More than sensate

Most living things are sensate. This means that they are sensitive to particular kinds of stimuli.

Many living things are sensate without being conscious – eg plants and single celled animals. Think of a sunflower that tracks the sun as it moves through the sky. There is stimulus and response but it is mechanical and inflexible. There is no one home.

In more advanced living things stimuli excite sense organs which encode the interactions and pass electrical signals along sensory nerves to specialist modules of the brain. These modules decode the signals and integrate them with signals from other modules. This makes it possible to generate the information that is needed to react and respond more or less flexibly to the changes in the environment that caused the stimuli in the first place.

Once upon a time there were sensate beings but none of them were conscious of the fact. They were not aware of or awake to what was going on in their mindbrain. They were zombies and robots. But things changed as brains evolved and became more self reflective.

Some human beings began to notice what they were noticing and to think about what they were thinking. They were aware of and awake to a particular mental construct in their mindbrain. This can be thought of as a subjective feeling or a perception. It is commonly known as consciousness.

In conscious beings new inputs from the outside world are deliberately matched against memories of similar situations in the past and there is judgment – good, neutral or bad. This leads to an appropriate reaction or response.

There is a lot going on in a human mindbrain and its associated nervous system. Most of it does not enter consciousness. There is therefore the concept of the subconscious or the unconscious. This includes reflexes (innate and conditioned), instincts (hard wired), and a range of culture specific intuitions and biases.

A useful metaphor is of a calm witness inside everyone’s head. This witness can note the thoughts and feelings that were fed into the attention centre from the unconscious. In many people the witness is asleep most of the time and the person lives on automatic pilot ie driven by the unconscious rather than self consciously. This gives rise to the feeling that ‘my mind has a mind of its own’; or, more poetically ‘the heart has its reasons that reason know nothing about’.

This might have been why the concept of self-consciousness came into being. There were at least two sets of intention and motivation - and ultimately at least two world views (Weltanschaaung). There is the unknown and unknowable unconscious, and the known rational self. So what and from where am ‘I’?

Human beings have evolved to be social animals. We are hard wired with the innate tendency to behave and believe, in general terms, this way rather than that. The process of enculturation causes us to learn how to believe and behave in more detailed socio-culturally acceptable ways.

The conditioning process moved up a gear with the evolution of language. In the beginning there was a small vocabulary and simple sentence structures. Advances were made through metaphor and analogy. The unknown is like the known because …

So what was known?  Patterns and agents woven into stories. These evolved to suit the needs of groups of hunters and gatherers in the African savanna. There was focus on status, hierarchy and power amongst families, friends, enemies and the forces of nature. And, by analogy, these simple social constructs became the knowns upon which social and metaphysical unknowns were comprehended eg there is the image of God the Heavenly Father linked to the divine right of kings.

• A father is responsible for decision making in the family – appease him
• A tribal chief is responsible for decision making in and between groups – appease him.
• A God is responsible for decision making about droughts and floods – appease him.

Once language evolved the rate of cultural evolution developed exponentially and newer and ever more sophisticated metaphors and analogies appeared and competed for prominence. Myth and magic abounded and people believed in all manner of patterns and agents.

For most of human history most people have believed that the objects of myth and magic were real. But there has always been a crazy few who, by adopting a higher form of thinking, have realized that thoughts and feelings were mind-made and had no abiding reality.

The Tao te Ching is a classic Chinese document from about 600BC. The author Lao Tzu was one of the crazy few. He left us some striking quotes:

• The reality that can be described is not the real reality.
• He who knows does not speak.
• He who speaks does not know.

There have been other members of the crazy few who have warned about the limitations of language when trying to describe those forms of consciousness that are above the ordinary. Those who sit quietly doing nothing can have a subjective and non-egoic appreciation of the Oneness which is everything. It is a state of mind that can be experienced but is ineffable and unspeakable. Language cannot do it justice but the words ‘enlightenment’ and ‘liberation’ are often used.

