I love the article and your perspective. Thanks for sharing. Here's some thoughts and reactions, for your consideration. 😊
> How does all the ACTIVITY buzzing around my brain get united into MY seamless conscious EXPERIENCE?
"MY"
More like "the hard illusion of consciousness"
I feel like the real question is "how is it that I feel like there is a 'me' that exists with some continual continuity, moment to moment?"
The simple answer seems to be "it evolved in the crucible of your mind," and "it's just the most common and comfortable way for most of us to interpret raw sensory experiences, but certainly not the only one, as anyone who has meditated extensively or taken hallucinogens" could tell you.
People don't want to accept that "the thing that feels like ME" is actually an apparent illusion, as are all of the things we sense and see.
If every question you ask has an axiom of "'I' is a real, consistent, and coherent thing that exists," you get a world that makes sense until you run into insurmountable paradoxes.
> The activity _is_ the experience.
Bingo! This is the devastating truth. There is no "me" separate from what is experienced here. Presupposing a separate "me" then creates an expectation that what is happening here can reach "me." But where is the me?! It's like a shirt with a message on the front and back, "sorry, the message is on the other side." After a certain amount of looking, any sane person would conclude that there is no message apart from what is actually on the shirts.
Similarly, there is something that it feels like to be me, but the "me" is an illusion. The feeling implies a center, but the center is empty. It's experience, all the way in.
Not a very satisfying answer, if you ask me. I can see why we keep asking "why" and "how?"
> The first-person mechanical feeling of jump shot activity, for instance, is given by the physical trajectory of the blocking activity that attempts to block the jump shot. At every moment, the blocking activity mechanically unfolds in response to its instant-by-instant interactions with the shooting activity.
Makes me fantasize about all kinds of meticulously engineered interactive experiences designed to produce arbitrarily detailed and exotic qualia in humans. Things like "unseeable" colors, "mirror hands" experiments, and "hot, cold, and lukewarm water" tricks pale in comparison to what is possible. Like, LHC levels of engineering just to create reliably reproducible and constrainable internal states. Hell, maybe someday we could finally map "my red" onto "your red," and back again. 🥲
> any given instant (technically, at any duration of arbitrarily small size), an activity has specific and quantifiable physical properties (such as position, velocity, acceleration, momentum, force)
What about the uncertainty principle? Do you think there is a minimum resolution, or is something else going on there?
> how does this gargantuan number of real-time interactions get “instantly” amalgamated into a unified conscious state experienced as _YOUR_ seamless experience_?_
Holy shit. "I" am a third person perspective? 🤯
> The answer, in a word, is _**purpose**_.
I feel like purpose is built in over time via evolution. Is it emergent, imbued, or some combination of both?
> Activity which _does not pursue the same purpose_ as game activity is easily distinguished as non-game activity, even by naive viewers.
Generally speaking, but certain activities may be mistaken for purposeful or irrelevant, depending on how specific and narrow the observation is.
> _**ALL the activity in your brain is PURPOSEFUL**_**.** _**ALL the activity in your brain is INITIATED BY YOU for a PARTICULAR AIM.**_
Who is "you" in this case? Are you pointing to the existence of an autonomous agent somewhere in the system, or are you using shorthand to point to the whole human being (mind and body)?
> The players don’t hurl the basketball at the bird. The referees might _halt_ game activity in response to these events
> If there is a parasite crawling through your cerebrum
I'm totally fascinated by how the state of the system affects the nature of the experience. Heat, rain, blood sugar, parasites, these all effect the nature of play. They're not part of the purpose, but the "spacetime" the purpose runs through are warped by them. I think that phenomenon deserves a series of essays of its own.
> Your Visual Where module locates the basketball ... and resonates on its location, generating _qualia_ that highlights exactly where to reach.
This makes me think that "purpose" is a higher-order description of an underlying nature of phenomena, namely the pattern of creating and fostering "qualia resonances" — the system somehow models and "chooses" which qualia to model to try to stabilize in reality. What we seem to be doing is generating a feeling inside our mind/body that is sort of an approximation of what is expected, and then all of the systems seem to try to continue to reduce the error between that expected feeling and the incoming sensory data, as both evolve/resonate over time.
I really wonder where choice comes into this whole thing, if at all.
> Because _you_ chose to pursue the basketball
"You chose" is doing such incredibly heavy lifting here.
It reminds me of Hofstadter's *Strange Loop*, in which the appearance of and descriptions of larger agents (dominoes or "simms") emerge naturally from the activities of smaller ones. At some point, the buck has to stop, no? It makes sense that everything traces back to a smallest, predictable (or stochastic) mechanical processes, and yet... where does "choice" come in?
> You experience _orangeness (_because your expect to see an orange basketball and the Reality activity matches your Expectation activity)
I feel like this deserves a bit more elaboration. If I understand correctly, in your model, experience is an emergent phenomena that is entirely constructed by physical activity. I'm not seeing you definitely claim that, so I wonder if I'm missing the point.
