Further Thoughts on "Box 1"
This essay builds on the concept of "Boxes" introduced in my April Summary. In a nutshell, we are all trapped in "Box 1", which is the world "inside our heads".
For millennia, there has been little dispute over the fact that our access to "reality" is far from trustworthy. In the extreme, there are those who claim that "reality" doesn't exist at all, or at least the existence cannot be proven. I am reminded of a professional geologist I once met. He managed to make a living dating million-year-old rocks, while simultaneously believing that the world was 4,000 years old. As the Red Queen said, we are capable of believing six impossible things before breakfast.
I believe that this approach sidesteps the core issue, which should be to explore the mind in its own terms, whatever the "mechanism" may be. In fact, attempts to "explain" consciousness seem to misunderstand the nature of "explanation" itself. I think Sam Harris put it best when he said it's hard to imagine what an "explanation" would look like. For one thing, "explanations" of the mind in terms of physical phenomena the language of explanation itself is a major roadblock. Those who would "explain" the mind assume that "mind-like" concepts can be stripped from the explanation, in a way that evolution can be reduced to physics, chemistry, and math. Damasio's approach attacks this particular problem at the root, by defining life itself as "striving to thrive." One may view this as a metaphor, but the fact is that it is tough to describe any living behavior without introducing the "mind like" language of what the organism is "trying" to do. Planets don't "strive" to obey the laws of gravitation, nor does nature "strive" to conserve energy. Or at least, this is the way we are taught to think of things.
All this tends to bypass the most amazing capability of the human mind, which is to construct a deep, rich, detailed universe that we experience in one particular time and place. Everything we know about that universe is the product of our own mind with extensive help from other minds. The world, as we experience it, is "mind-like" for a good reason. It is an active product of the brain. The implications of this are routinely missed.
Anne (not her real name) says things like "things happen for a reason." She is always asking"why" bad things happen to good people. Such a mindset fails to recognize that the universe, as experienced. It is a mental phenomenon, full of intentions, reasons and justifications, The evolutionary purpose of the mind is precisely to search out reasons and explanations - expecting to find them when a more objective perspective would claim that such statements and questions are inappropriate when applied to a world governed by physics and mathematics. The misunderstanding here is to mix up Box 1 (the mind) with Box 0 (the "real world" that is assumed to exist but is forever just beyond our grasp).
Anne is not happy with the explanation that an innocent girl was killed due to broken bones, gravity and momentum when hit by a car, yet she will accept that this explanation is somehow valid. What she fails to understand is that her own mind - a reason-seeking machine - is spinning its wheels, unable to detect agency where none exists. In fact, her wheels will keep turning as she seeks out an agent, such as a negligent driver, bad breaks, unmarked crosswalk, neglectful parents and on and on. In an emergency, Anne can always fall back "karma" and "fate", which hangs on to the notion that the universe is "mind-like" but that its intentions are unknowable.
Anne experiences a feeling of profound injustice and moral outrage. She is hard-wired to attribute the source of this outrage to be some Universal "mind" behind everything that happens. She is also hardwired to accept her perceptions as real. We don't wander through the world telling ourselves that "this is not real". Anne's perception (not just her abstract belief) is that there is something beyond herself that looks upon the situation and feels the same grief that she does.
Such a problem can be said to underly the whole of religion. This may be supposed to be a consistent failure to recognize the difference between Box 0 and Box 1. It should not be remarkable to find mind-like aspects of a world that is, after all, created by a mind. Our mind.
Not all religions fail this way, but many start out being sensible about the issue then slip into superstition. For example, in the (personal) branch of Zen I follow, we trust experience over philosophical word-play, which can be taken to be all forms of "mind like" assumptions about the world. Even so, I accept that there is no escape from Box 0 such as, for example, taking LSD or sitting in a cave for years. In theory, solid things like logic and mathematics are "mind like" and should be distrusted in favor of experience itself. Such ideas go back to the Tao Teh Ching which points out the difference between what we say about reality and reality itself (depending on the translation you are reading and what you are reading into it). But if you study the book as a whole, you detect a general disdain for investigation of any kind. We actually do need to understand Box 0 as well as we can, for simple reasons of survival if for no other reason.
In practice, Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen become straightforward fantasy worlds, actively denying what the rest of us would call "science." To my mind, this takes skepticism too far. "Skepticism" becomes skepticism of opponents to my religion, rejecting all arguments on principle as existing in some "truth domain" that doesn't touch the experience of the believer.
On the other hand, I think that religious attitudes and practices can be entirely appropriate if they are admitted to belong to Box 1, where there is no such thing as "objective truth." In Box 1 the universe is full of moral principle and agency. I first grasped this in Theological School where the instructor challenged us to ask what we would see if someone videotaped the Ascension of Jesus to Heaven.
This was a challenge (an outrage to a few of us). Are we to take Acts 9:1-11 to be a literal eye witness account, or are we to ask who wrote the passage and why? I became quite comfortable with this kind of question, personally delving into similar thorny issues, such as what was the experience of Isaiah when he spoke not for God but as God.
My approach is to accept religious experience as valid in "Box 1" - the world created by the mind. It then becomes possible to discuss religious beliefs and attitudes as one might discuss literature (in fact that is precisely the approach adopted by liberal schools of theology). Even in the world of imagination, some interpretations make more sense than others.
Of course, this is often offensive to believers, who tend to insist on the literal, objective truth of their version of history. Such folks, through no fault of their own, have come to mix up Box 0 and Box 1. Educating them on this matter can be stressful but, as my own education has proven, not impossible. In fact, most thoughtful believers are curious precisely on this matter. Not everyone follows the Red Queen.
