EvPhil Blog - Evolutionary Philosophy

Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery

3/17/2020

As I begin this series on consciousness, a good place to start is by knocking down preconceived notions that may be common here. This is something the Buddhists have been doing for hundreds of years and a good guide to this way of thinking is Sam Harris. Sam has studied meditation for years, including on very long silent retreats in India, but he is now much better known as a hyper-rational neuroscientist who is one of the four horsemen of the New Atheists. How does he bring these experiences together? His books, meditation app, and podcast are full of discussions about this, but I'll choose two particular podcasts to focus on.

The first is Episode #181- The Illusory Self. Most of this episode is a discussion with the writer and meditation teacher Richard Lang, but the introductory comments from Sam from 5:27 to 13:30 are particularly useful for my purposes. For those who can't listen to it, I'll copy the entire transcription of this portion of the podcast into a comment at the bottom of this post. But here are the most important lines:

In today’s podcast I want to give you sceptics one more shot understanding what I’m up to with meditation. There are specific insights here into the nature of mind that I consider to be the most important things I have ever learned.
I’ve been slow to understand just how much intellectual work is being done for me by the fact that I’ve had certain experiences in meditation. And these experiences have made certain features of the mind obvious.
The reality is that if you can pay sufficient attention to your mind, the illusion [of free will and the self] disappears. It becomes obvious that everything is just arising on its own, including one’s thoughts and intentions and other mental precursors to action.
Consider the analogy that I’ve sometimes used to the optic blind spot. You make two marks on a piece of paper. You stare at it. You close one eye, look at one of the marks, and bring the paper closer until the second mark disappears. This is a very simple procedure that allows you to see something right on the surface of consciousness that you would otherwise spend your entire lifetime overlooking.
In seeing the blind spot, you’re actually seeing something subjectively, as a matter of direct experience, that reveals a deeper truth about the eye. Well, I can also say that the non-existence of an unchanging self in the middle of experience, an ego, the feeling that we call I, is also predicted by the structure and function of the brain. ... There’s no account of neuroanatomy or neurophysiology that would make sense of an unchanging self freely exercising its will. Meditation is ultimately a very simple procedure that allows one to discover the absence of this fake self directly.

Next, I'd draw your attention to Episode #159 - Conscious, which is a discussion with Sam's wife Annaka Harris about her book Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind. Once again, there are a lot of interesting things said in this podcast, and I'll transcribe several relevant minutes in a comment below, but here are the most important lines:

The [hard] problem is, why is it that any configuration of non-conscious material can suddenly have the experience of being that matter? There’s no explanation that we could think of that could make this less mysterious. It’s always non-conscious matter getting arranged in a very specific way so that it suddenly lights up from the inside. It seems that no matter how much we know about the brain, there’s nothing that will ever make this less mysterious.
The most primary intuitions we have about consciousness live in two questions I like to keep asking myself. The first one is: is there any behaviour on the outside of a system that can tell us conclusively that consciousness is present in that system?
The second question is: is consciousness doing anything? Is it serving a function?
The idea that consciousness might not be doing anything is problematic from an evolutionary point of view because people wonder then why it would have evolved. Surely it must be doing something, because it must be expensive metabolically on some level.
So the argument about the evolution of consciousness is one that sends many people down the path of wondering if it is possible that consciousness is a fundamental feature of matter, that it is there in some form all the way down.
The name for that general family of views is panpsychism.
In my book I cite the title of this great article by Philip Goff, which is: “Panpsychism may be crazy, but it’s also most probably true.” That got me to the point where I started to take panpsychism more seriously. ... Once you’re able to break through the illusion of the self, these sorts of theories are easier to entertain or imagine.

Brief Comments
Having done a bit of meditation over the last 15 years, I can see the value of paying close attention to where thoughts, feelings, and intentions arise from. I can easily agree with Sam that there is no "unchanging self in the middle of experience, an ego, the feeling that we call I." But whenever Sam goes on about there being no self, I like to remember Laurence Krauss telling him he was pretty sure he could find a self somewhere within the vicinity of his body. He and Sam could be using different definitions for what the self is, however, and that's something I'll explore more later.

