The Nature of Consciousness: A Neurophenomenological Approach

I want to welcome you and thank you for joining the conversation on this elusive subject of consciousness which is our topic this evening and continues with our presentations tomorrow morning my name is Gendo Allen field i'ma lay ordained zen buddhist monk and teacher I lead practice at the Upper Valley Zen Center in White River Junction and also at the Zen practice group here at Dartmouth College this year several of our Dartmouth Zen students are studying cognitive and neuroscience and from our conversations emerged the idea of a cross-disciplinary cross-cultural conference on the nature of consciousness professor Marcelo gleiser and his Institute for cross-disciplinary engagement also known as IC e here at Dartmouth seemed a natural partner for this effort and his enthusiasm and backing have made this event possible we are also indebted to Amy flock Dhin administrator for IC e IC e and to Amy Zhang the Dartmouth senior who designed our poster is Amy here by any chance sorry she's not here but I I'm very was very pleased with her poster I'm also indebted to the Tucker foundation in chaplain Devine Lipton for financial support and to the Church of Christ at Dartmouth for the use of their gathering Hall for our meditation both this afternoon and also tomorrow morning at eight o'clock so our purpose has been to bring together three perspectives on consciousness the scientist the philosopher and the Buddhist I am grateful to the presenters we have assembled that you will meet in the course of this conference and I'm personally grateful to Shinji Roshi for accepting my invitation to join us after today's presentation the conference will resume tomorrow with an opportunity as I mentioned for meditation practice with Shin J Roshi at 8:00 a.m. there will be morning presentations concluding at 11:20 with a panel discussion at 12:30 everybody is invited to join our presenters for lunch which may be purchased at a cost of roughly I think it's $10 at the class of 53 Commons and directions will be provided I want to conclude with words from our proposal for this conference our aim is dialogue across cherished distinctions between academic areas of study and between science and quote religion it is a timely conversation in change in a changing world where openness and acceptance of different views contend with anger and fears of lost identity consciousness is not merely an academic concern but one that underlies a meeting of minds across all that divided divides us please welcome professor Marcelo gleiser who will introduce today's speaker okay okay welcome everyone my name is Marcelo gleiser I'm a professor of physics and astronomy here at Dartmouth and I'm also the director of the good ice know context the bad guys are the good ice so this is the good ice the Institute for cross-disciplinary engagement and so our mission is do something that people talk about a lot but it's very hard to do which is to bring the sciences and the humanities into constructive engagement right and we do that through a series of different activities one of them is we promote public dialogues and in theatres in big cities across the United States just to give you an idea in February we had on a physicist Sean Carroll and a Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace talking about the nature of reality in San Francisco we had almost 1500 people in the audience we really hit big because you had all the techies with the physicists and all the you know the people interested in other ways of knowing with Alan and so it was a wonderful experience and we also have a Fellows Program and other things and within the Fellows Program we are fortunate to attract people to the armas that are very distinguished in their fields and two of the speakers they're going to hear from are currently ice fellows so evan Thompson who is going to be talking today and adam frank who is going to be talking tomorrow so i invite you to visit our website ice dot dartmouth edu where you can find out about our many many activities lots of lactarius lots of interesting things that we promote an amazing collection of video interviews with people from experts in Lucretia's the cosmologists thinking about the multiverse and an also virtual library which is open and free to the public on many many different topics that we cover so please do visit ice and so let me thank Alan for being the initiator of this whole thing he came up to me and said we should try to do this cross disciplinary conference on bringing different perspectives on the question of mind and I thought what a great idea it does indeed fit fits very well with with what we do at ice so I was very happy with that and it's so nice to see an idea become reality you know and have you all here present today and we should have many different ways of thinking about this which is again a reflection of the question of the mind problem right it is not something that we can solve only through science or through philosophy or through spirituality it really needs a multiplicity of views in order for us to move forward and I think that's what we're here for today to learn from each other and to hopefully come up with again this constructive engagement of these different ways of knowing which is really what we're here for so to open our discussions we have here Evan Thompson and I'm going to read this description because I couldn't do anything better than this he's a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia he writes about cognitive science phenomenology the philosophy of mind and cross-cultural philosophy especially Buddhist philosophy in dialogue with Western philosophy of mind and cognitive science which is I have to say a very rare thing to do in academia and something that should be celebrated right there well as a child Sampson was home-schooled at the Lindisfarne Association so very radical stuff a think tank and a retreat founded by his father William Irwin Thompson in 1977 Thompson met Chilean phenomenologist Francisco Varela when Varela attend LEDs for conference which was organized by Thompson is bad and Gregory Bateson Thompson received a PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto in 1990 and an a B in Asian Studies from Amherst College in 1983 Thompson has thought at inverse of Toronto Concordia University Boston University and York University while York University Thomson was also a member of the Centre for vision research Thompson has held visiting appointments at the sentences for subjectivity research what a great name in Copenhagen and at the University of Colorado Boulder so he picks his places very wisely Thomson worked with Francisco Varela in Paris and during this time Varela and Thomson wrote the embodied mind cognitive science and human experience Thomson's book mine in life biology phenomenology and the sciences of mind explores how life relates to mine and his most recent book which is quite and wonderful achievement it's called waking dreaming being self and consciousness in euro science meditation and philosophy so Evan please before you start as MC let me just tell you a little bit about how this goes so hopefully you'll talk for about 45 minutes and and then I have invited two of our guests to offer commentary if they wish to do so if they do wonderful if not I'll open it to questions from the audience okay good well thank you very much for that very generous introduction and for the invitation to be here and thank all of you for for coming here this afternoon I'm going to be speaking about the nature of consciousness a neuro phenomenological approach and I want to begin with an image that I imagine many of you are familiar with this is a lithograph by MC Escher that's from 1956 and it depicts a man in a gallery viewing a print of a seaport and the gallery in which he's standing is one of the buildings in the Seaport the picture exemplifies what Douglas Hofstadter calls a strange loop the gallery is in the town the town is in the picture the picture as a picture is mentally in the person viewing it that is sort of as a content of his perceptual experience but the person is in the picture and of course we are the ones viewing this strange loop so it's in us in a sense and at the center of this strange loop is a circular void or emptyness where Esser has signed his name now in Buddhism this absence at the heart of presence is called Shunyata emptiness and it's one of our themes of the meeting and in one of the very early Indian Buddhist philosophical texts by the Indian philosopher Nagarjuna the fundamental stanzas of the middle way magar genus says whatever is dependently KO arisen that is explained to the emptiness so we have these linked concepts of emptiness and dependent origination or dependent arising now I think in contemporary Western philosophy there are a number of ways in which this idea is echoed in thinking about the