Chapter 4: From Ownership to Agency to Free Will
Review
In chapter 3, Metzinger used OBE and other disruptions to self-consciousness to sketch out a 3-part model of consciousness:
- Physical body model. This is a model of the physical body, with joints, bones, meat, weight, velocity, shape, etc. It is put into a model of the physical world, and it cannot occupy the same volume as other solids. So for example, the arm of the body cannot sink into the desk.
- Astral body model. This model has the same shape as the physical body model. However, it has no weight, is not affected by gravity, has no organs, and though it has a volume, it cannot exclude anything else from the volume (it's like turning off collision in a game). It is basically a ghost in the shell of the physical body model. It is usually a bit smaller than the physical body model.
- Viewpoint model. A point in space augmented with a Cartesian frame, to represent the orientation of your viewpoint. It represents your "true location". It is perched between the eyes of the astral body model, facing straight forward.
It is used to model where the sound you are hearing is coming from. So for example, if you hear a noise on the left, that would be modeled as a sound source to the left of the viewpoint.
It is also used to model where what you are seeing is. So for example, if you see a ball straight ahead, that is modelled as a ball straight ahead of the viewpoint.
Note that even in a blind-deaf person, there is still a viewpoint model. It is simply not used to assist in inference of audio and visual input. Even a blind-deaf person must feel like they are somewhere in spacetime. That "somewhere" is the location of the viewpoint model within the world model.
Metzinger further contends that to create a thing that feels, it is necessary and sufficient to make a "minimal phenomenal selfhood". A minimal phenomenal selfhood is made of these parts:
- A model of spacetime.
- A point in the spacetime model, indicating "here I am".
- A model of the body (usually humanoid) centered around the viewpoint.
- A global workspace, that is, a buffer memory unit like the RAM.
And to augment a minimal phenomenal selfhood into a minimal subject, it is necessary and sufficient to add:
- A self-attention control module. The three components of the minimal phenomenal selfhood should appear in the global workspace, and the self-attention control module's function is to emphasize/deemphasize parts of the self-body-model into focus in the global workspace.
Before the use of external tools could develop, a neurodynamic tool had to be in place in our brains. I have been calling this inner tool the PSM, the phenomenal self-model, a distinct and coherent pattern of neural activity that allows you to integrate parts of the world into an inner image of yourself as a whole. Only if you have a self-model can you experience your hands and your arms as parts of your own body. Only if you have a self-model can you experience certain cognitive processes in your brain as your own thoughts and certain events in the motor parts of your brain as your own intentions and acts of will. Our next step is the step from ownership to agency.
Alien Hand
The alien hand crushing cups on the tray and fighting with the healthy right hand seems to have a will of its own. When the alien hand begins unbuttoning the patient’s gown, this is not automatic behavior like the knee-jerk reflex; it appears to be guided by an explicit goal-representation. Apparently a little agent is embedded in the bigger agent—a subpersonal entity pursuing its own goals by hijacking a body part that belongs to the patient. In another typical case, a patient will pick up a pencil and begin scribbling with one hand, reacting with dis- may when she becomes aware of this. She will then immediately withdraw the pencil, pull the alien hand to her side with her “good” hand, and indicate that she did not initiate the scribbling herself. Another such case study describes the patient’s left hand groping for nearby objects and picking and pulling at her clothes to the point that she refers to her errant hand as an autonomous entity.
The subpersonal agent can be quite intelligent. It can play legal moves in a game of checkers, remember the move, and stubbornly replay the move when the other hand opts for a different move.
Patients suffering from Alien Hand syndrome still experience the hand as their own hand; the conscious sense of ownership is still there, but there is no corresponding experience of will in the patient’s mind. As philosophers say, the “volitional act” is missing, and the goal-state driving the alien hand’s behavior is not represented in the person’s conscious mind. The fact that the arm is clearly a subpersonal part of the body makes it even more striking to see how the patient automatically attributes something like intentionality and personhood to it, treating it as an autonomous agent. This conflict between the hand and the willing self can even become a conflict between the hand and the thinking self. For instance, when one patient’s left hand made a move he did not wish to make in a game of checkers, he corrected the move with his right hand. Then, to his frustration, the isolated functional module in his brain that was driving his left arm caused it to repeat the unwanted move.
Actually, philosophical ideas can be read as fantastical literature. But not only that, they can also be experienced vividly in alternative states of consciousness.
At one extreme of the philosophical spectrum, we find denial of the freedom of will: No such things as “actions” or “agents” exist, and, strictly speaking, predetermined physical events are all that have ever existed. We are all automata. If our hardware is damaged, individual subsystems may act up—a sad fact, but certainly no mystery. The other extreme is to hold that there are no blind, purely physical events in the universe at all, that every single event is a goal-driven action, caused by a person—for instance, by the mind of God. Nothing happens by chance; everything is purposeful and ultimately willed.
In fact, in some psychiatric syndromes, patients experience every consciously perceived event in their environment as directly caused by themselves. In other mental diseases, such as schizophrenia, one may feel that one’s body and thoughts are remote-controlled and that the whole world is one big machine, a soulless and meaningless mechanism grinding away.
