Michael Gazzaniga is a brain guy, and in his book, “The Mind’s Past,” he confronts this issue. He comes up with an answer that’s satisfying to him but not to me. I can use the following passages as a point of departure for talking about his and most people’s difficulties with this subject and where I think they arise.

Our mind has an absurdly hard time when it tries to control our automatic brain. Remember the night you woke up at 3 A.M., full of worry about this and that? Such concerns always look black in the middle of the night. Remember how you tried to put them aside and get back to sleep? Remember how bad you were at it? (p. 22)

Nowhere is the issue of ourselves and our brain more apparent than when we see how ineffectual the mind is at trying to control the brain. In those terms, the conscious self is like a harried playground monitor, a hapless entity charged with the responsibility of keeping track of multitudinous brain impulses running in all directions at once. And yet the mind is the brain, too. What’s going on?(p. 23)

After spending the book talking about what we know about how the brain works and how we know it, his answer in the end was to rejoice that we have the illusion of being in control.

In the example he gives of waking up in the middle of the night, he describes it as if there are two entities involved—our mind is trying to control our brain. Let me reframe the situation:

Many people have pointed out that what we’re thinking about at one time or another is the result of a sort of competition between different neural networks in the brain.  (Several years after he wrote this book, Gazzaniga took this position himself.) The example I’ve used before is the case where you stand on the scale in the morning and look at your weight and you think, “I’ve got to lose some weight,” or whatever your issue is. Everyone has, at one time or another, some sort of issue: I’ve gotta stop biting my nails, gotta quit smoking.

At the time we’re standing on the scale, it seems like it’s a very important thing, and it’s something we really need to work on, but at the time we’re sitting down to eat, there’s something else that takes over. The reality of the brain is that there is a neural network that is active when we’re standing on the scale that is brought to the fore by the fact that we are standing on the scale, and because we’re standing on the scale, the appropriate thing to think, the most important thing to think, the outcome of the competition between all the possible things we could be thinking, is the thought that we need to lose weight.

When we’re sitting down to dinner, we’re in a different environment. We’re being stimulated by different things, and there is, again, a competition between various networks in the brain about what’s most important at the moment. Depending on our history with food, the network that comes to the fore at that point usually has more to do with what tastes good to us, and the wonderful feeling we get when we are satiated, and that network has a tendency to dominate our thinking at the moment.

So the point is that as we go through the day, and as our brain reacts to different circumstances, different neural networks come into play and become the dominant network in that particular environment, with the result that our behavior in one environment is at odds with our behavior in another. We have difficulty when we’re in one mode—when we’re standing on the scale—understanding why it is that this other mode dominates when we sit down to eat.

When we leave the area of the bathroom scale, we’re in a different environment, and different thoughts come to mind. When we’re getting dressed we’re thinking about what we have to do for the day—our list of to-do items—or what we’re going to do at work, or whatever.

The problem that Gazzaniga and everyone else has with this issue is that we have a feeling of unity, that we are the same person in all those circumstances, and we don’t recognize that, in a sense, there’s a different person operating in each change of circumstances that brings forth its own set of memories, its own set of associations, so that who we are varies through the day, since all of those things can’t be active at once.

The brain’s way of coping with reality is to ask, figuratively, “What environment am I in at the moment? What is relevant to this environment? What is important for me to focus on?” Most of this juggling of what’s important goes on behind the scenes.

So to have a concept of our self that is in keeping with the reality of the brain, what we have to realize is that we are not one person. We are a variety people. We are a whole set of personalities that arise as we go through the day, and what Gazzaniga points out is that we have to somehow reconcile all those different personalities. There is the social necessity of unifying all the various aspects of ourselves, and presenting ourselves in a way that makes us predictable to a certain extent in social situations.

For things to work smoothly, there must be some consistency, and that necessity for consistency has a tendency to overshadow all the variety within our selves, so that people say things like, “I’m so angry with myself.” What they’re really saying is that the configuration of neural networks that’s active at the moment is angry with the behavior of a set of neural networks that was active at a previous time, and that did something that is now causing regrettable consequences for the set of neural networks that is in the foreground at the moment.

To give an example of how seeing this diversity, this multiplicity of selves, can be helpful, take the weight issue. The network that is active when you’re on the scales needs to find a way to reinforce itself so that in the circumstances where it’s really important to be in the forefront, it will be. A possible scenario—this wouldn’t work for everyone—but when you’re away from the table, when you’re not about to eat something, subscribe to a health newsletter. I subscribe to several: the Berkeley Wellness Letter, Consumer Reports on Health, Harvard Women’s Health Watch. They come in the mail, I leave them lying around, and they all say the same things: smoking is bad for you; being overweight is not healthy; you need to eat fruits and vegetables. So the set of neural networks that’s active on the scale takes advantage of the absence of the glutton to subscribe to various things, and to put props in the environment that reinforce the idea of doing whatever it is: getting to the gym, or whatever. You subscribe to a health magazine that has pictures of these happy people on the front that are physically fit, and you leave them lying around, and you read the articles, even, and you tell yourself, this is what I want to be. You stand in front of the mirror naked—this is what I do—I look at my body and I say, “Is this the way I want my body to look?”

