What is it like to be a bug?

There’s always Heidegger on bees…

Isn’t this related to the zombies question? It’s not as extreme, but someone who believes that there is some specific detail that distinguishes consciousness would presumably at least be open to the possibility that beings could otherwise appear intelligent but lack that detail.

On the issue of the ordinary person’s view, science fiction might provide some useful evidence — there’s a lot of writing dealing with the question of when other beings are people.

We’re not exactly conscious when we’re dreaming, yet we experience our dreams vividly. We don’t actually experience our conscious process in detail; most of us don’t have to put much thought into putting one foot in front of another, or using a towel after a shower, or composing a sentence. Some of my inventions and most of my best limericks popped into my head out of nowhere; the really interesting stuff happens beyond the reach of introspection.

My guess, and I think this follows Dennett, is that our experience is the immediate memory of perception and cognition, which explains the lag between intention and awareness. A neat consequence is that any creature exhibiting memory, even a butterfly that visits only certain flowers in my yard each day, is in the club, and it’s beyond question that scheming, gossiping, tool-making crows and rats with their maps have quite a bit in common with us.

Questions about qualia often involve color, so I asked my red-green color-blind brother-in-law about that. He can actually make fine distinctions between printed colors, but admitted he had trouble distinguishing leaves from dog poop. Good to know.

It’s in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. He talks about animals as being “poor-in-world” (vs. the “worldless” stone and the “world-forming” Dasein) as wall as boredom as a fundamental attunement of Dasein in the same vein as “being towards death” in B&T/i> (with the same variety of distinctions as fear/terror/angst building up to something grand about the essence of Dasein and all that).

And I’ve found the bee passage for your enjoyment. There’s a few pages more on the bee and what Heidegger thinks about being a bee (this seems like a good opportunity for a sketch involving bee-being and what it is to zzzzzz) around this particular account:

“A bee was placed before a little bowl filled with so much honey that the bee was unable to suck up the honey all at once. It begins to suck and then after a while breaks off this driven activity of sucking and flies off, leaving the rest of the honey still present in the bowl…. Yet it has been observed that if the abdomen is carefully cut away while it is sucking, a bee will simply carry on regardless even while the honey runs out of the bee from behind. This shows conclusively that the bee by no means recognizes the presence of too much honey. It recognizes neither this nor even – though this would be expected to touch it more closely – the absence of its abdomen. There is no question of it recognizing any of this, it continues with its driven activity regardless precisely because it does not recognize that plenty of honey is still present. Rather, the bee is simply taken by its food.”

Where any of this gets us concerning the initial post, I have no idea.

I think that if we make a distinction between perception and consciousness, then consciousness necessarily means “self consciousness”.
Self consciousness means that I have a model of the world in my mind that includes myself as an object.
Intuitively this depends on social interactions: the more complex social interactions one has, the more one develops self cosciousness.

Having an abdomen also seems to be a prerequisite for consciousness, both for bees and as a symbol of the proprioceptive feelings like hunger that create a difference between “me” and “the outer world” in the first place.

This post is outrageously dismissive of viruses. I am part-virus myself (with Varicella-zoster virus an undeniable part of my nervous system, along with myriad others, no doubt) and as conscious as any of you chauvinists. Hmmph.

(I mean can we be really sure that they’re self-aware at all?)

But does Nagel really believe that at some point in evolutionary history, a light flicked on in a brain somewhere, and the first experience was had?

It’s not obvious to me that you need to be a Nagelist (is that a thing? let’s say it is) to think that this is plausible. It’s worth noting that, introspection notwithstanding, it’s not at all clear that we really know what we even mean by “experience.” Probably, the thing we’re really trying to get at is not so much the experience itself as the awareness of the experience. In order for that to happen, it might well be that you need neural complexity that only manifests itself some way up the phylogenetic tree. Michael Graziano outlined a theory of this kind recently.

Nagel considers this sort of problem in “Panpsychism”. Why stop at viruses? What is it like to be a chunk of matter?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism#Thomas_Nagel

But he doesn’t seem to want to go Full Pansychist Monty.

Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness… can be downloaded off the Internet for free, it explains what consciousness is and is not in the first pages, and it’s fun to read. According to Jaynes even human beings only became consciousness about 3000 years ago. Wouldn’t you like to know what it was like to be a human being when Iliad was written? Recommended.

We will likely have to accept that there is an unbridgeable epistemic gap between first person experience and the third person description of the world that science provides.

If that is so, the sorites problem that John describes would be just one of the many unsolvable in principle problems of first person experience.

I have a hard time taking seriously anyone who tries to solve the philosophical problem of first person experience by throwing the word “complexity” around.

We will likely be able to make all sorts of progress in understanding the complexity of, say, the human visual system, the complexity of how it recognizes objects, how it reconstructs internally the ambient environment from visual cues (tasks that it still does orders of magnitude better than any available computer vision software). But that will not get us even an inch closer to explaining what first person experience is, or why it exists at all.

The passage that follows is from the opening of Chapter 10: “Music and Civilization” of my book, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (pp. 222-226). It is about how the Greeks reconceived themselves through a process that Jean Piaget has called reflective abstraction. I look at this, first in the domain of emotion (Julian Jaynes) and then in that of drama (Nietzsche). Note that here and there I refer to the mind as “neural weather,” a metaphor I develop early in the book. The idea is simply that the mind is a constantly shifting mass of neural firings as the weather is a constantly shifting mass of molecular collisions.

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In 1967, a book with an ungainly title, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, created a minor sensation with an astonishingly quixotic and original thesis: human consciousness originated in ancient Greece sometime between Homer and an Athenian Golden Age. That is to say, Homer was a Hellenic zombie telling heroic tales about older zombies. Night of the Living Dead had opened in Athens and was playing to a packed house.

The author, Julian Jaynes, stages this argument by noting that Iliad and Odyssey contain many episodes in which humans receive direction from gods and goddesses, and do not contain many words referring to mental states and actions. He takes the first observation at face value and concludes that the Homeric Greeks heard inner voices and acted on what they heard. From the fact that mental words had become common by the time of the Athenian Golden Age, he concludes that by that time, human consciousness had emerged. The inner voices were no longer necessary as their function was subsumed by consciousness; Jaynes would thus have us believe that the creation of concepts about mental states and acts gave rise to consciousness.

However skeptical I am about aspects of Jaynes’s theory—for example, the idea that Sophocles was conscious while Homer was not is deeply odd—something very important clearly happened in the period he surveys. Jaynes seems to have assumed that the absence of words about mental states means there was no consciousness. I see no reason to accept such an assumption. If one thinks of consciousness they way Walter Freeman does, then rabbits and dogs are conscious. But they have no words for mental states either.

