"Without deeply, personally appreciating the Pageant of Evolution, trying to ask, and answer, these deep existential questions is like playing basketball in zero gravity."
"Dr. Mark Solms makes it clear: … Modern science shows us that our mind is best understood as “a reflection of your body communicating with itself.” "
"Consider that momentous invention some four billion years ago of the Krebs cycle. Here on Earth, when geology and chemistry learned how to harness electricity, thereby giving birth to this Krebs cycle, which in turn gave birth to biology. There you’ll find the difference between a rock and living creature."
I’ve started posting at medium.com hoping to arouse a little discussion. But it means pushing back on what some others have written, and that means hurting feelings, which is not my intention. But then again, science isn’t about feel good, it’s about following the facts where they take us.
You see, I was raised by German science respecting parents. Actually, I was born over there, immigrating as a baby. We grew up with, shall I say, expectations: order must be, and tough love if it ain’t.
Fortunately, our parents truly loved us and empowered us. Still, order must be. And consequences were a reality.
Later in life, attending Community College of Denver part-time, including a writing class, with a superb writing lab for us to visit, I remember marching in there with some stories I felt real proud of, only to see them chopped to mincemeat, and walking out of there dragging my bleeding heart behind me.
But time is a healer. After a dose of self-flagellation during the walk home, I’d work on trying to understand. Then I’d rethink, reorient, and attack the piece again. One article in particular I remember. After a few difficult rounds, I returned to my harshest (good faith) critic with my final draft. As she was reaching the ending twist, tears came to her eyes, (gotcha!, I smiled to myself) followed by her smile and a handshake. It was later accepted to be printed in that year’s student literary magazine. That’s the best. I think, for both of us. Could never have happened without the pain.
Learning is a contact sport. Which brings me to an article I read recently, it repeated many fallacies that I believe need to be examined more closely. At least for the science respecting crowd who will like this update. I shared my intention, received no response, so I’ll simply plow ahead as discreetly as I can.
Why On Earth Are You Even Aware?
Blame it on Evolution.
Try to realize that your mind inhabits the evolved incarnation of a body that has gone through some half a billion years’ worth of successful generations. Not one single miss during all that time, or you would not be here.
It gets even wilder. The cells that make up your body — their history goes back over four billion years’ worth of successful reproductive cycles — all within a harsh and unforgiving biosphere.
The first thing that tells me is that our body must possess enormous amounts of knowledge, agendas, and strategies totally beyond what my/our introspective mind can possibly comprehend.
Your mind? Who are you?
Frankly, you are a highly evolved animal, the cumulative product of Earth’s processes. When “primitive” peoples spoke of “Mother Earth”, they were actually factually correct, but the western minds could only laugh. To our own detriment.
As for your mind, modern science shows us that our mind is best understood as “a reflection of your body communicating with itself.” (Dr. Mark Solms)
Add to that the realization that everything you’ve ever experienced must go through your particular body/brain before becoming part of your particular mind.
Why are you aware?
From a fundamental evolutionary perspective, you are aware because if you weren’t aware, you would die before you even got out the gate.
Awareness was among life’s earliest challenges, before molecular bundles could start coordinating into cooperative units and eventually self-sustaining cells.
…… Check out: “The Cellular Basis of Consciousness proposal — A Student’s Introduction to Dr. Arthur Reber’s CBC”
…… A Scientific Approach to Understanding Your “Self” — Nick Lane, PhD. A Student’s Resource
…… The Source of Consciousness — with Mark Solms, at the Royal Institution {I share more important names and links at the end.}
It is simply inaccurate — the result of ignoring one’s homework — to insist that scientists are clueless about those voices in our heads and brain functions.
Check out Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Feb 2, 2024: “Study Discovers Neurons in the Human Brain That Can Predict What We’re Going to Say Before We Say It” — and that’s just the first one off the stack.
As for Chalmers’ Hard Problem, I believe that says more about the questioner than it does about the topic being questioned. It’s a human-centric construct that, to my mind, is more theological than serious science. But then, I believe the same about Descartes, even though, from reading Meditations, I appreciate what an intellectual force he was.
