The Apophenion: A Chaos Magick Paradigm - Peter J. Carroll 2008

Multimind - Psychology

This chapter deconstructs the superstitions of Consciousness and Self, and seeks an Apophenia in the paradigm of the Multimind Randomaton.

Part 1.

The Myth of 'Consciousness'

Consciousness always has a subject other than itself. It always has a focus on some perceptual phenomenon or on some internal state or emotion or thought.

Descartes proclaimed 'I think therefore I am'. Other people may rely on consciousness of different phenomena to reassure themselves that they still exist, but toothache provides almost everyone with unarguable confirmation of their existence.

We cannot however have content free consciousness. It does not exist as a state of 'being', it consists of an activity, and this activity ceases under anaesthesia or deep sleep.

Try as hard as you like with meditation or sensory deprivation but you can never achieve pure consciousness, although you may achieve an interesting consciousness of your own blood circulation or endocrine functions, or of some mystical feelings or ideas.

So how does the subjective impression of consciousness as a state of 'being' arise?

Look again at Descartes' assertion of 'I think therefore I am'. The appearance of the word 'I' twice gives the game away. Plainly the two instances of 'I' cannot refer to the same phenomenon. Descartes must contain an 'I' doing the thinking, and an 'I' observing the other one doing it. Any form of introspection implies a dialogue of some kind.

Theriomorphic atavisms of the Multimind.

Plainly we should regard 'mind' as a verb, as an activity of the brain, rather than as a 'thing' which we have, or consist of. Mind remains unobservable; it consists of a doing, not a state of being. We can only infer the presence of the activity of minding.

Consciousness only occurs when it has a subject, so self-awareness can only consist of one part of the system having awareness of the activities of another part. However we learn to assume that The Same Part always has consciousness of the rest.

We probably have to adopt this assumption to retain a sense of personal coherence as a survival strategy, even though the evidence all points in the opposite direction.

Writing in a book of short essays about things we believe but cannot prove,⁵ one neurophysiologist quipped that he believed consciousness works as a sort of trick we involuntarily play on ourselves, but that understanding the trick might send us all to hell. Buddhists philosophers might argue that such an understanding could set us free.

The Philosophical Zombie describes a creature in a famous thought experiment.⁶

This hypothetical Zombie has all the usual attributes of a human except that it does not have our subjective conscious experience of events but acts entirely on reflex like a massively sophisticated automaton. Thus it withdraws from stimuli that its programs consider harmful, and it seeks food and water and reproductive opportunities and so on, as its programs compel it to. It can also make what sounds like perfectly intelligent conversation and pass the Turing test with flying colours, but it has no 'consciousness' even though it can monitor its environment and its internal states.

We would almost certainly have to make such a massively sophisticated automaton using organic chemistry, so it would consist of meat rather than metal, just like us.

Some theorists tend to conclude that such Zombies could exist and function without consciousness, so perhaps consciousness doesn't really exist at all except as an illusion. Perhaps we simply have to delude ourselves with a fictional sense of consciousness to create a sense of simple coherence inside an otherwise impossibly complex information processing device.

Others think that such a Zombie could not exist or function convincingly as human; because real humans require something qualitatively different called consciousness. They conclude that such a creature would behave more like a science fiction android automaton. 'My senses inform me that my foot has started burning, I shall therefore remove it from the source of heat in accordance with my survival imperatives'.

The creature would appear to lack what we call the subjective conscious experience or 'qualia' of pain. It seems unlikely that any degree of response sophistication could completely disguise this, even if we built in an automatic scream.

I beg to differ with both camps. I suspect that a creature with only a single consciousness would behave like the automaton type of zombie, and that we cannot understand consciousness if we assume that we have it in singular form only.

In the course of normal everyday life the assumption of singular consciousness works well enough, but in extremis we see a different picture. Consider the 'qualia' of pain, it behaves as though it consists of an independent 'pain consciousness' and as it becomes more active, our other consciousnesses start doing less and less, the pain consciousness becomes dominant, and you find yourself observing yourself mainly from the perspective of pain.