If we reject Jaynes’ claim about consciousness, however, we can still accept some of the reasoning that accompanies it. The important observation is that mental terms were scarce in Homeric times, but not in Sophoclean and later times. If one has few or no mental terms, one can hardly attribute much to the mind. Similarly, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King would not have been possible in Homer’s time precisely because it takes place in a mental realm. It is about mental events, acts of knowing or denial.

I submit that this change is about the emergence, not of consciousness itself, but of a whole range of new modes of consciousness, new ways to use the mind, new patterns of neural weather. Another way of talking about this change is to use Jean Piaget’s concept of reflective abstraction. In his studies of child development, Piaget proposed that conceptual development proceeds through a series of stages in which the mental mechanisms of later stages objectify those that were used in earlier stages. The conceptual development that Jaynes has identified is like this.

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There’s more at New Savanna:
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/08/rebirth-of-mind-and-society-jaynes-and.html

@Hidari Bill Benson: It turns out, wouldn’t you know, that apes plan ahead

Then again, if you cut out an ape’s behind, they would probably stop eating.

I came in here to make a substantive comment, but after reading the thread, I just want to say I love the commentariat here.

FS: Self-awareness isn’t a strict requirement for a bunch of kinds of mental activity. To see the argument developed in a fictional context, try Peter Watts’ amazing (and amazingly bleak) sf novel Blindsight, available for free in a bunch of e-book formats at Watts’ website as well as in print and audio. The second half of his endnotes, available as a separate PDF, take up the consciousness issue with the real-world foundations for his speculations.

It is in any event really clearly the case that a lot of our sense of self is basically invention and self-delusion. I’ve had to read more in studies of memory and the like than most lay people, to help make sense of life with an auto-immune disorder that does a bunch of nasty stuff to my neurochemistry. I’m not, at this point, prepared to join the crowd that says all our sense of self and free will and everything is self-delusion, but darned if they’re not right about way more of human experience than I’d like. It’s not the same thing as the absence of self-awareness that various folks cite here are on about, but a kind of related thing – self-awareness can be pretty darned detached from reality in its own way.

‘Peeping through my keyhole I see within the range of only about thirty percent of the light that comes from the sun; the rest is infrared and some little ultraviolet, perfectly apparent to many animals, but invisible to me. A nightmare network of ganglia, charged and firing without my knowledge, cuts and splices what I do see, editing it for my brain. Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: “This is philosophically interesting in a rather mournful way, since it means that only the simplest animals perceive the universe as it is.”‘ [Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), 19]

@bill benzon (#25):

To be fair, Jaynes’s evidence was interdisciplinary, not all of it negative, and he may deserve credit as an early proponent of Gazzaniga’s left-brain interpreter.

A purer, subtler, fuller use of Greek literature (with a dash of Nietzsche) in reconstructing a developmental history of consciousness was made by Bruno Snell in The Discovery of the Mind (to which Jaynes dedicated only two plagiarism-sparing footnotes) and may constitute a more judicious argument from silence.

Snell traced a gradual evolution by an almost stratigraphic treatment of literary genres, and the sorites problem seems no more problematic for him than for Dennett. His introduction seems even to anticipate Ned Block’s critique of Jaynes and Dennett’s rebuttal.

John, this is a fun post and a good way to get conversation started. If you wanted to press it, though, you’d have to do some more work. Whatever intrinsic interest sorites problems may have, they can’t generally be used to show that some concept or other is empty. There is a heap of firewood in my front yard, even though I can’t define exactly how many pieces make up a heap. There is a lot of debris on my driveway (I’m bad at property maintenance), even though I can’t precisely define how much is a lot. At some point in the passage from fertilized egg to now, I became a distinct organism, a moral subject with rights, and, arguably, a conscious being with qualitative experience. The fact that I can’t say exactly when doesn’t falsify any of that. Eventually I’ll die, but exactly when? And similarly for the qualitative experience of a rock, a bug, a bat, and you.

The point is (obviously) closely related to the badness of slippery slope arguments.

I don’t generally want to defend Nagel, but so long as there is at least one being with qualitative experience, he’s got an argument. And you can’t show that there are no such beings by showing that the boundaries of the concept are vague.

I love philosophical discussions, discussions of philosophy not so much. I come around again, though, when pretty much anything, philosophical or otherwise, is being discussed by philosophers. It’s as though my own consciousness — normally off somewhere by itself, and therefore more self-reflective than is probably good for me — becomes a bell-tower inhabited by invisible boys with sticks intent on ringing every single bell at random. I can follow the melody in any direction I like without worrying about whether or not there’s any long-run profit in it.

What this has to do with vagueness, differences of degree rather than kind, or bees missing their nether parts, I have no idea, but I find it fascinating to consider that magical moment when a heap-in-becoming finally becomes a heap. Am I crazy to think that the difficulty of definition here lies in the probability that heapness isn’t strictly a matter of number, or of incrementation, or indeed of any of its other attributes considered in isolation?

The same goes for what it’s like to be a bug or a bat. Isn’t that for them to know, and us to find out? Surely only science fiction fulfilled, or possibly metempsychosis, can provide definitive answers for those of us who really want to know.

I am not convinced that consciousness can be explained by concepts of “perception, memory, experience,” or even “intentionality,” but let’s suppose that it can.

Imagine how bees are conscious of humans: we are large fuzzy shapes of color, heat, smell. They cannot understand our total aspect or bodily composition. They cannot understand human language, or Beethoven’s 3rd, or a Netflix miniseries. They are less than us!

But what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander… Go upward from humans on the sorities scale: Put an end to consciousness-discrimination and human-privilege! Suppose there are conscious beings as far above humans, as we are above bees? Then what would they look like, to us?

The higher beings might look and smell like the surfaces of rocks, or clouds in the sky. We would see dim appearances, not their total aspects.

You, thinking you’re the top of the line, developed “reductionist materialism” to explain that it’s “water droplets” condensing in the “atmosphere”. You’re a goddamn silly bee! Nagel is right about this part! Not only that, next week the higher beings are “sending” you to a “proctologist”, to have your butt cut out!

@38: the instrumental view that the justified attribution of mental terms is just a matter of the predictive success thereby afforded the attributor. So, attributing pain to bugs, for instance, is justified just to the extent that we thereby gain something in modeling what bugs do.

Seems plausible to me. Is there a standard answer to this?

WT@39: I like your attitude.

“@38: the instrumental view that the justified attribution of mental terms is just a matter of the predictive success thereby afforded the attributor. So, attributing pain to bugs, for instance, is justified just to the extent that we thereby gain something in modeling what bugs do.
—
Seems plausible to me. Is there a standard answer to this?”

