Consciousness: The Real Neuro-Linguistic Programming

By Harry Knox

In the arena of psychology, no branch is more bizarrely named than “NLP” - neuro-linguistic programming. It doesn’t trip off the tongue and the meaning is, how shall we say, opaque.

One definition of NLP is that it’s “the study of excellence”. Another is that it’s an approach to communication and personal development. Another is that it’s about “how people organize their thinking and language and how this affects behavior”. NLP doesn’t seem to have a clear-cut definition and is often branded a pseudoscience. It still hasn’t achieved mainstream recognition in psychology.

A significant difficulty lies in the term itself. What on earth does neuro-linguistic programming mean? It seems like something extremely technical, difficult and scientific rather than a practical means of helping people to lead better and more effective lives, as its proponents claim.

Amazingly, the term “neuro-linguistic programming” is ideal for something that seems drastically different from NLP but is the exact reason why NLP works. Neuro-linguistic programming is in fact the perfect way to describe the most baffling phenomenon of all: consciousness. It should become the standard way of referring to consciousness. It involves all the key ingredients: 1) the nervous system (neuro), 2) language (linguistics), and 3) programming (how we program our neural network with language to allow us to use consciousness – a new, acquired, cultural operating system – to override programmed instincts, the old, biological operating system).

Humans aren’t born conscious. They become conscious as they learn language. Human thought is not conducted “biologically”, it is conducted via language, something we were not born with and hence cannot by definition be part of our biology.

Consciousness is a humanly acquired new operating system – a cultural, not biological, operating system. It has nothing at all to do with Darwinism, with selfish genes, with random genetic mutations, with the laws of atoms.

Consciousness gives us an initial level of programming, and there’s then nothing to stop us improving our consciousness, expanding our consciousness, refining our consciousness, altering our consciousness, all in the name of ultimately optimizing our consciousness so that we can lead the best lives of which we are capable.

It wasn’t Darwinism that brought about a phase change in human evolution. It was language! Come inside and find out all about it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781447830153

Harry Knox

Harry Knox is a consciousness researcher.

Book preview

Consciousness

The Real Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Harry Knox

Copyright © Harry Knox 2023

All rights reserved.

978-1-4478-3015-3

Imprint: Lulu.com

Table of Contents

Consciousness

The Brainwashed

The Three Brains

Mind Science

The Naked Lunch

The Original NLP

NLP

The Nervous System: The Mind In the Body

Genes versus Culture

Descartes

Plato and Science

The Substance of Consciousness

The Irrational

Ideas and Instincts

Universals and Particulars

Self-Consciousness

Kantian Knowledge

Mathematics, Physics, and Physiology

What Is Consciousness?

Mirror Neurons

Batman

Sentience versus Consciousness

The Foundation

The New Cartesianism

How We Made Ourselves Conscious

The Language of Consciousness

The Unconscious versus the Conscious

Philosophy versus Psychology

The Interaction

Existence

Conclusion

The Brainwashed

Consciousness – everyone knows what that is, right? We’re all conscious, so we must know what it means to be conscious. How could we not? It’s the defining fact of our life. We access everything else through our consciousness. We couldn’t imagine not being conscious. Nothing is more familiar to us and more essential to us.

Actually, consciousness is the least understood concept there has ever been. Almost no one understands what it is, and most people imagine it to be something it definitely isn’t. When science studies consciousness, it has no idea what it is studying. It has no definition of consciousness, no theory of consciousness, and no scientist has ever explained how matter generates consciousness. Does matter only produce consciousness in humans, or are all animals conscious? Are plants? Are rocks? Are atoms? Is the cosmos? How can we know if we can’t specify what consciousness is and explain its origin?

Consciousness is precisely where all human pretensions to knowledge collapse. If we don’t know what consciousness is, given that it is the very thing via which we acquire all of our knowledge, then how can we rely on any of our knowledge? If you don’t know what the instrument is through which you know then what do you know? Is knowledge an invention, a fiction, a delusion?

The immediate problem of consciousness is that people associate it with experience (empiricism) when it’s actually about knowledge (rationalism), and the supreme object of its pursuit of knowledge is itself (!).

Consciousness is a knowledge system, not an experiential system. It’s about knowledge operating on experience, not about experience itself. All animals are unconscious until they acquire a knowledge system with which to have knowledge of what they experience. Only humans have actually acquired such a knowledge system, and it is of course the knowledge system provided by conceptual language. Only humans are taught language.