People who practise extreme forms of meditation or concentration or mystical activity report that their consciousness of everything else decreases. Normally people tend to identify the consciousness that they perform as 'their own', but they may afterwards disavow extreme states, and claim that they came from elsewhere, particularly from spirits if they have religious inclinations. Many creative people claim that their inspirations come from a source that they do not identify with their normal consciousness. Their normal consciousness has awareness of the other source but does not seem to include it. But conversely, when the other source becomes very active, normal consciousness can become a subject of its observation, but eventually the other source may cease to notice the increasingly inactive normal consciousness.

Anger provides a simple example of this. When one feels anger rising, the normal consciousness has awareness of the increasing activity of the anger consciousness, and vice-versa. For a while it may remain in the balance which will become the most active and which will mainly observe the other. In extremes the anger consciousness may enter into a dialogue with body consciousness instead, whilst the normal consciousness shuts down. Afterwards, people who rarely experience such states may find difficulty explaining or remembering their actions in normal consciousness, they may even disclaim agency in terms of diminished responsibility.

Consciousness has the odd subjective property that it seems to have the ability to flit from doing one qualia or state to another, and often of doing several at the same time. All this does seem paradoxical if you insist on having only a single consciousness, the 'me' or the 'I'. On the other hand if we assume that all 'our' qualia and states exist as separate consciousnesses, then it makes considerably more sense.

From a quantum panpsychic perspective it appears impossible in principle to construct a philosophical zombie because any sufficiently complex information-processing device that can monitor its environment and its internal states will inevitably have consciousnesses well before it has a processing power equivalent to the human brain. At the time of writing, computers hardly exceed insects in their processing power. If we wanted to build a device that convincingly mimicked human responses we would have to endow it with many separate programs that competed for control; and which to some extent monitored each other. Each of these programs would inevitably have consciousness to some degree.

The quantum panpsychic view endows all phenomena with a degree of mind-like behaviour anyway, and quite modest quantities of brain tissue can support extensive monitoring and control programs. The human brain weighs about as much as the brains of 45 cats, or 700 rats, or an astronomical number of insect brains. We know that many parts of it have highly specialised functions. The human brain actually supports many consciousnesses. Some of these become active only infrequently, some monitor the activities of some of the others, but probably none monitors all of the others. A conspiracy of the more active consciousnesses usually learns to define itself as 'consciousness in the singular' in monotheist and post-monotheist cultures. We learn to regard ourselves as 'individuals' despite that we have profound internal divisions, and we have to make big efforts and sacrifices to create a unitary sense of self. In magic and mysticism and in creative thinking, we can gain much by relaxing the grip of the unitary consciousness that we have learned to construct. Part two of this chapter deals with the construction of self, and part three deals with undoing it.

Part 2.

Constructing the Self

The Self arises largely as a social construct. We become assembled from bits and pieces of other people. We start by receiving genetic material from our ancestors and then we go on to receive language and ideas and behavioural patterns from our parents, peers, and teachers. As we age we seem to develop some ability to choose what to incorporate into ourselves, and we select various add-ons available in the media of our culture.

At an early stage we seem to somehow develop 'theory of mind' as we come to the realisation that other people have 'intentionality' and act somewhat differently to say, refrigerators. We arrive at the idea that other people have minds which may lead them to behave as if they had intentions and concealed agendas. Autistic people may owe their condition to an impairment of the ability to develop theory of mind.

In the normal course of development, theory of mind attributes a single mind to each significant other person. However if a significant other behaves in wildly differing and contradictory ways it can lead to eccentric and possibly dysfunctional ideas about self and others in general.

Gradually we begin to apply theory of mind to ourselves and learn to recognise various intentionalities within, and we also learn to deceive and to lie. We come under intense pressure to conform to consistent behaviour patterns. Parents and teachers pressure and intimidate children continually in various subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways to exhibit approved behaviour, and then express surprise if they bully any of their peers who exhibit any sort of differences.

As a social species we exhibit an extraordinary suggestibility. It takes a chimpanzee about six years just to learn how to break nuts with two stones, in the same time a human has learnt half a language, a large suite of complicated physical skills, and the beginnings of a system of beliefs about the world.

