Wilder Penfield, Brain Maps, V.S. Ramachandran and Phantom Orgasms: The Man Who Mistook His Foot For A Penis

Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield performed pioneering experiments in the 1940s and 1950s. During extensive brain surgeries, he applied electrodes to different regions of the brain and stimulated them. He then asked patients what they felt.

A Phantom Arm and A Bizarre Experience

My right leg seems trapped in time and space, at a day and place long ago. Along the leg runs a large scar that always tingles in the background of my consciousness, and which tightens into fear whenever I focus attention there.

Blindsight: Graham Young Is Blind But Can See

Blindsight: Graham Young Is Blind But Can See

What is consciousness? You may say that it is to be aware. But what does it mean to be consciously aware of something? I can type this paragraph while outside my window a bird chirps, shadows dapple the window ledge, and here, inside, my fingers move on the keyboard, music plays on the radio, and so many other events also happen as I focus only on these words. I stop for a moment, and there they are, all these other things. Then I return my attention to the computer screen. In a sense, I see but I don't see. I am aware but I am not aware. Things are part of conscious and, so to speak, they are not.

Graham Young of Oxford, England is a case in point.

Bird Brains and Theory of Mind

Humans are exceptional beings, so we like to think. The so-called lower animals lack complex syntax for language. They simply are not as conscious. Many philosophers believe only humans understand that others have their own personal thoughts, which philosophers term as having a theory of mind, without which we would lack our empathy and deception. So goes the point of view. Theory of mind has implications that reach far into our notions about consciousness.

A Hairbreadth Difference and Heaven and Earth Are Set Apart: Theist, Skeptic

Why is there something rather than nothing? Lucretius

The skeptic: The universe is eternal. It simply is. There is no need for a creator. Moreover, If the universe has a creator, then it is impersonal, merely a force.

Mind Shadows Home      Thinking Without Thinking: Marvin Minsky, The Dalai Lama, & Artificial Intelligence

Some people think that consciousness and computers are a contradiction in terms. That is, they believe that computers can never qualify as conscious, which is a uniquely human quality.

Marvin Minsky believes that conscious artificial intelligence is not at all out of the question, which is in keeping with his writings.

Death and The Sense of Self

Death and The Sense of Self

Nunc lento sonitu dicunt, morieris. (Now this bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die.) John Donne Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." (John Donne, Meditation XVII, from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, 1624)

Three hundred years lie between Donne's No man is an island and Einstein's remark that a human being is part of a whole (discussed below), and each involves a contemplation of death as a type of illusion. Early in his life, Albert Einstein became aware of the illusions begotten by common sense.

Mind Shadows Home      Tielhard de Chardin, Noogenesis, No-Self, & Implications For An Intelligent Universe

A Jesuit priest born the year before Darwin's death, Pierre Tielhard de Chardin sought the Vatican's approval for his manuscripts, but never got it. His superiors continually denied permission for their release, believing that his theories would not accord with Church doctrine. Published posthumously in 1955 as The Phenomenon of Man, the book assembles his ideas and is based on his work as both a philosopher and paleontologist. His ideas matured in the 1940s while he was in China studying the fossil remains of Peking Man.

Mind Shadows Home      Benjamin Libet & Free Won't

(An updated, clearer article can be found be clicking here.)

Hold out your arm. Look at it. Now bend your hand at the wrist. Do it whenever you want. Do it a few times.

How did this process begin? Was it you? Was it these words?

In 1985, neurosscientist Benjamin Libet conducted an experiment similar to this. (See Free Will & Benjamin Libet's Experiments, 8 November 2003.)

< Photo of Camus

Mind Shadows Home      Beyond Science

And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water, and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes--how shall I negate this world whose power I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. . . . What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on the troubled heart teach me much more.

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942

Home

Mind Shadows       A Thought Experiment: Where Are You?

Where are you? Most people say that they are behind the eyes. Blind people often feel themselves at their finger tips when reading Braille, or at the handle of their cane when walking. Sometimes people feel themselves at the edge of a car as they almost have an accident with a passing vehicle.

Mind Shadows       Shakey, Beavers, and Cartesian Theater

In my 1 February article I make this comment: "So Consciousness may indeed be all, and I have no doubt it is. But I don't regard this situation as leaving Eastern thinkers with an I-told-you-so smugness. They have wrapped their teachings in doctrine, dogma, and ignorance, and have remained satisfied with ancient explanations for the enlightenment experience. They project an aura of beatitude over somebody who has experienced it. Its initial stage, the discovery of no-self, need not be wrapped in some mystical ballyhoo, however liberating the revelation. Some modern scientists and philosophers of consciousness accept it as a given and have quite good and well-reasoned explanations for it." (In a web article, "Beyond Belief," John Horgan quotes Stephen Batchelor, (Buddhism Without Beliefs) who says, "The scientific descriptions of the world generate to me a much deeper sense of awe and wonder than these Buddhist and religious sorts of fantasies." I agree with this.)

The traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism hold the discovery of no self as a religious experience, but it need not be decked out in ritualistic finery. In Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett does not deny that we think of an ego inside us; he grants that he, too, does so from time to time. Instead, though, he regards the sense of self as a deeply entrenched mental habit. He uses various approaches to illustrate his argument, each approach demonstrating it from a different angle.

Case 1: In this instance his subject is a robot, about which I should make one disclaimer. I don't regard artificial intelligence as explaining away consciousness.* Rather, the robot example provides a simple and straightforward analogy for thinking about the phenomenon of ego.

First, since Dennett uses the term Cartesian Theater, here is an explanation of what he means. He refers to Descartes' implicit idea of an intelligent homunculus, a little man, controlling things. In this theater the homunculus operates all the levers and switches, controlling operations between mind, body, and outer world. He is ego, or self.

Shakey illustrates one approach to Dennett's arguments. A robot of the late 1960s, Shakey was invented by Nils Nilsson and colleagues at Stanford Research Institute, a think tank in Menlo Park, California. The robot was a box with wheels and a television camera. Its brain too big for transport, Shakey used a radio transmitter to share data with a central computer. Scientists typed commands such as "push the box off the platform," and Shakey explored the room until it found the box, whereupon it located the ramp, then pushed the ramp to a platform. It then rolled onto the platform and pushed the box off the ramp.

It navigated by using software designed to recognize signatures--of boxes, pyramids, and other objects. These signatures registered on the electronic retina of its video eye. It rolled across the room and as an object came within video range, Shakey's computer measured gradations in illumination, detecting edges and corners. It processed these gradations according to algorithms that specificed how various objects looked from different vantages. Through this processing it determined if it detected the plane of a pyramid or the slope of a ramp.

Nilsson and colleagues could observe Shakey's behavior on a video monitor as it registered a dark blur, then traced the edges before declaring the thing a box.

But Shakey didn't need this monitor. It had no little man inside watching the screen. With the monitor unplugged, Shakey still went about its business. It had no impressions in its circuitry, no fleeting images of boxes and pyramids. It simply processed binary code, ones and zeros: 000000111010100101011111010.

It had no need of a Cartesian Theater, a homunculus, although it acted as if it had one.

Case 2: Dennett uses examples from nature. When a beaver builds a dam, it doesn't have to understand what it is doing. Nature has provided its brain with the necessary routines for the engineering. If it hears the sound of water running, leaking, through its dam, it will plaster everything around the sound. In one experiment, it pasted mud all over the loudspeaker from which the recording of gurgling was emitted.

Likewise, each human being makes a self. "Out of its brain it spins a web of words and deeds, and, like the other creatures, it doesn't have to know what it's doing; it just does it." Elsewhere: "Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control, and self-definition is not . . . building dams, but telling stories, and more particularly concocting and controlling the story we tell others--and ourselves--about who we are." (To awaken is to understand that nobody tells the story. It tells itself. Nobody needs to tell it, and therin lies a great sense of freedom.***)

Among many examples, he cites Multiple Personality Disorder, in which people claim more than one self: "The normal arrangement is one self per body, but if a body can have more than one, why not more than one under abnormal conditions?" His point is that the self is a construct.

