The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (Metzinger, 2009)
Start with six questions.
- One-World Problem, or the unity of consciousness;
- Now Problem, or the appearance of a lived moment;
- Reality Problem, or why you were born as a naive realist;
- Ineffability Problem, or what we will never be able to talk about;
- Evolution Problem, or the question of what consciousness was good for;
- Who Problem, or the issue of what is the entity that has conscious experience.
One-World Problem
photocopy all existing encyclopedia articles on the topic I could find and track down the historical references. I wanted to know whether in the long history of Western philosophy there was a common philosophical insight running like a thread through humanity’s perennial endeavor to understand the conscious mind. To my surprise, I found two such essential insights.
The first is that consciousness is a higher-order form of knowledge accompanying thoughts and other mental states... in an important sense, consciousness is knowing that you know while you know.
This, Metzinger skips over.
The second important insight seems to be the notion of integration: Consciousness is what binds things together into a comprehensive, simultaneous whole. If we have this whole, then a world appears to us. If the information flow from your sensory organs is unified, you experience the world. If your senses come apart, you lose consciousness.
Why do we see one world only? Why can't we consciously multitask? Why can't we consciously multi-see, multi-feel, multi-think? (Certainly, we can multitask unconsciously, as in, talking while bicycling while balancing the groceries in one hand, but only one task might occupy the consciousness at one time.)
Why can't consciousness be fractured, multiple?
Our tunnel is one tunnel; there are no back alleys, side streets, or alternative routes. Only people who have suffered severe psychiatric disorders or have experimented with major doses of hallucinogens can perhaps conceive of what it means to live in more than one tunnel at a time. The unity of consciousness is one of the major achievements of the brain: It is the not-so-simple phenomenological fact that all the contents of your current experience are seamlessly correlated, forming a coherent whole, the world in which you live your life.
Just think: our eyes contain only finitely many retinal cells, and each cell can only send 1 pixel into the brain. Why is it that we don't see the world in pixels? What has airbrushed away the sharp edges between the pixels?
An easy experiment to see how consciousness can only do one thing at a time: try to hold the two interpretations of the Necker cube in the mind. You can't. (Blindsight Vampires can!)
It is also very difficult to simultaneously see the fish and the birds in the following picture. The problem is that while it is technically possible for the picture to be interpreted as a bunch of fishes and birds fitting together, it's much more reasonable to interpret it as a lot of fishes on an orange background, or a lot of birds on a white background. The conscious mind, then, flickers between these two most likely interpretations, unable to hold them both in the mind.
Some amusing examples of what happens when the conscious experience of the world does fall apart:
There are also patients suffering from what has been called disjunctive agnosia, who cannot integrate seeing and hearing—whose conscious life seems to be taking place in a movie with the wrong soundtrack. As one patient described his experience, someone “was standing in front of me and I could see his mouth moving, but I noticed that the mouth moving did not belong to what I heard.”
Now, what if everything came apart? There are neurological patients with wounded brains who describe “shattered worlds,” but in these cases there is at least some kind of world left—something that could be experienced as having been shattered in the first place. If the unified, multimodal scene—the Here and Now, the situation as such—dissolves completely, we simply go blank. The world no longer appears to us.
The "shattered world" is from Luria's book The Man with a Shattered World: The History of a Brain Wound. The review is significant:
He could not even have written his journal―3,000 pages that he cannot read himself, composed with appalling effort over a quarter of a century―had he not learned to write automatically, without thinking of the process.
That is, this man could not read or write consciously, and had to write unconsciously, as if performing some incomprehensible ritual. The amazing thing is that the unconscious could understand, make sentences, and write, all without asking conscious for help.
What might it feel like, to live in a world that is shattered? Perhaps it's like living in a world where everything is a jigsaw piece, kinda familiar, but the pieces just don't fit, and there's no way to figure out what is the picture made from the jigsaw pieces.
As it turns out, BigGan is the perfect way to illustrate this:
Ever heard of gestalts? It's when a complex thing is held as one. A person is held as a gestalt, and so is an apple, or a book, or a word. Two books --- that's not a gestalt.
