I HAVE BEEN READING The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self
by Thomas Metzinger. It is a book with some flaws, which I'm not going to dwell on, but on the whole Metzinger presents a fascinating theory of consciousness, selfhood, and self-consciousness. Metzinger is a philosopher, so is concerned to give an overview and to create a coherent narrative of consciousness, but his source materials are the findings of neuroscience, along with his own out-of-body experiences and lucid dreams. The combination is intriguing because though he fits in with a scientific, even materialistic, world-view, he seeks a theory of consciousness which takes his unusual experiences seriously and explains them. This may make him unique in the field.His opening sentence declares that he is setting out to convince us that there is no such thing as a self. In this he follows in the footsteps of Antonio Damasio whose book The Feeling Of What Happens
I highly recommend. I want to come back to Metzinger's theory of consciousness in subsequent blog posts, but here to talk about a point he makes in passing in his chapter the 'Empathetic Ego'.Recently neuroscientists discovered two related facts about the link between behaviour and the brain. When we see an object, groups of neurons associated with motor activity are active. These are called canonical neurons. When we perceive objects part of us is relating to them by imagining potential physical interactions, by how we might manipulate them. I'm reminded here of George Lakoff & Mark Johnson's theory of metaphor. They say that the metaphors which underlie our abstract language and thought are related to our physical interactions with the world. Hence we can say that we grasp an idea meaning that we understand the concept. (See Metaphors We Live By
).On the other hand we know that some neurons associated with motor activity -- called mirror neurons -- light up whether we are doing the action ourselves, or whether we are observing someone else doing it. In particular these mirror neurons seem to be active when we witness emotional states in other people and feel empathy with them. It seems that mirror neurons are involved in modelling the posture, gesture and facial expression we see in others, in order to understand the kinds of feelings we associate with that physical arrangement. This ability to sense emotions in others is quite accurate, and important for us social primates.
Metzinger speculates that these two types of neurons might have been associated with the development of communication and I want to run with this idea, and sketch out an idea about how language might have evolved.
Once we move beyond the very simple forms of animal life - the single celled organisms - and look at the way animals communicate there are clearly hierarchies. We all release chemical messengers, e.g. hormones, and these are sensed with the mouth and nose, or have a physical effect on us. The other form of communication shared by all animals is posture - and posture is one of the basic activators for the canonical and mirror neurons. Posture can communicate attitude - aggression, receptivity (for mating), submission or dominance. But not much beyond this. Think of reptiles.
Subtlety begins to emerge when we employ three other forms of communication. Over posture we note that reptiles will sometimes reinforce posture with sound, although reptilian sounds don't add much to the message. Birds developed elaborate postural displays, and added more complex sounds to the mix. These sounds mainly seem to transmit the the message conveyed by posture -- e.g. territorial displays, or receptivity to mating -- but over a broader area. In other words, birds can broadcast their posture. Mammals, however, are capable of producing more sophisticated sounds, though these are still related to fairly basic 'emotions' like fear, contentment, receptivity, and aggression.
Some mammals added gesture, a more subtle form of posture, to the mix. Gesture allows for more nuanced communication. Then primates in particular added facial expression to this mix. With these one can communicate a wider range of emotions. Scholars have come up with many lists of basic emotions which overlap but do not converge. However, any list would contain some common items, for instance: anger, joy, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise, desire. All of these, and many variations can be accurately communicated without any words through posture, gesture, tone of voice, and facial expression.
With posture, non-language verbal sounds, gesture, and facial expression we can communicate the full range of human emotions. However there is not much scope for abstraction, no possibility of communicating outside the immediate present. And in fact we share this level of communication with other primates. We do know that chimps are capable passing on knowledge of tool use, of planning, and getting others to cooperate in group actions that require forward thinking - war and hunting. So this level of communication is quite sophisticated, but language is orders of magnitude more sophisticated again.
