For
years, I have argued both here and elsewhere that our notions of self,
identity, and consciousness are misguided. We typically think of them as
nouns, as objects we can study and measure. I believe, however, based
on my experience as a Buddhist and as a student of neuroscience, that
who we are is not a noun, not an object.
From the Buddhist
Abhidharma:
Here (in the the Dhammasangani),
the human mind, so evanescent and elusive, has for the first time been
subjected to a comprehensive, thorough and unprejudiced scrutiny, which
definitely disposes of the notion that any kind of static unity or
underlying substance can be traced in mind.
Here is more on the Abhidharma from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
The mature
Abhidharma thus assimilates the analysis of
phenomena-in-time-as-constituted-by-consciousness with a highly complex
description of the consciousness process, dissolving the causal
relations between ordered successions of consciousness moments into the
activity of perception.
We are verbs, we are process.
It's slightly humorous that it has taken the West almost 2,500 years to
catch up with these ancient ideas, but even now this is still a fringe
perspective in the neuroscience community.
Last year Virginia Hughes'
Only Human blog covered a couple of then-new research findings about consciousness, and concludes that "
consciousness, too, is a process — a very slippery one."
Allan Combs has written about
Consciousness as a Self-Organizing Process (An Ecological Perspective). In that paper, he offers this definition of consciousness, which is one of the best I have seen anywhere:
Consciousness is perhaps best understood from an ecological perspective in which the
ongoing events that structure it are seen as a rich interacting complex of informing
cognitive, perceptual, and emotional information subsystems analogous to the interactive
energy driven metabolism of a living cell. The result is an organic, self-generating, or autopoietic,
system constantly in the act of creating itself.
YES!
Consciousness is constantly in the act of creating itself. But we are
not aware of this process happening unless we have spent some
considerable time in meditation watching the mind. So why is this?
Again, Combs:
Informal introspection reveals the overall fabric of conscious experience at each
moment to be constructed of a variety of undergirding psychological processes such as
memory, perception, and emotion (e.g., James 1890/1981; Combs, 1993b; Combs, 1995b). This
idea is consistent with Tart's (1975, 1985) view that states of consciousness,
including dream and non-dream sleep, various drug-induced and ecstatic states, as well as
ordinary waking consciousness, are formed of unique patterns of psychological functions,
or processes, that fit comfortably together to make something like a gestalt. We
may suspect that this comfortable gestalt represents an energy minimum from the brain's
point of view.
Anyway, all of this is simply food for thought - as is the article below.
Perhaps
if we did not see our self as fixed and unchanging, we might more
easily change the dysfunctional patterns that disrupt our lives.
by David Shenk
December 23, 2013
We
study savants - you know, Rainman and people like that - and we think
there’s obviously evidence of innate gifts because these guys are
obviously born with different sorts of brains. They’re born with these
gifts that enable them to remember every calendar date going back to the
year 1200 or whatever.
When
you actually look at what is going on yes, these people are born with
birth defects if that is what you want to call them. Their brains are
certainly wired differently. There is no question about that, but it
turns out that the actual skills that they acquire then come after that
and that we can actually manipulate our own brains.
The
word is plasticity. Everyone has heard the term plasticity. There is a
difference in quantity between what these savants are born with and
what we can do with our own brains. There isn’t really a qualitative
difference. We can alter our own brains but we don’t actually develop
the skills to do what the guy in Rainman did or these other amazing
savants do. Those differences are already in place. It’s the process of
developing these skills, not just being born with the skill or the gift.
I'm
trying to help people understand that the old notion of innate, the old
notion of giftedness, the notion that we are born with a certain
quantity of intelligence or a quantity of talent really isn’t there.
We’re all born with differences, no question about that. We have
genetic differences, but how those genetic differences actually lead to
differences in traits - that’s a dynamic process that we are all very
much involved with on the family level, as parents, as kids ourselves,
culturally, in terms of nutrition and the environment. Everything we do
and everything we are is an ongoing interactive process, which affects
how those genes are then subsequently going to be turned into the traits
that work for us and against us.
In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think's studio.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock
by David Shenk