The world inhabited by a normal consciousness is filled with gestalts. However, that is a construction of the brain, and can break apart if the brain is sick, or other unusual situations. One example is Gestaltzerfall. You can easily experience it by staring at a word for very long. Eventually the word breaks into letters, the letters break into strokes, the strokes break into pixels.
Continue.
Another fascinating scientific route into the One-World Problem is increasingly receiving attention. It has long been known that in deep meditation the experience of unity and holistic integration is particularly salient.
So scientists imaged their brains while they were meditating.
Tibetan monks who had experienced at least ten thousand hours of meditation... self-induce sustained high-amplitude gamma-band oscillations and global phase-synchrony, visible in EEG recordings made while they are meditating. The high-amplitude gamma activity found in some of these meditators seems to be the strongest reported in the scientific literature. Why is this interesting? As Wolf Singer and his coworkers have shown, gamma-band oscillations, caused by groups of neurons firing away in synchrony about forty times per second, are one of our best current candidates for creating unity and wholeness (although their specific role in this respect is still very much debated).
How to meditate:
this high-amplitude oscillatory activity in the brains of experienced meditators emerges over several dozens of seconds. They can’t just switch it on; instead, it begins to unfold only when the meditator manages effortlessly to “step out of the way.”... oscillations are directly related to reports of intensity.
Meditation changes the brain:
Another interesting finding is that there are significant postmeditative changes to the baseline activity of the brain. Apparently, repeated meditative practice changes the deep structure of consciousness. If meditation is seen as a form of mental training, it turns out that oscillatory synchrony in the gamma range opens just the right time window that would be necessary to promote synaptic change efficiently.
In summary, consciously experienced things are made by neurons firing in sync. For example, this book is experienced as a whole book, rather than a loosely bound cloud of redness, heaviness, book-smell, and a vague sense of joy, because neurons representing all of these properties are in sync.
As another example, if you are listening to someone speaking, and your neurons for representing their speech and neurons for representing their mouth motion are not firing in sync, you'd have the feeling of watching a badly dubbed movie.
Metzinger describes how the brain creates the unity of conscious experiences thus:
a widely distributed network of neurons in the brain seems to achieve just that, as a cloud of single nerve cells, dispersed in space, fire away in intricate patterns of synchronous activity, perhaps with one pattern becoming embedded in the next. Just like the water droplets that form a real cloud, some elements leave the aggregate at any given moment, while others join it. Consciousness is a large-scale, unified phenomenon emerging from a myriad of physical micro-events.
Now Problem
A complete scientific description of the physical universe would not contain the information as to what time is “now.” Indeed, such a description would be free of what philosophers call “indexical terms.” There would be no pointers or little red arrows to tell you “You are here!” or “Right now!” In real life, this is the job of the conscious brain: It constantly tells the organism harboring it what place is here and what time is now. This experiential Now is the second big problem for a modern theory of consciousness.
In less mystical terms, brains are lumps of matter in the universe that contains little maps inside them, arranged on a timeline. Each little map is like the real world, but there is also an arrow on the map "I am here", and an arrow on the timeline "This is now".
How does the brain draw arrows "I am here"? That's not too difficult. A car with a GPS can do that. I know only the rudiments, but a part of how the human brain represents "here I am" is by encoding their position in grid cell firing patterns.
But drawing an arrow "this is now" turns out to be trickier. There are some illusions that can manipulate your sense of "Now", as detailed in Human time perception and its illusions (2010), for example.
The cheapest one is this:
look at your own eyes in a mirror and move your point of focus back and forth so that you're looking at your right eye, then at your left eye, and back again. Your eyes take tens of milliseconds to move ballistically from one position to the other – but here's the mystery: you never see your own eyes move. What happens to the gaps in time while your eyes are moving? Why doesn't your brain care about the small absences of visual input?
Another one is this:
- Watch a looped video clip of someone bouncing a ball, with sound on.
- Slowly back away.
- At some distance away, the sound and the image would suddenly go out of sync.
The lesson is this: the brain synthesizes events, reorders them, fills in some blanks, shifts them in time, and label events as "happening at the same time" even if they don't. If it is useful consider things happening at the same time, the brain does it. It doesn't matter if they actually differ by a small amount, and the brain can consider events that differ by up to 0.1 seconds as "simultaneous". Indeed, the out-of-sync in the second experiment usually happens around 34 meters away, since sound takes 0.1 seconds to travel that far.
