When Is It Time to Turn Out the Lights?

I happened to be reading "The Illusion of Conscious Will" by Daniel Wegner (which I highly recommend -- it is an excellent book) and in the text I came across the following excerpt from a book by Julian Jaynes:

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of ... How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when it actually does not.[3]

On reading this, I immediately thought to myself that the solution is, in fact, very easy: turn the flashlight off.

This reminds me of a certain other venerable old quotation:

It is said that things coming in through the gate can never be your own treasures. What is gained from external circumstances will perish in the end. However, such a saying is already raising waves when there is no wind. It is cutting unblemished skin. As for those who try to understand through other people's words, they are striking at the moon with a stick; scratching a shoe, whereas it is a foot that itches. What concern have they for the truth?[2]

This is the interesting thing about carrying a light with you: it is an invitation to explore deep and extremely dark places. This makes me think of the last time I ventured into a cave. (Missouri is, after all, "The Cave State". Because it's like living in a cave?), I went deep enough inside that I needed a light, and shining it about I saw all manner of strange and wonderful things. Still, I could not get past the sense that I was in some sense an anomalous occurrence in that place, if not an intruder outright. It's true, there were things before my eyes that I could perceive and understand, but they were made perceptible and understandable by my own planning and device. It's true that there's genuine information in a beam of light, in both the technical and the colloquial sense of "information". Moreover, such information would not be unavailable otherwise. Even so, investigating what's in the dark by getting rid of the inconveniently dark part seems very unlike the fabled objectivity that classical science strives to attain.

Without admitting romanticism or mysticism, we already know that the Universe contains at least two kinds of knowledge: things that are computable, and things that are not. How many other divisions may there be besides? If we admit that the mind is a physical process and not some magic causeless cause that can create information ex nihilo, there surely must be knowledge that it cannot produce, or even that certain of its subfunctions are unable to produce. (Aphasias are one such interesting and highly celebrated case.) This seems like a little explored and very challenging but very interesting domain for scientific investigation and philosophical inquiry. On the other hand, it might turn out that this is a domain wherein scientific investigation cannot possibly answer the questions we are trying to ask. What then?

We acknowledge that 'knowing' is a physical process, caused by physical processes. Still, we intuitively think of it as a "meta-process", that pertains to certain other processes. The time may yet come when we have to collapse all of the "meta-" distinctions in our modes of thought into a unified whole. A science that successfully transcends all barriers to knowledge will have to remove the distinction between the events in our brains that constitute "knowing" and the events elsewhere that seem, perpetually, to confront, confound and challenge us as human beings.

I realize that this is a very bold and very sweeping proposition, requiring a very unwieldy camel to be threaded through a very delicate needle. Even so, there seems to be a deep conceptual incongruity in our macro-scale world knowledge, and even our personal self-knowledge, that we habitually lean upon but seldom acknowledge. If the vivid sense of identity and "there-ness" that each human being experiences is dependent upon and essentially the same as phenomena in the world at large, why is the feeling of difference and identity so strong? This is the essence of the so-called Hard Problem of cognitive science, and of such puzzling questions as Hofstadter's "identical human copy" problem [1], and no doubt of many troubled personal introspections by many people. I would argue, however, that the question has a much broader, transpersonal significance: Are there facts that are scientifically unknowable? And have we reached a stage in the progress of science where such a question may be regarded as serious and respectable? Perhaps, perhaps not. If not, it seems science is moving more slowly hoped. Even so, this isn't a victory for romanticism either. The romantics, for all their rhapsodizing about essences and sneering at analytic problem-solving, have yet to give any clear, convincing, and accessible explanation of of the key practical point:

When and how do we turn the light off?

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[1] Hofstadter, Douglas. I Am A Strange Loop. Basic Books, 2007.

[2] Mumon's Introduction to The Gateless Gate, Katsuki Sekida (trans.)

[3] Wegner, Daniel. The Illusion of Conscious Will. MIT Press, 2002.