muflax65ngodyewp.onion/drafts/consciousness_defined.mkd

% Consciousness Defined

About "the Mind"

I'm doing something that, as far as I can tell, nobody¹ in the study of consciousness, and this includes neuroscientists, psychologists and Buddhists, seems to be able to do. The first thing, clearly stated, you should be doing is answer this question:

What do you mean by "mind" (etc.) and what does it encompass?

Everybody and their grandmother has a theory about the mind, yet when you actually look at these theories, they don't just approach the issue differently, they even approach different issues. Studying "the mind" or "consciousness" is kinda like a physicist saying they study "stuff". Unless you have a clear, explicit idea of what you mean when you say "mind", you will at best only confuse yourself and think that a half-baked answer solved the problem.

I was wrestling with all kinds of ideas about what consciousness is and how it works. The most important realization, and I credit Dennett for it, was that I didn't even know what I was talking about myself. I had no idea what I even meant when I spoke about my own consciousness.

So I stopped all the hypothesis-making and took a good, deep look. Exactly what is meant by the mind, what "parts" does it consist of, which phenomena are all to be included? Note that I don't aim to explain anything. At all. Here I just want a complete description of what there actually is to explain. Otherwise we'll just end up solving wrong or non-existent problems (see: free will).

I've also included comparisons to other models, so that you can see how my terms relate to concepts you may already know. (And why I consider all other models to be too deficient.)

The Complete(-ish) Model

I follow 5 simple principles:

TODO Really? Don't split too much!

1. Not everything that is a separate part in the model is meant to be strictly separate in reality. In fact, I am fairly convinced that some parts at least overlap, if they are not even identical. The distinctions are meant to help you understand what I'm talking about, not show you how it works.

2. The model is not necessarily exhaustive. I may have forgotten something, but I have compared my model to all common views on consciousness I could find and searched my own consciousness for anything missing. However, if you think something should be there but isn't, and it's not a part of something already there, then most likely I personally do not have this feature. (This applies equally if you find something unnecessary². Consider that you may have a different consciousness.)

3. The relationships in the model are only meant for easier classification. They do not necessarily reflect any actual relationships. However, I tried to get all important ones.

4. Nothing is included based on "inference". Just because you think something should exist because you can only explain something else that way, doesn't mean it actually does exist. If you can't access it, it doesn't belong in the model.

5. I shall not, under any circumstances, use the terms "mind", "consciousness", "perception", "soul" or "self". They are all so ambiguous that they will only confuse.

Here we go.

Now some explanations.

Senses (green)

It can be argued that some senses should be split further, particularly Smell and Taste, which is really a huge amount of very small senses, and Motor-Balance, which consists of senses of acceleration, balance and so on. The split I use is somewhat arbitrary, but I hope it covers every "kind" of sense without much overlap.

Also, Body Feedback means things like heart rate or hunger. I have not split this because I don't think that it actually is very differentiated. This is most obvious to me once the Space-time is impaired (most distinctly via shrooms), such that figuring out "where" a sense is coming from is very hard. Once this happens, I can't tell hunger from thirst from having to pee.

Most importantly note that at no point do I split "external" senses from "internal" ones. There is no such thing as "seeing something in the world" compared to "seeing something in your mind". They are the same process. "If all you can know is your brain programs operating, the whole universe you experience is inside your head.", as Robert Anton Wilson wrote in Prometheus Rising. If you still think "real" sight and "imagined" sight etc. are different, try to observe them critically in meditation, trying to pin-point the exact difference. Then do the same thing within a (lucid) dream.³

You might find it controversial (or plain wrong) that I included a Theatre in the first place and that I'm trying to sneak in dualism. I'm not, not at all. There is very strong evidence that the Theatre really exists as a separate thing, in which senses are united and dealt with. A good scientific model of this is Global Workspace theory, but more importantly, you can directly experience the Theatre. See the section on Presence on how.

Volition (red)

There are three important aspects to Volition I'll have to explain. Let's start with "Do It" Mode. What I mean by this is the difference between experiencing something and doing it yourself. I'll just quote PJ Eby on this, who calls it "command mode"⁴:

Point your finger at the screen. How did you do that? Do it again. Try something else. Make various motions with your body. Now just think about making the motions. What's the difference between thinking it, and doing it? That's command mode.

-- PJ Eby, The Multiple Self

The main drawback of my model is that it hides the bilateralism of the brain, as well as certain parallel structures. You might get the impression from looking at it that there is a single Volition center somewhere, when really, there are multiple ones with subtle, but notable differences. Don't think of every part as unique or isolated, but rather, a kind of job description that may be fulfilled (and competed over) by many applicants.

Attention

Presence

Let me get it out of the way: Presence is the most important, yet hardest to describe part of the model. It is essentially the whole reason I wrote this in the first place. Almost everybody ignores (or worse, rejects!) the existence of Presence, and the few that I suspect mention it are so unclear about it that I'm never sure what they really mean.

So what is Presence?

Well, it's the being here. The this gets experienced, not that. The quale. Not helping? I know. Let me instead say what it is not.

Presence is not any kind of sense. When you observe your senses, you will find them united in a certain way, in what I call the Theatre. This is not a unity in Space-time, which is actually superimposed. That it is not spatial can be demonstrated by disabling it, as mentioned for example by taking shrooms. It is very common to feel like you are at multiple places at once or are stuck in a time loop and stuff like that, but the unity of the Theatre is untouched. When you concentrate further on the senses, you will find that they disappear. It is very much possible to observe an empty Theatre. At first, it will feel like empty, infinite space, but even the space will disappear. Only nothingness remains, but you are fully aware of the nothingness. (This is something functionalism or something like higher-order thought theory can in no way explain.) But if you keep on concentrating, something even weirder happens. The nothingness disappears. I'm not making this up. There is no perception, but also no non-perception, yet you are still conscious. In the metaphor of the Theatre, what happens is that first, the actors leave and the Theatre becomes empty, but the stage is still there. Then the stage itself is removed, so there's nothing in the Theatre, yet it is still there. Finally, we remove even the building itself.

