The emotional ‘brain’, on this view, is distributed throughout our middles, with a particular concentration in what we call the ‘solar plexus’.

I was reminded of all this when I saw this article the other day.

For our other mentions of Mr. Gurdjieff in these pages, have a look here, and for related posts try our ‘Inner Work‘ category.

Suddenly a buzzard swooped down and carried off the liver.

“You fool!” shouted Nasrudin, “the meat is all very well — but I still have the recipe!”

From “The Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin”, by Idries Shah

Here’s what I found. Massachusetts has a special charm that’s all its own.

For Jaynes, there was a profound difference between perception and action on the one hand, and self-aware consciousness on the other. He gave the example of a man driving a car while having an engaging conversation. Miles pass as the driver negotiates the twists and turns of the highway, moves from lane to lane, and changes speed to accommodate the other cars around him. Much later he returns his attention to the road, and realizes that he has no memory at all of his driving all that distance; though he may remember well what was said, the complex actions of driving the car proceeded altogether mechanically, and quite unconsciously. Now subtract out the conversation, and what is left is what Jaynes imagined preconscious Man to be: a perceiving, behaving machine.

Jaynes further supposed that before our transformation, the operation of our minds was “bicameral”: there was one part that acted in an executive role, and another that heard the commands of the first part as voices of the gods — in just the same way that schizophrenics hear imperative, disembodied voices today — and acted on them, with no more consciousness than our imaginary motorist’s consciousness of driving the car down the highway.

Jaynes argued — persuasively enough that his view is still the subject of lively debate thirty-three years later — that it was not until the commanding Self began to fuse with the perceiving, reacting Hearer that our modern composite, self-aware consciousness began to form. (For our February 2006 post about Jaynes’s book, and a good comment thread, see here.)

The point that I want to emphasize here is that in Jaynes’s opinion, we are capable of a very great variety of sophisticated perception, intention, and behavior without needing to be conscious at all. We can function very capably in a completely mechanical way.

These ideas — that we are capable of sophisticated unconscious behavior, that a great deal of our cognition, planning, and perception is in fact completely unconscious, and that without some degree of reflective self-awareness we cannot claim to be conscious in any meaningful way — are by no means Jaynes’s alone. Freud persuaded the world that there were such things as completely unconscious emotions, motives, and intention, and the idea that we are, in the absence of guided inner work, little more than talking machines is central to a number of esoteric systems, most notably perhaps that of Gurdjieff (see various posts here).

In this past Sunday’s New York Times Book Review I found a critique, by the eminent philosopher of mind Ned Block, of a new book called Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. The book is by Antonio Damasio, a leading neuroscientist and explorer of the physiological underpinnings of the human mind.

In his book, Damasio takes a firm Gurdjieffian/Jaynesian position: that “phenomenal awareness”, or, as Block describes it in his review, “what it is like to have a headache, taste chocolate or see red”, is not in any sense really “consciousness” in the absence of self-consciousness: that self-consciousness is necessarily prior to any real subjectivity.

I think this is correct, and it is gratifying to see this view defended by a researcher of Dr. Damasio’s stature. Ned Block is having none of it, though, and he raises various objections, none of which I see as terribly persuasive.

First, Dr. Block refers to an exchange between Julian Jaynes and the philosopher W.V.O. Quine:

The philosopher W. V. Quine once told me that he thought Jaynes might be on to something until he asked Jaynes what it was like to perceive before consciousness was invented. According to Quine, Jaynes said it was like nothing at all — exactly what it is like to be a table or a chair. Jaynes was denying that people had experiential phenomenal consciousness based on a claim about inflated self-consciousness.

This is presented withouth further elaboration, as though it is some sort of reductio ad absurdum; it is nevertheless precisely Jaynes’s and Damasio’s (and Gurdjieff’s) point that in the complete absence of self-aware consciousness, we are entirely justified in denying “experiential” phenomenal consciousness. The assertion may be a radical one, but it is coherent, and Block’s anecdote is certainly not a counter-argument; it is nothing more than an incredulous stare.

Next, Dr. Block offers an example of a patient in a persistent vegetative state:

You may have noticed an exciting report a few years ago of a patient in a persistent vegetative state (defined behaviorally) studied by the neuroscientists Adrian Owen and Steven Laureys. On some trials, the two instructed the patient to imagine standing still on a tennis court swinging at a ball, and on others to visualize walking from room to room in her home. The patient, they found, showed the same imagistic brain activations (motor areas for tennis, spatial areas for exploring the house) as normally conscious people who were used as controls.

More such cases have since been discovered, and this year Owen and Laureys described a vegetative-state patient who was able to use the tennis/navigation alternation to give yes-or-no answers to five of six basic questions like “Is your father’s name Alexander?” These results are strong evidence — though not proof — of phenomenal consciousness in some of those who showed no behavioral signs of it. But Damasio scoffs, saying that these results “can be parsimoniously interpreted in the context of the abundant evidence that mind processes operate nonconsciously.” His skepticism appears to be grounded in the fact that these patients show no clear sign of self-consciousness and thus constitute a potential roadblock in front of his theory.