As for Annaka's points, I first wanted to let her introduce the idea of "the hard problem of consciousness" here. There will be much more about that in the next article focusing on David Chalmers who coined that term. As for Annaka's primary questions about consciousness, I think the first one looking for conclusive evidence of consciousness is a common error of essentialist thinking in an evolving universe where lines are blurry and there are no on/off eternal essences. Dan Dennett will address that later but it's important to see right away that looking for "consciousness" doesn't reveal any obvious answers. As for what consciousness does, that depends a lot on how it is defined, which neuroscientists have been teasing out over the last several years. Whether they find panpsychism all the way down will be up for interpretation. I'll cover much more about that further down the line.

What do you think? Are you even a you? Is the hard problem of consciousness hard to you?

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Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series

16 Comments

Ed Gibney link

3/17/2020 05:27:58 pm

Sam Harris Podcast — The Illusory Self
—(5:27) In today’s podcast I want to give you sceptics one more shot understanding what I’m up to with meditation.
—There are specific insights into the nature of mind that I consider to be the most important things I have ever learned. And they’re not a matter of simply believing something new. And they are certainly not matters of faith. The fact that some of these insights have been best described in Eastern traditions like Buddhism doesn’t make them Buddhist. No more than the fact the Isaac Newton was Christian makes the laws of motion somehow Christian. And these insights are not merely important for one’s well-being, they’re important intellectually. They clear up philosophical, ethical, and even scientific confusion. The truth is I’ve been very slow to appreciate this. I’ve been slow to understand just how much intellectual work is being done for me by the fact that I’ve had certain experiences in meditation. And these experiences have made certain features of the mind obvious. There are questions about things like free will, or the hard problem of consciousness, or the nature of morality that people continually get hung up on and I often can’t see the basis for their confusion. More and more I see that this basis is not conceptual, it’s that they can’t actually notice certain things about their own experience.
—Take free will for instance. This is a topic I’ve covered a lot. People find it endlessly bewildering. The truth is, we have every reason to believe that free will is an incoherent concept. It just doesn’t make sense in a deterministic universe. And it doesn’t make any sense if you add a dose of randomness to the universe either. This has been obvious for probably 400 years. And yet I keep running into smart people who think the idea of free will is a real intellectual problem, that we know we have it in some sense, or we have some purified version of it. We find ourselves at a kind of intellectual stalemate when debating it philosophically or scientifically.
—The reality is that if you can pay sufficient attention to your mind, the illusion disappears. It becomes obvious that everything is just arising on its own, including one’s thoughts and intentions and other mental precursors to action. There is just no fine-grained experiential correlate to the common notion of free will. That’s why I say in my book on the topic that the illusion of free will is itself an illusion. There is no illusion of free will. Being a better observer of the nature of one’s own mind isn’t just a matter of improving one’s well-being, although that is one of the core purposes of meditation. It’s also an intellectual project. It’s a matter of bringing one’s first-person understanding, one’s subjective experience, into closer alignment with a third-person understanding that is an objective understanding of how the world is. Meditation is the training that allows you to do this.
—Consider the analogy that I’ve sometimes used to the optic blind spot. You all know you have a blind spot in your visual field. I’m sure most of you were taught to see it in school. You made two marks on a piece of paper. You stared at it. You closed one eye, looked at one of the marks, and brought the paper closer until the second mark disappeared. This is a very simple procedure, subjectively, that allows you to see something right on the surface of consciousness that you would otherwise spend your entire lifetime overlooking. And the blind spot was actually predicted based on our understanding of the anatomy of the eye. Then someone developed this simple procedure to find it. So, in seeing the blind spot, you’re actually seeing something subjectively, as a matter of direct experience, that reveals a deeper truth about the eye. Well, I can also say that the non-existence of an unchanging self in the middle of experience, an ego, the feeling that we call I, is also predicted by the structure and function of the brain. The feeling of being an ego in your head, a thinker in addition to the next arising thought, can’t be one’s true point of view. In fact, the feeling that such a self exists is the same feeling to which people attach this notion of free will. There is no self who could enjoy this spurious power of free will. This is directly suggested by what we know is going on in the world, and in the world inside our heads. There’s no account of neuroanatomy or neurophysiology that would make sense of an unchanging self freely exercising its will. Meditation is ultimately a very simple procedure that allows one to discover the absence of this fake self directly. Here you can see that reasonable sounding objections from sceptics aren’t reasonable. Consider the one I just mentioned. What i

