The sensation model of thought
Mental training and rejecting the sacredness of thought
Hello again, friend. In my most recent article, we were introduced to the idea of the “mind process”. Specifically, we defined the mind as the process of thinking and experiencing, which are actions of the physical body. Using that definition required us to draw a line between thought (the processing of information) and the experience of thought, which might be in words, images, or some other form. I call this the sensation model of thought because it frames thought as the same kind of process as vision, hearing, touch, or any other sensation in that they all lie on the same side of the window of experience.
If this view is correct — which I think it has to be if you accept naturalism and materialism — then it has some pretty heavy implications for both our personal lives as well as society at large. To put it simply, modern society advocates a view of thought that is straight-up pathological, and the effects of this view are probably dealing some serious damage to the quality of your life. For your own well-being, thought must not hold a privileged position in the universe of experience. The thing is, taking this perspective requires us to reject the idea of a true and sacred “inner self”, which is a pesky little myth that has become central to many modern cultures.
By recognizing that thoughts are received by consciousness, not generated by it, you strip them of their moral power (“moral” here meaning I gotta do something about this shit!) and open yourself to the possibility of shaping the moment-to-moment experience of being you. It doesn’t come easy, though. It requires diligent supervision and training of the processes of thought. Becoming a wise, kind, loving, generous, patient, moral person is a difficult and lifelong project, and it’s not something that’ll happen on accident. That would be like waking up one day to find yourself a world-class athlete without ever having exercised a day in your life!
So that’s what we’ll be tackling today. I hope you enjoy it! As always, feedback is welcome and appreciated.
The window of experience
Have you heard of Plato’s allegory of the cave? Imagine there’s a prisoner called… Jeff. Jeff is in a cave, chained with his back against a rock so that he can’t turn around (it’s fine, if you know Jeff you know he deserves it). As the sun rises and sets, objects and creatures passing in front of the cave entrance cast shadows against the back wall of the cave. Jeff has been staring at that cave wall for his entire life, just the wall and its eternal shadow play. It’s all he knows. Importantly, he doesn’t know that he’s in a cave, that the shapes on the wall are only shadows of things outside the cave, that the light casting those shadows comes from a ball of fire in space, or that anything else at all does or could exist.
Plato argues that we are all like Jeff, and that our everyday perceptions are just an imperfect reflection of reality. He also argues that, just like Jeff, we mistakenly think that those distorted perceptions are accurate representations of the true nature of reality. The point I’d like to make is related but different.
At any given moment, the body is carrying out a legion of physical, chemical, and biological processes that are necessary for sustaining life. The vast majority of these are not accessible to our experience; they are “outside the cave”. Now and then, though, something emerges from this hidden universe to project some twisted and confused shadow for brief appraisal before disappearing again. This shadow is what we experience, and it is part — but only part — of the physical process being carried out in that moment.
To try and make the importance of this difference clear, let’s go through two examples of physical processes, one experienced and the other not.
First, consider the process of vision. As photons enter the eye and make contact with light-sensitive cells in the retina, they cause fluctuations in the electric charge of those cells. This causes a chain reaction of electric spikes, propagating from cell to cell down the optic nerve and into the complex network of the brain. At some point, this process produces the experience of an image.
Through careful study, scientists have determined that the image we experience matches up pretty well with the arrangement and timing of photons entering the eye. Pretty well, but not perfectly. For example, there are no photoreceptors at the point where the optic nerve connects to the retina, and so an image that perfectly recreates the activity at the retina would be empty at this point. Yet we have the experience of a complete visual field, no gaps. Our experience is a distortion of reality, shadows on the cave wall. This distortion extends even further: consider that you are completely unaware of the individual photons, and that objects look completely solid when they’re mostly empty space.
