Omar Claflin

 ‘How does the water of the brain turn into the wine of consciousness?’

The smiling-faced spirituals, new almost manic positivity thinking types, as well as the liberal forms of monotheism reinventing themselves now in the way of the eastern traditions place high priority on the goal of eliciting the subjective state of happiness or even blissfulness. Even the Western theologies hold as its highest reward, a permanent happiness or blissful state in an ethereal realm. I say state, and not reaction because the highest goal seems to be simple-mindedly keeping your limbic system (a constantly changing and highly reactive system) permanently kicking a stream of one kind of reaction. When did the permanency of one mental state become the goal? Denying the miserable, sad, and anxious; this is to remove all but one leg of the stool and trust it to hold you up as you stand on it. The baseline may be discomfort or mild anxiety, certainly not contentedness; obviously it isn’t given our forward progress. The torment of genius can be overhyped but perhaps the contentedness of mediocrity or the stupefaction of bliss shouldn’t be our cultural project.

Subjective emotional states, the work of the paleomammalian part of our brain that we share with our mammalian cousins, the system that was present before the evolution of our prefrontal cortex in our genetic history, is one of more primal systems working in our head. This system connects directly or indirectly into virtually every function we have. This system is part of us, this associative subjectivity is wired into face recognition, retrieval of a memory, placement of attention. It colors these perceptions and memories with pleasantness, apprehensiveness, disgust and joy.  

It serves as a first-generation judgment system but we should remember we also come equipped with more sophisticated tools in our toolset. We possess systems outside our minds in the form of organized inquiry as well as higher prefrontal processes that extract more sophisticated judgments, explanations with finer resolution, and more robust patterns than this primal saliency network.

Saliency weighting of our memories and our perception (that is, weak or strong subjective feelings when you remember or perceive something) is a short-cut associative system dragging our attention to the things it has been told that are important. Telling you to trust a certain face or to avoid a certain situation. Nausea at a food smell that made you sick in the past. This short-cut reporting style makes it efficient but also easily fooled.

The overenthusiastic projection of our neural reactions upon our physical world are the pointing and ooing of an infantile neural species. It’s understandable how we become taken with the output of our own appraisal systems. Some may ask how can you not believe in the sublime? Well, of course I believe it as an actual neural reaction but I don’t believe the painting, the sunrise or the stain on the carpet possess actual sublime qualities. Nor will they give consistent sublime reactions to other people or even consistently to the same person. Nor does having a photo-sensitive sneeze reflex (a reflex some people have that causes them to sneeze when suddenly exposed to bright sunlight) mean that sunlight possesses a literal ‘sneeze-like’ quality. Right? I mean this is just a conflation of language (or metaphorical language) driven by drama of our feelings.

The above may seem hardly worth saying but there are entire speech patterns that implicitly act as if this is true and not a metaphor or a loose poetic association. Even more, there are entire explicit confused discussions, entire fields really, of ‘mind philosophy’ that treat ‘qualia’ or ‘subjectivity’, the assemblage of our perception of feelings, with great reverent mystery ultimately leading to wacky conclusions about consciousness as an ethereal entity literally creating everything around us. The fact that the saliency level of this system can be cranked up with drugs, a mosh pit, a church choir, speaks to the volatility of the brain’s ability to process, not to the volatility of reality itself. Attempts to apply serious self-centered focus on our self-centered nature strike me as hilarious or tiresome depending on my subjective mood.

If the overwhelming sensation and knee-jerk quality of feeling continues to be a mystery to you, consider a different input than feelings that could have these qualities. Consider the broad seizing effect of a taser on your body’s musculoskeletal system. Or the reactivity you experience when an incredibly loud and unexpected sound occurs.

These are actions of muscles and nerve circuits that are on your body, that act without asking you. Other nerves then report to you, a moment later, what happened beyond your awareness or control. You take these reports and conflate them with profundity, divinity or alive-ness.

It’s a lower level system that gets to kick in on a priority channel if you will. It feels so visceral but that’s easily explained. Just as you perceive imagined stimuli with your eyes closed or your environment with your eyes open, you can also perceive these impending assessments and directives generated by your brain. These are biasing mental states.

Don’t go near that high ledge – it’ll possibly kill you. Chase after that exciting new experience — it’ll give you valuable new information and help self-development. Hunger. Curiosity. Comfort. These are all momentary, ever-changing assessments of your body and the environment around you. 

Rather than trying to coax a particular kind of reaction out of it continuously, we should strive to simply be aware of it and what it is. One slippery slope of trying to hold what is necessarily a highly relative, constantly-in flux system to one fixed point is that we unknowingly become susceptible to the volatility of drama. To constantly seek out activation of this system by drama. Even stoicism is a definition demanding drama by contrast. I would suggest we try cherishing sobriety.