Ed Gibney link

3/17/2020 05:28:42 pm

Sam and Annaka Harris on Podcast — Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind
—(9:26) Let’s start with the hard problem of consciousness and the intuition that some people have that this either doesn’t exist, or it’s not hard, or there’s no mystery around consciousness, that it is no different than any other thing we don’t yet understand scientifically. How do you raise this subject?
—The term was coined by David Chalmers in 1995, although people have been dealing with the subject of consciousness for much longer. It’s great, though that he gave us this shorthand. The problem is why is it that any configuration of non-conscious material (we know the ingredients of everything in the universe is made of this stuff) can suddenly have the experience of being that matter? There’s no explanation that we could think of that could make this less mysterious. It’s always non-conscious matter getting arranged in a very specific way so that it suddenly lights up from the inside. It seems that no matter how much we know about the brain, there’s nothing that will ever make this less mysterious. (11:04)
—So much can be done non-consciously, so why is it like something to be something?
—What is it like to be you? Got it. What is it like to be that shoelace? Nothing.
—(15:35) The most primary intuitions we have about consciousness live in these two questions I like to keep asking myself. The first one is: is there any behaviour on the outside of a system that can tell us conclusively that consciousness is present in that system? My first answer is always yes, and that’s something I question throughout the book. But I think it’s interesting because we feel very strongly that the answer is yes. If I see that my daughter has fallen down and is crying and you ask me if all this behaviour you are seeing is evidence that she is conscious, I would say absolutely. We can do it with animals as well. I think it’s interesting to question that, to question whether there is something that by definition gives us evidence that there is consciousness there.
—There are counterexamples of course. We meet people in dreams who are not conscious or don’t even exist. We will likely build robots at a certain point that pass the Turing test, and if we don’t understand the material basis of consciousness at that time, we won’t know whether they are conscious even if they seem to be. Conversely, there are people who we know, due to neurological injury, are still conscious, but they can give no sign of that, e.g. people with locked-in syndrome.
—Yes. I actually start there, with all of the cases where we don’t see that behaviour that we would normally give, yet there is a full complex experience that is present in people who are paralyzed. We couldn’t ever see that evidence from the outside. I think that’s an interesting place to start for where there will ever be evidence that we can conclusively point to for evidence of consciousness.
—The second question is: is consciousness doing anything? Is it serving a function? Our reflexive answer is yes, and my intuition goes that way. These are the simplest deepest intuitions we have and I wanted to start there. (18:37)
— (19:30) It’s not clear what consciousness is doing. The term here in philosophy is that consciousness is an epiphenomenon, which is to say that it is something that stands outside the stream of events that are causal. If consciousness is doing anything, it has to be doing it at the level, in our case, of the brain’s causal pattern, the neurophysiology. The most well-subscribed view at this point is that whatever consciousness is at the level of experience, the fact that the lights are on, the fact that it’s like something to be you in this moment, that’s how it seems from the first-person side, but there’s some third-person level of description which is its cash value at the level of causality. If some things can only be done consciously, that’s because whatever consciousness is at the level of neurophysiology, that has to be part of the causal strain. But it’s a little more mysterious than that because anything that we’re conscious of—take your decision to write a book, the decision to sit down precisely at that moment, the decision about what you’re going to write, where to start, word choice—anything you can point to in that process no matter how deliberative it seems is preceded by events in your brain which are not conscious. It seems that any of that could happen on its own. The question is, what is consciousness adding to that process? (21:16)
—(21:34) I think it’s easy to imagine AI doing a lot of the things we do without consciousness. Like writing a book. But even something like vision, it seems very natural to think

SelfAwarePatterns link

3/17/2020 09:15:14 pm

I think Sam Harris is basically right, although the version of self he's attacking seems naive. I'm not sure it really hits anyone other than substance dualists.