So I reinforce that set of neural networks that thinks it’s important to lose weight, and ideally, then, what happens is that when one sits down to eat there’s a little nagging network on the edge of consciousness, and sometimes it gets brought to the fore—and it can get brought to the fore more and more frequently—that says, “I should have a salad, maybe, with low fat dressing;” that makes healthier choices. Or choose the dish with all the vegetables in it. Have some fruit with your whole grain cereal in the morning.

In that way you can put to use the knowledge you have that different neural networks are operating at different times of day, in different environments.

So to get back to Michael Gazzaniga’s example of 3 A.M. in the morning, struggling with these thoughts, trying to get back to sleep. It’s not that the mind is struggling with the automatic brain, as he puts it, to quiet the thoughts that are keeping one awake. It’s that there’s a neural net that is concerned with sleep and rest that is struggling with another neural net that thinks that these things that one is thinking about are more important than sleeping. So what we experience in consciousness is, at one moment, the neural network that is in favor of sleep comes to the fore and says, “I’ve got to stop thinking about this stuff,” and the next moment, the neural network that involves the disturbing thoughts is coming to the fore—it’s winning the competition at that moment of what is important in the brain.

This competition is going on among all the things that the brain is aware of at any one time, prompted by the environment: The bills that have to be paid with not enough money, or the relationship that’s gone sour—whatever it is that one’s thinking about—and the part of the brain that deals with those issues is in ascendency.  It’s getting reinforcement from other parts of the brain. It’s like a committee meeting in that there are different factions in the brain that say, “Oh, this is the thing that we have to deal with,” and another faction says, “Oh no, this is the thing we have to deal with.” We don’t really see all the behind the scenes negotiations; what we see is what emerges in the foreground, and it ends up being this alternation between the need for sleep and the need to deal with these issues.

If our brain is deluded, thinking that we have a single self, then it doesn’t have the information about its own workings that could make it more effective in managing the organism.

Consider yourself informed, at least partially. There’s much to be learned.

(This is an edited excerpt from my podcast, Bare Brains Episode Three. Full transcript here.)

	Web www.rentine.com

I woke up this morning and began my usual routine—washing my face, drinking tea, etc.—but it soon became clear that something was different, or at least it felt different. It felt like I was watching myself perform these usual, mundane tasks, except it wasn’t really me. I was isolated from my body in some sense, and it was going through its motions without me except as a neutral observer. Everything in my apartment seemed altered in some way, shifted by millimeters, perhaps—just enough to make it all seem slightly surreal.

That state of mind is something that my brain has learned to value and to achieve in varying degrees. It knows most of my daily routine well enough to do it without generating consciousness of how it’s being done, and when it’s inclined to dampen its verbal chatter, can become absorbed in watching its various modules just doing their jobs. This morning was different in that there was no sense of intention to achieve that state of mind. It had emerged without effort as an after-effect of watching a movie with Gloria last night: Fight Club.

Without giving the movie away, I can tell you that the main character starts out in an Ikea, corporate-dominated reality that is transformed into the most opposite world you can imagine—perhaps more opposite than you can imagine. Those two radically different realities put my own everyday reality into perspective, even though it’s wildly different from both those portrayed in the movie.

This morning, seeing my formerly normal routines from what seemed a mildly skewed vantage point led to questions about my current life: How did I come to be here, in this apartment, in this city, with this extensive collection of habits and proclivities, devoting my time and energy to an inexhaustible flow of art, writing, and handyman projects. Like the character in the movie, a series of events and experiences had altered my brain in mostly unconscious, imperceptible ways, leading it to make the choices that brought me here.

As I thought about my most recent transition—from a happily married, working, railroad engineer, through a period of not-so-happily-married retirement, to living in this apartment with all its accumulated compliment of stuff—I realized that it was just the latest in a lifetime series of more or less radical transformations. These are some of the major personas that have occupied this organism:

1. 1961: Small-town southern Christian, most-likely-to-succeed president of the senior class

2. Disoriented atheist fumbling through 2 years of college

3. Reoriented as sociology major with 4-point average in one term of final year

4. 1966: At beginning of 2nd year of graduate school, star student drops out, becomes cafeteria worker, divorces wife of one year who goes on to become professor

5. 1967: Becomes Air Force ICBM missile launch officer in Montana to avoid Vietnam, marries again

6. 1971: Pot-smoking, psychedelic hippie English lit and auto mechanics student on GI Bill, railroad switchman in Eugene, Oregon

7. 1976: Now living in San Francisco, pot-smoking, psychedelic hippie railroad switchman/brakeman/conductor homeowner gets second divorce, trades house for live-aboard sailboat, then sells it and gets clean and sober

8. 1984: Moves to Tucson, Arizona to be railroad engineer, marries for third time to fellow engineer, gets divorce in less than two years

9. 1989: Moves to Oakland, CA, buys house with girlfriend, gets married so she can collect pension, retires in 2004, moves into apartment in 2005

10. 2012: ?

Through all these states and changes, what am I? Publicly I am the whole organism with its names, legal responsibilities, and actions. Privately I am my experience—lived, remembered, anticipated.

Stimulated by the movie, I began analyzing my current life, asking what might be changed. Perhaps the most radical thing would be to sell everything I own, move to another country, and start life over again. Between that and simply continuing as I am, there are infinite possibilities. What experiences have I not had that seem inviting? What sorts of accomplishments might be more fun or rewarding than the projects I’m currently embarked on? The questions have been asked; decisions to alter course, or not, will emerge sooner or later.

