Interviews with Jason Brown.
II. Microtemporal Structure of the Mind/Brain State
by David T. Bradford
Preface
This is the third in a series of interviews conducted with Jason Brown in November, 2006. The two earlier interviews appeared in 2009 in Psychoscience under the single heading “Interviews with Jason Brown.” The first focused on scientific and philosophical influences that shaped his early work in aphasia and anticipated the development of microgenetic theory. The second considered his adaptation of evolutionary principles in describing and explaining the mind/brain state.
The present interview moves more deeply into the microtemporal structure of the mind/brain state. Questions of terminology are addressed, such as the meaning of “phase” and “transition.” Later portions of the interview touch on material developed fully in Process and the Authentic Life, Brown's latest book-length publication. A bibliography and a list of secondary sources are included at the end of the first set of interviews. I welcome readers' comments.
David T. Bradford, PhD
Austin, TX
(email: dtbrad@flash.net)
DB = David Bradford
JB = Jason Brown
DB: We decided to talk about the sense of time and the internal structure of the mind/brain state. This involves consideration of the phases whose serial activation brings the state to the point of closure. If blocked or impeded, as occurs in pathological conditions, the series closes prematurely. Symptoms appear on this basis, and I would say that the sense of time is altered as well. To shift from the clinical perspective, the field of religious studies provides an example in the experience of what seems a timeless duration, which the mystic interprets as participation in the eternal life of God. Associated physiological effects would strengthen the impression, such as parasympathetic dominance. Ascetical and meditative techniques induce the premature closure of a series of states, with the result that awareness is filled with the sense of suspended time associated with early phases. The mystical experience is like a symptom, sanctioned and cultivated by the religious tradition.
It seems to me that mental process, under normal conditions, is highly unreliable in the sense that successive sets of states show great variability in their degrees of completeness. This would allow for rapid change in the form and content of consciousness. A person might alternate between attending to emotionally-salient remote memories and the absentminded effort of tallying the debits marked in his check register. Time seems to linger and pool during the reminiscence, but is quickened, uneven, and possibly races during the mathematical task. Another example would be trance-like immersion in hallucinatory imagery, alternating with objective awareness of the ambient environment.
You hold that neighboring states overlap. The lingering trace of the preceding state sculpts the next in sequence based on the earlier state's imposition of memory. This idea could be extended to account for what seems the near-simultaneous presence of different levels of consciousness. The schizophrenic might listen to his voices while conversing with the hospital attendant. Attention lingers in preliminary, hallucinatory phases, meanwhile the mouth parrots ideas keyed to later phases. Rapid alternation between the two activities would give the impression of their occurring simultaneously.
JB: These are interesting topics that touch on imagery, introspection, metaphor, and paralogical thinking.
DB: I mentioned alterations in the sense of time due to successive states elaborating only preliminary phase transitions. In melancholia, for example, time passes slowly, the present feels prolonged, vital momentum is blunted or absent. This could be our starting point.
JB: I suppose the alteration of timing or of the time sense in melancholia has to do with loss of objects, especially in severe depression. Many have written that the unconscious is timeless. Eduard von Hartmann was the first, I believe, then Freud. I don't think timeless entities can exist, so either the unconscious is not timeless or there are no unconscious entities -- or both are correct. Apart from the hypothesis of abstract or eternal Platonic objects, existence is temporal.
I would prefer to say that events in the physical world, and also unconscious happenings, are simultaneous. Some might question the distinction between simultaneity and timelessness, in supposing a lack of temporal order in the simultaneous instant. However, within a simultaneity there is temporal extensibility, a transition of phases, or becoming, that does not achieve existence until the succession is complete and a single object or mental state actualizes. This is the difference between the simultaneous and the non-temporal. The simultaneous is potentially temporal but not without a complete epoch of transition. All entities, physical or mental, have a minimal duration over which one complete state is achieved. For example, in the hypothetical atom, one complete orbit of an electron is necessary for the atom to exist. The transition cannot be frozen at an instant. Whitehead wrote of this.
The transition within an entity, say a particle, or within an object, say a tree in perception or a mental object such as an idea, is the succession from onset to termination that lays down one complete thing. This transition is replaced so rapidly it is unapparent, and we are aware only of the final actuality, which seems to be a product of the processes on which it depends. In microgenetic theory, an entity or object is not a slice of process in time or the output of prior operations but is the full sequence of antecedent phases, just as the atom is not the nucleus plus the electron at a single point, but one complete orbit.