You are you, but "you" is a constantly recreated center of gravity of all the innate and learned impulses. You have Damasio on your list, and he has some interesting things to say about the self.

I don't see the hard problem as hard, except perhaps psychologically for many people, but I'll have more to say on the Chalmers post.

Ed Gibney link

3/18/2020 10:10:10 am

I totally agree about Sam Harris. His statement here is fine, but only really argues against religious / folk notions of an immortal self (technically substance dualists, as you say). I haven't heard Sam engage well with philosophers (or neuroscientists) about this. As with Dan Dennett, the conversations seem to get stuck talking past one another. Part of me thinks Sam likes to be a zen koan on this, continually saying there is no self, but then exhorting people to do better. I know he has his explanations for how this fits together, but I think he needs a better explanation of what "you" are.

He needs something like your "constantly recreated center of gravity of all the innate and learned impulses." But, you know, maybe less catchy than that. ; ) I can't say I have that down yet, although I'm hoping to get better at it as I write this series out. Lately I have been thinking of the self as a relatively stable eddy, held together for some time by the gene x culture background that is specific to each individual. It looks like a self, as life / water flows through it, but it is always changing and eventually breaks apart from some internal or external ripple that can no longer be contained. This helps me see the self as having "immersed will" rather than "free will." It doesn't sound different than your conception; just different metaphors to help simplify the complex reality.

Thanks for the Chalmers tease. Looking forward to that post!

SelfAwarePatterns link

3/18/2020 04:05:47 pm

I have to come clean that the "center of gravity" phrase comes from someone else, I think Dan Dennett, although I'm not sure.

The stable eddy phrase works too. I sometimes refer to us as a wave of information, usually when discussing the fact that most of the atoms in our body are replaced every year.

Hope I don't disappoint on the Chalmers post. My holding off is that my comment specifically has to do with the way he talks about the hard problem.

Astronomer Eric

3/24/2020 01:02:53 pm

I like both Mike's and your version of "you". Maybe I can try to add my own metaphor from the point of view of a physics person. I tend to see a living organism (I'm refraining from using the word "self" or "you" on purpose here) as a complicated Rube Goldberg device that has multiple branching paths where the energy conversions can take place (more branches for more complex organisms) and mechanisms to reset (add potential energy to) the device. The individual components of the device are designed with the gene x culture themes that Ed mentioned. The energy doesn't flow through this device of its own free will. Instead it travels from high potential energy to low potential energy according to the laws of physics, converting to other forms of energy in the process such as kinetic energy, electrical energy, etc.

SelfAwarePatterns link

3/24/2020 04:06:07 pm

Hi AE,
My use of "impulse" was deliberately ambiguous. It can refer to an instinctual reflex, or a learned habit, which may be a slight modification of one of the reflexes, or a particular reflex arc.

So I guess an example of a learned impulse would be a habit.

It's worth noting that modification to instinctual responses can be very low level, at the level of the brainstem or even spinal cord. This is classical conditioning, which isn't very sophisticated. Operant conditioning requires some level of prediction, and global operant conditioning, integrated prediction.

Astronomy Eric

3/24/2020 01:29:25 pm

Hi Mike! In my first comment where I introduced myself on the Consciousness 5 post, I mentioned that in my emails with Ed that I am very much focused on Maslow's Needs theory. Maslow approached this theory from a psychological point of view and (motivated by Ed's evolutionary philosophy and his own interpretation of Maslow's theory as it applies to the entire realm of life) I am trying to bring an evolutionary point of view into it. And since we seem to have evolved a higher level evolutionary process built on a foundation of Memes, I am trying to wrap my mind around the interplay of genes and memes in this needs theory. In particular, I think it may turn out to be useful for creating better worldviews if we can separate the role of memes and genes in the needs theory since we are stuck with the genes we got but we can evolve our memes as often as we wish during our lifetimes.

