Tag Archives: Self

Fear Hologram Projector

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The brain has the ability to generate vivid, life-like images and scenes. It does this seemingly on its own. These scenes can appear in one’s consciousness at any moment and they can be nearly indistinguishable from reality (‘out there’ as opposed to ‘in your head’). These thoughts, in my experience, are mostly beyond ‘our’ control. They happen to us. And while we can’t prevent them, we can — with practice — observe them. See them for what they are. The analogy that best captures this for me is a Fear Hologram Projector.

“Fear” because the scenarios that trouble me most involve fear and worry and anxiety. “Hologram” because these little mental vignettes are so incredibly real. I don’t know why the brain (some brains) persists in creating these but the brain in my head pulls from a lifetime of images and situations and mashes them up with the most negative of emotions and ideas.

It’s like walking down one of the endless passages in my brain and suddenly finding myself in one of these holograms. And the more mental attention I give it, the sharper and more detailed it seems. The hologram seems to need the energy of my attention to project. The fear hologram can loop endlessly for days or weeks. Or longer.

The brain can, of course, create a more positive, pleasant scenario. We like to imagine good and happy things happening. It would seem to be just as easy to create that kind of hologram as the awful kind. If ‘I’ am going to imagine some future, why wouldn’t I choose to something pleasant? The only answer I can come up with is I don’t get to choose. These mostly just happen. They come unbidden.

How do we turn off the Fear Hologram Projector?

Well, we can’t turn it off until we recognize what’s happening. We can’t see the projector when we’re in the middle of the hologram loop. The key here is probably mindfulness. Seeing what is really occurring. Not in your head but in the real, objective world around you (if you believe in such a thing). We might think of this as “experiential reality.” What we see, hear, touch, smell, taste.

When I find myself trapped in a fear hologram, it feels dark, like a movie theater. The images on the screen are more vivid in a darkened theater. And I can’t see the projector because I don’t know to look for it, or where to look.

But if I can be mindful enough to recognize I’m in a hologram — something generated by a (I choose not to say ‘my’) mind — I can bring up the house lights of my awareness! And in that instant I can see that the images are not real. They’re brain stuff. Stuff ‘I’ didn’t choose. Under the bright light of my awareness, the hologram images fade and as my awareness stops powering the projector, the images disappear. My belief, my buy-in is necessary for the hologram to exist.

I’m reminded of lines from my reading about Buddhism and Taoism.

“Am I conscious now? It troubles me that I seem so often to be unconscious. I wonder what this unconsciousness is. I cannot believe I spend most of my life in a kind of darkness. Surely that cannot be so. Yet every time I ask the question it feels as though I am waking up, or that a light is switching on.” – Ten Zen Questions

“Belief is at best an educated, informed conjecture about Reality. In contrast, seeing — raw, direct, unadulterated experience — is the direct perception of Reality Itself. […] Base your actions on what you see, rather than on what you think.” – Buddhism Plain and Simple

The bad news: our brains (okay, fuck it! My brain) have an endless capacity for materializing FHP’s (Fear Hologram Projectors), twenty-four/seven. And a lifetime of material from which to create the loops. Access to all our fears and anxieties.

The good news: it’s pretty easy to hit the house lights, spot the projector and pull the attention plug. If we can stay mindful. Of course, mindfulness doesn’t necessarily mean a state of meditative bliss. If you’re rocketing down a black ski slope; lining up for a night landing on an aircraft carrier; or in the middle of brain surgery… you’re probably not trapped on some mental fear loop. And lots of daily, less challenging tasks, can help us stay in the moment. But the mind never stops. You can hit the house lights and pull the plug on the fear projector… and find yourself back in some anxious future 30 seconds later. And this can repeat over and over, day and night.

At the risk of oversimplifying, I am either ‘awake’ or not-awake. Not-awake can take several forms, of course. There the subconscious which is probably what I’ve been talking about. How frustrating that it handles all of those life and death tasks (breathing, heart, etc) without any help from the conscious me…. and still finds time to gin up endless fear and anxiety scenarios.

Then there are dreams — which tend to be more real than the Fear Holograms — but there’s nothing we can do about those. Fortunately, mine seem to fade quickly upon awakening. And I’ve read that we also experience unconsciousness most nights. Dreamless sleep. Would like to have more of that.

I expect to be reaching for the switch to the house lights for the rest of my life. Endlessly pulling the plug on the FHP. But I find some comfort in the belief that “Thoughts think themselves.” I don’t control them. That’s the subconscious, forever and always.

And I have the cushion. Meditation. Observing the mind, allowing it to become quieter (rarely quiet). Awakening, if only for a moment.

