The Primacy Off Conscious Experience T-215

8/13/2019 The Primacy Off Conscious Experience T-215

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S IEN ENID THE

PMM CY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

I~ t imat ion f a 21 ' CenturyRevolution

Edited by

Richard L ArnorosoPhysics Lab, 6tterrrati011alNoetic U liver.~ity

Rui AntunesTranspersonal Psychology Grotrp. U iversity of LisbonClaudia CoelhoTra ~sperso lalsychology Grorrp, U~riversityf LisborlMiguel FariasTransperso~ lal sychology Group, U.1iversityof Lisborth a eiteTra~rcpersonal sychology Gro tip, Utrh~ersityf LisbotPedro SoaresTra~rsperso lal sychology Grorrp, U~riversityf Lisbo~r

Book of Readimgs in omscioansmess Standies

THE NOETIC PRESS O R I N D


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Reprint: R.L. Amoroso et aL Eds.) Science ond the Primacy ofConsciousness. 1 7.999 The Noetic Press: Orindo. C USA. Printed in the United Stares ofAmerico.

The Pr imacy off Conscious Experience

Karl H. Pribram

Sunmnmary Currently great interest h as developed in trying to come to grips with the m ind bra in dualityIn part this is due to the ou tstanding successes in th e psychological an d neurosciences.The apparent gapbetween mind a nd matter is being filled with a plethora of data that firmly establish, in great detail, the win which our experience can e related t o brain organization. This success recalls the recent successes inDanwinian theory, where the evolutionary gap between human and non-human primates i s being filled winew discoveries almost daily.

1 1 A Synoptic History o the Mindlbrain Duality

Today we usually attrib ute the s har p distinction betwveen mind and matter to Descartes. Howvever, RenDescartes 1934) articulated a duality that goes back to the o rigins of propositional utterances:a subject,an object, and a verb that ascribes to tlie subject an aspect partaken of, or an intention taken toward object. Holophrases, words such asOm in Sanscrit and Yaveh in Hebrew which mean being , enfold, orrather fail to unfold propositional meaning s. Holopllrasesare said to have preceded propositiona l utterancin the development of languages, just as holophrases precede the development of language in children. Tprocess of being, becomes being, a subject with a beard who hands commandments to Moses, an obje

For Descartes, the thinker is subject; all else is object. Emanuel Kant, however, pointed out thathe objects of thoughtare ideas and ideas have two sources: sensory initiated phenomenal experienc(images of objects), and no umina, th e thinker's reasoned contributions. Thus, the thinker an d the contenof thought all became subjective nd knowledge of the objective, 'material aspect of the world,w

Arthur Schopenliauer, bothered by this indeterminacy, o w inability to really h o w he worlbecause of our entanglement in it, came to emphasize the role of the thin ker, of energy and willw, ointentions, in unraveling the ilfiness of the images. He noted that the unraveling of the world knot, ma

up as it is of entanglements of phenomena and noumina, is up to us. This provides us with the freedomto esplore and with th e opportunities to shape the world we inhabit. Today we often hear that tlie solutioto certain of our social problems is not just money but political will. This insight is very much i n lin e wi

Science and the Priniacy of Consciousness


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Pribram Printacy Science and the Printacy of Consc iousness

formulating a true psychological science that takes subjective espcrienc e seriously, but a t the same time isfilling the min dk rain gap. But they note that it is much harder to bridge the gap between our personalexperience and the experience of others that we validate through communication by way of ve rbal andinstrumental behaviors.

The philosophers who are not satisfied do have a point, and the point harks back to DescartesKant and Schopenhauer. The re is a duality between my subjective experience and tha t of others.Nonetheless, I believe the current philosophers are i n error in restricting the hard problem to consciousawareness of our experience. Desca rtes' duality was corrected by Kant: our experience involvesphenomenal representation and 'noumina . Neither our senses nor our cognitions readily provide us withunadulterated replicas of what's out there. Tha t is why we must apply ourselves to understand, not onlyconscious awareness but the origins of all our experience. In short, th e hard problem a pplies to allknowledge, all science, not only to the study of consciousness.

