Closer to Consciousness: The First Strong Theory of Consciousness

By Alexander Durig

In this book, Durig presents a full-blown theory of consciousness. By engaging contemplation of the possibility of two brain hemispheres operating as two brains interacting with one another and aware of one another, he claims that it is our brains existing in a System of Interactive Reflexivity (SIR), perpetually aware of the world and each other’s perception of the world, which is the cause of consciousness. He highlights the importance of social interaction for shaping consciousness into meaning, mind, self, language, and emotions, as well as noting weaknesses in the current paradigm.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781665579186

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2023 Alexander Durig. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

ISBN: 978-1-6655-7916-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-7917-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6655-7918-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022923944

Published by AuthorHouse 02/10/2023

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Dedication

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For my daughter Lydia Alexandra, her husband Jon Bush, and my three grandsons, Lukah, Jaeden, and Kieran

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CONTENTS

Dedication

Informal Sayings by an Informal Logician

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Acknowledging the Legacy of Bernard Rimland

A Note of Gratitude

INTRODUCTION

From Prototheory to Metatheory to Theory

Part I: Meaning, Autism, and Consciousness

The COMING Paradigm Shift

Part II: From Theory To Reality

Part III: Answering The So What? Question

Chapter 1 THE NEW SCIENCE OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Is Anything Missing?

Awareness

Meaning

Avoiding Confusion

The Philosophy of Reflexive Interactionism

The Significance of Reflexivity

The Philosophy of Reflexive Interactionism

Chapter 2 MEANING AND AUTISM

The Circle of Light

~ Themes in The New Science of Consciousness #1 ~

Introducing Social Inference Theory – SIT

Three Types of Logical Inferences

What is deduction?

What is induction?

What is abduction?

The Back Story

Focusing on the Assumptions of Normalcy

The Social Event Frame and The Autistic Visual Theme Frame

Presenting the Event Frame for People with Social Perception

Presenting The Visual Theme Frame for People with Autistic Perception

~ Themes in the New Science of Consciousness #2 ~

First the Theme, Then the Action

The Parallel Universes

Chapter 3 MEANING AND CONSCIOUSNESS

The Fundamental DOUBLY MISTAKEN Assumption of Consciousness Studies Today

Styles of Consciousness

The Fundamental Unit of Analysis

Voxels of Awareness

Voxel

SIR

SYSTEMS OF INTERACTIVE REFLEXIVITY

The Triquation of Abduction

The Underlying Logic of Logic

Revisiting Assumptions

Can We Talk?

Beware of Attacking Zombie Philosophers

~ Themes in The New Science of Consciousness #4 ~

Bottom-Line Metatheoretical Assumptions

The Problem with Materialist Arguments

Solutioning the Problem with Materialist Arguments

Meet The Blob

~ Themes in The New Science of Consciousness #5 ~

Lewis Carroll on the Foundations of Logic

Ground-Floor Assumptions

Neurotypical Perception

Autistic Perception

Chapter 4 SIT, SIR, AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Introducing SIR

Consciousness is not a Thing

AI = VAI

The Supreme Challenge of Talking about Difficult Subjects

What Is It Like to Be Thomas Nagel?

A Rebuttal to Nagel’s Argument

The Hard Ground Floor of Our Subjective Meaningful Perception

The Problem with the Hard Problem

Swimming in the Sea of Life

The Significance of Reflexivity

~ Themes in The New Science of Consciousness #6 ~

Chapter 5 CONSCIOUSNESS SUPPORTS PERCEPTION

Consciousness Supports Subjective Meaningful Perception

Consciousness as 3D Awareness of Self and Others in the World

What are Thoughts and Feelings?

Is Your ‘Self’ Just an Illusion?