Turns out philosophers have dreamed up every possible metaphysics that humans can intuitively believe in under alternative forms of consciousness!
Psychiatric diseases are reality-models—alternate ontologies developed to cope with serious and often specific problems. Interestingly, in almost all cases these alternate ontologies can be mapped onto a philosophical ontology—that is, they will correspond to some well-established metaphysical idea about the deeper structure of reality (radical determinism, say, or the omnipotent, omnipresent God’s-eye view).
Kinds of agencies
Attentional agency is the experience of being the entity that controls... the “ray of attention.” As an attentional agent, you can initiate a shift in attention and, as it were, direct your inner flashlight at certain targets: a perceptual object, say, or a specific feeling. In many situations, people lose the property of attentional agency, and consequently their sense of self is weakened. Infants cannot control their visual attention; their gaze seems to wander aimlessly from one object to another, because this part of their Ego is not yet consolidated. Another example of consciousness without attentional control is the dream state, and... severe drunkenness or senile dementia, you may lose the ability to direct your attention—and, correspondingly, feel that your “self” is falling apart.
Another is cognitive agency:
The cognitive subject is a thinker of thoughts and can also ascribe this faculty to herself. But often thoughts just drift by, like clouds. Meditators... strive to diminish their sense of self, letting their thoughts drift by instead of clinging to their content, attentively but effortlessly letting them dissolve. If you had never had the conscious experience of causing your own thoughts, ordering and sustaining them, being attached to their content, you would never have experienced yourself as a thinking self. That part of your self-model would simply have dried up and withered away. In order to have Descartes’ experience of the Cogito—the robust experience of being a thinking thing, an Ego—you must also have had the experience of deliberately selecting the contents of your mind. This is what the various forms of agency have in common: Agency allows us to select things: our next thought, the next perceptual object we want to focus on, our next bodily movement. It is also the experience of executive consciousness—not only the experience of initiating change but also of carrying it through and sustaining a more complex action over time. At least this is the way we have described our inner experience for centuries.
Metzinger has highlighted something surprising: around 2/3 of our conscious time is spent without having cognitive agency. Instead, we are washed around by unbidden thoughts, reveries, memories, impulses, or just a general lack of willful thinking. See The myth of cognitive agency: subpersonal thinking as a cyclically recurring loss of mental autonomy (2013).
This is directly opposite to the intuitive idea that we control what we think, something that Descartes believed in.
Finally, there is the subjective sense of effort.
Phenomenologically, it is an effort to move your body. It is also an effort to focus your attention. And it certainly is an effort to think in a concentrated, logical fashion.
In summary:
- Alien hand syndrome shows it's possible to have body ownership but not body agency over a hand.
- Certain schizophrenic experience themselves as remote-controlled puppets, showing it's possible to have body ownership but not body agency over the entire body.
- Akinetic mutism shows the same thing. However, in this case, the body is a puppet with broken strings.
- About 2/3 of our conscious time is spent without cognitive agency, as during daydreams. This shows it's common to have cognitive ownership without cognitive agency over thoughts.
- Certain schizophrenic experience some thoughts to be inserted by aliens, showing it's possible to lose cognitive ownership AND cognitive agency.
- Sleepwalking shows it's possible to execute complex actions entirely without consciousness.
Hallucinating Agency
oddly, many consciousness philosophers have long ignored this phenomenon. You can have the robust, conscious experience of having intended an action even if this wasn’t the case. By directly stimulating the brain, we can trigger not only the execution of a bodily movement but also the conscious experience of having the urge to perform that movement. We can experimentally induce the conscious experience of will.
An electric stimulation created an "urge to grasp" that is felt as self-originated (not alien). From Kremer et al., Letter to the Editor, “The Cingulate Hidden Hand,” (2001);
The patient began to search for the nearest object she could grasp, and the arm that was opposite the stimulated side—her left arm—began to wander to the right. She reported a strong “urge to grasp,” which she was unable to control. As soon as she saw a potential target object, her left hand moved toward it and seized it. On the level of her conscious experience, the irrepressible urge to grasp the object started and ended with the stimulation of her brain. This much is clear: Whatever else the conscious experience of will may be, it seems to be something that can be turned on and off with the help of a small electrical current from an electrode in the brain.
Apparent mental causation: Sources of the experience of will (1999) is an early example of how to do it without opening the brain.
people can arrive at the mistaken belief that they have intentionally caused an action that, in fact, they were forced to perform, when they are simply led to think about the action just before its occurrence.
One possible explanation is that the sense of agency is a "postconstruction". A just-so story told after the event:
- Huh, why did my finger move...
- I must have willed it!
Experiencing yourself as a willing agent has much to do with, as it were, introspectively peeping into the middle of a long processing chain in your brain. This chain leads from certain preparatory processes that might be described as “assembling a motor command” to the feedback you get from perceiving your movements.
Haggard points out that the awareness of intention and the awareness of movement are conceptually distinct, but he speculates that they must derive from a single processing stage in the motor pathway. It looks as though our access to the ongoing motor-processing in our brains is extremely restricted; awareness is limited to a very narrow window of premotor activity, an intermediate phase of a longer process. If Haggard is right, then the sense of agency, the conscious experience of being someone who acts, results from the process of binding the awareness of intention together with the representation of one’s actual movements. This also suggests what subjective awareness of intention is good for: It can detect potential mismatches with events occurring in the world outside the brain.