Consciousness is all about how learned language modifies how we experience things, how it reframes experiences, how it places distance between the experience itself and our language description of it, allowing us to reflect on the experience.

Reflecting on an experience is a secondary activity; it’s not the experience itself. Consciousness resides in this secondary activity – the processing of the experience in other terms – and not in the primary experience. People are typically unable to grasp this key distinction. They imagine that consciousness is something we are born with. It’s not. It’s something we are given via education, via the acquisition of language, allowing us to frame all experiences in secondary terms. Consciousness is about language applied to experience. It is not about experience itself. Experience itself is always concerned with the unconscious.

A human baby has no end of experiences, but it has no consciousness. It has no knowledge of what it is experiencing. Any non-self-reflective experience is unconscious, not conscious. Animals have unconscious experiences, i.e., they have experiences but they do not reflect on them, and have almost no memory of them. They have experiences, but have no knowledge of themselves having those experiences, and that’s precisely why they are not conscious.

Animals may be likened to human sleepwalkers – they can do all sorts of complex things, but they are not conscious of performing those tasks. They are obviously experiencing the tasks as they do them, but they are equally obviously not consciously experiencing them. Many if not most people seem baffled by the concept that minds can be experiencing things without being conscious of what they are experiencing – because they think that the experience itself is the fundamental element of consciousness. The very phrase conscious experience highlights the entire problem. People immediately associate consciousness with experience. What they ought to be told is that there are both conscious experiences and unconscious experiences, with the latter being enormously more common than the former, but not in the imagination of conscious people who misbelieve that they are conscious of everything happening to them. People cannot imagine being sleepwalkers, devoid of any consciousness of what they are experiencing.

The central problem in trying to understand what consciousness is is that humans, who are of course conscious, bring their consciousness to bear on what they are investigating. How do they separate their operation of consciousness on what they are investigating from what they are investigating? This is the same type of problem that arises when the procedures an experimenter takes to observe something have such an impact on what is being observed that they have substantively changed the nature of what is being observed, hence it’s no longer a case of something being passively observed (with minimum interference with what is being observed), but so actively observed and interfered with that the system is now something quite different.

The same type of problem occurs in Kantian philosophy. How do you consider the world in itself if you can’t help but impose on the world the faculties of your mind, which do not exist in the world in itself, but which you automatically apply to the world? According to Kant, space and time, for example, exist in the mind observing the world, not in the world itself. The mind therefore applies space and time to the world. They are absent from the world in itself. This is exactly what happens with consciousness. It is applied to the world we experience. It is not in the world we experience. Neither is it in our biology. It concerns how our biology is modified through the acquisition of language. No animal could ever be conscious unless it learned a conceptual language. Consciousness is not an innate property. It doesn’t belong to biology, to genes, to matter.

The same type of problem as the Kantian one occurs in Wittgensteinian philosophy. Wittgenstein said, The limits of language are the limits of my world. How, then, can you access what lies beyond the limits of language? Wittgenstein said, Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. So, if things exist which cannot be spoken of, then, according to Wittgenstein, we can go no further. He said, The human body is the best picture of the human soul. So, even if the human soul exists, then, according to Wittgenstein, we have to consider something else – the human body – to get what information we can about the soul.

The same type of issue is captured in the claim that the map is not the territory, or the menu is not the meal, or a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon, and other such claims that so many New Age gurus and Eastern mystics love to invoke. New Age guru Alan Watts said, What we have forgotten is that thoughts and words are conventions, and that it is fatal to take conventions too seriously. A convention is a social convenience, as, for example, money ... but it is absurd to take money too seriously, to confuse it with real wealth ... In somewhat the same way, thoughts, ideas and words are ‘coins’ for real things. The key idea here is that there is always a foundational, unbridgeable difference between the means for describing something and what the something actually is. We can operate on something with a descriptive process of some kind, but we can never get at the thing in itself (without that operation).

By this line of argument, if we are all times operating on everything via consciousness than we can never get at what anything is in itself – i.e., what it is devoid of the conscious operation. We cannot remove the operation, the operator (the map, the descriptive process, the application of consciousness) from what is being operated on (the territory, the thing in itself, the thing consciousness is investigating, the thing without consciousness).

Mystics use such arguments to insist that reality in itself is fundamentally unknowable, an infinite mystery, or whatever, and the best we can do is to subjectively experience it with as few filters as possible, with the barest, purest awareness which can be contrived, and mystics always promote meditation in this regard.

