I. The popular science of wonder
There is no greater ambivalence than watching something you consider quasi-sacred get pulled into the primetime as a trend in the gargantuan wellness industry. I’ve watched like a deer caught in headlights as “wonder” and “awe” have gone from philosophy, weed-hazed dorm rooms, and the heart of contemplative traditions onto the smiling ivory couches of the Today Show.
If the popular science of wonder has a herald, it’s probably UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner, author of the 2023 book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. Even thoughtful media coverage outside of the glitzy circus has embraced the story of awe, one of our least scientifically understood emotional states, as “an essential pathway to physical and mental well-being,” and “an evolutionary tool that holds the key to humanity’s capacity to flourish in groups.”
This popular science of wonder is something of an immune response against a much broader cultural drift labeled ‘disenchantment’ by sociologist Max Weber. Disenchantment describes the secularizing transition from magical religions to rational science as the lens through which we see the world; a particular worldview where all things are available, in the fullness of time, to rational comprehension. The world is emptied of all impenetrable mystery and incalculable forces, and remade as a fundamentally calculable phenomenon. All things may be contained in the equations of the future1.
As Charles Taylor, perhaps the greatest living philosopher of disenchantment, has written across a series of Very Large Books, during enchanted eras of the past, wonder was supplied by relation to the living spirits and divine forces woven through all things. Humans were situated within a much larger Great Chain of Being that imbued our world with meaning. Disenchantment severed us from larger causal systems, draining the external world of meaning and collapsing the generation of wonder into a personal problem.
Per Taylor, disenchantment’s secular worldview is not necessarily in tension with wonder. “Do we not now experience wonder at the vast yet intricate universe and the manifold forms of life,” Taylor asks? “In fact, from the very beginning, materialism has generated a sense of awe at the universe and at our genesis out of it.”
He locates disenchanted materialism’s engine of wonder as a particular kind of reflection on the marvels and intricacies of the natural world. There may be no divine cosmic order outside of our comprehension, but contemplating the fact that stardust became a planet where some molecules colliding in deep sea hydrothermal vents evolved into ballet dancers and peacocks can still fill us with a certain kind of wonder. This thread of naturalized wonder has developed alongside the process of disenchantment, from the Romantic poets through to Carl Sagan’s wide-eyed tours of the cosmos and Dacher Keltner today.
There are two things I dislike about this particular telling of the story of wonder.
The first is that it participates in the very worldview it reacts against. By accepting a cosmology evacuated of causal forces beyond our capacity to ever comprehend them — gods, spirits, extradimensional intelligences, whatever — disenchanted materialism’s story of wonder trades in the assertion that we know enough to rule any of that out, cosmologically speaking. It inflicts a premature closure on our account of the world. But let’s not get stuck on ontology.
The second is that the popular science of wonder seems to be getting things exactly backwards.
In Keltner’s book, he writes that “in our distal evolution as very social mammals, those individuals who united with others in awe-like patterns of behavior fared well in encounters with threats and the unknown.” In other words, evolution favors our sense of wonder. “We have a basic need for awe wired into our brains and bodies.”
I don’t think evolution wires in a need for wonder and awe. Instead, the measly drip of evidence we have so far suggests that the evolved mechanisms of cognition actually filter out a baseline of wonder and awe that’s already there, as among the most fundamental qualities of human consciousness. Strip the mind of its layered constructions down to its most essential form, and perplexingly, something like wonder lies beneath it all. Rather than bringing this underlying sense of wonder into richer expression, evolution seems to be engineering it out of our experience.
Following this thread reels us in from cosmology and cultural theory into some weird frontiers of consciousness science and philosophy of mind. But this is fruitful terrain. Against the grim backdrop of disenchantment, recent advances in the science of consciousness — particularly the study of advanced meditation and psychedelics — are spewing out raw material for new stories about the origins, nature, and even cultural prospects of wonder.
II. The science of consciousness has “a historical opportunity to start over.”
Thomas Metzinger, a German philosopher now in his late 60s, wears sleek rectangular glasses with a thick silver upper frame. He has hair the color of a crisp moon and a mildly extraterrestrial appearance. In the world of consciousness science, he’s near mythological status. His 2003 book, Being No One, is still probably the most comprehensive attempt at something like a theory of subjectivity that actually gives a robust answer as to why consciousness feels like it’s happening to someone, explaining the mechanics of this sense of self apparently at the center of each of our skulls.
