I’ve wondered for a long time if there could be any experience of consciousness without any stimulation.
Imagine a baby put straight from birth into a sensory deprivation chamber… if the child, as memory researchers seem to believe, cannot recall the sounds and sensations of being in the womb, then it has nothing to be aware of. And then, surely, consciousness would be absent?
The difficulty with consciousness, famously, is that it is an entirely subjective experience. It is impossible to know what any other being is experiencing.
Even if two people witness the same event, what they experience and remember, how they react and what they feel may be entirely different.
In a sense, experience always runs a little behind reality, which is filtered through the individual’s unique lens, coloured by their expectations, perceptions, biases and beliefs. What the brain has already experienced is as critical as what it currently experiences. Perhaps more so – because what the brain anticipates may determine what it absorbs from the environment. Certainly, what is being attended to will play a crucial role, limiting the capture of sensory data.
In fact, the current view seems to be that the brain acts as a ‘prediction machine’. It predicts in order to muster resources appropriate to what the situation demands. Only if reality crashes hard against the predictions does the brain then have to re-adjust. It’s in its interest to see things as it has expected them to be – as that maximises efficiency.
This relates to cognitive as well as sensory data – consilience and coherence are preferable to truth. Cognitive dissonance is painful. As we've seen before, we do not want to change our minds.
Back to the sensory system, though, and if there were no selection process, the system would be overwhelmed. Most of the time, we live in blissful ignorance of much of that is going on both in the world and in our bodies. Events might have to surprise us, shock us or endanger us to be noticed at all. That’s where pain and pleasure come in.
The more emotionally resonant an experience is, the more salient we will find it. And the more predisposed we will be to register the prospect of a similar experience – either because it is desired or feared.
This takes me to Antonio Damasio’s work on consciousness as arising from emotion. Basic emotions (attraction and aversion) can be seen even in bacteria (astonishingly, there's also communication between bacterial cells of the same species, as well as preferential non-communication to non-co-operating cells of the same species). They are the drives to move toward or away from. Consciousness of food (pleasure) or danger (pain) – but consciousness with an incredibly small ‘c’.
Once a life-form becomes multi cellular – and increasingly so as it becomes more complex – there must be a cacophony of these small ‘c’ consciousnesses, or perhaps small ‘e’ emotions, all the time, in an effort to sustain life by maintaining homeostasis. The central nervous system, which draws together all this information, to determine the appropriate behaviour of the whole organism, has a lot to deal with. It’s like it gets a million emails, some even spam, many of which can be subsumed into one heading, and uses that to focus attention on a primary cause. So, if the blood’s too thick and salty, the mouth and eyes are dry, the liver and kidneys are working hard, or whatever, the headline ‘emotion’ is thirst and the drive of the organism is to seek water.
Once a system has the ability to focus attention on a macro level, there seems, intuitively, an advantage, to having that information as an object in the subjective field. This is what I propose leads ultimately to the sense of a perceiving 'self' separate from the perceived experience.
When I came out of an induced coma some years back, the after-effects of the drugs left me for perhaps 24 hours in a halfway state between consciousness and unconsciousness. My thoughts were mixed with dreams, hallucinations and misremembered memory fragments. The messages from my senses, too, were confused. My sight was unreliable and my bodily sensations flashed in and out of awareness. Sometimes I appeared to be in pain, though thanks to analgesics, I experienced it more as a kind of systemic unease.
Much of the time I believed that I could not breathe. The medical staff had had to perform an emergency tracheotomy and so air was not going through the passages in my nose and mouth. Though my lungs were inflating and my blood was oxygenated, my mind held the conviction that I was suffocating because of the absence of the sensation of air in my nasal passages.
I could not speak and was hardly able to move. I was told to press a switch placed in my right hand if I wanted more morphine, but the staff had failed to notice that the index finger on my right hand was broken and I couldn’t work out how to press the switch without enduring sharp pain. I was more than confused; I was bewildered and terrified. Nothing made sense.
