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Zen Physics
p171 One simple change in our worldview would have the most profound and dramatic effect on our lives. And it is this: to see, as Eastern philosophies have long seen, that the brain does not give rise to consciousness.
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[Thoughts on the brain and consciousness.]
p172 Consciousness, in survival terms, is an irrelevancy. It is perfectly possible to conceive of a world inhabited by all sorts of life-forms... in which there never stirred a single conscious feeling or experience... It might appear to be full of diversity, sophisticated behavior, intelligence, and even wit and charm, and yet involve no subjective experience, no inner feeling of being, whatsoever.
I can't see this, but I’ll have to take his word for it at the moment.
Many attempts have been made by evolutionary biologists to explain why consciousness should have come about and what possible advantage it might have bestowed on its owners... Consciousness, it is sometimes said, helps us to see the world from each other’s point of view. But the circularity of this argument is readily apparent... [Only makes sense if] conscious feelings and experiences are already a fact of the world, but this offers no explanation of why consciousness should have come about in the first place. Exasperated by their failure to discern an obvious purpose for consciousness, some researchers have dismissed it as peripheral and almost accidental -- an inconsequential spin-off of the brain’s other activities.
The same problem that evolutionary biologists invent for themselves in trying to find a credible survival function of consciousness, neurologists face in their attempt to explain how consciousness stems from the workings of the brain. Consciousness-explainers are currently going to all sorts of lengths to weave a viable theory -- studying the development of neurons, tracing the precise pathways and stages of visual processing, drawing inspiration from artificial intelligence research, and, in the case of Roger Penrose and his followers, proposing that quantum effects inside the microtubes of cells will somehow do the trick...
p173 ... Life and nonlife... once considered fundamentally irreconcilable, were eventually seen to have a common basis thanks to the advent of molecular biology. In physics, magnetism and electricity were united by Maxwell’s field equations; mass and energy, and space and time, were linked through Einstein’s monumental work. But the divide between neural events and consciousness, brain and mind, is of a different order entirely. As Konrad Lorenz described in Behind the Mirror:
The “Hiatus” between soul and body . . . is indeed unbridgeable. . . . I do not believe that this is a limitation imposed just by the present state of our knowledge, or that even a utopian advance of this knowledge would bring us closer to a solution. . . . It is not a matter of a horizontal split between subjective experience and physiological events, nor a matter of dividing the higher from the lower, the more complex from the more elementary, but a kind of vertical dividing line through our whole nature.
There is an interesting parallel -- and it may be more than a parallel -- between the attempts of neurologists to explain how consciousness is produced by the brain and the efforts of cosmologists to show how the material universe was created or why it should even exist at all. At first sight, these programs seem poles apart. But in both cases, there is a persistent failure on the part of the investigators to recognize one simple truth beyond the complexity and ingenuity of their theories. And this simple truth is that what they are trying to do is not just difficult but fundamentally, categorically impossible. Even if physicists eventually discover... the... Theory of Everything -- it will not be possible to deduce from this why there should be an actual, material universe instead of the potential, abstract universe described by mathematical equations. Why should there be actuality instead of mere potentiality? Why should the equations have come to life? Why should there be both a script and a play? ….”
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[More about the brain and consciousness.]
p174 ... the moment we stand back, shake off our conditioning, and look at the issue anew, we can begin to appreciate that the scientific tenet that matter -- the entire objective world -- is primary is an arbitrary and totally unsubstantiated claim. [I used bold there just to make the sentence easier to read.] There is no prima facie reason at all to go along with the assertion that mind is an emergent property of matter -- that, at some point, mind came into being when matter, in the form of brains, acquired some critical level of complexity. On the contrary, it is the material world which is very evidently conditional, for it is just one among many objects of our experience, and an object, moreover, that is not strictly given but known only through interpretation.
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p175 ...quantum physics insists, consciousness has to be seen in a radically new light -- not as some quirky, local by-product of matter but as the very groundswell of creation. Only our stubborn, outmoded attachment to Newtonian reductionism [I think THIS is the sense of reductionsim he means... wait! No THIS is probably it] and Cartesian dualism -- an attachment that, not surprisingly, remains strongest among many scientists... is blocking the acceptance of this fundamental truth.