relationship between the mind and the world the idea of dependent origination so for example Hilary Putnam in one of his classic books from the early 1980s says the mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world some decades earlier the French philosopher Maurice merleau-ponty said in his phenomenology of perception the world is inseparable from the subject but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world and the subject is inseparable from the world but from a world that it itself projects now I want to take two guiding thoughts for what I'm going to tell you today from these strange loops one I'm going to call the primacy of consciousness and what I mean by that is that there's no way to step outside of consciousness in the form of lived experience everything we investigate including consciousness and its place in nature is always closed from within the horizon of lived experience and this includes when we're doing science the second thought is what I'm going to call the primacy of embodiment and that is that lived experience never shows up apart from our embodied being in the world so with those introductory thoughts here is the outline of what I want to present to you today I want to say some more things in detail with a bit more philosophical precision I hope about what I mean by the primacy of consciousness and then I'm going to say some things about the problem with physicalism physicalism is the philosophical or metaphysical thesis that everything that exists or at least everything concrete that exists leaving out math and logic and things of that sort everything that concretely exists is physical including the mental so I'm going to say some critical things about that and then the question will arise well does that mean that Pan psychism that everything is fundamentally mental is that how we should think about things and I'm going to say ten psychism does have an insight but no it's not quite what we it's not quite right and that's going to take us into the primacy of embodiment my second guiding thought and then I'm going to end with some remarks about neuro phenomenology okay so to talk about the primacy of consciousness let's go back again to this quotation from merleau-ponty the world is inseparable from the subject but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world and and this is the one I want to emphasize for our purposes at the moment the subject is inseparable from the world but from a world that it itself projects so the primacy of consciousness here can be thought of as the idea that in knowing the world we cannot step outside the horizon of our lived experience so let's let's think about this metaphor of the horizon for a moment the line of the horizon is a limit beyond which we can't go but it's in a parent line and a structure of our perception and it travels with us so on the one hand we could say the horizon is indeed real it's the farthest point the eye can see before the Earth's surface curves away beneath our view but we could also say in the philosophical sense of the term ideal that it's ideal that is to say it's a structure of our perception it's not something that exists independent of perception that doesn't mean that it's in my head it's a relation between me and the world now in phenomenological philosophy particularly the writings of Horrell we have what could be called a horizontal conception of consciousness this really uses the term horizon throughout his writings in a number of different ways but very generally we could say that the horizontal conception of consciousness is the conception of consciousness as the horizon from within which the world is present and disclosed to us wherever we find ourselves whether we're observing something in a scientific context or whether we're out on a boat sailing we always find whatever we find from within the horizon of our lived experience now if you're a philosopher or you're familiar with contemporary philosophy the horizon is let's call it a phenomenal structure of consciousness it's not a particular phenomenon property like the sourness of lemon or the redness of the sunset it's not in other words aquellia that is qualia in the way that philosophers use the term qualia to refer to the particular qualitative properties of a given perceptual or sensory experience indeed qualia and phenomenal contents that is whatever you're experiencing whether you're awake and perceiving whether your mind wandering and caught up in some thought whether you're falling asleep and seeing images play before your eyes whether you're in a dream whether you're having a lucid dream whatever it is that you're experiencing those contents appear from within the horizon of consciousness so this horizon all notion is not a content any particular it's a structure it's a structure of awareness but it's a phenomenal structure now here we come upon the first sense in which I think we can highlight the primacy of consciousness and I'm going to call this the existential primacy because consciousness in this horizontal sense is not something we have it's rather something we are or we could say it's something that we live so it has existential primacy and phenomenologist talked about this in different ways Heidegger talks about our being in the world mellow ponky talks about the lived body Husserl talks about the life world the horizon --all consciousness of the life world there are different terms and some may be better than others but they're all about this existential primacy of lived experience so if we think about this though horizontal consciousness in a way is nothing in itself right I said it's a structure not a particular content it's whatever the contents that we are experiencing are structured in the way that they are so in Buddhist terms that is to say it's empty Shinya of own beings vibhava that is it doesn't have an intrinsic reality of its own rather it's nothing other than the manifestation of the world it's we could say the disclosure or manifestation of our life world our concrete lived reality and lived experience now I just use the term life world which is another phenomenological term of art laden zelf so let's think about this for a minute in relationship to the concept of the universe if we're thinking as natural scientists where you might say the universe that is the totality of nature contains the life world contains our life world and indeed that makes perfect sense and there's there's nothing objectionable about that statement but for a philosopher we also want to be able to say that the life world and now we could elaborate this as the space of meaning within within which anything is intelligible anything is thinkable anything is observable that that contains the universe because the universe is always disclosed asked from within the life world after all our scientific endeavor of opening up new realms of observation and new ways of intervening within them is always within our life world so will philosopher wants to say yes of course the natural science perspective on the universe has its validity but the philosophical position position that reverses the primacy or the order of priority also has its validity and it's important not to lose sight of that now this brings us to another sense of the primacy of consciousness which is its epistemological primacy and in a way I've already said this but I'm going to elaborate it in a bit more detail as we live and as we investigate our world we open up new vistas with new horizons we do this in all sorts of ways I'm emphasizing science but of course art does that in in its own way the way that we do this in science is powerful unique distinctive and it's by producing objective knowledge objective doesn't mean independent of us it means tested and it means consensual you could say it means inter subjective so let me spell that out live experience is a point of departure and a point of return for the production of objective knowledge because the way science proceeds and the way it's evolved historically if we look from say Galileo up to today is that we set aside aspects of our concrete experience on which we can't agree the particularity of my sensations versus yours or how I taste things or aesthetically evaluate them the versus the way that you do our values our emotions we try to as much as possible bracket those there questions about how much we can do this but that's the effort and then what we do is we extract abstract and idealized invariants structural relational properties that are structural residues of our experience and then we we can treat these as objects of consensus we can test them and these are things like general proposition and logic or mathematical models or formula and then we implement these abstractions by way of technology and when we do that we can intervene we can manipulate we can measure we can cook we can control phenomena always in a contextual II situated and