Saturday, February 28, 2015

Realizing Awakened Consciousness: Interviews with Buddhist Teachers and a New Perspective on the Mind is scheduled for publication June 9. For information see the Columbia University Press page :
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/realizing-awakened-consciousness/9780231170758

Also on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Realizing-Awakened-Consciousness-Interviews-Perspective/dp/0231170750/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1422929844&sr=1-1&keywords=richard+boyle

Here is an outline compressing the book and work since it was written into seven pages. This outline guides a journal article I'm presently writing.


OUTLINE OF THE AWAKENING PROJECT
Richard Boyle, February 2015
Introduction.
Buddhism and cognitive science share an assumption that the content and structure of awareness at any moment is heavily influenced by conceptual systems stored in our minds.  Buddhism says that this is the cause of delusion, from which it is possible to awaken. Cognitive science documents many ways in which preexisting ideas alter perception, and philosophy recommends examining the ideas carefully to discover and correct faults. At the heart of both, therefore, is the conclusion that most people, most of the time, are operating with an awareness that is filtered through and to some degree distorted relative to the way their perceptual systems would otherwise present the moment.  
That is a powerful statement, with strong implications. Buddhism, especially, goes beyond the specific examples of distortion that science has documented to claim that the world of ideas that we carry around in our minds encloses us in a kind of bubble. This bubble, or veil, or carapace, separates us from direct experience of the perceptual world. Some people become tantalized by that notion and undertake a path recommended for dissolving the bubble, for “awakening.” The model outlined here tries to extend the scope of cognitive science to account for both ordinary and awakened awareness.
A. The Evolution of Culture, Social Reality, and Reification (Chapter 14). Since concepts have been identified as the source of distorted awareness, the first step must be to look at where ideas come from and what kinds of conceptual systems they form.
1. In evolutionary terms, concepts were not possible until some early members of the Homo genus began inventing language. This required a social group, and it is hard to imagine a group with even a simple protolanguage not sharing information and passing it on to their children. Presumably, then, the construction of culture proceeded parallel with the development of language, and gave major advantages to groups doing it.
2. I define social reality as the version of a culture that is internalized by an individual member. Heterogeneous, rapidly changing societies like ours include an enormous variety of sub-cultures; defining social reality in terms of individuals acknowledges this diversity. One’s social reality therefore incorporates ideas, values, beliefs, attitudes, habits, etc. from all the social groups to which one belongs or has belonged.
3. Thinking of social reality in terms of individuals is also convenient for defining reification. A person’s social reality is reified when it becomes, in that person’s mind, the taken-for-granted, unquestioned but authoritative way of doing things and making sense of life. When it has achieved this ontological status, social reality is layered with a texture of feelings and emotions. These are what Buddhism calls “attachments” – you can’t do something or think something without being affected by the associations within which it is embedded.
4. Early human groups whose culture was reinforced through reification must have enjoyed greater survival success than groups with a more objective, detached relation to their culture, due to stronger motivation to conform to group norms and sacrifice for group values. The question then becomes, how did this evolutionary bias toward reification express itself? Presumably a predisposition to reify is built into us biologically, just as a strong ability and predisposition to acquire language is part of our DNA. Most likely, neurological structures ensuring that children reify the culture that their parents present to them were built onto feelings and emotions already present in animals – but were elaborated on these themes to fit all the new possibilities created when social reality was added onto the perceptual reality of animals.
5. We take culture so for granted that we seldom look at it closely – it is in many ways the 800 pound gorilla in the living room that we tiptoe around and pretend does not exist. And when we do think of culture, we accept reification as an inseparable part of it. It is in that context that awakening presents its most dramatic assertion – reification is not necessary, we can live free of it. We can have culture, and use ideas, without reifying them. Social reality can be de-reified. Somehow, the neurological structures involved in reification include a switching capacity, which is characteristic of association networks like the Default Mode Network (DMN).
Therefore: Humans are born with a strong predisposition to acquire and reify social reality, a predisposition that is probably is the result of systems built into the brain at a fairly late evolutionary stage. Because humans reify social reality at the same time that they are learning it, unless this predisposition is corrected we go through life thinking that the awareness we experience day after day is real.
