Psyche as a Dynamical System

In my last post I presented a physical interpretation of the concept of spirit, making use of the idea of nonlinear dynamical systems and essentially equating the emergent behavior of a (sub)system with a personality (egregore), a practical implication being that one could interact with such a personality if one knew how. A more detailed account would equate a personality or aspect of spirit with an attractor of the system, that is (roughly speaking) a set of states towards which the system evolves and stays.

One could also apply this approach to the concept of psyche, considering the personality (or personalities) of an individual human being, since the human organism is nothing if not (at least) a complex dynamical system. In fact, Chris King makes this suggestion in great detail, describing a possible physical basis for consciousness. In many ways this article is one that I would have liked to author, but with King's breadth and depth of knowledge he makes a far more competent case than I could.

To be clear about my position on positivist/reductionist materialism: I am not saying that human beings are simply meaningless bits of dust (a relatively common position in 21st Century and a fundamental subtext of much current culture, as I remark in my previous post). In fact, I take somewhat the opposite viewpoint: everything is conscious and meaningful. King obliquely hints at this perspective by citing a work by David Chalmers

Although a remarkable number of phenomena have turned out to be explicable wholly in terms of entities simpler than themselves, this is not universal. In physics, it occasionally happens that an entity has to be taken as fundamental. Fundamental entities are not explained in terms of anything simpler. Instead, one takes them as basic, and gives a theory of how they relate to everything else in the world. For example, in the nineteenth century it turned out that electromagnetic processes could not be explained in terms of the wholly mechanical processes that previous physical theories appealed to, so Maxwell and others introduced electromagnetic charge and electromagnetic forces as new fundamental components of a physical theory. To explain electromagnetism, the ontology of physics had to be expanded. New basic properties and basic laws were needed to give a satisfactory account of the phenomena.

Other features that physical theory takes as fundamental include mass and space-time. No attempt is made to explain these features in terms of anything simpler. But this does not rule out the possibility of a theory of mass or of space-time. There is an intricate theory of how these features interrelate, and of the basic laws they enter into. These basic principles are used to explain many familiar phenomena concerning mass, space, and time at a higher level.

I suggest that a theory of consciousness should take experience as fundamental. We know that a theory of consciousness requires the addition of something fundamental to our ontology, as everything in physical theory is compatible with the absence of consciousness. We might add some entirely new nonphysical feature, from which experience can be derived, but it is hard to see what such a feature would be like. More likely, we will take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time. If we take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of constructing a theory of experience.

Stephen Lehar makes the point more explicitly:

If we accept the materialist view that mind is a physical process taking place in the physical mechanism of the brain, and since we know that mind is conscious, then that already is direct and incontrovertible evidence that a physical process taking place in a physical mechanism can under certain conditions be conscious. Now it it true that the brain is a very special kind of mechanism. But what makes the brain so special is not its substance, for it is made of the ordinary substance of matter and energy. What sets the brain apart from normal matter is its complex organization. The most likely explanation therefore is that what makes our consciousness special is not its substance, but its complex organization. The fundamental “stuff” of which our consciousness is composed, i.e. the basic qualia of color and pain, sadness and joy, are apparently common with the qualia of children, as far back as I can remember, although I also remember a less complex organization of my experiences as a child. It is also likely that animals have some kind of conscious qualia on logical grounds, because the information of their perceptual experience cannot exist without some kind of carrier to express that information in the physical brain. Whether the subjective qualia of different species, or even different individuals of our own species, are necessarily the same as ours experientially, is a question that is difficult or maybe impossible in principle to answer definitively. But the simplest, most parsimonious explanation is that our own conscious qualia evolved from those of our animal ancestors, and differ from those earlier forms more in its level of complex organization rather than in its fundamental nature.

The natural reluctance that we all feel to extending consciousness to our animal ancestors, and even more so to plants, or to inanimate matter, is a stubborn legacy of our anthropocentric past. But the history of scientific discovery has been characterized by a regular progression of anthrodecentralization, demoting humans from the central position in the universe under the personal supervision of God, to lost creatures on the surface of a tiny blip of matter orbiting a very unremarkable star, among countless billions of stars in an unremarkable galaxy amongst countless billions of other galaxies as far as the telescopic eye can see. Modern biology has now discovered that there is no vital force in living things, but only a complex organization of the ordinary matter of the universe, following the ordinary laws of that universe. There is no reason on earth why consciousness should not also be considered to be a manifestation of the ordinary matter of the universe following the ordinary laws of that universe, although expressed in a complex organization in the case of the human brain. A claim to the contrary would necessarily fall under the category of an extraordinary claim, which, as Carl Sagan pointed out, would require extraordinary evidence for it to be accepted by reasonable men.

