Stream of Consciousness
Trying to describe format & content
Epistemic status: Stream of consciousness with ad-hoc citatitons
Category: Introspection
My cognition is weird.1
Most of the time, my thoughts are non-verbal. The main exceptions are when my mind plays songs with lyrics,2 and when I prepare to interact with someone.3
Furthermore, I can’t conjure mental images. (=aphantasia)4 If I close my eyes and try to picture an apple, I see a solid colour between red and black; my eyelids with varying amounts of light passing through.5
Does that mean that my mind is perfectly calm? Far from it. My mental activity usually takes on a spatial nature, involving senses of direction, spaciousness, and attraction/pull/gravity. I get carried away on trains of thought, and can usually trace a chain of inferences back to an initial distraction. These inferences usually make sense on an abstract level, but when I try to remember the contents of each step, I end up with something intangible.
I’ve tried to learn how to meditate using instructions from “The mind illuminated”. I recognize a lot of the unskillful patterns described in the book, including monkey-mind, dullness and distraction. Some of the antidotes and advice are fairly helpful, but I’ve found myself plateauing.6
Imagine my joy when I picked up “the Science of Enlightenment” by Shinzen Young, and read that according to him, meditation is very analytical in nature. Yay. In the book, Shinzen recommends splitting up mental movements into component parts, in order to get a better grip on them. The first component is mental words. The second is mental imagery. Fuck.
This leaves me at an impasse: If I can’t follow Shinzen's ontology to make my inner world tangible, what are my alternatives? Here are a few:
Train myself to generate mental imagery and words. Interesting, but potentially risky. I’m generally a fan of how my cognition operates.
Come up with my own ontology to classify my mental movements.
Realize that I did generate imagery and words all along. Might work if my subjective lack of such movements is due to insufficient introspective capability.
Find meditative practices that fit me better.
[…]
I don’t think (3) holds true. Most people I’ve talked to seem to be able to hallucinate on command and some report incessant mental voices. Seems like a fairly obvious/noticeable thing. And there is at least one paper that agrees, stating: "These data suggest that aphantasia is a condition involving a lack of sensory and phenomenal imagery, and not a lack of metacognition.”7
(4) is quite sensible, but also a quick way out. If I pick the simple route I don’t get to make unsubstantiated cog.sci hypotheses. Boring.
So let’s start with (1), and then do a quick detour on (2).
But first, some context.
Killing off a bit of folk psychology
A lot of people run on legacy metaphysics. A particularly tenacious one is usually called “Cartesian Dualism”. This metaphysics splits the world into “outer”/material, and “inner”/spiritual. If you’re stuck on this metaphysics, you think of your Self as an entity bobbing around behind your eyes. This entity is sometimes referred to as “soul”, or “mind”.
If I put on dualist glasses, things get confused before we even begin. From a dualist POW, seeing things is different from visualizing things. Seeing is light entering your inner world through your eyeballs. Covering said eyeballs with your eyelids and then visualizing stuff must then be a separate thing from passively accepting entering light*.
(*according to legacy metaphysics)
And what about inner vocalisations? Is that the Inner Entity talking to itself? And what about people who hear multiple voices? Demons?
It’s possible to navigate the world using Cartesian Dualism, but stances on consciousness are bound to get very confused.8 It's a bit like classical mechanics: useful to calculate trajectories within certain bounds, but if you go too small or too fast, you need to upgrade your theory.
In much the same way, legacy metaphysics works kind of ok, unless you go into gnarly philosophical/introspective territory. This is where we’re headed, so let’s strip off some metaphysical cruft!
The dualist way of viewing things is deeply flawed. It's a kind of "Homunculus argument". To make the issues clear, you why we just need to consider how the entity within mind-space can look at things. Does it consist of yet another entity? Is your mind an infinitely nested babushka doll?9 Cartesian dualism inevitably leads to the supernatural10 or an infinite regression.
Those in the know will notice that “mind” or “soul” here serves as a “semantic stop-sign”, a pseudo-explanation that doesn’t give further insight or avenues of exploration. Just because you put a word to it doesn’t mean that you know more about it.