~ Themes in The New Science of Consciousness #7 ~

The Nonconscious Ground of Conscious Thought

The Underlying Logic of Conscious Mental Processes and Nonconscious Mental Processes

Resolving the Problems of Split-Brain Research

Principles of DIANA

Lydia’s Standing Wave: How the Conscious Mind Relies Completely upon the Nonconscious Mind

Chapter 6 THE PICTURES

The Genesis of Consciousness

The Genesis of Deductive Logic

The Genesis of Inductive Logic and Self

MIND-BASED LEVELS OF REFLEXIVITY

Level I Mind-Based Reflexivity

Level II Mind-Based Reflexivity

Level III Mind-Based Reflexivity

Level IV Mind-Based Reflexivity

Level V Mind-Based Reflexivity

Chapter 7 HOW DO WE EXPERIENCE TIME?

How Do We Experience the Passage of Time?

~ Themes in The New Science of Consciousness #8 ~

The Chinese Lattices

The Genesis of Inductive Inference and Our Experience of Time

Brain-Based Levels of Reflexivity

How We Experience Time

Brain-Based Levels of Reflexivity: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 …

Brain Plasticity and the Division of Labor between Conscious and Nonconscious Minds

Chapter 8 HOW TO RESOLVE THE PROBLEMS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

The Problem Underlying the Problems Facing a Science of Consciousness

Split-Brain Research

~ Themes in The New Science of Consciousness #9 ~

Redundant Connectivity

The Nonconscious Reality Underlying Conscious Minds

Confusion Management

Chapter 9 ROBERT LAWRENCE KUHN ON VIRTUAL IMMORTALITY

Breaking Down the Terms Being Used in Our Theory Construction Project

Prototheory and Metatheory of Computational Models

From Reality to Theory and Back

SIT and SIR Meet the Nine Schools of Consciousness Studies

~ Themes in The New Science of Consciousness #10 ~

The Integration of Social and Computer Thinking

Addressing the Metatheoretical Commitments Underlying the DSM

Addressing the Metatheoretical Commitments of a New Science of Consciousness

Closer to Truth

~ Themes in The New Science of Consciousness #11 ~

Revisiting Challenges to The New Science of Consciousness

Problems with Semantics – Problems with The C-Word

Chapter 10 FROM QUALE TO QUALIA THE C-WORD HAS BEEN A TRICKY WORD

Qualitative Models

Registering the World vs Perceiving the World

Qualifying Consciousness: The Search for DIANA

CONCLUSION: CLOSER TO CONSCIOUSNESS

Epilogue A: A Quick Note about Assumptionalism

Epilogue B: SIT – Reviewing the Work

Epilogue C: The Microsociology of Autism (1993)

Dedication

Abstract

Epilogue D: The Contributions of Social Inference Theory

Epilogue E: A Quick Note about Inferentialism

Epilogue F: Why did they call it Autism Spectrum Disorder?

Possible Futures of DSM Metatheory

Possible Futures of Metatheory for the Science of Consciousness

Epilogue G: The NIMH-Funded Pre- and Post-Doctoral Fellowships at IU

References

Endnotes

Informal Sayings by an Informal Logician

I. Consciousness is the universe’s way of getting to know itself.

II. The normal world is a crazy place.

III. Fish don’t know what water is.

IV. It’s not enough to know … you have to know that you know.

V. When you go to say the most meaningful things you ever have to say, you won’t be able to find the words.

VI. It’s all supposed to work out once in a while, and when it does, you know you’re cooking with gas.

VII. When people say the nicest things that they’ve ever said about you, you won’t be in the room to hear it.

VIII. The most important things, and the things that everyone wants and needs the most above all else, are not the obvious things like money or fame, it’s to be surrounded with trust, respect, safety, and comfort at all times.

IX. We like to credit ourselves for being the captains of our own ships, and the authors of our own actions and success, yet we do not even make our hearts beat and we do not make our lungs breathe at night when we are asleep.

X. The King of England has to say Please and Thank You and so do you.

XI. Life gets better and better and worse and worse at the same time.

XII. What the conscious mind believes, the nonconscious mind receives, as a command. The nonconscious mind is like a genie in a bottle that says, Your wish is my command.