One more piece of Metzinger lore. My favorite science fiction book is Blindsight by Peter Watts. It’s a hard sci-fi book that puzzles over the nature of consciousness. In the appendix, Watts cites the inspirations for the ideas in the book. He begins by shitting on a few household names, like Steven Pinker and Christof Koch:
“Pinker calls his book How the Mind Works, then admits on page one, ‘We don’t understand how the mind works.’ Koch writes The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach, in which he sheepishly sidesteps the whole issue of why neural activity should result in any kind of subjective awareness whatsoever.”
And then, Metzinger:
“Towering above such pussies, Metzinger takes the bull by the balls. His ‘World-zero’ hypothesis not only explains the subjective sense of self, but also why such an illusory first-person narrator would be an emergent property of certain cognitive systems in the first place. I have no idea whether he’s right—the man’s way beyond me—but at least he addressed the real question that keeps us staring at the ceiling at three A.M., long after the last roach is spent.”
So, you get the idea. In 1996, Metzinger was on the founding executive board of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, which has since become the leading academic series on consciousness studies. He organized the first ASSC conference in 1997, devoted to an emerging research paradigm on the neural correlates of consciousness.
The NCC approach takes two irreconcilable streams of data — brain activity and conscious experience — and seeks to close the gap by finding as many correlations between them as possible. Imagine strapping an EEG cap on and walking into a sanctuary of friendly and playful otters. The otters rush towards you, delighted by the prospect of company. They scurry and snuggle up into every available crevice of your body. Their slippery noses lightly tickle your neck, arms, and back. You are in heaven. Neuroscientists observe what part of your brain lights up with electrical activity during this whole affair. And lo! They will have then identified the “neural correlate” of delight2. And so on for every conceivable conscious experience.
Boosted by the NCC paradigm, the science of consciousness has grown from a fringe project to a mainstream field of research. Other sorts of theories of consciousness have emerged, like integrated information and global workspace theories, and are being empirically tested against each other. Related ideas, like active inference and predictive processing, are generating new insights into the functions of the mind.
And yet, the NCC paradigm has still not delivered a theory of consciousness the field can agree on. Most papers and books on consciousness still begin — and often end — by pointing out how much of a stubborn mystery consciousness remains. In a recent lecture, Metzinger summarized a growing pessimism: “now, we have a situation where many leading people in the community are saying that two decades later, let’s face it: this was basically a failed approach. We haven’t made enough progress with the NCC approach in consciousness research.”
For the last seven years, Metzinger has been working on launching a different approach, which he calls The Minimal Phenomenal Experience Project, or MPE. Rather than trying to weave a story of consciousness out of correlations between neural mechanisms and conscious experiences, MPE uses a “minimal model” approach.
To build a minimal model of consciousness, you strip away absolutely everything that can be removed without collapsing consciousness altogether, until all that remains are features that are universal to all instances of conscious experience. A minimal model of consciousness would tell us the structures, features, or qualities that are present in all cases of conscious experience. Whatever is contained in the minimal model is contained in every instance of consciousness.
Following this approach, Metzinger, who’s had a meditation practice for over 40 years, starts by saying that we need to throw the ordinary sense of consciousness most of us are accustomed to, where each of us experiences ourselves as selves located in time and space, out the window. Consciousness as we know it is a surface phenomenon, as he writes in his recent book on MPE, The Elephant and the Blind: The Experience of Pure Consciousness:
“My general working hypothesis is that there actually exists a maximally simple form of consciousness: minimal phenomenal experience, hereafter MPE. This simplest form of conscious experience lacks time representation; self-location in a spatial frame of reference; the experience of ownership, agency, and autobiographical self-awareness; and a phenomenally experienced first-person perspective.”
Similar states of consciousness have been described in contemplative and mystical traditions for millennia. Rigpa in Tibetan Dzogchen, sāksin in advaita vedanta, turīya in the Upanishads. Non-duality in both Advaita Vedanta and contemplative research today. But Metzinger’s project leverages what he sees as “a historically new situation.” Namely, millions of people across Western societies now meditate regularly, but do so in a secular context, outside of the traditional belief systems that have, until now, always informed how people describe these sorts of experiences.
Metzinger thinks that these new descriptions of meditative experience can feed directly into his minimal model approach, affording the stalled-out science of consciousness “a historical opportunity to start over.”