Enter Predictive Processing
A while ago I read “Surfing Uncertainty”, which has influenced my view on cognition a lot. The book is all about “predictive processing”, a neuroscientific paradigm I’ll try to summarize in a few sentences.11
In predictive processing, cognition is all about prediction. The mind is connected to the outside world through nerve endings that end up in sensory organs. These organs are flooded with patterns of stimuli from the outside world, and the job of your embodied cognitive machinery is to predict incoming patterns on the fly.
Whenever something triggers your sensory organs, the difference between actual sensory input and predicted sensory input gets propagated bottom-up, as a kind of “error signal”. If the error is large enough to propagate past subconscious processing into your consciousness, you get surprised.
Your cognition uses these error signals to continuously calibrate your world model. This enhances the accuracy of your predictions, allowing your prediction machinery to stay just ahead of the incoming percepts.12
Finally: the importance attributed to prediction vs error-signal depends on meta-predictions regarding the fidelity of the error-signal, and the strength of your prior beliefs. If it’s foggy, the error signal from your vision gets treated as less important. If you see a shape looking like a UFO, you will most likely disregard it as a figment of imagination + fog.13 Unless you STRONGLY believe aliens are true, in which case you might end up predicting UFOs and create a subjective experience of seeing UFOs.
Now how will this help me in my meditation practice? Who knows! I hope it will let me make better guesses than the ones based on outdated metaphysics. Let’s go!
On mental imagery
Based on my understanding of predictive processing, I’m pretty sure that the same brain areas are involved in:
visual memories
hallucination (visual)
vision
visual imagery during dreaming
picturing stuff in your mind.14
This system of interconnected brain areas is the prediction machinery responsible for predicting visual sensory input. In cases where the subjective visual imagery is divorced from actual sensory data, your predictions get free reign, unencumbered by error signals.15
I am not blind. So I should have the brain areas required to picture stuff in my mind. Maybe the issue is that I have a strong expectation not to.16 If I expect to see nothing, and then get zero input, there should be no error signal, and hence no prediction updating. This makes total sense but doesn't explain why other people don't gradually see fewer and fewer mental images.17
According to a 5min googling, very little is known about aphantasia. The first paper I found has this quote:
“One possibility is that individuals reporting aphantasia actually do experience mental imagery, but that such experiences are not accessible to conscious awareness.” link
This quote confuses me even more. Isn’t mental imagery a form of qualia? Isn’t qualia consciously available by definition?18
Is this quote about the brain engaging visual areas when making sense of the world, even for us poor aphantasics?
I sure hope so. If parts of my brain were permanently shut down, I’d be much surprised. Now I’m curious if my brain is repurposing19 the areas usually used in mental imagery, and if that's related to me being great at spatial/abstract stuff such as programming and IQ tests.
Who knows! Further research is required.
On inner dialogue
Having inner dialogues seems really annoying. I’ve read speed-reading advice suggesting that people stop “mentally vocalizing” (aka subvocalizing) as they read texts, seeing as this slows down reading to the rate they are able to speak.
I’m fairly confident this holds for reasoning. Consuming information getting limited seems to imply slower reasoning as well. Maybe people think really fast, like pro rappers? I don’t know, but I’m very happy with my thinking speed and don’t think increased tangibility is worth the potential processing overhead.
Also, this brings the “left brain interpreter” theory into mind, where the left brain makes up bullshit rationalisations to justify actions. I can recommend GCP Grey’s video “You are two” for some further deconstruction of the concept of “the individual”:
Furthermore, “reasoning as inner dialogue” seems awfully homuncular. We’ve rejected that metaphysics, remember? Given the “left-brain interpreter” view, I am leaning towards inner vocalizations being an epiphenomenon/interpretation of the reasoning process rather than it being “the reasoning itself”. But then again, I might be biased, seeing as I lack personal experience making extensive use of inner vocalisations in my reasoning processes.20
When I try to reason by subvocalizing propositions, things get awfully slow, and I realize midway that I already know what I’m about to say, similar to when I speak with others. This slowness/jumping ahead might be due to me not having fully picked up the skill, but still.
Summing up, I think trying to overcome aphantasia might be interesting (idk how though!), while subvocalizing seems like a dead end. Onwards to ontology construction!
