Consciousness and free will – Part 2

Posted on December 22, 2022 by colinmathers

“Free will is an illusion so convincing that people simply refuse to believe we don’t have it.” Jerry A. Coyne (Professor of Evolution and Ecology) commenting on Sam Harris’s book Free Will. An Australian Professor Daniel Stojar is an example of the many people who simply refuse to believe we don’t have free will, saying “It seems as obvious as anything that we have free will. ….. We are free to move our finger. That is neither determined nor random — it’s a choice we can feel in our bones.”

How universal is this belief that we have free will in the ordinary sense, not in the philosopher’s compatibilist sense?

The general public

Surveys of lay public views on free will have been difficult to interpret because of differences and limitations in how the researchers conceptualized and thought about free will. For example, Nahmias and co-authors (2005) carried out a study in which they presented what they saw as a deterministic scenario and asked respondents if the person acted of their own free will. Most say yes, and they interpret this to mean people think free will is compatible with determinism. I think the simpler explanation is that they think people act with free will (in the ordinary sense) even when they are told to consider a scenario in which a computer can predict the act. In fact, some people explicitly rejected that the computer could predict and had to be told to assume it would. But many probably thought that and didn’t make an explicit objection.

Recent research provides clear cross-cultural evidence that a majority of the lay public believe in free will in the ordinary sense – that we are the conscious authors of our own choices. Sarkassian et al (2010) found that subjects from the United States, Hong Kong, India and Colombia exhibited a surprising degree of cross-cultural convergence in belief in free will. An online survey of adults in the USA and Singapore found that 82% of US respondents believed in free will and 85% in Singapore. Other studies have found that few lay people appear to conceptualize free will in the compatibilist sense.

The fact that the Christian religion explicitly requires free will to justify the concepts of sin and eternal punishment, and that the majority of people in Western countries have this Christian cultural background at minimum, means that almost certainly the term free will is not interpreted in a compatibilist way by most people in countries with a Christian history and probably those with predominantly Muslim culture.

Philosophers

David Bourget and David Chalmers surveyed 1,972 philosophy faculty members at 99 institutions and received results from 931 of them. Most of the universities were in English-speaking countries and in other countries were chosen for strength in analytic philosophy. Before getting to free will, I note that they found 73% of philosophers were atheists and 56.5% were physicalists re the mind.

The survey found that 59% of philosophers were compatibilists, 14% libertarians, 12% thought there was no free will, and 15% had other views. As libertarians believe in free will in the normal sense, and compatibilists do not, this means that 71% of philosophers do not believe in free will (in the ordinary sense) and only 14% do. For the sake of figures that add to 100%, I will assume that the 15% “other views” split in the same proportions between free will and no free will, so that overall 84% of philosophers do not believe in free will in the ordinary sense, and 16% do.

Scientists

Following publication of an article on free will, Scientific American conducted a reader poll and found that 59% of the 4,672 respondents endorsed the idea that free will existed and 41% thought that it didn’t. This is clearly a self-selecting sample of readers of Scientific American, who I would assume to be more determinist than the average person and so have a lower percentage believing in free will. From the respondent comments, it seemed clear to me that most people were interpreting free will in the normal sense not the compatibilist sense.

As noted in my previous post, Einstein did not believe in free will. Other scientists, eminent and not eminent, who have concluded that we do not have free will include evolutionary biologists Charles Darwin and Jerry Coyne, physicist Stephen Hawking, the psychologists Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom, and neuroscientists Wolf Singer, Chris Frith, Anil Seth and Sam Harris. Indeed, a number of philosophers have publicly complained about all these upstart scientists who pontificate on free will without any understanding of the lengthy debates that philosophers have had.

However, its probably not the case that scientists in general do not think we have free will. Some look for chinks in the determinist view in the unpredictability of complex chaotic systems or the unpredictability of quantum events. Roger Penrose is a prominent example of the latter. And many, not given to introspection or meditation simply do not question their felt experience.

Graffin and Provine (2007) carried out a survey of 149 eminent evolutionary biologists on their beliefs about free will and religion. Their questionnaire offered evolutionary scientists only two choices on the question about human free will: A, all organisms are locally determined by heredity and environment, but humans still possess free will; B, all organisms are locally determined by heredity and environment, and humans have no free will. To the authors’ surprise, 79 percent of the respondents chose option A for this question, indicating their belief that people have free will despite being determined by heredity and environment. Only 14 percent chose no free will, and 7 percent did not answer the question.

They considered whether the respondents who chose option A were thinking of free will as choice in the compatibilist sense, but noted that this view was not mentioned in the interviews with selected respondents or in the many comments generated by the free will question.

One of the authors had been polling his undergraduate evolution class each year on belief in free will. He found that year after year, 90% or more favoured the idea of human free will for a very specific reason: They think that if people make choices, they have free will. The professional debate about free will has moved far from this position, because what counts is whether the choice is free or determined, not whether human beings make choices. People and animals both certainly choose constantly. Comments from the eminent biologists suggest that they were equating human choice and human free will. In other words, although eminent, the respondents had not thought about free will much beyond the students in introductory evolution classes.

Free will and moral responsibility

Sam Harris discusses in some detail the issue of how belief or lack of belief in free will affects people’s judgements of moral responsibility and impacts decisions about penalties and punishments by society. He makes the point that a person remains responsible for their acts whether or not they have free will, and that society should impose appropriate consequences for a number of reasons: to deter such acts in future, to protect society from dangerous people, to compensate others for harm incurred. What would be different is that there would no longer be a justification for punishment as retribution for making a wrong choice. All of this struck me as sensible and, like Harris, I think that we would be better off as a society in eliminating retributive punishment for the sake of retribution alone.

Last week I was discussing free will with a friend who said that he had also come to the conclusion that free will was an illusion. He had explained this to his teenage children who responded that in that case they no longer had to do their homework. I was quite puzzled about this reaction, it made no sense to me at all except as a typical teenage response of seeking to use anything they could think of to try to avoid unpleasant activities. But logically, I could not see why ceasing to believe in free will would lead you to stop doing things you had been doing up till then.

In do a review of the empirical literature on free will belief, I discovered a large body of research which has shown that changing a person’s belief in free will does result in behavioural change. Studies using deterministic arguments to undermine people’s belief in free will have led to a number of negative outcomes including increased cheating and aggression. It has also been linked to worse job performance, a reduction in helping behaviours and lowered feelings of gratitude. As with my anecdote about children and homework, I have trouble understanding why this would happen.

One strand of explanation looks at belief in free will as necessary to supply the requisite motivation to maintain a strong sense of ethical duty and responsibility ( an argument made by Smilansky here). Others assume that people decide if there is no free will “they cannot be held accountable, no one’s to blame, and everything’s permitted, right?” Which of course, does not follow at all.

Both these proposed explanations would apply only to people for whom the threat of punishment or the promise of reward are primary determining factors for actions. These are people at stage 1 of Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. People at stage 2 and stage 3 of moral development would not change their behaviour if they ceased to believe they had free will.

A third interpretation of people changing behaviour when they cease to think they have free will is that they are confusing determinism with fatalism. That what will happen will happen and their choice of action will make no difference to the result. Again, this is a completely incoherent reaction.

A number of philosophers such as Daniel Dennett and Saul Smilansky have concluded that, in Smilansky’s words “We cannot afford for people to internalize the truth” about free will”. Smilansky is convinced that free will does not exist in the traditional sense—and that it would be very bad if most people realized this. He argues that the fact that free will is an illusion is something that should be kept within the ivory tower.

Nietzsche called free will “a theologians’ artifice” that permits us to “judge and punish.” And many thinkers have believed, as Smilansky does, that institutions of judgment and punishment are necessary if we are to avoid a fall into barbarism. Like Harris, I think that relinquishing a belief in free will in the ordinary way could allow society should move away from barbaric and ineffective punishments based on retribution, in favour of evidence-based penalties and other responses which protect society, deter bad behaviour and maximise rehabilitation.

Its difficult not to conclude that free will is a concept with religious roots that should have been discarded ages ago. Accepting this would also free us from hatred. Blaming people makes us angry and vengeful, and that clouds our judgment. Harris’s book makes this argument in more detail as does a 2016 article in The Atlantic.

The philosophers however are probably right in thinking that the illusion of free will is so strong that there is really not much need to worry about possible negative consequences of people seeing that it is an illusion. The general population in most countries has a long way to go before most adults are beyond Kohlberg Level 1 or 2 morality.

Consciousness and free will – Part 1

Posted on December 19, 2022 by colinmathers

Like most people, it seemed obvious to me that we have free will and up until about three years ago, I had not thought about it much or questioned it. Then I read Sam Harris’ small book Free Will (2012, Free Press) which made the case that we do not have free will. In my previous posts on consciousness, I noted that Annaka Harris, David Chalmers and Anil Seth all had some discussion of free will in their books. So I re-read Sam Harris’s book, now with a much deeper understanding of its relationship to consciousness, and came away largely convinced that he is right in seeing free will as an illusion.

Free Will is a very short book, 66 pages of main text amounting to around 15,000 words. It is very well written and jargon-free and makes a very strong case that free will is an illusion. Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. Well worth reading, whatever your views on free will.

For most people, consciousness not only involves a sense of self but also the feeling of being in control of your actions, of being the author of your thoughts. In other words, you have free will, the ability to consciously choose among potential decisions or actions. I refer to this as free will in the ordinary sense. This idea of free will emerges from a felt experience, and most people do not question it. That included me until relatively recently.

Three main positions on free will

Harris notes that in the philosophical literature we find three main approaches to the problem: determinism, compatibilism and libertarianism. Determinists believe that our thoughts and actions are fully determined by internal and external background causes and free will is an illusion. Compatibilists accept determinism and redefine “free will” as being free from any outer or inner coercions that would prevent the person from acting on his actual desires and intentions.

Libertarians (no relation to the political philosophy) believe that free will occurs outside of physical causation, whether as the causal action of consciousness on the physical brain or perhaps via metaphysical entities such as a soul. While both determinists and libertarians believe determinism and free will are incompatible, I will refer to libertarians in this review as incompatibilists to avoid confusion with the extreme right-wing political libertarians. Harris notes that our modern understanding of brain and behaviour strongly supports a determinist view and that “today, the only philosophically respectable way to endorse free will is to be a compatibilist”.

David Bourget and David Chalmers surveyed 931 philosophy faculty members at 99 institutions in many countries and found that 12% of philosophers were determinists, 59% compatibilists, 14% incompatibilists, and 15% had other views. Leaving other views aside, this means that 71% of philosophers do not believe in free will in the ordinary sense and only 14% do. This means that almost three quarters of philosophers agree with Sam Harris’ case that (ordinary) free will is an illusion, except that some are quite angry with him for not accepting their redefinition of free will as the freedom from coercion (more of this later).

