I really enjoyed a lot about the recent TED Ideas article on consciousness by Anil Seth, Professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the University of Sussex, and co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. His final words are reassuring, just as they are, quite possibly, wrong. He writes, “Our conscious experiences are part of nature just as our bodies are, just as our world is. And when life ends, consciousness will end too. When I think about this, I am transported back to my experience — my non-experience — of anesthesia. To its oblivion, perhaps comforting, but oblivion nonetheless. The novelist Julian Barnes, in his meditation on mortality, puts it perfectly. When the end of consciousness comes, there is nothing — really nothing — to be frightened of.”
Seth has made what I think of as a common yet most important error made by most students of consciousness, the circular argument.
Seth’s story of his own experience of anaesthesia on his consciousness, can be rendered as this: I am conscious because I am self-conscious. When I am under anaesthetic I , later, remember my consciousness fading, and then I remember my consciousness reasserting itself. I am surprised to find out that xx time has passed, of which I have no experience. This time is perfectly correlated to the actions of the anaesthetist delivering and withdrawing anaesthetic. …So far so good.
Almost, I suspect, unconsciously (all puns about the content of Seth’s article, intended) Seth’s argument lives in the premise that only nature as experienced by our consciousness, exists. This implies two things: 1. Our consciousness is omniscient because it knows that only nature exists, and it could only know that if it is omniscient; and 2. Nature is all powerful because it led to something omniscient to exist. Why don’t we see this error in our usual thinking about consciousness and nature.?
We usually don’t see it for the very reasons Seth highlights in his article. Firstly, because the brain is something that evolved out of the ‘natural’ processes, it is completely integrated with that process and bound by it. Secondly, because the primary driver of our behaviour emanates from brain activity that is outside of conscious access, we do not relate any of our fading and reasserting of the consciousness from anaesthesia to the anaesthetic’s real purpose which is to stop motor responses to pain. Once we are conscious from anaesthesia, as a rule, we can also move, and do not have any awareness nor relatable memory that the body was immobile. The elimination of the consciousness of pain is quite secondary to the purpose of anaesthesia. Without any consciouness, the body will still squirm as a response to the pain nerves firing to the pain centres of the brain, making surgery difficult. It’s beyond the scope of this post to fully elaborate on how we might know this, except to point to neurophysiological research on the activation of sensory & motor system pathway loops, how hypnosis works, and perceptual limitations.
The circular condition (I see this is more of a situation than a thought issue) extends from that the brain cannot derive anything that it has not accidentally evolved to derive. All that the brain derived is from a phenomenon we call nature. We are only conscious of the phenomenon called nature because of the evolved structure of the brain. This tight loop creates, as a thought experience, the hidden circular argument that consciousness is an experience of ‘nature’. ‘Nature’, as here, to be distinguished from any meta concept of nature as everything we might yet learn about reality that we don’t currently experience.
So once we see that what we are dealing with is simply a self-assertion of a probably very limited sphere of perception through consciousness, as if it is the whole thing, then we can posit that ‘nature’ is only a very limited aspect of reality. The circular condition imposes limitations on what we, as part of ‘nature’ can render in consciousness. So the premises that : 1 Our consciousness is omniscient; and 2. ‘nature’ is all powerful, gives way to a question, “Then, what of the rest of reality?”
The possibility that there is a rest-of-reality outside of our structural brain effector-affector system including that part of the system that provide consciousness implies the possibility that our evolution has not only unfolded inside the laws of ‘nature’ but of other laws of the larger reality, and therefore not only along the lines of the physical structures we are aware through our limited conscious applications that we call knowledge. We can posit that there is, indeed, a larger structural reality that not only lies outside of the limited aspects we call brain and consciousness, but that reality has higher orders of evolved consciousness.
The implications for such a positing is that our arm is not just the arm we experience but a part of a larger form of that we define subjective experience ‘arm’ by self-awareness that is a small part of a larger consciousness. In the readiness of Seth and others to conclude that a period of blankness under anaesthesia is a proof of brain=consciousness, they fail to wonder whether anaesthesia of our brain is to our consciousness as a local anaethesia is to that local part of our body, just a numb, an unfeeling, and unmoving area. In the case of positing a larger reality, a larger consciousness, we can construe of ourselves as an entity that mostly exists outside of ‘nature’, time, and brain. From this vantage point, our consciousness is contiguous with the large consciousness and all that an anaesthetic causes is a numb spot on that larger consciousness.
So how does the brain fit in. Considering that the brain is a structural apparatus that ‘in-nature’ conducts electrical current and makes neurochemicals and hormones that effect other ‘in-nature’ physiological structures. Further, in line with the posited larger reality, the brain is contiguous with a larger reality structure that is by far the greater aspect of the reality. That larger reality structure is also correlated with a larger reality consciousness. So when an anaesthetic ‘numbs’, turns off nearly all our brain functions, there is no information either effective or receptive along a small contiguous pathway of the larger reality. We perceive a large time period of blankness. Our larger consciousness may, actually, be barely impacted.
Death, indeed, may be more peculiar than anything we currently imagine. There will be, I suspect, as Julian Barnes says, some moment of nothingness. Yet, as time-brain is completely denigrated, perhaps it is no more that sloughing off placental tissue. Ego self is certainly gone forever. Yet our larger reality consciousness continues to derive for it’s vitalised form, all that ‘in-nature’ activity of our living a conscious life. And now has all of this life-in-time, life-in-nature, informing a consciousness life form of the larger reality.
The great Educators have never been wrong about life after death or soul. They have only been limited for ways of expressing that reality in the limited culture and knowledge perspectives of the people. To be sure, their followers managed to build dysfunctional theologies around those ideas, just as other followers got right on the money how it is to live a fully conscious life. While we now have a vastly great know-how and a greater array of tools for getting behind out perceptual limitation, we can still under-read the teachings of Great Educators through a lense of ‘nice stories, shame about the fantasy’. Yet the modern tools of reflective inquiry do allow us to truly explore what it might have been about reality that the Great Educators had access, and come closer to vastly increasing our access to it.
Owen's Meanderings 