My life has given me a set of values and preferences, and has led me toward enjoying and actualizing many of them, along with the willingness to make radical changes on occasion. It continues to offer stimulation and encourage exploration.

What about you?

Nothing is set in stone until you’re dead.

	Web www.rentine.com

I got clean and sober in Alcoholics Anonymous, and I think one of the key aspects of the program is making amends to people who have been harmed by our actions—whether they were drug-related or not— “except when to do so would injure them or others.” When I was 11—when sugar was my only drug—I shoplifted the occasional candy bar from the gas station where I picked up the newspapers for my route. At the age of 40 I sent the station owner a check as part of making amends.

That might seem too trivial to bother with, but since I remembered it as something I had felt ashamed of, both then and later, I thought it worth doing. By the time I finished the process of making amends I felt cleansed, absolved, guilt-free. I no longer had to get high to feel good about myself, although my transition to the straight and happy life was far from over.

Few of us reach adulthood without having harmed someone along the way, and despite our tendency to rationalize all our unsavory acts, I think there is a memory of transgression at some level of brain machinery that is unreachable by rationalization. Research with dogs, monkeys—and perhaps other animals I’ve missed—indicate that even they have a sense of fair play. No doubt the roots of our own run deep, right down to the DNA.

We certainly note when someone treats us unfairly, but it’s likely that we also note our own acts in violation of that sense as well—whether we want to or not—and that they undermine our self-esteem at some level. We are not as nice as we’d like to think.

When rationalization fails to immunize us against our bad opinion of ourselves, drugs and alcohol may be more successful. Dopamine levels rise, pleasure centers are stimulated, and all is right with the world, no matter what we may have done. The brain compensates for increased neurotransmitters by decreasing sensitivity in one way or another, and addiction is under way.

If we get to the point that the addiction is too painful to continue, stopping then involves two problems: the lack of self-esteem which the drugs temporarily eliminated, and the changes the drugs made in our brains.

While our lack of free will means we could not have done other than cause the harm we did, and therefore we lack ultimate responsibility, the fact remains that harm was done, and our organism was the agent of that harm. Eleven-year-old Norm could not have done other than steal those candy bars, but adult Norm is capable of paying for them, plus interest, and can’t help but feel better for having done so.

My earlier take on guilt was that it was a cultural mechanism that had evolved for promoting social conformity, but I had not considered that social necessity might have selected for fair-playing/guilt-prone organisms. I had not considered that my understanding of natural causation in itself might not be enough to counter those built-in genetic tendencies, that they might demand satisfaction on other than a strictly intellectual level.

Perhaps it will take more than diet and exercise to put my friend on the road to better health. Perhaps he needs to understand the nature and origin of his addictions, and the necessity of undoing, in so far as possible, the harm his organism has done on its naturally programmed journey. From there he can begin rebuilding non-drug activated pleasure networks. (Smiling helps.)

It occurs to me that there may be a parallel between making amends and the blood sacrifices of our primitive ancestors. Although there are no supernatural gods to appease, perhaps our current selves must of necessity make some sacrifice to undo the harm caused by prior selves; to appease the mechanisms of DNA—the “gods” within.

Refurbished Pleasure Centers

	Web www.rentine.com

Just this morning I had a gratifying example of the advantage of understanding the causal chain that produces thought. I was doing the first of my Tai Chi warm-ups, which involves rotating the upper torso first one direction and then the other, and I was doing more than recommended, of course—a fairly consistent trait that’s a product of my personal history—rotating as far as I could for twice as many reps. About halfway through I realized I had forgotten to take off my glasses, which get in the way during post-Tai-Chi stretches, and when I stepped forward to put them on the desk I found that the twisting had made me dizzy, which brought on a little rush of fear. Several bouts of vertigo have married dizziness to fear, thanks to the zealous efforts of my amygdala.

I had recently read a column, “Vital Signs” in the April 2011 issue of Discover magazine, in which Mark Cohen discussed the activity of the amygdala and its likely role in the phenomenon of selective mutism. He brought up the possibility that cognitive-behavioral therapy could modify the amygdala’s association of emotion with a particular situation, since it gets feedback from cortical centers.

Primed by the Discover article, when I experienced that little rush of fear this morning it was accompanied by the thought, “Ah, my amygdala is arousing the sympathetic nervous system because it has paired fear with the sensation of dizziness.” That thought brought on a smile, which cancelled the fear.

My brain continued with that line of thought, considering that when I get my next real bout of vertigo/fear, it might remember that the amygdala is at work, and that fear makes the discomfort worse, not better. Maybe the next time I wake up and find the room whirling, my brain will produce the much more helpful phenomenon of smiling.

As the brain comes to understand itself better, a change in perspective occurs; when feelings arise they seem less personal. One part of the brain can monitor what another part is doing, and can alter the sense of self accordingly: I am not afraid, a part of my brain is mistakenly arousing an emotion that is disadvantageous to the organism as a whole.

When the brain realizes it has been bamboozled by society into thinking that it has free will, it gains an effective new strategy for optimizing its organism’s adaptation to reality—the job for which evolution selected it. This new strategy requires some effort, though. To make the best use of it, the brain needs to study its own processes to get at least a basic understanding of neuroscience and psychology. PhD’s in those disciplines are not required; Wikipedia and the popular media offer enough education to allow huge improvements in adaptive skills.

