How does our "mind" differ from our sensory experience? Inner speech is a mental event. How does it differ from ordinary speech?
Try engaging in inner speech such as internally describing the place around you and then try speaking out loud on another topic at exactly the same time. Did you manage to think verbally and talk out loud on a different subject at the same time? I cannot do this.
The reason that talking out loud can block inner speech is that they are created by the same processing engine in the brain.
Now try saying something out loud such as ‘Mary had a little lamb’. Observe where the sound of the words is located. Repeat ‘Mary had a little lamb’ out loud and then think the words using inner speech. Notice that the inner speech occurs at the same location as the spoken words. (I find the words are located inside my mouth, between and slightly below my ears). The mental activity of inner speech uses the same “nets” as the sensory and motor activity of spoken words. (see What an Experience (1) for a description of nets).
‘Nets’ is a term used in this book to describe where events appear that share a particular quality such as the quality of being sounds, or sights, or sensations of touch, bodily sensations etc. These various qualities share the same space and time in Experience but they interact with each other in different ways. As an example the net containing visual information can be transparent to the net containing sounds. (see What an Experience (1) for a description of nets).
The interaction of visual images and imaginings is similar to the interaction of spoken words and inner speech. We cannot easily imagine visual images while viewing the world around us because the process that creates sensory visual images for loading into Experience also creates imaginary visual images. The brain can do one or the other, mental or sensory imagery, but not both at once. As was found for imaginary and spoken words, the mental and sensory images share the same space.
This use of Experience either for information created on the basis of sensation or, alternatively, for internally created information, is the origin of the concept of "mind". Internally sourced, imaginary parts of Experience are said to be in our "minds".
We can occasionally experience fully formed mental images whilst looking at the world and we call these images "hallucinations".
The division between the imagination mode of Experience and sensory mode is not absolute, for instance all of us can imagine the crude outlines of faces, birds etc. in random visual patterns such as are formed by clouds. This weak overlap of imagination and sensation adds meaning.
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Can you see the white faces or a challice above?
Most people reserve the word “mind” for experience that is generated almost entirely internally by their brains without input from their senses. Whatever the underlying source of our Experience, whether it is loaded by processing sensory information or by processing internal information, there is only one Experience.
The result of this relatively exclusive interaction between sensation and imagination is that the modes of Experience can be paired according to which mode normally excludes another:
Action/sensation excludes lucid and sleep dreaming
Visual sensation excludes imaginary images
Verbal speech excludes inner speech
These pairs probably use the same nets to mount data. The exclusion is not absolute, a given net can be shared, for instance psychedelic drugs can cause imaginary images and visual sensation to occur together and some mental illnesses may generate auditory hallucinations.
Mental Space: The Space and Time of Mind
Notice that inner speech and visual imaginings are usually located near to the location of our head in Experience. It is possible to imagine sounds and images so that they are placed far away from our head but we usually place them near our head so they appear to be in ‘mental space’. Mental space is not a separate space, it is usually the part of the space of Experience that surrounds the head and we habitually use this for imaginary events.
Keep your head still and shut your eyes and imagine this page. Reach out to touch the imaginary page. You will discover that your finger is almost touching the real page. Imagination uses the same space and time as sensation.
Try closing your eyes and imagining an apple. Most people place the imaginary apple between 10 and 50 cms from their eyes - reach out to grab your imaginary apple to test this. We can imagine huge landscapes or the stars in the night sky but we normally place routine mental imagery near to our heads.
Part of the reason for the mental subspace being close to our heads is that we have a problem with focus in mental images.
You can test this problem with focus for yourself. Sit a couple of metres from a window and look out of the window at distant objects or the clouds and shut your eyes to imagine the clouds. Compare the detail of the imagined clouds with the sensory reality. The imaginary image of the clouds contains little of the foreground imagery such as the parts of the room near the window. If you examine the imaginary image you will find that you can either have detail of the clouds or detail of the foreground but not both. The distinction between focal planes is more severe with imaginary images than it is in sensory images.
The routine use of a near focal plane combined with the way inner speech is near our heads, gives the false impression that there is a separate mental space for mental events.
