This edition of the Weekly Head Voices, which proudly started coming at you from the Southern bank of the Crocodile river, looking over the water into Kruger National Park, right before being ignominiously ignored for an extended period of time and then finally being revived on the road (literally, I’m sitting in the passenger seat with my laptop on my… err.. .lap, thanks driver-spouse!) back from St Francis, covers the period of time up to when it eventually, hopefully, finally gets published.
Never be so focused on what you’re looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.
– Ann Patchett
First rule of blogging
Some of my blogging friends often joked: The first rule of blogging is you don’t blog about blogging. I really love that, but today we really can’t ignore the elephant in the room right here.
Friends, I still find myself in the midst of a pretty serious case of writer’s block.
I am back here writing this (months later on the road, not on the river bank anymore), because I am unable to suppress the almost continuous desire to write something on this thing that is interesting or entertaining enough for you to read. However, actually producing something that to my mind satisfies those requirements feels like it has become difficult almost to the point of impossibility.
After spending a great number of mental cycles on the tools and techniques part of a possible solution, I have so far come up with (…checks notes…) exactly zero solutions.
The currently best candidate for the psychological part of the solution is to reframe this as really writing for an audience of one, namely future me. Although I’ve often alluded to that idea on here, in practice I am thinking specifically about various of you, the readers who I personally know and love, a focus which ironically might be contributing to my predicament.
I hope that I can succeed in convincing myself at exactly the right moments that my audience is really only future me, so that I might be able to produce more regularly.
Rays of light
Kind reader NS left the sweetest comment on the previous WHV (yes, I think you should go read it now). We have never met in person, but they landed on my blog via a Stack Overflow answer of mine some years ago, and have been reading the Weekly Head Voices occasionally since then.
This also caused a little musical connection: Back in 2016, friend and colleague (and music connoisseur) FvdL introduced me te Jamie XX’s album In Colour (I found the guilty party in my notes), an introduction that landed in WHV #103 by way of which it became one of reader NS’s favourite albums.
In a great twist of coincidence, I got to see Jamie XX doing his latest set at Lowlands in August with a bunch of besties.
NS’s comment was a beautiful and quite timely reminder of why this here blog writing endeavour is worth every drop of blood, sweat and tears. (Even although I’ll be “writing it for future me”…)
Maybe the universe wanted to make doubly sure, because around the same time I received an emailed blog comment from afar, from old friend CS. Thank you universe, thank you friend CS.
Consciousness and the controlled hallucination
Previously on this blog I wondered about the strangeness of going through life essentially as a brain locked up in a dark skull (WHV #174), all the while slowly, incrementally building up a fantastic high-definition simulation (hallucination…) of the real-world outside based on the thin streams of photons entering one’s eyes, and sound waves one’s ears.
Somewhat later (WHV #180) I learned from the book Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert that this idea was introduced by Immanuel Kant as transcendental idealism.
In her book Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, Lisa Feldman Barrett explains that indeed your brain predicts almost everything you do (read the summary right here on this blog). In fact, “If your brain has predicted well, then your neurons are already firing in a pattern that matches the incoming sense data”!
In his book Being You, the neuroscientist and professor of cognitive and computational neuroscience at the university of sussex Anil Seth expands on this idea at length, also calling the way we experience reality through our perception a controlled hallucination.
Where this idea might be strange at first glance, the more one reads and thinks about it, the more it makes complete sense that our complete high-definition experience of everything around us, and even inside us, is our brain using the exact same mechanism for simulating reality that it uses during less controlled hallucinations such as dreams.
In other words, our subjective experience by definition is produced by, and runs entirely inside, the brain. Mostly we are unable to distinguish our dreams from reality. Many aspects of hallucinations brought on by certain psychedelics can’t be distinguished from reality either.
At a higher level, we go through life with a frankly quite limited set of senses, but we are treated with an incredibly detailed subjective experience. This can only work because we are in fact continuously and incrementally enriching an incredibly detailed model of reality with the limited sense inputs at our disposal.
From a slightly higher level, the simulation is enormous and complex in space and time, based on years of accumulated and integrated sense data.
There are folks like Donald D. Hoffman, cognitive psychologist and author of the book The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes, who argue that what we experience could even be quite far removed from objective reality.
Moving on to the “hard problem of consciousness” and back to professor Seth, I really liked to read about what he calls “the beast machine”.
Consciousness and selfhood arises from the body’s need to interpret and control a fantastically complex plethora of inputs and outputs: Energy, temperature, danger and then, probably the raison d’etre for our large brains, relationships now and in the future with a complex and changing network of fellow humans.
We experience all of this as feelings, as qualia, which encourage us to take the action that will help ensure our continued survival.
You know you’re going to feel hungry in a few hours, so you’re already starting to think about what you can rustle up to eat. You think that such and so would be really happy if did this or that, and so you factor that into your plans. Generally, your subjective experience as a conscious being is what enables you to navigate the incredibly complex and changing information landscape with success.
Based on Seth’s work, consciousness is emergent from and tied to being a living, self-regulating organism.
Now, as physicalists, we merely have to figure out the actual physiological mechanism of how consciousness is brought about exactly.
P.S. Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR) hypothesis
I was really surprised (and a bit scared to be honest) to hear how many hardcore physicists were focusing on different aspects of consciousness.
For example, Roger Penrose (!) together with Stuart Hameroff proposed that consciousness originates from quantum processes within microtubules inside neurons.
While the hypothesis is controversial, there is ample substance for discussion.
P.S. What is it like to be a bat?
In any consciousness readings, you’re bound to run into the paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” by Thomas Nagel.
Nagel describes consciousness as:
an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something it is like for the organism
The end
Dear reader(s), I wish that your consciousness hallucination is as pleasant as possible, and that it keeps you in the greenest of pastures.
We must always change, renew, rejuvenate ourselves; otherwise, we harden.
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe