[From Bill Powers (2010.03.29.1559 MDT)]
Bruce Gregory (2010.03.29.1310 EDT) --
BP: Are you saying you don't have any experience of observing things, aside from the things themselves that are observed? You wouldn't be alone in making that claim, but I find it very hard to understand.
BG: I don't want to be obscure. As I look at it, the self is a story. A story spun by what the neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga calls the "know-it-all interpreter." The know-it-all has a story about everything. It is the "voice in our heads." The view that there is no self is hardly new. The Buddha said it thousands of years ago.
"Suffering alone exists, none who suffer.
The deed there is, but no doer thereof.
Nirvana, but none who seek it.
The Path, but none who travel it."
BP: I agree that there are "stories" we tell ourselves about things, but some stories have been skeptically tested more throughly than others. For example, the story that the moon is a round ball of rock 2000 miles in diameter has been tested by flying around it (or doing something that was experienced as flying around it), and standing on it, and so on. I think that elevates it to the status of a theory, at least. Stories are easy to make up; theories are not. You don't check a story out; theories are nothing unless checked against experiment and observation.
But there's something else about the stories in my head. I know about them; I can hear them in the mind's ear and see the illustrations in the mind's eye. In other words, I can observe them. There they are, and here I am attending to them. When I'm through attending to them I can attend to something else that's already going on, like my breathing. I'm telling a story about this kind of experience because that's the only way to communicate it, but if I'm not trying to communicate it, I don't have to tell any story about it. I just experience it without trying to describe it.
You've seen Tim Carey's comment on this (which reached CSGnet just fine, Tim). He agrees that he observes, but says that the observing is another perception like all other perceptions. That's not a description of an experience, but more like a scientific theory. We don't observe neural signals in ourselves; theory tells us we do, but experience says nothing in that regard. Speaking as a theorist, I can agree that maybe it is a brain function like a perceptual input function, but if it is, it has some strange properties. At one moment I can be internally perceiving a pain in my toe where I kicked a rock by accident (intensity, sensation), and in the next moment I can be aware of someone laughing at my clumsiness and of my evaluation of my relationship with that person, and for the moment take my attention off the pain. I feel like the same observer in either case. What sort of neural circuit could do that kind of thing? Such a circuit would have to have perceptual input connections from a great many systems at each level from bottom to top. There would have to be an immense switching system to select which of the possible lower-order signals were to be accepted and perceived by awareness and the switching would be directed somehow -- it seems like an act of will, but without any willing entity, all we could say is that the strongest signal causes switching to be directed to it, somehow, with no internal motivation to do so. I don't think any such connection network has ever been found in the brain or built into an artificial control system.
That's what I meant by saying it sounds like S-R. A control system is a piece of machinery and it can behave only as it is made to behave by reference signals and perceptual signals. There is neither volition nor consciousness in any control system I have seen, either artificial or natural. The fact that living control systems are made of soft materials rather than silicon or glass and copper doesn't endow them with consciousness. The only observer of the workings of a thermostat is the person examining it. It has no consciousness of its own that I know of. I have built temperature controllers of several kinds, and they all worked fine without any consciousness, though they couldn't learn or set their own reference levels.
BG: Interestingly, the Buddha's psychological insight is consistent with contemporary neuroscience. There is no "I" in the brain as far as we can tell.
BP: There are no sensations or system concepts or ideas or colors or pains in the brain, either, as far as neuroscience can tell. Those terms are descriptions of experiences, not trains of neural impulses or concentrations of neurotransmitters. Neural impulses look the same anywhere in the brain. I would rather call the Buddha's insight his theory or proposition; to call it an insight implies that it is the apprehension of something that is known to be true, and that there is no use doubting it, which is not the case when it comes to the presence or absence of an I. Uttering a statement with an air of great confidence doesn't make it true, even if the person uttering it is an Indian prince.
BG: The hierarchy alone exists, none who observe it.
BP: That's what I mean. What is missing from that proposition is " ... because..." and a suitable attempt to demonstrate that this is true. It's just a proposition, which I feel perfectly free to doubt.
BG: Here is a quote from Oliver Sachs that may be helpful (or perhaps not).
�Thus, in one patient under my care, a sudden thrombosis in the posterior circulation of the brain caused the immediate death of the visual parts of the brain. Forthwith this person became completely blind�but did not know it. He looked blind, but he made no complaints. Questioning and testing showed, beyond doubt, that not only was he centrally or �cortically� blind, but he had lost all visual images, and memories, lost them totally�yet had no sense of any loss. Indeed, he had lost the very idea of seeing�and was not only unable to describe anything visually, but bewildered when I used words such as �seeing� and �light.� He had become, in essence, a non-visual being. His entire lifetime of seeing, of visuality, had, in effect, been stolen. His whole visual life had, indeed, been erased�and erased permanently in the instant of his stroke."
BP: An excellent argument for the local, rather than central, storage of memories. However, it has nothing to do with awareness or consciousness, because it describes what has been lost and therefore what is no longer accessible to observation. The "idea of seeing" is an idea, activity in the brain. If that activity stops, there is no idea of seeing available to observation even though awareness still functions, just as when you close your eyes, there is no visual image to observe even though the eyes are still functioning. The loss of all memories of ever having had vision is sufficiently strange that I'd like to get some verification on that before accepting it as a fact, but if indeed the memory traces had been erased as Sacks says, they would not be there to be observed, even with the observer still functioning.
BG: I won't pretend this view is easy or obvious. It is like mathematics. As John von Neumann observed, "You don't understand mathematics; you just get used to it."
It takes quite a bit of practice to get used to it.
I suppose one can believe anything by trying long enough to believe it, but that's not how I prefer to work. Give me a reason for getting used to it and I might try it. But I don't believe important statements just because someone makes them. Even if I make them.
Best,
Bill P.