I can think of an obvious one, that whether the bug experiences pain or not is something quite independent of the latest fashion in the methodology of science — including methodologies that consider a description of a state of the world justified only if it has predictive power.

Sure, even a stone has experience in that things have happened to it, it has emerged as it is from its past. The thing it doesn’t have is invidividuality in the sense of coherent self-contained being. That is, it is a unique pile of stuff … there are many rocks like it, but this one is mine … but it is a unique pile of stuff. It is not an organism. (A stone can even be said to be conscious in that it reacts to things that happen to it; it retains the trace of things the things that have happened. But again, a lot of possible reactions are like: fall to pieces.)

I think it’s reasonable to ask, What is it Like to be a stone? … spend some time on the cushion with that. Sure it must be different than being Like a bat, or Like a jihadi. I suppose the stone doesn’t have a notion of not being Like a bat or a jihadi, so what we’re doing here is commenting on what it is Like to be a Modern.

We can look at societies, etc, in the same way. If you think of the whole Cosmos as having “experience”, then there isn’t any need for a magic switch. As for the sorites problem, people who try to make hard and fast lines between things deserve what they get, like the famous ass that starved to death midway between two piles of hay.

Tom Slee:

cf Myth of Er. Also, it’s suspicious that that story was written by an “Eagleman.”

#48 “The oceanoid intelligence in Lem’s Solaris is probably consistent with a materialist ontology.”

I’m pretty sure Tarkovsky would take you to the woodshed on that one. Quite a leap, to suppose our level of consciousness has got it right about the ontology of the higher forms! And how could you possibly know, unless the oceanoids delivered it up on stone tablets? Do the bees think the same way about us, too? That their descriptions suffice for all higher forms? If they could comprehend them, that is. Or perhaps instead, there was once a Bee-Nietzsche who buzzed:

“I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” (Twilight of the Bee Idols)

If one has few or no mental terms, one can hardly attribute much to the mind.

I think this is actually rather backwards. One of the problems with being heir to the “conceptual analysis” school of philosophy is that you tend to think that having a name for something means that you’ve understood it, even when you have no idea whether that name actually refers to anything real. So there’s lots of talk about qualia and subjective experiences and zombies but actually no one really has any idea whether those words attach to anything at all. In fact, most of our mental vocabulary is pretty useless when it comes to conducting investigations about the brain; it’s only useful as a kind of phenomenological high-level picture and even then not all that much.

Alex: The question Dennett was addressing is: how do we know whether a bug (or a bat, or a human, for that matter) experiences pain? His answer is: we ask what would be the likely consequences of (follows from, is entailed by, etc.) one or the other possibility. Which is, he suggests, pretty much how we know anything: we ask what would be the case if A were true, and then look to see if that is the case. In other words, we make predictions.

And first-person knowledge of one’s feelings is not invariably more authoritative or complete than third-person knowledge. Some people (lovers, psychotherapists, marketing experts) can tell that we have certain feelings even if we can’t.

“Yet, I expect that you will protest against such a claim.”

That is, you would object to the claim that you don’t experience anything when you see a red wall.

Slightly off at a tangent, but Bad-Jim@5, I suffer from a form of red-green colour-blindness too. I think “warm” greens look red. When I was very young, I drew grass as red. Later I discovered that grass contains carotene as well as chlorophyll.

I deduced that I was over-sensitive to red pigment. I find I can correct for my colour blindness with slightly blue-tinted spectacles which, ironically, help me pick out “true” reds much more easily! :)

Lee@60: we are captured inside a discourse with a systematic subject/object distortion

Sounds extremely promising. Could you elaborate?

Alex@56/57: Yes, certainly we experience something when we see a red wall. Seeing is one kind of experience, as we currently use those two words. And among the consequences of seeing a red wall are: saying “red” when asked what color it is (unless we’re lying for some reason); choosing red from a color palette when asked to choose a color that matches the color of the wall; mentioning Santa Claus’ coat or a ripe strawberry when asked to name an object of the same color as the wall. This is how we understand one another’s experiences, isn’t it?

all our sense of self and free will and everything is self-delusion

This begs the question: what, and who, is being “deluded” by themselves?

Our belief that other creatures have “consciousness” may be based on their similarity to ourselves in other, observable, aspects. I believe myself to have conciousness; other humans look and behave quite like me, so I think it likely they have conciousness too. Bats are still fairly like me, so maybe they have conciousness too. Insects? No idea.

At the other extreme: I suppose I could doubt that Tibetan buddhist monks have “conciousness” in the way that I do, at least when they’re meditating. They have a “mere I”, sure, but maybe not the “consciousness” that Western philosophers obsess over. (“Consciousness” viewed as an unhealthy obession with your own mental states; philosophizing about other entities mental states being this unhealthy obsession taken to a meta level).

Young children (e.g. below about 7) can speak, but are surprisingly poor at reasoning about other people’s mental states. Conscious? Hmmm… well, I was a child once so I should be able to remember… But I don’t have any memories of very early childhood, and I’m not unusual in this. I could suspect that I was a zombie, once.

@67. It’s fairly easy to imagine an artificial intelligence computer program passing the “Sally – Ann” test and other experimental measures of theory of mind. (Probably beyond current technology, though…) Someone like John Searle could still consider such a program as mindlessly following pre-programmed rules.

@Lee

I think that in the debate Nagel is introducing the bat argument into, materialism, or “physicalism,” has a narrower meaning than you think it does. It’s the view motivated by things like the apparent causal closure of the physical, which is to say the causal sufficiency of physical explanation, and the explanatory emptiness of physical/non-physical interactionist theories. Classic mind/body stuff. It implies a commitment to physical reality if you want to characterize that as a bias, but it’s not some kind of generic positivist death march of all “descriptions of the universe” containing dances and love affairs and whatnot, which seems to be the thing you are (rightly) opposed to. Anyway, it’s just not that, although Nagel is certainly feeding off of that worry.

But all Nagel is really pointing out is that the scientific sentences comprising a description of bat experience will probably fail to evoke bat experience for observers like us. But why is that a problem? It might be a problem if our bat-experience theories completely failed, in the long run, to suggest anything about how we might get into bat experience-y situations (with sonar helmets or whatever), but Nagel either assumes that they will so fail, or else seems to be saying that those sentences should somehow contain the seat of bat experience itself. But does he also think that a cookbook should contain dinners? In any event, it is the anti-materialist hunch that is associated here with taking ones imaginative powers (or lack thereof) as a guide to the structure of reality and the future of science.

