To: K-list
Recieved: 2000/12/01 11:22
Subject: [K-list] The geatest myth of all?
From: Wim Borsboom
On 2000/12/01 11:22, Wim Borsboom posted thus to the K-list:
Hi all,
At the bottom of this post you will find a copy of an article (The greatest
myth of all) from 'The New Scientist' archives.
I know on this list we are not to do major quotes, but neither can we have
attachments.
So here, I shall sin... :-)
Not sure even if it is legal what I do here, but saving you time and getting
you to read the article cannot be too illegal, can it?
Anyway, here I shall trespass... :-)
You could of course also look it up through:
http://www.newscientist.com/ To find this article, it is easiest to have
access to TNS's archives. They let you take out '7 day free access'.
Peter Halligan and David Oakley finish their article as follows:
> Nevertheless, it will be virtually impossible to let go
> of the *myth that self and free will are integral
> functions of consciousness*. The myth is something
> we are strongly adapted to maintain, and almost
> impossible to escape from. Maybe that's not so
> surprising, because, after all, "we" are part of the illusion.
(The asterisks are mine.)
Wim 's comments:
It is thus and only at the end of the article, that the writers clearly
spell out what it is they want us to have debunked or demythologized.
But then...they also say that is it "virtually impossible" to have these
insights impact on reality, "because, after all, "we" are part of the
illusion." (No wonder these guys are not enlightened.)
(What is it? Are they paid by the word to write such a useless article?)
The quoted paragraph above contains the phrase:
>... the myth that self and free will are
> integral functions of consciousness...
The article does not attempt to define those mythical terms 'free will' and
'self'. It uses the words "free will" some 5 or 6 times and 'self' by itself
only 9, maybe 10 times. The article does not show that the writers like
definite descriptions of those terms, instead they use some vague
*concepts* or "notions" about 'self' and 'free will' and they assume that
the reader uses the same. What if that were not the case?
>... the myth that self and free will are
> integral functions of consciousness ...
They even describe the myth wrongly. In reality as well as in mythical
reality, self and free will are NOT integral functions OF consciousness.
Free will is a function OF self and one could say the same of consciousness.
(But that is more complicated as you will see.)
Responding to some pivotal incident, (hold on, I'll explain later) an
individual may at some point say, "I am conscious..."
I do not want to get into "Conscious of what?" I just want to stay with
"Who is conscious?" The subject of that phrase, "I am conscious..."
is an individual, indivisible, full bodied and physical entity, - I -.
(I am purposely emphasizing the physicality of that being.)
At the moment of responding to that pivotal incident (...just wait...),
while saying, "I am conscious..." this individual is being forced to create
a reflective, reactive or non-physical substitute: a - me -, a person that
can be divided, partitioned, divvied up or even multiplied into distinct
psychological entities.
The pivotal incident is usually a crucial moment in early childhood when a
child is being interrupted in its play..., taken out of play,
'disillusioned' - the original sense of the word.
('dis' =' away from', 'illusion' = 'in'+'ludere' (Latin) 'in or at play').
In such a moment a child is made self-con-scious. Its being and doing do not
overlap anymore, its integrity is being diffracted. A kind of introspective
astigmatism takes place that produces an internal double vision as in "I am
besides myself."
Instead of playing, such a child will now get into games. Games with rules
that may or may not be followed, rules and game pieces that can be
manipulated.
There is more to this of course but to keep this post short and simple, I'll
just 'put' it short and simple: conscious-ness is a symptom of un-ease,
dis-ease, pathology. Instead of getting deeper into the whys and hows,
let me just say that 'consciousness' is symptomatic of a pathology of
individuals who have been fundamentally questioned regarding their
physical past / future existence, masculine / feminine physical
existence and their human / divine integrity.
Harsha was quoting some observations by Ramana Maharshi regarding samadhi,
the various kinds. For the fundamentally undisturbed human or the human who
has reclaimed originality, samadhic distinctions are of no consequence.
There is 'sciousness' not consciousness ('scio' Latin= 'I know').
One just is! No questions asked, no answers looked for, no doubt, no faith,
no hope, no desire, no fear. Just 'sat-chit-tapas-ananda', divine energy
that sustains physical existence, supplies the luminescence of knowledge,
empowers unencumbered and creative will and lights up the fire of bliss and
glory. (The tapas/will part I discovered with Aurobindo Ghose and Juan
Mattis)
> ... the myth that self and free will are
> integral functions of consciousness...
Such a flawed premise can only lead to conclusions that are illusory.
