Robert, see Michael Graziano's "Rethinking Consciousness" for a deeply systemic take on consciousness giving pride of place to the "system's" focus on its attention as the heart of the feeling of self (and other).
Thanks, Simon. I had not heard of this work, so I asked Perplexity AI to bring me up to speed:
Michael Graziano’s Rethinking Consciousness (2019) is a compact, accessible defense of his Attention Schema Theory (AST): consciousness is not an ineffable extra ingredient generated by the brain, but the brain’s simplified, useful model of its own attention.
The central move:
The brain directs attention—enhancing and prioritizing certain signals, thoughts, memories, or perceptions. Graziano argues that, to control this process efficiently, the brain constructs an attention schema: a rough, simplified representation that says, in effect, “there is an inner subject here that is aware of X.”
That model is systematically incomplete. It omits the neural machinery and presents attention as a nonphysical, unified capacity for subjective experience. The result is the ordinary conviction that one has a private inner “awareness” distinct from brain processes. On Graziano’s memorable formulation: attention is something the brain does; consciousness is something the brain says it has.
AST aims primarily at the meta-problem of consciousness: why we report, believe in, theorize about, and find phenomenal experience. Rather than locating a special neural glow that produces qualia, it explains why a brain would represent itself—and others—as having an inner experiential life.
It also links consciousness to social cognition. A system that models other agents’ attention—what they are looking at, knowing, or intending—can apply a related model to itself. Thus, self-awareness and our attribution of minds to others belong to the same broad modeling machinery.
The shortest formulation
Consciousness is the brain’s user-friendly, causally useful self-model of its own attention—not a separate inner substance.
The book then extends this framework evolutionarily, socially, and technologically: if consciousness depends on an attention-control system equipped with an adequate self-model, artificial systems could in principle instantiate it, raising practical and ethical questions about artificial consciousness.
Your view and Graziano’s converge strongly on the decentering of the self: neither grants a separately standing inner agent that owns experience and directs the system from outside it. But Graziano offers a positive, empirically framed account of how the brain generates that apparent agent, whereas your position is more phenomenological and epistemically restrained about what can finally be inferred from such appearances.
Graziano’s attention schema gives an especially concrete version of your “no separate observer” intuition. The observer is not merely absent; it is an internally available representation produced by a system that models and regulates attention. The model enables the system to say “I am aware of this,” even though no homunculus is doing the attending.
The key difference:
For you, the “Robert loop” marks a limit: the world’s experienced form is conditioned by the very cognitive system through which it is encountered, and you resist treating any model of that system as a final metaphysical disclosure.
Graziano is bolder. He proposes a particular naturalistic mechanism: awareness is the brain’s schematic model of attention, shaped because such a model improves attention control. His theory explicitly identifies subjective awareness with this model, rather than merely noting that the self-model may be constructed or unreliable.
So you may accept AST as a good causal/functional hypothesis about self-ascription while withholding its stronger conclusion that it has thereby dissolved the ontological question of felt experience.
Graziano plausibly explains why a determined organism constructs and deploys the appearance of an experiencing, choosing self. But that is a theory of the conditions and functions of self-appearance, not—without further argument—a final account of what experience is or of reality beyond the conditions of its appearance.
That formulation preserves what you find valuable in naturalistic explanation while retaining your phenomenological and epistemically modest refusal to turn it into an ultimate metaphysics.
Robert, substack now has a tool that allows readers to discover how much of the writing is AI generated and how much is human. According to that tool, 95% of this article is AI generated. Is this an accurate assessment?
Thank you for such a clear piece. The line that the self-model is something the loop generates (not the thing running the loop) is the most matter-of-fact statement of anatta I've read in a while, and I appreciate that you arrive there by observation rather than metaphysics. It's hard not to hear an echo of Hofstadter's strange loop — the "I" as a pattern the system can't help generating about itself — and, further back, of Nagarjuna's emptiness: no autonomous, intrinsic self, only the interdependent process running.
I explored a closely related ground years ago on a now-abandoned blog, The Uncharted Present (medium.com/the-uncharted-present) — an attempt to bridge cybernetics with Zen sensibilities for a general reader (as much as the prose of a non-native speaker in the pre-ChatGPT era allows). It reads best in order, from the intro, following the links at the end of each article. I'd be glad to compare notes.
The Hofstadter echo is there, though he keeps the strange loop as a marvel at the center, where, for me, the self-model is more like a report the loop generates of no special standing.
Nagarjuna and I are closer, but he reaches emptiness by dialectic and makes it a path to liberation, while I only look and report what's there. The difference, if it's mine at all, is nothing added after the looking: no celebration, no logical proof, no ground of being.
I'll read The Uncharted Present in order, as you suggest. Cybernetics and Zen bridged before ChatGPT, by a non-native speaker, sounds worth the time. Glad to compare notes.
Many thanks for sharing this. And in general, my deepest thanks for sharing yourself through your books, video clips and posts. There’s something in this article - and in the whole subject as explored by many others - I’m not able to grasp: The system cannot step beyond its own boundary to see itself fully from the outside. Yet you state. “I observe directly”. This sounds to me like a vantage point outside the system. There’s something able to see the machinations of the system. What is it that sees directly? I’m sorry if I missed the answer being already in the article. And I would greatly appreciate your comment.
When I say I observe directly, I mean the observing is immediate, not routed through theory or belief, a report of what shows up rather than an inference about it. I don't mean I observe from outside the system. Those are different claims, which your question conflates.
"Direct" describes how the seeing happens—unmediated—not where it happens from. The seeing is still the system's seeing from within itself. That is the loop modeling itself, which it can do. What it can't do is step outside its own boundary to see itself whole. Modeling itself from inside, yes. Getting fully outside, no.
Then you ask, “What is it that sees directly?”
Try looking for the one who sees. What do you find? More seeing. Another action of observing, which you could then ask the same question about—what sees?—and so on, without ever arriving at a seer standing behind it all. The observing is real. But the "it" you're looking for, a thing that does the seeing from some station of its own, isn't found. What is found is seeing happening. The sense that there must be someone behind that is the same felt commander the essay points to, wearing a different name.
So there's no vantage outside, and no seer within either—only this experiencing itself, which is why I can't tell you what sees directly. When I look for it, I don't find a what. I find the looking.
“Look for the seer, and you only find seeing” - It is so simple yet so revelatory.
It is fascinating that the system can look at itself - from within itself and see its own machinations. I guess there would be no awakenings, otherwise. It’s a shame, though, that the phenomenon is so rare.
From reading this and your other writings, I understand that it is natural for the body-mind system to create a sense of self. But it is not an independent entity, meaning that when the body-mind disintegrates, the self collapses along with it. However, it seems to be more than just a sense. It creates a point of reference from which it experiences everything, including itself as a separate entity. If this centre point is created later, that means direct seeing is devoid of such a centre. Is that so?
I understood too that the self - the agent or controller - is not the actor behind the action, and only claims authorship afterward.
Since it is something secondary or nonexistent, in a way it cannot facilitate such seeing by effort or a method. So all the advice like “look inside yourself” or “look internally” seems useless. The seeing doesn’t come from the narrator, but from that which triggers narration, something primary.
Please feel free to correct me if I missed the point, or comment on this note if it triggers some reflections.
Thank you, Jarema. You've got it, with one real change to make.
