(Edited excerpts from a talk given by Copthorne Macdonald at the University of Prince Edward Island)
I want to talk to you today about a different way of looking at reality. It crystallized for me in response to my need to integrate personal experiences in two very different realms.
One is the realm of science, technology, and intellect. The other is the realm of the profoundly quiet mind. It is a place I discovered many years ago when I went on a 12-day meditation retreat. It is a realm I found so interesting that since then I have spent between three thousand and four thousand hours exploring it.
When you just quietly watch what goes on in your mind, day after day -- very much as a naturalist would watch the behavior of a bird or animal in the wild -- you have certain insights. You come to certain understandings. As the mind becomes quiet, and the reality-dissecting effects of our subjective-verb-object language die away, shifts in perspective occur. Our internal data processing system applies its conceptual knife to reality in unusual ways. Instead of slicing reality into a myriad of separate things and isolated actions as it usually does, it sometimes makes other kinds of cuts. A conceptual cut that I found particularly interesting was one that divided reality into the enduring and the ephemeral. Gestalt flips to other ways of envisioning and interpreting also occur, and even shifts of identity.
Among the most important things that I encountered during those hours of attentive observation are several that concern the nature of subjective experience. When sitting in the quiet circumstances of a retreat, with eyes closed, the level of sensory stimuli is very low. There are occasional sounds and somatic sensations, and a low-level visual noise involving random phosphenes. And when discursive thinking drops away, as it eventually does, there is not much mind content at all.
It was in these circumstances that I began to see awareness and mind content as two very different kinds of things. Even with little data coming in, awareness was present. I was intensely alert. I came to understand that awareness is mind's enabling quality -- always there, non-specific, generic, enabling. It had a medium-like or carrier-like quality. It supported or carried information -- this information being, of course, the many types of mind content: perceptions, emotions, thoughts, feelings, etc. I found myself with a foot in each of two very different worlds -- the world of science and technology on the one hand, a world I had total confidence in, a world that for me in my design engineering activities had worked predictably. And now this other world, of insights and perspectives arising from a quiet mind. Did they, too, reflect reality -- or was I experiencing flights of subjective fancy?
I found myself unable to let these two separate worlds remain separate. I began searching for an intellectual explanation that would encompass both. I sought some sort of overarching interpretive framework -- some sort of paradigm, if I can use that cliché. I sought a way of looking at things that had explanatory power in both realms, a perspective within which both sets of data would fit and make sense. I eventually found what I was looking for, and it is that perspective and some if its implications that I would like to share with you today.
Let us think for a moment about how we come to understand our immediate situation. Each of our senses -- vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste -- passes along to our brain and mind information about a different aspect of reality. These different sensory modalities complement each other, they don't conflict. Each gives us a valid but incomplete look at the present situation. Together they help us create a mental picture of what is going on right here, right now -- albeit, an incomplete picture.
Similarly, our intellectual theories about reality help us understand what's going on in the larger universe.
Quantum physics helps us to understand what's happening at the submicroscopic level.
The theory of relativity helps us understand what's going on at the macroscopic, whole-universe level.
Various other perspectives on reality focus on what's happening in between, at micro- and mesoscopic levels -- theories like:
* Classical physics
* System theory, and
* Evolutionary theory.
Each of these perspectives on reality helps us to understand reality more completely. Each sheds light on certain aspects of the cosmic situation. None tells the whole truth. But neither do they conflict.
The New Perspective
Today, I am putting forward for your consideration one more perspective on reality. Among its features:
It spans the full range of space and time.
It helps answer certain scientific questions -- particularly questions about the nature of scientific law, and questions about brain/mind relationship and function. It leads to certain predictions in these areas, and thus to suggestions for further investigation.
It also helps answer certain important philosophical questions -- particularly questions about the relationship between the enduring and the ephemeral, being and existence, reality and illusion.
It is a way of looking at things that makes use of certain "information age" or "post-modern" concepts that have emerged and matured in the last 30 years. Among them,
* information, and carriers of information,
* messages and media, and
* the algorithmic manipulation of information.
I presented parts of this view in my book TOWARD WISDOM, and there I discuss some of its personal implications. I presented it in more detail in a paper that appeared in the June 1994 issue of ZYGON: the Journal of Religion and Science. For those of you not familiar with ZYGON, it is a refereed journal sponsored jointly by three U.S. institutions that are interested in exploring the relationship between contemporary science, and religious and spiritual wisdom.
