Summary April 4, 2019

BOXES

One fanciful vision of the (flat) Earth was that it was supported on the back of a turtle, which was, in turn, standing on another turtle and so on: Turtles all the way down.

Similarly, I find it useful to think of "boxes within boxes all the way down." Box 1 is the world we experience "in our head," which includes all experience and everything we know. In particular, it includes what we have been taught and what we have been taught to assume, which is, to a certain extent, "programmed". Box 1 is the "matrix" of individually shared reality. But, unlike the Matrix of Science Fiction fame, our matrix depends deeply on the "real world" outside and our senses within, as eloquently explained by Antonio Damasio.

Our evolutionary survival strategy involves survival as a member of a group, or "super person". Not only do we not "think for ourselves," we can't.

We experience ourselves as objects in the world (that's me) and assume that the world exists without us. It has been here long before we were born, will still be here long after and exposes only a tiny amount of itself to our investigation. This is "Box 2". Box 2 is contained in Box 1. Thinking in "box 2" terms, we recognize that other people exist and that they have an internal world - their "Box 1" which is, to us, Box 3. Of course, there are billions of Box 3's, including Box 3's that belonged to people long dead. We are in "Box 3" when we say things like "I know what he's thinking". Language uniquely provides access to Box 3, when we ask things like "What do you see" and expect an answer that makes sense. It can get pretty crazy. It makes sense to ask if Galileo correctly understood the discoveries and system of Kepler (he didn't). In a similar vein, we can ask of the Church threatened Galileo because of his beliefs or because he was, according to what was known at the time, wrong. All this depends on an acceptance of the fact that each of us lives in our personal "Box 1". This is an unavoidable consequence of our nature. It follows that persecuting an individual for his beliefs is misguided since nobody really "thinks for themselves."

When we are speaking of experience or "external reality," we need to be aware of which "box" we are speaking from. For example, statements about objective reality belong in Box 2 and should not contain "mind-like" concepts like the "laws" of physics. Laws of physics belong in Box 1. They are statements about our experience of the world.

I allow for "Box 0", which is the hypothetical and unobservable world - beyond the reach of our cleverest instruments, observation or reasoning. Like Box 1, Box 0 is relative. We are always biting chunks off Box 0, but we must admit that there are things we will never know about the Universe. At the very least, we must, as individuals, recognize that almost all of Box 0 is beyond what we will ever understand. I assume that "Box 0" exists even if there are no observers anywhere - the situation we assume at the time of the Big Bang and millions of years after that.

I regard all of mathematics as being in "Box 1" as something "mind like." This stands against the common intuition of physicists that the Universe is somehow fundamentally "mathematical" and that we are "discovering" mathematical laws that exist apart from our minds. This assumption is certainly worth challenging, but it's good to make it explicit. Similarly, any statement that includes an "observer" or an "apparatus" is a statement in Box 1, not Box 0.  As far as I know, such "mind like" concepts can be removed from relativity and quantum mechanics without losing anything but hooks for idle philosophers to make their speculations sound "scientific."

"Theory of Boxes" takes a dim view of theories that attempt to explain either of these questions:

• Why is there anything?
• Why does it feel like something to exist (Chambers "hard question")

I am greatly aided in this skepticism by knowing that not all perfectly sensible questions have answers.  While it has not been proven that either of the above questions is formally undecidable, I think it's reasonable to think of them in this way until some future genius settles the matter. For now, at least, I proceed on the assumption that we have something called "experience" and that it is an experience of something other than ourselves. Not much of a stretch I think.

THE INTERFACE

In effect, what we call "mind" is an interface between the "real world" and "Box 1". You could say it's responsible for creating the whole stack of boxes. It is worth asking how it does this, which boils down to curiosity about neuroscience - the brain. More subtly, it involves asking about the nature of the universe we inhabit and what it takes to survive in it.

