Saturday, July 18, 2015

Consciousness as I know it

Two books I've read that deal more directly with the nature of the mind have stuck with me over the years. I wish I could say that a great deal of their content has stuck with me too, but in actuality just a few ideas.

The first - and one of my all-time favorite books - is Gödel, Escher, Bach. This was the first exposure I had to concepts like isomorphism and recursion. As it relates to the human mind however, what made the strongest impression on me was the idea that an essentially programmatic system could become so complex it could eventually refer to itself and even program itself. In that way, from the smallest biological building blocks we could eventually end up with consciousness and ostensibly free will.

The second was Consciousness Explained. What I retained from that one was the "multiple drafts" model of thinking. As I understand, it purports that at any given moment we have a shifting, incomplete impression of the world and ourselves. This is in keeping with the brain as a distributed network and in contrast to the outdated idea of dualism and the ghost in the machine. There is no central point where the experience of say, a color, is complete. Rather, we are more or less conscious of stimuli as their effects cascade across the brain.

This view of the mind rooted in materialism - that the brain is the mind - has me recalling the tendency to speak of the mind as though it exists independently of biology or the physical world. Just the other night a friend and I were discussing what someone would experience if they'd never been exposed to external stimuli. Biological considerations weren't the first thing to come to mind. It's as though we're wired to think we can transcend the material world. In a way, that's true. Neuroplasticity shows us thought can lead to physical change. While our minds may ultimately have a physical basis, we can overcome thoughts and behaviors and the particular physical states they represent.