Here be Dragons

Mapping the Inner Wilderness

“The map is not the territory”. Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity, 1933

“There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms”. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 1896

A dragon-like lizard: ancient, watchful, neither hostile nor tame. Photograph by the author

Maps and dragons

Every age has its maps, depending on what has been explored and what is left uncharted.

I have always liked maps. Maps reassure us. They suggest orientation, location, progress, mastery. They imply that with sufficient patience and precision, the unknown can be rendered knowable. As a psychiatrist, I have spent most of my working life listening to people describe inner landscapes that do not easily lend themselves to measurement or diagrams.

Early cartographers drew fantastical creatures and mythological beings on maps for decorative purposes, but sometimes as warnings of potential dangers in uncharted areas. The phrase Here be dragons (Latin: Hic Sunt Dracones) appears in two early 16^th century globes depicting the world map: the Hunt-Lenox Globe and the Ostrich Egg Globe. Variations of the warning have appeared on maps before and after, sometimes based on the known presence of beasts and serpents, and other times from the fertile imaginations of returning seafarers, embellished further by illustrators. In modern times, Firefox 3, the web browser used it as a warning before users could alter advanced internal settings. “Here be dragons” did not necessarily mean that dragons existed. It meant that we do not know what lies beyond this point.

Mapping the brain

A misted lake: what is visible rests upon what cannot yet be seen. Photograph by the author.

The brain is full of uncharted territories. The subcortex, the area beneath the cortex (outermost layer), was often described as “terra Incognita” (literally unchartered land). The deepest structures of the brain remain largely unknown, and at the microscopic level, mapping all possible connections between 86 billion brain cells – often estimated to be up to a quadrillion (1,000 trillion, or 1 followed by 15 zeros; some estimates are lower, 100 trillion) - is beyond current technological ability.

I was at the start of my surgical training when CT scanners were first introduced in India. It was revolutionary. Living brains could be studied in a non-invasive manner, replacing the earlier crude, painful and potentially lethal procedures. When I switched to psychiatry three years later, we convinced ourselves that we would finally see mental disorders as brain conditions and discover structural brain changes for conditions such as schizophrenia. That we would no longer be the butt of jokes of our surgical and medical colleagues. We would become ‘proper doctors’ rather than the oddities who ask their patients about incestuous desires in infancy (the Freudian Oedipal Complex). It would be the end of cruel jokes- “what is the difference between a psychiatrist and his patient? The psychiatrist has the keys”.

The heady intoxication of those days, anticipating easy answers, has passed in psychiatry. However, the promise has not been fulfilled as expected. Advances in brain imaging have not led to commensurate advances in our understanding of the causes of mental disorders or in increasing our therapeutic armamentarium. There have been modest gains, but no fundamental breakthroughs and certainly no paradigm shifts.

For imaging neuroscientists, it has been a period of enormous funding boost and prolific output of research papers. Beautiful high-resolution pictures, marvels of medicine and photography, litter the best journals. We now observe the living brain in extraordinary detail. We explore minute structures, watch neurones fire, networks organise, and regions activate and deactivate from moment to moment within a living brain. These are real achievements that have changed clinical practice in several brain conditions, from epilepsy to tumours.

Consciousness (un)explained

However, a central question remains unanswered: how does the brain produce experience? The more precisely we observe the brain, the more consciousness retreats from explanation.

Daniel Dennett, a leading neurocognitive scientist and philosopher, argues in his book Consciousness Explained (1991) that all mental states, including consciousness, are nothing but material (physical) processes. There is no body-mind split and no central observer; rather, what we call experience is a post-hoc narrative to explain parallel competing processes in the brain. He states: “consciousness is not a thing in the brain, but a process - or rather, many processes without a centre”. He completely dismisses the concept of qualia - a term used in philosophy to refer to subjective conscious experience - as a confused, incoherent, and contradictory idea that serves no useful scientific purpose.

Dennett explains consciousness by explaining it away.

Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) rejected the idea of mind as an entity. He argued that there was no “ghost in the machine”. To look for the mind was like looking for the “team spirit” in a game of cricket. In Ryle’s view, the concept of mind was a “category fallacy”. He considered philosophy to be akin to “conceptual cartography”. A villager may know his village (the mind) intimately and yet struggle to map it as an abstraction. Philosophers were cartographers creating maps, charting the territory of abstract concepts rather than studying mental objects.