My layperson explanation is: It isn't so much that "there is something that it feels like to be me" as it is "there is something that it feels like to be *anything*." The experience of "being me" is a subset of all experiences, and it is actually a class or category of experiences that work together to reify themselves and their continuity as such. Stepping outside of that reveals the "hard problem" to be a mischaracterization based on a limiting axiom.
Hi, Joshua! Thanks so much for your lovely thoughts!
So I don't think "me" or the "self" is an illusion, precisely. Any more than, say, the United States of America is an illusion. All of the activity that forms the Self IS the Self. Now, humans might very well ascribe illusory notions and concepts to the Self that FEEL real (like believing the Self "transcends" the body and might somehow survive death). But the reason I personally don't feel comfortable calling the Self or "me" an illusion is that for any experienced aspect of the Self (I am strong! I am smart! I am a good person who is kind!) we can always ground that experience in mechanical brain activity.
But there's a few ways that maybe one can consider the Self illusory, though always from a particular perspective. Our Self is most heavily shaped by the supermind--through mind-to-mind interactions (You are strong! You are a bad person!). This suggests that if you switch superminds, you may quickly develop a new Self. (If you're the only Babylonian in a tribe of Phoenicians, your Self will be different than if you're in a tribe of Babylonians.)
There's also spiritual traditions that seek to demonstrate the illusion of the Self.
Buddhist and Hindu traditions of meditation instruct practitioners to “clear their mind” and “observe their thoughts without judgment.” What these methods are ultimately designed to do is to diminish and ultimately eliminate craving and desire—that is to say, ELIMINATE PURPOSE.
We know from the Hard Problem that purpose drives the existence of the Self. All of the first-person perspectives on one's own activity are driven by purpose.
So what happens if you eliminate, or significantly reduce, the flow of purpose in your mind?
Veteran practitioners of these traditions often describe achieving an “altered state of consciousness” --a state of profound peace, stillness, and joy. They also describe a loss of sense of Self, or a realization of the illusory nature of the Self--or an IDENTIFICATION OF THE SELF WITH THE UNIVERSE.
If you can let go of will and aims and desire during meditation, and watch purpose arise in your mind but do not cling to it, you will no longer be initiating purpose to drive your mind (and self!) and instead will enjoy the opportunity to experience ALL of your mind's activity, instead of limiting it to experiences driven by your self-chosen purpose.
This makes sense, within the engineering model of consciousness we have been exploring. It is purpose that drives all our experience—and therefore causes all suffering, from when our aims are thwarted. If we remove “material” or “object” focused purpose from our mind, we create the opportunity for spiritual purpose engaging our entire mind.
When we focus on object-driven purpose (like swatting a basketball), our experience is limited to those brain activities directly related to the goal (such as, Visual Where module activity and Why module activity.) But if your purpose isn’t any particular goal, but allowing your mind to simply flow as it will without direction or guidance (other than gently guiding thoughts away from desires and urges that may arise during meditation), you can develop the ability to engage your entire mind with any stimulus, creating a far more expansive and multi-modal conscious experience.
Just to clarify further, these meditative practices are designed to help you see your self is "illusory"... but only in the sense that there are alternate experiences available to you other than experiencing reality through the filter of a Self.
Truly, the Self is very much like a game, like a basketball game. Is a game an illusion? No. But neither is it something solid or stable or lasting. It is ephemeral, like the wind. I'd say the Self is more like a hurricane than an illusion.
That makes sense. The "self" is no more illusory than any other apparently stable experience. I think that's why Buddhists say that all appearance is "empty." I think it's not that the appearance isn't real, per se, but that no appearance is any more real or fundamental than any other.
The hurricane analogy makes a ton of sense. These types of things seem to be self-stabilizing, time-dependent patterns. What I wonder is how and in what way their organizational processes are susceptible to external inputs. I suppose that question is of great concern to the self-help industry and meteorologists alike.
Thank you for the detailed response! I appreciate your perspective.
I think there's a distinction here that is lost in the words. I don't think I'll use "illusion" anymore, since it seems to convey "false" or "not real."
I think there are two layers here: (1) ontology, and (2) mechanics. I think they blend into each other in a lot of these descriptions.
On the one hand, we have a sense of what is "real" and what is not. It's easy to point to a chair and say it is real. Though, in another sense, it is just as easy to point to it as a specially shaped arrangement of wood and nails. To me, that's ontology. I think your definition of purpose is really helpful here. It's a chair to me, because I can use it as a chair. It fits the "chair-like" resonances that I've built up over time. So do rocks and boxes and even a person, leaning against a wall.
