David Eagleman's curious paradox/error: immortal mind stuff

I greatly admire David Eagleman for his little book "Sum" and for his excellent TV documentary series about" The Brain." He's a deep thinker, a neuroscientist and an excellent communicator.

But "here's the thing," as he likes to say when he unleashes another fascinating insight upon us. At one stage in his documentary, he talks about the demonstrable fact that many of our actions by-pass the conscious self, either because we respond too quickly, or it's an instinctive reaction beyond the reach of conscious thought. My example comes from cricket: a batsman facing a fast bowler has 1/5th of a second to "decide" what stroke to play after the ball bounces. He has no time to think about anything much, it's all in training and preparation, and stroke selection before the ball lands in front of him. 

Eagleman uses a scarcely believeable sequence of a young boy doing tricks with plastic cups, and afterwards the boy says no, he doesn't think about it at all, he's just trained himself to do it, speeding up bit by bit until it's automatic.

Eagleman describes how a child's brain develops, and becomes an individual consciousness, a mind. And how each morning when we wake up, we re-build, super-fast, our self-awareness, our sense of self. 

And how our memories are not a storage cabinet, but are also re-built from established patterns of connections between brain cells. So a mind isn't a thing, it's one of the things a brain does, all the time when we are awake. We are, as I have banged on about before, processes, always changing. We change our memories as we revisit them. The idea of the self as a thing, a constant, is a misleading illusion, as a north Indian sage realised in the sixth century BCE. And now neuroscience seems to be backing him up.

So far so good. Our brains and our bodies are a continuous system, cycling stuff around, and sometimes - often - our conscious minds are unaware of stuff we do. 

Our emotions are an essential part of this brain/body cycling. He showed us a woman who as a result of a brain injury (motor-bike accident) lost most of her emotional capacity in the area of decision-making. She suffers a lot because of it, because the smallest decision is extremely disturbing for her. We need our emotions to help us decide things. Reason plus emotion = a decision. That's why pure and absolute objectivity is impossible.

He also shows us how our bodies respond to emotions before our conscious minds do; an emotional response is rooted in our bodies. We may sweat, the electric conductivity of our skin may change, our eyes may show widening irises when someone attracts us, and "we," our conscious selves, our egos, know nothing of this. It's a body/brain response, not a mind/self-aware ego thing.



But I think he contradicts himself. In the last episode he did some stuff on how difficult it is to create truly humanoid artificial intelligence in a computer system. (I'd be interested to know what he thinks of the recent news that a Google "Deep Mind" AI has defeated the world's best (human!) Go player.)

But in this final last episode, he starts down the road of ways in which we could re-create the entire neurological activity of a brain. (Watch it on iPlayer if you are interested, it's good stuff.) If a brain is what it does, not what it is, maybe we could capture that unbelievably complex neurological totality and upload it. We wouldn't need "the wet stuff," as he so charmingly calls it! We would have immortalised a brain.

We could defeat death....Oh dear me no, did he really say that? Now we are surely talking misleading illusions again. 

Firstly, you might upload the totality of neural patterns, but that isn't a brain, nor a mind, nor a person, because all those bodily interactions aren't there. He's shown us that earlier in the series. We may be no more than a vast complex of tiny electro-magnetic interactions, but those interactions need to be in a body if they are to be a person.

And secondly, people - us - are built in time and end in time. I can't imagine what it would feel like to be a mind (of a sort) in a machine that wasn't time-bound. 

Or maybe I can: it would be called hell, it would be a kind of eternal madness. 

We, the people, are life, we are death. Or we are not people. Who wants to be a brain that isn't a person?

You said it, David! My mind is all of me, not merely the pattern of my neurons - it works both ways.

Give me life, give me death.

Let's separate the sci-fi from the wonders of reality. Let's accept the miracle of our mortality. Let's stop pretending that we won't die. If we can do that, we can really live. Now. In this moment.

Why I hate Facebook: commentless blogs e.g. Windermere Diaries

(Health warning: bit of a rant coming up. Probably not very fair or well-balanced.)

Yes, I've got a Facebook page. But it's a bloody nuisance. It's full of pleasant but mundane stuff, or people sharing political stuff most of which is preaching to the converted, But it's  quick and easy.
When blogging really got going, even by the time I started my first blog ("Meditation and Mortality") people took the trouble to add comments, and some really valuable conversations, arguments, affirmations and denials could develop. It helped me keep on writing.

Now, no-one seems to comment much on blogs. Not just this one.

Take, for example, the delightful "Windermere Diaries," simply and beautifully-written daily accounts of the life of a married couple of farmer/taxi-drivers in the Lake District. It's full of the profundity of ordinary daily life, of gentle humour, realism and acceptance. It's generous and ordinary. You don't have to read it every day, but it's there for you when you want it.

http://windermerediaries.com/2016/03/predictable/

Do people comment on it? Well, her Mum did recently. And occasionally she gets a comment. Yet she's got literally hundreds of regular readers.

