The Serpent's Wisdom

In previous posts i have written about the idea that mind is a field, by which i mean "a non-material region of influence." That influence, as in any field, takes the form of force imposed on particles within that field.

Let's back up a step. Either there is something special moving waves and particles in our brains in correlation to thought and action, or there is nothing doing so. The latter idea is a corollary of reductive determinism. The problem with this is that it cannot account for the perception of what it is like to be you.

Daniel Dennett gave it a really good shot in his book Consciousness Explained, which "explains" consciousness as a constantly-revised sensory first-person narrative. His account is fascinating, but my feeling was that it ultimately falls short of its lofty goal.

Dennett's objection to the idea of the "cartesian theater" rests primarily in the failure of brain science to locate a single place in the brain through which all perceptions and thoughts are filtered. He admits that the idea of first-person perception is strongly compelling, but insists it is a memeplex, a complex and powerful fiction produced by the brain. He can't really answer why the brain would do this. Susan Blackmore, in The Meme Machine, attempts to address this problem in Dennett's formulation, suggesting that the "I" evolved as a mechanism to create a more meme-friendly environment within the brain.

If the "I" is an illusion, than so is the will, that is, the ability to carry out that which the "I" decides to do. Will is a separate problem from consciousness; and to say that consciousness is a memetic fiction doesn't address the question of why we have this compelling experience of being able to decide, "I want a cup of coffee," and then watching as your body goes through whatever movements are needed to bring about that cup of coffee. The best the reductionists can suggest is that we go back and revise our first-person narrative of half a second ago to convince ourselves that we thought, "I want a cup of coffee," only after our body is already going through the motions of getting that cup of coffee.

If we are robots parroting memetic programs, why would the ideas of consciousness and will have arisen at all -- they are not necessary -- and why do they feel so convincing? The answers given above are within the realm of possibility, but they also seem inelegant, convoluted, and ultimately unsatisfying explanations for what many of us experience as a fascinating and beautiful part of being alive.

Suppose that no "cartesian theater" exists within the brain because it is not needed -- that is, because the primary work of thought is not carried out by brain tissue. At first glance this might sound like suggesting that thought is supernatural... which it may be. But it is not necessary to leap from the lack of certain brain structures to the supernatural, when there are other natural ideas that haven't been explored yet -- such as my suggestion that mind is a field.

If mind is a field, then it is intensified by some kind of activity in the brain. Other fields (electric, magnetic, gravitational) are intensified by very simple properties of matter, so either mind is too and all things possess some measure of consciousness, or mind is intensified by something peculiar and complex -- perhaps complexity itself, or perhaps activity at the quantum level.

If mind is a field exerting influence on matter within the brain, then we would also have some explanation for scientific results suggesting that meditation and mindful focus can bring about deliberate or desired changes in brain structure.

But while the noönic field may be intensified by the brain, it is not necessarily confined to the brain -- which sounds "cranky," but would explain a lot. Carl Jung proposed the presence of a "collective unconscious" to explain certain persisting patterns in human thought and experience; and Teilhard de Chardin proposed the existence of a "noosphere" guiding human evolution.

This also ties into speculations i've made in the past about the techniques of esoterica as a way of honing the conscious mind and will in order to make a person more of an individual, more likely to move beyond an existence of memetic parroting. More on this and the idea of collective mind (and other implications) as i think them through...