🧠⚖️ How our #brain makes #decisions & free will arises 🔍✨

In this #Zoomposium, #DanielDennett explains how #consciousness, #freewill, and decision-making can be understood from a #naturalisticperspective—and how insights from #cognitivescience and #philosophy help us better understand the #complexity of our #mind.

📽 https://youtu.be/M2qiVz95ZYk

📎 https://philosophies.de/index.php/2023/12/25/naturalistic-view/

#PhilosophyOfMind #ArtificialIntelligence #AGI #Naturalism #Materialism

🧠⚖️ Wie unser #Gehirn #Entscheidungen trifft & freier Wille entsteht 🔍✨

In diesem #Zoomposium erklärt #DanielDennett, wie #Bewusstsein, #freierWille und Entscheidungsfindung aus einer #naturalistischenPerspektive zu verstehen sind – und wie Erkenntnisse aus #Kognitionswissenschaft und #Philosophie uns helfen, die #Komplexität unseres #Geistes besser zu begreifen.

📽 https://youtu.be/M2qiVz95ZYk

📎 https://philosophies.de/index.php/2023/12/25/naturalistic-view/

#PhilosophieDesGeistes #KünstlicheIntelligenz #AGI #Naturalismus #Materialismus

🐸 #Frogseye: Simple #vision, complex behavior explained 🧠

The frog does not need a complete representation of reality, only what is relevant for successful action. #DanielDennett describes such mechanisms as “#userillusions”—functional simplifications that control #behavior.

📽 https://youtu.be/M2qiVz95ZYk

📎https://philosophies.de/index.php/2023/12/25/naturalistic-view/

#PhilosophyOfMind #CognitiveScience #Neuroscience #Consciousness #Perception #Zoomposium

🐸 #Froschauge: Einfaches #Sehen, komplexes Verhalten erklärt 🧠

Der Frosch braucht keine vollständige Repräsentation der Realität, sondern nur das, was für erfolgreiches Handeln relevant ist. #DanielDennett beschreibt solche Mechanismen als „#UserIllusions“ – funktionale Vereinfachungen, die #Verhalten steuern.

📽 https://youtu.be/M2qiVz95ZYk

📎https://philosophies.de/index.php/2023/12/25/naturalistic-view/

#DanielDennett #PhilosophieDesGeistes #Kognitionswissenschaft #Neurowissenschaft #Bewusstsein #Wahrnehmung #Zoomposium

There is something

There is something
that contains everything.
Before heaven and earth
it is.
Oh, it is still,
unbodied,
all on its own,
unchanging,

all-pervading,
ever-moving.
So it can act as the
mother
of all things.
Not knowing its real name,
we only call it the Way.

Laozi, Tao Te Ching, Ch. 25, tr. Ursula le Guin

There is a mystery in stillness that cannot be classified, explained or described. It is outside knowing, not to be contained in words or thoughts. Why would we even mention it, if it were not before and beneath, above all things that are?

As we live in the everyday reality we know, the things we see and hear, touch and smell and taste are images in the mind, icons that helpfully stand for whatever actually is. We tend to think that what they seem to be is what they are, standing for nothing else but how they look, sound, feel, smell or taste. They are useful, indeed benign (Dennett), user illusions; they seem to be what is really there; but they are not. They allow us to interact with each other, and with things, but they are generated as appearances, icons, within our own brains – and like any interface, they can be subject to errors. (An example from close to home: I have severe retinal damage in one eye, and as a consequence, I suffer from visual release hallucinations. These appear like perfectly concrete things – in my case usually animals of one kind or another – within the normal setting of our home. They are not, repeat not, “imaginary”. They appear indistinguishable from the real thing – an actual cat, for instance – except that if I focus on them directly (my good eye works just fine) they disappear without a trace. But they were real while they were there: just as real as my desk, or the rather chunky printer that sits on it.)

Perhaps we were always supposed to be able to see that what we take for reality is only appearance; perhaps we were all supposed to be what we now call contemplatives, or mystics, but we forgot. Perhaps our habitual taking of appearances for true being is a computational brain function that has over many generations got out of hand. Or perhaps we contemplatives are just weird anyway.

If we sit still, without trying to make sense of anything; sit pointlessly, not aiming to achieve anything at all, we can see for ourselves that bright something – no thing – before all things, and know it for our true home, before we or any thing was born. “Oh, it is still, unbodied, all on its own, unchanging,..”

#awareness #consciousness #contemplative #DanielDennett #Laozi #phenomenology #practice #stillness #UrsulaLeGuin

Am I conscious now?