Our extended self

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I’m rereading Kevin Kelly’s The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future.

“If I re-google my own email (stored in a cloud) to find out what I said (which I do) or rely on the cloud for my memory, where does my “I” end and the cloud start? If all the images of my life, and all the snippets of my interests, and all of my notes and all my chitchat with friends, and all my choices, and all my recommendations, and all my thoughts, and all my wishes — if all this is sitting somewhere, but nowhere in particular, it changes how I think of myself. […] The cloud is our extended soul. Or, if you prefer, our extended self.”

My relationship with the cloud has changed how I think about who or what I am. The best example of that is my fetish for saving excerpts from my favorite books in Google Docs. A few of those ideas might have stuck in the mush between my ears but not many.

Today I can open up Google Docs, enter a word or phrase (consciousness, self, universe, time, reality, media, etc) and instantly pull up every instance of that in every book or article I’ve read (and saved). And, increasingly, I’m linking these excerpts (someday Google will do that for me if I want).

Like Mr. Kelly, it doesn’t feel like Google et al are (is?) replacing my memory or intelligence so much as expanding and enhancing it.

Homo Deus: Free Will and Consciousness

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This is the second of three posts featuring excerpts from the new book by Yuval Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow). The first post dealt with traditional religions, creeds and ‘isms.’ The excerpts below are some of Dr. Harari’s thoughts on the concepts of free will and consciousness.

Free will exists only in the imaginary stories we humans have invented. […] (The question is not whether humans) can act upon their inner desires — the question is whether they can choose their desires in the first place.

I feel a particular wish welling up within me because this is the feeling created by the biochemical processes in my brain. […] I don’t choose my desires. I only feel them, and act accordingly.

Once we accept that there is no soul and that humans have no inner essence called ‘the self’, it no longer makes sense to ask, ‘How does the self choose its desires?’ […] There is only a stream of consciousness, and desires arise and pass away within this stream, but there is no permanent self that owns the desires.

If I am indeed the master of my thoughts and decisions, can I decide not to think about anything at all for the next sixty seconds?

(There are) at least two different selves within us: the experiencing self and the narrating self. The experiencing self is our moment-to-moment consciousness. The narrating self is forever busy spinning yarns about the past and making plans for the future. […] It doesn’t narrate everything, and usually weaves the story using only peak moments and end results. […] Most of us identify with our narrating self. When we say ‘I’, we mean the story in our head not the onrushing stream of experiences we undergo. […] We always retain the feeling that we have a single unchanging identity from birth to death (and perhaps even beyond).

If you want to make people believe in imaginary entities such as gods and nations, you should make them sacrifice something valuable.

Each of us has a sophisticated system that throws away most of our experiences, keeps only a few choice samples, mixes them up with bits from movies we’ve seen, novels we’ve read, speeches we’ve heard, and daydreams we’ve savoured, and out of all that jumble it weaves a seemingly coherent story about who I am, where I came from and where I am going. This story tells me what to love, whom to hate and what to do with myself. This story may even cause me to sacrifice my life, if that’s what the plot requires. […] But in the end, they are all just stories.

Every moment the biochemical mechanisms of the brain create a flash of experience, which immediately disappears. Then more flashes appear and fade, appear and fade, in quick succession. These momentary experiences do not add up to any enduring essence.

Dreams of stuff that never happened

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The subject of memory comes up a lot in my reading. Cognitive science; philosophy; Buddhism and Taoism. Eventually they all get around to talking about the sense of self. That feeling of “I” that almost everyone experiences. Memory seems to be the glue that holds the self together throughout the years. I few nights ago I was reminded there are two types of memory (perhaps more, but two that I’m aware of).

I was going to call the first — and most common — “real memory.” But memories don’t seem as real to me as they once did. I considered “Memories of Stuff that Probably Happened,” but that’s a mouthful. Let’s call these Accessible Memories. I’m sure people who study this kind of stuff have a name for these, I just don’t know what it is.

Accessible Memories are of people, places, things that (probably) existed or happened in your past. I call them “accessible” because you can “go back” and retrieve them. Let’s say someone you work with mentions taking her son to Little League practice. If you played you probably have memories and you can intentionally retrieve some of them. In my experience, it’s usually the same ones. Perhaps because they’re good memories… or bad memories. In my experience, the longer I spend thinking about that time in my life, the more memories I can access. But my sense is there is a finite number of memories. Perhaps with drugs or hypnosis I could recall all of my memories but that’s another topic. But for whatever reason, I have a strong sense these memories are of stuff that happened.