The question Dennett was addressing is: how do we know whether a bug (or a bat, or a human, for that matter) experiences pain? His answer is: we ask what would be the likely consequences of (follows from, is entailed by, etc.) one or the other possibility.

By that standard, it seems like the bisected bee experiment indicates that bees don’t feel pain, if they really continue eating as if nothing had happened; because that’s not how we would expect a being that is experiencing pain to react.

By contrast, if someone injures a dog (even in much less severe ways than cutting away major parts of its body), it will exhibit pain-reaction behaviors like whining and cringing, and possibly fear and hostility toward a repetition of the circumstances that led to its injury.

Of course, if you define pain by its reactions, then you can program a computer to experience pain, too; you could even argue that video game characters that are programmed to “flinch” when “hit” are already experiencing pain by this definition. (Although they may not be capable of the repetition-avoidance modeling that I described for dogs above, at least not with current technology.) Some even have specific rules for whether they flinch in certain circumstances and not others, or how severe an injury is required to make them flinch, etc.

Unfortunately I don’t think there’s any reliable way to distinguish “genuine” from “simulated” experiences of pain without jumping into the morass of qualia. Maybe this is an indication that the distinction isn’t as meaningful as we might be tempted to think.

Since JQ requested more zombies: zombies are traditionally depicted as not experiencing or reacting to pain and that’s one of the things that makes them frightening; but you could imagine a setting where zombies can react as if to pain, but since they’re still zombies, it’s questionable whether they are actually feeling it or just simulating it the way a computer program would (at least, if you accept that there is a real difference at all).

On Homeric zombies and such, here’s the sort of thing Jaynes was up to (from my book, Beethoven’s Anvil):

Jaynes’ analysis centers on a handful of terms. As used in the Iliad these words refer to bodily symptoms, but they later come to have mental referents, such as mind or spirit. One of these terms is thumos:

It refers to a mass of internal sensations in response to environmental crises. … This includes the dilation of the blood vessels in striate muscles and in the heart, an increase in tremor of striate muscles, a burst of blood pressure, the constriction of blood vessels in the abdominal viscera and in the skin, the relaxing of smooth muscles, and the sudden increased energy from the sugar released into the blood from the liver, and possible perceptual changes with the dilation of the pupil of the eye. This complex was, then, the internal pattern of sensation that preceded particularly violent activity in a critical situation. And by doing so repeatedly, the pattern of sensation begins to take on the term for the activity itself. Thereafter, it is the thumos which gives strength to a warrior in battle. …

The next step is to conceptualize thumos as a container of various psychological substances such as vigor, and as an agent responsible for some class of psychological acts. Once Jaynes has made similar arguments for the other terms, it seems obvious that the conceptualization of mind we find in classical Greek thinkers is constructed over sets of bodily symptoms we now recognize as being regulated by the brain centers most directly responsible for motivation and emotion.

Please! No more on James and Snell. Read your Bernard Williams. In this case “Shame and Necessity”.

@geo” And among the consequences of seeing a red wall are […]”

Seeing a red wall has plenty of identifiable consequences, to be sure. The question is whether the claim that you have some _subjective experience_ when seeing a red wall has any consequences that can be verified by a third person. Scientific models have your neurons firing in the same way regardless of whether we postulate that you have a subjective experience or that you don’t.

The way we understand each other’s experiences is a complex issue. Partly it’s just a projection of our own subjective experiences and partly it’s the fact that we were influenced by similar traditions of self-conceptualization.

Charles Taylor (the philosopher, not the warlord), in “Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity,” traces the modern conception of the self from the ancient, heroic age Greek conception of a “self” that is non-unitary and moved to action by powerful external forces; to the modern conception of a unitary self with inscrutable inner depths; from the location of the moral sources outside of ourselves (the Stoics began their lessons on morality with lectures on … physics) to the modern localization of the source of morality within ourselves.

I’m not going to try to make an adequate summary of Taylor’s argument, since its details are largely irrelevant. But what is relevant is that we share a substantive tradition that allows us to attribute to each other subjective experiences in absence of any purely scientific reason to do so. Beside the traditions described by Taylor, which are continent-wide, we may also share similar, more local, formative experiences with our friends, or even just fellow citizens. The presence of such rich shared traditions and experiences makes it much easier to jump from purely external behavioral signs to the attribution of subjective experiences in others.

But this does not imply that the scientific models of atoms, neurons etc. can be used to deduce the existence of subjective experiences. Those models are simply silent about whether we feel something or not.

I hear some looked at a burnt toast once and experienced Virgin Mary.

No mention of Wittgenstein yet.

@John Quiggin, #67:

For what it’s worth, it seems the sources for Odysseus’s draft-dodging attempt and Laocoön’s warning are Pseudo-Apollodorus, Hyginus, and Virgil, long postdating Homer. On the other hand, the Trojan Horse indicates a theory of mind at least as developed as those of toddlers and chimps.

Regarding whether consciousness or theory came first, here are Snell and Dennett (with apologies to Tony Lynch, #77):

Snell, p. vi, “In spite of our statement that the Greeks discovered the intellect we also assert that the discovery was necessary for the intellect to come into existence. Or, to put it grammatically: the intellect is not only an affective, but also an effective object.”

Dennett (pdf) says of morality, “The phenomenon is created in part by the arrival on the scene of a certain set of concepts.” Likewise he paraphrases Jaynes, “To put it really somewhat paradoxically, you can’t have consciousness until you have the concept of consciousness.”

But concepts can be more or less refined, accounting for the soritical nature of consciousness. This RadioLab episode (not maidhc’s) discusses the psychology of color (and its basis in Homeric scholarship), including observations that many languages develop color-words in the same order and that these vocabularies make distinguishing colors more or less difficult for native speakers. The host remarks, “If Homer had no word for blue, and the word somehow enables the blueness of the blue, then maybe his world was less blue.”

@ geo, Alex K.

Dennett’s classic statement on the ontological status of folk psychology according to his instrumental view is Real Patterns. Returning (sort of) to the original issue, you can see here how vagueness is built in to his theory of psychological attribution. His more eliminativist position on qualia is in Quining Qualia. Finally, key techniques for conducing a bat-like experience.

Reading the comments, I had this epiphany that consciousness is something we DO, not something we ARE.
For example, suppose I’m watching a movie, and while watching it I’m not self conscious.
But then I look at the clock and realise that is 1am.
At this point I remember that tomorrow morning I have to wake up at 7 to go to work . Now I’m self conscious as I’m seeing myself as an object (in the model of the world that exists in my head there is an object that corresponds to myself, so I’m conscious of myself) .
Thus self consciousness is not a property but an action, and specifically the cognitive action of not seeing the world in subjective.

