This recent article in Nova is fascinating. It seems that neuroscience is catching up to the truths of Zen.
Excerpts
How does consciousness come into this view of the brain? Is consciousness a mysterious phenomenon, in your opinion?
Llinás: I don't think so. I think consciousness is the sum of perceptions, which you must put together as a single event. I seriously believe that consciousness does not belong only to humans; it belongs to probably all forms of life that have a nervous system. The issue is the level of consciousness. Maybe in the very primitive animals, in which cells did not have a single systemic property—in which each cell was a little island, if you wish—there may not have been consciousness, just primitive sensation, or irritability, and primitive movement. But as soon as cells talked to one another there would be a consensus. This is basically what consciousness is about—putting all this relevant stuff there is outside one's head inside, making an image with it, and deciding what to do. In order to make a decision you have to have a consensus.
NOVA: But it all just boils down to cells talking to one another?
Llinás: Some people believe we are something beyond neurons, but of course we are not. We are just the sum total of the activity of neurons. We assume that we have free will and that we make decisions, but we don't. Neurons do. We decide that this sum total driving us is a decision we have made for ourselves. But it is not.
I seriously believe that consciousness does not belong only to humans; it belongs to probably all forms of life that have a nervous system.
IMO, this is not quite accurate, but close. Consciousness belongs to all forms of life that have an ego. A nervous system can centralise sensory data into a brain, and as such this must be coordinated through a central part of the brain, a CPU, but it takes the feedback mechanism of the ego to produce self-awareness. Any mammal is self-aware, and thus conscious, but I doubt ALL animals and insects are. They might be, but I doubt their central sensory processing is sufficiently complex as to allow the feedback from memory as is required for consciousness, rather there CPU just provides instructions for the body to do X,Y,Z.
We have tended to classify the ego as a human phenomenon, though lol clearly the Abrahmic God must have an ego. We do this because this is the only form of consciousness we can know.
A Buddha does not have ego but is clearly conscious.
You've been informed that a buddha does not have an ego, but that is total crap. Merely a buddha does not have an ego that activates the more animalistic and negative human emotions.
I am not personally aware of any buddhas. None of the QRS are buddhas. Whether the Buddha was "a buddha" is in no way provable.
For ego you need the thinking mind. So animals can't have the ego.
No animal could be a member of a herd without thinking or without an ego. Herd members must be able to think so as to know their place in the herd hierarchy.
Of course in humans the ego is far more developed - we even recognise a form of it as being "an inflated feeling of pride in your superiority to others". This form of ego is still just the emotions of pride and confidence though, it is an ego relative to those emotions, not all emotions.
A month or so back I started drafting a post about the relationship between the mind, the ego and masculinity and feminity.
I never finished the post, moved on to something else - but here is what I wrote. Just think of it as a series of "out of order" notes. Ever though it has minimal logical flow, it still might give you clues about how I view the ego. Where I crap on about how thoughts travel through the frontal lobes is meant to be allegorical, not literal.
I started off on this post thinking I was going to go through Kevin’s section on woman in Poison From the Heart and nitpick about all the partial truths it contains. Didn’t get very far, as I went off on a tangent on the first section.
WOMAN/MAN
Understand woman, and you understand the highest.
Transcend woman, and you transcend the highest.
Reject woman, and you reject the highest - the ego!
Actually I don’t think one does, rather an ego instead becomes a one sided affair, though imperfectly so. Rather than an ego originating from a feminine base, one's masculine emotional experiences thrust not into masculinity, but into femininity.
Masculinity and femininity are actualised in us only as a combination. Even a buddha would have some trace of femininity in every action that the buddha performs.
Lets examine the act of "thinking about reality". Thoughts are complex entities, they consist of innumerable lesser parts, as shown by just how much of the brain is activated during those brain scans that display mental activity. In order for these parts to fit together, to unite into one, they must form a structure. One that flows.
Structures cannot form without an equalisation of force between its parts - this is what holds the structure together. To be equalised requires some degree of polarisation between the two or more parts. Its all just like a cable and a port on your PC. To obtain a connection that electricity can travel through, requires that one side is a male connector and the other female. It is exactly the same for the parts of everything, including thoughts. Any unity, when examined at the fundamental level, at the pure logical level, must be an equalisation of opposing forces. Anything that is not such an equalisation would not be an observable part - all we ever observe, apart from space-time, is the intersection, not the fundamental content or cause. However we are capable of observing the intersection of two or more such intersections, as that is where thingness originates.
One of the oddities of femininity is that in order to form a unity, is that multiple masculine parts can merge with it - it does not have to equalise with a single masculine part, however, the total power of the masculine parts must still near equal the total power of the feminine parts.
Femininity as is a kind of central glue, multiple masculine parts can be connected to it. The central feminine parts of a flower for instance, the ovary, ovule and receptacle, hold in place the surrounding masculine parts like filaments and petals (lol perhaps that’s why females like flowers, the observable bits are a symbol of masculinity).
What this means is that our brains have both masculine and feminine sub-thoughts, though a total stream of thought will have a positive or negative bias towards each.
In an enlightened male the combination of these mostly results in an overall masculine thought - the feminine aspect holds the masculine parts together, but does not envelop any of these parts. This person has long ago learnt to emotionally associate masculine thoughts with a reward mechanism, probably because someone rewarded them for bright ideas early in their life. A love of the real truth is pre-existent, and there is a positive connection between thinking rationally and this love of truth, and the outcome of this positive connection is the releases of certain chemicals to make the mind feel "at ease".