Again, we have here no evidence of subjectively aware consciousness, but rather of areas of the brain reacting in the same way they would be expected to react in a healthy person. To be sure, these are murky waters here: an unambiguous objective test for subjective consciousness is the Holy Grail of both neuroscience and the philosophy of mind. But again, Dr. Block is not refuting anything here: he dismisses Dr. Damasio’s suggestion that what we see here is mere neurological reaction, devoid of real subjective awareness, as mere “scoffing”, while he in turn scoffs at Dr. Damasio’s assertion on no more solid basis than that it must surely be obvious that “real” consciousness must surely attend such examples of perception and reaction.

Dr. Block presses Dr. Damasio somewhat more effectively with his next objection: dreaming.

Damasio also stumbles over dreaming. In dreams, phenomenal consciousness can be very vivid even when the rational processes of self-consciousness are much diminished. Damasio describes dreams as “mind processes unassisted by consciousness.” Recognizing that the reader will be puzzled by this claim, he describes dreaming as “paradoxical” since the mental processes in dreaming are “not guided by a regular, properly functioning self of the kind we deploy when we reflect and deliberate.” But dreaming is paradoxical only if one has a model of phenomenal consciousness based on self-consciousness — on knowledge, rationality, reflection and wakefulness.

Here we do have a more difficult question. Dreams are a form of subjective experiencing, and they are obviously different from waking consciousness; indeed, the practice of “conscious dreaming” is not uncommon in South Asian esoteric systems. But I would argue that even if the perceptions in dreams are not actual physical responses to stimuli from the outer world, we may regard them as neurological “mock-ups”, to which the dreaming self-awareness stands in a similar relation as it does with the perceptions it receives during ordinary wakefulness. In other words, it is still the case that even in dreams, self-consciousness, however encapsulated it may be from the real world, is necessary for subjective consciousness of the mocked-up perceptions it is fed by the sleeping brain.

Finally, Dr. Block cites experiments in attention:

In one experiment, the Israeli neuroscientist Rafi Malach presented subjects with pictures and asked them to judge their own emotional reactions as positive, negative or neutral — a self-oriented, introspective task. He then presented different subjects with the same pictures and asked them to very quickly categorize the pictures as, for example, animals or not. Of course these subjects were seeing the pictures consciously, but Malach found that the brain circuits involved in scrutinizing self-reactions (as indicated by the emotional reaction task) were inhibited in the fast categorization task. Subjects also rated their self-awareness as high in the emotional reaction task and low in the fast categorization task. As Malach puts it, these results comport with “the strong intuitive sense we have of ‘losing our selves’ in a highly engaging sensory-motor act.”

From a Gurdjieffian perspective, this is simple: for those who have not practiced this sort of inner work, maintaining a self-reflective fragment of attention pointed back toward oneself is slow and effortful, and under stress, we act more mechanically. Dr. Block assumes that “Of course these subjects were seeing the pictures consciously” but I suspect that they were seeing them less consciously than before, and that in general they performed the second drill far more mechanically. (One common assumption is that consciousness is either “on” or “off”, but anyone who has made the sort of careful self-observation that systems like the Gurdjieff work require knows that there are continuous gradations of consciousness.)

I don’t think Dr. Block has made his case, and I’ll be interested to read Dr. Damasio’s book. You can read the review here.

(I’ve also just noticed that all the excerpts I’ve included from Ned Block’s review are indented using an HTML <blockquote> tag. Given the context, I think that’s kind of funny.)

A new study showing a correlation between “mind-wandering” and unhappiness supports the view that there is genuine value in mindfulness, for those who had any doubts.

Here.

Of particular relevance were these passages, which describe the experience of a dissolving of the “self” that hallucinogens can produce:

“All of a sudden, everything familiar started evaporating,” [a subject] recalled. “Imagine you fall off a boat out in the open ocean, and you turn around, and the boat is gone. And then the water’s gone. And then you’re gone.” …

In interviews … subjects described their egos and bodies vanishing as they felt part of some larger state of consciousness in which their personal worries and insecurities vanished.

These experiences are very much like those achieved by various meditative disciplines, and esoteric adepts have long used hallucinogenic drugs to give beginners a glimpse of the road ahead. The correspondence, it turns out, is not just subjective:

Scientists are especially intrigued by the similarities between hallucinogenic experiences and the life-changing revelations reported throughout history by religious mystics and those who meditate. These similarities have been identified in neural imaging studies conducted by Swiss researchers and in experiments led by Roland Griffiths, a professor of behavioral biology at Johns Hopkins.

