The Ocean of Experience
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?” — David Foster Wallace, This Is Water
As conscious beings, we are ever swimming in a sea of mind, continuously saturated by the tidal ebb and flow of sense data from rich, complex, and accessible floods of phenomenal expression. It is no small wonder that we have somehow come to consciously experience that ocean of phenomenal waves washing over us, moving us, and supporting us in its physiophenomenal buoyancy. For as both physical and phenomenal ‘fish’, how is it possible that we can understand what that ocean of mind might be when we are constantly surrounded and saturated by it? How can we rise above the water’s surface as spinning porpoises or breaching whales, launching our minds into the air of awareness, only to look down upon that cool expanse of sensuous liquid from whence we have escaped its sensorial surface to finally recognize it for what it is…for what we are?
Our conscious minds are a relational sieve — an alembic of awareness distilling phenomenal events into discretely unified, but richly defined experiences within a tightly focused perspective of conscious apprehension, judgement, and feeling. But our complete physiophenomenal system of unconscious, preconscious, and protoconscious processes is much deeper and more complex than that narrowly focused view of the world.
Our understanding of this vast ocean of phenomenal reality—viewed by us through our tiny portals of conscious experience—focuses only upon an immediate and infinitesimal aspect of the entire universe of potential experiential qualities and relations, from one conscious moment to the next. But beneath the surface of our private pools of conscious thought, we unconsciously process vast amounts of sense data, as well as run countless physiological processes and make trillions of informational and emotional connections, all without the benefit of any conscious experience at all. We experience only a fractional portion of what we fully perceive, process, and store in the nexus of our 120+ billion neuron relational engines. Our conscious minds are a relational sieve — an alembic of awareness distilling phenomenal events into discretely unified, but richly defined experiences within a tightly focused perspective of conscious apprehension, judgement, and feeling. But our complete physiophenomenal system of unconscious, preconscious, and protoconscious processes is much deeper and more complex than that narrowly focused view of the world.
We are overtly physical beings experiencing an objectively physical world through a qualitative filter of nonphysical, subjectively conscious experience. That we can have such experiences at all is one of the most perplexing mysteries that we have yet faced. Both why and how we are conscious at all continues to confound us, even as we constantly take for granted the most intimate part of ourselves we can know, each and every day.
§ § §
The Mind-Body Problem and the Substance Gap of Dualism
Throughout the history of human thought, we have imagined, pondered, and argued countless positions, theories, and myths attempting to explain how we beasts of physical flesh can dream, feel, apprehend, and reflect upon ourselves and our world — all from within the ephemeral boundaries of our own minds. How can an electrochemically-charged, 3-pound lump of salty fat, floating inside a brine-filled box of bone not only compose a symphony, a sonnet, or a mathematical model of the universe, but somehow apprehend, contemplate, feel, and even completely lose itself within perfectly subjective thoughts, feelings, emotions, perceptions, and experiences? How can a physical body experience the inner life of a shapeless mind; and how can that shapeless mind sense, influence, and even control that physical body?
We face an apparent fundamental dualism that frustrates our attempts to explain the interaction and interrelation between our brain and our consciousness —between body and mind….In framing the issue with categorical assumptions about something of one nature (mind) that is completely foreign to the nature of the other thing (body), we have created a problem that is harder to solve than it needs to be.
We are locked inside a classical philosophical conundrum that extends into the empirical realm of science, and that is all too often sought to be assuaged by religious and supernatural solutions. We face an apparent fundamental dualism that frustrates our attempts to explain the interrelation and interaction between our brain and our consciousness, between body and mind. It is at this very point that we face the challenge of the “hard problem” of consciousness. This is the essential philosophical and scientific gap that we just cannot seem to overcome. And this is the gap that we must traverse in order to solve this inexorable problem in order to finally stand upon the terra firma of understanding of how it is that we come to be consciously aware beings at all.