Objective evidence

Harris’s case rests on objective, scientific observations on the one hand, and subjective evidence from introspection and meditation on the other hand. The scientific evidence includes:

Observations that brain activity occurs a significant time interval before conscious awareness of the intention to do something.
Given the right experimental manipulations, people can be led to believe that they consciously intended an action, when they neither chose it nor had control over their movements.
Hypnotized people who are asked why they have done things that were suggested by the hypnotist will confabulate reasons for their actions that have nothing to do with the actual reason.

To this I would add the experiments done with split brain patients, where an action is requested to one side only of the split brain. When the patient is asked via the other side of the split brain why they did that action, the other side will invent a plausible reason that it believes.

Subjective evidence

Sam Harris devotes more of his book to discussion of our subjective experience, arguing that free will is not only an illusion, but it doesn’t even correspond to any subjective fact about us. Introspection soon shows us that thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. Seeming acts of volition merely arise spontaneously and cannot be traced to a point of origin in our conscious minds. As an experienced meditator, I am well aware that my thoughts appear spontaneously in my mind, and I can no more decide what I will next think or intend until a thought or intention arises in my mind. To directly observe this is to understand that we are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way that people generally suppose. You might respond that you can think connected chains of thought, but meditators know that these arise and cease for reasons outside our conscious control.

Part of the felt experience of free will is to feel that you could have chosen to do something other than what you did, to think the thought “I could have done otherwise” after doing whatever you did do. But it is not possible to go back and make a different decision. This is an untestable belief. The perception that you could have, is actually an understanding that you could make a different decision if similar circumstance arose in the future. And that is likely true, particularly if what you did do last time had undesirable consequences. Read Harris for a fuller discussion of this.

What do the authors of the other books on consciousness that I have been reading think about free will? Anneka Harris agrees with Sam Harris and summarizes the same case, probably just as well since she is married to him. I briefly discuss the views of the other authors below.

Daniel Dennett

Daniel Dennet is a compatibilist who agrees with Sam that we do not have free will and our choices are determined, not free. But he redefines free will as the freedom to do what is determined and is very aggressive about attacking Harris for claiming there is no free will (even though Harris is talking about the type of free will he agrees is an illusion). Einstein expressed this compatibilist view very clearly as follows: In a 1929 interview in The Saturday Evening Post, he said: ‘I do not believe in free will. I believe with Schopenhauer: we can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must.’

Dennett has written a book Freedom Evolves (2003) in which he defends his compatibilist view that that the concept of free will should be redefined so that it no longer involves a free choice among alternatives but rather refers to our freedom to do that one thing that we must wish to do, in other words our freedom from coercion. I think even this definition is incoherent, since if there is external coercion, it is just one of the external determining factors in the determination of our choice (either to change it because we are coerced, or to not change it and suffer the consequence of the coercion). As Eyal Moses’ 2010 review of his book stated:

“For Dennett, the significance of free will is that it is the basis of morality and moral responsibility, of engaging in moral judgment and holding people responsible for their actions. His thesis is that while free will in the ordinary sense is an illusion, these consequences of free will are real and compatible with his deterministic model of the universe, so free will should be redefined to refer to these consequences. Dennett suggests that calling an action “freely chosen” should not mean that the person had some other possible alternative action (which Dennett claims is never true), but rather should mean that we are justified in holding the person morally responsible for that action.”

Dennett has written a long, condescending and incoherent review of Sam Harris’ book. Harris has responded to this here, and Daniel Miessner has written a devastating critique of Dennett’s arguments and examples in his review of Harris’s book. Miessner summarizes Dennett’s position as (1) We have free will because we feel like we do and (2) It’s useful to hold people responsible for their actions, so we must tell people that free will is real.

If you want to dig a little deeper into the issues around understanding the true nature of free will, I can recommend reading Dennett’s review, Sam Harris’ response and Miessner’s detailed critique.

David Chalmers

Chalmers made a fairly strong case in his book that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of mental functioning and itself has no causal role. But he resisted drawing this conclusion, saying he is agnostic and hopes to find some subtle role for consciousness in causing behaviour. Annaka Harris identifies such a potential causal role for the behaviour of someone who is reporting on their experience of meditating on their empty consciousness (formless awareness). Its hard to imagine how a zombie could exhibit such behaviour.

Chalmers examines a number of potential strategies for avoiding epiphenomenalism but concludes that none of them justify rejecting the conclusion that consciousness is mostly epiphenomenal, perhaps with some subtle exceptions. This clearly is fundamental to the issue of whether or not we have free will, and I find it odd that Chalmers does not discuss free will directly. He is on record as saying he does not have strong feelings about free will. For some reason, he appears to act coy around expressing a view on free will, though he is clearly sceptical and tending towards compatibilism, saying in the Scientific American interview that “If it just means you can do what you want to do, then, well, that seems pretty straightforward. If it’s the ability to do something completely non-deterministic, well, I don’t know if we have that.”

Anil Seth

Anil Seth also comes down very clearly on the side of no “spooky free will” (free will where consciousness causally intervenes in the flow of physical events). He discusses in some detail how intentions are formed in the brain before we become aware of making a decision and the very strong feeling that our “self” has made the decision and is causing the action. He is also a compatibilist, also quoting Schopenhauer in slightly different words “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.”

But Seth, somewhat like Dennett, is clearly unwilling to state that free will is an illusion. Indeed, he says that the conscious experience of volition is as real as any other conscious perception, such as a visual experience of colour. I find it somewhat difficult to take him seriously after he has just reviewed at length all the neurological experiments showing brain activity a significant time before a conscious volition is experienced and that people will experience volition if they are fooled into thinking they are controlling a series of events or the real cause is hidden from them.

What Seth actually means by saying the experience of volition is “real” is that it is indeed an experience we have, even though it does not reflect a reality in which our “self” makes choices from a range of options, any of which the self could have chosen. Seth argues that the reason we have this experience of volition is that it is indispensable to our survival and assists us to realize that we can learn from our previous “voluntary” actions, to possibly make a different choice next time. He may well be right.

In conclusion

The objective evidence, well discussed in some detail by Anil Seth, and the subjective evidence, well laid out by Sam Harris, and which I have also examined in some depth, together make a strong case that free will in the ordinary sense, is an illusion, or as Sam Harris puts it more strongly, even the illusion of free will is an illusion. It seems to me very likely that not only are free will and the sense of a conscious self illusions, but that consciousness is largely along for the ride, and plays at most only a limited causal role in behaviour and thought.

I have not touched on the implications of this for moral responsibility. Sam Harris spends quite a bit of time discussing this in his book, and Daniel Dennett sees moral responsibility as necessary and that it justifies redefining free will so people can be told they have it. There is quite a body of empirical evidence around this issue and I will examine it, as well as evidence on the free will beliefs of the general population and specific groups, in Part 2 of this post on free will.

The “real” problem of consciousness: a review of Being You by Anil Seth

Posted on December 4, 2022 by colinmathers

In my fifth post in this series, I review Anil Seth’s 2021 book Being You. See here, here, here, and here for the previous posts. I read a Guardian review of this book in August 2021 which raved about it, as did various other reviewers. So, I went out and bought it, and when it came, I started to read it. It annoyed me so much (see below) that I put the book aside until recently. Seth is a Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Surrey, highly cited for his publications, and also a prolific popularizer of his views on consciousness (New Scientist, Scientific American, TED talks etc).

Seth starts well in the Prologue, with the comment that “consciousness is a mystery that matters. For each of us, our conscious experience is all there is. Without it there is nothing at all: no world, no self, no interior and no exterior.” But he continues with “For me, a source of consciousness should explain how the various properties of consciousness depend on, and relate to, the operations of the neuronal wetware inside our heads. The goal of consciousness science should not be ‑‑ at least not primarily ‑‑ to explain why consciousness happens to be part of the universe in the first place.”

The book is divided into four parts. In the first, Seth describes his approach to the study of consciousness. He also deals with attempts to measure the presence and level of consciousness. The second examines how the brain produces the contents of consciousness, and the third examines the sense of self and conscious selfhood. The fourth and final part, examines what his approach to the study of consciousness has to say about animal consciousness and the possibility of sentient machines.

The hard problem of consciousness

Seth defines consciousness as “any kind of subjective experience whatsoever. …. Whenever there is experience, there is phenomenology; and wherever there is phenomenology, there is consciousness.” He quotes Chalmers’ description of “the hard problem” before going on to say that his preferred philosophical position, and the default assumption of many neuroscientists is physicalism (synonymous with materialism, the view that consciousness is an emergent property of arrangements of physical stuff). At the other extreme to physicalism is idealism, the idea that consciousness or mind is the ultimate source of reality and matter emerges from mind. Seth then notes that various forms of dualism “sit awkwardly in the middle” and few philosophers or scientists now sign up for dualistic views. He doesn’t explicitly mention Chalmers’ naturalistic dualism, though he does describe functionalism as an influential form of physicalism. Functionalism is the idea that consciousness does not depend on what a system is made of, but only on what the system does, on the functions it performs. Chalmers is actually a functionalist, though not a physicalist.

Seth also mentions panpsychism and mysterianism. Panpsychism is summarily dismissed as not leading to any testable hypotheses, and mysterianism as unjustly pessimistic.

He then defends physicalism through an attack on so-called `zombie’ thought experiments. He argues, in my view fairly correctly, that the ability to imagine a philosophical zombie is an extremely weak argument that may have no bearing on the actual possibility of such a creature. However, he does not mention any of Chalmers’ other four arguments for the non-supervention of consciousness on the physical. To my simple mind, Seth just assumes that consciousness is an emergent property of physical brains without argument and ignores completely the mystery of how a first-person subjective experience can emerge from an arrangement of physical things, by their nature objective and third-person. How can an interior emerge from exteriors: the hard problem.

The `real’ problem of consciousness

Seth then explains that his aim is to address the “real” problem of consciousness, not the hard problem. According to the “real problem”, the main aims of consciousness science are to explain why a particular conscious experience is the way it is, in terms of physical mechanisms and processes in the brain and body. Why does a particular pattern of brain activity map to a particular kind of conscious experience?

This is of course an interesting question, but for me Seth is essentially avoiding the hard problem. He recognizes it exists (unlike Dennett) but simply decides that science should be about what seems tractable to him, and that is mapping and understanding the correlations between the brain activity and the conscious experience. As Chalmers also recognized, of course consciousness is systematically associated with physical structures and functions (see previous post). Seth is dismissive of the hard problem, saying: “the real problem is distinct from the hard problem, because it is not, at least in the first instance, about explaining why and how consciousness is part of the universe in the first place. It does not hunt for a special sauce that can magic consciousness from mere mechanism.”