In this area of concern, we also consider how the interface is "programmed" by language and other cultural factors. Analogy plays a key role here, as outlined in "Surfaces and Essences". A key concept in that books is "isomorphism" - the idea that some analogies are better than others. In fact, the best ones allow us to learn about one system from the properties of another. For example, we assume that objects in the universe behave as if they "obey" laws of gravity (mind-like ideas). Thus, we can predict how objects will behave (say the date of an eclipse) by working out the math in the model. On a broader scale, we can ask which of our ideas genuinely underpin reality itself, the subject of "A Beautiful Question".

Evolution has gifted humans with an obsession with "figuring out what's really going on". Many of our guesses are wide of the mark and wind up as "mythology". Some are impressively robust and useful - they are called "Science". So far, we can't be sure how closely our ideas mirror the "real world", but we can help ourselves by keeping in mind the difference between our ideas (mind-like) and the actual reality we attempt to approach.

Dimensions of Value: Maslow's Hierarchy

After writing it, I felt that this post was a bit "over the top". I thought of deleting it, but decided to leave it in, since it actually does connect to many of other ideas. It's just that I don't think our situation is quite this dark. I've got to stay away from Russian novels ...

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Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

We really should give a nod to Maslow's attempt to visualize the human situation in terms of "needs", which are almost the same thing as "values". Let's discuss Maslow's ideas - assuming that we somehow manage to "value" what we "need". My general impression is that Maslow's summary is somewhat misleading. It tempts us to over-simplify human motivation and overlook the fantastic complexity of these "needs". Once we shift to "values" and unpack the "values", we wind up with something that can actually explain practical things like political parties, war, persistent poverty, "fake news" and all the other things that seem to arise from the depths of human nature to form "social hurricanes" that leave us feeling helpless and in need to at least understand what's going on.

Maslow's "analysis" doesn't seem to provide much immediate help to individuals wondering how to organize their lives and priorities. But that's not the worst of it.

Maslow's cute diagram was flashed on the screen in millions of "Social Studies" classes around the world as a quick and dirty way of getting the issue out of the way and providing teachers with a good source of multiple choice questions. But it is horribly misleading. It is a lie to imagine that the business of human life boils down to the individual seeking to meet individual needs. The fact is that one must choose between (a) abandoning society naked savage in the jungle or (b) absorbing oneself into the society which may or may not allow you to live.

NETWORKS

We all exist within social networks. We also find ourselves in a physical environment which, for many of us, is man-made and (therefore) a world of ideas-made-real. We are born into such a world that has been designed by society to meet the needs Maslow discusses. In fact, we find ourselves in a "matrix" that society provides for us to meet at least the bottom 3 tiers of Maslow's pyramid. For most of us, whether we struggle to meet our "needs" at the bottom of the pyramid or the top is a matter that society makes for us.

This tells us that our fundamental need (and value) is to be accepted into a network of social relationships that provide for our needs in detail. Through this web of relationships, we acquire food, money, safety and all the other good things that keep us (and our society) going. Of course, it remains to discuss how these networks and value-transactions work in real life.

It turns out that there is not an exact correspondence between "need" and "value". We value lots of things we don't need - such as drugs, sugar, jewelry, viral videos, alcohol, new cars ... We also tend to not value things we actually do need, such as a healthy mind and body. It is more fruitful to analyze values than needs. For example, where, in Maslo's, hierarchy do we find cocaine? Prostitution? Child soldiers? Nuclear weapons? Obesity? There seems to be something missing in the assumption that human life is mainly concerned with meeting our needs.

SELF ACTUALIZATION (TOP NEED)

I have always found this term to be an annoying catchphrase of the self-involved California hippy. We still hear it a lot - mostly from people who have - through skepticism or laziness - rejected all other value systems and wound up with "be all you can be". Back when Maslow did this work, the choice seemed to be between "religion" (discredited) and nihilism. A false choice.

Maslow is here assuming that humans, in general, do not regard self-sacrifice and/or self-denial as a value. For example, he's assuming that humans won't be happy living as Muslims, Christians, following Confucious, joining the armed services or devoting their life to service of any kind.   The challenge for Maslow would be to ask if the ultimate need in human life is not to lose oneself in a higher goal - something that transcends the self. I seem to remember that Maslo himself acknowledged the ultimate need is to lose oneself in something beyond yourself - transcendence. I also remember that this was taken in a kind of mystical "hippy" kind of way.