Consciousness is not new, isolated, and relatively unimportant; it is ubiquitous and essential. It is a permanent, inherent property of the universe, a fact that becomes most immediately obvious to us when we escape temporarily from our normal, egocentric state of mind during mystical or transcendental interludes. At such times, “we” vanish altogether and in our place is simply consciousness. As soon as the analytical activity of the brain is suppressed or circumvented, pure consciousness -- the background consciousness of the universe -- floods in. [A personal aside here, this is what so unsettled me during my sole experience with LSD. Hanging on desperately to my “self” became my focus, which made it impossible for me to sleep and lead to a very long (and colorful but) not very enjoyable night. This is also why I fear I could become one of those people who cling to life past the point when it makes any sense. I hope I’m wrong.] And of all the occasions when this happens none is more profound or revealing than at the point of death when, with the brain almost totally disabled, a condition of the most indescribably profound and expansive awareness takes hold.
I’m surprised he doesn’t bring in the seemingly volitional aspect to dying (in some cases) -- people who seem to wait for a milestone or for people to leave the room before “crossing over.” This would seem to argue for the primacy of consciousness over sheer matter.
p176 Without the brain, it is true, there cannot be selves. And our preoccupation with the self is perhaps the main reason for our long-standing confusion. In the West, we have tended to equate having thoughts and memories and, above all, selves, with being conscious. But this is a serious mistake. As long as the self is in residence we can never truly be conscious, for while ‘we’ exist we are trapped in a kind of fantasy -- Einstein's "optical delusion’"-- in which memories and conditioning cause us to put a private and false interpretation on the world. Only when thought and self come to an end, when symbolizing, analyzing, boundary-defining, and ego-building cease, can genuine, unfettered consciousness begin.
Foucault's "unthought" once again.
... the world is already integrated. It is already as perfect, whole, and well conceived, throughout all of space and time, as it will ever be. What the brain really does is to sample extremely narrow aspects of reality through the senses and then subject these to further drastic and highly selective reinterpretation.
To grasp the truth about the universe we need to adopt a new, broader perspective. We have to see that reality is an unbroken unity, and that within this unity are aspects of the whole that think of themselves as being separate....
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p177 ...as Freud put it:
Our present I-feeling is . . . only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive -- indeed, all-embracing -- feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the I and the world about it.
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...The only reality that exists... is right in front of us; nothing is hidden, nothing is beyond our ken. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “Other world! There is no other world! Here or nowhere is the whole fact.”
I would have liked some context for Emerson as this could be read in at least two ways. But following the Wiki link above, it does look like he meant it as Darling would have us believe.
... The core message of the world’s great religio-philosophical systems, Eastern and Western, is to forget about yourself, lose yourself, and so, in the process, make contact with the much more important truth of the timeless awareness of the universe.
...Even a hardened pragmatist like J.B.S. Haldane felt moved to write that [I would have put a colon here and an ellipsis at the beginning of the next line]
if death will probably be the end of me as a finite individual mind, that does not mean that it will be the end of me altogether. It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere byproduct of matter....
p179 But as regards my own very finite and imperfect mind, I can see, by studying the effects on it of drugs, alcohol, disease, and so on, that its limitations are largely at least due to my body.
Without that body it may perish altogether, but it seems to me quite as probable that it will lose its limitations and be merged into an infinite mind or something analogous to a mind which I have reason to suspect probably exists behind nature. How this might be accomplished I have no idea....
This is also, I believe, the Dionysian state Nietzsche (in The Birth of Tragedy) would have us understand the dithyrambic chorus achieved in it’s worship of/contact with the godhead.
It may seem as if I have reached two very different and incompatible conclusions in this book. Earlier, I reasoned that after death the feeling of being a self continues. I argued that this can be thought of as a form of reincarnation: the death of one brain followed by the birth of another being functionally and experientially equivalent to a person in life forgetting who they are and subsequently remembering they are someone else. How can this conclusion be squared with the idea that at death we effectively rejoin the unbroken sea of consciousness that lies outside us? Surely, when we die, there can be only one outcome.
p180 But, in fact, there is no incompatibility. We simply need to appreciate that we are dealing with two complementary aspects of the universe. And I use the word "complementary’"here advisedly to highlight a comparison with the wave-particle complementarity of modern physics and the subject-object complementarity of Eastern philosophy. The cosmos exists en bloc and yet within it individual selves have evolved. The one does not preclude the other; in fact, the two appear to be in some kind of extraordinary, intimate symbiosis, the significance of which will doubtless become clearer as our species further matures.
This is the point I had in mind back when I said he was not being entirely honest about “really” believing what he was arguing. Still not sure if I’m satisfied about that.
New selves emerge as new brains emerge, because what a brain does is to act as a funnel, a filter, a limiter of consciousness, and therefore a shaper of self -- a separator of subject and object. The brain effectively pinches off a little bubble of introverted awareness and stores and manipulates information relevant exclusively to the survival needs of the individual so created... And... the projected self not only feels itself to be tangible, but it fails to appreciate, or even suspect, that it is never the same from one moment to the next.