For our second example, consider that those brain and eye cells discussed above rely on energy to function. When you scarf down that Chipotle burrito bowl with extra guacamole, carbohydrates are broken down and converted into glucose. This glucose is then absorbed by your intestines and finds its way into your bloodstream. As the level of glucose in your blood rises, insulin is released into the blood from the pancreas. The molecules of insulin bind to cell receptors throughout your body to trigger the absorption of glucose out of the blood and into those cells. The cells can then use the glucose for energy.
Fundamentally, what is the difference between these two processes? They are both processes of energy conversion. Both involve the cells of the brain at some point (brain cells need energy too!). Yet you have no conscious experience of the process of generating and consuming glucose, whereas vision is a pretty prominent part of a (sighted) person’s moment-to-moment experience.
Conscious experience is inside the cave. The entrance to the cave is the window into consciousness. It allows in shadows — imperfect and even deceptive — of the physical processes of reality. We have to be careful, though: casting such a shadow is only part of what a process does. There’s much more happening outside the cave, and the shadow does not necessarily even resemble the true nature of the process.
More importantly, there is no choice over what experiences present themselves. Photon activity is experienced, yet glucose activity is not. Whether it be sight, sound, taste, or touch, the processes causing the experience are “out there”, beyond the cave entrance, outside the window. Consciousness has no say about what happens on the other side of the glass, and whatever makes it through does so according to the impersonal laws of physics.
The experience of thought
Just like the traditional senses, thought is a physical process carried out by the body. After all, what else could it be? We still lack a complete understanding of the mind process, but if you accept naturalism and materialism then there just isn’t any room for imagining a non-physical source of thought. Whatever theory eventually unlocks a complete understanding of the brain and mind, it has to be a physical theory governed by physical laws.
So thought simply cannot be a privileged type of experience. We have to conclude that our experience of thought follows the same rules as our experience of sight, touch, or any other sensation. We might even say that thought is a sensation — specifically the sensation of information processing, see the “More than a feeling” section in my previous article — which is why I call this the sensation model of thought.
Just like with any other sensation, then, we have to accept that consciousness is not the source of thought. Instead, every thought you’ve ever experienced was received by consciousness just as unwillfully as you receive the image created by the photons from this screen entering your eyes. Even when you close your eyes, the process of vision continues.
That’s not to say that a particular thought can’t be the result of an event that is also experienced in consciousness. For example, the experience of a cool breeze might trigger the thought of a vacation by a lake, or of the morning run you’ll take tomorrow, or of buying a sweater. That makes perfect sense. After all, the mind is a physical process being carried out by the same machinery — the brain and body — that feels the breeze and thinks of the lake. Everything that arises in consciousness does so from that process and so is available to that process. You might then expect this kind of narrative continuity in the experience of thought just based on the fact that thought is the processing of information. Remember, though: the process which produces thought is non-conscious and inaccessible to consciousness. It’s outside the cave entrance.
This leads to a subtle but harmful misinterpretation of our own experience, where the contents of consciousness can appear to have causal power. For example, at some point after having the thought of buying a sweater, I (wait for it…) bought a sweater. It might then seem like my experience of cold caused me to buy a sweater. In actuality, though, both the experience of cold and the buying of the sweater were effects of the same underlying cause: the unconscious processing of the temperature of the air and its effect on the physical body.
This might be best illustrated with a diagram:
This difference might seem academic, maybe even purely philosophical, but it’s actually supported by empirical evidence. There’s a phenomenon called blindsight, where people with damage to a part of the brain that processes vision (called the visual cortex) will react to a visual stimulus without consciously experiencing it. Among the many case studies that support the existence of this superpower consolation prize, one I find most interesting involved an 83-year-old blind man, called TN, navigating an obstacle course. It’s OK, it was for science!
The quotes that follow are from a Scientific American article on this case.
After his strokes, ordinary tests of TN’s sight turned up nothing, not even an ability to detect large objects moving right in front of his perfectly healthy eyes…
They took him to a hallway and asked him to walk along it without his white cane. TN was reluctant, but they finally persuaded him to try.