Th e hard problem is the problem of knowving, tile ontological problem of epistemology. It is theproblem of unraveling the w orld knot, almost h arking back to the Cartesian problem of cogito vs. all-elseHowever, the new way that Kant a nd Scllopenhauer sensed the allels e, indeed add s to our sophisticationin that the all-else is to be included in tl ~ eard problem --a nd to resolve this problem on the plane that theyesta blisl~ ed oes require active involvement, inten t, will. Neuropsycl~ological nd neuroscientific researchis the cu rrent expression of this intent.

final point. W hile psycl~o logists nd neuroscientists are resolving the mi n dh at te r duality fromone perspective, quantum physicists have been tackling the issue from another. Bohr, Heisenberg, Diracand Wigner, each in his owwn way noted that how we approach an observation determine s it to a largeex-tent. As Wigner described it to me personally some years ago, wve no longer have obsewa bles in quan tumphysics, we have only observations. Bohr's complirnentarity and Heisenberg's indeterminacy principlesmake the same Kantian point (see Stapp, 1972). All of science, not just psycllological science, is beholdento the the hard problem.

1 4 A Duality Within Subjective Experience

As noted in the introduction, wwithinDescartes' Cogito itselfseveral different conceptions, different dualitieshave caught the attention of philosophers. One, most clearly enunciated by Franz Brentano, is the dualitybetween the perceiver and the perceived (Brentano,1973 . This also reflects the Cartesian duality: Th eperceiver is minding; all else is that wllicll is being perceived and minded. But c ontra ry to Descartes,Brentano is less interested in that wvhicll is being perceived but with the perceiver. Shades of S cho penl~auemerge as the perceiver intends his perceptions he can even inten d inesistant percepts suchasunicorns.

Bra in research has shown (see Pribram Bradley, 1998) that systems occupying the posterio rconvexity of the cerebral hemispheres are involved in organizing Brentano's duality. Whe n the parietallobe systems are injured a patient may no longer feel tl ~ erm o n the side opposite the brain injury tobe hisown. One of my students who suffered such an injury dubbed her arm Alice and stated that Alice doesn'tlive here any mo re. ~ e s ~ i t dhis loss of belongingness, the arm routinely performs many task s suchasbringing a cu p of coffee to the person's mouth, much to the surprise of the person when s he becomes awareof what has happened.

Damage further back in tlle convexity produces blindsight. Here again, the person can perform

many routine tasks that demand an optical input from the blind side, but the patient is unaware of, is blindto, that input. With an intact brain,we are aware both of ourselves as seeers and of what is being seen.

In these and similar instances, aw areness of one's bodily self and the environment are impaired.


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Pribram Prima cy Science an d the Prima cy o Consciousness

Alice isn't any longer part of me; die blind-sighted, optically-guided bchavior isn't mine. From sucobservations one can infer that ordinarily these brain systems opcrate to allow awareness of a corporea'me to occur. When impairment takes place, the distinction in awareness between perceiver and perceiveno longer exists- much as a color blind person can not differentiate between red and green. In the absenceof differentiation, neither co lor exists for that person. In the absence ofawareness of tlie difference betwee

perceiver and perceived, neither exists.There is another totally different duality that h as concerned philosophers. In addition to a sela me, the concernh s been with a transcendental awvareness of one's unity w ith a larger, more universalorde r. Carl Jung's archetypes address tlus aspect of experience (Jung, 1933).Paradoxically, thisesperience is as intensely personal a s it is holistic. The experience cannotbe analyzed into n here vsout there as in Brentan o's intentionality. Rather it partakes of a holy, healthy awareness that lacks

boundaries.Psychological and brain science have recently made great strides in u nderstanding thistyp of

awareness. First, Endel Tulving (see Bradley Pribram, 1998) differentiated two gp es of human memorya dictionary or semantictype and an other which dealt with episodes of one's esperience. At the same time,research wwith non-human primates distinguished a difference between brain system s that dealt withreference memory and those that dealt witti trial-by-trial types of processing.

There isgood evidence from human neuropsycliological research that allows identification betweethe processes responsible for seman tic memory and those of reference memory. These processes arimpaired when the posterior convesity of tlie brain is damaged. Referencing is what is entailed in thBrentano duality, the ability tobe aware of the distinction between perceiver and perceived.

There is also good evidence obtained with animals that trial-by-trial processing leads toremembering unique instances and therefore to the processing of episodes. Episodic processing is impaireby damage to the limbic systems that lie on the inner border (thus the term limbic) of tlie hemispheresofthe brain.

Impairmen t of episodic processing leads to a surp rising difficulty. Patients with such impairmenare personable and able to interact socially on a moment-by-moment basis by virtue of their intacsemanticlreferential processing. An interruption or distraction will, however, totallywip out the episodefrom furthe r awvareness as if that un ique instance had never taken p lace. Therefore, o ver time, ovesuccessive episodes, no personal hermeneutic, narrativeI becolnes established.