There are three Enlightenment projects:

• a Western one based on rational thought,
• an Eastern one based on seeing through the illusion of the Self, and
• a Postmodern one based on the concept of socially constructed reality.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau made the famous revolutionary pronouncement that: "Men are born free, and everywhere are in chains." A couple of centuries later that still holds truth for us, but now we see that the strongest chains are symbolic ones, mind forged manacles. (ref Truett Anderson)

But most of that is now ancient history. The crazy few is fast becoming the crazy many. The internet is encouraging tipping points in the promotion of (a) mindfulness based thinking and feeling amongst ordinary folk, and (b) holistic, multidisciplinary consilience amongst scientists and academics.

Do I see a planetary progression from sensate through self conscious to enlightened?

Hard and soft consciousness

David Chalmers

David Chalmers is an Australian philosopher who used to have long hair. He is famous as the originator of the phrase – “The hard problem of consciousness”.

The soft problem of consciousness involves gradually discovering its neurological correlates. This is the functionalist approach and the theme has its own acronym – NCC (neurological correlates of consciousness).

The hard problem can be stated as "why does the feeling which accompanies awareness of sensory information exist at all?"

The difference between the easy problems and the hard problem is that the former are at least theoretically answerable via the standard strategy in philosophy of mind: functionalism. Chalmers argues for an "explanatory gap" from the objective to the subjective, and criticizes physical explanations of mental experience, making him a dualist.

The existence of a "hard problem" is controversial and has been disputed by some philosophers. Further questions include, but are not limited to,

• whether being conscious could be wholly described in physical terms, such as the aggregation of neural processes in the brain.
• If consciousness cannot be explained exclusively by physical events, it must transcend the capabilities of physical systems - and require an explanation of nonphysical means.
• For philosophers who assert that consciousness is nonphysical, there remains a question about what outside of physical theory is required to explain consciousness.

I have been sidestepping the issue by referring to the ‘mindbrain’. The idea is that any cerebration that appears in consciousness (thought, feeling, mood) has an NCC. Note that the opposite is not true. Most cerebrations remain in the unconscious.

Article informed by Wikipedia

Workings of the mindbrain

My mindbrain is working all the time whether I am asleep or awake. But I am aware of only a very small amount of what is going on (less than 1%?).

To be aware of something is to be conscious of it. To be conscious is to be conscious of something. In essence it is to be conscious of those workings of the mindbrain that are channelled into the ‘attention centre’ where ‘I’ can be aware of them.

Ordinary consciousness is mainly concerned with the ‘executive functions’ and is thus about quickly reacting and slowly responding to internal and external stimuli. This involves linking to related memories and making judgments (good, neutral or bad) in advance of acting.

Self consciousness is mainly focussed on a socio-cultural context and involves communication about status in the family and group hierarchy.

The unconscious refers to those workings of the mindbrain of which ‘I’ am not ‘aware’. This is possibly more than 99% of what goes on in the mindbrain. And it would appear that most of what I come to be conscious of in the attention centre is but a shadow of what has already taken place in the unconscious.

Upon reflection ‘my’ self-consciousness has to conclude that ‘my’ mind has a mind of its own. This deep mind is subject to causes and conditions rooted in my nature, nurture and serendipity.

quantum through to cosmos

A 20 story compilation with references to the cosmic zoom from Quantum to Cosmos click HERE

Witnesses – outer and inner

Human beings are social animals. We evolved to operate in groups of about 50 to a 100. Our brains and nervous systems are hard wired with meta-cognitive instincts and intuitions (nature) which provide a skeleton to be fleshed out by enculturation and education (nurture).

There are as many patterns of culture as there are cultural groups. So there is plenty of variation on which natural selection can operate. The groups that survive are those where the members, on the whole, are committed to the status quo and buy into the notion of us (good) and them (bad). Success will be built on parochial xenophobia associated with territorial control of resources.

If there is to be long term sustainability of the cultural group there is need of a lunatic (paranoid?) fringe of creative revolutionaries to bend and twist the traditional ways of doing things. They will be effective as norm crackers and paradigm shifters. The hegemonic elites will seek to maintain their privileged positions using systems of brutal or elegant power to deal with the expanding horizons of citizens in this increasingly globalised world.

In these modern times we are all members of several cultural and sub-cultural groups. We are hard wired and socially encouraged to fit in and there are forces that help us along the way. One of the main forces for conformity is the authoritative witness. The idea is that there are people (forces) watching and judging (witnessing) all our thoughts, feelings, words and deeds. The thought police!