To a certain degree, one needs to surrender to this need/value if one expects to be a valued member of a group. On a very basic level, this means that one may be asked to clean toilets in a MacDonalds in order to make enough money to eat. The fact is that society rather strongly forces the individual into a role that serves society at large. In post-WW II America, this pressure was widely resented. Although we may regard some spectacular examples of "self-made men" "being all they can be", if we scratch the surface, we find people who are massively supported by society for the ends of society itself. Many others who have followed this path are known as criminals - especially psychopaths. The self-actualizing individual who rises to the top of a major corporation effectively surrenders himself to the myopic and psychopathic goals of the corporation (profit at all cost). Maslow's hierarchy makes no distinction between the people we call heroes and the people we call criminals.

I'm sure that Maslo imagined that everyone would become a philosopher like him if they could only succeed in "being all they could be". The fact is that freezing to death on the street is about all that some of us can manage. Beyond that, we all seem to need a lot of help. Some of us have come to the conclusion that the highest values of life are to be found with "a little help from our friends". Not just finding but providing help.

THE FOURTH TIER - BEING ACCEPTED

This is the need to "fit in". Maslow provides few details about how this is achieved, but we can see that the general idea is to find one's place in the social network to maximize the flow of value transfer between the individual and those who he/she is connected by bonds of employment, debt, business, obligation etc.  We note that Maslow makes no distinction between "fitting in" with the Mafia, fitting in with the Republican Party and fitting in with a campaign to save the whales. Doesn't it matter which group we "fit in" with? Doesn't it matter what we surrender, as individuals, to "fit in"?

The nature of these bonds needs to be "unpacked" if we are to wind up with a general view of what motivates human beings, which seems to be what Maslow is going for.

A CULTURE'S PYRAMID OF VALUES

Perhaps I will come back and put this in a pretty picture, but let's consider things from the point of view of a "network" or "superorganism" S, starting at the bottom. We can think of S as being a corporation, or nation-state.

Physiological

The continued existence of S doesn't depend on the survival of individuals - they are expendable. What needs to be preserved is the agreed-to system of values that prevent mass defection of individuals required to keep things going. Workers who are no longer needed can be off-loaded and taken care of like other externalized costs, like pollution and wounded soldiers. They are somebody else's problem. 

Safety

Again, the individual is expendable. The safety of S preempts the safety of the individual. The individual must be convinced that the bravest thing to do is to die for S, or at least work himself/herself to death for S at the expense of any personal benefit. Beyond a certain size, the corporation is immune from prosecution for any crimes it may commit. The nation-state need never acknowledge crimes committed in its name. Superorganisms are immortal or at least act as if they have a natural right to exist and grow forever.

Love/Belonging

It is necessary for S to maintain some kind of social cohesion by promoting values that make sense to individuals (both employees and customers) but may or may not be actually promoted in practice by S. A Strong feeling of "us" and "them" is necessary. "They" can be killed or starve to death or slowly killed by a poison produced by S. Whatever is good for "us" (namely S) is good. It is essential that unanimity be achieved on this score. Those individuals who challenge the common value system must be suppressed or expelled. "They" must handle the "externalities", preferably without taxing S.

Esteem

Depending on the type of S, it's called "protecting the brand". The national "brand" -  "national pride" should preempt the individual's desire to live. The "brand" should seek to preempt the individual's freedom of choice as a consumer. The actual benefit to the consumer (from Maslow's pyramid) is irrelevant. The consumer must be lead to think there is a benefit - even a need. Ideally, the consumer will see benefit from the bare brand itself - on a flag pole or T-shirt for example.

Self Actualization

A corporation becomes the ideal corporation by crushing competition, driving down wages or possibly eliminating human workers entirely. It dictates prices and convinces consumers to buy its products. All risks and costs are externalized. Ideally, the corporation can buy back its own shares, eliminating the need for pesky shareholders demanding return. It can suck up capital by leveraged finance, offloading risk by issuing bonds and buying insurance. The ideal corporation has no employees and no shareholders. It has no tangible product but accumulates profit and grows solely by amassing patent rights and leveraged financial capital. It is everyone's absentee landlord. It manages to "tax" every financial transaction while outsourcing all risk. Imagine one bank absorbing all the others and being run by a machine. Sometimes I think of this as being the ultimate state of Amazon. Just a machine that taxes the movement of goods from manufacturer to consumer, all done by robots and a vast machine we call the "cloud".