The existence of focal planes means that there are three main spatial levels or zones in Experience. The zone nearest to our head is normally used for the mind and near sensations, the more distant zone is used for sensation and there is an outer zone. These are all zones of the space and time that is our Experience.
The mind can place imaginings in the more distant parts of Experience normally used by sensations but it can only deal with one focal plane at a time whereas sensations can populate both near and more distant zones.
Notice that reading and operating computers, smartphones etc. trains us to limit our mental space into a nearby subspace of Experience.
Why Experience?
Our Experience seems to contain a tiny fraction of the work being performed by our brains. Much of the work of our brains, such as constructing phonemes and the parts of images, controlling our heart rate, monitoring our gut etc. never enters our Experience and might be called “non-conscious”. Highly skilled tasks can be performed without the involvement of Experience.
The non-conscious brain seems to construct almost all of the content of Experience as well as being able to perform complex tasks outside of Experience. So why does our brain model the world and ourselves as our Experience when it has clearly already processed the data in our Experience? Why do we have Experience as a model based on the world and not just have the brain process the data from the world and respond? If everything can be done without Experience why does it exist?
If our Experience appears pointless for the function of our body then the opposite would seem true: Experience does not exist to control our body but the body exists to create our Experience.
This observation, that the body and its brain exist to create Experience is obvious to all of us. Just look around, this Experience is our reality, what matters most is that this Experience should continue, not that we can complete a line of knitting or press a key on a computer.
Experience could be adding something that cannot be achieved by simple processing or it could be the whole point of the body. If Experience is the point of the body then we would need to know the point of Experience to understand why it exists.
Does Experience have a Purpose?
(It is helpful to have read the chapter on Time before reading this and the following sections)
The great physicist Herman Weyl summarised what makes change in the world: “Only the consciousness that passes on in one portion of this world experiences the detached piece which comes to meet it and passes behind it as history, that is, as a process that is going forward in time and takes place in space.” (Weyl in “Space Time Matter”). For Weyl it was the movement of the observer through time that creates the impression of change.
Weyl was not implying that events would not exist without a conscious observer. He was saying the opposite. He was saying that events are patterns that exist along a time axis in the same way as this line of text exists along the left-right axis (x-axis). He was pointing out that what we call ‘change’ is due to our observation moving through time. This movement in time makes fixed patterns in time appear to us to be like changing patterns.
The idea that our Experience is moving through time would partly answer the problem of the purpose of Experience: nothing would happen without it. Without our Experience our lives, cars, computers and so on are just fixed patterns, it needs our Experience to “read them out” by moving through time. However, this is largely a restatement of the idea that Experience is not required for us to function, everything would be there without our Experience but, of course, there would be nothing to “read it out”, to experience it. If we put the observer first – ourselves – then it would be we who make the universe happen.
Movement in time must be more than simply reading out changes from a pre-set future because this is a pointless exercise if it leaves us as passive observers of a fixed sequence of events. Our movement in time seems to have two components: the movement in time itself and the possibility of changing the sequence of events.
Changing the Sequence of Events
What is change? What is it like to us? Change is evident in the time extended contents of Experience. A wavering, short musical note might occur in our Experience and the waverings make an angle through time at the observation point. Change for us is a time extended object that varies and is also the steady replacement of time extended objects in all parts of Experience.
The way we see, hear, feel etc. things that change within the contents of Experience confirms the idea of the world as an arrangement of events along an existent time dimension. This is ‘confirmed’ by a current experience that extends in time by about half a second. Unfortunately half a second is not a very big sample of time, we do not know whether the events that occur in Experience remain the same once they have left our bubble of observation .
We feel as if the future might have multiple possibilities and is not already rigidly defined. This feeling is a ‘hunch’ that is related to the idea of free will. How could events be arranged in time to permit free will?
Our Experience contains a model that is continually growing into another form. The whole model alters as each time extended element is replaced with another. This Experience is much like what we know about the physical world. When we look around us the flower grows on a bush and the rock falls from a mountain so change is always contextual. For us change is usually about alterations to the immediate past. Change is the next step in the evolution of a system. The pre-existing state of a system determines the next change and this leads to an idea of change as events accreting onto an historical structure.
Consider the idea that two balls collide in space and the outcome of this is a ‘change’. This is only a truly meaningful idea if we add that these two balls come from over there and had a collision here. It is then meaningful because we are considering particular objects in a particular context.