Before I get to that, quickly on the rest: Be careful with "the self creates a point of reference." When you say "the self," I assume you mean the self-model, not some supposed "Self" running the show. If that is what you mean, your statement gives the self-model powers it lacks. It isn't creating or doing anything. It can't. But yes, seeing happens and seems to involve a central seer. That felt center is constructed within the seeing. It's not a place seeing comes from. Yes, the self collapses when the body-mind does, and even short of that, the body-mind's condition bears on the self-model continually. And yes, the agent claims authorship only after the fact.
The important change involves your last step. You say seeing comes "from that which triggers narration, something primary." But seeing isn't emitted by a prior source. As far as we can discern, seeing is just occurring. "Something primary" is the seer sneaking back in one layer down, renamed. When you look for what the seeing comes from, you find more seeing, not a primary behind it. Your sense that "look inside yourself" is useless is right — but not because the seeing issues from something primary rather than the narrator. It's that there's no location it issues from at all, inside or behind.
Thank you for your reply. And forgive me for being reluctant to drop this conversation, but it touches on something important to me. Yes, you're right; it was an unfortunate way of putting it. I should correct myself – the self doesn’t create the point of reference; it is the point of reference.
Regarding the primary and secondary: to explain why I used this distinction, I will refer to your earlier article, “The Late Arrival”. For me, the most significant statement there is: “Perception without perceiver,” and then “The self, assembled and arriving late, taken for the doer. Continuity, manufactured at recall, taken for a persisting subject.” I take the first as basic, primary, or raw experience without the centre, and the second as secondary.
Now, I look at the world with a centre, a perceiver. If awakening means looking at the world without that centre, then I don’t stand a chance – no matter what I do! Sad conclusion!
Your correction is right: the self isn't the maker of the point of reference; it is the point of reference. And your reading of primary and secondary is a fair enough way of sorting it out.
You've assumed awakening means looking at the world without the felt center. That is not what I mean by awakening, nor is it anything I said. The sense of looking from here, from behind the eyes, is natural and doesn't go away. The change is only noticing that the apparent center is a point of view, not an agent with the power to choose and decide. The feeling of a center remains. The belief that the felt center is a controller running the show loosens and fades.
Thank you, Robert. Yes, this is exactly how I interpreted “perception without perceiver” mentioned in “The Late Arrival”. And the awakening itself, in fact - looking at the world without a perceiver, without the centre. Now, I understand that it is not so much looking without the perceiver as seeing what the perceiver is. That’s a huge difference! Still, I’m not able to put the two together: You write: “Perception continued, but the perceiver had gone absent. To me, perception is created by thought - and I take this thought to be me, a perceiver. If the perceiver is absent, that means the thought must be absent too.
Also - and I think it is now confirmed by science - there’s a split-second difference between receiving raw data by the eye, for example, and the time when the brain interprets this data in the context of its knowledge. To me, knowledge, thought, self, centre and perceiver are all the same. If it’s absent, then it simply is absent and unable to create the sense of being there. If it’s still there, then I’m in the dark. The bottom line is that it’s just my understanding after years and decades of digging into the subject - erratic in most cases and useless, as it can never produce the real thing. Best to throw it all away and just live life, as it happens, if one can do that. Once again, thank you, Robert, and my best wishes!
The body-cell analogy might get at this more simply, and without needing systems-theory vocabulary as a bridge.
A cell has a self-model too, its own internal signaling, its receptors, its sense of what to do next. In a healthy cell, that model tracks real signals from the organism and regulates against them. In a cancer cell, the model has gone self-referential: the cell produces its own growth signal and its own receptor for it, and answers to that instead of to the organism. It isn't missing a self-model. Its self-model just stopped checking against anything outside itself.
Same question as yours, is there a commander, or just the loop, but landing in a frame most people already carry some intuition for, since everyone knows what cancer is even without the mechanism.
That's a good analogy that needs no systems frame. Everyone has an intuition for cancer, and the picture carries.
It illustrates something real and does it cleanly: a self-model that stops checking against anything outside itself and answers only to its own signal. The healthy cell's model tracks the organism; the cancerous one produces its own growth signal and its own receptor and regulates toward that. That is a vivid picture of a model decoupled from its checks, autopoiesis gone malignant, the loop closed against its conditions.
That said, the point in the essay isn't that a healthy self-model regulates correctly and a sick one doesn't. It's that the self-model, checking or not, isn't the commander. It may not do the regulating at all. So the cancer cell illustrates a self-model losing contact with reality, which is a real and related thing, but slightly to the side of "is there a commander, or just the loop?" Both cells are just the loop. Neither has a commander. The cancerous one isn't a loop that lost its ruler; it's a loop whose signal went self-referential, with no more or less ruler than the healthy one had.
Where your analogy lands with real force is the psychological version. A self-model producing its own signal and answering to it instead of to anything outside—"I should be further along, calmer, better"—regulating toward a standard it generated itself, closed against the world.
That's the suffering loop exactly, and cancer is a striking picture of it. The self-model gone self-referential, consuming the organism it was supposed to serve.
Good distinction, and fair. But I think the cell question isn't really about whether there's an internal commander. Even a cell with no ruler inside it harms the system, and gets killed by it, the moment it disconnects from the organism's signals. So the internal-ruler question isn't the one that matters most.
For a person, that's the same shift. Seeing there's no internal commander doesn't by itself fix anything. A person can fully accept "I'm just a loop" and still be disconnected from anything larger. What changes things is understanding you're part of a bigger system and staying responsive to it. That's the actual cure.
Yes, I agree. Seeing there's no internal commander doesn't, by itself, fix anything. Accepting "I'm just a loop" as a proposition changes nothing; that noticing is just more of the loop running. And we agree that connection matters. The disconnected cell dies; no organism is separate from its conditions. Co-dependent origination is real, and nothing I am saying denies it.
But where we part company is at "the actual cure." That phrase reinstalls a “there” to get to: connect to the larger system, become responsive, and you're healed. That's a set-point with a gap to close, which is the same structure the suffering ran on, wearing new clothes. The seeker who takes "stay responsive to the whole" as the fix has a fresh project that will shake out like the old one—never quite achieved, never quite responsive enough, always a little further to go.
“Staying responsive" sounds good superficially, but requires the commander we just let go of. Who stays responsive? If there's no ruler, responsiveness isn't something a self does—it's how the loop runs in the environment of its conditions, or doesn't. Describing that is fine. Prescribing it as something you understand and then maintain puts the doer back in the driver’s seat.
So I'd keep your insight and drop the cure. A loop in contact with its larger conditions does fare differently from one closed against them—that's true, and your cancer picture shows it. But "responsive to the whole" is a description of a system running well, not a task a supposed self takes on to get well. That distinction is essential, because the task is the disease it claims to cure.
There's an assumption smuggled in that responsiveness requires a commander. A cell doesn't command anything. It's simply connected to the body and supplied by it, no ruler needed for that to happen.
Same with a person. When aligned with the larger system, they're nourished by it. Not through thinking, and not through achieving anything. Just feeling whether there's more or less aliveness in this moment. That's the only parameter. No commander required to feel it
Yes, I think we agree on a lot. I don’t deny aliveness, or the ways we can get caught in self-generated loops and suffer for it. Your language points to something real and useful. I only hesitate when it becomes a cure, or something one has to understand or become.
I wasn’t saying that you personally turn it into another project of self-improvement. I’m pointing to a human tendency to turn even a helpful insight into another project, and thereby add to the suffering already built into being human.
For me, everyday experience flows quite well without needing a theory at all.
This is what I was trying to articulate in a comment some months ago, about the self being one of the emergent properties of the system called “body”, and also what we usually call the “mind”. Couple that with the ship of Theseus story, that will help explain why the non structural changes in the body don’t change the body fundamentally, as Maturana and Varela proposed. In this view, I proposed, the self is not the flow of feelings, perceptions and thoughts.
