In the Moment

March 30, 2007 1:35 AM

Consciousness is a mystery, and Paul Broks thinks Nicholas Humphrey (not to mention jazz guitarist Pat Martino) may have some answers.
posted by cgc373 (21 comments total)

About Pat Martino, Broks says:

I still have my hair, and when I recovered I took my feeble lungs, and Seeing Red, to Philadelphia. I was going to meet a man who, more than any other I know, lives absorbed in the present moment. My film director friend Ian Knox and I drove from New York and, close on midnight, arrived at the home of Pat Martino, the subject of the film we were making. As a young jazz guitar virtuoso starting out alongside John Coltrane, Pat was one of the finest musicians of his generation. Insect-thin and fastidiously dressed in black with cropped white hair, he is cadaverously handsome and unsettlingly serene. We sent out for Chinese food and got talking. With a catalogue of successful albums to his name, and on the brink of a major new recording deal, Pat became seriously ill. He was diagnosed with manic depressive disorder, but then the seizures started. The brain scans revealed a large arteriovenous malformation in his left temporal lobe. The surgery that saved his life wiped his memory. He had no idea who he was and didn't recognise his parents. The amnesia ripped selfhood from his brain. Nothing mattered; life was meaningless; he was nobody. They tried to coax him back to being the "somebody" he once was. His father would play Pat's old records at full volume—an intolerable torment. Pat could stand it no longer and left. He drifted, for a time living in Japan and then Amsterdam. He was recalled to Philadelphia on the death of his mother. His father died soon afterwards, and it was too much. Pat's life fell apart, and he ended up once more on a psychiatric ward. But it was there that an astute psychiatrist gave him a primitive computer to play with. It contained a music program, and Pat began to play, like a child with a toy. There was nothing to achieve, nowhere to go, forward or backward, nothing to do except play. It was an epiphany. It was like being born again, he says, but "living entirely in the moment." The music mattered; life was meaningful; he was somebody. And with music as the golden thread, he began to weave a new version of himself. He took up the guitar again, studying technique, via tuition videos, from a great teacher—his former self. Pat's memory is now substantially recovered, but he still has a residual, Zen-like focus on the "now." He claims to have a heightened sense of aliveness, of selfhood, of the sheer privilege of being alive. In the Moment is what we're calling the film.

posted by cgc373 at 1:36 AM on March 30, 2007

Wow. Amazing. Thanks.
posted by pjern at 1:43 AM on March 30, 2007

More like Colin McGinn rejects the possibility of an answer, no?

Interesting that before his aneurysm, Martino recorded an album called Consciousness.
posted by painquale at 3:50 AM on March 30, 2007

I saw Pat Martino with my old man about a year ago. That man has some fast fingers! I was surprised and awed that someone who had been playing shows since he was 16 could still play like that after 50 years...then my dad told me about his illness as described above and I was completely blown away. Watching that guy play was truly an honor.
posted by baphomet at 5:09 AM on March 30, 2007

Wow, am I an idiot.

The book review is of a book by Nicholas Humphrey, not Colin McGinn. Man, oh man, do I hate not being able to edit my posts after they're up there.
posted by cgc373 at 6:27 AM on March 30, 2007

Mod note: fixed the post
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 6:35 AM on March 30, 2007

If I had to pick between keeping Pat Martino or the Liberty Bell in Philly, bye-bye bell. He is an amazing cat.
posted by Mister_A at 6:40 AM on March 30, 2007

Whenever I hear the word qualia, I reach for my gun. Anyone who finds such concepts appealing should read Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained, which, while badly written, does, in fact, explain consciousness. Anyone who disagrees with him should have a good meal, get some sleep, and then make a better effort at trying to understand what he says. Repeatedly, if necessary.

Yes, I'm having a shitty day week.
posted by Anything at 6:46 AM on March 30, 2007

Pat Martino is brilliant. I am blown away, because I have some onf his older albums, but I never heard this story. I am stunned that he had to basically relearn the guitar.

He's also a philly icon, which is saying something when you considering the old and new players still floating around that city. If you are ever in Philly, get thee to Alex's Jazz Underground - Bruno and lot of these other guys sometimes just drop in when they aren't performing (or they used to, I haven't lived there for a few years- I hope it's still there).
posted by Pastabagel at 8:00 AM on March 30, 2007

>>And in the process, I realised two things: that I didn't exactly know what I believed and that I didn't much care.

>Probably, most everyone would discover this also if they could look sincerely.

