What we Learned from JW's Monism

[AshvinP]

...

It occurs to me that I'm not aware of what JW's stance is on the matter of inner activity. I mean the following:

From what I see above, it seems that he uses 'energy' in a more or less phenomenological sense, as the raw pixels/vibrations of experience - the elemental ground of experience. He keeps openness about the 'other-sidedness' of this energy, realizing that this leads to abstract metaphysics. We can more or less imply that our human-scale experience can be thought of as the stream of elementary energetic/vibratory phenomenal experiences. Things, however, become trickier when we include inner activity. If we want to hold fast to the view of reality as a stream of concatenated elementary events, then we must conclude that things like intentionality and activity are also merely what the elementary domino-train feels like. For example, reaching with my hand for a glass of water feels like something at my human scale, but at the energetic level it is nothing more than the concatenation of elementary events, following the gradient (thus, there's nothing at the human scale that really tips the World flow in one direction or another).

Has he ever clarified his position on this? Does he see inner activity as a kind of illusory playback of the raw energetic stream, or does he admit the possibility that this activity contributes something unique to the stream, something that does not result from the mere locally interacting energetic domino pieces? If it is the latter, then naturally it can be reasoned what the limits of such contributions might be.

Through the discussion, it has become much clearer to me how he views this question. Basically, he would see the very formulation of the question as stepping into the rigged metaphysical projective game. It presupposes that we can positively articulate something about the 'true causal relationship' between energy and inner activity, rather than sticking to the directly experienced correlation between the two and going no further. In that sense, it is like what you expressed before:

"We are not here to tell whether the sense of agency is real or not, but only to elucidate that it is possible to utilize that agency in such a way that more and more phenomenal outputs are grasped as receding impressions of intuitively guided will."

Except he would hold only the first bold part as sound philosophy, and discard the underlined part as highly likely to result in a subtler process of metaphysically projecting 'intuitively guided will' into the prearticulate mystery. In that sense, he has thoroughly worked out all the common intellectual traps that spiritual science also describes in the domain of philosophy, science, and religion, and is extremely consistent in that standpoint when trying to explore the implications of various ideas. He feels that energy can be validly described as the 'primary articulation' as a result of scientific observation, but refuses to ascribe any further implications to that observation for the evolutionary relationship between the bodily organization and the possibilities of consciousness.

It seems the fundamental obstacle, as usual, is an implicit pride in the evolved state his consciousness has so far reached. Anything that speaks as if there is deeper potential for lucid consciousness to explore is considered a completely possible, yet hypothetical scenario for everyone. If it is suggested that this potential is already presently accessible, then the suggestion must be a metaphysical projection of imagined possibilities into the mystery.

Here are a few more (and perhaps final) comments. I am curious, however, if you have any suggestions about addressing his content-less meditation and why the very technique he is employing prevents his consciousness from feeling concretely entangled with other conscious perspectives. Given the implicit pride in these situations, it is very difficult to touch on these intimate matters without automatically shutting down receptivity to what is conveyed (as we often saw with Eugene, for example).

***

JW: I think your seismograph metaphor actually helps locate our difference. With an actual seismograph, we know that the line registers perturbations originating beyond the line because the larger physical constellation—instrument, ground, vibration, recording mechanism—is independently available to investigation. The line is not our only access to a hypothetical “silent context.”

In your application to consciousness, however, that context is precisely what remains in question. To describe imaginative flashes as effects of a hidden context is therefore already to have interpreted the experience. And when that context becomes “spiritual-energetic,” still more has been added. I can accept the experience you describe without accepting the ontology subsequently articulated around it.

This is not because I regard bodily consciousness as a metaphysical certainty. I don’t. Nor do I claim that consciousness independent of present bodily organization is impossible. Consciousness may evolve into forms we cannot presently imagine. But possibility and disclosure are different things.

What has not become articulated cannot be borrowed from possibility and treated as though it had already been disclosed.

Your final question therefore seems to me to reverse the burden. You ask how we could discover consciousness independent of bodily constraints if we classify the possibility as metaphysical projection whenever it enters thought. My answer is: by encountering something that requires us to reconsider our present articulation. That is very different from imagining what such an encounter might someday disclose and then allowing the imagined possibility to guide our interpretation of present experience.

Quantum physics is instructive here. The breakdown of classical categories was not licensed because someone imagined that locality, causality, separability or subject/object might someday fail. Experiment forced reconsideration of articulations that had previously seemed secure. Sometimes what is encountered breaks the articulation.

I would welcome the same thing here. If experience breaks our present articulation of consciousness, then the articulation should change. What I resist is deciding beforehand what the breakthrough will reveal.