Susan Blackmore (Zen and the Art of Consciousness) asks the question, as a kind of koan, “Am I conscious now?”

It’s a good question. Am I? Have I been?

We must all be familiar with the sensation of listening to a favourite piece of music, and suddenly realising we’ve missed the best bit – the key change we love, the beginning of the bridge, whatever it is. We’ve been listening out for it, anticipating it, but when it comes our mind has wandered off into some fantasy, some memory, or a bird passing the window has caught our attention, and it is gone. Where? Were we aware of it?

Or we are meditating, paying attention to what is happening now, and we become aware (Blackmore uses this example herself, but I have had the identical experience many times) of a sound in the street outside. How long has it been going on? When we notice it, it has not just begun. And yet when we notice it, we are aware that we were aware of it already. It’s been going on for several seconds, quite distinctly, but we didn’t exactly notice. Now we do, and we remember, if that’s the right word, that it was happening already. Were we conscious then?

Here we are. For a moment, our whole attention is on now. Oh, the delicious freshness of it! We’re not remembering: we’re hearing it, feeling it, now! All that is, is now. There is nothing else. What else could there be?

Blackmore mentions Daniel Dennett’s objection to Cartesian dualism (which roughly states that there’s an I, sitting in here looking at a that, which is out there somewhere). But where is this I? There’s nowhere in the physical brain that could correspond to an I, no locus of consciousness, nor is there anywhere an incorporeal self (soul) could plug into the soggy assemblage of neurons between our ears. Dennett suggests rather that consciousness consists of “multiple drafts”. Blackmore writes (ibid.) “Dennett describes the self as a ‘benign user illusion’, and replaces the theatre with his theory of ‘multiple drafts’. According to this theory, the brain processes events in multiple ways, all in parallel and in different versions. None of the drafts is ‘in consciousness’ or ‘outside consciousness’; they appear so only when the system is probed in some way, such as by provoking a response or asking a question. Only then is one of the many drafts taken as what the person must have been conscious of. This is why he claims that ‘There are no fixed facts about the stream of consciousness independent of particular probes.’”

This makes more sense. Perhaps the light of attention picks out one or another draft, falls on one or another as the object of attention. But whose attention? Another draft’s attention? It’s all very puzzling.

But that moment. Now! That moment. There there is no sense of a shifting light of attention. There is only now. It has all come together in an instant, literally. This instant, now!

Perhaps we cannot know. Perhaps there is something here not susceptible of analysis. The bright instant is itself, represents no thing. It seems to rest in the ground of being directly, an isness that is only itself. Perhaps it is only light.

#awareness #contemplative #DanielDennett #illumination #isness #practice #SusanBlackmore #unknowing

Atheism and metaphysics

Metaphysics can seem to be a rather slippery term. On the one hand it can be taken to be “the study of the most general features of reality, including existence, objects and their properties, possibility and necessity, space and time, change, causation, and the relation between matter and mind” (Wikipedia) but on the other, being the study of, in one sense, how things come to be, it is too easily conflated with religious creation myths, or with cosmologies intricately involved with religious doctrines of causality and phenomenology.

But “according to modern scientific knowledge, mental events and processes presuppose the existence and reality of material things. Thinking, for example, implies the existence of a bird or a mammal with a brain. Or a momentary event, such as the proverbial cat sitting on the mat, presupposes the real existence of the cat, the mat, the earth under the mat, as well as a real human observer of the event.” (Morris)

But for me, that which is intended by using the term “ground of being” (Tillich) is precisely that which can be known directly as “no-thing” in contemplation. I am not talking here of an idea, a common factor in a Huxley-like perennial philosophy, but of a repeated and very direct experience of what Quakers have referred to as “the light”, as described for instance by Emilia Fogelklou (she writes in the third person): “Without visions or the sound of speech or human mediation, in exceptionally wide-awake consciousness, she experienced the great releasing inward wonder. It was as if the ’empty shell’ burst. All the weight and agony, all the feeling of unreality dropped away. She perceived living goodness, joy, light like a clear, irradiating, uplifting, enfolding, unequivocal reality from deep inside.”

This kind of experience can of course not be described terribly clearly, nor can it be communicated directly, and any attempt is likely to fall into superlatives such as Fogelklou’s. But the experience is as real and direct as any sensory experience, perhaps more so, and it has a curious undeniable quality, a great lifting and healing of the heart. I use Tillich’s term for it not because I have any particular attraction for that as an idea, but because it seems to get closer than anything else I have read to the encounter itself. There is a visual analogue that sometimes occurs in meditation – and which can lead to the experience I am trying to describe – of the visual field itself, seen through closed eyes, extending suddenly through and beneath what ought to have been the observing mind, but which is no longer there.