Yes, Roberto, that's the connection, and the ship of Theseus fits. What persists in an autopoietic system is the organization, the pattern of relations, not the material, which turns over continuously. Identity in the pattern, not the planks.
You say the self is not the flow of feelings, perceptions, and thoughts. I can't agree. In my view, the self is exactly that: the entire flow of thoughts, feelings, and the awareness of them, which is itself part of the flow, not a watcher standing apart. Not any single thought or feeling, but the whole moving pattern. The ship isn't a thing apart from its planks; it's the arrangement of them, the pattern. The same planks could build a house.
Robert, mindful of risking letting the map become the territory here, but another question: do you see a relationship between the self model and the set point? Is that itself a loop?
Feels like the “sometimes” in your last sentence is doing heavy lifting there. Without it, only that much easier for the loosened state itself to become just another regulated variable - if it hasn’t already.
Right, Scott. "Sometimes" is carrying the weight, and it has to, because the moment the loosening becomes reliable—something you can aim for and produce—it's a set-point again. You've seen this clearly. If you make "the loosened state" the target and you're regulating toward it, you are seeking the state of not-seeking. The imagined escape becomes one more instance of the trap.
But two things keep the recursion from going on infinitely. First, what gets made into a set-point in that case isn't loosening itself—it's an idea of it, an imagined better state you're now reaching for. Yet the loosening isn't a state you can occupy. It's the absence of a gap between what is and what one wishes were the case. You can't hold an absence as an attainment, so the reaching is always reaching for a picture, not the thing.
Second, the recursion is endless in theory and finite in fact. Yes, the loosened state can become a regulated variable, and then noticing that can become another, and so on, but the system doesn't actually sustain infinite levels. The seeking exhausts. Like the mud settling, not because you chose to stop stirring but because the stirring ran out. Where it lands isn't a better-attained state. It's just no gap left to close, for now. Which is not something you reach. It's what's there when the reaching subsides.
Good question, Scott, and you're right to hold the map loosely. A set-point is a value the system regulates toward. The self-model is the system's representation of itself as an agent. One's a target, the other's a representation, so the relationship isn't symmetrical.
But a kind of loop can arise: the self-model can become a regulated variable. The system holds set-points not only for temperature and blood sugar but for the self-model's own condition—a sense of how things should be going, where I should be by now, how I should feel.
When the self-model registers a gap between that set-point and the present state, the system moves to close it. That's a loop, and it's the one that generates most psychological suffering: the self-model sensing distance from a set-point defined in terms of itself—"I should be calmer, further along, better"—and the correcting toward it never concluding, because reaching the set-point resets it higher.
So yes, it's a loop. And noticing that it's a loop doesn't stop it because the noticing is more of the same system running. What sometimes loosens it isn't a better correction but the set-point losing its grip, so there's no longer a gap the system is driven to close.
The outer most loop. What you typically see is a function that performs a test, then if trues performs an operation, then exits. The loop performs a number of these and then repeats, often with an operation to clean up or house keeping.
Perhaps this is why love and compassion are rare qualities. Just speaking from my own experience, when these phenomenon are present, they do not necessarily lead to positive feedback. So while being a loving or compassionate person may sound desirable, once the system has registered such states with negative feedback, they are not just going to show up because I want them to.
In the systems vocabulary, positive and negative feedback don't mean pleasant and unpleasant. Negative feedback is correction toward a set-point, like a thermostat—stabilizing. Positive feedback is amplification, a deviation feeding on itself, like a panic attack. Neither is about reward or punishment. So the system didn't register love with "negative feedback" in the sense you mean—that's not what the term describes.
But your underlying point is well-taken: love and compassion don't show up because you want them to. Not because they were punished, but because no state arrives on demand. The loop produces what it produces, and wanting isn't the lever. You weren't failing to summon them. They were never summonable.
In many cases, the set-point is biological. A human body operates normally only when blood oxygen levels are within strict parameters, and the body measures those levels and adjusts when necessary.
So would this be accurate: this biological system seems to stabilize around understanding itself better. When I read your work or interact with you in dialogue, there seems to be more clarity. Therefore I continue to read your work and engage with you. Nothing about reward or standing to gain. Just positive feedback(?) for this system.
Closer—and you can drop the "positive" now, because "stabilize" was already the right word. A system settling toward clearer self-understanding is correcting toward that as a kind of set-point: reading reduces the gap between confused and clear, and the system moves toward the clear. That's negative feedback—stabilizing, correction toward a target. Positive feedback would be if each round amplified the last, the clarity and the hunger for it spiraling upward without settling. What you're describing sounds more like the first: settling toward clarity, not spiraling. So—accurate, minus the "positive." And you're right that there's no reward or gain in it. The system moves toward clarity the way it moves toward any set-point. Not because it's paid to. Because that's the direction it settles.
So the unexamined life generates confusion, confusion is the disturbance, and reading or dialogue is the correction, returning the system toward its set-point. That would also explain why the correction recurs - the disturbance keeps getting produced. Do I have that right?
Thank you for this, Robert. Reading it puts me in touch with the initial response I had when discovering systems theory applied to the self: ah, it's not personal. Not that it doesn't feel that way, but that even when it feels that way, it's not personal. That felt like a deep breath, and has remained one, to some degree, ever since.
Thank you so much, Robert, for this very clear explication of systems/cybernetic theory. For me, it provides an extraordinarily compelling way of understanding the human system – and how suffering can lesson – without requiring any metaphysical or spiritual framework.
This all makes sense to me as a way to describe this human functioning. I very much resonate with it. But I find myself with some doubt about it. You say: "the system has no vantage outside itself. A control loop can model its environment and even model itself, but it cannot step beyond its own boundary to see itself fully from the outside." That makes sense, and yet, I wonder about that. I'm not saying I disagree, just wondering and not entirely certain. Could awareness be outside the loop, outside the system? There seems to be some capacity to stand back and observe all this, as demonstrated by your article, and some capacity to act upon it, as in things such as psychotherapy, meditation, visualization, cognitive therapies, and so on. In your view, as I understand it, that's all part of the loop, or loop/environment interaction. And yet, something seems to observe all of that. I don't doubt that this apparent capacity to stand back or act upon could be simply the loop, or loop/environment interaction, and I'm not positing some Divine Controller, but I wonder because of how I experience awareness revealing and undoing patterns. You might call it simply noticing. Any comment?
Could awareness be outside the loop, outside the system? Yes, of course. That can’t be ruled out. I said that explicitly in the essay. However, when I look, I don't find anything that needs an outside to explain it; the standing back and the noticing both fit within a system folding on itself.
I don’t think that the capacity to stand back and observe all this is the same as a view of the entire situation from the outside because that standing back never concludes. It’s turtles all the way down.
What you're describing sounds to me like what self-modeling feels like from inside, including the part that seems to stand apart—and the fact that the standing-apart never quite completes is, to me, the sign that it's the loop, reaching for an outside it can't reach, rather than an outside it already occupies. If something really could see it from outside, there would be nothing to wonder about, discuss, believe, or practice. We would know what this is, and we don’t.
