We make our sense of self into the truth of our own existence and treat our embodied biology as a problem. If we could only free our conscious mind from our body! Illustrated perfectly in Descartes ‘I think therefore I am’. Wittgenstein comments; ‘it is humiliating to have to appear like an empty tube which is simply inflated by a mind’.
In open woodland two people are sitting by a pond. We meet them again in the action and speech and language in order to bring out other points.
Person1 “what are you thinking about”?
Person2 “nothing, I was looking into the water, what were you thinking about”?
Person1 “oh, nothing much, but if you want to know, I was thinking if the chutney in my sandwich will go with the cheese. I thought I saw something move behind that tree over there and then I caught myself scratching my ankle and looked to see if I had a bite”.
Person two denies that he was thinking. Was he conscious? He was aware of what he was doing because he can report on it. He says that he was looking into the water. Am I still thinking when I have no verbal thoughts as I polish my shoes or concentrate on maneuvering a pickled onion from the bottom of a jar? What person two was saying when he denied that he was thinking was that his inner dialogue was turned off. The core meaning cluster for our use of the word thinking refers to the functioning of our inner dialogues. We then casually ask questions such as does a dog think, as we watch and admire the way that it gets a tennis ball from behind the sofa? We are impressed by the mental powers of dolphins and chimpanzees and we constantly comment on the intelligence that we see in animal behaviour. If we claim that dogs, dolphins and chimpanzees can think then we are claiming that they have verbal thought/inner dialogues. This is very different than describing them as having intelligence and in fact it is close to nonsense. Can they think, means have they got an internalised language or, to put it more technically, have they got a grammar that manages a large range of random groups of sound sequences with clusters of experience stuck to them; i.e. words? This is a very clear example of the dangers of taking a word outside its language game.
No carbuncle of experience is harder to take apart than that attached to the word conscious. It is dogged by problems such as this. ‘I think therefore I am’. Does this mean that when I turn my inner dialogue off I disappear? Descartes question does however lead us to the core of the problem. When we are conscious, where are we in our bodies?
The second person denies that he was thinking of anything as he was ‘looking into the water’. Both participants understand that the word ‘thinking’ refers to verbal thought. Person two is reporting that his inner dialogue was not operating. He could have conveyed a similar meaning by saying ‘I was not thinking of anything, I was paying attention to the water’. We feel that where our attention is there we are. This is the bridge where we stand and control the ship. At this place we take in sensations and feelings. We also encounter language or, to put it more accurately a stream of inner and outer language full of words carrying their own clouds of meaning themselves linked to present and past sensations and feelings. The latter is not always present as with person two above. The words that are currently in our head at this moment of time we also feel to be the place where we are. There are therefore two different places which exist in a dynamic tension.
Person one is caught in his focus of attention while person two sits in his inner dialogue (thought), which is currently occupying his focus of attention. Behind them both, is chaotic conflict as topics fight to make it into the inner dialogue while at the same time biological processes and the inner dialogue fight to occupy our focus of attention. When person two was looking into the water he was conscious and attending to what he was looking at. He had no verbal thought not even of the kind that describes the water or speculates about what was being looked at and what might swim by.
Focused attention is experienced as a continuous state of wakeful awareness with varying content provided by a wide range of biological registers. Outside of the awareness there are flexible models controlling access but the strength of the individual register, in both relative and absolute terms, drives its appearance in focussed attention. All complex animals have this awareness in a way appropriate to their nature. Only we can be aware of the awareness because only we can refer to it in inner dialogue – we can name it - i.e. looking at a dog can be followed by thinking ‘I am looking at a dog’.
Focussed attention is often doing something different than our body/brain movements/actions. We can ‘find ourselves’ getting a drink of water or taking a wrong turning in a familiar environment. On my way to a school from the office I found that if I was worrying about a child in another school I would then find myself driving to that school. As we have seen the brain and its phalanx of registers does not need focussed awareness to function. Indeed this tiny space can do little compared to the awe inspiring complexity of the animal brain/body. You are not brain dead when focussed attention is switched off in sleep. When I started to think about my visit to the school that I should have been going to my focussed attention then checked the visual/movement model and found that it was the wrong one. It then ran the right one. Feelings, memories, movements and wrestling with our ‘experience registers’ largely takes place ‘out of sight’ of focussed attention. These must get into our focused attention before we can refer to them with thoughts. It as if our inner dialogues (thoughts) and outer dialogues (comments made in shared experiences) are waiting to pounce on anything that appears in focused attention.