For millennia, there has been little dispute over the fact that our access to "reality" is far from trustworthy. In the extreme, there are those who claim that "reality" doesn't exist at all, or at least the existence cannot be proven. I am reminded of a professional geologist I once met. He managed to make a living dating million-year-old rocks, while simultaneously believing that the world was 4,000 years old. As the Red Queen said, we are capable of believing six impossible things before breakfast.
"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things." "I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."Both "reality" and the "mind" exist and are susceptible to experimentation. Obviously, mental phenomena are correlated with events in the brain. Much of the focus of "Cognitive Studies" is on this correlation. We see books like Dennet's "Consciousness Explained," which would better be titled "Consciousness Explained Away." The core of this approach is to study the brain in the context of what I call "computational" models of how the brain produces the various phenomena it does, including consciousness. At present, this approach seems to be able to detect the presence of consciousness through sensors placed in the brain, but, apart from Science Fiction, we see no evidence that we will ever be able to "peek in" to share the experience of another human being.
I believe that this approach sidesteps the core issue, which should be to explore the mind in its own terms, whatever the "mechanism" may be. In fact, attempts to "explain" consciousness seem to misunderstand the nature of "explanation" itself. I think Sam Harris put it best when he said it's hard to imagine what an "explanation" would look like. For one thing, "explanations" of the mind in terms of physical phenomena the language of explanation itself is a major roadblock. Those who would "explain" the mind assume that "mind-like" concepts can be stripped from the explanation, in a way that evolution can be reduced to physics, chemistry, and math. Damasio's approach attacks this particular problem at the root, by defining life itself as "striving to thrive." One may view this as a metaphor, but the fact is that it is tough to describe any living behavior without introducing the "mind like" language of what the organism is "trying" to do. Planets don't "strive" to obey the laws of gravitation, nor does nature "strive" to conserve energy. Or at least, this is the way we are taught to think of things.
All this tends to bypass the most amazing capability of the human mind, which is to construct a deep, rich, detailed universe that we experience in one particular time and place. Everything we know about that universe is the product of our own mind with extensive help from other minds. The world, as we experience it, is "mind-like" for a good reason. It is an active product of the brain. The implications of this are routinely missed.
Anne (not her real name) says things like "things happen for a reason." She is always asking"why" bad things happen to good people. Such a mindset fails to recognize that the universe, as experienced. It is a mental phenomenon, full of intentions, reasons and justifications, The evolutionary purpose of the mind is precisely to search out reasons and explanations - expecting to find them when a more objective perspective would claim that such statements and questions are inappropriate when applied to a world governed by physics and mathematics. The misunderstanding here is to mix up Box 1 (the mind) with Box 0 (the "real world" that is assumed to exist but is forever just beyond our grasp).
Anne is not happy with the explanation that an innocent girl was killed due to broken bones, gravity and momentum when hit by a car, yet she will accept that this explanation is somehow valid. What she fails to understand is that her own mind - a reason-seeking machine - is spinning its wheels, unable to detect agency where none exists. In fact, her wheels will keep turning as she seeks out an agent, such as a negligent driver, bad breaks, unmarked crosswalk, neglectful parents and on and on. In an emergency, Anne can always fall back "karma" and "fate", which hangs on to the notion that the universe is "mind-like" but that its intentions are unknowable.
Anne experiences a feeling of profound injustice and moral outrage. She is hard-wired to attribute the source of this outrage to be some Universal "mind" behind everything that happens. She is also hardwired to accept her perceptions as real. We don't wander through the world telling ourselves that "this is not real". Anne's perception (not just her abstract belief) is that there is something beyond herself that looks upon the situation and feels the same grief that she does.
Such a problem can be said to underly the whole of religion. This may be supposed to be a consistent failure to recognize the difference between Box 0 and Box 1. It should not be remarkable to find mind-like aspects of a world that is, after all, created by a mind. Our mind.
Not all religions fail this way, but many start out being sensible about the issue then slip into superstition. For example, in the (personal) branch of Zen I follow, we trust experience over philosophical word-play, which can be taken to be all forms of "mind like" assumptions about the world. Even so, I accept that there is no escape from Box 0 such as, for example, taking LSD or sitting in a cave for years. In theory, solid things like logic and mathematics are "mind like" and should be distrusted in favor of experience itself. Such ideas go back to the Tao Teh Ching which points out the difference between what we say about reality and reality itself (depending on the translation you are reading and what you are reading into it). But if you study the book as a whole, you detect a general disdain for investigation of any kind. We actually do need to understand Box 0 as well as we can, for simple reasons of survival if for no other reason.
In practice, Buddhism, Taoism, and Zen become straightforward fantasy worlds, actively denying what the rest of us would call "science." To my mind, this takes skepticism too far. "Skepticism" becomes skepticism of opponents to my religion, rejecting all arguments on principle as existing in some "truth domain" that doesn't touch the experience of the believer.
This was a challenge (an outrage to a few of us). Are we to take Acts 9:1-11 to be a literal eye witness account, or are we to ask who wrote the passage and why? I became quite comfortable with this kind of question, personally delving into similar thorny issues, such as what was the experience of Isaiah when he spoke not for God but as God.
My approach is to accept religious experience as valid in "Box 1" - the world created by the mind. It then becomes possible to discuss religious beliefs and attitudes as one might discuss literature (in fact that is precisely the approach adopted by liberal schools of theology). Even in the world of imagination, some interpretations make more sense than others.
Of course, this is often offensive to believers, who tend to insist on the literal, objective truth of their version of history. Such folks, through no fault of their own, have come to mix up Box 0 and Box 1. Educating them on this matter can be stressful but, as my own education has proven, not impossible. In fact, most thoughtful believers are curious precisely on this matter. Not everyone follows the Red Queen.
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