The Short Version

For a few seconds this morning, I had the odd and distressing feeling of being trapped in my own brain; a victim of invisible forces, shuttled from one experience to another at the whim of incomprehensible neural machinery. I wanted out. I even wondered briefly where I might go—could I exist in a computer?

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 much 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 describing the brain’s 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, who asked him a question he couldn’t answer. 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

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I had read all Damasio’s earlier books, but wasn’t aware he’d written this one till I saw an article in the December, 2010 issue of Discover magazine in which he was promoting the book and, surprisingly, presenting a weak but adamant argument in favor of free will. I wrote a letter to Discover, pointing out the flaw in his argument, which they said they would publish in the March, 2011 issue, at which point I decided I should read the book to make sure he hadn’t been misrepresented.

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

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