A Mind Seeks Itself, Part 4: The War Against Self.

In 1641, Rene' Descartes declared that he had found the essence of himself. His "self" was found in his ability to think, to challenge, to conclude. He was his mind. His mind was himself. Subsequent generations immediately challenged that, and the challenging has gone unabated. Now the challengers are emboldened. As Massimo says, there aren't many dualists around these days. At least not in philosophical circles, where science is king, scientism reigns, and the science is settled - rather the philosophy that science is "the answer", is settled. Because science is constrained to material entities, so limited due to measurement and replication restrictions, so is contemporary philosophy by extension... whether a legitimate extension or not. The extended contemporary philosophers tend overwhelmingly to be Philosophical Materialists, having confused that with the voluntary functional materialism of science.

Philosophical Materialism, the underlying philosophical premise in support of Atheism, requires that everything that exists be physical. The final frontier for the Materialist is the human mind, which presents a knotty logical conundrum of Gordian dimension. The problem comes from the inability of the observer to know, reliably, the contents and internal motions and commotions of any mind other than his own. Historically, this meant that there were two ways to analyze the issue of mind: introspection of one’s own mind; and observation of the behaviors of others, extrapolating that behavior into presumed mental activity. A third, non-analytical approach has been to conjecture, based on other conjectures which might or might not regress to observations, or maybe just regress to opinions of how it should work (a lot of philosophy is just this).

Introspection is commonly attacked by reducing it to a philosophical null proposition by asserting that one’s own mental status could be one of delusion. A deluded person doesn't recognize his own delusion: therefore the introspection process is suspect.

Observation of other's behaviors reduces by knowing that others might be deluded, plus the insight that behavior is not necessarily driven by any rational process, it could be emotional or autonomic, or even Newtonian in certain cases. Plus the inference process could introduce even more errors into the hypotheses. So the ability to determine the actual functioning of a rational mind is heavily beset with possibilities for error, at least in the "reductionist" view.

Furthermore, most contemporary theory of operation of the human mind is necessarily limited to the physical, material mass-energy constraints of the Material Monist universe. So under these constraints the mind must be one of the following: a mass; an energy discharge; both mass and energy discharge; none of the above: nothing at all.

It is hard to reconcile sentience or even consciousness with mere mass and energy discharges. The problems of causality and chains of causality are daunting for materialists. Mass and energy do not anticipate sentience, consciousness, agency, or will. There is no empirical causal connection. And hypothetical causal connections (e.g. evolution) are just as difficult. And the idea of intentionality and agency brings up the vision of "uncaused causers", billions of us roaming the planet. Not a pleasant thought for the Philosophical Materialist.

So the Materialist choreographers of Mind Theory typically choose “none of the above”, and claim that many of the things we think we know about ourselves are delusions: they really don’t exist. Among these are the concept of “self”; the feeling of “consciousness”; the idea of self-agency (free will); and sentience. Because these things are illusions or delusions, there is no need to address them as one would address reality: empirically, replicably, falsifiably. The burden on the Philosophical Materialist is... well, reduced. Or no, it is eliminated, reductively.

The concept of “self” is attacked by Thomas Metzinger, in a book called “Being No One: the Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity”, and in an article called “Precis: Being No One”. The following somewhat difficult paragraphs from Metzinger’s “Precis” describe a journey toward the idea that consciousness, and thus self, is an internal construct, not a truly existing entity.

“The strategy of approaching the globality-constraint by researching globally coherent states (as initially proposed in Metzinger 1995b) leads to a new way of defining research targets in computational neuroscience (e.g., von der Malsburg 1997). However, it must be noted that what is actually needed is a theoretical model that allows us to find global neural properties exhibiting a high degree of integration and differentiation at the same time. The neural correlate of the global, conscious model of the world must be a distributed process which can be described as the realization of a functional cluster, combining a high internal correlation strength between its elements with the existence of distinct functional borders. This cluster directly corresponds to the distinct causal role mentioned above. Edelman and Tononi have called this the "dynamic core hypothesis" (see Tononi and Edelman 1998a,b; Edelman and Tononi 2000a, Tononi 2003; for a comprehensive popular account see Edelman and Tononi 2000b).

The hypothesis states that any group of neurons can contribute directly to conscious experience only if it is part of a distributed functional cluster that, through reentrant interactions in the thalamocortical system, achieves high integration in hundreds of milliseconds. At the same time it is essential that this functional cluster possesses high values of complexity. Converging evidence seems to point towards a picture in which large-scale integration is mediated by the transient formation of dynamical links through neural synchrony over multiple frequency bands (Varela, Lachaux, Rodriguez, and Martinerie 2001, Singer 2004)”.

In other words, consciousness requires coherent complexity in the brain’s neural cluster structure accomplished through crosslinking or possibly feedback; the complexity is transiently produced or at least instantaneously experienced; the complexity changes dynamically and instantly; and it requires that neural connective activity be coordinated despite the lack of a known clocking mechanism or a meta-supervisor

.“This way of looking at the globality-constraint on the neural level is philosophically interesting for a number of reasons. First, it makes the prediction that any system operating under a conscious model of reality will be characterized by the existence of one single area of maximal causal density within its information-processing mechanisms. To have an integrated, globally coherent model of the world means to create a global functional cluster, i.e., an island of maximal causal density within one’s own representational system. Philosophical functionalists will like this approach, because it offers a specific and global functional property (a "vehicle property") that might correspond to the global phenomenal property of the unity of consciousness. In short, what you subjectively experience upon experiencing your world as coherent is the high internal correlation strength between a subset of physical events in your own brain.”
[emphasis added]

Well, in short, that almost goes without saying, does it not?

