Mind-life continuity: A qualitative study of conscious experience

Abstract

There are two fundamental models to understanding the phenomenon of natural life. One is the computational model, which is based on the symbolic thinking paradigm. The other is the biological organism model. The common difficulty attributed to these paradigms is that their reductive tools allow the phenomenological aspects of experience to remain hidden behind yes/no responses (behavioral tests), or brain ‘pictures’ (neuroimaging). Hence, one of the problems regards how to overcome methodological difficulties towards a non-reductive investigation of conscious experience. It is our aim in this paper to show how cooperation between Eastern and Western traditions may shed light for a non-reductive study of mind and life. This study focuses on the first-person experience associated with cognitive and mental events. We studied phenomenal data as a crucial fact for the domain of living beings, which, we expect, can provide the ground for a subsequent third-person study. The intervention with Jhana meditation, and its qualitative assessment, provided us with experiential profiles based upon subjects' evaluations of their own conscious experiences. The overall results should move towards an integrated or global perspective on mind where neither experience nor external mechanisms have the final word.

Introduction

Thousands of years ago, long before the dawn of science, perceptive access to the world enabled human beings to conduct their affairs. As Koffka (1935, p. 7) put it: “To primitive man each thing says what it is and what he ought to do with it: a fruit says, “Eat me”; water says “Drink me”; thunder says “Fear me””. Over time, by encountering both veridical and erroneous cases in their original world, human beings learned to distrust what things told them, and henceforth developed a new system founded no longer on particulars, but on universals. While the world of primitive man directed his experience—telling him what was good, bad, dangerous, healthy, or safe—today the world of scientific man guides human experience through the intellect, logic, and verified data.

Throughout the ages, however, a challenging question in science has remained, viz. why does physical sensory stimulation have to be accompanied by subjective experience? Were this not the case a neurobiological explanation would suffice, and Beethoven composing the Ninth Symphony, or Gödel working on his theorems¹ could be explained by the stimulus-response schema. Subjective phenomena,² which constitute the very texture of our existence, are difficult to describe and have thus far been excluded from scientific investigation. This is a very difficult topic for experimental research, particularly because modern Western science starts by quantification, and assumes that psychological experience can be expressed in purely quantitative terms (Weber's law). Of course scientists recognize that only because somethings escape quantification, it does not mean they are to be dismissed from science. On the contrary, as His Holiness the Dalai Lama remarks,

“It seems that scientific research reaches deeper and deeper. But it also means that more and more people, at least scientists, are beginning to realize that the spiritual factor is important. I say ‘spiritual’ without meaning any particular religion or faith, just simple warmhearted compassion, human affection, and gentleness. It is as if such warmhearted people are a bit more humble, a little bit more content… If we do not combine science with these basic human values, then scientific knowledge may sometimes create trouble, even disaster” (His Holiness the Dalai Lama, cited in Varela, 1997, pp 4–5).

How, then, do we explain subjective phenomena in a non-reductive metaphysics of the human mind? Psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and physics, among other areas, study the nature of the subjective phenomenon. Their progressive specialization has marked scientific progress both in Eastern and Western views, experimental and theoretical. This specialization and separation was necessary, but it has inevitably worked against the aim of an integral science (Simeonov, 2010), i.e., a science that is plurally constituted. Owing to this, we propose to look at a new perspective within the study of the mind and subjective experience. This perspective is based on the principle of interdependence between the constituting disciplines, in a dialogue between Eastern and Western traditions. In this paper, it is our aim to show empirically how theoretical cooperation between these traditions may shed light on a non-reductive understanding of life and mind.

A unified approach can be rigorously formulated to accommodate qualitative analysis and quantitative measurements. In our study, we combined a psychological assessment with a molecular measurement of protein profiles, with the aim of contributing to the phenomenological investigation of subjective experience. This is the first in a series of papers in which we focus on the intervention methodology adopted, viz. Buddhist meditative practice. We begin the paper by introducing the hard problem of consciousness, discussing the various answers it offers with regard to the phenomenological investigation of subjective experience. We focus in particular on the Western neurobiology of consciousness hypothesis, and the life-mind continuity thesis. We expect the results of our qualitative experiment (section 4) to show alignment with the life-mind continuity thesis.

It is uncontroversial that consciousness is present when, for example, a student attends a class, in a spectator's excitement at a football game, when Galileo worked on his physics, or when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. These activities can be described molecularly as processes whereby excitation on the sensory surface of an animal is conducted by nerve fibres to nerve centers, switched over to efferent nerves, and resulting in muscle contraction or gland secretion. Ordinary man, however, knows nothing of the molecular processes of conscious experience, but he certainly knows what it is like to experience a football game or a sunset by the sea.

