Fable

From the shiver of fear to the vastness of awe:
Emotion creates consciousness

The panoramic sweep widens much further because consciousness is a combinatorial system. It creates sentences from sentences. It can make ephemeral-objects out of sentences, sentences of sentences, and stories. It can look at ▲▼▲ as a system to be examined. It can witness.

Botany Of Desire by Michael Pollan¹ is a brilliant book. He wonders if are we really agents of our destiny or if we just think so:

A group of angiosperms [flowering plants] refined their basic put-the-animals-to-work strategy to take advantage of one particular animal that had evolved not only to move freely around the earth, but to think and trade complicated thoughts. These plants hit on a remarkably clever strategy: getting us to move and think for them. Now came edible grasses (such as wheat and corn) that incited humans to cut down vast forests to make more room for them; flowers whose beauty would transfix whole cultures; plants so compelling and useful and tasty they would inspire human beings to seed, transport, extol, and even write books about them. This is one of those books..

Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into active subjects and passive objects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject has an object, every object a subject. That’s why it makes just as much sense to think of agriculture as something the grasses did to people as a way to conquer the trees.

To summarize Pollan - the grass made me do it. He saw the truth behind a popular college excuse.

Neuroscience² is studying the first person perspective, our role as the subject of our experience in the world. Pollan understands neuroscience: more than we care to recognize, we are the object and not the subject. The interplay of two distinct objects - a person and his stuff - creates mental reality.

Think of a simple organism swimming along, entering a patch of acidic water. It reacts and swims away. For a patch of food-rich water, it swims in and enjoys the bounty. The condition of the water changed the action of the organism. It’s a one sentence story. Organism-as-it-was, object, organism-as-it-is: the primal first sentence

The better the quality of reaction, the greater its survival benefit. Evolution kicks in. Natural selection organizes simple reflexes into elaborate collections of well-coordinated reflexes.

Such collections are called emotions. Emotions are the reflexes that change the organism in primal first sentence. Creatures emote for the sake of their lives.

As the reactions to challenges and opportunities become more sophisticated, organisms grow into billion-celled monstrosities with very sophisticated mental lives. Like kids growing up to become emotional teenagers.

From the very moment of life, the primal first sentence describes an organism in the world. Increasingly elaborate neuronal structures react with more elaborate, adaptive reactions. At the high end of evolution, the one sentence story becomes a building block for mental life and consciousness.

A big, ugly bug flies straight at your head. You duck, flail your arms, and if you’re like a certain friend, scream, “It was a big bug!”

Here’s what happened. Your body was hanging out. A bug showed up and attacked. You drove the bug away. In other words, the bug changed your body. You acted out an emotion.

To represent the primal first sentence,

1. ▲ is the body-object,

2. ▼ is the ephemeral-object, and is considered emotionally significant if it provoked reflexive body-change,

3. ▲¹▼¹▲² is the sentence for the event when the ephemeral-object changes the body object, the familiar body-as-it-was, object, body-as-it-is.

4. ▲²-▲¹ or d▲ is body-change, an emotion, and

5. ▲▼▲ is a simplified form of ▲¹▼¹▲².

Both ▲ and ▼ have physical qualities and those qualities become neural patterns within the brain, or more simply, “maps.” An emotional response happens when the brain pairs the neural patterns of ▲ and ▼. As the brain becomes more sophisticated, these neural events give rise to mental experience and even consciousness.

In other words, consciousness arises from the objects in our lives. If you look again at the sentence ▲▼▲, you see two objects, the body-object and the ephemeral-object which is simply apart from the body. Pollan would wish us this perspective.

Bugs are objects, but so are feelings and thoughts. Ephemeral-objects can be mental in nature. The body is the body-proper.

We notice ephemeral-objects and live in, hardly aware of, the body-object. In a sense, ephemeral-objects are us.

No wonder we have over-identification problems: I am my car, my job, my family, my horrible story about a painful experience. In these cases, perhaps the emotion-significance of an object was so great, it triggered much of the recent history of mental experience. Such history would have a significant autobiographical quality.

Another feature of the sentence ▲▼▲: Because my body changed, there is consequence to the object ▼, from the perspective of ▲. In this example, the consequence would read “I dodged the bug.” A more primitive version might read “I squashed bug.”

These consequence-sentences are like the sentences we commonly use for thinking and verbalizing. We are the subject, the primal first person. Consequence-sentences state: I have agency against object.

Remember the words “accept the things I cannot change” from the serenity prayer? Just as first-person perspective fuels over-identification, it also enlarges our sense of agency, the consequence of consequence-sentences. The problems caused by the feeling of too much agency are so large, we pray for God’s grace.

For example, a short story.