The ideal nation-state has crushed all other nations and dominates the world. Outside its own borders, there are only "they". Inside its borders, a tiny cadre has the precarious honor of being "us". All others are "they", under constant suspicion of treason. Imagine Stalin's Soviet Union covering the world. Imagine, in this world, all material goods being crap sold by Amazon.

The ideal nation-state and the ideal corporation are actually the same thing. The goals of a nation-state are best served by co-opting the corporation. The goals of the corporation are best served by absorbing the nation-state. Such a nation-state is called a "kleptocracy". To me, Russia looks like it "wants" to be like this. Where do the "oligarchs" end and the nation of Russia begin?

THE DARK TRUTH

In the real world, there is nothing to prevent superorganisms from taking over the planet while humans chase after Maslow's "needs". The world of "Terminator" is not as far-fetched as it seems. We need to understand that we are not the only sentient beings on the planet. The "needs" of every cell in my body are met by a system they don't understand. In fact, the organism called "me" doesn't understand much about the process either. But the analogy breaks down when we consider that I am (presumably) "smarter" than any of the cells in my body. The survival of all these cells is (mostly) up to me. But the "superorganisms" of which we are apart are usually pretty stupid. Their rules of growth and survival seem to make them even more destructive and stupid.

It is important to understand that "morality" exists only on our scale of things. 

I'll leave it there. I've talked myself into feeling rather unsafe. A nice friendly chat is called for. Besides, I'm kinda hungry...

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More dark thoughts on the malignant influence of superorganisms may be found here

Dimensions of Value: Influence, Power and Status

In a previous post, I mentioned how our world view - especially our perceived system of values - comes into our politics. At the same time, political players tend to misrepresent their own value system and the value system of their opponents to gain power. Power itself is a value worth looking into. In fact, "political" power seems to show up in all the "social great apes" and many other species. My aim here is simply to visualize this dimension - to come up with a visual metaphor that helps us think of this type of value. There are many values similar to "political power". I chose to talk about "influence" as a representative of this class of values. These networks are essential to understanding one of the themes of this entire blog: the superorganism. Networks of value play a role similar to the nervous system of the individuals who make up these organisms. They account for "why" these organisms value what they value and do what they do. They explain the "nuts and bolts" of how individuals are "programmed" by the superorganism.

From "Connected: The Surprising Power of our Social Networks .." Page 289

Social networks transmit all kinds of social things, including "influence", "political power" and "debt".

As already noted, debt is the shadow of "money", but this is a rather abstract idea that we can conveniently ignore. In practice, each of us in debt to identifiable entities, such as the government, the bank, and persons such as our society, our mentors and political patrons. Much of our behavior is governed by perceived obligation, even if we pretend to ourselves that we act freely.

In "Thieves of State", Sarah Chayes provides a detailed description of the architecture of one particular well developed "kleptocracies" - Afghanistan. This networked structure is composed of two-way relationships between the "boss" and the "client". Money (bribes etc.) flow "up" to the boss and perks, protection and status flow down. The link is usually established by the "client" paying for the position in the first place.  Sarah's analysis is particularly helpful in revealing how the corruption of the entire "government" structure works. It is, in effect, a criminal conspiracy that has captured the government. It is extremely durable since it comes to be an accepted aspect of the culture itself.

As Chayes points out, there are different structures in different countries, all lying on a spectrum of "corruption" - from outright capture of the economy by organized crime (Russia) to "white glove" capture of the economy by the rich, where political power and wealth are assumed to be interchangeable.

Networks of influence effectively control governments (including ours) where "corruption" is technically illegal.

