Previously on Kingdom of Mind...

In Part One, we introduced Turing's "Imitation Game," Moravec's Paradox, and Minsky vs HAL 9000.

In Part Two, we introduced a working definition of Intelligence and the Bitter Lesson.

In Part Three, we introduced the Child-King and the Illusion of Sovereignty.

In Part Four, we introduced 'stepping up' from Language and 'stepping down' from Consciousness.

Katabasis: A Journey to the Underworld

Prometheus was sentenced to have his liver pecked out by an eagle each day, and each day it would grow back. His crime was stealing fire for the benefit of mankind. But only through conflation does the Prometheus myth exemplify Katabasis (a heroic journey to and from the underworld). Prometheus stole fire from up high in Olympus, not down in Hades; I lost a third of my liver just once, and I did not bring back any gifts for mankind. No moment of my self-inflicted journey should be considered heroic.

Still unable to breathe, I reached to my lower back, expecting to feel dirt and the borders of seeping guts where I had been cut in half. After a mortal wound, there can be time to horror at your own carnage. I had no sensation in my back, but my hand was feeling an externally intact body. I felt I was cut in half, but concluded it was only inside. I thought, "If a helicopter could whisk me off to the ER in the next few minutes... modern medicine has a shot at saving my life."

My riding buddies continued riding, jumping, and successfully not running over the crumpled body on the ground, whom they assumed "just needed a bit more time to catch his breath." I could feel blood filling my abdominal cavity. After about 10 minutes, they took my request to "please get an ambulance—I ruptured my stomach" seriously. (Mobile phones were not a thing yet.) It took a fast rider over an hour to ride through the desert to base camp and then return with a pickup truck. It was another hour of rough terrain to the nearest road. And then an hour by road toward the Mexican border to find a town. There was discussion that maybe the best course of action was for me to sleep it off in the comfort of a van and head back to a hospital closer to home. I was definitely at the bleeding edge of shock.

Refusing to pass out, refusing to give way to shock, and refusing to sit back and be cared for, was required to avoid death, and I realized it. The Kingdom was in shambles and the Agents called for the Child-King to be front and center.

This might be the first part where recognizing the Spectator aspect of Consciousness becomes apparent. The 'I' in "I have to stay conscious" kind of gives away a state where 'I' recognizes the rest of Consciousness (whatever that is) is not fully functioning. And when the story pivots, and you are Humpty Dumpty, then they better call out all the King's Horses and All the King's Men, and do a far better job than in the rhyme.

At the ER they quickly inserted a catheter and the bag immediately filled with blood. Then they stuck a comically big syringe into my abdomen.

"Diagnostic peritoneal lavage (DPL) is an invasive emergency procedure used to detect hemoperitoneum and help determine the need for laparotomy following abdominal trauma."

"We are sorry sir, but apparently you have internal bleeding which will require emergency surgery."
"No kidding, let's go!"

Under Anesthesia

For a while, the anesthetized Child-King was in exile while the Kingdom took a further beating.

When I regained consciousness after surgery, I found dozens of metal staples holding my abdomen together, from my breastbone all the way to my pelvis. The surgeon showed pictures of the operation to my friend. "Dude," he told me soon after, "all of your guts were laid out on either side of your body. ALL your guts!" Apparently, my self-assessment of "being cut in half" was fairly accurate. They had to remove my gall bladder, one-third of my liver, and install multiple drains for the remaining damaged organs. To move fluids out of my body, I had a catheter, a temporary colostomy, a mechanically pumped drain on the left side of my abdomen and a clear rubber ball drain on the right. To put fluids back in, I had IVs in both arms. At this point, I was determined to make a rapid recovery and head home in a few days. That didn't happen.

A Few Weeks Later

The injuries had been extensive, and the operation lengthy and involved. Sometimes when you take everything apart, it doesn't go back together correctly. That was my case. My intestines were kinked so that nothing could pass through. My liver was extremely agitated and pumped out bile, heading for storage in a gall bladder that no longer existed. The bile would load up in my abdomen, and begin tearing out the staples. In response, they inserted an NG (Nasal-Gastric) tube, which is a plastic hose the diameter of your finger, up my nose and then snaked it down into my stomach. The NG tube was hooked to another pump to pull out bile that had backed up into my stomach, alleviating the overextension and tearing.

