Self, Mind and Supermind

Zen and its Western cousin, "Mindfulness" were a stop on my long journey to self-discovery. They introduced me to a line of investigation through subjective experience. In spite of the strong tradition against a philosophical interpretation in Taoism and Zen, all this came with a certain amount of "theory". To make a long story short, these disciplines challenge our idea of the "self" and, following ancient Buddhist tradition, regard the self (whatever that is) as impermanent**. Some would go as far as to claim that the self is an illusion. The Western "scientific" branch would claim that there is no "self" to be found in the brain. Sam Harris is a leading popularizer of this view and he claims extensive subjective experience (hundreds of hours of meditation) as his "evidence".

Antonio Damasio takes a different view, based on thousands of case studies (a more trustworthy kind of "evidence"). His view is that our feeling of "being there" has its physical home in brainstem structures that we share with all mammals (at least). Sub-cortical structures, such as the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the thalamus play an intermediate role, with the cerebral cortex "assisting" and informing the core brain stem function.

Damasio doesn't deny the conventional functional analysis of brain functions. The problem with such analysis is that it reveals what information is sent back and forth without saying anything about how this information becomes conscious. To whom or to what is all this information relevant?

Damasio draws a distinction between two types of information coming into the brain stem from massive neural systems. Broadly speaking: "inside" and "outside".

Let's talk about the "inside" system here. The sensation of the status of your own body. To me, it is no accident that "meditation" techniques primarily focus on inner sensation - usually through bringing attention back to the breath or other direct bodily perception. This amounts to an attempt (with varying success) to draw attention away from the "outside" - perceptions and the chattering distractions of the everyday world: the world of Samsara.

Now, the ancient sages had no idea that "inside" and "outside" amounted to two quite distinct perceptual systems. For the most part, they were unaware of the role of the brain in any of this. So, the experience afforded by directing attention to the "inside" mind - often for hours or days at a time - felt very different. At least calming or even mystical. My theory is that the "experts" like Sam Harris have succeeded in suppressing "outside" brain functions enough so that they experience or remember experiencing (not quite the same thing) "loss of self".*

Such an experience would involve almost entirely suppressing functions of the cerebral cortex. The mysterious memory function of the hippocampus (subcortical) would continue to "tick over", explaining why Sam remembers losing himself. Of course, Sam avoids giving a straight answer to "who" is remembering having no self. Zen loves paradox.

For many years, I have pictured my brain stem when I talked about my "lizard brain" - the source of my animal instincts that often got me into trouble. Damasio has allowed me to change this image slightly to think of the "lizard" as me. It's a part of me shared by mammals. It's just a shared structure bequeathed through common descent from a distant ancestor. The lizard brain in a dog is no more "primitive" than my own.  (I hate the word "primitive" since it tends to sprinkle evolutionary fairy dust over ideas).

What is different is this massive "cap" of cortex that filters perception of the outside world. In particular, I have a "forebrain" (prefrontal cortex) that is, compared to other mammals, rather large., along with "speech centers" that seem to be unique to humans. What are these structures doing?

Obviously, the answer that question would fill a library, full of books I would probably not understand. At my current humble non-professional level of understanding, here are some things I imagine the prefrontal cortex is doing:

• It's the part of the brain most like a computer. It calculates. It "reasons".
• An important function is to suppress and override impulses to action coming from my "lizard" subcortical structures like the amygdala (flight or fight). It's the forum for "sober second thought".
• It performs two distinct kinds of "calculation". One involves abstract questions and the outside world. The other involves social calculations. The latter is far more complex and equally important to survival. Who can I trust? What behavior is socially acceptable? What is "right" and "wrong" to do? What is the "moral" thing to do? What can I get away with?

So I wind up with an image of myself as a lizard in my head, not much bigger than my thumb, trying to make sense of the world with a huge over-growth of evolutionary "new" equipment that allows me to regard both morality and the Big Bang as objectively "real". This new equipment doesn't add much to my ability to perceive the world more accurately than, say, my dog. What it adds is the ability to connect my humble powers to those of other human beings. In fact, my "world" - "umwelt" - is shared. It is the supermind.

Anyone who has seen a video of a wolf pack running down a caribou will see that the wolves have a pretty good idea of what the other wolves are doing. Wolves have a shared umwelt. But it's nothing compared to the way humans coordinate attention, intention, perception, resources, and behavior to do things like putting one of their members on the moon for "all mankind".

That's what makes us special. That's what makes us dangerous.

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* I tend to distrust "data" gathered by introspection since my own mind has quite often provided compelling evidence for factually wrong ideas. My lizard is easily fooled. For me, meditation techniques help to calm my chattering brain - nothing more. The scientific supermind is where I go for the facts and theories.
**  I don't attempt to decipher the muddle of what became of some branches of Buddhism, which eventually came to include ancestor worship, heaven and hell, gods and reincarnation of "something", when the Buddha explicitly (seems to have) built his whole teaching on the impermanence of everything, including the "mind".  At home, "On the ground", Buddhism seems to be as crazy and superstitious as medieval Christianity.