#reflective awareness

[alunah-lalunah]

Hurray, We Know We're Going To Die

What people won in the course of evolution is the distinction between simply having experiences and being able to represent those experiences to oneself. A mouse can be afraid. A human can be afraid and also think, "I am afraid," wonder why they are afraid, imagine future fear, compare today's fear with yesterday's, and write a book about fear. That second layer is what psychologists often call metacognition or reflective awareness. It allows us to make ourselves objects of our own thought.

Do animals know that they are going to die? Two truths, they know and we simply do not know that. Many animals appear to possess at least some degree of self-monitoring. Great apes, dolphins, elephants, corvids, and some other species show evidence of recognizing themselves, monitoring their own uncertainty, planning ahead, and even modifying their behavior based on what they appear to know or not know. None of this proves that they possess human-like self-consciousness, but it also prevents us from drawing a sharp line between humans and everything else.

A dog certainly does not formulate the proposition, "I am currently experiencing hunger," in language. But whether there is a primitive awareness of bodily states is another matter. Modern neuroscience suggests that many mammals possess interoception, which is the nervous system's monitoring of the body's internal condition. Hunger, thirst, pain, and fatigue are not merely automatic reactions. They are represented in the brain to guide behavior. The real difference is probably not between awareness and no awareness, but between simple bodily awareness and highly abstract self-reflection.

Humans appear unique, or nearly unique, in their ability to construct an extended narrative about their future death. We do not merely avoid danger. We can imagine ourselves decades from now, imagine our own absence, anticipate grief, build religions, write wills, construct philosophies, and experience existential anxiety long before death is near. That ability is intimately connected with language, episodic memory, and imagination. These cognitive capacities allow us to simulate futures that never happen as well as the one that eventually will. And as usual in evolution, we don't know until the end whether it's a blessing or a curse.

Do animals know that they are fearful? There are probably several levels here. An ant may simply execute defensive programs. A mouse may experience fear as an integrated emotional state. A chimpanzee may perhaps recognize its own emotional state to some degree. A human can recognize fear, name it, analyze it, suppress it, romanticize it, or become anxious about becoming anxious. Rather than a binary distinction, evolution seems to have produced increasing layers of self-modeling.

Reflective consciousness is less a mysterious a god-given property than a new computational ability. Evolution did not suddenly create consciousness out of nothing. It appears to have gradually increased the nervous system's ability to model both the external world and itself. Humans possess an unusually sophisticated self-model that includes autobiographical memory, symbolic language, and the capacity to imagine hypothetical futures. Those abilities dramatically increase our capacity for planning and cooperation, but they also make existential suffering possible. The same mechanism that lets us write symphonies, invent science, and understand evolution also lets us anticipate loss, regret the past, worry about tomorrow, and contemplate our own extinction. Reflection is both our greatest adaptation and one of our greatest sources of suffering.

To sum up, animals mostly experience the world. Humans experience the world and build models of their experiencing. Those models become stories, identities, moral systems, philosophies, and fears. The self is not just hungry. It can think, "Why am I always hungry? What does this say about me? Will I always be like this?" That recursive loop is where much of specifically human psychology begins. The suffering and the achievement are the same mechanism. The mind that can understand its own existence is also the mind that cannot entirely escape knowing that its existence will end.

[alunah-lalunah]

From Persistence To Resignation

Life unfolds in creatures and that effort changes little or nothing. It is certainly true that the range of possible actions available to any organism is extremely limited. Genetics, physiology, and environment narrow the space of outcomes long before conscious choice appears. Even the capacity for awareness differs widely between organisms. A human nervous system produces a different range of experience than a dog’s, and both differ radically from simpler organisms. The degree of reflective awareness is constrained by the architecture of the brain that generates it. In that sense the system sets the boundaries long before the individual reflects on them.

However, the conclusion that effort “changes nothing” quietly overshoots the evidence. Effort does not suspend mortality, but it clearly modifies trajectories within the limits of the system. People who attempt medical treatment sometimes live longer than those who do not. A dog that learns a new behavior changes its survival chances. Also the act of understanding alters neural activity and future responses. None of these changes escape the causal structure of nature, but they are still changes within it. Saying that everything is determined does not mean that nothing has causal influence. Deterministic systems are full of interactions where one process modifies another.

