Implications of a single consciousness

[Paul Martin]

I have brought this discussion over from the thread discussing Chapter 7 of "A Place for Consciousness".

But [a single consciousness] wouldn't be in a position to act naturally in the world, the way you and I do, since It would not be incarnated in a body.

I think it would. First of all, we aren't really sure how we act naturally in the world. I happen to think that we act the way we do because we are vehicles being driven by a consciousness that is not seated in the brain. This is similar to the way in which cars act. When they are driven, they behave in ways completely unpredictable by the laws of physics. Intentions of the driver (which is literally seated in the car but is not part of the car) are expressed by relatively small and infrequent forces on the various controls. These "cause" the car to stay on the road and move from point A to point B. The overwhelming majority of causes involved, of course, are the forces produced by converting chemical energy in the gasoline to mechanical forces applied to the wheels. These cause the car to go from A to B but only in a crude, unintentional way. Without the driver's relatively small interventions, the car would not behave as it does.

I think this "driver" model is a sensible interpretation of what you call incarnation. Otherwise, how can we make sense of the mind influencing the body at all?

So you have to assume that, contrary to the evidence there is a single Consciousness,

It may be contrary to popular opinion, but I don't agree that it is contrary to the evidence. I think the "evidence" for multiple consciousness is analogous to the "evidence" for multiple TV programs on a single channel at one time. It looks as if each TV set has its own unique program, when in fact there is only a single program being transmitted to all the TV sets. I have recently been given some additional confidence in my conclusion that there is only one consciousness by Canute. He told me that Erwin Schroedinger, among others, held the same opinion. Evidently the evidence for multiple consciousnesses was not compelling for him either.

and, contrary to the evidence, consciousness of such a nature that it can act directly and miraculously wihout a physical vehicle.

I don't think you can produce such evidence. First, I claim that consciousness does have physical vehicles in the form of biological organisms. But in addition, I think that consciousness can act directly in some circumstances outside of those vehicles. In particular in the establishment of the laws of physics and in the establishment of the initial conditions for the physical universe. Whether we should append the adverb 'miraculously' to these actions I think would simply be an inconsequential semantic choice.

And if there is a single Consciousness that doesn't need physical vehicles, why would it even seem that there are multiple consciousnesses?

It's not a question of whether the single consciousness needs the vehicles but a question of whether it uses the vehicles. If vehicles weren't used, then it wouldn't seem that there were multiple consciousnesses at all. If vehicles are used, however, then it would seem, from the points of view of the vehicles themselves, that there were multiples. Keep in mind that if there is only one consciousness, then that is the only thing to which "seeming" can even happen. If there is only one consciousness, then it is obvious that from the point of view of any particular vehicle (i.e. human brain), knowledge that is accessible to the consciousness is limited to local information related to that particular body. Thus it would seem to the consciousness, while driving a particular body, that consciousness is seated in that body's brain and that no other body is conscious. That's exactly the way it appears to each of us. We are directly aware of consciousness in our body but we have no access whatsoever to the consciousness, if it exists, in others. They only seem conscious to us because they behave sort of like us.

But we still have one Hard Problem if we posit a single universal Consciousness

But I don't think it is nearly as hard. Instead of the self-referential problem of brain states causing consciousness and in turn consciousness causing brain states, we would have an agent outside the brain causing (or more accurately, triggering) brain states. That's much easier. I think analogous problems would be the problem of designing a robot which could pass the Turing test and which in addition really did achieve consciousness, versus the problem of designing a vehicle such as a car which could be driven by a conscious driver. The first problem is much harder.

...and we still have one Hard Problem if we posit multiple personal consciousnesses without a single universal Consciousness.

It's harder than the single consciousness case as I described above, but in addition you have the problem of explaining the emergence of consciousness from non-conscious physical systems. I think that makes it twice as hard.

So, as far as answering the mind-body problem goes, the hypothesis of a single consciouness doesn't seem to add anything ...

