Subjecting Experience to an Investigation

Jay Garfield hands down has the best translation of Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (the discourses on the middle way and emptiness in Buddhism) and so I was pleasantly surprised to see that he has a new book out called Losing Ourselves: Learning to live without a self. We have covered this territory before but from a meditation practitioner's perspective. In short, in Mahamudra/Dzogchen, the practitioner learns to (i) first practice no-self wherein awareness is directly connected to phenomenal content with the self seen as a construct; (ii) next the practitioner gets behind everything and begins to see the entire world (including space and time) as a construct with awareness being the stillpoint of the universe; (iii) phenomenal content returns and in the one taste meditation, awareness/content is seen as simultaneous with a separate awareness being seen as a construct; (iv) the crossover instructions are taken to heart and the practitioner now sees each moment as awareness/content expressing itself to itself with meditation seen as a construct; (v) the Dzogchen practices then take over (automatic emptiness, Lion's Gaze etc.) with an extraordinarily simple non-practice practice wherein awareness/content is exhorted to stay and stay and with excessive retreat into clarity, stillness and bliss disrupted by the PHAT! instructions. (We have not yet covered Crossing Over and Dzogchen here on this blog.)

I mention all this just to say that Garfield roughly covers step 1 in this book. As such, this aspect of the book is extraordinarily useful. You have a top flight analytic philosopher tackling the no-self doctrine. He very carefully points out the danger of reification of the self, the historical impulses (Kant, most of Indian philosophy etc.) behind it and then brings his attention to modern approaches to the subject of experience. 

And then it all falls apart. Garfield's polemics are reserved for Galen Strawson's thin subject and Dan Zahavi's minimal self (with similar concepts in Evan Thompson's work). We have already covered this territory, and have pointed out how useful it is to have a non-Cartesian thin subject since it so directly corresponds to our experience. Strawson, Zahavi and Thompson have done us a huge service in unpacking this construct - enabling future researchers to include this minimal self into the world stream which they surely will. (We have attempted to do so in the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference series using category theory inspired models, but I digress.)

Why is Garfield so sure he is right? It's because of the very first premise in Galen Strawson's The Subject of Experience to which we now turn:

1.  "Awareness is (necessarily) a property of a subject of awareness." (The Subject of Experience, page 193).
   

Garfield takes issue with this claiming that Strawson is reifying the self with awareness as its property (sorta like the property of an object). He then criticizes Strawson for descending into reflexivity of awareness since what usually happens when you go down this route is that you will get an awareness of awareness recursion causing - as Wilber said a very long time ago - centauric awareness to recede. (Incidentally, I was stuck here for a loooong time and let me tell you, the level of depression got pretty acute: and all stemming from mistaking awareness as "my awareness." The alienation from others and the world goes to infinity and you end up in existential despair territory pretty quickly.)  

But this is not where Strawson ends up! To cut a long story short, while he begins with step 1 which is a fairly simple existential level observation, that's not where he ends up which is:

  "All awareness comports awareness of itself" (page 195).

 

which is where Mahamudra/Dzogchen ends and begins: awareness/content expressing itself to itself.

 

I was curious to see if Garfield would reference and discuss The Embodied Mind co-authored by Evan Thompson and Francisco Varela (whom we all miss terribly) along with Eleanor Rosch. While that book covered similar terrain, it backed away from a univocal no-self doctrine by gingerly bringing emptiness of concept back into the picture. Garfield does not do so and this is a clear regression relative to The Embodied Mind. It is worth revisiting Wilber's criticism (page 691, note 1 to chapter 14, 1st edition) of the no-self arguments in The Embodied Mind since it applies to Losing Ourselves in spades.

 

"Nor, I believe, is Spirit's literal interpretation as "no-self" very helpful either......In short, both the cohesive self and the momentary states are relatively real, but both are ultimately Empty: the absolute is neither self nor no-self (nor both nor neither), neither momentary nor permanent (nor both nor neither), but is rather the "Thatness" disclosed by nondual Prajna or primordial awareness, a "Thatness" which, being radically unquaifiable, cannot be captured in any concepts whatsoever."

A bit more flowery than I would like but the point should be clear. Now, Garfield undoubtedly knows all this, so why does he do it? The answer, I believe, lies in this paragraph:

 

"...awareness can be the result of the cooperation of a number of psychophysical processes, and it can consist in a number of relations between aspects of a person and aspects of their environment. Awareness is most plausibly an umbrella property that reflects an extremely complex set of underlying properties and relations." (page 71).

