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Mindfulness and Meaning

Practitioners of mindfulness meditation in particular (and that includes a desultory me) are apt to see the mind, body and spirit as an inseparable unity. But there are several difficult issues associated with this idea.

To help highlight these, I will first look at the suggestion that an artificially intelligent (AI) robot can never be such an inseparable unity, can never be sentient, because it has an inherent disunity in comprising distinct layers of software programming on top of a hardware machine. This is really just the old dualist mistake in a new home. Mindfulness teaches us only that our sensations and thoughts of body and spirit are part of a unified experience, it teaches us nothing about the underlying reality which raises those experiences to consciousness. In truth, both our sensations and our thoughts, as we experience them, are nothing but meanings carried over electro-chemical patterns swirling through physical nerve connections. Sensory nerves initiate the patterns from the body, thoughts arise in substantially unconscious areas of the brain with access to memory, and consciousness arises where all this meaning comes together in an as-yet poorly understood cognitive area. None of this is possible without the underlying "wetware" of conductive interconnections. Machines too have electrical sensors, such as video cameras, microphones and touch sensors, even mice and keyboards. The analogy between brain and computer is as perfect as an analogy can be when AI has not been invented yet. As such, it points firmly in the direction towards where AI will find itself when it finally arrives. We have absolutely no reason to believe that the artificially intelligent brain will be any different in kind from the naturally evolved intelligent brain. We humans are sentient, AI will be sentient too.

What mindfulness really teaches the cognitive scientist is that machines must be just like us, there is no duality of kind to be found here, no man-machine distinction, just a blended unity of substrate and information.

Another apparent duality lurks here, that between physical presence and symbolic meaning. But again, this is just the old mistake slightly refined. Sentience confers some special distinction on the brain. Since the brain is made of ordinary physical stuff, the old assumption was that that special distinction must come from some other plane of existence which, typically, is believed to outlive the brain it currently inhabits. When we discover in the laboratory that the special distinction appears to be merely the processing of complex symbolic information, it is easy to modify our dualism to treat that level of symbolism or meaning as the something special. There are even religious cults today who worship information as the essence of our being and regard the destruction of information as a sin.

I used to believe in this modified duality, until I realised that symbolic meaning can arise quite naturally through biological evolution. My favourite example is the eye spots on a butterfly's wings, which quite unconsciously carry the symbolic meaning of a large predator's face.

But there remains one last, more traditional and intractable duality. It is that between the physically active expression of meaning and the inner experience of that meaning. An analogy is sometimes drawn with the two sides of a coin; every objective brain signal pattern which corresponds to a conscious experience is also associated with a subjective inner quality associated with its meaning. One cannot have the one without the other, any more than one can have a one-sided coin.

Returning to our mindful meditation, our experience of all-pervading unity is just such a coin, a gentle signal pattern in the cognitive region symbolising the unity, paired indissolubly with the inner sensation of that same unity. Of course, while meditating we must not intellectualise that unity, as must be done while writing this. The spontaneous unity in itself and the intellectual concept of it are very different things, accompanied by both different brain signals and different inner experiences.

If every coin has two sides, what then should we make of a unified coin, a reality in which every objective conscious brain signal has an associated subjective quality of experience, or quale, and vice versa, and in which meaning is the coin to which both sides attach? Does this resolve all our difficulties?

Not quite, or at least, not yet. The butterfly's wings carried symbolic meaning too. Any small predator about to eat the butterfly evolves through natural selection to retreat from big, staring eyes. No cognition, no quale of experience, is needed to accompany it. It might do, but it need not; although the butterfly certainly isn't conscious of its eye spots, whether any given small predator is sentient enough to produce such an experience is another question altogether. Then again, most of the brain's thought processes go on unconsciously, without the need for any quale to be present. We only become aware of a few selected thoughts, which is to say the qualia arise, after the event. So symbols and meaning can exist without any quale present: this coin is evidently one-sided and in this circumstance the coin analogy breaks down.

Then again, there is no guarantee that the same meaning will evoke the same quale in different individuals. Will say hunger or the urge to flee feel the same for an octopus as they do for me, or will they feel very different? It would be rash to draw any conclusions. (For more about qualia, see Towards a Theory of Qualia.) Unless we ever discover something truly remarkable about brain signals, the coin analogy can only be directly valid within the conscious mind of a given individual.

To resolve this untidiness I would suggest that, outside of any conscious mind, the symbolic meaning is latent. Meaning can then only ever find expression in the conscious mind - if, for example, the eater of butterflies is sufficiently sentient. This in turn suggests an interesting possibility for the evolution of consciousness. Perhaps it is necessary in order to abstract, or intellectualise, and then overtly express symbolic meaning in such a way that it can be manipulated as information in its own right. Or, to put it another way, is consciousness an inevitable accompaniment to such expression of meaning?

We know that most mental processing in the brain is unconscious and that even things like apparently conscious decisions get made unconscously before appearing in the limelight of consciousness perhaps a full second later. One might make a distinction here between cognition and sentience: a cognitive system can receive and process information and take decisions, while a sentient system does so consciously. The human brain is essentially a cognitive system, with sentience added literally as an afterthought.

This allows my suggestion to be treated as a testable hypothesis. As neuroscience refines its understanding of the brain areas involved in consciousness, we can begin to analyse the processing signals present to discover the meaning encoded in them. We should eventually be able to compare conscious and unconscous processing streams and look for structures present only in the stream of consciousness. Such structures would provide tell-tale signatures of meanings unique to consciousness. Any abstraction of meaning as "meta-information" should leave its signature, and the hypothesis can be tested by whether or not that signature is unique to consciousness.

Either way, the world of the sentient being is built not of spirit, nor of matter or energy or information, nor even of experience, but of meaning. No wonder so many of us spend so much of our lives searching for it, whether mindfully or otherwise.

This essay was sparked off by psychologist Susan Blackmore's latest book, "Seeing Myself: The New Science of Out-of-Body Experiences", Robinson, 2917.

Updated 17 Sept 2017