In the rest of this first part of the book, Seth sets out to identify various neural correlates of consciousness (NCC). He first examines the search for NCC to identify how conscious someone is, on a scale from complete absence of conscious experience (eg. in a coma or under anaesthesia) all the way to “vivid states of awareness that accompany normal waking life”. No mention of altered or non-ordinary states. A chapter follows in which Seth describes various advances in using EEG, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to analyse brain function and identify levels of consciousness in terms of a measure of the “algorithmic complexity” of certain brain waves./i

Seth describes meeting the psychedelics research Robin Carhart-Harris and applying his “algorithmic complexity” measure of consciousness level to the brain scans of people who had taken psychedelics. He found that the level was increased relative to the baseline level of waking rest. Seth describes several similar measures of brain order-disorder and says none of them work very well. I’m not surprised, the theory itself is misguided and probably has little or nothing to do with consciousness.

In the next Chapter, Seth reviews an even more elaborate information-based measure Φ (phi), which is supposed to be the additional amount of information generated by the system as a whole, over and above the information generated by its parts. Apart from the fact that Φ cannot be calculated or measured for a brain (which Seth admits), its proponents make the claim that Φ (or integrated information) is identical to consciousness. This claim is completely unbased in any evidence, theory or argument and strikes me as typical of people who want their science to be “physics-like” and simply borrow concepts such as entropy and claim they explain something else.

This is the point I got to in my first attempt to read the book where I got so annoyed that I put it down for over a year. This sort of idiocy could only be dreamed up by the one third of people who simply don’t think the hard problem really exists, and that of course includes most neuroscientists.

Creating the contents of consciousness

On my second reading, I pushed past the Φ nonsense into the second part of the book, which how the brain creates the contents of consciousness. In brief, Seth argues (correctly) that the contents of consciousness are essentially controlled hallucinations, in which the brain generates predicted perceptions about the causes of sensory inputs, and continually corrects and updates these perceptions as new or clearer sensory inputs become available. What we perceive is tied to, controlled by, causes in the world, but is not just a reflection of “things out there”.

Seth examines how this occurs for various senses, including a few beyond the traditional “five senses” such as proprioception. I found these chapters very interesting.

A brief aside now. He discusses our sense of time and states categorically that we have no internal pacemaker, our time perception comes from a “best guess” about the rate of change of sensory signals, without any need for an inner clock. He quotes a number of experiments that he thinks confirms this. But my direct experience contradicts this.

My first example is a time when I was had a fairly large garden project and used self-hypnosis to give myself a command to wake at 5 am each morning to do a couple of hours work on it. I did not want to use an alarm clock so as not to disturb my wife. I actually woke within a minute or two of five o’clock almost every day for over two months. My second example is an experience I have often had when using an alarm clock to wake each morning for work. Every now and then I experience a period of several days, sometimes more, where I wake each morning one minute before the alarm goes off. I either have an accurate internal clock or while asleep my brain is able to tap into sensory signals of some sort and very accurately predict how much time is passing, to the minute. I mention this because it seems to me a typical example where neurologists extrapolate unjustified conclusions from fairly primitive experiments on limited samples and do not think to review the broader experiences of large numbers of people or identify individuals who may have outlier abilities.

This second part is well worth reading, and I agree with most of it, but it has little to do with the hard problem, though Seth thinks it makes the hard problem a non-problem. I am guessing that like the philosophers Seth has no experience with meditation, or of consciousness when its contents drop away. As I described in my previous post, it is possible to eventually turn your conscious attention away from other sensory contents and thought and back on itself. To sit simply aware of awareness. That is the fundamental essence of the hard problem: how does that awareness arise. It simply cannot be an emergent property arising from the brain and its production of perceptions because the awareness that experiences those perceptions is not those perceptions and remains when perceptions of everything except first-person awareness drop away.

The illusion of the self

In the third part of the book, Seth examines the sense of a “self” that we usually feel is what is experiencing consciousness. He notes that Buddhists have “long argued that there is no such thing as a permanent self and through meditation have attempted to reach entirely selfless states of consciousness” though he does not seem to understand that many meditators do reach such selfless states, albeit usually only for a short period of time. It’s the selfless stage of consciousness that is rarely reached. The experience of selfless states is empirical evidence, albeit first-person data not the outside observer data that Seth is more comfortable with as a scientist. Seth also notes that psychedelics can result in experiences of no-self (and in my experience, also in drastically altered senses of self).

Seth identifies several types of selfhood that we experience: the embodied self (our experience of our body) the perspectival self (our first-person perspective), the volitional self (our perception that we have free will), the social self (how I perceive that others perceive me) and the narrative self (our remembered past and anticipated future). Seth argues (convincingly to me) that these diverse elements of selfhood are normally bound together in a unified experience, together with a perception (not really accurate) that our selfhood is enduring and little changing. He argues that the brain has evolved to produce this sense of selfhood in a similar way to how it produces predicted perceptions as a tool to enhance the survival of the individual. The self is another controlled hallucination that operates to support the fundamental biological drive to survive and reproduce.

Seth appears to think that losing the sense of the reality of the self is bodily regulation gone deeply awry, a severe psychiatric problem. That may be the case in some specific psychiatric conditions but is certainly not the experience of meditators who taste the no-self state, quite the opposite.

This part of the book finishes with yet another chapter on a pretend-physics theory of living organisms and a chapter on free will. The free will chapter is excellent and thought-provoking but I will leave that topic for a later post.

Animal and machine consciousness

The last part of the book examines the issue of whether other animals are conscious and whether machines can be conscious. The animal chapter is a fascinating read. Other than mammals which Seth argues likely mostly have some form of consciousness as their brains are so similar to ours, Seth explores the very alien consciousness of the octopus and this is indeed a fascinating read. Highly recommended.

The chapter on machine consciousness makes the very valid point that intelligence and consciousness are not the same thing and many make the assumption that achieving artificial general intelligence will automatically bring consciousness. Seth is sceptical and also is agnostic on the requirement of functionalism, the idea that consciousness depends only on function not on the material from which a system is made. Another excellent discussion, which I mainly leave for a separate post on machine consciousness.

In summary

Anil Seth is one of the one-third of people who simply don’t “get” the hard problem of consciousness. He thinks progress on his “real” problems will not solve but dissolve the hard problem. The parts of the book where he delves into pretend physics theories of consciousness are annoying and silly. But the rest of the book where he addresses the way that the brain produces perceptions via “controlled hallucinations” and that the sense of self is one of these controlled hallucinations is an excellent and enjoyable read. I learnt a lot about how visual and other illusions provide evidence of how the brain produces perceptions adjusted for its best guesses of the errors in the sensory inputs.

Seth has looked at some aspects of psychedelic experiences, though he largely ignores the very large body of subjective first-person evidence of non-ordinary states of consciousness and the theoretical work to develop maps of states and stages of consciousness. He also completely ignores first-person evidence from meditative experiences, and indeed seems to see the Buddhist insight that the self is an illusion as a belief not as a result of empirical observations.

A book well worth reading but try not to let the sections on pretend-physics grand theories put you off completely. Take them lightly or skip them; the rest of the book is full of fascinating information and arguments.

The hard problem of consciousness: David Chalmers and The Conscious Mind

Posted on November 23, 2022 by colinmathers

In my fourth post in this series, I review David Chalmer’s 1996 book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. See here, here and here for the previous posts. This is a long and often technical book (about 395 pages) though Chalmers has kindly flagged the Chapters and Sections that he recommends non-philosophers read and has asterisked the headings of Sections that he considers technical details likely of interest only to philosophers. I read some but not all asterisked sections, and I have to say that it is indeed the most technical and “academic” work of philosophy I have read in decades. But let’s dive into it.

The hard problem of consciousness

It was like a breath of fresh air to read the introductory chapter. Instead of dismissing consciousness as an illusion, Chalmers sees it as the largest outstanding obstacle in our quest for a scientific understanding of the universe. He coined the phrase “the hard problem” around 1994 and it caught on. In contrast to the hard problem of why we have first-person experience, issues such as how the brain processes environmental stimuli, or how it integrates information into a coherent whole, might be called “easy” problems, and many books about consciousness, such as Dennett’s, are largely about the easy problems. Consciousness remains a big, deep mystery about which science has almost nothing to say, and where there is no agreement even in the broad about how consciousness occurs.

Chalmers says he has found that around one-third of people think that solving the easy problems explains everything that needs to be explained about consciousness, and around two thirds hold that there is a further “hard” problem. This ratio is fairly constant across academics and students in a variety of fields. He sets out explicitly to address the hard problem and to develop at least a basis for a scientific theory of consciousness though he recognizes that it is not open to investigation by the usual scientific methods.

He outlines a set of constraints within which attempts to obey in this quest. First, to take consciousness seriously and not redefine it as something else (as per Dennett). Second, to take science seriously in the domains where it has authority. Third, to take consciousness to be a natural phenomenon.

Two fundamental questions about consciousness

In the Introduction and Chapter 1, Chalmers clarifies what he means by consciousness. It’s the way we experience the world, the way it feels to us subjectively. Using the phrase Nagel made famous in 1974, Chalmers says “We can say that a being is consciousness if there is something it is like to be that being …”

Chalmers identifies two fundamental questions about consciousness that we currently cannot answer. (1) Why does conscious experience exist and how does it arise in physical systems, and (2) why do conscious experiences have their particular nature? Why does the experience of red differ from the experience of blue?

First, Chalmers draws our attention to the range of conscious experiences by presenting a set of examples ranging from visual experiences, through mental imagery, to emotions, and to our sense of self. It seems odd that he completely ignores non-ordinary states of consciousness though he touches on changes in consciousness with a discussion of how his visual experience dramatically changed as a child when he was fitted with glasses.

This leads into an important distinction that he makes between the psychological concept of mind and the phenomenal concept of mind. The phenomenal aspect of mind is conscious experience. The psychological aspect of mind refers to the mental states construed as the (ultimately physical) states relevant to the causation and explanation of behavior. It matters little or not at all whether these mental states are conscious or not. The materialist hopes that the phenomenal and psychological minds turn out to be the same thing, Chalmers argues that they are different things, a form of dualism.

Chalmers approaches the study of consciousness from a completely nonspiritual, nonreligious perspective. The dualism he advocates is governed by natural laws, it is just that these natural laws extend beyond the laws of our current sciences. He is not a mysterian, someone who throws their hands up and say that consciousness is a fundamental mystery outside the reach of human understanding. Rather he wants to understand and explain consciousness as a natural phenomenon.

Zombies and other arguments against a reductive materialist explanation

Chalmers argument against a materialist explanation of consciousness relies heavily on two things: supervenience and logically possible worlds. The definition of logical supervenience is as follows: B facts/properties logically supervene on A facts if no two logically possible worlds are identical with respect to their A facts while differing in their B facts. A phenomenon is reductively explainable in terms of low level physical facts if and only if it logically supervenes on those properties.

These issues are dealt with in detail in a long and philosophically technical chapter 2. Its worth reading to get a grasp of Chalmers’ arguments in following chapters, but it is a heavy read with technical terms such as “intension” and “instantiation” much used.