Individual voters imagine that their "influence" flows to their representative in the form of their vote. In fact, such influence is openly sold to large campaign donors. "Fundraising" actually takes up the lion's share of the time available to elected officials. One of the key ideas of "socialism" is that each individual citizen should have an equal influence on the decisions of the government. This is specifically denied by the capitalist system, which is effective "one dollar, one vote". Capitalist politicians, such as Republicans in the USA, devote their energies to voter suppression - specifically standing against "equal representation" - "equal influence". They also vigorously defend mechanisms that maximize the influence of individuals and organizations with "deep pockets" (PACKS). We should note that the purpose of a PACK is to reverse the flow of influence - to influence the voter in favor of the PACK's agenda.

A whole library of books could be written on this subject. For the moment, I'd just like to point this out as one of the "dimensions of value" that matter in a fundamental way. Dimensions like "money" obviously play a role, but political power itself is a key value, most obviously to politicians but also to those who feel they are being left out - those who can be convinced to vote against their own interest in the name of some populist rhetoric. The dynamic "works" for the politician, but seldom for the disenfranchised voter. "Money talks". The rules of the game are set by those currently in power, resulting in a system as resilient to change as that in Afghanistan.

In political networks, loyalty functions more or less the same way it does in the Afghan-type kleptocracy. Individual representatives commit political suicide if they don't support the party agenda. In turn, the party provides financial help to get the representative re-elected. Loyalty networks function to draw the compliant politician closer and closer to the center of power while banishing anyone who shows a hint of disloyalty to the political wilderness. Newly elected politicians are "shown the ropes" by senior experts at the game, resulting in powerful loyalty networks between mentor and student.

Before leaving aside this topic for the moment, I should mention how "money" is only a value in itself when it buys the basics of life (food, shelter, security). Beyond that, money is a symbol of status and valued membership in a group. Status and membership are values on their own. Beyond "minimum wage", money buys status. A with all the great social apes, status figures into every minute of every day. It is the key to obtaining access to other values, such as mates, medical care, education, information and, of course, power. They also allow the individual to obtain shiny things like gold, jewels, and fancy cars, whose main function is to signal social status, even if this status is empty and devoid of actual influence or power - "status in the mirror".

Now What?

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. 

T. S. Eliot - Little Gidding

I have been writing for a long time about the concept of "supermind" and the "dragon". Groups of humans - armies, governments - have a life of their own and thrive at the expense of the humans that oppose them - even their own members.  These groups steal our identity and prevent us from thinking for ourselves. It's all true, of course, but what is new is the total acceptance of the situation. Comfort almost. This is the human condition. Our "minds" function as part of a whole. It may be a mistake to "analyze" - to break things down into pieces, but indulge me for a moment while I describe things that make up our "minds" that are usually regarded as something happening between our ears.

• The brain, especially considered as part of the body (Damasio). The function of the brain is primarily to support the organism - the efforts of that organism to thrive. 
• "Reality" - what "scientists" observe and explore. Quantum mechanics has taught us to think of "reality" as a set of shared observations and models - strictly speaking, that is what we "know". Actual "reality" (apart from what we can measure) always seems to be just out of reach.
• "Society" - from birth, we are knit into a human milieu. We parse reality in words we learn as children, we grasp and learn tools that reflect hundreds of thousands of years of invention and ingenuity.  

It is not wise to separate these three except for the purposes of discussion. The brain is "hard-wired" into the body and the body is a real thing - an object in reality. We cannot speak of any of this or learn the simplest task of existence without drawing on what we are told and shown by the people around us.

In short, our minds are not "our own", nor does it make much sense to insist that we "think for ourselves". Our minds are constrained by what they are - or, if you want, the fact that they are embedded in reality in a certain manner - a manner that is inescapable.

So what is new (and perhaps an echo of thoughts I have had for half a century) is to see all this at once.  This leads to experiences that are somehow kissed with new insight. For example, I see scenes of happy congregations hugging and greeting each other in a new way. I would normally harrumph in the background about how silly their beliefs are and shake my head at how amazing it is that so many people can all be so deluded about the core nature of reality. But now I see this as a whole and don't separate what is supposedly going in between the ears of the believer. What is going on is happening to everyone in the room and has roots that go back centuries. The "mind" at work is what I used to call "supermind", but what I have been missing is that the individual experience of mind is just what goes on in our own minds. We are mostly unaware that we are not "thinking" our own thoughts, not being motivated by our own motives, not intending what we individually intend. The process works so smoothly and so naturally that we know as little about it as do bees in a hive.