As such, I think I am having trouble with the definition of impulse as you have used it. When I read "impulse", I interpret it as a "need", or more specifically a chemical signal in the body that in turn motivates us into action. From that view, I see an impulse as a genetic mechanic that can't be learned. To use food as an example: we have a hunger mechanic which contains a stress hormone that is released when we need food, and a pleasure hormone that is released when we satisfy the need. These things are unlearnable. But, as organisms with the capacity to create memes, what we satisfy the need with can be learned. So we can learn any number of recipes and create food from those.

Can you give me an example of a learned impulse so that I may better understand how you are defining impulse?

Philosopher Eric link

3/19/2020 07:14:33 am

Hopefully I’ll have some time for this as well guys.

That Sam Harris is proposing meditation to help demonstrate that his views are valid, seems sketchy at best. He’ll need far better if he wishes to sufficiently challenge our conception of freewill. (I was discussing freewill a bit earlier today with a new friend: https://reasonablydoubtful1.wordpress.com/2020/03/12/challenging-the-libertarian-conception-of-free-will-with-flatland/comment-page-1/#comment-1069 ). At least Sam didn’t propose that meditation also helps validate his moral realism!

That Annika Harris sympathizes with panpsychism doesn’t surprise me. Trendy people should tend to seek trendy people.

To me the hard “how” of consciousness should only truly be hard for a strong naturalist like myself. How the hell should causal dynamics create phenomenal experience? I don’t know. But if it’s beyond causality then nothing exists even conceptually to understand. So I accept the metaphysics of causality because I seek understandings, or reason over faith.

Conversely there shouldn’t be anything “hard” about this for dualists. Here it’s simply magic. It’s the same for the panpsychist in the sense that they propose that all of reality has a phenomenal characteristic. To me standard software based notions go this way as well. Note that information merely animates the function of a computer screen rather than exists as such. Similarly information should animate mechanisms for producing phenomenal experience rather than exist as such.

Ed, have you heard of a molecular geneticist by the name of Jonjoe McFadden? This UK professor proposes that some of the electromagnetic fields associated with neuron firing, exist as the conscious entity. It’s the only option I know of which doesn’t violate my own extremity of naturalism.

Ed Gibney link

3/19/2020 12:18:17 pm

Hey Eric! Glad to hear from you when you can on this.

I had not heard of Jonjoe McFadden. A quick review found this quote on the wikipedia entry for "Electromagnetic Theories of Cosnciousness"

"David Chalmers[22] argues that quantum theories of consciousness suffer from the same weakness as more conventional theories. Just as he argues that there is no particular reason why particular macroscopic physical features in the brain should give rise to consciousness, he also thinks that there is no particular reason why a particular quantum feature, such as the EM field in the brain, should give rise to consciousness either."

Maybe you could take electromagnetism as the fundament panpsychist view of what consciousness is made up of? Hard for me to say anything intelligible about this without a deep dive into McFadden's work. He seems to rely elsewhere on interpretations of quantum mechanics though and that's a confused mess as far as I can tell so I would be reluctant to build anything off of that.

I really like Gregg Caruso on free will as a free will skeptic. I was lucky enough to hang out in a pub with him and Christian List after they debated this topic last fall. Their debate was written up and recently published:

https://philpapers.org/archive/CARFWR.pdf

Philosopher Eric link

3/19/2020 01:43:53 pm

I totally agree about the quantum stuff Ed. My current understanding is that McFadden has explicitly rejected quantum theories of consciousness, though he’s very much into QM regarding life based function. I don’t know about that, except to say that apparently our computers use a lot of QM to do what they need to, so maybe.

Regardless, no one disputes that neuron firing produces EM fields in the macro world. Indeed, those fields are commonly the evidence that we have for neuron firing itself. The main positive of this theory is that at least a mechanism is proposed beyond just information alone. This sort of theory gets around John Searle’s Chinese room thought experiment (and my own “thumb pain” version of it).