All reflection and examination of consciousness is futile unless the person or persons make it clear whether they are talking about the ‘attention’ meaning cluster or the ‘thinking’ meaning cluster. They cannot have both at the same time. It is an illusion that we can talk about them in the same breath. Their meaning clusters are very different. As they both carry the feeling that this is where we are and very often keep company with one another; awake, paying attention and thinking; we confound them together. We have a motive for doing this. How can we be in two places at once? Can we survive if we are in competing places? Can we stay sane and free from harm?
This is where a great chasm opens up between the experience of, and the awareness of being human. Instead of just being alive we also think we are alive (we are consciously aware of being alive). The ‘focus of attention’ is only about being alive. It is the peak sense of being alive for more complex animals. It is in the world of meaning that we believe ourselves to be alive and this is a direct by-product of the human language that has been programmed into the waiting biological hardware. It parallels, penetrates but above all rides our wider experience as well as helping to develop the complex and confusing meaning clusters of social relationship and cultural knowledge. Our thinking that we are alive is what we also call ‘sense of self’ and it develops alongside the development of our inner dialogues. It is not our sense of self at all. It is unique, yes, but only because of the way that it is put together. What we think, the content of our inner dialogues, is ours only because it us that is thinking it. All of our inner language is a personalized tentacle of a common pool, a social and culturally given reality and process. We can never be free of it. Even if as an adult we run away and hide from any exposure to human language in any form what we already carry in our heads is complex and self-contradictory enough to keep us thinking until the end of our days and its presence will accompany nearly every living moment of wakefulness. Only human beings have a sense of self. The attribution of a sense of self to other animals is a projection that can become believed.
‘Sense of self’ is the key component of the universal human ability to separate mind and body. This is sometimes described as the problem of being embodied.
In order to shed light on this it is helpful to return to the pond and look at the inner dialogue of person one. Like his friend he was in a state where he has nothing pressing on his mind. Unlike his friend his inner dialogue was turned on; his mind was working; and accompanied his casual awareness. He thought of the suitability of the chutney in his cheese, of the possibility that something moved behind a nearby tree and he was suddenly aware that he was scratching his leg and looked down to see that he had a bite. Firstly he knew these thoughts to be not just private but also trivial. They were ‘nothing much’. When our mind is idle its true nature can be seen. It feeds on different senses, memories and emotional states. In other topics we see that not only all our senses but also all our emotions and biological processes are turned on all the time. When not idling we have a greater feeling of conflicting demands; i.e. in our attention and thinking. Our inner dialogue has space for only one thought at a time. Its capacity is chronically limited. The same is true for our focused attention. Both of them process very rapidly but it is still the case that not only is our consciousness in two places but both places are very tiny in the context of the fullness that we are. As we have seen our sense of being alive is located in our ‘focus of attention’ while our sense of self lies only in our verbal thought; in other words in our inner dialogues or in our mind.
The picture that we have drawn shows that there is a considerable distance between our sense of self and our embodied being alive. This is illustrated by person one who says ‘I caught myself scratching my ankle and looked to see if I had a bite’. The ankle scratching started automatically without engaging either focused attention or thought. A chimpanzee could do the same thing. It could find itself scratching and then look to see what was there. Its focused attention would be drawn to it. It could not however ‘think’ about it. There would be present no inner language and no ability to share the experience using communicated language. There would be complex processing led by visual imagery and we look at this in another topic, in the context of our own ape-ness.
We observe our own bodies and at the same time cannot properly connect with them. I do not know if I have an aortic aneurysm. I do not know what is causing the ache in my side. I do not know why I cannot hear the sound reported by the person next to me. Thoughts do arise in us that present information about our bodies. I have just had to stop writing in order to sneeze and take out my handkerchief. My inner dialogue also noticed and began some related thinking but this was only after my focus of attention had been grabbed away from thought to the feeling of a sneeze coming on. In addition our meaning structures are elusive. They underpin and act as a rich network of associations and they have rich connections to many parts of our brain but they have to grab the inner dialogue before they can participate in thought, speech or writing. They have to find the words. Word finding.