(For the record, I exist at street level—never pretended to be an academic scholar. I’m an enthusiast—and I only know Chalmers from his speaking performances, and what fans pass along. Mark Solms has forced me to acknowledge there is a lot more to the academic scholar, beyond my reach. Still, I don’t think that forgives for how he has hobbled the lay-public and obscured the path to a sober understanding of our body via evolution and how the process produced ourselves.)
Where Do Thoughts Come From?
I googled that question, and the AI Overview seems relevant: “Thoughts come from the complex interplay of your brain’s neurons firing electrochemically, influenced by sensory input, memories, emotions, and the unconscious mind, creating patterns representing ideas, beliefs, and experiences, with some perspectives seeing the mind as separate from the physical brain, while neuroscience largely views thought as a product of brain activity.”(Hmmm, unconscious or subconscious mind … ?)
But they can’t track the original source of a new thought?
What is that even asking? The experience that triggers the thought, the trigger itself, beyond what’s already diagramed? I don’t understand what’s missing, beyond more details.
Considering the vast complexity of our body-brain system, it sounds more like a trick question than genuine curiosity. After all in real life we need to make do with the information at hand and move forward, not create impossible expectations.
We are animals that interact with a complex world. Our thoughts are triggered by our environment (both exterior and interior) and interactions, to produce more thoughts and awareness — consciousness. Each to their own body plan.
Impressions get processed through your body’s array of sensors, and communication channels, then gets passed on to the brain, all the while the brain is responding with its signal streams. Body + Brain + Interacting (interior & exterior) = mind, consciousness. The impression happens because we are real physical beings, in a real physical world, interactions and impressions are inevitable.
It is a thing of awesome complexity, where much of the magic happens down in the microscopic world. The irony being the more we zoom in on one aspect of this spectacle (that is, our thought process), the more we lose sight of other equally relevant components.
Evidence for “consciousness” is found in single-celled creatures, indicating that something between awareness and consciousness permeates through all the cells of our body. (see Arthur Reber) This works fine for simple creatures, but as complexity increased, consciousness needed new conduits — roads, plumbing, wiring, and whatnot — to encompass the needs of evolving expanding complex systems.
A big problem with all this consciousness talk is that it’s a spectrum, not a thing. I don’t know of anyone who’s done a simple, but informed spectrum, defining the various plateaus of consciousness — from the awareness in single-celled creatures, on up the biological complexity scale, to arrive at our fantastic memory and introspective consciousness. (I’ll bet, in addition we still possess layers of more primitive consciousness, still doing their thing, learned at some point in evolution’s distant past.)
That is where neurons and brain stem came into the picture, to help streamline consciousness. With time and development of bodies, eventually that information load reached another critical mass and turned introspective. With the brain stem evolving into a complex human brain to match our complex body and lifestyle.
The point being, consciousness is part of an evolving continuum driven by the ever-increasing complexity of environment and creatures. As for plants and fungi, they too have been proven to be aware. Most probably an awareness unlike anything in the animal kingdom, but an awareness nonetheless — suited to the creatures particular biological processes, even if we aren’t able to conceive of what that might be at this point.
What Happens When You Sleep?
Some will say, “we don’t yet understand why we sleep or dream.” That simply doesn’t feel right, and I’ve never investigated it, meditating on my own patterns as been enough, so here, I’m simply rambling.
What about simple biology? Go work in a field for a few hours; tell me you don’t need to take a break to “recharge your batteries.”
There are pragmatic and necessary housekeeping chores going on inside your body that can’t be avoided, or you die. Which is as true for every component of your insides as it is for your body as a whole.
This sort of question seems to me like looking through the wrong end of the microscope.
Looking at it from an Earth-centric, bottom-up evolution respecting perspective, we start at the beginning of life upon a planet that has a day-night cycle. The oceans’ microscopic creatures show profound changes between day and night. Everything else built up from there. One day/night cycle at a time. I can’t think of anything that doesn’t possess cycles, from a baby to waves of water and wind to earthquakes. Every material carries a certain resonant vibration frequency, down to the mitochondria within our cells. Our lives are driven by rhythms and cycles. How else could it be?