Chalmers then argues that everything in our world logically supervenes on the low-level physical facts except for consciousness. He actually gives five arguments in Chapter 3 for this conclusion. The first and third, which I find the most compelling, are the zombie argument and the epistemic asymmetry argument.

The zombie argument is that it is logically possible to imagine zombies who are just like us, fuctionally, psychologically and behaviourally, but yet have no phenomenal mind, no experiences, nothing that it is like to be them. These are often referred to as philosophical zombies, as opposed to the Hollywood zombies who are functionally impaired. It is logically possible to imagine a world physically identical to ours inhabited by philosophical zombies. Therefore consciousness does not supervene on the physical facts. So consciousness cannot be reductively explained in terms of the physical and materialism is false.

The epistemic asymmetry argument stems from the fact that we know about it only through our own experience. Even if we had a completed theory of cognition (and biochemistry, chemistry, and physics) that information would not lead us to postulate consciousness. There is also the problem of other minds. Even if we know everything physical about other creatures, we do not know for certain if they are conscious. There is no problem with physical things like “other lives”, or other “economies” or “other heights”. Chalmers argues there is no epistemic asymmetry in these cases precisely because they are logically supervenient on the physical.

Chalmers concludes that consciousness cannot be logically supervenient “because a logically supervenient property can be detected straightforwardly on the basis of external evidence, and there is no special role for the first-person case.” This is as close as Chalmers comes in the whole book to saying in straightforward jargon-free terms why consciousness cannot be reduced to the physical. The physical is objective, third-person, the “outside”. Consciousness is subjective, first-person, the “inside”. It seems quite obvious to me that the subjective cannot derive from the objective, the first-person from the third-person, the inside from the outside.

Chalmers’ five arguments are all “intuition” pumps to help the skeptical see that consciousness does not logically supervene. Briefly, his other three arguments are:

2. The inverted spectrum. Imagine someone physically identical to you, but with different conscious experiences. For example, their experience of the colour spectrum is inverted relative to yours.

4. Someone raised in a black and white room could have complete knowledge of neuroscience but still have no idea what it is like to see green or any other colour.

5. The lack of any remotely plausible analysis of consciousness that can explain even in outline how it arises from non-conscious processes.

In the rest of Chapter 3, Chalmers examines in detail and refutes all the various objections that he thinks might be raised against his arguments and conclusion. As Dennett, caustically but wittily has said, “Chalmers never leaps to conclusions; he oozes to conclusions, checking off all the caveats and pitfalls and possible sources of error along the way with exemplary caution.” Dennett has concluded that nothing can shake Chalmers intuition that consciousness is not reductive to the physical, because he has presented excellent versions himself of every one of Dennett’s objections and failed to convince himself. Dennett in quite an entertaining attack then suggests a number of reasons Chalmers may “cling like a limpet” to dualism. These include that it is a parody of academic philosophic scholarship, or that it is a philosopher performing (I am a philosopher and this is what philosophers do). See Dennett’s 2012 article “The mystery of David Chalmers” for these and other entertaining observations.

I am quite sure that Chalmers is largely correct in his conclusions, but rather than writing in clear language for a general intelligent reader as Anaka Harris does, Chalmers is indeed “doing what philosophers do” and doing it in excruciating detail.

Naturalistic dualism

In Chapter 4, Chalmers examines the implications of his conclusion that consciousness is a feature of the world over and above the physical, and not reducible to it. However, consciousness is systematically associated with physical structures and functions. Chalmers develops this into the concept of “natural supervenience”, that there is an as yet unknown lawful association between the phenomenal mind and the psychological mind, between consciousness and physical processes. Again, a very technical and jargon-filled set of arguments. To my mind, its completely obvious that the inside (the first-person) is systematically associated with the outside (the third person).

Chalmers then suggests that a theory of consciousness could go one of two ways. First, that consciousness is a fundamental property alongside things such as charge, spin, etc. Second, that consciousness derives from some other class of more fundamental properties, which cannot be physical properties since consciousness is not supervenient on the physical.

Chalmers calls this position “naturalistic dualism” because it posits that everything is a result of basic properties and laws and is compatible with existing “physical” science. There need be nothing transcendental about consciousness, it is just another natural phenomenon. He then examines a range of possible objections to naturalistic dualism, particularly the concept of emergence of consciousness from complex systems, probably the dominant view among neuroscientists. Like Annaka Harris, Chalmers rejects emergence on the grounds that consciousness is not supervenient on the physical and so cannot be emergent from it. The first-person subjective cannot emerge from sufficiently complex arrangements of third-person objective things.

Annaka Harris says this much more clearly than Chalmers does: “when scientists assume they have bypassed the hard problem by describing consciousness as an emergent property — that is, a complex phenomenon not predicted by the constituent parts — they are changing the subject. All emergent phenomena — like ant colonies, snowflakes, and waves — are still descriptions of matter and how it behaves as witnessed from the outside. What a collection of matter is like from the inside and whether or not there is an experience associated with it is something the term “emergence” doesn’t cover. Calling consciousness an emergent phenomenon doesn’t actually explain anything, because to the observer, matter is behaving as it always does.”

Can consciousness play a causal role in events?

Next, Chalmers tackles the issue of whether consciousness is epiphenomenal. If all physical events are caused by physical causes, then consciousness cannot play a causal role in physical events, it is an epiphenomenon. Chalmers examines a number of potential strategies for avoiding epiphenomenalism but concludes that none of them justify rejecting the conclusion that consciousness is mostly epiphenomenal, perhaps with some subtle exceptions. This clearly is fundamental to the issue of whether or not we have free will, and I find it odd that Chalmers does not discuss free will directly. He is on record as saying he does not have strong feelings about free will. In any case, I will leave the issue of free will for a following post to examine.

In Chapter 7, Chalmers examines the issue of phenomenological judgements. This refers to when we use our cognition (thinking functions) to make judgements about the experience of consciousness. Chalmers argues that phenomenal judgements are themselves cognitive acts, and so fall within the domain of psychology and thus are not mysterious, potentially explicable scientifically, unlike consciousness. This leads to a paradox since our claims about consciousness should be reductively explicable in terms of cognitive science whereas consciousness is not.

Chalmers then argues that our judgements (and the things we say about the experience of consciousness) would be the same whether or not we actually experience consciousness. In other words, the zombie will describe experiences of consciousness exactly in the way that we do, although he does not experience consciousness. This simply makes no sense at all to me and seems like a convincing argument that the complete philosophical zombie is actually not a logical possibility. A zombie cannot report his experiences of consciousness in the same way that I do. In other words, there is an area where consciousness plays a causal role in behaviour.

Annaka Harris makes exactly the same point: “consciousness seems to play a role in behaviour when we think and talk about the mystery of consciousness. When I contemplate “what it’s like” to be something, that experience of consciousness presumably affects the subsequent processing taking place in my brain. And almost nothing I think or say when contemplating consciousness would make any sense coming from a system without it. How could an unconscious robot (or a philosophical zombie) contemplate conscious experience itself without having it in the first place?”

Why does Chalmers ignore the evidence from meditation?

Most people who have had sufficient training in meditation realize that an experience of consciousness needn’t be accompanied by thoughts—or any input to the senses, for that matter. I have experienced what it is like to be acutely aware of my subjective awareness in the absence of any content such as thought, sights, sounds, or other perceptions. I have practiced for many hours to become aware of my awareness as an observer of thoughts and sensory perception, that is separate from them. And then to take that awareness and turn it back on itself, letting thoughts and sensory perceptions fall away. While I might have difficulty finding words that can convey a sense of that experience, there are many such descriptions in the Zen literature, for example. I really don’t see how a zombie could carry out such a program, or report the experiences that result, let alone in similar terms to what I might report.

Chalmers’ explanation for how a zombie is still conceivable in theory is that the language and concepts of consciousness could be built into the program of a zombie. The unstated implication is that we could also have the same language and concepts of consciousness built into us. And the implication of that is that we also are not actually conscious, but our sense of the inexplicable wonder of consciousness is actually an illusion built into us somehow by evolutionary processes. This totally destroys Chalmers claim that consciousness is not reducible. The idea that its logically possible for zombies to replicate the outcomes of a long-term meditation practice seems nonsensical to me.

Chalmers would seem to have no real experience of meditation. In a 2017 interview with Chalmers, John Horgan reported that Chalmers has “never had the patience” for meditation, and he has doubts about basic Buddhist claims, such as anatta, the doctrine that the self does not really exist.

I find this astonishing. Chalmers has made the nature of consciousness his life’s work and understands intellectually that consciousness cannot be investigated using the third-person objective methods of science. But he apparently does not have the patience to investigate the very sophisticated first-person methods that have been developed over thousands of years to exactly investigate the nature of consciousness. While Chalmers is of course entirely free to doubt that the self does not really exist, it seems enormously arrogant to do this while dismissing the no-self experiences of many people, including myself, through meditation or through exploration with psychedelics.

Does functional organization fully determine conscious experience?

In chapters 6 and 7, Chalmers starts to outline a possible approach to developing a naturalistic dualist theory of consciousness. He argues for a general principle that consciousness is an organizational invariant, i.e., that “functional organization fully determines conscious experience. In other words, if a silicon brain is organized identically to a human brain, it will also be conscious. He did not present any evidence for this claim that I could see, and I don’t find it plausible. In another review, Eric Dietrich comments that this principle is unintuitive and not widely believed among philosophers.

Chalmers gives some thought experiments to argue for this principle: his examples show that, without it, humans could be massively mistaken about their experience of qualia (whether absent, fading or dancing). I found all these thought experiments unconvincing, not least because once Chalmers has decided that zombies can be programmed to think they are conscious even when they are not, then humans can also be massively mistaken about their actual experiences and his arguments self-implode.

Panpsychism: maybe not as silly as people tend to assume

Chapter 8 is even more speculative. Chalmers proposes that the basic stuff of the universe is information and that has two aspects: a phenomenal and a physical aspect. He largely lost me here. I did not find it at all compelling. But this leads him to consider panpsychism, since even simple systems containing information must then have associated experience. Of course, the experience of a simple system will not be associated with a mental life, a sense of self, or memory.

I discussed panpsychism in my previous post about Annaka Harris’s book, and that it is largely dismissed as ridiculous by scientists, who imagine it implies rocks must have human-like consciousness. Chalmers makes all the same points, very clearly, and also notes that panpsychism avoids the need to have consciousness wink-in or switch-on at some particular level of complexity. Rather it may be a universal property, with very simple systems having very simple phenomenology and very complex systems having very complex phenomenology.

Chalmers also discusses the possibility that we have various information-processing systems in the brain with associated consciousness, to which we do not have access. This indeed is what has been found in some split-brain patients. Chalmers concludes that his theory results in a variant of “outrageous” panpsychism, but it is a view that can grow surprisingly satisfying with reflection. I am inclined to agree with him.