I think it adds a great amount of simplicity, as I described above.

...but we can explain a lot of other problems...so long as we attribute to universal Consciousness all sorts of things which have nothing to do with ordinary everyday consciousness

What other problems do you have in mind? In my view, you don't have to attribute to the universal consciousness anything we don't experience in everyday consciousness, except longevity. I think rather that the single consciousness was extremely primitive and limited at the very beginning. I think it has been evolving and growing ever since, just like everything else.

...and we don't ask any awkward questions like "who created God" ...sorry, I mean "Who created the universal Consciousness".

I don't think we need ask that awkward question because I think it would be a mistake to associate the single consciousness with the notion of God. The notion of God, as held by virtually everyone who uses that term, connotes perfection, omnipotence, omniscience, immutability, and infinity. I think none of these pertains to the one consciousness.

As for the question "Who created the universal Consciousness?" it is no more difficult for me than the corresponding question is for any philosopher, scientist, theologian, or magician who claims that X is ontologically fundamental:"Who created X?" At least in my case the starting point is as simple as it can get, whereas other points of view must start with something "infinite" or otherwise very complex.

 

[spicerack]

In the car analogy I think we as a unique entity do the driving and consciousness is a passenger we relate to as a navigator. The navigator from having foreknowledge of someone having driven that road before and inputted the data back provides help in the way of instinct and intution but we a drivers can override our conscious instincts using logic and reason.

Hence why we can't make sense of consciousness is becauase we are using the wrong faculties. It is only when we use instinct and intuition that we can understand it otherwise there is no reason why we should be able to. Logic and reason are learned abilities and is what constitutes us as unique individuals in that we all use it differently and were taught how to use it differently the best use of which is according to our developed and evolved intellect which in turn is governed by genetics and cultural evolutionary processes

this also accounts for the evolution of the extant single consciousness by having direct input from us as individual and unique entities.

did that make sense to anybody ?..it did to me on an instinctual level on a logical level it doesn't quite do it justice probably because the language of consciousness is not in this case english.

 

[Canute]

Paul

As you know I pretty much agree with your hypothesis in outline. But I think you are a bit too pessimistic about this single fundamental state of consciousness when you say "In my view, you don't have to attribute to the universal consciousness anything we don't experience in everyday consciousness, except longevity. I think rather that the single consciousness was extremely primitive and limited at the very beginning."

Buddhists and Taoists say that understanding reality is like coming home. This is because, so they say, reaching an understanding of the roots of human consciousness is equivalent to reaching an understanding of reality, of how this universe and individual sentient beings arise, and thus of where we all started and where, sooner or later, we all finish. The necessity of becoming one with this fundamental state in order to understand it is what Mohammed meant by "Die before your death". He means, it seems to me at least, that one must achieve the death of ones self (or concept of self) as a distinct individual 'me' before that 'me' dies as a mortal or 'relative' self in order to know who one really is and thus know that who one really is transcends life and death.

In this view your attribution of longevity to this thing would be incorrect since, strictly speaking, time is an illusion (i.e. epiphenomenal in the same way that 'selfs' are).

Buddhist masters sometimes say that sentient beings do not exist. What they mean is that these beings (you and me as relative and discrete selves) are epiphenomenal on something underlying them which might be called consciousness but is not consciousness as sentient beings commonly conceptualise (or experience) it. In Zen there is something like your 'single consciousness', but it is not something unknowable and apart from ourselves, quite the reverse in fact. It is what we are, what we always have been, and what we always will be. Thus 'Enlightenment' is simply knowing who or what one is.

Dr. Daisetz Suzuki writes "Zen, therefore, aims to come into contact with that divine nature which is in us all, and this revelation of the divine nature in ourselves is what constitues the Enlightenment experience of Buddha. This divine nature is what we may call the Absolute Self."

