#16. Our Own Inner World

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One of the most fascinating findings uncovered for us by contemporary neurological studies is the fact that we each have our own inner world. That's what this posting is about.

As I mentioned in the previous post (#15. Pre-view and Re-view), it's something we experience all the time but rarely give any attention to.

It has to do with how we are related to the rest of the universe, to what I've called in that posting (#15) the anthropos-cosmos relationship, so it has a number of significant religious implications. It's worthy of our attention.

And of course it's challenging, as are so many of these ideas that deal with the convergence of science and religion.

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It isn't easy, for example, to identify the most personal and private aspect of ourselves with the scientific jargon term "cognized environment." But from the point of view of brain and nervous system studies, we indeed are the external world "cognized" (internalized), "the world become conscious of itself."

This same concept is also the basis for understanding that each of us has our own inner world. You might like to look back at post #13 where I tried to spell out the concept of "cognized environment" in some detail.

In previous centuries our spiritual nature was expressed by terms such as interiority and subjectivity. Today, thanks to the modern evolutionary worldview, we can have an even better understanding of personal consciousness.

We know that there are three levels of complexity to the cosmic process-- matter, life and mind-- and that at the level of mind, via the workings of the most complex thing we know (the human brain), the world is doubled back on itself, resulting in personal self-awareness.

Understanding this reflexive process also helps us to understand that each of us has our own inner world. The details are a bit involved, but if we can hang in there, we can see that it really does make a lot of sense. It is, in fact, both awesome and delightful.

And it has profound implications for understanding the meaning of our existence. It's precisely in this fundamental understanding of the fact that each of us has our own inner world that the findings of contemporary science and the insights of ancient religions converge.

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To begin with, the neurological account of consciousness represented by the phase "cognized environment" makes clear that we do not have direct access to the external world.

Rather, data coming in via the senses from the external world (the "operational environment," as Biogenetic Structuralism calls it), gets taken in and organized by the brain's activities in terms of what's already there in the organizational structures of the brain. And this "cognized environment" is what constantly gets modified by our life-experience.

Biogenetic Structuralists refer to this process as the Empirical Modification Cycle; I spelled it out a bit in post #14 (on Person as Process). The main idea is that, via physical ("anatomical") changes in the physical links and electrochemical activities in the brain, in-coming data from the operational environment (the external world) constantly modifies the already-there structural organization of the brain.

It sounds awfully complicated, but it's not an unfamiliar experience. We "live and learn," as we often say after an especially significant modification of our personal awareness. We just don't usually think about that kind of experience in terms of brain functioning.

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With regard to understanding that we each have our own inner world, we need to keep in mind that, when we come into the world, something is "already there." The basic structural organization of our brain and nervous system is there right from the start; it's in-born.

To appreciate this perspective, we need to take the long view, precisely the view offered to us by evolutionary science. At the second level of evolutionary complexity, life results from the organization of atoms and molecules in the DNA of living cells; at the third level of complexity, mind-- gnosis (our personal consciousness)-- results from the organization of living nerve-cells in our brain's structural systems.

And the brain's neural structures are, of course, the result of our genes. As we grow through our nine-month gestation period, from a one-celled zygote to an embryo and fetus, the development of our brain and nervous system has its source (just as do physical characteristics like our body-build and hair color) in the genetic material we receive from our parents.

And it's this genetically-based organizational structure of the brain which is constantly being modified by our life-experiences.

Because our brain and nervous system comes from our DNA, we are born with an "already-there," genetically-based, neuro-gnostic brain structure. We are unique from the start.

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Three enormously significant ideas-- awesome ideas, really-- come from this combined evolutionary, genetic and neurological perspective. Each has to do with one of the three levels of the cosmic process: matter, life and mind.

The first, with regard to physical matter, is that our personal in-born consciousness is the result of millions of years of cosmic evolution.

Not just the chemical elements in our bodies and their structural arrangements in our DNA, but also the subsequent structural arrangements in our brain and nervous system, have a long history.

Human beings emerge at the third level of the cosmic process, but in terms of the cosmic matter of which we are made, that process started a long time ago; it started with the Big Bang. Each of us personally has been "gathered," as Teilhard puts it, "from all time and the four corners of space."

Teilhard describes us as having been gathered "into a wondrous knot." I imagine the "knot" he had in mind was an immensely complicated and beautiful Celtic knot. It's a good image for the material complexity that is the basis of our personal consciousness which has been in the making for many billions of years.

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The second "awesome thought" coming out of the combined evolutionary, genetic and neurological perspective has to do with life, the second level of complexity in the cosmic process. It is that the DNA of every human being is different.

While the general structure of human and chimpanzee DNA differs by less than two percent, and in fact all things on Earth have a great deal of their DNA in common, it is also the case that the specific structure of each human being's DNA differs from that of every other human being.