Presence is not attention. It is not focusing on anything, it has no content. It has no memory, it is not "attached" to anything going on in the mind. It has nothing to do with emotions or thinking or action or will. It doesn't make any decisions, but there is feedback. It is not epiphenomenal. It is also not subjective experience. Presence is still there during schizophrenic attacks, still there during deep sleep (all of which I can attest to). The problem is that Presence is not (and probably can not be) encoded in memory, so it's really tricky to find out if it was there in the past. You have to reproduce the experience and see for yourself, making a note right then, in some form or another.

Let me give a metaphor I personally really like. Think of Presence as the sky. At first, you might think the sky are the clouds, but the clouds are really in the sky. Or you might think it is blue, but that's the light travelling through it, not the sky itself. It is impossible to pollute the sky. You can pollute the air, but not the sky itself. Nor can you send up a missile to attack it. It is untouchable, the ground on which all else is possible, but not directly affecting anything.

Unfortunately, the metaphor is misleading because you might think of it as some kind of space. Like the mental space in which your stuff happens. This is conceptualization through Space-time, not Presence. If your mental events are reflections of a real world, then Presence is the mirror. Which color is it? None. Shape? None. Where is it? Nowhere. Does it still exist, can we still know it is there? Yes.

Thinking

I tried hard to figure out if "thoughts" should be here somewhere. I searched everywhere, but couldn't find any that very not actually heard sentences, seen images and so on. Therefore, there is no Thought in my model.

I have united space and time as Space-time not because I want to brag with my understanding of the theory of relativity, but because I agree with Jaynes' assertion that time can only be spatially understood. I can't think of time except by treating it like space. Therefore, they are united. #REALLY?

Comparisons

Brahman

There is a striking resemblance between Brahman and Presence. However, I am not convinced that they are really the same. Brahman is unconstrained. Everyone has the one same Brahman, separation is just an illusion. This may be true (in fact, I highly suspect it is and that everything, including rocks, has Brahman), but I don't have enough evidence for this yet. Therefore, I won't equate the two.

Buddhism

In Buddhism, there are 5 canonical "senses" (seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting) and there is additionally a consciousness of each of those senses. These 5 are generally grouped together and called "thought". This distinction is broken and better understood via shifting attention, as in my model. I have not been able to figure out what else thought is supposed to be than directed attention, so I did not include it. Therefore, I deliberately diverge from the Buddhist view here.

Similarly, several senses and emotions (often all of them) are always grouped together, when they are clearly distinct. I have split as much as I could.

One big advantage of Mahayana models is that they include Presence. Theravada rejects it, as far as I can tell. To be honest, most of the time when I think a Buddhist mystic is talking about Presence, they seem to start attributing things to it that it clearly doesn't have, like a content, so I'm never really sure if they are talking about the same thing or something closely related. And the more people "get" it, the less they seem to talk about it. Zennists often even outright refuse to talk about any of this. I find this completely unacceptable. This is the behaviour of a vulnerable child that doesn't want its comfortable delusions to be taken away, not that of a truth-seeker.

Bicameral Mind

If you are familiar with Jaynes' Bicameral Mind model, then the early bicameral mind looked like this:

[]

while the subjective mind looks like this:

[]

Both modes fit my experience very well, which is why I included them. If you are not familiar with Jaynes' work, you really should be. I highly recommend it.

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1. Ok, that's not exactly true. I've seen, for example, definitions and diagrams in books by (or about) Julian Jaynes and Bernhard Baars. Still, these models are often only meant to demonstrate how their own ideas fit together, not to catalog the whole phenomenology. ↩︎

2. When I write that features may be "unnecessary", I mean that there is nothing they "do" or "influence" and can't be accessed in any way. I don't mean that they are "virtual", i.e. that they are the result of the interaction of multiple other parts. For example, "Music" is virtual, as it is created by the interplay of "Hearing", "Space-time" and so on. There is no separate "Music" thingy that is independent from the others. (See the first principle.) However, "Thoughts", as defined in the article, are unnecessary. They don't exist. ↩︎

3. This is interpretation now, not just description. I believe that all perception, as it happens in the Theatre, is a hallucination, in the sense that it is exactly the same thing as any other hallucination. There is no difference in looking at a flower, dreaming a flower, imagining a flower or hallucinating a flower. None at all. There are difference in relationship to Memory, Volition and so on, which make these states distinct, but the actual Seeing is identical.

   At no point in time does the Theatre (or anything working with it) ever get the "real" perception. You don't see what your eyes see, not for a single moment. What happens instead is that the Theatre is wildly hallucinating, like a mad improv actor, but sense processes (that have filtered and modified "raw" data from the eyes and so on) interrupt the performance and correct it. There is a certain amount of feedback, in that specific data can be requested to fill in details, but never is the direct data ever used.

   Stephen LaBerge calls this "constrained dreaming", meaning that normal perception is simply dreaming with hard constraints on content by the outside world, while normal dreaming doesn't get the unchanging correction and so diverges.

   This explains all the problems of strong, convincing and incredibly common hallucinations we get and removes the fake distinction between "this is real" and "this is imagined". Every group event is a mass hallucination. ↩︎

4. Evolutionary speaking, I think "stop pretending mode" would be a more accurate name. I'd imagine that at first there is a direct link between simulated events and actions, then later a switch is introduced so that events can be simulated in advance, or with different preconditions. ↩︎