Letters to the Editor
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A penny falling from the Empire State building...
I've participated on one of these University experiments. We had to write down our emotional state(s) either when a beeper went off or at certain hours of the day (oh, how my memory fails me now...). I usually wrote down "stressed."
Can we just chalk this experiment down as creative tasking? Is the subject, in fact, actively remembering her thoughts or is she creating a thought for the task at hand? I'm not sure whether I was sometimes writing down a fake emotion or a real one--just to make sure the task was done--as I claimed responsibility for it. I guess it's called bullshitting. God, how I'm becoming more of a bullshitter as I age...
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No self
There is consciousness, but there is no self-consciousness, since there is no self. Yes, of course, you have a body you might be aware of, but if that's YOU, then what is perceiving the body? Someone else? But you cannot perceive YOU--only more perceptions. David Hume and Siddharta Guatama intersect here.
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Not to get all meta about this or anything, but...
There's something deeply and creepily old-fashioned (or is it eternal?) about the story of this experiment. I can't help myself seeing this as a movie plot: two smarty-pants male professors have a debate, and they pull in a young woman, the age of a senior undergraduate or a grad student, to be the object/subject by which they hope to prove their points, as it were. Hmmm, Scarlett Johansen as Melanie, perhaps, and cast the stupendously-named Hurlburt and Schwitzgebel any way you like (William Hurt and Jack Nicholson? Too old? You pick). It's one of the oldest stories around: two competing powerful yet aging males face off against one another while simultaneously--I'm having trouble finding non-double-entendres here--using the young woman as their proving ground, probing, displaying, and questioning her innermost experience. Whose interpretation of Melanie's experience is the truest, most valid? Who in fact owns Melanie's thoughts? And then sweet Melanie wakes up (ah!) and says, hey, I want to be co-author... Somebody call Camille Paglia in on this, please. Or a scriptwriter.
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conscious automata?
"If we built an automaton that imitated humans, it would still not be conscious, as long as nothing within it had been programmed for consciousness."
This is stated in the article as an "obvious truth" -- but nothing could be less obviously true. Dennett's claim is that you would be unable to construct such an automaton without creating a consciousness. Raymond Smullyan has a great story about this: paraphrased:
A dualist is miserable every second of his life, but can't kill himself due to life obligations. A drug X is discovered that destroys consciousness *while leaving your behaviour unchanged* (in other words, it changes you into that "automaton that imitates humans"). He resolves to take it.
During the night, a friend sneaks in and secretly gives the dualist the drug X while he's asleep. It works; the dualist wakes up with no consciousness at all -- he's simply an automaton. He then rushes to take the drug *again*, waits a while, and then says, "What a ripoff! The stupid drug didn't work! I'm still conscious and I feel just as bad as ever!"
The point is that such a drug is of course impossible.
Restated, the claim of Dennett and a lot of other cognitive scientists is that "consciousness is an emergent phenomenon from sufficiently complex reasoning systems." No more -- but absolutely no less than this.
Dennett goes a little further than this in "Consciousness Explained"; he claims that consciousness is a linear stream of internalized speech that overlays the underlying massively parallel architecture of the brain.
I strongly recommend that book. Considering the depth of the concepts explained, it's quite accessible, and Dennett is an intrinsically entertaining writer.
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Pure Consiousness
I would disagree with the commentor above who says that the purpose of Zen is to "free the meditator from all consciousness".
In my understanding, the purpose of Zen is to quiet the chattering/visualizing ego, so as to attain a state of pure consciousness, pure awareness.
Consciousness is 99% of who we are, and yet that part of us is without form, completely invisible and untouchable.
Is consciousness God?
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There is a Talmudic phrase
Paraphrased, it says "God answers ALL prayers, but His concept of time is radically different from yours."
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mindfullness
I studied mindfulness training with a Thai Buddhist monk for many months and continue now on my own. The purpose is to see/learn how the mind/consciousness leaps from one thing to another, constantly changing focus outward and inward. i think these gentlemen would profit from practicing a little mindfulness training rather than intellectualizing which almost always gets the conscious/living experience wrong.
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Freud Seen Leaving the Building
The stunning breakthrough illuminated in this bright article is that a psychological subject's resistance was taken seriously, rather than as fodder for subjective research. Freud's Orwellian trope, defining the negative, inverted the cardinal rule of empiricism, objectivity, closing the door on science. Dare we hope psychology is becoming a science?
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Book recommendation on this topic
In Steven Johnson's Book Mind Wide Open:
http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Wide-Open-Neuroscience-Everyday/dp/B000HEW0R0/
he examines various methods that people (mostly scientists) are employing to understand how our brain states relate to our consciousness.
For a broad survey on the topic, it is an interesting and entertaining read.
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Bankei Zen
The little known Zen master, Bankei, has a bit to offer on this subject. A rather caustic fellow who lived around 1600 and had thousands of adherents yet forbade them of recording his teachings. And now, due to the errant behavior of a few students, we have some morsels to spice our dharma to which the following quotation falls:
"When I was still very young I discovered the principle of the Unborn and how it works with thought. What we think of as a "thought" has already lost the living reality of the Unborn mind. What is the Unborn? It's that part of your mind which doesn't think! When you unexpectedly hear something, you know exactly what it is. This is due to the wisdom inherent in your Unborn Buddha-mind."
(don't) Think about it.
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A possible soluton to the death penalty question....
First off, I am totally against the death penalty. However, given that it is a fixture in this country, the least we can do is ensure that it is humanely applied.
The current State and Federal Supreme Court cases about the appropriateness of the three-drug cocktail currently being used could be solved by ensuring that the prisoner was completely unconscious and deeply sedated before the final administration of the potassium chlorate injection that ended his life.
The Bispectral Index (BIS®) consciousness monitoring device described in this article could possibly be used to solve the question of whether a prisoner was capable of suffering during the execution process.
Has anyone considered this at all?