For me, some things simply feel self-evident.
Since we’re on the topic, people often speak of the sleep state as if it were an on/off thing, or level one, two, three, if you’re monitoring your sleep. I don’t go straight from wake to sleep or vice versa. There’s a nuanced gradient while going under and that weird “O zone” of neither here, nor there, awareness through a fog. Body monitoring the environment, like cats ears tracking noises, partially arousing as this or that unfolds outside, only to fade back out again, or not. Or a certain noise has you on your feet and half way to the door before realizing you’ve woken up. From monitoring myself these days, I know that no two nights of sleep are the same, and sleep is amazingly more dynamic than I ever imagined.
I’ve also heard we can’t tell the difference between the dream state and waking — but I don’t believe it, because it sure feels different to me. I don’t think the problem is with my perception; I believe it has to do with idealistic thinking that avoids being attentive to sloppy biological reality.
While I sleep, there are systems that continue monitoring my situation (interior and exterior) and that will arouse other systems as needed, or not. A fluid dance as wonderful as our daytime hours. I also know there’s a deep sleep state where my body really is comatose, but it turns out to be rather short. I just looked it up: 13%–25% is average, with me at the low end of that. It makes all the sense in the world to me that my body needs that downtime.
Especially since I know what sleep deprivation is like. Oh, and how much one is engaged with the day — I’ve seen that impact the amount of sleep I need, well, the younger me. Now at 70, my body becomes less tolerant of long days and is rougher with the payback, so I pay more attention. But I’ve digressed.
Why Can Some Brain Injuries Totally Change Who You Are — While Other Brain Injuries Don’t Seem to Change Anything About You?
Location, location, location.
Beyond that, I can’t speak to this but I sure can recommend a renowned expert on the topic who does a wonderful job of explaining the complexities, based on the latest scientific work.
Rethinking the Mind — Professor Mark Solms
(Psychoanalyst and Neuropsychologist) — Machine Learning Street Talk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meUtWtY00H8How Do Dreams Relate To Consciousness? Why We Dream & The Felt Uncertainty Theory | Mark Solms — Mind-Body Solution
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkbeaxjAZm4
How Do You Make Decisions?
“The readiness potential appears before the subject reports the decision to move. This raises deep questions about the nature of volition.” — Benjamin Libet, neuroscientist
This seems to me another example of looking through the wrong end of the microscope. Besides, they are talking about milliseconds. For me, understanding this question requires a bottom-up evolutionary appreciation.
Decision-making didn’t start with humans; the need to make choices started within single-celled creatures over four billion years ago.
Bringing it Back to the Earth-Centric Perspective.
I appreciate that my body possesses half a billion years’ worth of 100% successful generations under its bellybutton, so to speak. Meaning that it must also possess levels of awareness, goals, and strategies light-years beyond my self-conscious mind’s ability to know.
I was lucky to get my first inklings of that in high school, because it set up a partnership between my thoughts (the endlessly jabbering storytellers in my head) and my physical body’s sensiblities and impulses, that made a mockery of my highfalutin thoughts with all their resolutions and plans.
Since then I’ve learned to explicitly understand myself as a product of evolution — deep-time evolution — appreciating the mind-boggling reality of it unfolding one day at a time. That was real. So where others see mystery, I see wonder in the biology within me, and me within time, and Earth’s pageant of evolution. All thanks to what science has been revealing to humanity this past half century, and more, that I’ve been an attentive witness.
Without deeply, personally appreciating the Pageant of Evolution, trying to ask and answer these deep existential questions is like playing basketball in zero gravity.
What Is a Self?
It starts with a unique egg and sperm, and not so much a plan as an imperative.
Grow, survive, prosper.
The imperative within me came out of the momentum of half a billion years’ worth of 100% successful generations of learning and refining.
“Self” is about biology. Senses + body + brain, constantly interacting with the real world, exterior and interior. Like it or not, that produces who you are.