OK, I’m mostly on-board with this as it matches well with the Devi’s Dream way of looking at reality. I don’t see the importance of the “never the same from one moment to the next” part, but that seems to be important to the author. Because this is built on the foundation (not in Haidt’s sense) of what we learned about the brain/mind relationship earlier in the book, he is unable to include a “pure” form of reincarnation (like the Tibetan version). Memories and characteristics can’t migrate from brain to brain, consciousness to consciousness. In the pure Devi’s Dream interpretation, this is not a problem. What he said above about pinching off little bubbles of awareness still works, but there’s no reason that “little bubbles” of Devi’s consciousness can’t include memories of previous “little bubbles.” And, of course, it’s nonsense to speak of “previous” at all.
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p181 ...we appear to be far from the masters of our situation. Our brains are in thrall to the automatically encoded programs in our genes, and “we” are shaped not by our own efforts but by the influence of our brains and our environments. It is a sobering realization that, in an important sense, we don’t really own or exert will over our bodies and minds; we are simply part of an endlessly unfolding process... if we can embrace a... wider panorama [of the self], we can begin to see that the differences between us are so slight and the similarities so great that all of us alive today are really just minor variations on the same person. The fragmentation or plurality of consciousness is only an appearance, like the hundreds of little pictures that a multifaceted crystal reflects without multiplying the object in reality...
I'm still hoping the film Lucy will turn out to be an eventual cult hit, like Blade Runner, so I'm going to talk about it even though few people seem to have seen it. Your loss. The conceit of Lucy is that the protagonist has taken a drug that allows her to use more and more of her brain, up to 100% at the end. The consequences, in the movie, are that she is able to defy the physical laws of the universe, among other things. Luc Besson is like Michael Bay's intellectual twin... neither makes much sense, but at least Besson is interesting.
If, instead of the drug and the brain, you think of Lucy as transcending her self and merging more and more with universal consciousness (god), then the movie makes much more sense. The physical "laws" of the universe would be irrelevant to a consciousness that was dreaming that space-time reality. I may have to watch it again to see if Besson dropped any hints that that was what he was really talking about.
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We have a future, then, beyond death, as new individuals -- as participants in “I-mode” continuity, or what amounts to secular reincarnation. However, standing behind this is the unfragmented consciousness of the universe. And, in some ways, this is the ideal and only genuine state in which to exist. It is that to which we ultimately aspire -- the timeless, all-knowing condition in which subject and object, life and death, you and I, God and man, are one.
I’m not sure I agree with his belief in the continued existence of an “individual.” He seems to be contradicting himself in his eagerness to please everyone. Unless you want to view the new “all” as an individual, which seems disingenuous. There will be other selves, other individuals, but they are only related to us as we are all related to each other, as pinched off bits of mind (or god.)
Also, as is so often the case, he doesn’t give any thought to the dream state as a more profound form of consciousness, a case of our being unrestricted by our brains even while we maintain a (sometimes tenuous) hold on our identities. Why people don’t pay more attention to their dreams in this sense is a mystery to me.
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p182 Death of the self is seen as the gateway to what Buddhism calls nirvana and Christianity refers to as heaven. Buddhism urges us to escape the Wheel of Life, the cycle of death and rebirth, by achieving enlightenment through meditation -- by becoming a new Buddha. Zen goes a step further and tells us, effectively, not to even bother trying to escape; we should simply stop thinking about it, because there has never been a time when we haven’t been free. [This sound very much like what I like about Tantra Hinduism, as covered HERE.] In Christianity, the same message is couched in different terms. All we need do, it says, is become like little children (whose selves are not yet well defined) in order to enter God’s kingdom.
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The plain fact is we are already one with the universe; we have never really been apart from it. And only the presence of self prevents us from seeing this... As Bertrand Russell wrote:
p183 The best way to overcome {the fear of death} -- so it seems to me -- is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river -- small at first, narrowly confined within banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks receded, the water flows more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thoughts of rest will not be unwelcome.
I'm thinking right now that I should go back and cite the age at which everyone quoted in this blog wrote or made their statements. I'm guessing Russell was not young when he wrote this.
Our revels are now ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air . . .
. . . We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
-Shakespeare, The Tempest
To die will be an awfully big adventure.
-James Barrie, Peter Pan
I was tempted to hold off publishing this, the ending of Zen Physics, until I also wrapped up The Righteous Mind. But it would have been strange to have such a long pause in the blogging of this book. Aside from the few reservations I've noted along the way, I don't have much of a problem with Darling's position here. I think it's very plausible that death will be like putting down a particularly engrossing novel, or coming to the end of a very good film. And if it isn't, no one will be the wiser.
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