Child-King—Unlicensed Vocational Nurse

With shift changes each day, new nurses were continually introduced to the locations and maintenance of my various tubes, pumps, and collection devices. The word-of-mouth instructions from nurse to nurse was not confidence-inspiring. The Child-King was petitioned to take over. If a machine failed or was not emptied on time, bad things would happen, like bile would overflow from my stomach until I vomited out the slimy green tube still inserted up my nose...in front of visitors. So to properly address the continual staff turnover, I memorized all the technical names and maintenance timing for each part of my newly extended body. There was now new territory in the Kingdom and no lower-level Dukes or Barons had been assigned. This job fell directly to the Child-King, who was becoming more overwhelmed by the hour. This gets to the part of the story that relates to deconstructing Consciousness.

Canine Continuity

A decline in my overall health started with the accident, but cascaded precipitously downward as fluids were drained or vomited from my body. I also suffered from pain-induced insomnia, and/or narcotic-induced nightmares. I dropped over 40 lbs of lean mass and looked like a picture at the edge of starvation...because I was dying.

Another tube was inserted through my chest into my aorta to deliver liquid protein. This bypassed the wreckage of a GI tract normally needed to process nutrition. Nevertheless, the Child-King had already begun to seriously fade. The "Helpless Spectator," the remaining sense of 'I,' was still front and center for the horror show, but preferred periodic Demerol-induced breaks. Memory was still being recorded; unlike its later failure during concussion. The rest of the Kingdom was keeping the lungs and heart working, and the King's Men were repairing damage where possible. Meanwhile, the Spectator got to witness the degradation of a diminishing Consciousness.

Watching TV seems as low-effort an activity as possible, and yet there is much more going on in our minds. A pet dog or cat may look at the screen, and perhaps even associate the images with the creatures they depict. Without whatever component is responsible for the Illusion of Continuity, I watched TV in a manner I assumed was similar to how a dog would watch TV. The image motion all made sense, as did various angles of the same scene. But when the scene shifted to a new time or place, nothing made any sense. There was no higher-level story being filled in by separate events. Without an Illusion of Continuity, the Spectator gave up Television watching altogether.

ICU Psychosis

First Aid instruction will say that if impaled by some foreign object, like a tree branch, secure the object in place and seek medical attention to remove it safely. Is that what you are going to do? Hell no. You are going to YANK IT OUT if at all possible.

We have a very strong sense of the borders of our body, and go into high alert at the first sign of intrusion. The Kingdom has a standing army and instructions for how to handle these breaches. Expelling invaders does not involve Consciousness. It's on the list of "Easy Things" handled via evolved instinct.

If you were on the street and a stranger stuck an IV needle in your arm, you would not ask, "Hey, is this a surprise medical treatment?" You would immediately yank it out, yell, and possibly much more. There is no Conscious decision about this reaction.

Consciousness comes into play the same way it does with SCUBA diving. It's there to override your instinct to bolt to the surface and kill yourself. In a hospital setting, it is your Consciousness that must ultimately accept IV's, catheters, and other medical body invasions. If the Child-King is deposed, the rest of the Kingdom can panic and start to pull things out. It is referred to as ICU Psychosis or ICU Delirium. It can also manifest in a strange and opposite manner.

In my case, Consciousness had a few weeks of incorporating the various intrusions into a new body-image. If these were not cared for, I would hurt, and if they were yanked out, I could die. Much of this was considered new territory versus an invasion. Unfortunately, as overall body vitality fell, the Child-King was deposed. Remaining agents and the Spectator tried to make sense of a body that spread beyond both sides of the hospital bed and across tubes to machines with sensor lights beyond.

When I asked the night nurse why they didn't just admit that they had repurposed my body to send encoded messages, she introduced me to the term 'ICU Psychosis.' Obviously more than just the Spectator was present in order to have such a conversation. But from memory it does not seem the normal Child-King was presiding. More bizarre and frightening than that is what happened after I would fall asleep. All previous history would be lost. Upon waking, only the disoriented Spectator would preside. And the core question would not be "where am I?" or "who am I?" The 'Boot-Up-Sequence' for initial Consciousness is "WHAT am I?"

