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Dear Pat:
The following notes have been written as part of an effort to
gain some clarity, to see some structure in the confusing variety of
things that are nowadays said about consciousness. As far as I am
concerned, it has been quite useful writing them. First, they sort of
give a map which can guide further search along different lines. I
had Jed Harris read them and he made many interesting comments,
several of which I have included in these notes.
I purposefully refrained from explaining many of the issues,
even from being exhaustive or from giving precise references. This is
a first map and I have sacrificed detail as well as rigor for the
sake of encompassing an overall view. Otherwise, I could have
elaborated much longer on some of the issues; several of the issues,
for instance the review of contemporary efforts by psychologists to
create a theory of consciousness, could be the subject of a paper.
Also, I could provide the precise references for all the
authors quoted, if you are interested in it.
But I'd prefer to have first your reaction to these very
sketchy notes, before I make the effort of making them more coherent
and self-contained.
AN HISTORICAL PREVIEW.
I experience great difficulty in formulating what the issues
about consciousness are. The reason for this is that the field is in
a messy state right now, despite -or perhaps because- of the efforts
that many researchers have lately dedicated to it.
The study of consciousness is nothing new. Many of the oldest
texts known to us are dedicated to it. But the ways of approaching a
subject are -as Kuhn has pointed out- inseparable of a socio-cultural
context. In our scientific culture, there are several avenues to the
study of the mind. And there are the practicioners too; with or
without university degrees.
Before Freud, only philosophers were supposed to be
interested in the mind (but there also were the underground
practicioners and students, as we now know). With Freud, modern
psychology and psychiatry are born, so there is a new set of people
who are concerned with it. And there is a new, acceptable set of
practicioners; I view the relationship between psychology and
psychiatry very much like that between biology and medicine. The
first serious effort to uncover the knowledge of the old,
underground, unrecognized practicioners is made by Jung, who came to
them as a result of his practicing experience. (However, the mystical
tradition seems to have been a major influence in Freud as well.)
Another set of people interested in the mind have been the
logicians. However, they have been concerned with the purely formal
aspects of its workings, namely with correct reasoning and thought.
The nature of the thought acts, and the question "what is
conciousness" was not part of their discipline. The question of
whether consciousness can be accounted for in formal terms is one of
the big open questions, if not the main one.
Gestalt psychology and gestalt therapy originate from
Phenomenology. As i do not know as yet anything about Gestalt, I will
skip this important development for the time being.
The next development is cybernetics, or the science of
comunication and control in the animal and the machine, as Wiener
called it. It is the first -and so far the most significant-
breakthrough towards understanding man as a machine. The subsequent
technological inventions, and especially the advent of computers,
fosters the faith in the thesis that animals are machines, i.e. that
man can be accounted for in mechanistic terms - at least in the
formal aspects of its organization, since quantum mechanics has
barren the road to any ultimate description of nature in mechanistic
terms. I view this as the 20'th century version of the mechanistic
credo of the 19'th century.
Since Wiener, there are several new sets of scientists who
approach the mind from the point of view of their disciplines:
neurophysiologists, electronics technicians, engineers, etc.
Turing bridges the gap between the formal study of thought
(logic) and cybernetics. And he advocates that all mental activity
-which he sub-summes under the term "intelligence"- can be programmed
into the machine. From there the field of artificial intelligence
develops. I think that it deserves some consideration what the exact
claim of Turing is, and what is the credo of artificial intelligence;
I will discuss this separately so as not to destroy the continuity of
these thoughts. Let me just say for the moment that here we come to
terms with the same big open question I already mentioned. Namely,
can consciousness be accounted for in formal terms? If yes, build up
a rudimentary conscious machine or give conclusive evidence that it
can theoretically be built. If not, prove why not.
A related issue can be expressed in the question: how can one
determine whether a system is conscious within a "Turing test"?
I have intentionally postponed to discuss what do we mean by
consciousness. I want to discuss it later, because that seems to be
one of the main sources of confusion: we don't even know what
consciousness is! But I am not going astray from current scientific
practice if I beg this question: many prestigious scientific writers
like, for instance, Wooldridge, do just the same, when they discuss
consciousness. By the way, Wooldridge's "The Machinery of the Brain"
is in my opinion representative of the "new mechanicism" I have
referred to before. All he manages to say about conciousness is that
it might come to be explained in the "machinistic" view, that he does
not know what it is, but that it might be much more a "window" than a
control instance, and he argues that point. So he is focusing on the
issue of "free will", which I think is indeed very related to
consciousness.