Building an ontology
I took a pause to meditate and tried to separate out the different components of my mental movements. This will take some iteration, but here are some I could sense:
“Spatial experience”, involving direction, dimensions (width etc), trajectories and spaciousness. It’s hard to explain this, but it’s not visual. It’s a bit like navigating your room in the dark of night, being able to sense/remember where different objects are even though vision is at 0%.21
A conceptual “stepping back”, where I jump between different interlinked concepts that share conceptual characteristics. This is very hard to describe.
A kind of “body imagining”, where I experience the intent, focus-trajectory and interoceptive experience I would have if I choose to engage in some activity. When I sat down to meditate I started analyzing the difference between a link and an embedded youtube video, by “putting myself in the shoes” of a visitor to this page. I could feel myself emulating the attention movement that comes with reading line-by-line, and the subjective sense(s) of salience/jumping out that a link would have vs an embedded video.
Bodily sensations, things like itching, tenseness, and sudden awareness of clothing. But also bodily sensations I interpret as my subconscious trying to communicate through feeling-substrates. One such feeling substrate might be a sense of blood flow in my arms and a tensing of my shoulders which I interpret as agitation/restlessness.
Bonus realizations
I’ve never gotten mad at a movie getting the looks of a book character correct. I don’t visualize the looks of characters at all, instead, I’m interested in their reaction patterns, reasoning and intentions.
When people ask me to repeat myself due to them not catching a statement I’ve made, I tend to express the same sentiment but with other words. This annoys some people.
I’m really good at analyzing dependencies between concepts. I’m also good at wording concepts (Concept-first?). I tend to have unique perspectives when I write software, this might be related.22
I remember people well if I’ve had an interesting conversation with them. I can remember what we talked about, usually verbatim. Remembering someone based on the colour of their clothing or similar doesn’t really work out well for me. If I hang out in a social context that contains people I don’t interact with that much, I need to meet them 3-4 times before I start remembering them unless I make an effort (or am attracted to them in some way).23
If I really want to remember someone’s name, I try matching it with an evocative concept. My boss is called Mikael. When I started working I thought of him as an imposing presence with a big wingspan and a sword. An archangel. And there are only 3~ to pick from.24
And yes, I have visual imagery when I dream. Spatial sense, movement and intent tend to be the most prominent features though. I like flying-dreams, where I usually have a strong sense of g-forces and “pushing” myself up.
Anyway, I’ll end here. Hope you’ve enjoyed my stream-of-consciousness exploration of my stream of consciousness. ‘Til next time!
I’m an outlier in a lot of aspects. An anthropic argument for solipsism?
your position in the queue is.. 1
I can mentalize taste rather well though. I’m currently mentalizing a mix of spaghetti, dark chocolate and lemon. Maybe I should give it a try.
If I push on my closed eyelids and hold for a bit, I see shimmering black/grey fractal shapes split up in rhombuses. I guess this is my brain trying to make sense of pressure-induced optic nerve activations. (don’t quote me pls)
Maybe one day I’ll head to an actual meditation centre…
Keogh, Rebecca; Pearson, Joel (2017).
The map is not the territory! Though sometimes the map carries enough feature to be useful :)
Also, how come your entity gets affected by consuming alcohol? Does the alcohol “leak into” mind-space, entering the entity? Is this why alcohol is called “spirits”??
Supernatural= complex things treated as ontological primitives. Mind projection fallacy boo.
oh boy
Surfing uncertainty, much like a surfer rides a wave.
Given that your prior knowledge is incompatible with random aliens
The top answer on quora linked to a paper that seems to kind-of agree: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15183394/
Uh hello there dreams
I don’t have strong enough prior knowledge to make absolute claims about my prior-knowledge.
My brain thinks it’s a good idea to speculate on the vivid imaginations of children here. But I don’t know enough about his shit to feel comfortable. So I hid it in a footnote.
qualia: ”In philosophy of mind, qualia (/ˈkwɑːliə/ or /ˈkweɪliə/; singular form: quale) are defined as individual instances of subjective, conscious experience.”
exaptation is the heart of sorcery!
Funnily enough, I read in some paper that early proponents of behaviourism tended to be aphantasics. Hehe. Can’t be bothered to sci-hub it up though, sorry.
This is something I’m really good at. Related? Also, blind people should be great at this. Are they aphanatasiacs?? Depends I guess..
There’s a guy on Quore with this hypothesis, so it must be true: https://qr.ae/prXvfy
This might just be them autism though
The number of people named Gabriel & Rafael is luckily small.