It is worth noting that the succession is not “in time” until it terminates and the full sequence is realized. This is the temporal thickness of all objects or entities. In mind, it pertains especially to unconscious phenomena. When unconscious happenings transition to consciousness, they take on temporal order. Presumably, events that remain unconscious still achieve closure and replacement, though we cannot know such events until they become conscious. The dream, for example, in my view is simultaneous until one awakens when for a brief moment it is apprehended all at once in its entirety. This is reminiscent of the so-called iconic memory in experimental psychology. Then one attempts to reconstruct the sequence in a narrative that makes sense to the waking subject.
The ordering of events in mind or world is an outcome of individuation as events take on temporal order out of potentiality or timelessness. Event-order exhausts the potential latent in the simultaneity. In a withdrawal back through the transitional sequence, in pathological states like depression, deep meditation or mystical trance, early segments of the becoming actualize a pre-object, an image or concept or category, perhaps a kind of block moment as a final phase. The abbreviated mental state has a diminished temporal order that narrowly escapes simultaneity. The loss of objects in morbid depression is a loss of the final phases of the mental state.
The creation of temporal order articulates space and gives the succession of events in perception. It is important to distinguish the succession that underlies the perception of events from that which is perceived in the world. The one is real or genuine change that deposits a novel object; the other is apparent or illusory change that results from the replacement of objects, giving the appearance of an ordered series of events. This concept may be difficult to follow. The change we see in the world is illusory; the change we do not see inside an object is genuine and novel. In the replacement of each epoch, genuine change accounts for apparent change. Further, while we see objects that change, say a bird that flies from one branch to another, we do not see an event-continuum, the changing world in which the bird is a series of recurrent objects like an unrolling spool of snapshots.
The question for the substantialist is how change occurs for “solid” objects, in other words, the nature of the causal step from one state to the next. The problem for process thinking is how flux divides into objects. From a process standpoint, objects are the illusory stabilities of events. The change within the object is invisible while the change across objects is an effect of the replacement of epochs. These concepts conflict with our common sense view of things.
To return to depression and similar states, when objects are lost the erosion of serial order gives the monotony of objectless time. Time seems to pass slowly. Events punctuate and "stretch out" duration. The loss of objects or events gives a change in the sense of subjective time. We all have experiences when time seems to pass slowly or quickly. In dream, there is no duration, just a present that is constantly replaced. The feeling of duration requires a past and present, not mere succession. Duration is bound up with a specious present hovering over the phase transition, but this is another conversation. The point is that a truncated becoming gives a contracted present. This occurs in severe amnesia, when event-decay is so rapid that unfilled durations shrink. For the amnesic, a month feels like some days. An alteration of time accompanies an alteration of change. In meditation, the goal is to expand the now of present experience so it embraces all past and future time. Eckert and Coomeraswandy wrote of states in which the now approaches the eternal now of god's mind.
DB: We decided to devote more time to the mind/brain state and its microtemporal structure. You favor "transition" and "phase." The word "strata" has some appeal because of the connotations of surface and depth, which support the idea that neural process advances toward the forebrain, activating more deeply situated structures before coming to cortex. I would ask you at some point to trace the course of transitions constituting a single state.
JB: As to terminology, I try to avoid "stratum," "plane," "stage," and "level."
DB: Why is that?
JB: The words suggest a more persistent or defined --
DB: A more static --
JB: Yes, something more definable or static --
DB: Unlike "phase."
JB: Phase has a more dynamic quality to it. I speak of “phase” or a “phase transition” and of “segments” in the transition as a continuum that is arbitrarily demarcated. One has a kind of clustering at certain phases, but a phase does not usually appear, for it is transformed to an ensuing phase. An intermediate phase is observed as a momentary terminus when it actualizes as a dream image or in pathology as a symptom.
DB: Your referring to “segments in the transition” raises questions about terminology. I now doubt my understanding of the meaning of “transition.” My understanding has been that “transition” and “phase” are interchangeable, and that both are abbreviated ways of speaking of the “phase transition.” This may not be the case. Tell me, does “phase transition” refer to the individual phase or to the succession of phases that constitute a state?