In law, science, business, government, systems and cultures of objective procedure are put in place to counter drama. The cannibal worse than faulty facts, bad arguments, obscuring reductions, injected motives, over-projected paranoid future scenarios — worse than all of that, is drama. It feeds on and creates all these things.

No need for alarm or dramatic counterbalancing. That only fuels the cannibal. Takedown of drama is best done by ruthless objectivity, generalized processes and ingenious systems that are robust enough to proceed despite individual inconsistency. Systematic dispassionate consideration is the building block of our civilizing progress. Perhaps it seems anti-human to be so dispassionate but consider humans are our only example of civilizing progress.

The reason to speak defensively of the somewhat sterile, incremental and procedural process of objectivity is many will go after it as simultaneously being fundamentally flawed (as being too narrow) but, in the same breath, borrow its credibility and claim that products of it reaffirms their associative, hard-to-pin-down ideas.

Systematic dispassionate thinking has enabled us to understand of all sorts of processes and mechanics of the world. We have broken things down to find patterns and seek clarity. Civilizing progress occurs in multiple arenas by dispassionate trial-and-error: Sophisticated valuation of our advanced economics systems, scientific discovery by a pursuit of mechanisms, the multi-layered socioeconomic support systems of government, our sophisticated civil rights systems and other grand projects of civilization.

Systematic objectivity isn’t only in scientific inquiry (as it’s often pointed to as an example). Don’t call it objectivity or refer to science as an example if that makes your skin crawl (maybe that’s just me). Call it clarity seeking. Call it objective confirmation of superior process. But it is the constant incremental process to answer how. The question of ‘why?’ is a question of narrative (chapter 3) which is a nice summarizing structure of the human brain’s attempt to understand,  but can actually be set aside completely in a sterile process of understanding ‘how?’, which I will call clarity seeking. It doesn’t have to even be a scientific process on biology or physics. It could be the high-level assessment of how a business is failing or how an intrapersonal conflict came to be. Many of us do this constantly in our professional and personal lives. Like I said, call it clarity-seeking.

The scientific test of falsifiability of hypothesis is awkward to say the least. I’ve been trained as a scientist, more than once, and even I have a hard time naturally applying it in naturally in my mind (e.g. is the statement they are making falsifiable? Is there possible things you could observe that would disprove that statement?). The point for this though is to strive to make a handling of a situation as objective, fact-based as possible. To remove subjectivity to the level we can because, at the core, we are subjective creatures.

What is subjectivity? It’s our input of the world combined with our feelings.

The perception part makes intuitive sense to most of us. Seeing objects, hearing sounds, etc. The typical five senses people think of. Treat feelings as another sense. Another set of stimuli, albeit sightless, tasteless and wordless, generated internally from lower levels of your mind and body to be combined along with the other senses.

You already have other senses beyond the five common ones, like proprioception which let you know, with your eyes closed, what position your arm, hands and fingers are in. You feel hunger from a sensor system in your stomach and small intestines. Think about that rolling sense of hunger. Now realize feelings, an emotional wave, as it passes through your awareness for what it is as well. Another sensation. Another perception.

Emotional states serve as a low-level snap judgment system. For instance, a particular individual’s face, even a picture of that face, may bring up strong disgust or anger. These are the low-level summaries your limbic system has taken away from its past experiences. Upon seeing that face again, it reminds you roughly what you concluded about that face in a wordless way. As a salient feeling.

A dessert or a puppy might make you slightly elated. Maybe even smile a little. In fact, generating a smile in absence of that dessert or puppy may cue mental processes to trigger similar feelings because those feelings usually follows a smile. Your nervous system is not going to keep falling for that for long in absence of a dessert but it might work a few times because the biology of feelings works on association. This association is strengthened by the frequency of coincidence. Violate this coincidence enough times and your neural networks will unlearn that association as well.

The intense saliency of joy, annoyance or disgust in your mind may lead you to think you are not Pavlov’s dog. But that is precisely how subjectivity creeps in. This is the reason for dispassionate clarity.

Your conscious mind is a mental workroom of sorts. One with memories, incoming perceptions, low-level gut reactions and possibly, depending on how un-zen you are, higher level symbolic processing in the form of inner dialogue. Memories and perception. And feelings. It’s a salient information system.

Feelings are a visceral representation of a summary assessment. This assessment isn’t comprehensive, up-to-date or very critical. You can manipulate its assessment with anxiolytics, a relaxing bath or even different colored wallpaper. Or a workout or some music. Consider the nearly paralyzing fear that occurs sometimes with public speaking. The assessment of your limbic system of being judged by people (fearing a loss of social status if you speak) can be turned around with a beta-blocker. The system works for communicating a general assessment (avoid the entire situation) in a pervasive manner (trembling hands, sweaty palms, loss of words).

It’s biology-relevant. Or irrelevant depending on your goals. For instance, fear can be thought of as an assessment of your mind that makes you highly avoidant. It may be warranted or it may not be. Either way, its manifestation in your mind is such that it tries to paralyze you with fear. Prevent you from doing that because its avoidant of whatever outcome it has associated with that context.