My comments: * I differ from Dennett in that I regard consciousness as accessible from a separate vantange, the kind implied by Stephen Jourdain** or Ramana Maharshi. Just as quantum physicists are discovering, Dennett's approach will ultimately reveal itself as a kind of infinite regress. It will continue to expand boundaries of research rather than finally explain consciousness. Still, he and others like him have done very good work, which is much needed. It helps remove the smoke and mirrors by which religions have held people in thrall. Because of the halo-effect projected on gurus, even some individual seekers remain relatively naive about their quest. **( Jourdain awakened at age sixteen after pondering Descartes' cogito ergo sum--I think therefore I am.)

*** To remain morally engaged with the world, we must slip into the story, try on a sense of self now and then. But is the world itself a story? Perhaps, even probably, but the situation is like taking a soothsayer to a horse race. One's sense of the world as story may be rather like the prophet's ability to predict. Consider this from 25 November, Yoruban-, Sport- , & Zen-consciousness:

"[Even if he can prophesy future events,] would I take a Yoruba tribesman to a horse race to help me pick a winner? No. Not that I doubt his ability to predict but that, as a scientific experiment, it could not be repeatedly verified. Assume that such prediction has hits and misses, with probability greater than chance that predictive hits outnumber misses. That is good, but not enough to place five grand in the Trifecta on Whodunnit and other thoroughbreds."

The point: One can sit in lotus position and watch the world go to hell in a handbasket because he believes nothing can be done, or he can take the perspective of Zen from which ultimate knowledge cannot be claimed. ( People like Ramesh Balsekar claim we have no choice, regardless. All is predetermined. They make claims that even Buddha avoided. Why can it not be said that Choosing chooses? That is, just as potentia exist before observation collapses the wave function of quantum physics, why can't potentia exist before "choosing chooses"?--before consciousness processes a history of intentions into a fait accompli ?

Home

Mind Shadows      On The Fear of Death, by William Hazlitt (1778-1830):

"Perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern—why then should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be? I have no wish to have been alive a hundred years ago, or in the reign of Queen Anne: why should I regret and lay it so much to heart that I shall not be alive a hundred years hence, in the reign of I cannot tell whom?"

"When Bickerstaff wrote his Essays, I knew nothing of the subjects of them: nay, much later, and but the other day, as it were, in the beginning of the reign of George III, when Goldsmith, Johnson, Burke, used to meet at the Globe, when Garrick was in his glory, and Reynolds was over head and ears with his portraits, and Sterne brought out the volumes of Tristram Shandy year by year, it was without consulting me: I had not the slightest intimation of what was going on: the debates in the House of Commons on the American war, or the firing at Bunker's Hill, disturbed not me: yet I thought this no evil—I neither ate, drank, nor was merry, yet I did not complain: I had not then looked out into this breathing world, yet I was well; and the world did quite as well without me as I did without it! Why then should I make all this outcry about parting with it, and being no worse off than I was before? . . . . ."

"The love of life, then, is an habitual attachment, not an abstract principle. Simply to be does not 'content man's natural desire ' : we long to be in a certain time, place, and circumstance. We would much rather be now, 'on this bank and shoal of time,' than have our choice of any future period, than take a slice of fifty or sixty years out of the Millennium, for instance. This shows that our attachment is not confined either to being or to well-being; but that we have an inveterate prejudice in favour of our immediate existence, such as it is. The mountaineer will not leave his rock, nor savage his hut; neither are we willing to give up our present mode of life, with all its advantages and disadvantages, for any other that could be substituted for it. No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves."

