After the Peak

As neuroscience every day brings us that much closer to understanding our the human brain in terms of being just a fleshy machine, the most intriguing feature continues to be consciousness.  Descartes’ claim of its essentiality to existence seems far-fetched — why can’t a rock be?  A rock is, is it not?  Yet romanticism with consciousness endures nevertheless.

But is this importance accorded the consciousness overly egotistical, in the worst connotations of that word?

More to the point — do we need consciousness?  Why?

Of course, the importance of consciousness as the only actual reality, recognizing that nothing exists except perception, yadda yadda yadda, will never go away.  That rock isn’t a rock at all but only a rock in my mind, those interstellar nebulae aren’t really out there either, except as bits flashing in a radar array.

But it works both ways.  One could just as easily argue that consciousness does not exist at all.  Nothing exists except what we do or say.  Tell me a thought you think you had yesterday that you didn’t tell anyone until just now.  And then prove to me that just now wasn’t when you actually thought it.  How can you, except by writing it down, or otherwise externalizing it and therefore invalidating the experiment?  The scientific method does not allow for consciousness.  Point that out the next time a well-intentioned atheist is arguing to you about evolution or global warming.  Point out that the underpinning of those systems of understanding are incompatible with Descartes.  Consciousness exists as far as if you raise a child to speak English and understand what the word “consciousness” means, then if polled “are you conscious?” they will most likely say yes.

(And maybe one day it will exist as much as a clump of neurons, a complex interaction of neuro-electric fields, some ingeniously bizarre mechanism to replicate the function of the instruction pointer register inside whichever computer you’re reading this on.)

So never mind Descartes vs Occam for now.  Let me argue instead that consciousness is worse than useless, is some unfortunate evolutionary artifact like the appendix, one that can only impair our natural functioning.

There’s a recent link out there somewhere, in the greatest thinking organism known to man, this Internet, which, btw, functions beautifully without any apparent consciousness.  About a study in which groups were given choices to make.  At first simple, but then complex.  The discovery was: faced with complex choices, people make better decisions, decisions that they are happy with longer, if they are distracted when the choices are presented, such that they cannot bring their full consciousness to bear on the decision.  That is, if they are prevented from fucking up their natural good sense with their woefully underpowered ego.

If we drop the ego’s pretension, we admit, do we not, that this isn’t all that surprising?

What does Kobe Bryant, or any other athlete, say they were thinking during a super-human performance?  “I was playing unconscious.  I really wasn’t thinking at all.”  And what happens to Karl Malone and Jim Kelly and just about any golfer who’s ever taken a one-shot lead over Tiger to the back nine on Sunday, that instant that they start to think “wow I could win this thing”?

Ok so not everyone is a world-class athlete in the most intense moment of competition of our lives, but I say that The Zone is the place we always wish we were in anyway.

Take interpersonal relations.  Giving a presentation to the boss, making that sales pitch, approaching that cute girl at the bar.  Think about every little detail, what you’re saying, what the other person is thinking, how your voice moves up and down.  Think these thoughts mentally out-loud, think about thinking, think about why your voice suddenly went up an octave, you started stammering, and now you don’t remember the next thing you were going to say at all and your audience is starting to look at you funny.

I’ve a debilitating compulsion towards argument.  And a reputation for being somewhat “good” at it.  A feel for rhetoric, the various trips and traps and tacts to take to making my point of view sound the most reasonable.  A record of adversaries surrendering with some comment about me being “so logical”.  It seems to me that people always use “logical” to infer that a conclusion was reached from some methodical process.  Like balancing an algebraic equation.  4x - 7 = 2x + 9.  Move all the x’s to one side.  2x - 7 = 9.  Move the constants to the other.  2x = 16.  Divide out the factor.  x = 8.  The left side of the big brain-polarity myth.

Honest truth though, how I argue is I open my mouth and words just come out on their own.  That they connect into that semantical linguistic symmetry people call “logic” is due to the same mechanism that causes Tetris blocks to fit together just right (hopefully!) even when they’re dropping down the screen at dizzying speeds.  Words said quickly enough to rebut the first half of a sentence before that sentence has even been completed cannot have first wallowed in consciousness any more than can those “reflexes” required to play video games.  It’s all unconscious pattern matching.

And this truth, that our unconscious performs far more of these tricks of intelligence than we give it credit for, is actually kind of logical when you think about it anyway.  That instruction pointer of consciousness holds, what, about 7 things if we’re really pressing things?  But date me for a year and I’ll still have fresh anecdotes I can tell you in vivid detail, pulled out of that vast unconscious beneath.  Consciousness tells as much of the story of our brains as one instance of Firefox can tell you about the Internet.  Or riding in one car can tell you about all the starts and destinations and stories and reasons for travel of all the tens of thousands of people in the traffic jam with you.  That myth that we’re only using a small percentage of our brain holds much truth, at least if we’re only talking about our consciousness.  And don’t wise ones always admonish us to use the bigger of our multiple brains?

And so many problems are caused by that tiny little conscious one.  Like the entire litany of ailments of our modernity: Depression, Anxiety, Politicians, Lawyers, Consultants, Fundamentalism, Deception, Greed, Envy, all the evils of Idleness, New Age anything, Impotence, Narcissism, Pop Culture, the Democratic Leadership Council, Jerry Springer.  Another link that was floating around suggested, in fact, that maybe consciousness doesn’t really predate civilization.  That consciousness was only an attribute humans developed in parallel to modern societies.  Before written history, before mass communications, there was no such thing as consciousness.  People spent all their time toiling to survive, following their instincts to eat and fuck and that’s it.  The oldest stories we know of are always about what people did.  It’s only now we make stories about what people think.  Advancing civilization breeds this neurosis we call “thought”.

So I’m going zen.  Emptying my mind.  All introspection has ever told me is that I can’t think of a damn thing introspection has ever told me.  The conscious chatter are chains holding my super-human self back.  Good-bye Thought, and good riddance.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
- Hamlet