It seems to me that Wooldridge's book is representative of
what a certain scientific paradigm has to say about the mind, even
though it was written 10 years ago. Artificial intelligence has not
fullfilled its promises; after its initial success in mechanizing
some thought processes, progress in AI has been quantitative rather
than qualitative. (Though I should make two exceptions to the last
comment: Winograd's "world model" paradigm and the emerging
"extensible interpreter" paradigm (frames, SMALLTALK) seem to be
major advances in AI). I also feel very unsatisfied with the efforts
of the psychologists to explain human memory in terms of what might
by now be called the computer paradigm.
What I have briefly sketched might appear to be essentially
all that has been happening in the study of the mind - and we are
stuck if that is true. But I think we are not. Some other
developments have taken place in the last decade, but they have gone
almost unnoticed by the scientific community, since the impulses came
from the practicioners and they did not challenge any existing
theories, but rather reflected total bewilderment. I will try to
sketch this.
The most significant impulse comes -initially- from the
extensive use of psychodelic drugs in the sixties for purposes of
therapy, research and individual exploratory experiences. It should
not surprise us that data coming from that source would have caused
scientists to focus on consciousness: for a function is not properly
understood until it is pushed to its limits, until it is observed
under abnormal conditions, etc. Conciousness is so much taken for
granted in our everyday experience, that medern thinking has been
barely aware of its problematics. Most affected by the data coming
from those experiences were people related, in one way or another, to
the practice of psychiatry or psychotherapy. The reason is evident.
They were those who had the best access to people's accounts of their
own experiences and also -incidentally- those who were better
prepared to relate those data to other sources.
(I owe to Jed Harris the remark that Phenomenology is a major
exception to what I say in the last two paragraphs.)
Their search for explanations of the new data lead many of
these people along a strange path, to older and always older texts;
"the older they were the more relevant" as someone said in a joke.
Initially they found that religious symbology was helping them
understand their patients' experiences better than modern psychology.
Later some began to understand Eastern religions from a completely
new perspective. And they also discovered the relevance of the
doctrines of many old so-called "esoteric" traditions, as well as
their intriguing convergence.
Only very recently, i. e. in the last two years, do we find
some clarity in that confusion, while the underlying ideas become
available to a greater number of people. Naranjo argues the
fundamental unity of all religions and esoteric traditions. Ornstein
proposes to study consciousness experimentally through the
measurement of brain waves, presents a rudimentary, tentative
paradigm for a theory of consciousness and argues that the techniques
and exercises of the so-called esoteric traditions are essentially
aimed at de-automatizing conciousness. Tart attempts to formalize the
notion of "states of consciousness". Last month researchers at SRI
succeed at implementing the first mind-computer communication system!
At the last annual meeting of the AAASc. there is a two day session
dedicated to the study of consciousness with Ornstein and Tart as
featured speakers and an attendance of 750.
[I owe to Jed Harris the observation that a rather complex
-perhaps vague, but solid enough to be useful- model is implied in
the idea that the disciplines and exercises of the esotheric
traditions are techniques for de-automatizing consciousness. The
underlying common idea of all those techniques seems to be to force
awareness onto consciousness, i.e. to force consciousness to include
itself. What effects this may have is anybody's guess - but it seems
that they are always the same, as we may infer from the intriguing
unity of the different traditions. Thus, we find that this forced
self-re-programming perhaps leads to a fixpoint of the system: and
there might be a connection between this idea and Scott's models of
computation. See also the anotherremark below.]
Somewhat earlier, i.e. in the late sixties, I can think of
two persons who were somehow precursors of the developments just
sketched. Allan Watts convincingly argued that the Eastern religions
were not the equivalent of our religion but of our psychotherapy. And
Lilly published in 1967 "Programming and Meta-programming in the
Human Bio-computer". Lilly's theory was very especulative, but it
seems that it contained the right ideas, since it is having very much
influence in later authors like Tart. Lilly's paradigm views man as
an hierarchical "bio-computer" with 9 levels of control, some of
which are called programming or meta- programming levels; the last
level is "unknown", so as to leave the system open. Lilly was
actively engaged in LSD research and he conceived his theory as a
psychotherapeutical tool. No proofs are given. However, it now seems
that his basic paradigm will be around for a while.