How could any creature possibly feel like anything other than what it is?
How can any creature not feel itself, since itself is all that it is made of?
Scientists have learned there has never been a dumb animal on this planet; they could have never gotten past the starting gate.
Inside of me is nothing else but me — guts included.
Back in a younger decade, I got lucky to spend six weeks learning the craft at a Swiss Metzgerei (butcher and sausage maker). On a later job, I was called on to butcher a deer. The chef came down long enough to help me skin and split it, then explained the cuts he wanted and assured himself that I had the skill required. So he let me at it, as he returned upstairs, leaving me alone with this carcass.
No biggie, and I proceeded to part it up. Then came this rush of awareness — an epiphany, a genuine religious experience. This creature was built exactly the way I was. Same bones, same muscles and joints. Proportions were different, of course, but that’s chump change. As I dismantled that deer, I could clearly see myself within that creature, and it was a revelation.
The realization has never left me. It continues rippling through me, influencing how I’ve looked at these questions and this world with its animal, plant, and “other,” kingdoms of life around me.
Can Other Things Be Conscious?
Is your dog conscious? Your laptop? A rock?
Panpsychism does not make any sense to me. What’s the point of consciousness when there aren’t any decisions to be made? Which is the case out in the cosmic realm of particles and energy and gravity.
Why ignore that momentous invention some four billion years ago of the Krebs cycle? That is, when geology and chemistry learned how to harness electricity, thereby giving birth to the Krebs cycle, which in turn gave birth to biology. There you’ll find the difference between animate and inanimate.
For details, see Nick Lane’s Transformer and his previous books. Also David Quammen’s The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life.
Biology, together with chemistry, geology (Earth), time, created life, followed by the amazing Pageant of Evolution into this cornucopia of life we once knew upon this planet.
Evolution holds all the lessons, because it’s the process of building new stuff on top of old stuff, along with repurposing old stuff and ditching useless stuff. That is how we came to be.
And it is good.
Parting Thoughts
All of us look at this information through our own eyes, filtered through our own experiences and learning. That’s why working in a bubble isn’t good. We have our bandwidths and need others to help us expand them. Fortunately, I’ve had some damned good authors for company, still, discussion would be fun.
These things matter, especially in these weird days heading at us. For starters we need to get a healthier grip on who ‘me, myself & I’ actually is. I firmly believe only through a serious personal connect to the Evolutionary process and learning about how our bodies were developed, do we have a chance of getting a bit of a foundation under one’s Self. While rediscovering our personal link to Earth.
At least it has worked for me, the Earth Centrist. What’s really cool is that it is all based on bona fide scientific evidence and findings. No need for magical thinking. What it needs is a sober new found respect for Earth and her systems. The answers are in Evolution and science, and every season brings new lessons for us to add into our respective mindscapes.
As they say, what will you be present to?
Here’s an introductory author’s list
Robert Hazen: Mineral evolution on Earth, preparing the ground for biology
Nick Lane: Geology and chemistry harnesses electricity to create biology.
. . . . . Writer of the most excellent summary of “SELF”
Jack Szostak: The Early Earth and the Origins of Cellular Life
Michael Russell: On the Emergence of Life Through “Negative” Entropy Trapping
Arthur Reber: The “Cellular Basis of Consciousness” proposal — CBC
Michael Levin: Bioelectricity in development and regeneration, exploring cellular cognition.
Biology together with time, and chemistry and geology, that is, Earth’s processes created creatures and environments and competition, in short, evolution.
Pageant of Earth’s Evolution, Index of noteworthy YouTube videos
Mark Solms — Regarding the Source of Consciousness
Antonio Damasio — Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain
Robert Sapolsky — Behavioral Biology with a Primatology background
Honorable mention, author David Quammen’s The Tangled Tree of Life, a front and center history of the ‘70’s genetics revolution, that ushered in this golden age of biology.
These are some of the leading lights, though I never forget they require the support of thousands to help this work move forward.
No comments:
Post a Comment