limited way but all of that of course is registered in our experience you have to observe something you have to record a measurement that requires experience so an important implication of this is that claiming that consciousness in this now sense of lived experience can be reductively explained I'm emphasizing the word reductively now can be reductively explained by one of its structural residues for example in the context of neuroscience today where we're thinking about consciousness something like to Nonis integrated information theory or the global work space theory of consciousness and and it's it's neuronal architecture to claim that we can reductively explain consciousness in terms of that rather than establishing a relationship between the two is to turn the whole epistemological procedure upside down and this is indeed whorls point in his work of 1938 the crisis of European Sciences and transcendental phenomenology he argues that it's in principle absurd to think that we can explain subjective experience by reducing it to certain objects of science since these objects are abstract relational structures extracted from the life world of lived experience so it's to invert the order the epistemological order she's not arguing against science he's arguing that we need to understand how its situated in relationship to our lived experience and Horrell thought that the deep you could say existential or spiritual crisis of our scientific culture is that we constantly forget that lived experience is the source of science and it's ground of validity this is what Adam and Marcello and I have been talking about in terms of a kind of blind spot in our scientific culture now finally this brings us to a more difficult but in some ways more precise philosophical sense of the primacy of consciousness which following country could call the transcendental primacy of consciousness and transcendental here is being used in content not in say the sense of transcendental meditation that dates me I suppose so the idea here is that consciousness is the condition of possibility for scientific knowledge so so let me read to you something that Conte says when he's defining the word transcendental he says I entitled transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects with with what as with the mode of our knowledge of objects with how how we know not what we know insofar as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori so Kant says we have knowledge we take that for granted and now the question is how is it that we know what we know how what are the conditions of possibility for our having the kind of experience and knowledge that we have and that kind of investigation is a transcendental investigation in his sense and the point here is that consciousness then is not another object of knowledge or we could say not just another object of knowledge its that by which any object is knowable and when we think about it this way that is to say transcendentally in con sense and also whorls consciousness is irreducible to the domain of objects it doesn't make sense to treat it as an object because it's the condition of possibility for objects being manifest to us in all the ways that they are in the first place so to summarize consciousness has primacy existentially in the sense of it's what we live our concrete lived experience epistemological E it's the point of departure and the point of return for science and transcendentally it's this is a sort of English rendering of a German term as you can probably tell it's the unco behind Abel condition of possibility for knowledge okay so now note it does not follow from this argument that is to say this argument is not logically entailed that consciousness has ontological primacy in the and psychist cents that is it doesn't follow that the property of being conscious is an extra ingredient this is Dave Chandler's term in nature at the fundamental micro physical level and I'm going to come back to this point later when I talk about Pam's psyche is Imai just want to flag that nothing I've said so far logically entails that way of thinking about consciousness that it's everywhere in nature micro physically I think that way of thinking gets something right but I also think it gets something wrong so I'm going to come back to that that's a sort of teaser I hope okay so I've now told you what I mean when I'm using this expression the primacy of consciousness so now I want to say some things about the problem with physicalism in a nutshell physicalism I think is a useless thesis physicalism is the thesis that everything is physical or everything concrete is physical the immediate problem is that physical is not well-defined what does it mean attempts to define it makes Idzik ilysm either false empty not in the Buddhist sense or non naturalist so let me spell that out this is not thought by any means original to me it goes back to the philosopher Karl Hemphill and it's known as temples dilemma and the dilemma is if we define physical as what contemporary physics tells us is physical then physicalism is very likely to be false if we define because physics obviously is a work in progress and any inductive argument from the history of science is going to lead us to think that physics is Gunder good is going to undergo radical revision on the other hand if we define physical what by what the ideal completed physics if it even makes sense to think of that but let's suppose that it does if we define it in terms of the meaning of physical for the ideal completed physics then physicalism is empty because we don't know what that physics will be we have no we have no kind of tangible sense of exactly what that means now at this point some philosophers there's a kind of trend in philosophy today to try to define physicalism for the scientists and for other philosophers so some philosophers will say look we shouldn't and overall authority to the physicists or to physics to determine what physical because no matter how far the bounds of the physical stretch it's a conceptual truth or you could say it's an a priori truth that the bounds of the physical can't include fundamental mentality or strong emergence the idea of radically new emergent configurational forces now I don't think this works this gambit basically shows that physicalists and I'm talking about physical philosophers now are caught between on the one hand wanting to be naturalist because the whole point of the term physicalism as opposed to materialism was to signal the preeminence of physics since physical science so on the one hand physical as philosophers want to be naturalist as indeed they should who defer to science but they want to be meta physicians too because after all they're philosophers and that leads them to place a priori restrictions or to try a place a priori restrictions on what can count as physical now I think that a number of years ago Chomsky in one of his books basically showed that this is really wrongheaded he points out that trying to restrict a priori what counts as physical is like a 17th century materialist responding to Newton trying to restrict a priori what counts as matter and we know from the history of science that science simply supersedes that kind of metaphysics or that way of doing metaphysics okay so the upshot then is that understanding the mind and its place in nature is of course a genuine and extremely important scientific and philosophical enterprise but physicalism is useless to it all right so now maybe Penn psychism is that what follows here well I don't think so Penn psychism is undergoing a resurgence you can see that in the book there which just came out last year a collection of articles by a whole bunch of philosophers very interesting articles on Penn psychism exploring it as an option and philosophy of mind today or metaphysics so it's the view that everything is mental or phenomenal experiential to put it in the most general way and it's based on this recognition that you can't get consciousness qualia the qualitative characteristics of experience or subjectivity out of the abstract relational properties of Natural Science equations relating magnitudes for example or mathematical functions you don't get the consciousness out of that and get a you get an abstract relational structure so that's a recognition that's an insight but pans latest response is to postulate that consciousness is everywhere as an intrinsic property of physical nature now I want to take you through the argument that that leads to this thought or what I think is best argument or the most interesting I suppose forceful and this is an argument that we see in some ways in Whitehead although I wouldn't quite call white hit upon psychist in the sense but in some ways we see elements of in Whitehead you see it in the physicist Sir Arthur Eddington we see it in Bertrand Russell and we see it today in Galen Strawson all of whom were extremely