Many of my earlier posts have explored some of the implications of new knowledge in these areas as I’ve encountered it. Other excellent sources of information are Tom Clark’s book, Encountering Naturalism, his web site, naturalism.org, Cris Evatt’s site on Brain Biases and my book High School Zen.

Realizing that we don’t have free will opens a whole new world of adaptive opportunity: a chance for the brain to construct a more effective, reality-based version of itself.

	Web www.rentine.com

 

As the distress faded I thought, “What a strange idea, that I could somehow exist separately from my brain, that it could imprison me.” It seemed ludicrous that I could have such a thought, and yet the feeling of being locked in and pushed around had felt totally real and oppressive. It was perplexing and laughable at the same time.

I found my brain thinking through the convolutions of how it could create an entity that then felt trapped inside it.

It soon came up with a parallel: conscious visual experience. I have the feeling that I have seamless visual access to the world, but that experience is the product of a lot of complicated processing in which the brain uses shortcuts and workarounds to convert an avalanche of fragmented data into a useful model.

Despite my intellectual understanding of its construction, my visual world-model still looks seamless, “out there,” flawless, and instantly accessible. For the most part, there’s no real advantage in dwelling on the fact that it’s all in my head; it works well just as it is.

My sense of self is the product of even more complex processing, and in some ways it’s equally constrained by reality. If my visual system misrepresented the real world I might walk off an unseen cliff; if my self-model misrepresented my abilities, I might walk off an accurately visualized cliff, thinking I was immune to gravity.

While the physical world puts constraints on the self-model, in the brain’s descriptions of its own internal processes it is susceptible to wide departures from reality. The brain doesn’t have conscious access to most of what it does, and is free to imagine a self that makes decisions freely, independent of prior circumstances or reason. It can even imagine the self as a soul-like thing that exists outside the brain. Scientific understanding of how brains work shows that this antiquated model deviates wildly from reality, and that such deviations exact a price in guilt, shame, anxiety, and more.

I could see now that my distress this morning had resulted from the temporary activation of this ancient and inaccurate soul-like self-model, despite my brain’s trying to develop the habit of keeping such inaccuracies in check. A lapse of mindfulness had allowed the culprit through.

Mindfulness comes up fairly often in discussions of the brain these days; in fact I had just seen reference to it in an article on daydreaming and the “default network,” by Josie Glausiusz in the March 2011 issue of Scientific American Mind. (Here’s a more research-oriented article on the same subject.) It seems most people spend about 30 percent of their waking hours in the non-task-focused default network—day-dreaming, spaced-out, etc.—and most people are unaware that they’ve drifted away from what they were supposed to be doing.

The default network is an interesting subject in itself, but what struck me was that here, once again, no one is in charge of the switch from task-focused to default mode. The brain is pursuing its own nonconscious agenda, and without warning or fanfare, can decide that instead of reading the book in front of you, it would rather take you on an imaginary trip through Spain.

Which reminds me of a Zen story I first encountered in the early 90’s: Having completed his ten-year apprenticeship and become a teacher, Tenno had gone to visit Nan-in. It was a rainy day, and Nan-in asked whether Tenno had left his umbrella to the left or the right of his shoes. Realizing he didn’t know, that he hadn’t reached the level of “every-minute Zen,” Tenno studied with Nan-in for another six years.

My reaction at the time was that the idea of paying attention to every trivial detail of life was ridiculous, and that I certainly had better things to do.

Thinking of every-minute Zen in terms of the “default mode,” it would seem to mean one would never indulge in day-dreaming, never mentally wander from the task at hand, although it might not rule out the possibility that one could activate the default mode deliberately. In any case, assuming Tenno and others accomplished such a state of control, what would that tell us about brain function?

Marvin Minsky might say that different parts of the brain jockeying for control of the brain’s scarce resources is a normal part of how the brain works; that in Tenno’s case, one part of the brain has learned to control other parts. (In fact, he points out that such “direct control” might be dangerous, and evolution may have selected against it.[p. 93])

In an earlier blog post I looked at this idea in greater detail while discussing Minsky’s Emotion Machine, using this quote, among others:

“…when you see the mind as a cloud of conflicting resources… you can imagine that, while some parts of your mind are uncomfortable, other parts of your mind may enjoy forcing those first parts to work for them.”(p. 325)

Mindfulness raises the possibility that we can learn to keep track of which parts are forcing the others to work. While we might not want to go to Tenno’s extreme, we could acquire a useful level of mindfulness in the same way we would acquire any other habit. It first has to come to be seen as valuable, which means that it has to be reinforced by factors in one’s environment, just like any other value. (I’m trying to reinforce it now.) None of us acquires a desire to eat healthy foods, get physically fit, learn to play the piano, etc., unless those desires are reinforced by exposure to media, authorities, and peers, and the same is true of mindfulness, or what is sometimes called “meta-awareness.” Sufficient practice turns these desires into habitual responses and behaviors.

The level of mindfulness my brain has developed so far made it possible to recognize that an undesirable self-model had become dominant this morning, and ushered a preferable one to the fore, which then presided over ruminations about the whole process.

Understanding the brain is a complicated business; sometimes it’s like Abbot and Costello’s Who’s On First in here.