Language sits on top of all of this. You would be forgiven for thinking that language existed apart from all of this because linguists seldom make reference to non-linguistic communication, and are often focussed on just the words involved in language, or even just written language. As I mentioned, Lakoff & Johnson have argued that the metaphors which underlie the our abstract though are based in our physical interactions with the world. So native English speakers know the metaphor that up is good (on the whole) and down is bad: e.g. a good mood is up; optimists feel things are looking up etc. (Similar metaphors are found in Sanskrit btw.). Similarly, in discussions we employ the argument is war metaphor: we take sides and defend positions against opponents; a vigorous exchange involves cut and thrust; we line points up and shoot them down; and we win if our points are on target or we exploit a weakness, or lose when our argument is undermined or demolished; we love to drop bombshells, and overturn paradigms, but hate to capitulate and back down. This suggests that language doesn't jut sit on top of the under-layers of physical, emotional communication, but is deeply rooted in them, and perhaps emerges out of them. We can't really consider language separately from gesture for instance, or from posture, or tone of voice.
Further support for this idea comes from research on the Brocas area of the brain. This region is intimately connected with language, but is also part of the system that controls motor function in the mouth and hands. V. S. Ramacandran (in his 2003 Reith Lectures) speculated that cross-activation in this area is responsible for the tongue poking out during intense concentration on manual tasks for instance, and that this is related to the evolution of language. Gestures, mouth movements and language are obviously connected. People can communicate complex abstract language with only their hands.
Vocal sounds are, at least some of the time, used symbolically and the study of this phenomenon is called Sound Symbolism or Phonosemantics. The roots of sound symbolism may be in pre-language sounds which communicate emotions, and in mouth movements which either directly interact with an object, or imitate an interaction. In which case we would expect that both canonical and mirror neurons would be involved in the language as well - I'm not sure if anyone has looked at this.
One of the central dictates of modern linguistics is that "the sign is arbitrary". This is usually qualified by saying that it is arbitrary but not random, since clearly conventions of sounds are seen. Sound symbolism takes this further by saying that the conventions are so pervasive and they represent such a high a level of organisation that they cannot be arbitrary. Indeed it would be surprising if verbal sounds were arbitrary in relation to the concept being conveyed because they would exist outside the structure of language itself. Lakoff & Johnson say that abstractions are not arbitrary, but rooted in how we physically interact with the world. Sound symbolism tells us that there is a relationship between a word and it's meaning which is not arbitrary, but related to how verbal sounds function as symbols.
So Metzinger's theory is interesting because we can construct a plausible narrative about the evolution of communication around it, and it links up with other interesting ideas about the brain, the mind, and the evolution of language. It can incorporate many different observations, and it dovetails with other theories of embodied awareness and communication. It certainly seems to tie together many of my own interests. Though I note that one reviewer of The Ego Tunnel complained that "Grandiose philosophy is so 19th-century". [1] So perhaps Metzinger and I, with our interest in such "grandiose philosophy", are out of step with contemporary philosophy - but there have been few ages when being out of step with contemporary philosophers has been a bad thing. Personally I think Metzinger is ahead of his time.
This is not idle speculation on my part, nor only a side line. This idea has been bubbling away in my Buddhist brain because I am fascinated by Buddhist mantra. Mantras are said to be sound symbols, and I'm interested in how verbal sounds function as symbols. I believe that this sketch of a theory, or something very like it, might begin to explain the effectiveness of Buddhist mantras both as a collective, devotional practice, and in individual meditative practice -- without resort to the supernatural.
~~oOo~~
Note
- Flanagan, O. (2009). Review: The Ego Tunnel by Thomas Metzinger. New Scientist, 201(2700), 44.
image: Rhetorical gestures. Wikimedia.
4 comments:
Should this mean that language evolved out of symbolic communication, or that today's languages (as your reference to mantras seems to imply) are to be interpreted in this way? Don't you think that the gap separating us from the first (human?) beings who developped language is too big to apply symbolism to 'our' sounds?
actually there is quite a literature concerning human emotional perception of sound, as such and, as this interacts with verbal symbolism. So cross culturally various tones, and changes in tonality are perceived as associated with various emotions and emotional changes. Of course within culture this is much more highly specified, as in western music major chords denote generally positive emotion, while minor chords denote generally negative emotion. Certainly chants create hypnotic effects which are well documented, tend to remove analytic thought processes in favor of more purely emotional ones. Certainly the power of these effects has nothing to do with anything supernatural.
Hi Earl
Yes. My interest in mantra is partly driven by having been a musician, and particularly a singer, all my life.
