How Consciousness is Made 2: A Proclivity for Activity
"Mind" is an action noun. The mind is dynamic activity, as is consciousness itself.
TECHNICAL LEVEL: Easy For Everyone
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.
.Carl Jung, Alchemical Studies.1
This series of articles are written so that you don’t need a science or math background to appreciate consciousness.
Truthfully, the situation is even more favorable for those who haven’t cracked an abundance of textbooks. Such readers may find it easier to grasp how consciousness is made compared to those of us who’ve had our perspective cinched tight by a modern science education.
This might seem backwards. What is it about consciousness that makes it easier to grasp the less science schooling you have? Simple. The physical sciences have long trained their practitioners to view the world as a logical collection of things.
Scientists’ natural instinct when confronting a puzzling phenomenon is to break it down into smaller and smaller snippets, then break down the snippets into tinier crumbs until they reach the itty-bittiest smidgen. This foundational smidgen is then used to reverse-engineer the puzzling phenomenon because scientists can now work their way back up the stack of things. Scientists explain how smidgens fit into crumbs, how crumbs fit into snippets, and how snippets fit into a phenomenon no longer so puzzling.
Indeed, this is the great triumph of the physical sciences: a clear and coherent account of how quarks combine into protons, how protons combine into atoms, how atoms combine into molecules, how molecules combine into polymers, how polymers combine into carbon fiber composites, how carbon fiber composites combine into aircraft—and now you can rocket through the clouds!
In the physical sciences, humankind has reveled in a glorious march of unimpeded progress and illumination. Where everything snaps together snug like Tinker Toys or sudoku.
But that’s not how minds work. That’s not how consciousness works.
If you try to tackle the mystery of thought by breaking thinking down into smaller and smaller crumbs, you end up with empty fingers. When it comes to thinking, there is no bottom-most smidgen. That hasn’t stopped mindscientists from trying to find those elusive smidgens, over and over again, generation after generation.
If you want to know why mindscience lags so embarrassingly far behind the steady march of physics and why it’s taken so dang long for Homo sapiens to fathom consciousness, the explanation is forthright:
To understand Mind, you need to think in terms of activity rather than things.
.2
Somewhat ironically, consciousness itself is responsible for the fact that scientists hunt ceaselessly for non-existent mental smidgens. As we shall see, the physical design of consciousness impels us to experience reality as an everchanging pattern of stuff. This thing then that thing then that other thing over there. By design, our conscious human mind naturally conceives of the world as made of bricks and atoms and cells and colors and scents and sounds and words and numbers and moments.
But consider the mindwhirl. What are the bricks?
You might suggest the sensor and doer and environment are the bricks of thought. The most fundamental constituents of Mind. Except… you can’t manufacture a thought with only one of these “bricks.”
You can’t create any kind of purposeful activity with a single brick or even a single type of brick. You might have a billion sensors but if that’s all you have, you’ll never build a mind. You can’t make a mind with two bricks, either. If you somehow had a sensor and a doer but no environment to interact with you still couldn’t produce a thought because you couldn’t produce a mindwhirl.
To form a mindwhirl, you need three distinct forms of activity: sensing activity that can influence doing activity that can alter environmental activity. What’s crucial is the way sensation and action and environment flow into one another. Their collective activity—their collective interactivity, to be precise—determines whether a mindwhirl emerges or not.
Here's why the distinction between things and activity is so important. For well over a century, a great many mindscientists have hunted for the magical bricks of thoughts. For the most fundamental stuff responsible for human experience. A long and venerable roster of researchers and theoreticians postulated a variety of candidates for the role of “enchanted brick of thought," ranging from “pontifical neurons” (like the pope, these neurons were believed to be responsible for dispensing the blessings of consciousness) to “orgone energy” (a kind of orgasmic life force posited as responsible for awareness).
The quest was always futile. Why? Because anything can be a sensor. Anything can be a doer. Anything can be an environment. Because it’s not the thing itself that matters—not the physical substance of a sensor—what matters is the activity the sensor produces.
Consider a toothpick.