By using the term 'divine' he does not imply God in a Western sense but something more like your fundamental consciousness. He therefore says here that by exploring our own consciousness we can confirm the existence and nature of that underlying single consciousness. (I'm sure that it's not quite correct to call it single, but it is single in a sense). This consciousness is non-dual, and therefore, just as in your hypothesis (but for different reasons), it cannot be said to be one or many, nor "perfection, omnipotence, omniscience, immutability, and infinity". Rather, it is said to have all attributes and no attributes (depending on which way one conceptualises it, or uses the words). The 'Tao' is this 'Absolute Self', as is the 'Godhead', 'Nirvanah', 'Allah' (in Sufism), 'Unicity', the 'Kingdom of Heaven' and many other misleading names. It is in fact unnameable since it is inconceivable, only experiential. To name it is to objectify it, and to conceive of it is to not be it, since namer and named, or conceiver and conceived, are inevitably two things.

I agree with you that by taking this idea seriously we open the door to solving a number of currently intractible scientific and philosophical problems. It baffles me why so many Western philosophers don't see this.

If you found Scroedinger's view interesting you might like to get 'Quantum Questions' by Ken Wilbur (pub. Shambala I think) in which he collects together the metaphysical writings of a number of famous physicists, (Einstein, Heisenberg, Eddington, Schroedinger, Jeans etc) most of whom agree with you.

 

[Pensador]

Paul,

I've been following your posts since the "A Place for Consciousness" discussion, and even though you have some very interesting ideas, your basic proposition - that there is only one consciousness - seems to involve a violation of semantics which would make it meaningless at best, and just plain wrong at worst. Let me try and explain why I think so.

When I read your posts, your usage of "consciousness" makes it appear as if you think of it as a concept similar to "energy". That is, while materialists think everything that happens can be explained in terms of energy acting on matter, you seem to think consciousness has the ability of directing that energy to specific goals. (that, by the way, is how most people intuitively feel things to be, so kudos for formally expressing such a strongly intuitive notion)

The problem, however, is that "energy" is an abstract concept and therefore cannot be counted, at least not in the way we count objects or persons on this planet. In the same way, when I read your statement that "there is only one consciousness", I understand it to mean "there is only one energy", which could only make sense in a context where different forms of energy are compared (eg. kinetic vs. potential). I don't see how that comparison would apply in terms of consciousness; what I really gather from your basic proposition is that is akin to "there is only one beauty" or "there is only one fairness". It's not wrong as much as it is nearly impossible to understand.

On the other hand, it does sound to me as if you're really saying "there is only one person", but you do refrain from putting it that way because of the obvious problematic consequences.

 

[Steve Esser]

I see a conflict between Paul’s view (which seems clearly to be idealism – please correct me if this is wrong), and some of Canute’s quotes, which refer to a more neutral basis for monism, from which consciousness as well as the rest of the world arise. My sympathies are with the latter, although any “substance” based approach has challenges and I think event or interaction based ontologies will work better.

In addressing the body/mind problem I see no reason to inflate consciousness into a mega-mind which is then the basis for everything else. This is a mirror image to materialism, which elevates one side of the body/mind dichotomy and relegates the other side to second-class citizenship at best.

Rather than propose new entities which transcend nature, first person experience should be fully naturalized and explained side by side with the physical world. Idealism has had a centuries-long review and hasn’t succeeded. Efforts to work out a naturalistic panexperientialism, now well exemplified by Gregg Rosenberg’s book, have gotten little attention (apart from a few Whitehead followers) and hold the most promise, IMO.

 

[Pensador]

In addressing the body/mind problem I see no reason to inflate consciousness into a mega-mind which is then the basis for everything else. This is a mirror image to materialism, which elevates one side of the body/mind dichotomy and relegates the other side to second-class citizenship at best.

It's not a mirror-image because materialism cannot properly explain how something came out of nothing, or how it existed forever. If idealism is the only alternative to materialism, then it must necessarily be the better one, even if we have not yet found the right way to formalize it.