In conclusion

The two final chapters deal with conscious machines and strong artificial intelligence (chapter 9) and quantum mechanics and consciousness (chapter 10). I will leave these subjects for later discussion.

While Chalmers does indeed take consciousness seriously and recognize that it is fundamentally different to physical functions and cannot be reductively explained, most of his philosophic machinery and some of the principles he argued for in the second half of the books I found unconvincing. Consciousness exists in the real world, it is our primary experience and in fact ALL our experiences of physical systems are mediated through consciousness. So consciousness must be explored using evidence, not by using thought experiments of what is guessed to be logically possible. And the primary evidence is direct personal exploration of consciousness through tools like meditation, breathwork, psychedelics. None of which Chalmers appears to have any interest in or experience with. Sure, these first-person experiences are much more difficult to work with than the objective observational tools of current science, but philosophical thought experiments about “logically possible” worlds are even less adequate for understanding such an important aspect of our reality.

Consciousness Explained…..or Consciousness Ignored?

Posted on October 16, 2022 by colinmathers

In my third post on consciousness, I review Daniel Dennett’s 1991 book Consciousness Explained. My preliminary reading suggested this was an important contribution to the debate on the nature of consciousness.

His first chapter starts with the brain in the vat. He argues that the creation of all the inputs needed to fool the brain in the vat they were having real experiences is simply computationally impossible, due to the massive number of scenarios requiring inputs. And also claims that hallucinations are rarely “deep” in the sense of being solidly realized hallucinations that the person can interact with, walk around, view from different angles etc.

He seems to have a very limited understanding of the range of hallucinogenic experiences that people have, or for that matter, lucid dreams in which they can have detailed interactions, conversations etc with other dream characters and interact in detail with their dreamscape, including changing and influencing it. He does have some interesting thoughts on how dreams can be randomly generated in a way which means they reflect the concerns of the dreamer, but have no “internal author”.

He later goes on to explain how brain processes use partial sensory information to fill in what we perceive as perceptions without gaps and holes. He goes to some length to explain how this could be done simply by creating the memory that it was done rather than that the brain has to construct a detailed “film” to be played in an internal “Cartesian theatre” for the mind to view it. Yet does not seem to twig that exactly this process can operate to create what we experience as extremely solidly realized hallucinations.

The book is around 500 pages in length and the bulk of it is about brain processes and how they construct our perceptions from partial inputs. He doesn’t really get to address the hard issues re consciousness until the last three chapters.

For example, Dennett discusses how we see a continuous visual field with no blind spot. Is the brain taking the visual input and “filling in” the blind spot? There are various other perceptual issues where what we “see” is minus the missing data in the visual input. It seems fairly obvious to me that the brain simply has an instruction to ignore the missing stuff, or more correctly, without any actual input from that part of the field it simply ignores it, and we are unaware anything is missing. And after about 10 pages of discussing the issues with “filling in” he gets there. Perhaps I’ve picked up the solution to this question from more recent writing, and he is simply writing before much of this was explored.

But it is yet another example of how most of his quite lengthy book is devoted to discussing how the contents of consciousness are created, not discussing consciousness itself. His book was written before Chalmers in his 1996 book invented the term “hard problem of consciousness” and brought a lot of attention to it. He does address this issue in the last part of the book, and as I discuss below seems to completely dismiss it on the grounds that consciousness is an illusion.

Dennett is one of those infuriating philosophers who think that whatever half-baked assumption he has about the world can be stated as an obvious truth from which he then draws entirely unwarranted conclusions. For example, in Chapter 3 he tells us that most animals other than cats and dogs cannot enjoy what they do, and as an example says that birds cannot enjoy the sensation of flight. He goes on to conclude that humans are the only animals that can do things purely to have fun.

In Chapter 10, he tells us that the hallmark of consciousness is that they can be reported (barring aphasia, paralysis, or being bound and gagged). The exceptions in brackets are his. So he then concludes that conscious states must be accompanied by suitable higher-order thoughts. Apart from being a non-sequitur, he seems completely unaware of the extensive reporting of states of consciousness by humans which were not accompanied at the time by higher-order thoughts. In fact, I drop into such a state sometimes while meditating, when all thoughts may drop away for a period.

In Chapter 12, Qualia Disqualified turns to a discussion of qualia (for example the subjective experience of a colour). He makes the point that the affective or emotional properties of red are to a large extent programmed into the brain by evolution (red is universally a colour that alerts, perhaps because it is so different to the normal blue-green of the natural environment). And the subjective response to red is not only a result of programmed instincts, but also of individual associations and quirks. He concludes that qualia for redness are JUST those complexes of dispositions evoked by the perception of “red” light. To quote:

“You seem to be referring to a private, ineffable something-or-other in your mind’s eye, a private shade of homogeneous pink, but this is just how it seems to you, not how it is. That “quale” of yours is a character in good standing in the fictional world of your heterophenomenology but what it turns out to be in the real world in your brain is just a complex of dispositions.”

The phrase I have italicized astonishes me. “Just how it seems to you” is exactly what qualia refer to, the subjective individual experience of red. But apparently this is “Not how it is”, as presumably that is the set of brain reactions and instincts triggered (a complex of dispositions that can in principle be at least partially observable by another person).

But! Qualia ARE the subjective experience, not the objective dispositions of the brain. Qualia are observed from the inside and indeed are exactly “just how it seems to me”, not the chemical and electrical processes of the brain “observed from outside”. Here Dennett is essentially dismissing the whole experience of first person consciousness as “fictional” and what is real is the associated objectively observable phenomena.

He doubles down on this position by claiming that the qualophile will claim that the quale red could be changed without changing any of the associated dispositions. This is entirely beside the point. I would not make that claim, the inside and outside of something are not independent. But the fact that a change in the experience of a quale will likely be associated with some change in the brain functioning does not mean the first-person experience is a fiction (or non-existent) and all that is real is the third-person observations of brain states.

Now that he has concluded that qualia do not exist, it is not surprising that he further concludes that there is no hard problem of consciousness, and “philosophical zombies”, which are supposed to act like a human in every way while somehow lacking qualia, cannot exist. In his 1996 book (next on my reading list), David Chalmers argues that Dennett’s position is essentially a denial of consciousness and, perhaps jokingly, suggests that Dennett is a philosophical zombie.

Dennett spends quite a bit of time making the point that qualia are epiphenomenal in the philosophical sense that they are an effect which itself has no effects in the physical world. This implies that things would happen in exactly the same way without them. Hence there is no empirical reason for believing in them. His sleight of hand here is slip in the “empirical” which is a reference to external third-person observations. The first-person experience that we all have is completely dismissed. If anything, his argument is a valid argument that we cannot tell whether someone else is a zombie or not. But for him, the “not” is not an option because qualia have been shown by him not to exist.

To quote Dennett directly “Are zombies possible? They’re not just possible, they’re actual. We’re all zombies*. Nobody is conscious…..I can’t prove that no such sort of consciousness exists. I also cannot prove that gremlins don’t exist. The best I can do is show that there is no respectable motivation for believing in it.” The asterisk indicates a footnote in which Dennett says it would be an act of desperate intellectual dishonesty to quote this assertion out of context. I think I have provided enough context!

To respond: it may not be “respectable” in some academic philosophical circles, but first person consciousness is intrinsic to my entire experience of reality, including the objective third-person observations which Dennett thinks are the only real aspect of reality.

In a somewhat refreshing interlude in Chapter 13, Dennett addresses the reality of the sense of being a “self” and concludes that it is a brain construct. His arguments are an extrapolation from his discussions of brain processes with no apparent awareness of the fact that many people have had direct experience of “no-self”. He asks the question “are there conditions under which life goes on but no self emerges? Are there conditions under which more than oneself emerges? We can’t ethically conduct such experiments.” In fact, we can. Meditation, psychedelics, breath work and other practices can provide ethical experiments for altering brain states and consciousness. I have experienced the loss of a sense of self in meditative states, and I have experienced the emergence of multiple selves and radical changes in the sense of self while on psychedelic journeys. But that is for another post.

In the final chapter, Dennett attacks those who argue that its not possible to imagine how a software program running on a machine could become conscious. Dennett argues that any program complex enough to simulate conscious interaction with humans will be no different to humans (whose brain processes are all that is going on, and these are the equivalent of very complex programs). I remain totally unconvinced. He is completely dodging the hard question of the emergence of consciousness from non-conscious inputs. He also dismisses the possibility that it is impossible to imagine what its like to be a bat. Here, I am actually fairly sure Nagel was referring to the possibility of knowing (not imagining) what it was like to be a bat.

In conclusion, Dennett has a story which focuses mainly on how the brain creates the contents of consciousness. And for that topic, he does quote quite a bit of neuroscience research. But as the book was written in 1991 and there has been a huge increase in our understanding of brain processes in the decades since, this is not the book I would read for the neuroscience of how our brain processes perceptions for us to experience.

On the topic of consciousness itself, he really doesn’t explore any of the vast evidence on consciousness, altered states, psychedelics, meditation, breath work, etc. Dennett finishes the book claiming he has shown how consciousness is an illusion that can be explained in terms of unconscious events. Nope, not even close. As Annaka Harris has pointed out, consciousness is the one thing that can’t be an illusion – by definition. “An illusion can appear within consciousness, but you are either experiencing something or you’re not – consciousness is necessary for an illusion to take place.” Having just now looked at the Wikipedia article on Consciousness Explained, I am in full agreement with the critics it quotes as saying that “Dennett is denying the existence of subjective conscious states, while giving the appearance of giving a scientific explanation of them.” In summary, I found the book a tedious read, unconvincing, disappointing, and dated.

Here are links to my previous posts in this series on consciousness.

Anneka Harris on the fundamental mystery of consciousness Oct 6 2022

What is consciousness Aug 26 2022

Annaka Harris on the fundamental mystery of consciousness

Posted on October 6, 2022 by colinmathers

In my previous post on consciousness, I noted that the 2019 book Conscious: a guide to the fundamental mystery of the mind, by Annaka Harris, was a superb discussion of the various issues, evidence and theories about consciousness. Of the seven books on consciousness I listed in the previous post, hers is the only one to take into account insights derived from meditation, use of psychedelics, and of altered states of consciousness more generally. It is also the only one to review, fairly honestly as far as I can tell, most of the major approaches to understanding and explaining consciousness and to discuss their pros and cons rather than making a partisan case for one approach.