The meaningful analysis is that a particular ball moves from its previous position and strikes another ball so that a structure is formed in spacetime. If time exists the past ball does not move anywhere, it is replaced by balls that were in the future.
Change is the growth of a structure in time and the events in the immediate future are accreted onto the pattern of the immediate past. This idea of the world is different from that described by Weyl in the quote above. Each moment in time contains the possibility of multiple futures. The future that occurs is that which best fits the current state of the world (in a physical sense such as the next ball along the time axis largely overlying the previous ball).
Although we observe change can we change anything ourselves? Our Experience is behind the time in the world so this creates real problems for it being the source of change in the world. By the time most events in the world outside our bodies have been observed any changes in the outside world have already happened. Our sensations in our Experience are delayed and, as will be seen below, we do not even know that our brains have taken a decision until after the event. Superficially it seems as if our Experience is just the observer of fixed events.
However, everything in Experience is not fixed by events that have already happened. The qualities that connect the parts of time extended objects in our Experience are reworking the segment of time where they exist. This opens the possibility that we might change something in our minds.
Free Will
Willpower is the ability to select between the Modes of Experience. Modes are described in detail in Chapter 3 . Various modes can occur in our Experience, as an example we might have free running inner speech or be possessed by a television drama etc. Modes are absorbing and tend to exclude other modes. It takes willpower to move from one mode to another.
Free will depends to a large extent on being in Observation Mode. In Observation Mode other modes and submodes will appear and a preferred mode can be selected.
Invoking attention within Observation Mode permits a change of mode. This new mode or ‘state of mind’ will then be a predisposition, or basis, for decision taking.
The selection of a mode sounds easy but it is not. Some people spend an entire lifetime dedicated to developing a particular mode. Many people live in a default mode of the repetition of an interplay of sensations and inner speech and never escape from it.
Free will is the freedom to select modes.
Our habitual Modes of Experience have a huge effect on our lives.
Consider this meditation. You are seated or lying quietly and gently putting away any mode that is becoming dominant by briefly attending to it.
You might then allow a narrative of inner speech to occur, occasionally inspecting it and restarting it. Your decisions are then influenced by dwelling in this inner speech, for instance you may become annoyed at the interruption due to your dog pawing at the door and shout at the animal.
Equally you might be entranced by the church bells in the distance and bring auditory sensory mode to prominence. Rested, you hear the dog at the door, rise and let him in.
A Mode, or state of mind, introduces a general bias to almost all decision making. The general state of mind of a particular mode was responsible for biasing the decision to shout at the dog in the example above but it was not the decision itself. Modes introduce a general bias. They affect decisions but are not decisions.
We have the freedom to nurture Modes of Experience and these affect many of our decisions. This selection and nurturing of particular modes is known as ‘Free Will’.
Free Will and Decision Taking
Many discussions of Free Will are about decision taking rather than Free Will. Free Will is the ability to adopt a state of mind, it is a continuous bringing forward of those qualia that are attached to one mode and reducing those that are attached to another mode. The current mode affects decision taking but does not take decisions.
Decisions are relatively sudden selections between alternatives. A decision might involve pressing a button or saying yes or no etc. We only have the result of a decision in Experience after it has been taken. Decisions pop into Experience in the same way as the words we think or say pop into Experience. Simple decision taking is clearly not ‘conscious’ because the result of the decision is not in Experience until it is taken. Unlike Free Will, Free Decisions do not exist.
If I decide to adopt a particular mode can I be said to have Free Will? Suppose I decide to give more prominence to Observation Mode in Experience. The decision to do this might just pop into mind. However, the maintenance of Observation Mode is a continuing project. It is not like pressing a button. After days or years of increasing and decreasing of Observation Mode the decision is no longer present but the will within Experience remains.
The move to a particular mode can be free even though the original decision to cultivate swapping between modes may just have popped into Experience at some time in the past. There is an interplay between determinism and freedom, decisions and will.
The role of Modes cannot be overstated. Modes underlie all our decisions and behaviour. We are so familiar with modes that we do not realise how different reading this text is from taking a breath and sitting back to observe the world around us. Modes are important.