Really, the brain cannot help but synthesize a "now", because it's not fast enough to react in real time, nor is it usually useful to differentiate events that occur less than 0.1 seconds apart.
we are never in touch with the present, because neural information-processing itself takes time. Signals take time to travel from your sensory organs along the multiple neuronal pathways in your body to your brain, and they take time to be processed and transformed into objects, scenes, and complex situations. So, strictly speaking, what you are experiencing as the present moment is actually the past.
This has a curious parallel with the idea of "nowcasting" in economics and pandemics control. For example, consider a disease control center trying to figure out what to do with the pandemic. It can only know the daily infection numbers from up to yesterday, so it has to synthesize and guess the numbers of today and tomorrow, and use those to decide on the actions. It doesn't matter that it has no access to the real now. What matters is that it constructs a useful now. Similarly, a government can't ever measure its country's GPD and other vital stats right now, but it can synthesize by past data, and use that to decide on actions.
The brain, in constructing a "useful now", is also nowcasting.
Another use of constructing a "useful now" is for bringing diverse information together so that they can be used in new and exciting ways. Picture yourself a conspiracy-theory corkboard:
One essential function of consciousness is to help an organism stay in touch with the immediate present—with all those properties in both itself and the environment that may change fast and unpredictably.
... metaphor of consciousness as the content of a global workspace of the mind implies that only the critical aspects are represented in consciousness. Conscious information is exactly that information that must be made available for every single one of your cognitive capacities at the same time. You require a conscious representation only if you do not know exactly what will happen next and which capacities (attention, cognition, memory, motor control) you will need to react properly to the challenge around the corner. This critical information must remain active so that different modules or brain mechanisms can access it simultaneously.
In this metaphor, conscious information is like a public message board for the brain. What is published there should be both critical and uncertain concerning which department might find it useful.
Musical notes can form a motif—a bound pattern of sounds constituting a whole that you recognize as such from one instant to the next. Similarly, individual thoughts can form more complex conscious experiences, which may be described as unfolding patterns of reasoning.
It is almost impossible to experience a musical motif, a rhythmic piece of poetry, or a complex thought that lasts for more than three seconds as a unified temporal gestalt.
Side note: What happens if you have a broken time-gestalt?
Many possibilities, one of which is that you get akinetopsia. You can't see motion, only a sequence of "disjoint movie frames".
In summary, why is it useful for the brain to construct a "now"?
[the brain constructs] a representation of time, including an illusory, smeared present, plus the fact that the beings harboring this new property in their brains could not recognize it as a representation. Billions of conscious, time-representing nervous systems created billions of individual perspectives.
It successfully bundles perception, cognition, and conscious will in a way that selects just the right parameters of interaction with the physical world, in environments like those in which our ancestors fought for survival. In this sense, it is a form of knowledge: functional, non-conceptual knowledge about what will work with this kind of body and these kinds of eyes, ears, and limbs.
In other words, our brains have a certain kind of "nowness bias", much as it has an "objecthood bias", an "agent detection bias", a "three-dimensional space bias", etc. This nowness bias is not trivial, but very useful. Human brains construct "now" as a smeared interval lasting about 0.1 seconds, but can incorporate information from the distant past (memory), the distant future (prediction), neither (imagination), and the recent past (time-gestalt).
Here, I'm speaking in languages familiar to AI researchers. Perhaps the "nowness bias" can become a useful inductive bias for general AI, much as the "consciousness prior" is, according to Yoshua Bengio.
Reality Problem
Imagine you could introspectively become aware of ever deeper and earlier phases of your information-processing while looking at the book in your hands. What would happen? The representation would no longer be transparent, but it would still remain inside the tunnel. A flood of interacting patterns would suddenly rush at you; alternative interpretations and intensely competing associations would invade your reality. You would lose yourself in the myriad of micro-events taking place in your brain at every millisecond—you would get lost inside yourself. Your mind would explode into endless loops of self-exploration.
It's difficult to see air. It's difficult to see the cornea. It's all but impossible for fish to notice water. The only way to shock one out of the peace of transparent self is to smash the screen, by psychedelics, or by brain trauma, or some other ways to throw the brain out of wack. Consciousness is too transparent and has to be problematized before it can be studied.