Some period of time, maybe an hour, would be spent trying to move portions of my body. "What parts are me, and how do I move them?" Some parts of the body-image would move, and some (like the tubes) would remain paralyzed. It was actually terrifying and created a reluctance to go to sleep, only to wake up and have to "Reboot Again."

The initialization question "WHAT am I?" was not an internal verbalization or image. It's at a more fundamental level. It may be an aspect of a Spectator that finds itself only with default settings. It could be a highly conserved instinct to be run once immediately after birth. Human children seem to spend a long time answering this question, and prey animals seem to be born and start figuring it out right away. Computers have an initialization sequence, an IPL (Initial Programn Load) or BIOS, that is responsible for 'booting-up' the initial Operating System to hardware relationship. The BIOS allows advances to be made in future operating system capabilities or reconfigurations of future hardware. Evolution would want to employ a Boot-Up strategy for creatures so positive new features could be quickly recognized and put into service. My experience of "WHAT am I?" was not influenced by computer design, but when I learned about BIOS years later, I recognized I had personally been there before.

After a repeat operation, coupled with internal fasteners to force things into place, I recovered. Nothing I learned from the experience was worth it, and though it didn't kill me, it still didn't "make me stronger." But we can survey some lessons nonetheless.

A proper accounting of Consciousness has to be broken into various components:

• The Spectator and Recorder aspects seem minimal for any experience that will remembered later.
• I am sorry if you encounter the Boot-Sequence of your brain a second time after birth.
• You can have Awareness and a sense of 'I' without benefit of the full Child-King of Consciousness.
• Without the various Illusions of the Child-King, the value of conscious experience will be noticeably diminished.
• If the Child-King is not on the throne, other Agents may attempt to fill in. They may attempt access to similar resources such as speech and visualization.

Night Gallery: Come On Along!

After I returned home and had the final drain tube surgically removed (yep, in that order 😢), things were largely peaceful. My body was on the way to a full recovery, I could eat normally, and didn't require medication. I did have some PTSD. But overall, I felt like the experience was behind me.

After a month or two I began to have exceptionally vivid dreams. This seemed like a side effect of increased nutrition and a well-fed brain. But then these dreams started to get out of hand. The scenario would begin at a brightly lit and colorful venue. There were lots of young happy adults, and maybe some festive music would begin playing. I would think "Wow, this is really fun." The other people seemed to be like a "Disney's Kids of the Kingdom" performance team. And they would gather and start singing "Come on along! Come on along!" and they would join hands in a chain and whirl past, and then they would pull me into the middle of the chain, and the music would get louder and the colors more vivid and the action more frantic. As the intensity grew it became unsettling, like being tickled until you were out of breath as child. And I knew it was a dream, but not one I was in control of or could escape, and the intensity increased to a level I felt had become dangerous, probably damaging, or possibly fatal. I believe I had to consciously fight hard to escape this "trip" and wake up.

It become a repeated motif, so days later, in another calm dream, I could be at an art gallery with only few low-key people around, and someone would ask, "Have you seen the collection in the other room?" And they would take me by the hand and say "Come on along..." And whisk me through the door into the festive, hyper-kinetic, singing chain again. "COME ON ALONG! COME ON ALONG!" It was frightening, unusual, and unexpected. The dream scenario was recurrent enough that I would talk about it, and a friend today still asks about my "Come On Along!" dreams.

I realize pointing out synchronicities is a good way for the critical reader to dismiss the more objective discoveries in my articles. But it would also seem to me dishonest not to point them out when they occur. So while proofreading this article, I decided to Google "Come On Along!" and see if there was some song I was only half remembering. A good candidate was a 45-second YouTube clip² "Come On Along! Come On Along! Join The Caravan!" from a children's show I have never seen nor heard of. The show came out years after my dreams, so not a possible inspiration. However, I watched thinking, "Could there be singers holding hands?" Instead I get hit with this image. Make of it what you will.

