The primacy of the mind

When it comes to understanding how consciousness arises, I am most convinced by the reductive materialist view: all mental states correspond to some physical arrangement of matter and energy. There is no need to invoke a soul, spirit, or anything magical. Emergent phenomena appear to be reducible in principle, even if our current tools can’t yet fully account for them.

But when it comes to navigating the actual lived experience of being conscious, I find it more useful to focus on the primacy of the mind: the mind exists first, and the “universe” is borne of sensations within it.

Both perspectives seem valid and non-conflicting, useful in their own ways. My aim here is less to explore the philosophy and more about pragmatic value. A practitioner’s musings, as it were.

First- vs third-person

The reductive materialist view is the third-person perspective: the universe exists, your parents exist, you grow from embryo to fetus to baby and somewhere along the way your brain develops and you “feel like something” – you are conscious. The universe came first, then your mind.

The primacy of mind is the first-person perspective: there is nothing, then there is something. Sensation. Phenomenon. Appearances. Temperature, pressure, color, light, shadow, sound. From these raw sensations, we construct concepts such as sky, blanket, tree, sun, house, water. And in time higher abstractions like good, bad, fun, boring, school, science, history, space, time. The raw sensory inputs and the concepts you layer on top – these are, in fact, the universe to you.

Practical value

The value of the materialist view is its power to explain and predict what happens to us. Explain: Why are you tired? You didn’t get enough sleep and your brain is physiologically unwell. Predict: Didn’t sleep last night? In the coming hours you may feel tired. Science, culture, the economy – everything is built on this materialist understanding, to great effect.

The value of the primacy view is different: its power is to illuminate the distinction between consciousness and its contents, and the liberation to be found in that recognition.

The movie theater

A metaphor here is movie theater. Absorbed in cinema, we forget that we are merely seeing images projected on a flat screen. But we can suspend our absorption and settle our view on the screen itself, allowing the images to simply flash before us: they are, after all, merely images. Phenomena in our minds are like these images on screen. They come, they change, they pass.

Sensory input

A simple exercise to invite the shift in perspective is to slowly walk forward and backward in space and – rather than conceptualize that as your body moving – instead imagine your mind as still and the visual change occurring around your still mind as if on a screen. Movement, space, your body, steps… these are concepts you have layered on top of your raw sensory inputs to form a model of the world around you.

Another exercise is to sit still and look at an object before you. Then in your visual field soften the distance between you and the object, look ahead as if at a flat image. Indeed, you are receiving two-dimensional visual input and conceptualizing a three-dimensional environment. Can you soften your absorption with that concept and see the raw image before you?

While the movie metaphor applies most directly to visual experience, its principles extend intuitively to all five senses. It’s possible to sit back and allow sensory inputs to flow through you.

Beyond the senses

It’s less intuitive to apply this lens to emotions and thoughts. For me, the most clear path to that understanding is by comparing your experience of sounds vs your experience of thoughts.

Close your eyes and start to pay attention to sounds. As other phenomena arise, gently return your focus towards the sounds you hear. Notice how sounds enter your field of awareness, then change, then fade away. Notice how sounds come and go without your choosing.

Now turn your awareness towards your thoughts. Notice how they exhibit the same properties as sounds. They come, they change, they go without your control.

Through this conceptual bridge from sounds to thoughts, we see that everything appearing in our minds is like the projected movie: feelings, emotions, itches, urges. All textures and tones of conscious experience can be reduced to: phenomena that enter our field of awareness, change, and then pass away.

The primacy of the mind

By elevating the mind, we find more clearly that, from an experiential perspective, all that we know to exist is our consciousness and its contents. In this view the lived world is merely content within consciousness. Images on a screen.

This insight offers the possibility of freedom and equanimity. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest includes an extreme example, wherein a recovering drug addict has been shot and refuses painkillers – instead leaning into the open quality of mind that exists prior to the appearance of and attachment to phenomenon.

Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was the second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering. […] It’s too much to think about. To Abide there. But none of it’s as of now real. […] He could just hunker down in the space between each heartbeat and make each heartbeat a wall and live in there. Not let his head look over. What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all. What his head could report to him, looking over and ahead and reporting. But he could choose not to listen; he could treat his head like G. Day or R. Lenz: clueless noise.

Thankfully, most of us do not experience that degree of suffering in normal life. But to recognize the transient nature of all phenomena is to reclaim the present moment from any form of suffering. It is to soften into the “space between each heartbeat” and rest there.

One path, two views

The reductive materialist and primacy of mind perspectives need not compete. Understanding your brain’s neurochemistry can inform better sleep, nutrition, and medical care. But when you are stuck on the tarmack when your flight is delayed, it’s the recognition that everthing is just phenomena arising and passing that offers immediate relief. Both views serve consciousness: one explains how it works, the other reveals how to work with it.

Lineage

These ideas, of course, are not my own. They follow from millenia of Buddhist tradition. I was first exposed to meditation through my friend Luke Kreinberg and to other ideas through Sam Harris’ book Waking Up and later his app, to which I have a lifetime subscription and highly recommend!