Maybe this is what Aldous Huxley meant when, in his 1954 classic, The Doors of Perception, he quoted William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.”
This is what happens when under some psychedelic drugs. Indeed, the book The Doors of Perception elaborates on his psychedelic experience under the influence of mescaline in May 1953.
However, even when under psychedelics, one cannot fully perceive how the construction is made. The brain is not big enough to internally describe itself, anymore than a book can fully describe its atomic structure in words.
A major function of the transparent conscious model of reality is... to generate a rock-bottom frame of reference for the organism using it: something that unfailingly defines what is real (even if it isn’t); something you cannot fool around or tamper with. Transparency solved the problem of simulating a multitude of possible inner worlds without getting lost in them; it did so by allowing biological organisms to represent explicitly that one of those worlds is an actual reality. I call this the “world-zero hypothesis.”
My theory—the self-model theory of subjectivity—predicts that as soon as a conscious representation becomes opaque (that is, as soon as we experience it as a representation), we lose naive realism. Consciousness without naive realism does exist.
If you could consciously experience earlier processing stages of the representation of the book in your hands, the image would probably become unstable and ambiguous; it would start to breathe and move slightly. Its surface would become iridescent, shining in different colors at the same time. Immediately you would ask yourself whether this could be a dream, whether there was something wrong with your eyes, whether someone had mixed a potent hallucinogen into your drink. A segment of the wall of the Ego Tunnel would have lost its transparency, and the self-constructed nature of the overall flow of experience would dawn on you.
He predicts that the three problems -- unity, nowness, reality -- would be reflected directly in the neural correlates of consciousness:
- Unity is implemented by a dynamic brain state exhibiting large-scale coherence
- Nowness will be implemetned by... "fully integrated with whatever generates the virtual window of presence"? I don't know what's his point here.
- Reality will be implemented by making earlier processing stages unavailable to high-level attention.
First, finding a suitable phenomenological description of what it’s like to have all these experiences; second, analyzing their contents in more detail (the representational level); and third, describing the functions bringing about these contents. Discovering the global NCC means discovering how these functions are implemented in the nervous system. This would also allow us to decide which other beings on this planet enjoy the appearance of a world; these beings will have a recognizable physical counterpart in their brains.
Ineffability Problem
Imagine I’m holding color swatches of two similar shades of green up in front of you. There’s a difference between the two shades, but it’s barely noticeable. (The technical term sometimes used by experts in psychophysics is JND, or “just noticeable difference.” The JND is a statistical distinction, not an exact quantity.) The two shades (I’ll call them Green No. 24 and Green No. 25) are the nearest possible neighbors on the color chart; there’s no shade of green between them that you could discriminate. Now I put my hands behind my back, mix the swatches, and hold one up. Is it Green No. 24 or Green No. 25? The interesting discovery is that conscious perception alone does not enable you to tell the difference. This means that understanding consciousness may also involve understanding the subtle and the ultrafine, not just the whole.
In between 430 and 650 nanometers, human beings can discriminate more than 150 different wavelengths, or different subjective shades, of color. But if asked to reidentify single colors with a high degree of accuracy, they can do so for fewer than 15. The same is true for other sensory experiences. Normal listeners can discriminate about 1,400 steps of pitch difference across the audible frequency range, but they can recognize these steps as examples of only about 80 different pitches.
Technically, this means we do not possess introspective identity criteria for many of the simplest states of consciousness. Our perceptual memory is extremely limited. You can see and experience the difference between Green No. 24 and Green No. 25 if you see both at the same time, but you are unable consciously to represent the sameness of Green No. 25 over time. Of course, it may appear to you to be the same shade of Green No. 25, but the subjective experience of certainty going along with this introspective belief is itself appearance only, not knowledge. Thus, in a simple, well-defined way, there is an element of ineffability in sensory consciousness: You can experience a myriad of things in all their glory and subtlety without having the means of reliably identifying them.
That's the first way in which conscious states can be ineffable.
Second way:
You cannot explain to a blind man the redness of a rose. If the linguistic community you live in does not have a concept for a particular feeling, you may not be able to discover it in yourself or name it so as to share it with others.