In one of Dr. Griffiths’s first studies, involving 36 people with no serious physical or emotional problems, he and colleagues found that psilocybin could induce what the experimental subjects described as a profound spiritual experience with lasting positive effects for most of them. None had had any previous experience with hallucinogens, and none were even sure what drug was being administered.

That these substances can induce mental states that are both subjectively and objectively similar to, or perhaps indistinguishable from, “genuine” religious or mystical experiences, has led to the coinage of an excellent word for them: entheogens. And that these ineffable subjective experiences can be brought about by such “material” causes as the use of drugs, or even brain trauma (watch this extraordinary video, if you haven’t seen it before) is, it seems to me, more grist for the materialist’s mill.

Read the article here.

My friend and I make fundamentally opposite assumptions. For him, consciousness and purpose are bedrock features of the world, while I suppose that consciousness emerges, somehow, from the substance and activity of our brains. (It’s worth noting that he is a theist, and I’m not.)

My interlocutor asked me:

Do you think there is such a thing as raw consciousness, awareness, an Observer; or do you think there is just an incredibly complicated causal mental chain that somehow includes self-awareness, somehow generated by the same process?

My inclination is toward the latter model, of course, and though I wasn’t sure I understood just what “raw” consciousness means, I replied that the materialist view would be that the brain being what it is, and doing what it does, is what gives rise to consciousness, and that any Observer is therefore just an aspect of the brain in action.

My friend clarified:

Obviously there is the question of how a materially-caused causal chain of thoughts can observe itself, let alone how/why it “feels” qualia.

This is, of course, very much the question. It’s all very well for us materialists to simply assert that consciousness arises from the workings of the physical brain, but until we can offer some account of in virtue of what, exactly, a pinguid, three-pound lump of meat can do this trick, we are never going to persuade the dualists and idealists. We may indeed have plenty of good, empirical reasons to think this must be the way it is, but as it stands we really have no physical account whatsoever of what consciousness is, nor of what the necessary and sufficient physical circumstances are for it to arise. Any materialist who doesn’t admit this is simply not being honest.

I acknowledged to my correspondent that this was indeed a truly vexatious problem, and added a link to Daniel Dennett’s oft-cited paper on the slipperiness of qualia. In his reply, he mentioned Dennett’s “multiple drafts” model of the way the brain promotes localized cognitive processes to full conscious awareness by a sort of competitive process, as well as Dennett’s focus on the easily demonstrable “gappiness” of consciousness, and said:

I suppose you go along with this? Could it be like putting the cart (certainly not Descartes) before the horse — pledging faith in materialism so that, if Dennett’s line of thought is where materialism winds you up, then you believe it; you can’t really question the result because the result proves you’re incapable of doing that. Materialism is the premise, not the consciousness you live with. It’s a faith-based thing. You believe in materialism more than your own consciousness…

I replied:

Not so fast. It isn’t just an arbitrary choice to think that consciousness is a result of the material brain at work; the balance is tipped toward that view by all the ways that consciousness seems to be supervenient on the state of the physical brain. Damage the brain, damage the mind in predictable ways. Stimulate this or that neuron, get a conscious perception – a smell, a memory, a melody – again in repeatable, predictable, mappable ways. Etc., etc., etc., in a thousand compelling examples.

If the brain were just a “radio receiver” of some sort, a metaphor that some find appealing, you wouldn’t expect to be able to interfere with reason itself, or personality, the way we can by tampering with the brain. Then there are also all those Libet-style results, about “action potential” preceding conscious awareness of voluntary decision-making.

It seems to me the most parsimonious account to imagine that the brain came first, and that consciousness arises from its activity somehow.

But I do think Daniel Dennett goes too far in trying to fob off consciousness as an illusion. Yes, it’s gappy as hell, and tricks itself in various ways. But he almost seems to try to get rid of subjective awareness altogether, which is crazy. I mean, for there to be an illusion, there has to be someone being fooled, right? But he always says he isn’t denying consciousness altogether, that he is misunderstood — though I’ve yet to figure out what he means. Wish I could find myself next to him on a plane someday.

We found ourselves, albeit briefly, on common ground. My friend next sent this:

We’re in synch here… I know and can’t disagree with the supervenience points, of course. I don’t suppose the Buddha really said it, but I’ve always kind of thought the points we’re discussing explained the aridity of consciousness that Buddhism posits. You see where I’m going, or where I came from at the beginning. The other side of the supervenience stuff is the unalterability of the raw, observing consciousness, if stripped of sufficient secondary reactions: it doesn’t matter how drunk, how in pain, how dizzy, etc., you are. Sometimes you go out like a light, but your raw awareness in dreamland is the same awareness and the dream and sleep yoga literature tells us you can learn to wake up to raw awareness in non-REM sleep, or whatever, non-dreaming, deepest sleep.

