Where is I?

I kicked off my writing on consciousness with a post on my overall framing of the problem. Now, by way of warm-up, let’s explore a problem that is confusing and interesting, but not completely mysterious, which I call the problem of indexical extent. The indexical problem is this: assume somebody explains consciousness satisfactorily, and even the existence of specific conscious points of view. Follow-up question: Why are particular conscious points of view associated with particular conscious beings? In particular, why is this particular conscious point of view associated with me? That’s still too hard, so let’s start with a simpler question: “Where is I?” This is the problem of indexical extent.

“Where am I?” is a question that reduces the question of the spatio-temporal location of subjective consciousness to a matter of linguistic convention. We assume, for the purposes of the question, that the subjective self is collocated with the body with which it is associated, and this works for practical situations whether we are asking about the body or the I. Let’s question the intuition behind this convention, by asking Where is I?

Why is Alice not Mabel?

Let’s get a feel for the underlying indexicality problem first. Early in Alice in Wonderland, Alice attempts to explain her confusing condition by pondering if she is herself:

And she began thinking over all the children she knew that were of the same age as herself, to see if she could have been changed for any of them…”I’m sure I’m not Ada,” she said, “for her hair goes in such long ringlets,… and I’m sure I can’t be Mabel, for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh! she knows such a very little!”

At this point Alice attempts to recall some simple arithmetic and geography, fails, and concludes that she is Mabel after all, and her concerns shift to practical matters:

“I must be Mabel after all, and shall have to go and live in that poky little house, and have next to no toys to play with…”

This is a good way of approaching the question. Why is this funny? Why are we so convinced that Alice is not Mabel? This is not just a physical appearance-switching thought experiment (a fairly harmless idea, philosophically speaking, that is at the heart of many movies and the polyjuice potion episodes of Harry Potter). We are talking about becoming another conscious being, an idea which is only intriguing if individual physical beings are normally conceptually inseparable from their indexicals — their I’s.

So let’s review: the four problems, in sequence, are:

1. Main Problem: What is consciousness? What is the I that Alice and Mabel experience?
2. Why does it normally appear to come in localized, limited-extent ‘points of view’? Why are there separate Alice and Mabel instances of I?
3. Why is there indexicality? Why is this physical lump of matter named “Alice” associated with a specific conscious point of view, Alice’s “I”, and that one with Mabel’s “I.” Why can’t they switch places?
4. Where, spatio-temporally, is the I associated with Alice?

The term ‘indexical problem’ is something I encountered in Chalmers’ The Conscious Mind. Chalmers himself appears to believe that the first two problems may be independent of the third, and require different axioms in a theory of consciousness. The overall theme has been explored in several popular pieces, including the famous What is it like to be a bat? piece by Thomas Nagel, and On Having No Head by Douglas Harding, both of which can be found in the Hofstdater-Dennett edited collection, The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self & Soul.

But I am interested in question 4, primarily because it is a good starter question that nevertheless hits many of the main puzzles in consciousness. Let’s table the other three for now.

Where is I?

Where am I? is philosophically innocent and a matter of linguistic convention like I said. Since it does not feel to me like consciousness is localized to a point in a continuous space-time, we can ask about spatio-temporal extent, with possibly a canonical point within it to place the ‘I’. (We’ll explore point-set consciousness at some point if I can think of something useful to say about the idea). Here goes:

Everyday Options

Taking the fully-awake case (to separate out the temporal problem for the moment), here are the basic options, starting with the most obvious:

1. Co-extensivity: The I is co-extensive with my body, with a canonical point somewhere behind my eyes. This is obviously wrong, since, if my foot falls asleep (i.e. a part of the sense of proprioception fails) the I adapts and the asleep leg feels like an attached object. The ‘behind the eyes’ part is very stable; I have tried and failed to shift this perception consciously.
2. Proprioceptive-extensivity: The I is co-extensive with my field of proprioception. This is possibly correct, as phantom phenomena in amputees demonstrate. The I is clearly a constructed entity that is maintained as an ongoing fiction by a brain. The brain itself is not immune, and the constructors of I can themselves fail. You could argue that the I splits into at least two pieces in surgeries that split left and right brain hemispheres.
3. Sensory extensivity: The physical world of sensation comprises photons dashing around, getting entangled and so forth, waves of air pressure, mechanical pressure and chemicals binding to receptors. Yet, even though the physical phenomena that comprise sensory perception happen within our proprioceptive extent (at least in terms of classical physics), we perceive the sensory phenomena there, where they occur. The I extends, at least in a sense of projective constructive control, to everywhere we can construct the hypothesized sensory landscape. As virtual reality glasses demonstrate, this need not be consistent with any notion of objective reality.
4. Imaginative extensivity: In a very weak sense, I can mentally ‘see’ an imagined Bombay right now. Or imagine a highly zoomed-in view of the Andromeda galaxy. Both have some basis is in a memory of actual sensory perception. This does not appear to be a serious case to me.
5. Co-construction of Object and Subject. You get this case by attempting to undermine case 3. Ask the question: if the constructed-projected outside world were actually inside your skull, how would you know without an independent knowledge of ‘outside my skull’ to refer to? In other words, our sense of ‘skull’ being also constructed as part of an overall constructed objective reality, it is largely meaningless to ask if we perceive reality inside it or outside. But since the constructed sense is the only way we engage reality (if it exists), the point is moot, and we might as well assume that if there is an out there, it is where we project it to be. With this caveat, the relative question of where the constructed I is, with respect to the constructed out there, is meaningful. But if subjective I and objective out there, skull, and inside, are all constructed together the extent question is uninteresting, since there is no ground truth representing the spatio-temporal extent of anything, including space-time itself. If this is the case, then the extent problem should be replaced with the problem of conceptualizing the idea of object-subject co-construction by one of the constructed elements itself. Confusing, huh? I’ll punt on this one, since it deserves a separate essay. Let’s continue with an unexamined notion of objective “out-there.”

Note that we are not concerned with truth per se. For instance, in the sensory construction, if I stare at a mirror, there is clearly a whole bathroom behind it. Equally clearly, what is actually there is a lawn behind a wall. This does not matter. The fact requiring explanation is that the I extends, via projective construction into a constructed objective space (which may or may not exist, a theme I am developing in my digital physics series). Let’s summarize these options (except number 5) in a cartoon:

We have here a one-legged man with the other leg asleep, touching a table and staring, through virtual reality glasses, at a computer-generated 3d image of a building. His constructed sense of self extends to his phantom right leg (dotted blue outline), but not to his asleep left leg. His projected sensory reality includes the (constructed real) locations from where he hears sounds and feels the texture/temperature of the table, and the (unreal) building, but NOT the real potted plant. At the very least the building is where he sees it, and is part of his I, since it is not part of anything else.

Sleep and Death

Sleep and death are two universal experiences that illuminate the indexical extent problem. How should we view the question Where is I? during sleep? Only two options appear reasonable to me:

1. The I simply isn’t during deep (non-dreaming) sleep. It is reconstructed from manifest memory during awakening, and a sense of continuity (stream of consciousness) is constructed.
2. The I shrinks to below a critical threshold and expands again during the processes of falling asleep and awakening. If ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, and ontogeny is as much a process of awakening consciousness as it is about biological maturation, then we can say, awakening recapitulates ontogeny, which recapitulates phylogeny. Or, while falling asleep, you go from human, to ape, to amoeba to rock. And back.

Death is harder. I can only conceptualize it as a permanent falling asleep, with no causal relationship with any I that might emerge from the material remains (I am ignoring theological ideas about I after death — they appear superfluous, and there appears to be no reason to hypothesize them). Death does not appear to be phenomenologically distinct to me, besides possibly being vastly more painful.

Unusual Options

The options discussed so far are ones everybody can identify with or at least understand (assuming most of you haven’t lost a leg). Let’s cover two in the ‘not universal’ bucket that I have experienced, and which I believe are not too rare. There may be rarer ones.

First we have apparent out-of-body experiences. This used to happen to me, for some reason, on hot days, when I was in high school, and in the habit of taking afternoon naps immediately after returning from school, and until I read the physiological explanation, I was convinced I was going mad.

Here is what happens. When you are in REM sleep, your body is paralyzed (apparently a bodily protective measure, since otherwise dreaming can cause you to lash out physically and hurt yourself). But occasionally, your brain can wake up before your body follows, and you can get an eerie sense of your I getting up, but your body not ‘following.’ You then realize your paralyzed state and feel a sense of extreme panic for a few seconds, and after a feeling of tremendous mental exertion, your physical body ‘snaps’ awake. The feeling can be extremely odd. I remember reaching with my arm to touch my nose, and watching a ghostly outline arm reaching toward my nose (even though my eyelids were closed, since they couldn’t open under REM paralysis any more than the arm could move). Even after I read the explanation (I forget where), it was still a very unsettling and disturbing sort of experience. But eventually, I learned to have fun with those few seconds of unreality, to the point where I was able to effectively make my ghost body float slightly above my real one, flip around, and look at it. I don’t have the experiences any more, which I kind of regret.

This phenomenon is neither imagination, nor dreaming. You are actually awake, so you are not dreaming. And it is a sensory experience, not a conceptual one. Here is a picture of what it feels like:

And finally, let us include the variety of experiences that can be generated spontaneously, with drugs, various forms of sensory deprivation or (possibly) through meditative practices (a good selection of self-reports, worth reading with a stance of “this is data,” is in Mystics, Masters, Saints, and Sages: Stories of Enlightenment). The common sensory element among these is a tangible physiological sense of the ‘I’ extending vastly beyond normal experience, and leading to such self-reports as “I am the Universe!” Having personally experienced this sort of thing (entirely unintended), the physiological reality of such experiences is no longer in question for me. I don’t see the point of any attempt to legitimize one sort (say meditation-induced) over others (say LSD induced). For the question of indexical extent, the metaphysical meaning of such experiences is irrelevant, and I’ll address that topic some other time. The physiological basis appears to be systematic, if not comprehensible (your brain’s normal I constructor circuits go into unusual modes, and there are books like Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief that describe plausibly what might be happening).

What is philosophically interesting about both the REM paralysis type experiences, and the less common ‘dissolution of self’ sorts of experiences, is that they detach the extent of the I from one of the ‘usual’ ones we discussed earlier. That this is even possible tells us that the programming behind the sense of constructed self is not firmware. But we ought to note that the boundaries of manufacturable I’s are vastly more flexible than you might think based on everyday consciousness. I suspect, though I haven’t experienced this, that even the locus can also shift from ‘behind the eyes’ to other positions.

Is One Category of Experiences more ‘True’?

A quiescent crust is no more ‘normal’ for Earth than a Richter-9 earthquake. I see no value in treating particular experiences of I as more “true” than others. As far as subjective consciousness goes, neither an ordinary or an extraordinary I experience, in the form of self-reports, is falsifiable, so we must appeal to metaphysical modes of argumentation in either case. To a certain extent, it is immaterial whether the I is co-extensive with the body or with the universe. Both cases are equally mysterious. One is just very much rarer and, within certain cultures, more valued. Whatever you’ve personally experienced, the philosophical commitment involved in believing in your everyday I is just as daring a leap of faith as believing in the (presumed legitimate) wilder rides of Eckhart Tolle or Buddha.

But it is important, in studying consciousness, to appreciate the full envelope of its manifestations. A theory of a designated normal sort of consciousness would be a theory of prototypical instances, not a theory of a phenomenological (or, if you must, noumenological) space with an analytical boundary. In particular, the extreme experiences, like the degenerate triangles I talked about in the article linked above, get at the a priori or primary intensional boundaries of the concept of consciousness, which I explored in my piece on definitions (Now you know why I wrote those two philosophical-mathematical pieces!)