The episodic processing that leads to experiencing a narrativeI s separate from that lead ing toa corporeal 'me. Cluldren who hawre bilateral damage to tlie limbic systems from birth, can learn to readand other aspects of semantic processing are unimpaired. case liistory dramatically demonstrates tlideficiency in constructing a narrative I.

This cluld was orn with large cysts involving the limbic and frontal part of his brain. Heundenvent two surgeries before the age of six months. He has never given any evidence of episodimemory, however, he was capable of learning verbal language to ag e-appropriate levels.t Age 8 he wasable to give his name, age, birthday, a nd names of family members. He reported his favorite gametelevision program, and favorite color across trials. Expressive language capabilities were age approp riatand there were no obvious weaknesses in grammar. Despite this, he was unable to recallwhat he had eatenfor breakfast a few hours earlier. He was unable to correctly iden tifjan examiner with whom he hadworked that morning from am ong a group of four people. He was unable to say what he had eaten for luncafter returning from a restaurant.

Obviously episodic processing is not necessary for the establishment of normal semantiprocessing. The converse is also true: children wh o suffer injury to the systems dtat process the corporea'men as for instance those who ar e spastic from birth, have no difliculty with episodic processing andevelop a normal narrative 'I.


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Pribram Primacy Science and the Primacy of Consciousness

Such children also develop normal sem antic processing, indicating that the me has two distinaspects: one related to sensory input an d another to motor output. Th is separation of motor skills frobody awareness is due to the increased importance of these somatic motor systems.' Th e distance sensdepen don their motor components primarily to enhance sensory processing. By co nua st, the somatic motsystem has the ability to skillfully and dram atically change the environmental input.s a result the motorsystems in primates, including those of hum ans, become m ore distinctly separated from the somatic sensoinput systems, whereas there is more overlap between input and output in th e distance senses.

Th e brain systems that orga nize episodic processing also have inputs an d outputs and these aloverlap considerably. mediobasal motor system covers the anteri or portions of the limbic cortex ancenters on the amygdala, a basal ganglion. Electrical stimulation of this cortex produces marked ch a ngin heart a nd respiratory rate, in blood pressure and in gastrointestinal contractions. In contrast to tresults of electrical stimulation of the somatic motor cortex, only gross turning of the body an d eyes awfrom the side of stimulationwere produced.

Also, the input from the body comes mainly from tracts concerned with visceral, autonomic, paiand temperature stimuli. Togeth er these inputs can be classified as mediating hedoni@leasant/unpleasant) emotional aspects of awareness. There is, therefore, not surprisingly, an anatomicapl~ysiologicalelationship behveen hedonic and episodic processing. After all, the narrativeT xperiencesthe episodes and research has shown that rewards and deterrents are critical in stamping in an episoso that it becomes a remembered part of the personal narrative.

Scllopenhauer emphasizes the importance of the body in the o rgan izatio n of intention, of withough he fails to distinguish betwveen the body as a skilled 'me and the bodyas a hedonic I. Plans andthe Structure of Behavior (Miller, Galanter Pribram, 1960) separated these aspects of will bdistinguishing between motivations (hedonic) as predispositions and intentionss dispositions. Intentions,in turn. ar e divided into strategies (prior intention s) and tactics (intentions in action, a s John Searle (198has called them).

There is a relationship between emotion, motivation, strategy and tactics.s William James(1950) pointed out, emotions stop at the skin, motivations (termed in the literature of tha t time, instinctreach out beyond. To implement motivations we develop intentions, both strategic and tactical. Separabrain systems are related to each of these behavioral categories: amygdala to emotion; caudate-putamto motivation; anterior frontal cortex to strategies; and the more posterior frontal, the precentral cortextactics.

Schopenllauer, though well read i n the Upanisllads fails to follow them in tlleir emph asis on thhedonic aspects of wholeness as exemplified in gardening or in lovemaking, and he therefore fails understand fully the holistic transcenden tal aspect of theI. Despite his attempts to ground th e will in thebody, Schopenhauer's d evelopment of body involvement in untangling the world knot results in a corporeme not a holistic I. The consequences of this failure led bothNazi (idealistic) and communist

(materialist) philosophies to neglect individual incentive, and par ad oic all y, to an unhealthy, un-holistiunholy society.