"There are some persons of that reach of soul that they would like to live two hundred and fifty years hence,* to see to what heights of empire America will have grown up in that period, or whether the English constitution will last so long. These are points beyond me. But I confess I should like to live to see the downfall of the Bourbons. That is a vital question with me; and I shall like it the better, the sooner it happens! . . . " ( * Hazlitt refers to America in 2072.)

Home

Mind Shadows      Space capsules, & Eastern I-told-you-so: or, Does a Bach Sonata Make Sound if Nobody Hears It?

Douglas R Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach, says this of a recording of Bach's Sonata in F minor, inspected by aliens outside the solar system after a space capsule lands on their planet: "Thus immediately its shape, acting as a trigger, has given them some information: that it is an artifact, perhaps an information-bearing artifact. This idea--communicated, or triggered, by the record itself--now creates a new context in which the record will henceforth be perceived. The next steps in the decoding might take considerably longer--but that is very hard for us to assess. We can imagine that if such a record had arrived on Earth in Bach's time, no one would have known what to make of it, and very likely it would not have gotten deciphered. But that does not diminish our conviction that the information was in principle there [my emphasis] ; we just know that human knowledge in those times was not very sophisticated with respect to the possibilities of storage, transformation, and revelation of information."

And so it is with all effort at ordering the world. We don't have Archimedes' lever, no standing point outside the world, or outside consciousness, from which we can speak with certainty. We can only say "it is our conviction," which carries a sense of reasonableness, but that's all it is. As I say in the 6 January article, "The traditional view of the world as external obscures or denies that we cannot explore or explain cognition without the very faculties we want to explore or explain. As living systems, we exhibit cognition. We occur within this circularity of X explaining itself."

Was the information already there? We are carried back to assumptions, not validations. (See When Is A Head Like A Rock?, 6 November.) Since the early decades of the last century physicists have found with the double slit experiment and wave/particle duality that whenever they try to validate, the wave function collapses so that they get a confirmation of sorts but not of a world wherein information is already there. Instead, information complies with the shape of their need for it. We think this occurs only on the quantum level, but how can we be sure that it does not also occur in our larger world and in the universe as gravitational?

Hofstadter supposes that rather than landing on a distant planet, the space capsule and its recording are met by a meteorite which, instead of deciphering the information, punctures it. We might be tempted to call the meteorite stupid, but "perhaps we would thereby do the meteorite a disservice. Perhaps it has a ' higher intelligence' which we in our Earth chauvinism cannot perceive, and its interaction with the record was a manifestation of higher intelligence. Perhaps, then, the record has a ' higher meaning'--totally different from that which we attribute to it: perhaps its intelligence depends on the type of intelligence perceiving it. Perhaps."

This fits with our modern situation in that we understand our intelligence to be limited either by consciousness alone or by a larger system of which we are unaware. Electrons seem to exist in various dimensions (not that we have ever seen them) and yet in our lives we apprehend only four dimensions--length, width, depth, and time. In wave mechanics, we get the information we are looking for. We get velocity if we measure one way, and position, if we measure another way. (See Heisenberg in the 10 November article.) To resolve our puzzlement we propose a Many Worlds theory to explain superpositioning (see Schrödinger's Cat, 2 January). Or we accept the standard Copenhangen Interpretation (See Wheeler, Delayed Choice, & Time, 11 January.).

So Consciousness may indeed be all, and I have no doubt it is. But I don't regard this situation as leaving Eastern thinkers with an I-told-you-so smugness. They have wrapped their teachings in doctrine, dogma, and ignorance, and have remained satisfied with ancient explanations for the enlightenment experience. They project an aura of beatitude over somebody who has experienced it. Its initial stage, the discovery of no-self, need not be wrapped in some mystical ballyhoo, however liberating the revelation. Some modern scientists and philosophers of consciousness accept it as a given and have quite good and well-reasoned explanations for it. (Daniel Dennett is one; for a scientist's explanation at this site, see Varela: Cartesian Anxiety, 6 January.)