Technically the main strength of such theory is that it provides a ready made solution for “the binding problem”. How does all sorts of neuron firing all over the brain come together to create a single conscious experience? It could be that such firing does so by means of em waves. They talk about how certain neuron firing tends to incite others to produce larger fields, and that this tends to correlate with conscious experience.

I’ll take a look at that Caruso/List debate. I’m pretty confident in my own view that, no, freewill cannot exist in a natural realm, though it can be useful for us to perceive freewill given that our perspectives are so pathetically small.

James of Seattle

3/24/2020 01:00:59 am

I’m not much of a Sam Harris fan, but what he says about the self rings mostly true. And yet, it’s not that there is no “self”, but that “self” is a conceptually loose concept, like heap. Sometimes it’s useful to include your clothes (“I didn’t touch that, my shoe did”), and sometimes it includes some subset of mechanisms in your brain (“hold on, ... I know her name ... it will come to me ...”)

I hadn’t made the connection between Annaka and Sam. Her book is one of the few that I have actually finished recently. I actually liked her review of the field. But in the end she seemed attracted to panpsychism, which is just wrong, but I expect I’ll have more to say about that later in the series.

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Ed Gibney link

3/24/2020 11:32:54 am

James,

Yes, that loose view of the self as a heap holds together. But it's a category error to think the self then exists as something real over and above this. I see the self along the lines of David Hume's bundle theory. Take the properties away one at a time and nothing is left.

And I wouldn't be so bold as to say panpsychism is "just wrong" either. There are too many flavours of it to make such a sweeping gesture, and without a physical understanding of consciousness, it may just be a fundamental attribute of the universe like mass, space, time, and spin. Chalmers lays this out well in the next post. That doesn't help science make progress at all if you declare such things prematurely, but who knows, that may be the concept in the end that is the only way we make sense of things.

James of Seattle

3/25/2020 05:14:39 am

Ed, you’re very kind to treat me with kid gloves. My pronouncement that panpsychism is “wrong” could be described with words much more derogatory than “bold”. I do have reasons for the statement, and I will try to elevate my game.

*

Ed Gibney link

3/25/2020 10:10:03 am

No worries James. I don't think of this as a battle arena so it's not like I was holding back or anything. I'm just trying to encourage helpful dialogue that's as illuminating as possible. In my evolutionary philosophy, I find the win-win of cooperative rational selection a much more preferable process than the win-lose of competitive natural selection.

Astronomer Eric

3/24/2020 12:48:37 pm

I think it’s very important to remind ourselves that we are capable of conjuring up imaginary things like Jabberwocks. If we can conjure these things up, we can conjure gods, free will, elan vital, aether (from a physics standpoint), “self”, etc. I guess from a survival standpoint, we had better be able to quickly conjure up worldviews that are “just good enough to get by” until we can procreate. I think one of the fortunate things (well, maybe it’s fortunate if it doesn’t destroy us in the process) that civilization has brought us is the spare time to sometimes exit the ancestral survival fray so that we can attempt to make our worldview more and more accurate.

The points that Sam makes in this post jive with me…although I have never meditated once in my life because I can’t. I have tourettes or some other such physical twitch syndrome (thankfully no verbal twitches except for maybe excessive grunting), so the longer I try to sit still, the more I just have the urge to twitch. Yet I have reached the same conclusions that Sam has, although maybe it’s more because I have accepted the observations of others like him than because I have come on them by myself.

The first point that Annaka makes about the hard problem and non-conscious material *suddenly* having the experience of being matter both sounds Jabberwockish to me and also doesn’t seem to jive with the theory of evolution. It seems more accurate to me that things gradually appear over time through iteration after iteration rather than just suddenly appearing. Can’t a single cell organism moving towards a food source be considered to be aware of its surroundings at some level, even if it’s arguably much more simple than our awareness?

Currently I feel that the word “consciousness” is on the same Jabberwockish level as “god” or as Mike mentioned, “elan vital”, etc. So when Annika says “Is there any behavior on the outside of a system that can tell us conclusively that consciousness is present in that system?”, I feel like I can replace the word “consciousness” with something like “god” or “elan vital” and get the same feeling.

Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery

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