Keeping Things in Perspective

	Web www.rentine.com

 

Although he doesn’t specifically use the term “free will” in the book, the argument he presented in the article was taken almost word-for-word from page 271. (A less-edited video and transcript of the conversation between Siri Hustvedt and Damasio which was the basis of the Discover piece can be found at bigthink.com, along with an interview of Damasio.)

So he wasn’t misrepresented; he tries very hard to make the case for free will without actually using the term. In spite of his intentions, however, the book has much to offer to those of us who don’t believe in free will. Much of it makes a very good case for our not having it, and is well worth reading for that reason. All you have to do is exercise your critical thinking skills and rewrite all the passages where he is trying to demonstrate that the tail wags the dog, or just strike through those that are nonsensical. I’ll give some examples shortly, but first…

If you have not learned to exercise critical thinking in this area and believe in free will, you will happily follow Damasio down the garden path, and you, too, will find this book very rewarding.

Now, back to those examples for critical thinkers:

Here’s one, among many, that you’ll just have to strike through: “We all have free access to consciousness, bubbling so easily and abundantly in our minds that without hesitation or apprehension we let it be turned off every night when we go to sleep and allow it to return every morning when the alarm clock rings…”(p. 4) Some of us are more reluctant than others to have consciousness turned off, but the idea that anyone could “allow it to return” is nonsensical. How could someone who is unconscious allow consciousness to return? You have to be conscious to “allow” anything, which means consciousness has to return before you can allow it to return. What?

Back on the planet, he writes: “Mind is a most natural result of evolution, and it is largely nonconscious, internal, and unrevealed. It comes to be known thanks to the narrow window of consciousness.”(p. 177) If Damasio could embrace the implications of this statement, much of the conceptual briar patch he’s tangled in would disappear. Instead he goes on to tangle himself further with this: “Consciousness offers a direct experience of mind, but the broker of the experience is a self…” The brain creates the self and then the self arranges or negotiates our experience of the mind? This reminds me of an Escher drawing of stairways in which you can go upstairs or down but either way you end up in the same place. How do we parse this statement into something that coheres with what we know about the brain? Come along…

Damasio is perfectly willing to grant control of huge swaths of our behavior to nonconscious brain processes:

“Spontaneously and nonconsciously, the brain stem answers questions that no one poses, such as, how much should the situation matter to the beholder? Value determines the signal and degree of emotional responses to a situation as well as how awake and alert we are to be.”(pp. 186-187)

“… the autobiographical self leads a double life. On the one hand, it can be overt, making up the conscious mind at its grandest and most human; on the other, it can be dormant, its myriad components waiting their turn to become active. That other life of the autobiographical self takes place offscreen, away from accessible consciousness, and that is possibly where and when the self matures, thanks to the gradual sedimentation and reworking of one’ s memory.”(p. 210)

Damasio even cites an ingenious experiment of his own in which subjects make choices that indicate their brains have deduced probabilities long before they become conscious of them: “In all likelihood, there is an important reasoning process going on nonconsciously, in the subterranean mind, and the reasoning produces results without the intervening steps ever being known.”(p. 276)

Disregarding such insights, Damasio wants to find a job for the conscious self, and in addition to calling it the “broker,” mentioned above, he calls it variously the owner, protagonist, agent, proprietor, conductor, entry into knowledge, window, knower; a process, a state, a function, and perhaps others I have missed. All these are intended to present the self as an entity that exerts some degree of conscious control over the brain.

Patricia Churchland thinks of the self much differently: “…what is the ‘self’ of self-control? What am I? In essence, the self is a construction of the brain; a real, but brain-dependent organizational network for monitoring body states, setting priorities and, within the brain itself, creating the separation between inner world and outer world. In its functionality, it is a bit like a utility on your computer, though one that has evolved to grow and develop.”

Much of what Damasio writes in his book can be taken as a fleshing out of just this definition, but he would rebel at describing the self as a “utility,” even though such an interpretation would save him endless conceptual contortions. If he were to accept Churchland’s view, then the idea of “conscious deliberation”—which he relies on heavily to support belief in free will—could be reframed in a way that actually made sense.

Here’s his description: “Conscious deliberation is largely about decisions taken over extended periods of time, as much as days or weeks in the case of some decisions, and rarely less than minutes or seconds. It is not about split-second decisions.”

He mentions split-second decisions because many researchers, some of whom he cites, have demonstrated that the brain makes such decisions prior to their becoming conscious. Damasio acknowledges the validity of their research, but claims that it doesn’t reflect on free will because the decisions they were examining were immediate, “in the moment,” whereas conscious deliberation takes place over extended periods of time.

No matter how long such deliberations may take, each of the conscious thoughts involved—“I should get a new job; it should be in a different city,” etc.—emerges “in the moment” from the interactions of millions of neurons, and those interactions are just as unavailable to consciousness as those leading to a thought like, “I should move my finger now.”

