Maps, Models, and Blowing Smoke

Concur: "no credible modern scientific model exists that can tell us how the electrochemistry of the brain" can account for the "experience of a particular person's inner phenomenal world" (Hart). 

Except absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. You still need to a model that is more credible and convincing than a material one, and which doesn't unexplain what materialism explains.  

Look who's talking. You're not even material.

That's not the point. It's a matter of principle.

This reminds me of college. An introductory psychology course characterized the mind as a black box about which we could only formulate models to account for the phenomena. 

Analogously, imagine if we couldn't open a watch to see what's going in inside, but rather, could only construct models to account for the movement of the hands. We could never know which model was the correct one, only which one was more capable of predicting the phenomena. The inner workings of the watch -- the noumena -- would be unknowable to us in principle.

In that same introductory course we were familiarized with all the most popular models, e.g., behaviorism, Freudian, Jungian, existential, gestalt, humanism, transpersonalism, etc.

Which one is correct? It's a bit like asking which religion is correct, each religion being likewise a map of the unmappable, and no map is ever the territory. Still, it's understandable why someone would want to turn the map into the territory, which is to say, absolutize it. It certainly simplifies life and tames the ambiguity. 

Which model did you go with? 

Good question. It was more analogous to a musician who learns and assimilates all the scales in order to express himself musically. The scales aren't the music, but are subordinate to it. In the past I've highlighted this quote by Keith Jarrett:

A master jazz musician goes onto the stage hoping to have a rendezvous with music. He knows the music is there (it always is), but this meeting depends not only on knowledge but openness.... It [music] must be let in, recognized, and revealed to the listener, the first of whom is the musician himself.

Now, the same is true of the psychotherapeutic session. We go into it hoping to have a rendezvous with emotional truth. We know it's there -- it always is -- but will the patient and therapist (for it requires both) be open to it? 

Now do religion. 

This can't help sounding pretentious, but let's imagine that 

A metacosmic blogger goes onto the keyboard hoping to have a rendezvous with the transcendent, which we will symbolize O. He knows O is there (it cannot not be there), but this meeting depends not only on knowledge but openness. O must be let in, recognized, and revealed to the reader, the first of whom is the blogger himself.

One has only to get out of the way -- abandon memory, desire, and understanding -- and hope for the best.

Back to Hart. At the end of the chapter, his alter-ego repeats that "no physical description of the world we inhabit necessarily entails the existence of consciousness." 

Analogously, imagine a scientist studying the electricity that flows through a telephone line. The most complete understanding of electricity would reveal nothing of the conversation taking place, let alone if it were "true." 

Rather, electricity provides only the boundary conditions that are enlisted by a higher level of reality. Truth could never be reduced to the electrical signals being used to convey it. Likewise, 

if you were unaware of the existence of subjective consciousness, no observation of the physical processes of organisms and their world... would apprise you of its existence (Hart).

Or imagine seeing smoke signals without knowing anything about the existence of Indians.

The preferred nomenclature is Native American.   

Anyway, you'd surely be able to deduce the existence of fire from the smoke. But it would never occur to you that a Native American is using smoke to send a message. No observation of smoke tells us anything about the existence of native Americans or what they're saying to one another, let alone if what they're saying is true or if they're just blowing smoke. We are entirely excluded from that loop.

Likewise, no third-person model of the mind could ever "capture the deeper enigma of subjectivity itself." Thus, "the essential question must be whether subjectivity in itself can fit within the prevailing picture of physical reality at all." 

Hart suggests that

the mind is a contraction of some larger reality, so that at its heights it opens out into something more than itself, and in its depths too opens out into the natural world at large.

This checks out, i.e., the mind opening out to transcendence at one end, immanence at the other. 

In the past I've used the analogy of a lampshade with pinprick holes in it, so it looks as if there are many individual lights, when in reality there is just the one source of Light at the center. 

Hart describes something similar. Here is the full passage

It's something anonymous, really -- so anonymous that it doesn't differ from one person to another. And I, of course, believe it's really one and the same in all of us: the same divine spark shedding its light on all that the mind contains -- the single flame burning in the lanterns of all our souls

End of Part Two, Chapter II.