Distributed Mind and Existence After Death

  • I believe that one's mind exists also outside of one's body. However, the "self" is not aware of that (a person can't perceive from outside the confines of their own body, can't communicate telepathically). That is, my belief is compatible with the perceptions I have and people have (we feel to be located inside our heads). Yet it is a consolation for death and a topic of my meditations to extend my concept of self beyond my self and thus looking through the illusion of a "self". I believe that the parts of a person's mind that are outside their body continue to exist after the death of the person. I believe that a person's mind can partly exist in other people which there was enough interaction with.

  • Consciousness is the sharing of information between information processing centers; it is not a result of it, it is it.

    • The Self (and its surrogates, the Cartesian res cogitans, the Kantian transcendental ego, among others) is not to be located by subtraction, by peeling off the various layers of perceptual and motor "interface" between Self and World. We must reject the traditional "sandwich" in which the Self is isolated from the outside world by layers of "input" and "output." On the contrary, the Self is large, concrete, and visible in the world, not just "distributed" in the brain but spread out into the world. Where we act and where we perceive is not funneled through a bottleneck, physical or metaphysical, in spite of the utility of such notions as "point of view."

    • Daniel Dennett — Are we Explaining Consciousness Yet? 2000 [retrieved on 2017-06-16]. https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/cognition.fin.htm

  • The behavior of split brain patients hints on the possibility of dividing one consciousness into two, and each one still thinking "I am I, I am not aware of being split".

  • There are hypotheses that consciousness is an emergent property of several simpler processing centers communicating with each other, or that the communication and availability of information is itself consciousness.

    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergentism [retrieved on 2017-06-16]

    • Daniel Dennett — Are we Explaining Consciousness Yet? 2000 [retrieved on 2017-06-16]. https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/cognition.fin.htm

    • I know I can't know what makes a mind, whether it is the state of matter (brain), whether quantum states matter or play any role, or whether it is or interacts with a yet undiscovered substance. I am inclined to think that mind is an emergent property of complex interactions of matter (mainly the brain), and that it is as deterministic as the matter. If we had all inputs and an exact computational model, I am inclined to think that then we would be able to predict the behavior and flow of the mind. But it is so computationally infeasible, with so many possibilities, that we perceive us as having a free will and being non-deterministic. I also think that the computation is unfeasible also because of high sensitivity to input conditions, just as a CSPRNG in computer science is deterministic but computationally so complex we regard its output as random and mostly uncorrelated to its inputs as far as most applications of the concept go (it is usually enough to not know the exact state of only a small part of the inputs for CSPRNG output to be unpredictable), and just as a double rod pendulum is perfectly deterministic but very difficult to measure, compute, and predict.

    • I regard as a wonder that matter (if the hypothesis is correct) can think, have feelings, or love.

  • There is a hypothesis that brain performs distributed information processing in several places concurrently and the information are retrospectively assembled into one coherent whole, and this is what we are consciously aware of (we are aware only of the result, not about the intermediate work in progress versions).

  • There is a theory that awareness is a representation (caricature) of attention, and that awareness is computed for other people and when it is computed for self, it is consciousness.

    • Graziano MSA, Kastner S. Human consciousness and its relationship to social neuroscience: A novel hypothesis. Cognitive neuroscience. 2011;2(2):98-113. doi:10.1080/17588928.2011.565121. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3223025/ [retrieved on 2017-06-16]

    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Graziano [retrieved on 2017-06-14]

      • Graziano[42][43] proposed that specialized machinery in the brain computes the feature of awareness and attributes it to other people in a social context. The same machinery, in that hypothesis, also attributes the feature of awareness to oneself. Damage to that machinery disrupts one's own awareness.

        The proposed "attention schema theory" was motivated by two sets of previous findings.

        First, certain regions of the cortex are recruited during social perception as people construct models of other people's minds.[44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51] These regions include, among other areas, the superior temporal sulcus (STS) and the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) bilaterally but with a strong emphasis on the right hemisphere.

        Second, when these same regions of cortex are damaged, people suffer from a catastrophic disruption of their own awareness of events and objects around them. The clinical syndrome of hemispatial neglect, or loss of awareness of one side of space, is particularly profound after damage to the TPJ or STS in the right hemisphere.[52][53]

        The conjunction of these two previous findings suggests that awareness is a computed feature constructed by an expert system in the brain. The feature of awareness can be attributed to other people in the context of social perception. It can also be attributed to oneself, in effect creating one's own awareness. The conjunction of these two previous findings may though merely mean that these regions of the cortex deal with the same problems.

        Why construct the feature of awareness and attribute it to other people? In order to understand and predict the behavior of other people, it is useful to monitor other people's attentional state. Attention is a data handling method by which some signals in the brain are enhanced at the expense of others. According to the attention schema theory,[43] when the brain computes that person X is aware of thing Y, it is in effect modeling the state in which person X is applying an attentional enhancement to signal Y. Awareness is an attention schema. In that theory, the same process can be applied to oneself. One's own awareness is a schematized model of one's own attention.

  • The fact that "self" refers to the continuity of changes, as opposed to something unchanging, is relevant to the idea of distributed mind, as it too is connected not by an unchanging quality or thing, but by the continuity of interaction.

  • Psychological practice in dealing with PTSD in people who were abused as children accepts that the mental voices in the victim's head belong to their abusers - e.g. in case of abusive parents, "parent-voice internalization"

    • Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents — Lindsay C. Gibson

    • Toxic Parents — Susan Forward

    • I don't think such victims get a second mind proper, just that some of mind's properties exist alongside their own mind as a second partial instance, a set of processes, modelled after their abusers; and that the victim's mind itself is partly molded by the abuser's thought patterns.