ON CIRCULARITY.
A somewhat separate set of efforts has been undertaken by
some people around Heinz von Foerster: Maturana and Varela,
biologists, Lofgren, logician, Gunther, philosopher, and some others.
The common theme of these is the concern with circularity or
self-reference as an inescapable property of nature. Spencer-Brown
focuses on the same issue and develops a very basic mathematical
calculus which he claims to underly all thinking; he says it is the
hidden arithmetics of Boolean algebra. Spencer-Brown explicitly says
that he developed his calculus in the process of exploring his own
mind and he claims anybody can use it for that purpose. He has been
closely associated with Laing. The theme of circularity is central to
Laing as well; in "Knots", for instance, he lays bare the formal
structure of many of the loops most commonly found in people's minds.
These circular structures are self-preserving, or ultra-stable; hence
the difficulty we experience in re-programming our consciousness.
Some people claim that a new paradigm is being born in
science. Varela presents this view in an as yet unpublished paper.
What is central to all these different ideas is that circularity -far
from being shunned- is made to the turning stone of all thinking.
Scientific paradigms are self-validating and self-perpetuating, as
Kuhn noticed. So are social, political, economical systems, as we
very well know by now (Marx was very clear about this fact, but
non-Marxist Western thinking has been strangely un-aware of it). And
so is our consciousness of the world, what we take to be "reality",
as Castaneda holds. So are also biological systems; Maturana and
Varela postulate circularity as the only essential charachteristic of
life and try to base biological theory on that foundation.
Anthropologists have previously recognized the vanity of any attempts
to understand -even to describe- another culture from without. I
think one of the most important by-products of such a paradigm -if it
ever develops and attains vigency- is that it can provide us with a
better frame of mind to live in a divided world; perhaps the only
frame of mind which could prevent global war.
[Another remark of Jed Harris: the above ideas are related to
Quine's "radical indeterminacy of translation", something I never
heard of.]
Lofgren results show that the concepts of complete
self-reproduction and complete self-explanation are independent from
ordinary scientific reasoning. Specifically, he shows that it is
consistent with and independent of the von Neumann-Bernays-Goedel set
theory, but that it would contradict theories containing the axion of
restriction. I don't understand myself the consequences of this
result, but I'd guess they are interesting with respect to the
possibility of providing rigorous foundations for a paradigm of
self-reference.
[I owe the following remark to Jed Harris: a typeless model
for the lambda calculus has been developed by Scott and it provides
probably the single most important advance in formal semantics in the
last several years; this, together we Scott's ideas of fixpoints, is
likely to be the best handle on the problems of self-reference. For
consciousness, the convergency properties of self-re-writing systems
should be important.]
***************
The above very sketchy and incomplete review was intended to
show some of the developments that have been taking place lately,
especially on the local scene (with the proliferation of scientific
information, science is becoming more parrochial than we are normally
willing to accept).
Confessedly, the above paragraphs are as scattered as the
field itself is at the moment. But writing them has helped me to gain
some clarity about the issues.
SOME CURRENT ISSUES.
First, we find that present day psychotherapy is lacking a
scientific foundation; indeed, it is far apart from any commonly
accepted scientific theories, and -what is worse- the gap is
increasing. The reason for it is not hard to guess; the "new
mechanicism" -which might be a satisfying intellectual exercise, or
"headtrip"- is USELESS for any practical endeavor. Cyril Burt has
said it well:
"And so we arrive at the current conception of the brain as a
kind of computer, and of human beings as mere conscious automata. "If
you think we are waxworks" said Tweedledum to Alice, "you ought to
pay." And contemporary psicology has had to pay a heavy price for
adhering to this mechanistic doctrine. It makes nonsense, not only of
parapsychology, but (as practical psychologists have been long
protesting) of every branch of applied psychology - criminology,
psychotherapy, educational and vocational guidance, and of all moral
or aesthetic aspirations and values."
(Quoted in Koestler's "The Roots of Coincidence", which I
have begun to read after the foregoing pages were written.)