We also learn to present a fairly consistent self to the world. Out of character behaviour attracts disapproval or punishment. Nothing instils a belief more strongly than persistently acting out the behaviour that goes with it. We do not so much do what we believe, as believe what we do. Quite soon we internalise the idea of the singular self because our culture demands that we act as though we had one.

For further commentary on this kind of view of the nature of mind see the work of Norretranders⁷ and Ornstein.⁸

The singular self remains a defining feature of monotheist and post monotheist cultures. It confers a greater sense of personal responsibility than our pagan forebears would have felt comfortable with.

Every theology, pantheon, and demonology implies a psychology. Most pagan cultures attempted to include a wide spectrum of possible selves and behaviours, with a god or goddess or a minor deity for just about any activity, allowing them to make love or war or whatever, as they felt the inspiration to do so. Thus they seem to have thought and acted with less of a sense of internal conflict and less of a sense of personal agency than we find normal today. Thus violence and unrestrained sexuality seem to have featured as everyday phenomena in many early pagan cultures, rather than as occasional paroxysmal outbursts as they do in ours. As pawns of the gods of their own creation, the pagans gave themselves licence to express their impulses and selves to the full, especially if they occupied a position in society that gave them the power to do so.

However city life threw up many challenges to later paganism. Increasingly complex rule structures evolved to cope with the expression of pagan impulses within densely packed populations, and pantheons tended to proliferate rather absurdly as the Romans in particular attempted to incorporate cults from all over their empire. It seems likely that the majority of notable Greek and Roman thinkers paid only lip service to their official religions, but we owe the ideas of the muse, the daemon and the genius as quasi-independent sources of personal inspiration, to these cultures.

Monotheism certainly brought a brutal simplicity to the questions of social control and personal behaviour. Half of all behaviour got defined as approved by the single deity, and the other half got defined as damned. Monotheism mounted a two pronged attack on pagan cultures. It appealed to the rulers of societies as a superior means of social control, (they usually considered themselves above the moral precepts anyway), and it appealed to the poor masses as it made a virtue of avoiding the sybaritic excesses that they could not usually afford to indulge.

Monotheism brings with it an increased sense of personal agency and individual selfhood defined by the supposed free will to choose between what god and society requires and what personal impulses suggest. In monotheism you cannot always find a god that agrees with you, so the daemons that inspired the pagans become the demons that culture now expects you to reject as not-self. This creates a thriving industry of self-loathing and guilt. Monotheists define themselves at least as much by what they don't do (or pretend not to do) as by what they do. Expect extensive lists of prohibitions from any monotheism or post monotheist secularism.

The post monotheist westernised democracies have largely retained the paradigm of the mono-self and refined it in many ways. Secular law now attempts to both reflect and lead belief as religious based law once did. You can believe more or less what you like so long as you don't express beliefs critical of certain other classes of people, but intense social pressure falls on those whose beliefs or actions do not conform to certain standards of self-consistency.

Whilst a wide range of roles and hobbies remain available, our culture regards many as exclusive of certain others. Consider this short selection:

Astrologer, Politician, Priest, Scientist, Prostitute, Schoolteacher, Businessperson, Druggie, Artist, Police Officer, Model, Lawyer, Magician, Soldier, Erotic Novelist.

Whilst many people could easily have any of these activities as a career and another as a sideline or hobby, the social conventions of consistency usually discourage or prevent many possible combinations, for few discernible logical reasons whatsoever.

But don't we find it fascinating to discover someone who has two 'incompatible' identities?

The word schizophrenia comes from the Greek roots 'divided' and 'mind' and in the popular imagination it often means someone with two minds, at least one of which seems mad. An old joke puts it thus, 'when a man speaks to a god its prayer, when a god speaks to a man its schizophrenia'. In psychiatric terms schizophrenia covers a very poorly defined group of maladies that does not invariably include hearing voices, although this symptom frequently provokes that diagnosis.