This perspective puts an end to the "supermind" blog. It is an error to think of mind and supermind separately, just as the behavior of bees makes no sense without reference to the "goals and intentions" of the hive. This insight also marks a new direction for this blog, which started out trying to find a rational, skeptical way forward in a sea of myth and misdirection. In a way, I see the name of this blog (The Christian Skeptic) as a theme to which I must now return, knowing that we are all in a state of tension between our "heritage" and what comes next. Skeptics, like Christians, don't "think for themselves".

Of course there are many, many layers involved in this process.  You can go on splitting and analyzing to your heart's content. For example, in "Behave", Sapolsky analyzes our reasons for doing what we do, going up the ladder of detail from the way nerves move our limbs to the way society tells us what is "right" and "wrong'. If nothing else, Sapolsky ties human behavior into the physical structure of the brain - everything from the chemistry of enzymes to the modular structure of brain "systems". The brain is a thing - an object in reality.

Drilling Down to Motivations

Sapolsky reluctantly concludes that there is no place for "free will" in his analysis. Perhaps that is because he, like others, is stuck with the image of the "self" as being some kind of puppet master between the ears of the individual. The truth is that the borders of "self" are extremely fuzzy, both in time and space. What happens in our heads is the result of an astronomically complex calculation whose inputs go back to the swamps when life first emerged - a point that structures Damasio's story of who we are - the Strange Order of Things. We have motives - feelings - that Damasio sees at the very root of being and Sapolsky confirms are rooted in biology - the term "computation" for this process is misleading. We are not computers.

In Damasio's account, to live is to thrive, which means that living things don't just "try" to continue their existence, the "try" to push themselves further into the future (persist). They reproduce, grow and grab all the resources they can to do it. In corporate turns (which Damasio hates), living things don't just break even, they make a profit. Damasio walks right up to considering human groups to be alive in their own right (since they satisfy his criteria for being alive), but balks at the conclusion since human groups overlap. For some reason, he feels that a single organism can't be part of two superorganisms at once. There is no particular reason for this criterion, which seems to emerge out of the blue - unconnected to any of his other arguments. In any case, as pointed out by one very early reader of the "Dragon" blog, it's mainly a matter of terminology. What is important is to recognize the actual relationship between the individual human and society, whether you call society "alive" or not.

Strangely, Damasio is quite willing to consider a beehive as alive (and even conscious) in its own right.  His arguments for this are convincing and I really don't see why they would not apply to human society, which is quite happy to "brainwash" its citizens so that they throw their lives away for the sake of their country or even corporate profits - profits that they themselves never see.

But the trick is to see that we are all brainwashed all the time. Otherwise, we could not speak, find our way around or feed ourselves. This is who we are, what we are.

Great sections of our brains are devoted to fitting our individual existence into the group. We have "speech centers" in the (normally) left brain devoted to generating and understanding speech. We have forebrain modules that are constantly doing "social" calculations to determine what is the socially appropriate thing to do (Sapolsky). On a more subtle level, our brains seem to work in such a way as to parse the world in terms of "objects" and "events" that lend themselves to verbal communication.  In other words, "language" is deeply embedded in the way our brains actually work - an insight spelled out in great detail in "Surfaces and Essences" - Hofstadter.

What is often overlooked is the fact that all this functions according to the laws of physics, chemistry, and geometry. We are embedded in a real world. It is commonplace to remark that we only see part of what is "out there". What is overlooked is that what we do see is actually "out there". One image I have in my head is the way our brains are packed into a finite volume but fold the surface to maximize the amount of cortical area. One imagines that we would have had big, spherical brains except that they would be unwieldy. It's just the way I see geometry placing constraints on what and how we think - who we are.

Along these lines, I see "society" and culture as a way of escaping constraints that we inherited from millennia of evolution - the "design concept" of individual organisms, reproduction and all that. Human societies "thrive" by a new mechanism - one involving "information" breaking free of its DNA shackles to exist out in the open as the blood and bones of human society.

