In the belly of a beast

Mind first emerged in life forms that move about, as an orientational interface for them to find food and avoid danger. Evolutionary pressure for its increased sophistication gradually honed its capabilities, to the point where we can now not only perceptually reflect our immediate surroundings but also conceptually reflect on reflection—we can think about mind and reality in the abstract.

This is made possible by our remarkable mental malleability, presumably selected for because it makes us omni-adaptive. Our bodies are relatively weak and fragile, but our molding clay minds take the shape of our surroundings, enabling adaptation to just about any environment. This malleability also enables us to zoom out to gain orientation at ever higher levels of abstraction—but doing so comes at the cost of detaching us from the undoubtable realism of the immediately given: the conceptual world we paint for ourselves is of a far more tenuous and hypothetical kind than the vibrant first person perspective produced by our subconscious perceptual process. In other words, alienation is par for the course with the power of abstraction.

Our conceptual minds are limited, but this doesn't stop us from setting them on the task of fathoming an enormous range of space and span of time, even reaching toward the infinite whole of everything. The results necessarily involve severe simplifications. In order to contain as much as possible in a single view, we boil things down to abstract essences. However, our compression is lossy—we never quite capture the heart of reality; it keeps slipping away, surprising us with the ways in which we haven't fully accounted for it. At the same time, we're easily blinded by the elegance and grandiosity of our cosmic projections, and tend to get carried away with our conceptions, getting distracted by ideas we mistake for reality, sometimes losing track of the latter entirely, at which point the detachment is complete, and we drift off into fantasy land until reality reasserts itself through some material crisis. Our conceptual ability has opened our eyes to the universe, but at the same time, it is causing us to lose our minds, spellbinding us by various forms of wishful thinking and superstition. If we're not careful, we'll be sleepwalking over a cliff's edge with stars in our eyes.

The problem we're facing is that of a second order orientation. The first order problem, ever present, is to tune our mental instruments to reality, to give our organisms reliable interfaces. The second order orientational challenge is to understand this operation itself, to get familiar with the workings of our instruments, their reality-interfacing applications and their connections to our emotional and motivational systems. We need awareness, not only of reality in the form of acceptable interfaces, but of the gap between our minds and reality, so that we can navigate up and down levels of abstraction without alienation or obsessive-compulsion, and manage to switch between interfaces without confusion or nihilism. If the first order orientation is a map of our surroundings, the second order is a manual for our instrument panel, to help us find mental nourishment (wisdom) and avoid mental dangers like delusion or excessive skepticism.

Today, a first order cosmology looks like science. A second order cosmology relates to something far less concrete, and has to rely largely on metaphor. Traditional religions used to mix the two orders into a single cosmological vision. This is no longer tenable. Modern science leaves too little ambiguity for religion to fill in the blanks with second order suppositions. The two concerns must be separated.

The following is my attempt to sketch out a second order orientational framework based on the metaphor of mental digestion—starting from a contextualizing first order story about life as such.

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Our universe began as a single point of energetic potential that exploded into the unfathomably rich complexity of our present circumstances. From the informationally simple state of this cosmogonic singularity some 13.8 billion years in the past, disorder is relentlessly increasing toward a heat death conclusion trillions of years in the future. Life swims against this flow, with living organisms propelling themselves against the current of entropy increase, to maintain and develop the internal order of their bodies by means of chemical combustion—which hastens the rate of overall entropy increase. We're using the energy from catalyzing the process of cosmic decay to maintain our own homeostasis.

The digestion of material nutrients is thus the core concern for living bodies. Vegetative forms of life rely on chance to find themselves in a nourishing environment, and have no need for a mind in any sense that we'd recognize. Animal life, on the other hand, need to go out into the world to find nourishment. This is where the mind comes in: as an orientational tool to inform decisions about where to go and what to do. As a process, the mind can be viewed as an informational digestive organ, sifting through a firehose of signals from the senses in order to construct and maintain a mental map of the organism's circumstances. The bigger the mind, the more complex understanding it can form, and the more advantageous actions can be found for the organism. However, brains are energetically expensive. Small and simple forms of animal life can only afford rudimentary mental mapping capabilities, in some cases presumably consisting in hardly more than the current direction of light in their immediate surroundings. Bigger, more complex animals can invest in sophisticated perceptual systems that present them with a phenomenally rich first person perspective, in which they can identify even subtle dangers and opportunities. Human cognition builds on this with a conceptual stage of mental digestion that abstracts from the here and now in order to render a world far beyond the limited horizon of the senses.

In our mental digestive system, the perceptual mind is serially connected to the conceptual, like the small intestine to the large. It is in the latter segment that we find ourselves, because this is where we have conscious control. Unlike the prisoner in Plato's cave, we have no way out from inside this cave to a "real world". Upstream, the vast, largely subconsciously operating perceptual system is hard at work churning out a coherent flow of sensory experience for us. Further upstream still, there's just an incomprehensible noise of unprocessed, disjointed, raw sensory signals. Downstream, nothing but the drain of forgetting. This is our situation. We're stuck inside the informational digestive system of our organism—in the belly of a beast.

It appears our task is clear enough: we are to help maintain a sensible conceptual worldview for high level orientational purposes, work that alternatingly can be both creative and janitorial. Our only window to the world is the first person perspective presented to us by the perceptual system, but if we get to work picking out flotsam from the stream of sensory impressions, looking for patterns, pinning certain perceptions to memory, receiving pre-digested conceptual messages-in-bottles from other hermit belly dwellers, drawing up maps and constructing inventive conceptual edifices—an immense and marvellously consistent wider world can be revealed to us.

Our minds are in the business of making interfaces so we can get a handle on reality, and they're so good at it that we end up mistaking our interfaces for reality itself—at least until we squint at the seams or get reality checks in the form of profoundly unexpected experiences. Coming to terms with this mother of all mistakes, and understanding how it can be both useful and harmful, is vital to our maturation as the first species on Earth to rely so heavily on conception. The digestive metaphor could help provide a language to get a handle on this difficult topic, by how it clearly places us at an epistemological remove from reality, but without leaving us adrift.

Where nutritive digestion serves to maintain the biological order of the body, mental digestion serves to maintain the informational order of our worldview, and just like with bodily health, adaptive self-renewal of one's worldview is necessary for mental health. Getting stuck on ideas is a problem equivalent to constipation—unfortunately, a pervasive problem throughout our intellectual history! Skepticism is part of the solution, but its complete mental digestive flushing is obviously unsustainable. It should be thought of not as a permanent state, but as a purging cure, a mental laxative—which incidentally is also a good way to think about psychedelic drugs. This similarity is not superficial: at sufficiently high doses, both psychedelics and skepticism are associated with ego death and the teaching of surrender.

Mental digestive regularity is a good measure of mental health: a healthy flow consisting of both certainty and doubt, gradually evolving and renewing our worldviews as needed, for skillful and flexible adaptation to reality as it unfolds. In other words, the digestive metaphor can be used not only descriptively, to understand how our minds relate to reality, but prescriptively, suggesting how we ought to go about that relation.

The language of mental digestion might seem gratuitously poopy, but this actually counts strongly in its favor. In investigating cognition, the foremost danger we need to stay clear of is to be blinded by our self-admiration, which quickly leads to hubristic superstition. One way to make sure of that is to label experience as a stream of informational digestive chyme, and our convictions as mere molding clay reconstructions of what might lie beyond the mind-belly.