My personal opinion, though, is that there is a third alternative which is far superior to both materialism and idealism. But that would be the subject for another topic.

 

[Paul Martin]

Spicerack,

I think the difficulty, if any, that you and I have in understanding one another is simply due to semantics. I think we agree if you consider that the distinction you make between "instinct and intuition" and "logic and reason" is equivalent to my distinction between "the one consciousness" and "individual human beings".

I think that the aspects of mentality involving consciousness, such as the ability to know, free will, imagination, and "instinct and intuition" do not inhere in brains and thus are not attributes of human beings. Those things inhere only in the one consciousness.

On the other hand, some aspects of mentality, such as awareness, cognition, language, and "logic and reason" are inherent functions of the brain. So by interpreting what you wrote making these distinctions, I think what you said makes sense.

 

[Paul Martin]

In this view your attribution of longevity to this thing would be incorrect since, strictly speaking, time is an illusion (i.e. epiphenomenal in the same way that 'selfs' are).

"Strictly speaking" I would agree with you. I glibly used the term 'longevity' simply to make the point that an individual brain has but a short existence in the common sense of time whereas the one consciousness wouldn't have this limitation.

...it seems to me at least, that one must achieve the death of ones self (or concept of self) as a distinct individual 'me' before that 'me' dies as a mortal or 'relative' self in order to know who one really is and thus know that who one really is transcends life and death.

I think I agree with this, however it isn't clear what you mean by "ones self". In my view, there is only one self. So "ones self" is not the same as a distinct individual. So, to try to clear up my understanding of what you wrote, let me use the unambiguous term 'human being' to designate a live body/brain and the term PC to designate the Primordial Consciousness which I claim is the only thing that can know or feel or will or experience etc. Thus to paraphrase your quote above, I would say

...it seems to me at least, that PC, while driving a particular human being, must achieve, prior (in the temporal dimension humans mark with clocks and calendars) to the death of the human being, the understanding that there is no meaningful concept of 'self' associated with the human being as a distinct individual, if PC is going to be able to report that understanding by driving that human being to utter sentences attempting to explain that understanding. Otherwise, PC can obviously know who "one" is but this knowledge could not be reported by a human being.

I think the important notion working here is that "while" PC is "driving" a particular human being, the information available to PC is severely limited. This may be due to something akin to preoccupation, such as the "Flow" experience described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in which time seems to stop and awareness of the universe is shrunk down to the local experience only. Or it may be due to limitations of the communication link between PC and brain so that the only information available is that which is stored locally in the brain. Or it could be a combination, or it could be due to something quite different. But the fact is that we human beings do not have access to much knowledge beyond that which we accumulate from our life's history.

Buddhist masters sometimes say that sentient beings do not exist. What they mean is that these beings (you and me as relative and discrete selves) are epiphenomenal on something underlying them which might be called consciousness but is not consciousness as sentient beings commonly conceptualise (or experience) it.

I agree with the Buddhist masters here. In my view, there is only one sentient being in all of reality, using the common connotation of 'sentient'. But if my view were to be accepted and prevalent, that would make the term 'sentient' rather useless. I would propose changing the notion of 'sentience' to mean any vehicle or device which could be "driven" i.e. though which PC could vicariously experience or control part of the environment of the device. That would make not only human beings sentient, but also cars, Mars rovers, and other devices whose behavior can be controlled by conscious actions and whose experiences can be perceived. On second thought, since that will never happen, I suppose I should coin a new term for that kind of entity. I suspect there's plenty of time to worry about that, though.

If you found Scroedinger's view interesting you might like to get 'Quantum Questions' by Ken Wilbur

Thank you. I have added it to my list of books to buy.

 

[Paul Martin]

When I read your posts, your usage of "consciousness" makes it appear as if you think of it as a concept similar to "energy".

It may appear that way, and that probably explains why what I wrote seems meaningless to you. But that is not the way I think of the concept of consciousness.

what I really gather from your basic proposition is that is akin to "there is only one beauty" or "there is only one fairness". It's not wrong as much as it is nearly impossible to understand.

I don't think that is far off. More than simply "there is only one beauty" or "there is only one consciousness" I say that there is only one "thing" at all. And I say that one thing is very close to if not identical with the "thing" that experiences the consciousness that seems to inhere in the body/brain/mind of Paul Martin, the human being typing this sentence "now". I suspect it is the same identical "thing" that is experiencing the reading of this sentence "now".

Now I suppose that "thing" I have just described has some similarities to the concept of energy, but if so, it would be purely coincidental.

As for being impossible to understand, I don't think it is any more so than any other concept. My suggestion is to try to understand the concept in terms of the analogies of radio and remotely controlled vehicles. Those things are understandable, given a knowledge of our technology, and I think the concepts and mechanisms involved may have understandable counterparts in the bigger picture of reality with respect to consciousness, mentality, and physicality.

On the other hand, it does sound to me as if you're really saying "there is only one person", but you do refrain from putting it that way because of the obvious problematic consequences.

Yes, that is what I really am saying. The only reason I have refrained from putting it that way is because the term 'person' hasn't come up in these conversations. I claim there is only one person; there is only one identity; there is only one knower; etc.

The "obvious problematic consequences" escape me. What are they?

 

[Paul Martin]

I see a conflict between Paul’s view (which seems clearly to be idealism – please correct me if this is wrong), and some of Canute’s quotes, which refer to a more neutral basis for monism, from which consciousness as well as the rest of the world arise.

I don't have any idea what "monism" is so I can't comment, nor can I see the conflict you talk about.

In addressing the body/mind problem I see no reason to inflate consciousness into a mega-mind which is then the basis for everything else. This is a mirror image to materialism, which elevates one side of the body/mind dichotomy and relegates the other side to second-class citizenship at best.

I do see a reason to do so. The reason is that from that hypothesis, you can derive a much simpler explanation for everything else.

Rather than propose new entities which transcend nature

I don't propose a new entity. I propose the only thing I know for sure exists. My experience of consciousness is incorrigible and undeniable. It seems to me to be the best starting point. Whether it transcends nature is simply a matter of semantics. If 'nature' is defined to be the domain of physics, then I agree that consciousness transcends nature. But if 'nature' is taken to mean what is natural, then I think consciousness is natural.

first person experience should be fully naturalized

What do you mean? And how would you propose going about it?

...and explained side by side with the physical world.

I agree. I think that can be easily done from my starting point.

Idealism has had a centuries-long review and hasn’t succeeded.

The same can be said of Alchemy. But once they changed some of their underlying hypotheses (and changed the name to 'Chemistry') a great deal of progress was made.

Efforts to work out a naturalistic panexperientialism, now well exemplified by Gregg Rosenberg’s book, have gotten little attention (apart from a few Whitehead followers) and hold the most promise, IMO.

Efforts to work out any sort of understanding of consciousness whatsoever got virtually no attention from scientists until the past decade or two. I am delighted that some of our best people have finally begun to work on it. Present readers are all included. I extend my heartfelt thanks and encouragement to all of you.

 

[Paul Martin]

My personal opinion, though, is that there is a third alternative which is far superior to both materialism and idealism. But that would be the subject for another topic.

Please don't leave us hanging. Tell us about that alternative and we can decide later whether it belongs in another topic.

I'll be gone for a few days so I don't expect a quick response from you, nor should anyone expect one from me until I get back.

 

[Pensador]

My suggestion is to try to understand the concept in terms of the analogies of radio and remotely controlled vehicles. Those things are understandable, given a knowledge of our technology, and I think the concepts and mechanisms involved may have understandable counterparts in the bigger picture of reality with respect to consciousness, mentality, and physicality.

