Susan Blackmore thought experiment - buddhism?

[Mister Noodle]

In her book The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore invites readers to attempt an empirical thought experiment: to mentally sit back and watch their mind work, taking note of the way perceptions trigger recollections/ideas, which in turn trigger others - all while the subject's attention is focussed on the process itself.

A sort of Cartesian Matinee :cool:

(I've tried it, it's a damn weird mental state you end up in. Kinda neat.)

The point is to demonstrate that consciousness is quite decentralised, and goes on regardless of what 'you' seem to be doing.

Combined with her overarching thesis that the self is a convenient but fictional concept (much like point mass) retrospectively constructed to model our own behaviour, she goes on to suggest that the reader consider that since there is no top-level executive module directing consciousness or making decisions, they don't have to take on board the hassle and stress of acting as though 'they' embody that module.

In other words:



Shall I get out of the bath now, or laze in the warm water for another ten minutes? Well, I don't have to worry, It's not my problem. Either now or later, the desire (or perceived necessity) to get out will outweigh the desire to stay in - and I'll act on it. As I trust my own judgement, and am quite happy to do what I tell myself, I delegate the decision to whatever part of me ends up making it.

I'm not putting it across very clearly, and I do encourage people to read the book; she is far more lucid than I.

What I'd be interested in knowing is whether this is close to the central thesis of buddhism - whether by annihilation of the self they really mean decentralisation of the (perceived) self, with the attendant decentralisation of stress.

And if so, why they couldn't just *say* that. Lose the reincarnation and other things (such as the ultra-subjectivist position, which I'm sure got cheesemakered into incoherency), and it makes for a pretty cool way to approach the world.

[alicesmum]

hahahah Mr N. very high brow indeed! :D

yes, it is the central thesis, especially in the zen tradition (possibly theravadin as well). i think she and others (e.g., Ken Wilber, Eckhart Tolle) stay away from "buddhism" as they don't wish to associate their central thesis/es with a religious tradition. probably sensible.

but yes, buddhism is certainly very naturalist in approach (www.naturalism.org (http://www.naturalism.org) has many buddhist readers/supporters) and basically teaches "no-self" or that the "executive self" cannot be found, no matter how hard you go looking. where this leaves teachings about rebirth I am still asking around myself!

"buddhism without beliefs" by steven batchelor is a great book for that, and he basically says that although many of the teachings suppose, imply or state a belief in rebirth, nothing is lost without it and hence, it's not essential. my zen colleagues range from those who take it as analogy (like a candle lighting another candle) to those who say they "don't believe" as such. many of the old legends talk about zen masters who "get their new body" but when I ask my teacher (who is also one) what it is that is reborn (if there is no self) she gives me a typical (but very articulate) zen response which leaves me rather confused and not certain about anything at all (which is kinda the point sometimes :p ).

The greatest Koan (or Kong An in Korean Zen) - which is a question to ponder or let the subconscious work on and one without intellectual answer(s) - is "Who am I?". A Korean variant is "Who was I before my mother was born?". Every other variant (e.g., sound of one hand clapping) is said to lead back to this fundamental question, which'll do your head in after a while. (Love it!)

Could chat all day about this topic, but housework must give way to mental ma$turbation at some point....

[alicesmum]

And if so, why they couldn't just *say* that.

i got it around the wrong way i think. You meant why don't buddhist teachers and authors just say that, didn't you Mr N?

Some are starting to I think. All those experiments on Buddhist monks' brains an' all....

I also think that they are coming from a tradition that is 2,500 years old, so the language is very different, even though it is pointing at the same thing. the Buddha was ahead of his time, maybe even ahead of our time, and so didn't have the tools or terms to talk about these experiences the way Blackmore and others are. Western Buddhism is such a recent and emerging phenomenon, but it is slowly integrating Eastern and Western approaches and terminolgies etc. It's happening right now (v exciting).:p

[Saraswati]

So who/what is the 'observer' of the thoughts? If I am not my thoughts, my body, my personality, what is it that I AM? The reason that I have to part company with Mr N on this point is because, based on my own experiences, the 'I' behind the mind, the observer, is not nothing. Rather, it is everything, it's the energy that creates all and is all. Or call it a soul. Whatever. And the reason I am experiencing it as 'something' is because when I leave my 'self' to merge briefly with the unthinking observer, I'm overcome with an incredible, indescribable bliss.