So for example, to hallucinate the body-agent-statement "I made my finger move", what actually happened was this:
- A complex chain of events in the brain initiates a motor cortex event-chain, to prepare for moving the finger.
- Somewhere in the middle of the chain, a copy is sent to the global workspace.
- This creates the conscious sense of agency.
- Later, as the finger actually gets moved, the motion is compared with the copy in the workspace.
- If there is no discrepancy, the case is dismissed. But if there is, then the difference between expectation and reality is inferred to be due to unaccounted for perturbation, such as someone holding the finger down.
The conscious experience of will and of agency allows an organism to own the subpersonal processes in its brain responsible for the selection of action goals, the construction of specific movement patterns, and the control of feedback from the body. When this sense of agency evolved in human beings, some of the stages in the immensely complex causal network in our brains were raised to the level of global availability. Now we could attend to them, think about them, and possibly even interrupt them.
Moreover, sense of agency allows creatures to model agents. They could model themselves as agents, as well as others as agents. This is a very useful abstraction, since it allows the creature to use the intentional stance and save computing power.
How exactly does a creature model agents? Agents are things that can plan motions, so to model an agent, you'd have to be able to model motion-planning algorithms... And a natural way to do that is to look into your own motion-planning algorithms, to inspect intermediate "stages in the immensely complex causal network in our brains".
For the first time, we could experience ourselves as beings with goals, and we could use internal representations of these goals to control our bodies. For the first time, we could form an internal image of ourselves as able to fulfill certain needs by choosing an optimal route. Moreover, conceiving of ourselves as autonomous agents enabled us to discover that other beings in our environment probably were agents, too, who had goals of their own. But I must postpone this analysis of the social dimension of the self for a while and turn to a classical problem of philosophy of mind: the freedom of the will.
How Free are we?
As noted previously, the philosophical spectrum on freedom of the will is a wide one, ranging from outright denial to the claim that all physical events are goal-driven and caused by a divine agent, that nothing happens by chance, that everything is, ultimately, willed. The most beautiful idea, perhaps, is that freedom and determinism can peacefully coexist: If our brains are causally determined in the right way, if they make us causally sensitive to moral considerations and rational arguments, then this very fact makes us free. Determinism and free will are compatible.
The three theories are respectively hard determinism, occasionalism, and compatibalism. But this is not a book about that. Instead of attacking directly, it's more fruitful to examine the material basis of the brain's decision process, and see how it is felt as willful (sense of agency) and free (sense of freedom). Because, whatever position you might hold on free will, you must explain why people claim they have free will. It is the meta-problem of free will, like the meta-problem of consciousness.
we clearly experience ourselves as beings that can initiate new causal chains out of the blue—as beings that could have acted otherwise given exactly the same situation.
When certain processing stages are elevated to the level of conscious experience and bound into the self-model active in your brain, they become available for all your mental capacities. Now you experience them as your own thoughts, decisions, or urges to act—as properties that belong to you, the person as a whole. It is also clear why these events popping up in the conscious self necessarily appear spontaneous and uncaused. They are the first link in the chain to cross the border from unconscious to conscious brain processes; you have the impression that they appeared in your mind “out of the blue,” so to speak. The unconscious precursor is invisible, but the link exists. (Recently, this has been shown for the conscious veto, as when you interrupt an intentional action at the last instant.) But in fact the conscious experience of intention is just a sliver of a complicated process in the brain. And since this fact does not appear to us, we have the robust experience of being able to spontaneously initiate causal chains from the mental into the physical realm. This is the appearance of an agent. (Here we also gain a deeper understanding of what it means to say that the self-model is transparent. Often the brain is blind to its own workings, as it were.)
As explained before, the "conscious veto" is an important function of the sense of agency. It was elevated to philosophical significance by Libet. The same Libet who found that action potentials in the brain can be used to predict actions up to 0.2 seconds before conscious notice of the action. See Libet Experiments.
Libet claims that "free won't" exists: the conscious veto is "free", in the sense that they cannot be predicted by action potentials. That may be measurably wrong, according to There Is No Free Won’t: Antecedent Brain Activity Predicts Decisions to Inhibit (2013):
Larger prestimulus ERP amplitudes were associated with trials in which participants decided to act rapidly as compared to trials in which they decided to delay their responses. Last-moment decisions to inhibit or delay may depend on unconscious preparatory neural activity.
The science of the mind is now beginning to reintroduce those hidden facts forcefully into the Ego Tunnel. There will be a conflict between the biological reality tunnel in our heads and the neuroscientific image of humankind, and many people sense that this image might present a danger to our mental health. I think the irritation and deep sense of resentment surrounding public debates on the freedom of the will have little to do with the actual options on the table. These reactions have to do with the (perfectly sensible) intuition that certain types of answers will not only be emotionally disturbing but ultimately impossible to integrate into our conscious self-models. This is the first point
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
We all would like to believe that, ultimately, intellectual honesty is not only an expression of, but also good for your mental health. My dangerous question is if one can be intellectually honest about the issue of free will and preserve one's mental health at the same time. Behind this question lies what I call the "Forbidden Fruit Intuition": Is there a set of questions which are dangerous not on grounds of ideology or political correctness, but because the most obvious answers to them could ultimately make our conscious self-models disintegrate? Can one really believe in determinism without going insane?