Harris starts by explaining what she means by the word “consciousness”. She basically takes the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s definition in his famous essay “What is it like to be a Bat?” and posits that an organism is conscious if there is something that it is like to be that organism. She says:

“Consciousness is experience itself , and it is therefore easy to miss the profound question staring us in the face in each moment : Why would any collection of matter in the universe be conscious ? We look right past the mystery as if the existence of consciousness were obvious or an inevitable result of complex life , but when we look more closely , we find that it is one of the strangest aspects of reality”

How does conscious experience arise out of non-sentient matter? This is the problem that the Australian philosopher David Chalmers famously termed the “ hard problem ” of consciousness. Harris also points to a related question: at what point do the “lights turn on” for some collections of matter in the universe? Presumably there is nothing that it is like to be a fertilized human egg cell, but at some point in the development of the foetus and its brain, experience apparently ignites.

In the second chapter Harris explores two related and important questions about consciousness:

In a system that we know has conscious experiences—the human brain—what evidence of consciousness can we detect from the outside?
Is consciousness essential to our behavior?

These questions lead Harris to the conclusion that (a) that both conscious and non-conscious states seem to be compatible with any behaviour and (b) that it may just be prejudice that makes us think that non-human living systems cannot be conscious. In the following Chapter she delves more deeply into the question of the extent to which consciousness plays a role in our behaviour.

She reviews experimental evidence which suggests that, at least for some types of behaviour and actions, the body-brain system has started the action before we are consciously aware of having to act. She concludes that our consciousness does not actually appear to be involved in much of our own behaviour, and this leads straight into the question of whether we have free will. The argument that conscious will is an illusion is further strengthened by the fact that the illusion of free will can be intentionally triggered and manipulated in experiments where there is not actually free will.

Harris then turns to the question of our experience of a “self” that is the subject of everything we experience. Is it possible to simply be aware of perceptions, feelings, thoughts etc without the sense of being a “self” who is aware of these things. Such an experience is not uncommon in meditation and in psychedelic experiences, and I can attest to this from personal experience, as can many other people.

In fact, research on brain functioning in people having psychedelic experiences has identified areas of the brain known as the default mode network which plays a key role in the sense of self. Researchers have found that during the psychedelic state there is significant deactivation of the default mode network, and this is strongly correlated with the experience of ego dissolution, or no-self.

Given that consciousness is the first-person experience of awareness, it seems obvious to me that first-person tools of investigation such as meditation and psychedelic experiences must be taken into account along with third-person observations of human functioning.

Harris then reviews “split-brain” studies, arguing that they shed light on both the concept of the self and on the malleability of consciousness. Split-brain experiments show that the part-brain without knowledge of the reason for a behaviour will invent a story to explain why the person is doing something. This suggests that maybe our sense of free will and decision making is a brain construct. Other experiments appear to show that each split brain has a separate centre of consciousness. There is not a single centre or “self”. Harris speculates that perhaps consciousness is not a “unitary” phenomenon but there may be flows of consciousness distributed across the brain and perhaps elsewhere in the body, and that these are “bound” into an apparent unitary “self” rather like disparate patchy sense inputs are bound into an apparent unitary experience.

Harris concludes that we can’t actually find reliable external evidence of consciousness, nor can we conclusively point to any specific function it serves. She raises the question of whether consciousness is “along for the ride” rather than playing a causal role in our functioning?

She then returns to the question of how and where to draw the line between conscious and non-conscious matter and suggests that perhaps consciousness is embedded in matter itself, as a fundamental property of the universe. This is a form of panpsychism and in Chapter 6 she explores the arguments for and against this.

Like many scientists, I have tended to dismiss panpsychism as hugely implausible, and this was one aspect of Ken Wilber’s view of reality that I found impossible to accept. Harris lays out an argument that it should at least be considered and does offer simpler solutions to important questions about consciousness. She finishes the chapter by saying:

“And, of course, the false conclusions drawn from a misunderstanding of panpsychism—that individual atoms, cells, or plants possess an experience comparable to that of a human mind, for instance—are often the very thing used to argue against it. Unfortunately, it seems quite hard for us to drop the intuition that consciousness equals complex thought. But if consciousness is in fact a more basic aspect of the universe than previously believed, that doesn’t suddenly give credence to your neighbor’s belief that she can communicate telepathically with her ficus tree. In actuality, if a version of panpsychism is correct, everything will still appear to us and behave exactly as it already does.”

I like Anneka Harris’ open-minded stance about these questions. Unlike many philosophers and neuroscientists who decide they know the answers and everyone else is wrong, Harris says:

My own sense of the correct resolution to the mystery of consciousness, whether or not we can ever achieve a true understanding, is still currently split between a brain-based explanation and a panpsychic one. But while I’m not convinced that panpsychism offers the correct answer, I am convinced that it is a valid category of possible solutions that cannot be as easily dismissed as many people seem to think. Unfortunately, it remains difficult for scientists to join the conversation without fear of jeopardizing their credibility.

She goes on later in the book to say:

Although I’m defending panpsychism as a legitimate category of theories about consciousness based on what we currently know, I am not closed to the possibility that we might discover, by some future scientific method, that consciousness does in fact exist only in brains. It’s hard for me to see how we could ever arrive at this understanding with any certainty, but I don’t rule it out. Nor am I discounting the possibility that consciousness is something we will never fully grasp.

In his article “Conscious Spoons, Really? Pushing Back against Panpsychism,” Anil Seth expresses a common view among neuroscientists that consciousness science has “moved on” from grappling with Chalmers’s “hard problem,” and thus from such “fringe” solutions as panpsychism. Unlike Anil Seth and Daniel Dennett (whose book I am reading now), Harris takes seriously the question of the nature of consciousness per se, the various hard problems, whereas they both duck these questions preferring to study the neural correlates of consciousness and the contents of consciousness.

In the final Chapter, Harris discusses how the mystery of consciousness is also intimately bound up with the mystery of time. That is something that has been very apparent to me from my experiences with meditation and grappling with the Buddhist understanding that the past and future do not exist here-now. Is there nothing but the present moment, does consciousness “move” through time, is time movement an illusion?

If you are looking for an easy-to-read book which does an excellent job of examining the major questions, the evidence, and the pros and cons of various views on the nature of consciousness, I highly recommend Anneka Harris’s short book. It has certainly opened my mind to a wider range of possibilities, and a realization of how the mystery of consciousness is intimately bound up with the mysteries of time, of free will, and of the nature of reality.

What is consciousness

Posted on August 26, 2022 by colinmathers

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been thinking more and more about the nature of consciousness. My Zen meditation practice basically involves letting go of thoughts, letting go of the self, and simply experiencing consciousness without content. I have direct experiences from my meditation practice, as well as a reasonably wide reading of Zen and Buddhist masters and their experiences and understanding of consciousness, self and reality. At times, I feel like I have had openings to experiences which have “enlightened” me about the nature of self, consciousness etc, but I have not really integrated these tastes of non-self into any sort of stable or mature understanding of reality.

I had read a few articles by philosophers who have explored the nature of consciousness, particularly the so-called hard problem of consciousness and last year read a review of a new book by Anil Seth which led me to think he had made advances from the neuroscience perspective.

Apart from my direct explorations through Zen meditation, breathwork and psychedelics, I also have worked with several Zen teachers and read extensively on consciousness in Buddhist literature and in the works of Ken Wilber, who has explored and mapped states and stages of consciousness in his writings. More recently, I read and reviewed Sam Harris’s book Waking Up, which also discusses the nature of consciousness and self.

So I decided I would read some of the key books and articles on consciousness from the philosophers and neuroscientists, to complement my experience and understanding gained from meditation and psychedelic explorations.

I bought the following books:

Anil Seth. Being You : A New Science of Consciousness. Faber and Faber (2021)
Peter Godfrey-Smith. Metazoa: animal minds and the birth of consciousness. William Collins (2020)
Harris, Annaka. Conscious: a brief guide to the fundamental mystery of the mind. Harper 2019. Kindle Edition.
David Lewis-Williams, David Pearce. Inside the Neolithic Mind: Consciousness, Cosmos, and the Realm of the Gods. Thames Hudson (2005)
David J. Chalmers The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. Oxford University Press 1996
Daniel Dennett. Consciousness Explained. Penguin (1993).
Derek Parfit. Reasons and Persons. Oxford University Press (1986)

Anil Seth is a neurologist, Peter Godfrey-Smith a biologist and philosopher of science. Annaka Harris is a science writer (fun fact: also the wife of Sam Harris). Lewis-Williams and Pearce are both archaeologists. The final three are all philosophers. I guess the other relevant discipline I am missing is artificial intelligence research. I’ve read a little in this area and have found it mostly irrelevant to the issues relating to consciousness that I am interested in, and tedious reading to boot.

I browsed Chalmers book on consciousness and discovered the entire book ignores the entire knowledge base on states of consciousness, meditation, nondual states, etc. As if it’s irrelevant. So I quickly browsed the books by the other two philosophers, and the book by Anil Seth the neurologist. Not a single mention of meditation, altered states, psychedelics. I had bigger problems with Seth’s ideas, but will leave that to a separate review.

My initial reaction was to dismiss the philosophers as inhabiting a limited sterile corner of academia ignoring large parts of human experience. But then realized if I did that, I would be no better than them.

Ken Wilber has gone down this same path of integrating Western psychology and philosophy with Eastern first-person methods and understanding and has been largely ignored by academia and philosophers. In part, because he does somewhat go over the top, and despite his focus on empirical methods, does seem to uncritically accept aspects of Tibetan Buddhism at more or less face value. Such as rebirth.

Sam Harris seems to get it more right. And his conclusions are very much aligned with mine. And even he gets dismissed by Western commentators as being arrogant. By telling them they cannot just critique from the outside, without trying the methods for themselves. So much for open-mindedness to all the relevant evidence.

For consciousness per se, which is a subjective experience, its clear that the objective methods of science are going to be at best marginally relevant. What is most relevant is the actual massive domain of experiences of consciousness. Particularly those focused not on the contents of consciousness (as the psychologists and neuroscientists like to do) but those focused on the exploration of consciousness per se when the contents are out of the way. The recent book by Anneka Harris is the only other one on my list above which examines what meditation tells us about consciousness. And when I started reading it, I found it a superb discussion of the various issues and theories about consciousness. So my next post will be a closer look at Harris’ book, and then I will dive into the philosophers.

Links to my later posts on consciousness are given below:

Anneka Harris on the fundamental mystery of consciousness Oct 6 2022

Consciousness Explained…..or Consciousness Ignored? Oct 16 2022

How psilocybin uncovered repressed trauma and healed my pain

Posted on February 24, 2022 by colinmathers

My experience at a psychedelic retreat

I was in high school during the 1960s and psychedelics were illegal by the time I started university in 1971. Although I was fascinated by writings on psychedelics by Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts and others, and the experiences recounted by various friends, my fear of adverse outcomes led me to avoid trying LSD when the opportunity presented.

In 2019, I read several accounts of people who had attended legal psychedelic retreats in the Netherlands and elsewhere seeking to facilitate personal development. I also read Michael Pollan’s best-selling book on the current psychedelic renaissance, Changing Your Mind. I was searching for new priorities and purposes in life after divorce and retirement. Maybe a psychedelic retreat could provide some clarity?