So this leads me to wonder about the past and future of my soul - that pond of bliss inside me which too often illudes me. And my loosely held beliefs regarding reincarnation and the like are created from readings which resonate with me, combined with experiences in mediatation, even dreams etc. And they are loosely held because I like to stay open-minded and I know that with my puny human mind I could never begin to know the comprehensive truth about everything.

But as AlicesMum says, the reasons why we're here, whether we have lived before and will live again, don't matter at all. At the end of the day, all we need do is stay focused right here in this moment. Unfortunately my undisciplined mind loves to entertain itself with theories about life after death, past lives and anything else it can puzzle over! But truly, now is all there is.

i feel compelled to apologise - I'm so tired and although I know what I'm trying to say, I think I'll read this back tomorrow and realise I've said nothing (nothing that makes sense anyway!) :sleeping:

[Mister Noodle]

So who/what is the 'observer' of the thoughts? If I am not my thoughts, my body, my personality, what is it that I AM? The reason that I have to part company with Mr N on this point is because, based on my own experiences, the 'I' behind the mind, the observer, is not nothing. Rather, it is everything, it's the energy that creates all and is all. Or call it a soul. Whatever. And the reason I am experiencing it as 'something' is because when I leave my 'self' to merge briefly with the unthinking observer, I'm overcome with an incredible, indescribable bliss.


Pippy: the "I" is best likened to point mass. A convenient fiction that is very useful, but with no basis in reality.

For those that don't know the term, it's a concept borrowed from orbital mechanics (among other things)

The idea is that the gravitational pull of a given planet/moon/asteroid/pebble/etc. gravity is the sum of the forces exerted by every single atom within it. However, doing the trillions of individual calculations required to get he right answer would take the lifetime of the universe to do - and you'd never get any work done.

So, you cheat. You say that the object is roughly symmetrical, especially from a distance (for the angle encompassed by any lumps rapidly approaches zero as you get further away), and so, from a distance, it's entirely fair to say that the planet 'acts as though' all of the mass were contained in a teeny-tiny point right at the very centre. If you do all your sums based on this assumption, your results work just fine.

It's not actually *true*, but that doesn't matter - it works, and you can translate in and out of the metaphor at will.

Similarly, there's nothing in human neurology to suggest any kind of central architecture - no single part that makes all of the decisions, feels all the feelings, or senses all the senses. There's simply no common path that all the information can take. All the various little bits of brain do their own thing, pretty much of their own accord.

Now, the human mental killer-app, our most distintive cognitive skill, is our abiliity to model the minds of others. If we know what each other is thinking, society can function and we all benefit from being part of the group.

But of course, we can't possibly keep track of all the massively-interconnected bits of neural architecture in other people's heads. We can't *tell* how they're wired up, and even if we could, it would be far too hard to do all the billions of sums.

So we cheat. We say that they look like one object, and so it's fair to say that they 'act as though' their brain were all one big lump that did all the work as one single unit. This is *much* easier, as we can just assign a bunch of traits to the person as a whole, even though those traits are actually the result of half a dozen separate things all seen together.

An analogy might be modelling the 'personality' of the government. We can treat it as an individual, and say that 'it' would likely do X if Y happened. We don't need to know the individual ministers, or their interpersonal relationships - we just need to know how they work as a whole.

And here's the kicker: we use that same methodology to model ourselves. It's a whole lot simpler, it doesn't take an intimate knowledge of all of our internal state, and we can use generalise of our modelling-others skills and apply them to ourselves - so we can relate things to others, and vice versa.

Our brains do what they do, then retrospectively construct a narrative of ourselves to explain it - just exactly the same way that we retrospectively construct the backstory of a fire engine in a dream to explain the sound of our alarm clock.

This can been shown quite neatly: stick electrodes on someone's arms to measure muscle potential, so you can see when they're preparing to move them. Then ask them to wait a while, then note the exact time, and then decide to move either their left or right arm.

Do this many thousand of times with hundreds of people, and something quite astounding shows up: the time they start deciding reliably runs about a quarter of a second after they had already prepared the respective arm.

What we experience as decision-making is actually rationalisation of our already-committed actions. The 'I' that makes them is a fictional generalisation - just like the 'it' of the government, or the 'you' or 'them' of other people.

