Waking, Dreaming, Being by Evan Thompson

Waking, Dreaming, Being by Evan Thompson

The subtitle of the book self and consciousness in neuroscience, meditation, and philosophy, captures what I like best about it: it examines three separate disciplines to see what they say about the issues of self and consciousness, examining their areas of focus and how congruent their explanations are when they overlap and why the foci differ, when they do.

Thompson adopts a mode of thought he attributes to Francisco Varela:

Varela’s position is to suspend judgment. Don’t neglect the Buddhist observations and don’t dismiss what we know from science. Instead of trying to seek a resolution or an answer, contemplate the question and let it sit there.

A couple of up-front notes: 

Thompson is generous in his characterization of the results of each field and is exceptionally good willed in his efforts. He works from the assumption that each discipline is engaged in a (mostly) good faith effort at understanding what’s going on. That said, he’s not assuming everybody (or even anybody) has an answer to the questions being raised. In the spirit of Varela, he’s perfectly willing to let the question of who’s right just sit there unresolved. 

There’s a lot more detail available than I would have expected: 

On the meditation side: The observational details are very refined: “The Abhidharma maps of the mind list over fifty distinct mental factors, specify their functions, and group the factors into various categories”. I didn’t expect that level of detail for introspective reporting, but it is there, and the techniques have been being refined for centuries 

On the philosophy side: Philosophers in this area have been extensively collaborating neuroscientists and have used that collaboration to inform an refine their theories. Philosophical thought had helped identify blind spots in each area and how disciplines may or may not overlap.

On the neuroscience side: neuroscientist’s instruments provide a lot of detail, albeit at nowhere near the accuracy that we’d like. Although that does often lead to a reductive bias, no study of consciousness can be completely reductive if, for no other reason, than that the definitive report of consciousness is inherently subjective (at least at the moment).

His top level assessment is that no field has either the definitive answer or even the definitive criteria for identifying the answer.

— Or perhaps even a definite answer to what it is that’s under discussion. For example, if you take per Thompson, Chalmers’ characterization of the ambiguity of the term consciousness 

In short, “consciousness” can mean awareness in the sense of subjective experience or awareness in the sense of cognitive access.

I think that, with our current toolset, we’d be hard pressed to determine if such a state of inaccessible awareness even existed: We know that the yogis are inherently only able to report on the consciousness to which they have access since, by definition, they don’t have access to non-accessible awareness, even though their training allows access to experiences that most of us don’t share. 

On the other hand, current neuroscience even has difficulty distinguishing between the two (if indeed there are two distinct states), let alone something this subtle. Additionally, any validation we get of the mapping of brain states to consciousness might be hard pressed to go beyond what can be cognitively accessed. 

That said, I wouldn’t go as far as Thompson who thinks it a priori impossible 

promise lies not in being able to measure consciousness itself—which, as we’ve seen, makes no sense—but in being able to provide refined measures of the neural correlates of consciousness …

Given that specific patterns of brain activity correlate with states deemed to be conscious because individuals have cognitive access to their contents, and thus can report those contents, we infer that these patterns of brain activity are reliable neural correlates of consciousness. So, strictly speaking, we’re not correlating consciousness itself with brain activity; rather, we’re correlating something that we already take to be a reliable indication or expression of consciousness—verbal reports or some other cognitive performance—with brain activity.

I do expect that both the measurement and the experimental design would be subtle, but, I don’t see why measuring consciousness itself “makes no sense” since it’s easy to imagine that the state of being conscious is 1-1 and onto “putting your brain in state X” —  I’m not understanding why this couldn’t be the case. 

A few specific items are particularly worthy of note

One of the most unexpected things in the book is that both the yogic and the neuroscience disciplines find that, at the most detailed level, consciousness is intermittent and regulated by the brain’s alpha and theta waves ~in the 100-200 ms time range. I suppose that we don’t experience this for reasons similar to those that make learning about saccades surprising: the sporadic input is smoothed by the brains cognitive preprocessing into an apparently continuous experience 1 However, alpha and theta waves operate much, much more slowly than saccades (which if I’m reading the wikipedia article correctly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade is ~ 20 ms

Although these timelines seemed slow to me, they do appear to line up with higher level tasks, such as playing twitch video games

One unexpected item that I found shocking was this

Take memory, for example. When I remember myself from the outside as a kid on the ferry in Scotland, I see myself as an other from a third-person perspective and thereby distance myself from my past experience (I was scared while being tossed about in the little boat). At the same time, I represent that past self as me and appropriate its experience to my life story, my own sense of personal history

I’ve never had a “memory from the outside” like that. It reminds me a bit of how some people claim that they can’t mentally rotate objects in 3d, or the controversy around do we think in words or visually, to which I respond weird and both respectively. “Quasi veridicality” seeing myself from the outside, in a dream or whatever is beyond my imagination.

The penultimate section of the book concerns dying. It is an insightful mediation of what dying consists of but served more to highlight something that bears greater study in our death adverse society, than being, like the rest of the book, a consideration of the findings of multiple disciplines that have conducted extensive investigations of the topic.

The book ends with a section Is The Self An Illusion? In which Thompson concludes that it isn’t since there definitely appears to be something that is bearing witness to these conscious experiences. I’d argue that this is the wrong question: personally, I’m more concerned whether the self is an agent capable of making “free will” decisions or is it just an observer, seeing decisive actions taken by our autonomic systems —a question he leaves unaddressed.