Implication: Many, probably most, of the world’s problems are and always have been caused by the human need to maintain, support, and protect a reified social reality. (chapter 16). The terrible mistake of evolution, after providing us with the capacity to develop culture, was to saddle us with such a strong predisposition to reify that culture. The remarkable assertion of awakening is that social reality, and culture, can be de-reified.
B. Ordinary Awareness (chapter 17). A review of the main factors involved in generating, at each moment, the subjective experience of ordinary awareness. (While there is no “standard model” of consciousness, there is some consensus about important parts. The model proposed here tries to express that consensus in summary form.)
1. Perception: bottom-up perceptual processing analyzes incoming sensory stimuli while top-down processing tries to fit this with information stored in memory. When top-down processing finds a match (which may be only approximate, even wrong) we have object-recognition, perhaps also situation- and event-recognition.
2. Conceptual processing involves words and other symbols.
a. After an object, situation, or event has been recognized, a word or phrase that describes it is activated in unconscious processing.
b. Sounds or written patterns are recognized as words (and corresponding percepts are activated).
c. Inner speech may be generated in conscious awareness whenever words are active in unconscious processing.
3. Any conceptual activity activates relevant portions of the person’s social reality.
a. Social reality is structured in terms of scripts, plans, and stories which specify approved means, desired ends, and appropriate emotions. These schema tell us how we should live and provide explanations and meaning for life as it unfolds.
b. The ordinary self is the way we experience, and have experienced, living in social reality.
c. Cultures provide models for how self-awareness should be structured. In modern western societies the self-model assumes a protagonist with free will who makes (or should make) conscious decisions and assumes (or should assume) responsibility for their outcomes.    
4. If a perceptual version of what is going on in the moment differs from the conceptual account of what should be going on that social reality provides, then one or both is modified. The dynamic for resolving the dissonance is to move toward consistency by modifying one or both versions. Note that this consists of rearranging the contents of ordinary awareness, not changing its structure.
Implication: All known human societies have cultures, and their members therefore need to maintain some degree of consistency between their culture and the facts their lives are presenting them with. In times of change or trauma, or because the ideas making up the culture are being questioned, or because group ties are weakening (or all three together), people may experience dukkha, or ontological insecurity. This can lead to social and individual disintegration, to fanatical reassertion of core beliefs (especially religious), to innovative changes in what one accepts as social reality, or to increased interest in meditation and awakening. Chapter 16 discusses the Gautama-Giddens theory of dukkha.  
5. It is important to distinguish between conscious and unconscious awareness. Unconscious awareness is a hypothetical construct which merely says that we can act appropriately in a situation even though we are not consciously aware of it (e.g., “blindsight” demonstrates that action can proceed directly from unconscious visual processing).
6. Unconscious processing also controls three activities that we can both engage in and observe ourselves doing in conscious awareness: action, attention, and inner speech.
a. Action: research stemming from Libet suggests that action slightly precedes its appearance in conscious awareness. We then perceive ourselves acting but modify the perception to conform with the stipulation of our self-model that conscious awareness precedes action. Note, however, that unconscious processing can also prevent or “pause” an action, put it on hold pending further processing.
b. Attention: We are subjectively aware that attention can vary from focused to diffuse and from attentive to inattentive. Attention is involved in the entire process of generating awareness, from focusing the lens of the eye on the retina to generating the final version in conscious awareness.
c. Inner speech is the expression in conscious awareness of what we call “thinking.” Kahneman distinguishes “fast” and “slow” thinking. Slow thinking is controlled by attention in such a way that the inner speech expressing the thought appears in conscious awareness but action is inhibited. Unconscious processing then responds to the awareness as it would a new event, by considering its implications and generating a new “thought” as inner speech. Slow thinking continues until a “decision” is reached and action released. In fast thinking the action occurs more or less simultaneously with the initial inner speech. I add a third type, “wandering thinking,” to refer to inner conversations taking place but with no attentional control over how one segment of inner speech leads to another.