And this is why I don’t think openness requires keeping particular metaphysical possibilities alive. Genuine openness is more severe than that. It must remain open even to something for which we presently have no name—and therefore cannot already call “spiritual,” “disembodied,” or “Gnostic.”

There is also a possibility much nearer at hand that interests me more than speculation about future or disembodied consciousness. We already experience forms of disclosure that do not proceed by fixing the flashing image, pulling it apart, and converting it into determinate knowledge. Poetry and music have worked in that region for a very long time. They can gather without demanding that what is gathered become an object or a system.

Perhaps the discipline you describe is most interesting precisely at the moment before we ask what the flashing image is “made of,” what hidden reality caused it, or what metaphysical possibility it confirms. Perhaps we should sometimes allow it to resonate without forcing it to become knowledge.

That would not be a failure to follow the disclosure. It might be a different way of listening to it.

A: Right, so my position can be summarized as follows:

What I am pointing to is not any kind of theoretical ontology about how consciousness, loosened from bodily constraints, may be experienced. What I am describing are empirical facts of supersensible experience that can be directly encountered. I speak of "possibility" only to emphasize that it requires active inner effort to become manifest, just as experiencing the space of advanced mathematical intuitions is only a "possibility" for those who have not yet actively probed its intuitive landscape. Those who have experimented in this direction, in contrast, unmistakably encounter something that requires them to reconsider their present articulation that previously seemed secure. The new horizon of experience breaks our present articulation of consciousness in characteristic ways, but I have no choice but to convey how it does so in symbols drawn from familiar articulated experience. Nevertheless, these symbols point to living encounters that break the distribution of familiar articulated experience in completely novel ways that could never have been extrapolated, derived, deduced, etc. from within the latter, just as the novel intuitions of QM could not have been extrapolated from within the classical categories of Newtonian physics.

In both cases, concrete experimentation in a direction orthogonal to the classical perspective is necessary. As a similar analogy, we can consider how Oersted accidentally discovered the magnetic properties of an electrical current at a right angle (perpendicular) to the flow of that current, while completely missing those properties when directly seeking them on the same plane (parallel) as the electrical flow. In the history of modern science, paradigm-shifting discoveries have often been made despite the expectations and existing conceptual palette of the discoverers. Similarly, we can faithfully and openly seek holistic intuitions of how the 'silent context' constrains our intuitive process at 'right angles' to the familiar flow of bodily experience. Unlike the forces detected by the natural sciences, however, the perpendicular inner 'forces' that constrain our intimate intuitive process cannot be stumbled into by accident, but only through fully conscious and purposeful efforts.

Again, I know why it is tempting to take all of the above and lump it into the category of "allowing the imagined possibility to guide our interpretation of present experience". That is by far the way most similar presentations in philosophy and theology unfold. I have encountered the same thing in many idealist, panpsychist, panentheist, etc. philosophical positions. But I hope you can also appreciate how, from my perspective, that is not at all what I am doing. In fact, the way you characterize your answer to my final question sounds much more like what I am doing and how the intuitive process as a spiritual path unfolds more generally. It is truly an experimental science that, however, doesn't self-constrain itself to only the empirical dynamics of bodily experience, but also integrates the expanded empirical dynamics of all that we normally associate with psychological, esthetic, and religious experience. This naturally clarifies many aspects of individual and collective life experience that otherwise remain enigmatic and unpredictable, but these novel 1st-person scientific efforts are still in their infancy.

"Consciousness may evolve into forms we cannot presently imagine. But possibility and disclosure are different things." (JW)

Most likely, this new consciousness would not evolve uniformly in every human being simultaneously, correct? Some would still be in the old form of consciousness while the new is already evolving and taking root, just as the vast majority of scientists were in the classical perspective of physics while QM intuitions, developed through concrete experimentation, were evolving and taking root.

In that case, how could those firmly rooted in the old form ever confirm that those participating in the new form are speaking of something directly encountered, of concrete disclosures, rather than imagined possibilities that are being projected into disclosures and clothed in all sorts of concepts? I am really curious what that process might look like, from your perspective. Is there any way for the old to develop trust in the new, or can it only be as Planck observed: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”?

JW: Only through direct experience of its revelation. In the end, if you believe you have the beginnings of that revelation, then that is the path that opens for you. While I have similar experiences of meditation, I never encounter anything pointing to a primitive consciousness separate from living beings. If I come close to removing all content in my mediation, I only encounter my own consciousness—which in itself is enough mystery for me. A different path from yours opens for me.