The ultimate boundary, death and structural limitation does not mean that all effort appears futile. Life is exactly the force where local causes matter. A person cannot extend life indefinitely, but they can affect whether they die tomorrow or decades later. The final limit does not erase the intermediate causal layers.

The deeper point, though, concerns awareness. Understanding itself is limited by the structure that produces it. A human being cannot decide to have the sensory world of a bat or the cognitive architecture of another species. Consciousness is not a free-floating observer; it is an output of a specific nervous system. This observation aligns closely with the work of Thomas Metzinger, who argues that what we experience as “self” is a model generated by the brain. The degree and style of awareness are constrained by that model’s architecture.

The relief of letting go of the demand to change fundamental parameters has a rational core. The organism cannot redesign its own basic structure through sheer will. But the step from “structure limits us” to “effort changes nothing” quietly erases the layered nature of causality. So creatures remain constrained and yet still responsive.

In other words, the organism is not a sovereign agent directing its destiny, but neither is it a completely inert passenger. It is a node where causes meet and produce further causes. Action and understanding are themselves parts of the unfolding pattern. A stone does not deliberate, a dog does not analyze metaphysics, and a human cannot escape the architecture that generates these differences. Each of them expresses the range available to it. Within that range, small variations still propagate through the network of causes.

The uncomfortable clarity is that neither heroic effort nor total resignation captures the structure accurately. The organism acts because its structure generates action, and those actions feed back into the system that produced them.

[poor-pixie]

Self-reflection is the key to self-awareness: it allows us to look neutrally at our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and actions. Through this practice, we are able to look at ourselves with interest and curiosity. We begin to dig deeper, to question our very being: why do I feel this way?

[inwrdbound]

In my view the mind system is an experience-creating self-reentrant staging post that has the means of reflecting (with the aid of speech-thought) on the ongoing experience and in which this very reflection is experienced as self-generated performance. The entire performance pattern is continually advancing into the oncoming moment's totalization. It is in the confines of this neural interplay that mental options are generated. It is in these confines that the two disparate hemispheres optimally interact. This brings together right-hemispheric pattern perception and left-hemispheric critical analysis to create the highest form of insight and cognitive synthesis possible. In short, I perceive the mind system as being a miracle of cognitive organization. This must seem even more miraculous now that purely physical processes can be shown to sustain it. But then: 'A miracle explained makes it no less miraculous,' and we can rest assured that the physicality of the mind system adds to—rather than subtracts from—this wonderfully intricate achievement. If the physical mind is at last taken to be what it is, this puts an end to the muddle and double-think of naive introspection. It is also the end of the projective free-for-all that has caused this overworked entity to fit in with magico-metaphysical molds of anyone's fancy. Having passed its 'identity crisis,' the mind is now in a position to recognize itself as real, neurofunctionally anchored, and causally related to the organism and to the outside world. The beauty of this is that this seeming reduction of the formerly spiritual mind entity to a physically functioning organ system is no reduction at all but an expanding perspective and a widening horizon. This is because the mind in its true role as the biosphere's most negentropic and advanced manifestation can now begin to explore the whole scenario, including itself.

Zoltan Torey, The Crucible of Consciousness

[inwrdbound]

What we colloquially refer to as our 'conscious mind' is really only the old primate brain revealed to itself and empowered by new techniques to take an active part in guiding itself and generating the awareness of being aware. The breakthrough is nevertheless an epic, a passport to a new internal sphere of operation.

Zoltan Torey, The Crucible of Consciousness

[inwrdbound]

Knowing that we know (that we don't know)

In this compelling excerpt from The Crucible of Consciousness, Torey explains that because reflective awareness (consciousness) is grounded in the human brain, although it appears to serve my self, it ultimately serves the organism whose brain is producing it. That organism is me, of course, but the distinction is critical, and it's often overlooked.

Torey goes on to theorize about the problems this arrangement will always pose for theories of consciousness based on insight, and how our chronic inability to see this has led to the varieties of pseudoexplanations that so vividly confuse our understanding of who and what we are.