So I decided to attend a psychedelic retreat and this is an account of my experiences. They led in an altogether unexpected direction and led to the resolution of repressed trauma that I had been unaware of.

Legal retreats in the Netherlands

The Netherlands fully legalized the psilocybin-containing truffle form of magic mushrooms in 2019 and a number of organizations started to provide psychedelic retreats designed to facilitate personal growth, emotional breakthroughs and spiritual development. There is growing evidence for the transformative potential of a well-prepared psychedelic experience in a safe and supportive environment (see for example Madsen et al 2020, Aday et al. 2020, Kettner et al. 2021). . A new wave of research is also finding that psychedelics can offer significant therapeutic benefits for people suffering with depression, trauma or addiction (see here and here).

The Synthesis retreat centre in Amsterdam has been running 3 day retreats since April 2018. After speaking to several retreat facilitators at Synthesis, I decided to enrol for their first five-day retreat in October 2019. This would include two psilocybin ceremonies on the second and fourth day. Before enrolment, I undertook an interview and a health screening process, similar to that being used in clinical studies of psilocybin.

I also accepted an invitation to participate in a research study being carried out by the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London to investigate changes in wellbeing associated with the retreat process. This involved answering questionnaires at six different points in time; before, during and after attending the retreat, as well as wearing a bracelet during the retreat days to monitor various physiological variables.

Synthesis puts a strong emphasis on preparation before the retreat, support from facilitators during the retreat, and integration of the experience and its lessons into daily life after the retreat. The three-week preparation phase included weekly group Zoom calls and preparatory activities including journaling, meditation and the development of three intentions for the retreat. These intentions play a crucial role as the expectations of the psychedelic voyager usually have a strong influence on what is experienced. My two main intentions were: to reach closure on the end of my marriage, and to clarity on my goals and priorities in retirement. My third intention was more of a wishful hope that I would experience the ego-dissolution that psilocybin can cause, and that I had previously experienced several times when practicing Zen meditation.

The first day at the retreat – flight instructions

The retreat was held in a converted church in near Amsterdam, now decorated in a mix of Buddhist and shamanic symbolism. There were around ten of us, together with five guides. We came from Europe, UK and North America and ranged in age from around twenty up to me in my sixties. Most of us had not had any previous experience with psilocybin.

Each of us was paired with an individual guide who would help us prepare for and integrate our psychedelic experience. My guide emphasised the importance of being open to the experience and not resisting it. He recommended that I work on this in the breathwork sessions later that day and the next morning.

The guides also gave us “flight instructions”: advice on the process, what to expect, and what to do if the experience became uncomfortable. They emphasised the importance of our three intentions in creating expectations that would influence psychedelic experience and maximize its potential benefits. We were given a mantra “Trust, let go and be open” to use when we recognized that we were resisting. The first ceremony would be a medium dose of psilocybin followed during the second ceremony by a deeper dive if requested.

First ceremony

The second day started with silent meditation and then a guided breathwork session to further prepare us for the afternoon ahead. The breathwork surprised me by releasing some quite strong emotions, resulting in tears and bodily shaking, and I used the mantra to stay open to the experience.

After a light lunch, we prepared the truffle tea. We ground up truffles and ginger, then added boiling water to make a ginger tea. Mattresses were arranged in a large circle in the ceremony room, each with pillows and a gravity blanket. When everyone was settled on their mattresses, we were served our truffle tea. I drank it all and then ate all the ground truffles left in the cup. I put on my blindfold mask, lay down on my back and covered myself with the gravity blanket as music from a curated playlist started to play. I was to lie there for the next five hours, apart from one trip to the toilet.

After maybe 15 or 20 minutes, I started to notice light and patterns. As I looked more closely these would break up and extend into intricate moving geometrical patterns or distinctive rainbow bands of colours shimmering and rippling. Every time I looked at something it would expand into fractals, or geometric patterns of immense detail and dynamics. I could drill down into these dynamic patterns and every level would expand.

And then my mind was totally caught up in the music. The music was much more than sound, it was colour, emotions, patterns, and very real and very solid. I experienced tones or chords as solid objects, that changed and grew with the music, building dynamic structures.

As the afternoon went on, the music and the visual patterns became less distracting. I started to get visions and to experience changes in my sense of self. I saw my parents and I was a child. I experienced myself as other people and even as four separate people.

I rummaged through the traumas of my life, revisiting periods when I was with my first wife and now-estranged daughters. I also revisited periods in my second long-term relationship. I re-experienced the love that I felt at those times, as well as the grief and sadness at the failures of those relationships. Curiously, the end of my most recent marriage did not come up.

When eventually I surfaced from my inner voyage and took the mask off, I looked at my hand. It looked gaunt and wrinkled and was going black and blue as I looked at it. When I went to the toilet and looked in the mirror, I saw an old man, a stranger, looking back at me.

I went back to the mat and kept drifting in and out of a meditative state, seeing difficult times in my life as if watching a movie, and still avoiding feelings. Towards evening, I went outside in the wind and watched the leaves and trees against the sky. I was cold but invigorated and feeling somewhat more open and connected.

Uncovering repressed feelings about my estranged daughters

On the third day of the retreat, I had a one-on-one session with my guide to understand and integrate the previous day’s experience, and to discuss strategies and intentions for the next day’s ceremony.

I was surprised that my trip had not focused on recent issues, but on the trauma and grief dating from the estrangement of my two daughters twenty years previously. I separated from my first wife in 1992 when my daughters were five and nearly eight. We divorced the following year and reached an agreement under which I had the girls about one-third of the time over the next seven years.

When I told my ex-wife in 1999 that I was going to work for a UN organization in Geneva for a year, she and my daughters refused any further contact. I have not seen them again since late 1999. Despite my close relationship with the girls, she convinced them that I was seeking to avoid my child support obligations. My efforts to show that I was not avoiding child support or seeking to avoid it were fruitless.

I was close to my daughters until they cut off contact, and the estrangement was hard for me to accept. I found a psychologist in Geneva and saw him for two or three years, reaching a point where I felt I had come to an acceptance of the situation and dealt with the grief and loss.

More recently I started counselling with another therapist about current issues and some of the emotions around the estrangement of the girls came up again. She spent time helping me to address that, and I thought I had reached acceptance of the situation and was no longer troubled by it.

Lying in bed falling asleep after the first ceremony, I became aware of the presence of buried feelings about my daughters’ estrangement. It felt as though they were encased in thick armour, like a spherical steel container. During the next day and night, I was always aware these encased feelings. It seemed like they were partly buried and partly protruding into my consciousness.

I very much wanted to get rid of this armour, to release whatever was inside. If I was ever going to explore what was buried deep inside my mind, this might just be the best place to do it. I determined to take advantage of the higher dose of truffles planned for the second ceremony to do this.

Second ceremony

We prepared the tea starting at 12 noon, this time with a higher dose of truffles. Almost immediately I was engrossed by extraordinarily intricate dynamic mandalas of bright lights, crystals, diamonds, endlessly unfolding, filling all space. I went deep into this space and was floating in front of an enormous spaceship. I felt I had a huge crushing weight on my chest and found that I stopped breathing unless I consciously took breaths. For a while I was worried that I would die if I forgot to breathe. Then I realized that I had guides sitting beside me and a medic nearby. They would notice if I wasn’t breathing, so I relaxed and stopped worrying.

The deep black space then transformed into an extraordinarily beautiful kaleidoscopic space filled with endlessly changing crystalline lights and colours. This went on so long that I started to worry. I wanted to go deeper and get past the light show to “important” stuff. I became very restless and repeatedly pulled off my blindfold.

My guide asked if I wanted more truffles and I said yes. After taking a second dose, about half the amount of the first, I put my mask and headphones back on. Now the music dominated and took me with it, and I started resenting it. I realized I was resisting, and said to myself several times “It’s me, don’t blame the music”. I then had a series of quite intense visionary experiences which became increasingly emotional. Some of these involved dramatic changes in the sense of self. I did not resist but leaned into the uncomfortable emotions that arose.

I saw my girls as they were when they were last with me. I experienced an intense feeling of loss and grief. Over and over, I said to myself “I miss you” as the feeling intensified. And at some point, I let go of the young girls and experienced the presence of my daughters as adults now. The grief transformed into love and I started crying and shaking.

One of the guides had noticed how overwhelmed with emotion I was, and sat next to me and held my hand, and his simple presence reassured me and encouraged me to open to my feelings.

After some time, I had an extended vision of the evolution of the universe, the earth, life, my ancestors and my place in the chain of life with my children following. And I saw myself getting very old and dying. I did not experience the dying itself but did experience that I was gone and that life goes on. And how crucial love is to that journey.

I was the last one left in the room by the time evening came. And still in an altered state. People came back into the room for a final closing and sharing circle. I was still there. Hadn’t left the room for close to 8 hours, apart from 2 trips to the toilet. On my second trip to the toilet, I looked in the mirror. Unlike in the first ceremony this time I saw a strong and healthy man looking back at me.

Integration

On the last day of the retreat I had another one-on-one session with my guide. I realized I had suppressed the feelings of loss, probably a decade ago, because they were too painful and had genuinely thought that I had accepted the situation. But in reality I was still caught up in the need to get the girls to realize they have been misled about me. Letting go of that need freed me from the anger and resentment I had been stuck in. My guide advised me to practice connecting with the deepest parts of myself and experience and express my love for all my children. That love is unconditional and does not depend on what the girls might believe. I don’t need to demand a response and the armour is gone.

We had weekly group video sessions over the next three weeks with the Synthesis guides to support and guide the integration process.

Two years later

After the retreat, I wrote letters to my daughters. I enclosed documentation of the child support payments made over the years. They can examine the facts if they want to. I no longer worry about what they might believe about me. I continue to write to them from time to time, so they know about my life and that I think about them and am open to communication.

I was somewhat disappointed that I did not have a profound no-self experience at the retreat or come home with clarity on what I wanted to do in retirement. It was not until around ten months later, when I volunteered to participate in a research study on the association of positive outcomes with psilocybin-induced experiences, that I realized that I had indeed had an extraordinary outcome, though not one I had anticipated. The pain and trauma that I had repressed, and did not know was still there, has now been replaced by openly experienced love accompanied by some sadness. Two psilocybin journeys in a supportive environment with appropriate integration has made a profound and long-lasting change, a change that I was not able to achieve through several years of psychological counselling. I feel like I’ve taken a very heavy weight off my mind and that has been incredibly liberating.

Research has shown that psychedelics have the capacity not only to retrieve past traumas, but to simultaneously dampen an overactive emotional response when it is relived. Even so, I doubt I would have had the courage to press through the resistance and repression if I had taken psilocybin on my own. My confidence that I was in safe surroundings with expert guides to assist if I got into difficulties allowed me to drop my resistance and surrender to the experience.