It seems to me that the ideas anticipated in Lilly's
"Programming and Metaprogramming..." are proving functional as a
basic, praxis oriented psychological paradigm. In this view, the
brain is considered as a computer and the mind as its software. Thus,
within restrictions imposed by the nature of the hardware, the mind
programs the body, and we have the ability to re-program our
software. This re-programming, however, is a fairly difficult
endeavor. It is the aim of all psychotherapy, education and religion.
In order to achieve some re-programming, we need to become conscious
of its present workings. Thus we find (for instance in Jung) that the
aim of psychotherapy is sometimes defined as an expansion of
conciousness, and that one of its results is an increased sense of
freedom.
Another of Lilly's basic ideas is expressed in the motto:
"What I believe is true, is true or becomes true within limits to be
determined experiencially. This limits are again beliefs to be
transcended.", which heads one of his later books. This view, which
he does not bother to prove formally, appears to be related to: 1)
the self-validating nature of belief systems; 2) the aspect of
consciousness as a belief system; 3) the intriguing nature of the
commitment required for any effective psychotherapeutical work. This
issues are indeed related. The commitment or surrender to a system is
an essential, though often hidden premise, of psychotherapy; in many
psychotherapeutical disciplines this commitment is not required, but
it is brought about experientially, by creating a world first and
letting an interpretation emerge from the common experiential
background (an idea which we also find in Castaneda's development as
a sorcerer's apprentice).
IMPORTANCE OF A THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
A theory of consciousness should at least provide a framework
for understanding the interrelationships between beliefs, experience,
awareness and sense of freedom, as we find them in present day
psychotherapy. I think it should also provide us with a tool for
action.
A better understanding of the way our consciousness is
formed, should prove effective in designing our educational systems
as well. As soon as we understand education as a process of
conscious self-development, or as a process of expanding
consciousness, we may accept that any knowledge of the ways we
re-program our minds will be relevant for educational practice.
And I foresee another area of application, in the social
domain: namely, human organizations are entities which exhibit a
certain degree of self-consciousness and a certain degree of "free
will"; in the computer age, information can be circulated among the
members of an organization at a potentially unlimited rate, but we
still do not understand how to make use of this ability. (As a matter
of fact, almost all present day use of computer in organizations is
fairly stupid, compared to the potentiality.)
I run up against these problems as I was working in Chile,
under the direction of Stafford Beer. We were designing a
computerized information and control system of an absolutely novel
kind, described by Beer in "Brain of the Firm", which should have
eventually integrated all Chilean industry. At a certain stage in the
development of the system, we tackled the issue of workers'
participation in the direction of their industries, and in general in
the direction of society at the various levels of control, since
workers' participation was a major political aim of Allende's
government. Organizations are nowadays managed in an authoritarian,
top-down fashion (and they have always been, as far as we know); we
wanted to close the loop, so as to make society more circular, and,
in the long run, more stable. Nowhere has the issue of workers'
participation been given a satisfactory solution, and it was not
solved in Chile. But it seems to me now that any effective solution
of this matter pre-supposes an understanding of the way collective
consciousness is constituted. And the same applies, mutatis mutandi,
to the question of "computerized democracy".
ABOUT IDEALIST THEORIES.
I have avoided the question of parapsychological resarch,
although I believe that any new developments in this field will have
profound influence on our views on consciousness. I am not fond of
the complicated experimental techniques required for such research,
and theoretical research in this area is bound to be very
speculative, for the time being. However, I would like to mention one
interesting attempt in this direction: Walker, who is trying to base
parapsychological phenomena and consciousness on a quantum mechanical
theory, where the hidden variables account for the non-physical
world. He does a fairly meticulous work in linking the hidden
variables with the workings of the nervous cells, analizing rates of
data transmission, etc. Unfortunately, I could elaborate on or
criticize his views before I have given more careful attention to
them.
One of the basic issues where opinions go apart is whether
consciousness is just a function in the individual, or a principle
transcending our individual minds and belonging to another
ontological domain, perhaps a property of matter itself -as some
people hold-. This last view seems to be held by Spencer-Brown, when
he says: "we cannot escape the fact that the world is made so as to
be able to see itself".
I believe, however, that research on consciousness can
proceed parallel to and independent of such questions. Alternative
models can be provided, incorporating the "materialist" or the
"idealist" postulates on the nature of the world. Perhaps the models
can help us gain a better understanding of the different views, of
its problems; perhaps we will find that they are just different,
equally valid ways, of saying the same.