The same sort of analysis could no doubt be applied to more or less every philosophy ever stated by any empiricist (i.e., someone who defines reality in relation to experience).

All arguments that rely on an empiricist worldview fall into catastrophic problems of logic, which are inherent in the correspondence theory of truth. Wikipedia says, In metaphysics and philosophy of language, the correspondence theory of truth states that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined only by how it relates to the world and whether it accurately describes (i.e., corresponds with) that world. We could call this the modeling theory of truth. You have to create models (maps) of reality (the territory) using some mapping technique or other (some descriptive technique), but your map can never actually tell you what the territory is. All it can do is correspond to it. But that’s not the same as being it. What the thing actually is remains a total mystery. A model of a thing is not the thing. This really is a case of the map (model) not being the territory (the thing).

Stephen Hawking said, Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

In scientific materialism, the description of matter (the map, encapsulated in an equation) is not matter (the territory). Not only is there no explanation of what breathes fire into the equations, there’s no explanation of how abstract, immaterial equations can correspond in any way, or map in any way, to concrete, material things. Science never answers these questions, that’s for sure. It’s not interested, and it never will be – because it’s not an intellectual subject directed by coherence; it’s an anti-intellectual subject driven by practicality, by sensory correspondence.

What science does is model material phenomena using an abstract mathematical map, but it never gets anywhere near explaining what concrete matter actually is, or even how this correspondence, this mapping, this modeling, is possible in the first place. The mere fact of correspondence is what interests them, not how correspondence is possible. It has no philosophy to explain why correspondence is legitimate and why we should accept it over coherence.

Wikipedia says, Correspondence theories claim that true beliefs and true statements correspond to the actual state of affairs. This type of theory attempts to posit a relationship between thoughts or statements on one hand, and things or facts on the other. Correspondence says that although the map is not the territory, the map corresponds to the territory, and this correspondence is the best that can be achieved and is the only thing that can elucidate the territory. So, although science cannot explain what life is, what mind is, what matter is, and so on, it can produce abstract equations which generate results that correspond well to observed material phenomena. Although the phenomena in themselves cannot be explained, they can be modeled, often with a high degree of accuracy, and that’s all that scientists care about. They have no interest at all in the question of how abstractions can correspond to concrete things, a prima facie logical impossibility. Empiricists are never interested in logical coherence. That’s one of their defining characteristics.

Everything is different with coherence. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says, A coherence theory of truth states that the truth of any (true) proposition consists in its coherence with some specified set of propositions. The coherence theory differs from its principal competitor, the correspondence theory of truth, in two essential respects. The competing theories give conflicting accounts of the relation that propositions bear to their truth conditions. … According to one, the relation is coherence, according to the other, it is correspondence. The two theories also give conflicting accounts of truth conditions. According to the coherence theory, the truth conditions of propositions consist in other propositions. The correspondence theory, in contrast, states that the truth conditions of propositions are not (in general) propositions, but rather objective features of the world.

These are two absolutely different worldviews, yet practically no one cares that one of these must be absolutely false. A scientist is happy to follow a correspondence theory, and equally happy to reject coherence (i.e., he is happy to embrace incoherence), while never actually believing that he has anything other than a demonstrably coherent, rational and logical worldview. Yet he manifestly doesn’t because he explicitly chooses correspondence over coherence.

No part of science relies on coherence. All of it relies on correspondence. Its entire method is predicated on correspondence, i.e., on observation, not on reason and logic (as would be the case with coherence).

Empiricists pursue correspondence theories while rationalists pursue coherence theories.

For empiricists, consciousness concerns our experiences of things. We are conscious because we experience things. To experience something is to be aware of it, and conscious of it. This automatically leads to the claim that animals must be conscious given that they experience things, and seem to be aware of the world. Yet many people also regard it as somewhat self-evident that humans are conscious and animals are not. How is that contradiction possible? Well, for rationalists, consciousness does not concern our experiences of things. Rather, it concerns our knowledge of our experiences of things, and our knowledge of knowledge. So, humans are conscious because they have knowledge – via reason, logic, language and conceptualization – while animals are not because they lack reason, logic, language and conceptualization.

Here we have an astounding difference. For rationalists, animals cannot be conscious. They can be sentient (have feelings, sensations and experiences), but without consciousness. For empiricists, animals can and indeed must be conscious because they have feelings, sensations and experiences.