On the other hand, we have the mechanics of what constitutes the item. A constructed chair is easy to see and point to as a chair, especially because I have a preexisting basis for understanding what chairs are. A basketball game is easy, too. Some other exotic forms are less easy. For example, what is in the domain of politics? Is protesting part of our political system? Destruction of property?
It seems like the bounds of things that exist can get fuzzy. And even other things that exist don't seem to need a clearly discernible purpose to still form a "thing." Maybe bird murmurations qualify as a simple example of this.
That's why I call the "self" illusory. Maybe I'll settle for the terms "emergent, incorporeal, and ephemeral." I will agree that the self exists as much as a basketball exists, and in an ontological sense, as much as a chair does, as well!
The *sense* of the self as a permanent, unified thing, though, that I will still. argue is a pattern-matching trick of the mind, which throws in whole distinct classes of internal experience into a similar bucket and fills in the gaps. This seems to be similar to how the visual system causes us to believe that our vision is universally sharp, when in fact it has holes for our optic nerves and it blurs towards the edges. Our common usage of "self" and our vision don't reveal the gaps and inconsistencies in either—in fact, they're actually evolved to avoid them.
I imagine our perspectives overlap quite a lot, here, actually, and I'm merely tripping over the words. What I'm interested in most, though is the paradox of choice. In your view, how does choice appear, and how does it function?
To me, the word "choice" seems to imply that there must be more than one option, and that "something" must be able to chose between those. But without a clear degree of indeterminism, the "choice" just seems to be another apparent feature, emerging from perspective. I'm a little stuck there, to be honest!
(I can imagine a setup in which our internal complexity exceeds our external outputs, such that we can internally model our "choices" in parallel, exploring multiple paths and "choosing" the optimal one, based on the modeled outcomes. In some sense, that feels accurate. However, I still don't see how that's not just a more complex determinism, like a triple pendulum system. In reality, I imagine we're doing that AND partially leaking our modeling, which leads to some interesting entangled effects... it seems that "true" choice and causality would be irrecoverably buried in that complexity.)
Ah, choice! One of my favorite topics. And, shockingly, it relates to quantum observations and upends physicists' core convictions about quantum physics.
Purpose is not deterministic! Purpose unfolds through choice. Purpose creates choice, and by creating choice, creates time.
The key idea to understand how minds can be purposeful while physics remains deterministic is that minds are HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURES.
When physicists and philosophers start thinking about choice and decision-making and determinism, they tend to focus on the smallest possible interactions, quantum interactions, which are governed by the demi-deterministic rules of quantum physics (which, of course, specify PROBABILITIES rather than FIXED DETERMINISTIC OUTCOMES).
Anyway, most scientists and scholars get obsessively locked in to the smallest possible physical interaction, which is, sure, subject to non-purposeful physics.
But that's just because they've inhaled the religion of reductionism all their life. It's very hard to let go of reductionism, but purpose cannot be understood reductionistically. If you want to explain why mindscience has lagged so far behind the physical sciences for so long, this is the single factor: YOU CANNOT FIGURE OUT MINDS OR CONSCIOUSNESS USING REDUCTIONISTIC METHODS (or not exclusively using reductionistic methods.)
Stephen Grossberg's methods were NOT reductionistic. He creates a new methodology, suited for studying minds: the method of minimal anatomies. In simple terms, this allowed him to pursue purpose mathematically in every direction, instead of following physicists down down down to the uttermost and then deciding the uttermost is the "true reality."
It's the true reality if you're getting paid to understand atoms. Not the true reality if you're getting paid to understand minds.
You won't get purpose or non-determinism by watching an isolated quantum interaction.
But you will get purpose and break determinism by creating mental structures capable of creating a timeline that moves forward (which physics does not, not on its own).
Consciousness is an engine that unifies the PAST and the PRESENT (through resonance) in order to CHOOSE THE FUTURE, by choosing what behavior to perform in response to the present and past.
It achieves purpose through parallel activities--parallel laterally, and parallel hierarchically. Because you can have multiple activities happening simultaneously at different levels, you can side step determinism.
Just think: if you are making a conscious choice as a human, you've just used billions of neurons, tens of thousands of neural circuits, and several modules simultaneously.
Note that for choice to be real, you need random probabilities in the physical substrate, rather than deterministic rules. (exactly as we have in quantum physics).
Don't forget! The equations for purpose--the equations for all mental activity worked out by Grossberg--DO NOT CARE WHAT PHYSICAL SUBSTRATE THEY ACT UPON. They DO NOT HAVE ANY PHYSICAL VARIABLES IN COMMON WITH THE EQUATIONS OF PHYSICS--save one.
Time. Time is the only variable that the equations of purpose (i.e., Grossberg's mental math) and the equations of aimlessness (i.e., quantum physics and general relativity) have in common.
And physics doesn't generate time!
Purpose CHOOSES the future. Time unfolds through purposeful choice.
