Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude

50 days of observations, insights, and contemplations...

by Tyler Volk

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

Day 0 - Introduction

The ideas and daily events in this book took place from Sunday, July 18, until Sunday, September 5, 2004. Each day I carried a small tape recorder with me and recorded thoughts when they seemed relevant to what had become my overall quest: to think about thinking, to watch the stream of consciousness.

Free-form introspection has long been a favorite pastime of mine. This stands in contrast to a more narrow, focused introspection, of the kind, say, practiced by many versions of formal Buddhist meditation. In my free-form variety, mind-watching is linked to a state of mind- wandering, in other words, recording the mind while thinking what you want to think.

The issue of “want” is a bit problematic, however, because I didn’t really want to think about anything other than thinking itself. Much of this time, as I had realized often before (and as all beginning meditators not only quickly note, but also often are shocked to discover), much of my thinking was done for me by deeper unconscious mechanisms that continuously roll out a cornucopia of thoughts into consciousness. So most of the time, what I wanted as the highest goal was merely the free time to follow my thoughts and then pick up on certain themes that struck me as relevant to note down and thereby reinforce them in memory, making it more likely that I would re-visit them again for further exploration. It was akin to freely wandering in a state of discovery across an intricate landscape.

My physical landscape was a wondrous one in which to wander. I had for many years spent summers in the mountains of Southwestern New Mexico. But I usually had writing projects to start or complete, which loomed in my daily thoughts and required more attention that I had bargained for. No complaints about that, but I had always craved a bigger chunk of mental breathing space. And after several years of having immersed myself into the topics of cognitive science, neuroscience, and the philosophy of mind during as much intellectual free time as I could muster, I had started asking questions about the mind from a more personal angle. Finally I was to carve out that space.

Home was a ten foot by forty foot trailer with a covered porch of the same size. And there I lived for the fifty days, without companionship, without television or radio. I did need to complete a few small writing projects and every so often log on to email via a slow, long distance line. Occasional phone calls were treats savored with distant friends, family, and colleagues. A single camping trip to meet a friend in another state allowed me to be social for a whole day. One couple, my best friends in this mountain valley, twice invited me to dinner. A few other neighbors chatted with me when I did laundry at the local “post” or when we met— they often in pickup trucks, I on bicycle—along the single paved road that wound through the rugged canyon terrain for five miles to its terminus at appetite but classic ancient cliff dwelling. Fifteen miles in the other direction of up and down switchbacks led to the first intersection, after which another twenty-five miles through mostly National Forest took me to town for essentials and to visit an elderly friend for lunch. I made this drive of an hour and a half each way through winding wilderness about every ten days.

Other than these relatively limited amounts of contact, I had days and days of hours and hours solo.

The sequence is here described as it happened. Typed transcriptions of the tapes, made in chunks every few days, supplied the raw material that helped me focus on themes and related ideas. After the original fifty days, over the next two and a half years, I worked on the writing in several complete passes, because my original verbal improvisations in “real time” were often a bit too telegraphic. Nonetheless, I have tried to preserve the flavors of the moments, and what remains in the text after my editing has hopefully distilled out those ideas that are relevant to some readers.

The incidents reported each day are small stuff: taking hikes, noticing acorns scattered on the ground, watching a frog watch me, scraping old porch boards to prepare them for painting. My reactions became springboards into the general ways of the mind, which often, I felt, are not dissimilar to the ways in which it works in the same basic patterns when it grapples with much bigger stuff of life. At times I reached what I would call personal epiphanies, with almost revelatory intensities. When William Blake wrote about “seeing the universe in a grain of sand,” he was pointing out the possibility of using the small to go into the large.

For me “the large” during this time specifically did not include dives into my past and ongoing personal life with its ever-present ongoing and all-too-usual human crises. It did not include analysis of friendships, love life, general social relations, world politics, or the greenhouse effect. Thus there is nothing of the stuff of novels or potboiler memoirs here. I just simply sought to better know the dynamics of my own inner stream of consciousness when unfettered from most of the normal calls of pleasures and pains, and opportunities and demands, of my typical social and professional life.

My “large” eventually became certain questions: What did I expect to gain from studying my mind? How should I deal with the sense that mind just “happens” all by itself? How would I evaluate the formation of an inner evaluator of thinking? What does it mean that the stream of consciousness seems to be a blending of what are in fact multiple streams? I offer such questions and some ideas about their answers as topics that are, to the best that I can tell, still generally open at this stage in the awesome, arching quests of human thought. Some of the issues I raise include the role of inner imagery in planning and desires, whether seeing should be considered a type of thinking, how to keep from slipping into automatic scenarios as whirlpools of the mind, the seeking to improve the activity of seeking, the entrainment of thought by tasks, and the need to be creative. These, and more, as well as the big questions noted, have a lot to do with the over-riding question about who the heck we think we are as thinking beings with personal selves. Or so I believe.

I could have filled out a longer book with citations to others who have grappled with such questions. So I admit right away that I have not cited everything relevant to the ideas, such as others who have pondered similar issues more completely, eloquently, or scholarly, some of whom I have seen speak or I have read their papers or books, or those others that would be found from a literature search when preparating for a scholarly exegesis. As a nod to these facts, I set a goal in the reference notes to provide at least one pointer to some other thinker, often a scientist or scholar. Hopefully that will be enough of a start for those readers who seek some trails to follow.

About the images in this book: Sitting by the stream described in the first day, I had the idea (another one of those automatic thoughts) that I should take a daily photograph relevant to the current theme. Each was originally made with a low-end film camera, but then in the summer of 2006, I re-took about eighty percent of the shots with a digital camera. The visual record, to accompany the thoughts of the day, helped me focus on the non-verbal parts of the thoughts, on what I call the stream of inner imagery. Some of the shots stand as they were snapped. With others I’ve had some fun in the land of digital manipulation.

Would I do it again? Definitely. And I heartily recommend the experience. I did not get lonely, but that was likely a personal quirk. I had been interested to see what it would take to get lonely, but apparently the small social contact I had was enough, and I knew the time would be limited.

Mind-watching, or thinking about thinking, is often called metacognition, which means awareness of the cognitive events in the field of consciousness. Metacognition is one avenue along which we will find answers to many of the questions I raised, or so I concluded. The daily development of this faculty can continually add to one’s life, because it seems unlimited in its possibilities. It appears to be both a stream of thinking and a level of cognition that is above, in a sense, all the braided streams of thinking. The level of metacognition, because it apparently can be continually strengthened as a cognitive organ, at least for those who possess human minds and self-observe, appears freer from the puzzling prevalence of automaticity, because it is closer to the developmental cognitive architecture of the present moment that is chosen by the “I.”

And this “I” offers the issues ideas here, collectively, as a kind of meditation. Given what is being discovered weekly by the neuro- and cognitive sciences, as well as our having achieved global access to the wisdom of the thinkers of all ages and cultures, it seems to me that eventually everyone on Earth will be beset by such topics. More and more in the future we will all be confronted with the contentious dilemmas of free will, the self, the “I,” the role of the emotions and reason, the self-construction of the mind, and the co-creating of the individual mind and the larger body of society, with implications for the legal system, consumerism, politics, our relationship to the growth of machine intelligence, and the way we might actually desire to be in the future. Within this tangle, with its heightened inner excitement, a new application for the general process of evolution might be emerging, an evolution of oneself. As experiments, we each can create new forms of the self by modifying the variations of our experience, with the aim to fashion a creative, individual, and knowledgeable path of inner development, both for our “I” and our larger, shared cognitive existence.

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