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The idea that brains produce conscious experience runs up against an unsolvable logical problem: how can the same brain that is generating the experience also experience the experience.

Cognitive psychology came upon this early on with something called the homunculus infinite regress problem. If the idea of mental representation—a foundational principle in cognitive psychology—is taken seriously, then you need both the process that is creating the representation, and a “something else” that it is being represented to. But in order for this something else to know what it is observing when it interprets the representation, it needs a way of representing the representation, and so on in an infinite regress.

Stated in neurological terms relative to consciousness, in order to be conscious, you need something to be conscious of (the output of brain activity) and something (other brain activity) to register the awareness of it. But this registration of awareness is just more brain activity and not the awareness itself. For that you need something else, which can only be additional brain activity requiring yet an additional something else and so on.

It’s turtles all the way down.

The only real solution to the infinite regress problem is to dislodge consciousness from the organism. Material engagement theory reflects one interesting attempt to articulate this. In (grossly) simplified terms, material engagement theory (MET) considers conscious experience as a phenomenological property of the three-way interaction (interpenetration?) between culture, the person, and the material world. [In his book, How Things Shape the Mind, Lambros Malafouris provides an in-depth look at material engagement theory, and, in particular, how it relates to human tool use.]   

But the notion that consciousness is a brain product is a hard one to shake for most folks. Part of the reason for this may have to do with the way civilized life is structured, and the fact that (a point that MET drives home) the way we think about the world is not independent of what we are actually doing and how we are doing it.

Consider how a logical error called the mereological fallacy plays into this. The mereological fallacy, as it applies to living organisms, is the tendency to ascribe characteristics of the whole creature to a single component part. For example, to say that stomachs digest, or that legs run, or that brains remember. The world of cognitive neuroscience is replete with examples of this logical error, conscious brains being just one.     

The mereological fallacy reflects a thoughtform that is endemic to the civilized mind, and its parts-standing-in-for-the-whole nature reflects the constituent partitioning of civilized activity. Civilization is a mechanistically structured, systemized way of living in which various parts of the system are designed to play circumscribed roles or carry out specific isolated functions. In addition, the civilized perspective ascribes ontological priority to abstract categories rather than to concrete material events. In reality, of course, consciousness is just an idea, a concept, an abstraction. Awareness is never without content. Awareness is not to be found outside of the content. But consciousness is nonetheless mistaken for a thing in itself, is reified, is granted “thingness,” and its existence then becomes a problem to be solved.

So, what difference does it make how we think about consciousness? What does it matter and why should anyone care?

Seeing consciousness as something produced by brains, something happening inside us, something separate and independent of the world itself, supports the irrational notion that our experience exists somehow independent of the various environments that we inhabit, that we could be who we are independent of the larger contexts in which who we are expresses itself, that we could somehow exist outside of any context at all, or in an artificial context of our own choosing. Not only does this predispose us to undervalue the rest of living nature, but it can ultimately lead to absurd and potentially dangerous notions such as the crazy idea that physical reality doesn’t matter at all, that we could, for example, upload our consciousness into an artificial medium and become an inhabitant of an electronic “metaverse.”   

Consciousness doesn’t happen in brains. First-person experience is not actually first-person, but something that emerges from our shared participation in a world inhabited by numerous others. And, perhaps most importantly, who we are at any point in time depends critically on those numerous others.  Those numerous others are, in the most intimate and inseparable sense, us.  

According to a recent theory, the capacity for conscious awareness traces to the evolution of primitive brain areas designed to predict the organism’s likely future movements by generating a dynamic simulation or model of the organism itself. The appearance of the cortex added a whole new layer (literally) to the complexity and sophistication of this self-simulation ability, and consciousness emerged as a result.

A somewhat compelling theory, perhaps. But describing brain areas and their putative activities says absolutely nothing about consciousness.