The writers obviously do not live in reality, they do not deal with stuff,
things, tangibles, hardly even with sense perceptions. They deal with the
brain, the mind, consciousness, concepts, thoughts, a data base management
system. An information system is not what it records, tracks or traces. A
picture of a pipe is not a pipe (Magritte).
Illusion (their definition) says nothing about reality.
Love,
Wim
"Indirect knowledge gathered from books or teachers can never emancipate a
person until its truth is investigated, applied, experimented with and
experienced. Only direct, factual and actual realization does that. Realize
your whole self, reintegrate your mind and body." - Tripura Rahasya, 18: 89
-----------------------------------------------
The article from The New Scientist: (of course it lost it's formatting and
spacing)
-----------------------------------------------
Greatest myth of all
18 Nov 00
What do you mean when you talk about "yourself"? Leading neuroscientists
Peter Halligan and David Oakley are rewriting the rules on consciousness.YOU
know what it's like to be you-to be aware of yourself as an individual with
your own thoughts and feelings. You know how it feels to have consciousness.
More than likely you also feel responsible for your thoughts and actions,
that you decide what to think and say and do. But you are mistaken-your
experience of consciousness is an elaborate
self-deception.Neuropsychologists and researchers studying certain types of
brain damage have come to the conclusion that many of our actions and
perceptions are carried out by unconscious parts of our brains (New
Scientist, 5 September 1998, p 30). For example, if you want to reach out
and pick up an object, you don't need to be conscious of the exact size and
shape of it, or what each of your muscles needs to do.But surely it's not
like that for higher level mental activities, such as our thoughts and
feelings? Most people-and many researchers-consider that these originate
within the realms of consciousness. We don't agree.We suggest that all the
thoughts, ideas, feelings, attitudes and beliefs traditionally considered to
be the contents of consciousness are produced by unconscious processes-just
like actions and perceptions. It's only later that we become aware of them
as outputs when they enter our consciousness. As pointed out by Jeffrey Grey
of the Institute of Psychiatry in London-consciousness occurs too late to
affect the outcomes of the mental processes that it is apparently linked
to.You may prefer the notion that you are in charge of your own mind. But
where did that idea come from? If you stop to think about it, you'll
probably find that it just popped into your head-like all your thoughts.
Perhaps you have decided to read the rest of this article. But did "you"
really make that choice? Keep reading, if you can. You may never think of
"yourself" in quite the same way again.The next time you're casually talking
to someone, see if you can guess what your next words will be. If speech is
a product of our conscious minds, it should be easy. But almost certainly
you'll have to wait until you hear your words spoken before you can know
what they are. The same applies to writing, particularly creative writing.
Many authors say they often don't know what the next sentence will reveal,
or where the next turn in the plot will take them.Enid Blyton, the
children's story writer, described to the psychologist Peter McKellar how
she would close her eyes and wait, typewriter at the ready, for her
characters to emerge into her mind's eye and begin their adventures. She
felt she could not have thought up the storylines by herself. So who did?
Her brain created them outside her conscious experience, but she only became
aware of them later as fully formed ideas, conversations, even jokes.In our
view, speaking, writing and all of the brain's information processing
activities occur at an unconscious level, only later giving rise to a
continuous conscious experience of the world and of yourself. In our model,
we refer to these "unconscious" parts of the brain as Level 2. Within this
level, there must be some kind of decision-making device, a central
executive structure. The CES identifies the most important task the brain is
carrying out at any moment, and selects the information that best describes
the current state of the brain in relation to the chosen task. Only this
information would be allowed to enter Level 1, to produce "our" conscious
experience (see Diagram).
Our mental process from thoughts to actions
Imagine that you are sitting in an uncomfortable chair, listening to a
lecture. If the talk is interesting, you'll be aware of the speaker's voice,
the meaning of what's being said, and perhaps also the speaker's
surroundings. These are all products of Level 2 processing that the CES
currently considers important. It has therefore allowed them into Level 1-so
"you" experience them.At the same time, Level 2 is processing information
about the hard chair, the smell of the room, sounds from outside and the
whispered conversation going on behind you. Because they are not important
to the task of listening to the lecture, the CES does not select them for
entry to level 1, and "you" remain unaware of them.However, if the talk
becomes boring, the CES might judge that doing something about your
discomfort is now the priority, and "you" become aware of the hard chair.
