What is a good state of consciousness?

Neuroethics is important but is not enough by itself. I propose a new
branch of applied ethics—consciousness ethics. In traditional ethics, we
ask, “What is a good action?” Now we must also ask, “What is a good
state of consciousness?” I am fully aware that a host of theoretical complications
arises. I will present no extended discussion here, but my intuition
is that a desirable state of consciousness should satisfy at least
three conditions: It should minimize suffering, in humans and all other
beings capable of suffering; it should ideally possess an epistemic potential
(that is, it should have a component of insight and expanding knowledge);
and it should have behavioral consequences that increase the
probability of the occurrence of future valuable types of experience.
Consciousness ethics is not about phenomenal experience alone. There
is a wider context.
Consciousness ethics would complement traditional ethics by focusing
on those acts whose primary goal is the alteration of one’s own
experiential states or those of other persons. Given the new potentials
for such acts, as well as the risks associated with them, and given our
lack of moral intuition in this area, the task is to assess the ethical value
of various kinds of subjective experience as such. You might call this
the rational search for a normative psychology or normative neurophenomenology.
If consciousness technology arises from the naturalistic
turn in the image of Homo sapiens, we must deal with normative issues.
The development of consciousness ethics would allow us to focus the
moral debates on the wide range of problems created by the historic
transition under way. As soon as we concern ourselves with what a human
being is as well as with what a human being ought to become, the
central issue can be expressed in a single question: What is a good state
of consciousness?
The Ego Tunnel evolved as a biological system of representation and
information-processing that is part of a social network of communicating
Ego Tunnels. Now we find ourselves caught in the midst of a dense
mesh of technical systems of representation and information-processing:
With the advent of radio, television, and the Internet, the Ego Tunnel became embedded in a global data cloud characterized by rapid growth,
increasing speed, and an autonomous dynamic of its own. It dictates the
pace of our lives. It enlarges our social environment in an unprecedented
manner. It has begun to reconfigure our brains, which are desperately
trying to adapt to this new jungle—the information jungle, an
ecological niche unlike any we have ever inhabited. Perhaps our body
perception will change as we learn to control multiple avatars in multiple
virtual realities, embedding our conscious self into entirely new
kinds of sensorimotor loops. Conceivably, a growing number of social
interactions may be avatar-to-avatar, and we already know that social
interactions in cyberspace increase the sense of presence more strongly
than higher-resolution graphics ever could. We may finally come to understand
what a lot of our conscious social life has been all along—an
interaction between images, a highly mediated process in which mental
models of persons begin to causally influence one another. We may
come to see communication as a process of estimating and controlling
dynamical internal models in other people’s brains.
For those of us intensively working with it, the Internet has already
become a part of our self-model. We use it for external memory storage,
as a cognitive prosthesis, and for emotional autoregulation. We think
with the help of the Internet, and it assists us in determining our desires
and goals. We are learning to multitask, our attention span is becoming
shorter, and many of our social relationships are taking on a strangely
disembodied character. “Online addiction” has become a technical term
in psychiatry. Many young people (including an increasing number of
university students) suffer from attention deficits and are no longer able
to focus on old-fashioned, serial symbolic information; they suddenly
have difficulty reading ordinary books. At the same time, one must acknowledge
the wealth of new information and the increased flexibility
and autonomy the Internet has given us. Clearly, the integration of hundreds
of millions of human brains (and the Ego Tunnels those brains
create) into ever new medial environments has already begun to change
the structure of conscious experience itself. Where this process will lead
us is unforeseeable. What should we do about this development? From the perspective of
consciousness ethics, the answer is simple: We should understand that
the new media are also consciousness technologies, and we should ask
ourselves again what a good state of consciousness would be.
A related problem we face is the management of our attention. The
ability to attend to our environment, to our own feelings, and to those of
others is a naturally evolved feature of the human brain. Attention is a finite
commodity, and it is absolutely essential to living a good life. We
need attention in order to truly listen to others—and even to ourselves.
We need attention to truly enjoy sensory pleasures, as well as for efficient
learning. We need it in order to be truly present during sex or to be
in love or when we are simply contemplating nature. Our brains can
generate only a limited amount of this precious resource every day.
