The Fosterville Institute of Applied & Progressive Cultural Experience has directed our attention to this article by Michel Bitbol at Academia.edu :
From :
The Monastery and the Microscope
Conversations with the Dalai Lama on Mind, Mindfulness, and the Nature of Reality
Edited by W. Hasenkamp & Janna White
Yale University Press, 2017
Chapter 7:
A Strange Loop of Relations: Phenomenology and experience.
A study of consciousness (Michel Bitbol, PhD)
Scientific research and methods have traditionally supported
the idea that the brain is the cause of consciousness. Michel argues,
however, that the relationship is mutual and grounded in experience, creating
a “strange loop of relations” where experience is primary, and the brain itself
can be both an object of, and a basis for, experience. The subsequent discussion
is an example of excellent interdisciplinary dialogue, with a vigorous and
collegial debate about how much the materialist view can really tell us about
conscious experience.
From that published article, this extract taster :
A Brain Seeing a Brain
Michel Bitbol : ...If we accept that, then the complete picture changes. We no longer have a one-way relation between the brain, which is basic, and consciousness, which is derivative. Instead we have a mutual relation between them. Moreover, their mutual relation is itself understood as a fact of experience. We have what I would like to call the strange loop of the relations between the brain and consciousness ; but a strange loop that is itself a fact of consciousness.
This strange loop was wonderfully expressed by Bertrand Russell, the great British philosopher of the 20th century. Russell said, “Men will urge that a mind is dependent upon the brain, or, with equal plausibility, that the brain is dependent upon the mind.” (14) Why did he say that? We know that there are experiments that show various correlations between the brain and the mind, and we know that we can trigger mental activities and experiences by stimulating the brain. Therefore we say that the mind might be dependent up on the brain. But we know also: (i) that we can transform the brain by mental training, and (ii) that the brain is an object of our experience. Therefore the brain is somehow also dependent upon the mind. The relation is mutual.
14 Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic: And Other Essays
(New York: Longmans,Green and Co, 1919), 136.
Figure 7.3
The strange loop of relations. At the left is an image of a brain that is seen by a person’s eye, which is connected to his or her brain. Thus, a representation of the small brain exists in the visual cortex of the person’s brain(right). Michel emphasizes the difference between our knowledge of the process of the brain “seeing” this figure, and the raw experience of seeing.
Let’s make a little thought experiment together about this strange loop.
We see a wonderful thing on this picture (figure 7.3). We see a brain that is seen by an eye. The eye is the eye of somebody who has a brain. Therefore the picture of the brain is projected on the back of his or her brain cortex (the occipital cortex), and the person sees the brain.
We are now seeing a brain that is seeing a brain. But please notice that we are all outside the picture. Now, who is seeing the picture of a brain that is seeing a brain at this very moment? If I wait a little bit I’m sure somebody will tell me, “Oh it’s my brain that is seeing the brain that is seeing the brain.” Maybe. But to say this, you have to think for a few seconds. Initially, and immediately, all you had is an experience, your experience of seeing. When I stop and ask you who is seeing the brain that is seeing the brain, you first dwell in your experience and then make inferences from there to say that it is your brain. But even that belief — that it is your brain that is seeing the brain that is seeing the brain — is here and now a conscious experience. You see? At the present end of the series of visual perceptions, inferences, thoughts, and beliefs, there is an experience: an experience of perceiving, thinking, believing, but an experience in every case. Even your belief that your experience is underpinned by your brain is a present experience of yours!
What I am trying to do is bring you back to what you are now, at this very precise moment, not a thinker but an experiencer — an experiencer even of the thinking, an experiencer even of the idea that experience is underpinned by a brain. What there is now is experience, nothing else but experience. You believe that this is not the case, that there is now something other than experience? But even this belief is an experience!
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A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
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