Many people hear voices without suffering any of the debilitating and dysfunctional effects associated with schizophrenia, some treat these voices as sources of inspiration or develop religious ideas about them, others become mediums or occultists.

The idea of demonic possession occurs in most monotheist cultures but post monotheist paradigms usually describe it as some variety of schizophrenia. Yet possession sometimes gets treated as a desirable state to achieve, as in the Voodoo faith or in some other ecstatic cults.

Despite its popularity in pop-psychology, Multiple Personality Disorder very rarely manifests in its recognised psychiatric form where some of the selves have complete amnesia about the activities of others. It would seem that anyone can present a different persona in different circumstances, but that severe trauma can induce a permanent split between those personae.

The classical psychological concepts of the unconscious and the subconscious minds arose in a culture that expected people to act in a considerably more reserved and repressed fashion than seems normal today. Sharp divisions between the conscious, the subconscious, the unconscious, and perhaps the super-conscious (whatever that may mean), now appear rather artificial and contrived. Some memories, thoughts, emotions and impulses merely acquire more of a propensity to take control of the whole organism than others. Many of them operate without much direct communication with what the early theorists called the 'ego'; another rather loose concept derived from the Latin word for 'I'.

The fact that the mind tends to produce confirmation of any descriptive scheme that we impose on it, including the Freudian Id, Ego, and Superego or the Kabbalistic Sephiroth of the Tree of Life or the Eight Circuit Wilson-Leary model, surely tells us something. No part of it can comprehend the whole incredibly complex and malleable assemblage.

All in all, it seems that humans can function across a whole spectrum from the apparent Mono-Self type to the Multi-Self type. In practise neither extreme of the spectrum seems optimal, because at both ends of it the selves erect barriers between each other.

The Mono-Self type acts predictably and with restricted creativity, and has a cellar full of demons and discarded angels. The full-blown Multi-Self type can act creatively and unpredictably, but erratically and dysfunctionally if communication between the selves breaks down.

We need to aim somewhere between the Zombie like automaton of the mono-self type and the disintegrated condition of the complete Randomaton to explore the multitudinous riches within and to emerge in a functional and sane condition.

Monotheist mysticism and magic inevitably plunges its practitioners into the demon realms.

Monotheist mystics exalt one imagined god-self within by repressing all their own natural ungodliness. They never succeed in this until perhaps old age erodes their sexuality and aggression and appetites, but in the meantime they sometimes manage to sublimate their impulses into 'good' works. But expect outbreaks of appalling behaviour or long nights of unproductive guilt and anguish at the very least.

The Devil gave his name as Legion, the legion of repressed selves lurking in the monotheist's dungeons.

Part 3.

Dicing with the Randomaton

Chaoists approach multi-self management with stochastic techniques. If one self doesn't work, try another; if necessary, at random. Here we see lateral thinking at work on the grand scale.

Most people seem strangely protective about their name and immediately correct you if you so much as mispronounce it. On the other hand, in many mystical organisations people often have a special name which they only use within it. A change of name or title seems charged with considerable significance for most people. I once spent a year and a half in a job where they called me Jim rather than Pete, due to someone mis-hearing something on the first day. I decided not to disabuse them. It worked out rather well, Jim did a better job of educating the unwilling and the behaviourally challenged than Pete would have, and Pete refused to take Jim's identity and job home after hours.

This seems to work best where you can enter a new situation. Asking everyone you already know to call you something different has little effect in the short term and gains you no extra degree of freedom.

Apparently everything perceived in our universe has a name, and whenever anyone comes across something lacking a name they seem to feel an overwhelming compulsion to give it one. Yet in bizarre contrast to this, few people have any names at all for any of their many selves. Half of their universes consist of murky areas full of phenomena that don't even have proper names. Mere psychological tags often have to suffice, even for the relatively self aware.

Despite that we can peer into the hearts of stars and atoms; our psychology remains primitive. Arguably we have little more real psychological knowledge than the ancient Greeks did. The destruction of all books on psychology would have no serious consequences at all.