If wve follow the lead of the eliminativ e materialists our society m ight end similarly.s a judgepointed out at a recent meeting devotedlto consciousness studies, reducing psychology to neurons iscategory erro r which would destroy our entire moral structure: We canno t hold neurons accountable four behavior. One of the eliminatists, Fran cis Crick (1 991), has noted that categories are h uman inventioand tha t we often chan ge categoriesas ou r knowledge increases. But this misses the point: the categoryerror deals not with howwe categorize per s e but wit11 the level or scale with which the category deals. Thcategory error is a not just a trivial philosophical contrivance- making tllis errorh s serious personal andsocial consequences.

In 1989 B.F. Skinner; a pioneer radical behaviorist who led a lifelong crusade against folk


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psychology and toward a behavioral science of the "empty organism," ended his caree r a year bcfore hisdeath with the follo uing revised insight that provides a healthy alternative to elimination:

There are two unavoidable gaps in any behavioral account: one between the stimulating action oftheenviron ment and the response of the organism and one between consequences and the resultingchange in behavior. Only brain sciencecan fill those gaps. Inso doin g it completes the account;it does not give a different account of the same thing. (13-18)

Wheredoes that leave us? In other essays, I have noted that our intense interest in the m in dh at te rduality w s fostered by the industrial revolution. Most scientists are materialists and have begottenmentalists s for example Roger Speny [I9801 and John Searle (19831) who perceive flaws in thematerialist position. But materialism an d mentalism bear lie same relationship to each others "downnand "up" -on e would notesist without the other. Which comes first, our experience of the material worldor the material brain that makes the esp erience possible? Is the chicken a n egg's way of reproducing itself- r is it the other way around?

The information revolution is beginning to shift tlie ground from an intense interest in amentaYrnaterial duality to tlie issue that occupied Plato and Aristo tle: the ideal vs the real. Already, somemathematicians (e.g. Roger Penrose[ l989]) have, not unespectedly, declared themselves on the side of

Plato. Dualities such as these are extremely helpful in exposing issues, but they ar e relatively primitivetools. Pre-Socratic holistic pragmatisms such as that practiced by Pj-thagoras in dividing av ibra ting str ingin half to discover the principle of the octave, or, for that matter, the Am erican pragmatism of CharlesPeirce (1931), help to place suc h dualities in proper perspective.

#ant (who was trained in the law) and Schopenhauer, and even earlier, the Upanishads haveilluminated this healthier alternative to elimination: Th e humble realization that the way to knowing isall of a piece; that the hard problem encom passes all of knowing; and that it takes personal involvementand dedicated work to unrave l the wvorld knot.

Brentano, F W 1973) Psychologvfrom on enrpirical standpoint. New York: Routledge.Chalmers, D.J. (1995) Absent qualia, fading qualia, dancing qualia. InT Metzinger's Conscious

Experience. Schliningh: Imprint Academic, pp.309-328.Crick, F.H.C. (1991)The Astonishing Hypothesis: The ScientiJc Search For the Sou l., New York: Charles

Scribner's Son's.Descartes. Rene (1934)A Discourse on Method. London: J.M. Dent Sons.James, W. (1950) Principles o/Psychology. (Vol. 1 and 2). New York: D over Publications, Inc.Jung, C.G.Modern Man in Search o f a Soul. Harvest Books.Kant, E. (1965) Critique o fl ur e Reason. (N. Kemp Smith, Trans.). New York: MacMillan.Miller,, G. A., Galanter,E. Pribram, K. H. (1960) Plans and the Structure ofBe havior . New York:

Henry Holt, 1960. (Russian trans; also in Japanese, German, Spa nish, Italian.)Penrose, R (1989) The Emperor s ew Mind. London: Od or d University Press.Pierce, C.S. (1934)Pragmatism a ndPragaticism. Collected Papers Vol. 5, Lectures VI VII@p 94-13 1).

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Pribram, K.H. (199 1)Brain and Perception: Holononry and Structure in Figural Processing. New York:

Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.


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Pribram Primacy Science and the Primacy of Consciousness

Pribram, K H Bradley, R 1998) The Brain,tile Me and the I. In M. Ferrarri R Sternberg (Eds.),SeV wareness: Its Nature and Development. New York: Guilford Publications, Inc.

Searle, J.R 1983). Intentionality: An essay on the philosophy of mind. Cambridge, Eng.: CambridgeUniversity Press.

S k i ~ e f , .F. 1989) The origins of co gnitive thought.American Psychologist 44 1), pp. 13- 18.Sperry, RW. 1980) Mind~brainnteraction -M entalism, yes -Dualism, no.Neuroscience 2 pp. 195-206.Stapp, H. 1972) The Copenhagen Interpretation.American Journal of Physics 40 8), pp 1098-1116.

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The Primacy Off Conscious Experience T-215