Time does not unfold through physics, which doesn't give a rat's wrinkle about time.
Oh, the reason that choice upend quantum physics is because one thing you will hear all the time from physicists when they talk about quantum interactions and especially the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is that "it doesn't matter whether the observer is human or mindless" suggesting that the principle holds even in a universe without people.
Except WHERE would the observation come from??? Only PURPOSE can make an observation in time. There are no mindless observers, because mindless observers are not locked into any timeline--there is no future or past, there is no CONCERN over observations. And even though physicists, again, focus on a single quantum interaction when they discuss quantum principles, an observation can only be generated by the complex structure of a mind--by a STABLE GOAL-DRIVEN ACTIVITY.
Observation and interaction seem to be the same thing, to me. I believe those physicists don't seem to understand that they themselves occupy quantum states, and by interacting with their equipment, they and the equipment are "collapsing" each other. Just my hunch.
"Purpose" does seem to be a specific type of phenomena in this system. Whether it exists at the behest of some agent in the system, or if it IS the agency in the system is still unclear to me.
Thank you for your thoughtful and interesting discussions and questions, Joshua.
Here's the difference between observation and interaction, the mechanical distinction. An interaction is any two activities interacting with each other--such as a proton and an electron, or an electron and a photon. An interaction can be PURPOSE-driven (a mental dynamic) or it can be PHYSICS-driven (an aimless dynamic). But an OBSERVATION is part of MENTAL DYNAMICS pursuing a goal unidirectionally in time. An observation requires some physical structure beyond the mere interaction of activities, a physical structure which endures in unidirectional time. In other words, you need STRUCTURED PURPOSE-DRIVEN ACTIVITY for an observation, but all you need for an interaction is activity (well, 2 activities). This is a huge difference.
One of the most common yet profound fallacies that physicists have made since Heisenberg started working on the uncertainty principle is to assert that when it comes to quantum mechanics, IT DOES NOT MATTER IF AN "OBSERVATION" IS MADE BY A MIND OR BY "MINDLESS PHYSICS". I just read another instance of this this very morning in a pop physics book that, while talking about quantum observations, declared, "Crucially, this aspect of observing doesn’t assume a conscious or otherwise human agent." That is, it's okay if the observation is done by a robot or an orbiting asteroid.
This is a profound mistake that physicists smuggled in a century ago and are too terrified to contend with now. But it absolutely DOES matter whether it's a conscious agent (or, more mechanically general, a purposeful agent). That's the entire point!!! An interaction may or may not be observed. AN OBSERVATION CAN ONLY BE CONDUCTED BY PURPOSEFUL ACTIVITY, AND PURPOSEFUL ACTIVITY ONLY EXISTS WITHIN THE STRUCTURE OF MINDS.
The solution to the hard problem of consciousness connects profoundly with the notion of observation and interaction and provides a mechanical clarity not available from physics alone. Why? Because to solve the Hard Problem requires clarity about two activities interacting with each other and how this interaction gives rise to subjective experience.
In effect, the Hard Problem and quantum mechanics are addressing the exact same cosmic fundamental--the interaction of two physical activities--but quantum physics only provides half the answer, half the picture. You need purpose to make sense of it and see why interactions and observations are distinct, and have radically different effects on the evolution of reality.
> they've inhaled the religion of reductionism all their life
This made me laugh!
I think you're looking in all the right directions. At the same time, I personally crave a more mechanistic deconstruction of all of these things. For instance, "time" doesn't exist as I understand it, but is more an artifact of our perception. Have you read Carlo Rovelli? I loved "The Order of Time."
So, to me, any explanation that rests on a definition of time is necessarily rooted in those fundamental artifacts of human conscious perception. I do think that there is an inescapable element of this, since we can't get "outside" the structure to define it independently. Any definition will necessarily drag in other axioms, and from the comparison and contrast of these differing paradigms (say the quantum and the conscious), we might be able to extract a meaningful impression of the ultimate reality from which this is all derived.
I appreciate your interaction and your passion about the nuances of this topic! It's inspiring! Thank you for sharing it with me. 😁
I like Rovelli's approach to time better than any other physicist I've read--I confess I favor physicists who can write well, so there may very well be physicists with fantastic genius ideas about time who can't write. But I think even Rovelli is stuck in the same sanitorium of aimlessness as other physicists.
I agree 1000% that "any explanation that rests on a definition of time is necessarily rooted in those fundamental artifacts of human conscious perception"--though I'd perhaps not constrain it to artifacts of HUMAN CONSCIOUS PERCEPTION, as animals are conscious and perceive time as we do, and for the same reasons that we do. And even though insects and worms aren't conscious, they also contribute to the perception and flow of time.
It's minds that make time. There's no time without minds. And it takes purposeful structure to make minds, and to make time. It's a very different way of thinking about it than what physicists have adopted.