JB: David, to clarify, I think that a phase is unstable. It appears as a symptom, but in normal cognition it is always transitional to an ensuing phase. When the phase transitions to the next, it vanishes, having given up what it was to what it becomes. I avoid terms such as “level,” “stage” or “plane” to avoid the suggestion of stability in the phase. I use the term “phase transition” for the microgenetic sequence, and the term “segment” for some succession or series of phases within that sequence.
DB: I understand that phases are arbitrary demarcations, at least in normal conditions, and that a preliminary phase may be evident in a symptom. I find it helpful to think of increments of change, beginning with the phase, coming to the segment, and closing with the phase transition, none of which are evident in normal mental process. I recognize that "increment" insinuates a sense of fixity in what is more nearly a flux, but it does help to clarify these concepts. I notice this morning your using the term “epoch," basically a synonym for "phase transition," granted differences in nuance. "Epoch" is the more common term in earlier work; "transition" and "phase transition" are favored in later publications.
We began talking about variations in the sense of time in religious and in pathological experience. I mentioned the idea that series of states are highly inconsistent in their respective degrees of completeness, and said this might account for the experience of nearly simultaneously carrying out different kinds of tasks, each keyed to a particular phase.
JB: You were speaking about multiple levels of consciousness. I think it is important to mention that it is not a question as to whether one has multiple levels, or rather phases, but that one needs them, first to be conscious, which occurs when the phase of the self is aware of the phase of an object world. The self-object relation is a relation of early to late phases in the same mental state. Introspection is not an addition to the sequence but a branching from preliminary phases. It entails the coming-to-the-fore of phases between self and object. It is essential that the mental state terminates in a veridical object. Otherwise, introspective contents will undergo distortion in archaic modes of cognition, as occurs in dreams.
Dream is consciousness of an image world when the object-development is arrested. The difference between dream and waking consciousness is that in wakefulness an image occurs in relation to the self at one pole and an object at the other. Images close to waking consciousness tend to be “reality-oriented”; those more preliminary, as with reverie or fantasy, can be like dream-images. Verbal and visual imagery -- inner speech, for example, and imaginal images -- are interposed between the self and the outer world. The object- and activity-awareness that Piaget thought was typical of young children, perhaps of animals, is an immediacy of awareness, without mediation by a self. I speak of the relation of subject to object as “awareness,” and the relation of self to object as “consciousness”. The latter is an intentional mode of thought.
The self is not only conscious of objects, but of images in the context of a perception of the external world. There is also a volitional or intentional quality of the imagery. We feel that we are agents of inner speech, and that we control thought imagery. However, without an external world, an image becomes an actuality or endpoint, as in dream or hallucination. Moreover, the self of dream is a different self than in wakefulness. It is passive, swept along by events, without a sense of willing or guiding events. It is drawn by the events to which it is a witness or victim.
DB: Let's talk about the phase transition. "Transition" avoids the connotation of something fixed and for this reason is preferable to "stratum," "plane," or "slice." To grasp the unbroken continuity of the state’s development is not an easy task. A temporal perspective has to be substituted for fixed points of reference. Why not trace the passage of a single state whose outcome is the formation of a particular perceptual object. This table could be the object of interest.
JB: Let's say we are looking at a table. We have no sense of an underlying sequence of phases. We just see the table and we think we see it directly. How can we demonstrate an antecedent sequence of phases that very rapidly delivers the table into consciousness? These phases are exposed in pathology. The disorders of object-perception reveal the microtemporal transitions that underlie external objects. In any event, there have to be antecedent phases, whether one thinks of them as assembling the object and projecting it outward or, as I do, individuating the object from a background potential. In either case, there are antecedent events from which the perception develops. These phases are imminent in the object. For me, this background is a cascade of whole-part transforms. When one looks at the separate aspects of an object -- the color, the shape, the movement, and so on -- it is natural to think there are mechanisms in the brain that mediate such features or properties. But in hallucination, one observes that object boundaries are really color boundaries, or boundaries of hue. Without color, and without the achromatic colors, the world is grey and objects disappear. This occurs in snow blindness. There is always some color boundary. In hallucination, colors melt off objects into a space that is like an object, a space that is viscous or palpable, not the empty space of normal perception. Probably, the idea of "ether" is a residue of the intuition that space is not an empty vacuum. Hallucination and dream space are foreshortened, objects are fluid, changing, dissolving, and object boundaries are unclear, certainly far from the solid objects and infinite space of wakefulness. Space is a medium, a kind of soup in which objects swim or float.