Now, I have long enough experience in contemplative practice to know that experiences are not things to hang onto, still less to seek after, and I would not be happy if any words of mine sent anyone on a quest for experiential chimeras. Yet the experience itself, with all its indelible affect, has occurred so often over the years, since childhood, that I find myself referring to it over and over again, and it remains for me a kind of lodestone.

Are these metaphysical experiences, insights? Are they therefore somehow at variance with the fundamental insight of atheism that the idea of another, supernatural, layer to existence, within which the human self can somehow transcend, or survive, the electrochemical apparatus of the central nervous system, is illusory? I don’t think so. Daniel Dennett’s insight into human phenomenology as a “benign user illusion” coincides well with the Buddhist conception of things as empty of intrinsic existence (śūnyatā) – all of which seems to me to be a formal expression of what I have come to experience as “no-thing.” Andreas Müller:

All there is is oneness. The unknown. No-thing appearing as it appears. It is already whole. It is already complete. That which seems to be missing – wholeness – is not lost…

What remains is indescribable. It is indescribable simply because there is no one left who can describe it. There is no one left who experiences oneness (which, by the way, would then not be oneness anymore) and could possibly know how that is. Yes, there is no one left who knows how it is. That is freedom.

#AndreasMüller #atheism #awakening #BrianMorris #consciousness #contemplative #DanielDennett #EmiliaFogelklou #PaulTillich #philosophy #practice #religion #Wikipedia

A window on what is

I find the study of phenomenology in my amateur way endlessly fascinating; it is all too easy to follow it down philosophical rabbit-holes, as I have done in several posts recently. But the contemplative life, related though it is to the practice of philosophy (as seen so clearly in some Buddhist schools like Yogācāra) deals in itself not with discursive thought but with direct experience; which is one of the reasons I have for so long been drawn to the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition of hesychasm, or to the Pure Land Buddhist practice of the Nembutsu – not primarily because of the nature of these practices themselves (repetitive prayer) but because of their extreme simplicity.

Now, phenomenal experience is sometimes characterised as a tunnel (Metzinger), a “benign user illusion” (Dennett, glossed so brilliantly by Susan Blackmore) or a mindstream (Yogācāra). The idea generally seems to be that what we experience from moment to moment is a transparent, essentially functional but ultimately illusory interface that the mind provides between reality and our (equally illusory) experience of a permanent self. Reality itself is far richer and stranger, and the self is “but one of the countless manifestations of the Tao” (Ho (PDF)). To say these things can of course provoke in the reader a myriad of misunderstandings, and to realise them oneself can cause a temporary existential disruption that is horribly like a classical bad trip. Misleading though many of its Perennialist assumptions may be, one of the best accounts of what is at stake must be Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. Donald Hoffman finds the same position in Erwin Schrödinger:

[Schrödinger’s] position boils down to this: what we call the physical world is the result of a process that Schrödinger called “objectivation”, i.e. the transformation of the one self-world (Atman=Brahman) into something that can be readily conceptualized and studied objectively, hence something that is fully void of subjective qualities. In the theory of conscious agents this amounts to the creation of “interfaces”. Such interfaces simplify what is going on in order to allow you to act efficiently. Good interfaces hide complexity. They do not let you see reality as it is but only as it is useful to you. What you call the “physical world” is merely a highly-simplified representation of non-dual consciousness.

Donald Hoffman, Schrödinger and the Conscious Universe (IAI News)

Last year I attempted, as I periodically do, to explain to myself how this paradoxical relationship between overthinking and contemplative practice could possibly work. I concluded:

I have written elsewhere of the profound stillness I experienced recovering from childhood meningitis; in many ways, my contemplative practice over the last 40-odd years has been an attempt, scattered as it has at times been, to recover that stillness.

These things are nothing new. The Taoist tradition beginning between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE, and the Chan Buddhist writings in the early centuries of the present era, are full of wanderings “cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown” (Chia Tao). And the central tradition of (at least Zen) Buddhist meditation consists of “just sitting” (shikantaza).

The falling away of purposeful action, in itself the very simplest thing, seems one of the hardest to achieve – perhaps because it isn’t an achievement at all. An achievement would be the result of purposeful action. This appears to me to be the snag with so many programmes of practice involving concentration, visualisation, ritual and so on.