The East and West provide distinctive conceptions of this subjective experience. Western medicine, for instance, tends to see the mind and body as “split,” comprising two separate entities. Eastern traditions, by contrast, suggest that mind and body derive from the same energy (source). These conceptions of consciousness pose more than philosophical issues, particularly because, in the West, dualism between the mind and body has affected how patients are perceived and treated.

The problem of consciousness has occupied the best human minds for thousands of years, and has generated two most common ways of facing the hard problem of consciousness in western science, the physicalist and the dualistic view.

• The whole problem is illusory. This response holds that there are not two kinds of substance or modes of existence, matter, and mind, but only one, viz. matter. Matter is composed of blindly whirling atoms that, owing to their great numbers and time available, form all sorts of combinations, among them those we call animals and human beings. Thus, it is scientific conviction that thinking and feeling are merely movements of atoms, even including the feeling of awe accompanying the moment of remarkable scientific discoveries. This materialistic conception of mind has served science well, building up physical and physiological knowledge. Nevertheless, difficulty resides in the fact that between life and mind this conception of consciousness makes an arbitrary discrimination with regard to scientific dignity. They have accepted matter and rejected mind, while each of them may in fact disclose as much of the truth as the other.

• The second solution draws a Cartesian line between life and inanimate nature belonging together. This response places mind and life together as directed by a power not found in inorganic nature, and therefore as essentially different from it. However, this response does not solve but rather re-emphasizes the problem. Numerous speculative attempts have been made to overcome dualism. But pretending that a new name provides a solution to it may do a great deal of harm to science were it to be widely accepted.

Cartesian dualism is theoretically rejected in contemporary science, although, as previously mentioned, in practice we see too often a gap between the body and the mind in western science. The procedure is either to look for the subjective phenomena in the brain (bottom-up paradigm), or to theoretically reject the subjective phenomena while investigating brain function (top-down paradigm). Science cannot empirically deny subjectivity as an ontological phenomenon, nor can it verify or falsify subjective phenomena.

Subjective phenomena have been identified as the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1995). The hard problem concerns why physical stimulation must be presented to consciousness with a subjective feel. As David Chalmers frames problem (1995, p. 3).

It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

The subjective aspect of experience, elicited from sensory stimulation, was illustrated by Frank Jackson (1982) in a thought experiment known as “the knowledge argument” against physicalism. It can be summarized as follows. Mary is a neurophysiologist who happens to be color blind from birth, but nevertheless specializes in perception and color. Imagine that she knows all there is to know in physical terms about perception before she in fact perceives red for the first time. Would she know what it is like to perceive red? Notwithstanding all the knowledge Mary has about the neurophysiology of sight—however detailed it may be—this knowledge cannot give her the experience of what it feels like to see a red rose. Jackson's thought experiment attempts to establish, first, that there are non-physical properties, and second that knowledge of these properties can only be attained through conscious experience. Thus, Jackson's thought experiment attempts to refute the claim that all knowledge is physical knowledge. To the contrary, conscious experience must involve non-physical properties because someone with complete physical knowledge about some phenomenon might yet lack knowledge about how it feels to experience the phenomenon itself. From this it follows that Mary does not know what if feels like (Nagel, 1974) to see red until she in fact sees red, sc. until she has had the conscious, phenomenal experience of red.

Easy problems, on the other hand, are those that fall within the scope of neuronal and cognitive function. These are usually studied through statistical and computation measurements. Such measuring techniques include behavioral models of yes/no responses (button-pushes, time-responses, etc.), and neuroimaging. Cognitive functions, such as memory, attention, sensory stimulation, are empirically investigated and explained by the standard methods and tools of cognitive science, viz. by computational or neural mechanisms (Chalmers, 1995, p. 2). On these models, to explain access (to consciousness) and reportability (language), for instance, we need only specify the mechanisms by which information about internal states is retrieved and made available for verbal report. To explain the integration of information, we need only exhibit mechanisms by which information is brought together and exploited by later processes. For an account of sleep and wakefulness, for example, an appropriate neurophysiological account of the process responsible for an organism's contrasting behavior in those states will suffice. As Chalmers (1995, pp. 2–3) explains:

In each case, an approximate cognitive or neurophysiological model can clearly do the explanatory work […] If this phenomena were all there was to consciousness, then consciousness would not be much of a problem.