In waking hallucination, the same features of dream are perceived adjacent to normal objects in a separate locus of the visual field. In pathological cases, hallucinations may replace objects in the affected part of the visual field and are often the initial symptom of object loss. Auditory hallucinations replace or rather supplant auditory perceptions. These as well as many other clinical observations and studies indicate that images and perceptions are not served by different mechanisms, but rather images are attenuated objects or, conversely, objects result from sensory constraints applied to exteriorizing imagery. One can say that perception develops out of an hallucinatory background. More precisely, the ground of the hallucination, not the image content but the phase mediating that content, is transformed by sensation to an external object. An hallucination is what happens to a pre-object, such as an image or a concept, when the final sensory sculpting is not applied. In brief, an object is an image, an hallucination, that is sculpted and so adapted by sensory data to the outside world.
When we withdraw from objects to images, we encounter a variety of image types, each accompanied by a different sense of self and agency. We feel that we search for a memory image; we try to recall a memory and are frustrated if we can't remember it. Hallucinations in pathology or hypnogogy come to us without warning or control. If we reach for an hallucination it may disappear. In hypnogogic hallucinations, which are marvelous to behold -- usually faces more brilliant than life, colorful, agonized -- one tries to be passive and let the experience continue, but as soon as the eyes are diverted to the image or one reaches for it, the image disappears. This is also described in hallucinations, that is, the hallucination disappears on reaching for it, or when attention is diverted to action, or when the eyes move toward the image. One must remain a passive spectator like the self in dream.
Actually, the passivity of the dream self is important because I think it explains paranoid ideation, where one has the feeling of being a victim of one's own imagery. Images can even take on a kind of agency of their own, as in command hallucination, where verbal hallucinations instruct the person what to do. The sense of personal agency is lost, or transferred to the image. This, by the way, shows that the feeling of agency or volition is not standing behind the content but develops and changes with the momentary state. Normally, we don't feel an agent to objects. They are happenings out there in the world that impinge on us. We do have a sense of agency when we imagine a mouse crawling over the back of an elephant. There is a sense of volition in visual imagery. We can call up the imagined sound of music or a conversation. Volition is not just linked to action; it is also woven into the antecedents of perception. In eidetic imagery, there is some feeling of voluntary control. As eidetic images decay to memory images, the sense of volition changes.
The feeling of volition depends on the dominant phase in the transition, which is associated with different forms of imagery. From this, one can reconstruct the sequence of object- or image-formation, as well as that of object-concept, meaning, and feeling. What I mean by this is that images differ in their meaning-content. Dreams are symbolic images that we feel the need to interpret. Hypnagogic images are filled with affect. Eidetic images are pictorial and appear relatively meaning-free. Memory images can have profound meaning for the individual. The way these different images are related to successive phases in the object-formation -- from conceptual feeling to object value, from an archaic to a rational mentation, as well as from past to present or mind to world -- reveals the transition from deep phases of categorical primitives in the core associated with drive-like affect, to meaning-laden, intentional concepts and images, and finally to world-close configurations that achieve mind-independence.
As one goes more deeply into the precursors of external objects, one accesses the intense feeling of drive. At the other pole of the mental state, an object in the world seems free of personal affect, or it seems to have an affect of its own, initially its existence, then its worth or value. There is feeling in the object; rather, objects are filled with our own feeling that travels with them from the mind. We sense this when we love someone, or desire an object, and the object becomes the focus of attention.
Interest or focal attention is the first sign of value. We see a face in a crowd, we notice it and have some interest in that face. The face takes on greater value than other faces or objects. Gradually, the personality behind the face grows in significance. As we get to know the person, our affection can develop into love. The face of the beloved then fills the entire field, soaks up all of the feeling that before was distributed evenly over all objects. Feeling is now concentrated in one object of overwhelming desire. The same applies in the case of other emotions such as fear and hate. All signal the presence of overwhelming value. Emotion becomes intense and is felt in ourselves and in the object. Often, we have the experience of not knowing whether the feeling is in the object or in the self. Is she beautiful because we love her, or do we love her because she is beautiful? Do I desire this diamond because it is valuable, or is its value related to my desire? We don't know if desire creates the feeling in and for the object or if feeling in the object provokes the desire. I think this shows that the boundary between self and object, mind and world, is artificial. It also shows that value is a complex phenomenon, with an unconscious core, a conscious desire, and a worth that seems located in the object. The fragile boundary between mind and world is evident in psychosis as thoughts become like objects and objects become thought-like. The psychotic has the insight of a continuous transition from mind to world, which the normal person has lost, and for good reason, or we would all be psychotic.