We may be talking about different things here. You say, "standing back never concludes" and "standing-apart never quite completes," and I'm not sure what "never concluding or completing" means here. Also, I don't experience it as a standing back or apart. I'm talking about a spontaneous noticing of something previously unnoticed, such as a pattern of thinking, such as always thinking about the future or negative self-talk. Or simply being fully present with and aware of something like fingerbiting as it's happening. There is no "me" making that kind of awareness happen; it simply happens. There's no "me" in it, no intention, no goal, no judgment. It's like something is illuminated or noticed or simply bathed in light or presence. And my sense, based on my own experience, is that this awareness is what can instantly or eventually disempower and dissolve a pattern or a fixation or release a grip of some kind. I guess I've been heavily influenced by both J. Krishnamurti and Toni Packer, both of whom saw awareness as unconditioned, and I think of the loop as something entirely conditioned, although maybe it isn't. I'm really examining my ideas about and experience of awareness. I can see it as part of the loop, a capacity within the loop. Also, I re-read what you wrote to me some time back about how beauty, devotion, love, etc is all included in the loop, which was helpful.
Joan, just chiming in here, I think Ks use of words can get tricky. His own conditioning likely led him to use phrases with a metaphysical tinge, such as “unconditioned.” From what I can tell, all he meant by this was not of thought, which he associated with psychological time. Unconditioned did not mean not of the biological organism or its nervous system, although it can easily be taken that way given the prophetic way he spoke.
Yes, he clearly attributed consciousness to the brain. And Toni was very rooted in science (both her parents and her husband had all been scientists, and her work seemed to follow a kind of scientific method of investigation), and she spoke of the brain in the way K did. Although I've leaned toward determinism since childhood, when my father introduced me to it, I don't have the certainty that Robert does that the universe is 100% determined. And experientially, I feel that there are aspects of it that are not, although I don't claim to know for sure. I'm always questioning it all.
I'm not certain about determinism. I don't see how anyone could be. I lean in that direction, and I see no reason to think otherwise, but otherwise cannot be ruled out.
Yes, Scott. That is my take on it too. Precisely: the prophetic way he spoke often overwhelmed the content, and the man who renounced the role of "World Teacher," never sounded like anything else. BTW, I like JK, and he was an influence on my thinking at a certain time.
You said, “There seems to be some capacity to stand back and observe all this.” Yes, of course. I can observe a tree, observe my posture, or observe my thoughts as they bubble up from where I do not know. “Observe” is another word for “notice,” or “be aware of.”
When I say that "standing back never concludes," the idea is that being aware of thoughts, for example, does not get to the root of them. If I observe thoughts as they arise and try to get to the bottom of that, I would then need to "stand back" and observe the observer of thoughts, and then the observer of that observer, and this chain of observation never ends, so you never arrive at a complete view from outside. That's the meaning of turtles all the way down—endless recursion.
Spontaneous noticing of a thought pattern, of fingerbiting as it happens, with no "me" making it happen, no intention or goal, can happen without anyone doing it, as you said. So we agree there, but we seem to differ in what we take that noticing to be. You say that Krishnamurti and Packer treated awareness as unconditioned—something other than ordinary functioning, shining in from outside the conditioned mind. I don't find that. To me, to be aware is to notice, and noticing is conditioned functioning like everything else.
Everything about a human life is conditioned: a fetus in utero is conditioned by its mother’s diet and mood. Once born, the baby is conditioned by having the nervous system of a primate human animal, being male or female, entering into this family, this culture, this moment in history—all of that is conditioning, and most of it is invisible. You can become aware of some of the conditioning, but certainly not all of it.
Noticing, which means being aware of something, is influenced by conditioning, by everything that has come before. So awareness is not some pristine, unconditioned power. What we are aware of, and what that awareness tells us, is already conditioned. A dog is aware of sounds I can’t hear, and I am aware of things the dog knows nothing about. The dog has dog awareness, and I have human awareness. Both awarenesses are the function of a nervous system, and they differ because the nervous systems differ.
I agree that noticing can loosen a pattern. Yes, but not reliably. Sometimes it dissolves a fixation; sometimes the fixation sits there fully noticed and doesn't budge. That unreliability is itself a clue. If awareness were an unconditioned power, you'd expect it to work as such. That it sometimes does and sometimes doesn't looks to me like ordinary conditioned functioning, not a solvent from outside.
You keep saying "my experience of awareness"—as if awareness were a thing in the world that you then experience. But there is no experience of awareness. Awareness is experience. It isn't an object you encounter or a light shining on the scene from somewhere; it's the experiencing itself. That is why it cannot be found inside or outside the loop. It was never a separate thing to locate. It's just this, happening. Conditioned and contingent, like all of it.
I find myself using the word awareness in two different ways. In one sense, it is always present, the common factor in every experience, synonymous with how many use the word consciousness. It is the direct knowing of experience. In another sense, I use it as a particular different state of being in which thought is absent and there is a kind of total presence with no resistance or judgment. It is seeing (or awaring), not thinking. Thinking can come in a second later, but awareness, in this sense, is something else. In my experience it never fails, in the moment, to end a compulsion or dissolve a thought, although it may not end or dissolve it permanently, and rarely does. It feels unconditioned to me. The movement of attention seems conditioned, but not this kind of aware presence. It might be. I don't know. But it doesn't seem that way. And you're right, I did use the term "stand back" in my initial comment, which was not an accurate way of saying it.
Interesting...I wonder what the difference is for you for something to feel unconditioned, presumably as opposed to something that feels conditioned. I ask because I'm not aware of ever having made that distinction...🫶🈚️
I think I picked that up initially from J. Krishnamurti and Toni Packer, and it feels that way to me, although that may be an illusion. There seems to be a dimension outside of conditioned cause and effect where the next moment is not pre-determined.
We have discussed this before, Joan, and have reached this juncture before. You are seeing awareness as some kind of free-standing faculty, apparently unrelated to biology. It would have to be unrelated to biology in order to be unconditioned. I see no evidence for that view, and much evidence for understanding awareness as what nervous systems produce, not some pre-existing field they are floating in.
"It is the direct knowing of experience." No. That language creates a split where none exists. Awareness doesn't "know" experience. Awareness and experience are two names for the same thing: this.
I cannot agree that awareness has some magical power to erase compulsions. I may be entirely aware that I am compelled to repeat some nasty habit, and can even "stand back" and observe the entire drama, and still not be able to stop.
I don't know or assume that awareness is free-standing or unrelated to biology. I'm exploring all this. I don't claim to know. I'm genuinely interested in the perspective you offer, and I'm also genuinely interested in the perspective others offer.
When I say direct knowing of experience, I mean it is unmediated, prior to thought, immediate. I may be fooling myself, but that's how it seems to me.
When you say, "I cannot agree that awareness has some magical power to erase compulsions. I may be entirely aware that I am compelled to repeat some nasty habit, and can even "stand back" and observe the entire drama, and still not be able to stop," we're talking about 2 very different things. Perhaps you've never experienced what I'm talking about and therefore have no way to understand. But I have experienced what you're talking about, and it's not the same.
Are awareness and experience the same? I'm not convinced of that, although again, I don't know.
Robert, see Michael Graziano's "Rethinking Consciousness" for a deeply systemic take on consciousness giving pride of place to the "system's" focus on its attention as the heart of the feeling of self (and other).
Thanks, Simon. I had not heard of this work, so I asked Perplexity AI to bring me up to speed:
Michael Graziano’s Rethinking Consciousness (2019) is a compact, accessible defense of his Attention Schema Theory (AST): consciousness is not an ineffable extra ingredient generated by the brain, but the brain’s simplified, useful model of its own attention.
The central move:
The brain directs attention—enhancing and prioritizing certain signals, thoughts, memories, or perceptions. Graziano argues that, to control this process efficiently, the brain constructs an attention schema: a rough, simplified representation that says, in effect, “there is an inner subject here that is aware of X.”