Have you ever tried to observe introspectively what happens when you decide to lift your arm and then the arm lifts? What exactly is the deep, fine-grained structure of cause and effect? Can you really observe how the mental event causes the physical event? Look closely! My prediction is that the closer you look and the more thoroughly you introspect your decision processes, the more you’ll realize that conscious intentions are evasive: The harder you look at them, the more they recede into the background.
The phenomenology itself may well be shaped by this, because a self-model also is the window connecting our inner lives with the social practice around us. Free will does not exist in our minds alone—it is also a social institution.
This is a big claim, so I checked for backup info, and found a dissenting opinion! Is Belief in Free Will a Cultural Universal? (2010):
Recent experimental research has revealed surprising patterns in people’s intuitions about free will and moral responsibility. One limitation of this research, however, is that it has been conducted exclusively on people from Western cultures. The present paper extends previous research by presenting a cross-cultural study examining intuitions about free will and moral responsibility in subjects from the United States, Hong Kong, India and Colombia. The results revealed a striking degree of crosscultural convergence. In all four cultural groups, the majority of participants said that (a) our universe is indeterministic and (b) moral responsibility is not compatible with determinism.
This claim is in the domain of experimental philosophy. Another relevant paper is Experimental Philosophy and the Problem of Free Will (2011), which is more moderate:
Many philosophical problems are rooted in everyday thought, and experimental philosophy uses social scientific techniques to study the psychological underpinnings of such problems. In the case of free will, research suggests that people in a diverse range of cultures reject determinism, but people give conflicting responses on whether determinism would undermine moral responsibility. When presented with abstract questions, people tend to maintain that determinism would undermine responsibility, but when presented with concrete cases of wrongdoing, people tend to say that determinism is consistent with moral responsibility. It remains unclear why people reject determinism and what drives people’s conflicted attitudes about responsibility. Experimental philosophy aims to address these issues and thereby illuminate the philosophical problem of free will.
On the psychological side, there are papers like Believing versus Disbelieving in Free Will: Correlates and Consequences (2012) showing that belief in free will is adaptive for living in Western societies:
Disbelief in free will has been shown to cause dishonest, selfish, aggressive, and conforming behavior, and to reduce helpfulness, learning from one’s misdeeds, thinking for oneself, recycling, expectations for occupational success, and actual quality of performance on the job. Belief in free will has been shown to have only modest or negligible correlations with other variables, indicating that it is a distinct trait. Belief in free will has correlated positively with life satisfaction and finding life meaningful, with self-efficacy and self-control, with low levels of stress, and (though not entirely consistently) with internal locus of control. High belief in free will has been linked to a punitive attitude toward wrongdoers and lower forgiveness toward them. The belief seems to involve a sense of agency and expecting others to behave in morally responsible fashion.
And Free to Punish: A Motivated Account of Free Will Belief (2014) shows that it helps people punish people:
There is no consensus among scientists and philosophers regarding the actual existence of free will or what form it might take, yet the vast majority of laypeople believe in free will (Nahmias et al., 2005). Moreover, recent empirical findings have shown that free will beliefs have behavioral consequences, mostly along the lines of making people act in accordance with cultural values (e.g., Baumeister et al., 2009; Vohs & Schooler, 2008). The findings that free will beliefs are so pervasive and have important behavioral consequences highlight the importance of understanding the factors that influence people to hold affirming versus skeptical beliefs about free will. We have reported five studies aimed at testing one explanation for the causation of free will beliefs. Specifically, we tested an idea dating back to Nietzsche (1889/1954): the idea that free will is embraced, at least partly, in order to justify holding others morally responsible for their wrongful behaviors. Our investigation has supported Nietzsche’s hypothesis with multiple findings, diverse methods, and different populations.
There seems little doubt that the subjective experience of choosing and acting supports people’s belief in free will, but our findings suggest another powerful motivating factor: the human impulse to blame and punish. People believe in free will—at least in part— because they wish to affirm that people who do immoral things could have and should have acted differently. Though questions remain, to our knowledge, the present research is first to demonstrate that free will beliefs can be motivated by situational factors and first to demonstrate a powerful and consistent way of increasing free will beliefs.
What did Nietzsche say? In Twilight of the Idols,
Today we no longer have any pity for the concept of "free will": we know only too well what it really is — the foulest of all theologians' artifices, aimed at making mankind "responsible" in their sense, that is, dependent upon them... Men were considered "free" only so that they might be considered guilty – could be judged and punished: consequently, every act had to be considered as willed, and the origin of every act had to be considered as lying within the consciousness (and thus the most fundamental psychological deception was made the principle of psychology itself).
Back to Metzinger.