[AshvinP]

The conversation seems to have moved towards its conclusion. I think that he was very repetitive in his argumentation and overlooked many points that I consider critical. For example, my explanation of religion or the criticism of the dichotomy between experience and interpretation, etc. In one respect, however, I have to say that he is open to poetic experience and engages with the reduction of the intellect. Following Heidegger, he tries to allow appearing to show itself, to show what it shows, without forcing it into our categories and systems, but rather allowing it to be non-reductively and preserving its openness. What shows itself there, however, must not be manipulated through our concepts, which we project onto the experience in order to explain it, justify it, etc.

This movement of the intellect, which secretly interprets experience through its religious and metaphysical concepts, can be very subtle and lead into illusion. In a certain sense, this is basically the warning Kant gives: not to let our concepts go beyond experience, at least the underlying movement is similar. He fears that spiritual, religious, and metaphysical concepts and systems of thought, as well as wishes and aspirations, subtly condition experiences, lead us into illusions, or make us prematurely and secretly infer something from experiences that they do not give by themselves. He is right about that, and this is a real danger for every religion, philosophy, and also for Anthroposophy itself. We should examine this point very carefully and always carry this warning with us.

But perhaps he does the same thing himself with his argument that energy is equivalent to consciousness. This can subtly condition, from behind the scenes, what appears meaningfully thinkable to us, etc. But at least intellectually, he seems to remain open to the possibility that this is not an absolute matter.

I have no desire to continue the discussion. But I think we should take his warning seriously, and perhaps observe it even more strictly than he himself does. I think his last answers in particular are formulated very clearly.

In the end, it is still a matter of personal certainty, not universally valid objectivity. That means we should always ask what science and spiritual science actually mean.

What is your conclusion?

Guney,

What you point out here is indeed very important to always keep in view on any spiritual path. I think you are correct that JW has honed in on this aspect quite well: the 'sphere of mirages', as Tomberg called it. Every occult pupil needs to become increasingly sensitive to how their inner life conditions their pursuit of higher knowledge, i.e., their encounters with inner experiences that are not so tightly mediated by the physical organism. At the same time, we need to be clear that the latter themselves are not mirages; they are simply empirical facts of experience. For example, we can imagine a random voice popping into our mental state. This voice is a fact of experience that we can patiently integrate into the harmony of other experiential facts through inner experimentation, including the higher-order facts pertaining to our desires, wishes, aspirations, etc. This fact becomes woven into a mirage only when we fail to pursue that inner experimentation patiently and instead interpret it as a 'message from God', or something similar, and fit that interpretation into a systematized intellectual narrative.

The problem, as usual, occurs when the sphere of mirages is absolutized and becomes a rigid measuring stick for any supersensible communication. For example, when spiritual science speaks of Saturn, Sun, Moon, Lemuria, Atlantis, and so on. It is tempting and convenient to automatically cram those communications into the category of mirages conditioned by Steiner's metaphysical concepts and other soul factors. Yet we need to see how this move is merely the flip side of foregoing patient inner experimentation and automatically believing such communications are the "voice of God." In the skeptical case, we also forgo patient inner experimentation so we can automatically identify the communication as a "metaphysical mirage". This is what JW struggles with most whenever there are hints of precise supersensible knowledge. Of course, it's not unique to JW - we have encountered many others who struggle with the same thing. How do we differentiate between metaphysical projections rooted in the sphere of mirages and objectively transpersonal inner experiences that are being artistically described with various concepts?

Ultimately, the differentiation can only be made by living more thoroughly within the intuitive process and observing its characteristic dynamics for ourselves. This requires a certain amount of reasoned faith in that process, as you also emphasized. If we remain forever paralyzed by the fear that, no matter what inner experiences we have, there is always a chance they come from the sphere of mirages, then we simply remain stuck at the threshold of our own deeper reality. And because we are beings who naturally seek to explore this deeper reality, we will continue to subtly speculate and project our desires, preferences, etc. into it. Just because we refuse to articulate any specific spiritual frameworks doesn't mean we aren't still succumbing to the mirages in various ways, just through the fact that we are thinking beings who always seek greater orientation within the flow of existence. As you point out, this occasionally happens with JW and his ideas surrounding energy as the primal articulation upon which all currently known forms of consciousness depend. There is only one remedy, which is to faithfully trace the inner process deeper and deeper, as we remain intensely vigilant about the fact that our soul life can no longer be bracketed off from this path of knowledge, but should become increasingly transparent through it.

[Cleric]

Here are a few more (and perhaps final) comments. I am curious, however, if you have any suggestions about addressing his content-less meditation and why the very technique he is employing prevents his consciousness from feeling concretely entangled with other conscious perspectives. Given the implicit pride in these situations, it is very difficult to touch on these intimate matters without automatically shutting down receptivity to what is conveyed (as we often saw with Eugene, for example).