Nevertheless, I believe it is valuable to model consciousness from a physical perspective, both because it removes the "woo-woo" factor from discussions about consciousness, and because it actually clarifies certain points, for example the value of meditation. Let me explain further.

If you are sufficient self-aware of your own mental processes (either by formal meditation or simply by being an astute observer) you will eventually come to the realization that you are not one personality. There are in fact multiple yous inhabiting the same body, and each becomes active under different circumstances and stimuli. This phenomenon is a more complex version of multistability, where a system alternates between multiple semi-stable states (or, informally, partial attractors). A characteristic of a psychologically healthy individual is an ability to move flexibly among multiple semi-stable states under appropriate stimuli, so multistability of personality is in fact normal and necessary. The critical issue ultimately boils down to the topology of the attractor set.

For example, certain pathologies can arise. The schizophrenic will have a highly chaotic consciousness, with little apparent organization or system stability. Interestingly, the dissociative identity disorder (which is often incorrectly associated with schizophrenia) apparently involves the opposite problem, in that consciousness is fragmented into multiple states that are rigidly isolated. Mood disorders and less severe cognitive disorders have a more normal attractor topology, but they might be characterized by having too few semi-stable states, with consequent maladaption to environmental conditions (e.g. obsessive-compulsive disorders and clinical depression), or too numerous semi-stable states with insufficient isolation between them (e.g. bipolar disorders).

If you happen to be a garden-variety neurotic of the type that is common in Western civilization, i.e. that your consciousness follows a dynamical system that is reasonably normal in terms of attractor topology, then you might still find it beneficial to have more control points in your consciousness, with checks on the cascade from one semi-stable point to another. That is, you may wish to have more control over the transitions between your individual personalities, (assuming of course that you have such a you), having more flexible responses to environmental stimuli or fewer tendencies to react maladaptively to uncomfortable or threatening situations. You may even wish to spawn new semi-stable states that offer perspectives that are distinct from existing ones. In short, you may seek to achieve a "meta" personality that adaptively integrates all existing personalities.

One way to do this is to build a new personality that is trained to monitor other internal states. This is essentially what one learns to do in some forms of meditation: observe the mind and its workings. By collecting data on subsystems, a portion of your mind is trained to maintain a coherent ("still") observational state.

Buddhists will suggest that the aim of meditation is to achieve a state of emptiness or apprehend the "ground-of-being". I think it bears mentioning that the "void" of the physical universe is somewhat less than fully empty, as Chris King points out:

The theories describing force fields such as electromagnetism through the interaction of wave-particles are the most succinct theories ever invented by the human mind. Richard Feynman and others discovered the field is generated by uncertainty itself through particles propagated by a rule based on wave spreading. These particles are called virtual because they have no net positive energy and appear and disappear entirely within the window of quantum uncertainty, so we never see them except as expressed in the force itself. This seething tumult of virtual particles exactly produces the familiar effects of the electromagnetic field and other fields as well... Even in the vacuum, where we think there is nothing at all, there is actually a sea of all possible particles being created and destroyed by the rules of uncertainty.

Repeating Chalmer's proposition, that "a theory of consciousness should take experience as fundamental", it seems that the void is merely raw experience itself, and that the emptiness towards which meditation strives is a kind of root or unitary collective consciousness.

It's hard to know what Chalmers, King, or Lehar might think of equating their concept of fundamental experience with a super-collective consciousness or anything like a deity. Indeed, Buddhists themselves would caution against over-interpreting the ground-of-being or imputing features that are anything like our own normal human consciousness. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to talk about raw undifferentiated consciousness (whatever features it has) as a fundamental aspect of reality. The practical significance is that the state-coherence developed by meditation practice approximates a more direct and fundamental form of experience, in a physically interpretable manner. In addition, this state-coherence can stabilize a maladaptive system by altering the topology of the attractor space.

In conclusion, I believe that meditation is a physical process that produces empirically verifiable alterations in consciousness that have practical implications in the normal life of a human. In addition, there is a there there: consciousness is something that is real, and worthy of a dignity and sophistication that it is afforded less and less this century.