Statistically, the chance that any two persons might have exactly the same DNA structure has been calculated to be about one out of 10⁸⁰. That number is larger than all the stars thought to exist in the universe.

So each of us is genetically unique. Right from the start, even as a one-celled organism-- even before we have a brain and nervous system out of which our consciousness emerges-- we are called forth by the cosmic process ("from all time and the four corners of space") as utterly unique beings. (Even identical twins cease being totally identical once the one-celled zygote from which they are forming begins to divide.)

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The third "awesome thought" has to do with the level of mind. It's a specifically neurological concept.

We need to remember that, as I said above, data coming in via the senses from the external world (the "operational environment") is organized by the brain's activities in terms of what's already in the brain.

This means that not only do each of us start out as utterly unique, but that as we grow and develop, our in-born, genetically-based consciousness constantly gets modified by incoming data from the external world. Each life-experience, each thing we do, each choice we make, modifies who and what we are even more, so that as we live out our life we become even "more unique."

This is probably one place where "more unique" is a correct expression.

If, when we're born, our genetically-given uniqueness is such that there's only one chance in 10⁸⁰ that anyone else might have DNA identical to ours, then by the time we're two or three years old, the innumerable modifications of our inborn uniqueness-- via the Empirical Modification Cycle-- would make the chances that anyone else would have the same personal consciousness as ours would be far less likely than one in 10⁸⁰.

Mathematically, it's probably more like one chance in 10⁸⁰ raised to the eightieth power; i.e., (10⁸⁰)⁸⁰!

The point is that our in-born uniqueness is so modified by our life experience that there never was, and never will be-- indeed, never can be-- anyone like the utterly unique individual that each of us is. No one else-- past, present or future-- has or will experience the world exactly the way each of us does.

No one else-- ever, in the whole history of the cosmos-- is "the world become conscious of itself" in exactly the same way.

It seems like a strange idea, when we first think about it, that each of us has (or is) our own inner world, and yet, as I mentioned earlier, it really is a familiar experience.

In everyday life, it usually gets expressed in negative terms. We often say, of people we find difficult to understand or be sympathetic to, "She lives in a different world than I do." Or we easily dismiss someone's thoughts with words like, "He lives in his own world."

But it's a profoundly positive aspect of our personal existence. And, as these evolutionary and neurological perspectives become better known, we can expect that they will have a strong impact on our religious understanding.

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For example, with his early awareness of the significance of cosmic and biological evolution, Teilhard had an extremely positive appreciation of the fact that we each have our own inner world.

The Teilhard scholar, Georgetown University theology professor Thomas M. King, S.J., mentions it several times in his book Teilhard's Mass: Approaches to "The Mass on the World" (Paulist Press, 2005).

Fr. King calls it Teilhard's "individualism," and notes that it is an element of Teilhard's thought which often goes unrecognized even by those familiar with Teilhard's writings.

In Making of a Mind: Letters from a Soldier-Priest, 1914-1919 (Harper and Row, 1961), Teilhard says, "Every man forms a little world on his own."

Teilhard wrote two essays with the title "My Universe." In one he observes, "I've become so accustomed to living in 'my own universe'." And in his Letters to Two Friends, 1926-1952 (New American Library, 1968) he says, "Another man is, for each of us, another world."

Fr. King notes that sometimes Teilhard refers to persons by the philosophical term "monads" and quotes Teilhard's Writings in Time of War (Harper and Row, 1967) where he says, "Each monad, in turn, is to some degree the centre of the entire Cosmos."

In that same collection of Writings, Teilhard sums up his view in one sentence: "Each one of us has, in reality, his own universe; he is its centre and he is called upon to introduce harmony into it."

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Science and religion converge powerfully in that last statement.

The scientific fact that each of us is at the center of our own world doesn't isolate us from the rest of the universe. Rather, it allows us to see that we have a profound relationship with the entire physical cosmos and thus that our personal existence has meaning and purpose within the cosmic evolutionary process.

We usually associate terms like meaning and purpose with religious or spiritual views more than with objective science, but that last statement of Teilhard's brings the two together in a way that simply wasn't possible before humanity awakened to contemporary evolutionary perspectives.

The "biogenetic" (evolutionary) perspective of modern science allows us to see the validity of the old religious idea of vocation.

Because we are at the center of our own inner world, we are thereby "called upon"-- by our very existence as part of the cosmic process-- to do something. We have a task. We have a purpose. Life isn't meaningless.

And when we see that our very existence is the result of fourteen billion years of cosmic evolution, and that the details of our everyday life have significance within that cosmic process, it slowly becomes clear that what we are "called upon" to contribute to the evolution of the universe is nothing less than ourselves.

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"This stuff is a bit heavy for me," one of my cousins told me recently.