Third way:
A third type of ineffability is formed by all those conscious states (“conscious” because they could in principle be attended to) so fleeting you cannot form a memory trace of them: brief flickers on the fringe of your subjective awareness—perhaps a hardly detectable color change or a mild fluctuation in some emotion, or a barely noticeable glimmer in the mélange of your bodily sensations. There might even be longer episodes of conscious experience—during the dream state, say, or under anesthesia—that are systematically unavailable to memory systems in the brain and that no human being has ever reported. Maybe this is also true of the very last moments before death.
Ineffable conscious states present a serious problem to any attempt to find neural correlates. What is the brain state for Green 24, if Green 24 cannot even be internally identified by the person themself?
What to do? If identification is not possible, elimination seems to be the only alternative. If the qualities of sensory consciousness cannot be turned into what philosophers call proper theoretical entities because we have no identity criteria for them, then the cleanest way of solving the Ineffability Problem may be to follow the path that neurophilosopher Paul Churchland and others suggested long ago—to deny the existence of qualia in the first place.
Basically, if it's just impossible to study Green 24, or any state of green itself, maybe it's time to just eliminate it from a theory. We don't need to reduce qualia to brain waves, because there is no qualia to reduce. Eliminative materialism!
Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our commonsense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience.
Evolution Problem
Why, and in what sense, was it necessary to develop something like consciousness in the nervous systems of animals? Couldn’t zombies have evolved instead? Here, the answer is both yes and no.
Metzinger thinks that human self-consciousness is very much adaptive. Most people would agree, but not because they actually thought through the reasons, but because they think "I like being self-conscious, therefore it must be good for the species!"
A few disagree (including me). In Blindsight, (Peter Watts, 2006), there is a dissenting opinion: self-consciousness is not adaptive, a misstep in evolution that persists because no stronger competitors have yet emerged. A wasteful accident that would be corrected eventually.
Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.
If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert.
Peter Zapffe in The Last Messiah gave a much more brutally pessimistic description of self-consciousness. According to Zapffe, self-consciousness is a harmful trait in humanity that evolved due to a runaway evolution. It is harmful, because it makes people aware of their own death, and that causes relentless panic that must be dealt with by mind hacks.
His creative imagination constructs new, fearful prospects behind the curtain of death, and he sees that even there is no sanctuary found. And now he can discern the outline of his biologicocosmic terms: He is the universe’s helpless captive, kept to fall into nameless possibilities. From this moment on, he is in a state of relentless panic.
Such a ‘feeling of cosmic panic’ is pivotal to every human mind. Indeed, the race appears destined to perish in so far as any effective preservation and continuation of life is ruled out when all of the individual’s attention and energy goes to endure, or relay, the catastrophic high tension within.
The tragedy of a species becoming unfit for life by overevolving one ability is not confined to humankind. Thus it is thought, for instance, that certain deer in paleontological times succumbed as they acquired overly-heavy horns. The mutations must be considered blind, they work, are thrown forth, without any contact of interest with their environment.
In depressive states, the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground.
Today, we have a long list of potential candidate functions of consciousness: Among them are the emergence of intrinsically motivating states, the enhancement of social coordination, a strategy for improving the internal selection and resource allocation in brains that got too complex to regulate themselves, the modification and interrogation of goal hierarchies and long-term plans, retrieval of episodes from long-term memory, construction of storable representations, flexibility and sophistication of behavioral control, mind reading and behavior prediction in social interaction, conflict resolution and troubleshooting, creating a densely integrated representation of reality as a whole, setting a context, learning in a single step, and so on. It is hard to believe that consciousness should have none of these functions.
Metzinger agrees with the global workspace theory of consciousness, and further claims that it is a very useful function: Consciousness, as a global workspace, is useful, not useless like Zapffe and Watts claimed.
There are many degrees of conscious experience, and the closer science looks, the more blurry the border between conscious and unconscious processing becomes. But the general notion of global availability allows us to tell a convincing story about the evolution of consciousness. Here is my part of the story: Consciousness is a new kind of organ.