Although neuroscience has not yet shown how self-awareness works, it is able to furnish the physical and conceptual frame for a model that makes sense. Libet's (1990) 'time-on' theory, for example, draws the data on brain-processing into a useful perspective. Using this data, a three-tiered model of the conscious brain can be erected in which the tiers represent increasing levels of integration. Neural events are time dependent, and it takes longer to achieve higher levels of integration. Events and subcomponents on the bottom tier are too brief to reach the level of awareness. Awareness requires 400 to 500 milliseconds of processing and is first attained on the second tier. On this level, events and event components are integrated into the simple animal endogram. In all infrahuman organisms this second tier is the top tier, as no facilities for higher integrations exist even if more time were available for the purpose. The third tier is that of reflective awareness. It is exclusive to humans and it involves more than just additional time for integration. It entails extra structures, functions, and neural adaptations for tackling the endogram from within, and for managing and reentering the reflective process as experience. Human awareness normally uses the top two tiers. It shifts in and out of the highest (reflective) gear as required, idling in the middle 'gear,' and falling to the lowest level during sleep and reduced blood and oxygen supply.

The three tiers, 'subawareness,' 'awareness' (the level of the animal endogram), and 'reflective awareness' (the level of the self-accessible human endogram), roughly correspond to events on the level of the 'neuron code,' the 'brain code,' and the 'mind code,' respectively. The point to stress is that the reflectively aware state is the result of a time-dependent process, involving reentrance and self-management; it is not a structureless abstraction.

Turning to [the difficulty posed by] the brain's mandate to provide an optimal and stress-free adjustment, it is necessary to look at the consequences of having acquired reflective awareness. Reflective capability (the facility to modify the character of the endogram from within) can be the source of stress and neuroendocrine imbalance. This must be taken into account when considering what the brain is able to discover and disclose about itself. To lead into this it must be emphasized that the organism cannot have evolved by maintaining stressful incongruities between constituent subsystems. The attainment of reflective capability had to be a net gain. For this to be possible, defensive mechanisms had to be available to manage the stress. For the unreflective ape this is not a contingency. It cannot stop the experiential 'tape,' to rewind and replay it, or to perpetuate the memory trace for repeated recall and reexperience. It is not exposed to self-induced stress because its brain does not have the facility to meddle with or reset its data-processing arrangements.

By contrast, humans' speech-thought skill enables them to interfere in all the cortical operations and to wreck the previous symmetry between cortical problem load and endocrine support capability. The availability of objectificated percepts (words) enables humans to enlarge, dwell, and perseverate on selected experiential material from life encounters. Humans can generate in themselves a climate of disproportionate concerns. This means increased vulnerability to perpetuated stress and trauma. What could not have meant more to the ape than a fleeting instance of fright, humans can expand into chronic anxiety, fretting, and anticipation of danger. Humans now need neurotic defenses to deflect, sublimate, or suppress the offending material to maintain some form of intrapsychic equilibrium. Lorenz (1976), reflecting on this mind-generated anomaly, has this to say:

It is a curious paradox that the greatest fits of man, the unique facilities of conceptual thought and verbal speech, which have raised him to a level high above all creatures and have given him mastery over the globe, are not altogether blessings. Or at least are blessings that have to be paid for very dearly.

The dislocation that results from language-based self-accessibility calls for somatic adjustments, such as increased or modified endocrine output. While this reduces or counterbalances the stress load, the lion's share of the compensatory accommodations are cortical in character. Language is ideal for the restoration of the primate's ambience and for the control of the elevated stress that the organism's reflection continuously creates. It is worth noting that humanity's psychoreligious constructions, that is, their tendency to fashion belief systems to sustain them in a self-created predicament, is adaptive in character. Chomsky (1968) puts it this way:

Our systems of belief are those that the mind, as a biological structure, is designed to construct.

Far from representing objectivity, one of the language instrument's tasks is to maintain the organism's inner peace and sense of security. It follows that:

the brain is not a disembodied research organ with free access to unbiased information;

its functioning as a data-processing instrument is strongly compromised by tacit and compelling commitments to deep-seated organismic needs; and

the brain's job of investigating these matters has no clear mandate to succeed, since mind and awareness play a pivotal role in humans reequilibrating efforts.

It is then possible to conclude that the chronic conceptual confusion in this area is not just the result of lagging insight into a complex frontier domain of understanding. Rather it results from humanity's disposition to palliate, which makes their concern with and commitment to the rational understanding of reality and their place in it no more than nominal.

In view of these limitations the introspecting brain's ideas about itself are only of academic interest. Its views are compromised. It has no direct insight into the nature of consciousness. Furthermore, if this were otherwise it would interfere with it. Leaving aside the mystic and the religious, who see the problem of the mind through the tunnel vision of revealed truth, scientists tend to conceptualize the phenomenon in one of two ways. They regard consciousness as an expression of brain functioning, or brain functioning as an expression of consciousness. The first view seeks material anchorage for it; the second view looks for manifestations of what it regards as a cosmic principle.