Given this and all the other evidence he cites, it seems reasonable to alter his dictum that “Conscious deliberation… is a major consequence of consciousness,”(p. 271) to “consciousness of deliberation indicates that deliberation is taking place.” The brain deliberates—that’s its job—and when such deliberations are its top priority, some of the options it’s considering become conscious. Here’s a passage that could be greatly improved by taking such a point of view:

“…we need to be aware of the peculiar hurdle faced by our consciously deliberated decisions—they have to find a way into the cognitive unconscious in order to permeate the action machinery—and we need to facilitate that influence. One way to transpose the hurdle would be the intense conscious rehearsal of the procedures and actions we wish to see nonconsciously realized, a process of repeated practice that results in mastering a performing skill, a consciously composed psychological action program gone underground.”(p. 281)

Reinterpreted it becomes: Conscious rehearsal of procedures and actions is an indication that the brain has found them important enough to devote large portions of its resources to learning them well so that they become skills—habits that can be enacted unconsciously with fewer resources. The fact that some skills and decisions develop over time, with many episodes and possibilities becoming conscious, only means that those particular jobs are difficult and the brain is taking them very seriously.

Another reason that the steps in processing such big-time decisions recur in consciousness is that the brain has to explain itself to its peers. It has to invent descriptions of its processes that can be expressed in language and communicated to others. Such explanations are always conscious, indicating that they monopolize large portions of brain resources, and rehearsing them makes the conversation go more smoothly when it’s time to take the stage.

This necessity for communication calls to mind Michael Gazzaniga’s concept of the “interpreter,” of which Damasio says, “there is a distinct ring of truth to it.”(p. 204) He references it while writing about the “core self” and says it doesn’t apply to that entity. Seventy pages later, however, he says, “…storytelling is something brains do, naturally and implicitly. Implicit storytelling has created our selves, and it should be no surprise that it pervades the entire fabric of human societies and cultures.”(p. 293) Here, where Gazzaniga’s interpreter would fit perfectly, Damasio doesn’t bring it up, and thereby avoids pointing toward Gazzaniga’s conclusion, which contradicts his own.

As Gazzaniga says, “We human beings have a centric view of the world. We think our personal selves are directing the show most of the time. I argue that recent research shows this is not true but simply appears to be true because of a special device in our left brain called the interpreter. This one device creates the illusion that we are in charge of our actions, and it does so by interpreting our past—the prior actions of our nervous system.”(The Mind’s Past, p. xiii) (Gazzaniga’s book is not without problems of its own, discussed in my review on Amazon.)

I have been reading, thinking, and writing about consciousness and the human condition for more than two decades, and I could go on for pages about the assets and liabilities of this book. There is gold here, but it takes some digging and polishing to appreciate it.

The self is the brain’s model of who it and its organism are, but since it can perceive very little of it’s own processes, it depends on feedback from outside sources—much of it wrong—in constructing that model. Our ideas about the self evolved over millennia of social living, and there is perhaps nothing more difficult than trying to replace those ancient but mistaken ideas with a concept that is consistent with contemporary understanding of the brain. The process can be terrifying, and your life has to give you the desire and prepare you to undertake the challenge. Damasio has my complete sympathy.

(If you’re new to the idea of life without free will, Tom Clark’s book, Encountering Naturalism, and mine, High School Zen, might be helpful.)

Transparent Reality

	Web www.rentine.com

Tweet

]]>

It’s interesting that Hustvedt brought up the question of free will early on, and that Damasio supported her contention that we have it. He seems to accept that the kinds of decisions Libet’s experiments dealt with demonstrate the absence of free will, in that the brain makes a decision prior to its becoming conscious, but proclaims that “most of the decisions important for one’s life are not made in the same way we decide to move a finger…” The difference, he says, is that we deliberate on the more important decisions for long periods of time; they don’t occur “in the moment of execution of the action.”

No matter how long such deliberations may take, each of the conscious thoughts involved, “I should get a new job; it should be in a different city,” etc., emerges “in the moment” from the interactions of millions of neurons, and those interactions are just as unavailable to consciousness as those leading to a thought like, “I should move my finger now.”

I have benefited greatly from Damasio’s work, primarily in his reiteration in various contexts of ideas that refute the concept of free will, like this one from The Feeling of What Happens: “Emotions can be induced in a nonconscious manner and thus appear to the conscious self as seemingly unmotivated.”(p.48) Like emotions, decisions emerge from nonconscious processes, but the fact that they may seem “unmotivated” does not mean they are free of the cause and effect relationships that are the essence of science.

Damasio is not alone in his inability to embrace the implications of his otherwise insightful investigations. Unfortunately he has much intelligent and knowledgeable company.

Here’s the letter as it appeared in the March, 2011 issue:

Is Free Will a Myth?
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio and novelist Siri Hustvedt discussed the deep mysteries of consciousness and free will in “Of Two Minds” (page 64).
Damasio and Hustvedt explain that when making a decision to move a finger, a person does not become conscious of the action until after the brain has issued the command to move. Damasio contrasts that with more important decisions (like choosing whom to marry), arguing that we still have free will for these decisions because we have time to deliberate and reflect. But no matter how long such deliberations may take, each of the thoughts involved emerges “in the moment” from the interactions of millions of neurons—interactions just as unavailable to consciousness as those leading to the motion of a finger. It is interesting that Damasio accepts the absence of free will in the finger example but not in choosing a partner.

The article was intended to promote his new book, Self Comes to Mind, of which I’ve written a review.

A video and transcript of the conversation between Hustvedt and Damasio is available at bigthink.

