Published in EXPLORE March/April 2015, Vol.11, No.2

Only One Mind: An Artist's Exploration of Consciousness

The aim of this article is to critique the contemporary scientific reduction of mind to brain and to explore the imaginal realm of consciousness. Through the author’s own practice as an engraver, and through the researches and discoveries of free-thinking scientists, philosophers and artists, this realm of the 'One Mind' is revealed to be timeless and universal.

I believe that the purpose of the universe is consciousness: to produce multiple foci and expressions for all creatures, who are in effect one creature, One Consciousness–a Monad, experiencing itself as self and itself as other–simultaneously, alternately, inextricably. –Richard Grossinger1

INTRODUCTION

Engraving—the process of sculpting copper plate, of driving a line through its surface with a steel burin—has always been for me an act that induces a sense of expanded awareness. It is a “technique of transcendence” during which “an inward relocation of the real” takes place “at the expense of… everyday consciousness.”2 It is a kind of “ecstasy” in the original sense of the word, “ekstasis,” the movement out of oneself into a larger self, into “Big Mind.” The experience of “ekstasis” is both in time (as if inside the physical movement of the burin through the copper plate) and also, paradoxically and simultaneously, a timeless activity, as if watching the act with a mind out of time.

Access is obtained to the limpid and pervasive realm of metaphor and imagination—which becomes potent as a living and lived reality or presence, ontologically dominant, a zone of tension and energy beyond words and symbols. Consciousness expands outwards, relaxing into a larger field of awareness co-existent with the physical, and which is energetically enhanced, so real as to be populated—“livelier than life.”3 Through the imagination, in its deepest and most dynamic sense, a vital metaphorical force bridges eternity with time, a fact of which William Blake was constantly aware. For him, Imagination was Eternity. Metaphor becomes a living force; it is “our means of effecting instantaneous fusion of two separated realms of experience into one illuminating, iconic, encapsulating image.”4 It is an experience that dissolves, in the act, the philosophical dilemma of mind and matter.

MIND THE GAP

Since Descartes’ separation of the mental and material worlds, philosophers have struggled to close the gap and reconcile the two domains. With the rise and dominance of neuroscience in contemporary culture, the trend has been to conflate mind and brain, seeing consciousness as a kind of residue, or froth, effervescing from the brain’s neuronal activity: “When mind seems visible within the brain, the space between person and organs flattens out—mind is what the brain does.”5 For some commentators, like sociologist Nikolas Rose, “we are inhabiting an emergent form of life,”5 and “… are increasingly coming to relate to ourselves as ‘somatic’ individuals, that is to say, as beings whose individuality is, in part at least, grounded within our fleshly, corporeal existence.”5

Rose5 elaborates a vision of the present and emerging future dominated by “the new psychiatric and pharmaceutical technologies for the government of soul.” Iconic images of the simulated brain from increasingly sophisticated neuroimaging technologies have become compelling ambassadors for the brain’s incorporation of mind. Informing us about our so-called identity, these images, claiming to explain the mind, convince us that the mind is the brain. We are “neurological selves” and these new selves are being progressively layered onto our former selves, whose psychic depth is being “flattened out.”

"The new style of thought in biological psychiatry not only establishes what counts as an explanation, it establishes what there is to explain. The deep psychological space that opened in the twentieth century has flattened out. In this new account of personhood, psychiatry no longer distinguishes between organic and functional disorders. It no longer concerns itself with the mind or psyche. Mind is simply what the brain does.5 (Emphasis added)

In this 'brave new world' where "...the new truths of ourselves arise, not from philosophy, it seems, but from research,"5 personhood is mapped directly onto the body and especially the brain, so that dysfunction, mental disorder, or any kind of mental pathology “is simply the behavioral consequence of an identifiable, and potentially correctable, error or anomaly in some of those elements now identified as aspects of that organic brain.”5 Psychopathology becomes an anomaly classified as a chemical disorder of the brain to be corrected by therapeutic intervention from pharmacology. It is this doctrine of molecular monotheism that now directs the psychiatric gaze to the virtual exclusion of all other approaches.