Now we can begin to see what the central evolutionary function of consciousness must have been: It makes classes of facts globally available for an organism and thereby allows it to attend to them, to think about them, and to react to them in a flexible manner that automatically takes the overall context into account. Only if a world appears to you in the first place can you begin to grasp the fact that an outside reality exists. This is the necessary precondition for discovering the fact that you exist as well. Only if you have a consciousness tunnel can you realize that you are part of this reality and are present in it right now.
The consciousness organ also allows even more organs to be built upon it.
Moreover, as soon as this global stage—the consciousness tunnel— has been stabilized, many other types of virtual organs can be generated and begin their dance in your nervous system. Consciousness is an inherently biological phenomenon, and the tunnel is what holds it all together. Within the tunnel, the choreography of your subjective life begins to unfold. You can experience conscious emotions and thereby discover that you have certain goals and needs. You can apprehend yourself as a thinker of thoughts. You can discover that there are other people—other agents—in the environment and learn about your relationship to them; unless a certain type of conscious experience makes this fact globally available to you, you cannot cooperate with them, selectively imitate them, or learn from them in other ways. If you are smart, you may even begin to control their behavior by controlling their conscious states. If you successfully deceive them—if, say, you manage to install a false belief in their minds—then you have activated a virtual organ in another brain.
In summary, consciousness is the latest brain-technology for fluid intelligence!
Every conscious thought, every bodily sensation, every sound and every sight, every experience of empathy... Whatever is elevated to the level of global availability suddenly becomes more fluid and more context-sensitive and is directly related to all other contents of your conscious mind.
Who Problem
To form a successful theory of consciousness, we must match first-person phenomenal content to third-person brain content. We must somehow reconcile the inner perspective of the experiencing self with the outside perspective of science. And there will always be many of us who intuitively think this can never be done. Many people think consciousness is ontologically irreducible (as philosophers say), because first-person facts cannot be reduced to third-person facts. It is more likely, however, that consciousness is epistemically irreducible (as philosophers say).
Most people think that subjective redness is real, as real as 300 nm electromagnetic waves, but these two kinds of real are different kinds of real: subjective and objective, experienced and unexperienced, first-person and third-person. You can't reduce one aspect to the other, because they are different kinds of stuffs (they are ontologically irreducible).
This separation has the most extreme expression in panpsychism: everything has two distinct aspects that are not mutually reducible: a subjective aspect and an objective aspect. Even an atom has an inner world, and when enough atoms come together in a certain way, their objective aspect become a lump of brain, and their subjective aspect become a thinking feeling person.
Metzinger proposes that there is really one stuff: physical world. What is irreducible are two ways to know this stuff: first-person knowledge and third-person knowledge.
The idea is simple: One reality, one kind of fact, but two kinds of knowledge: first-person knowledge and third-person knowledge. Even though consciousness is a physical process, these two different forms of knowing can never be conflated. Knowing every last thing about a person’s brain states will never allow us to know what they are like for the person herself.
In any case, the first-person view can completely disappear, in odd situations, even if the third-person view remains. There can be consciousness without self-consciousness, without a person at all.
Is the existence of an experiencing self a necessary component of consciousness? I don’t think it is—for one thing, because there seem to be “self-less” forms of conscious experience. In certain severe psychiatric disorders, such as Cotard’s syndrome, patients sometimes stop using the first-person pronoun and, moreover, claim that they do not really exist. M. David Enoch and William Trethowan have described such cases in their book Uncommon Psychiatric Syndromes: “Subsequently the subject may proceed to deny her very existence, even dispensing altogether with the use of the personal pronoun ‘I’. One patient even called herself ‘Madam Zero’ in order to emphasize her non-existence. One [patient] said, referring to herself, ‘It’s no use. Wrap it up and throw “it” in the dustbin’.”
Mystics of all cultures and all times have reported deep spiritual experiences in which no “self” was present, and some of them, too, stopped using the pronoun “I.” Indeed, many of the simple organisms on this planet may have a consciousness tunnel with nobody living in it. Perhaps some of them have only a consciousness “bubble” instead of a tunnel, because, together with the self, awareness of past or future disappears as well.