On the other hand, were more scientists to seek ways to render into theory the teachings of the ancient East, they might find practical explanations for that which has so far puzzled them at the quantum level. For example, an understanding of the manufacture of time by thoughts, would yield a new way of regarding the double slit experience. However, as I have pointed out elsewhere, this requires experiential expertise, and not just rational analysis *. (See Varela: Cartesian Anxiety, 6 January, and Dawkins, Memes, Genes, & God, 31 December.)

As for Bach's sonata and Hofstadter's space capsule, we allow them as hurtling somewhere through the black infinitude of space, although we cannot know where they are. What are they, if not a thought? To end on an earlier note, the question does not diminish our conviction that the thought is in principle there.

* (This by Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature, is helpful: " All receipt of information is necessarily the receipt of news of difference, and all perception of difference is limited by threshold. Differences that are too slight or too slowly presented are not perceivable. They are not food for perception. It follows that what we, as scientists, can perceive is always limited by threshold. That is, what is subliminal will not be grist for our mill. Knowledge at any given moment will be a function of the thresholds of our available means of perception. " My point is that expertise in forms of consciousness alters the threshold of perception.)

Home

Mind Shadows      Organic and Inorganic

In his Shobogenzo, Dogen (1200-1253), profoundly realized and brilliant, does not speculate about time and being but speaks about them out of his deep experience. In his section "Being-Time" he states that time occurs because man disposes himself and takes this disposition as the world. As Dogen puts it, "Thus the self setting itself out in array sees itself." Here is another example: "In your study of flowing, if you imagine the objective to be outside yourself and that you flow and move through hundreds and thousands of worlds, for hundreds, thousands, and myriads of eons, you have not devotedly studied the Buddha way."

He views the world not as inert-matter, not as inorganic, but as an organic whole. In a different sense, physics describes organic patterns. This means that particles, bits of matter, are organic energy. Non-scientists think of anything organic as living. This, of course, is not the intent of describing particles that way.

But what can be said about the organic as distinct from the inorganic?

Think about a rock and a human being. My apologies for the rather morbid example, but it serves my explanation. Drop a rock from a cliff, then drop a human being from it. As matter, organic or inorganic, they are both governed by the same law of falling bodies.

The big difference between the rock and the person is that the rock is lifted, held in the hands, then dropped. The person will put up a mighty struggle before going over the edge. One does not act while the other does. To what do we attribute this action?

At least two explanations occur. One is that the human looks ahead, which is to say he has time-consciousness. He can foresee death. He is time-bound while the rock is not.

But perhaps in certain instances some kinds of matter can also look ahead. When photons are fired through two slits, then through one, the particles exhibit a peculiar behavior, which can be interpreted as knowing in advance which slit will be open. (See Wheeler, delayed choice & time, 11 January, & Schrödinger's Cat, 2 January and Bell/Aspect cited below.) Physicist Henry Stapp puts it this way: "The central mystery of quantum theory is ' How does information get around so quickly? ' " ("Are Superluminal Connections Necessary?," Nuovo Cimento, 40B, 1977)

Another explanation. Human reaction occurs much more quickly than does inert matter's. Iron reacts to oxygen by forming rust. Sodium reacts to chlorine by forming sodium chloride. Both people and inert matter are time-bound and both respond in different lengths of time. The rock will fall without struggle, markedly different than the person, but one cannot say of the human that he alone is time-bound--only that he can look ahead, which is not a property of the rock.

An additional explanation is that human beings have choice. The struggle occurred because the individual chose to struggle. Perhaps. Certainly humans respond through an intricate complex of factors. Today much empirical evidence indicates that the individual is programmed by genes, and by environment (maybe even by the Big Bang some fifteen billion years ago). The individual puts up a fight because the struggle to survive, as one example, is innate and can be found in all life forms, from plants, with tropisms to turn from pain, to animals, with immediate responses.