Rose sees this change in therapeutic outlook as “a shift in human ontology–in the kinds of persons we take ourselves to be. It entails a new way of seeing, judging, and acting upon human normality and abnormality. It enables us to be governed in new ways. And it enables us to govern ourselves differently.”5 Rose does not see this biological reductionism as a cause for concern or criticism; rather he views “our bodies becoming ourselves” as the grounds for a certain optimism: it is giving rise to a “somatic ethics,” in which individuals are becoming more responsible for themselves and able to manage their own affairs: "On the one hand, our vitality has been opened up as never before for economic explotation and extraction of biovalue, in  a new bioeconomics that alters our very conception of ourselves in the same moment that it enables us to intervene upon ourselves in new ways. On the other hand, our somatic, corporeal corporeal neurochemical individuality has be opened up to choice, prudence, and responsibility. to experimentation, to contestation, and to so to a politics of life itself."5

While this grounding of personhood in the physicality of corporeal existence is seen by many to be a positive development, the “flattening out” of the psyche and the biological reduction of personhood to molecules is more menacing, with implications for collective soul-loss and profit-driven corporate manipulation on an even more profound and global scale than at present, as the “new style of thought” spreads throughout contemporary culture. Oxford University’s Institute for the Future of the Mind, for example, makes a clear and unequivocal statement about how the “mind” is formed by brain activity:"The brain is the most dynamic, individual, and vulnerable part of the human body. Although we are born with almost all of the brain cells we will ever have, it is the growth of connections between neurons that accounts for the physical growth of the brain after birth. Importantly, these connections are highly determined by individual experience and change throughout life. This“plasticity” enables us to move from a view of the world through primary sensation to building our own interpretations in the light of previous experiences. It is this continuous personalisation of the brain, through individual experience and the development of belief systems, that forms the “mind.”6 (Emphasis added

Similarly, a walk through the Who am I? gallery of the Science Museum in the UK’s London borough of Kensington reveals the same “new style of thought” about human identity. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the gallery is full of pithy blandishments coaxing parents and children, and innocent others, gazing at prominent slogans and amusing interactive showcases, into believing their minds and identities arise from no more than the mechanical firing of their brain cells. Take, for example, Showcase 14: Who do you think you are? "The human brain is a thinking machine with 100 billion nerve cells and 100 trillion connections. This mysterious device creates memories, sparks moments of genius and makes sense of what you see, touch and hear." And Showcase 11: What do you think you are? "Three pounds of wrinkly, grey flesh...Scientists now know that our thoughts, feelings, memories and reason all emerge from the brain. People used to believe that their heart was the seat of their identity. Do you feel your brain is what makes you you? (Emphasis added)

The emergent utopia inhabited by our brain-based, neurochemical selves may even promise eternal life through genetic manipulation: "Advances in genetics and medical technologies are already saving, improving and lengthening lives. But where might this research eventually lead? Some creatures, such as jellyfish, appear never to age. By studying their genetic make-up, scientists might reveal how we could have not only healthy but potentially never-ending lives.7

Thousands of visitors to London’s Science Museum read this material, day in, day out, month after month. Yet this myopic molecular fantasy – especially the absurdity of extrapolating from seemingly ageless jellyfish to everlasting life in an unaging human body – goes unquestioned. Taken to an extreme, the vision becomes dangerous: scientists today believe they have the means to engage in “neurotechnological mind-reading.” The human psyche becomes irrelevant when technologies like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are used “to enter and read the contents of the human mind via its cerebral activities.” "The possibilities of neurotechnological mind-reading that we have today allow access to mental states without 1st person overt external behavior or speech. With the advancement of decoders of cerebral activity (and also of other non-cerebral markers of inner thought) it is very likely that in the near future we will see a rapid progression in the capacity to observe – without mediation of language – contents of the others’ mind.....we might be able to efficiently use a subject’s cerebral cortex for rapid object recognition, even when the subject is not aware of having seen the recognized object. This may be extended as a great promise to the domain of dreams, to observe in real time the content of a visual narrative during sleep."8