XIII. Each of us does everything we do for the most meaningful reason possible at the time.

Foreword

Philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience perspectives or frames underlie most contemporary interest in the study of consciousness. I focus first on the way I came to study autism and consciousness, because I did not set out to develop a theory of autism or consciousness but rather, I set out to construct a theory of perception. While briefly referencing the way I constructed social inference theory (SIT), I pay particular attention to the way that SIT gave way to a theory of autistic perception. This allowed me to write The Microsociology of Autism in 1993, which described the autism spectrum 20 years before the APA decided to call it Autism Spectrum Disorder in 2013. My first book, Autism and the Crisis of Meaning, was published in 2006, and since that time we have witnessed the development of a new subfield: the sociology of autism and neurodiversity (Leveto, 2018).

Two important variants in current consciousness thinking, philosophical/cognitive science, and neuroscience draw on some common sources, but also exhibit significant variation. In common, they have forwarded no theory of consciousness that dominates the landscape in terms of consensus and potential applications for research. The philosophical/cognitive science and neuroscience bodies of work tend to stay away from subjectivity beyond mentioning it as a no-man’s-land – subjectivity is routinely thought of as nearly impossible to study. Regardless of the particular school of thought or body of work it is safe to say that existing work in the new science of consciousness has taken a measured and cautious approach to the prospect of studying subjectivity systematically.

On the other hand, I stress the import of subjective experience to human social behavior, and I view society as an outgrowth of interaction, society as basic to the development of self, and self-concepts as guiding social behavior. For me, everything is interactive. Everything that is interesting about the human mental experience, the subjective experience of consciousness as our 3D awareness of self and others in the world, is shaped in social interaction. It is our experience with others in social interaction that prompts and forces our mental experience.

For my dissertation I set out to study what kind of information we have to have in order to organize a perception of the world that is meaningful. I said there are three kinds of thinking. We use social thinking to figure out what is going on in social situations. On the basis of that, we use computer thinking to infer the expected behavior for those situations. And we use creative thinking to solve problems.

There is creative thinking inside the social and computer thinking. When the social thinking and computer thinking encounter problems, then the creative thinking produces new ideas. We can suppose that neurotypical (normal) people have average amounts of social thinking and computer thinking wired into their brains.

But a person who has proportionally more computer thinking wired into their brains will likely be diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum. Likewise, people who have proportionally higher levels of social thinking will tend to be very social and personable, like actors, politicians, and con artists.

People on the autism spectrum have their own experience of meaningful perception. They have their own experience of meaning, mind, and self, and those repetitive behaviors that can sometimes annoy social people might just afford them with a soothing experience of creature comfort or ‘mental health’.

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So, by moving the levels of social thinking and computer thinking, I was then able to say that if the deductive computer thinking was a little bit higher, then a person might be slightly autistic. I was also able to say that a person with average or above average social thinking, with a bit higher deductive computer thinking, might qualify as Asperger Syndrome.

In this way I was able to move the levels of social and computer thinking and describe all kinds of autistic perception. Now I could describe all kinds of meaningful perceptions in terms of the ratio of social to computer thinking. I began to wonder if I might not be able to describe all the items listed in the DSM – the psych handbook for mental illness and mental disorders. Currently, there is no single theory that allows us to provide a theoretical underpinning for the DSM. It is a disparate book of lists until and unless we develop a theoretical framework that can address all of it.

Preface

The well-known story of Buddha contains some pearls of wisdom that are not widely acknowledged when the story is recounted. For instance, Buddha was a somewhat revolutionary figure. As a member of the ruling Kshatriya caste, he was not supposed to have abandoned his home to live the life of an itinerant, enlightened beggar.

Going further, Buddha deconstructed the traditional lore of Hinduism and the Vedas using the power of logic. The place of logic is inherent and curiously prominent in Buddhism, as opposed to most forms of mysticism. When Europe was in the Dark Ages there were Buddhists living in monasteries high up in the Himalayas who were exploring the relation between meaning and logic.