Well, he often speaks about dissolving the subject-object duality (if I got that right). I wonder what he makes of this meditation, which feels to him like presenting "my own consciousness". It is one thing to conceptually smear out this duality, but it is quite another thing to discover as a reality that "my own consciousness" is a perspective/aperture of the World flow, where not only my will and intuitive intents are active. My guess is that he'll draw a division line and say that at the current stage we can conceive the dissolution only abstractly, while we're still locked into our subjective experience. This, however, means that we're still only doing metaphysics. Shouldn't our meditation lead into the reality of this oneness? And if it doesn't, could it be that it is because we're not considering methods that do? Could it be that while we succeed in relinquishing our mental chatter, we're still secretly 'staring' into/attending to our bodily volume (and it is, in fact, this familiar carrier volume that makes us say "my own consciousness". In reality, it would be more correct to say "the phenomenal volume that pertains to my bodily experiences")?

[AshvinP]

Here are a few more (and perhaps final) comments. I am curious, however, if you have any suggestions about addressing his content-less meditation and why the very technique he is employing prevents his consciousness from feeling concretely entangled with other conscious perspectives. Given the implicit pride in these situations, it is very difficult to touch on these intimate matters without automatically shutting down receptivity to what is conveyed (as we often saw with Eugene, for example).

Well, he often speaks about dissolving the subject-object duality (if I got that right). I wonder what he makes of this meditation, which feels to him like presenting "my own consciousness". It is one thing to conceptually smear out this duality, but it is quite another thing to discover as a reality that "my own consciousness" is a perspective/aperture of the World flow, where not only my will and intuitive intents are active. My guess is that he'll draw a division line and say that at the current stage we can conceive the dissolution only abstractly, while we're still locked into our subjective experience. This, however, means that we're still only doing metaphysics. Shouldn't our meditation lead into the reality of this oneness? And if it doesn't, could it be that it is because we're not considering methods that do? Could it be that while we succeed in relinquishing our mental chatter, we're still secretly 'staring' into/attending to our bodily volume (and it is, in fact, this familiar carrier volume that makes us say "my own consciousness". In reality, it would be more correct to say "the phenomenal volume that pertains to my bodily experiences")?

I think the latest comments suggest a bit more flexibility with respect to the conscious aperture and its possibilities. At the same time, they also introduce new subtle obstacles that condition the perspective of what is possible and what 'widening the aperture' means, particularly the psychedelic experiences. But I think it is helpful, taking things a notch further, and at least introduces a wider experiential palette to work with in drawing comparisons to the higher cognitive flow.

***

A: It helps to consider why standard forms of meditation that seek to eliminate all content result only in experiencing the internal states of our personal consciousness. Somewhat ironically, it's because we aren't maintaining enough contact with our bodily organism. It is like our inner activity drifts into a sleep state where it loses the support of sensory input and corresponding thoughts, but maintains a general awareness of being in this state.

We can use a video game metaphor here. Imagine that from the beginning of our life our hands have been fused to a game controller, so that we can know our hands only through the sense of touch at our fingertips. If we simply let go of the controller, we ‘fall asleep ’- we lose consciousness of both the gamepad and our hand movements, since we can feel our hands only when touching something. In other words, maintaining the point of contact is crucial. Only this way do we have conscious tactile feedback about what we are doing with our hands. Likewise, in imaginative meditation, it is as if we loosen our grip on the gamepad such that we subtly feel our finger touching the button, yet without losing contact altogether. Now we gradually develop finer sensitivity in our fingers. We try to experience the button-press so gently and attentively, as if we try to intuitively differentiate how much the sensation is shaped by the gamepad's geometry and how much by our dim intuitive inputs. By not pressing the button habitually but gently gliding our finger over its surface, we become aware of more intimate hand gestures, which have hitherto been forced to stream entirely within the rigid gamepad buttons.

If we simply let go of the controller (standard meditation of eliminating all content), in contrast, the end result is that we either fall asleep (since we lose the conscious feedback to our dim intuitive inputs) or we surrender to the controller geometry and only contemplate our free fall as a kind of pure observer. The latter approach splits our inner life into our ordinary cognitive experience, on one hand, and a completely inexplicable dream-like experience on the other. Then it is not surprising that one cannot find a bridge between our cognitive experience, where we feel active and encounter manifold content (albeit content that feels ghostly and remote), and the meditative experience, which feels extremely intimate but devoid of content. Instead, when we sustain an imaginative theme in our meditation, even though this inner activity operates through a constrained imaginative and conceptual palette, we feel that there’s something concealed in this experience: an unfamiliar aspect of our intuitive existence that presently manifests only through the well-trodden patterns of our everyday thinking and imagination.

