Try a quick exercise. Hold up your hand at arm’s length and point your finger at an object in front of you. Focus your attention on the object, looking across space. Do this for 30 seconds, or a minute. Then, with your arm still outstretched, turn your hand around and point your finger back towards your face, from the place you are looking from. What are you pointing at? The obvious answer is your face, your head. You know it’s there just as surely as the pointing finger. But sit like this a bit longer, focusing only on your sensory experience, and you might notice something else—that your head is not in your visual field. Yes, you can feel it, but that feeling is not in sight either. Instead, where your finger is pointing there is only empty space.
Consciousness is the most fascinating thing I can think of. Despite our attempts, it remains a mystery mostly outside the reach of science. All the hardware and circuitry of neurons and chemical transmitters simply do not add up to the experience itself—the “I” that I feel myself to be. In philosophy, this is referred to as the “hard problem”. Hard because there is no reason to expect that physical matter be conscious in the first place. My atoms, cells, and neurocircuitry could theoretically function just as they do but without there being someone experiencing it. We normally take this feeling for granted. But where did it come from?
Natural selection teaches us that advantageous traits get passed on through the generations, while maladaptive ones do not. The acquiring of an advantageous trait, though, is not always completely positive. More often it’s a tradeoff. The ribbon-tailed astrapia (Astrapia mayeri), for example, is a bird of paradise native to the subalpine forests of Papua New Guinea. For millennia, females of the species have preferred males with long, bright white tail feathers. Those males pass on their genes, selecting for offspring with ever-longer and more colorful feathers. The outcome is pretty extreme—males today have tail feathers nearly one meter in length, the longest in relation to their body of any bird. In flight, the tail drags behind them, increasing the energy required to stay aloft and making it more difficult to navigate dense jungle canopies. It also makes them more conspicuous to predators, who can spot the bright white feathers from far away. But the fact that the ribbon-tailed astrapia still exists means the tradeoff must be worth it.
The same goes for the evolution of human intelligence and cognition. Our species evolved on the savannah in small, tight-knit groups. It was important for group cohesion to be able to detect and interpret the emotions of others and discern their motives through facial expressions, body language, and inflection. That social skill, pitted against itself for generations, caused a rapid increased in brain size, mostly in the neocortex which controls conscious decision-making and language. It helped propel us to the top of the food chain, allowing for coordination in hunting and child-rearing and the passing of information between generations. The tradeoff, some would argue, is that the sense of self we have inherited has become overdeveloped. We plan, strategize, rationalize, ruminate, and memorialize in a never-ending stream of self-talk, its insistent voice drowning out all others. We are utterly convinced that the “I” we feel, through its vividness and emotional salience, actually exists in the world, never taking the time to question it.
Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson summarized the scientific method as “Do[ing] whatever it takes to not fool yourself into thinking something is true that is not, or that something is not true that is.” As scientists, we seek to make unbiased observations, conduct “blind” studies, and in doing so draw conclusions about how the world really works. Baked in is the assumption of an objective, mechanistic worldview wherein it is possible for everything to be deconstructed and inspected. The whole is the sum of the parts. The elusive nature of consciousness presents a problem to such materialist understandings, however. At the most fundamental level, we cannot escape the inherently subjective nature of our experience, the lighthouse of blood and bone from which we gaze. I strive for objectivity but am fundamentally unable to achieve it.
Even advances in quantum mechanics seem to corroborate this sense of subjectivity. In the famous “double-slit experiment”, for example, photons are shot from a laser through two slits a few millimeters apart, then absorbed by a detector. Photons have characteristics of both electromagnetic energy (as waves) and discrete packets of matter (as particles) in what is called wave-particle duality. Typically, when a wave passes through the two slits, it creates an interference pattern on the detector. Shine the laser, a stream of photons, on the slits and that’s what you’ll see. But fire a single photon and things get interesting. If you don’t pay attention to the slits, the detector will still show the interference pattern. The photon is acting as a wave and interfering with itself, seeming to pass through both slits at once! But if you refine your experiment to detect which slit the photon passes through, you will see that it only ever passes through one or the other. No more interference. That is, photons behave differently when they are observed and when they are not. Why it should matter that someone is looking is still hotly debated—a spooky tremor in the formerly solid ground of physics.
For centuries, practitioners of meditation and mindfulness have known that there is more to the story. Direct experience, they say, is the only link we have to reality. Mindfulness involves cultivating attention for the present moment through acknowledgement of moods, sensations, feelings, and thoughts. To be mindful is to be grounded, clear-thinking, perceiving the world exactly as it presents itself to one’s eyes and ears. To let go of concepts and abstractions and the trance of self-talk.
These days, mindfulness is in vogue, closely linked to the wellness industrial complex and other pseudospiritual trends. But weed through that and you will find that mindfulness is in fact a science itself, but one of the mind. In meditation, we ask questions, collect data, and appraise results—true self-experiments. Because discoveries are reportable only in subjective terms, however, mindfulness and meditation have been largely ignored in scientific circles until recently. But being intangible is not the same as unreal. After all, to "come to your senses" is synonymous with sanity and rationality. With practice, it can be observed that experience is the ultimate source of all insights, even scientific ones.
The finger pointing exercise works because of the implied gesture of a pointing finger. Pointing directs our attention to an object’s solidity in physical space, “over there”. But when turned on itself, the apparent solidity of our everyday perspective—the body—drops away, and we are confronted with the raw experience of boundless and undefined openness. What is there to measure about that? This is not a retreat into solipsism. It is the recognition that making progress in any field must be rooted in our condition as embodied beings. We are not merely thinking machines. I am also struck by the other connotation of the word: mind-fullness. I don’t want to go through life playing with only half the deck. If there is more out there to be known, beyond the measurable or verifiable, then count me in.
I tend to think that truth cannot be deduced from any single viewpoint, but through the parallax of many viewpoints. Accurately measuring the distance to a star, for instance, can only be accomplished by looking at it sidelong from a second vantage point, seeing how the background shifts. In the end, science and mindfulness/meditation are after the same goal—not to live in delusion. To see and confront the facts of life and the universe as they are, on their terms. There is much in common between a headstrong laboratory or field scientist and a yogi who spends years on retreat in a cave meditating. Both are guided by that one objective, following it wherever it leads.
Another good read. That double slit experiment is fascinating.