The assumption that something like free agency exists, and the fact that we treat one another as autonomous agents, are concepts fundamental to our legal system and the rules governing our societies—rules built on the notions of responsibility, accountability, and guilt. These rules are mirrored in the deep structure of our PSM, and this incessant mirroring of rules, this projection of higher-order assumptions about ourselves, created complex social networks. If one day we must tell an entirely different story about what human will is or is not, this will affect our societies in an unprecedented way.
He claims that there is a fourway interaction:
biological body - phenomenal experience - cultural explanations - social-legal institutions
Scientific understanding of consciousness would first make its way into cultural explanations for consciousness, which then has massive consequences for both phenomenal experience and social/legal institutions. The consequences of scientific enlightenment can be quite dangerous.
Here Metzinger starts sketching things out in quick, unjustified succession, which I'll critique.
For instance, if accountability and responsibility do not really exist, it is meaningless to punish people (as opposed to rehabilitating them) for something they ultimately could not have avoided doing. Retribution would then appear to be a Stone Age concept, something we inherited from animals.
This is a reasonable prediction about human psychology. The traditional joke about free will won't apply:
- "Mr Judge, I plead not guilty, because I have no free will."
- "I have no free will either so I must sentence you to death."
When modern neuroscience discovers the sufficient neural correlates for willing, desiring, deliberating, and executing an action, we will be able to cause, amplify, extinguish, and modulate the conscious experience of will by operating on these neural correlates. It will become clear that the actual causes of our actions, desires, and intentions often have very little to do with what the conscious self tells us.
This is related to an old news from 1977 that most people have never heard about: the introspective illusion, a cognitive bias in which people wrongly think they have direct insight into the origins of their mental states, while treating others’ introspections as unreliable. Introspection is not a direct spying on your own decision process, but is merely inferring your decision process, the same way you infer others' decision process.
From a scientific, third-person perspective, our inner experience of strong autonomy may look increasingly like what it has been all along: an appearance only.
Autonomy is an illusion, like the sense of direct introspection.
At the same time, we will learn to admire the elegance and the robustness with which nature built only those things into the reality tunnel that organisms needed to know, rather than burdening them with a flood of information about the workings of their brains. We will come to see the subjective experience of free will as an ingenious neurocomputational tool. Not only does it create an internal user-interface that allows the organism to control and adapt its behavior, but it is also a necessary condition for social interaction and cultural evolution.
Neuroscientists like to speak of “action goals,” processes of “motor selection,” and the “specification of movements” in the brain... If one takes the scientific worldview seriously, no such things as goals exist, and there is nobody who selects or specifies an action. There is no process of “selection” at all; all we really have is dynamical self-organization. Moreover, the information-processing taking place in the human brain is not even a rule-based kind of processing. Ultimately, it follows the laws of physics. The brain is best described as a complex system continuously trying to settle into a stable state, generating order out of chaos.
Chapter 5: Philosophical Psychonautics: What Can We Learn from Lucid Dreaming?
In dream research, this is a well-known phenomenon called false awakening. Did I really have an out-of-body experience? Or did I only have a lucid dream of an out-of-body experience? Can one slide from an OBE into an ordinary dream via a false awakening? Are all OBEs forms of lucid dreaming in the first place? To wake up twice in a row is something that can shatter many of the theoretical intuitions you have about consciousness—for instance, that the vividness, the coherence, and the crispness of a conscious experience are evidence that you are really in touch with reality. Apparently, what we call “waking up” is something that can happen to you at any point in phenomenological time. This is a highly relevant empirical fact for philosophical epistemology.
... the appearance/reality distinction emerged only on the level of appearance: False awakenings demonstrate that consciousness is never more than the appearance of a world. There is no certainty involved, not even about the state, the general category of conscious experience in which you find yourself. So, how do you know that you actually woke up this morning? Couldn’t it be that everything you have ever experienced was only a dream?
One particularly severe episode of false awakening struck Russell. From Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948):
It may be said that, though when dreaming I may think that I am awake, when I wake up I know that I am awake. But I do not see how we are to have any such certainty; I have frequently dreamt that I woke up; in fact once, after ether, I dreamt it about a hundred times in the course of one dream. We condemn dreams, in fact, because they do not fit into a proper context, but this argument can be made inconclusive, as in Calderon’s play, La Vida es Sueno. I do not believe that I am now dreaming, but I cannot prove that I am not. I am, however, quite certain that I am having certain experiences, whether they be those of a dream or those of waking life.
Or just this Roy: A Life Well Lived | Rick and Morty (Adult Swim, 2015):
What are dreams, really?Dreamers are self-aware, but functionally they are not situated. Dreams are subjective states in that there is a phenomenal self; however, the perspective from which this conscious self perceives the world is very different—and much more unstable—than it is during wakefulness...
... attentional agency is not just the ability to “zoom in” on certain things or point your mind at particular features of your world-model; it also entails the sense of ownership—ownership of the selection process preceding the shift in attention. Both aspects are missing in dreams. In a way, you are like an infant or a severely intoxicated person. The dream Ego is much weaker than the waking Ego.
It also has no conscious access to intermediate steps of motor decision process, thus it is also not an agent.