interesting writers and the argument goes like this physics reveals to us only the relational properties of physical phenomena it gives us models with magnitudes and equations relating them relational properties need intrinsic properties are determined by intrinsic properties so this argument says certain configurations of physical phenomena generate or constitute phenomenal states the brain and the body so the intrinsic properties of physical phenomena must encompass this power our own inner awareness reveals that phenomenality the taste of something the quality of something visually is an intrinsic property of our experience indeed it's the only intrinsic property that we know of because science doesn't give us intrinsic properties so phenomenality must send an intrinsic property of physical phenomena or at least of certain organized physical systems that's that's the argument as we see a deploy today now there are two problematic assumptions in this argument one is that relational properties are determined by intrinsic properties it seems to me entirely possible that and indeed it would be a Buddhist idea that there are no intrinsic properties spa bhava own being there is just dependent arising in relationality all the way down all the way up and all the way out so this premise is contestable and indeed there are some very interesting technical arguments around this in indian philosophy indian buddhist coffee and tibetan plus as well and then secondly our own inner awareness reveals that phenomenality is an intrinsic property that is to treat our inner experience as if it were just a matter of these special intrinsic non-relational qualities which divests our experience of its embeddedness its situatedness and its embodiment its relationality in other words so I don't find this argument persuasive indeed I find it subject to two different extremes you could say one is what would be the what in philosophy of science today is called the structural realist position though I would call it the structural reification assess that well actually only relational properties are mind independently real and they're real structural features of the world apart from the mind and that's what science is about so that is to me to reify scientific models it's to forget that they are idealized abstractions out of our concrete lived experience but Pam psychist fell prey to a different kind of reification because they reify consciousness as an intrinsic property and they forget its relational and contextual Constitution by way of embodiment pan psychism also has another interesting problem which is called the combination problem and this is a more in a way a more interesting one because it leads me it's going to lead me positively into saying some things about embodiment so if you think as the pen situs does that there are micro level phenomenal properties or experiences everywhere then there's the problem of how do they combine to form macro level ones this is a sort of strange mental version of a physicalist composition problem now just transposed into the mental reg Sir William Jane has put this very well in his writings when he was talking about tan psychism he says take a sentence of a dozen words and take 12 men and tell to each one word then stamina in a row or Jam them in a bunch and let each think of his word as intently as you will nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence where the elemental units are supposed to be ceilings the cases in nowise Altered take a hundred of them shuffle them and pack them as close together as you can still each remains the same feeling it always was so he's basically saying look if you think that there are phenomenal properties scattered everywhere you need to explain how they cohere in or combine into subjects of experience and you don't get that just by sort of putting them in a row now the pants leg is response to this today is to say that well mental properties belong only to genuine individuals not to mere aggregates not to mere collections not to conglomerates but then how do we determine what counts as a genuine individual this is the boundary problem do elementary particles count as individuals well it doesn't seem like it would count as an individual in the way that say a bacterial cell would so what's the principle of individuation here exactly I think one of the best statements of this is by Greg Rosenberg who's to my mind one of the most interesting pans psychist philosophers and he says the hard nut of the boundary problem is that animal experiences possess a kind of inherent individuality at a physical mid level of reality which is hard to explain if pan psychism psychism is true why do the boundaries exist just so boundaries are harder to explain than combination we are faced with the need to understand what it is to be an inherent individual in the natural world this takes us to embodiment because the boundary problem is in a way the problem of embodiment because to be a genuine individual is not simply to be a particular it's to be a system that has some kind of bounded organizational unities who ongoing internal material transformation again think of a living cell so that kind of system is not any kind of particular it's it's a body it has an embodiment okay so this brings me now to the primacy of embodiment so let's recall our guiding thoughts the primacy of consciousness no way to step outside of lived experience but now we're looking at the other side of the coin that lived experience never shows up apart from our embodied being in the world and in the middle of Ponte quotation I gave you earlier we're now emphasizing this thought the world is inseparable from the subject but from a subject who is nothing but a project of the world now to illustrate in the most general way the emergence of individuality I want to do it in a in a schematic way by way of this figure so the circles represent processes under some conditions of observation and the arrows represent enabling relations or relations of conditioning so if a circle has an arrow pointing to and other circles and that circle is enabling is a process that's enabling the one that is pointing to contributing to it under observation we see that some of the arrows form a tightly interdependent Network the one that are black they have a unitary character to them because they have in the logical or algebraic sense a kind of closure that is every process in that network is the result of another process and is affecting another process it doesn't closure here doesn't mean that it's separated from the environment because indeed it's being it's embedded in the environment in terms of the gray circles and the green arrows which indicate conditioning relations from the network into the environment but when we have a system that has this kind of network density we have the emergence of a kind of individuality where every process is contributing to every other process so that the network emerges under certain conditions as having a robust individuality that continues for a time until it dissipates for whatever reason and each circle black circle in the network is doing what it does under conditions of precariousness precariousness nose yes that's a word that is to say if if it weren't for that Network the network is functioning as a kind of constraint on it if it weren't for that network it would have a tendency to run down and atrophy so it's holding together because of this entangled mutual modification now I've put this in very abstract terms but you could think of this as this is I think maybe the easiest way to think of it as the emergence of life of a protocell or of a cell with an internal metabolic reaction network that's constantly modifying its activity and I'm going to I'm going to elaborate that in a minute but before I do that I want to link this to a very important Buddhist philosophical way of elaborating this concept of dependent origination that we began with earlier so in mad Yamaka philosophy particularly as it develops later in india the writings of the commentator on the gardener by chandrakirti the idea is that dependent origination can be thought of in three ways or having three aspects there's causal dependence dependence on conditions there's the dependence of the parts on the whole and we could also say the whole on the parts because the the parts give rise to the whole but the parts are what they are in context of the whole and then there's an interesting one that chandrakirti points out which is dependence on concepts that is we framed this in a certain way we're observing it at a certain scale of observation we're picking out certain things as salient for our purposes when we do it that way it then becomes an objective matter a testable consensual matter what the nature of the situation is but it's still being conceptually framed by us so there's a kind of conceptual dependence here as well so this is what dependent