In that sense, we cannot know this deeper intuitive existence by completely letting go of the controls (eliminating all content). We need the point of contact with the gamepad, because this is where the more intimate flow, even if in a constrained form, intersects with it. Even if our imaginative theme is not directly taken from sensory life (for instance, a mathematical theme), the act of sustaining it maintains a 'cerebral' point of contact with our bodily organization. Then we still progress toward a more loosened meditative state that silences all ordinary movements of the intellect and imagination, but within this silence remains the kernel of lucid cognitive activity that can precisely differentiate how it is entangled with, shaped, and constrained by various conscious perspectives. Even our ordinary thinking can dimly discern that must be the case - for example, the thoughts we have and the decisions we make today are clearly shaped by our relationships with other autonomous beings throughout life, including those whom we may have never physically met and who may no longer be physically alive. The imaginative meditative state simply brings this reality into much more expanded and concrete focus, so the living relationships that continually shape our state are no longer proxied by ghostly, fragmented mental images."

JW: "Part 1: Ashvin, I have been thinking further about what you wrote, and I suspect our experiential positions are considerably closer than my earlier responses may have suggested.

Much of what you describe is intimately familiar to me, both from meditation and, much more dramatically, from two psychedelic experiences. The loosening of ordinary cognitive structures, the weakening of the distinction between perceiver and perceived, the appearance of relations that ordinary consciousness separates, and the alteration of ordinary temporal sequence are not phenomena I regard skeptically from outside. I have experienced them.

This has made me reconsider my response to your phrase “deeper consciousness.” I still hesitate over deeper, because it suggests a stratification in which another consciousness lies beneath ordinary consciousness. But I think you may be directionally right. I would call it fuller consciousness.

Ordinary waking consciousness is an extraordinarily severe reduction. A stable and navigable world requires distinctions: this and that, here and there, before and after, self and other, inner and outer. Those distinctions are not illusions. They are articulations through which a world comes forth. But neither should we assume that they exhaust what is occurring.

This is where my understanding of the preconscious becomes important. I understand it as a fullness prior to conscious reduction. Even prior has to be treated cautiously, since it need not mean temporally earlier. If linear time itself belongs to conscious articulation, we cannot simply place the preconscious a few milliseconds earlier on the same timeline.

Nor do I imagine the preconscious as a backstage populated by already constituted perceptions, memories, intentions and affects waiting to enter consciousness. That would simply project the determinations produced through consciousness backward into what consciousness articulates.

There does seem to be a playing-out there: forces, urges, attractions, aversions, possibilities, caring. But playing-out should not imply a succession of already determinate events along a linear timeline. It is closer to a field of tensions and possibilities taking form without yet possessing the determinate identities that emerge through the conscious cut.

Perhaps the most direct way I can put it is that our preconscious presence is aesthetic. I don’t mean aesthetic in the restricted sense of beauty or art, but something closer to aisthesis: felt presence before it has been reduced to determinate objects and propositions. We feel far more than we are explicitly aware of feeling. An uneasiness is present before we know what troubles us; a direction before we know where we are going; an attraction before we have articulated what attracts us.

We are never separate from this fullness.

There is a resonance here with quantum coherence that I find increasingly suggestive, although I do not mean a quantum theory of consciousness. A coherent quantum state exists, but it is not “real” in the classical realist sense of already possessing the identifiable characteristics that appear with reduction to an Eigenstate. The determinations appearing after the cut cannot simply be projected backward as though they had existed in that determinate form all along.

The parallel I am suggesting is limited but important. In both cases the mistake would be to project the determination produced at the cut backward into existence pre-cut.

This leads me to a formulation that has become increasingly important to me: consciousness is the cut.

...

Part 3:There are experiences that leave me unwilling simply to close the question. Reports of people sensing that they are being watched are one example. There may be subtle sensory or preconscious mechanisms that account for them. There may not. I don’t regard such reports as sufficient evidence for a new physical interaction. But I also don’t think our present inability to articulate a mechanism warrants declaring beforehand what is impossible.

So I find myself moving somewhat closer to what you have been pointing toward—not toward a metaphysics of spiritual or disembodied consciousness, but toward greater openness concerning what a fuller consciousness might disclose about physical relation itself.

Perhaps consciousnesses participate in one another physically at levels that ordinary consciousness severely reduces or entirely elides. Perhaps what appears as another person’s “presence” involves sensitivities to relations that our ordinary articulation cannot isolate. Perhaps such experiences will eventually receive much more familiar explanations.

I don’t know.

And I increasingly regard that I don’t know as philosophically important rather than deficient.

What I want to resist is closure in either direction: denying what has not yet been disclosed, or claiming what has not yet been disclosed.

This is why I would now formulate my difference with you less sharply. When you speak of a deeper intuitive consciousness, I think you may be pointing toward something genuine. I would simply resist determining too quickly what that something is.