Here I quote Collision With the Infinite: A Life Beyond the Personal Self, a book by some human, which, somehow, stopped constructing a self in the brain, but could still write just fine:
The mind, body, and emotions no longer referred to anyone--there was no one who thought, no one who felt, no one who perceived Yet the mind, body, and emotions continued to function un impaired; apparently they did not need an "I" to keep doing what they always did. Thinking, feeling, perceiving, speaking, all continued as before, functioning with a smoothness that gave no indication of the emptiness behind them. No one suspected that such a radical change had occurred All conversations were carried on as before; language was employed in the same manner. Questions could be asked and answered, cars driven, meals cooked, books read, phones answered, and letters written.
While my first instinct was to object that the body cannot write without having a self, on second thought, a human is resilient and adaptive. Surely it could still write even if it can no longer create a construct a person in the brain, just like how a human without both legs could still move around after adaptation.
Metzinger claims that the construction of self is one step on the long road of self-other distinction in biology. From immunological self, to unconscious brain-representation self, to conscious self.
In evolution, this process started physically, with the development of cell membranes and an immune system to define which cells in one’s body were to be treated as one’s own and which were intruders. Billions of years later, nervous systems were able to represent this self/world distinction on a higher level—for instance, as body boundaries delineated by an integrated but as yet unconscious body schema. Conscious experience then elevated this fundamental strategy of partitioning reality to a previously unknown level of complexity and intelligence. The phenomenal self was born, and the conscious experience of being someone gradually emerged. A self-model, an inner image of the organism as a whole, was built into the world-model, and this is how the consciously experienced first-person perspective developed.
The immunological self is pretty interesting. The problem solved by the immunological self-recognition is almost philosophical: "what is me, and what is not me? Attack what is not me." In this sense, every organism has a primitive sense of self: the immunological sense. See Philosophy of Immunology.
A conversation with Wolf Singer
A unique property of consciousness is its coherence. The contents of consciousness change continuously, at the pace of the experienced present, but at any one moment all the contents of phenomenal awareness are related to one another, unless there is a pathological condition causing a disintegration of conscious experience. This suggests a close relation between consciousness and binding. It seems that only those results of the numerous computational processes that have been bound successfully will enter consciousness simultaneously. This notion also establishes a close link among con- sciousness, short-term memory, and attention. Evidence indicates that stimuli need to be attended to in order to be perceived con- sciously, and only then will they have access to short-term memory.
Think about it. At any moment, everything in consciousness fits together. The puzzle pieces match. There are no seams in the perceived reality. This is not New-Age bullshit: Everything that appears in consciousness is connected. This is quite remarkable, like drawing a bunch of dots, and seeing they always make a complete graph!
Seeing cracks in conscious world must be a horrifying experience, like seeing a physical contradiction, a thing that must not be, like psychosis, waking nightmare, losing one's mind.
Now the miraculous thing is that, looking at the brain anatomy, and looking at the electric activity, there is no command-center. The brain is massively parallel. Not only that, the complex representations -- like the representation of a book, a feeling of fear, a musical motif -- all of these are represented by a network of. It's a bit like doing a computation on a distributed network of computers: any one of the computers can only do a little piece, and the whole computation is distributed all over the globe.
The binding problem results from two distinct features of the brain: First, the brain is a highly distributed system, in which a very large number of operations are carried out in parallel; second, it lacks a single convergence center, in which the results of these parallel computations could be evaluated in a coherent way.
So how does the brain sync them up into a coherent picture? The answer may be in synchronous neural firing.
Syncing is how the brain binds things.
Since the discovery of synchronized oscillatory discharges in the visual cortex more than a decade ago, more and more evidence has supported the hypothesis that synchronization of oscillatory activity may be the mechanism for the binding of distributed brain processes—whereas the relevant oscillation frequencies differ for different structures and in the cerebral cortex typically cover the range of beta- and gamma-oscillations: 20 to 80 Hz.
How do neurons code for information? By firing electric pulses. There are three main parameters for firing:
- frequency
- amplitude
- relative phase
The most challenging questions are how information is encoded in distributed neuronal networks and how subjective feelings, the so-called qualia, emerge from distributed neuronal activity... accumulating evidence suggests that complex cognitive contents are encoded by the activity of distributed assemblies of neurons and that the information is contained in the relations between the amplitudes and in the duration of the discharges.
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