”Second, it is interesting to note how the large group of neurons constituting the dynamical core in the brain of an organism currently enjoying an integrated conscious model of reality will very likely be different at every single instant. The physical composition of the core state will change from millisecond to millisecond. At any given point in time there will be one global, minimally sufficient neural correlate of consciousness, but at the next instant this correlate will already have changed, because the consciousness cluster only constitutes a functional border which can easily transgress anatomical boundaries from moment to moment.

“Third, it has to be noted that the informational content of the dynamical core is determined to a much higher degree by internal information already active in the system than by external stimuli. Just as in the Llinás-model, an overall picture emerges of the conscious model of reality essentially being an internal construct, which is only perturbed by external events forcing it to settle into ever-new stable states. In short, there may be many functional bundles - individual and episodically indivisible, integrated neural processes - within a system, and typically there will be one single, largest island of maximal causal density underlying the current conscious model of the world”.

Consciousness is caused by neural discharge perturbations… but of what? What changes the neural electrochemical discharges into experiences? And what causes the discharges to function in a coherent, meaningful fashion in the first place? What is the causal chain involved here? Even for the Materialist, it is a legitimate question, regarding material existences: why should electrochemical discharges result in my knowledge of the sum of 14 plus 912?

Temporal delusion:

”A complete physical description of the universe would not contain any information about what time is "now", nor an analysis of time as a unidirectional phenomenon. On the contrary, the conscious experience of time inevitably possesses an indexical component in the temporal domain. This type of mental content is simulational: It is not an epistemically justified form of content in that, strictly speaking, it does not involve knowledge about the current state of the actual world. Although we subjectively experience ourselves as in direct and immediate contact with the "Now", all empirical data tell us that, strictly speaking, all conscious experience is a form of memory. Information represented by phenomenal models of reality is always being presented to the subject of experience as actual information. It is this form of temporal internality which is a simulational fiction from the third-person perspective. “

So for empirical purposes, then, there is no “Now”, either.

The Essence of “transparency” is the inability to see your own brain states, or at least look right through them. This leads inevitably to errors:

”The phenomenal content of your currently active paper representation [presumes reading this on a paper medium] is what stays equal, no matter if the paper exists or not. It is solely determined by internal properties of the nervous system. If your current perception, unnoticed by you, actually is a hallucination, then, as it were, you, as the system as a whole, are not anymore looking "through" the state in your head onto the world, but only at the representational vehicle itself – without this fact itself being globally available to you. The specific and highly interesting characteristic of the phenomenal variant of representation now is the fact that this content, even in the situation just described, is invariably experienced as maximally concrete, as absolutely unequivocable, as maximally determinate and disambiguated, as directly and immediately given to you.”

To Metzinger, our dream states, especially “lucid dreams”, are more whole than our conscious states, in the sense that they exercise the whole model. Conscious states, then, are actually dream states that are limited by neurally transmitted sensory inputs. So reality is non-existent, or at least inaccessible; there is a faux-reality that exists only in our minds, one that incompletely represents the external world, and does not represent our internal world at all (transparency of mental states and activities).

In Metzinger’s mind, those things we think we are and do are separated from actual reality. This includes the ideas that we have about our own intents and agencies; these are really just complex models of a perceived reality being internally executed by ever changing batches of neurons in our heads. The models have no actuality, no physical components in terms of materiality; they are processes only, nothing more. So they do not exist, they only seem to exist.

As the Precis progresses, Metzinger adds more and more models and invents more new words. He modifies and refines, but the concept remains that there is no material reality to the self, to consciousness, or to intentionality. Being without material reality, then, those things just do not exist.

Given that a person cannot directly monitor the goings-on in another person’s mind, and can empirically experience only his own mind, how is it that Metzinger has been able to derive such inclusive general models of the operation of the minds of each and all of us? Why should his conclusion of inaccessibility of reality to the mind not be considered just another attempt at Pyrrhonian Skepticism, this time applied to the mind? How do electrochemical discharges become experiences? If there is no “self”, materially speaking, why is there an implicit conclusion that there also is no self, non-materially speaking, unless Materialist Monism is presupposed? Why should Materialist Monism be presupposed, and Neutral Monism ignored totally? Finally, the derivation of mental modeling as having emerged from purely material causation is not examined by Metzinger, at least in his Precis.

In fact, the requirement for instantly changing hyper-complex bundles of neurons that are coherent and synchronized to “Now”, yet they dissociate the next instant, seems to argue largely against any material causation. It argues for the existence of a meta-supervisor, which is highly responsive and thus also not material. But it does not successfully argue against the Russell concept of a separate existence, a separate causal chain, via Neutral Monism.

And even if intentionality is only internal, directed at an internally perceived replica of an external object rather than directly at the external object, it is empirically obvious that intentionality in behavior results, regardless. Denial of this is not a result of empirical observation, it is rather a statement of a deluded belief.

The premises and conclusions that Metzinger feels are necessary and sufficient to eliminate "self" do not apply under Neutral Monism. Is Metzinger prepared to demonstrate the non-feasibility of Neutral Monism? If not, then his arguments are merely contingent on a worldview: Philosophical Materialism.

In fact, Metzinger's propositions do not meet the requirements of Materialism, either. This is because if there is no self, no consciousness, no intentionality, no agency, then he himself, Thomas Metzinger, cannot have these features either. This produces a text without meaning, the product of an illuded or maybe deluded process, produced by material cranial neurological entities without demonstrable intent. Without any purpose, there is no meaning. Without meaning, Metzinger's writngs have no value, and therefore are self-defeating, paradoxical logical errors, having doomed themselves with their own words.