Rationalists distinguish between sentience and consciousness. Empiricists say they are the same thing.

The differences between rationalists and empiricists appear everywhere, and basically create two competing worldviews, but which are often force-fitted together.

Many people think consciousness applies to humans, not animals, but, when pressed, quickly agree that animals are conscious. They don’t realize they are accepting two totally different concepts of what consciousness is, one based on an empiricist definition and the other on a rationalist definition. The two definitions cannot intersect.

One interesting area that crops up is in relation to the self-referential problem of how consciousness investigates consciousness. How does consciousness operate on consciousness to discover what consciousness is? How does the operator operate on the operator? How does the descriptor describe the descriptor? If we were to agree that the map is not the territory, could we talk of the map mapping the map, or the territory somehow experiencing or knowing the territory?

In Kantian philosophy, you always need a mind to operate on the world, but that means two things: 1) you can never get at the mind-free world (the territory, free of the mapping mechanism), and 2) the mind has to operate on mind – but how can it, since the mind is what operates on non-mind, on the world, a totally different thing from mind.

Some mystics claim that reality is actually made of consciousness and everything is therefore a product of consciousness and exists within consciousness, but of course this signally fails to explain what consciousness is. These mystics avoided the problem of consciousness having to explain the world by claiming that the world too is consciousness. But they can’t get consciousness to self-referentially explain consciousness, hence consciousness becomes the supreme mystery, as opposed to the world being the final unknowable. They simply relocate the problem from the world to consciousness. Everything remains as unclear as ever.

These mystics never apply rationalism to consciousness. They always conceive consciousness in empiricist terms. They claim that either consciousness is experience, or consciousness is awareness of experience, but with experience and awareness of experience being more or less synonymous, i.e., they cannot imagine experience occurring without awareness and they cannot imagine this awareness to be anything other than conscious (they have no conception of unconscious awareness, such as a human sleepwalker exhibits – because a sleepwalker as sure as hell isn’t conscious but they are definitely aware of the world or they could not move around in it!).

These mystics talk about cosmic consciousness as bare awareness, i.e., as awareness without any filtering at all – getting experience and awareness of experience as close together as possible, so that experience is more or less awareness, so the entire world of experiences in themselves is an entire world of bare awareness. They might, along similar lines, describe cosmic consciousness as pure subjectivity – because only subjects can be aware; objects cannot be … they are objects for subjects. But if everything is experience, if everything is bare awareness, as these people claim, how can non-experiential, non-aware, non-conscious, non-subjects (objects) exist at all? The increasingly popular philosophy of panpsychism responds to this by claiming that all objects are indeed subjects, i.e., have awareness, have subjective experiences, and are conscious. Atoms, these people tell us, are conscious, as are electrons, and quarks. Who knew?!

Many mystics refer to nondualism. Wikipedia says, "In spirituality, nondualism, also called nonduality and interconnectedness; and nondual awareness, is a fuzzy concept for which many definitions can be found, including: a rejection of dualistic thinking originating in Indian philosophy; the nondifference of subject and object; the common identity of metaphysical phenomena and the Absolute; the ‘nonduality of duality and nonduality’; the unity of God and man; or simply monism, the nonplurality of the world, or double-aspect theory. … Nondual awareness, also called pure awareness or pure consciousness … is primordial consciousness or witness-consciousness, a ‘primordial, natural awareness’ which is described as the essence of being, ‘centerless’ and without dichotomies. … In Indian traditions, the realization of this primordial consciousness, witnessing but disengaged from the entanglements of the ordinary mind and samsara, is considered moksha … release from suffering and samsara. This is accomplished by self-restraint and bodhi, discriminative discernment or ‘enlightenment’."

Everything clear now? As you can see, the entire debate around consciousness is fantastically confusing because so many different ideas are in play as to what it actually is. Plainly science cannot study something it cannot even define. No help will be coming from there. Equally, academic philosophy, which is now just the poodle of science, will not be offering anything that fundamentally contradicts science. Again, no help will be arriving from that source. The claims of mysticism are just bizarre, so that will never be of any use in elucidating the nature of consciousness.

Only the rationalists – the most ignored people on earth – can make any progress. Hegel, one of the great rationalists – a genius conceptualist – delivered a definitive refutation of any empiricist idea of consciousness.