I should probably make it clear that I consider spiritual practices to be psychological practices, and like many scientifically inclined people, I'm not drawn to any of the traditional conceptualizations of God or Deity. In my writing I talk about fundamental reality, but have avoided using the word God except when I needed to do it in referring to other people's views. Despite this, in the Globe and Mail's review of my book, the reviewer spent much of the review talking about my new conceptualization of God, and how much he liked it. This "reading into" what I wrote didn't bother me at all. As the reviewer correctly saw, I understand primal reality to be the seat of action in the cosmos. If someone wants to call that God, so be it. It's the old guy with a white beard peering down from heaven that I have big problems with.
Most recently, I wrote a paper that focuses on the implications of the medium/message view for brain/mind relationship and function. The paper is currently out in Journal-land looking for a happy home.
The ZYGON paper is entitled "An Energy/ Awareness/Information Interpretation of Physical and Mental Reality." I'd like to read the core statement of the interpretation from that paper:
Reality consists of an enduring medium modulated by transient informational patterns. The medium has a physical aspect, a mental aspect, and an algorithmic aspect. Physically, the primal medium is energy or protoenergy--the ground of the physical universe. Mentally, the primal medium is awareness or protoawareness--the ground of mind and subjective experience. Algorithmically, the medium is the home of "laws of nature" algorithms which, during the life of the universe, allow mental/physical potentials to become actualized. These algorithms, these laws, are the intrinsic rules that guide physical, chemical, geological, and biological change. It is the moment-to-moment functioning of these algorithms which forms, patterns, and modulates the primal medium with information--creating, as it does, that hierarchy of systems we call the universe. In information processing terms, the universe is equipped with built-in recursive algorithms which, in parallel-processing fashion, repeatedly take the informational situation that exists at this instant and transform it into a new informational situation in the next.
I suggest that we look first at the physical implications of this, and I'd like to begin by making sure that we all understand what I mean by information.
* Information is any difference that makes a difference.
* Information is a pattern, form or arrangement
in space or time.
* Information is significant difference (of whatever kind)
imposed on a medium or carrier.
There are several very interesting progressions at work in the universe as it moves from its beginning some 14 billion years ago to its end many billions of years from now:
The universe moves from little or no information to a great deal of information
* A hierarchy of systems is created.
* Elementary particles come together to form molecules.
* Molecules come together to form megamolecules, crystals, and simple life forms.
* Individual cells come together to form simple organisms and the organs of more complex organisms.
* Organisms come together and form societies and ecosystems.
We start with a universe that was all potential and no actualization, and progress to a fully-actualized universe with no potential remaining. (Assuming, of course, that the universe continues to expand and does not collapse in on itself.) The process moves from a beginning characterized by simplicity, to an ending characterized by complexity. From a universe in which energy predominates, to one in which matter predominates. And, ever-increasing entropy.
Many people find the concept of entropy confusing. One of the reasons is that most of us first learned about it in connection with thermodynamics and the behavior of gases. The mistaken idea has arisen that high entropy means a high degree of disorder. That may be true in the case of gases, but it is not generally true.
Kenneth Boulding pointed out that the most general way of looking at entropy is in terms of potential. An increase in entropy signifies a decrease in the potential for things to happen. Entropy and information are concomitants, and in some sense are the reverse of each other. Information has been called negative entropy -- or negentropy -- and that relationship holds even mathematically. The creation of information in local situations, the creation of new structure, is accompanied by an increase in the entropy of the universe as a whole. Creating one bit of information increases the entropy of the universe by at least 10 to the minus 23rd joules per degree Kelvin.
The earth receives 1.6 times 10 to the 15th megawatt-hours of energy from the sun each year. It also radiates back into the universe almost exactly the same amount of energy. The arriving energy, however, comes from the sun -- a roughly 6000 degree Kelvin source -- and it radiates from the earth -- a 290 degree Kelvin source.
Tribus and McIrvine calculate that this transformation of energy from 6000 to 290 degrees K results in a negentropy flux of 10 to the 38th bits per second, much of it used to create information in meteorological and biological processes. The creation of this information is paid for, in a sense, by an equivalent increase in the entropy of the universe.
All this information comes into existence because the universal process is rigged to make that happen. With physicist Stephen Wolfram, I am saying this: that underlying our verbal and mathematical laws of nature are functioning actualities -- algorithms that guide the creation of complexity in the universe, algorithms that guide all physical, chemical, and biological processes.