That model is systematically incomplete. It omits the neural machinery and presents attention as a nonphysical, unified capacity for subjective experience. The result is the ordinary conviction that one has a private inner “awareness” distinct from brain processes. On Graziano’s memorable formulation: attention is something the brain does; consciousness is something the brain says it has.
AST aims primarily at the meta-problem of consciousness: why we report, believe in, theorize about, and find phenomenal experience. Rather than locating a special neural glow that produces qualia, it explains why a brain would represent itself—and others—as having an inner experiential life.
It also links consciousness to social cognition. A system that models other agents’ attention—what they are looking at, knowing, or intending—can apply a related model to itself. Thus, self-awareness and our attribution of minds to others belong to the same broad modeling machinery.
The shortest formulation
Consciousness is the brain’s user-friendly, causally useful self-model of its own attention—not a separate inner substance.
The book then extends this framework evolutionarily, socially, and technologically: if consciousness depends on an attention-control system equipped with an adequate self-model, artificial systems could in principle instantiate it, raising practical and ethical questions about artificial consciousness.
Your view and Graziano’s converge strongly on the decentering of the self: neither grants a separately standing inner agent that owns experience and directs the system from outside it. But Graziano offers a positive, empirically framed account of how the brain generates that apparent agent, whereas your position is more phenomenological and epistemically restrained about what can finally be inferred from such appearances.
Graziano’s attention schema gives an especially concrete version of your “no separate observer” intuition. The observer is not merely absent; it is an internally available representation produced by a system that models and regulates attention. The model enables the system to say “I am aware of this,” even though no homunculus is doing the attending.
The key difference:
For you, the “Robert loop” marks a limit: the world’s experienced form is conditioned by the very cognitive system through which it is encountered, and you resist treating any model of that system as a final metaphysical disclosure.
Graziano is bolder. He proposes a particular naturalistic mechanism: awareness is the brain’s schematic model of attention, shaped because such a model improves attention control. His theory explicitly identifies subjective awareness with this model, rather than merely noting that the self-model may be constructed or unreliable.
So you may accept AST as a good causal/functional hypothesis about self-ascription while withholding its stronger conclusion that it has thereby dissolved the ontological question of felt experience.
Graziano plausibly explains why a determined organism constructs and deploys the appearance of an experiencing, choosing self. But that is a theory of the conditions and functions of self-appearance, not—without further argument—a final account of what experience is or of reality beyond the conditions of its appearance.
That formulation preserves what you find valuable in naturalistic explanation while retaining your phenomenological and epistemically modest refusal to turn it into an ultimate metaphysics.
Robert, substack now has a tool that allows readers to discover how much of the writing is AI generated and how much is human. According to that tool, 95% of this article is AI generated. Is this an accurate assessment?
Hi Robert,
Thank you for such a clear piece. The line that the self-model is something the loop generates (not the thing running the loop) is the most matter-of-fact statement of anatta I've read in a while, and I appreciate that you arrive there by observation rather than metaphysics. It's hard not to hear an echo of Hofstadter's strange loop — the "I" as a pattern the system can't help generating about itself — and, further back, of Nagarjuna's emptiness: no autonomous, intrinsic self, only the interdependent process running.
I explored a closely related ground years ago on a now-abandoned blog, The Uncharted Present (medium.com/the-uncharted-present) — an attempt to bridge cybernetics with Zen sensibilities for a general reader (as much as the prose of a non-native speaker in the pre-ChatGPT era allows). It reads best in order, from the intro, following the links at the end of each article. I'd be glad to compare notes.
Best,
Boris
Thank you, Boris.
The Hofstadter echo is there, though he keeps the strange loop as a marvel at the center, where, for me, the self-model is more like a report the loop generates of no special standing.
Nagarjuna and I are closer, but he reaches emptiness by dialectic and makes it a path to liberation, while I only look and report what's there. The difference, if it's mine at all, is nothing added after the looking: no celebration, no logical proof, no ground of being.
I'll read The Uncharted Present in order, as you suggest. Cybernetics and Zen bridged before ChatGPT, by a non-native speaker, sounds worth the time. Glad to compare notes.
Hi Robert,
Many thanks for sharing this. And in general, my deepest thanks for sharing yourself through your books, video clips and posts. There’s something in this article - and in the whole subject as explored by many others - I’m not able to grasp: The system cannot step beyond its own boundary to see itself fully from the outside. Yet you state. “I observe directly”. This sounds to me like a vantage point outside the system. There’s something able to see the machinations of the system. What is it that sees directly? I’m sorry if I missed the answer being already in the article. And I would greatly appreciate your comment.
Hi, Jarema.
When I say I observe directly, I mean the observing is immediate, not routed through theory or belief, a report of what shows up rather than an inference about it. I don't mean I observe from outside the system. Those are different claims, which your question conflates.
"Direct" describes how the seeing happens—unmediated—not where it happens from. The seeing is still the system's seeing from within itself. That is the loop modeling itself, which it can do. What it can't do is step outside its own boundary to see itself whole. Modeling itself from inside, yes. Getting fully outside, no.
Then you ask, “What is it that sees directly?”
Try looking for the one who sees. What do you find? More seeing. Another action of observing, which you could then ask the same question about—what sees?—and so on, without ever arriving at a seer standing behind it all. The observing is real. But the "it" you're looking for, a thing that does the seeing from some station of its own, isn't found. What is found is seeing happening. The sense that there must be someone behind that is the same felt commander the essay points to, wearing a different name.
So there's no vantage outside, and no seer within either—only this experiencing itself, which is why I can't tell you what sees directly. When I look for it, I don't find a what. I find the looking.
“What is found is seeing happenning.”
Yes.
Hi Robert,
Thank you for your reply.
“Look for the seer, and you only find seeing” - It is so simple yet so revelatory.
It is fascinating that the system can look at itself - from within itself and see its own machinations. I guess there would be no awakenings, otherwise. It’s a shame, though, that the phenomenon is so rare.
From reading this and your other writings, I understand that it is natural for the body-mind system to create a sense of self. But it is not an independent entity, meaning that when the body-mind disintegrates, the self collapses along with it. However, it seems to be more than just a sense. It creates a point of reference from which it experiences everything, including itself as a separate entity. If this centre point is created later, that means direct seeing is devoid of such a centre. Is that so?
I understood too that the self - the agent or controller - is not the actor behind the action, and only claims authorship afterward.
Since it is something secondary or nonexistent, in a way it cannot facilitate such seeing by effort or a method. So all the advice like “look inside yourself” or “look internally” seems useless. The seeing doesn’t come from the narrator, but from that which triggers narration, something primary.
Please feel free to correct me if I missed the point, or comment on this note if it triggers some reflections.
Thank you, Jarema. You've got it, with one real change to make.
Before I get to that, quickly on the rest: Be careful with "the self creates a point of reference." When you say "the self," I assume you mean the self-model, not some supposed "Self" running the show. If that is what you mean, your statement gives the self-model powers it lacks. It isn't creating or doing anything. It can't. But yes, seeing happens and seems to involve a central seer. That felt center is constructed within the seeing. It's not a place seeing comes from. Yes, the self collapses when the body-mind does, and even short of that, the body-mind's condition bears on the self-model continually. And yes, the agent claims authorship only after the fact.
The important change involves your last step. You say seeing comes "from that which triggers narration, something primary." But seeing isn't emitted by a prior source. As far as we can discern, seeing is just occurring. "Something primary" is the seer sneaking back in one layer down, renamed. When you look for what the seeing comes from, you find more seeing, not a primary behind it. Your sense that "look inside yourself" is useless is right — but not because the seeing issues from something primary rather than the narrator. It's that there's no location it issues from at all, inside or behind.