But this gap may not be as wide nor as impassable as we have led ourselves to believe. In fact, this gap may only exist as an artifactual function of the way we have traditionally approached this problem in the first place. In framing the issue with categorical assumptions about something of one nature (mind) that is completely foreign to the nature of the other thing (body), we have created a problem that is harder to solve than need be. For many reasons, we have defined these two manifestly integral components of reality as utterly distinct and foreign from one another, instead of simply accepting them as merely different qualities or aspects of a broader, more inclusive reality, with a much more complex matrix of relations than we have heretofore dreamt of in our past and current philosophies.
Have we simply become self-delusional in our framing of the problem from the beginning, setting up a false dichotomy and then naïvely wondering “how can this be?” It is almost as if we have placed a veil of mystery over our eyes, and have then ironically exclaimed, “Lo, we are mystified!”
We thus come to a pivotal disjunction: either we are disembodied souls; or our consciousness is nothing more than just another physical manifestation of our physical world that we have simply failed to understand; or our current understanding of the fundamental nature of existence is somehow lacking the ability to justify both mind and matter, or even account for consciousness at all.
Upon deeper reflection, it does seem that we have simply been historically blinded and both willfully and unwillfully ignorant in maintaining this rigid duality. Despite our rich philosophical and scientific heritage of attempting to somehow explain supposed interrelations and interactions within this dichotomy — or to simply explain it away — we have led ourselves into an intransigent cul du sac of conscious confusion. We can certainly explain this conundrum from a religious perspective, given the traditional division and codified distinction between the holy and the profane that inexorably led to the sanctified ideal of an eternal and disembodied soul somehow becoming tied to this frail and fallible body during its short and brutish stint upon this secular and sin-laden earth. That dualistic model of canonized spirituality has certainly dominated Western religious thought for centuries. Our eternal soul conveniently answers all questions!
But for the rigorous endeavors and investigations within the rational realm of philosophy — arguably descending from Descartes’ Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, with his snappy sales slogan of “I think, therefore I am” and his product marketing strategy of selling the ideas of our being a thinking thing (res cogitans) as well as a physical thing (res extensa) — we have been suffering from buyer’s remorse ever since.
Reductive materialist theories have attempted to explain the overtly subjective datum of consciousness in purely physical terms (physicalists). Idealists deny physicality and embrace mentality as the sum total of existence (Berkeley). Some inexplicably deny the existence of consciousness completely, attempting to frame it as a mere illusion (Dennett). Dualists accept the premise, and attempt to defend its expository virtues by proposing some bridge solution, citing pseudo-mystical strong emergence, or asserting some magical epiphenomenal explanation where nonphysical subjective consciousness suddenly springs into existence from purely physical processes (modern science). But all these attempts fail to justify the manifest datum of subjectively conscious experience, while accounting for how it can obtain within the ontological manifold of concrete physical existence, based merely upon the laws of physics, biology, and neuroscience that we currently accept as the dominant scientific paradigm of our understanding.
We must accept the latter position and consider the possibility that brain and mind are all one ‘substance’; and that we have simply never really understood what that ‘substance’ has been all along.…As we cannot get blood from a stone, we must pursue a different tack, and seek to get blood with a stone.
We thus come to a pivotal disjunction: either we are disembodied souls; or our consciousness is nothing more than just another physical manifestation of our physical world that we have simply failed to understand; or our current understanding of the fundamental nature of existence is somehow lacking the ability to justify both mind and matter, or even account for consciousness at all. Setting aside religious dogma and the overt problems with metaphysical idealism; and since we can justifiably discard the failed positions of substance dualism, reductive materialism, strong emergentism, and epiphenomenalism; we must accept the latter position and consider the possibility that brain and mind are all one ‘substance’; and that we have simply never really understood what that ‘substance’ has been all along.
As we cannot get blood from a stone, we must pursue a different tack, and seek to get blood with a stone.