More dramatically, even during the most engaging talk, if your name is
whispered, you suddenly become aware of the conversation behind you and lose
the thread of the lecture completely. But "you" didn't consciously decide to
attend to the pressure of the chair or to the conversation. The information
was "outed" by the CES from Level 2 to Level 1 and you become aware of the
product.Outing can be public, in the form of speech or writing, or can
remain private, in the form of feelings and thoughts. But whether public or
not, these outed products have certain distinctive features. They are always
identified as belonging to the "here and now", rather like a process of
automatic date stamping, and they are labelled as belonging to the "self".
Actions, especially when they are labelled as originating from self, are
also tagged as being voluntary. In the process of outing, any thoughts,
ideas, beliefs, perceptions and acts become "yours" and are automatically
linked to the idea of free will.Inevitably, it will be difficult to prove
this account of consciousness and free will, especially as most people
recoil from the idea that their thoughts originate anywhere other than in
their own consciousness. Even if, as we propose, all the contents of Level 1
are second-hand, they can only be viewed by "you" as first-hand experiences.
But if we move away from everyday experiences and think about some of the
effects of hypnosis, it becomes clear just how illusory is the feeling that
we control the contents of our own consciousness.In some people who are
easily hypnotised, it is possible to create the experiences of blindness,
deafness, paralysis or insensitivity to pain. Richard Bryant and Kevin
McConkey, psychologists at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, have
shown that a hypnotically blind person is still able to respond to visual
information, in a way that resembles cases of "blindsight" (New Scientist, 5
September 1998, p 38). For instance, people who had been hypnotised could
respond accurately to indicator lights above a set of switches, even when
they were experiencing hypnotic blindness.Perhaps hypnosis works by allowing
an external influence, such as the suggestion of the hypnotist, to affect
the decision-making process of the CES (Contemporary Hypnosis, vol 16, p
215). In the case of hypnotic blindness, it is as though the hypnotist is
able to persuade the CES to stop selecting visual information as current and
so prevent its entry into Level 1. The hypnotised person claims they cannot
see, but with further appropriate suggestions their sight is restored.
Because they continue to respond to visual signals when hypnotically blind,
Level 2 must still be processing the relevant information. The CES simply
ceases to select it for entry into consciousness. As a result, the person
doesn't experience the visual signals and so will report, quite honestly,
that they cannot "see" anything.The idea that many aspects of consciousness
represent the products of prior levels of "unconscious" processing is not
new. Pioneers such as Hermann von Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt, who founded
the first psychology laboratory in Leipzig in 1879, recognised that most
mental processes were in many ways no different to the physiological
processes of the respiratory, cardiac or digestive systems. All are
efficient automatic processes that happen outside our awareness.
Nevertheless, many people consider that mental events accompanied by
conscious experience somehow involve additional or superior processes that
are not present in the vast range of unconscious operations. We
disagree.According to our model, everything experienced in consciousness has
already been formed in the unconscious, and consequently there is no need to
propose any additional or further processing. The selected products of Level
2 and the contents of Level 1 are one and the same thing-the only difference
is that once these products are selected as current and "outed" they become
part of the conscious experience of the individual. The contents of Level 1
as conscious experience do not go on to do anything more, nor do they
directly influence any other processing. They are simply replaced by the
next set of current contents from Level 2.Even when it comes to thinking,
which just doesn't seem possible without consciousness, all is not as it
seems. In his book Psychology: The science of mental life, George Miller
provides a thought-provoking illustration. He invites the reader to try to
think of their mother's maiden name and report what happens in their mind as
they do so. Most people describe feelings of tension, maybe an irrelevant
image or two, and then suddenly the answer was there in full consciousness.