 

To which I say bollocks. Garfield seems to be attempting to finesse away the hard problem  by attempting a solution on the cheap: this will never work considering that the problem of consciousness has been with us for a very long time. At times in the book, I almost caught a whiff of eliminativism in Garfield which he most likely does not hold but unfortunately the Dennetts of the world are surely taking notes from this book. To be clear, there is a way to interpret "an umbrella property that reflects an extremely complex set of underlying properties and relations" such that it honors both physicalism and consciousness but we must reject the perspective from which Garfield makes this observation: he views the self as a construct and the "underlying" brain processes as real and attempts to get the former from the latter without a fundamental rejiggering of our worldview which I think is impossible. It ends up in a complex systems or radical emergentist view of the world and will likely enable AI engineers to claim that their artifacts are conscious. Before you get upset, the likelihood of AI engineers claiming this is highly remote and I merely offer this as a possibility.

All this goes to show how even a highly principled and sincere investigation can go off the rails. I sometimes wonder if things would be different if  Galen Strawson had called  his concept a "thick perspective" interpreted as "bounded awareness of phenomenal content" (since I can prick you but not directly feel your pain) rather than a "thin subject," but the damage is done. And sadly, the solution is so simple. Acknowledge that the self is a construct (which is Strawson's point as well but Garfield seems to have not figured this out), but so is the world and quarks and leptons, bosons through to cells etc. But, it is a natural construct and not a cultural construct (like astrology). Garfield seems to think it is the latter and not the former, hence his polemics. He therefore selectively applies emptiness of self where it suits him leaving out the emptiness of the world while allowing physicalism to remain unchallenged. But, as Daniel Stoljar tells us, this will never work.

Liberalism versus populism

It is 2022 and I'm convinced that the US has now entered one of the most dangerous phases in its history. Don't think this is hyperbole and will try and justify this below. If all goes well, we will probably look back to 02/24/22 - the onset of the Ukraine war - as the turning point where a robust new liberalism seized back the initiative from the forces of oligarchy, plutocracy etc. worldwide. But this is not a given: the next few years will be gut wrenching if this transformation is to occur.

What has to die is the neoliberal economic order of the past 40 years. We have already mentioned the reasons why this order is going kaput but two excellent recent books - The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (by Gary Gerstle) and Liberalism and its Discontents (by Francis Fukuyama no less) - have considerably clarified the picture. Both books argue that the neoliberal order of the past 40 years is dead and that we must pave the way for a new economic order. Otherwise populist forces of the right and left will usher in oligarchic forces which will install a strongman, game the population and turn every intellectual into a bitter cynic. It will be game over if that happens, not just for America but for the world. Adapted from Gary Gerstle:

"A political order must have the ability to shape the core ideas of political life......The neoliberal order persuaded a large majority of Americans that free markets would unleash capitalism from unnecessary state controls and spread prosperity and freedom throughout the ranks of Americans...[Instead] political disorder and dysfunction reign. What comes next is the most important question the United States, and the world, now face." 

Clearly then, the US central bank will be, er, central to the efforts aimed at ushering in the new order. But, this can only happen if there is a crisis and I believe we are hurtling toward such a crisis which will peak within the next few years. The crisis will probably involve the status of the US dollar as the world's premier reserve currency and just like Bretton-Woods was necessary in 1944, we might need to install a new financial order in 2022-2026. Since the US is a forward looking country, it could be something completely unexpected and new like the adoption of a crypto currency with communities worldwide being enabled by tethering to the US neodollar. Or something else.

Setting aside these speculations, what are the implications from a consciousness studies perspective? To put it simply, I think the coastal elite have to become the new conservatives and broadcast messages of inclusion to the entire country. The US has to secure the foundations of a new order which will treat everyone equally (thereby taking the wind out of identity politics of all stripes) while maintaining the social gains of the past 80 years (which saw all kinds of marginalized people enter the mainstream). To achieve this, the baby boomers and millennial followers (sorry Gen-X) have to keep repeating that we are all in this together and that democracy itself might be at stake (in the world's oldest democracy). The formerly radical boomers - the most narcissistic generation ever produced by America - should now strengthen institutions and ward off attacks by the populists (who are now the new radicals). We have to become the new conservatives if America is to hold together.