I have no problem with those analogies, as I happen to think along very similar lines. What I'm trying to understand is how you arrived at similar conclusions starting from completely different premises. If I were to put the one-consciousness hypothesis in my perspective, it would fall apart completely.

Yes, that is what I really am saying. The only reason I have refrained from putting it that way is because the term 'person' hasn't come up in these conversations. I claim there is only one person; there is only one identity; there is only one knower; etc.

The "obvious problematic consequences" escape me. What are they?

Well, I guess they are not so obvious after all. As far as I can tell, there's plenty of evidence that more than one person exists, and no evidence whatsoever to the contrary. Where did you get that idea from? Besides, if that one-and-only individual person can exist, what exactly prevents other persons from existing? To borrow from religious concepts, where does the idea that only one God can possibly exist came from? Why not two, or four, or six billion?

 

[Tournesol]

First of all, we aren't really sure how we act naturally in the world.

All the evidence is *that* we do. Consc. does not move things about without
the intermediary of nerves and muscles.

I happen to think that we act the way we do because we are vehicles being driven by a consciousness that is not seated in the brain. This is similar to the way in which cars act. When they are driven, they behave in ways completely unpredictable by the laws of physics. Intentions of the driver (which is literally seated in the car but is not part of the car) are expressed by relatively small and infrequent forces on the various controls. These "cause" the car to stay on the road and move from point A to point B. The overwhelming majority of causes involved, of course, are the forces produced by converting chemical energy in the gasoline to mechanical forces applied to the wheels. These cause the car to go from A to B but only in a crude, unintentional way. Without the driver's relatively small interventions, the car would not behave as it does.

But the driver is in the car. And if consc. can add subtle 'tweeks' to the
behaviour of such a sensitive and complex organ as the brain -- fair enough.,
That does not mean it can cause big bangs.

I think this "driver" model is a sensible interpretation of what you call incarnation. Otherwise, how can we make sense of the mind influencing the body at all?

Redutionism, functionalism and identity theory can all answer that question
perfectly well. What they can't address is the gap between subjective experience and objecive description. It remains to be seen that your theory fares better.

It may be contrary to popular opinion, but I don't agree that it is contrary to the evidence. I think the "evidence" for multiple consciousness is analogous to the "evidence" for multiple TV programs on a single channel at one time. It looks as if each TV set has its own unique program, when in fact there is only a single program being transmitted to all the TV sets. I have recently been given some additional confidence in my conclusion that there is only one consciousness by Canute. He told me that Erwin Schroedinger, among others, held the same opinion. Evidently the evidence for multiple consciousnesses was not compelling for him either.

Both theories are compatible with the evidence. You don't seem to have any
positive reason for preferring your theory.

I don't think you can produce such evidence. First, I claim that consciousness does have physical vehicles in the form of biological organisms. But in addition, I think that consciousness can act directly in some circumstances outside of those vehicles. In particular in the establishment of the laws of physics and in the establishment of the initial conditions for the physical universe.

I find if highly suspicious that, after creating the universe, consc. does nothing
for billions of years until sutitable vehicles arose (and why did that take so long?)

Whether we should append the adverb 'miraculously' to these actions I think would simply be an inconsequential semantic choice.

Obviously the establishment of physical laws cannot be explained *within*
physical laws, so it is miraculous by definition.

It's not a question of whether the single consciousness needs the vehicles but a question of whether it uses the vehicles. If vehicles weren't used, then it wouldn't seem that there were multiple consciousnesses at all. If vehicles are used, however, then it would seem, from the points of view of the vehicles themselves, that there were multiples.

That is not at all obvious.

Keep in mind that if there is only one consciousness, then that is the only thing to which "seeming" can even happen.

OK.

If there is only one consciousness, then it is obvious that from the point of view of any particular vehicle (i.e. human brain),

Hang on, there is only one thing to which "seeming" can happen, the universal Consciousness. So nothing can seem to anyting else, including a brain.

knowledge that is accessible to the consciousness is limited to local information related to that particular body.