I love the article and your perspective. Thanks for sharing. Here's some thoughts and reactions, for your consideration. 😊
> How does all the ACTIVITY buzzing around my brain get united into MY seamless conscious EXPERIENCE?
"MY"
More like "the hard illusion of consciousness"
I feel like the real question is "how is it that I feel like there is a 'me' that exists with some continual continuity, moment to moment?"
The simple answer seems to be "it evolved in the crucible of your mind," and "it's just the most common and comfortable way for most of us to interpret raw sensory experiences, but certainly not the only one, as anyone who has meditated extensively or taken hallucinogens" could tell you.
People don't want to accept that "the thing that feels like ME" is actually an apparent illusion, as are all of the things we sense and see.
If every question you ask has an axiom of "'I' is a real, consistent, and coherent thing that exists," you get a world that makes sense until you run into insurmountable paradoxes.
> The activity _is_ the experience.
Bingo! This is the devastating truth. There is no "me" separate from what is experienced here. Presupposing a separate "me" then creates an expectation that what is happening here can reach "me." But where is the me?! It's like a shirt with a message on the front and back, "sorry, the message is on the other side." After a certain amount of looking, any sane person would conclude that there is no message apart from what is actually on the shirts.
Similarly, there is something that it feels like to be me, but the "me" is an illusion. The feeling implies a center, but the center is empty. It's experience, all the way in.
Not a very satisfying answer, if you ask me. I can see why we keep asking "why" and "how?"
> The first-person mechanical feeling of jump shot activity, for instance, is given by the physical trajectory of the blocking activity that attempts to block the jump shot. At every moment, the blocking activity mechanically unfolds in response to its instant-by-instant interactions with the shooting activity.
Makes me fantasize about all kinds of meticulously engineered interactive experiences designed to produce arbitrarily detailed and exotic qualia in humans. Things like "unseeable" colors, "mirror hands" experiments, and "hot, cold, and lukewarm water" tricks pale in comparison to what is possible. Like, LHC levels of engineering just to create reliably reproducible and constrainable internal states. Hell, maybe someday we could finally map "my red" onto "your red," and back again. 🥲
> any given instant (technically, at any duration of arbitrarily small size), an activity has specific and quantifiable physical properties (such as position, velocity, acceleration, momentum, force)
What about the uncertainty principle? Do you think there is a minimum resolution, or is something else going on there?
> how does this gargantuan number of real-time interactions get “instantly” amalgamated into a unified conscious state experienced as _YOUR_ seamless experience_?_
Holy shit. "I" am a third person perspective? 🤯
> The answer, in a word, is _**purpose**_.
I feel like purpose is built in over time via evolution. Is it emergent, imbued, or some combination of both?
> Activity which _does not pursue the same purpose_ as game activity is easily distinguished as non-game activity, even by naive viewers.
Generally speaking, but certain activities may be mistaken for purposeful or irrelevant, depending on how specific and narrow the observation is.
> _**ALL the activity in your brain is PURPOSEFUL**_**.** _**ALL the activity in your brain is INITIATED BY YOU for a PARTICULAR AIM.**_
Who is "you" in this case? Are you pointing to the existence of an autonomous agent somewhere in the system, or are you using shorthand to point to the whole human being (mind and body)?
> The players don’t hurl the basketball at the bird. The referees might _halt_ game activity in response to these events
> If there is a parasite crawling through your cerebrum
I'm totally fascinated by how the state of the system affects the nature of the experience. Heat, rain, blood sugar, parasites, these all effect the nature of play. They're not part of the purpose, but the "spacetime" the purpose runs through are warped by them. I think that phenomenon deserves a series of essays of its own.
> Your Visual Where module locates the basketball ... and resonates on its location, generating _qualia_ that highlights exactly where to reach.
This makes me think that "purpose" is a higher-order description of an underlying nature of phenomena, namely the pattern of creating and fostering "qualia resonances" — the system somehow models and "chooses" which qualia to model to try to stabilize in reality. What we seem to be doing is generating a feeling inside our mind/body that is sort of an approximation of what is expected, and then all of the systems seem to try to continue to reduce the error between that expected feeling and the incoming sensory data, as both evolve/resonate over time.
I really wonder where choice comes into this whole thing, if at all.
> Because _you_ chose to pursue the basketball
"You chose" is doing such incredibly heavy lifting here.
It reminds me of Hofstadter's *Strange Loop*, in which the appearance of and descriptions of larger agents (dominoes or "simms") emerge naturally from the activities of smaller ones. At some point, the buck has to stop, no? It makes sense that everything traces back to a smallest, predictable (or stochastic) mechanical processes, and yet... where does "choice" come in?
> You experience _orangeness (_because your expect to see an orange basketball and the Reality activity matches your Expectation activity)
I feel like this deserves a bit more elaboration. If I understand correctly, in your model, experience is an emergent phenomena that is entirely constructed by physical activity. I'm not seeing you definitely claim that, so I wonder if I'm missing the point.