Whatever the view, the raw datum of consciousness is the same. It is that of 'self-embedding,' the knowing that one knows, the feeling that one feels; in short, the reflection of whatever is happening in that moment as part of the ongoing experience. It is a puzzling and enthralling intrapsychic circumstance. It is without clues as to how it is happening and as to whether it is possible to separate it into meaningful constituents.

[inwrdbound]

I use the term 'reflective awareness' as synonymous with 'consciousness,' the knowing that we know. The conscious brain's difficulties in thinking about itself are quite exceptional. It is 'thinker' and 'thought,' 'experiencer' and 'experience' at the same time, and this duality is opaque to introspection. This is not surprising, for the brain is trying to identify no ordinary phenomenon, but one that is always part of what is being experienced. Its generality makes the problem even more intractable, for while there is concern, curiosity, and wonder, there is really very little to work on. Predictably, even sophisticated speculations lead to no more than vacuous or absurd 'explanations.'

Zoltan Torey, The Crucible of Consciousness

[inwrdbound]

This will be a long one, but well worth reading. This book is more than a candle in the dark. It's a lightswitch. From The Crucible of Consciousness by Zoltan Torey:

We shall now take a closer look at attentional oscillation to see how it accounts for characteristic phenomena of human cognition. This will bring us nearer to an understanding of the mind, the intrapsychic workshop that renders the endogram [i.e. the brain's situational statement of what we are aware of at any given time] aware of itself.

Pioneering 'split-brain' experiments by Sperry (1966) and others have shown that in human beings meaningful perceiving of patterns such as faces, objects, and the like is mostly right-hemispheric. The right hemisphere of the brain has by far the closer links with subcortical centers of emotional integration, that is, with the primitive experiential core over which the cerebral hemispheres have built their superstructure of elaborations. Thus it is the right or recessive hemisphere that more resembles the primate brain and is the richer source of integrated modality experiences. In the human brain these visual, auditory, and somatosensory percepts can be word-linked and internally manipulated. The linchpin of the interhemispheric speech transaction is the left or dominant hemisphere's motor facility. While the recessive side furnishes the modality experience (the primary percept of vision, audition, etc.), it is the dominant side that supplies the secondary percept, the word, that represents it and synchronously interacts with it. The two hemispheres come to the party in their specialized ways and are equally able to bring all the referents to the focus of attentional oscillation.

What we have just discussed is the establishment of an associative action bond and a mutually evocative relationship between them. To activate it one only needs to utter the word that means the thing, or conversely, to experience the thing, say, visually, that signifies the word. The two represent each other quite specifically. The dominant hemispheric word-utterance is a reflexive reiteration of the percept, that is, an echo-response to it. The echo-response (the word) occurs almost simultaneously with the percept that triggers it. Word and percept are thus mutually excitatory and equally able to elicit each other. While the technicalities of this echo-responding are simple enough, its consequences are far reaching. The creation of an interplay between percept and word is an important source of the brain's experience of itself.

To illustrate the changes that were generated by the interplay we need to look at the ground conditions from which it evolved. On the infrahuman plane attentional oscillations were neither possible nor needed. There were no hemispherically disparate inputs to integrate and the arousal system's dual attentional searchlights turned onto twin excitations, one in each hemisphere. After a brief moment's fixation the attention was released and a motor response followed. This freed the system to search for and lock onto a new stimulus.

As we turn to the asymmetric human brain we find that the processing format is changed. The arousal system's attentional searchlights lock onto paired inputs that are no longer identical twins but disparate targets, that is, percepts and words. Additionally, one of these, the word, is also motor-wired and responds by triggering its percept-companion anew. This sets the attentional searchlights into a stable oscillation between the inputs, permitting their integration and giving the brain the experience of the accompanying proprioception and of the volitional control that goes with it.