DB: Incipient value is a basic mark of the object’s existence. In accruing feeling, its draws and holds attention and assumes focal importance. Once feeling is supplied the object, mental process is already set in motion.
JB: As we are talking, David, I see that a major preoccupation in all my work has been the subject-object relation.
DB: Please, continue.
JB: Whether the relationship is framed in terms of self and other, or Buber's "I" and "Thou," it has played a major part in different approaches to neuropsychology and philosophy. I think it reaches its fullest expression in Process and the Authentic Life, in which the problem of self and other is thematic. The nature of the self and the relation of self to other, is treated in a subjectivist way. I argue that feeling goes from self to object, that feeling in an object passes into it from the self. Thus, when one begins to fall in love, the self creates the other as a receptacle for its own feeling, which arises in the core and empirical self, flows into desire and then trickles into the value and interest of the beloved’s face. Whether value or interest in the other strengthens or weakens depends on the self-concept, our needs, core values and beliefs. What I tried to work out in this book is how the other is a self-creation. The common-sense idea that we meet a person, get to know each other and gradually, through external contacts, feeling develops, is the usual way of thinking about this experience. For me, it is backwards. Microgenesis is a counter-intuitive theory. It holds that the other is a creation of the self, that the other comes to fill a larger or smaller portion of one's own self-concept, and that in order to know the other one has to withdraw into one's own self more deeply to find a common ground in which antecedents of the self and the other cohabitate, a potential out of which both are realized. The ground that gives rise to the self and the other is beneath my consciousness and that of the other person. Self and other are part of a deeper unity that has to be accessed in a descent through internal phases. I suppose this is a way of incorporating the other into my own solipsism, or avoiding solipsism by assimilating the other, but it can also explain such things as mourning or grief over loss, which is like an excision of the self.
DB: In seeking explicit awareness of the deeper nature of a close relationship, I am forced out of the empirical ego. In settling toward the core, I arrive at what could be described as a mutually shared self. Mutuality might be graded in terms of relative proximity to the core. Romantic love is an example of close proximity.
JB: Yes, but also fear and other intense emotions. This is also the course for romantic love. Love is the usual example because there is a loss of self or an introduction of the other into the self. One doesn't necessarily think about other emotions in the same way. There are some philosophers whom I greatly admire, such as McTaggart, who argued that love is the goal of philosophy. Plato also believed that love -- of wisdom -- was the highest point.
DB: You mention fear and other intense emotions in addition to love. This leads to the idea of a limited number of emotional primes. Let's move backwards, in the microtemporal sense, toward the core and distinguish its principle emotional tributaries. This is to come to drives and their respective emotions. In Process and the Authentic Life, you speak of "egocentric" and "exocentric" drives as core-related properties. Why not pursue this topic.
JB: I began thinking about that while writing Process and the Authentic Life. The effort was to explain how a theory of moral feeling can be grounded in character. If one begins with character, the subjective is primary. If you deal with choice, you are in the area of logic or philosophy. When you deal with behavior or conduct, you are in the area of moral judgment, law and punishment. My emphasis has been on character and the stream of value that issues from it in thought, act, and perception.
In a sense, action channels the self into acquisition and activity, while perception channels the self into passivity and receptiveness. So, in general, perceptual flow is other-centered because it leads to objects that are independent, that seem to come to or at us, or in relation to which we are helpless or recipient, whether objects that love or attack us or involve us in one way or another. In contrast, action goes to the side of aggression, activity, self-expression and the implementation of desire. But the distinction is fuzzy. One can have action that is compassionate, which aims to help others, as well as action that promotes acquisition. Action can be selfish or unselfish. Similarly, with other-centered drives, one can use others as a means, or love them as ends. The boundaries are unclear. But generally speaking, the acquisitive, selfish drives lead to the action-development, and the unselfish ones lead to the object-development, as the core self develops into acts and percepts.
DB: This is a fitting place to stop.