Switching Off

(Moved here from another blog site I had/have as extra referenced material for "Doing Stuff," above. It was published on the other site almost exactly two years ago, so you may have seen it before — either way, feel free to skip it…)

The really interesting thing about the other day was when they killed me.

As I said in a previous posting, I went in for a spot of minor "day surgery." Since a colonoscopy doesn't involve cutting anything unless odd stuff turns up on the monitor as they drive the little TV camera "home," I'm not sure how that's "surgery," but there it is.

Nothing odd did turn up. In fact, the doc said I have the ass of an 18-year-old which happens to be bolted to the body of a sixty-odd year old. Well, that's not exactly what he said, but I'm sure that's what he meant. Everything is fine, in other words, so fine that they don't want to see me again for another 10 years, even though at my age they normally want 'em back every 3-5 years.

Yadda, yadda, yadda. Medical shit. So to speak. Back to where I started this: The only part of the entire process that really interested me was when they killed me.

As noted in the prior blog entry, "we," "us," "me," or "you" exist only as an emergent property called "consciousness." An emergent property is that which “emerges” from an apparently chaotic complex distributed system and becomes a coherent pattern. As an example, there are stretches of the Mekong River where, after dark, you can paddle a boat and find long patches, entire trees and forests and sections lit by fireflies. And they are all switching on and off at exactly the same time. It's like the entire river is being lit by a bazillion little lanterns, all wired through the same circuit. On. Off. On. Off. Completely silent. Spookiest damned thing ever, actually.  

If you take a big ol' wad of these fireflies home with you and let them loose in your livingroom (it’s been done,) they'll flash randomly, just like fireflies normally do. But if you wait long enough, a couple will began syncing their flashes. Then some groups. Then the groups begin syncing with each other, and before long, you have a livingroom full of fireflies all flashing together. On. Off. On. Off. Notice that there is no firefly directing this, no boss firefly, no committee, no firefly "self" entity or soul who is stepping up and taking the reigns. The smartest part of this group has a nearly-invisible sliver of a brain. The random flashes synchronize on their own schedule, until they are all the same. The pattern has "emerged," and is therefore an "emergent property" of the flashing fireflies.

It's the same reason that traffic in cities looks like arterial bloodflow pulsing and hurricanes swirl in artistic spirals and butterfly wings have patterns and ants, which are literally the stupidest creatures it’s possible to imagine, build great works and have societies.

In the case of consciousness, a certain complexity in the intra-brain communications network is achieved, and consciousness emerges. It’s not certain how many nodes or how much complexity is needed. But at that point, one neuron less = no consciousness. One ant less than the minimum = chaotic, failed colony.

"You," in short, are not an independent soul or entity that exists independently and has been hiding out somewhere while the brain sorts itself out. "You" are a property of the astounding high-density parallel multiplexing in your neural network, much of which seems to be focused around the insanely complex circuitry between the Anterior and Lateral Prefrontal Cortex the Thalamus and the Posterior Parietal Cortex. Single, multiple, and complex signals along a single neurons or bundles and trunks of neurons result in enormous, ongoing, and constant cascades of cross-chatter and communications between these, and it is perceived by us as -- well, "us."

It has long been known that interrupting the communications between these by disease, defect, injury, or drugs results in a complete loss or extreme modification of the "self" which is supposedly "housed" there. If death is defined as ceasing to exist, then interfering with the network to the point that it no longer supports the emergent property of "you" actually and literally kills you.

You aren't the meat, you know. You're not the face, hair, eyes, legs, tits, balls, sweat, or stink of this corpus that protects, feeds and transports that neural network. Most importantly, you are not that powerful illusion of an independent thing contained in your body or mind. Descartes’ dualism is useful in philosophy and religion, but doesn’t describe reality very well. When the neural network fails to produce "you," you no longer exist, and that's all there is.

    (SIDE NOTE: You DO exist when you’re sleeping or drunk, which is really just enforced sleep — I’m talking about anesthetics in the class of Propofol [a good ‘un] which at least partially work by actually preventing the formation of consciousness by interfering in the network’s communications in the gamma-wave band, which is implicated in brain information integration. Totally different thing, and obvious as sunrise on an EEG.)

Where, then, do we "go?" Nowhere. And there's the non-mystery of death. Whether permanently killed by destruction of the meat that feeds and supports the neural infrastructure or physically breaking the infrastructure itself or “just” temporarily killed, as I was the other day by temporary interruption of the information integration ability of my neural net, "death" isn't a matter of going anywhere. Nothing has changed, really.

Consider: If you admired the beauty of a complex house of cards and later returned to find that some event had happened and it had collapsed into a pile, it wouldn't occur to you to ask where the house went. It's right there, every single card that was there in the first place. The house just doesn't exist anymore.

One of the distinguishing things about being dead is that marking/tracking time stops. I was dead for about an hour. Here’s how it looked to me:

Tech (who had been warned about my resistance to anesthetics): “OK, it’s going in now. You should start to feel the effects in about 15 seconds.”

(I watch him start to pump the milky soup through the IV and mentally begin counting down from 15. I get to zero, and my vision begins to swim. This guy’s good. Very precise.)

Tech: “Do you feel it?”

Me: “Yeah, well, my vision is…”

SWITCH OFF

SWITCH ON — Elapsed apparent time: Zero

Me: “…starting to swim.”

Recovery Room Nurse, totally different location: “Beg your pardon? Oh, are you back with us?”

I could have been down for 2 hours, or 10, or a week, or years. There is no time when there’s no “self” to measure it. The time-shock is the weirdest feeling ever.

Of course, the reason it’s the weirdest feeling ever is because I switched back on. If I hadn’t — well, nothing at all.

Absolutely fascinating.

In Our Next Episode: