In 1960, counter-culture icon Timothy Leary went to Mexico and took psychedelic mushrooms, inspiring him to launch the Harvard Psilocybin Project. He and other psychologists believed these mind-altering substances offered access to higher states of consciousness, and a personal connection to the divine. Leary was profoundly changed by his psychedelic experiences and famously exhorted disaffected youth to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Though arriving a generation late to the ‘shroom party, Leary’s appeal to “Tune in” especially resonates with me.
My own explorations with psychedelics strongly suggest to me that consciousness isn’t made by our brain. Like a radio, opening it up and examining all the minute components reveal no band playing inside. Rather, imagine our brain as a receiver, connected to a higher mind through a medium beyond ordinary perception. The brain does not cause the mind nor contain it, but is an instrument for us to perceive our local version of it. When we tune in to the source of the universal symphony, we experience the divine in everything around us.
Subjective experience feels so absolutely real and correct for each of us, we cannot know what it feels like not to be ourselves. We intimately know the person who is perceiving our world, and how this world consistently occurs to us. The hard problem of consciousness centers on the belief that we know how the brain performs functional tasks, yet there is an accompanying subjective experience that occurs for each of us in the process. It feels like there is a “me” behind everything that observes all of these actions. Even autonomic functions seem under our supervision, such as noticing when our anxious heart beats faster, and having the agency to calm ourselves down. The idea behind cognitive control is that there is a “me” who is controlling things.
According to British cognitive neuroscientist Anil Seth, “It’s more accurate to think of our conscious experience as a series of predictions that we’re incessantly and subconsciously fine-tuning – a world we build from the inside out, rather than the outside in.” There’s that word “tune” again. When we are attuned to things, we notice and put our attention on them. Our conscious awareness is an internally generated frequency by which we perpetually tune in to the station of our unique reality.
Scientists like Seth seek to quantify consciousness in the same way they go about any reductivist activity: by breaking down everything into its smallest component parts and observing how these parts interact. To do this in the brain assumes that somehow, consciousness must be an emergent property of a super-complex system. It’s taking a description of consciousness at the level of subjective experience, and attempting to map it to objective descriptions of brain mechanisms. This approach seeks to slice and dice Descartes by asserting, “Being is an only illusion created by thinking”. To most neuroscientists, the brain, in its totality of functions, must contain all the nano-instruments of the band to whose music we are tuned. The materialist view is that we are nothing more than the activity of our neurons, and the non-deterministic aspects of our brain just have to be observed under a better microscope.
Our experiences of being and having a body are ‘controlled hallucinations’ of a very distinctive kind. — Anil Seth
Aeon, November 2, 2016, The real problem
Seth’s idea of the brain as nothing more than a prediction engine must extend to all living creatures. A bat is aware of its position in space and spontaneously predicts flight paths through sophisticated sonar. An archer fish predicts shooting a water jet with extreme accuracy based on advanced geometry. If these tiny brains are also operating on a best guess basis, doesn’t this predictive coding infer some kind of consciousness? If, as Seth asserts, that “The specific experience of being you is nothing more than the brain’s best guess of the causes of self-related sensory signals”, then everything with a brain would have a subjective experience.
No matter how the brain infers reality from sensory input based on prior expectations, there is no denying that there is a continuous sense of “me” experiencing this world in terms of “my” unique relationship to it. I agree that this multifaceted sense of selfhood is an illusion, but not for materialist reasons. The controlled hallucination of our reality is not seeing things how they are but how we are. We see what we expect, which is that the “me” controlling the hallucination is separate from every other “me” and that “my” unique interior world is the world itself. We operate as if our map is the territory.
Through psychedelics, I’ve come to believe in the idea of non-local consciousness, or consciousness that originates outside our brains. What we call the mind is our local decoder of consciousness, designed to make practical use of it. I embrace the monist view that mind and matter are the same thing, in that all matter is purely information. The electromagnetic field of the brain tunes in to the mind that permeates all matter. Both exist in a quantum field of probability through which the experiencer is continually collapsing the wave function of thought. It comes down to our best guess of “whom” is experiencing “what”.
I came to this understanding through repeatedly experiencing thoughts that originated outside my mind. I didn’t think them, I tuned into them. If these are hallucinations, they are startingly clear and hint at explaining what materialist science cannot. Consciousness permeates everything like a luminiferous ether and our brains decode it into predictably recognizable forms and patterns. “My” mind is a filter that makes “my” unique experience. Like a radio tuner, it filters out the static and noise of all other frequencies. We always hear the same station. When we are still in meditation, or under the spell of psychedelics, we become aware of things outside of normal waking consciousness. The radio spectrum opens and new messages can be received. If the message is, “You are beloved“, when our conscious or even unconscious mind doesn’t believe this to be true, where does this message originate?
Science itself is a best guess endeavor. We know how matter behaves; we just don’t know what it is. We know how gravity behaves; we just don’t know what it is. We can likewise observe spooky quantum effects and go with what we know. The subjective experience of what it feels like to be “me”, a bat or an electron are all intrinsic qualities that cannot be described by causal structures and processes. There are no cognitive mechanisms that generate a sense of selfhood. Mind does not depend on matter because mind is matter and so it is in reverse. This is not woo-woo mysticism, it’s our best guess at describing quantum systems, the rules of which our minds, as all information, must follow. The intrinsic presence of “me” is the hallucination that the perceiving subject’s experience is an interpretation of the world rather than a cause of it.
Like jewels in Indra’s web, we are all connected to a vast network of consciousness. It is the programming language of the universe, with unfathomable intelligence behind it. In the brief moments that the hidden world reveals itself, we become aware that all along, God has been hiding in plain sight.
He’s a radio receiver
Tuned to factories and farms
He’s a writer and ranger and a young boy bearing arms
— Rush, New World Man