What is behind our eyes

Humanities and Social Science
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For an idealist, this question is not especially difficult. The self exists independently of physical reality, and the observer is fundamental. Whatever the strengths or weaknesses of that position, it is not the one that interests me.

My question is different: what is it that sees through our eyes?

The obvious answer is, “It is you.” Yet that can’t be right. The eyes are biological sensors. They deliver information, whatever is behind doesn"t have eyes.

If we continue looking behind the eyes, we do not find another observer. We find only biological processes.

My intuition is that the brain consists of many biological commissioners. Each commissioner is capable of commissioning a complete account of the present moment—an account of the world, of the body, and of the self within that world. These accounts overlap, differ, reinforce one another, or conflict, but each is internally coherent enough to stand on its own.

There is no central editor choosing between them.

Instead, the accounts exist within the same neural economy. Those that fit most effectively with ongoing neural activity naturally become stronger. They recruit other compatible accounts, reinforcing one another through ordinary biological processes. Others gradually fade. This is not competition in the ordinary sense, because nothing intends to win. It is simply the consequence of how networks of neurons stabilise around coherent patterns of activity.

The account that becomes most stable is experienced as the present moment. A moment later, it becomes memory. The continuous succession of these stabilised accounts gives rise to what our experience

The important point is that there is never a single observer behind the eyes. There is only a dispersed process of biological commissioning, in which complete accounts are continually formed, strengthened, weakened, and replaced. The experience of “I” is not the author of these accounts. It is the account that, for the moment, has achieved the greatest coherence.

Perhaps truth is not even the primary criterion. The accounts that endure are ordinarily those that best anticipate what happens next. Their value lies less in faithfully representing reality than in generating successful predictions that guide future action.

Slight edit
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I would add that memory, habit and conditioning play a role too in the sense of self identity, patterns of behaviour. Strip these and the I becomes pure consciousness without judgement but just pure perception. As we experience the world new views are assimilated and integrated as long as they are in congruence with reality.

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Thanks for that comment. Yes the self is the whole of our lived experience.

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I think of it as a committee which gathers the info from all the departments and presents its best guess to the self. Something like that.

The other day, I reached into the frig for a grape but accidentally picked up a grape tomato.

Boy, was my brain confused for a minute there when I bit into it. I think the different departments were giving the committee contrary reports or something.

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I like it. Both are metaphors. Yours has the advantage of simplicity. However it leaves in place an internal observer. What’s behind their eyes?

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Behind the eyes? Remember that the brain is also executes and acts sometimes this can happen with muscle memory at other times there’s no such constraints however inhibitions serve a purpose too.

The true I is undiluted awareness it can be accessed when the various layers of personality are removed

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Surely you are the true I. Not something that looks out of the eyes but the one with eyes. Inside are only processes.

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Yes background processes or imprinted ideas. These can be superimposed but the I remains its view just remains obscured. If one wants to remove this obscurity and wants to view things as they are they must dissolve the ego. The ego can be an issue as it wants and desires things although there’s nothing wrong with that and can be healthy

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The process that created it maybe.

I wouldn’t know how to define it, but I think of it as some kind of narration. Metzinger, in The Ego Tunnel, tries to help me understand it, but I’m a bit lost. It’s a model created by the mind and then convinced that it is a being–something like that.

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I agree with much of what you say. But marriages and numbers are also conventional. I’m reluctant to call them unreal.

The self is an institution. Bodies are trained into time-binding loci of responsibility. Bodies are trained to say “I” and drag the past of that body’s doings along with that body.

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I don’t think the eyes are a separate thing from “me”. I am the whole shebang. So it’s not something seeing through my eyes.

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Yes only process behind.

I haven’t read Metzinger. I will add to my reading list, which since I Joined the forum has become impossibly long.

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Yes there are processes behind the eyes but no separate observer. To the extent there is an observer its indistguishable from the brain and the body.

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14

Holy cow, you ain’t kidding!

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I’m not sure what it would mean to claim that there is a being back there. How would we define such a thing?

I discount every prophet and holy book I’ve so far met, so I’d want someone to give me a secular or technical definition for the being. And I don’t know how anyone could do that.

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This is all very Humean. Reminds me that our neuropsychological accounts haven’t progressed very far beyond mid 1700’s philosophy.

“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.”

“I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.

That’s not to say philosophy has not ventured into territory well beyond Hume, only that neuroscience lags behind the philosophy.

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That’s a bit like saying there’s no such thing as marriage or debt. Practical life is full of conventional entities that turn out to be extremely important to us.

We might say the self is “virtual.” Well so is an algorithm. I could even make the case that all entities are “virtual” in a certain sense of the word.

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I’m with you. I’d put it this way: my “consciousness” is the being or the presence of the entire world — the whole shebang — from the point of view of the organism that has my name.

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I am not sure what you mean. Please explain

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I haven’t claimed otherwise

In my reply to you I said that the self is indistinguable from brain and body. Whether that means literally identical or something subtly less than that is for me an open philosophical question. I still lie in bed in the morning and say time to haul myself out of bed body and brain. Its an emergent feature of brain activity instantiated in neurons but it is concerned with their whole.

However, there is no regression to an inner observer. No ghost in the machine. Inside there is process.