Letters to the Editor

• thoughts

  [Read the article: A penny for your deepest thoughts]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  Fine article, but I hate that locution "our." Zen may be foreign to your awareness. Not mine.

  And Dennett has not convinced everybody. His grasp of physics and mathematics is spotty, but he often uses them to support his arguments.

  Let us make a distinction between "consciousness" and "awareness." Consciousness is the reflexive attention of the mind to its own processes. Awareness is openness to the nature of existence.

  The sages have been saying for a long time that consciousness is provisional, that the self is a creation which we delude ourselves into thinking is the entire being. It requires only a little examination to realize that the ego, or small self, is an artifact, a device we use to test scenarios.

  I do not mean we should vanquish ego. That would be like vanquishing your arm. I simply mean it is important to understand the true nature of ego, and to strive to make ego accurate (I don't think people have big egos, I think they have mistaken egos), and to use it the way it functions best.

  Zen describes self as the "bundling" of the five senses. That corresponds strongly to what I see as the way we create ego: A very rapid sampling and integration of information from the senses--each sense stream quite distinct, and the information arriving unrelated to the other senses--allows us to fabricate the sense of a single united personality located in a definite place and time. Time and space, incidentally, are essential to ego. I strongly suspect they too are our models of what is actually out there.

  WHY does it matter so much to Dennett to proclaim that there is no soul? Is that not a fair question? There is not sufficient evidence to draw such a conclusion, and yet he draws it. Why? Is he not just another champion of a theory that may or may not prove to be accurate? Should he not be required to demonstrate his ideas as certainties before we accept them as truth? He has an opinion. He has a lot of metaphors. He does not have anything that will remotely pass as evidence.

  Nevertheless, he is oddly close to the mark. Zen and Buddhism generally state that the small self is empty, is an illusion. If "consciousness" as I have defined it is what Dennett is mistaking for soul, then he agrees with zen (which is in my opinion wiser than Dennett--it is certainly far older). There is no location for personality, for ego. That, however, does not mean the universe is not alive and that we are not beings of spirit.

  Are we supposed to think that, of the hundreds of thousands of years of human existence, that only our age has had the wit to investigate consciousness properly? What hubris!

  I think Melanie was quite right to laugh at the investigator. Too long we have let these blindly analytical types try to tell us what is what. The really funny thing is that for some reason Schwitzgebel thinks that his doubt of her is more valid than her doubt of him. On what basis?

  If one accepts that the self is not the being, but a construct of the being, it is no longer surprising that we think in many different ways and that our images contain only the precision we require them to. Of course it's that way.

  Schwitzgebel is fun, but why the hell does he expect thought to render photographically complete images? One only entertains so much of the image as one needs for one's purposes. Has the man never heard of holograms, of information storage that is global and not localized? For crying out loud, does he think that thought is some sort of completely mimetic process and therefore if we imagine an image of a man but do not think of the legs or where they are we are falling short? Doesn't he understand uncertainty? If in the course of dwelling on an image it becomes important to notice the legs, then they will become clear. Perhaps one will invent a bush to hide them. When I think of the person I love most, I do not see her all at once. I usually have an impression of her face. Sometimes other portions of her, if my thought wanders that way. But she's not some confounded movie in my head.

  Anyone who thinks this sort of investigation is liable to lead to ultimate answers is mistaken. Of course the mind has some difficulty reporting on itself. It has some difficulty reporting on ANYTHING. Believe me, physicists are face to face with the dilemmas raised by observation of the so-called "natural world" (we are part of it, and that is why we can never truly separate our minds from our investigations).

  But there are many of us who have spent our lives practicing the discipline of self-observation. You can tell me all you want to that it is not possible. I know you are wrong. The thing is, it takes constant practice. Almost nobody is willing to make the effort, hence all the confusion. It does not seem strange to a scientist to say, You must master all the jargon and technicalities before you understand my actual point. Why does it seem strange when a man like Suzuki, who has spent his entire life mastering these things, says the same thing about self-awareness?

  If these babies are interested in actually learning something about thought and awareness, and not merely proclaiming "interesting" opinions, perhaps they should spend some time with those who have mastered the process.

  I find almost all research on "consciousness" deeply frustrating. It presumes a great deal based on preconception, it pays no attention whatsoever to accumulated wisdom from the species--and yes, there is such a thing, otherwise science itself could not proceed--and its methods are slapdash.

  Permalink Friday, January 11, 2008 05:44 AM