My layperson explanation is: It isn't so much that "there is something that it feels like to be me" as it is "there is something that it feels like to be *anything*." The experience of "being me" is a subset of all experiences, and it is actually a class or category of experiences that work together to reify themselves and their continuity as such. Stepping outside of that reveals the "hard problem" to be a mischaracterization based on a limiting axiom.
Hi, Joshua! Thanks so much for your lovely thoughts!
So I don't think "me" or the "self" is an illusion, precisely. Any more than, say, the United States of America is an illusion. All of the activity that forms the Self IS the Self. Now, humans might very well ascribe illusory notions and concepts to the Self that FEEL real (like believing the Self "transcends" the body and might somehow survive death). But the reason I personally don't feel comfortable calling the Self or "me" an illusion is that for any experienced aspect of the Self (I am strong! I am smart! I am a good person who is kind!) we can always ground that experience in mechanical brain activity.
But there's a few ways that maybe one can consider the Self illusory, though always from a particular perspective. Our Self is most heavily shaped by the supermind--through mind-to-mind interactions (You are strong! You are a bad person!). This suggests that if you switch superminds, you may quickly develop a new Self. (If you're the only Babylonian in a tribe of Phoenicians, your Self will be different than if you're in a tribe of Babylonians.)
There's also spiritual traditions that seek to demonstrate the illusion of the Self.
Buddhist and Hindu traditions of meditation instruct practitioners to “clear their mind” and “observe their thoughts without judgment.” What these methods are ultimately designed to do is to diminish and ultimately eliminate craving and desire—that is to say, ELIMINATE PURPOSE.
We know from the Hard Problem that purpose drives the existence of the Self. All of the first-person perspectives on one's own activity are driven by purpose.
So what happens if you eliminate, or significantly reduce, the flow of purpose in your mind?
Veteran practitioners of these traditions often describe achieving an “altered state of consciousness” --a state of profound peace, stillness, and joy. They also describe a loss of sense of Self, or a realization of the illusory nature of the Self--or an IDENTIFICATION OF THE SELF WITH THE UNIVERSE.
If you can let go of will and aims and desire during meditation, and watch purpose arise in your mind but do not cling to it, you will no longer be initiating purpose to drive your mind (and self!) and instead will enjoy the opportunity to experience ALL of your mind's activity, instead of limiting it to experiences driven by your self-chosen purpose.
This makes sense, within the engineering model of consciousness we have been exploring. It is purpose that drives all our experience—and therefore causes all suffering, from when our aims are thwarted. If we remove “material” or “object” focused purpose from our mind, we create the opportunity for spiritual purpose engaging our entire mind.
When we focus on object-driven purpose (like swatting a basketball), our experience is limited to those brain activities directly related to the goal (such as, Visual Where module activity and Why module activity.) But if your purpose isn’t any particular goal, but allowing your mind to simply flow as it will without direction or guidance (other than gently guiding thoughts away from desires and urges that may arise during meditation), you can develop the ability to engage your entire mind with any stimulus, creating a far more expansive and multi-modal conscious experience.
Just to clarify further, these meditative practices are designed to help you see your self is "illusory"... but only in the sense that there are alternate experiences available to you other than experiencing reality through the filter of a Self.
Truly, the Self is very much like a game, like a basketball game. Is a game an illusion? No. But neither is it something solid or stable or lasting. It is ephemeral, like the wind. I'd say the Self is more like a hurricane than an illusion.
That makes sense. The "self" is no more illusory than any other apparently stable experience. I think that's why Buddhists say that all appearance is "empty." I think it's not that the appearance isn't real, per se, but that no appearance is any more real or fundamental than any other.
The hurricane analogy makes a ton of sense. These types of things seem to be self-stabilizing, time-dependent patterns. What I wonder is how and in what way their organizational processes are susceptible to external inputs. I suppose that question is of great concern to the self-help industry and meteorologists alike.
Thank you for the detailed response! I appreciate your perspective.
I think there's a distinction here that is lost in the words. I don't think I'll use "illusion" anymore, since it seems to convey "false" or "not real."
I think there are two layers here: (1) ontology, and (2) mechanics. I think they blend into each other in a lot of these descriptions.
On the one hand, we have a sense of what is "real" and what is not. It's easy to point to a chair and say it is real. Though, in another sense, it is just as easy to point to it as a specially shaped arrangement of wood and nails. To me, that's ontology. I think your definition of purpose is really helpful here. It's a chair to me, because I can use it as a chair. It fits the "chair-like" resonances that I've built up over time. So do rocks and boxes and even a person, leaning against a wall.