  • Satanic possession as described by M. Scott Peck

    • People of the Lie — M. Scott Peck

      • Overnight the patient regressed to severe life-threatening illness, and shortly began to hear "the voice of Lucifer."

      • The spirit I witnessed at each exorcism was clearly, utterly, and totally dedicated to opposing human life and growth. It told both patients to kill themselves. When asked in one exorcism why it was the Antichrist, it answered, "Because Christ taught people to love each other." When further questioned as to why human love was so distasteful, it replied, "I want people to work in business so that there will be war." Queried more, it simply said to the exorcist, "I want to kill you." There was absolutely nothing creative or constructive about it; it was purely destructive.

      • For the sake of clarity I have possibly talked about Satan with too much definitiveness. I described the greater part of both exorcisms as a process of separation. Yet even at their clearest moments it was often impossible to fully distinguish whether the voice talking was that of the patient's unconscious or one of a true demon. Perhaps it will forever be impossible to totally discern exactly where the human Shadow leaves off and the Prince of Darkness begins. It is appropriate to conclude by focusing on the supernatural mystery of Satan. The evidence of the exorcisms was sufficient for me to become a believer in its existence, and I cannot deny the reality of the healing that occurred, but I am left with many more questions than before—too many even to detail.

    • I think that if possession is a purely computational process in the brain, it is an instance of the distributed mind — someone else's mind(s) having their processes there. If possession is a spirit that entered the person, it would mean that consciousness and mind is not explainable purely as a computation, or that, again, the computable mind/spirit/soul/whatever is distributed.

  • Victor Frankl's thought processes connected with his wife

    • Maria Popova — Viktor Frankl on the Human Search for Meaning https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/03/26/viktor-frankl-mans-search-for-meaning/ [retrieved on 2017-06-18]

      • In examining the "intensification of inner life" that helped prisoners stay alive, he considers the transcendental power of love:

        • Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.

      • Frankl illustrates this with a stirring example of how his feelings for his wife — who was eventually killed in the camps — gave him a sense of meaning:

        • We were at work in a trench. The dawn was grey around us; grey was the sky above; grey the snow in the pale light of dawn; grey the rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and grey their faces. I was again conversing silently with my wife, or perhaps I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious "Yes" in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable grey of a dawning morning in Bavaria. "Et lux in tenebris lucet" — and the light shineth in the darkness. For hours I stood hacking at the icy ground. The guard passed by, insulting me, and once again I communed with my beloved. More and more I felt that she was present, that she was with me; I had the feeling that I was able to touch her, able to stretch out my hand and grasp hers. The feeling was very strong: she was there. Then, at that very moment, a bird flew down silently and perched just in front of me, on the heap of soil which I had dug up from the ditch, and looked steadily at me.

    • I think that his experience was not just an imagination of his wife; it was the processes belonging to his wife's mind (residing in his mind) interacting with the processes of his mind.

  • Sogyal Rinpoche — The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, Part One, quoting Lama Tseten before his death

    • With the master, there's no such thing as distance.

  • I believe my mind is distributed through interactions.

    • Terminology as I understand and use it: mind = the software part of information processing machinery (or an illusion thereof, if it is all hardware), with memory, being able to perceive; self = the illusion of being a separate entity in the world, having my own one point of view, being located in one place in my head, and memories, perceptions, feelings, emotions, largely overlapping with the mind; consciousness = a quality of being aware of being aware, a feeling of being conscious and having a free will, a feeling of existing

    • my thought patterns are observed by others who reconstruct them (not necessarily identically) in their minds, and through repeated interactions learn more of them to a greater precision

    • the changes I cause in the world act as a feedback, as I perceive them back. On a primitive scale, a note taking system augments my mind and changes my thought patterns. On a more complex scale, I interact with people whose behavior is partly modified by thought processes that mimic myself (as they learn to predict my own behavior). In a long term relationship, my self (and to an extent my mind) relies, among other things, on those thoughts in the partner that originate from their interactions with me and their observations of me, and vice versa. In this situation, not only that our selves are partially fused together, as known by many (Peck, Hanh), my mind also exists in my partner's and the partner's mind in mine.

    • Perceptual and thought states are not conveyed in their entirely outside the confines of a physical person, only a small sliver is communicated through physical actions like words, gestures, action, and nonaction. These internal states are of course not duplicated losslessly to other persons or things as part of the distributed mind.

    • This leads to another hypothesis — that the distributed mind also contains non-conscious parts. And that, I believe, is correct. There are many unconscious processes in the brain and the neural system (breathing, some emotions, unconscious thoughts, reflexes (which often enter consciousness after they happen)); consciousness is aware only of some of these processes, and of that set only a subset can be changed by consciousness, the rest is only observed after the fact. By the same principle, some parts of my mind which are located outside of my body are not conscious. And those parts that are conscious are separated from my current self, not connected by direct conscious thought, telepathy, or feeling, yet I believe they do exist.

  • Yet I know I don't have answers for everything and that I might be utterly wrong despite my beliefs. For instance, I do not yet comprehend whether and how an ant colony thinks, and whether there is an emergent consciousness consisting of the individual ants, and whether the individual ants (who do pass a mirror test) have consciousness and what it is like. I welcome these challenges and they are a part of my wonder about the reality and everything.

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