"Yes," I said. "Isn't it awesome!"


sam@macspeno.com

#14. Person as Process

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This is the third of three blog postings dealing with the Mystery of Person in light of the neurological perspectives of Biogenetic Structuralism.

The two previous postings dealt with the neurological understanding of consciousness as the cognitive extension of prehension (#12) and as cognized environment (#13).

That first post (#12) is about how the human spirit is both free and also rooted in the Earth and the cosmic process; it's relatively easy to understand, despite the jargon. The second (#13) isn't so easy: the idea is that we're not just part of the universe but in fact are "the universe become conscious of itself." It's an unfamiliar concept for most of us.

This third posting on the Mystery of Person is even more challenging; it's about how neurological studies help us to understand ourselves as a process. We know we're not just an object or thing, but process? We've really got to work at this one!

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From one point of view, the idea is clear enough. If we are the universe internalized ("cognized"), and the universe is a dynamic (not static) process, then logically we, too, must be a dynamic process.

But logic isn't everything.

And yet that logic does confirm one of our fundamental intuitions (gut feelings), that persons really are something more than mere objects or things.

It's that "more" that this posting is about.

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In some sense, of course, we are things. We're not a vacuum or emptiness. We're something, but we're not just some thing. Not a thing, but not nothing.

Language is inadequate because we're not yet used to thinking in dynamic or evolutionary terms; the static worldview has prevailed for so many centuries in western culture. But as the developmental perspectives coming from contemporary science filter down to the popular level, we can expect to be able to express these ideas about ourselves more readily.

We really do live in a tremendously transitional time. In terms of our understanding of the world and of the place of humanity within it, words such as the Great Turning, Immense Transition and the Second Axial Period are being used to describe our time in human history.

And among the many adjustments we're being called to make in our perceptions of things, it may be that coming to see ourselves as process may be the biggest adjustment of all.

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One of the 20th century's great geniuses, Buckminster Fuller, saw it. He entitled one of his books I Seem to Be a Verb (Bantam Books, 1970). And it's already more than fifty years since the famous British biologist Julian Huxley made his now well-known statement that humanity is "the universe become conscious of itself."

But even back in the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas, working in the context of Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy, described the human soul as "that which can become all things." It was his way of distinguishing human souls from the souls (life-principle) of animals.

Of course he didn't have the modern evolutionary perspectives and the findings of neuro-physiology available to him, so his statement is probably a working out of a profound intuitive perception on his part. 

But he was saying something very much like what neuro-science means when it uses terms such as "cognized environment" and "process" to describe the mystery of personal consciousness.

Those neurological perspectives help us to understand just what it means to say that we are one with the universe (that we can "become all things") and that we are the activity of that dynamic process reflecting back on itself at its most complex stage of development (that we can "become all things").

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We struggle for words to describe the Mystery of Person.

One frequently used term is subjectivity. We say that a person is not an object but a subject. "Not an it but a thou," in Martin Buber's words.

Another frequently used term is interiority. Religious language has included talk about the "interior life" for many centuries.

In our day, the style in which we live our interior life has come to be known as a spirituality, and it appears that our personal spirituality-- the way in which we are religious, how we live our inner life-- depends to a great extent on our inborn personality type. Our style of spirituality seems to depend on the genetic material the universe provides us with when we are called forth from within the cosmic evolutionary process. I hope to share some thoughts along those lines in future posts.

Words like reflection, reflexive and reflective also have been commonly used in western culture to describe the intuitive insight that human consciousness is somehow the world "convoluted" or "doubled back" on itself. It's the "somehow" of that process which neurophysiology helps us understand better.

As I spelled out in some detail in the previous posting (#13 on Cognized Environment), the basic idea about the reflexive nature of consciousness is that "any sense data that enters the brain is immediately compared with already-there previously-stored sense data." New information is compared with already-present information.

That's our brain's reflective ability. It emerged originally as an adaptive evolutionary mechanism: in-coming data is processed in terms of how it fits with previous information already stored in the brain, so that threatening things in the environment can be avoided and beneficial things can be pursued.

It's this activity of the brain which accounts for the external world (what neurology calls the "operational environment") becoming internalized (become "cognized"). And it's the neurological mechanism which, although obviously unknown to Aquinas, is what he was trying to describe by saying that the soul "can become all things."

In neurological jargon, the soul (personal consciousness or neuro-gnosis) is the "informational content" of the media of nerve cells and networks of neural structures in which this information is "coded" and by way of which it gets modified via our life experience.

"Coding" refers to the fact that awareness is the "informational content" of the neurological structures; it's "coded" into those structures in the same way that information about gender, body build and hair color, for example, is coded in our DNA structures.

The difference between DNA and brain structures helps us to be more clear about the second and third levels of complexity in the cosmic process. DNA is essentially a very large molecule made of millions of atoms; it is located inside the nucleus of each living cell and its activity accounts for the emergence of self-transforming life-forms. In contrast, the human brain is made of millions of cells-- as many cells as there are stars in our galaxy-- and the activity of its incredibly complicated structure is what accounts for the emergence at the third level of complexity of personal consciousness.