On the other hand, we have the mechanics of what constitutes the item. A constructed chair is easy to see and point to as a chair, especially because I have a preexisting basis for understanding what chairs are. A basketball game is easy, too. Some other exotic forms are less easy. For example, what is in the domain of politics? Is protesting part of our political system? Destruction of property?
It seems like the bounds of things that exist can get fuzzy. And even other things that exist don't seem to need a clearly discernible purpose to still form a "thing." Maybe bird murmurations qualify as a simple example of this.
That's why I call the "self" illusory. Maybe I'll settle for the terms "emergent, incorporeal, and ephemeral." I will agree that the self exists as much as a basketball exists, and in an ontological sense, as much as a chair does, as well!
The *sense* of the self as a permanent, unified thing, though, that I will still. argue is a pattern-matching trick of the mind, which throws in whole distinct classes of internal experience into a similar bucket and fills in the gaps. This seems to be similar to how the visual system causes us to believe that our vision is universally sharp, when in fact it has holes for our optic nerves and it blurs towards the edges. Our common usage of "self" and our vision don't reveal the gaps and inconsistencies in either—in fact, they're actually evolved to avoid them.
I imagine our perspectives overlap quite a lot, here, actually, and I'm merely tripping over the words. What I'm interested in most, though is the paradox of choice. In your view, how does choice appear, and how does it function?
To me, the word "choice" seems to imply that there must be more than one option, and that "something" must be able to chose between those. But without a clear degree of indeterminism, the "choice" just seems to be another apparent feature, emerging from perspective. I'm a little stuck there, to be honest!
(I can imagine a setup in which our internal complexity exceeds our external outputs, such that we can internally model our "choices" in parallel, exploring multiple paths and "choosing" the optimal one, based on the modeled outcomes. In some sense, that feels accurate. However, I still don't see how that's not just a more complex determinism, like a triple pendulum system. In reality, I imagine we're doing that AND partially leaking our modeling, which leads to some interesting entangled effects... it seems that "true" choice and causality would be irrecoverably buried in that complexity.)
Ah, choice! One of my favorite topics. And, shockingly, it relates to quantum observations and upends physicists' core convictions about quantum physics.
Purpose is not deterministic! Purpose unfolds through choice. Purpose creates choice, and by creating choice, creates time.
The key idea to understand how minds can be purposeful while physics remains deterministic is that minds are HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURES.
When physicists and philosophers start thinking about choice and decision-making and determinism, they tend to focus on the smallest possible interactions, quantum interactions, which are governed by the demi-deterministic rules of quantum physics (which, of course, specify PROBABILITIES rather than FIXED DETERMINISTIC OUTCOMES).
Anyway, most scientists and scholars get obsessively locked in to the smallest possible physical interaction, which is, sure, subject to non-purposeful physics.
But that's just because they've inhaled the religion of reductionism all their life. It's very hard to let go of reductionism, but purpose cannot be understood reductionistically. If you want to explain why mindscience has lagged so far behind the physical sciences for so long, this is the single factor: YOU CANNOT FIGURE OUT MINDS OR CONSCIOUSNESS USING REDUCTIONISTIC METHODS (or not exclusively using reductionistic methods.)
Stephen Grossberg's methods were NOT reductionistic. He creates a new methodology, suited for studying minds: the method of minimal anatomies. In simple terms, this allowed him to pursue purpose mathematically in every direction, instead of following physicists down down down to the uttermost and then deciding the uttermost is the "true reality."
It's the true reality if you're getting paid to understand atoms. Not the true reality if you're getting paid to understand minds.
You won't get purpose or non-determinism by watching an isolated quantum interaction.
But you will get purpose and break determinism by creating mental structures capable of creating a timeline that moves forward (which physics does not, not on its own).
Consciousness is an engine that unifies the PAST and the PRESENT (through resonance) in order to CHOOSE THE FUTURE, by choosing what behavior to perform in response to the present and past.
It achieves purpose through parallel activities--parallel laterally, and parallel hierarchically. Because you can have multiple activities happening simultaneously at different levels, you can side step determinism.
Just think: if you are making a conscious choice as a human, you've just used billions of neurons, tens of thousands of neural circuits, and several modules simultaneously.
Note that for choice to be real, you need random probabilities in the physical substrate, rather than deterministic rules. (exactly as we have in quantum physics).
Don't forget! The equations for purpose--the equations for all mental activity worked out by Grossberg--DO NOT CARE WHAT PHYSICAL SUBSTRATE THEY ACT UPON. They DO NOT HAVE ANY PHYSICAL VARIABLES IN COMMON WITH THE EQUATIONS OF PHYSICS--save one.
Time. Time is the only variable that the equations of purpose (i.e., Grossberg's mental math) and the equations of aimlessness (i.e., quantum physics and general relativity) have in common.
And physics doesn't generate time!
Purpose CHOOSES the future. Time unfolds through purposeful choice.
