What makes the body special?

In this session we discuss:

• What makes the body special: enforced dissociation
• The hierarchies of dissociation and attention
• You are not your body
• Why Bernardo disagrees with, but respects Michael Levin's opinion
• The rubber hand illusion

How can a physical act such a needle in your arm cause the mental event of pain?

The idealist answer: there is no needle.

All matter is what mental states look like from across a dissociative boundary. Both the needle and the arm are appearances in consciousness, and both appearances represent other experiences in consciousness.

Many philosophers have considered the 'physical world' in such ways.

What Bernardo calls extrinsic experience Barfield and Schopenhauer called 'representation'. Spinoza called it 'Natura naturata' and Kant called it 'phenomena' as opposed to 'noumena'.

So what mental state or experience would the body represent?

On inspection, the physiological processes in the body seem mainly concerned with survival, metabolising raw ingredients from the environment to resist entropy. In Bernardo's terms, this is the image of maintaining a dissociative boundary from the surrounding 'Mind at Large.'

It's intuitive when you notice the body is made of exactly the same atoms and molecules as the rest of the physical world, and is in constant exchange with it. It is a particular pattern, a temporary 'excitation' of the whole of which we are a part.

So is everything about survival?

Freud thought yes, leading to his well-known obsession with sex and reproduction. Nietzsche spoke of a Will to Power - arguably also driven by the desire to survive.

In contrast, Viktor Frankl recognised a Will to Meaning, but Bernardo considers Jung to have made the more complete synthesis, being the Will to Self. This includes survival, the reconciliation of opposites, completeness, meaning and spiritual connection.

This would mean that there are archetypal drives that percolate through the layers of activity needed for survival.

Whilst much of the brain's activity also represents this drive to survive, it also correlates with other mental activity and drives.

The hierarchy of dissociations

Our inner life is a boiling dynamic of mental activity, associating and dissociating all the time. In one moment, a thought might be on the tip of your tongue, just beyond reach. In the next it pops into awareness, and feels as obvious as your own name. You might be able to feel your thumb at will, but distinguishing the 3rd and 4th toe is a blur.

Bernardo distinguishes between dissociation in which the reporting ego has no path to access an internal experience, and cases in which a mental activity is simply not the focus of attention. When focused, it is re-represented and thereby grows in intensity.

Equally, some ideas may form into "complexes" - constellations of unconscious ideas with an emotional charge that influence our behavior.

Integrated Information Theory seeks to model the ebb and flow of information and boundaries, but Bernardo contends that living bodies represent a special kind of boundary - one that is actively enforced. This dissociative boundary is yet to be modelled theoretically. This could end up being a synthesis of Karl Friston's work on Markov Blankets, which involve an actively enforced boundary but as yet no account for how this is formed based on first principals, and Integrated Information Theory which does have a first principals account for how boundaries are formed, but not how they are actively enforced.

Dissociations could be everywhere, but life is special

So for Bernardo living organisms are a special pattern of dissociation in nature that allows for a continuity of self. Most objects are identified arbitrarily, convenient fictions that have no objective truth outside the criteria we choose. The body, because of it's unique ability to resist entropy and generate perception of the outside world, is special.

"I accept that there may be dissociative boundaries that are not actively enforced happening in mind at large. As someone who thinks IIT is largely correct I must accept that. But I do think there are some dissociative bounders that are actively enforced."

Next week, we have Michael Levin returning for a Q&A, so we had Bernardo reflect on their last dialogue.

"I don't think Michael would disagree with me there. From that perspective we are not as far away as you might think, because under IIT you could have an inanimate process that is not biological, is not metabolising, and because of the dynamics of information integration, spontaneously gives rise to some high Phi complex. Relatively high. No where near what we have. We need this active reinforcement of the boundary to maintain high complexes. But presumably something relatively high phi could be happening out there if the substrate is complex enough.

Those non-actively enforced boundaries, (which I do accept), I think are forming and unforming all the time, so there is no constant self that is in there. Whether the boundaries that you would derive from IIT would coincide with the boundaries that Michael intuits, I don't know the answer to that question. I don't even know if Michael would know the answer, because you would really have to invest with being familiar with IIT."

I'm excited to have Michael Levin back with us next week to continue the discussion and take some of your excellent questions!

Until then,

Amir

Time stamps

0:00 Member introductions
00:10:20 The body is what the dissociative alter looks like
00:14:40 We all accept there are mental states out in the world
00:17:40 The body: an image of maintained dissociation
The brain: an image also of other mental activity
00:26:00 Deriving boundaries from first principles.
00:30:34 Hierarchy of dissociations
00:33:00 Bodies are an actively enforced boundary powered by metabolism
00:35:00 The layers of dissociation within the body
00:44:00 We are an excitation of the field
00:49:25 Michael Levin is not a metabolism chauvinist
00:52:40 The ego is not actively reinforced
00:55:00 Markov blankets within the body - The biggest organ in the body: interstitium 
00:57:00 Towards an integration of Karl Friston Markov blanket & IIT
01:01:30 How IIT might account for self-reflection
01:04:00 There aren't infinite alters in the body
Two paths from the subconscious & the new unconscious
01:13:15 Non-mental states are an abstraction
01:22:00 Why the ego has no Markov Blanket
EEG is not stable enough to constitute a Markov Blanket
01:31:00 Scientific approximations arrive at fundamental conclusions
01:34:30 Most objects are arbitrary - the body is special
01:42:00 You are not the body
01:46:00 The boundaries of the body determined by source and sensation
01:47:00 Why Bernardo disagrees but respects Michael Levin's opinion
01:50:00 Can we experience two alters simultaneously?
01:53:27 Rubber hand illusion

The Rubber Hand Illusion

How we make an internal model of our own body is very malleable, as demonstrated by this experiment:

As Bernardo mentions, this can be done for any part of the body, we can modify our model of ourselves.

Norbert Majubu, a neuroscientist and participant in our meetings shares these articles as good examples of the academic background: 

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16280594/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3125296/

The below figure shows the "pointing error" measurements:

Recording