Decisions Emerging

 

	Web www.rentine.com

 

 

Tweet

]]>

My own brain wasn’t agile enough to come up with a brief and insightful comment, and besides, no one asked for any. The nice thing about having a blog, though, is that I can offer my opinion without being asked, and my brain can take it’s own plodding time to come up with one, therefore…

Don’t believe everything your brain tells you. Brains don’t automatically know how they work, and as a result, they sometimes misinterpret their own workings. By studying how other people’s brains’ abilities have been altered by stroke or injury, our brains can learn things about themselves that they couldn’t learn by introspection, and can correct some of their faulty interpretations.

The first bit of information every brain needs in order to evaluate its experiences doesn’t involve brain damage, however, but an understanding of a built-in limitation of the organ: its limited capacity for attention. There is a wonderfully relevant article in the current issue of Scientific American Mind, called “Mind over Magic?”. It goes into detail about how magicians have, for centuries, exploited the limits of attention to perform their feats, and about the neurophysiology involved. Not only is attention inherently limited, but when it’s directed toward one thing, the brain actively suppresses firing in neurons that are stimulated by that thing’s surroundings to bring it into sharper focus.

The object of attention is determined by the interplay of external and internal stimuli, and in order to experience the “nothingness” my friend was interested in, we have to become convinced that that experience is more important than anything else, internal or external, that might tempt our attention. Our personal history—some sort of study or contact with a teacher—has to lead us toward that conviction and give us the willingness to practice, and has to provide us with an idea of what “nothingness” might be like. The brain’s ability to focus attention on one thing and suppress everything else allows it to create that and any number of other amazing experiences.

When we understand how the brain works, then the skill of experiencing nothingness can be seen as no more unusual than learning the skill of playing the violin: it takes devoted practice, but it is not beyond the brain’s natural capabilities. It doesn’t constitute contact with anything beyond normal reality; no otherworldliness required.

The experience of functioning without the sense of self being involved can be seen as a variant of the same skill of focusing attention that allows the experience of nothingness. The sense of being a person, a self, is located in particular parts of the brain—malfunctioning brains have taught us a lot here—and when attention is focused tightly enough in other areas, there isn’t enough attention left to monitor one’s selfhood, resulting in what Meister Eckhart called the total “poverty” of the self. Again, unusual, but not unnatural, brain function.

There are many motivations for wanting to develop the focused attention that meditation practice makes possible. When I first encountered the idea, I thought it was about getting high. Later, I thought it was about finding a higher truth; something unavailable in ordinary experience. Both those motivations are based on the idea that ordinary reality is unsatisfactory, which is true, I think, in a sense.

Most of us grow up with conventional ideas about what it is to be human, and for many of us, those ideas are uninspiring, to say the least: get an education so you can get a good job so you can raise a family, etc. Join the rat-race.

It turns out that the problem is not with reality, but with the limited values and options that most of us learn; with the limited idea of human possibilities. Learning what we are—how our brain works and how we acquire values—opens us up to consider a broader range of possibilities, to explore the values of eras and geographies other than those we grew up in.

In my own explorations, I came to the conclusion that nothingness was not particularly interesting; it’s like dying without actually being dead.

Turning off self-consciousness has been more rewarding. Learning to do things like wash the dishes without my brain running its habitual self-maintenance routine is a nice break, but being involved in social life means I have to keep my “story” current, although not as obsessively as once was the case.

As for getting high, I had an experience on LSD a few times that I’ve learned to reproduce, and it can be fun on occasion. It involves closing my eyes and focusing on visual sensations without any attempt to manipulate them, so that I can watch my visual system’s random activity. It’s like abstract three-dimensional movies, and it’s the primary reason I got interested in doing 3D animations. My 3D efforts in the world outside my head have not yet approached the variety and fecundity of my brain’s unfettered activity, but I’m getting closer, and I’m having a lot of fun in the process.

I’m all in favor of developing the ability to focus attention; it can open us up to the brain’s many wonderful capabilities. But we need to understand that even though we can experience something in our head that seems very real, it doesn’t necessarily reflect outside reality. There are millions of way to imagine the universe, but unless they generate testable hypotheses, they’re only good for entertainment.

All our experiences are natural, no matter how exotic. That they seem supernatural is the result of not understanding our built-in capabilities. If there were such a thing as the supernatural, we human beings wouldn’t have access to it.

	Web www.rentine.com

Tweet

]]>

That seems to be the strategy Marvin Minsky recommends in his book, The Society of Mind. That book has profoundly altered the way I think about myself since I first read it in the mid-nineties, but he suggests that we avoid that sort of thing by compartmentalizing our understanding the way “we keep our books and clothes in self-made shelves and cabinets—thus building artificial boundaries to keep things from interacting very much.”(p. 65)

In his view, self-knowledge is dangerous because if we closely examine the needs, values, etc. that are our heritage, we might find them “too infantile or too unworthy to tolerate… what would we substitute for them—once we divested ourselves of all those ties to instinct and society? We’d each end up as instruments of even more capricious sorts of self-invented goals.”(p. 68)

The alternatives, as he sees them, are either to continue in the ways of our forefathers and mothers—already capricious—or abandon ourselves to becoming instruments of even more caprice, but what if there were other alternatives? What if examining all those old ideas revealed an underlying order in reality that earlier generations had overlooked? What if this underlying order were more profound, more inspiring, and less capricious than anything they had conceived?