It is possible that the Will that selects Modes of Experience may be able to escape determinism and this is discussed in the next section.
How Will escapes determinism if Experience has time extended objects
If time exists as a real arrangement of events then it is probable that our Experience extends in time so that we can hear whole words and see motion. (See Chapter 4: Time). The objects in Experience extend 0.5 to 1 seconds from the subjective present of the observation point into its future but do not extend beyond the objective present where our senses interact directly with the world around us.
Should anything happen in our time extended Experience that was not loaded into it when it was created then this event would escape determinism. This is because events that appear spontaneously in the past are not determined by events prior to their occurrence.
Take a simple example. I am looking meditatively at an object, putting away all other content. I then attend briefly to inner speech and allow this to become free running. I have permitted a change of mental state from Sensory Mode to Inner Speech Mode. The changeover may take a couple of seconds to complete but it begins in the objective past. (This is because the whole of Experience is in the objective past - this allows it to contain time extended objects like whole words). The change from the dominance of sensory content to that of inner speech was not loaded when the bubble of Experience was created so the change of modes was not predetermined.
If the the ability to swap modes is a property of Experience itself without being loaded into Experience from elsewhere then it is not set by deterministic process. It is ‘free’.
The account given above is an account of what an act of will is like. The physical model suggested above may be an analogy rather than a definite reality. Enter Observation Mode and take a look for yourself.
Is Free Will really important?
The reason for this discussion of free will is that our lives, and the whole universe seem pointless without it.
Suppose we can indeed change our world and are not just replaying what has already been laid down as the future. As discussed above, this change would be general, as a change in mode, rather than a specific decision. This idea supports the older sense of the words "will" and "will power". What we call our will power is the ability of a generalised influence to change a mode of Experience.
Free will as something that changes the general state of our Experience is well known. Some Modes, or States of Mind, can deeply change a person. As an example, for centuries people have declared that "religious experience" changed their lives. This experience is not about going to church, temple or mosque but a deep change in the habitual Mode of Experience.
Free will would be pointless unless as we move in time.
Meaning
When we touch one hand with the other the action makes immediate sense. The question “where is the hand going?” is immediately combined through the time extension of Experience with the answer “to touch the other hand”. This knowing the meaning of events is basic to our consciousness. Our “Knowing” is having time extended Experience. However, consciousness itself exists without meaning because it is the time extended container for the events in Experience. It persists even when nothing happens.
At each instant events are a frozen pattern in three dimensions. Events gain meaning from their succession over time and their direction in space. Consider the process that loads events into our Experience: at each instant it is just a set of frozen signals, it is only when the events are loaded into our Experience that time extension imbues them with meaning.
Experience needs time. We have no “blue” in our Experience unless the blue is extended in time. We have no whole words in Experience without time extension. Each patch and object in our Experience is a model with immediate connections and relations to previous Experience containing the object. When we see a bird on a tight packed bush we expect it to fly away from the bush, not into it, when we see a runner we expect them to take another step. The immediate future of the runner is already in our Experience. Events in Experience are time extended and they already contain the computed and immediate outcomes for objects in Experience. The objects in our Experience are meaningful because they contain a time extended model that embeds the connections between the object and the immediate future and history of the object.
There is no subject and object where events flow from our Experience into our minds to be analysed, instead our Experience contains all of the current objects and all of the currently known analysis.
If we want to see what becomes of a flower our Experience already contains the expectation of its next swaying motion and the likely departure of the hoverfly lapping at its nectar. Our memory and analysis of events add relations to the objects in Experience. Our Experience is our ideas about reality, not just the actual events that it models.
Meaning is a multidimensional form that contains the progress of events as well as their positions. The functional reason for Experience is to put all the different modes of sensation and mind into a single form so that the spatial, temporal and informational relations of events which we call their ‘meaning’ is immediately evident. Events gain meaning by being hosted in our Experience.
"Meaning" is a property that is added to the world by the conscious observer.
Modes of Experience - States of Mind
Our Experience exists. Our minds and our sensations share the space and time of Experience. When our minds are actively creating mental events based on internal data our senses can become obscured. This was covered at the beginning of this chapter. It means that States of Mind are not neutral because they can impact on sensation, other States of Mind and even our bodies.