When we are infants our parents and siblings are outer witnesses. Then there are your neighbours – with rural and urban variations. And, as we spread our social wings, there are many more real witnesses and potential judges - doctor, minister, teacher, policeman, bouncer, councillor, counsellor, therapist, social worker and lawyer. And, if you have been conditioned to being Christian, there will be the imagined Jesus and his Dad and maybe a host of angels or devils. At a more mundane level there is CCTV almost everywhere. Big brother is watching you.

And then there are two types of inner witness.

You can always imagine what the outer witnesses might be thinking and be channelled this way rather than that as a result. In extreme cases your can have your long dead mother whispering in your right ear and the omniscient God or devil whispering in your left ear. These tend to be conservative forces that confine you to a relatively parochial world view.

The other type of inner witness presents the possibility of existential enlightenment and freedom from parochiality. This inner witness is associated with mindfulness meditation. It is ‘as if’ there are three ‘yous’.

• The first is the unconscious source of the thoughts and feelings that are projected into the attention centre. The mind that has a mind of its own.
• The second is the self-conscious you (self or ego) that experiences the thoughts and feelings and can be overwhelmed by them.
• The third is the witness who is cool, curious and non-judgemental and notices what is going on. This inner witness knows that the thoughts and feeling are mind made rather than objectively real. This allows a blissful state of non-attachment to develop.

While we are awake our sense organs are busy ‘noticing’ what is happening in the external environment. Having noticed things and events we can then judge them as good (eg food), as bad (eg predators) or as neutral (neither good nor bad). And we can then react or respond by seeking to acquire or avoid the thing or event. (the fight or flight response). The process can be captured in four linked action verbs:

When there is ‘noticing’ there are limits. For example, as humans, we cannot physically ‘see’ beyond the range of visible light and we can be mistaken in what we think we see (eg a snake which turns out to be a rope.)

There is also the problem that it is not the eye that sees. The many light sensitive cells in the retina react to different aspects of that which is ‘seen’. That which is sensed is coded into on/off electrical signals which are routed to a part of the brain that can decode them. And there are associated signals passing between the visual part of the brain and other parts – especially memory.

‘Judging’ implies comparison, is a key aspect of ‘learning’, and involves memory – short, medium and long term. Sights, sounds and smells etc are relayed by electrical code to their specialist modular areas such that, following an inter-modular synthesis, a ‘situation’ can be identified. It will be holistic and multi-sensory. This situation can then be used as a search template which highlights similar items from the various memories. A comparative judgement can then be made about whether the present situation is good, bad or neutral.

Reactions are fast and do not involve much cognition – act first, think later. Responses are slower and involve a more thoughtful review of the evidence before reaching a conclusion and developing an action plan – please engage brain before opening mouth. In either case the result involves electrical signals influencing the contraction of muscles and the release of a wide range of chemicals.

Elegant power happens when the ruling elite convinces the subservient masses that the inequities in the system are due to a law of nature or an act of an omniscient supreme being who works in mysterious ways. It is not so long ago that people believed in the divine right of kings (and queens?). There are still people who are conditioned to believe in supernatural beings. That is the outdated stuff of myth and magic. In that way lies inflexible and small minded bigotry.

But there is an increasing number of open minded world citizens who bear compassionate witness to what goes on in their mindbrain. It is a mode of thinking, feeling and being that goes by many names. A useful name is mindfulness. And the essential force lies in cultivating the inner witness who finds liberation, flexibility and peace.

Grace and grudge revisited

There were two robust ‘objects’ in the attention centre this morning. The first was energized by household activity performed with grace rather than with grudge. The second was a comment from a friend about the large amount of autobiographical details in my posts.

I was vaguely aware of having written about such things in the past. I have been blogging for more than ten years.

The first blog dealing with ‘perception’ was called ‘Existential Soft Rock - mental re-construction through just sitting - be still and know’. It was live from 2002 till 2013 and had 507 posts. As of today it has had 32531 pageviews. This gives an average of 64 pageviews per post.