In cognitive science the hard problem of consciousness, or of subjective phenomena, comes up again and again. Indeed, it is well-known to those who study brain function, such as LeDoux, Antonio Damásio, Gerhard Roth, and Francisco Varela. There are two fundamental models to understanding the phenomenon of mind. The first is the computational model, based on symbolic thinking paradigm; the second is the biological organism model, based on the natural life paradigm. The latter involves the thought that we should understand mind from the perspective of life and evolution. In what follows, we will briefly present and discuss two versions proposed within the biological model.

In recent years, neuroscientists have intensively studied the cerebral activity correlated with conscious experience. Patterns of cell activity have been detected from PET and fMRI scans, which are commonly seen as showing the mind in action. It is said that we can now see where mental arithmetic occurs, where words are formed, where lies are generated, and even where our religious sentiments are located (albeit what we are in fact witnessing are changes in oxygen levels in the blood during these mental activities).

The embryonic neurobiology of consciousness was introduced by Crick and Clark in their The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994), followed by The Quest for Consciousness by Koch (2004), which further lays down paths to be explored in the next several decades. Koch is optimistic that careful scientific research will provide the answers, but is less impressed with the theoretical limits imposed by philosophers. Although Koch admits that philosophers have frequently formulated questions that challenge scientists, philosophical constraints are often overlooked (Martinez-Conde, 2004). Their model proposes a neurobiological account of experience. Koch narrows down the neural correlates of consciousness for visual consciousness to coalitions of neurons in and around the inferior temporal cortex, projecting to the frontal lobes and supported by feedback activity from the cingulate and frontal cortices. The function of consciousness, he states, is to provide an “executive summary” of the world's status to the planning stages of the brain (i.e. the frontal lobes). Thus, consciousness may be an intermediate-level process (see Jackendoff's, 1987) limited to intermediate brain areas. This view has been illustrated with the idea of a homunculus, sc. the explanation of (human) vision by assuming there is an internal ‘viewer’, namely a ‘little man’ or ‘homunculus’ inside the brain ‘looking at a movie’ inside a theatre (this has also been called the Cartesian Theatre). The homunculus argument has, however, been the target of criticism and is today generally seen as a fallacy. Another source of difficulty regards how to metaphysically define, and ontologically conceptualize, “visual consciousness”. In empirical investigation, one should be cautious when establishing metaphysical correlations of levels of reality. It seems the object of Koch's study is ‘vision awareness’, that is, the relation between attentional function and vision stimulation, which would fall naturally within the purview of the easy problems. It has, however, nothing to do with how subjects experience a certain phenomenon. In other words, it fails to explain the phenomenological experience accompanying sensory stimulation.

Antonio Damásio proposes a theory about the neural basis of consciousness that contests the idea of a homunculus inside the brain (Damásio, 1994, Damásio, 2010). On Damásio's view, consciousness is a private, first-personal phenomenon that can be studied by combining cognitive and neurobiological methods in order to describe its cognitive nature, behavioral correlates, possible evolutionary origin, functional role, and finally its neuroanatomical and neurophysiological underpinnings (Damásio, 1998). Phenomenal conscious content is, in Damásio's view, a matter of associations that are processed in different brain areas at the same time. More specifically, what makes a conscious state feel like something rather than nothing is explained as a fusion of mind and body, in which neurons become “extensions of the flesh.” Phenomenal consciousness is enabled as the result of a procession of neural maps of inner and outer worlds. Indeed, this is what Damásio names self-consciousness. Without a self, the mind would lose its orientation: thoughts would be freewheeling, unclaimed by an owner, and we would almost certainly look unconscious (Damásio, 2010; chap. III).

Damásio makes a distinction between three levels of “self”, which build upon each other to construct the kind of full-blown consciousness that humans are privileged to experience. On his view, the most basic form of self—the “protoself”—is a neural map of an organism's internal status, i.e., related to primordial feelings of the body present in the normal, waking brain (p. 191). The “core self” is what further extends the “protoself”, namely by incorporating interactions between an organism and its environment. It provides personhood, and firmer senses of being. At the highest level, there is the “autobiographical self”, which adds information about an organism's past and its expectations about the future. With language as a useful medium, memory and reasoning are enhanced. With this enhancement, narratives become possible, giving the “core self” the sense of being a protagonist, that is, an “autobiographical self”.

Damásio's theory is largely centered on the notion and levels of self as exemplified by the brain. His theory relies on neuroimaging techniques and determines that experience results from internal or external physical stimuli. This view therefore requires understanding experience on its reductive construal. Damásio, 1994, Damásio, 2010 rejects dualism by bringing consciousness back to the body (sc. brain function). The reduction of experience to brain function returns us squarely to a reductionist view of consciousness.