The universe is much like a parallel-processing computer. The informational situation existing at this instant is input information for the cosmic processing activity. And that situation is transformed in the next instant, in accord with those laws-of-nature algorithms, into a new informational situation.
Mentality and the New View
Let us move now to the implications of this medium-message perspective for brain/mind relationship and function. The energy/awareness/information interpretation sees the physical and the mental to be equally real and equally fundamental. It holds that just as energy is the medium's physical face, awareness is its mental face. It holds that just as energy is medium-like and real, so awareness is medium-like and real. The primal stuff has mental as well as physical potentials, and in the process of evolving physically, it also actualizes some of those mental potentials.
Although radical materialists are not apt to embrace this position, the view that mentality is primal has been adopted by many respected scientists. Gordon Globus said the following: "...mind is but one aspect of a fundamental neutral reality with matter being a second aspect, both aspects having equal importance, as two sides of a coin." George Wald put it this way: "[Consciousness] is not some iffy phenomenon that we just project on reality; it is at the base, at the foundations." Wald also quoted Wolfgang Pauli:
To us...the only acceptable point of view appears to be one that recognizes both sides of reality--the quantitative and the qualitative, the physical and the psychical--as compatible with each other, and can embrace them simultaneously. It would be most satisfactory if physis and psyche (i.e., matter and mind) could be seen as the complementary aspects of the same reality.
Bernard Rensch said: "...there is no contrast between mind and matter. We must recognize that all "matter" is protopsychical in character."
Although I certainly may have missed something in my exploration of the scientific literature, I have not run across any experimental results that would falsify the view of mind, and brain/mind relationship, that I am about to present. The only conflict I am aware of is with the radical materialists's unproven assumption that reality is only physical.
The truth is that the whole enterprise of modern science rests on a set of unproven assumptions that scientists rarely question. There is the assumption that the universe is open to investigation, and that the readings of scientific instruments are meaningful. There is the assumption that the laws of nature have never changed and never will. The assumption that the values of the universal constants remain constant. And for many scientists, the assumption that reality has only a physical nature, that reality has no mental or proto-mental qualities.
I note in my most recent paper that the highly-physical branches of science flourished under radical materialism, but I suggested that this happened because radical materialism's key assumption was never effectively challenged. My comment was: "Where experiments involve overwhelmingly physical phenomena, it simply doesn't matter whether mentality exists or not. In those fields, the "everything is physical" assumption had little or no effect on the choice of experiments or on the interpretation of experimental results."
In neurology and psychology, however, the presence of this assumption matters a great deal. Most importantly, perhaps, it limits the range of hypotheses likely to occur to experimenters and theorists -- or to be taken seriously by them if proposed by others.
Roger Sperry has written at length about the problems that radical materialism caused for the sciences of brain and mind in the first half of the 20th century, and about the movement toward re-legitimizing mentality that began in the 1960s. Sperry came up with his theory of emergent interactionism at about that time, and about then both John Eccles and Wilder Penfield embraced the dualism of Descartes, Catholicism, and certain other branches of Christianity. Following the 1960s, the whole field of cognitive science exploded into existence, and with it a variety of views about mind and the brain/mind relationship. There are still people like Daniel Dennett who try to explain mind away. And there are many others who don't exactly do that, but don't face subjectivity face on either. Most of these people tend to equate mind with information.
Others in the forefront of this field, people like Gerald Edelman and Ray Jackendoff, do acknowledge awareness and mind as real and possibly functional, but they too, have found themselves unable to explain the relationship between brain and mind.
Jackendoff has called it "the essential mystery: how a computational or physical state could possibly be related to an experience."
The Energy/Awareness/Information view of things leads us to a concrete and potentially testable hypothesis about brain/mind relationship and function. The hypothesis employs familiar terms, but some are used in a special sense. Thus, we need to go over some definitions.
AWARENESS
is the subjective aspect of reality.
is the ground, medium, and carrier of mind.
is what permits conscious experience.
is the sentient medium that when modulated by neuronally-generated information becomes mental qualia, mind with informational content.
QUALIAare awareness-associated informational artifacts.
are discernible parts of a mental scene.
are instances of informationally-modulated awareness.
are mind content.
MINDis the space-like awareness field (or aggregate of superposed fields) in which qualia appear.
CONSCIOUS EXPERIENCEcomprises those qualia that are to some degree being attended to.
ATTENTIONis a condition of mind and brain marked by heightened and often selective noting of qualia. In selective attention, more cognizance is given to some aspect or aspects of conscious experience than is being given to the rest.