Our first-person experiential awareness of the world is simply not something that can be explained by what happens inside brains. Consciousness cannot be found lurking within neural connections or patterns of brain activity. No matter how complex or nuanced or sophisticated this brain activity is, it is still just organized clusters of neurons engaged in interactive twitching.

Now, I understand and accept that my conscious awareness is correlated with the activity and structures of my nervous system. Pull out parts of my brain, and my conscious experience is likely to change. But that doesn’t mean that my conscious experience is being created by neural activity.

Perhaps, as panpsychic theories claim, consciousness is an imminent feature of the universe itself, a fundamental quality of matter, something that permeates everything, part of the substrate of reality, a primary feature of what the universe is, and physical brains act to compartmentalize this universal consciousness, temporarily sequester slivers of it.

Panpsychic notions seem at least as reasonable as the idea that the organized twitching of neurons can summon consciousness out of the void. And there are likely other possibilities that are just as reasonable, but that have yet to be conceived.

To explain consciousness in terms of brain activity is merely to restate the question.

Edit: here is a good, easy-to-understand article about the ridiculousness of thinking about brains as computers.

Not too long ago I was listening to an hour-long presentation on Zoom about the importance of relationships on campus—relationships with colleagues, relationships with students. And when it got to the part about how this information should be applied in the classroom, what specific things I should be doing, my levels of irritation became almost unbearable.

Relationship, or what is meant by that term in this context, is a basic, primary, fundamental, and fundamentally human thing. Relationships are things that develop and grow and change organically. Educational institutions are machines. They are inhuman, mechanical, artificial things. There is no humanity lurking inside the procedural structure of an educational program. There is nothing human in a bureaucracy. There are no relationships in an institutional system, only connections, contacts, and conduits.

And so what the folks (institutional servomechanisms) running the presentation were doing, what they were trying to say, was something along the lines of: “OK, people are suffering a little bit because the relationship thing is missing because we are dealing with contrived connections and mechanical activities and there is nothing human in any of that (only they weren’t saying it that way), so what we need to do is we need to add ‘human’ back, and here are the techniques for doing that, here are the mechanical changes you can make to how you act within the system so that people can feel (experience the illusion) that there is some sort of actual relationship there; here’s how you can make relationship happen—how you can manufacture relationships.”

The absurdity of this should be glaringly obvious to everyone, and the fact that it’s not is more than just a little frightening to me.

I’m sure you have seen those political compass memes that attempt to display political ideology in terms of a two-dimensional grid, with economic left and right on the x axis and level of individual freedom, from authoritarian down to liberal, on the y axis. What results is four quadrants that can be labeled “authoritarian left,” “authoritarian right,” “liberal left,” and “liberal right.”

Although this seems on the surface like a reasonable way to sort out mainstream political affiliation, I can’t seem to find a place for me in this simplified political landscape. Most of my friends, and many of my casual acquaintances as well, identify as “progressive,” and fall somewhere in the left-most regions of the “liberal left” quadrant. But I don’t fit in this quadrant. Nor do I seem to fit in any of the others. As a result, participation in friendly political discussions has proven to be somewhat difficult at times.

Although I am somewhat sympathetic with the radical left, I am not progressive. Neither do I consider myself politically liberal in even a general sense. I am extremely anti-authoritarian, and no one would ever place me amongst the fascists occupying the authoritarian right, but I have occasionally been confused for libertarian, an occupant of the lower right quadrant, ideological territory that I find particularly repulsive.

It recently occurred to me that the reason I don’t seem to fit in (on the compass and in most mainstream political discussions) is that I don’t accept the underlying premises that the two dimensions in question are based upon.

Economically, I don’t think that the system should be collectivized. Neither do I think that it should be based on free market competition. As a primitivist, I don’t think there should even be a system to begin with. And when it comes to the question of how much freedom the individual should be allowed, as an anarchist, I consider “legitimate authority” to be an oxymoron, and that no one (either individual or collective) should have the power to impose restrictions on anyone else.