The model works amazingly well. It does the job it's needed for. Society is strikingly effective.

It's only when you start digging inside individual people trying to analyse this 'I' that it all falls apart. Going back to point mass, it's as though you're burrowing through billions of tons of rock looking for the 'point' that has all the mass of the planet. The deeper you dig, the less there is to find - because it's all around you.

It would seem that nailing down the self inside a person is like trying to gather up a conversation at a party and take it home with you.

It's an abstraction of a process, not a thing. No wonder every search for it fails.

[alicesmum]

mr noodle....you utter naturalist you! did you check out naturalism.org???

that's the end of conscious will then. oh dear.....apparently God didn't give us free will....

....makes for more compassion towards others tho doesn't it ;)

[Mister Noodle]

I think 'free will', by most definitions, is actually a very silly concept.

Think of the mind as a black box - input (senses/biochemistry/environment) goes in one end, and output (actions/behaviour/etc) comes out the other, and we completely ignore what happens inbetween.

There are, as far as I can see, three basic possibilities:

a) The output is a function of the input. This is the pure-deterministic model. We run around like ants: if we see X, we do Y. There may be a trillion interacting factors that make it impossible to exactly predict it all, but it all still boils down to clockwork made of meat. No free will here.

b) The output is completely chaotic. We buzz around like unprogrammed robots, acting completely at random, doing everything for no reason whatsoever. I doubt anyone would call that free will.

c) The output is invariant - somehow prerecorded or predestined. We're a tickle-me-elmo with a threescore-and-ten-year tape. Hm. No freedom there.

d) The output is a function of some completely hidden input. Our brain is just a radio receiver somehow tuned into a soul, or space aliens or Danny DeVito, and we're just a remote-controlled meat robot for it. Still doesn't sound very free to me, and it's just hiding the problem - our soul itself would have to be either a, b or c.

Now of course, things are rarely that simple - we're likely a combination of at least a and b. But none of these combinations have any 'free will' whatsoever, so none of them are going to get any more free.

We're software. Ridiculously complex, fascinating software with a trillion little quirks and bugs, constantly getting updated and rewritten, an almost impossible to predict to any degree of accuracy over any length of time. But software nonetheless - qualitatively no different from any other bot (http://home.online.no/~anlun/bots.htm).

[alicesmum]

wow. they even have a bot named after my daughter. how nice!

now, mr N. you still didn't answer my question on this thread about checking out www.naturalism.org (http://www.naturalism.org) (would like your thoughts)....

...nor have you answered my question on the other thread re changing pooey nappies and enjoying fatherhood so far.....

....not that i would hold it against you if you rudely ignored me. after all, if there is no free will, who would i blame!?!;)

answers please!!!

[Mister Noodle]

Naturalism.org is interesting, though... I dunno, they seem to be a little agenda-led.

They're also guilty of a little sloppy argumentation:


Given the circumstances both inside and outside the body, they couldn’t have done other than what they did. Nevertheless, we still hold individuals responsible, in the sense of applying rewards and sanctions, so that their behavior stays more or less within the range of what we deem acceptable. This is how people learn to act ethically. Naturalism doesn’t undermine the need or possibility of responsibility and morality, but it places them within the world as understood by science. However, naturalism does call into question the basis for retributive attitudes, namely the idea that individuals could have done otherwise in the situation in which their behavior arose.

So claim X, based on counterfactual premises, is still valid because accepting it produces useful results.

But claim Y, also based on counterfactual premises, is invalid because it is based on counterfactual premises.

Sounds a little selective to me.

Personally, the reason I oppose retribution/punishment is simply because the suffering of the guilty does no good in itself - if they're trying for the secondary effect of deterrence, then the price is just too high.

As for pooey nappies - surprisingly less of an issue than I'd imagined. I think there must be a defense mechanism in there for dealing with your kids. I'd still run a mile before changing another kids nappy, but Asher's... meh, it's no more traumatic than wiping my own bum. Weird, but useful.

[alicesmum]

i must say that i agree wholeheartedly with that quote that you pulled. they did say "sanctions" , not "punishments". i don't agree with punishment either, but i still want rapists locked up and away from me and my friends and family.

i know what you mean about the poo!!! :D