I was moved from the Intensive Treatment Unit to a specialist ward to recover. Porters wheeled me on a stretcher through hospital corridors at what appeared to be breakneck speed. There seemed to be some urgency. It was like a nightmare of a theme park.
Then I was left and it was dark – but I had no concept of time. I couldn’t read the clock, that was too cognitively challenging, and as I had been in the subdued atmosphere of the ITU for a long period, I did not realise that darkness in another ward meant night. I assumed that a few days had passed. Time gets stretched and elongated or whisks by in a rush when you have only fragments of functionality.
There was one period, which was separated from the rest of my experience as though by a circular moat of nothingness. Or as though I had crossed Lethe and lost my past and, so, my self, my identity. I lay in the bed, seeing only narrowly around me – for I couldn’t turn my head a great deal, just my eyes. And I had no sense of anything. No pain or awareness of time passing. All I felt was fear. A visceral, cold, profound emotion. It was very pure. Untainted by narratives of either worry or consolation. It was like a distillation of experience into the crystalline condition of fear. There were no thoughts to accompany it. No rationalisation. The perceiving 'self' was absent.
Afterwards, I remembered this state as one that was worth experiencing. For the first and (I hope) only time in my life I was without context. It was interesting, despite the profound unpleasantness of it. Had the emotion been joy or peace or nothingness, it might have been life-changingly inspiring. Transcendent. I might have taken up meditation as soon as I was able to assert control over my will and mind (which took about three months – those drugs stay in the system for a long time). As it was, I felt that I had been given a window into the consciousness, perhaps, of some non-human animals. We don’t know, of course, what the consciousness of other species really is like, but even at its most limited – sensing purely the body and the emotion, without a concept of identity or duration – there is enough to force us to consider what experiences we put them through. They are sentient, after all. And in my mind putting suffering such as I endured on a sentient being that cannot reframe it through context, through the narrative and sense-making of a perceiving self, cannot be ethical.
So, I considered that prolonged transportation, solitary confinement, states of fear in slaughterhouses, painful operations and treatments or extended periods of illness when a full recovery appears only possible rather than likely and so on do not seem to me to be ethical.
If their consciousness is more sophisticated, forcing any such suffering upon them is even more immoral.
Recently, I read an article by the psychiatrist and writer Dan Siegel, a hero of mine, which recounted a similar experience of losing his sense of self after a head injury. You can find it here. Siegel did find what he described ‘as a level of knowing beneath personal identity, personal belief and personal expectation’ to be inspiring. An existential wake-up call to lighten up. He experienced the world directly, in all its freshness and novelty, without the intermediate intervention of the perceiving self and without the brain's habit of making things essentially familiar through its prediction modeling.
In fact, it seems to me that the experience offered a foundation for some of his later work in which he distinguishes between the messages from the senses (vision, sound and so on) and the constructs we place upon through the activity of the predictive and concept forming mind. This is part of his recipe for mental well-being. I think he is completely right. I’ll go into this in more detail in a future post. But what interests me here is how a very similar experience can leave two people in such different emotional states, He was freed by experiencing without creating meaning, while I was terrified.
Though maybe that’s not right. In my experience the terror was somewhat objective. I mean, it was there but I did not place much value on the terror. Afterwards, the terror had meaning. I don’t know.
Perhaps the take home message is that for both of us, a step out or ‘ordinary’ consciousness opened a door. It inspired me to armchair study and him to professional study. It encouraged us both to realise that there is more variation, more varieties of conscious experience, than we tend to assume. An opening, a portal into alternatives, otherness, the manifold richness of being. And, perhaps more importantly, it inspired us both to consider the well-being of others, the ways in which our different consciousnesses or conscious experiences, can make the world more nightmare or more nirvana.
PS - somewhat synergistically I heard an interview with Jeffrey Kripal about scientists experiencing changed consciousness last night. His book The Flip has just come out. That's kind of expensive. A cheaper - free - alternative, perhaps, though it doesn't cover precisely the same territory is John Horgan's Mind-Body Problems.
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