origination means as it gets elaborated in Indian philosophy the very powerful notion okay so let's illustrate this more concretely now in the case of life the Chilean biologist Umberto Madonna and Francisco Varela introduced society of auto poesis self production and what they meant by that is that a system in the molecular domain that's made up of molecular processes that form a reaction network that is that catalyze each other's production produce each other in a way that also involves the fabrication or production of a membrane that makes the system bounded in space that this is the minimal example of the emergence of we could say a body that is an individual that's not only individuated but self individuating because a system like this alters its boundary conditions in a way that say a candle flame doesn't doesn't alter its boundary conditions in the way that a living cell does so they talked about this as a kind of basic bio logic you have this autopoietic loop it's a strange loop in a way you could say using Hofstadter's term that complex autopoietic systems are adaptively related to the environment that is they can modify their behavior and relationship to their zone of viability what is what is going to lead to the systems the solution versus what is going to enable it to continue to hold together this is constantly driving it in relationship to the environment so that we know for example that very very simple bacterial critters that they swim about with the flagella rotating clockwise counter clockwise tumbling versus directed swimming and that this is under the controls too strong a word is under the modulation of the ongoing autopoietic metabolism and this is a kind of basic sense making because the these organisms differentiate in their environment things that are significant versus insignificant sucrose versus heavy metals things that will make it swim up gradient that enhance its metabolic continuation things that will repel it and make it swim away so I like to put this by saying that living even at this very fundamental level is sense-making in precarious conditions that's what it's embodied sense-making in precarious conditions now if we think of this in a in a much more evolutionary sense where we're particularly focused on animal life animal life is about multicellularity about a body that has many kinds of cells with neurons that are needed to signal rapidly and across large distances sense the sensory and motor ends but it's the same kind of strange loop organization where now the auto regulation is facilitated through the self production of the neuronal cells in a dense Network like those circles with the black arrows that I showed you before and in animal life we see what looks more familiar to us what we would call cognition emotion effect and so on and of course in mammal life this is social from the ground up there's the in mammalian life no brain is an island everything is about coupling and co-regulation so this is very very quick going through a number of different things but what I'm trying to bring out and emphasize to you is what happens when we put life back into consciousness by way of the primacy of embodiment this perspective transforms how we think about what philosophers call the explanatory gap between consciousness and nature the gap is no longer or the problem is no longer the gap between the mental defined as fundamentally non-physical or the physical and the physical defined as fundamentally non mental which is how philosophers usually set it up the problem is rather the passage from the living body to the live body and back again how do we negotiate that passage and that's what I call in my book mind in life the body body problem negotiating it requires that phenomenology and science work together without one aiming to usurp the other we can think of this as a kind of mutual circulation or mutual illumination where phenomenology and science work together to illuminate each other by way of the primacy of consciousness and the primacy of embodiment okay so this brings me to the last part of the talk which is the idea of neural phenomenology which comes from Francisco Varela this is you didn't invent the term but he brought it into current currency and used it in a particular way and in his usage it works under the assumption of the primacy of consciousness and the primacy of embodiment and investigates the relationship between conscious experience and brain activity Varela's working idea this is now back in the in the 90s up to the time that he died in 2001 was that the flow of experience or what William James had called the stream of consciousness reflects what neuroscientists today call intrinsic brain activity or spontaneous brain activity as much as or more than stimulus evoked activity so the brain is constantly endogenously generating its own activity and and it's doing that in a way that's under the influence of stimuli but the way that stimuli are received and dealt with has to do with what the brain is doing intrinsically spontaneously and barela's idea was that a careful phenomenology of the flow of experience can be used to illuminate intrinsic brain activity it can help to as it were recover noise what would otherwise be treated as noise and that this kind of phenomenology would benefit from trained contemplative insight so you can think about it as on the one hand we have the phenomenology of consciousness now we're really talking about of course human consciousness and the neuroscience investigation of it and bringing the neuroscience of meditation into the sphere of the neuroscience of consciousness and bringing meditative insight into this year of the phenomenology of consciousness in this mutually illuminating mutually mutual circulation way now there are a number of studies that I just want to highlight for you I'm not going to go through them in detail because we don't have time that pursued this approach or at least try to pilot it to some extent one was a study that Varela published or actually appeared after his death where they looked at different qualities of attention antecedent to the presentation of a stimulus which was a a stereogram a depth illusion and they looked at how the antecedent spontaneous activity and different qualities of attention distraction versus attentional stability modulated the behavioral response to the stimuli and the the the vividness of the of the perception and they were investigating this looking at frequency phase phase synchrony patterns reported through EEG so oscillatory activity as recorded by eg and and the temporal phase relationship between the between the signals so this was this was published some years ago another study that just just appeared a year ago is one that I participated in which used experienced tera vaada the possum meditators to report on when they first noticed the arising of a thought and the idea was to use this ability to to track the neural activity further back in time than would be possible with an untrained observer of the arising of spontaneous thoughts as a way of getting a more fine-grained temporal portrait using fMRI of the antecedent neural activity generating spontaneous cognition and another study looked at using real-time fMRI feedback and how people with attentional stability through meditation are able to through the feedback about their own neural activity to to modulate in a reliable way they the signals coming from in this case it was the the posterior cingulate as measured using fMRI so these are just all examples of some neural phenomenological kinds of studies and if you're interested in the details of this there's a short review paper that I did with Sinha Fuzzle for is a PhD student of mine on the brain dynamics and and how they're viewed from a neuro phenomenological perspective okay so neuro phenomenology then is about we could say cultivating the experiential side of the embodied mind through contemplative training and Varela's idea was to embed contemplative practice and mind science in a larger common framework based on the primacy of lived experience where again there's a mutual illumination and circulation back and forth between phenomenology and in this case neuroscience alright so this brings me then to the concluding thoughts to repeat something that I began with there's no way to step outside of consciousness as lived experience and to measure it against something else everything we investigate is disclosed from within lived experience and direct experience never shows up apart from our being embodied and situated in the world if therefore makes no sense to aim to reduce experience to something essentially non experiential as the physical is classically conceived to be rather understanding how consciousness is a natural phenomenon may require radical revision to our scientific concept of nature such that consciousness in quotation marks because I'm talking about the concepts now