Why is that? I've looked sincerely and have a decent idea of what I believe (about what "I" is/am) and I care, in that it tends to matter with respect to morality and philosophy.
posted by Bort at 8:58 AM on March 30, 2007

For those of you who might have missed it, Douglas Hofstadter's new book on consciousness was released this week. I haven't read it yet, but I'm looking forward to it.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 10:35 AM on March 30, 2007

Exciting post cgc373, thanks so much!

Now I'm curious to read more by Nicholas Humphrey. Here's his site. He has a number of excellent, stimulating, well-written papers online. Worth reading.

If the X factor has to do with anything, he says, it has to do with time. Phenomenal consciousness is about the temporal "depth" of the present moment. The subjective "now" is, paradoxically, extended in time: it is "temporally thick." We experience it not as an infinitely thin sliver of time but as a moment in which times present, past and future overlap. We travel through life as in a "time ship," which "has a prow and stern and room inside for us to move around."

Many of the concepts that Nicholas Humphrey discusses about conciousness jibe with what I studied in the theory of mind classes with Geshe Ngawang Dhargey at the Library of Tibetan works and Archives and written about in his book, Tibetan Tradition of Mental Development.
posted by nickyskye at 10:51 AM on March 30, 2007 [1 favorite]

I've been using my brief period of meditation practice as an opportunity to introspectively observe my own mental processes, and have come up with a number of interesting observations and philosphical questions. The excerpts from the Humphrey book in the article parallel quite closely with my own ideas. I definitely want to check this out. I knew the Hofstadter book was coming out, and I want to read that, too.
posted by ken_zoan at 11:14 AM on March 30, 2007

For those of you who might have missed it, Douglas Hofstadter's new book on consciousness was released this week. I haven't read it yet, but I'm looking forward to it.

I'm just about finished with it and I'm pretty disappointed. It's no GEB, not by a long shot. It's not even on par with The Mind's I. Save $10 and order it from Amazon as opposed to getting it from the book store.
posted by Bort at 12:54 PM on March 30, 2007

What I cannot wrap my feeble little brain around is the notion of consciousness AFTER DEATH.
Consciousness during sentient life is fraught with enough paradox; how can or does my "Dizzy-ness", contained (perhaps, debatedly) in the meat of my actual brain continue when the meat is dead?
Apologies for the derail.
posted by Dizzy at 3:18 PM on March 30, 2007

(And I'm not asking for any kind soul to definitively solve this perpetually unsolvable conundrum, I'm just saying this issue is specifically interesting to me.
But if you have insight, fire away!)
posted by Dizzy at 3:44 PM on March 30, 2007

B-han:
Would you happen to have a video that might further illustrate said assertion?
Please?
posted by Dizzy at 4:04 PM on March 30, 2007

Need more tinfoil.
Please advise.
posted by Dizzy at 5:26 PM on March 30, 2007

One can certainly argue with Dennett's conclusions (ie, the Consciousness Explained Away crowd), but I have never before seen anyone claim he writes poorly. The man writes with a diamantine clarity that burns his argument into one's mind.

I am looking forward to reading Humphrey's and Hofstader's books-- but I just had to express my shock that someone would both agree with Dennett and find him a poor writer before my consciousness exploded.

I think the notion that consciousness exists primarily to make us want to continue to exist passionately makes an enormous amount of sense.
posted by Maias at 7:46 PM on March 31, 2007

I think tying conciousness to a sense of self is a common error. Each of us has both but not always at the same time. Some of my most intense experiences happened without an "I" experiencing them in the moment. After they passed I claimed them as my own and relate my experiences to others and to myself.
posted by pointilist at 10:24 PM on March 31, 2007

Maias, I didn't like how extensively he used this something of a bait-and-switch type argument, where he first goes to great lengths explaining some viewpoint, implying that he agrees with it, and then pulls an "ah-ha, but it ain't so!". I ended up having to spend (hyperbole alert:) like a half an hour on every paragraph because I distrusted every word. I guess you could argue for the usefulness of such skepticism, but when it starts to influence almost trivially true matters that are not relevant to the core questions, it gets tiresome. A perpetual april fool's day.

I don't have the book at hand, and it's been quite a while since I've read it, so I don't remember the details, but one other issue I had with the book was that he spent a lot of pages speculating on an experiment that might possibly be a problem to his argument, and then finished by pointing out that the experiment has never been repeated. The editor should've sent him to the lab.

I have no problem with his style as such, and I think the book is extremely important.
posted by Anything at 6:37 AM on April 1, 2007