Further, the presence of each of these things, authority and a complex economic system, depends on the presence of the other in a way that makes thinking of them as separate dimensions problematic in the first place: without authority, there can be no sustained economic system; remove the system, and you eliminate the substrate through which authority operates.

Not really a great insight, I suppose. And none of this really matters, of course. It’s just a silly meme, after all. And its two-dimensionality is just a reflection of the simplistic flat-screen-friendly ways that social media has conditioned people think about themselves.   

I have long believed that humans are goal-directed problem-solving creatures by design. But now I am no longer so sure.

It is clear that most of our actions can be interpreted in terms of goal-pursuit, and can be seen as means to various ends. But I am no longer sure that this reflects something built into us by design, that to call humans either “goal-directed” or “problem-solving” captures something fundamental about our species’ character.

I am starting to suspect that “goal-directed” and “problem-solving” express more about the demands of life in modern civilization than about any core feature of human nature. I am starting to suspect that the tendency to see things as problems that beg for solutions reflects a purely civilized thoughtform.   

Uncivilized life is frequently framed in terms of central problems of survival: food and shelter and safety. But to what extent do the uncivilized themselves think of these things as problems to be solved? It seems to me that—Hobbesian delusions aside—finding food and shelter and keeping track of potential threats are all just part of living, no different than breathing or walking.

Yet, for the civilized, even breathing and walking become problems to be solved—with a Fitbit to keep track of your progress.    

Einstein said: “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” But what if the real problem is in the nature of civilized consciousness itself? If the real problem is a mind that has been conditioned to see only problems to be solved, then there is no conscious vantage point from which to craft a solution.  

We live in two worlds: the civilized and the wild. The first is a world designed to be occupied. It is a built place, a place of constructs, both physical and symbolic, a place of prefabricated meaning. It is a place of obligation and commitment. It is a place of unspoken expectations and explicit demands. It is a domesticated place. A place of docility and latent fear. A place of rules and regulations and restrictions and arbitrary consequences. A place of violence. It is a place without a present tense.

The second world is one that we never truly leave because there is no place we could possibly go that is outside or beyond. It is a place without walls or borders or boundaries. It is place without purpose or expectation or demand or commitment. It is a place where the only obligation is to breathe. It is a place of openness and spontaneity and fierce interconnection. It is a wild place. It is a place meant to be inhabited, a place of dwelling. It is a place where the present moment is allowed to express itself fully and on its own terms.

Only one of these places is real, of course. Only one of these worlds has ever had any legitimate claim on us. The other is little more than a lethal form of fairy dust.  

My offering of hope for the emerging new year: as the light begins to spread itself more generously day by day, may we find in ourselves the strength to refuse our forced occupation of the sterile civilized world, the equanimity to reject our coerced participation in the global death machine, and the courage to embrace and reinhabit our true wildness.     

The water’s surface texture, something there, a form that appears nowhere else exactly like that—sometimes in snowdrifts, something similar, but not the same, not fluid. I want to say “diamond” but that is just a cliché. It’s a texture of stacked and dynamic tessellations, each moving in a different way and at a different speed and in slightly—or completely—different directions.

The form that emerges from this, a transcendent configuration that doesn’t correspond to any one part of the water’s surface, any one depth. Not really there at all, perhaps. A reflection, but not a simple recoil of light—a physical reflection, an echo of something deeper, more penetrating than physical. Yet still only echo: ephemeral and transient.

There is a strange persistence despite perpetual movement and change, lagging just behind the wind, transformations in both size and shape, but all through the transition somehow retaining the same elemental form, the same pattern of stacked tessellations.

There is an important message in this. Not mere metaphor. I am convinced that if I can understand this phenomenon thoroughly, completely, not just the physics of it or the underlying Fourier patterning of the various waveforms (those are all meaningless abstractions), but understand it on its own existential terms, in terms of its own expressive being, I will know something of immense importance.   

Or remember something essential that I have forgotten.

This moment now is a phrase that captures the three indivisible facets of authentic experience. Three things, always these, never one without the others.

