I should say at the outset that I am not trying to explain the hard problem away. I take the felt quality of experience to be real, and the aim here is to follow where that leads. Many questions — whether philosophical, physical, psychological, or neurological — can be understood and placed into context through the hard problem. And in doing so, we find not only clarity but perhaps even some decent arguments for making sense of the game of ourselves more deeply.
Let’s set out the problem first. We can assume that the difference between perceiving and the perceiver is that the perceiver sits at the center of the perceiving. What perceives sees a world of objects — these can be concepts, ideas, real tangible things, and other things that fall under qualia. We don’t normally stop to notice it, but we are unable to make a full object of our own mind. We cannot see ourselves, our mind, or the psyche we are made of. What we see is the effect of being in the middle of qualia. Just as a man cannot eat his own head, the mind cannot conceptualize itself as a mental object to be fully perceived. The mind is what generates all objects, but cannot point at itself while doing so.
To choose left is to refuse right
Every determination is also a negation: the taking and the leaving are a single whole. And this is why the whole can only be experienced from within — any view of it from the outside would itself be a determination, a part carved from the rest, never the whole itself. It’s hard to prove, but easy to understand. The choice between left and right is, by analogy, the mathematician’s truncation: to keep one is to discard the rest in the same act.
This is often done because a choice is made to measure something tangible, provable. The very act creates an object out of a potential. That object then functions as a scoped object — because from a holistic perspective, the only object we ever scope is one within the field of understanding.
And even the largest objects we carve — an unfolding stock market, say — come back only as approximations: truncations of a total too vast to ever gather whole. Which is the price of its objectivity; an object, poetically put, of a whole world of wholes.
Even in the world of computer science — which seemingly works on perfect parameters — if we look closely at the substrate, we find failsafe systems managing the digital clashes that the approximations produce.
Then, if we flip the coin to the other side: we don’t run on the uncertainty of approximations, but assume we have the correct answer. Not by knowing, but by thought experiment. How am I sure this answer is correctly gathered? Just as in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the number 42 — though the most significant number we come across — is empty without its question. Even a perfectly reasoned, certain answer is nothing without the question behind it.
question. Even a perfectly reasoned, certain answer is nothing without the question behind it.
From the outside to the within
So, choice has a nature to it. And that nature shows itself as feedback — not only from the choice, but from the whole. This doesn’t only happen physically; we make these choices in the mind too. So truncation applies within the psyche as well. Normally we do it through focus. But what we don’t recognize is that we do the same thing with focus that we did with mathematics. By focusing, we truncate thought through a relative scope. This scope comes from the whole and, strangely enough, stays the whole, by virtue of the fact shown above. This truncation has no boundaries, yet it can select. How can something select without boundaries? It does so by relevance to a function: the scope becomes a functional selector. The selection itself doesn’t complete the function, but by gating, it can choose the logic of that function — by focusing on it.
In short: the psyche holds its order only by paying thermodynamics to do so — and so the way it truncates is set by what lowers its free energy, and what it discards, it discards at a cost.
From within to the ego
So all objects within are objects of the whole self. And so is the ego. Now it depends how you look at the ego. Is the ego a belief you have? Perhaps you are the belief. Or maybe you use the ego as an expression. It matters — but the ego is mostly defined by identification. So whatever mode of vehicle one uses to do things, it’s an active focus, a relative ratio to the whole. Which means we can deduce that the ego is not there to take out — but to reduce, and place in ratio to the whole, so that one may experience the virtues of other states of mind.
And this is explainable by the following reasoning. If one system uses less energy because it shrinks in bandwidth, the overall self makes place for something else. This works for neural anatomy as much as for psychological work. It’s known that the taxi drivers of London cultivate a larger hippocampus — the posterior part — because the trade there is to know every street by memory alone. And it comes at a cost: the gain in one region is paid for by another. So we see how different systems take precedence on the overall stage of the psyche — and how that stage is finite.
So how would one go about doing this — putting the ego into a more reasonable position? Within psychology there’s a nomenclature for it: state vs trait. An active script running is a state; the standing tendency for it to activate is a trait. Which is a very good subdivision of the anatomy of a script.
Take the context of work. Your identity is active — so you run the ego as a state, channeling focus through it. You activate it, you use it, and so the trait strengthens. But held as a tool, you don’t always reach for it. Through meditation, for example, you learn to look differently — you learn to let go. And in the letting go you free up bandwidth, room for new and authentic ideas to show up. And in so doing, we learn to actualize, and become more refined.