Mind Watching: Field Notes from Wilderness Solitude – Day 31

days of observations, insights, and contemplations...

by Tyler Volk

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

Day 31 - Funeral

When I returned to the trailer yesterday afternoon, after camping, I had a phone message from a longtime friend in Silver City, who was retired. A dear friend of his had died while I was away and her memorial service was today. So I drove the windy mountain roads that led into town.

She had reached the venerable mid-eighties, and had always been so vibrant and talkative, until the Alzheimer’s struck. She had loved the southwest and with her husband, when he was alive, often took extended road trips with a camper pulled behind their truck.

The casket was gaudy and expensive; the funeral home employees who milled around prior to the service were happy to discuss its cost and materials with me. The preacher started out just right with a reminiscence of how he first met the newly deceased. He had lived across the street from her and her husband. He recalled how one day he backed his car out of his driveway and right up into their yard, wiping out a landscaped wall. I later was told that the same preacher had used the same story ten years earlier when the husband had died. The preacher relished that tale, and with other remarks it was clear that he also relished the idea of everlasting life in heaven, visions about which he regaled us, fortunately for not very long.

In the pre-linguistic human infant, any cognitive capability that adults might be tempted to call the self cannot tied to a linguistic “I.” That’s obvious. Yet the infant has an evaluator, of sorts. Judgments of good or bad are made whenever emotions kick in with joy, anger, or any of the other primary expressive forces we all are born with. True, this evaluation is tied to the immediate sensing of both world and state of body. The infant cannot, for example, question its anger or offer comments about its consciousness through internal verbal dialogue. (But does the infant have a silent inner voice, at times, of coos and cries?)

So the evaluator at its most primal level works without an inner voice. This level might very well continue non-verbally in us adults. Furthermore, if this nonverbal evaluator is in fact something along equivalent lines to what we would call the self, with preferences and judgments, and if, in addition, this evaluator is not the inner voice, then, by logic, the self itself is not the inner voice. Is this nonverbal evaluator then unconscious? Or can it be conscious even though it’s not part of the inner voice? (Like, for example, when I learned in the tent that I could will myself to hold my breath through a totally nonverbal command.) The evaluator is definitely not the river sound, or inner music, or body sensations. So then, if it’s some conscious component of overall being, then what is it if it’s not one of the feeder streams of consciousness that are easier to distinguish and point to? Could the nonverbal evaluator be akin to awareness itself? Can we say that awareness means attention and attention is a kind of evaluation?

Think of how many sentences that I have used during life contain “I” in them. All the sentences, little by little, imprint patterns into the brain. Not each sentence is remembered, but they create—just during the course of hours, days, years, decades—a cognitive complex system that could be similar in complexity to the network of tens of thousands of enzymes within each living cell.

All the I’s used in thought throughout the duration of our lives etch themselves into the brain to form interactive, adapting, changeable circuits. But let’s be clear: these circuits are constrained by the fact that they allow or disallow certain patterns to the potential changes. Some changes are permissible and some are not, given the dynamics of the to some degree etched-in I-network. As we age and can express in words our judgments about ourselves, it appears that the evaluator might become more evolved, because we are able to express some of its findings in words, which, in sophisticated thinking, are linked to the concept that I concluded days ago, namely, that the evaluator has to do with testing hypotheses of how to be. But the findings themselves might not be, at first cut, through words. Words certainly often come later. Or are internal words an integral part of the process? It’s hard to tell, and to become conscious of what one can do with the aid of internal words versus non-verbally, in terms of these higher-order evaluations, when they involve the structure of the “I.” Please keep at this inquiry while I’m alive!

© 2024 by Tyler Volk

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