Do we perceive thoughts? A blog about Information and awareness

“I think where I am not; therefore I am where I do not think."

Jaques Lacan

Do we perceive thoughts?

According to our man Rene Descartes, thinking stuff and extended stuff are different substances. We are a ghost in an often sickly machine. Contrast this with the materialist vision of a meat robot!  The former suffers from a homunculus problem and is quite anti-science, whereas the latter doesn't allow us the free-will most of us take for granted. Both get to the heart of a conflict at the heart of science, religion and philosophy - just what *is there*? These discussions are not unimportant for teachers. We act as if students are autonomous and responsible. We assume free-will in most of our daily interactions with others, and we emphasise effort, morality and kindness as attributes that it is within our capacity to control. We often get frustrated with kids when they don't live up to our high expectations, and we hold them accountable for their actions. Our entire system of education wouldn't work with the view of the world presented by the "meat robot". However, we are also, like good scientists, unlikely to believe in something immaterial or ghostly to explain human life. We just aren't that special. We are beasts and evolution gives a pretty convincing account of why.

Buddhism argues that "the self" is empty of inherent existence. The self, and in fact all phenomena, are empty. This should not come as a surprise to those of us who follow a bit of cognitive science. It's stated quite frequently with gusto and conviction that there is no "homunculus" guiding our actions and lives. There is no "mini-me" at the controls taking rational decisions and weighing up all the information. In his book, Straw Dogs, John Gray describes the self in the following terms:

At this point, I'd like to suggest something a little out there. This suggestion is a bit different, so please bear with me. I take it as evident that we are aware of our thinking and emotions most of the time. Are our thoughts, therefore, not just our brains perceived from the inside? You might jump up here and go wait, this is just sneaking in dualism by other means, what is doing the perceiving? Perhaps, but if you look at the passage above, sentences like "the continuities we find are imaginary" or "we project a self into our actions" don't make sense without some self. Common language requires some kind of "doer".

We conclude we are a self because we are alive and experiencing things, not just because we think. The evil demon in Descartes meditations could just as easily be planting thoughts into your head as modifying the external world. In the classic Cartesian view of the world, thinking stuff and extended stuff is different substances. If we don't want to believe that, then we need to argue that thoughts are biological. Let's agree, for the sake of argument, that we can refer to thoughts as emergent properties of matter. This is quite a big assumption. Our thoughts are chaotic, unpredictable properties of an ever-changing biological pattern. We cannot reduce this emergent property to individual tokens of matter  - this is why neuroscience's pretty pictures of MRI scans are limited in what they can tell us. No thought is identical with any particular biological pattern. In fact, I don't even know if "one thought" makes sense as a phrase; all thoughts are interconnected. In chaos or complexity theory, they provide an example of a vast pile of sand onto which individual grains are dropped from a regular height. As we drop one grain of sand onto the total pile, we cannot predict how it will affect the collection of sand onto which it falls. There will be "tipping points" in which one grain will have a considerable impact, producing great cascades and ravines to form. In other moments there will be little impact. We cannot predict the future. The whole is more than the sum of its parts and even knowing the exact positions of all the grains of sand before dropping the subsequent grain cannot help us to understand what might happen to the overall state afterwards. Thoughts and emotions, as presented in awareness, are stochastic, complex and irreducible properties.

If we want to avoid dualism thoughts cannot be different from the organisation of a swarm of bees, but there is one crucial difference, and that is self-awareness. We are aware that we are thinking. Consider a lucid dream. A lucid dream is a set of perceptions that involves a limited version of the self-awareness that we have when we are awake. It's an entirely hallucinatory world in which the subject has volition. In this world, unlimited by the fetters of reality, people fly and get to make out with beautiful people. If I ask you to picture a carrot in your head, you can do that. What needs explaining is not the carrot - that was caused by the relationship between the word carrot in your perceptual apparatus and the image of a carrot you have in memory. What needs explaining is the awareness of that carrot. In fact, "awareness" of anything and everything. If we posit thoughts as part of the rules-governed material universe alongside particles and plants, then the problem becomes a different one; we just need to explain why there is any kind of awareness.