The ethical menace of this brave new world is plain to see. While the privacy and integrity of selfhood are clearly under threat from the application of so-called neurotechnological “mind-reading”, the promotion of this neurotechnology as a means of mapping ‘identity’ inevitably leads scientists into the moral maze of genetic modification and the molecular manipulation of what they believe to be a person’s essential (even if neurological) self. The pharmaceutical industry also has much to gain by eliminating the psyche – along with the psychotherapist – in order to treat mental problems directly as disorders of brain chemistry through the sale and use of their drugs.

'You're Nothing But a Pack of Neurons'

This brain idolatry and the brain’s appropriation of personhood has been vigorously criticised by Oxford philosopher, Peter Hacker, as a symptom of widespread conceptual confusion amongst the neuroscientific community at large, with leading researchers committing major category errors and, basically, talking nonsense: "On the current neuroscientist’s view, it’s the brain that thinks and reasons and calculates and believes and fears and hopes. In fact, it’s human beings who do all these things, not their brains and not their minds. I don’t think it makes any sense at all to talk about the brain engaging in psychological or mental operations.9 For Hacker, mind is a capacity not an entity, and it is a mistake to be “reifying the mind.”He follows Aristotle in seeing “the mind...as an array of powers or potentialities.” To do so would prevent us getting “enmeshed in insoluble problems of interaction. For it patently makes no sense to ask how one’s abilities to do the various things one can do interact with one’s brain.”10 This view is endorsed by the distinguished British biologist, Denis Noble, who sees ‘the self’ as an integrative construct or process rather than a neurological object. He, too, believes that ‘the self’ belongs to a different category or semantic domain than the scientific study of the brain: "At the level of neurons and parts of the brain, what we normally mean by self, that is you and me, is more like a process than an object. But when we start talking about the location of the self, we are talking about a person. Such talk belongs to a context in which it makes sense to refer to persons. It leads to semantic confusions to recast these as questions about locations in the brain:11 Both Noble and Hacker point out that neuroscientists can only discover correlations between neural states and consciousness, and it is a mistake to ascribe causation of our states of mind to the brain. The brain makes conscious thought possible, but it does not in itself think or feel anymore than it can go for a walk. As Bennett and Hacker point out, “We are human beings, and we do not live in our skulls but in our dwellings.”12

"We are human beings, and we do not live in our skulls but in our dwellings"

One of the most extreme formulations of reductionist materialism was expounded by Sir Francis Crick, Nobel prize-winner for his co-discovery of the structure of DNA. In his book, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search For The Soul, Crick outlined his view with this famous statement: "‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’ This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people today that it can truly be called astonishing."13 In a certain sense, the title of Crick’s book is misleading: his radical reductionism was not a 'hypothesis' at all, for it could be neither verified nor falsified; rather, it was a point of view, an ontological assumption that had become dogma. Nor is it “astonishing” in terms of novelty, for as Peter Hacker and his co-author, physiologist Max Bennett, point out in their magisterial critique, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, "it was already propounded in Epicurean atomist form in the first century BC by Lucretius in his great poem De Rerum Natura. In somewhat different forms, it was defended by Gassendi and Hobbes in the seventeenth century, and by La Mettrie, Diderot and d'Holbach in the eighteenth."14