The second and current blog is called ‘Changing Minds - thoughts about the thinking and feeling processes and the dis-ease that comes with thinking outside the box’. This began in 2013 and to date has 279 posts and 9321 pageviews.  This gives an average of 33 pageviews per post.

I searched on the two blogs for [grace grudge] and found the following three posts:

In the Mood
“When I am in the mood for something I do it effortlessly and with good grace. This contrasts with doing things with a grudge because I have to. So what might it take to avoid the drudge of grudge and be more often in the mood?” [more]
07 March 2008


Thrilling Stilling
“I used to be a Scottish Presbyterian workaholic and busy-ness freak.  There was no time to lose as the devil finds work for idle hands to do.  These days I remain Scottish but I am more relaxed. I made time to stand and stare. I found ways to be still and know how my mind works and about who 'I' am. So how was this managed? In two words – just sit.” [more]
18 July 2008

What makes your heart sing?
“When your heart is singing you enjoy what you are doing and willingly go the extra mile. You are kindly disposed towards everybody and everything. You act with grace rather than with a grudge. You are happy and smile a lot. So what is the root of that hallowed state of coronary operatics?” [more]
20 September 2010

I am now several years down the road. There are still wafts of grudge concerning various topics – for example doing my accounts and filling the tax form. The grudges are often slow to go away but I can now step back and observe them and this removes the worst of their sting. But there is still a tendency to laziness and procrastination. It would make sense to deal with the topic and thus get it out of mind - but I still tend to leave such things to fester; and I ruminate about them.

I accept the autobiographical comment. But it is not driven by ego. Very few of my stories are based on hard, peer referenced data. The stories are subjective and it therefore seems necessary to establish credibility by outlining the nature of the subjectivity, ie its causes and conditions in terms of nature, nurture and serendipity.

Reality is contextual. And each thought moment brings a new context. In this particular moment there is the feeling that I might be getting better at graciously accepting the flow and not bearing grudges.

the everyday sublime

stephen batchelor

To experience the everyday sublime one needs to dismantle piece by piece the perceptual conditioning that insists on seeing oneself and the world as essentially comfortable, permanent, solid, and mine.

It means to embrace suffering and conflict, rather than to shy away from them, to cultivate the radical attention (yonisomanasikara) that contemplates the tragic, changing, empty, and impersonal dimensions of life, rather than succumbing to fantasies of self-glorification or self-loathing.

Stephen Batchelor, The Everyday Sublime

A shifting vocation

My vocation is teaching and the facilitation of learning: but what this involves has changed through time and work in six different countries.

I began teaching science and biology in schools. Then there was curriculum development and teacher training in a range of subjects. Next I helped set up an Education Advisory Service dealing with leadership, management and administration in schools. But, along the way, I lost faith in the ability of the formal education system to change the world.

My energy shifted to using plain language to produce materials that would help adults to better prepare themselves for participation in their governance – especially regarding the Poverty Reduction Strategy Programme (PRSP) and the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) which were being promoted by the IMF and the World Bank for a while. [Note 1] But, along the way, I lost faith in the willingness of the power elites to pay any attention to what ‘ordinary’ people had to say.

My energy shifted to being objective about the more emotionally sensitive (spiritual) aspects of multi-stakeholder processes (MSP) (ref Minu Hemmati). In terms of holistic development policy I developed the acronym STEEPLES (Social, technical, environmental, economic, political, legal, ethical and spiritual.) (for details see http://sites.google.com/site/steeplessrds/ ).

To cut a long story short I have not yet totally lost faith in the ability of ‘mindfulness’ to enable policy makers to engage in cognitive retraining and to be aware that their world views are not absolutes. They will thus be able and willing to renounce their limiting viewpoints for the greater good of humanity, the environment and the planet.

I am writing this story to address a negative thought that came to my attention this morning. Namely that I dumb down everything that I put my mind to. My main retort is that I help to point to the insubstantial nature of facts, ideas and concepts and the way in which they become hypotheses and then theories. These are mind-made entities seen from a particular point of view, there is no abiding reality.

But there is churn in the mindbrains of policy makers, freelance philosophers, media makers and ordinary people. World views and the language in which they are expressed change. Many new words are created but only a few are fully adopted, and old words drift out of fashion. This creative process happens in individuals and in groups. No culture sits still. The Dinka of the South Sudan are changing their ways and language as are my subcultural group of Doric speakers in the NE of Scotland. Both are building new nations – all change!