Let's now move on to the hypothesis itself. It has several parts, and I will make some comments as I present them. In the visual, auditory, and somatosensory cortex of the human brain there exist a multitude of relatively simple neuronal systems, each of which brings into existence (as a consequence of its functioning) an elemental awareness. For a long time people assumed that mind was one unified whole, and that it probably arose from the functioning of the whole brain. Mind seems unified, but it isn't. The evidence of that has been building up:
* Donald Hebb has talked about Sperry's split-brain work. He notes that when the corpus collosum is cut you have two independent hemispheres, and two separate minds.
* Paul MacLean, the originator of the triune brain theory, sees 3 mentalities -- one associated with the reptilian brain, one with the limbic system, and one with the neocortex.
* Ray Jackendoff takes the position that each sensory modality has its own separate awareness.
My hypothesis takes this disunity of awareness one step further. If we assume that mentality is as much at the root of things as physicality, then simple minds are plausible -- simple minds associated with simple neural systems. For one thing, this makes evolutionary sense. If mind only appears in animals that have extremely complex brains, then we face the giant-step problem: How did just exactly the right kind of complex system needed to produce mind happen to evolve if mind wasn't present in some form along the way?
If an appropriate neural signal is received from an external source, each of these mind-element systems also informationally modulates its elemental awareness, creating in the process an elemental quale --
* a pictorial element,
* part of an auditory experience, or
* a localized sensation.
I'm hypothesizing that the same neural system that brings the awareness into existence also applies neuronal modulation to it. The hypothesis is potentially falsifiable:
* A convincing demonstration that awareness is molar would do it.
* So would repeated confirmation of some very different theory of brain/mind relationship.
* In addition, it could be falsified if experiment reveals that some of its predictions don't pan out.
The first prediction is that awareness can exist independent of modulation. As I mentioned before, in my experience with the "opening up" kind of meditation, I've seen that intense awareness can exist, accompanied by very little informational modulation. If you spend several days in quiet circumstances, eliminate most discursive thinking, and sit with your eyes closed, sensory stimulation will be quite low. Yet in those circumstances you are intensely alert, and you know that. Awareness and our cognitive processes recognize the presence of awareness. You become able to clearly see the difference between the ground of mind and mind content, between awareness and its informational modulations. I'm sure that some sort of controlled experiment could be devised to demonstrate this.
The second prediction is that the mind-element systems of the hypothesis actually are present in the sensory cortex. Such systems do appear to exist -- I'll mention two pieces of evidence:
1. Small islands of sight exist in some cortically-blind subjects. These are associated with small islands of fully functioning cortex surrounded by non-functioning or malfunctioning tissue. It seems particularly obvious in this situation that the likely source of the awareness is not some large brain system, but the relatively simple systems on that cortical island.
2. F.T. Hambrecht of the NIH Neural Prosthesis Program has implanted microelectrodes in the central visual region of the primary visual cortex. When electrical signals are applied to the electrodes, the subject "sees" pinpoint-sized phosphenes. If two electrodes 250 microns apart are stimulated, only one phosphene is seen. If two electrodes 500 microns or more apart are stimulated, two phosphenes are seen.
Hambrecht's data is consistent with my speculation that the mind-element systems of the hypothesis are associated with the neural columns that Mountcastle and others have written about. The typical spacing of columns in the cortex seems consistent with the electrode spacing in Hambrecht's phosphene experiments. I suspect that individual columns would be involved with both computational tasks and the mind-element-system function. My contention is that in using Hambrecht's technique to produce a one-pixel phosphene you have also located the neural system that gives rise to it.
I can envision a general investigative procedure. First, using Hambrecht's technique, find a mind-element system. After finding such a system, use detecting microelectrodes to find and monitor its inputs and outputs under various conditions of optical stimulation. Next would come surgical removal and microscopic analysis of sample systems. Then, one would compare the design of quale-producing systems with the design of other columnar systems that do not produce qualia. Also, one would compare the design of modules for one sensory modality with the design of modules for the other two, and look for differences and similarities.
Basically, it's a problem of reverse engineering. I am hypothesizing that evolution developed mind-element systems. Locating one seems straightforward -- at least locating the neural column of which it is a part. The problem is then to identify the mind-element part of the column, figure out what sort of systemic configuration causes the elemental awareness to arise, and see how the modulation is applied.