Crick presumably felt that it was "astonishing" because it does not “come easily to believe that I am the detailed behaviour of a set of nerve cells.” But Bennett and Hackerare not astonished, and they simply draw attention to the basic assumptions of his position: "This conception appears to be a form of ontological reductionism, inasmuch as it holds that one kind of entity is, despite appearances to the contrary, actually no more than a structure of other kinds of entity. Side by side with the ontological reductionism, Crick also defends a form of explanatory reductionism: 'The scientific belief is that our minds – the behaviour of our brains – can be explained by the interactions of nerve cells (and other cells) and the molecules associated with them.'15 Bennett and Hacker illustrate how pervasive this view – that our actions and experience are the products of our brains – has become amongst the purveyors and consumers of both ‘hard’ and popular science; and they expose the articles of faith held by most scientists as being unscientific. “Such assertions as these – namely, that human beings are machines, or that behaviour of a human being is no more than the behaviour of their nerve cells, or that decisions are taken in and (apparently) by the brain – are not science but metaphysics.”14 (Emphasis added)

In neuroscience, there is an an unquestioned assumption that the results of research intothe activities of the brain can be translated into the language of human experience and behaviour, and can explain that behaviour. A new kind of animism prevails in which the brain “knows” or “wants” or “decides” or “thinks.” For Bennett and Hacker this is nonsense and they go to great lengths to show how the brain cannot be the subject of psychological attributes: “It is not the brain that is conscious or unconscious, but the person whose brain it is."14 They give a detailed example of how illogical this confused thinking about the brain and identity can be: "If I were, per impossible, an embodied brain, then I would have a body – just as the Cartesian embodied mind has a body. But I would not have a brain, since brains do not have brains."15

Bennett and Hacker’s exposure of the unscientific basis to the supposedly ‘hard scientific’ outlook in much contemporary neuroscience, along with its animistic ascription of human qualities and faculties to the brain and its parts, is withering. A long line of distinguished neuroscientists and some philosophers are exposed for their failure both to abandon the structural dualism inherited from Descartes, updated as “crypto-Cartesian” “brain/body dualism,” and also to establish, as a precondition for scientific investigation,“the question of sense.” Without general agreement amongst scientists “on what counts as a manifestation of consciousness” they will hardly be in a position to identify what they are investigating or to be able to communicate their results.

Similarly, in their discussion of vision, Bennett and Hacker agree that the discoveries of neuroscience have helped us to understand the neural substrate and processes which are the necessary precondition for the experience of seeing. Yet again, they emphasize that it is not the brain that has the experience but the person (or “animal” in their terminology): "The truly impressive discoveries in visual theory explain the neural processes requisite for an animal to see, not for a brain to see. And the explanations do not bridge or purport to bridge any gulf between brain processes and consciousness, for the existence of a gulf is an illusion."15

“It is not the brain that is conscious or unconscious, but the person whose brain it is.'

Beyond the Brain

While Bennet and Hacker see the gap between brain and consciousness as an illusion for linguistic and semantic reasons, and the neuroscientists see it as non-existent because they have conflated the two realms and squeezed out psyche or soul, Nobel prize-winning neurobiologist, George Wald, expresses humility in the face of the mystery of consciousness: "I have spent most of my scientific life studying the mechanism of vision…One can put together everything we have learned, and add to it everything that workers in this area hope to learn; and none of it comes anywhere near, or even aims in the direction of what it means to see...That is the problem of consciousness…Seeing—the event in consciousness—seems to lie in another universe, unapproachable by science.16

This sense of mystery is echoed more explicitly in American anthropologist Richard Grossinger’s speculation about “the template” for the miracle of biological growth: "Our basis is completely mysterious—don’t try to tell me that the impetus holding fetal phases together, gluing tissues into functional sheets, transmuting meridians into metabolic series and fractal organ fields, sage to each lineage and life form, is mere DNA flow, valence, and shear force twirling randomly under gravity and heat. There is a template, somewhere, beyond thermodynamics, an esoteric intelligence is mirroring, lasering two and three dimensions back and forth through one another until crystals cake into banks of nerves.