Consciousness, he says, gives no clue as to where the answer comes from. It
is the result of thinking, not the process of thinking, that appears in
consciousness. As Susan Blackmore from the University of the West of England
in Bristol has pointed out, consciousness does not "do" anything;
consciousness is simply "what it is like to be me now".But consciousness has
its uses. Along with our actions, the publicly outed elements of our
consciousness enable others to form a picture of us. In order to survive in
complex social groups, this picture should be as consistent and apparently
rational as possible. Society also needs us to take responsibility for our
actions. Consequently, one of the most important creations of Level 2 is a
belief in a self to which mental processes can be attributed. Level 2
thinking and feeling becomes "I think" and "I feel" when selected for entry
to Level 1.Level 2 is responsible for creating and maintaining this
consistent self-representation. To do so it has to keep track of what has al
ready been outed in the form of biographical memory. As Nicholas Humphrey, a
psychologist and philosopher at the London School of Economics, has
suggested, having a strong representation of ourselves may provide the basis
for understanding others and for them understanding us. The self we present
to the outside world is thus a useful fiction created by Level 2 and the
experience we have-in Level 1-of control, free will and continuity of
experience is simply a congenial myth.According to Michael Gazzaniga, a
neuroscientist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, part of the
role of consciousness is to serve as a reliable "spokesperson" for the
individual. To achieve this, output at Level 1 needs to be made consistent
with previously outed material. This can lead to Level 2 inventing plausible
explanations if it does not have all the relevant information in
biographical memory. When that invention is selected to enter our
consciousness, our experience will be that it is correct and accurate.More
than 30 years ago, Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson of the University of
Michigan in Ann Arbor demonstrated this process. They suspended two cords
from the ceiling and asked people simply to tie the two ends together. The
only snag was that the cords were too far apart to reach both
simultaneously. When the subjects had exhausted all their ideas, the
experimenter walked past one of the cords and "accidentally" brushed against
it, setting it in motion.Very soon after that most of the subjects solved
the problem, coming up with the idea of tying a weight on one of the cords
and setting it swinging, making it easy to reach the ends of both cords at
the same time. However, when they were asked how they arrived at the
solution most failed to mention the experimenter's hint-they simply said
that the solution just dawned on them. It seems that information about the
significance of the experimenter's behaviour was not selected by the CES for
elevation to Level 1 and so was not available to be outed in speech and
thought.In conjunction with the notion of a self, Level 2 also creates an
illusion of control over our actions-the appearance of free will. We usually
feel that voluntary actions follow a clear intention to act. Benjamin Libet
of the University of California, however, used electrical recordings of the
brain's activity to show that preparations for carrying out an act can be
detected in our brains shortly before the intention to act appears in our
consciousness (New Scientist, 5 September 1998, p 32). The idea that you
form an intention and then act on it is compelling, but wrong.Even if you
look carefully at your own experience of decision making, it is evident that
you don't make up your own mind-if you are honest, and you take the time,
you discover that your mind makes itself up. Take the following familiar
example of deciding to get out of bed in the morning. Guy Claxton, a
psychologist at the University of Bristol, describes his own experience of
this. First, on waking, he becomes aware of thinking "I must get up" or "I'm
going to get up" and then his mind drifts off onto other things and he
continues lying there. Then, when he is in the middle of a completely
unrelated train of thought, he suddenly "comes to" to find that he has
already begun to get out of bed. In other words, when you decide to get up,
you frequently don't. When you have stopped thinking about getting up, at
some point you do.Some of the views expressed here may be unsettling. They
seem to rob us of the most cherished characteristics of the human mind. But
while we are saying that our conscious experiences of self and control are
an elaborate delusion, we are not dispensing with the notions themselves. We
are merely shifting those mental processes traditionally associated with
them away from the domain of consciousness into the unconscious mechanisms
of Level 2. We accept that somewhere in our minds is a representation of a
self, and there are clearly systems of control, maybe even free will. But
none of these reside in our consciousness.Our message is that we should all
learn to accept our Level 2 and extend the concept of "myself" to include it
when claiming to make decisions, organise or plan strategies. Perhaps we all
should recognise that "me" is, at best, a partial and often biased version
of the "larger me" in our unconscious. We should not deceive ourselves by
believing that the "me" each one of us is conscious of has any significant
influence over our actions and experiences. In many respects this "me" only
operates as a monitor or recorder of events which occur elsewhere in the
unconscious parts of our minds.
Perhaps by now you have begun to think of yourself differently, to realise
that "you" are not really in control. Nevertheless, it will be virtually
impossible to let go of the myth that self and free will are integral
functions of consciousness. The myth is something we are strongly adapted to
maintain, and almost impossible to escape from. Maybe that's not so
surprising, because, after all, "we" are part of the illusion.
Further reading: · : Understanding Consciousness, by Max Velmans (Routledge,
2000) · The Volitional Brain: Towards a neuroscience of free will, edited by
Anthony Freeman, Benjamin Libet and Keith Sutherland (Imprint Academic,
1999) · The Mind's Past by Michael S. Gazzaniga (University of California
Press, 2000)
Peter W. Halligan is at the School of Psychology, Cardiff University and
David A. Oakley is at the Hypnosis Unit, Department of Psychology,
University College London
From New Scientist magazine, vol 168 issue 2265, 18/11/2000, page 34
© Copyright New Scientist, RBI Ltd 2000
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