For this brief commentary I have lumped together applications of the term organic but, even were they treated separately, a central question would remain. Can we clearly delineate between the organic and the inorganic? Is it more instructive to think of everything as organic? Neils Bohr * concluded that both organic and inorganic matter are constructs which cannot be used simultaneously in the same situation. Nonetheless both are required for a complete complementarity description of a quantum event. ( * See Bohr at 11 January, 6 January, 2 January, & 27 December.)

To maintain a distinction between inorganic and organic, we must reduce things to less than they are. By themselves neither sodium nor chloride is novel, yet together they produce salt, an emergent property, which cannot be fully explained by its parts. The DNA in our bodies has never died, but instead emerged into new properties out of bacteria swimming in primordial seas. (See One Life, 10 January.) In each case, where does the inorganic end and the organic begin?

Douglas Harding has pointed out that to think of this planet as a life-infested rock is as absurd as thinking of the human body as a cell-infested skeleton. How can the organic and inorganic be separated? (See his link under Consciousness in the sidebar.)

We are imprisoned by a way of seeing, to include distinguishing between organic and inorganic. In the exercise of intellect, we must distinguish, and should, as reason is a noble faculty, but we should also understand that we and every organism create our own environment. Our knowledge of the world is, in one sense, self-knowledge. We "know" the world into a translation of events as bodily processes via the nervous system and brain. Bees can tell the position of the sun by observing a patch of blue sky. Bats echolocate their flight path with a kind of sonar.

Dogen does not answer any question directly, but instead poses new ways of being aware. Of dichotomies such as that between organic and inorganic, he points out our tendency to category awareness: "The flowers depart when we hate to lose them; The weeds arrive while we hate to watch them grow." He promotes a different way of seeing with such questions as these: "Is there a real basis inside or outside your body now? Your body with hair and skin is just inherited from your father and mother. From beginning to end a drop of blood or lymph is empty. So none of these are the self. What about mind, thought, awareness, and knowledge? Or the breath going in and out, which ties a lifetime together: what is it after all? None of these are the self either." (Gakudo Yojinshu*, written in 1234. * Guidelines For Studying The Way.)

(See variously, John Bell's Inequality Theorem and Alain Aspect's non-locality experiments, 10 November, Peter Lynds and time, 20 November, The illusion of free will, 28 December, Benjamin Libet's experiments, 8 November, Albert Einstein on free will, 5 December, Daniel Dennett and compatibilist volition, 15 December.)

Mind Shadows      From One Life:

Conclusion 1: There is no death in the DNA replication process. Argument: All of the material in the original strand of DNA becomes a part of the resulting two strands. There is no residue. There is no dead tissue. There was no death.

Conclusion 2: There is no new life created during the replication process. Argument: The information in the coding in each side of the original strand of DNA is identical (although one side is the reciprocal of the other, the information content is identical). One of the sides, containing its complete description of the organism, went into one of the resulting DNA strands, while the other side went into and became a part of the other. There was no new life created. The life in each new strand came directly from the original. The original merely grew into two.

Conclusion 3: All living DNA today has been alive since the first life. Argument: To replicate, the DNA must be alive. When it replicates, it passes its life physically and directly to its offspring. All living things today are alive by virtue of the DNA living in each cell in their bodies.

Conclusion 4: All of the cells in the human body contain the same life. Argument: When a human child is conceived, it consists of a single cell. In that cell are two sets of 23 chromosomes. One set came from the father, one from the mother. The set that came from the mother contains an X chromosome. The set that came from the father may also contain an X chromosome, in which case the new child will be a female. The set from the father may contain a Y chromosome in the place of the X, in which case the new child will be male.

The DNA will immediately start dividing. When the cell contains four sets of chromosomes, instead of its original two, the cell itself will divide. As the DNA grows, so grows the child. The cells multiply in the series 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc. until the total cell count approaches 10 billion at maturity. We have seen in conclusion 2 that as the DNA replicates, it carries the actual life forward.