Doth a ghost dwell inside the living machine? Absolutely.17

George Wald is emphatic that the “somewhere” of this template, the source of “the event in consciousness” cannot be approached by science:"… science has no way to approach consciousness. It lies in another sphere from what we call physical reality, congruent in part with it, yet distinct from it, and projecting far beyond; beyond physics into metaphysics, intuition, emotions, imagination, dreams, perhaps much more. ...Science tells us nothing about consciousness, nor does it promise ever to do so....Metaphysics is the sky over the sea of physics, not only what we know in physics, but what we are likely ever to find out as physics.18

Wald’s “event in consciousness”—in his example, “seeing”—does lie in another universe, or “in another sphere” to the physical, or rather, perhaps more precisely, it lies in another dimension or realm, the transcendent or imaginal realm, “congruent in part with material reality,” through which that unique function of the human animal—“the production and condensation of ideas”—is expressed. For philosopher and psychonaut, Terence McKenna, “the very fact that a primate has left the ordinary pattern of primate activity and gone into the business of running stock markets and molecular biology labs and art museums indicates to me the nearby presence in another dimension of a kind of hyper organizing force, or what I call the transcendental object”19 (emphasis added). He observes, “There is below the ordinary surface of space and time, ruled by relativistic physics,… this strange domain of instantaneous connectivity of all matter, of all phenomena.” 20 This domain is also Grossinger’s “Big Mind” where there is a fusing of mind and matter: "The original healing modality is Big Mind—a configuration-space of phase transitions expressing the core gene–cell–cosmos function and generating a biosphere of coevolving hypercubes cascading epigenetically. Mere thought can be the most powerful medicine of all, for mindedness and cellularity are different octaves of the same original state, vibrations of the same wave form. Big Mind is always present as an activating force in organismic state change… Big Mind is as much a fact of nature as water or roches moutonnées, those immense glacial boulders on the tundra of little mind.21

REFERENCES

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2. Ryan R. The Strong Eye of Shamanism: A Journey into the Caves of Consciousness. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions; 1999;115.

3. Filedt Kok JP. Livelier than Life—The Master of the Amsterdam Cabinet or the Housebook Master, ca. 1470–1500. Amsterdam: Rijksprentenkabinet/Rijksmuseum; 1985.

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6. The Institute for the Future of the Mind, Oxford University, UK. Available at:〈http://www.futuremind.ox.ac.uk/about/mind.html.)

7.The Science Museum, London, UK. Available at〈http://www. sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum_old/accessibility/
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11. Noble D. The Music of Life: Biology Beyond the Genome. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2006;133–134.

12. Bennett MR, Hacker PMS. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Walden, MA: Blackwell Publishing; 2003;359.

13. Crick F. The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. New York, NY: Touchstone; 1995;3.

14. Bennett MR, Hacker PMS. Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. Walden, MA: Blackwell Publishing; 2003.

15. Bennett MR, Hacker PMS. Reply to Professor Dennett and Professor Searle. Recent Conference Papers. 2006. APA Eastern division. Delivered version 28.12.2006 in New York. Available at: 〈http://info.sjc.ox.ac.uk/scr/hacker/docs/Reply%20to%20Dennett%20and%20Searle.pdf.〉.

16. Wald G. Life and Mind in the Universe. In: Gandhi K, editor. The Evolution of Consciousness, New Delhi: National Publishing House; 1983;6–7.

17. Grossinger R. The Bardo of Waking Life. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books; 2008;99.

18. Wald G. Life and Mind in the Universe. New Delhi: National Publishing House; 1983;10–11.

19. McKenna T. Opening the Doors of Creativity. Podcast Port Hueneme, CA: 1990. Available at: 〈http://www.matrixmasters. net/salon/?p=152.〉. Accessed June 6, 2014.

20. McKenna, T. Appreciating Imagination. Podcast. Esalen, Big Sur, CA: 1997. Available at: 〈http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?

p=244.〉. Accessed June 6, 2014.

21. Grossinger R. The Bardo of Waking Life. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books; 2008;187–188.

22. Abram D. Becoming Animal—An Earthly Cosmology. New York, NY: Pantheon Books; 2010.