It’s not simply that Iliad was, even arguably, ABOUT zombies, but that Homer hisownbadself, and everyone in his audience, WERE (arguably) themselves ZOMBIES. Jaynes is arguing that they weren’t conscious. He’s arguing that consciousness arrived on earth, or at least in Europe, sometime between Homer and Sophocles. Before that moment, all zombies 24/7/365.

I don’t think it would be wise to let Richard Dawkins get ahold of Jaynes. Because then he’ll conclude that the core texts of Judeo-Christianity were written by zombies. Hence, religion is by zombies for zombies. QED.

Jaynes did indeed argue that Homer that the Greeks in the time of Homer (or at least the time that Homer was writing about) were not conscious, but it’s worth pointing out that his definition of ‘consciousness’ was not the normal one: it was much tighter than that. He was absolutely not arguing that these ancient Greeks were shambling zombies. It would make much more sense to argue that Jaynes was the ancient Greeks as being behaviourists, in other words, as having no concept of the ‘inner’. In this view, ‘our’ ‘Western’ worldview (in which we have an ‘inner’ world of conscious experience and an ‘outer world’ of external experience, which are somehow linked together) is a social construct (Jaynes also believed that newborn babies are not conscious in his highly specific use of the world. You have to learn to be conscious).

And this links his work with Wittgenstein and Heidegger (or at least Heidegger as seen by Hubert Dreyfyus: ‘Dreydegger’). Both of these thinkers questioned the concept of the ‘inner’, Wittgenstein by his so-called ‘private language argument’ (which is not really an argument in the classical sense, but we will let that pass) and Heidegger by pointing out that human ‘consciousness’ so to speak, lies on a substrate of socially constructed social practices.

See this paper here, which has the obligatory reference to zombies (pointing out that the idea is a contradiction in terms. A zombie would have zombie consciousness, more limited than ours (world-poor in Heidegger’s terminology) but nevertheless consciousness of a sort).

http://www.academia.edu/223717/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_Nonconscious_A_Defense_of_Julian_Jaynes

And here is Dreyfus talking about consciousness and Homer, making the point that consciousness mostly is an adjunct to action, that there are different kinds or varieties or action, and that consciousness is therefore something that is ‘in the world’ (to be more specific, to do with the interaction between you and the world and other people in the world) not something that is primarily ‘in your head’.

Therefore consciousness studies fall under the purview of the sociologist, not the neuroscientist, who is quite literally looking in the wrong place.

Doesn’t the attempt to get power over the outer world, and its bastard child, the explanation, foster, even demand, the creation of an inner world? Is there any way at all to do tools without also doing creation myths, dream interpretation, architecture, theater, politics, etc.? And isn’t it almost inevitable that in going down that path, we wind up at some point thinking that our selves and the rest of the world are to some extent mutually exclusive, and suffer from a fear of death as well as alienation, narcissism, sociopathy, psychiatry, and Wittgenstein in roughly that order?

If we’re human, I’d say the answer is yes. I’m not persuaded — yet — that what we think we know about other species tells us why the answer for them still seems to be no. Although actually reading all the books might change my mind, at this point I suspect that we’ve been nibbling around the edges of something for a very long time that may not have a center accessible to us at all.

@100, this reminds me of this experiment (from wikipedia, although I first read about it in the book called User Illusion):
“…a patient with split brain is shown a picture of a chicken and a snowy field in separate visual fields and asked to choose from a list of words the best association with the pictures. The patient would choose a chicken foot to associate with the chicken and a shovel to associate with the snow; however, when asked to reason why the patient chose the shovel, the response would relate to the chicken (e.g. “the shovel is for cleaning out the chicken coop”).”

Philosophatty #71 “I think that in the debate Nagel is introducing the bat argument into, materialism, or “physicalism,” has a narrower meaning than you think it does… it’s not some kind of generic positivist death march of all “descriptions of the universe” containing dances and love affairs… although Nagel is certainly feeding off of that worry.”

Has Nagel changed his position since the bat paper? In the new book he writes, “…among the scientists and philosophers who do express views about the natural order as a whole, reductive materialism is widely assumed to be the only serious possibility.” (p. 4) Then he mentions the arguments (brought forward in part by creationists, though he is careful to dismiss them on other grounds) that physical evolution may not have had enough time for consciousness to develop. The balance of the book is an exploration of what that, if true, might mean for a new, non-theistic account of consciousness. Further, he implies that it might change science across the board. Do you think that such an account would not affect new scientific descriptions of dances and love affairs?

It wasn’t invented/discovered by Greeks, he just uses Iliad for his analysis. And it has nothing to do with pain, or slaughter, with or without consideration.

I haven’t read Jaynes since it was published, but I thought his idea was that, based on the evidence of Homer, the Greeks did not have interior reflective consciousness, i.e. thoughts about one’s own inner states. I never bought this. They may not known how to express it, which is different. Could the supposed lack of interior reflection just be the lack of a literary development? By exhibiting Ulysses, Homer invents the question: Then after that, the Old Testament writers reflect upon their relationship to their god, Marcus Aurelius and Montaigne are all about the interior, but we don’t see much self-reflection in fiction until Marlowe and Shakespeare. Perhaps it wasn’t worthy before then — we are all a part of the body of god, and you are not the king getting his biography written, so shut up. What if bees are conscious as we, panpsychism, but are lacking some pain receptors, and don’t have much means of expression? They apparently dance to communicate. That means in theory they ought to be able to express symbolic negatives — tie themselves to the mast of the ship.

The Old Testament (except for more recent parts, like Ecclesiastes) is about rules, strict orders given to you by God or someone who can hear God. It’s all about demanding that you obey this particular God, and ignore commands given by all other gods, idols. Christianity otoh clearly assumes free will, that you’re the one making decisions.

In addition to bees and lizards Heidegger also talked about “what-it-is-like” to be a unicellular bacteria. In the History of the Concept of Time he writes:

“A stone never finds itself but is simply present-at-hand. A very primitive unicellular form of life, on the contrary, will already find itself, where this affectivity can be the greatest and darkest dullness, but for all that it is in its structure of being essentially distinct from merely being present-at-hand like a thing.”

Thus, for Heidegger, the dividing line between cognitive and non-cognitive beings is that cognitive beings have “affectivity”, which can be translated roughly as having the ability to “care for things”, including “caring for oneself”, which in primitive beings is just survival and homeostatic equilibrium. In this respect, Heidegger was ahead of his time by talking about biological systems in cognitive rather than purely bio-chemical terms, echoing some recent biologist’s talk of bacteria as “Small but not stupid”: http://shapiro.bsd.uchicago.edu/2006.ExeterMeeting.pdf

“someone who can hear God” — Jaynes’ point, almost to the letter…

Wow, what a great discussion thread.

