Notes on the Super Person 2 - Inside the head
One intuitive obstacle to the idea of the super person is our own sense of being "one" person inside our skulls. While this is not directly relevant to the idea of the super person, it may help to think more clearly about how realistic this idea of the unitary self is.
This leads us into he fascinating and controversial area of "consciousness". I usually consider this subject as overlapping with 2 others, namely "attention" and "working memory". Attention and working memory have the advantage that they can, in some sense, be located in the brain by fMRI scanning - correlating the areas of the brain that are active with reports or experiments on the subject. These studies suffer from the common assumption that the area of the brain that "lights up" is "responsible" for the function in question. It is more accurate to say that the area that lights up is involved in the function - part of a circuit or system that correlates with the function in question.
Especially when we consider this wider context, consciousness, attention and working memory seem to involve many areas of the brain areas that change from moment to moment. Bottom line, there is no one area of the brain that we can pin own as responsible for the experience we call consciousness. On this evidence, some claim that there is no "self" to be found in the brain, therefore the self and consciousness is an illusion.
The question I'm asking in these notes is: are all the components of the system inside the head? in Obviously, you can't have an experience without quite a lot going on your head, but is this all that's needed? In a trivial sense, we observe that consciousness is generally about something - usually external to the brain. Even if it's about the body (a sore toe, for example), it's still about something external to the brain.
Does it matter if we can at least hypothetically imagine consciousness that is disconnected with the real world? I'd say it doesn't. My contention is that, by and large, our usual experience is about something external. This is even true when we are talking to ourselves "in our heads", since I maintain that language itself can be considered to be external. This point is one that requires a bit of unpacking below, but for now, we can glimpse the outline of an argument that the outside world is an important (perhaps necessary) element of the flow of experience we call consciousness. If so, this means that we do not exist solely in our heads but, in fact, extend to some degree into the environment - both past an present. We also seem to extend into that parallel universe that Plato called the world of "forms" - more real than the world. What we'd call the world of logic or mathematics. That should also be part of our "unpacking" project.
An analogy may help. Suppose a Martian scientist landed on Earth an became interested in a chattering TV set, constantly displaying an infinite stream of pictures. He unplugs it, and comes to the conclusion that all the talk and pictures are coming from the power chord. His partner says, no, and disassembles the device, discovering essential components such as speakers and the LCD screen. Of course, we know that all this investigation is pointless since we know that the "content" is coming over the air (or cable). The "content" is what matters and, beyond that, the source of the content is what matters: other humans.
In this analogy, we picture the human mind as being in the business of receiving, processing and re-transmitting "content" from the environment. As with the TV, the details of the brain's systems and modules are a detail. What matters is "content". We may consider human language as analogous to a transmission protocol - necessary to support human-to-human communication.
More precisely, we are interested in the function of the brain that receives, processes and re-transmits messages relevant to a group of human beings, just as the cells in our bodies communicate with each other with the ultimate goal (unknown to the cells) of maintaining the welfare of the body. Returning to our analogy, no amount of information concerning my brain cells will tell anything meaningful about who I am or what I am experiencing at the moment without some kind of reference to the "outside world".
The job of our brains, then, is to tie us tightly us into the environment and each other. This is what is going on in "experience".
This leads us into he fascinating and controversial area of "consciousness". I usually consider this subject as overlapping with 2 others, namely "attention" and "working memory". Attention and working memory have the advantage that they can, in some sense, be located in the brain by fMRI scanning - correlating the areas of the brain that are active with reports or experiments on the subject. These studies suffer from the common assumption that the area of the brain that "lights up" is "responsible" for the function in question. It is more accurate to say that the area that lights up is involved in the function - part of a circuit or system that correlates with the function in question.
Especially when we consider this wider context, consciousness, attention and working memory seem to involve many areas of the brain areas that change from moment to moment. Bottom line, there is no one area of the brain that we can pin own as responsible for the experience we call consciousness. On this evidence, some claim that there is no "self" to be found in the brain, therefore the self and consciousness is an illusion.
The question I'm asking in these notes is: are all the components of the system inside the head? in Obviously, you can't have an experience without quite a lot going on your head, but is this all that's needed? In a trivial sense, we observe that consciousness is generally about something - usually external to the brain. Even if it's about the body (a sore toe, for example), it's still about something external to the brain.
Does it matter if we can at least hypothetically imagine consciousness that is disconnected with the real world? I'd say it doesn't. My contention is that, by and large, our usual experience is about something external. This is even true when we are talking to ourselves "in our heads", since I maintain that language itself can be considered to be external. This point is one that requires a bit of unpacking below, but for now, we can glimpse the outline of an argument that the outside world is an important (perhaps necessary) element of the flow of experience we call consciousness. If so, this means that we do not exist solely in our heads but, in fact, extend to some degree into the environment - both past an present. We also seem to extend into that parallel universe that Plato called the world of "forms" - more real than the world. What we'd call the world of logic or mathematics. That should also be part of our "unpacking" project.
An analogy may help. Suppose a Martian scientist landed on Earth an became interested in a chattering TV set, constantly displaying an infinite stream of pictures. He unplugs it, and comes to the conclusion that all the talk and pictures are coming from the power chord. His partner says, no, and disassembles the device, discovering essential components such as speakers and the LCD screen. Of course, we know that all this investigation is pointless since we know that the "content" is coming over the air (or cable). The "content" is what matters and, beyond that, the source of the content is what matters: other humans.
In this analogy, we picture the human mind as being in the business of receiving, processing and re-transmitting "content" from the environment. As with the TV, the details of the brain's systems and modules are a detail. What matters is "content". We may consider human language as analogous to a transmission protocol - necessary to support human-to-human communication.
More precisely, we are interested in the function of the brain that receives, processes and re-transmits messages relevant to a group of human beings, just as the cells in our bodies communicate with each other with the ultimate goal (unknown to the cells) of maintaining the welfare of the body. Returning to our analogy, no amount of information concerning my brain cells will tell anything meaningful about who I am or what I am experiencing at the moment without some kind of reference to the "outside world".
The job of our brains, then, is to tie us tightly us into the environment and each other. This is what is going on in "experience".
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