Let’s talk about dreams for a moment. Most of my dreams involve people and places from my past. As well as events that, though distorted and warped, have some basis in experience. But every so often I’ll have a dream that features totally unfamiliar elements, involving people/places/events that were never part of my waking life. Where did those images come from? Creepier still, one of these “made up” dreams might reoccur months or years later.

I’m aware of these “made up” dreams because I remember them. Sometimes upon awakening. Sometimes days later, “out of the blue” as it were. This is the other type of memory that I find so mysterious. Can one have a memory of something that never happened. Not just an inaccurate memory where you get some of the details wrong. But of something completely… imaginary? But that’s not right. The dream did happen. And I’m having a memory of that dream. Are dreams and memories completely different phenomenon? Can I dream about a memory? Why not?

Since I can have a memory of a dream (based on experiences), why not a memory of a dream featuring people that never existed and stuff that never happened? It feels like I’m conflating dreams and memories and they’re probably two different but related experiences. But these memories-of-dreams-of-stuff-that-never-happened fascinate me. And make my head hurt. (I keep looking for Leonardo DiCaprio’s little top from the movie Inception.)

Memories and dreams are “head stuff.” That’s the only place they happen (I know, I know. That’s the only place everything happens). So they feel less real to me than, say, the breath I’m taking at this moment. I can reach into wherever memories are kept and paw through them like a shoebox full of old photos… I can’t go digging around for a favorite dream. They’re mostly gone. For good reasons, I’m told. But once in awhile one “pops into our heads.” A memory, but always fleeting. Perhaps dreams-of-stuff-that-never-happened (DOSTNH) belong to someone else and got caught in a cosmic consciousness riptide before drifting over to one of my dreams.

Memory creates the illusion of continuity

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Daniel Kahneman said, “There are the experiences in our lives… and our memories of those experiences. And they are not the same.”

Memory seems to be the secret sauce to that feeling of a continuous, unchanging ME. But I’m finding it increasingly difficult to think of my memories as “mine.” It was easier when I thought of them as photographs in a shoebox on a shelf in my mind.

“Memories are not etched permanently in the brain. Instead, every time a memory is retrieved, it is destroyed and then re-created, and it becomes a memory of a memory. Any current memories we have are copies of copies of copies… many times over depending on how many times we have recalled that particular experience. Because of this process of creating, destroying, and re-creating memories, our recollections are unstable and subject to alteration. Each time we recall an event from our lives, the memory of that event can change. […] We never have a full recollection of anything that’s happened to us, and our memories are constructed from hints, scraps and traces found within the mind.” — Living As A River

I have a memory of a four-year-old Steve jumping up and down on the bed and then crashing through the bedroom window. Obviously that didn’t happen and I have no idea when or how the memory was formed. How many other of my memories are “constructed?”

Thirty years ago Barb and I went to New York with another couple. It was miserably cold and I remember almost nothing of that weekend. I have a photo of me with a parrot sitting on my shoulder. That must have happened but I’m not sure if I have a memory of the experience or if the photo somehow created that memory.

So what remains when the person, that oh-so-strong sense of a permanent self, is gone?

“A vague memory remains, like the memory of a dream, or early childhood. After all, what is there to remember? A flow of events, mostly accidental and meaningless. A sequence of desires and fears and inane blunders. Is there anything worth remembering? Realize that your present existence is like a shower of sparks, each spark lasting a second and the shower itself — a minute or two.” — Nisargadatta Maharaj

My memories seem so important. Would there be a “me” without them? And, yet, when I examine them, one at a time, they are indeed “mostly accidental and meaningless.”

James Gleick says “We experience childhood one way when we’re living it and another way when we relive it in memory.” Good. That means it was more fun than I recall.

Again, James Gleick: “But if memory is the action of recollection, the act of remembrance, then it implies an ability to hold in the mind two constructs, one representing the present and another representing the past, and to compare them, one against the other. How did we learn to distinguish memory from experience?”

Might that be why memories are mostly fuzzy and vague, “…constructed from hints, scraps and traces found within the mind.” We seldom confuse experience with memory.

I’m spending a lot of time thinking about the question who or what am I? And the answer I keep coming up with is: I am this immediate experience. And nothing more. As Alan Watts said, “This is it.” But it’s impossible for me to think of an experience as a discrete ‘thing.” Each is gone before I can bring it into consciousness. I can only think about the experience that just slipped away. It easier to think in terms of process, a flow of experiences. Ever changing. Never the same. That means keeping all the inputs wide open. Turn down the noise, turn up the signal. Be here, now.