The results are in the video below:
Did you see that shit?!
…when we questioned him afterward, he [TN] insisted he had simply walked along the hallway: he was not only unaware of seeing anything but also oblivious to how he had maneuvered around the unseen objects. He was at a loss to explain or even to describe his actions.
As we can see, the causal chain of normal functioning can remain unbroken by the loss of conscious experience. It’s reasonable, then, to expect that consciousness’s role in that process is non-causal; it’s an effect, not a cause. In this particular case we’re dealing with vision, but we concluded above that thought is just another sensation and has to follow the same rules. In other words, the conscious experience of thought is not causal.
Let’s recap. Consciousness is a physical process. The contents of consciousness — whether they be experiences of sight, sound, or thought — are not caused or even selected by consciousness. Nor do they have causal power over the physical processes of the body from which they arise. Rather consciousness, its contents, and all future physical states of the body are the products of physical processes evolving under the impersonal laws of physics.
The ever-changing self
If I were to ask you what kind of person you are, how would you respond? You might start by listing various personality attributes: patient; outgoing; lover of tropical fruit (oh man, have you tried durian?!). But what do those responses mean? Take patience, for example. What does it mean to be a patient person? Is there anything more to being a patient person than having patient thoughts? In other words, isn’t a patient person simply someone whose thoughts tend to steer clear of volatile or short-sighted reactions to their present circumstances?
As we discussed above, though, thoughts are just the product of physical processes. The patient person’s experience of their own patience is a product of processes that are entirely external to — and so neither available to nor affected by — that experience. I’m not saying that those processes are completely isolated or autonomous, though. The processes of that body are obviously affected by its physical circumstances: how much sleep you got last night; how long it’s been since you last ate; even what it smells like in the room where you’re sitting.
So if a personality characteristic is simply a statistical tendency in thought patterns, and if those thought patterns are products of physical processes that are jostled around by constantly changing physical conditions, then that personality characteristic has exactly the same level of persistence as the arrangement of the relevant atoms within and around your body. It might stick around for a while, or it could change completely in the very next moment!
So long as a thought — say, wanting to quit your job — comes from your “inner sense”, there’s the sense that you should do something about it. After all, that’s what you “really think”, or maybe what you really feel. It’s important, damn it! This is the view of thought that has become normal, even encouraged, in modern Western culture. We are supposed to look within for knowledge and to live the truths that we find there. This is what writer Yuval Noah Harari appropriately refers to as the “religion of liberalism”, and it’s a dangerous idea to hold.
“You” are a dynamic, ephemeral process, never the same in any two moments. What’s more, there’s nothing else to “you” but that process. There’s no hidden, “inner self” underlying and driving it all. There’s just physics and entropy. Once you accept that, even the most profound-seeming thought seems no more “true” than the strangest whisp of a notion that floats across the surface of the mind. Thought is stripped of its moral power, and your relationship to it can fundamentally change.
Accepting thought
There’s no such thing as what you “really think”, any more than there is such a thing as what you “really smell”. There’s only what you’re thinking right now. The thought on its own doesn’t “mean” anything profound about you or your life — or, if it does, you should be skeptical about your ability to decipher that meaning. After all, thought is the result of processes and conditions outside of your conscious perception, so you can easily be wrong about why you think what you do.
I might now seem to be encouraging an attitude of passive acceptance of, even indifference to, the contents of consciousness. From one perspective, that’s spot on! Whatever thoughts are or aren’t making themselves available to you, that is exactly the nature of your experience in this moment, and it can’t be otherwise for any amount of wishing or wanting.
The story doesn’t end there, though. Though thoughts appear and pass away, diligent self-observation can reveal patterns in the operation of the mind. Being aware of these patterns helps you predict how the mind will react to future situations and stimuli.
Imagine that you decide to become a wine taster. You sample many varieties of wine. You carefully observe the sensations evoked in the mouth, nose, throat, left pinky toe, whatever. Over time, you become familiar with the experience of drinking each type of wine. Over months and years, you approach each glass with more and more confidence about what sensations are in store for you.
Imagine now that you’re taking a sip of a familiar vintage. If, to your surprise, you find that some expected sensation — a floral scent or fruity taste — is missing, then it’s missing. You can’t make yourself taste a flavor that you’re not tasting. Even the smallest detail can no more be forced to make an appearance in your experience than you could make the entire glass of wine taste like a cheeseburger.
The same logic applies to thought. Given the state of the body and environment in a given moment, the experiences produced in consciousness — including experiences of thought — will be exactly what they will be. Any outcome other than the one produced was, however conceivable, quite simply impossible.
This is why you should “be kind to yourself”. It’s not about letting yourself off the hook so much as it is recognizing that you are simply a finite system responding to physical conditions. As much as you might wish you were quicker, cleverer, kinder, more generous, or more foresighted, the facts of the matter in each moment are exactly what they are. Those facts include the composition of the atoms in your body and the laws of physics, and they lead to exactly the behavior that they do.
Mental training
Imagine a world without physical training, where even world-class athletes reject the notion of a structured training program. Olympic runners show up to the starting line having spent the preceding months having only lugged their skeletal meat bags through whatever physical activities happened to materialize in their daily lives. Think how ridiculous it would be for a would-be strongman to expect to be able to, say, deadlift 300kg when the heaviest thing they’ve ever lifted is an especially full grocery bag!
We actually don’t even need to consider such an extreme example. You know, it wasn’t so long ago that it was considered quite unusual for physical exercise to be part of the average person’s daily routine. Now it’s the standard recommendation from your doctor, and having a gym membership is pretty common [insert COVID joke here, I miss barbells, sadface].
Why not train the mind, then?
Here we have to grapple with an apparent contradiction: I have been harping on about acceptance in the present moment, but isn’t the feeling of acceptance also just a product of the mind process, the same as any other sensation? Then whether you have this feeling or not is outside of conscious control, right? So how can you possibly do anything to cultivate it?
There is no contradiction. In each moment, things are exactly what and how they are. The future, on the other hand, is another story.
The mind process is just that: a process. Change is inherent, and every human that has lived from childhood to adulthood — undergoing all the evolution in thought processes that this entails — is an existence proof for the reality of that change. Do you still think the same way you did when you were five, or 15, or 25? Clearly not!
So change is not only possible. Like Thanos in the Avengers, it is inevitable. Recognizing that inevitability — and assuming that you have some preference about the type of person you are and the headspace you inhabit — doesn’t it seem only logical to guide the evolution of the mind as much as possible?
Just like, in our wine taster example above, you can train yourself to have a more discerning and present experience of flavor, you can also train yourself to have a more discerning and present experience of thought. You might know this as “mindfulness”, and it is an essential skill for a healthy mental life. Mindfulness is not the only mental skill that can be trained, though. I’m talking about any personality aspect you would consider worth having. Kindness, wisdom, resilience, these are not fixed traits. They are skills, and they won’t manifest themselves in the mind on accident. It takes repeated, deliberate training.
This is the promise of the mind process: improvement is always possible. You are not limited to being who you are today, to forever thinking the same thoughts and feeling the same feelings. This is because thoughts and feelings are not the reflection of some deep and unchanging inner “you-ness”. Thought is simply the product of a biological machine, and that machine can be trained.
Conclusion
I hope I’ve convinced you of both the possibility and importance of mental training. There’s still a lot to say about what that looks like in practice, and that’ll have to come later in another article, but I can at least get you started.
It’ll probably come as no surprise that I advocate daily meditation. There are plenty of pretty good apps out there to help you build a habit of meditation (Waking Up, Headspace, Calm, etc.). So go grab one and get training! Just avoid anything with crystals or chakras or nonsense like that. We’re training the mind here. It’s not magic, it’s physics.
Until next time, happy training!
