days of observations, insights, and contemplations...
by Tyler Volk
Tyler Volk’s “Mind Watching” Series Table of Contents
Day 28 Three Levels
Today, starting from camp, I hiked to a place that for years had only seemed like a distant mirage. The upland traverse would be long and sweaty, but I knew that if I got an early start and kept up a steady pace I could make it there and at least be headed back when the mid-afternoon rains might strike. My goal was a geological feature called White Rocks.
If the inner evaluator examines thoughts, then the evaluator is located on the level of thinking about thinking. It might involve a combination of verbal thought, imagery, and emotions, blended on that level of thinking about thinking. Let’s call the evaluator a process on “level two.” But then the next question is obvious. What is going to determine the structure of the evaluator? Asking about that—essentially, how to evaluate the evaluator—would logically take us to a next level of thinking—level three.
You might now be thinking that it’s easily possible to enter a series of recursions without end: thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking and so on. Is there a final level of thinking? This logic is reminiscent of that long ago used by philosophers such as Aristotle and Aquinas. They questioned the origin of motion in the universe. If B moves A, then what moves B? Say it’s C. Then what moves C? And so on. To end the chain they postulated an Unmoved Mover, a mover that starts something else moving but which doesn’t itself require anything other than itself to move. So, eventually in the chain of levels of thinking we might need to postulate an Un-evaluatable Thought, a Thought That Cannot Be Thought About.
Fortunately, human cognitive capacity for making practical sense of the levels of thinking peters out long before we approach the U.T. Though I can conceive of level three, and perhaps level four (evaluating the evaluator of the evaluator of thinking), anything beyond that eludes me. I just can’t feel an infinite chain of higher levels as active cognitive forces. Besides, it’s the evaluator on level two that’s the issue now. That’s plenty to think about. So let’s just rest our inquiry at level three and its relation to levels one and two. Right now there’s plenty of work to do on these basic levels, the zones in which we primarily live.
When I first began this morning’s hike to White Rocks by climbing out of the main valley of my campsite and heading across a flat area of grassy meadows and scattered juniper trees toward a more distant broad mesa I’d also have to scale on the way up, I experienced my evaluator in action. I thought about a teaching issue I might face in the fall when back at my university. I was trapped in an absurd amount of rehearsing, as if I were getting ready for opening night on a Broadway play. But unlike the play, my matter was trivial. I caught myself. Stop!
Do I need to be thinking about that now?, I asked. No, I answered. Then I realized that my question and the answer were processes of the evaluator. The “no” was especially meaningful. It showed a potential that such inner veto power upon thought might be nurtured into becoming a permanent part of the evaluator, a way of allowing certain types of thoughts to pass into consciousness or not. The evaluator, in this sense, could be like the membrane of a cell, a border with active pores for accepting and rejecting molecules in the case of the cell, for accepting and rejecting thoughts in the case of consciousness.
So the evaluator might consist of rules or at least rules of thumb. And if these rules cannot actually stop the entrance of useless thoughts, at least the rules can guild me to reverse certain categories of thoughts once they have entered the doors into consciousness. The mind might be significantly cleaned up with a rule of thumb such as “Don’t accept thoughts about the future.” That’s a crisp way to make a separation between yes and no with regards to thinking.
White Rocks themselves did not disappoint. The fantastic, reflective forms carved by wind and water took away my breath, as exotic as if I were plunged deep under the ocean among the white smokers of a submarine tectonic ridge. From a perch within the geological exuberance, vistas unfurled toward dark green forests and the dramatic sky. Habitat there was a three-dimensional play world with castle-like ridges of crumbly white stone. The kid in me sprang forth. How wonderful it is to visit something new, to have fresh conscious experiences.
We live in consciousness. It’s what we ultimately value, even more so, in some ways, than our physical body. In contrast, we value the unconscious not for itself but for the fact that it supports consciousness. I was having a moment of celebrating consciousness!
Imagine going to White Rocks as an unconscious zombie with senses but no memory. Or what about going there blindfolded with ear plugs? Or given a drug afterwards that blocked conscious access to the memories of the day’s trip? Would anyone still be hot to go? True, the body would still have the experience. But somehow the body alone having the experience is not satisfying. It’s not enough. Suppose somebody told you went as an unconscious zombie and even showed you pictures of how you stood there, on the white pinnacles?
We do value what lies underneath in the engine room of our mind or behind the counter of its bakery, the helper-aides that support conscious experience, from our genes to our higher-level unconscious processes of memories and desires. And we value what’s outside, the wonders of nature, our loved ones, even the abstraction of the struggling web of humanity. But after recognizing that we value what is down under or behind, how much do we really care about non-experienced parts of our bodies or minds? For example, what about the vast autobiographical self that resides as stored memories? Do we care about these memories when they are tucked away out of consciousness? Or do we truly only care about them when they surface? We certainly care about our ability to experience certain poignant memories when they surface. And we care that we usually can recall them. Of course, even when they remain submerged, autobiographical memories influence the present moment, as does the health of the non-experienced parts of the body. But the value is usually focused upon the contents and structure of consciously lived experience.
It’s a tremendous challenge to try and change the dynamical patterns of consciousness, dependent as they are on the stability of the body, on the stability of unconscious memories and processes, and on the stability of the social world. But one way to think about the inner evaluator is to consider it as a means to train the unconscious to put consciousness into whatever state that consciousness decides is valuable. We learn to ride a bicycle by training the unconscious to do a job, by using conscious will to program our bodies to bicycle. Likewise, we might use consciousness to train the unconscious to do a job in the creative re-structuring of consciousness, and thereby increase the benefit and even joy of having conscious experiences of consciousness.
Later in the day, on the way back from White Rocks, I found myself hurrying. Rain clouds and thunder circled me on all parts of the horizon. My thoughts, too, were hurried, and even a bit out of control. With the evaluator’s potential rule of no thinking about the future, I should have slowed down, relaxed, returned to the present moment. But I was grateful for how my anxious thoughts prompted me to quicken my steps, because I was still in the uplands and exposed to potential lightning, and all alone in the wilderness. Consciousness about the future can be beneficial. Rehearsal can be valuable.
If at times rehearsing the future is positive, even life-preserving, then there cannot be a single, simple rule of thumb toward thinking about having future-directed thoughts. In the case of my rehearsal about the university, it was not the fact that the rehearsal involved the future that made it a useless stream of thought, but the fact that this was a situation in which I would be able to just be myself and deal with it when it occurred, in that future not now. I gained nothing from thinking about the potential situation during this hike.
These considerations suggested the following for level three, to create a structure for the evaluator. I had asked earlier, how is the evaluator structured? It’s not a set thing, like the human heart. The evaluator is created, inwardly evolved. That implies an iterative process, something akin to the scientific method. Positing the rule of “no thoughts about the future,” was really a hypothesis, a tentative rule to be tested in the proving grounds of the psychological dynamics that run their courses in daily reality.
Level three could be the utilization of the scientific method on oneself, which means hypothesize, conduct experiments, and critique the results of the experiments, all in the service of discovering rules for shaping the evaluator as level two. Notice that the evaluator, if created along these lines, is made by a process that uses an assessment of the experiments, in other words, an evaluation on level three. This process shows how crucial are recursive levels of abstraction in the structure of the human mind.
© 2024 by Tyler Volk
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Intitive resemblance to Hanoi towers.