The popularity of “mindfulness” has put now in the spotlight. Life in consumer civilization renders now of its substance, squeezes it hollow, makes it into just another empty passing point along a continuous array of empty passing points, one thin line in a queue of identical thin lines etched into the face of a clock. The call for mindfulness is an appeal to re-embrace now in its infinite richness, in its astonishing density.

Or it should be that. More often it becomes just another palliative, just another form of self-absorption, just another strategy for distraction and disengagement.

The immersive experience of “flow” is in some sense the inverse of mindfulness. Flow is a word for what happens when you inhabit moment as it expresses itself; flow occurs when you allow your conscious experience to unfold along its own temporal creases. When entering a flow state, moment broadens its shadow, and its artificial borders disintegrate, allowing it to stretch outside of the sharp temporal structuring mandated by systematized routine. Flow is analgesic. When moment is temporarily dislodged from its mechanical moorings and allowed to drift with the currents and eddies of thought, there is an anodyne tranquility that follows re-immersion into the civilized world of coerced commitment and bureaucratic obligation.

Popular psychology has yet to acknowledge the remaining facet, however, failed entirely to notice the third face of the sacred trinity. There is no trendy quasi-sophisticated word for this. But this is indispensable, elemental. The content of now is entirely unique; this has never been before and will never be again. And it is not just any moment; it is this moment.

This is what the civilized are missing most of all.

Language creates symbolic worlds, worlds where things aren’t just things, worlds where non-things are given power over people, worlds where things of actual substance may or may not be recognized for what they really are.

Contrast this with the world of a nonlinguistic creature, say, a dog. Dogs are unable to penetrate beyond the symbolic surface. Dogs live in a world of signs and signals, a world of indications, a world of smells and sounds and sights and movement. There is nothing arbitrary about a sign; the relation it shares with the thing that it signifies is direct: a footprint and the foot that created it share an intimate and insoluble bond across time. The aggressive posture of another dog’s body is predictive precisely because it is a nonarbitrary external expression of an actual internal state.

Not all signs are equally reliable, of course. Some signs are vague indications while others are direct evidence. Still others can be purposely deceptive. Humans long ago evolved the ability to use signs as tools for social manipulation, for example. Facial expressions are perhaps the most obvious case of this. But even in the case of deceptive facial expressions, the signal is nonarbitrary, and linked directly to the manipulative intentions of the signaler and the predictable interpretations of the receiver. 

Symbols, in stark contrast to signs, are entirely arbitrary, and can have no bearing on reality at all except by transmutation through a mythical parallel universe, an ersatz universe, a stylized imitation of an imagined universe. Symbols are mediators that inevitably become barriers to the abundance of the concrete world. Symbols can operate only inside a symbolic world, and language frequently leaves humans trapped on the symbolic inside where myth becomes reality and reality languishes unattended in the shadows.

Humans swim in an insulated make-believe linguistic pond, and come to see the whole cosmos as saturated with its rarefied waters.

And then a strange alchemy occurs in which words, arbitrary symbols, become signs. The arbitrary becomes the determined. And, especially among the civilized, words are treated as if they held more signifying power than how they are being expressed. Written language pushes this to the extreme, where the how becomes completely invisible, and even the addition of symbols designed to convey the emotional context, emojis and the like, are unable to compensate for the massive amount of information that is lost in the process. The inside-out topsy-turvy way that civilization reframes reality has made the distinction between symbols and signs sloppy and difficult to untangle. As a result, the symbolic becomes the default, the arbitrary becomes primary. The problem with this should be obvious.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the symbol-enchanted civilized human mind, nothing is obvious.

If there is one word that describes the conceptual landscape of the modern, digital, smart-everything lifestyle, it’s the word sophistication, a word commonly used to describe things that are intricate and complex, or people who are highly cultured and in possession of worldly wisdom and refinement.