Or take "The Hearth of Mopsus," if you want to know what a thoughtful, Goth-obsessed open-minded but very devout C of E vicar is up to. Again, hardly ever a comment.
 
http://hearthofmopsus.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/a-fantasy-of-end.html

My guess is that Facebook has done this. We'd rather tell someone about an article in the papers, urge them to sign an on-line petition or tell the world that we've just had a nice walk, photo attached. We want to reassure ourselves with little gestures from like-minded people rather than engage with otherness. Please Like Me (so I know I exist.) 

I'm even invited to "Like" South-West Trains. Why would I do that?

Sod Facebook, we should use blogs to think and write just a little more lengthily and thoughtfully. and comment on what people have written. I want to know what people have to say, not just what papers they read and what they had for tea.

stranger love in a crowd

"Love one another" various religious leaders and figures have urged us, as if love was something you could will into being. "Practice loving-kindness," urge meditation teachers as they help us try to do so.

In a quieter, less densely-populated area such as the one I live in, it is easier to acknowledge each person you encounter than it is in a teeming city street or a big railway station. To respond, even to notice, each person would quickly exhaust you. We hurry along, regarding other people as at best irrelevant, at worst dawdling obstacles to get round between platform 12 and the entrance to the Northern Line so I can make my connection.

Every person on that station  concourse is a story, is in the middle of some narrative. I sat by a cafe window looking out and down at the crowd, taking the trouble to look at each face I could see, taking in the posture and attitude of each individual making up that transient pattern, that hurrying diverse crowd.

 I wasn't trying to feel any particular kindness towards any of them, but an unusual thing happened (unusual for me, though I guesss saintly people feel like this much of the time. I haven't filled in the application papers for sainthood, nor am I likely to. All that hard work and self-denial!)

I began to feel, unannounced, a kind of gentle benevolence, a sort of non-specific kindness towards them. 

Maybe I was doing what we do when we are looking for a specific face in the crowd, searching to pull familiarity and reassurance out of anonymity.

 This person's narrative

seemed to involve waiting for a train time on the indicator board - or was she looking for someone who was looking for her? which is perhaps why she stood still. 

Aha! One of the the faces in the crowd turned into the one she's looking for. (Actually, they hugged each other, but I didn't take a photo, it felt intrusive, somehow.)

And off they went; who knows how their stories changed after that meeting? 

I knew nothing of any of the people below me, through the window. I'd simply given them some time and attention, and a fellow-feeling, a kindness, had emerged. Of it's own accord, nothing to do with my ego or will.

"Love is most nearly itself when here and now cease to matter," wrote TS Eliot, and I had no idea what he meant. It had seemed to me that one loved someone, or a group of people, or a rugby team, a country, a few acres of ground. 

But if we see love as a universal force, an attraction, a state of nature, then perhaps that's the simplest and purest kind of love.

The people I was looking at had no idea about what I was feeling, of course. But it helped me; I was tired and feeling a little sad and drained when I sat down. I left the cafe feeling quite different.

And all I'd done was let something rise to the surface which is there in potential all the time.

 

Journeys, change, realities: Rilke, C Day lewis, Eliot

We read these two poems in our meditation group today.
 First one by Rilke trans. Robert Bly.
 

"The Walk"

"My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by
 what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance –

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave ...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces."

And this by C Day Lewis:

 "O Dreams, O Destinations"

"To travel like a bird, lightly to view
Deserts where stone gods founder in the sand,
Ocean embraced in a white sleep with land;
To escape time, always to start anew.
To settle like a bird, make one devoted
Gesture of permanence upon the spray
Of shaken stars and autumns: in a bay
Beyond the crestfallen surges to have floated.
Each is our wish. Alas, the bird flies blind,
Hooded by a dark sense of destination:
Her weight on the glass calm leaves no impression,
Her home is soon a basketful of wind.
Travellers, we are fabric of the road we go;
We settle, but like feathers on time's flow."

To which one might have added (but didn't):

 "When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters
(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief,
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
Watching the furrow that widens behind you,
You shall not think "the past is finished"
Or "the future is before us".
At nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial,
Is a voice descanting (though not to the ear,
The murmuring shell of time, and not in any language)
"Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind."

            (from TS Eliot, "The Four Quartets: The Dry Salvages III")


A big journey tomorrow, and yet in an ultimate sense, no different from any day's journey. All processes, all changes, all flows. I (any of us) am not a fixed thing moving through space and time, I am the journey which is me. Fare forward, voyagers. All of us. "We are the fabric of the road we go."

walking, age, Ken Jones

I really hope the family and friends of the late Ken Jones, meditation teacher and poet, don't mind my posting this, as a tribute to a fine teacher I wish I had known. I belong to a walking group and a meditation group, to both of which I recommend this sequence.

Octogenarian Ramble

Rambling through old age -
she looks behind
to see if I'm still there

As her flickering compass tacks and veers, I lag behind with the map to shout changes of direction. In the interludes of easy going, my poles clicking on the tarmac, we once again strike out together.

Facing obstacles once taken in our stride, like this crumbling drystone wall.

Dignity dictates
I decline her proffered hand
this life in the past tense

Sometimes, however, I do accept a little push-up over a sheep fence.