A fuller consciousness may disclose relations that ordinary consciousness has cut apart. But if consciousness can genuinely evolve by widening—by becoming capable of reducing less while remaining articulate—then we should expect that what it discloses may exceed the concepts with which we presently try to anticipate it.

Perhaps we already possess intimations of that possibility. Meditation is one. Certain psychedelic experiences may be another. And I would include aesthetic experience. Poetry and music can sustain relations, ambiguities and simultaneous resonances that propositional thought ordinarily reduces. They articulate without necessarily closing what they articulate.

Perhaps that is part of their still largely untapped philosophical significance. They already exercise something like the capacity a wider consciousness would require: the ability to hold more without immediately forcing it into determinate separation.

So I would modify my earlier response considerably. I no longer want simply to oppose your “deeper consciousness” to my understanding of the preconscious. There may be a genuine point of contact between what we are describing.

I would call it the possibility of a fuller consciousness approaching existence pre-cut—not by escaping articulation, but by widening the articulation through which it encounters what exists.

How far that widening can go, and what it might disclose, I don’t know.

For now, I think that is precisely where the question should remain open."

A: "Thank you for elaborating further on your experiences and their philosophical implications. There are indeed many ways in which we are intuiting similar dynamics of a 'fuller consciousness' that widens the conscious aperture for encountering what exists. It is also good that you bring immense philosophical discipline into the domain of psychedelics. All too often, those who ingest substances and experience exotic imagery begin to conflate those experiences with some objective structure of reality populated by objects, mechanisms, beings, etc., that feel mysteriously connected to its perspective. Yet there is no expanding intuitive sense for the lawful relations in which its perspective is entangled, so the intellect feels forced to interpret those exotic experiences according to its familiar spatiotemporal intuitions.

It's interesting because, in our experience of conscious intention, we already have a hint of preconscious activity that extends temporally and guides the unfoldment of psycho-physical states. We explored that more intimately in the counting exercise, but we can also see it disclosed from a standard scientific perspective. Consider this new paper, "Action fluency and conscious intention: being aware of what you are about to do."

https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article ... 08/8758580

Conclusion: To conclude, we have developed a novel paradigm for investigating the neural precursors and subjective correlates of volitional action generation, by combining a typing verbal fluency task with probe-based sampling of conscious experience. Within this paradigm, the experience of becoming aware of a word that one will type next provides a novel, and intuitive operationalization of the experience of conscious intention to initiate volitional action. Importantly, our experimental paradigm gives participants clear reasons for action, and a readily-identifiable, easily-reportable experience of conscious intention, that also resembles the common everyday experience of the right word coming to mind. We suggest that our paradigm overcomes some of the methodological difficulties that have affected previous research on conscious intentions. Using this paradigm, we could reliably identify a transition from no conscious intention to act, to a reportable experience of conscious intention linked to typing a specific word. These reports of conscious intention were necessarily prospective rather than retrospective, because they were evoked by pseudorandom probing during the interval preceding an action, rather than being retrospective reports made subsequent to an action. Our task design then allowed us to investigate EEG correlates of such prospective intentions. We showed that a negative-going potential, reminiscent of the classic RP but with a more anterior bilateral prefrontal topography, was more strongly associated with the presence of prospective intention than its absence. Analysis of LRP tentatively suggested that prospective intention was preceded by a shift of EEG activity towards the cortex contralateral to the hand that would make the action. These results are difficult to reconcile with the view that experiences of conscious intention are merely a retrospective confabulation (Dennett 1993; Wegner 2004). Instead, we suggest that prospective experiences of conscious intention involve, at least in part, a non-inferential readout of the neural precursors of action generation processes

.

We could say the ordinary conscious reduction is when attention is forced to follow only the finished psycho-physical states, rather than remaining gathered within the temporally extended curvature of conscious intention. The squiggly line in the attached image illustrates that familiar reduction, while the nested spheres can be understood as symbolizing differing degrees of attention span. Drawn like that, it may seem like we're proposing something like the block universe view, where spacetime already exists ‘out there’, and consciousness can expand to grasp more of it. However, there’s no need to imagine that. We can stay anchored in the here and now and consider the expanded attention span to be also in the here and now, except that it intuits more persisting tendencies of the World flow; what you referred to as the ‘playing-out’ of urges, attractions, aversions, possibilities, etc. In that sense, 'spacetime' should not be understood as some perceptible structure that already exists and we, as a separate conscious entity, expand within its container. Rather, it is a symbol for the only reality we ever know: our first-person temporal intuition of the playing-out, which is always present in the here and now.