In ordinary dreams, you sometimes cannot experience yourself as any sort of agent at all. It is difficult, for example, to make a decision and follow through with it. But even if you manage that, you are typically unable to ascribe agency to yourself. The dreaming self is a confused thinker, severely disoriented with regard to places, times, and people’s identities. Short-term memory is greatly impaired and unreliable. Also, only rarely does the dream self have such sensory experiences as pain, temperature, smell, or taste. Even more interesting is the extreme instability of the first-person perspective: Attention, thinking, and willing are highly unstable and exist only intermittently, yet the ordinary dreaming Ego does not really care about this, or even notice it. The dream self is like the anosognostic patient, who lacks insight into a deficit following brain injury... this feature of the dream state is a “metacognitive deficit. ” The dream Ego is delusional, lacking insight into the nature of the state it is itself generating.
There is also an interesting connection between delirium, delusion, schizophrenia, and dreaming. Continue.
At the same time, the dream self creates intense emotional experiences—some aspects of the self are clearly stronger in the dream tunnel than in the tunnel of waking consciousness. Anyone who has ever had a nightmare knows how intense the feeling of panic can become during dreams. In the dream state, the emotional self-model can be characterized by unusually intense degrees of feeling, though this is not true for all emotions; for example, fear, elation, and anger predominate over sadness, shame, and guilt.
In fact, I have experienced great sadness a few times in dreams, although fear is more common.
Blind people are sometimes able to see in dreams. Helen Keller, who turned blind and deaf at the age of nineteen months, emphasized the importance of these occasional visual experiences: “Blot out dreams, and the blind lose one of their chief comforts; for in the visions of sleep they behold their belief in the seeing mind and their expectation of light beyond the blank, narrow night justified.” In one study, congenitally blind subjects produced dream drawings that judges were unable to distinguish from drawings of sighted subjects, and as EEG correlates between were sufficiently similar, this strongly suggests that they can see in their dreams—but do they?
What? That's Visual dream content, graphical representation and EEG alpha activity in congenitally blind subjects (2003), which said:
... the two groups presented equivalent visual activity indices, and no differences in the analysis of graphical representation of dreaming imagery.... In conclusion, the congenitally blind have visual content in their dreams and are able to draw it.
Continue.
It is also interesting to note that Keller’s dream tunnel contained the phenomenal qualities associated with smell and taste, which most of us experience only rarely in the dream state. It seems as if her dream tunnel became richer because her waking tunnel had lost some of its qualitative dimensions.
Lucid dreaming
Lucid dreams are fascinating because our naive realism—our unawareness of living our lives in an Ego Tunnel—is temporarily suspended. They are therefore a promising route of research for solving what I termed the Reality Problem in our tour of the tunnel in chapter 2. A lucid dream is a global simulation of a world in which we suddenly become aware that it is indeed just a simulation.
During what are sometimes called pre-lucid dreams, we frequently become aware that none of this is real, that this must be a dream, but we remain passive observers.
One step above that is the lucid dream self, which adds action agency as well as full access to your memories.
With the onset of full lucidity, the dreamer often turns from a passive observer into an agent—someone who takes charge, moves around, explores and experiments, who deliberately starts to interact with the dream world and shape it.
What exactly allows lucidity? How does the dream self upgrade from a minimal phenomenal self to an agent?
Allan Hobson... has speculated that for lucidity to occur, “the normally deactivated dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) must be reactivated, but not so strongly as to suppress the pontolimbic signals to it.” This part of the brain may allow us to refer to ourselves by engaging in reflective thought. In the lucid-dream tunnel, this leads to the reestablishment of executive control and the reemergence of a full-blown agent. If Hobson is right, the moment we consciously think, “My God, I’m dreaming!” may be the moment the self-model of the dream state becomes hooked up to the prefrontal cortex, making proper reflexive self-consciousness possible again and reestablishing cognitive agency.
Here are some questions for future research: What precisely happens to the conscious self during the transition from an ordinary dream to a lucid dream? What are the fine-grained functional differences between the dream self-model and the lucid self-model? Could there also be something like “lucid waking”? And what, exactly, happens during a false awakening?
Lucid dreaming gives all kinds of funny stories. Here are a few:
Dutch psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden, who coined the phrase “lucid dreaming”:
I dreamt that I was lying in the garden before the windows of my study, and saw the eyes of my dog through the glass pane. I was lying on my chest and observing the dog very keenly. At the same time, however, I knew with perfect certainty that I was dreaming and lying on my back in my bed. And then I resolved to wake up slowly and carefully and observe how my sensation of lying on my chest would change to the sensation of lying on my back. And so I did, slowly and deliberately, and the transition—which I have since undergone many times—is most wonderful. It is like the feeling of slipping from one body into another, and there is distinctly a double recollection of the two bodies. I remembered what I felt in my dream, lying on my chest; but returning into the day-life, I remembered also that my physical body had been quietly lying on its back all the while. This observation of a double memory I have had many times since. It is so indubitable that it leads almost unavoidably to the conception of a dream-body.
Van Eeden’s “dream-body” is the self-model in the dream state.
