The Experience of Existence

I've been thinking a lot about the mind, as usual.  But who is it that's doing the thinking? Isn't it the mind itself? Isn't this a hopelessly recursive process, like trying to capture the image of a mirror with another mirror, only to see an infinite regress of reflections?

That is why the so-called "hard problem of consciousness" is so difficult to solve. We can figure out the easy part--mapping the functions of consciousness to its physical processes, which is what neuroscientists have been doing diligently. But the hard problem of consciousness is trying to understand the subjective experience of the mind. What is it like to be a bat or to be you? Why should I trust you when you say that you are conscious? I can never experience what you experience now, reading these words. 

I myself am claiming that I am conscious, because I have the illusion of agency and an experience of selfhood who is the initiator and writer of these sentences. The motor movement of my fingers stem from an intent from my conscious mind, or does it?

Do I even have a choice as to what I'll be typing? Words emerge out of the void and are being manifested here on this blog. What makes anyone think that it's a conscious choice of my mind? I don't have control over what thought would come over me next. I could decide to take a bathroom break or take another sip of my Earl Grey. Who decides that? Me?

Maybe not. Maybe free will is an illusion, like what many philosophers and scientists say. I'm alright with that. I would like to imagine myself to be a river, just flowing along, obeying the laws of physics. All spiritual traditions advocate some form of living akin to this. It's living in the Now, as Eckhart Tolle would put it, or doing God's Will, as the monotheists would prefer to see it.

The terrorist on a suicide bombing mission would also claim that he is doing God's Will. How different is that from the hippie meditator who claims to commune with the divine on a psychedelic trip? Are not both attempting to tap into the natural flow of the universe, which we claim has its innate wisdom?

I guess, the essential attitude to have in pursuing any religion or spiritual practice is to have a sense of humility. Never latch on to certainty. The religious extremist on a suicide mission has a fixed ideology in his mind: that life transcends this mortal body and there's a hereafter where the real reward awaits. Well, that could be true as no one has gone there and come back to tell the tale. 

I don't give too much credence to near-death experiences about seeing angelic beings or bright lights at the end of the tunnel. So what? We see all sorts of magical worlds on an LSD trip. Is that real, or is it just the mind trying to interpret particular patterns of firing in our neurons? We will always see faces or creatures in the shapes of clouds or in the configuration of stars in the night sky. The mind is a pattern recognition system, honed by evolution. We can't see the world any other way.

Well, for all we know, life might extend beyond the horizon of this material existence. That'll be great. But I suspect, the 'you' that inhabits this body, will not see it in the same limited way that you see your world now. Heaven will not be you having wine and caviar in an opulent palace. Thinking about pleasure as simply that is just a reflection of our lack of imagination. Imagination itself is what we could construct with building blocks and patterns that our mind already knows--the pleasures of food, sex and kinship with other beings. Pleasure is just another series of neural-chemical processes happening in the brain and body. 

Whenever I browse a website, I would imagine HTTP requests being sent out and HTML code code being returned with status 200. To the browser, that is 'pleasure'.  A need is satiated. But HTTP requests and responses are abstractions of the application layer of the TCPIP stack. There is no such thing as a request or response, only data packets with bits and bytes being shuffled around by routers. 

Even packets is another layer of abstraction. They are real only if you are an entity living in layer 3 of the stack. And ultimately, it's just energy pulses being transmitted across space through photons or electrons, which again are also abstractions, called 'particles'. Our minds are only capable of thinking about objects that we have seen or touch--billiard balls, sand and waves in the sea. Hence all our models of the world is based on a very limited human vocabulary.

So let's have a sense of humility whenever we proclaim the ultimate truths of any insight that come from our human mind, whether they are the products of reason or divine vision. Ultimately, everything reduces to another experience of existence. And that's all there is.