III. New methods in mind
In The Elephant and the Blind, Metzinger describes the “pure consciousness” of MPE as “a phenomenological prototype of humankind;” the bottom layer of any and all conscious experiences. He also calls it “a systematic societal blind spot,” dovetailing with a 2024 book by philosopher Evan Thompson and physicists Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser, The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience.
The book argues that science has been structurally blind to consciousness since about 1623, when Galileo published Il Saggiatore, or The Assayer, wherein he formalized the scientific method by cleaving apart subjective qualities like taste, smell, and touch from objective qualities like size, shape, location, and motion. He declared that mathematics was the language of the universe, while conscious experiences were the immaterial province of the soul. For Galileo, science had no business studying the soul, and could simply concern itself with the mathematical universe.
Philosopher Philip Goff calls this separation of subjective and objective qualities “Galileo’s Error,” and it has persisted all the way into the NCC paradigm. Somehow, the mathematics of brain activity must explain the conscious experiences they correlate with. There’s just no explanation of how.
Thompson, Frank, and Gleiser argue that overcoming the blind spot requires “a methodological transformation of the problem of consciousness into a new scientific research program.” Specifically, one anchored in an idea proposed by Chilean biologist Francisco Varela in 1996: neurophenomenology.
Neurophenomenology argues that subjective qualities ought to have the same epistemological status as EEG and fMRI readouts of brain activity. Brain activity does not explain conscious experience any more than conscious experience explains brain activity. The two are irreducible to each other.
While NCC has reigned supreme, consciousness science has mostly focused on refining the side of the equation with objective data. The number of electrodes on EEG caps keeps going up. The magnetic field strength of fMRI machines is rising. But these sharper pictures of brain activity are just getting mapped to the same blunt units of conscious experience. While the precision of neuroimaging improves, the precision of introspection has remained stagnant.
Varela’s pitch for neurophenomenology is that this is a weird mistake: “It is remarkable that this capacity for becoming aware has been paid so little attention as a human pragmatics. It is as if the ability for rhythmic movement had led to no development of dance training.”
The obvious example is meditation. Getting better at meditation is framed as providing higher quality data into the dynamics of subjective experience. Which brings us back to Metzinger’s MPE project, a concrete implementation of exactly the kind of methodology that Thompson, Frank, and Gleiser think we need to build a better science of consciousness.
In 2021, Metzinger published the first round of results from a 92-question survey on MPE experiences in meditators, which included an option for free-form descriptions of pure consciousness episodes. With 3,627 submissions, he wound up with 1403 usable responses to the 92-item survey spanning five languages and 57 countries (46 percent identified as spiritual but not religious/affiliated), and 841 free-form descriptions.
Most of them went something like this:
“Pure awareness is the realization of having finally found home after an eternal search. The pathological searching, the agony of control, comes to an abrupt end, and for the first time you realize what it means to be alive.”
IV. It is pretty odd that minds appear to be made of wonder
The MPE questionnaire is kind of a doomed enterprise. It asks for descriptions of an experience where, by definition, there was no one present to experience it. You can read the instructions for yourself, which try a couple of different awkward maneuvers to isolate a particular thread of weird meditation experience from all the rest:
This questionnaire investigates all experiences in which there is an “awareness of awareness itself” or “consciousness of consciousness itself.” Our target is the subjective experience of “consciousness as such.” Sometimes such states are also referred to as “pure awareness” or “pure consciousness.” We are not primarily interested in mystical experiences or dramatic spiritual peak experiences of any sort, but rather in all states characterized by a quality of “pure awareness” or of “consciousness itself.” This means that—independently of the current existence or nonexistence of other consciously experienced contents—an “awareness of awareness” has emerged. In other words, we are interested in states in which we clearly and distinctly experience the quality of “consciousness” itself.
Do you catch the immaterial drift here? Regardless, Metzinger dutifully plods on to run all sorts of thematic analyses on the responses he got. The first thing I’d like to point out is how delightfully strange the responses are. For example:
Respondent #3369: “There was a sensation of ‘being turned inside out,’ as if I had slipped through the eye of a needle, and everything dissolved. Every bodily sensation, thought, emotion, everything. There was a very light-filled and incredibly joyful pure presence, pure being in which there was no object or subject, observer, etc., but only pure, luminous joy and limitless being. The sense of time was completely gone; when ‘it was over’ it was 2.5 hours later. […] The awareness was very strong that this is ‘actually’ the true being and my real nature, also that it is infinite, eternal, and indestructible.”