Naming the selves of the personal mythos might seem like the first step on the road to insanity and the disintegration of the ego or self image, and we might well ask 'who' names them. In the absence of any sort of 'real' inner core or 'essential self', the selves have to name each other or at least to exchange names and welcome each other to a party that has no host with special privileges, because they all own the building.

I tend to favour democracy, it looks like the least worst system of governance yet devised. Critically, it depends on all power blocs allowing other blocs to try anything that does not radically obviate their own agenda. It does not work in highly divided 'societies'; it depends to a large extent on negotiation between various interest groups.

A truly sane individual or society tries to achieve a compromise between all its impulses.

We (the author) have endeavoured to conduct our life as a party, with something to amuse and exercise the skills and obsessions of all those present at various points during the celebration. In the absence of an adequate psychological terminology we have tended to identify each other with the names of the now safely dead classical gods from various pantheons.

Take violence for example. Everybody has a self that loves violence, whether they try to repress it or not. Don't pretend that several million years of evolution has not equipped us with a certain facility to relish hunting, fighting, and killing, and the crushing of rivals and enemies, and given us a sense of glory and achievement in doing so. However a Mars self unadvised by our other selves, leads the whole organism rapidly to disaster.

Plus of course people don't generally like anyone manifesting a Mars self except under the controlled circumstances of sport or entertainment. Watching violent sport and entertainment seems rather like watching pornography and then not having any form of sexual activity. It titillates an impulse but does not satisfy it, and it allows the maintenance of the hypocrisy that we abhor violence. In fact we have a self that loves violence and several others that don't like it, and they usually have a bad opinion of the self that does. Thus the violence presented in entertainment for the viewer to identify with usually has to appear as justifiable revenge, anything else seems immoral to several of the other selves.

We* (the author*) let Wotan, as we call him, out of his cage for regular ritual exercise. He likes weightlifting, sword practice, the thunderous roar of drums and cannon, the crash of axe upon shield, fire, explosions, muscle powered projectiles such as javelins, knives, arrows, etc and getting into an ecstatic rage for the hell of it. Well why not?

Anger seems a much-neglected resource. It can temporarily double your physical strength and concentration during really hard work, it can project a sort of madman-charisma that wins conflicts psychologically, and it can also serve as a gnosis for projecting intent magically.

We* (the author*) don't feel ashamed of Wotan, we can trust him not to act out of turn, we regard him as a valuable committee member, he likes devising and playing complex board wargames with Logicus the abstract thinker, which neither of them would probably enjoy on their own. Wotan regards ordinary individual human stupidity as rather laughable and only gets aggressive at organised stupidity and malice.

Then we* find that we also comprise at least half a dozen other Selfs with various agendas and abilities, and that all of them seem to have magical powers if the others will stand aside for a while and let them do their stuff.

Death provides constant saturnine advice on matters of time, ageing, senescence, mortality and futility. Sex seems more polymorphous-perverse than the rest of us realised, and has developed a delightful repertoire of fairly harmless paraphilias over the years. Love appears as several different characters that love quite different phenomena, and get quite different payoffs for doing so. The same goes for Hatred. This realisation solved an awful lot of confusion and argument. Logicus would no more try to rationalise any of our Hatreds away than he would try to kill any of our Loves.

So which of my who's am I?

We* regard that question as meaningless because it contains a false imputation of 'being' in the use of the word 'am'. We* have no chairman at our round table, the microphone gets passed around according to circumstance or purely randomly if no circumstances impinge. If we* have any kind of real or fundamental self it consists of the quantum panpsychic chaos underlying all of our* consciousnesses. The Ancient Greeks considered that their gods arose from Chaos, they had a point there.

Great people invariably contain great contradictions, internal self-consistency has no virtue, it merely causes mediocrity. Rather we should strive to make the most of all the selves that we contain, for each can function as a god for a time if the others stop trying to restrain it. We* seem to function better by regarding ourselves as a team, and by occasionally letting one of our number manifest in full god form, but more of that in Chapter 4.

Some Chaomeras of the

Neural Neopantheon;

We have worlds within us

And we have others within us

Humans and gods make each other

In each others images