When the spheres of attention span become more concentric (through meditative concentration), the shorter spacetime intervals can be said to feel musically and meaningfully embedded in the greater intervals. A short-term spacetime interval may make local sense, yet it may fight a higher-order tendency. In that case, the attention-span spheres are eccentric; we either feel the clash of tendencies very dimly or not at all, and simply live through many chaotic oscillations. Conversely, when the spheres are concentric, then even our moment-to-moment frames of existence feel musically embedded in a longer-term unfoldment that makes greater sense. We often experience something of that in our work life, when a momentary task (like constructing a paragraph) feels embedded within a longer-term project (like constructing a whole essay).

Every wider sphere grasps the existential flow at a certain level of integration, so to speak. For example, one such attention span can become known to human beings in the event of a near-death experience. Then, by being temporarily freed from the suction and distraction of the bodily 'ticking rate' of articulated experience, one may become concentric with an attention span that grasps our life journey more holistically. Now everything is seen on a more existential level. We realize we may have been slumbering most of our life, living reactively to momentary sensations, chasing them and experiencing corresponding bouncebacks, with little awareness of whether our life’s story is integrating into a more meaningful plot. It is still an articulated experience, but it "holds more without immediately forcing it into determinate separation", as you expressed.

With that said, it is important to perceive that NDEs, psychedelics, and similar episodic 'loosenings' from the ordinary conscious aperture only allow fragmented glimpses into the playing-out tendencies, precisely because they are not consciously prepared for and are entered into through a sort of external compulsion (ingested substances, physical accidents, etc.). Eventually, those glimpses still need to be crammed back into our familiar concepts rooted in articulated experience, leaving us with a lot of uncertainty about the significance of the widened experience. When we enter the expanded spheres entirely through our own inner volition and with full waking consciousness, on the other hand, it is more like entering into a sustained dance with the playing-out tendencies, where the latter begin to lucidly think with and through us. It is more like gradually becoming accustomed to a whole new mode of encountering and navigating existence, and it becomes transparent how this new mode relates to our ordinary articulated encounters and navigation; how the former is continually collapsing into the latter.

"How far that widening can go, and what it might disclose, I don’t know.

For now, I think that is precisely where the question should remain open." (JW)

Here, I assume you mean it should remain open, not just for you, but for everyone. This move continues to confuse me in your otherwise impeccable reasoning. In the most general sense, it is true that we always need to remain open to possibilities of widening and disclosure that remain mysterious, no matter how much we have already widened the articulated aperture. Yet that truth does not foreclose upon, but can be held comfortably together with, another important truth: that all humans exist along a gradient of widening apertures, and the whole evolutionary process unfolds because of this differentiation. If all humans existed at the same level of widening and disclosure, then the educational process (in the widest sense) could not exist. There would never be any stimulation for the old, tightly constrained apertures to widen into the new, less constrained ones. Then the question simply becomes: what warrant do we have to consider our current experience of the widening and disclosure as the furthest attainable one? And if we have no such warrant, where might we look for clues, hints, and guidelines for our further education?"

[AshvinP]

JW: "Sorry it took a few days to respond. Occasionally I find it necessary to take a couple days away from philosophy—especially if I’ve done a lot of writing.I think we are now in almost complete agreement until your final paragraph. Even your phrase that widened experience “holds more without immediately forcing it into determinate separation” is very close to what I mean by a fuller articulation—reducing less while remaining articulate.

Nor do I think our present degree of widening is the furthest attainable one. Quite the contrary. When I speak of a possible evolution of consciousness, that possibility of further widening is precisely what I have in mind.

So when I say the question should remain open, I do indeed mean open for everyone. But open is doing important work there.

You ask what warrant we have for considering our present experience the furthest attainable. My answer is: none whatsoever. But neither do we have warrant for specifying in advance what a further widening will disclose.

That is the distinction I have been trying to preserve throughout our exchange.

We certainly have clues concerning how consciousness can widen. Meditation is one. Aesthetic experience may be another. Psychedelics can disclose, less reliably and without the discipline you rightly emphasize, how contingent some of our ordinary reductions are. And the enormous historical variation in human articulation gives us every reason not to regard our present form of consciousness as final.

Where I remain cautious is in converting those clues about the possibility and practice of widening into clues about the ontology that widening will eventually disclose.

Your gradient itself makes me more cautious rather than less. If genuinely wider consciousness can disclose relations unavailable to a narrower aperture, then the wider the future aperture we imagine, the less entitled our present aperture is to determine beforehand what it will find. Otherwise we risk populating the unknown with concepts generated by precisely the consciousness we expect to transcend.

This is why “I don’t know” matters to me. It isn’t skepticism about widening. It is openness to it.