Is a toothpick a magical mental brick? Is it the elusive bottom-most smidgen of thought? Probably not. Yet a toothpick can serve as a perfectly fine sensor. Just place it upright on the floor leaning against the bottom of your front door. The toothpick-sensor will sense whether someone enters your house: if it falls down, the toothpick is sensing an intruder in the environment. If you added a tiny little button on the floor that could be triggered by the toothpick falling upon it, the button could switch on an alarm (the button-alarm is a doer) which could change the environment by scaring away the intruder.
There’s nothing enchanted about the composition of a sensor or doer. The magic of thinking isn’t hidden inside a toothpick. Sensors and doers are like players in a basketball game. To create a basketball game, the identity of the players doesn’t matter. Ten American men, ten Moroccan girls, ten teenagers named “Joaquín,” ten robots with blue stripes—as long as the individuals form into two teams of five and begin dribbling, passing, blocking, and shooting baskets to score more points than the opposing team, then you have a basketball game.
In the simplest living minds on Earth—the microscopic minds of bacteria and protozoa—the sensors are molecules. There’s nothing individually special about these physical molecules that enables them to participate in a mindwhirl and generate thoughts. They’re nanoscopic toothpicks. When a molecular sensor senses a target, it undergoes a simple geometric change. A sensor molecule usually bends or twists when it senses food or toxins, and this simple physical change serves as a signal to influence a doer molecule. A sensor’s magic does not manifest individually, but collectively: a sensor only becomes a sensor when it is conjoined with a doer and an environment.
By itself, a sensor is just a boring toothpick.
If you’re searching for the secrets of consciousness, you’ll not find them concealed inside a mind’s sensors and doers. Any more than you’ll find the secrets of basketball concealed inside a point guard’s liver. There are no magic bricks inside your mind.
Only magical activity.
Like the mindwhirl. The mindwhirl is the most fundamental activity of thought. You can’t break down a molecular mindwhirl any further without losing all trace of thinking, purpose, and meaning. It is the collective activity of the mindwhirl that forms a thought. Not the mindwhirl’s constituent stuff. If you have a sensor, a doer, and an environment but they are not interacting, there is no mind.
A corpse dead an hour holds the same physical gunk in its skull it did an hour earlier, but the gunk is no longer interacting. There’s no activity. A corpse is like ten players standing around a basketball court blinking at you: no activity, no game, no mind.
This is the true sorcery of Mind: if you arrange purposeless things into a sacred configuration, purposeful activity emerges like a flame from a matchstick.
.3
Consider a hurricane. A hurricane does not contain magical bricks. Instead, like the mindwhirl, it flaunts magical activity.
What is a hurricane made of? Air and water.
What is special about air and water that enables them to make hurricanes? Do water molecules possess a special “hurricane-generating-property” like the midi-chlorian particles in Star Wars that generate the Force? (Another instance of the human mind’s propensity for imagining magic bricks!) Do the tranquil air molecules in the calm eye of a hurricane lack “hurricane-making-flux”? If you mix air and water in a bucket, do you get a hurricane?
You do not. No matter what portions you use.
A can of seltzer and a Category five hurricane are made of the same stuff: air and water. Yet, though they are fashioned of the same “bricks” they are not the same. They share the same physical ingredients but do not share the same physical activity.
A can of seltzer is calm until it’s opened, then bubbles and fizzes. A hurricane whips round and round and round at tremendous speed and devastates metropolitan seaboards.
A hurricane is defined by its activity. Any physical phenomenon that shares the same whirling activity as a hurricane will exhibit the same properties as a hurricane, even if it’s made of different stuff. The Great Red Spot on Jupiter is a hurricane, a whirling storm of exotic chemicals that exhibits the same properties as an Atlantic hurricane even though the Great Red Spot holds neither air nor water.
The word “mind” is an action noun like “waltz,” “game,” and “hurricane.” So too the word “consciousness.” That’s why if we want to understand how consciousness works we must develop our intuitions about flow. About change and movement and transformation and merging and separating and decaying and blooming. We must learn to feel the flow of thought, the vibrations of consciousness.
The perspective that views Mind and consciousness as activity is known as Dynamic Mind.
Previous Consciousness: 1: The Mindwhirl
Next Consciousness: 3: Resonate, My Lovely