The paradox inherent in practice, any practice, only begins to thin out in sheer pointlessness, either the pointlessness of a repeated phrase such as the Jesus Prayer, or the Nembutsu, or of merely sitting still. The power of shikantaza is simply powerlessness, giving up, complete acceptance of what is without looking for anything. When you cease to try to open the doors, they open by themselves, quite quietly. Not looking, the path opens.

#AldousHuxley #contemplative #DanielDennett #DonaldHoffman #ErwinSchrödinger #hesychasm #nembutsu #practice #SusanBlackmore #Tao #ThomasMetzinger #unknowing #Wikipedia

Interrupting the skeuomorphs

Anyone who was involved with personal computers around 25 years ago will be all too familiar with skeuomorphs, those little pictures of familiar material things that were so often used as interface elements – ring-binder pages for calendar applications, or the little gleaming jewel-like forward and back buttons in a web browser like Netscape Navigator 9 or Internet Explorer 7. They’re still in use today – the virtual keyboard of your smart phone is a skeuomorph – there isn’t a keyboard there at all: it just looks, and works, like one.

It seems to me that our day-to-day experiences are not unlike existential skeuomorphs – they allow us to remember, to interrogate and interact with events, but they are no more than pictures of what actually happened. Of course, we couldn’t operate, couldn’t even usefully perceive anything, without them. Part of the phenomenological action of psychedelics is surely just that: the disabling of this delicate interface through which we encounter the world. No wonder a person on a bad trip feels they are going mad; temporarily (we hope) they are. The world may be an inconceivable web of fields and probabilities, but we perceive real tables and chairs, cats and boxes; they may be illusions, but they are benign (Dennett) and necessary illusions, as real as we are ourselves.

Only in the stillness of meditation – or a sudden unbidden illumination – can we, if only for a moment, allow a fully open awareness to catch a glimpse of what actually is.

All there is is oneness. The unknown. No-thing appearing as it appears. It is already whole. It is already complete. That which seems to be missing – wholeness – is not lost…

What remains is indescribable. It is indescribable simply because there is no one left who can describe it. There is no one left who experiences oneness (which, by the way, would then not be oneness anymore) and could possibly know how that is. Yes, there is no one left who knows how it is. That is freedom.

Andreas Müller, No-thing – ungraspable freedom

(I wrote at greater – if more subjective – length about this last year. It seemed to me today, though, that it was worth mentioning again in the context of these perceptions. I am not a neuroscientist, nor even a philosopher of mind; I am only someone who has occasionally encountered something that seems almost as if it might be the tangible fruit of such disciplines in direct experience.)

#AndreasMüller #awareness #consciousness #DanielDennett #philosophy #stillness

Trees

Sometimes I feel that Western philosophy, especially since the Enlightenment, has too often come to resemble the conifer plantations common to commercial forestry: useful, yes, and in their way productive, but almost barren, sterile. On the other hand, the philosophies surrounding Taoism – including Chan Buddhism and its Japanese descendant Zen – seem more like old growth forests, rich in natural diversity, fluid, resilient, fertile.

Of course it would be easy to romanticise such a distinction, as often seemed to happen during the early days of Zen’s growth in the West, and its influence on the Beat movement – Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums being the obvious example. But the partitioning of Western academic philosophy into e.g. metaphysics, philosophy of mind, phenomenology and so on contrasts powerfully with more organic, experiential approaches.

I am no philosopher, needless to say, so in a sense I shouldn’t say such things; but I am someone most of whose intentional (c.f. Daniel Dennett’s idea of the intentional stance!) life has been given to a sort or sorts of contemplative practice, and so in a sense to the attempt at living out of some kind of philosophy or another. Over the years it has become clearer to me that “the Tao as an ontological ground… the One, which is natural, spontaneous, eternal, nameless, and indescribable… at once the beginning of all things and the way in which all things pursue their course” (Wikipedia) is just the simplest, least superstitious way to understand what is to be found in just sitting, apophatic meditation, or what you will. (The Sōtō Zen expression shikantaza, untranslatable as it is, is probably the closest I can get!)

So, sitting still, we can see that the self is not a thing but a pattern, not an object but a movement among the leaves, not other than the way things come and go. Just as sitting still is an entirely pointless thing to do, so too the Tao has no purpose. You couldn’t use it for anything, and yet it is before all that is, and holds the source of the farthest stars. Empty, all it is is inexhaustible.

#contemplative #DanielDennett #JackKerouac #philosophy #practice #shikantaza #Tao