Conclusion 5: There is only one life and it is shared by all living things. Argument: From conclusions 1 and 2, if there is neither death nor creation of life during DNA replication, then the life after the replication must be the same life as that which existed before. From conclusion 3, all life since the first life has been alive since then. All modern life is the same age. Life has been growing since the beginning.

Life, therefore, is collective and it began millions of years ago (the life in our bodies is that old). We are vessels that carry a small portion of that life for a short time. Death for the individual is not an end to life, since life continues to exist in all other forms of life, and will continue to do so as long as there is life.

Conclusion 6: A philosophy that satisfies the needs of the human must also include all other life. Argument: In its strictest sense, a human is alive only by virtue of the DNA in its body. It is the DNA which lives and which gives all of the forms of life their structure. In the structure of life, the human is only one element in a multitude. To determine the goals, aspirations and moral behavior for the human, therefore, the human's inclusion within and its interface with all other life must be considered. More

Home

Cartesian Anxiety: Francisco Varela: The Emergent Self and Its Implications for Eastern No-self

Cartesian Anxiety: Francisco Varela: The Emergent Self and Its Implications for Eastern No-self

At 23 Francisco Varela (1946-2001) received his PhD in biology from Harvard. An extremely original thinker, a theoretical and experimental biologist, he disagreed with the traditional view in which an organism represents a model of a world existing independently from it. Instead, the world is non-representational and depends on organisms for its existence. Living systems cannot be reduced to atomic structures as objects in the world. As analogy, consider the internet. No component starts or ends it. Interconnected, components compose a whole structure. So, too, living systems are a web of interdependencies. A component structure depends on neighbors. The neighbors depend on neighbors. The structure evinces circularity.

Scientific research into mind requires that cognition be used to explain itself. X must be used to explain a presumption about X, a circular process. How to avoid circular investigation? Francisco Varela and his mentor, fellow Chilean Humberto Maturana (linked under Time in the sidebar) focussed on the question and arrived at self-production, or autopoetic theory, which does not explain atomic units in an objective world but regards organisms as living systems.*

The traditional view of the world as external obscures or denies that we cannot explore or explain cognition without the very faculties we want to explore or explain. As living systems, we exhibit cognition. We occur within this circularity of X explaining itself.

Autopoetic theory does not duck the inherent paradox in its approach. It has two maxims.

Everything said is said by an observer. ( X must be used to explain itself. There is no Y available. This does fit with what is obvious about perception from ordinary experience. See Perception. Although I quote the Kema Upanishad you need not make anything mystical about what it says. Just check out your own experience. You may have to keep at it but the empirical fact becomes obvious eventually.

All knowing is doing and all doing is knowing. Knowledge is not separate from the actions involved in cognition.

Observations are couched in physical terms without assuming component properties are described. (In his interpretation of quantum observations, Neils Bohr took a similar approach because he could not know what was happening at the quantum level.) Concerned with the organization of living systems, the theory focuses on the relationships and processes between components.

Varela, et al.: "Minds awaken in the world. We did not design our world. We simply found ourselves with it; we awoke both to ourselves and to the world we inhabit. . . . . We reflect on a world that is not made, but found, and yet it is also our structure that enables us to reflect upon this world. Thus in reflection we find ourselves in a circle: we are in a world that seems to be there before reflection begins, but that world is not separate from us. [my emphasis]" The Embodied Mind

Varela sees as human malaise the overwhelming desire for some fixed ontology, some reference point for all knowledge. People fear that without a fixed point chaos becomes the only alternative. He and his colleagues call the malaise Cartesian Anxiety, after René Descartes, French philosopher who split the modern world into mind and body, self and other. (See Descartes and Prozac.)

Because no world exists "out there" in his theory, the process of living brings forth the world. This accords with Buddhist and Hindu thought and experience. Similarly, the emergent self implies that human cognition arises through self-organized processes that span and interconnect brain, body, and environment in reciprocal causal loops. Things happen "upward" into personal consciousness as well as "downward" to nerves and body.