such that consciousness and nature don't mutually exclude each other at the outset or by construction as they have basically for a sense Descartes rather they imply each other or arise from something neutral between them at the same time our ultimate and truly hard problem hardest task is not to solve an abstract mind-body problem it's rather to live the mutual dependence of experience and embodiment with benevolence with mindfulness and with care this is especially meant to if you were Adams talk yesterday to echo his discussion of the situation we find ourselves in today on the planet the Anthropocene and whether that's going to be a good or a bad Anthropocene so I want to end with Steven bachelors poetic rendering of one of the verses from the Gardiners fundamental stanzas of the middle way this is one of my my favorite favorite ways of rendering some of his thoughts you are not the same as or different from conditions on which you depend you are neither severed from nor forever fused with them this is the deathless teaching of Buddhas who care for the world and my favorite part when Buddha's don't appear and their followers are gone the wisdom of awakening bursts forth by itself thank [Applause] Thank You Evan for this that was wonderful illuminating inspiring awesome thank you and I would like to know if the people are invited to comment blue comment I'll count to five if they don't what ah we have a hand okay come over please so this is Professor Peter safe from the brain and cognitive sciences and he's one of our speakers tomorrow morning so so it's a beautiful talk and important perspective so neuro phenomenology is something I care about a lot it's something that's missing in science pretty much so within neurosciences we could in principle have three basic surfaces of information everything associated with brains including neurons and consequences of neural activity like bold signal and fMRI and EEG then behavior and that's associated with psychophysics and then there's our experience and this is not really emphasized enough and if you do emphasize it like I do in my own work you have to kind of hide it behind the guise of hardcore psychophysics but the field could move in a true neuro phenomenological direction if it allowed for example human neurophysiology which it doesn't now but it should I think and in fact I think would be much less ethical for neuroscientists to do these experiments on each other than on monkeys where for example let's say I had a year left to live and I had my trusted friends who are neurophysiologists opening my skull and controlling neural activity say going into particular brain areas that are involved in color perception or shape perception or whatever and manipulating that activity in a controlled way you know there's an area called v4 if I go in there 20 hurt stimulation 30 hurts and I could say you know when you do that I see red flickering here and and there's lots and lots of things we could do so my hope for the future within science is a real embrace of neuro phenomenology to take a causal manipulation as the proach towards subjective experience beyond simply bombarding us with drugs like psilocybin which you know has some consequences that might be analogous with some Buddhist experiences but let me say you know the we do know that we can manipulate brain activity through drugs like psilocybin or even banging you on the head and you see phosphenes and that that triggers subjective experiences so I think the the Assumption behind neuroscience that subjective experience is realized in our suppose supervenes upon neural activity is I think a good one to go with at least for now unless until someone can prove to a to me that or any other standard neuroscientists that there could be disembodied subjective experiences and I'm not saying that's what you're advocating but right so if we assume that consciousness is embodied in the sense that it's realized in neural activity then it's a worthwhile enterprise to try to figure out what that relationship is and let me just close by saying that I think it's kind of cool to hear somebody point out the irony or the absurdity of science you know neuroscience which is taking the only thing that we know for sure which is our conscious experience and then using that based upon that evidence to create models of things that presumably don't have subjective experience and then try to eliminate conscious experience from the universe on the basis of these things that were derived from that I think that's a very good point it's ironic and it's really food foolish but it happens for deep historical reasons I think so every time you come from a tradition that goes through I would say merleau-ponty and Heidegger through his role to count and back to Plato's allegory of the cave something like that and psychology that and neuroscience our traditions I come from are well I would take the traditions started with a ville homeland in the 1860s and 70s who started a movement called structuralism which was introspection istic and reductionistic unlike anything that exists now is reductionistic because what blew people's minds and 1850s was Mendeleev's periodic table and they said okay well if there's atoms of matter that can explain all the complexity of matter well maybe there's atoms of mind let's find out what those atoms of the mind are so it was reductionistic what are the atoms of the mind and it was introspect sadistic because they would take a grad ship and put an apple there and say waiting what are your subjective atoms you know and there's a redness and roundness good okay so this kind of movement started by bunt which is really the first peeling off of psychology from philosophy went on for some decades it had two rejections one rejection was the American rejection of Indian structuralism which rejected its introspection ISM utterly and this is John B Watson and his followers that are later known as the behaviorist and they said it's ridiculous to have a science that takes unobservable subjective experience seriously we have to focus on what's publicly observable and that's behavior that's behaviorism almost simultaneously around 1910 or so you had a German rejection of once introspection istic and reductionistic structuralism and that was the gestalt movement which rejected the reductionism but kept the introspection ISM which so they were both rejections of this but the German movement almost got wiped out by Nazism because the founders max wertheimer and Kafka were Jewish and Vulcan curly who wasn't Jewish they all had to come to America couldn't get jobs because it was dominated by behaviorist so in neuroscience and psychology what dominated overwhelmingly was the American embassies on the publicly observable and the but there has been a recent reinvigoration or rebirth of Gestalt psychology within these traditions and I think there might even be emerging in of these who Sarah lien traditions now if we could really create a kind of neuro phenomenology that allowed us to manipulate human consciousness in a way that we could report and so that we could really understand the neural basis of consciousness but I think it would require a new kind of science namely human neurophysiology we have a lot of commentary for a different perspective haha wonderful okay ginger Rashi will speak tomorrow to that was really a very wonderful rich and inspiring talk thank you and your your words about the horizon reminded me of something that I asked my mother about and I was about seven or eight I wanted to know is there God she said oh I don't know I said no really I need to know she said well here's a piece of paper and a pencil let me show you something she drew of a circle and she said everything we can know can be proven by science by the rational mind and it's all in this circle and I said but all I care about is what's outside the circle to that she had no response and the other thing I wanted to say is you mentioned what happens in the awareness of thinking the awareness of what thoughts are arising during meditation and how important that is as we go further in contemplative work to notice thoughts as they arise because so often we get hijacked into what we might call a very negative mindset and that it's possible to change that right as it's happening and you know in terms of what we just heard about the needs of this very really crisis-ridden world we're in to be able to do that for each of us to be able to do that and change our minds again and again is absolutely crucial great well um now open to questions from the audience I just ask you to raise your hand I'm going to bring the microphone to you because we have video recording this okay you hi so I have a question so one of the things that I is fine fine most interesting about the idea of consciousness is all these ongoing works on machine learning right so a lot of these things now cars can drive you know they