Let us now look at the attentional oscillation itself and the prolonged duration of meaning resulting from it. In the dual-representational layout of the human brain, the attention—first caught, say, by a visual percept—has a secondary of phonemic percept (a word) to switch to. Moreover, it can do this before the experience of the visual primary could have faded. The switching itself is accomplished without losing the shared meaning-content. This is possible because the reflexive word-response to the original visual percept is delayed only by the time needed for its evocation. The time lag allows the word-percept to take over and hold the attention even while the visual excitation begins to fade. Since, however, the two percepts are in a mutually excitatory relationship, the word (now holding the attention) reelicits the visual percept, and does this just before it itself begins to fade. This switches the attention back to the primary, and the cycle of to-and-fro oscillations can proceed without a break. In this manner the two synchronized excitations are able to keep up the alternating reexcitatory sequence. They can rapidly swap the attentional focus between the two alternating—yet in a technical sense novel—events. These events are technically novel in that they are newly focused on at every turn. Therefore they can repeatedly draw on fresh arousal energy.

During the transactions of the interplay the attention is held firmly by the interacting pair participating in it. It is neither the individual percept nor the individual word that commands the attention, but the interlocked pair of a mutually evocative percept and word. The distinction highlights the fact it is the interplay itself that is attention binding rather than the content featured in it. It is possible to hold the attention with gibberish and to carry the interplay even with nonsense material. This provides evidence that it is the new brain transaction, the interhemispheric juggling of percepts, that is responsible for maintaining the reflectively aware state.

Attentional oscillation as a neural device for integrating hemispherically disparate inputs is not a new idea. Ornstein (1972) observed that 'Rapid switchings of attention between alternating modes of thought may be occurring.' Guiard (1980)—confirming asymmetry's role—noted that 'Although functionally complementary, denotation and connotation are hemispherically separated aspects of the integrated language process,' while Kinsbourne (1978) concluded that 'The logic of symmetrically attending to asymmetric disparate excitations all but demands something like an oscillation paradigm.'

The oscillation of the attention between percept and word is a familiar experience. It is also clear that prolonging the oscillation will hold the attention onto selected percepts and increase the brain's exposure to their meaning. Needless to say, the naive brain is in no position to realize that its steady experience of continuous awareness is only a stream of overlapping yet discrete occurrences. The brain does not know that:

it is the continuous shifting of the attention between the hemispheres that prevents the rapid loss of meaning through fading and replacement;

it is the oscillation of the attention that frees the brain from having to react purely on impulse; and

it is this mechanism that circumvents the stimulus-bound and response-compulsive condition that delimited even the most advanced of the pre-speech hominids.

We can evaluate these modifications in light of their consequences for human cognition and intrapsychic freedom. To do this, it is necessary to outline the primate's functional baseline and to indicate the qualitative changes the breakthrough to language (the means of self-assessing) has created.

The infrahuman processing scenario may be sketched as follows. A given percept arouses the organism by locking in its attention. This primes it for a near-instantaneous motor response. The performance of this response modifies the organism's situation and this modification is fed back as data; that is, it is flashed on the endogram as the updated version of the earlier percept. This indicates the effectiveness of the action taken and furnishes clues for the next move. In this fashion the cycle is carried forward continuously. Percepts bring on arousal, attention, and motor response in turn. This uninterrupted circular sequence depicts the infrahuman organism as an elaborate percept-and-response, making 'ham' in a tightly packed input-output 'sandwich.' The essential point is that this sequence cannot be interrupted. On the infrahuman plane there are simply no facilities for bringing about self-induced deliberate interruptions.

On the human plane this is no longer the case. It is possible to build up and elaborate the 'ham' phase by means of language. Language is able to manipulate the intrapsychic experience and change the endogram without bringing on a motor action as well.

The human brain's language-based self-accessibility should, however, not be taken to imply that it is free of biological constraints. It would be wrong to infer that conscious (mental) processes have acquired some form of extraterritoriality and are no longer accountable to the organism. Although self-accessibility and mental processing involve an attentional holding mode that inhibits response compulsion, there is no break with the fundamental processing conditions of the organism. To quote Edelman (1992): 'Such a view of attention still concedes the major overriding significance to non-conscious mechanisms and to the orienting behaviours mediated by global mappings in response to emergencies.' In other words, the motor system is always reengaged, and in spite of impressions to the contrary the 'off-line' 'ham' phase can be shown to have subserved the organism even if covertly. Although the self-aware state is highly sophisticated, self-guided interference with the endogram is no more than a technical elaboration of the processing equipment, that is, a physical circumstance. The physicality of these qualitative changes leading to the reflective capability must therefore be accounted for in concrete terms. Far from leaving these matters to religion and philosophy, an intrasystemic causal description of the human brain's processing layout should be sought.