Usurper of the Throne

The theme from the dream issue above was a struggle for control happening within a mind. These were not merely "bad dreams" expressing unresolved fears. They didn't represent conflicts in the outside world, played out safely in dream space. They were actual battles within dream space. I introduced "Come on Along!" because it was the precursor of what happened next.

I was fortunate to be recovering in my childhood bedroom at my parent's house. The "Come On Along!" dreams had subsided but it felt like a calm before the storm. Some kind of Shakespeare³ meets 'Inception'⁴ was taking place in lower layers of the Kingdom.

What happened was that when I would awaken from a dream, I would find I was not really awake but in another level of dream. This is not entirely unheard of, and you may have experienced it yourself. It has a clinical name: 'False Awakening.' If you (the Spectator) are aware and questioning whether you are witnessing reality or another dream-state, it can turn into a 'pre-lucid dream.'

In a Type 1 False Awakening, there is a brief period of thinking one is awake and perhaps getting up for work or going to the bathroom. This is followed by actually waking up. Type 1 can sometimes loop, with the brief 'awakening' turning out to be a sleep state refusing to yield. The experience will frequently be based on a routine segment of life.

Type 2 is rare and is generally proceded by feelings of suspicion, followed by a feeling that something is wrong with the perceived environment. Psychologist Charles McCreery suggests these type experiences represent "an intrusion into waking consciousness of processes associated with stage 1 sleep."

I will introduce my own 'Type 3' False Awakening category. In this case I had become distrustful of even seemingly calm dream scenarios. The Spectator and Recorder would be active. Additionally, whatever was generating the dream input (similar, but different from waking consciousness) would remain vigilant. Don't hold hands, don't go though doors, listen for faint music... Wake up at the first sign of "Come on Along!" This would be a phase of lucid dreaming, but not false awakening. That was next.

Sensing a threat from a dream, intentionally cutting it off by waking, only to find your are in yet another dream, is terrifying. I don't remember the full battle of loops, but my sense was that a coup was in process. The Child-King had shown weakness during ICU Psychosis, and a substitue Agent, an Usurper, was attempting to take its place. The Usurper was feeding the Spectator a permanently simulated reality, not claiming to be the new king, but rather the same king. I could wake up in my bedroom and everything would appear normal. But a small glitch would give it away, and I would forcefully throw off that illusion and wake up again. Each time it felt like the simulations were becoming more perfected. Soon, I would not be able to discern reality from simulation. Accepting this would mean losing my mind.

I remember being panicked and going to my parent's room and asking them to sit with me. This is not something I had done before or since. I explained that I was "losing my mind" and needed an anchor to reality for a bit. They got up and came to the foot of my bed, and talked to me. It was exceptionally comforting, and I realized while it was easy to simulate all of the static things in my room, the unpredictable behavior of other humans was beyond the Usurper's ability to simulate. "Don't worry, we will watch over you until you get back to sleep" my Dad said reassuringly,
IN MY MOTHER'S VOICE.

Ruby Slippers

I honestly don't remember the final steps to resolved this mental challenge. I probably clicked my heels and repeated "There's No Place Like Home..." The Child-King ultimately escaped and regained his position that morning. Permanently. Maybe realizing other people could break the simulation was all that was required to push the Usurper off the throne. Maybe the Child-King was indisposed, and the Usurper was just trying to help. Maybe the Usurper is a Child-Queen and was responsible for piloting my bike down the Mountain.

Appreciation

Thanks for enduring that interlude. It was extremely hard to write. I had to relive the experience and honestly pull in whatever the Recorder captured at the time. Discussing Consciousness is not like anything else. We could talk objectively about your hand, and you could think of your own hand as an object. But for Consciousness, I can't prove anything to you objectively; even suggesting your Consciousness is an Object will throw you out of your thought stream. Clinical discussions will speak of "Patient X's" brain trauma or mental illness, or perhaps a psychonaut will recount their drug-induced trip. But your Child-King will categorize those things as something that happens in other Kingdoms. We want to use the only tool we have left — introspection — and try examine to the components of what we have verbally mislabeled as a single mental process.

 

In PART SIX, we will cover the Floodlight of Attention, Split Brains, Aphantasia, and the Inner Voice.

 

PART SIX »