can respond to you when you speak to your phone so how do you actually start to draw the line as to where it's just a machine doing some sort of you know linear fitting or where is it actually conscious what is it actually making decisions and how does that really fit into the the large you know big data area that we live in how do you start to do all out the same notions of consciousness and neuropsychology that you're talking about here into a more technological space yeah so I think of all of those technological devices and advances especially you know coming out of computational work as examples of the re implementation via technology of the abstraction from concrete lived experience so that the concrete lived experience is then altered by the the technological reimplementation of those scientific idealizations abstractions mathematical models and so on with regard to consciousness my own view I didn't you know I didn't argue for this today but this would be my view is that or let me put it this way that that embodiment lived experience in the sense of embodied situated experience requires a system that is going to have the kind of individuation or autonomy we could say that we see in life in living systems and that we have not been able to achieve this in robotics it's proved to be an extremely difficult problem and that it may indeed someday happen that we have systems of that sort but simply building devices that are able to control their own operation in certain ways is not sufficient to create a system that is autonomous in that sense that it individuate sit self in relationship to its environment and constantly things in the world matter for it by because of that ongoing demand of individuation where you know metabolism is a concrete example of that in terms of life so I you know I think we're far away from that and I think that you know that that's actually really necessary for consciousness in the way that that I think of consciousness yeah this is not something that you know most people who work in AI would agree with it's very much there's a sort of line of work in AI that emphasizes the importance of autonomous agency and the difficulty of building truly autonomous agents but autonomy means here what we see clearly in the case of a living organism the kind of autonomy that a living organism has is not the kind of autonomy that we see in any artificial system yet we may someday though I think the thing that excites me most about what has been said here both by Peter C and by Evan is the the idea of a new kind of science like something that is I don't know what it is and now it's something new it incorporates obviously first-person subjectivity and one of the things that I feel like has been maybe left out a little bit or I haven't heard mentioned the primacy of embodiment you know this is this is the body and consciousness awareness interacting with the body being placed in different areas of the body the body itself adopting different positions different movements different experiences arising through the body I'm particularly talking about Qigong but of course there are many other systems that do the same kind of thing with an incredible amount of detail and power in terms of exploring the nature of consciousness and the nature of embodiment and I would see that you know very much as one of the seasonings in the stew or maybe one of the you know vegetables so the the meat and potatoes in that stew yeah I mean I completely agree with that I'm a on a long term Tai Chi trained practitioner so I'm committed to the importance of the embodied perspective in terms of body practices and what they can tell us about affect and emotion and attention and intention and awareness and there's there's some work in a neuro phenomenological vein that's being done with some of these kinds of somatic practices not a lot but it's a very interesting and you know fertile area my my wife Rebecca Todd is a neuroscientist but before she became a neuroscience and came over to the dark side as I like to say she was a contemporary dance choreographer so and we have another person here who works in dance and neuroscience so I think that's an extremely interesting and very fertile area to explore yeah thanks a lot for your talk I am I was thinking about this model of the horizon and I wondered if the question that's sort of coming to my mind is whether saying that all consciousness is horizon is the same thing as saying that consciousness is not all-inclusive or that it's limited and if it's not if it means something more than that what more does it mean so I mean one of the things I like about the horizon metaphor is that it's a structure that goes with you but of course you move and explore and you open up new horizons so you know the way that hosts world for example thinks of it is that when we we explore what he calls the outer and inner horizon of things we explore how things look from different perspectives how they're situated you know as figure to ground how my view of it from here refers to a possible view that I could have of it from there and my perception is always a kind of sensorimotor exploration so we're constantly um you know structured by a horizon but we're also changing the horizon and opening it up to new vistas and then Westar oil has this wonderful wonderful sort of way of saying that the world is the horizon of all horizons and what he means by that is that it's it's not just another horizon it's the the thought that we can that we can think that all horizons themselves open up into other ones and that at the limit the horizon of all of that is really what we what we think when we think the concept world and he in this context has this marvelous statement where he says the world is one but not in a sense in which it could have been - so the horizon is the horizon of all horizons is one all-encompassing horizon but not in a sense in which it could have been you know - rather than one so I think of the horizon as an open concept in that way it's not a limitation I mean of course it is a limitation in one sense but it's a limitation that always points beyond itself and and this is the idea in phenomenology really of transcendence that consciousness is that which always in some sense opens up to what's beyond itself yeah let me just make a call that connecting go ahead yep - your image of the circle I call it the island of knowledge so there is some similarity there and as a good island of knowledge no it's surrounded by the ocean of the unknown the mystery right and perhaps that's the horizon right I mean it's this need that we have to go beyond the no need to be unknown right and that's where perhaps is no human curiosity and transcendence is is all rooted at yeah this reminds me of you know way back in college studying philosophy and comparative religion one term that stuck with me and I don't remember from where it came by transcendental subjectivity just so it encompasses both oh yeah transcendental subjectivity is is Herschel's way of talking about the primacy of lived experience yes thank you it's that it's not it's transcendental because it's the condition of possibility for anything showing up in the way that it does for us which means that it's not as a condition of possibility it's not just another thing in the world it's it's transcendental and he talks about this in terms of subjectivity and then he shifts eventually into talking about a life world and some of us would see this as his kind of grappling with his still being caught in Cartesian ways of thinking that are bound to an ocean of subjectivity whereas he's shifting into trying to talk about the primacy of the of the life world towards his later thought yeah thank you thanks very much for that I just wanted to ask you what you thought about the fact that this term consciousness I think part of the reason it's problematic is that it's it implies a thing miss so that whether we think of it as being either innate or emergent there's always this mistake that is that it's somehow something that is there a property that things have rather than this participatory field and I wonder what you think about the possibilities for turning to two words more like attention or awareness because there's at least overlap there which feels like neuroscience although then there is the problem of whether it's something that is implicit or not yeah I mean there's always a problem with neste words that they can get reified they're you know they're prone to that I tend to try to vary the words that I use so sometimes I use consciousness sometimes I talk about awareness I don't think attention is synonymous with either consciousness or awareness attention for me is a cognitive function that has to do with with selection and it's it's it's used in a lot of different ways depending on the cognitive science context itself I suppose so I do use attention when I'm really wanting to refer to a