It’s similar with anger. A switch is flipped, you become angry and before you can hardly realize it, your body enters a red-alert, physically ready stance. Simplifying focus and hair-trigger reactions take over.

These reactions can obviously be less dramatic than violent rage or paralyzing fear. You can just feel an annoyance or a low-level avoidance. Maybe just a momentary jaw clench instead of a heart-pounding, fist-clenching, whole-body stiffness.

I’m not dismissing the underlying intelligence available to us in the form of subjectivity and gut reactions but the progress-accruing ability of setting these aside should hopefully be clear. We attempt to do this in our justice system, our scientific process, our governing processes, our business practices and even our personal lives through systematic objectivity.

The defense of progress through clarifying inquisition and discovery is hardly necessary and others have done a far better job so I will keep this short. The reason for clarity-seeking, if not self-evident, is that it’s highly enabling. Empowering. I will even say, dramatic. And not in some placebo, vague superficial sense of delicate mantra-maintained feeling of contentedness. In a very real way, application of our comprehension organ with clarity as the goal, laying aside subjectivities temporarily, has enabled us to conquer very complex natural phenomena. Forget understanding for a moment and look at our capabilities, the consequence of our understanding of once-thought-to-be incomprehensible phenomena that have fallen prey before the collective might of our information organ’s ability to clarify and understand. If I sound a little one-sided, it’s only because humanity boasts an inspiring track record on this one.

The ability to telecommunicate with another human being in another city with pocket-sized cellphones using electromagnetic radiation. The ability to conquer billions of bacterial invaders by swallowing a complex chemical, often getting chemically converted by the enzymes of your liver, processes we understand at a body, organ, blood, genetic, biochemical and even atomic level. At least we understand well enough. Not to mention the well-being achieved by the death of countless moronic ideas you probably never think about like the idea that your neighbor being a witch or crop harvests failing because you didn’t arrange some stones in a particular way. Let’s not even get into bloodletting.

Or more personal applications of your own objective comprehension of the psychologies and situational reactions that your coworkers and family members. Understanding that has enabled you to resolve conflicts or at least avoid them more often.

This is why clarifying explanations avoid as much as possible, why, and focus on how. The truth is subjectivity and objectivity don’t actually exist as absolutes. But attempted objectivity of probability and actions, is much more doable than ‘why’ explanations. Why lends to anthropomorphic interpretation and exact opposite explanations of ‘why?’ can be procured. Anthropomorphism is a powerful simulator of human or intelligent behavior. Insinuating a psychology onto an aggressively maneuvering black-tinted vehicle in traffic, whose driver you can’t even see, is a powerful induction of vehicular behavior to personality. Or similarly from purely digital interactions online which may involve action as sparse as a ‘poke’. Your brain simulates psychologies of others constantly. Everyone has experience of misreading someone based on incomplete information, or overreading into someone else’s actions. This becomes more error-prone when dealing with non-human action such as reading a psychology into the universe, a god, the ecosystem, or a misbehaving laptop.

Many people are reeled into arguments for anti-clarity, anti-objectivity stances by a sense that this whole rational process dismisses subjectivity and feelings, and therefore is dismissing their very sense of being. Acknowledge your sense of being. With objectivity.

How could feelings be dismissed? For god’s sake, I feel my feelings so much. These logical automatons of the world must be missing the whole point of human existence.

No one’s arguing their realness. Their existence. Even the deliberate exercise of them. But what they have to say is limited. Their value is not limitless. The process that has to be engaged to figure out what’s going on is going to be benefitted by being able to set aside subjectivity. It has to be. Understand that you are not your feelings and subjectivity. You’re much more than that.

I don’t mean that poetically or in emotionally reassuring way. I mean that literally.

You are not just feelings and perception. You also have inner dialogue, memories of varying degrees of vividness, and many implicit skillsets. These, too, even in combination with perception and feelings, don’t make up a ‘you.’ There’s more to you than even that.

Subjectivity is perception that can carry more saliency than the sights or sounds around you and carry a more complicated association with changes in the environment around us. But understand, they are perceptions alike. They carry information from deep subconscious processes as visceral assessments. The level of saliency is also communicating information, whether it be barely perceptual or overwhelming. Our frequent tendency to conflate and not discriminate our many inputs (one could say it’s a complex integration) isn’t evidence for some ethereal concept of consciousness or incomprehensible ethereal entity.

No one’s saying subjectivity and perception is not important. We are subjective, perceptual beings at our cores. I intend to fully explore how we think, experience and understand, all processes made up of almost entirely perceptual and subjective processes. Of course it’s important. We should strive to understand them as well as we can, not to deny them, but to utilize them to their fullest potential. Using them blindly and indiscriminately, is to wade around in muddied waters unbecoming of what we are.

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