Minsky’s concern says more about his own approach to life than about any universal danger, but his approach is shared by the large conservative branch of society. Daniel Dennett expresses a like sentiment in his book, Elbow Room, as I noted in my review: He cautions us about looking “`too closely’ at our mental activities.”

Others have approached the unknown territory of our inner life with a more adventurous spirit:

Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and preferred to die rather than give up his own examination. Fortunately, most of us will never have to choose between physical death and freedom of thought, but self-knowledge can lead to a kind of death that is, for some, equally frightening: Once we have thoroughly looked into it, we may find our old self deadly uninhabitable.

In order to pursue self-knowledge, then, we have to believe that no matter how bad the things we learn about ourselves may be, knowing the truth is preferable to remaining ignorant. We have to be willing to give up our comfortable illusions in the hope that reality will at least be bearable. It may even turn out that truth is not only stranger than fiction but more fun—there are rumors to that effect.

Life has to embolden us to make such a choice, and there are many suggestions that it is, indeed, a radical one. The Buddhists have a couple of metaphors: it’s like taking a step from the top of a hundred-foot pole, or letting go over the edge of a thousand-foot cliff.

How do we find the courage to take such a step, to risk all that is familiar for the chance that the unknown holds something better? We can take Socrates’ word for it, as one who has been there and lived to tell the tale, and there are others in every major religion—usually on the fringe—who offer reassurance: Meister Eckhart, Rumi, Dogen, and many more.

Some of us have found ourselves in the position of Cortez’ soldiers when he invaded Mexico and burned his ships after everyone got ashore: we know too much to go back to where we were, and the only course is to forge ahead and hope for success.

I have certainly had my share of “dark nights of the soul,” along the way, but the end result has been a freedom I had never imagined possible. I have been freed from the anxiety and insecurity that were built into my earlier, conventional view of life and myself.

We have nothing to lose but our chains, but if life hasn’t prepared us for it, Socrates’ reasoning alone won’t convince us to take that leap. Here’s hoping you have that kind of life.

	Web www.rentine.com

Tweet

]]>

Not anticipating it, I had made no preparations for being 30, but I realized that if things kept on as they had and I lived to be 40, perhaps it would be wise to make some plans.

The reason I’m thinking of that long-ago day now is that I’ve read a couple of things lately that put planning for the future in a different perspective. Paul Bloom wrote a very interesting article in the November 2008 Atlantic Magazine called, “First Person Plural,” about the concept of having multiple selves. I’ve written and talked about this idea previously, often using Marvin Minsky’s term, “sub-personalities,” but perhaps multiple selves is better: “sub-personalities” suggests that there might be some main personality that somehow dominates or is superior to its subordinates—someone in charge—and I think there may be no such entity.

I could write a very long piece on all the points Bloom makes—the article is well worth reading—but for now, this quote is what brought on thoughts of my 30th birthday:

Although it might be hard to think about the person who will occupy your body tomorrow morning as someone other than you, it is not hard at all to think that way about the person who will occupy your body 20 years from now. This may be one reason why many young people are indifferent about saving for retirement; they feel as if they would be giving up their money to an elderly stranger.

The young people he’s referring to sound like me with my prior-30 attitude.

Bloom doesn’t mention him at all, but I’ve been re-reading Minsky’s Society of Mind, and interestingly, he brought up a very similar idea 25 years ago:

Consider how you are generous to future self at present self’s expense. Today, you put some money in the bank in order that sometime later you can take it out. Whenever did that future self do anything so good for you?”(p. 54)

As Bloom points out, we feel more akin to the self of yesterday and tomorrow than we do to that self in the distant past or future. Perhaps it is because the consequences of our actions are more obvious in the short term: yesterday’s overeating is today’s extra pound, and tomorrow’s paycheck may depend on our going to work today.

For people who believe in free will, who they were in the distant past may not seem particularly consequential. They feel they have the power to alter their course at any time no matter what has happened to them earlier. We determinists may feel more tightly bound to what has come before, more interested in understanding the connections between what we were and what we have become. Careful consideration of the consequences of past actions leads to their exerting a greater influence on present decisions than if they were less thoroughly examined, and we become more attuned to the possible ramifications of the present for the future.

Regardless of the importance we assign to the past, the recall of memories has an interesting effect: When I remember things that I did and how they felt, I am recreating the experience of a former self in the context of the present. Past experience becomes present experience, and despite any differences in how it felt to prior selves, it is updated in recollection to the point of view of the self now in charge, so that it feels very much as if it happened to the current “me.”

(A note to those young people Bloom refers to: If you are fortunate enough to become that “elderly stranger,” it will feel very much as if it is you, and it will feel as if you are experiencing the consequences of your current self’s behavior.)

Memory provides the base from which we imagine the future, and the greater our education and experience, the broader foundation we have for imagining what may lie ahead. Some of us have to repeat the same mistakes several times before realizing that the results are always the same, and sometimes it takes years to learn the lesson. Younger people haven’t had that opportunity.

Actions do have consequences, and despite the differences between my current selves and those that came before, they made me who I am, and I am grateful to those that made it easier for me. I’m enjoying the fruits of their labors, and with that in mind, I’m doing my best to take care of the brain and body that future selves will inherit. If all goes well, they’ll have as much fun as I’m having now.

	Enter your search terms
	Web www.rentine.com Submit search form