The Buddhist Apoha theory of meaning entailed an analysis of meaning and logic addressing the same issues as Wittgenstein would address in the 20th century. For my part, there is nothing practical in the work of Wittgenstein that was not previously addressed by C.S. Peirce in the mid-19th century. The Buddhist monks who have expounded on the Apoha theory of meaning have been little recognized for nurturing one of the most ancient theories exploring the relation between meaning and logic. Indeed, philosophy has been defined by some as the study of the relation between meaning and logic.

In Hinduism, it is said that the whole universe is made of the three gunas: sattva, rajas, and tamas, or creation, maintenance, and destruction.

Buddha broke with Hinduism when he argued the following:

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In this way, we can understand that the Buddha represented a truly revolutionary and intellectual kind of mysticism.

Indeed, examining the enigma of consciousness, meaningful perception, logic, and emotions and recognizing them as outstanding qualities of the human experience has been a hallmark of human scholarship since the beginnings of scholarship. It is a not-so-subtle irony of contemporary science and scholarship that John Searle has been credited with making consciousness respectable.

Yet clearly, there have been millions of people who respected the art and science of consciousness studies for millennia upon millennia throughout the human experience. For millennia there have been numerous philosophers and mystics, from India to Persia to Greece to Europe, and the Americas, who expounded upon the underlying dynamics of meaning, logic and consciousness. Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s marvelous show Closer to Truth has had evergreen popularity for many, many years precisely because so many of us are enchanted with consciousness, the mind, and the deep end of the philosophical pool.

How ironic that science today would anoint itself as the crown of creation, claim to have created nuclear weapons capable of destroying the planet, and yet only relatively recently arrived at the point of almost just barely beginning to make consciousness studies respectable. From the ancient Vedas of India to the ancient scriptures of Buddhism, to Charles. S. Peirce and William James writing in the 19th century, consciousness studies have continually received the highest respect since long before the 20th and 21st centuries.

It is ironic and truly paradoxical that we would claim to have built the tower of science with its advanced high-level knowledge and modern high technology, yet the one thing we cannot study is our own perception and our own experience of consciousness. The highest value of the ancient Greeks, inscribed over the doorway into the inner sanctum of the arcane mystery schools was Know Thyself. Today, a grad student who claims that they want to undertake a scientific study of meaningful perception or consciousness is just as likely to be excoriated as taken seriously.

The final knot in the garden hose of contemporary philosophy and science was tied by Wittgenstein. The young Wittgenstein set out the foundations for much of the work in Analytic Philosophy taken up by the Logical Positivists in the Vienna Circle and explicated the project to connect meaning and logic. He was hailed as a great young genius. Then the elder Wittgenstein wrote more ingenious thoughts, claimed that the younger Wittgenstein had gotten it all wrong, and effectively slammed the door shut on any hope of connecting meaning and logic.

As a result, there is no way that anyone in the academe today will take a young philosopher seriously.

Today, you have no hope of being taken seriously in philosophy until and unless you are the elder version of your younger self (I was 29 when I started working on my theory, and I am 62 now, and the theory is wholly consistent with itself throughout the last 30 years). Meanwhile, today’s philosophers, in the tradition of Wittgenstein, spend all of their time talking about how we talk about things, and all of it amounts to saying very little or nothing at all.

This has been confusing to me because I consider myself a philosopher and I became a symbolic interactionist because I thought it represented the ultimate, highest pinnacle of philosophy. I climbed onboard eagerly to study the social construction of meaning, mind, and self. For me, pragmatism is the ultimate statement of philosophy because it assumes an explicitly interactive real-world premise. Symbolic interactionists simply enjoy taking that ball and running with it as far as we can go. I left academics in 1999 and I no longer consider myself a sociologist. I have been a self-employed business plan writer since 2006. But I will always be a symbolic interactionist and a pragmatist at heart.

The first few decades of symbolic interactionism in post-WWII America comprise a literature that is unique in the entire academe. It is the best of all worlds. You have pragmatism as the ultimate philosophical position, and you have symbolic interactionists taking that to the hilt and writing tomes of theory and presentations of ethnographic research that are the height of social science in America. They were inspired by classic pragmatist philosophy and a long line of brilliant ethnographies in anthropological research that studied people from all over the planet. What happened was something uniquely American, a precious intellectual lens focused on American behavior.