Respondent #1337: “I began to discorporate and spread in every direction. My mass had converted into energy. The energy was aware. My awareness spread in boundless directions. I was everywhere and everything.”
But maybe reading these isn’t your idea of fun. Fair enough. Of particular interest to our whole enchantment thread is a theme running through the reports that Metzinger calls a “calm and entirely undramatic phenomenology of rapture and ‘nonsensational awe.’” He further describes it as a “subtle but distinctive form of bliss,” and the “sheer experience of aliveness” as it’s “pulled into the foreground” of consciousness.
According to a few of his survey respondents:
Respondent #3146: “There was a quality of gentleness and wonder, not in any words or concepts, but more as a pervasive feeling of ‘this is it, this is how everything truly is.’”
Respondent #3624: “...There was a subtle and completely undramatic but positive feeling tone permeating this silent awareness, a very fine and nonsensational sense of wonder, of delight, and soundness.”
These are varieties of experience that would be at home under labels like “wonder” or “enchantment,” but they subtly differ from more popular accounts. The wonder is not in reaction to anything. There is no starry night sky, great bulging mountain, or delicately woven spider’s web. The wonder is just there, like a basic feature of deconstructed awareness itself. Meditators keep unraveling the layers of the mind, and they keep finding this same fundamental sense of enchantment just humming along in the basement of the mind.
Contemplative traditions disagree on whether this flavor of wonder is actually fundamental to consciousness, or if there’s some even deeper fabric of awareness so “pure” that it has no qualities at all. The Vedantic idea of sat-chit-ananda (existence, consciousness, bliss), for example, does ascribe qualities to pure consciousness. Tibetan Buddhist traditions like Mahamudra often dismiss these experiences as mere “meditative moods,” cautioning practitioners not to cling to them, lest they get sidetracked from the real goal, which is the actually pure “abiding state.”3
According to predictive processing, the theory that underpins Metzinger’s view of the mind, even a pure consciousness episode is still a representation being generated by the predictive mind. Every experience is an internally generated model of something, a construction built in just the same way as the sense of self, space, and time.
Speculatively, Metzinger currently suspects that pure consciousness is what the representation of cortical arousal in the Ascending Reticular Activating System feels like. Internally modeling this basic degree of arousal is the primordial representation that creates the arena of subjective experience.
He further describes the phenomenology of that pure arena of experience as wakefulness: “Wakefulness is always there whenever there is conscious experience at all, autonomous and largely independent of the ever-changing kaleidoscope of surface phenomenology, but it comes in different degrees of intensity and somehow it ‘radiates.’”
I read this as placing Metzinger closer to the camp of Vedanta than Mahamudra, with the baseline of all consciousness indeed having qualities. But he isn’t sure what qualities actually belong as part of the minimal model of consciousness. He uses his data in the MPE book to untangle a number of more ecstatic states that are often reported in mystical experiences or deep states of meditation:
“The new phenomenological data presented here show a double dissociation: In meditators, the experience of pure consciousness can definitely occur without automatically triggering joy, awe, bliss, or gratitude; and all human beings—meditators and nonmeditators alike—know the conscious experience of joy, awe, bliss, or gratitude in situations where the phenomenal character of awareness itself is entirely absent.”
So the more sensational and dramatic experiences aren’t fundamental qualities of pure consciousness. They’re close relatives, but not necessary features of his minimal model of consciousness.
But when it comes to the “very subtle, undramatic, unsensational quality of rapture and wonder,” — what I’m calling enchantment — he considers whether these qualities are fundamental to wakefulness, to the fabric of the arena of experience itself, “one of the most interesting research questions in this subdomain.” Maybe minds are made of wonder.
Here’s another question. If something like enchantment is a fundamental, structural feature of consciousness itself, and is therefore at some level present in each and every instance of consciousness, why then aren’t we all staggering around with drool slithering from the corners of our open mouths in perpetual states of awe? Why do we need a popular science of awe to make the case that we ought to spend more time cultivating it? Why does wonder feel partial to certain kinds of experiences, like contemplating the miniature intricacies of the worlds of insects, or the scale of the universe and the luminosity of the stars set against the black velvet sky?
