Otis

Thanks for your reply, Maddie! Yeah, I think there's a real analogy to some Buddhist concepts. The concept of Maya is that the world (as we perceive it) is an illusion. And that's also the truth in our theory. Our brains creates models of the world, to help us remember what happened, but also to allow us to predict what might happen next. Of course, our models are biased by our experience, and so we perceive the world according to our own mental habits. The illusion of the world is clearly based upon a true story, but we put our stank on it. As for the self, that's even more illusory, because we are even more motivated to believe certain things about ourselves. It's very easy to mis-perceive our own behaviors, or even our motivations. What's even stranger, is that our brain doesn't always know itself. The brain is composed of semi-autonomous systems that push and pull upon each other to arrive at mutually acceptable conclusions. And yet, a lot of that information from these systems don't make it to memory, and so don't get included in perception. And here's the real kicker. There is an interpreter in the brain, called the Core Network, which observes memories, and tries to story-tell, based upon them. This is probably the origin of language thought; we started using thoughts as narrative mnemonic devices to attach to memories. We think (for example) "I am the victim; he is doing this to me", so that when we remember the event, that thought also is retrieved, and gives the appropriate stank to the recalled memory. So thoughts probably began as something like tags, that were attached to the memory, in order to give it more context. So the state of the whole brain gives rise to the new memory, but the Core Network only sees the memory, not the whole state of the brain. Therefore, the interpreter makes a lot of assumptions about the brain's function that actually ignore important internal features. This disconnect leads to many of the wild pathologies of subjective experience, like delusions, schizophrenia, anosognosia, etc.

Thanks Steve! Good to see you as well!

Dear fellow Bums, I used to post here regularly, then shifted focus to a Consciousness documentary (still a work in progress) and a peer-reviewed published theory paper. I have just finished a podcast and video called "Anatomy of Subjective Experience" about that theory, and I wanted to share them here. Spoilers, sorry, but the gist of the argument is that neurotypical subjective experience is actually the brain's first experiencing of a brand new episodic memory. If our intuitions about subjective experience were correct, by contrast, we would expect to see the following in our brains: a place where all the data streams from all the senses + mind come together to form Experience, and then we should see a single pipe leading from this Experience Generator to the hippocampus, so that complete experiences can become episodic memories, and thereby be remembered later. But, in truth, when we look at the brain, the hippocampal complex IS that place where all the senses + mind come together. The brain builds a memory in the hippocampus, and then immediately plays it back to itself, for reality check, among other things. That first playing of the new memory is what we call 'subjective experience'. In fact, we also only exist within our own memories. The perceived-self is a construct of memory, created by the brain as a mnemonic, to help give memories context. What was I doing in the past event? What decisions did I make? When did I become aware of that threat? And memories, of course, exist to help the future brain learn from its past mistakes and successes. The true self is the body. The brain is a subset of that, and the "me" is just a representation, invented by my brain. The perceived mind is also a construct, within memory, created primarily by the Core Network (also called the Default Mode Network), using the hippocampus' experience generation powers to run mental simulations, like Theory of Mind or daydreaming. The reason why we think in words is because the hippocampus evolved to be able to represent and remember complex audio, including speech. So the Core Network uses the hippocampus' qualia-generation powers to create visual images and word thought. If you happen to know about H.M., a famous patient who had both of his hippocampi fully removed, you may be thinking: but he is 'fully conscious'. And that may be so, but in this case by 'conscious' we mean that he is awake, and responsive, can talk and behave. Those are separate functions from subjective experience, and they happen elsewhere in the brain. The tradition of the word 'consciousness' has combined all these functions into one concept, but they're not actually much related in the brain. I deal with H.M. and similar patients in the podcast and video. There's lots more to be said about the model, but that's what the podcast and video are for. I'll leave a link here to the video, but the podcast can be found on all the major distribution apps. It's called "Anatomy of Subjective Experience", and it's presented a lot like an NPR Radiolab episode. I hope you enjoy it, and I look forward to hearing your responses. https://youtu.be/psyvlO3Ssfc

I think there may be something very beneficial about the instinct toward tearing it all up. It all depends upon where you are in your life. If you were very dissatisfied right now, then tearing it all up might be the best possible thing. Personally, as someone who has a most important goal in my life (my documentary) the desire for which I feel to my core, I can say that finding what feels like 'my purpose' is both sweet and frustrating. It's great to have a sense of direction, but painful to always be in the pursuit of that goal, rather than having simpler tastes, and just enjoying what's sweet about life right now. That said, I would not give up that goal, just to get rid of the frustration. The goal is in my bones now, and won't let me rest.