Therefore: In ordinary awareness perception may be modified by conceptual systems, in a way that attempts to negotiate consistency between the perceptual image and, especially, the systems representing self and social reality. But inputs may also be initiated by conceptual systems as inner speech, and can be experienced subjectively as one of three forms of thinking. The self-model prevalent in our society emphasizes conscious awareness and downplays or ignores the roles of social reality and unconscious processing.
C. Preparation for awakening (Chapter 12). Can we account for awakening by varying some of the properties of the model just proposed for ordinary consciousness? The teachers interviewed in the book told about special practices and training they followed on their paths. These are discussed in three categories, along with their implications:
1. Practices designed to quiet the mind. These include many forms of seated meditation, techniques for maintaining mindful awareness of the perceptual moment whether sitting or active, and other strategies for developing attentional control. Engaging in these practices has causal consequences:
a. The experience of meditators is that with time and some discipline there is a reduction in the amount of uncontrolled inner speech (wandering thinking). Gradually the amount of attentional effort required diminishes as the mind seems to learn and enjoy settling into silence.
b. This silence implies that the Default Mode Network (DMN) in the brain can be turned off through attentional control. In ordinary consciousness, when one is actively engaged in physical or mental activity the parts of the brain comprising the DMN are quiet, but when one is not doing anything they become intensely active and inner speech commences. As noted, inner speech may take the form of slow thinking, but wandering thinking is also likely. During meditation, however, the DMN remains inactive and inner speech is minimal. Therefore the DMN appears to be switched on when our level of attentiveness is low, but switched off during activities requiring attention – including mindfulness during sitting meditation or other activities that would normally encourage wandering thinking.
c. Another implication of quieting the mind is that with less conceptual processing going on, perceptual information can play a larger role in generating awareness. As a result,  perceptual experience may seem clearer, brighter, and more vivid.
2. Letting go of attachments and de-reifying social reality:
a. Practices intended to encourage letting go of attachments to ideas, desires, habits, and emotions  include:  
-        Questioning ideas previously taken for granted, especially re: self and social reality;
-        Using attentional control to break old habits and cultivate new ones;
-        Adopting a more relaxed and equanimous way of being;
-        Learning to control desires and emotions by ceasing to indulge them;
-        Using psychotherapy to loosen the ties of fear, anger, desires, depression, etc.
-        Changing one’s life or environment, permanently or temporarily, or equivalently, doing nothing at all for a day or so (no striving, no worrying, no planning).
b. The ordinary self is us living in social reality. On the surface that self is familiar, but deeper levels are murky, difficult to inspect in conscious awareness. We need to examine the self carefully, e.g. by asking questions like “Who Am I?” The purpose is to cultivate awareness of the hidden workings of the ordinary self, which in turn begins to reveal the difference between the self that lives in social reality and the self that lives in perceptual reality.
3. Developing compassion, feelings of loving-kindness, etc. has been shown to assist in quieting the mind and in loosening attachments associated with emotions (e.g. fears), desires, etc., sometimes sweeping these away and bringing an experience of awakening as part of the flow. However, on the basis of existing evidence, it appears that people lacking in compassion can nevertheless realize awakened consciousness. (Chapter 13)
Therefore, practices recommended in Buddhist teaching traditions appear to be effective for quieting the mind, letting go of attachments, and cultivating compassion. While the first two conditions appear to be necessary for awakening, compassion appears to be a contributing but not a necessary condition.
Implication: The fact that many people, even in the modern Western world, have experienced awakening demonstrates that the bonds of reification imposed by evolution can be broken (and suggests that the brain mechanisms responsible for reification are relatively recent and relatively simple, perhaps an association network analogous to the DMN).
D. Theory: How these preparatory practices act on ordinary awareness to produce awakened awareness.
In a full experience of awakening, conscious awareness is almost entirely dominated by perceptual processing (i.e., inner speech is infrequent). Perceptual recognition of objects, situations and events still activates corresponding words, phrases, scripts, and meaning systems, but because social reality has been de-reified, feelings and emotions associated with the concepts are not activated and do not modify the perceptual image that appears in awareness. Conceptual processing remains active at unconscious levels, enough to generate occasional inner speech (as “thinking” or “commenting”).
