146. Virginia Woolf

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Proust Was a Neuroscientist

I need to get the rest of the book up before my book club meeting tomorrow, so I'm publishing a bunch of posts at the same time. Sorry. This should be on top, but below you will find posts on Gertrude Stein and Igor Stravinsky.

I don't know when I will resume but I will return to Vertigo and Candide.

Virginia Woolf - From Proust...

p169 ...Woolf's revelation was that we [as selves] emerge from our own fleeting interpretations of the world. Whenever we sense something, we naturally invent a subject for our sensation, a perceiver for our perception. The self is simply this subject; it is the story we tell ourselves about our experiences... "We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself." ["In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." John 1:1]
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p170 ...she also acknowledged the strange utility of her [mental] illness. Her incurable madness -- this "whirring of wings in the brain" -- was, in some ways, strangely transcendental: "Not that I haven't picked up something from insanities and all the rest. Indeed, I suspect they've done instead of religion."
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p171 ...After each depressive episode, she typically experienced a burst of creativity as she filled her journal with fresh insights into the workings of her own "difficult nervous system."... [Sounds like Adrian in Doctor Faustus.]

p172 What Woolf learned about the mind from her illness -- its quicksilverness, its plurality, its "queer conglomeration of incongruous things" -- she transformed into a literary technique... Although the self seems certain, Woolf's writing exposes the fact that we are actually composed of ever-changing impressions that are held together by the thin veneer of identity...
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p175 ...The self emerges from the chaos of consciousness, a 'kind of whole made of shivering fragments." ... 
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p176 Woolf's writing never lets us forget the precariousness of our being. "What does one mean by 'the unity of the mind.' " Woolf wonders in A Room of One's Own, "it {the mind} seems to have no single state of being."... Although the self seems everlasting -- "as solid as forever" -- it lasts only for a moment. We pass "like a cloud on the waves."

... He [T.S. Eliot] believed that the modern poet had to give up the idea of expressing the "unified soul" simply because we didn't have one... 

p177 ...Experiment after experiment has shown that any given experience can endure for about ten seconds in short term memory. After that, the brain exhausts its capacity for the present tense, and its consciousness must begin anew, with a new stream. As the modernists anticipated, the permanent-seeming self is actually an endless procession of disjointed moments.
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Those interesting corpus callosum splitting experiments where there are actually two competing "selves" in our head, are mentioned here.

Emergence
p180 ...If we know nothing else, it is that we are here, experiencing this. Time passes and sensations come and go. But we remain. [Descartes's I think therefore I am]
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...The secret, Woolf realized, was that the self emerges from its source. Emerge is the crucial word here. While her characters begin as a bundle of random sensations... they instantly swell into something else... The impersonal sensation is always ripening into a subjective experience, and that experience is always flowing into the next one. And yet, from this incessant change, the character emerges... In her fiction, the self is neither imposed nor disowned. Rather, it simply arises, a vision stolen from the flux.
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p181 Woolf realized that the self emerges via the act of attention. We bind together our sensory parts by experiencing them from a particular point of view. During this process, some sensations are ignored, while others are highlighted. The outside world gets thoroughly interpreted... 
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p182 But how do we endure? How does the self transcend the separateness of its attentive moments? How does a process become us? For Woolf, the answer was simple: the self is an illusion. This was her final view of the self... The self is simply our work of art, a fiction created by the brain in order to make sense of its own disunity. In a world made of fragments, the self is our sole "theme, recurring, half remembered, half foreseen." If it didn't exist, then nothing would exist. We would be a brain full of characters, hopelessly searching for an author.
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p183 Lesions in the V1 only cause conscious blindness, a phenomenon [Lawrence] Weiskrantz named "blindsight." Although these patients think they are blind, they can actually see, at least unconsciously. What they are missing is awareness... blindsight patients are unable to consciously access what their brains know. As a result, all they see is darkness.


p184 ...On various visual tasks they perform with an aptitude impossible for the totally blind... While they have no explicit awareness of the light, they can still respond to it, albeit without knowing what they are responding to...