If wonder is a property of all conscious experience, shouldn’t it be just as present when I’m staring at the cracked white paint on the wall of my office? If wonder is so fundamental, why is it also so hard to sustain?
V. Evolution selects against enchantment
Maybe Keltner is right that to some degree, evolution recruits a minimal sense of awe for survival purposes. Even so, it does not seem to select for creatures that have maximally wonderful experiences of being alive. It’s easy enough to imagine how being perpetually blissed-out on the savannah would not have made you a better hunter. But some relatively new ideas gaining prominence in cognitive science frame the relationship between evolution and enchantment as particularly antagonistic.
In 2014, a very prominent psychedelic neuroscientist by the name of Robin Carhart-Harris proposed the entropic brain theory. The gist is that the brain has evolved a capacity for entropy suppression, which recruits networks of brain regions — primarily the default-mode network — to support more complex varieties of selfhood that, while enabling the metacognition that boosts prediction and planning, also suppresses the richness of conscious experience. The gist is that our fancy selves are buzzkills, making sure we never get too drunk on the splendor of all things.
Carhart-Harris argues that in our ancestral past, consciousness was predominantly rich, in the way that psychedelic trips, meditative states, the onset of psychosis, or infancy are all experientially rich. He calls this primary consciousness. We have research on almost all of these cases, which are marked by higher degrees of entropy (aka disorder, randomness) in their associated brain activity. Higher degrees of entropy, he suggests, index richer conscious experiences, like flooding a black and white image with color.
Per that point about being blissed out on the savannah, primary consciousness was not an evolutionary marvel. So at some point, the DMN evolved in a way that let it turn down the dial of richness. This made us more successful creatures, since we could now focus more on the business of living and reproducing, rather than the blinding grandeur of raw experience. Carhart-Harris calls this toned-down orchestration of experience ‘secondary consciousness.’
According to Carhart-Harris, secondary consciousness depends on the brain’s “extended ability to suppress entropy and thus organize and constrain cognition.” He continues: “this entropy-suppressing function of the human brain serves to promote realism, foresight, careful reflection and an ability to recognize and overcome wishful and paranoid fantasies.” But here’s the kicker: “Equally however, it could be seen as exerting a limiting or narrowing influence on consciousness.”
The DMN’s production of secondary consciousness may have outcompeted primary consciousness in evolutionary terms. Too much richness comes with less metacognitive oversight, and undermines our ability to predict, shape, and control our environments. Primary consciousness, Carhart-Harris says, “may be a sub-optimal mode of cognition that has been superseded by a more reality-bound style of thinking, governed by the ego.”
We shouldn’t just conflate richness with enchantment and Metzinger’s whole thing about undramatic rapture. But I do think that their Venn diagram would closely overlap. And both the sciences of psychedelics and meditation have converged on reducing activity within the DMN as a primary mechanism involved in the eruptions of wonderfully strange and rich altered states of consciousness. So it does look plausible that the DMN helps to sustain a more disenchanted style of selfhood.
To step out of the realm of theory for a moment, looking back at accounts of meditation experiences does fit suspiciously well with all this. Take the biotech writer José Luis Ricón, who recently published an account of his seven day meditation retreat focused on cultivating states of blissful absorption known as the jhanas (emphasis my own):
So I went down to the beach. “Kinda nice”, I thought. The sky had a particularly vibrant blue color, the waves had ‘the right size’, their roar was pleasant. I started to walk around trying to continue meditating. I focused my awareness on an arising sensation of open heartedness and then I noticed my eyes tearing up (”Huh? I thought”). I looked again at the ocean and then I saw it. It was fucking amazing. So much color and detail: waves within waves, the fractal structure of the foamy crests as they disintegrate back into the ocean. The feeling of the sun on my skin. I felt overwhelmed. As tears ran down my face and lowkey insane grin settled on my face I found myself mumbling “It’s... always been like this!!!!” “What the fuck??!” followed by “This is too much!! Too much!!!”. The experience seemed to be demanding from me to feel more joy and awe than I was born to feel or something like that. In that precise moment I felt what “painfully beautiful” means for the first time in my life. I had to look away. I calmed a bit. I walked a few steps and looked back. The exact same thing happened. “It’s reproducible, hihihihi”, and I started laughing. Then I found a log to sit on, calm down, and look back at the ocean. Now it wasn’t overwhelming, but “kinda nice” was now “fucking amazing”.