Damásio's theory is in opposition to other biological approaches, such as the life-mind continuity thesis. According to the latter, notions of both conscious phenomena and selflessness play an essential role.

A variety of phenomena in human experience reveal that, within different evolutionary levels of living organisms, life and mind cannot be thought of as two distinct phenomena. To the contrary, mind and life are two indispensable categories that, by virtue of their internal relation and identical ontology, form a whole.

According to the mind-life continuity thesis there are three levels (Godfrey-Smith, 1998). On the weak continuity view, whatever has mind will have life, although not all things that have life have mind. Cognition is a kind of activity of a living system. On the strong continuity view, life and mind have a common abstract model or set of basic organizational properties. The functional properties of mind are usually the indispensable properties of life. On the methodology continuity view, the understanding of mind requires further understanding the role that it plays in the whole living system (pp. 72–73). Each of the views within the life-mind continuity thesis share the perspective that cognition should be studied in the context of “the whole organism” (Godfrey-Smith, 1998).

The life-mind continuity thesis is accommodated by enactive cognitive science. This is the biological model that emerges from the theory of autopoiesis. Autopoiesis aims to correlate the data from brain, mind, and consciousness studies (particularly neuroscience laboratory work), with phenomenological insights in the understanding and explanation of subjective experience, and ongoing reflection on one's own personal consciousness, as conceived by Buddhism (Varela et al., 1993, Varela, 1996, Varela, 1999, Hayward and Varela, 1992).

Autopoiesis is a theory concerning the inextricable link between life and cognition, insofar as one cannot exist without the other. As Luisi and Houshmand (2010, pp. 85–86) elaborate:

[The] starting point is the interaction between the autopoietic unit and the environment. The living unit is characterized by biological autonomy and at the same time is strictly dependent on the external medium for its survival. There appears to be a contradiction here, and life must indeed operate within this apparent contradiction. The interaction with this environment is always a very specific one, in the sense that the interaction a butterfly has with the environment is different from the interaction a worm or a human being has with the environment

In other words, the internal structure of the organism changes and adapts according to its environment. The structure of the living organism, together with its previous history of perturbations, determines the reactions that new perturbations will induce. Changes, mutations, and evolution are here seen as the result of maintaining the internal structure of an autopoietic organism.

The term 'cognition' applies only to living entities, and not to the inanimate world. From unicellular to multicellular organisms, from plants to insects, fish and mammals, each one has its own type of cognition corresponding to a different level of life's complexity. Cognition, as seen here, contrasts with the representational/cognitivist model. This is because it consists in a mutual interaction between the inner structure of the system and the environment, in the sense that the environment is ‘created’ during interaction itself as, for example, when a spider creates a web. It is in this sense that enaction is the process of mutual bringing into existence: the organism with its sensorium ‘creates’ its own world; the environment allowing the living organism to come into being.

According to this theory, the very notion of consciousness derives from the autopoietic organization of life: there is no organic human life without consciousness, and there is no consciousness that is not embodied in organic life. This perspective culminated in the neurophenomenological method (Varela, 1996), which is, according to Varela (1997, in Rudrauf et al., 2003):

grounded on a pragmatic will to progressively and systematically reduce the distance between subjective and objective […] a way of narrowing the gap between the mental and the physical

There have been recent attempts to formalize the enactive theory with brain physiology. This is known as the Free Energy Principle (FEP). On some generous articulations of this view, free energy minimization occurs not only in biological systems but also takes place in nonliving systems, ranging from synchronization of clocks, to the primordial soup and social networks. Although there are some variants of this hypothesis, it generally holds that organisms act to maintain themselves in their expected biological and cognitive states, and that they can only do so by minimizing their free energy, provided that the long-term average of free energy is entropy (Kirchhoff and Froese, 2017).

A cognitivist view of the free energy principle, however, conceives of the relationship between life and mind under the predictive mind hypothesis. This is a model associating minds with computational processes requiring semantic (i.e. contentful) properties, or allowing the possibility of the mind to be potentially realized independently of life, were it to be given artificial support.

A non-cognitivist approach to the free energy principle (Friston, 2009, Friston, 2013), by contrast, implies that mentality is ubiquitous. This is a strong continuity view on particular concepts of life (viz. autopoiesis and adaptivity) and mind (basic and non-semantic). On the non-cognitivist view:

All systems that maintain their variables within a limited range of values can be understood as having some form of mentality or proto-mentality given that the FEP casts any system that is able to maintain structural integrity in the face of a fluctuating environment as engaged in predicting its own future states. That is, retaining integrity rests upon processes the function of which is to maximize model evidence—i.e., these processes exhibit self-evidencing dynamics (Kirchhoff and Froese, 2017, p. 18).