When Experience is mostly filled with data from our senses our Experience is in Sensory-Action Mode. When we close our eyes, relax our bodies and daydream our Experience is mostly in Imagination Mode (Mental Mode). The principle modes are Sensory/Action Mode, Mental/Imaginary Mode and Observation Mode.
A Mode within Experience is a set of events that have a common origin, such as the external environment or internally derived processing, and these events occupy a significant proportion of the space and time of Experience. Modes can be difficult to maintain or difficult to leave, in either case will-power is often involved in the presence of the mode.
Modes have submodes that usually relate to a single source and either a single ‘net’ or several ‘nets’ (Nets are described in Chapter 2). The source will normally be a part of the environment or a particular aspect of mental activity. The nets are usually visual Experience, auditory Experience, bodily position in Experience, tactile Experience etc. Some examples of submodes are: Inner speech, listening to music intently, playing a musical instrument, visual imagining etc..
Submodes can co-exist with other submodes that affect a different net but tend to exclude submodes that use the same net. As an example, it is easily possible to daydream while playing a guitar but it is difficult to play a tune on a guitar whilst imagining a different complex tune.
Given that submodes can coexist a set of submodes that occur together will also be called a mode. A description of some modes is given below:
The Default Mode. In the absence of other modes most of us relax into mixed inner speech and imagination that wanders from topic to topic. This is a sort of disorganised day dream that may jump from memories of family to work to conversations we have had to flashes of TV dramas etc. People differ in the proportion of weak imagery and free running inner speech when they are in Default Mode. If we attempt to listen closely or watch what we are imagining the Default Mode tends to cease. This makes it quite difficult to pin down exactly what we have been thinking about, especially given that the contents of Default Mode are rapidly forgotten.
Inner Speech - Narrative Mode. We are the social apes that speak. We can tell each other about other people and paint an imaginary description of their "inner life". Most people learn that if they create and disseminate a description of themselves that is desirable they will be popular, with all that this means for a social being. The "Narrative" consists of both talking to others and inner speech that rehearses such talking. It is more structured than Default Mode.
Narratives need, to some degree, to be consistent with our actions so the development of a Narrative also leads to life choices. Narrative Mode affects decisions. As a social ape we develop a Narrative that integrates us into the lives of others around us.
It is important to realise that almost no-one really understands why they are doing what they are doing or what they should be doing; instead they act according to social constructs. The personal Narrative is heavily controlled by the dominant narrative of society. In Britain the dominant narrative is now a synthesis of mass media tropes.
Modern entertainment media is almost entirely about the Narratives of characters.
Free running inner speech is usually stimulated by emotions and it stimulates emotions. Anxiety, love, social acceptance, hate, anger etc. can all form reinforcing cycles with inner speech. The anxious school child may worry about being bullied. The university don may rehearse and imagine pride and social acceptance from the imagined applause for their future lecture. The saleswoman may rehearse a meeting and imagine themselves and their client being happy. A major purpose of free running inner speech is to generate preferred mild emotions. It can also generate undesirable emotions.
Self guided or rational inner speech may be used along with weak imaginings to solve problems. It can be hard to maintain because it entails attention to its content and attention can both start and stop a mode.
Externally guided inner speech: this was a rare mode until social media and messaging apps. If we receive a message on social media we tend to formulate a reply and then respond. The response may then be rewarded by a further message. The emotions of social acceptance are activated and there is a temptation to obtain more of this by further responding. There is a tendency to try to shape incoming messages by posing as holy or reinforcing the meme of the exchange of messages to gain acceptance. After years of connection to machines the whole of Experience is in danger of being dimmed by inner speech and social anxieties.
Sensation-action mode. The sensation-action of running or jogging may calm the body and mind and, for those overly dedicated to sport, still the agitation of not running. The easy sensation-action of socialising with friends may produce a sense of well-being. The more difficult sensation-action of socialising with strangers may stimulate inner speech and anxiety afterwards.
Drug modes. The possession of Experience by the effects of a drug may abolish other disturbing modes and provide relief from the agitation of not having the drug.
Lucid Dreaming (self guided daydreaming) is an example of Mental Mode largely replacing Sensory Mode.