Re: consciousness of bugs (OP and all that): I would posit that bugs are not “conscious” in the same way that human beings are “conscious,” given the structure(s) of their nervous systems.

Re: evolution of consciousness in human beings: there is a theory that human consciousness (however defined; I think of it as the “capacity for self-reflection leading to new thoughts [innovation]/potential action in the outside world”, and suspect it to be a cognitive capability made possible by the neuronal wiring of the neo-cortex; among the pre-requisities seem to be massive connectivity, infinite recursion, and the capacity for symbolic thought – all of which are necessary, though not sufficient, presuppositions for the development of language). In this respect, cognitive scientists seem to find helpful the study of other highly-evolved primates / mammals (e.g. dolphins).

Re: Homeric man and zombi-ism: I’m not familiar with Jayne’s arguments, though I’ll follow the links above with interest. Here, however, there seems to me no question but that Homeric man was conscious in the full sense (i.e., our own sense); what set Homeric man apart from Classical – modern man was his Weltanschauung, which projected causality for psychological states onto/into external agents (e.g., “the gods”). Sometime between Homer (late Geometric-early Archaic age) and the 5th century BC, this attributional scheme changed dramatically – certainly in consequence of the Sophistic philosophers of Ionia, and (imho only) perhaps also in consequence of the Greeks’ massive colonization of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean littoral. Basically, the predominant mode of thinking changed from what has been called “paratactic” to that called “hypotactic”, a revolutionary change which made possible the so-called “Greek miracle” (and by extension, “Western thought”). This, however, was not the emergence of consciousness per se, but rather an alteration in the programmatic fashion in which consciousness/ conscious thought was deployed in service to thinking about, and acting in the world.

So, we have: perception (a capacity all sentient beings possess, including bugs); consciousness (a capacity some highly-evolved animals possess, most notably but not exclusively homo sapiens sapiens), and world-view (which involves so-called “modes of thought”, all of which, however, presuppose the neural structures briefly noted above that enable consciousness), which feature various “styles” of thinking/reflecting on the world “outside”.

Bernard Williams (as @77) is exceptional in “Shame and Necessity”; basically his is a philosophical response to those who have claimed that the Greeks lacked some components of modern consciousness, e.g. the capacity for “guilt”. However, by the time we arrive at the point of classifying a culture as “shame” or “guilt”-based, consciousness has been around for a very, very long time – in fact, perhaps for a few hundred thousand years, in light of recent discoveries about the artistic and tool-making accomplishments of our distant ancestors.

Anyway, just my two cents’ worth – I’ve been thinking about these issues for a long time w/r/t the ancient Greeks, and reading a bit about the evolution of the language faculty as a separate hobby.

In neuroscience, the “default mode network” in the human brain is associated with inward mental reflection when the experimental participant has nothing more urgent to do. (e.g. when they’re in a fMRI scanner, and not doing the experimental task, and start thinking about what they’re going to do when the experiment is over and they get home).

The kinds of mental activity characteristic of the “default mode network” may roughly correspond to the kinds of activity some philosophers refer to as “consciousness” (memory, planning, inward self-reflection etc. as opposed to responding to immediate sensor stimuli). I don’t know if bats have a default mode network or not. This is an empirical (not metaphysical) question that could probably be answered by getting a bat into an fMRI machine (the practical details of which are left as an exercize for the reader, or possibly the reader’s grad students). A very quick literature search didn’t find anything relevant, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s been done. In any case, if bats don’t have a default mode network, their psychic experience is likely very different from ours.

I’ve just realised that there’s a curious co-incidence in Nagel’s choice of a bat for the thought-experiment. Bats, who use echo-location, have evolutionary selection in the FOXP2 gene whose human equivalent is associated with language. If you think language has something to do with consciousness, this possibly places bats closer to us than most other animals. They build their mental model of the world by making and listening to squeaky noises. We do too, except our squeaky noises include things like the works of Martin Heidegger[*]

[*] Read alound, obviously. Spoken language precedes written language, historically.

Make that Jung, not Freud, if you will. I’m not exactly Goldilocks, but I do sometimes feel as though somebody’s been sleeping in my unconscious without my knowledge or permission.

And shouldn’t someone mention Levi-Strauss at some point in this discussion? It seems to me that he had provocative things to say about the human end of the Great Chain of Being invoked in the OP, especially about its lack of uniformity across cultures.

@124. See, for example “Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity” by Judson A. Brewer et al, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 108, no 50. People have measured what’s happening neurologically during meditation, and it appears there’s a major effect. As I understand it, what you describe is how you make the default mode network go silent.

Jaynes’ claims about Homer’s mental state needs to be clarified. Jaynes’ didn’t think that Homer himself was fully bicameral (i.e. completely lacking introspection but hearing voices of gods). Rather, Jaynes thought Homer was likely introspectively conscious to some limited degree but was *reporting on* on events hundreds of years earlier that were populated with people that Jaynes thought were total “Greek zombies” i.e. intelligent, bicameral, but lacking the capacity for conscious narratization and self-reflective introspection.

Jaynes thought the earliest stories about divinely inspired heroes were reporting stories of genuine phenomenological experience that were more prevalent in these pre-Homeric times e.g. Achilles’ hallucinations of the gods was not just a poetic device but a descriptive report of early bicameral mentality. Later, conscious poets like Homer and other scribes inserted introspectional vocabulary (e.g. about cunning Ulysses) that over-laps the older, more bicameral vocabulary. But if you look, you can trace the evolution of psychological-introspectional words from their more concrete origins in the Iliad to more abstract notions in later texts. “Psyche” goes from being an oozing substance to an abstract soul.

The same evolution of introspectional vocabulary and mentality can be observed in the Old Testament (e.g. the earliest text of Amos the shepherd boy prophet) to the highly introspectional texts of Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon.

Recent philological research supports Jaynes’ claims about the evolution of introspectional vocabulary throughout the Axial Age: “A quantitative philology of introspection.” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23015783

SusanC. #125 – Very interesting, thanks! Why do they pick right-handed subjects?

Lee@124: As an old mystic …

Does this mean that you are old and a mystic, that you are a long-time mystic, or that you were once a mystic?