So in terms of what's going on in the brain, it may be that information processing isn't such a bad way to understand the mystery of person.

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A problem is that we tend to think of knowledge or consciousness as something we have, not as something which we are. But that's still thinking in terms of the old static worldview. In the perspectives of a dynamic evolutionary universe, being a person isn't something that we are so much as something which we do.

Another problem is that it may seem that this is, once again, a reduction of the mystery of person to the level of matter. But it's not. 

We need to keep in mind that we're not talking here about rocks or clouds but living matter at the most complex organizational level we know of in the entire universe. If the activity of DNA inside cells can produce whales and roses, we can expect that the activity of the millions of cells operating together inside our brain produces something more.

So maybe "information processing" is a very good way of understanding the mystery we are.

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It's often said that we live in an "Information Age." Adding information or information processing to the list of words-- such as mind, soul, spirit, awareness-- we use to name personal consciousness might in fact be a breakthrough. It provides us with a new and better way to appreciate just what we mean by a human person. For the first time in humanity's cultural development, and with thanks especially to contemporary neurological studies, we can value persons in a way that wasn't part of our thinking in past ages.

We may be coming into the Age of the Person.

It sounds like hype, but it doesn't have to be. It can be a way of saying that for the first time in human history, we're coming to recognize the significance of persons in a cosmic context.

It's surely a big improvement over Aristotle's definition of a human being as a "rational animal" and of Rene Descartes' description of a person as a "thinking reed." We know so much more about the world and thus about ourselves than those earlier thinkers ever could!

Understanding persons in terms of information processing helps us not only to move out of the centuries-old prison of religious and rationalist dualism, it allows us to see ourselves at the very center of the cosmic process.

So even though it's not easy to think of ourselves as information-processing, we may be on to something of great significance. It's here that we can see that the findings of contemporary science begin to converge with the deepest perspectives of our religious traditions.

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I started this blog for "sharing thoughts about the convergence of science and religion" back at the end of 2006. It was sparked by media reports of the science-religion controversies. More correctly, it was sparked by my impatience with the naivety of many of those reports.

By far the best of them was the cover essay of US News (15 Oct 06), "Is There Room for the Soul?". It was written by Jay Tolson of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, DC and included a review of highlights of contemporary consciousness studies. You might like to check out Tolson's article and/or that first blog entry (On Recent Developments in Science and Religion).

In his article, Tolson brings up the problems involved in recognizing that personal consciousness "is not a thing." He emphasizes that this "doesn't mean that consciousness isn't real or that the mind doesn't exist, but only that 'thing' may not be an accurate way to understand it."

He suggests that we can profit from what he calls the wisdom of Buddhism... "where the inner self is correctly understood not as an entity or substance but as a dynamic process." His suggestion is a good example of the convergence of an ancient spiritual perspective with the findings of contemporary neuro-science.

But we don't need to be Buddhists to know that information processing is a good way to understand ourselves. It's something we know from personal experience. We are always learning and changing as a result of what we do and what happens to us.

In neurological jargon, the process is called the Empirical Modification Cycle. It has, as I mentioned in posting #10 (Overview of Biogenetic Structuralism), "a central place in the scientific understanding of our personal and cultural development." I hope to spell out some of those ideas, especially with regard to symbol, ritual and meditation, in future postings.

We need to be careful not to let the neurological jargon, Empirical Modification Cycle, get in the way. A blog reader sent this brief description of what Biogenetic Structuralists mean by it: "physical changes in the brain because of outside events."

That description is a good way to summarize the idea that the information already in the cells and structures of our brain is constantly being modified via our life-experience.

We know that life-experience changes us. Each of us has attended the "school of hard knocks" and we feel good about our successful accomplishments. But what a difference in perspective when we place those experiences, good or bad, and the changes they bring about in us, in the context of the dynamic cosmic process!

One thing we can immediately recognize is that all the problems and challenges we encounter as we live our lives are aspects of the evolution of the universe. Our personal struggles are the cosmic process in action. I put it this way at the end of the previous posting: "Our personal relationships and the products of our creative imagination and technical know-how are not just private activities. They are the cosmic process doing its thing through us."

Understanding ourselves as cosmic process isn't easy. As I said at the beginning of this posting, we've really got to work at it. But it's worth it.

The biogenetic (evolutionary) and neurological perspective provides us a sense of meaning and purpose we just can't have in a static worldview. In the dynamic perspectives of contemporary science, we can see that what we do and what happens to us has cosmic significance.

Just saying that begins to sound like religious language. Meaning, purpose, significance: the religious implications of this scientific view of personal consciousness are immense.

So much to investigate!

sam@macspeno.com