Hi Robert,
Thank you for your reply. And forgive me for being reluctant to drop this conversation, but it touches on something important to me. Yes, you're right; it was an unfortunate way of putting it. I should correct myself – the self doesn’t create the point of reference; it is the point of reference.
Regarding the primary and secondary: to explain why I used this distinction, I will refer to your earlier article, “The Late Arrival”. For me, the most significant statement there is: “Perception without perceiver,” and then “The self, assembled and arriving late, taken for the doer. Continuity, manufactured at recall, taken for a persisting subject.” I take the first as basic, primary, or raw experience without the centre, and the second as secondary.
Now, I look at the world with a centre, a perceiver. If awakening means looking at the world without that centre, then I don’t stand a chance – no matter what I do! Sad conclusion!
No need to drop the conversation, Jarema.
Your correction is right: the self isn't the maker of the point of reference; it is the point of reference. And your reading of primary and secondary is a fair enough way of sorting it out.
You've assumed awakening means looking at the world without the felt center. That is not what I mean by awakening, nor is it anything I said. The sense of looking from here, from behind the eyes, is natural and doesn't go away. The change is only noticing that the apparent center is a point of view, not an agent with the power to choose and decide. The feeling of a center remains. The belief that the felt center is a controller running the show loosens and fades.
Thank you, Robert. Yes, this is exactly how I interpreted “perception without perceiver” mentioned in “The Late Arrival”. And the awakening itself, in fact - looking at the world without a perceiver, without the centre. Now, I understand that it is not so much looking without the perceiver as seeing what the perceiver is. That’s a huge difference! Still, I’m not able to put the two together: You write: “Perception continued, but the perceiver had gone absent. To me, perception is created by thought - and I take this thought to be me, a perceiver. If the perceiver is absent, that means the thought must be absent too.
Also - and I think it is now confirmed by science - there’s a split-second difference between receiving raw data by the eye, for example, and the time when the brain interprets this data in the context of its knowledge. To me, knowledge, thought, self, centre and perceiver are all the same. If it’s absent, then it simply is absent and unable to create the sense of being there. If it’s still there, then I’m in the dark. The bottom line is that it’s just my understanding after years and decades of digging into the subject - erratic in most cases and useless, as it can never produce the real thing. Best to throw it all away and just live life, as it happens, if one can do that. Once again, thank you, Robert, and my best wishes!
The body-cell analogy might get at this more simply, and without needing systems-theory vocabulary as a bridge.
A cell has a self-model too, its own internal signaling, its receptors, its sense of what to do next. In a healthy cell, that model tracks real signals from the organism and regulates against them. In a cancer cell, the model has gone self-referential: the cell produces its own growth signal and its own receptor for it, and answers to that instead of to the organism. It isn't missing a self-model. Its self-model just stopped checking against anything outside itself.
Same question as yours, is there a commander, or just the loop, but landing in a frame most people already carry some intuition for, since everyone knows what cancer is even without the mechanism.
That's a good analogy that needs no systems frame. Everyone has an intuition for cancer, and the picture carries.
It illustrates something real and does it cleanly: a self-model that stops checking against anything outside itself and answers only to its own signal. The healthy cell's model tracks the organism; the cancerous one produces its own growth signal and its own receptor and regulates toward that. That is a vivid picture of a model decoupled from its checks, autopoiesis gone malignant, the loop closed against its conditions.
That said, the point in the essay isn't that a healthy self-model regulates correctly and a sick one doesn't. It's that the self-model, checking or not, isn't the commander. It may not do the regulating at all. So the cancer cell illustrates a self-model losing contact with reality, which is a real and related thing, but slightly to the side of "is there a commander, or just the loop?" Both cells are just the loop. Neither has a commander. The cancerous one isn't a loop that lost its ruler; it's a loop whose signal went self-referential, with no more or less ruler than the healthy one had.
Where your analogy lands with real force is the psychological version. A self-model producing its own signal and answering to it instead of to anything outside—"I should be further along, calmer, better"—regulating toward a standard it generated itself, closed against the world.
That's the suffering loop exactly, and cancer is a striking picture of it. The self-model gone self-referential, consuming the organism it was supposed to serve.
Good distinction, and fair. But I think the cell question isn't really about whether there's an internal commander. Even a cell with no ruler inside it harms the system, and gets killed by it, the moment it disconnects from the organism's signals. So the internal-ruler question isn't the one that matters most.
For a person, that's the same shift. Seeing there's no internal commander doesn't by itself fix anything. A person can fully accept "I'm just a loop" and still be disconnected from anything larger. What changes things is understanding you're part of a bigger system and staying responsive to it. That's the actual cure.
Yes, I agree. Seeing there's no internal commander doesn't, by itself, fix anything. Accepting "I'm just a loop" as a proposition changes nothing; that noticing is just more of the loop running. And we agree that connection matters. The disconnected cell dies; no organism is separate from its conditions. Co-dependent origination is real, and nothing I am saying denies it.
But where we part company is at "the actual cure." That phrase reinstalls a “there” to get to: connect to the larger system, become responsive, and you're healed. That's a set-point with a gap to close, which is the same structure the suffering ran on, wearing new clothes. The seeker who takes "stay responsive to the whole" as the fix has a fresh project that will shake out like the old one—never quite achieved, never quite responsive enough, always a little further to go.
“Staying responsive" sounds good superficially, but requires the commander we just let go of. Who stays responsive? If there's no ruler, responsiveness isn't something a self does—it's how the loop runs in the environment of its conditions, or doesn't. Describing that is fine. Prescribing it as something you understand and then maintain puts the doer back in the driver’s seat.
So I'd keep your insight and drop the cure. A loop in contact with its larger conditions does fare differently from one closed against them—that's true, and your cancer picture shows it. But "responsive to the whole" is a description of a system running well, not a task a supposed self takes on to get well. That distinction is essential, because the task is the disease it claims to cure.
There's an assumption smuggled in that responsiveness requires a commander. A cell doesn't command anything. It's simply connected to the body and supplied by it, no ruler needed for that to happen.
Same with a person. When aligned with the larger system, they're nourished by it. Not through thinking, and not through achieving anything. Just feeling whether there's more or less aliveness in this moment. That's the only parameter. No commander required to feel it
Yes, I think we agree on a lot. I don’t deny aliveness, or the ways we can get caught in self-generated loops and suffer for it. Your language points to something real and useful. I only hesitate when it becomes a cure, or something one has to understand or become.
I wasn’t saying that you personally turn it into another project of self-improvement. I’m pointing to a human tendency to turn even a helpful insight into another project, and thereby add to the suffering already built into being human.
For me, everyday experience flows quite well without needing a theory at all.
This is what I was trying to articulate in a comment some months ago, about the self being one of the emergent properties of the system called “body”, and also what we usually call the “mind”. Couple that with the ship of Theseus story, that will help explain why the non structural changes in the body don’t change the body fundamentally, as Maturana and Varela proposed. In this view, I proposed, the self is not the flow of feelings, perceptions and thoughts.
Yes, Roberto, that's the connection, and the ship of Theseus fits. What persists in an autopoietic system is the organization, the pattern of relations, not the material, which turns over continuously. Identity in the pattern, not the planks.