I think the major/minor thing is a bit simplistic, but music does seem to invoke or even provoke an emotional response without involving the intellect (they go under the radar rather than "removing analytical thgought").
I can see a number of evolutionary advantages to this - one needs to react without thinking to sounds which are often harbingers of danger. But they also form an extension - to go with the McLuhan idea - of social primate grooming. Singing together, especially, creates a sense of well being and emotional harmony. The content of the vocalisations is irrelevant - I've done experiments with this.
I would say that none of these things *requires* a supernatural explanation, but one must be careful to admit that neither are they fully explained and encompassed by a materialist or reductionist explanation. In that uncertainty anything might be possible. Just because a theory adequately explains the phenomena we are looking at, doesn't mean it has universal application. We scientists have learned this the hard way!
So when you say you are certain that it does not involve anything supernatural you go beyond what you can reasonably know. I don't believe in the supernatural, but I also acknowledge the limits of materialism. One can say that one has a seemingly adequate explanation for something, but that will come with a set of assumptions about what constitutes adequacy. The fact is that even having a very useful theory that make precisely accurate predictions (which we do not have in the case of the phenomenology of group singing I think) that we must not mistake the map for the territory. We may have a good explanation, but we do not have the Truth. We cannot exclude other explanations, nor the possibility that at any moment new data will invalidate our present theory.
This is especially the case when we consider the use of mantra in sadhana - where it is not chanted, but seen and heard within the context of a visualisation that often takes on a life of it's own (literally the sense of willing the practice can drop away and it carries on without our direct agency). The phenomenology of this has scarcely been studied, let alone explained. One would expect it to involve canonical and mirror neurons, and both sound and vision processing, but something else beyond.
As far as a scientific examination of Buddhist practices goes, a start has been made, but the detail is still terra incognita. We know that it radically transforms people - I know because I have been transformed by the practices, and I've seen others transformed, time and time again. But we don't really know how, or why this happens. I look forward to finding out more, but I doubt the details will be clear in my lifetime.
Yes, Jay, I hadn't intended to launch heavily into the agnostic v. atheist issues, merely to say that Occam's razor in mind, no supernaturalist constructs are required to account for the phenomena in question. They may always be entertained of course by those motivated to do so (and there can be excellent motivations, I think).
Of course you know that all beliefs, including phrenology, astrology, etc. have the ability to radically transform people, and there are no shortage of folks who will support the actual accuracy of their views on the basis of personal transformation. It is just that this phenomenon is quite easily explained by current psychological understandings and doesn't require that the belief system of the adherent be correct.
The point I was making with chanting, does have to do specifically with the hypnotic effects of repetitive stimuli, which have been examined empirically for over half a century, resulting in literatures which are beyond by personal study save for cursory examination, on occasion over the past several decades. One hypnotic effect is the relative de-emphasis of neocortical and left cortical (or dominant hemisphere) response, which is what I am referring to when I say reduction in analytical function (which is dominant, neocortex response primarily). It is this relaxing of critical analytic faculties which allow hypnotic effects to occur, and, as it were, sometimes by themselves on the basis of "suggestion". So "trance validation" procedures often involve something that is counter-intuitive, like having your arm floating and rising in the air as it is being suspended and pulled upward by imaginary helium filled balloons thus counteracting our well defined beliefs in gravity and the weight of our arm. And in this phenomenological state, the arm does not get "tired" and "heavy" as it would if you were consciously asked to hold your arm up, and is felt to rise of it's own accord. I don't know anything about Buddhist chanting, but imagine that the phenomenological aspects would be fairly consistent with the hypnotic literature relating to other activities which involve ritual repetition of emotionally significant symbolic material.
I'd also note that we don't really have to understand the fine grained neuroscience substructure to be fully confident in the sorts of constructs which account for these phenomena. The behaviorists have been doing this, keeping the brain a black box, for almost a hundred years now. And of course, many different empirical disciplines of psychology have been active since the 1860's in defining the variables that account for human perception and behavior, and none of this until very recently has been cross-pollinated with methods involving brain waves and imaging. So while it is wonderful to be able to (as a near-materialist myself) correlate theories which have been empirically supported in other ways with actual real-time brain function, we should not think that this is in any way necessary to be confident in the findings that have been developed over the last century, and which are the bases of Psych 101 courses.
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