As a facilitator of lifelong learning I find Taoist philosophy to be inspirational. “The reality that can be described is not the real reality.” “The beginning of wisdom is in knowing that you do not know.”

I am also inspired by the scientific method which includes the duty to attack a colleague’s point of view. If the assertion survives the attack then it will be stronger. If it succumbs then it is good to cut it down before it can do damage. Ideally the scientific cut and thrust would be calm and mild mannered. But scientists are also human beings. Debate can often get acrimonious. So what is to be done?

In a word – mindfulness. Think about thinking. Notice what you notice. Be self reflective and find that there is no self. And it is said, “No self, no problem”.

I have been practicing mindfulness meditation off and on since my late teenage years and I have devoted more time to it since I retired. The main message is that what matters is not what you intuitively think and feel when you are on automatic pilot. What matters is that you should be calm and curious and ever willing to listen carefully to ‘other’ points of view.

My vocation involves changing minds. It has three sympathetic and increasingly consilient (ref E O Wilson) thrusts:

• In terms of western philosophy I highlight the hard academic question “How can we know?” (epistemology) rather than the softer one of “What do we know?” (ontology).
• In terms of eastern psychology I highlight the need to be still and know that my/your ‘self’ has no abiding reality. So ‘truth’ and reconciliation is possible,
• In terms of global science I highlight the structure and function of the evolving human mindbrain as promoted by neurology and evolutionary psychology.

SO – there are a lot of ideas in a short collection of words. Do they facilitate learning? Do they help promote freedom and enlightenment? Or is there too much dumbing down?

>>>>>

Note 1>  I wrote about the MDGs in the much read ‘No more broken promises’ http://www.srds.co.uk/mdg ) (144,712 page views as of today since April 2003). 345 returns from Google search for [“http://www.srds.co.uk/mdg”]  References  include http://www.gameonscotland.org/Images/LearningJourneyRightsValuesGoals_tcm4-748706.pdf

Life’s likes and fights

As I gallop from womb to tomb there is stuff that I like and other stuff that I fight against - and the pattern changes through time. It will be more or less the same for other people but with different  details.

This morning I happened to visit George Monbiot’s website (he has a degree in Zoology!) and I was impressed with the way he prepared his ‘About George’ page (see http://www.monbiot.com/about/). So I have adapted his technique to be better suited to my present situation. Amongst other things I do not include simple items like (a) shopping, cooking and eating and (b) managing the self catering accommodation in my spare cottage.

The following lists deal with ‘things I like doing’ and with ‘things I try to fight’. The lists were originally quite short but new ideas popped up in the attention centre while I did other things. It is still not complete but I found it to be a useful activity in terms of the ancient advice to ‘know yourself’ – at least in the way things stand at present. You might like to try making your own list.

Here are some of the things I like doing:

• being: sitting quietly doing nothing;
• mindfulness meditation; especially with the Sangha;
• living in renunciant retreat;
• being in my unkempt, walled garden;
• appreciating light, warmth, and white clouds passing through a blue sky;
• keeping up with cutting edge thinking – especially about neurology, evolutionary psychology, and linguistics;
• noting how my world view changes in light of the courtship between eastern and western modes of thinking and feeling; the psychology of perception;
• letting the unconscious churn out blog posts; the muse in flow;
• writing about the more interesting and potentially universal thoughts and feelings that pass through the mindbrain - and making them available globally through the internet;
• using plain language techniques when writing;
• interacting socially with various groups – the Northern Lights Sangha, the Keith Parkinson’s Support Group; Portsoy Past and Present Community Group;
• interacting socially with various good friends – mainly from a distance;
• taking and editing photographs;
• making music (but this is no longer so easy because of the Parkinson’s);
• using the internet in support of most of the other things;

Here are some of the things I try to fight:

• Elegant power and its inequitable, and environmentally unfriendly hegemony
• Big government and small minds
• Parochial xenophobia and unthinking consumerism
• Wasting time – being on automatic pilot
• Waves of workaholism and procrastination
• Debilitation due to Parkinson’s Disease