Hi silent thunder, I'm a visiting old-timer Bum. I don't know if this relates to what you were asking about, but I think about this quite a bit. In Buddhism, people often talk about 'attachment', and well they should. But 'attachment' is only the yang neurosis. The yin neurosis is 'detachment', meaning being disconnected from their lives. Detachment, as far as I can tell, is every bit as problematic as attachment. Panic, anxiety, pain - these are all obvious feelings that call our attention to them, and thank goodness, so we can deal with them. But even more problematic are the feelings we don't feel. This includes problems of numbness, self-blindness, motivated forgetting, unconscious ignoring. These are even tougher to deal with, because our system shuts them out. It's hard to ignore my own pain, because it yells at me, but it's easy to ignore what I'm self-blind to. Detachment is what allows people to ignore others' pain. How could so much of American society be sanguine to the separation of immigrant children from their parents? Only by becoming detached from the humanity and suffering of others.

Hi Yonkon, I'm just a visiting Bum, but sounds like a nice experience. I belong to the local Y, pretty much purely for the sauna and steam room. I find both to be excellent for warming up my muscles, so that my body gets extremely relaxed, and it's easy to stretch. Throw in a little cannabis, and the result is multiplied. I haven't tried microdosing, and I'm not really a meditator, beyond stretching. But I've found that combination to be very useful for unwinding my body. Even if it doesn't become your practice, I don't see why it can't complement it.

Thanks, s1va!

Hey therner, good to hear from you. And yes, I still swear by all that. It's been a powerful restorative to my body's function!

Yes, that's me.

The model in the paper and the above video occurred to me during a conversation with my dad, when he told me about new research. In 2007, researchers who worked with patients with completely damaged (or surgically removed) hippocampi showed that the hippocampus acts as the "mind's eye". If there is no hippocampus, the brain cannot previsualize or have other vivid internal sensory experiences. This suggested that the hippocampus was an experience generator. We already knew that it created episodic memory, but knowing that it also helped the brain create pure simulations indicated that it was like Star Trek's holodeck: an empty reality simulator that can mimic any kind of environment. The hippocampus also seems to be the place where dreams come together. During REM sleep, the neocortex practices new skills and facts that it learned that day. The hippocampus stays active during that time, to provide sequence and timing information to the neocortex. All the near-random activity from the neocortex gets reported to the hippocampus, as in waking, but since it's meaningless, the hippocampus does its best to confabulate an imaginary (but real seeming) experience out of it. (So yes, to whoever said that we are dreaming 24/7, you are correct. It's just that our waking dreams are more constrained by continual neocortical input and prefrontal reality testing). Even more important, this insight helped finish the picture. The neocortical sensory nodes provide information that gives rise to the memory of the world, and motor + somatosensory nodes provide the experience of body, but finally this simulation experiment showed how the remaining element of 'mind' enters the picture. Mind, in the model, is part of the overall movie of memory. It reflects how one of the brain's major networks, the Default Mode Network (DMN) interacts with the hippocampus. It is only in the DMN-hippocampus loop that the mental imagery simulations are possible. And I hypothesize that language thought occurs the same way. If you think about it, language thought is a strange occurrence. Our brains' language is synaptic firing and brain waves, so why do we hear ourselves think in language? In our model, it's because the hippocampus evolved to represent the outside world, including accurate reproduction of sound, including speech. So the DMN uses the hippocampus' ability to buffer speech, and introduces inner speech into the simulator. This inner speech, which we call thought, is largely a mnemonic, to give memories a narrative and proper context. Language allows human memories to be much more efficient than non-language animals, because we can sum up an event with a simple story (this is also part of where we go wrong). But language thought is also a form of simulation, not unlike image thought. It can be used to predict a conversation with someone else, or it can be used to buffer information within the hippocampus, for the sake of inner deliberation. It's just a tool, to help the DMN try to predict and plan for the future.

