Losing Oneself

Tag: consciousness

  • default mode network

    If you start reading about consciousness, the brain and mindfulness practices you will come across the term Default Mode Network or DMN. It refers to network of brain structures responsible for the “inattentive wandering of our minds” (Williams, 2014) that was first described by Marcus Raichle in 2001.

    The term is relevant in Losing Oneself because of how experiences of movement improvisation seem to intersect with mindfulness practices.

    Matthew Williams describes the mental state of inattention that is synonymous with the DMN:

    By “inattention” I mean times when you are not attending to physical activity, engaging with the external environment, or carrying on a conversation. Inattention, in the way I am using it, describes states of daydreaming, contemplating the future, reliving the past, or general rumination. The DMN is the set of neurologic structures responsible for this ruminative mental activity.

    In Williams’ excellent overview of the neurscience of mindfulness he compares the DMN with the task positive network (TPN). Who doesn’t love a three letter acronym (TLA)?

    Compare this description of inattention with how paying attention is ceasing to do something.

  • paying attention is ceasing to do something

    It seems generally hard to get a handle on words like perception, attention and sensation, and especially so in nonduality: When paying attention who is the subject doing the attending, and what is the object that is being attended to?

    Here’s Sam Harris from his Waking Up app on how choice happens:

    When we focus our attention on consciousness, who is it that is being attentive? In other words, which faculty of mind can set the focus to the experience of consciousness? Well, like many of these kinds of questions, much of this seems backwards from the experience of just noticing how consciousness is. It’s not that you are focusing your attention on consciousness, you are simply ceasing to be distracted, […] you’re ceasing to be identified with thought and with attention itself.

    The feeling that you can direct your attention is part of this undercurrent of thinking that you’re not noticing […] there’s simply consciousness … already. Everything is appearing on its own, including acts of attention. And the truth is you don’t even have to be attentive, you simply have to no longer be distracted, you’re ceasing to do something, you’re not doing something, the sense that you’re doing something is more distraction.

    – Sam Harris

    I find this very useful indeed. That paying attention is a recognition of distraction and that if I have the thought (one of many) “pay attention to the weight of my arm” the flow of distracted thought ceases and there is simply arm’s weight being sensed.

  • the sensing of a sensation

    In one of our conversations post movement (on 2 February 2024) I ask Katye:

    Are we expressing sensation? Can you talk more about sensation and movement? You say “sensation then movement”. What is this thing called “sensation”?

    I then wonder out loud if sensation is different from sensing.

    Once Katye and I have worked through the transcripts more carefully I’ll get to that conversation. But as I’m reflecting now what I suspect (or perhaps propose) is that there is no separation between sensation, sensing, experience, awareness and consciousness. That is, when perceiving (or feeling) a sensation (say pressure or tension on the outside of the left calcaneus) that is the experience one is aware of and that is in the open flow of consciousness. This is not to say that all sensations enter consciousness (far from it), but rather that the feeling or perception of a sensation (or the sensing of a sensation!) is indistinct from experience, awareness and consciousness.

    I’ll write more about the enfolding of perception, feeling, sensation, experience, awareness, consciousness, perception and action another time. It seems important to be able to disambiguate them as well as recognise when they are being used interchangeably. I should say also that I don’t think the above is quite right …

  • the ordinary self and nonduality

    To the ordinary self, NDA appears as an object of sorts, something one might want to experience or as a capacity one might want to have. To NDA, however, the ordinary self and its constituting processes, to the extent that they can be phenomenally accessed, appear as contents within its space.[1]

    – Josipovic and Miskovi

    In the above quote Josipovic and Miskovic describe a vital aspect of nonduality. That is, the self (or what we think of as a self) is simply yet another thing (or object) in consciousness. Furthermore, there is no “I” aware of itself as an object in consciousness, because where would that “I” exist or be located? Rather there is simply no “I”. This is what is meant by the unification of subject and object.

    The proposition here is that we human beings are already nondual; nonduality is not a ‘state’ to be reached (like we might say ‘flow states’ are). Rather we create and recreate the self as part of the process of grasping or reaching for sense. Sam Harris refers to this as selfing:

    … your mental experience of the world is a process. It is not a static something. So the experience of being a self, an ego, in the middle of all of these changing neurophysiological states, it too must be a process. It’s a verb, it’s not a noun. You are selfing your experience. You are not a self standing in the middle of experience. Self is a kind of action. It’s the act of identifying. It’s the act of grasping.[2]

    – Sam Harris

    [1] Josipovic, Z. and Miskovic, V. (2020) ‘Nondual Awareness and Minimal Phenomenal Experience’. Frontiers in Psychology 11, 2087

    [2] Harris, S. (nodate) Ego and Illusion. [online] available from https://dynamic.wakingup.com/course/CE2E59 [30 January 2024] (from 01:29min).

  • consciousness

    I’ve been mentioning consciousness quite a lot on this blog. But what is it?

    Annaka Harris is a editor and consultant for science writers and the author of a lucid introduction to the nature of consciousness research called Conscious: a brief guide to the fundamental mystery of the mind (2019). She writes:

    And even though, as mentioned earlier, Thomas Nagel’s definition of the word “consciousness” (i.e., being like something) is the most accurate way to talk about subjective experience, there are a variety of ways people use the word (the capacity for self-reflection, wakefulness, alertness, etc.), which causes additional confusion.

    – Annaka Harris

    Nagel’s definition is from a 1974 article called What Is It Like to Be a Bat? and his perspective on consciousness as subjective experience is now known simply as the “what it’s like” thought experiment. It boils down to this:

    An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism – something that it is like for the organism.

    – Thomas Nagel

    Anil Seth describes the importance of this idea as follows:

    Without consciousness, it may hardly matter whether you live for another five years or another five hundred. In all that time there would be nothing it would be like to be you.

    – Anil Seth

    Yet, how consciousness relates to awareness, perception, attention, sensation and feeling (and how to disambiguate these different terms which are often used interchangeably in dance research) is for another time.

  • the paradox of choice

    In the middle of a guided Waking Up meditation I hear the following words:

    Observe that you don’t actually choose the next thing you notice; whatever it is. Everything is simply appearing, including acts of attention. You don’t know what you will pay attention to next. See if you can drop back into that position of merely witnessing whatever happens.

    – Sam Harris, https://dynamic.wakingup.com/daily/DA9545D

    This is a difficult idea to assimilate: even the act of attending to the body is simply appearing in consciousness, and we do not know what we will pay attention to next. Consciousness is merely happening.

    But perhaps the condition of unusually high degrees of movement provided by the context of dancing mean that sensations in the body are simply more likely to appear in consciousness. If this is the case, then is there an agent here? And if so, who is that agent?

    This is a paradox of choice. We think we are directing our attention and it feels like we are directing our attention, but attention is merely yet another appearance in consciousness. If this is the case, then why do we move or dance in the ways we do? Habit? Training? Some kind of predictive processing in which we our orient towards movement and body-based priors feed consciousness and vice versa?

    Here’s the full transcript of the meditation:

    Let your body resolve itself into a cloud of sensation. Pay close enough attention so as to relinquish the form of your body. The shape of your hands, and back and head. Just let each new sensation appear in consciousness.

    And among this many sensations are those of the breath.

    And now notice whatever sounds you hear. And let your mind expand so it’s just the space in which sounds and sensations are appearing.

    And the moment you notice you are lost in thought, watch the thought itself unwind. And just come back to noticing sensations and sounds.

    Observe that you don’t actually choose the next thing you notice; whatever it is. Everything is simply appearing, including acts of attention. You don’t know what you will pay attention to next. See if you can drop back into that position of merely witnessing whatever happens.

    Again the moment you notice a thought is present witness it clearly. Where does it go? And then briefly look for the thinker. Look for the seat of attention. Look for what’s looking. And then leave your mind at rest.

    In the last minute of the session, become clearly aware of the sensations in your body. Return to the undifferentiated cloud of temperature, and pressure, tingling. Whatever is there.

    – Sam Harris, https://dynamic.wakingup.com/daily/DA9545D

  • interpretations of sensory signals

    Anil Seth is a cognitive neuroscientist who thinks and writes about consciousness. He is known for describing perception as a form of controlled hallucination.

    The third and most important ingredient in the controlled hallucination view is the claim that perceptual experience – in this case the subjective experience of ‘seeing a coffee cup’ – is determined by the content of the (top-down) predictions, and not by the (bottom-up) sensory signals. We never experience sensory signals themselves, we only ever experience interpretations of them.

    – Anil Seth (2021) Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. London: Faber & Faber (Loc 1391)

    What I like about this idea is how strongly it contradicts the phenomenal experience of sensing the body in motion. This is particularly intriguing in a movement practice (or indeed any activity) that is not goal-oriented. There is no ‘best outcome’ here, or some other measure of success – just sensing, moving (or not) and being in a wide-open field of awareness.

    The question then might be, why interpret these sensory signals in this way and not that? I doubt this is a question that is answerable.

  • experience and consciousness

    Wherever there is experience, there is phenomenology; and wherever there is phenomenology, there is consciousness.

    – Anil Seth (2021) Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. London: Faber & Faber

  • the body tends to efface itself

    Normally, the body tends to efface itself in our world-directed activity. However, it appears as an object of conscious attention, particularly when it is inadequate for a task to be performed, be it by a lack of capacity, fatigue, illness or numbness, and whenever it becomes an object for others to whom I feel exposed. In these cases, the body’s performance is made explicit and may often be disturbed. Thus, the body has a double or ambiguous experiential status: both as a ‘lived body’, implicit in one’s ongoing experience, and as an explicit, physical or objective body. An ongoing oscillation between these two bodily modes constitutes a fluid and hardly noticed foundation of all experiencing.

    –Thomas Fuchs and Jann E. Schlimme (2009) ‘Embodiment and Psychopathology: A Phenomenological Perspective’: Current Opinion in Psychiatry 22 (6), 570–575.

    I find the language of the body effacing itself to be fascinating. How it is that the body can do this to itself? Is the body in this case both subject and object?

    The work in the practice component of this research is to foreground the body in consciousness such that it tends not to efface itself, if at all — to patiently allow, enable or afford the body to resonate through consciousness. What are the strategies for such affordance? What does this feel like?