptions linked with sensations.

Samuel Johnson tried to prove a rock was real by kicking it. To George Berkeley's theory that all is mental, solipsistic, he said "I refute it thus!" after kicking the rock. He refuted nothing. He felt the rock against his shoe, which was only a sensation. He saw it skitter down the street, also sensation. Etc. The idea of an object is just that--an idea. We must live with assumptions, not validations.

We can assume a subjective world with Bishop Berkeley or one of subject and object with Dr Johnson, but assume we must. Unless, through meditation, we learn to see through assumptions altogether, as has been told of Eastern sages.

They pose the question, Who am I? Harvey Smedlap? That's only a name. Spouse, parent, lover? Those are also labels. How about personality or mood--loyal, hard working, angry, sad? These features come and go. The sages say I am not anything described by words; yet, I am. Here is a koan from Zen: What was my face before my parents were born? Think about it. Meditate on it. It becomes quite revealing.

More on this discussion at a later date. Here, though, is a related item, one that addresses the issue of consciousness. Consider it in terms of subject (mind) losing its object (body). Does all consciousness depend on the brain? What is consciousness? Or, what is is?

In the passages which follow, the writers assume that conscious is localized in the brain. They indicate no curiosity toward after-effects on the body. Nor is it the capitalized Consciousness of which sages speak.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Guillotined head opens its eyes! This is the bizarre story of Monsieurs Beaurieux and Languille and a macabre study done in 1905:

Q. Would a guillotined person die instantly or would the severed head live long enough to feel itself hit the ground? How could anyone but those executed ever know?

A. This grisly question is more answerable than one might think. In France in the days of the blade, some of the condemned were asked to blink their eyes to show continued consciousness after decapitation, and a few heads blinked for up to 30 seconds, says Dale McIntyre in New Scientist. "How much of this was voluntary and how much due to nerve reflex action is speculation. Most nations with science sophisticated enough to determine this question have long since abandoned decapitation as a legal tool."

Addressing the reflex issue, one Dr. Beaurieux observed the execution of a murderer in 1905, told in History of the Guillotine by Alister Kershaw. First he saw in the head spasmodic movements of eyes and lips for 5-6 seconds. Then the face relaxed, the lids half closed, "exactly as in the dying whom we have occasion to observe every day in the exercise of our profession."

"It was then that I called in a strong sharp voice: 'Languille!' " The lids lifted, and Languille's "undeniably living eyes" fixed on the doctor, after which they closed again. Moments later he called out again, fetching another look by Languille. But a third call went unheeded.

"I have just recounted to you... what I was able to observe. The whole thing had lasted 25-30 seconds."

The above Q & A excerpt comes from the Cincinnati Inquirer (cincinnati.com), 26 August 2002.

The beheading account below, by Cecil Adams, derives from a site called The Straight Dope (straightdope.com) and is dated 12 June 1998:

After Charlotte Corday was guillotined for murdering Jean-Paul Marat, the executioner slapped her cheek while holding her severed head aloft. Witnesses claimed the cheeks reddened and the face looked indignant. According to another tale, when the heads of two rivals in the National Assembly were placed in a sack following execution, one bit the other so badly the two couldn't be separated.

[Can the brain be proven to remain conscious for a duration after decapitation?] This didn't seem like the sort of question that could ever be conclusively resolved.

Or so I thought. Then I received a note from a U.S. Army veteran who had been stationed in Korea. In June 1989 the taxi he and a friend were riding in collided with a truck. My correspondent was pinned in the wreckage. The friend was decapitated. Here's what happened:

"My friend's head came to rest face up, and (from my angle) upside-down. As I watched, his mouth opened and closed no less than two times. The facial expressions he displayed were first of shock or confusion, followed by terror or grief. I cannot exaggerate and say that he was looking all around, but he did display ocular movement in that his eyes moved from me, to his body, and back to me. He had direct eye contact with me when his eyes took on a hazy, absent expression . . . and he was dead."

I have spoken with the author and am satisfied that the event occurred as described. One can of course never be certain about these things. Nonetheless I repent my previous skepticism.

Cecil Adams
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During my stay in Paris, the sight of a public execution revealed to me the weakness of my superstitious belief in progress. When I saw the head divided from the body, and heard the sound with which they fell separately into the box, I understood, not with my reason, but with my whole being, that no theory of the wisdom of all established things, nor of progress, could justify such an act; and that if all the men in the world from the day of creation, by whatever theory, had found this thing necessary, it was not so; it was a bad thing, and that therefore I must judge of what was right and necessary, not by what men said and did, not by progress, but what I felt to be true in my heart.

Leo Tolstoy
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Of his marvelous invention, Doctor Joseph Guillotin said that it was swift, merciful, and that its victims would only feel a rush of fresh air. Was his confidence based on the testimony of somebody like Languille? ;-)

Hal Milo

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