I would argue that the field of social identity theory in psychology subsumes theoretical work by my mentors David Heise (1998, 1991), and William Corsaro (1985, 1992), as well as work in identity theory by Sheldon Stryker (see, Stryker, 1980; Serpe, R. T., & Stryker, S., 2011) and that what is said in this book is certainly convergent with symbolic interactionism and social identity theory regarding fundamental prototheoretical and metatheoretical commitments.

Acknowledgments

On the way to completing this book, I have learned from, and been influenced and inspired by, the following people and I am grateful for their responses to my work.

Tommaso Dorigo

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I made Tommaso’s acquaintance a few years ago when we were both writing blogs at Science 2.0 (see, Science 2.0 | ® The world’s best scientists, the Internet’s smartest readers). Tommaso is a world-class physicist. Around that time, he published Anomaly! Collider Physics and the Quest for New Phenomena at Fermilab (World Scientific 2016). As a social psychologist I was quite taken by this book about how physicists talk to one another. I maintain this kind of study has been sorely neglected in all the literatures of the sciences, and that considering how physicists talk to one another must be as important as physics itself.

To paraphrase Tommaso’s bio, he is an experimental particle physicist working as a First Researcher for the Italian institute for nuclear physics (INFN), and a member of the CMS experiment at CERN since 2001; previously (1995-2012) he has been a member of the CDF experiment at Fermilab.

His bio and vita are far too long to be included here, but they may be accessed at his impressive website (https://www2.pd.infn.it/~dorigo/#home).

Thank You, Tommaso Dorigo.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn

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My introduction to Robert Lawrence Kuhn came when I happily discovered Closer To Truth. Watching many episodes of the show Closer To Truth became a source of comfort for me in the first decade of this century after I had left academics. It was all the more comforting because he was not in academics.

He is a Ph.D. in neuroscience, and an accomplished investment banker, with a stellar real-world resume that is a mile long. Please refer to a detailed list of his accomplishments at Robert Lawrence Kuhn - Wikipedia, and I also recommend the impressive website for Closer To Truth (Cosmos, Consciousness & Meaning TV Series on PBS - Closer to Truth).

In Closer To Truth, I saw him functioning at the highest levels of intellectual and conversational interaction. It helped me to make the difficult transition from being a career academic to being a regular person in the real world. The series has always inspired me.

As I was about to finish this book, I contacted him and shared some of the diagrams in the book. I offered to share it with him, and, whether he intended to or not, his response gave me a concrete sense of guidance for finishing the book and I am grateful for that. I cannot do justice to his life’s work in these acknowledgements – that would require another book.

For present purposes, I want to borrow from his bio (see, Robert Lawrence Kuhn - Wikipedia). Kuhn is the author or editor of 25 books on business strategy-finance and science-philosophy, including Dow-Jones Irwin’s seven-volume Library of Investment Banking. He is a frequent commentator on the BBC (BBC World News / BBC World Service), CNN, Bloomberg, others. Kuhn is a senior international commentator for political, economic, social and business matters on CCTV News. He has written for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Forbes and Chief Executive. Kuhn is a regular columnist for China Daily and South China Morning Post on China politics/economics and international affairs.

Closer to Truth is a continuing television series on PBS and public television stations, created, executive-produced, written and hosted by Kuhn, and produced and directed by Peter Getzels. The series premiered in 2000. The current series, Closer to Truth: Cosmos. Consciousness. Meaning/God, is in its 19th season. The series offers candid, in-depth conversations with leading scientists, philosophers, theologians and scholars, covering Cosmos (cosmology/physics, philosophy of science), Consciousness (brain/mind, philosophy of mind) and Meaning/God (philosophy of religion). The accompanying website (Cosmos, Consciousness & Meaning TV Series on PBS - Closer to Truth) features over 4,000 videos of conversations. Kuhn’s presentation, Asking Ultimate Questions, is the foundation of Closer To Truth.