...their consciousness has been divorced from their sensations. Although the brain continues to "see," the mind can't pay attention to these visual inputs... Blindsight patients are sad evidence that we have to transform our sensations -- by way of the moment of attention, which is modulated by the self -- before we can sense it. A sensation separated from the self isn't a sensation at all.

I disagree with what is in bold in that paragraph. They are true statements for the "conscious self" or the "mind" but not for the totality of the being-in-our head. That may sound like a meaningless distinction, but unless you are willing to subtract all the unconscious aspects of our selves -- like how we can fall in love at first sight -- then I will stand by it.

These experiments, on the contrary, seem to prove the opposite: The brain (or under-mind) is aware of more than the self is aware of. Not only do these sensations remain, they are processed up to the point of their being made available to the self-consciousness. As strange as blindsight is, is the process of the brain passing information to the mind without the mind knowing where it's coming from really that different from other things we seem to "know" without understanding how -- like we can, apparently, know when a woman is ovulating or that the person across the dance floor would make a perfect life partner.

If anything, the blindsight experiments prove that there is a more profound level of intelligence below the level of our conscious selves.

Here's a BBC piece that makes a similar point.

... Your head contains a hundred million electrical cells, but not one of them is you or knows you or cares about you. In fact, you don't even exist. The brain is nothing but an infinite regress of matter, reducible to the callous laws of physics.
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...and biology. I have in mind evolution. "You" may be a ghost riding a biological machine, but the cells of that machine follow the rules of evolution.

I was thinking about all this at the gym this morning and it occurred to me that multiple personality disorders, schizophrenia, amnesia and the like, should be collectively termed diseases of the self. "I think therefore I am" is the fundamental statement of the philosophy of the self, and this is true even if you have to add a MPD amendment like, "We think therefore we are." But this tells us nothing about reality in general, despite what Descartes intended. The statement is just as true if the self is no more than a helpful creation of the brain. The usual problems people have suggested for our being mentally unable to understand the mind of God, could equally well apply to our understanding the logic of the brain that creates "us." 

Lily

p185 The most mysterious thing about the human brain is that the more we know about it, the deeper our own mystery becomes. The self is no single thing, and yet it controls the singularity of our attention...
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Coda
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p196 We now know enough to know that we will never know everything. This is why we need art: it teaches us how to live with mystery... 

A little more about this book and this author. The book was published in 2007 -- so Lehrer hasn't been following my blogs and answering most of my questions about things like dissonance. And the dust jacket has this to say about Jonah Lehrer, "is editor at large of Seed magazine. A graduate of Columbia University and a Rhodes scholar, Lehrer has worked in the lab of Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel and in the kitchen of Le Cirque 2000 and Le Bernardin. He has written for the Boston Globe, Nature, NPR, and NOVA ScienceNow, and writes a highly regarded blog, The Frontal Cortex."  
 

Real estate sales in this Brave New World

When I consider a space to live in I try to imagine what I would do with it given my stuff and my abilities. I moved into my present (tiny) place largely because it was an interesting challenge. In over 20 years the place has had a number of different looks, as I accumulated family furniture. (Now I kind of wish I had followed young Marcel's example in In Search of Lost Time and found a nice brothel to give the furniture to.)

But (in so many different ways) I am not normal, and the thing to do now if you want top dollar in a hot market is to pay people to "stage" the space. I just toured the newly staged lower level unit in our building and it looks amazing. There's no doubt in my mind that it has never looked better -- and probably will never look this good in the future. There are some obvious (and some less obvious) shortcomings of the space, but what you see now is how bright and perfect everything looks. The staging acts as a distraction, you see the staging instead of the space.

If I was considering buying the unit I would have to mentally remove all the staging to try to get an idea of what I was really dealing with. Most people won't go to that trouble so they will judge the place by how great it looks now... which is not what they will be buying. None the less, at the price it's listed at, they will be getting a good deal, given the location, as long as they don't need a car. And just to give you an idea of how crazy the housing market is here, this, problematic, 450-480 sq ft space (a variety of number are floating around) is listed for a half million dollars. Though the regular association dues are very reasonable for Nob Hill. If I were the realtor, that's what I would plaster on all the signs.

Next - 147. Certifiably a Geezer