The enactive theory endorses the non-cognitivist view. Subjective phenomena should not be mistakenly understood as a powerful generative brain model of semantic mental representations (cognitivist free energy principle), nor as an application of processing neural maps used to ‘recover’ the structure of the external world by conceptual reflection on the state of the external environment (as argued by Damásio). On the enactive view, human experience is conceived of as an internal structure of pre-reflective dynamic interaction. Varela adopts the Buddhist notion of a virtual self—or a selfless self—and reconceives it on biological level. Enactivism, as informed by Buddhism, thereby assumes a unique perspective.

The western idea of self is very different from the eastern because the universe does not play an important or relevant role. The self is seen as the enclosed capacity “to order my own thoughts and my own life, to use reason as an instrument to control and order my own life … what's really important is not the particular content of our feelings or thinking but the power to control it reflexively (Varela, 1997, p. 18).

Over the past two thousand years Buddhists have developed sophisticated philosophical, phenomenological, and epistemological notions of egolessness (or selflessness), which form the core of Buddhist thought.

The Dalai Lama then asked, “In the modern West, when one thinks ‘I’ or ‘I am,’ does this necessarily imply that the ‘I’ so conceived must be posited as being independent or autonomous?” Charles's answer was very Buddhist in flavor. “If you ask people, they say no. But in the way they actually live it, the answer is yes, very powerfully, and much more so than our ancestors who thought of themselves more as part of a larger cosmos. (Varela, 1997, p. 20).

Buddhists refuted the existence of a permanent, unchanging self. In general, all four philosophical schools within Buddhism agree in denying the existence of a self that has a separate nature from the psychological constituents. According to His Holiness the Dalai Lama,

“There are four major schools of Buddhist philosophy, among which we consider the Prāsaṅgika Madhyamaka school to be the most profound. One school of thought identifies the self essentially with consciousness, whereas the Prāsaṅgika school regards the self as something imputed on the basis of the collection of the aggregates, or the mind and body. The Svātantrika Madhyamaka and all the lower Buddhist schools regard the statement that phenomena exist merely as imputations, not by their own nature, as an expression of nihilism” (Varela, 1997, p. 117).

The self is a flow of our experience: feelings of sadness and so forth arise in response to certain experiences,

“If in fact the self does not truly exist, then apprehending the self as not being truly existent is, of course, in accord with reality … For a person who has investigated whether or not the self is truly existent, and through this investigation gains some actual experience of the lack of true existence of a self, when for this person a sense of self starts to arise more strongly it would not arise with the sense of apprehending the self as truly existent. Rather, the self would be apprehended without the qualification of being either truly existent or not truly existent. It could also happen for such a person that, although the self appears as if it were truly existent, one knows that it’s not. In this situation, the self is apprehended as being like an illusion. It appears in one fashion but one knows it doesn't exist according to that mode of appearance. Hence it's like an illusion.” (His Holiness the Dalai Lama, in Varela, 1997, pp. 117–118).

As a practice, Buddhism requires involvement in the same way that scientists are involved in their work, or as a writer's mind is involved in writing (see Brockman, 1996). To these contemplative practices, the self is neither a thing nor an entity, but a process.

According to Evan Thompson (2014), the sort of focused attention practices—as developed by some Buddhist traditions—can be construed as techniques for attending to features of experience that we ordinarily ignore or neglect. In other words, adept meditators can see and notice things that we rarely ever do. Thus, Buddhist contemplative practices can be understood as a kind of phenomenological training that can serve the scientific study of mind.

In Buddhism, mental training is often described as a systematic process of familiarizing oneself with the present character of mental events. This training cultivates a capacity for sustained, attentive awareness of the moment-to-moment flux of experience (Thompson, 2006). This seems to tell against a reflective account of the self, because concepts do not always do justice to the full range of qualities we experience. In the Western tradition, we tend to think that consciousness is something that is either present or absent: you have it when you are awake, and lose it when you are knocked out. In the East, however, it is essential to distinguish modes of consciousness within the range of, what we in the West call, unconsciousness. Dreaming, lucid dreaming, deep and dreamless sleep, and so-called 'pure awareness' are examples of such modes. Indian philosophy's (see Kak, 1997) major aim is precisely the development of a taxonomy of modes of human consciousness (Thompson, 2014).

Western science, however, has not yet furnished for itself an adequate phenomenology of conscious experience. As such, it is essential that we open the channels for constructive dialogue with the Eastern tradition and its practitioners, thereby enabling their insights to inform our own investigations, and vice versa.