I thought he was helping himself to too much here:

I am not sure I agree about the “unalterability” of the “raw” experience. It seems you are going for a binary, there-at-all/not-there-at-all distinction — and certainly there are times where it’s not there at all, and times when, obviously, it is — but you are compressing the dynamic range far too much. I think the lowest levels of consciousness are very different indeed from higher ones, and also that dreaming consciousness is very different (in degree, or level, or whatever) from waking consciousness.

It seems to me that consciousness is one of the most “alterable” things there is, in fact.

He replied:

I disagree. The observer is constant. I know this from personal experience. It would be interesting to talk about the layers built thereon, and the degree to which they are merely causal in origin, and whether the observer can jog the causal chain so as to nudge things out of your material view. But the observer is always there, always the same.

Hmmm… I thought that this Observer was getting awfully detached, indeed rather suspiciously so:

Well, as they say, “if you make yourself small enough, you can externalize everything”. But I’d say that pretty much everything about our conscious experience can change: its contents, emotional state, level of awareness, just about anything you care to name except the most basic distinction between being conscious at all or entirely unconscious — and of course we are not conscious of being unconscious. That is a very important point: consciousness is not aware of its own borders, so it seems that it is plenary, constant, consistent, in a way that it most certainly isn’t.

I am well aware of the cultivation of an Observer; it is the foundation of the Gurdjieff work, and I worked very hard at it for many years. But to me that is about control of attention, about training the brain to work in a new way. So I see consciousness very much as changing, as coming and going, expanding and contracting, depending on what is happening in the physical brain.

Also, I had to ask:

What do you mean by “always the same”?

He replied:

Well, as I said, no matter how drunk or dizzy or sleepy or sad you are, there is a part of you that just observes this and is not befuddled at all. Sometimes I think there’s a missing period. It gets lost at points, seemingly, during sleep, and seeming hitches at sleep transitions; as far as I can tell, I lost it during anesthesia; but it is so constant, and I can really know it is there through wake-sleep-dream–I’ve traveled with that; so I can believe it’s there during unconsciousness, but bringing back the recollection of it is hard. Presumably, it takes a lot of work to know it when it isn’t observing anything.

Anyway, I was going to add that my last point about it being hard to know the observer when it isn’t observing anything (and of course one works toward that in meditation) raises interesting subject/object questions, including suggesting there is something to the idea individuality is a snare & delusion. If one hypothesizes there is a sea of consciousness, then that membrane of individual awareness, without it being aware of anything, is elusive — or maybe one can grow it bigger with practice. But in my cosmology it must work something like that: that there’s awareness, awareness of self, awareness of self-experience, awareness of one’s thoughts, a lot of layers of awareness of one’s thoughts.

Deep waters here. He continued:

I would say that when one observes one’s thoughts, or shall we say the subject matter one sees arising in one’s consciousness, one sees causal relationships … and the causality can be related to events, and ultimately to materiality; but what is it that observes this? This never changes. My reaction of disgust at the unoriginality of my thoughts spirals out into that same world of causal relationships, but that which observes exists, is never befuddled, is always the same. It is of course hard to sever it from everything built upon it. Perhaps you cannot do it. Perhaps most people cannot do it. Perhaps I cannot do it very well… I don’t really believe that, though. I think everybody can do it, but may not have focused and worked on it. I think this is why children get dizzy and adults get drunk: so they can calmly observe their ordinary consciousness become unusual, so they can separate themselves from their… can’t find the right word, experiences, certainly; so their consciousness can be more obviously on two planes for awhile, because we are so used to the seamless integration of our linear mental chatter and our observing of it. Some people get high to calm down, to feel better, to otherwise regulate their somatic and experiential system; but some healthy people do it as a kind of unwitting spiritual exploration. Dennett doesn’t believe this, but you can’t grasp Dennett on this point; neither can I; and Dennett is not an explorer of consciousness; he is just a manipulator of data and theories about it.

And there we left it, for now. But there was an item in the paper today that said some interesting things about all of this, which I’ll save for next time.

The word is “behavior”; specifically the sense of the word that applies to what living creatures do. Although there are entire academic fields that have the word in their names, it appears that just what constitutes “behavior” is rather a difficult question for even the boffins themselves to answer.

The question was brought to the floor by Daniel Levitis, a teaching assistant at Berkeley. We read:

Daniel Levitis was working as a teaching assistant for an animal behavior course at the University of California in Berkeley, and on the first day of class, the professor explained that the shorthand definition of a “behavior” is “what animals do.”

O.K., that’s the freshman-friendly definition, Mr. Levitis thought. Now how about the unabridged, professional version? What is the point-by-point definition of a behavior that behavioral biologists use when judging whether a particular facet of the natural world falls under their purview? After all, animals digest food and grow fur, yet few behavioral researchers would count such physiological and anatomical doings as behaviors.

Mr. Levitis asked the professor for the full definition of a behavior. She referred him to their textbook, with its promising title, “Animal Behavior.” To his surprise, neither that textbook nor any other reference he consulted bothered to spell it out. “It was assumed that everyone knew what the word meant,” said Mr. Levitis, who is completing his doctorate at Berkeley.