This emergent self remains evident so long as one does not look but it cannot be found when introspecting. Why not? Because it is not a phenomenon in consciousness? No. Because it is completely delocalized. It doesn't exist at a particular neural location. Various circular processes contain different identities, from one for body immunity to one which cognizes for social purposes. If you experience a migraine headache, a cerebral-neural identity arises.**

Is this emergent self real? Yes, even if it does not have a center or substance. It is real in that it provides a "surface" for interaction but an "I" does not substantially exist and disappears when sought. In other words, it is real in the same sense that the taste of coffee is real, or as real as the pleasure in watching a sunset.

The emergent self, then, is the sense of self. Not specific, this sense arises in interaction with the body and the world. (John Donne: No man is an island.)

I am reminded of a Buddhist parable in which interaction between body and world is literally experienced. While crossing a bridge, a Zen master said that the water did not move under the bridge, but that the bridge moved under him. Also, Suzanne Segal provides this account: "I was driving north to meet some friends when I suddenly became aware that I was driving through myself." (Search elsewhere at this site. Key words: Suzanne Segal, Collision With The Infinite.)

Western cognition science, according to Varela, doesn't know enough about experience. Part of the problem is that its traditional methodical approach levels a playing field for all researchers. Regardless of differing abilities, researcher A must be able to reproduce the same results as researcher B.
Varela on scientists and experience: "It's like karate science. You've got to distinguish between the kid who just came for the weekend and the eminent master. . . . people will have to work. In experiments you . . . determine the level of competence that people need. . . . only very, very gifted, extraordinary individuals can carry this out in a productive manner. The access to experience seems difficult to most people because it is. To go beyond just this purely impressionistic account of what one is experiencing is not easy. . . .[my emphasis]"

Suspension of habitual mental patterns reveals new features of experience. Of this suspension, Varela said, "Buddhism has explored [it] thoroughly. You put your ass on the cushion and you move one level above your habitual engagement and see from an aerial perspective. But . . . when many people do that nothing much happens. . . .[and they] say, 'This introspection thing doesn't work. . . .' [But] the whole point is that after suspension you have to tolerate that nothing is happening. Staying with it is the key."

Varela uses virtual self to refer to "selfless" selves. He says we are composed of many virtual selves, a cellular identity, an immune identity, a cognitive identity. (Recall the migraine headache in a paragraph above.) These identities shaped evolution from local parts to emergent properties in life forms. He refers to cellular automota and bootstrapping, in which cells draw up their own boundaries (identities), communicating them to neighbors, eventually "leaping" to an emergent property.

With his survival of the fittest, Charles Darwin would never have thought of evolution this way. He had inherited the Cartesian model of the universe and saw external forces acting on a species, and would have regarded emergent properties as some kind of god in the machine, although it offers simpler solutions. Accepted by many modern biologists, emergent properties allow some aspects of evolution as a kind of benign cooperation, without nature always red in tooth and claw.

Compassion. Varela referred to the Buddhist view of letting go: "a life of wisdom is to be constantly engaged in that letting go. . . . When you are with somebody who really has that capacity to a full-blown level, it affects you. . . . the whole process is not individual, it's not private, and you enter into that kind of resonance." He also spoke of compassion, social service in developing the virtual self, that his mind was not "his" mind but requires an "interbeing," and that it not a case of how nice he is, but "it has to do with how real things are. . . . So you see the Buddhists have a wonderful message, saying that compassion is the natural condition of what one really is."
____________________________________________

This brief article doesn't do justice to Varela's thinking. It is far more complex. See Edge The Third Culture
* (Autopoeisis, or self-production, is a concept with many implications but it essentially means that all living systems such as you, me, the bacteria in our bodies, are organized so that the overall autonomous structure is continuously maintained with clear relations among components even while the structure or its material undergoes changes.)
** (A short explanation: identities are living systems with circular networks persisting in an original or different environment, bodily or "geographically.")