Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude – Day 26

days of observations, insights, and contemplations...

by Tyler Volk

Tyler Volk’s “Mind Watching” Series Table of Contents

Day 26 - Chipping Away

Into the sides of a ruddy cliff along the river valley, wind and water have eroded cubbyholes, bit by bit, grain by grain. Still it stands, proud, strong, massive. The cliff is not whittled away. It’s hardly touched and laughing.

The cliff is like human psyche, a complex cognitive matrix barely touched by the cubbies of understanding chipped out by modern science. So many articles are published every month and each, bit by bit, little by little, each a rounded out hole of understanding into the human mind; as years go on the papers stack into thousands upon thousands of theoretical and experimental peer-reviewed probes of science. But in some way, the more we know about the mind the more stupendous it becomes, in the sense that we gain insight into the magnitude of complexity. (How simple things were when we just immortal souls inside gross bodies.)

The cliff stands on deep bedrock. Do we have to go down into the bedrock of human history for full understanding? Or into the whole solid planet itself—meaning that to understand the human mind will we be required to uncover everything about the evolution of behavior and perception, starting with single cells?

Will we chip out cubbies until we finally reach the inner self? And if it appears, will it be in human form, like a sculpture by Michelangelo that seems to wait there within a block of marble until the artist simply chips away the excess?

One researcher who I heard lecture on the topic of how the brain makes decisions, was one of those I’ve heard say in public that the work led him to the conclusion that “there’s no one home.” Science does appear to uncover numerous, interconnected processes operate in our unconscious, down there in what the philosopher Daniel Dennett has called the unconscious engine room, with wires, shafts, combustors, transformers, gears, and protective covers.

I like to imagine my engine room full of little helpers, akin to the elves of Santa’s workshop, making presents for the moment by giving me presence. I speak to them: “You can stop piping up the music now, I don‘t really need it. Keep the tunes playing for yourselves if you want.” Perhaps they are the neuroscientist Christof Koch’s “zombie agents.” In many ways the elves are terrific help, because so much is being done for me but not by me. Just think of the work if I had to do it all myself. The little agents figure out the quick-paced dynamics of conversations, make all kinds of decisions day to day, formulate sentences, come up with answers to inquiries from people, think through issues, remind me of mundane tasks such as unwritten emails and produce the profound and subtle emotional duet between myself and themselves. For example I can just send down some guilt and they send up some answers and suggestions for behavior.

If getting answers from neuroscience, on one hand, seems like watching the wind erode rock, and if on the other hand envisioning the unconscious as Santa’s workshop seems too facile, then one can turn to the world’s great wisdom traditions, sometimes called religions. They often give holistic advice and conclusions about the self from deep thinkers, their prophets and seers. Welcome to a total explanation! These traditions do have much to teach of value, and provide high-level goals, such as the admonition to do good, to love your neighbor. But then along with those positives comes the well-known bag of negatives: submission to authority and arbitrary rules that vary across religions, an easy answer to one’s concern about being a mortal animal (if the tradition claims a happy afterlife is possible), and reliance on writings thousands of years old so not exactly up to date with latest discoveries about the universe and human evolution.

As yet another avenue for our guidance, we gain instructions on how to be and thus who we are as walkers along paths via our psychological shoes built up into us as we individually develop, from deep historical moral codes and laws that are not strictly religion-based, as well as from the behaviors we teach each other, as contemporaries, in the little yeas and nays with which we prod each other, often subconsciously, in discussions and classes, at work and social gatherings.

It would be nice if thinking were as simple as breathing. In a way, breathing and thinking are similar. Both are largely automatic; their activities rise and fall in established patterns. Both bridge outer and inner worlds, creating an exchange. With each breath, oxygen from the outer air is exchanged for carbon dioxide from the inner air of the lungs. Thinking also acts between outer and inner worlds, as patterns are exchanged. Sensory and social information come in, and thinking puts forth language and actions. Thereby the worlds are somewhat brought into conjunction and, with the best thinking, harmonized. I think that best thinking includes a higher sensation of being a conscious actor, beyond the workshop of zombie agents or engine room helpers, as essential as those unconscious toilers are to our daily lives.

Reference

Koch, C., Crick, F. (2001). The zombie within, Nature, 411, 893. -- As to the role of consciousness Koch and Crick say, “It may be because consciousness allows the system to plan future actions, opening up a potentially infinite behavioural repertoire and making explicit memory possible.”

© 2024 by Tyler Volk

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