His interest piqued, Mr. Levitis investigated with a survey of professionals:

To perform their linguistic investigation, the researchers composed an online survey with two basic parts. In the first, they presented 13 “potentially diagnostic” statements about behavior, compiled from their sweep through the scientific literature, with which respondents could either concur or not. “Behavior always involves movement,” for example, and “is always an action, rather than a lack of action.” Or, “behaviors are always the actions of individuals, not groups” and “something whole individuals do, not organs or parts that make up an individual.” Or, “a developmental change is not a behavior.”

In the second part, Mr. Levitis and his co-workers offered 20 instances of natural phenomena and asked, Behavior, yea, nay or can’t say? “A sponge pumps water to gather food,” for example, or “a plant bends its leaves toward a light source” or “a beetle is swept away by a strong current.” Does a flock of geese flying in V formation count as a behavior? How about when a person decides not to do anything tomorrow in the event of rain, or when a female ant that is physiologically capable of laying eggs doesn’t do so because she’s not a queen? (If you’d like to take the survey and see how your responses compare with scientists’ and other readers’, please go to nytimes.com/science. Warning, spoilers ahead.)

Nearly all of the items were designed as borderline cases that tested the validity of one or more statements in the first half of the survey. “Flocks of geese fly in V formation,” for instance, contradicted the notion that behaviors are the actions of individuals rather than of groups. A person deciding on inactivity in the event of rain and an ant forgoing reproduction because she’s not royalty both flouted the premise that a behavior is always an action. One offering, “a spider builds a web,” contradicted none of the 13 stipulations about behavior and thus served as an experimental control.

The results showed little, if any, agreement amongst those who participated, and often evoked inconsistencies even amongst answers given by a single respondent.

If this vagueness and inconsistency of meaning is possible even with a familiar term used by professional scientists to refer to the very subject of their expertise, it seems naively optimistic to imagine that very much of human discourse consists of a meaning in one interlocutor’s mind being faithfully transferred to, and subsequently represented in, another’s.

Indeed, Mr. Levitis’s project points out that the problem runs far deeper than the failure of language to provide a reliable channel for transferring precise meanings from one mind to another; it reminds us that even within ourselves the labels and concepts that, taken together, provide the scaffolding upon which our world-picture is erected are not the solid objects, the sturdy posts and beams, we imagine them to be, but are, rather, nothing more than diffuse and amorphous nebulae of associations. Though we often imagine that language is essential to the organization of our storehouse of concepts and ideas — indeed, it is hard for us to imagine how we could have meaningful concepts at all without language to give them definite form — it begins to seem that what we have instead is a collection of familiar terms, like “behavior”, that point not to anything solid, but into a mass of clouds. And although we humans can easily — blithely, glibly — share the words, each of has his own personal cloudscape, unique and irremediably private, and available even for our own introspection only with sustained and quite unnatural effort. We do not know ourselves; we do not understand most of the things we think we know; and to imagine that we really understand anyone else must surely be little more than a comforting fantasy. We roll words around in our minds, and pass them around amongst ourselves, but really we are far more alone than we imagine.

Read the article here.

This necessary insight has nothing to do with Islam, or even God.

The man who entrusted them to him counted them, one by one, so that Nasrudin could be sure that there really were nine.

On the road his attention was distracted by something by the wayside.

Nasrudin, sitting astride one of the animals, counted them, again and again. He could make it only eight.

Panic-stricken, he jumped off, looked all over the place, and then counted them again. There were nine.

Then he noticed a remarkable thing. When he was sitting on donkey-back, he could see only eight donkeys. When, however, he dismounted, there were nine in full view.

“This is the penalty,” reflected the Mulla, “for riding, when I should, no doubt, be walking behind the donkeys.”

“Did you have any difficulty getting them here?” asked the farmer when Mulla Nasrudin arrived, dusty and disheveled.

“Not after I learned the trick of donkey-drivers — walk behind,” said Nasrudin. “Before that, they were full of tricks.”

From “The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin”, by Idries Shah

The thing that gives a first-class hangover its bite, its existential awfulness, is dehydration, largely due to the diuretic effect of alcohol. When, years ago, I heard about the recommended solution used by relief organizations for the treatment of severe dehydration due to dysentery, etc, it occurred to me that it might be effective for this particular form of elective suffering as well, and indeed it was.

The mixture is prepared as follows:

Into a quart of water, stir eight tablespoons of sugar, and one teaspoon of salt. Drink as much as you can.

If you have a headache, add two or three aspirin (NOT Tylenol, unless you want to end up like Mickey Mantle). If your stomach is bad, take three Alka-Seltzer instead.

You will feel better, and may even wish to carry on living.