I can say that consciousness may widen. I can participate in practices through which it already does widen. I can even say that wider consciousness may sustain more of the playing-out without immediately reducing it into our familiar separations.

What I cannot yet say is what the widest possible consciousness is, what ultimately exists within its disclosure, or whether our present concepts—spirit, God, disembodied consciousness, nonlocal consciousness, or any others—will survive that widening.

Possibility is not disclosure.

Perhaps this is now the small remaining difference between us. You seem more willing to regard certain inherited experiences and practices as clues not only to the possibility of further widening, but to what that widening will disclose. I regard them as clues that the aperture can widen while trying to remain radically open concerning what may appear when it does.

And that is not because I think we have reached the limit.

It is precisely because I don’t."

A: "There is certainly some difference between us here, but I'm also not sure my point about the gradient came across as intended. We can speak of the overall evolutionary gradient that humanity goes through over centuries, and also the gradient of perspectives within current humanity. These two are also related, in my view, insofar as the latter gradient is a precondition for the former.

In other words, the very possibility of individual and collective widening is a function of the educational gradient among current perspectives, which exist simultaneously at different levels of widening and disclosure, so that some perspectives can grow through the greater foresight of others. We not only stand on the shoulders of giants that came before us, in that sense, but are given the opportunity to be drawn higher by giants that have already become what we may become, i.e., our fuller potential. This may sound a bit strange, but it is simply another way of stating what is already conspicuous in every other field of inquiry and what we take for granted as the process by which knowledge grows in those fields.

If we are novice chess players, for instance, becoming more proficient in our playing skills depends heavily on the existence of master-level players who have already developed those skills and can instill guidelines in us. We may imagine we can work everything out by ourselves at the board, but realistically that would never happen. We need an existing gradient of Chess-playing perspectives so more constrained perspectives can draw on the strategic wisdom of less constrained ones. Another interesting example is a recent declaration/petition by prominent mathematicians. They pointed out that AI in the domain of mathematical problem solving is such a risk because 'solving mathematical problems' is not just about reaching the correct outputs, but the wider context in which teachers use the problems to train their students and people collaborate to discover the best ways of creatively navigating the problem space.

https://mathandai.org/

The mathematical community functions, in many ways, as a miniature version of humanity. It consists of individuals using a wide variety of different approaches, joined by core values. The most precious resources of our profession are students and ideas, and these we nurture with great care. We feel responsible to let them grow to their full potential, until they can live a life of their own in the mathematical world. For students we often suggest problems with the core intention of developing skills making them well-positioned for advances in research and elsewhere. Our ideas we disseminate in talks, private discussions and careful writeups, connecting them to the previous ideas of others. These processes invariably take time and are based on human interaction.

In recent months, the success of AI in solving major mathematical problems has made headlines even outside mathematical circles. But solving problems is only a tool and proxy for achieving the primary goal of conceptual understanding and insight. Forgetting this in the world of AI may turn the tool against the primary goal. Indeed, the mass production at faster and faster pace of "true/false" statements could destroy fertile ground instead of breathing life into new ideas.

This otherwise transparent dynamic of widening the knowing aperture only becomes murky when we begin philosophizing about the domain of playing-out tendencies that we associate with the prearticulate mystery. Then we curiously begin to imagine that all human perspectives exist at the same level of widening, and that we will all grow into wider apertures at the same future time. In the last part of the comment, you spoke of "I don't know" many times, but the implication is also that "we" don't know, meaning every possible human perspective at present. But I don't see any warrant for this assumption, and I think it can practically act like the Kantian epistemic boundary by leading us to feel that the future disclosures of widening can only remain hypothetical and theoretical for now. Then, naturally, if we ever encounter concrete indications of what the widening will disclose, we feel safe dismissing them as metaphysical projections into the unknown.

To be clear, I am not suggesting we need to become reliant on others to convey information to us about the wider disclosures. In Chess, a master-level player can't impose the dynamic insight of 'how to optimally navigate the Chess space' with conceptual instructions that we memorize. Their hints, clues, and guidelines only help orient our intuitive process in a certain direction, along certain fruitful vectors of tactics and strategy, but it is always up to us to live through the relevant experiences and gradually work out the dynamic insights. Widening the aperture of consciousness into playing-out tendencies is a dynamic life skill in a similar way, and so it can never be imposed on us as a series of stepwise conceptual instructions or information about 'what widening will disclose'. The only true disclosure is consistent inner experimentation and direct intuitive experience. Yet it is also critical to acknowledge the 'giants' whose wisdom can point us along the most fruitful vectors. The concepts conveyed to us about precise disclosures should always be treated, not as discursive information to memorize, but as inner exercises that help us gradually forge the dynamic life skills by which we can strategically navigate the 'problem space' of persistent playing-out tendencies."