1. The first primal sentence: body, tiger, staring-body. Consequence-sentence: “I noticed a tiger.”³

2. The second primal sentence: alert-body, crouching-tiger, proud-body. Consequence-sentence: “I stared down the tiger.”

3. The third primal sentence: proud-body, attacking-tiger, mauled-body. Consequence sentence: “I greeted God.” This specific behavior was not particularly adaptive.

A surviving body-object might say, “The damn tiger attacked me. So I ran.” This sentence acknowledges the agency of the tiger (tiger-attacked). Still, there is an implied consequence-sentence: “I fled tiger.”

Since the body is oriented to objects, so much of our conscious awareness is directed at non-body objects. That’s what we notice. Like fish not noticing water, we do not notice much about body-objects unless something is amiss. We are only aware of 2% of our mental function and most mention function is about the body-object.

Some key points from this discussion of the primal first sentence, ▲▼▲:

1. The sentence contains two objects, the body-object ▲, and the ephemeral-object ▼. Recall the opening quote.

2. The brain knows both objects through neural patterns or more descriptively, first-order maps.

3. The primal sentence is the consequence of automatic behavior provoked by the two first-order maps, an emotional response,⁴

4. The continuous presence of ephemeral-objects gives rise to mental experience and its elaborate form, consciousness.

5. Because the body-object is an object in every primal sentence, the intrinsic perspective of mental experience is in the form of first-person consequence sentences.

6. The first person perspective is not the only available perspective on ▲▼▲. Both ▲ and ▼ can be seen as objects.

Now, I will step off the ledge hoping for Roadrunner’s grace rather than Coyote’s peril. I’m taking Antonio Damasio and his Somatic Marker Hypothesis with me:⁵

Extended consciousness is everything core consciousness is, only bigger and better, and it does nothing but grow across evolution and across a lifetime of experience in each individual.. The range of knowledge that extended consciousness now allows you to access encompasses a large panorama. The self from which that large landscape is viewed is a robust concept in the true sense of the word. It is an autobiographical self.

I stretch the panorama wide and examine the examination of ▲▼▲. The history of society shows how we have come to care for and nurture the autobiographical self.

Many functions of the brain are organized into the body-object domain - ▲, and the ephemeral-object domain - ▼. Studies, conclusions and theories from neuroscience and psychology are grouped into concerns about body-objects or concerns about non-body-objects.

The study of body-objects is directed in part to the study of emotions, innate defenses, implicit or somatic memory, and so on.

The study of ephemeral-objects is directed in part to the study of language and stories, explicit or procedural memory, and mental experience evoked by a continuous stream of ephemeral-objects. In other words, it’s the study of the self.

The combination of knowledge from these domains of study underlies the nurturing arts. Some arts emphasize body-object wisdom. Some arts emphasize wisdom about ephemeral-objects (feelings, affects, thoughts, defenses, and so on). Perhaps different personal issues would benefit from different therapies and interventions.

Body-based⁶ nurture arts include as sensorimotor psychotherapy, physical therapy, yoga, etc. The body reveals a tremendous about a person. Change the body, change the person.

Psychology and many other ephemeral-object arts focus on our feelings, affects, thoughts, defenses, and so - what it is to be us. So much - the experience of life, arises from so little - ephemera. Change the stories, change the person.

Good talk is big business. Therapy, counseling, life coaching, and other similar services provide tremendous resources to clients. Talking to someone who knows how to listens generates a tremendous amount of self-regulation. It just feels good to be heard.

The panoramic sweep widens much further because consciousness is a combinatorial system. It creates sentences from sentences. It can make ephemeral-objects out of sentences, sentences of sentences, and stories. It can look at ▲▼▲ as a system to be examined.

It can witness.

From a microscopic view of ▲▼▲, witnessing shifts the focus to the body and the slivers of emotion that course through it moment after moment. This perspective, in a narrow sense, leads to mindfulness and personal attunement.

In a panoramic sense, when we examine the system of experience, we discover vastness. This perspective bears the sweep of all historic spiritual traditions.

Good talk is big business. God talk is huge. Spending on religion dwarfs all spending on therapy, however broadly defined.

We can also witness the system of experience without the presence of an ephemeral-object, a perspective that might describe meditation and other contemplative traditions. This witness practice would touch on the idea of egolessness, and on transcending consciousness. In a way, it is a practice of turning off consciousness.

To me, it is amazing that

1. The body-object, ▲, suggests a gateway to the vast history of body-wisdom,

2. The ephemeral-object, ▼, suggests a gateway to the psyche, the self and the traditions of self-realization, and

3. The witness-perspective of ▲▼▲ suggests a gateway to mindfulness, spirituality and contemplative traditions.

▲▼▲ is what we want to understand.