Like Dennett, Ryle redescribed experience but did not explain it. He told us what consciousness is not, but not what it is.

The exclusion of consciousness from our inner world found its extreme position in B F Skinner’s behaviourism. In his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) he considered all inner experience as irrelevant. Humans are machines that respond to contingencies (punishments and rewards) and are conditioned by reinforcement schedules. Mental states are inherently unscientific because they are unobservable. He wrote: “what we call intention, feeling or thought, adds nothing to the prediction of behaviour”. Skinner’s model was efficient in explaining habits, addictions, and simple learning which are all forms of stimulus-response conditioning. But it completely bypassed meaning, suffering, creativity, and above all, experience and awareness.

Skinner treated the mind as irrelevant.

The limits of explanation

Each of these positions redraws the map. None of them enters the territory.

How does matter give rise to experience? Does observing neuronal activity when someone sees a red object explain the source of the subjective redness of the red object? We can map the electrical signals that result in pain, but does that tell us what it is like to feel pain? Love, grief, and joy cannot be dismissed as post-hoc narratives, fallacious categories, or predetermined responses of a programmed machine.

Materialistic explanations of the mind and consciousness take a constrained and limited approach. They use examples of easy problems of consciousness with clearly laid-out visual tracks to explain visual perception or standardised tests to explain memory. They map what can be mapped and describe functions and mechanisms. They are like a man looking for his lost ring in the garden. He knows that he left it on the side table in his bedroom. But his bedroom is dark. He is looking where it is bright. Neuroscientists go where the light is, not in the black box that is consciousness, perhaps where enlightenment resides.

Phenomenal consciousness, that is, subjective experience or qualia, remains unexplained. This is the “hard problem of consciousness” a term popularised by David Chalmers in his book The Conscious Mind (1996). In his 1995 paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, he stated, “the hard problem… is the hard problem of consciousness. When we think and perceive, there is a whirl of information processing, but there is also a subjective aspect…Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information processing, we have visual and auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all”?

Thomas Nagel’s short essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” remains one of the clearest statements of the problem. Nagel’s point is simple yet devastating. An organism is conscious if there is something it is like to be that organism. No amount of objective knowledge about bat brains, bat behaviour, or bat echolocation will tell us what it is like to be a bat. The subjective character of experience is not missing information. It is information of a different kind.

This is not a failure of neuroscience or philosophy. It is built into the limits of explanation.

Wilderness seen, rather than conquered. Photograph by the author

Gungey ka Gud (a mute tasting jaggery)

The Indian phrase Gungey ka Gud (a mute tasting jaggery) is a fitting metaphor for the hard problem of consciousness. Someone who has never tasted jaggery cannot imagine it, derive its taste from knowing its chemical composition, or grasp it through analogy. A mute person who has tasted it knows it completely but cannot express it. Even if the mute person could suddenly speak, he would still struggle to convey its sweetness or the experience of its crumbliness in words. Words are not the limitation here. It is the limits of what can be described in words.

Contemplative traditions go even further, often refusing to provide explanations altogether. In Zen, when asked about enlightenment, a teacher does not explain. He may raise a finger, hold up a flower, pour tea, or remain silent. In one well-known story, the Buddha holds up a flower before a silent assembly. Nothing is said. Something is transmitted.

The Upanishads speak in the same register: “That which cannot be seen by the eye, but by which the eye sees. Know that alone to be Brahman.” Master Eckhart said in one of his sermons, “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one, one seeing, one knowing, one love”.

Awareness is not an object we can point to. It is that by which pointing is possible at all.

This is where the map must end. Neuroscience can tell us endlessly more about the conditions under which experience arises. It can and should continue doing so. However, awareness itself is not waiting to be discovered inside the brain, like a hidden organ. It is not something that we possess. It is something we are.

To insist on explaining it as an object is to commit a category mistake: to search for the dragon by dissecting the map. Some things can only be met, not explained. Music must be heard. Sweetness must be tasted. Awareness must be lived.

At the edge of every neuroscientific map, honestly drawn, there should be a familiar inscription: Here be dragons.

A leopard half-concealed: what may be seen only when we stop hunting. Photograph by the author.