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.
A other way to look at it is, truncation is dual — functional by logic, costly by finitude: the logic shapes the focus, the finiteness charges for it.
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.
Citings
The Free Energy Principle — backbone of “From the outside to the within”
Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience 11(2): 127–138. — doi.org/10.1038/nrn2787 The canonical statement: the brain minimizes variational free energy, an upper bound on surprise (prediction error / expected cost). Grounds “the way it truncates is set by what lowers its free energy.”
Friston, K., Kilner, J. & Harrison, L. (2006). A free energy principle for the brain. Journal of Physiology–Paris 100: 70–87. — doi.org/10.1016/j.jphysparis.2006.10.001 The original brain formulation — the historical anchor.
Friston, K. (2012). A free energy principle for biological systems. Entropy 14(11): 2100–2121. — doi.org/10.3390/e14112100 Extends the principle past brains to living systems holding order against entropy — “the psyche pays thermodynamics to hold its order.”
Feldman, H. & Friston, K. (2010). Attention, uncertainty, and free-energy. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 4: 215. — doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2010.00215 Earns the “functional selector”: attention is cast as inferring the precision (uncertainty) of signals during hierarchical perception — focus selects by relevance-to-function, not by drawing a boundary.
Parr, T., Pezzulo, G. & Friston, K. (2022). Active Inference: The Free Energy Principle in Mind, Brain, and Behavior. MIT Press. The textbook; active inference (perception and action) backs “choice has a nature… feedback not only from the choice but from the whole.”
Hohwy, J. (2016). The Self-Evidencing Brain. Noûs 50(2): 259–285. — doi.org/10.1111/nous.12062 The self-maintaining loop that holds itself up by modeling itself — for the ouroboros.
“What it discards, it discards at a cost” — and the computer-science paragraph
Landauer, R. (1961). Irreversibility and heat generation in the computing process. IBM Journal of Research and Development 5(3): 183–191. — doi.org/10.1147/rd.53.0183 Erasing one bit carries a hard minimum energy cost. The literal, physical version of the line: discarding information is never free, in a brain or a chip.
Intro — the hard problem and the view from within
Chalmers, D. (1995). Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3): 200–219. Names the hard problem the essay sides with.
Nagel, T. (1974). What Is It Like to Be a Bat? The Philosophical Review 83(4): 435–450. The subjective character has no view from outside — “the whole can only be experienced from within.”
The ego as a self-model — “From within to the ego”
Metzinger, T. (2003). Being No One. MIT Press; and (2009) The Ego Tunnel. Basic Books. The ego as a representation the system runs, not a thing it contains — grounds “not there to take out.”
Letheby, C. & Gerrans, P. (2017). Self unbound: ego dissolution in psychedelic experience. Neuroscience of Consciousness 2017(1): nix016. — doi.org/10.1093/nc/nix016 The self-model as something that can be turned down.
Carhart-Harris, R. & Friston, K. (2019). REBUS and the Anarchic Brain. Pharmacological Reviews 71(3): 316–344. — doi.org/10.1124/pr.118.017160 The bridge: it puts ego-relaxation in FEP terms (relaxed high-level priors / precision), tying the ego section back to the free-energy backbone.
Reducing the ego frees other states
Raichle, M. et al. (2001). A default mode of brain function. PNAS 98(2): 676–682. — doi.org/10.1073/pnas.98.2.676
Brewer, J. et al. (2011). Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity. PNAS 108(50): 20254–20259. — doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1112029108 Meditation quiets the self-referential network — “the virtues of other states of mind.”
State vs trait, and the three modes
Spielberger, C. (1983). State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI). Consulting Psychologists Press. Origin of the state/trait nomenclature.
Goleman, D. & Davidson, R. (2017). Altered Traits. Avery / Penguin. States, repeated, becoming traits — “machine learn it into ratio.”
Hayes, S., Strosahl, K. & Wilson, K. (1999 / 2012). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Guilford Press. Fusion/defusion — “have it / are it / use it.”
Use-dependent plasticity — the taxi drivers
Maguire, E. et al. (2000). Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers. PNAS 97(8): 4398–4403. — doi.org/10.1073/pnas.070039597
Woollett, K. & Maguire, E. (2011). Acquiring “the Knowledge” of London’s layout drives structural brain changes. Current Biology 21(24): 2109–2114. — doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2011.11.018 The longitudinal version, and the one carrying the trade-off (the cost).
The close
Rogers, C. (1961). On Becoming a Person. Houghton Mifflin. The actualizing tendency and authenticity — where “actualize and become more refined” lives.