A Hierarchy of Masks (Part 1)
[This is the first half of a major post that has been a long time in the making. To fully grasp it, I suggest reading previous posts in The Encephalon Engine.]
I have written about self-preparation, emergent consciousness, and the fragility of memory, all in my quest to dispel the illusion of a unified conscious identity. To paraphrase an archaic quote, each of us is legion. There is no unique soul locked away in the core of the brain’s hardware: we act based on dynamic motivations, both conscious and non-conscious, and nowhere in an explanation of the human mind or its manifest behaviours is a unified mental entity required. Yet introspective experience is so strong – so convincingly continuous – that this assumption still lies beneath almost every attempt to understand the encephalon engine. In the first part of this piece, I will highlight some of the phenomena that have led me to suspect this assumption is false, or at least misleading, before proposing my own version. In the second, I will discuss some of the directions we might take if we stop taking unity of mind for granted, and some interesting applications – in particular, a motivational management system I have recently developed, called the hierarchy of masks.
Consciousness is mysterious. No one has demonstrated it, yet few deny its existence, and most take it for granted. Dualists such as David Chalmers have attempted to demonstrate its existence, separate from the brain’s physical structure, through thought experiments such as the “philosophical zombie” – a being that is imagined to be completely physically identical to a normal person, but lacking in conscious awareness.
There are two problems with the philosophical zombie. The first, damning problem is that its very existence hinges on the assumption that consciousness can be “removed” without altering any neural substrate (i.e. a responsible brain structure). The second, less obvious problem is that the “difference” between a p-zombie and a human is entirely introspective, and as such there is a subtle implication that such a difference is real. By definition, no one but the subject can determine if they are a philosophical zombie or a real human. The situation quickly becomes more of a headache: the p-zombie must examine its own introspective ability to determine if it is a p-zombie. Exactly how the capability to examine one’s own introspective ability is different from consciousness, and how, is a question that dualists hope you will not ask when confronted with the thought experiment.
Attempting to use the mysterious nature of consciousness as evidence of its mysticism seems to me no different than attempting to show love, or equivalently any other emotion, are mystical. Emotions have a sensation as well, but those sensations shift more rapidly, are more fleeting, and are less transient. We can easily recognise when we are angry, but it is also extremely difficult (perhaps impossible) to imagine emotions in the way that we can imagine and recall images and sounds in our “mind’s eye”. Emotions work behind the scenes, as I will discuss below – if sensory “qualia” are the actors of memory and imagination, emotions and their accompanying motivations are the directors, the producers, and the distributors. I do not trust that the relative prominence of light and sound makes them any more mystical than emotions. As usual, evolution explains this prominence: emotions are basic, and rapidly shortcut whole sets of behaviours appropriate to the situations that tend to elicit the emotions. There is no need for their “qualic” sensations to be as strong as that of sensory input. Fascinating conditions such as cortical visual impairment add more support to qualia being an illusion. Cortical visual impairment is caused by dysfunction in the brain’s visual cortex, rather than the eye itself, and it has led to some wild case studies with patients who cannot be convinced that they are visually impaired. It is literally impossible to imagine the experience of having your brain try to fill in the damaged components of vision.
In short, dualism and materialism can be thought of as representing two resolutions of the same problem: an introspective experience that cannot be explained by physical means. A dualist is someone who has therefore concluded that there must be something more than physical existence. A materialist is someone who has therefore concluded that the experience is an illusion. I am firmly in the latter camp. Once you dispel (or rather, accept) the emergent illusion of consciousness, the illusion that we – I – it is unified quickly crumbles as well, and this is where the meat of my discussion lies.
This time, I will summarise at the get-go: it makes more sense to think of consciousness as the (strictly retrospective) sum of different motivational states that share the same neural hardware. These states are not necessarily discrete – that is, it is not necessarily possible to list them, nor must we change from one to the other with a snap of the fingers. Nor need they be one-dimensional – that is, we’re not moving along a line of grey shades between two extremes of white and black. I believe, however, that often they will be strongly correlated with some of the emotions you will be familiar with – and maybe some that no one is familiar with.
When I say they share the same neural hardware, I mean hardware that is strictly far below awareness. This certainly does not include memory, which is not a complete, communal phenomenon: emotions at the time of memory-encoding and memory-retrieval influence the memories you can more easily recall. But then again, memory is already strange. Think about who you are right now. Are you the same person who went to preschool? If so, do you conclude that based on a sparse selection of fragmented, corrupted memories? (Yes, it is highly likely that most of them have “gone rotten” and are now mostly wrong.) You can probably recall your dream from last night more comprehensively and accurately than what you were doing at this time yesterday. In a week, you’ll remember the essential meaning you took away from this post, but you won’t be able to string a dozen words of it together unless the meaning had to do with the specific structure of those words.
That’s more than Leonard Shelby could do. (Readers unfamiliar with Leonard Shelby are required to watch Memento three times before continuing.) Leonard showed us what someone might do if they knew (perhaps paradoxically) that they had anterograde amnesia, and why. He took my concept of self-preparation to new, necessary heights. His motivational states fluctuated normally, but were completely shielded from each other by his additional memory handicap. Every tattoo on his body, every scribbled note and Polaroid, was a message received by each short-lived “Leonard” from a previous one. He had no concept of time beyond buffers of a few minutes, but he held it together because he had dogmatic faith in the validity of the messages he was sending to himself. The thought that he might mislead himself is alien, because whenever he contemplates it, he’s not in the same motivational state that would actually do it. A very similar conundrum meets Aaron and Abe in Primer – when they discover time travel, and are confronted with the possibility that “they” are already manipulating things from the future, they have to ask themselves with complete sincerity, “Would I do that?“. They try to think of events that could motivate them to do such a thing – another extreme example of embracing self-preparation.
But where Aaron and Abe end up existing across time, Leonard exists outside of it. The “scenes” of his memory intervals are played to us backwards. It’s disorienting at first, but it’s still a finely ordered structure. To Leonard, his memory intervals have no order whatsoever, except that they occur some time after his accident. He might guess how long it has been based on his progress and his appearance, but he cannot place them in any sort of sequence because he is never aware of anything that happened to him before his short-term memory buffer. He talks about conditioning, a type of automatic learning that is essentially distinct from memory, and how he now relies upon self-conditioning. But beyond automatic learning, his actions from moment to moment presumably depend entirely upon his current motivational state, because his reservoir of conscious experiences never changes – it’s limited to experiences between his birth, and his accident.
In the second part (which may not come immediately), I will talk more about why Leonard Shelby would be the perfect case study for my anti-unity of mind position if he was real. Then I will look at some real case studies, specifically Patient HM and Clive Wearing, before getting into practical applications of this approach. Sadly, I can’t promise that post won’t be just as long as this one.