Today, the advertisement and entertainment industries are attacking
the very foundations of our capacity for experience, drawing us into the
vast and confusing media jungle. They are trying to rob us of as much of
our scarce resource as possible, and they are doing so in ever more persistent
and intelligent ways. Of course, they are increasingly making use
of the new insights into the human mind offered by cognitive and brain
science to achieve their goals (“neuromarketing” is one of the ugly new
buzzwords). We can see the probable result in the epidemic of attention-
deficit disorder in children and young adults, in midlife burnout, in
rising levels of anxiety in large parts of the population. If I am right that
consciousness is the space of attentional agency, and if (as discussed in
chapter 4) it is also true that the experience of controlling and sustaining
your focus of attention is one of the deeper layers of phenomenal selfhood,
then we are currently witnessing not only an organized attack on
the space of consciousness per se but a mild form of depersonalization.
New medial environments may create a new form of waking consciousness
that resembles weakly subjective states—a mixture of dreaming,
dementia, intoxication, and infantilization.
My proposal for countering this attack on our reserves of attention is
to introduce classes in meditation in our high schools. The young should
be made aware of the limited nature of their capacity for attention, and they need to learn techniques to enhance their mindfulness and maximize
their ability to sustain it—techniques that will be of help in the battle
against the commercial robbers of our attention (and that will not
incidentally undercut the temptations to indulge in mind-altering
drugs). These meditation lessons should of course be free of any religious
tinge—no candles, no incense, no bells. They might be a part of
gym classes; the brain, too, is a part of the body—a part that can be
trained and must be tended to with care.
In the new era of neuropedagogy, now that we know more about the
critical formative phases of the human brain, shouldn’t we make use of
this knowledge to maximize the autonomy of future adults? In particular,
shouldn’t we introduce our children to those states of consciousness
we believe to be valuable and teach them how to access and cultivate
them at an early age? Education is not only about academic achievement.
Recall that one positive aspect of the new image of Homo sapiens
is its recognition of the vastness of our phenomenal-state space. Why
not teach our children to make use of this vastness in a better way than
their parents did—a way that guarantees and stabilizes their mental
health, enriches their subjective lives, and grants them new insights?
For instance, the sorts of happiness associated with intense experiences
of nature or with bodily exercise and physical exertion are generally
regarded as positive states of consciousness, as is the more subtle
inner perception of ethical coherence. If modern neuroscience tells us
that access to these types of subjective experience is best acquired during
certain critical periods in child development, we should systematically
make use of this knowledge—both in school and at home.
Likewise, if mindfulness and attention management are desiderata, we
should ask what neuroscience can contribute to their implementation in
the educational system. Every child has a right to be provided with a
“neurophenomenological toolbox” in school; at minimum this should
include two meditation techniques, one silent and one in motion; two
standard techniques for deep relaxation, such as autogenic training and
progressive muscle relaxation; two techniques for improving dream recall
and inducing lucidity; and perhaps a course in what one might call “media hygiene.” If new possibilities for manipulation threaten our children’s
mental health, we must equip them with efficient instruments to
defend themselves against new dangers, increasing their autonomy.
We may well develop better meditative techniques than the Tibetan
monks discussed in chapter 2. If dream research comes up with risk-free
ways of improving dream recall and mastering the art of lucid dreaming,
shouldn’t we make this knowledge available to our children? What
about controlled out-of-body experiences? If research into mirror neurons
clarifies the ways in which children develop empathy and social
awareness, shouldn’t we make use of this knowledge in our schools?
How will we conduct these discussions in open societies in the postmetaphysical
age? The point about consciousness ethics is not one
about creating yet another academic discipline. Much more modestly, it
is about creating a very first platform for the normative discussions that
have now become necessary. As we slowly move into the third phase of
the Consciousness Revolution, these discussions must be open to experts
and laypeople alike. If, given the naturalistic turn in the image of
human beings, we manage to develop a rational form of consciousness
ethics, then in this very process we might generate a cultural context
that could fill the vacuum created by the advances of the cognitive and
neurosciences. Societies are self-modeling entities too.