My First Introduction To Zen

Key to this insight is the analogy between DNA - the "program" that determines the physical shape and behavior of an organism - with "Information", the physical, real-world "tools" that society uses to thrive. In the latter category are not just what is usually seen as "information" (books and computer files etc) but the physical creations of society, like telescopes, automobiles and language itself. When you sit behind the wheel of a car, you are being absorbed into the skills and thought processes of tens of thousands of people who invented everything from the dash ornaments to the theory of internal combustion. This is an insight that goes back to "Zen and The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance", a book I read when it came out (1974). The book is not about Zen or Motorcycle Maintenance, but I did take away the idea that a motorcycle is an idea cast in metal. I come back to the same place and know the place for the first time ...

It is worth noting that I come back to this idea having absorbed many of the key ideas of Zen. I'd say "motorcycle" actually extends Zen in an exciting way. Perhaps Pirsig, like the rest of us, knew more about Zen than we thought at the time. Specifically, the insights here vastly expand what we think of as "mind", "attention" and "consciousness". These are the central concerns of Zen. There is no particular reason why those who follow the path of self-discovery should be stuck with the metaphors created thousands of years ago.

Back in 1974, I would frequently point out that a man with an ax is as different from a man without an ax as a zebra is from a horse. Our tools accelerate evolution in a new way. But back then I didn't quite grasp that the tool exists in its own "space" - the supermind - that is using the man as much as the man uses the ax.

So it is that today, in 2018, I have the unusual comfort of having a big insight that has been bubbling up from below for half a century. It makes sense.

But now what?

Self, Mind and Supermind

Zen and its Western cousin, "Mindfulness" were a stop on my long journey to self-discovery. They introduced me to a line of investigation through subjective experience. In spite of the strong tradition against a philosophical interpretation in Taoism and Zen, all this came with a certain amount of "theory". To make a long story short, these disciplines challenge our idea of the "self" and, following ancient Buddhist tradition, regard the self (whatever that is) as impermanent**. Some would go as far as to claim that the self is an illusion. The Western "scientific" branch would claim that there is no "self" to be found in the brain. Sam Harris is a leading popularizer of this view and he claims extensive subjective experience (hundreds of hours of meditation) as his "evidence".

Antonio Damasio takes a different view, based on thousands of case studies (a more trustworthy kind of "evidence"). His view is that our feeling of "being there" has its physical home in brainstem structures that we share with all mammals (at least). Sub-cortical structures, such as the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the thalamus play an intermediate role, with the cerebral cortex "assisting" and informing the core brain stem function.

Damasio doesn't deny the conventional functional analysis of brain functions. The problem with such analysis is that it reveals what information is sent back and forth without saying anything about how this information becomes conscious. To whom or to what is all this information relevant?

Damasio draws a distinction between two types of information coming into the brain stem from massive neural systems. Broadly speaking: "inside" and "outside".

Let's talk about the "inside" system here. The sensation of the status of your own body. To me, it is no accident that "meditation" techniques primarily focus on inner sensation - usually through bringing attention back to the breath or other direct bodily perception. This amounts to an attempt (with varying success) to draw attention away from the "outside" - perceptions and the chattering distractions of the everyday world: the world of Samsara.

Now, the ancient sages had no idea that "inside" and "outside" amounted to two quite distinct perceptual systems. For the most part, they were unaware of the role of the brain in any of this. So, the experience afforded by directing attention to the "inside" mind - often for hours or days at a time - felt very different. At least calming or even mystical. My theory is that the "experts" like Sam Harris have succeeded in suppressing "outside" brain functions enough so that they experience or remember experiencing (not quite the same thing) "loss of self".*

Such an experience would involve almost entirely suppressing functions of the cerebral cortex. The mysterious memory function of the hippocampus (subcortical) would continue to "tick over", explaining why Sam remembers losing himself. Of course, Sam avoids giving a straight answer to "who" is remembering having no self. Zen loves paradox.