Sophistication has another, somewhat older meaning, however, relating to sophistry, which involves the use of ingenuous or fallacious argumentation meant to deceive or mislead. Both meanings seem to apply to the ways that modern, digital, smart-everything people understand themselves.

Life has become increasingly complex and our daily interactions with technology have become increasingly finely calibrated. And our access to information is such that the most obscure details about the farthest reaches of the world are just a screen-tap away. But our knowledge is also littered throughout with misinformation and intentionally-crafted falsehoods that serve the interests of people and entities that do not have our best interests at heart—to the point that almost everything we think we know about ourselves is either flat-out wrong, or so distorted that it barely resembles the realities of our situation.

Quite often civilization is spoken of as if it is an evolved feature of human nature, something that emerged as a natural and perhaps inevitable consequence of our technical and social proclivities as a species. One problem with this way of thinking is that no other species does anything at all like civilization. Not even close. Civilization is evolutionarily without precedent.

Evolution occurs through the alteration of a species’ existing characteristics. As a result, there is an observable continuity in physical features and behavioral tendencies across species. But civilization has no obvious precursor. It is something more than just a series of adaptations and alterations to the lifestyles that preceded it. It involves a whole new way of doing things. Although civilization emerged and developed—evolved—over time, the timeframe from its earliest inklings to its full-blown presence is far too short to fit within a strictly Darwinian natural selection framework. And, despite the irresistible temptation to anthropomorphize, there is zero continuity between many of the principal features of human civilization and anything that our closest primate relatives do. 

Some (for example, Raymond Tallis[i]) claim that this fact, the fact that civilization is unique in the animal world, provides incontrovertible evidence that humans are special as a species, really something quite extraordinary. These folks are right about the singular uniqueness of civilization, but they are wrong in treating civilization as if it is a delimiting attribute of our species, a defining feature of “humanity.” To do so ignores the continued presence of the uncivilized, and implies that existing indigenous and aboriginal people are not entirely human in the way that the civilized are. Or they are not quite human yet; they are unenlightened or uninformed or uneducated in the ways of civilization—or worse: they are less-evolved, subhuman. A quick glance at European colonial history (or what is happening today in the Amazon) shows how this way of thinking plays out.  

The appearance, diffusion, and expansion of civilization is not a natural phenomenon in the way that, say, the emergence of spoken language is. Or the evolution of symbolic thought. Or even the appearance, diffusion, and expansion of tool manufacture or the use of fire. All of these things existed in full flower for hundreds of thousands of years before the first invasive spores of civilization fell upon the river valleys of Northern Africa and Western Asia.

At its base, civilization is a technological phenomenon. It is a result of applying a technological frame to the human social world. Prior to (and outside of) civilization, all human relationships involved the organic interactions of autonomous and irreducibly unique beings. Since civilization appeared, relationships among people have become more and more mechanical and systematic, more systematized. Intimate organic interrelations have been replaced by superficial transactional contacts and engineered connections among standardized servomechanisms. Or, if you prefer a more contemporary vocabulary: humans in civilization are reduced to redundant nodal points of interface in an ever-expanding informational network. Irreducible and multidimensional uniqueness has been replaced with category membership. We are “citizens” and “consumers” and “employees” and “administrators” and “investors” and any of a number of additional hollow abstractions depending on the context. And it is precisely this artificial social structuring, this forced technologizing of human relations, that places civilization outside of the realm of the natural.  

The story of the emergence and proliferation of civilization does not fit neatly as a chapter in the ancient and ongoing saga of the natural history of planet Earth. The consequences of civilization, however, do belong there, and several volumes worth: civilization as a colossal mass extinction event, civilization as the trigger for ruinous climate disruption, civilization as ecological holocaust. The impact of civilization has been like a world-shattering asteroid strike in slow motion. A mere ten thousand years of civilization has rewritten the text of future natural history for tens of millions of years to come.

But this is not the story that most civilized humans tell to their children.   

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[i] See, for example, his 2016 book: Aping Mankind