It creates a problem for us that our mind is constantly and variously tied up with the world of external language through media and other people. We are invaded by confusing meaning clusters traveling under word sounds and arranged in the given thought structures of grammar. It is also a problem for us that thinking competes with everything else for our limited attention. I must stop thinking so I can concentrate on sowing on this button. Yet again it is a problem for us that our thought can only link to our senses and emotions through the weird and unreliable meaning clusters at the same time that it finds itself competing with them for the focus of attention. I need to stop writing this to get a drink. These experiences create the feeling that our mind is separate from our body. This feeling is a by-product of a reality but it has a massive effect on our sense of self and our understanding of what it is to be human. We make our sense of self into the truth of our own existence and treat our embodied biology as a problem.
The sense that we are separate from our bodies has always had a profound effect on our belief systems. Beyond this, questioning what happens to us when we die, belief in rebirth and reincarnation and choosing to die in this life in order to live in the next are all based on knowing that we are alive, the sense of self, rather than our embodied life, the experience of being alive.
In Plato’s dialogues, for Socrates it is self-evident that we exist prior to our life and after it. He even argues that we know things before we are born. ‘If then he had this knowledge within him, not having acquired it in this present life, it is plain that in some other time he had learned it’ (The Meno). Ecclesiastes looks at human experience in a profoundly perceptive and hard-nosed way constantly asserting that ‘everything is futile’. The writer takes it for granted that we have both a body and a self (spirit or soul) and ends his book with: ‘Remember your creator…. before the dust returns to the earth and the spirit returns to God that gave it’.
Cultural beliefs routinely capture both the split between the world of attention outside of our inner dialogue and the inner dialogue itself (conscious thought), and the sense of alienation created by the inability of our conscious thought to root itself in the world of living things. This is neatly captured at Spirit Sands.
Spirit Sands is a nature park in the middle of Canada. It is a sandy area of conifer trees and small lakes and is popular for camping in the summer. Nearby the camp, is a place where the conifers give way to small bushes then small plants and then finely just sand with nothing growing. Standing in this area of sand you are aware that you are surrounded by conifers and in a large shallow bowl. It feels a very unusual place to be and it is moving and baffling. The bafflement is eased when you learn that the constant small breeze keeps the grains of sand in the centre moving so much that nothing can grow there. The emotional impact of the place remains and it is easy to understand why it was a sacred place for the regions native people; even more so when you hear of their beliefs. They believed that the wind was the movement of the spirit of creation and that plants were the nearest to the creator. The animals came next but they, as humans were the furthest away. They had to make ritual efforts to connect with the Great Spirit. At Spirit Sands they could encounter the wind directly moving the sand grains and see beyond the animals and the plants. The beliefs of this human culture give a vivid picture of the degree of alienation that we can feel from lived experience: a gift of our mind.
We can reduce the self, down to some essence that can reincarnate in any living thing or leave it as human occupying a new life on earth or in a different place. When we personally relate to the ant on the desk as we would to a human companion then we immediately find it hard to take its life. We are disgusted when someone kills their pet even if it is ‘only’ a locust. We can kill ants on the desk until there the one that we give a little too much attention to and find that we have automatically gifted it with a self. Often we then give it a name. Anthropomorphism is easy because of our disembodied self.
We have seen from the nature of language and from the way that language games fragment across experience that our bodies are a strange place to call home. Our talking self (mind) is a ‘bolt on’. By this we mean that it is a by-product of human language not that it has a separate coherent form or identity. You only have to look at the anarchic field of meaning clusters to realise that there is no independent body or coherent form there. The greatest culturally pictured nightmare that humans have is the fear that their bodies will be taken over by an alien. That is because we already have a deep sense that our minds are in some way alien from our bodies and can be easily detached and replaced. This alienation leads us to reverse the natural order. We understand that our mind is ‘homed’ in the brain. We know that there is a complex connection between mind and trauma to our brain. In order to keep our brains healthy, and to combat dementia, we approach them from the direction of the mind. We give the mind exercise in the form of reading, completing visual patterns, crosswords and quizzes to name but a few. Knowledge shows us that the natural order takes the opposite approach. Physical exercise with a decent aerobic content; swimming, walking up hill; is what the brain needs to be kept healthy. The brain is only an organ within the body.