It’s exactly this kind of joyful overwhelm that the DMN usually keeps a lid on. And since we’re now on the receiving end of neuroscience research on all things advanced meditation, let’s take a quick look. One of the most rigorous fMRI studies of jhana meditation to date (the kind of meditation Ricón was doing) just came out. And it affirms the general idea that meditation basically flips the DMN’s usual patterns of activity. It reduces activity within the DMN, while cranking up its connections to other parts of the brain.
The authors suggest that flipping the DMN’s patterns around in this way disrupts the usual organization of experience. And all of that unbridled joy “may be experienced by curtailing the influence of prior beliefs in the pleasant object of meditation, and thereby amplifying the inherently pleasant and novel quality of the sensation.”
But given the MPE framework, we can interpret this a little differently. The overwhelming joy, bliss, or pleasantness aren’t inherent to any particular sensation. Not exactly. It’s not that Ricón was overwhelmed by awe because he looked specifically at the immense ocean, and had he instead looked at a rock, he would not have had the same experience. The ocean might make it easier to see the enchantments of awareness, but even the rock, properly attended to, could have been just as overwhelmingly joyous.
The idea here is that these overwhelmingly wonderful qualities are properties of awareness itself, the fabric of all sensations. Any sensation, properly attended to, becomes a gateway into the qualities of pure awareness4. Enchantment is a mode of perception, a style of selfhood made porous5 to the intrinsic qualities of awareness itself6.
VI. Don’t worry about the bewusstseinskultur
There are a few things that still bug me about this new story of wonder that makes it an attunement or opening of cognition to the underlying qualities of pure consciousness. As with disenchanted materialism’s story, it makes wonder something of an individual responsibility. If you are suffering under the crushing weight of disenchantment, simply meditate to unblock the pores of your-self and let the crisp air of pure consciousness in.
That’s fine as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go very far. Cultural patterns of phenomenology are socially constructed. That’s why theorists of enchantment like philosopher Jane Bennett angle their own projects explicitly towards deriving social, political, and ethical commitments from the phenomenology of enchantment. A variant of materialism that takes the phenomenology of enchantment seriously, Bennett writes, would draw from it a “contingent source of receptivity and generosity toward other bodies. In the hem of this matrix, ethical principles, rules, ideals, and sensibilities are born.”
Even Metzinger tends to conclude his papers and books with calls for a Bewusstseinskultur, a culture of consciousness. “One important research target for the future,” he writes, “will be to better understand the mutual relationship between the meditator’s individual phenomenology and the sociological context in which it is embedded.”
When pressed, Metzinger will sometimes take one additional step and say something about the mental toxicity of the attention economy. But you won’t find any actionable policy blueprints for that Bewusstseinskultur.
Which is, of course, fine. That’s not his job. One new research program in consciousness science need not resolve the entire cultural matter of enchantment. But maybe it can help. Bennett, in her more sociologically oriented work, has been criticized for, basically, having too hand-wavey a definition of enchantment.
She tells us: “There is, for most humans, a subdispositional attachment to the abundance of life that is deeply installed in their bodies.” And “Enchantment, that energizing and unsettling sense of the great and incredible fact of existence, reflects a stubborn attachment to life that most bodies seem to possess.”
All well and good. But, as one reviewer put it, her idea of enchantment “seems to encompass all of the ways in which human beings can enjoyably experience their presentness to the world — but if this is enchantment, who has ever denied its existence?”
Maybe MPE research helps pin down what exactly we’re talking about when we talk about enchantment. Maybe it articulates a particularly self-and-neuro-centric account of wonder that theorists of enchantment define their own vision against. Maybe it does nothing at all on the cultural theory front. If all it managed to do was budge the trajectory of the science of consciousness to care as much about refining the depth and quality of data on subjective experience as it does ramping up the magnetic field strength of MRI machines or recreating brains inside of computer simulations, that would still be progress. I’m not sure that it would land Metzinger on the Today Show. But these days, you never know.
Philosopher Jane Bennett has a fun little checklist containing eight symptoms of disenchantment gone wrong:
1. Do you long to be released from “the cold skeletal hands of rational orders, just as completely as from the banality of everyday routine”?
2. Do you lament the fact that it’s a dog-eat-dog world, where the more “the modern capitalist economy follows its own immanent laws, the less accessible it is to any imaginable relationship with a religious ethic of brotherliness”?