The Fear Basket

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I’ve struggled with worry and anxiety my entire life. Tried a little counseling. A mild anti-anxiety drug for a while. Lots of reading on the subject. And, in recent years, meditation. I suspect a professional would put me on the low end of the anxiety spectrum, if there is such a thing. At this point in my life, I don’t expect to ever be completely worry-free. I’ve learned to live with it. Continue reading →

meOS

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“This very large thing (the net) provides a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall, planetary scope) and a new mind for an old species. It is the Beginning. […] At its core 7 billion humans, soon to be 9 billion, are quickly cloaking themselves with an always-on layer of connectivity that comes close to directly linking their brains to each other. […] By the year 2025 every person alive — that is, 100 percent of the planet’s inhabitants — will have access to this platform via some almost-free device. Everyone will be on it. Or in it. Or, simply, everyone will be it.”

— The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly

“All information will come in by super-realistic television and other electronic devices as yet in the planning stage or barely imagined. In one way this will enable the individual to extend himself anywhere without moving his body— even to distant regions of space. But this will be a new kind of individual— an individual with a colossal external nervous system reaching out and out into infinity. And this electronic nervous system will be so interconnected that all individuals plugged in will tend to share the same thoughts, the same feelings, and the same experiences. […] If all this ends with the human race leaving no more trace of itself in the universe than a system of electronic patterns, why should that trouble us? For that is exactly what we are now!”

— The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts

“Humanity is developing a sort of global eyesight as millions of video cameras on satellites, desktops, and street corners are connected to the Internet. In your lifetime it will be possible to see almost anything on the planet from any computer. And society’s intelligence is merging over the Internet, creating, in effect, a global mind that can do vastly more than any individual mind. Eventually everything that is known by one person will be available to all. A decision can be made by the collective mind of humanity and instantly communicated to the body of society.”

— God’s Debris by Scott Adams

In all of my reading about Taoism, Buddhism and other eastern mystical traditions, one theme repeats over and over. That there is no permanent, on-going self. That feeling of “me” and “I” is an illusion. And the source of all suffering. Clinging and resisting is mixed in (I want things to be the way I want things to be) but I won’t try to tackle that here.

There is nothing more difficult for me to comprehend than the idea that my feeling of “me-ness” is just an illusion. Not real. I’ve been struggling with this for many years. And I’ve grabbed on to various metaphors in an effort to see (or feel) how this could possibly be.

 

For the last week or so I’ve been thinking of myself as a computer connected to a vast network of other computers. Over the years, every part of the computer has been replaced. The monitor, the hard drive, the keyboard, all the internal parts… all have been replaced. In no sense is the computer the same computer that was there in the beginning.

In this tortured analogy, the computer operating system is my brain(mind?). But from the very beginning, the OS was being continuously updated. This is where the analogy gets wobbly because who or what is using the computer? I don’t have a clue so I’m gonna say the computer OS is using itself and, in the process, creating an imaginary sense of self that believes it is operating the computer. Why is it doing this? No clue. How is it doing this? No clue.

But every day the OS changes and evolves as it processes ever more information. Emails, text messages, videos, songs, news articles, and all the rest. Every new bit makes a tiny change in the OS so it is never the same from one moment to the next. From the computer’s perspective, everything is humming along fine. An endless flow of new and interesting stuff.

But let’s assume we can only keep the hardware and software running for 80 years. Manufacturer’s planned obsolescence or something. The network knows this and when one computer goes “offline,” another one comes on, running the latest OS. The network is always becoming. It only exists as an entity in relation to the network.

But the imagined self — the ghost in my machine — is horrified by this prospect. It doesn’t know (can’t know?) it’s not real. It’s non-existence is horrifying and unimaginable (take a moment to appreciate the irony). I took a moment to watch the final scene of 2010 (A Space Odyssey) in which Dr. Chandra explains to HAL that it will be destroyed.

So, no self… happy ending (No ending, actually). Self… The End. Oblivion. Easy choice. But it is only from my God-like, Creator of the Analogy perspective that any of this can be considered. The only way I can keep my head from exploding (one of the most difficult parts to replace) is to imagine the “always Becoming OS” can generate this view, this understanding and in so doing, recognize the illusory nature of the self. Enlightenment.

Additional reading:
Neuroscience backs up the Buddhist belief  that “the self” isn’t constant, but ever-changing
You’re a completely different person at 14 and 77

The Tao of Zen: Emptying

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taoofzenIn The Tao of Zen, author Ray Grigg devotes 170 pages to tracing the historical roots of Buddhism, Taoism and Zen. I find it tough sledding every time. The rest of the book explores the philosophical similarities between Taosim and Zen. Chapters on: Wordlessness, Selflessness, Softness, Oneness, Emptiness, Nothingness, Balance, Paradox, Non-doing, Spontaneity, Ordinariness, Playfulness, Suchness.