Time does not unfold through physics, which doesn't give a rat's wrinkle about time.
Oh, the reason that choice upend quantum physics is because one thing you will hear all the time from physicists when they talk about quantum interactions and especially the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is that "it doesn't matter whether the observer is human or mindless" suggesting that the principle holds even in a universe without people.
Except WHERE would the observation come from??? Only PURPOSE can make an observation in time. There are no mindless observers, because mindless observers are not locked into any timeline--there is no future or past, there is no CONCERN over observations. And even though physicists, again, focus on a single quantum interaction when they discuss quantum principles, an observation can only be generated by the complex structure of a mind--by a STABLE GOAL-DRIVEN ACTIVITY.
Observation and interaction seem to be the same thing, to me. I believe those physicists don't seem to understand that they themselves occupy quantum states, and by interacting with their equipment, they and the equipment are "collapsing" each other. Just my hunch.
"Purpose" does seem to be a specific type of phenomena in this system. Whether it exists at the behest of some agent in the system, or if it IS the agency in the system is still unclear to me.
Thank you for your thoughtful and interesting discussions and questions, Joshua.
Here's the difference between observation and interaction, the mechanical distinction. An interaction is any two activities interacting with each other--such as a proton and an electron, or an electron and a photon. An interaction can be PURPOSE-driven (a mental dynamic) or it can be PHYSICS-driven (an aimless dynamic). But an OBSERVATION is part of MENTAL DYNAMICS pursuing a goal unidirectionally in time. An observation requires some physical structure beyond the mere interaction of activities, a physical structure which endures in unidirectional time. In other words, you need STRUCTURED PURPOSE-DRIVEN ACTIVITY for an observation, but all you need for an interaction is activity (well, 2 activities). This is a huge difference.
One of the most common yet profound fallacies that physicists have made since Heisenberg started working on the uncertainty principle is to assert that when it comes to quantum mechanics, IT DOES NOT MATTER IF AN "OBSERVATION" IS MADE BY A MIND OR BY "MINDLESS PHYSICS". I just read another instance of this this very morning in a pop physics book that, while talking about quantum observations, declared, "Crucially, this aspect of observing doesn’t assume a conscious or otherwise human agent." That is, it's okay if the observation is done by a robot or an orbiting asteroid.
This is a profound mistake that physicists smuggled in a century ago and are too terrified to contend with now. But it absolutely DOES matter whether it's a conscious agent (or, more mechanically general, a purposeful agent). That's the entire point!!! An interaction may or may not be observed. AN OBSERVATION CAN ONLY BE CONDUCTED BY PURPOSEFUL ACTIVITY, AND PURPOSEFUL ACTIVITY ONLY EXISTS WITHIN THE STRUCTURE OF MINDS.
The solution to the hard problem of consciousness connects profoundly with the notion of observation and interaction and provides a mechanical clarity not available from physics alone. Why? Because to solve the Hard Problem requires clarity about two activities interacting with each other and how this interaction gives rise to subjective experience.
In effect, the Hard Problem and quantum mechanics are addressing the exact same cosmic fundamental--the interaction of two physical activities--but quantum physics only provides half the answer, half the picture. You need purpose to make sense of it and see why interactions and observations are distinct, and have radically different effects on the evolution of reality.
omg I love this
I totally agree with you.
> they've inhaled the religion of reductionism all their life
This made me laugh!
I think you're looking in all the right directions. At the same time, I personally crave a more mechanistic deconstruction of all of these things. For instance, "time" doesn't exist as I understand it, but is more an artifact of our perception. Have you read Carlo Rovelli? I loved "The Order of Time."
So, to me, any explanation that rests on a definition of time is necessarily rooted in those fundamental artifacts of human conscious perception. I do think that there is an inescapable element of this, since we can't get "outside" the structure to define it independently. Any definition will necessarily drag in other axioms, and from the comparison and contrast of these differing paradigms (say the quantum and the conscious), we might be able to extract a meaningful impression of the ultimate reality from which this is all derived.
I appreciate your interaction and your passion about the nuances of this topic! It's inspiring! Thank you for sharing it with me. 😁
I like Rovelli's approach to time better than any other physicist I've read--I confess I favor physicists who can write well, so there may very well be physicists with fantastic genius ideas about time who can't write. But I think even Rovelli is stuck in the same sanitorium of aimlessness as other physicists.
I agree 1000% that "any explanation that rests on a definition of time is necessarily rooted in those fundamental artifacts of human conscious perception"--though I'd perhaps not constrain it to artifacts of HUMAN CONSCIOUS PERCEPTION, as animals are conscious and perceive time as we do, and for the same reasons that we do. And even though insects and worms aren't conscious, they also contribute to the perception and flow of time.
It's minds that make time. There's no time without minds. And it takes purposeful structure to make minds, and to make time. It's a very different way of thinking about it than what physicists have adopted.