As these masculine parts flow through the frontal lobes, some parts break off or act as spark plugs that trigger an electronic re-iteration process that flows back into the brain and causes a kind of refinement of the thought being processed. To get to a the stage of a thought may take hundreds or thousands of recursive loops through the frontal lobes, and each time a little bit of masculinity is used up - eventually releasing the central femininely biased kernel to the emotional triggers. The ego is a set of programs the content of which is determined by past experience.
Male non-thinkers/masculine minded women, however have not developed a love of truths of reality, there is no positive connection between such thoughts and their emotional system, so masculine thoughts that originate in their mind trigger different emotional responses. Such thoughts, when strongly masculine, may instead trigger the emotions related to power over others or things, or those related to aggression. Many have a love of knowledge or a love of games, so for example, not being able to solve a puzzle may result in irritation, whereas solving it results in pleasure.
Typical female thoughts are more like pea pods. The bulk of their sub-thought parts are feminine, and such sub-thoughts find a unity by totally encasing the masculine parts of the thought stream, the peas. These peas have little chance of ever reacting with the frontal lobes in a manner that would induce a love of truths of reality, or even rationality. Love is blind, because the masculine sub-thoughts generated when under the love spell are carried straight through the frontal lobes in a sludge of feminine sub-thoughts, straight to the emotional trigger stations, without activating the calculating tools of the frontal lobes that allow for rational thinking and innovation. Note here, that compared to the feminine kernel of a male thinkers final thought stream, the females is like a flood. if a dumb blonds actions are any example, these thought streams must trigger stronger emotional responses.
We are all pleasure machines, whether enlightened or not. The Dali Lama laughs because of this type of association. The QRS feel certain and secure. Bush has a positive association with the use of power, but a negative one with rational thinking. Muslims feel pleasant about God and control over others including their women. Modern minded Jews feel pleasant about, self depreciating humour and a degree of rationality.
The ego’s content is entirely formed by emotions, relative to what a body experiences. So when thoughts trigger emotions, this must cause the ego to evolve, to alter in some manner.
The ego is the judge of positive and negative, of pleasure and pain.
The ego is what feels, not the body. The body is what causes the ego to feel, and the ego is what directs the body to act in certain manners. As bodily movement is a learnt exercise, this means that what is learnt must also be directed. It is directed by the physical ego. A sportsman learns a physical craft, a method of reacting automatically and rapidly. This is stored as a set of programs, and as such to be utilised such programs must be “organisedâ€, otherwise they would be called into play randomly. With such organisation, a program hierarchy exists and obviously such programs are able to be directed, when experiences warrant there use. Ie a sportsperson learns the art of concentration, which is putting the physical ego in the prime ‘call upon’ position, above the emotional ego, to direct physical activities.
As well as the physical ego there is the emotional ego. This ego is our awareness, our consciousness. Like the physical ego it is active to some degree at all times, except deep sleep,, coma, when hypnotised, knocked out – or when one is deeply concentrating.
As the body causes the structure of the emotional ego, what occurs to a developing child is of vital importance, as it will affect the initial programs that evolve into the emotional ego, as the child experiences more and more. Babies are not really conscious, until the emotional ego has developed.
Around birth, the newly added programs, though foundation, are weak. New programs are constantly being added or existing programs altered.
The frontal lobes are the program makers. Every learnt thing is a program, a structured instruction. What occurs in the frontal lobes can alter existing programs, expand them, link them to other programs, reduce them, pack them or erase them.
Of the programs created, the ones with the most linkages are the strongest*. These form the master index of the emotional ego [and this is why some people can never escape a belief in god, such beliefs are part of their primary or key ego programs]. As the frontal lobes create new programs, these programs may become linked to lower level neural networks, and with repeated thought can grow to become new key triggers in the emotional ego.
The emotional ego is a separate form to the memory programs. It “valuates†these programs under the influence of the bodies emotional chemicals. The state of the bodies emotional chemicals is dependant on triggers from the physical and instinctual ego [instinctual = a very hot body is negative as it causes physical damage, Physical ego = body is hot, then stop present activity], or instructions from the emotional ego, activated immediately prior to the present [hot body = makes me feel unhappy, must find relief, must take action, send out signals to memory to see how some similar experience in past was resolved]. The emotional ego shifts programs up and down its index by directing how the frontal lobes is to add to or alter existing neural networks.
[*Note - to cure early detected autism. Give electric shock treatment (to make the brains existing programs compute falsely, to crash - so it then knows its memories need attention by the frontal lobes) + Oestrogen or Estrogen, then provide positive experiences and testosterone injections to make the brain correct such wrongly ]
The ego is the brains mental reflex action, sitting above more animalistic instincts like the flight response in the presence of danger.
What it does is based on what the brain has previously experienced. It’s purpose is to cause automatic, thus speedy and timely response to similar past experiences being experienced in the now.
Having an ego is not optional, one can never not have one and still think, though how much emotional effect it produces can be reduced.
The ego affectively determines the number of recursive flows through the frontal lobes. It tempers masculine thought by adding feminine “noise†to thought streams.
It takes information from the physical ego about the sate of the body, and the stream of sensory data causing thoughts in the brain, the combination of which trigger primary programs, which trigger lower level programs (memories) that the ego refers or routes to the frontal lobes and which becomes the “application†(like software) currently residing in the Operating System that is the ego. Where the current data stream is the same as a “current image of reality†previously created by this application, the application closes, otherwise it will store the image as a new memory linked to this application. Applications may have been wrongly chosen by the ego, or the data stream may be changed, in which case the data stream is directed back to the ego to select alternative “applications programs.
A person on the enlightenment path actually gains a powerful ego. As I have inferred above, providing your memories are fairly masculine, and your feminine instincts minimal, it appears one can train the mind to focus almost entirely on the creation of masculine thoughts, so that the ego directs thoughts to be processed not as feminine henids, but as slowly and carefully built rational thoughts.