Paul Tholey:
I briefly looked back. The person following me did not look like an ordinary human being; he was as tall as a giant and reminded me of Rübezahl [a mountain spirit in German legend]. Now it was fully clear to me that I was undergoing a dream, and with a great sense of relief I continued running away. Then it suddenly occurred to me that I did not have to escape but was capable of doing something else. I remembered my plan of talking to other persons during the dream. So I stopped running, turned around, and allowed the pursuer to approach me. Then I asked him what it actually was that he wanted. His answer was: “How am I supposed to know?! After all, this is your dream and, more- over, you studied psychology and not me.”
Metzinger:
I also bought an expensive lucid-dreaming device called a Nova Dreamer, which looks a bit like the eye masks you some- times see people wearing on long-distance plane flights. The Nova Dreamer is activated when your rapid eye movements signal the start of a dream. After a couple of minutes, it begins submitting mild subliminal visual stimuli, and you can perceive these soft, red, ring-shaped flashes of light through your closed eyelids. They are meant to alert you to the fact that you are dreaming; however, they are more likely to be integrated into your dream story.
Unfortunately, all I ever got out of my expensive lucid-dreaming device was terrible nightmares—with an interesting twist. In Germany, the flashing lights of police cars are blue. So what I got from this device was American nightmares, with American police cars hunting me down and cornering me, flashing red lights and all.
Eliminative phenomenalism
Imagine that while in the dream tunnel, you suddenly become lucid and find yourself at a major interdisciplinary conference, where dream scien- tists and dream philosophers are discussing the nature of consciousness: While they’re standing around during the coffee break, one of them claims that you do not really exist, because you’re just a dream figure in your own lucid-dream tunnel, a mere possibil- ity. Amused, you reply, “No, you are all figures in my dream— just figments of my imagination.” This response is greeted with laughter, and you notice, too, that colleagues at other tables are grinning and turning their heads in your direction. “All of this is happening in my brain!” you insist. “I own the hardware, and you are all just simulated dream characters in a simulated envi- ronment, processed and created by my central nervous system. It would be easy for me. . .” Here, more laughter interrupts you—roars of laughter. A young PhD student arrogantly starts explaining the basic assumptions about the nature of reality shared by this particular scientific community: No such things as brains or physical objects ever existed. The contents of con- sciousness are all there is. So all phenomenal selves are equal. There is no such thing as an individual “tunnel” in which one self-model represents the true subject of experience and all other person-models are just dream figures.
The strange philosophical concept this dream community of scientists has developed as their background assumption is known as eliminative phenomenalism. As the slightly overambitious PhD student explains: “Eliminative phenomenalism is the thesis that physics and the neuro- scientific image of man constitute 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 a completed science of pure consciousness.” All reality, accordingly, is phenomenal reality. The only way you can drop out of this reality is by making the grandiose (but fundamentally false) assumption that there actually is an outside world and that you are the subject—that is, the experiencer—of this phenomenal reality, that there actually is a con- sciousness tunnel (a wormhole, as they ironically call it), and that it is your own tunnel. By entertaining this belief, however, you would sud- denly become unreal and turn into something even less than a mere dream figure yourself: a possible person—exactly what your opponent claimed at the beginning of the discussion.
“Listen, guys,” you say, in a slightly irritated voice, “I can demon- strate to you that this is my consciousness tunnel, because I can end this state, and your very existence, at any point in time. A well-known technique for terminating lucid dreams is to hold one’s hands up in front of one’s eyes and fix one’s visual atten- tion on them. If I do this, it will interrupt the rapid eye move- ments in my physical body and thus end the dream state in my physical brain. I will wake up in the Waking Tunnel. You will simply cease to exist. Do you want me to show you?” You note that your tone of voice sounds triumphant, but you also note that the amusement in the eyes of the other scientists and philosophers has changed to pity. The arrogant PhD student blurts out again: “But don’t you see that simply falling back into what you call ‘waking up’ doesn’t prove anything to anybody? You must demonstrate the truth of your ontological assumptions to this scientific community, on this level of reality. You cannot decide the question by simply degrading yourself to a virtual person and disappearing from our level. By waking up, you will learn nothing new. And you cannot prove anything at all—certainly not to us, but not to yourself, either. If you want to humiliate yourself by vanishing into your waking wormhole, then just go ahead! But the serious pursuit of consciousness re- search and of philosophical theory of science is something en- tirely different!”
Conversation with Allan Hobson
Dream consciousness is more intense, more single-minded, more elaborate, and more bizarre than consciousness in waking. Hence, it can reasonably be viewed as the most autocreative state of the brain-mind. It is also the most psychosis-like state of normal consciousness. Because its neurobiology is so well known, its study offers us a unique scientific opportunity to understand ourselves better in both health and disease.
Hobson is thoroughly in agreement with neutral monism; Metzinger likes neutral monism. In the neutral monist view, dreams and REM sleep are the two aspects of the same physical event.
my hypothesis is that dreaming is our subjective awareness of our brain activation in any state of sleep. Activation is highest in REM sleep. So is dreaming. I think that dreaming and REM sleep are our subjective and objective references to the same fundamental process of the brain-mind. I am a monist, through and through.