Let's look now at the remainder of the brain/mind hypothesis. Each awareness element produced (whether modulated or not) has a location in that sensory modality's subjective field that is topologically related to the body image. The locations of sensory neurons are topologically mapped in the sensory cortex, and are mapped once again in the subjective field. In ways that are not yet fully understood, the brain is able to make complex scaling, orientation, and other adjustments to the topology so that each sensory field is aligned with the body image, and the subjective display of data has a geometry that corresponds closely with objective reality. Taken together, the elements of awareness produced by all systems of a sensory modality constitute the field of mind for that modality.
I'm contending that the awareness elements are placed adjacent to each other in subjective space -- they might even overlap to some extent. In any event, the subjective impression is of one unified awareness -- a continuous space-like field in which mind content appears. The multi-modal awareness field that results from the superpositioning of one-modality fields is where all conscious experience appears - including conscious experience related to the "higher" functions such as thought, imagination, dreaming, etc.
Here I'm simply noting something that I assume is non-controversial. I'm saying that in aligning each sensory field with the body image, that the brain, in effect, superimposes them. And that this creates a subjective experience almost indistinguishable from what we imagine a single, multi-modality awareness field would offer.
Why did human level mind evolve? The hypothesis contends that selective attention is a device that reduces to manageable proportions the amount of computational processing needed for situation evaluation. My strong suspicion is that this is the very reason why complex, human-level mind evolved. This idea is not new. Harry Jerison, the theorist of evolution, suggested computation reduction in his 1973 book, and the idea probably predates that.
We now know that there are neural correlates of selective attention. One of these has to do with the position of a stimulus in subjective space. Robert Wurtz, Michael Goldberg, and David Lee Robinson reported that: "When the monkey begins to attend to some object...the nerve cells in the posterior parietal cortex that are related to the object because it is in their receptive field begin to discharge more intensely..."
Visual attributes like space, color, velocity also have neural correlates. Maurizio Corbetta & his associates reported that: "...attention to basic visual attributes such as shape, color, or velocity appears to influence...physiological measures of visual processing.... Physiologically, neural activity is increased in extrastriate regions specialized for processing information related to the selected visual attribute. These enhancements reflect cognitive (top-down) control of visual processing..."
There are still things about attention that we don't understand, but with the existence of these neural correlates having been confirmed, the role of selective attention as an aid to situation evaluation and computation reduction seems to have been clearly established.
Philosophical Ramifications
I mentioned that the Energy/Awareness/Information perspective on reality also has philosophical implications. Some years ago I mused about the fact that scientists are reality-seekers, and that philosophers and spiritual seers are reality-seekers too. Why then do they not arrive at the same conclusions? Why do scientists and philosophers so often seem to talk past each other?
I finally concluded that it was largely because the two groups had different set of interests. Even though scientists are reality seekers and philosophers are reality seekers, and both groups do deal with the same reality, most of the time they ask different kinds of questions.
For example, scientists have traditionally shown little interest in differentiating between the enduring and the temporary aspects of phenomena, but this is not the case with philosophers and spiritual teachers. Many have found this distinction interesting and important -- though somewhat difficult to conceptualize and talk about.
Today, the medium-message interpretation brings new explanatory power to this domain of philosophical inquiry. In particular, this perspective on reality renders much more understandable an ancient way of looking at things that has arisen independently at different times and places during the past several millennia, and for that reason has been called "The Perennial Philosophy."
The term was popularized back in 1945 by Aldous Huxley in his book by that name. The essence of the Perennial Philosophy world-view is that underlying the transient, ever-changing realm of manifest existence there is an eternal unmanifested Ground -- an enduring oneness that interpenetrates existence and enables it to be.
Hindu and Buddhist teachers called the transient, ephemeral aspect of existence maya which is usually translated illusion. Taoist teachers, in a similar vein, referred to the "ten thousand things." Zen teachers talked about forms and appearances. These Perennial Philosophy teachers also recognized that human attention and allegiance tend to become attached to this transient, insubstantial aspect of reality, and they attempted to redirect their students' attention to the underlying, interpenetrating, enabling oneness which they labeled Brahman/Atman, Tao, Mind-essence, or Godhead.
The ancient seers who articulated the perennial philosophy did not have concepts like information, algorithm, and carrier to incorporate in their explanations, but it is my sense of things that the energy/awareness/information perspective is a post-modern articulation of exactly what they were getting at. It has helped me make more sense of the ancient texts, and I hope it does the same for others.