Barbed wire yoga
the lift of my boot
just one inch short

At a broad, fast flowing stream she honours me - by not looking back. Left alone to enjoy both fear and audacity. Launched creakingly in mid-air, that second of freedom beyond age and youth. And Splash!

Old age is also about falling over.

Black and blue
the colour scheme
of this old body

Happily, the elegance learnt in youth remains. I can still fall gracefully, softly and unnoticed. Moreover, I can still provide some entertainment.

His roly-poly fall
down a gentle slope
her helpless smile

And so mortality eternally renews our weekly rambles through crag and forest, pasture and bog.

Getting lost together
blithely we make our waytowards the final destination

brain-fade

Watched a movie last night, "Still Alice." Beforehand, much debate by the fireside. Watching a film about Alzheimer's - would it only be depressing and scary, are we too chickenshit to face some difficult truths about it, etc. Anyway, eventually watched it.

 It's beautifully controlled acting and direction, and it was clever of them (and the original novelist) to choose early-onset Alzheimer's in a high-drive successful professional whose field is - words. The above still is from the secene when, out jogging in once-familiar surroundings, Alice (Julianne Moore) can't recognise where she is.

 The still below is much later on in the progression of the disease, with her daughter, who turns out to be strong-minded and self-denying.

 I don't really want to get far into the film itself. They are a family of prosperous middle-class Americans, so that cushions the blow somewhat, but it is still thought-provoking, moving, scary. 

I'm more interested in trying to contemplate the dissolution of a unique consciousness.

This next bit may seem a little stern, not too many laughs, so please leave now if you're feeling fragile!

OK, on we go.

Thing is, every consciousness comes to an end. We can ignore that knowledge, or live with it. Without dementia, consciousness comes to an end either abruptly, or gradually through illness etc, but either way, it lasts more or less to the end of life itself. 

Up to that point, our memories work away all the time, providing the basis for our sense of "me." That "me" isn't static, it is continuously reconstructed by our brain's activity; but with dementia, the lightning-fast continuous reconstruction job runs out of building blocks. 

There's an agonising scene in which after watching her daughter's performance in Chehov's "The Three Sisters," Alice goes up to her and asks her if she is staying on in town for the rest of the summer season. Someone has to tell Alice that she is talking to her daughter. Familiar enough situation to care workers and the family of dementia sufferers, no doubt.

Before she reaches that stage, Alice tells someone that she'll fight it as long as she can, and as her memory goes she will just have to live in the present.

Living in the present is all any of us can do, of course - the rest is memory, anticipation or fantasy. But eventually, inevitably, Alice can't carry on living in the present as "Alice," because she loses her sense of identity, of self. She just lives. Entirely in the present, but hardly aware any longer of herself as "Alice."

I think many of us are more scared of losing our "me" consciousness, our sense of self, than we are of death itself. So, what is to be held up against this fear and pain?

In Alice's case, the love of her family, and her love for them, which is not sentimentalised (her illness causes real problems and conflicts.)

Our culture is trying to get to grips with the size and scope of the problem - so many old people surviving illness until dementia strikes. But NB: it doesn't always strike. I know from my work as a funeral celebrant that very many people  live on into their 80s and 90s with no dementia, just memory loss, the sort that makes me forget where my glasses are. That's not dementia. Dementia is when I don't know what my glasses are for.

And there are things we can do to keep our minds going. As you might guess if you've ready any of this blog before, I'm placing a bet on meditation. And the love of family and friends. And the Guardian quick crossword.

It's not a depressing movie, ultimately. It is just a challenge being grown-up about this stuff. 

OK, you can come back into the room, I'm done with the scary stuff, more conversations with rivers soon.

snowdrops, Lloyd George and riverspeak

A poetic cliché from school days is "The paths of glory lead but to the grave." (Points if you know who wrote it.) All very humbling, I'm sure, and there are no doubt those who would do well to remember it. But the paths don't only lead to the grave, because what you do en route with and for others is surely significant.  This:

is the grave of and memorial to David Lloyd George, close to the village where he was raised, and to Afon Dwyfor, a most beautiful river. Lloyd George was a very influential figure in British history, and laid the foundations of the welfare state. (You knew that, of course, just trying to remind you.) He was, like any powerful person, controversial, but his paths to this lovely spot mattered a lot to our people. (All right, all right, he had trouble keeping his trousers on, but that's not quite to my point...)

Our paths earlier this week led not just to, but also from DLG's grave along the river to the wonderful displays of wild snowdrops to be found thereabouts. 

Perhaps the star of the show for me was really the river. The company was good, so I didn't want to mooch about too much on my own, but I did find a few moments just to be with the river, its flow and its changes.

It was, as usual, a focus for me on the changeability of everything. A river isn't an entity, a thing, but an uncatchable flow of processes, water and air, vegetation and creatures, watchers and rocks and stones, all in an impossibly complex of undisentangleable (so why try?) elements. All this change and flow keeps me in the moment for a moment.

So this essence of processes helps me let go of the vain effort to be a solid defensible unchanging thing. Not so much going with the flow as being part of it and going nowhere but here. Belonging with it, not so separate from it.

Bah! Words. One tries.

The river had much to say to me in almost no time at all.