They then discuss what brain anatomy allows dreaming.
The neuropsychologist Mark Solms asked some three hundred stroke patients whether they had noticed any change in their dreaming after their strokes. Patients reported a complete cessation of dreaming if their stroke damaged either the parietal operculum or the deep frontal white matter. These claims were particularly interesting, because these same brain regions were selectively activated in PET studies of REM sleep. Another finding of interest is the report of dream cessation after prefrontal lobotomy, which Solms discovered in the literature of the 1940s and 1950s.
Hobson notes that the "lesion study approach" has limitations: suppose that Wernicke's area is necessary for sleep, then that hypothesis can't be tested by finding a patient with a lesioned Wernicke's area, because the patient would have Wernicke's aphasia be unable to talk about whether they have dreams!
Similarly, there are good reasons to believe parts of the brainstem are necessary for dreams, but lesions to the brainstem large enough to make an impact on dreams would make them vegetative or dead.
For the present, all we can say is that dreaming depends on the selective activation and deactivation of many brain regions, including those which, when damaged, lead to the failure to report dreams.
Hobson then discussed function of sleep and dreams.
At its most extreme, the argument says that dream consciousness is an epiphenomenon, which humans and other animals can do just as well without. The most cogent reason for thinking this may be true is the all-but-complete amnesia that we have for our dreams. If dream recall were adaptive, surely we would have more of it! But taking this position about dreaming as a conscious experience does not negate a healthy, speculative interest in the functional significance of having a brain that can self-activate in sleep. Such a brain could be doing many things. These include the already known enhancement of motor learning, the regulation of dietary and thermal calories, and the improvement in the immune functions. I don’t have to be aware of those functions, even if they are essential to my survival and my reproductive success.
it can be safely said that the fully developed sleep-wake cycle, with alternative phases of NREM and REM sleep, is an adaptation reserved to homeothermic animals—namely, mammals and birds that regulate their body temperature. What is the adaptive link between homeothermia and sleep? Again, the answer is simple. Keeping brain temperature constant despite enormous fluctuations of environmental temperature guarantees reliable brain function in a wide variety of environmental contexts. In other words, temperature control and brain function are tightly linked, and sleep secures that link.
This claim is quite surprising, and I tried looking for support and can't find any. Instead I found some research suggesting that some reptiles can have REM sleep. Slow waves, sharp waves, ripples, and REM in sleeping dragons (2016)
Most animal species sleep, from invertebrates to primates. However, neuroscientists have until now only actively recorded the sleeping brains of birds and mammals. Shein-Idelson et al. now describe the electrophysiological hallmarks of sleep in reptiles. Recordings from the brains of Australian dragons revealed the typical features of slow-wave sleep and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. These findings indicate that the brainstem circuits responsible for slow-wave and REM sleep are not only very ancient but were already involved in sleep dynamics in reptiles.
Dreams are not that useful for therapy or self-understanding:
It might well be that dreaming reveals one’s cognitive repertoires in dealing with emotion, but that is not particularly difficult to discern in waking. The stronger claim, by psychoanalysis, that dream interpretation reveals hidden links between cognition and emotion, has no scientific proof whatsoever.
On lucid dreaming:
... the conscious state accompanying brain activation in sleep is both plastic and causal. It is plastic because self-reflective awareness occasionally does arise spontaeously, and because with practice its incidence—and its power— can be increased. It is causal because lucidity can be amplified to command scene changes in dreams and even to command awakening...
On how to do dream research: rigorous descriptive phenomenology.
Reports of conscious experience must be collected from many individuals in many states. These reports must be rigorously quantified, and the states with which they are associated must be objectified. The brain states must be more fully characterized using a full panoply of techniques, including PET and MRI in humans, cellular and molecular probes in animals, behavioral tests in humans, and more... [eliminative materialism] will never lead to an understanding of conscious experience.
They then went on a discussion of psychoanalysis, mostly about how wrong it is about dreams. Wikipedia states that,
Dreams, in Freud's view, are formed as the result of two mental processes. The first process involves unconscious forces that construct a wish that is expressed by the dream, and the second is the process of censorship that forcibly distorts the expression of the wish. In Freud's view, all dreams are forms of "wish fulfillment"
Hobson compared psychoanalysis with neurobiology:
(1) Instigation of Dreaming.Freud: release of unconscious wishes.Neurobiology: brain activation in sleep.
(2) Characteristics of Dreaming.(a) Bizarreness.Freud: disguise and censorship of unconscious wishes.Neurobiology: chaotic, bottom-up activation processes.
(b) Strong emotion.Freud: Can’t explain that one!Neurobiology: selective activation of limbic lobe.
(c) Amnesia.Freud: repression.Neurobiology: aminergic demodulation.
(d) Hallucinations.Freud: regression to the sensory side.Neurobiology: activation of REMs and PGO waves.
(e) Delusion, loss of self-reflective awareness.Freud: ego dissolution.Neurobiology: selective deactivation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
(3) Function of Dreaming.Freud: guardian of sleep.Neurobiology: epiphenomenon, but REM sleep essential to life via enhancement of thermoregulatory and immune functions.
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