One common objection to naturalistic accounts of human morality — usually made in support of theistic viewpoints — is human altruism, which often seems to go beyond any clear expectation of reciprocity, or benefit to individual fitness. But on a group-selection level it becomes far easier to understand: it makes economic sense for a social organism, living as part of a group, to exhibit behavior that might reduce its relative fitness within the group as long as it increases the fitness of the group as a whole, relative to other groups. This in turn improves the average prospects of all the individual members of the more-altruistic group; the rising tide lifts all the boats more than enough to account for the within-group sacrifices the altruistic mindset requires. Religion provides an excellent framework for this sort of social arrangement.

This is not, of course, to say that there is a Christian genome, a Muslim genome, and so forth. But what it does mean is that the sorts of brains that are better able to learn these social behaviors — the brains that are more easily trained to hold the sort of concepts that aid in the suppression of individual advantage over that of the group, and perhaps to have the kind of “religious experiences” that reinforce belief in, and the cohesive power of, religious traditions — will be favored.

Once you have the right sort of brains in place, a new sort of competition begins: a cultural arms race between various social systems. Those that do the best job of binding the group, and of reinforcing the behaviors that lead to group success, will do better in competition. If my group has a religious system in place that offers me, in exchange for my self-sacrifice, the approval of my entire tribe in this life and an eternal reward in the next, we are likely to prevail in competion against teams less well organized.

Religions themselves will, then, be subject to design pressure; the most successful ones will have an impressive arsenal of cognitive and social features that protect them and help them propagate.

Because religions are ideas, their habitat, their ecosystem, is therefore human minds. “Propagation”, to a religion, means making a copy of itself in another mind, and the religions that do this best are going to enjoy a “fitness” advantage of their own. They might achieve this by containing, in part, ideas that encourage the mind each copy resides in to be aggressive about making more copies in other minds — or to believe that it is necessary to eliminate those minds that contain copies of competing sets of ideas.

On this view of religion, religious idea-sets can be seen as having Darwinian “interests” of their own, and can be looked at as organisms unto themselves; indeed a religion that is especially effective at propagating itself into other minds might do very well independently of the effect it has on the fitness of the host. This might take the form of a religion that causes all its adherents not to breed, or to commit suicide. Examples of such religious cults do indeed exist; the Shakers, for example, were celibate. (You probably don’t know any Shakers, and now you know why.) We can also imagine that a religious idea-set might confer fitness advantages on a group under some circumstances, but not others; we might expect these religions, which could do very well for a while, to die out as the competitive environment changes.

If an organism that requires a host tends to kill its hosts once acquired, it must either be very good at finding new ones quickly, or it will not be around long. But some organisms enter a mutually beneficial relationship with their hosts, which, when it occurs between living organisms, we call symbiosis. We should expect that the most successful religions will be like this: sturdy of design, good at propagating themselves, and tending to increase the fitness of the minds that they occupy. And we should also expect that, given the long symbiosis of human minds and religion, there will be plenty of human brains that are good hosts: that are correctly set up to enter such a relationship.

There has been quite a lot of research, lately, confirming that religious people are in various ways better off than the rest of us. In an article published a few days ago in the New York Times, John Tierney, himself an unbeliever, cites a new study (by Michael McCullough and Brian Willoughby of the University of Miami) showing that religious adherents exhibit better self-control. Tierney writes:

This sounded to me uncomfortably similar to the conclusion of the nuns who taught me in grade school, but Dr. McCullough has no evangelical motives. He confesses to not being much of a devotee himself. “When it comes to religion,” he said, “professionally, I’m a fan, but personally, I don’t get down on the field much.”

His professional interest arose from a desire to understand why religion evolved and why it seems to help so many people. Researchers around the world have repeatedly found that devoutly religious people tend to do better in school, live longer, have more satisfying marriages and be generally happier.

These results have been ascribed to the rules imposed on believers and to the social support they receive from fellow worshipers, but these external factors didn’t account for all the benefits. In the new paper, the Miami psychologists surveyed the literature to test the proposition that religion gives people internal strength.

“We simply asked if there was good evidence that people who are more religious have more self-control,” Dr. McCullough. “For a long time it wasn’t cool for social scientists to study religion, but some researchers were quietly chugging along for decades. When you add it all up, it turns out there are remarkably consistent findings that religiosity correlates with higher self-control.”

Well, maybe it’s just that people like that tend to gravitate toward religion. No, says Dr. McCullough:

But which came first, the religious devotion or the self-control? It takes self-discipline to sit through Sunday school or services at a temple or mosque, so people who start out with low self-control are presumably less likely to keep attending. But even after taking that self-selection bias into account, Dr. McCullough said there is still reason to believe that religion has a strong influence.

“Brain-scan studies have shown that when people pray or meditate, there’s a lot of activity in two parts of brain that are important for self-regulation and control of attention and emotion,” he said. “The rituals that religions have been encouraging for thousands of years seem to be a kind of anaerobic workout for self-control.”