Lee and Susan: I’ve also seen plausible reports (eg. from the Buddhist neuroscientist Alan Wallace) that meditation can produce extraordinary brain states. And of course, we hear daily from all sides about the health benefits of mindfulness. I fully believe both claims. But I’m not sure I see what enlightenment is good for besides improving your blood pressure and heart rate. The Dalai Lama is a good egg, but everything he’s written doesn’t weigh in the scales with a sentence by Nietzsche or a stanza by Yeats. If you spend ten thousand hours studying physics, you may invent string theory. If you spend ten thousand hours writing a novel, you may produce Anna Karenina. What can you do (for the rest of us, I mean) when you’ve spent ten thousand hours meditating?

I am old and an ex-mystic, though you never really get over it…

Lee@129 Right-handed subjects are the (ahem) default choice in neuroscience studies because their functions are very consistently lateralized. For instance, language is on the left and spatial awareness on the right in almost all of them. Lefties are a complete crapshoot in this regard.

Lee@138: Most of the studies I’ve read are from institution-fee databases. If you can get them, some of the best (IMHO) creativity studies come from Bowden, Jung-Beeman, and Kounios at Northwestern. They use something called the Remote Associates Test, where 3 unrelated words should lead one to a 4th (i.e. “basket” “hard” and “dance” –> “ball”) . So it’s intellectual-conceptual. Other sorts of tasks with veiled awareness (like photographs becoming discernible, or priming) have two problems: (1) they don’t have an incubation period which some insist is necessary to be insight (2) the neuro results have been pretty much inconsistent. Jonah Lehrer’s book (the one that got him into all the trouble) is actually pretty good on this work.
As to “more and more connections” without enlightenment, I hear you. That might be just the busy modern condition, as both meditation and creativity require free time and the ability to chill out. But meditation lacks the emotional charge and the disruptive force of insight.
As to changing minds… always difficult. The only sure way is for that person to have an insight moment where they feel they’ve discovered on their own exactly what you want them to believe. Iago was the master of this , BTW.

On this wretched “theory of X” business: An infant is propped in front of a screen. It sees a ball enter the field of view from one side, traveling at a steady rate. It then disappears behind the screen. And it fails to reappear on the other side of the screen when it should, given its rate of travel. The infant appears to be a bit startled when the ball fails to appear. Conclusion: The infant has a (freakin’) theory of (freakin’) objects.

I take the use of “theory” in such contexts as evidence of the poverty of psychologist’s theoretical imagination.

And, if true bugs don’t work for you in this example, there’s always the colloquial “bugs”

Actually ‘true bugs’ are an order of insects, the Hemiptera, rather than insects in general. Thought you should know.

SusanC: “I think of “Theory of Mind” as just being the name for a fairly fuzzily-defined list of human abilities. It is not a “theory” in any technical sense…”

Right. 100%.

Alas, as one is farther and farther away from the observations on which this “Theory” is posited, the theory aspect tends to congeal and reify. A psychologist writing a review article is pretty far from those observations. For a literary critic reading that review and who is interested in how characters in novels relate to one another – and such critics have emerged in the last decade – those observations might as well have been made on Mars.

Maybe I can sum up: our conscious experience develops and intensifies as we interact with with other people, and collectively as we, as groups, make contact with other cultures. Whether or not this process depends on the spread of viruses and consequent neurological enhancement requires further research.

It’s quite a stretch to say that the age of prophets ceased during Old Testament times. There have been plenty of people during the last two millennia, including during the last few centuries, who have claimed that God has spoken to them, that they have received a calling from God, that they have observed supernatural beings etc. Do we really know that this kind of phenomena was more common among the early Greeks than among for instance 7th century Arabs, medieval Europeans, or 19th century North Americans?

Agog #142: “the Sufis sub-divide(d) your two types of experience into many many states and stations”

Do you have the name of a Sufi or anything in print? That would be great! Thanks!

Homer was a participant in a bardic tradition in which many thousands of lines of poetry were memorized and changed according to the preference of the singer and the needs of the day.

It seems to me that there are still benefits to making speculative statements about metaphysical phenomena.

@144
“The ‘Theory of Mind’ approach has been associated with probably the fastest-growing body of empirical research in psychology over the last 25 years, and has given rise to a range of different theoretical positions and elaborations within those positions. The basic idea is that understanding other people involves bridging a gulf between observed ‘behaviour’ and hidden mental states by means of a theory. The articles in this Special Issue subject ‘Theory of Mind’ to sustained critical scrutiny, and also present alternative accounts of how we make sense of—and make sense to—other people. They trace the historical sources of ‘Theory of Mind’, criticize its fundamental assumptions and favoured methods, and examine its applications to child development and the explanation of schizophrenia and autism.”

http://tap.sagepub.com/content/14/5/571.short

cf also Leudar, I. and Costall, Alan, eds. (2009) Against theory of mind. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. ISBN 9780230552739

Agog #152 — It is true that the Hindu and Buddhist traditions describe subdivisions of attainable states. There is much confusion within each tradition however, and the progress in an adept is never linear anyway.

If you categorize them by described effects, there are only two main states: the one which occurs shortly after meditation is stabilized (and this one has the most number of named subdivisions), and a final radical transformation after many years, which may or may not be achieved. (After many years for most; Ramana Maharshi was rather immediate.)

I am sitting here looking at a bookshelf with about 130 practical mystical manuals from all the traditions. That does not include theology or “mystical theology” (whatever that is; I think it is what the Roman Catholic priests call “spirituality” literature), –just practice manuals!

The all-time winner in the number of named, attainable states may be the Visuddhimagga, which is an 800-page Buddhist compilation. There are even subcategories of final extinction (nirvana). It is entirely on-line here: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/nanamoli/PathofPurification2011.pdf

The later chapters are fascinating, with lists and tables of consciousness-aggregates and so forth. (The basic problem with Christianity IMHO is that it did not go in this direction.) Brain scientists really ought to have a look at the Visuddhimagga, it could keep them thinking about research topics for decades more!

The Paulist Press book “Early Islamic Mysticism” contains excerpts of the emotional (devotional) path, and it ignores various state discriminations and descriptions.

This is true of the emotional/devotional paths across the board, even the “bhakti” paths in Hinduism. Hinduism of course has a big tradition of intellectual expositors too, who go into discriminative details about attainable states of consciousness. Judeo-Christian descriptions are almost entirely emotional/devotional, with the exception of Richard of St. Victor, John of the Cross (for my money, the best of the intellectual Christian mystics), and a very few others. Imagine a physics professor lecturing about physics — but only by discussing his feelings about it!, and you get the idea.

Ibn ‘Arabi would be the likely candidate, an intellectual writer, but his practice was heavily emotional/devotional. Even his nice little manual “Journey to the Lord of Power” (recalling Sankara and Patanjali in directness, concision, and hard results-orientation) only identifies the state of “fana”, i.e. the final release. He describes some resident effects of meditation (which he calls “dhikr”, remembrance) but does not name attained states. The Bezels of Wisdom is highly emotional/devotional; it reads like Catherine of Genoa or Catherine of Siena.