The guided lucid dream mode of reading a novel, watching a play or television can be a distraction from other modes although it may consume time and ingrain thoughts that are not true. The cinematic arts use lucid dreams in which the filmmaker’s storyboard is seamlessly joined into a continuous drama. When we watch films our sensory visual Experience, encompassing the world around us, becomes dull as it gives way to imaginary visual Experience. The lucid dream is guided by the sensory visual and auditory cues from the screen.
Free running daydreams may produce motivation or anxiety.
Emotional states occur when sensory modes reinforce mental modes. A surge of adrenaline (epinephrine) can induce free running inner speech about the cause of the surge that is expressed as anger. The type of inner speech might lead to anxiety instead of anger and so on.
Observation Mode
The contents placed in Experience by mind and sensation are the result of processes that are outside of Experience. Thoughts and sensations pop into Experience, they are not created in Experience. However, once thoughts and sensations enter Experience they are immediately connected to their relations. This word is at a particular place on the page and the page is in our view. The text popped into Experience and it becomes related in all directions and through the extended present to events that were already current.
When an event pops into Experience it becomes part of the whole of Experience and creates new objects that contain the event. The new objects occur as a result of the extra directions for arranging events in Experience in the same way as a scatter of single dots spread over two dimensions can create letter shapes on a printed page, even though only dots were added.
Experience probably has four or more dimensions for arranging events so each event that pops into Experience can create many objects. Four musical notes can create a bar of a tune, the new smell in the room can complete a flower.
The loading of an event, such as a musical note, in Experience is the result of a process in our brain and the spatio-temporal geometry of our Experience converts what was loaded into a full event in a view with spatial, temporal and informational relations attached.
The geometry of Experience, its space and time, applies whether the source of what pops into it is internal mental processes or sensory data. Observation Mode is the state that contains both mind and sensation and so it is the general state that is Experience itself.
In Observation Mode we are not attending to anything in particular. It can be replaced by other modes if attention occurs.
Attention can occur in two ways. It can be forced to occur as external processes load new events or it can occur when we are in Observation Mode and cease to ignore one of the modes or submodes within it. A mode that has attention becomes dominant in Experience and other modes become less evident, including Observation Mode. If a particular event is gaining attention the mode where it occurs gains attention and then the event within it becomes prominent.
As an example we might hear a bird and sensory mode becomes dominant, the submode of visual sensation dominates and the event of the bird in a bush becomes the object of attention as external processes load new events into the visual sensory content of Experience. While this is happening it is possible that no mental modes or smells and tastes etc. have any prominence, they are relatively suppressed.
Attention is an intermediary between processes that are outside Experience and the arrangements in space and time (contents), that are within Experience. If we desire to switch modes within Experience rather than have modes switched from outside of Experience we must seek Observation Mode (See Free Will above).
Entering Observation Mode is an act of will and maintaining it can be difficult because attention always beckons.
The Optimal State of Mind
The optimal state of mind is less important than the optimal state of Experience. Mind is a small part of Experience. The optimal state of Experience is Observation Mode because it potentially has access to all the other modes. Invoking Observation Mode allows Experience to be balanced. Observation Mode is the general observation that contains events without attention.
There are many modes and submodes that allow an easy return to Observation Mode. As an example a period of sensory-action mode during light exercise can easily give way to Observation Mode. On the other hand a personal narrative that embroils us in worry may fail to give way to Observation Mode except with effort and will. Platonic love can be a mode that allows an easy return to Observation Mode because it involves service to the object(s) of the love and hence strengthens the will.
The optimal states of mind are those that permit an easy return to Observation Mode. This does not mean that some sub-optimal states of mind should be avoided totally. Some modes might be fun and others, such as study, provide understanding and material well being.
Observation Mode may be the optimal state of Experience because it allows harmony and control of the other modes. The other modes are like active ‘programs’ that can evolve to be undesirable so it is important to be able to access Observation Mode as the locus of control so that they can be terminated at will. We move in and out of Observation Mode to control other modes. Whether it is optimal to make Observation Mode persistent is a matter for discussion.
The importance of Observation Mode has been known for millennia although it is known by other names such as a ‘clear mind’ etc. In yoga it is part of shavasana. The gentle practice of the will in single focus meditation or mindfulness also makes Observation Mode more accessible.
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