specific way in which cognition or awareness is modified or modulated so that something is being oriented towards and selected that's usually the way the cognitive psychologists talk about it I suppose so you know sometimes I talk about lived experience or sometimes I talk about embodied experience or sometimes I talk about awareness versus the contents of awareness and you know at the end of the day they're all words and it sort of depends who you're talking to and what the conversation is but I do agree that you know we need to be cautious with the words and be sensitive to the ways that they can you know distort what we're trying to talk about yes but it might be that attention and consciousness are as close together as can be without being the same like a married relationship yeah where that which we call consciousness is the domain of everything that we can relationally attend or our volitionally attending now and so I would challenge people you know can you think can you find something that you are that you can be conscious of that you cannot volitionally attend at your will or anything that your volitionally attending now that you're not conscious of so that's true it's like the relationship of an operator to the upper hands yeah yeah yeah I mean so this is a debate I would say in cognitive neuroscience right now between people who think that there's a kind of phenomenal consciousness or phenomenal awareness that is awareness or or experience apart from any possibility of attentional access to it and those who say that that's not really a coherent notion and that if it's if it's a conscious I mean of course you know this right if it's a conscious experience then there has to be the possibility of attentional access to it so I mean I mean I'm inclined to think to agree with you that when we're talking about awareness there's there's got to be the possibility of some kind of attention where that means some possibility of orienting towards it and enhancing certain aspects of it for certain aims volitional or intentional that's that's how I would be inclined to think of it for sure yeah but it but it just to be you know I guess open-minded it's contested right certainly within the context of Buddhist say a be Dharma philosophy you know attention well or the word that we translate as attention which for them has in that in that context a sense of orienting towards something before it even sort of selected for like scrutiny that that's what's called a constantly present mental factor so any moment of awareness has that factor and an moment of awareness is like a hand and there are the various fingers that are always there that enable you to kind of cognitively grasp something so attention is like one of those fingers that enables you to sort of grasp something but they bet the tension we wouldn't still reduce awareness to attention attention would be a kind of aspect or component or factor of awareness yeah that that particular that particular question makes me feel like maybe it needs empirical rather than abstract investigation now that may not be true of that specific question but more generally if we're dealing with near phenomenology the other thing I love a lot about phenomenology as opposed to most forms of philosophy is that it includes an an empirical practice of actual direct investigation which you know I think is essential to this whole endeavor and you know I've practiced various forms of meditation which are definitely that and I've read a certain amount about the methods in phenomenology and I'm continually frustrated at not being able to find any source of clear descriptions or you know training how to cultivate the specific methods of phenomenology and so partly I'm asking you for references yeah I mean so this is the situation in sort of the canonical phenomenological text you know text by postural text by software merleau-ponty is that you have these very rich descriptions and there's no real discussion of you know how these descriptions came to be in terms of the you know the volition and the attention of the phenomenologist you know they're scattered things in horse roll and and hust roll is a kind of interesting case because his descriptions always in a way I would strip his theoretical structure so you know he's he's trying to do things theoretically and they draw him into you know real concrete phenomena of you know of importance and interest like our consciousness of time and then he starts to investigated and describe it and the descriptions actually outrun his theoretical constructions then he has to go back and rework the theory and it's like his whole life is about this which I mean is very fertile that's not a criticism but by the same token there's very little you can find about what exactly is the attentional skill that's required to generate these kinds of descriptions and of course in contemplative traditions there's there's obviously much more of that there are practice communities and traditions and instructions on you know how to do do those kinds of things yeah so this is why the movement in phenomenology today is to is to try to be enriched by those but by those practices okay you have one more question I think there's one back there and Adam also had one too okay two more quick three more question okay so let's make it brief very briefly I'm not sure I understand at all the idea of lived experience I'm sitting here thinking does your idea of consciousness and so forth and lived experience exclude sudden blinding insights from some sort of beyond something beyond I've ever lived in my experience no doesn't exclude that I think there are countless reports throughout many traditions of people who report sudden insights that they experience as beyond what beyond exactly means that's a whole other question but experientially no I wouldn't I wouldn't dismiss that at all yeah Oh your discussion about the attention made me think a little bit about the unconscious is there is that the main difference between consciousness and unconsciousness just attention or are there other aspects of unconsciousness that can be applied with its neuro phenomenological want me to try to figure out what's going on well the idea of neuro phenomenology is that increased stability of attention can facilitate access to aspects of let's say cognition that would not otherwise be readily accessible so it's it can maybe change the threshold of unconscious versus conscious but of course from the perspective of embodiment you know most of what we are is not accessible to our you know our cognition our consciousness nor should it be wouldn't be a good thing if it were probably Asia so sorry okay yeah our last question to be really good okay no pressure I'd like to go back to the subject of the horizon and you said it was defined it as a phenomenal subject and you used qualia as the phenomenal content content I still would like to delve into why not why can't you go past that horizon maybe introspectively but and then you need to back out of that with the science behind it why not I'm not quite sure I understood exactly what you're asking I mean is it why can't you go beyond the horizon is that the question well I also heard you say that you can create new horizons yeah I didn't write so I'm so you but not duality so creating a single horizon and yet there's beyond the circle so I mean the horizon again I would say is you know if I go out and stand you know I don't know in the quad I'm going to have a certain horizon but as I move of course I get a new horizon as I move so I don't ever step outside of having a horizon but the horizon does change so the idea is that it's a it's a structure of the field of awareness let's let's not talk let's use the word awareness maybe instead of classes it's a structure awareness has a field structure there are the particular contents that come and go but they are local modulations of the field and the field has this horizontal structure and I can change the particular horizon it were but I can't ever as long as there's a field of awareness not have a horizon you can see well inside there's a different kind of horizon I would say yeah yeah it's it's an information bubble that we live in you know and and and there is stuff outside that information bubble but you cannot get information from it because there are limitations physical limitations emotional limitations so I think that's the idea yeah okay so before we go remember we have tomorrow at eight o'clock at the white church here there is a meditation session for those who are interested and then otherwise we'll reconvene here and nine o'clock for our plenary discussions thank you for coming and have a great night [Applause]

Channel: ICE at Dartmouth

Views: 21,161

Rating: 4.837709 out of 5

Keywords: Evan Thompson, Neurophenomenology, Consciousness, mind, Dartmouth College

Id: 6K3o-TNJXyM

Length: 87min 8sec (5228 seconds)

Published: Mon May 15 2017