Thank you, Robert Lawrence Kuhn.

Damian Amendra

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Every once in a while, someone will discover the books I self-published at Amazon and write me an email. I have engaged correspondence with several people this way. Each time they have told me that they like my work on autism. This means so much to me as I am no longer working in academics, no longer publishing in academics.

The latest person to find me in this serendipitous way was Damian Amendra, M.D., a young physician from London. In corresponding with Damian, he let me know there were no illustrations in the books. I had no idea, until he alerted me, that the illustrations for the books had been lost when Amazon changed its platform for self-published books. Damian encouraged me to recreate the illustrations, and that mission, after many twists and turns, eventually led to this book in its present form.

Thank you, Damian Amendra.

Acknowledging the Legacy of Bernard Rimland

Bernard Rimland was the father of modern autism science and research. Before he came on the scene, psychologists had blithely been applying the Freudian approach to autism, which blamed refrigerator mothers for failing to socialize their children, and Mom was the cause of autism. Bernard Rimland had a Ph.D. in psychology, and he and his wife had a son who had very strong autistic perception. On the basis of his experience with his son, Rimland wrote the book Infantile Autism (1964) in which he claimed that autism is not something caused by mothers, it is a brain-based congenital disorder. He is also responsible for changing the 20th century terminology from the erstwhile idiot savant to the more accurate autistic savant. He did this in an article published in Psychology Today titled Inside the Mind of the Autistic Savant (Rimland 1978).

Later on, Bernard Rimland was the expert consultant on Rain Man. He taught Dustin Hoffman how to act like a person with autism.

One day I was sitting in my office in Cal State San Marcos in north San Diego County. By this time, I was already contemplating taking my leave from academics because I had no one to talk to. The phone rang. It was Bernard Rimland, the father of modern autism science. He invited me to meet him and to visit the offices of his Autism Research Institute in San Diego. He took me to lunch. He told me he liked my ideas. He was one of the first people to take notice that my first book had been published. He encouraged me to keep going with my work.

He said that he thought it would be interesting to do research on inductive and deductive inference from the standpoint of compatibility. He wondered if successful marriages might evince their own particular pairing of people according to their levels of social and computer inference. He was no longer in academics himself by that time.

He told me something else: he said that he thought the label of PDD-NOS (Pervasive Developmental Disorder – Not Otherwise Specified) that had been added to the DSM in the autism category was a pernicious label and he felt very strongly that it was contrived and more than useless. As far as he was concerned it was just a catch-all label that had been invented to recoup all the experiences of autistic perception and behavior that were not adequately being captured in the previously existing DSM categories. It said nothing and it meant nothing. It just represented a category for all the behaviors and experiences Not Otherwise Specified in the DSM.

That is not theory. The penchant for theorizing is all too often confused with the act of making lists of everything you can think of to say about a topic and claiming that to be theory. But that is only making long lists of things and saying nothing at all about how it all hangs together.

When I was preparing to publish my second book, I called Bernie and asked him for a testimonial. He gave me the loveliest testimonial. It appears on the back cover of the book, and I present it with great pride:

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- Bernard Rimland,

Ph.D., Director, Autism Research Institute"

Thank you, Bernard Rimland.

Having this kind of relationship with him when no one in academics would talk to me had a dramatic effect on me. I still get emotional when I think about it. I could go on, but I will stop here. Bernie passed away not long after the second book was published in 2005.

Contemporary Sociology is the book review journal of sociology. Once a sociologist, who will go unnamed, wrote an absolutely scathing review of my first book Autism and the Crisis of Meaning. In that article, the sociologist excoriated me and then added, I wonder what Bernard Rimland would think about this book?

According to the policy of the journal I was allowed to write a response to the review, which was soon after published. It was a rare version in print of the kind of treatment I received regularly from colleagues in sociology. In my response I explained how I had met Bernard Rimland and recounted the story I told above. And now I think it is only fitting