Hi wandelaar, I'm a big fan of Dennett's, and his book was one of the first I read, in preparing for the doc. I've also interviewed him, in 2014. I think his immense contribution was in his attempt to demystify consciousness, to get the woo out of it. Very important. But I do think there's a bit of hand-waving in Consciousness Explained, that I saw only in the second reading. In particular, he claims that we do not really have subjective experience; it just seems that way. But I think that's a flawed argument: if it only appears like we have experience, then it is the 'appearance' that we still need to explain. In my model, there are illusions, for example that 'consciousness' is a 'command and control process or entity'. But experience itself is considered very real, and useful. Particularly for non-language animals, experience is the language of memory; it is how an organism recalls events. My model also attempts to specifically deal with one of Dennett's major arguments, about multiple drafts. In our model, multiple drafts is reflective of how memory is formed. Field CA3 of the hippocampus is a predictive engine, and uses old memories to guess what the next moment of memory will look like. So it broadcasts a 'best guess' to the neocortex - is this what the next moment will look like? The neocortex reports back with mismatches (in the case of the multiple drafts example, the red light pool was predicted to remain, but now it has disappeared, to be replaced by a nearby green light pool). That mismatch gets flagged for the hippocampus. Field CA1 of the hippocampus then takes the 'final edition' news reports from the neocortex, and edits the prediction. And there is even a buffer (field CA2) in which a memory can be stored for a fraction of a second, while conflicts are worked out. This is why the window of 'now' appears to be a slightly fluid timespan of ~300ms-1sec, because that is the range of possible hippocampal times for presenting the new memory, depending upon upstream mismatches. I hope this makes sense...

I think this is right, Steve. We've never been separate from our environments; it just feels that way from within. It's funny: TTB and Taoism helped launch my interest in consciousness, and the model in the published paper is very similar to what I proposed here. And yet, what I consider to be the most profound implications of the theory, the kind of thing that you wrote above, I had to leave completely out of my paper. The reviewers want papers to be as dry and academic as possible, so I had to leave the really juicy stuff out.

Good to hear from you, too, Steve! I'm glad to hear your practice is strong, and that you are continually deepening and improving your relationships. I hope your surgery practice is also still going well! The chronic pain meditation project sounds like a natural marriage of your medical background and extracurricular activities; best of luck with that. I've gotten deeper into anatomy, over the last few years, than I ever imagined; fascinating stuff! I find the science of consciousness much more interesting than the philosophy of it. If you're open to hearing more about my projects, the theory is the place to start. In essence, the theory is this: this experience that I'm having right now, of being a body and a mind in the world, that experience is actually a brand new episodic memory. (Episodic memory, for those who don't know, is the memory of an autobiographical event, the recall of having been in a situation, as opposed to the memory of facts or the memory of how to do a skill). The hippocampus, which is the episodic memory engine, is at the pinnacle of all the sensory systems in the brain. They come together only at the hippocampus to form a big picture view of what all the brain nodes were up to, just a moment ago. We think of episodic memory as something we only look back on later, but I argue that it is first available, right now, in the form of 'neurotypical subjective experience' (NSE is a much better scientific term than 'consciousness' because the C-word means too many things to too many people). So the reason why the world is illusion is precisely because the hippocampus is constructing our internal simulation of the world, moment by moment, with lots of assumptions built in. And the reason why the 'self' is illusion is because the 'perceived self' (my feeling and experience of being a mind and body) is also part of the simulation. The episodic memory needs a self in the middle of it, to give context to the memory (e.g. who did what, how did I feel about it), and we mis-perceive that memory self as our actual selves. But the real self is the entire organism, the whole brain and body, and the perceived self is just part of a movie that plays in the brain. The perceived self, of course, is probably the most 'confabulated' (i.e. made up) part of perception, because the temptation to cheat is so high. There's a lot more to it, in the paper, but I also made a 5 minute explainer video about the theory, which lays out the rough picture:

Thanks, Marblehead! I've just revisited a bunch of old conversations from back in the day, and I very much enjoyed our back-and-forth. You were one of the few other Bums to really make skepticism a core element of your discovery. A couple years ago, one of my brothers asked if I still considered myself a Taoist, and I responded that I mostly think of myself as an atheist now. I can't really claim any capital-letter -ist groups, I think; too much belief and too much baggage. But I'm still a big fan of Lao Tze and Mo Tze and all the other great Tze's. And of the Bums! I hope you're doing well! Here's the promo I created for the Consciousness Doc:

I'm a big Einstein fan, but I have my own private theory. I think that General Relativity could potentially be extended from the solar system level, where it works extremely well, to the intergalactic level, in which it completely fails (without invoking Dark Matter and Dark Energy as kluges). I think my theory can cover both scales, without the need for the kluges.