I have spent some time thinking about whether to share this deeply personal experience but decided it might be helpful to others to document my experience of the potential of psychedelics to resolve past traumas and issues.

Near-Death Experiences – Part 1

Posted on January 29, 2022 by colinmathers

I’ve had a number of near-death experiences over the years. Almost all of these were the result of sheer stupidity doing risky things. I recently read an account by someone who survived having seen certain death approaching. That and other recent circumstances have got me thinking about my own experiences and meditating on death and dying more generally.

In this post I remember two incidents in which I was knocked unconscious and would never have known about it if I had died. These experiences had a far greater impact on me and my feelings about death and dying than any of the incidents where I realized that death was a probable outcome.

In the early 2000s, I was in South Africa for three weeks as one of the staff for a WHO global training course. The course was being held in a small game park and resort, which was closed to general visitors. There was a water slide which was also closed, but several of us persuaded the staff to open it one lunch time for us. The water slide was a fully enclosed tube with water running through it which ended over a small swimming pool about 2 metres deep. My friend J and I were the first two there and each did a slide down the tube. I sat up in the tube and found there was too much friction so that I went down quite slowly.

For my second slide, I lay down completely flat in the tube. I do now remember the initial moments, going quite fast and bouncing around in the tube. I must have hit my head on the side of the tube on the way down because I was unconscious when I entered the water and went to the bottom of the pool.

J had gone down before me and was already walking back up the path to the top of the slide. Halfway up he looked back and saw me lying on the bottom of the pool. He initially thought I was clowning around and kept walking. But when he looked back again, I was still in the bottom of the pool. He ran back down to pull me out of the water. I was bleeding heavily from a cut over one eye, and he told me later he thought my skull was broken and my brains were coming out. I regained consciousness a few minutes later, I don’t know whether he did resuscitation or I started breathing on my own. I asked him what happened and where was I. When he told me we were in South Africa, I was astonished. I had no memory of going to South Africa or any idea why I would be there. I was as astonished as if someone had just told me I was in Siberia. I knew who I was and who J was, but I had no memory of anything that had happened in the last few weeks.

An ambulance came, and I was taken to the nearest town with a hospital, where they took X-rays of my head and neck. And debated for some time whether the signs of fractures in my neck vertebrae were new or old (they were old). I was fitted with a neck brace and they stitched up the split skin over one eye. My amnesia gradually disappeared over a period of a day or so, until eventually I could remember the initial part of going down the slide and starting to oscillate. But the actual blow to the head and the aftermath before I came to has remained a blank.

It was an existential shock to realize that if I had not been pulled out, but drowned, I would never have known. I would not have known I was about to die. Amnesia meant my mind was a blank in the minutes leading up to possible death. It was profoundly disturbing to realize it was entirely possible I would die without ever knowing about it. And it continues to be a realization that I keep revisiting.

I also realized that the state of being dead is nothing to fear. I experienced “not being there” in any form and its nothing at all to be afraid off. You don’t exist, and there is nothing to experience the not existing.

The second experience occurred a couple of years later in Geneva. I had left work to ride to the gym on my bicycle. I was riding in the bus lane on a road which went down a long slope from the World Health Organization. I was riding quite fast and became worried that a bus might be coming up behind me. I looked back and in doing so steered the bike into the gutter. I hit the gutter at speed and went over the front handlebars.

That is the last memory I have until I suddenly became aware that I was on my bicycle and covered in blood. I was bleeding quite profusely from skin loss on legs and arms and riding in heavy traffic. I had no idea where I was at all but knew from my injuries that I must have been in some sort of accident. I got off the bike and rang my wife on my mobile. I explained I had been in an accident and had no idea where I was. She told me to go to the nearest street corner and tell her the names of the streets. I did that and it turned out I was near the main train station about three and a half kilometres from where the accident occurred.

She came and got me and took me to the hospital, where they diagnosed concussion (duhh!), cleaned and bandaged my wounds, and kept me overnight under observation. When I returned to work and told colleagues what had happened, one of them told me he had seen me on my bicycle riding in the traffic and had not noticed anything unusual. Apparently I am capable of riding in traffic while unconscious. Or perhaps conscious but without any memory-retention ability. I could easily have ridden in front of a car and been killed. As with the first experience, if that had happened I would never have known.

I guess death was a more certain possible outcome for the South African experience. If my friend had not seen me on the bottom of the pool and got me out in time, I would have almost certainly died. This was a much more traumatic experience (after the event) than other “near-death” experiences where I was conscious and realized I was likely to die. I’ll write about them in a later post.

I recently read a blog post by Nathan Hohipua in which he argues that it is impossible to (truly) imagine our deaths, and that the only possible attitude towards death is one of anxiety. He claims that “The light of consciousness cannot really, truly imagine its own extinction” and concludes that “Anxiety is the only possible response to death because it’s just what it is to contemplate something that literally can’t be contemplated because it is the end of all possibility of contemplation.“

I think he is wrong in generalizing his own inability to imagine the state of being dead to others. In the waterslide accident, I truly feel that I came back from an experience identical to that of being dead. No memory, no awareness, no experience, nothing. If I had not come back, I would never have known it. That realization has been profoundly disturbing. But the state of being dead? I experienced “not being there” in any form and its nothing at all to be afraid off. You don’t exist, and there is nothing to experience the not existing. I may be missing something, but I don’t have any problem accepting that there will be a future point after which I simply don’t exist. Its exactly the same as before the point in time at which I started to exist (some time after conception). I have not existed for billions of years and I will also not exist for billions more.

The process of gradually losing function and experiencing pain and possibly loss of mental functioning, whether through ageing or illness, that is a completely different issue. And something that does worry me. I am working on accepting and letting go of the mental drama about it. And eventually when needed, do some contingency planning and prepare a living will. Nathan Hohipua says that if someone tells you they have completely accepted their death, they are deceiving themselves. That likely is true in some cases. And might be true if you are referring to the process leading up to the point of death. But completely untrue for me, if you are referring to the state of being dead. I’ve experienced it, and its nothing to be afraid of.

Breath: the new science of a lost art —- a review

Posted on January 24, 2022 by colinmathers

In two earlier posts about breathwork (here and here), I described my experiences with Wim Hof breathwork and transformational breathwork. More recently I have done a three-day holotropic breathwork retreat and a workshop on transformational breathwork, which gave me the chance to experience a range of breathing techniques.

A friend recommended I read Breath: the new science of a lost art, by James Nestor. Published in 2020, this book became a New York Times bestseller. It describes Nestor’s 10-year journey exploring various forms of breathwork and the scientific research about them.

The first half of the book examines breathing methods for improving health. Nestor focuses extensively on nose breathing versus mouth breathing and on various “under-breathing” techniques which are said to make dramatic differences to chronic lung conditions such as asthma and emphysema, as well as promoting general good health and increased endurance and athletic performance. Nestor spends some time discussing his experiment in solely mouth-breathing for two weeks (his nostrils were physically blocked for the duration) followed by two weeks of solely nose breathing. He taped his lips shut at night so he would not mouth-breath while asleep. He took extensive measurements of physiological indicators and other factors, such as time spent snoring. Mouth breathing resulted in substantially worse health and mental states, as well as higher blood pressure and heart rates. Nose breathing resulted in dramatic improvements. He also reviews a lot of research and ancient knowledge supporting these conclusions.

James Nestor having his nasal passages examined

This half of the book was fascinating, and I’ll certainly experiment with some of the techniques. Although he warned that breathing methods will not cure cancer or make an embolism go away, this part of the book still reminded me of books I’ve read where the author claims their diet, exercise, or whatever, will cure all your health problems and turn you into a high-functioning human.

The second part of the book looked at breathing techniques which are more extreme and claimed to be radically transformative. These include various forms of breathwork which affect the autonomous nervous system and can improve immune system function and the ability to withstand extreme cold. Wim Hof breathwork is a well-known form of this and Nestor spends quite some time reviewing studies of it, and investigating the biological mechanisms involved. He does practice some Wim Hof breathwork with an instructor, but as far as I could tell, did not actually include cold exposure training. He much more briefly discusses holotropic breathwork and his discussions with Stan Grof and other holotropic breathwork instructors. He did one holotropic breathwork session early in his exploration of breathing methods and did not experience much at all. He is dismissive of other participants who had dramatic experiences, noting that their breathing did not appear much more intense than his and that their experience came on very quickly. He largely dismisses the effects of holotropic breathwork as psychosomatic (due to set or setting rather than the breathing technique).

I was disappointed in the inadequacy of his approach to understanding it. My experience is that the results of holotropic and other forms of breathwork is very dependent on your willingness to open to rather than resist the experience (yes, set is important). To a greater extent than in psychedelic drug trips, the holotropic breather is largely in control the intensity of the experience. In my first transformational breathing session, I held back from allowing the bodily energy and emotions full expression due to embarrassment, but later I found that I would very rapidly start to experience powerful emotions and bodily energy in a breathwork session. Nestor’s description struck me as that of someone who had held back in their first and only holotropic session.

A third type of breathwork covered in the second part of the book involves drastically increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air breathed. Normal outdoor air concentration of CO₂ is around 0.04% and carbon dioxide therapy involves breathing a mixture of 15-35% CO₂with normal air. Although blood oxygen levels do not change significantly, the very high concentration of CO₂ induces an intense fear of not being able to take another breath and arises from chemoreceptors in the brainstem. It is a much more primitive and uncontrollable biological reaction than fear mediated by the amygdala. I recently met someone who told me he had purchased a cylinder of CO₂ and was experimenting with breathing mixtures involving around 7% CO₂. He claimed that this invoked a very intense fear of death which enabled him to break through to deep unconscious fears and address them. At the time I had not read this book and thought he was a nutcase. Nestor claims that this form of conscious breathwork (a much more intense version of breath-holding practice) allows the practitioner to develop much greater chemoreceptor flexibility and tolerance. In effect, it vaccinates the practitioner against excessive stress responses to events in their life. Hmm, its an extremely unpleasant experience, and I think I will pass.

James Nestor breathing high concentration of carbon dioxide

While I was disappointed at Nestor’s lack of interest in exploring holotropic and related forms of transformational breathwork, I did learn a lot and enjoyed reading the book overall. I can see why it was a bestseller in the pandemic period, when no doubt many people were stuck in lockdown with time to experiment. Anyway, I’m heading to the bathroom now to shave off my moustache so I can tape my mouth shut tonight.

	colinmathers on Competing in Powerlifting afte…
	My Irish Palatine an… on Thomas Wilson – convict…
	Zeno on What proportion of the populat…
	colinmathers on What proportion of the populat…
	Zeno on What proportion of the populat…

Mountains and rivers

Explorations by Colin Mathers

Category Archives: Altered States