1. In ordinary consciousness perceptual processing is modified to better fit social reality; in awakened awareness non-attachment to (or de-reification of) social reality means that no modification is necessary. Without modification, awakened awareness directly expresses the contents and structure of perceptual processing.
2. Awakened awareness differs from ordinary awareness primarily in terms of structure.
a. Ordinary awareness is structured in terms of social reality, with time as an underlying dimension along which scripts (for socially appropriate action) and plans (for using available means to achieve desired ends) are generated. Scripts and plans therefore extend conscious awareness through time by representing past and future as real.
b. Awakened awareness is structured as perceptual systems present it. Although memories of previous perceptual experience can be brought into conscious awareness and extrapolations into the future can be imagined, this is usually brief and conscious awakened awareness remains primarily concentrated on the present moment. This is encouraged when the mind has become quiet through practice – without inner speech to express scripts, plans, and stories, awakened awareness is silent and without a time dimension.
c. Unconscious processing, however, knows about the past and can project immediate situations into the future by drawing on memories of previous events, stored as either percepts or concepts. Therefore, unconscious awakened awareness does extend over time, and can use this capacity to generate appropriate action. Living with awakened consciousness thus means living consciously in the present moment, but with faith that unconscious processing will “do the right thing.” This is made possible through training that quiets the mind and lets go of attachments to social reality.
Therefore. Experiencing awakened awareness requires settling into a world of perceptual reality in which inner speech is mostly silent, both the structure of and specific attachments to social reality have been de-reified, and unconscious processing is trusted to take care of action.
Implication. Awakening is experienced as “sudden” because although gradual preparation is necessary, there comes a point where no gradual transition is possible. This is true for the transitions between between inner speech and silence, between reified and de-reified social reality, and between a self-conscious self and a self that trusts unconscious processing.
E. People describe their experience with awakened awareness in ways that imply five properties (Chapter 13). How does the theory account for these properties?
1. Conscious awareness is silent of inner speech.
Theory:     a. Inner speech is muted when the Default Mode Network is inactive, because mindfulness involves attentiveness.
b. The perceptual content of conscious awareness is distinctly more vivid, because when the cognitive load required for conceptual processing is reduced, perceptual processing is enhanced and conscious awareness reflects this.
2. No Reification: no emotional attachments to the structure or contents of social reality, which now look like scripts for a movie in which we no longer need to be actors.
Theory:     The practices summarized in section C.2 as facilitating “letting go” of attachments have the effect of de-reifying social reality, thus eliminating all emotional attachments to it. Austin proposes that certain areas of the thalamus serve as the mechanism for switching “excessive” emotional attachments off, and thus accomplishing de-reification.
3. No Separation: the usual feeling of separation from the world around us vanishes; awareness switches from a perspective of looking out at the world as a separated self (egocentric orientation) to one of being an integral part of an interdependent and interconnected system (allocentric orientation).
Theory:     Ordinary awareness structures the self as a responsible actor relating to others in a social reality of scripts, plans, and stories. When the self of social reality is de-reified, the self of awakened awareness is structured in terms perceptual reality. The sense of encapsulation disappears and one’s awareness is of coexisting as an equal part of one’s environment. Austin has identified neural systems responsible for ordinary awareness (the egocentric system) and for awakened awareness (the allocentric system).
5. Not Knowing: action proceeds directly from unconscious processing.
Theory:     Once de-reification of self and social reality has taken place and inner speech has been brought under control, conscious awareness is structured by perception and its contents include only the present moment. Unconscious processing, however, can draw on perceptual memory and carry out conceptual processing, which allow it to take these cognitive resources into account in determining appropriate action for the (next) moment. The trick lies in letting go of self-consciousness, i.e. attachment to the ordinary self.
NOTE: Examples of unconscious processing competently determining appropriate action include: skillful skiing or other cases of “being in the zone” in sports; driving-while-thinking-about-soemthing-else (where unconscious awareness serves as a monitor that can switch attention back to the task of driving the car).  The processes implicated in switching between awakened and ordinary consciousness need to be researched, especially if it is true that slow thinking is not possible during awakened consciousness.

 There is also an brief research design and proposal posted on:
https://dana.io/realizing-awakened-consciousness

Comments or questions can be sent to me at boylemmx@gmail.com