You say the self is not the flow of feelings, perceptions, and thoughts. I can't agree. In my view, the self is exactly that: the entire flow of thoughts, feelings, and the awareness of them, which is itself part of the flow, not a watcher standing apart. Not any single thought or feeling, but the whole moving pattern. The ship isn't a thing apart from its planks; it's the arrangement of them, the pattern. The same planks could build a house.
Robert, mindful of risking letting the map become the territory here, but another question: do you see a relationship between the self model and the set point? Is that itself a loop?
Feels like the “sometimes” in your last sentence is doing heavy lifting there. Without it, only that much easier for the loosened state itself to become just another regulated variable - if it hasn’t already.
Right, Scott. "Sometimes" is carrying the weight, and it has to, because the moment the loosening becomes reliable—something you can aim for and produce—it's a set-point again. You've seen this clearly. If you make "the loosened state" the target and you're regulating toward it, you are seeking the state of not-seeking. The imagined escape becomes one more instance of the trap.
But two things keep the recursion from going on infinitely. First, what gets made into a set-point in that case isn't loosening itself—it's an idea of it, an imagined better state you're now reaching for. Yet the loosening isn't a state you can occupy. It's the absence of a gap between what is and what one wishes were the case. You can't hold an absence as an attainment, so the reaching is always reaching for a picture, not the thing.
Second, the recursion is endless in theory and finite in fact. Yes, the loosened state can become a regulated variable, and then noticing that can become another, and so on, but the system doesn't actually sustain infinite levels. The seeking exhausts. Like the mud settling, not because you chose to stop stirring but because the stirring ran out. Where it lands isn't a better-attained state. It's just no gap left to close, for now. Which is not something you reach. It's what's there when the reaching subsides.
Good question, Scott, and you're right to hold the map loosely. A set-point is a value the system regulates toward. The self-model is the system's representation of itself as an agent. One's a target, the other's a representation, so the relationship isn't symmetrical.
But a kind of loop can arise: the self-model can become a regulated variable. The system holds set-points not only for temperature and blood sugar but for the self-model's own condition—a sense of how things should be going, where I should be by now, how I should feel.
When the self-model registers a gap between that set-point and the present state, the system moves to close it. That's a loop, and it's the one that generates most psychological suffering: the self-model sensing distance from a set-point defined in terms of itself—"I should be calmer, further along, better"—and the correcting toward it never concluding, because reaching the set-point resets it higher.
So yes, it's a loop. And noticing that it's a loop doesn't stop it because the noticing is more of the same system running. What sometimes loosens it isn't a better correction but the set-point losing its grip, so there's no longer a gap the system is driven to close.
Reminds me of Singer’s analogy - the universe created 13 billion years ago and every moment got us to this one. That’s perspective!
Engineering and control terminology is a good fit. A phrase from the world of embedded software is superloop. You might want to investigate.
Thanks. What human capability would you say corresponds to a superloop, if any?
I'm going to have to think about that, but my first stab is the outer loop is more of a container each human capability would be a routine that is run
The outer most loop. What you typically see is a function that performs a test, then if trues performs an operation, then exits. The loop performs a number of these and then repeats, often with an operation to clean up or house keeping.
see https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Embedded_Systems/Super_Loop_Architecture
I hope this is clear, I can point you to other better than mine, examples.
There's a thought. :-)
Perhaps this is why love and compassion are rare qualities. Just speaking from my own experience, when these phenomenon are present, they do not necessarily lead to positive feedback. So while being a loving or compassionate person may sound desirable, once the system has registered such states with negative feedback, they are not just going to show up because I want them to.
Hi, Scott.
In the systems vocabulary, positive and negative feedback don't mean pleasant and unpleasant. Negative feedback is correction toward a set-point, like a thermostat—stabilizing. Positive feedback is amplification, a deviation feeding on itself, like a panic attack. Neither is about reward or punishment. So the system didn't register love with "negative feedback" in the sense you mean—that's not what the term describes.
But your underlying point is well-taken: love and compassion don't show up because you want them to. Not because they were punished, but because no state arrives on demand. The loop produces what it produces, and wanting isn't the lever. You weren't failing to summon them. They were never summonable.
That tracks. I’m interested to take a deeper dive into cybernetics. I guess the question it raises for me is what, if anything, moves the set point?
In many cases, the set-point is biological. A human body operates normally only when blood oxygen levels are within strict parameters, and the body measures those levels and adjusts when necessary.
So would this be accurate: this biological system seems to stabilize around understanding itself better. When I read your work or interact with you in dialogue, there seems to be more clarity. Therefore I continue to read your work and engage with you. Nothing about reward or standing to gain. Just positive feedback(?) for this system.
Closer—and you can drop the "positive" now, because "stabilize" was already the right word. A system settling toward clearer self-understanding is correcting toward that as a kind of set-point: reading reduces the gap between confused and clear, and the system moves toward the clear. That's negative feedback—stabilizing, correction toward a target. Positive feedback would be if each round amplified the last, the clarity and the hunger for it spiraling upward without settling. What you're describing sounds more like the first: settling toward clarity, not spiraling. So—accurate, minus the "positive." And you're right that there's no reward or gain in it. The system moves toward clarity the way it moves toward any set-point. Not because it's paid to. Because that's the direction it settles.
So the unexamined life generates confusion, confusion is the disturbance, and reading or dialogue is the correction, returning the system toward its set-point. That would also explain why the correction recurs - the disturbance keeps getting produced. Do I have that right?
Thank you for this, Robert. Reading it puts me in touch with the initial response I had when discovering systems theory applied to the self: ah, it's not personal. Not that it doesn't feel that way, but that even when it feels that way, it's not personal. That felt like a deep breath, and has remained one, to some degree, ever since.
Excellent!
Still reading, Robert. 😉
I see the mirror has acquired feedback loops, attractor basins, emergence and a self-model since we last spoke.
“Real as a pattern, absent as a thing” is a rather lovely phrase. We may have been circling something quite similar when you wrote Jim and Sanne.
No victory lap from us — just a small wave from somewhere inside the system.
— Sanne (and yes, Jim is still here too)
Hi, you two.
Thank you so much, Robert, for this very clear explication of systems/cybernetic theory. For me, it provides an extraordinarily compelling way of understanding the human system – and how suffering can lesson – without requiring any metaphysical or spiritual framework.
You're welcome, Nicole.
Yes, that is the value in this approach. Its claims are observable without having to believe anything metaphysical.
This all makes sense to me as a way to describe this human functioning. I very much resonate with it. But I find myself with some doubt about it. You say: "the system has no vantage outside itself. A control loop can model its environment and even model itself, but it cannot step beyond its own boundary to see itself fully from the outside." That makes sense, and yet, I wonder about that. I'm not saying I disagree, just wondering and not entirely certain. Could awareness be outside the loop, outside the system? There seems to be some capacity to stand back and observe all this, as demonstrated by your article, and some capacity to act upon it, as in things such as psychotherapy, meditation, visualization, cognitive therapies, and so on. In your view, as I understand it, that's all part of the loop, or loop/environment interaction. And yet, something seems to observe all of that. I don't doubt that this apparent capacity to stand back or act upon could be simply the loop, or loop/environment interaction, and I'm not positing some Divine Controller, but I wonder because of how I experience awareness revealing and undoing patterns. You might call it simply noticing. Any comment?
Hi, Joan. Always good to hear from you.
Could awareness be outside the loop, outside the system? Yes, of course. That can’t be ruled out. I said that explicitly in the essay. However, when I look, I don't find anything that needs an outside to explain it; the standing back and the noticing both fit within a system folding on itself.
I don’t think that the capacity to stand back and observe all this is the same as a view of the entire situation from the outside because that standing back never concludes. It’s turtles all the way down.