For many years, I have pictured my brain stem when I talked about my "lizard brain" - the source of my animal instincts that often got me into trouble. Damasio has allowed me to change this image slightly to think of the "lizard" as me. It's a part of me shared by mammals. It's just a shared structure bequeathed through common descent from a distant ancestor. The lizard brain in a dog is no more "primitive" than my own.  (I hate the word "primitive" since it tends to sprinkle evolutionary fairy dust over ideas).

What is different is this massive "cap" of cortex that filters perception of the outside world. In particular, I have a "forebrain" (prefrontal cortex) that is, compared to other mammals, rather large., along with "speech centers" that seem to be unique to humans. What are these structures doing?

Obviously, the answer that question would fill a library, full of books I would probably not understand. At my current humble non-professional level of understanding, here are some things I imagine the prefrontal cortex is doing:

• It's the part of the brain most like a computer. It calculates. It "reasons".
• An important function is to suppress and override impulses to action coming from my "lizard" subcortical structures like the amygdala (flight or fight). It's the forum for "sober second thought".
• It performs two distinct kinds of "calculation". One involves abstract questions and the outside world. The other involves social calculations. The latter is far more complex and equally important to survival. Who can I trust? What behavior is socially acceptable? What is "right" and "wrong" to do? What is the "moral" thing to do? What can I get away with?

So I wind up with an image of myself as a lizard in my head, not much bigger than my thumb, trying to make sense of the world with a huge over-growth of evolutionary "new" equipment that allows me to regard both morality and the Big Bang as objectively "real". This new equipment doesn't add much to my ability to perceive the world more accurately than, say, my dog. What it adds is the ability to connect my humble powers to those of other human beings. In fact, my "world" - "umwelt" - is shared. It is the supermind.

Anyone who has seen a video of a wolf pack running down a caribou will see that the wolves have a pretty good idea of what the other wolves are doing. Wolves have a shared umwelt. But it's nothing compared to the way humans coordinate attention, intention, perception, resources, and behavior to do things like putting one of their members on the moon for "all mankind".

That's what makes us special. That's what makes us dangerous.

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* I tend to distrust "data" gathered by introspection since my own mind has quite often provided compelling evidence for factually wrong ideas. My lizard is easily fooled. For me, meditation techniques help to calm my chattering brain - nothing more. The scientific supermind is where I go for the facts and theories.
**  I don't attempt to decipher the muddle of what became of some branches of Buddhism, which eventually came to include ancestor worship, heaven and hell, gods and reincarnation of "something", when the Buddha explicitly (seems to have) built his whole teaching on the impermanence of everything, including the "mind".  At home, "On the ground", Buddhism seems to be as crazy and superstitious as medieval Christianity.

Design Is In The Eye of The Beholder

A "design" is an abstract concept. We can speak of the "design" of the human heart without expecting to find a blueprint somewhere. Even in cases where we know there was a human designer, the design of a human creation remains even if no documents or memory of the design exists. We see design where we see purpose.

"Design" and "model" are closely related concepts and both may be seen to live in the same "space".

DNA can be seen to embody the design of a life form, but the physical embodiment of the design in the DNA is not essential. In fact the non-essentiality is a characteristic of models/designs. We could imagine creating a process that would produce all the machinery of the cell by some other means - even such a simple means as switching the chemical structure but not the "meaning" of one of 4 letters of the genetic code.

At the "mind" level of model and design, we know that our minds are somehow implemented in our brains, but we have assumed for millennia that this relationship is non-essential, most recently by imagining that a computer might have a mind. At this level, it is still difficult to imagine that our minds are, in fact, completely abstract and only implemented in our brains.

For the supermind, it appears that the "implementation" is ephemeral, like the structure of a hurricane. Of course, a hurricane is "real" but what makes it a hurricane (its "design") emerges from the physics of heat and water. Similarly, a "supermind" emerges when many human minds share attention and intention to act upon the real world. Take away that attention and the supermind vanishes. A philosopher might easily to say that the supermind doesn't exist at all, but that's like saying only heat and water exist: but not hurricanes.

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The concept of "design" here owes a great deal to Daniel Dennett, especially "From Bacteria to Bach and Back"