3. Is it hard for you to believe in “the primitive image of the world, in which everything was concrete magic” even though you sometimes ache for communal life, for the enlivening “pneuma, which in former times swept through the great communities like a firebrand, welding them together”?
4. Do you see nature and society as complex but systematic orders that are, at least in principle, susceptible to rational decoding?
5. Do you (privately) believe that we are better off than nonmodern peoples precisely because we approach the world with the confidence that “one can, in principle, master all things by calculation”?
6. But does this picture of the world as a “causal mechanism” also leave you wondering about the purpose of it all? In other words, has science stamped “the imprint of meaninglessness” on your life and death?
7. Do you take comfort in the idea of progress, in the possibility of the continual advancement of humankind through reason and science, and yet still experience a nagging sense of futility because anything you achieve “asks to be ‘surpassed’ and outdated” by new and improved ideas, inventions, and institutions?
8. Are mystical experiences and erotic adventures appealing to you because they seem to be gates “into the most irrational and thereby real kernel of life, as compared with the [lifeless] mechanism of rationalization”?
I’m only being a little facetious here. A more clinical NCC example is the 1998 binocular rivalry experiment. A participant lay inside an fMRI scanner while wearing glasses tinted red in one eye and green in the other. They were shown a screen with superimposed images of a face and a house, each tinted to match one of the lenses. The result is that one eye sees the face, and the other sees the house. Consciously, however, the participant doesn’t see both at once. Instead, the competing visual inputs lead to a flipping back and forth, seeing the face for a few seconds, then seeing the house for a few seconds.
Using the fMRI machine, the researchers found that when participants were seeing the face, activity spiked in a brain region known as the fusiform face area (FFA), and dipped in the parahippocampal place area (PPA). When perception flipped to the house, the pattern reversed: activity in the FFA dipped while the PPA spiked, suggesting that the FFA and PPA could be the “neural correlates” of the conscious experience of faces and houses, respectively.
I’m accepting Metzinger’s interpretation of these traditions and their claims here, but I don’t think it’s as clean as he suggests. Many (if not most?) Mahamudra teachers will ascribe qualities like “luminosity” or “clarity” to the nature of the mind. Calling them “qualities” might be a little misleading, but if we can leave our pedantic hats aside, it seems to me that most contemplative traditions — Mahamudra and Dzogchen included — generally admit to there being something like qualities ascribable to the simplest form of conscious experience. Which ultimately dovetails back to better support Metzinger’s own position, that there are qualities (like “wakefulness”) that persist through the most thorough possible deconstruction of conscious experience that leaves consciousness itself intact.
Here’s another instance of this idea, this time from philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart describing a particular kind of wonder:
“Not, that is, a simple twinge of curiosity or bafflement regarding some fact out there not yet in one’s possession: if anything, it is the sudden awareness that no mere fact can possibly be an adequate explanation of the mystery in which one finds oneself immersed at every moment. It is the astonishing recollection of something one has forgotten only because it is always present: a primordial agitation of the mind and will, an abiding amazement that lies just below the surface of conscious thought and that only in very rare instants breaks through into ordinary awareness. It may be that when we are small children, before we have learned how to forget the obvious, we know this wonder in a more constant, innocent, and luminous way, because we are still trustingly open to the sheer inexplicable givenness of the world.
Worth noting that enchantment as “porosity” fits very nicely with Charles Taylor’s idea of disenchantment inaugurating a “buffered” style of selfhood basically made impermeable to outside forces, etc.
One way to understand the basic sales pitch of many contemplative traditions is as making egoic constructs porous enough that the wonderful light of pure consciousness still shines through into our daily business.
Just thinking of you today, wishing with my mind, to be in touch. THANK YOU FOR SENDING. Missing Mildred et al.
This reframes something I’ve long felt but never seen put so sharply. I’ve come to think of the brain, first of all, as a survival filter — it shows us not the world but the thin slice of it useful for staying alive. Your essay follows that thought to its beautiful conclusion: if the filter were lifted, what’s underneath might be closer to wonder than to neutrality. In my own small way I’ve glimpsed this in meditation — not awe added, but the ordinary mental noise subtracted, and something quietly astonished left behind when it goes. Thank you for this — I’ll be sitting with the Metzinger thread for a good while.