Attacking the notion of what would now be called pure or bare awareness – which he termed sense-certainty, referring to the absolute certainty that the bare, pure, unfiltered, sensory experience (unmediated by human language) seems to offer – Hegel wrote, Because of its concrete content, sense-certainty immediately appears as the richest kind of knowledge, indeed a knowledge of infinite wealth for which no bounds can be found, either when we reach out into space and time in which it is dispersed, or when we take a bit of this wealth, and by division enter into it. Moreover, sense-certainty appears to be the truest knowledge; for it has not yet omitted anything from the object, but has the object before it in is perfect entirety. In the event, this very certainty proves itself to be the most abstract and poorest truth. All that it says about what it knows is just that it is; and its truth contains nothing but the sheer being of the thing.

This is such a brilliant insight. To sense something – which is so often conflated with being aware and thus conscious of something even though, as Leibniz pointed out centuries ago, we can have countless perceptions made by our sense organs that never make it into our conscious awareness – is nothing to do with knowing what it is, assuming you become directly aware of it. A human baby may stare intently at its mother’s face, but the baby has no idea what mother is, or what it is itself, or what a face is, and what eyes are and a nose is, and so on. It instinctually uses its senses and it instinctually responds to its mother, but it has no knowledge of any of it, and thus no consciousness of any of it.

Humanity is fated to use the word consciousness all the time – and to see its existence revolving around it – without, in most cases, ever knowing what it is. It almost refuses to know what it is. It refuses to accept that rationalism, not empiricism, is the key to consciousness. It refuses to accept that consciousness is about knowledge of what we are experiencing and not about the experiences per se. In fact, consciousness is all about taking a step back from the experience in order to label it, reflect on it, and pass judgment on it. It’s about filtering the experience. It’s about mediating the experience via conceptual language, hence about moving away from the immediate (unmediated) experience – the sense-certainty experience. It’s not about being absorbed by the experience, but about separating from the experience in order to reframe and reinterpret the experience in other terms that are not part of the experience. We use language to describe experiences, but language itself isn’t experience. It exists on its own, independent of experience, yet applicable to any experience. And that’s exactly what consciousness is. It applies to experience – allowing us to knowledgably reflect on experience – but it definitely isn’t the experience itself, contrary to what almost all of humanity believes.

Hardly anyone understands that consciousness can be totally detached from experience and put to completely different uses. When you are consciously reflecting on the eternal and necessary analytic a priori truths of mathematics, you certainly aren’t engaging with any sensory or emotional experiences, you certainly aren’t channeling the bare or pure awareness of the mystics, you certainly aren’t involved with nondualism, and yet you are 100% conscious, maybe maximally conscious. You are conscious of exactly that which is a priori, i.e., independent of experience. And that, of course, ought to be impossible if consciousness is experience, or awareness of experience.

So, whatever consciousness is, we know absolutely one thing about it – it can operate in the entire absence of experience!

That means we must not look to experience to understand what consciousness is. It’s about knowledge, not experience. You do not perceive knowledge, you conceive it. It’s a rationalist activity, not empiricist.

Consciousness – knowledge – transformed humanity. Experience did not. Stone Age humans existed for hundreds of thousands of years without consciousness, without knowledge. They had plenty of experiences, but no knowledge. They were just like the animals … until consciousness arrived, and then they ceased to be anything like animals and became the masters of the world.

The Three Brains

Why is human life problematic? Every human is beset by internal conflicts. Our very physiology conspires against us. According to Paul MacLean’s triune brain theory, each of us has three different brains, each with its own worldview and modus operandi, all trying desperately to work together as one brain, and not doing a great job.

MacLean wrote, Man finds himself in the predicament that Nature has endowed him essentially with three brains which, despite great differences in structure, must function together and communicate with one another. The oldest of these brains is basically reptilian. The second has been inherited from lower mammals, and the third is a late mammalian development, which in its culmination in primates, has made man peculiarly man.

Humanity is condemned to work with legacy brains. We might think of Humanity 1.0, Humanity 2.0, and Humanity 3.0 all coexisting, rather than each higher version replacing each lower version. Imagine human beings with only a neocortex and no limbic system and reptilian brain stem to interfere. Would that be a much higher humanity, a rational and logical humanity?

MacLean wrote, "Speaking allegorically of these three brains within a brain, we might imagine that when the psychiatrist bids the patient to lie on the couch,

Reviews for Consciousness

[Edward Nix · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

How can you discuss consciousness without defining it first? This book will take you on a journey of discovery and give you a much clearer understanding of what consciousness actually is and how it comes about. Read it, you won't be disappointed.