In a study published by the University of Maryland in 2003, students who were subliminally exposed to religious words (like God, prayer or bible) were slower to recognize words associated with temptations (like drugs or premarital sex). Conversely, when they were primed with the temptation words, they were quicker to recognize the religious words.

“It looks as if people come to associate religion with tamping down these temptations,” Dr. McCullough said. “When temptations cross their minds in daily life, they quickly use religion to dispel them from their minds.”

So is it organized religion, with all its cultural trappings, that produces this result, or just a spiritual nature generally?

In one personality study, strongly religious people were compared with people who subscribed to more general spiritual notions, like the idea that their lives were “directed by a spiritual force greater than any human being” or that they felt “a spiritual connection to other people.” The religious people scored relatively high in conscientiousness and self-control, whereas the spiritual people tended to score relatively low.

“Thinking about the oneness of humanity and the unity of nature doesn’t seem to be related to self-control,” Dr. McCullough said. “The self-control effect seems to come from being engaged in religious institutions and behaviors.”

Tierney, who is not religious, finds all of this rather dispiriting:

So what’s a heathen to do in 2009? Dr. McCullough’s advice is to try replicating some of the religious mechanisms that seem to improve self-control, like private meditation or public involvement with an organization that has strong ideals.

Religious people, he said, are self-controlled not simply because they fear God’s wrath, but because they’ve absorbed the ideals of their religion into their own system of values, and have thereby given their personal goals an aura of sacredness. He suggested that nonbelievers try a secular version of that strategy.

“People can have sacred values that aren’t religious values,” he said. “Self-reliance might be a sacred value to you that’s relevant to saving money. Concern for others might be a sacred value that’s relevant to taking time to do volunteer work. You can spend time thinking about what values are sacred to you and making New Year’s resolutions that are consistent with them.”

Of course, it requires some self-control to carry out that exercise — and maybe more effort than it takes to go to church.

“Sacred values come prefabricated for religious believers,” Dr. McCullough said. “The belief that God has preferences for how you behave and the goals you set for yourself has to be the granddaddy of all psychological devices for encouraging people to follow through with their goals. That may help to explain why belief in God has been so persistent through the ages.”

The rational, naturalist infidel does find himself in a bit of a pickle here. The myths, folklore, and superstitions of religion have no pull on him whatsoever. Unsupported by any compelling evidence, and full of Ptolemaic epicycles and special defensive pleading, they seem quite obviously made up, and almost certainly false. (At best, given that they make incompatible assertions, all but one must be false, and to us unbelievers, that one is too.) But swallowing the pill — suppressing one’s intellectual immune-system so as to let the virus enter and take hold — seems to confer real, measurable benefits.

The question, then, is: must it be one or the other? Can we wean ourselves from religion? Can we fly without the magic feather? Can we learn to have the benefits, the solidarity, the “sacredness” of religion without the supernatural beliefs?

Inshallah, I think we can.

You can read McCullough and Willoughby’s paper here.

In case you aren’t familiar with this beermaker (and if you enjoy beer you ought to be), Dogfish Head is an edgy little brewery down in Delaware that specializes in unusual and “extreme” beers. They make, among other things, a series of India Pale Ales that increase in strength, and bitterness, according to the duration of the hop-infusion. The most conventional of the lot is their 60-minute version; it is excellent, and at 6% alcohol by volume (ABV), it is strong, but not unusually so. (India Pale Ales were developed as a way of shipping beer from Britain to India without it spoiling during the long, hot trip; the extra hops and alcohol had a preservative effect.)

Next comes the 90-minute version, which is simply outstanding: a bright corona of hops surrounding a rich, malty base, and a warming 9% ABV.

But the king of the hill is the 120, which is brewed only a few times a year, and which I have never been able to track down, until tonight. This is most certainly an “extreme” beer; it costs anywhere from 8 to 10 dollars for a 12-ounce bottle, and its ABV is a (literally) staggering 21%, about the equivalent of a fortified wine such as a port or a strong sherry. (For comparison, Budweiser is about 5% ABV).

I am about to drink this monster. There will be no further posting tonight.

Sometime, when I set to thinking about the various activities of men, the dangers and troubles which they face at Court, or in war, giving rise to so many quarrels and passions, daring and often wicked enterprises and so on, I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.

Pascal saw in Man’s constant need for diversion our terror of the abyss of wretchedness we must confront if we are brave enough to look within ourselves. In this he was exactly right.

Man has not changed: the wretchedness is real enough, and the diversion more cacaphonous than ever. What can be done? For Pascal, the answer lay in God. But is God as real as the wretchedness? If not we need another approach.

“We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching.

Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.”

The crisis is that we are here now, but there will come another “now” when we are not. But that’s wrong, because as far as we can tell, there is no such thing, in the objective, physical world, as now; it is only a subjective feature of our awareness, which means for us there simply can be no “now” in which that awareness does not exist. There is a span of time that our lives occupy — one can mark off spacetime events b and d as our birth and death, and between those events we are alive — but there is nothing about space and time as we understand them that corresponds to the idea of now. Somehow, our subjective awareness seems to illuminate successive slices of our lives’ block of spacetime, one after the other, always moving. But to the physicist, all the slices are just the same; they all simply are. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever been able to answer this simple question: why is now now?

If the flow of time is, as seems to be the case, an illusion, bound somehow to consciousness, then perhaps it is by focusing our attention on the direst consequence of the apparent flow of time — that we die — that we can bind them together, force them into juxtaposition, to give ourselves something stationary to take hold of as we try to resist the current of sleep in which we drift from birth to death: not with panic, or titillation, but with a matter-of-fact appreciation that we have much work to do in a finite span of time, and that the stakes may be high.

At the end of G.I. Gurdjieff’s extraordinary book Beelzebub’s Tales To His Grandson, Beelzebub, long past the passions of his youth — for which excesses he has spent millennia exiled on Earth, studying the curious, stunted beings who dwell thereupon — is asked by his curious and beloved grandson Hassein what, if anything, would direct the people of Earth onto the path of self-development that is the proper task and duty of all conscious beings. Beelzebub replies that they would have to be reconstituted as follows:

…that every one of these unfortunates, during the process of his existence, should constantly sense and be aware of his own death, as well as of the death of everyone upon which his eyes, or attention, rest.

Only such a sensation and such an awareness could destroy the egoism now so completely crystallized in them that it has swallowed up the whole of their essence, and at the same time uproot that tendency to hate others which flows from it — the tendency that engenders those mutual relationships which are the chief cause of all their abnormalities, unbecoming … and maleficient for them and for the whole of the Universe.

One important point Gelernter makes is that a widely held view among many AI researchers and philosophers of mind — that consciousness arises in our brains solely in virtue of the computation performed, and that therefore any system running the right sort of software ought to be conscious — is pure speculation, and not a safe bet at all. This assumption underlies, for example, Nick Bostrum’s “simulation” argument, which we looked at in an earlier post, and which was just mentioned in the New York Times. But such a view overlooks the fact that there is one thing in the whole world, and one thing only, that we know to be capable of becoming conscious — namely the human brain — and the fact is that we don’t even have the right language yet to express what consciousness even is, let alone to make definite statements about how our brains create it. While it may indeed be the case that our brains generate consciousness solely in virtue of the computations they perform, the physical, biological brain may yet turn out to be a necessary substrate for consciousness. It’s simply too soon to say.

Gelernter also touches on an aspect of consciousness that is often overlooked in philosophical and scientific discussions: that it is not a binary, “on-off” phenomenon, but varies along a continuous gradient. This is common knowledge in esoteric systems of inner development, but gets short shrift indeed in Western academia, and it is refreshing to see him bring it up. The article also stresses the central role that attention plays in moderating our levels of consciousness, and even touches on — and this is a first, as far as I know, in mainstream discussion — the cohesion of the ‘I’ that results from the gathering of the attention in more conscious states. This is, in particular, absolutely and explicitly central to the practical system of inner work brought to the West by Gurdjieff, and I wonder if Dr. Gelernter has some connection with this teaching. It is a topic I’ve been meaning to return to in these pages.

Finally, the article takes up the nature of emotions, and here, I think, goes a bit astray. But that’s a matter for another post.

Anyway, go and have a look. You can read the article here.

When this sort of thing happens, the natural reaction here in the U.S., where we are able to live our lives at a level of safety and comfort that is unparallelled in the history of the world, is to ask how we can prevent it from happening again. This isn’t some horrid Third World backwater, after all, where life is cheap; this is America, and if something is broken, we want the government to fix it. But underlying this attitude is the assumption that everything can be fixed; that we have an inalienable right to live tranquil and sheltered lives, and that what we get for living here and not, say, Darfur, or East Timor, or Baghdad, is that our children will be safe. And the amazing fact is that generally, they are.

But we must take a step back from our indignation to realize that we live brief and precarious lives on a tiny speck of dust in a vast and indifferent Cosmos, and that despite our very best efforts — and by all means, let us see what we can do, not with a hysterical backlash, but by a reasoned examination of our options and priorities as a society — despite our very best efforts, the chaos, the blackness, the uncaring and infinite Wild that we so effectively manage to keep just beyond the gates is going to creep in now and then, and pick some of us off. We live in a firelit glade in the forest, and sometimes we forget how recently the ground was cleared, and how small a place we occupy in the wilderness all around us.

The madness that took those infinitely precious young lives on Monday was not a localized instance, nor is it “fixable” by legislature. It was an eruption of a molten pool that lies beneath us all, and while our species passes through its awkward and painful adolescence — as the world is compressed ever more tightly, and as more and more of us are brought, willy-nilly, into random and kinetic interaction with one another — that heat and pressure will find its way to the surface again and again, until we transform not our governments, not our laws, but ourselves.