After three readings, my copy of this book has so many underlines, margin notes and highlighter, it’s getting hard to read. Here are few ideas from the final chapter:

In Taoism and Zen, suchness is accommodated by emptying. This is the process of clearing away the attitudes, the judgements, the roles, and all the conditioned patterns of thinking and feeling that shape ordinary experience. This means no questions, no answers, no explanations, no justifications, no rationalizations, no utilitarianism. It also means no moralizing, no personifying, no empathizing.

“Our existence is nothing but a succession of moments perceived through the senses.” — Jean Jacques Rousseau

(In Taoism and Zen) self is a soft and flexible persona worn for the practical purpose of identification. This was Alan Watts’ point when he said that he was not really Alan Watts, he was only called Alan Watts.

“I don’t have faith. I have experience.” — Joseph Campbell

The Way of Taoism and Zen comes of itself. “It” happens when “It” is ready.

Time Travel: A History (James Gleick)

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screen-shot-2016-10-05-at-12-01-53-pm“From the acclaimed author of The Information and Chaos, here is a mind-bending exploration of time travel: its subversive origins, its evolution in literature and science, and its influence on understanding time itself.”

Sleeping into the future is what we do every night.

“Man can do what he will, but he cannot will what he wills.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

“People living in different countries kill each other at irregular time intervals, so that also for this reason anyone who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror. I trust that posterity will read these statements with a feeling of proud and justified superiority.” — Albert Einstein’s message in the time capsule buried at the 1939 New York World’s Fair

We know that complete certainty must always elude us. We know that for certain.

“Time and space are modes by which we think, and not conditions in which we live.” — Albert Einstein

“I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything.” — Richard Feynman

What is time? Things change, and time is how we keep track.

Schopenhauer asserted that life and dreams are pages from the same book. To read them in their proper order is to live, but to browse among them is to dream.

No one can really explain how memories are formed and retrieved. Nor can anyone explain away Proust’s paradoxical contention: that the past cannot truly be recovered by searching our memories, by interrogating them, by rewinding the film or reaching back into the drawer; rather, that the essence of the past, when it comes to us at all,comes unbidden.

If you ever see yourself coming out of a time machine, run the other way as fast as you can. Nothing good can come from meeting yourself. — Charles Yu

We experience childhood one way when we’re living it and another way when we relive it in memory.

But if memory is the action of recollection, the act of remembrance, then it implies an ability to hold in the mind two constructs, one representing the present and another representing the past, and to compare them, one against the other. How did we learn to distinguish memory from experience?

Our conscious brains invent the concept of time over and over again, inferring it from memory and extrapolating from change. And time is indispensable to our awareness of self. […] You order the slices of your life. You edit the film even as it records.

“There were buttons and switches everywhere—buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature, and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.” — The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster

Why do we need time travel, when we already travel through space so far and fast? For history. For mystery. For nostalgia. For hope. To examine our potential and explore our memories. To counter regret for the life we lived, the only life, one dimension, beginning to end.

“We know it all now, with our thoughts travelling at the speed of tweet. We are time travelers into our own future. We are Time Lords.” — Ali Smith

If we confuse the real world with our many virtual worlds, it’s because so much of the real world is virtual.

Time’s winged chariot isn’t taking us anywhere good. […] The past, in which we did not exist, is bearable, but the future, in which we will not exist, troubles us more.

“We perceive time only because we know we have to die.” — Heidegger

The Mind-Body Problem

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“The scientific and philosophical consensus is that there is no nonphysical soul or ego, or at least no evidence for that.” — Philosopher David Chalmers

From Consciousness: The Mind Messing With the Mind (NYT)

“Michael Graziano, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, suggested to the audience that consciousness is a kind of con game the brain plays with itself. The brain is a computer that evolved to simulate the outside world. Among its internal models is a simulation of itself — a crude approximation of its own neurological processes. The result is an illusion. Instead of neurons and synapses, we sense a ghostly presence — a self — inside the head. But it’s all just data processing. “The machine mistakenly thinks it has magic inside it,” Dr. Graziano said. And it calls the magic consciousness.”

I think this is what is commonly referred to as “the hard problem.” How minds are generated by brains.

“Some philosophers and scientists have been driven back to the centuries-old doctrine of panpsychism — the idea that consciousness is universal, existing as some kind of mind stuff inside molecules and atoms. Consciousness doesn’t have to emerge. It’s built into matter, perhaps as some kind of quantum mechanical effect.”

I like the idea of universal consciousness. Until there’s solid, scientific consensus on how the brain creates consciousness… this is as good an explanation as any.