What you're describing sounds to me like what self-modeling feels like from inside, including the part that seems to stand apart—and the fact that the standing-apart never quite completes is, to me, the sign that it's the loop, reaching for an outside it can't reach, rather than an outside it already occupies. If something really could see it from outside, there would be nothing to wonder about, discuss, believe, or practice. We would know what this is, and we don’t.
We may be talking about different things here. You say, "standing back never concludes" and "standing-apart never quite completes," and I'm not sure what "never concluding or completing" means here. Also, I don't experience it as a standing back or apart. I'm talking about a spontaneous noticing of something previously unnoticed, such as a pattern of thinking, such as always thinking about the future or negative self-talk. Or simply being fully present with and aware of something like fingerbiting as it's happening. There is no "me" making that kind of awareness happen; it simply happens. There's no "me" in it, no intention, no goal, no judgment. It's like something is illuminated or noticed or simply bathed in light or presence. And my sense, based on my own experience, is that this awareness is what can instantly or eventually disempower and dissolve a pattern or a fixation or release a grip of some kind. I guess I've been heavily influenced by both J. Krishnamurti and Toni Packer, both of whom saw awareness as unconditioned, and I think of the loop as something entirely conditioned, although maybe it isn't. I'm really examining my ideas about and experience of awareness. I can see it as part of the loop, a capacity within the loop. Also, I re-read what you wrote to me some time back about how beauty, devotion, love, etc is all included in the loop, which was helpful.
Joan, just chiming in here, I think Ks use of words can get tricky. His own conditioning likely led him to use phrases with a metaphysical tinge, such as “unconditioned.” From what I can tell, all he meant by this was not of thought, which he associated with psychological time. Unconditioned did not mean not of the biological organism or its nervous system, although it can easily be taken that way given the prophetic way he spoke.
Yes, he clearly attributed consciousness to the brain. And Toni was very rooted in science (both her parents and her husband had all been scientists, and her work seemed to follow a kind of scientific method of investigation), and she spoke of the brain in the way K did. Although I've leaned toward determinism since childhood, when my father introduced me to it, I don't have the certainty that Robert does that the universe is 100% determined. And experientially, I feel that there are aspects of it that are not, although I don't claim to know for sure. I'm always questioning it all.
I'm not certain about determinism. I don't see how anyone could be. I lean in that direction, and I see no reason to think otherwise, but otherwise cannot be ruled out.
Yes, Scott. That is my take on it too. Precisely: the prophetic way he spoke often overwhelmed the content, and the man who renounced the role of "World Teacher," never sounded like anything else. BTW, I like JK, and he was an influence on my thinking at a certain time.
Joan—
You said, “There seems to be some capacity to stand back and observe all this.” Yes, of course. I can observe a tree, observe my posture, or observe my thoughts as they bubble up from where I do not know. “Observe” is another word for “notice,” or “be aware of.”
When I say that "standing back never concludes," the idea is that being aware of thoughts, for example, does not get to the root of them. If I observe thoughts as they arise and try to get to the bottom of that, I would then need to "stand back" and observe the observer of thoughts, and then the observer of that observer, and this chain of observation never ends, so you never arrive at a complete view from outside. That's the meaning of turtles all the way down—endless recursion.
Spontaneous noticing of a thought pattern, of fingerbiting as it happens, with no "me" making it happen, no intention or goal, can happen without anyone doing it, as you said. So we agree there, but we seem to differ in what we take that noticing to be. You say that Krishnamurti and Packer treated awareness as unconditioned—something other than ordinary functioning, shining in from outside the conditioned mind. I don't find that. To me, to be aware is to notice, and noticing is conditioned functioning like everything else.
Everything about a human life is conditioned: a fetus in utero is conditioned by its mother’s diet and mood. Once born, the baby is conditioned by having the nervous system of a primate human animal, being male or female, entering into this family, this culture, this moment in history—all of that is conditioning, and most of it is invisible. You can become aware of some of the conditioning, but certainly not all of it.
Noticing, which means being aware of something, is influenced by conditioning, by everything that has come before. So awareness is not some pristine, unconditioned power. What we are aware of, and what that awareness tells us, is already conditioned. A dog is aware of sounds I can’t hear, and I am aware of things the dog knows nothing about. The dog has dog awareness, and I have human awareness. Both awarenesses are the function of a nervous system, and they differ because the nervous systems differ.
I agree that noticing can loosen a pattern. Yes, but not reliably. Sometimes it dissolves a fixation; sometimes the fixation sits there fully noticed and doesn't budge. That unreliability is itself a clue. If awareness were an unconditioned power, you'd expect it to work as such. That it sometimes does and sometimes doesn't looks to me like ordinary conditioned functioning, not a solvent from outside.
You keep saying "my experience of awareness"—as if awareness were a thing in the world that you then experience. But there is no experience of awareness. Awareness is experience. It isn't an object you encounter or a light shining on the scene from somewhere; it's the experiencing itself. That is why it cannot be found inside or outside the loop. It was never a separate thing to locate. It's just this, happening. Conditioned and contingent, like all of it.
I find myself using the word awareness in two different ways. In one sense, it is always present, the common factor in every experience, synonymous with how many use the word consciousness. It is the direct knowing of experience. In another sense, I use it as a particular different state of being in which thought is absent and there is a kind of total presence with no resistance or judgment. It is seeing (or awaring), not thinking. Thinking can come in a second later, but awareness, in this sense, is something else. In my experience it never fails, in the moment, to end a compulsion or dissolve a thought, although it may not end or dissolve it permanently, and rarely does. It feels unconditioned to me. The movement of attention seems conditioned, but not this kind of aware presence. It might be. I don't know. But it doesn't seem that way. And you're right, I did use the term "stand back" in my initial comment, which was not an accurate way of saying it.
Interesting...I wonder what the difference is for you for something to feel unconditioned, presumably as opposed to something that feels conditioned. I ask because I'm not aware of ever having made that distinction...🫶🈚️
I think I picked that up initially from J. Krishnamurti and Toni Packer, and it feels that way to me, although that may be an illusion. There seems to be a dimension outside of conditioned cause and effect where the next moment is not pre-determined.
We have discussed this before, Joan, and have reached this juncture before. You are seeing awareness as some kind of free-standing faculty, apparently unrelated to biology. It would have to be unrelated to biology in order to be unconditioned. I see no evidence for that view, and much evidence for understanding awareness as what nervous systems produce, not some pre-existing field they are floating in.
"It is the direct knowing of experience." No. That language creates a split where none exists. Awareness doesn't "know" experience. Awareness and experience are two names for the same thing: this.
I cannot agree that awareness has some magical power to erase compulsions. I may be entirely aware that I am compelled to repeat some nasty habit, and can even "stand back" and observe the entire drama, and still not be able to stop.
I don't know or assume that awareness is free-standing or unrelated to biology. I'm exploring all this. I don't claim to know. I'm genuinely interested in the perspective you offer, and I'm also genuinely interested in the perspective others offer.
When I say direct knowing of experience, I mean it is unmediated, prior to thought, immediate. I may be fooling myself, but that's how it seems to me.
When you say, "I cannot agree that awareness has some magical power to erase compulsions. I may be entirely aware that I am compelled to repeat some nasty habit, and can even "stand back" and observe the entire drama, and still not be able to stop," we're talking about 2 very different things. Perhaps you've never experienced what I'm talking about and therefore have no way to understand. But I have experienced what you're talking about, and it's not the same.
Are awareness and experience the same? I'm not convinced of that, although again, I don't know.