The Buddhist view, just like cognitive science, says there is no unitary self. There is no centralised awareness. However, there is *awareness* or a "universal clear light of the void". Unlike thoughts, which have properties that need explaining, awareness doesn't contain anything which we might feasibly measure or perceive. Buddhist thinking identifies belief in this unitary and really existing self as the source of all suffering. The concept of "mine" arises because I think that there is "a me" to which things belong. Without such an illusion, I cannot be upset that something is not mine. If thoughts are part of the quantifiable universe alongside computer software and cups of tea then awareness is not a part of the measurable order because we cannot assign it predicates. What then, is awareness? Well, the Buddhist view is that awareness is nothing and - by process of logic - infinite, ever-present and universal yet utterly empty of inherent existence. We cannot ascribe properties to awareness but we can ascribe properties to thoughts - I am thinking of an apple, the apple is green, for example. Thoughts are just images and words, after-all. What vexes is us is *awareness* of those thoughts. What about emotions? Well, also physical phenomena; emotions are complex emergent properties of physical states we are aware of.

You might say this is a long-winded way of getting back to dualism. The difference with this and substance dualism is that thoughts are information like the external world is information. If anything we are closer to idealism. If we are saying that thoughts are information and perceptions are information, there is less of a problem in suggesting that awareness and information can interact. We can't move matter with non-matter, but we can move information with awareness and volition. It seems like perceptions are made of the same stuff as thoughts. If thought and perception are of the same nature, then awareness quite clearly can and does interact with it. We can picture stuff, we can direct attention, we can move. In some sense then, this is a kind of idealism. Perhaps the only characteristic that awareness has is volition and intention.

I'd like to try to link this to quantum physics. Bear with me, I'm really not trying to be pretentious. Firstly, in some sense, all of our perceptions are emergent properties. This is controversial, I know. However, at the quantum level, Newtonian physics comes unstuck. There are interactions between particles disconnected in time and space, "spooky action at a distance". "Dark matter" is inferred as existing everywhere and in every place to explain the somewhat counter-intuitive idea that the absence of matter (as we understand it) includes more energy than matter itself. This describes how - to contradict King Lear - something came of nothing. The non-material parts of the universe - the regions to which we cannot currently ascribe predicates - contain more energy than that which is available to our perceptual apparatus. When I look around me, I see Newtonian physics. Stuff falls and breaks, things happen sequentially in time, I cannot close a door without reaching out to it and closing it. Regularities define the "scientific" world view. I can step out of my front door without falling upwards or sinking into oblivion. All these regularities are emergent properties of an infinitely more chaotic system of quantum particles. So if thoughts are emergent properties of brains and perceptions are emergent properties of quantum reality, then all that needs explaining is awareness. Awareness is empty, infinite, and for all intents and purposes, non-existent. But only non-existent in the same way that dark matter is non-existent. We infer it to explain certain phenomena, i.e. the fact we are conscious.

In this view, information and awareness are the only things that "exist", and neither are centralised anywhere. Awareness is something infinite and all-encompassing, not something which belongs to me. Our thoughts are the result of what we have experienced and retained in memory. They pass chaotically through our minds like so many grey clouds. This isn't a metaphor. They are of the same level of existence. What then does our mind actually do? Well, Buddhists have spent millennia developing what they would describe as the "science of the mind". Primarily they train attention, imagination and focus. This is what meditation is for, the process by which you become simultaneously aware of the emptiness of all phenomena - both thoughts and perceptions and realise the inherent emptiness of your self. As this occurs, you develop self-less-ness or a slow realisation of connectedness to absolutely everything. Sometimes it's called the clear light of the void. For Buddhists, realising non-self signals the end of suffering and the merging of awareness with information.

So in this view, there are no thinking skills except the act of bare awareness with limited intentionality over thoughts and perceptions. In the Buddhist view, not-thinking has more power than thinking as we accept the emptiness of awareness the emptiness of the information contained in perceptions and thoughts. Far from generic thinking skills - thinking hard about something - Buddhists attempt to direct awareness away from narrative streams of consciousness. Conceptual blending occurs more effectively when we don't try. You might usefully think of this as being a computer that possesses the ability to turn itself on and off every so often or an iPhone that closes down apps that are not in use. You briefly interrupt the flow of working memory to unclutter it and thus allow the processes via which thought occurs to happen unencumbered by your other perceptions or thoughts. There is evidence that more effective problem solving happens through this process of non-thought.

We can assume kids have some agency. They can direct their awareness of certain things and use their imagination, but in most cases, they will rely on memory. The more information they have to draw from, the deeper schemas are embedded into long term memory, the more likely it is that they will successfully navigate the world and solve problems. Finally, when we discipline kids, it's useful to create a culture or environment where it's harder to do the wrong thing than the right thing. If we can create a healthy, disciplined environment where kids are taught, and learn, the high-quality information they need to exercise intentionality and choice over their lives, we are doing our job well. A lot of poor behaviour is choosing peer acceptance above learning because it's more fun. We don't have to spend hours trying to persuade kids out of that, we should just make it challenging to do.