A possible exception to my findings so far, might be Gurdieff, if he is considered to be in the Sufi tradition. He broke it down, lathered it over with a verbose quasi-science fiction story to sell it Westerners, and made a delicious Persian soup (according to Ezra Pound, who was otherwise disinterested, in Guide to Kulchur). I heard a leading Gurdieff-follower strongly criticize Ouspensky for breaking away from Gurdieff after attaining meditational stabilization, but never learning anything about the final transformation, thus starting his own sub-cult of people who don’t know the whole show! And indeed there is not a wisp of the idea of the second transformation, nirvana-fana-samadhi-beatific vision, in any of Ouspensky’s books. Interestingly, I think Ouspensky is the basic source of the tradition of those executive-training seminars at the airports.

I promise to quit commenting after this one.

It may be that the distinction of “states of consciousness (or being)” from “residing effects” presents a descriptive problem. What is consciousness, what is a perception? The only way to try to solve that is to elaborate. So, at the risk of alienating/boring everybody, the following are the practical states of the mystical path from my own long research in comparative mysticism.

I tried to be objective, and I used a categorization that was formulated in an old article in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology (and if I ever get access, I’ll cite it).

I think it also maps over modern psycho-therapeutic phenomenology, — with a huge number of caveats, there. But it might be useful to brain researchers, who knows?

The 3 categories are semantic criteria:

A) states of being, as named or characterized by mystics. It turns out that there are three main states. The first one, everybody knows: waking consciousness. The two “altered” states are: meditational fusion of subject/object (aesthetic epiphany), and final ego-extinction.

B) psycho-technologies, as named and described to attain those states (i.e., purification, meditation, plus refusal to engage in resulting hallucinations and illusory powers), and

C) residing effects, named at each step — this is more of a catch-all, stimulus-response category, but you’ll get the idea.

I retained only those things that are reported by these people, one from each tradition: Patanjali (Yoga), Sankara (Advaita Vedanta), Buddaghosa (Buddhism), John of the Cross (Christianity), and Ibn ‘Arabi (Sufi Islam). These were the most intellectual + some of the most fully “realized” folks, by the acclaim of others in their traditions, and they surely left us the best rational descriptions, all the way through to the end of the process. The only exception is that Ibn ‘Arabi does not characterize or name the second state, at least in the English translations. If you read him, I think you will agree that this is more a matter of not caring to have a category.

Progress isn’t linear, but I put them in their most common order. I hypothesize that my result is rather similar to the idea of the child-developmental stages in Piaget, which are not precisely the same for each individual, but close enough—and similarly, there are cumulative aspects as well as sudden changes.

So again, according to A) states of being, B) psycho-technology, and c) residing effects:

(1. FIRST state of being)—Waking consciousness.
(2. psycho-technology)—Practice of virtuous conduct and purification.
(3. residing effect)—Quiet and inner strength.
(4. psycho-technology)—Direct the mind to one object, and hold it for as long as possible (i.e. meditation).
(5. residing effect)—Massive counterattack by the sins, very specifically, the preventers of holding the mind on one object: Greek Christian sin = “hamartia” = “missing the mark,” Vedantism “unwholesome roots,” Buddhism “nivarana” = “hindrances,” Islamic Sufism “Satan’s character traits”.
(6. psycho-technology)—Reapply the mind again and again to one object, and hold it for as long as possible.

—At this point there is a jump of many months or years until you can maintain:

(7. psycho-technology)—Maintain a continuous, non-discursive flow, via #6.

—-And at that point there is a jump of only a few days or weeks until there comes a the first discontinuous change:

(8. SECOND state of being)—Fusion of subject and object, fusion of visual foreground and background, the mind seems fill in space (e.g. Buddhism’s “second dhyana”).
(9. residing effect)—Continuous growth of what is reported as a combined emotional-intellectual function: usually termed something like “illuminated wisdom-love;” plus:
(10. residing effect)—But the sins or “unwholesome roots” remain, to resurface and torment throughout; plus:
(11. residing effect)—Powers, visions, pseudo-nirvanas, which are to be strongly rejected (in #12).

—-And then it may take decades until the following is perfected:

(12. psycho-technology)—Via #6, renounce and sacrifice #9,10,11, all entirely, and renounce and sacrifice one’s own self.

—-Which, upon total accomplishment, immediately leads to an enormous discontinuity:

(13. THIRD state of being)—Ego-death, “nirvana” (extinction), “samadhi”, “deiformity,” “fana”, “aloneness;” with:
(14. residing effect)—Freedom and detachment.

I remember liking Paul Boyers ‘When time shall be no more’, back in the day (which was on Millenarianism and Biblical literalism in US Evangelicalism, IIRC)
Doesnt this tradition (born again fundamentalist religiosity) have a long history in the US, traced back to the second awakening (or probably longer)?

if anyone would like an explanation of how state-contingent production leads to a better understanding of the moral hazard problem (or a zillion other abstruse problems in modern econ), you just have to ask.

Here’s me asking.

(Also, you say: ‘I thought that Thomas Nagel’s famous paper on “What is it like to be a bat?” might address this problem, but as far as I can see he skates straight over it.’ And the question you’re pointing to is certainly an interesting one [tho to be honest, not one I myself could ever get very exercised over], but in fairness to Nagel, it’s not really within his purview in the ‘bat’ paper. TN wants to argue against the explanatory adequacy of certain [roughly] reductive theories of consciousness/subjective first-person experience, etc. Even if there is a Sorites-type problem here, the argument should go through for anything that manages to get the ‘heap’-style designation—i.e. anything we do want to designate as ‘consciousness’. That the status of some beings is indeterminate with respect to the question of consciousness doesn’t, as far as I can see, affect Nagel’s argument one way or the other.)

Gary Williams,

I don’t know, but these Egyptian Kas sounds very much like what later became called angles. Believing in angles, and to some extent talking to them, is apparently acceptable among both Christians and New Agers, and everything in between.

And the Book of Malachi wasn’t the end of history. Only a few centuries after the Old Testament was completed, a new prophet that claimed he was the Son of God did overturn everything. 600 years later a new Middle Eastern prophet did the same. Even today, parts of the priest class encourages divine communication through speaking in tongues and its interpretation. I don’t think talking to God ever went out of favour.

If the proto-Greeks were bicameral, the Proto-Indo-Europeans must have been as well. But at some point in time the whole of Europe had abandoned this. I’d like to see some estimates of when this bicamerality ended in different cultures, and whether it happened at the same time in all social classes.