But there is only one Consciouness and knowledge from all bodies is accessable to it.

Thus it would seem to the consciousness, while driving a particular body, that consciousness is seated in that body's brain and that no other body is conscious.

Would it ? Why can't it drive all bodies simultaneoulsy ? If it "multiplexes"
why does it forget from body to body ? That all seems quite arbitrary.

That's exactly the way it appears to each of us. We are directly aware of consciousness in our body but we have no access whatsoever to the consciousness, if it exists, in others. They only seem conscious to us because they behave sort of like us.

It seems that you need a lot of additional, arbitrary hypotheses to make
your theory work.

But I don't think it is nearly as hard. Instead of the self-referential problem of brain states causing consciousness and in turn consciousness causing brain states, we would have an agent outside the brain causing (or more accurately, triggering) brain states.

And doesn't this external consciousness get any feedback from the brain/body ?
If not -- what is it supposed to be consciousness OF ?

That's much easier. I think analogous problems would be the problem of designing a robot which could pass the Turing test and which in addition really did achieve consciousness, versus the problem of designing a vehicle such as a car which could be driven by a conscious driver. The first problem is much harder.

Harder for whom ? Nature had 15billion years.

It's harder than the single consciousness case as I described above, but in addition you have the problem of explaining the emergence of consciousness from non-conscious physical systems. I think that makes it twice as hard.

Historical emergence is not much of a problem for physicalists or panexperientialists to name but two.

I think it adds a great amount of simplicity, as I described above.

What other problems do you have in mind? In my view, you don't have to attribute to the universal consciousness anything we don't experience in everyday consciousness, except longevity. I think rather that the single consciousness was extremely primitive and limited at the very beginning. I think it has been evolving and growing ever since, just like everything else.

Didn't it create the universe ? While it was still 'primitve', to boot!

I don't think we need ask that awkward question because I think it would be a mistake to associate the single consciousness with the notion of God. The notion of God, as held by virtually everyone who uses that term, connotes perfection, omnipotence, omniscience, immutability, and infinity. I think none of these pertains to the one consciousness.

But the ability to act supernaturally does.

As for the question "Who created the universal Consciousness?" it is no more difficult for me than the corresponding question is for any philosopher, scientist, theologian, or magician who claims that X is ontologically fundamental:"Who created X?"

Since every theory has that problem, including your own, you cannot justify the extra complexity of your theory on the basis that it answers the fundamental question.

At least in my case the starting point is as simple as it can get, whereas other points of view must start with something "infinite" or otherwise very complex.

An all-embracing universal consciousness is simple ? Most people don't even think human consciousness is simple.

 

[Pensador]

Please don't leave us hanging. Tell us about that alternative and we can decide later whether it belongs in another topic.

I think the problem with every single philosophy I know of is that they try to avoid paradoxes, yet they all fail. It seems to me that paradoxes cannot be avoided, only hidden from view for some time until someone exposes them.

I decide to take that historical fact as a premise: paradoxes cannot be avoided, period. And since any possible explanation of reality will harbor a paradox, it follows that the paradox must have a counterpart in reality itself. Incidentally, that paradox is known as "time". The universe, at any given point, is in a state that can't possibly be "true" (real). A state of ambiguity always exists, and it must be resolved, but it can only be resolved by creating another state of ambiguity. That process gives rise to all the dynamics we observe in the universe.

How does that relate to materialism vs. idealism? Well, both views are necessary to account for the paradox which exists in reality. Materialism provides solutions to the paradoxes in idealism, but only by creating new paradoxes, which then idealism solves, and the cycle goes on and on. The bottom line is that both materialism and idealism are real, though not necessarily true if we require that any true idea must be free of paradoxes. The perceived incompatibility between them is the result of their mutual interdependency. Our knowledge of reality will always be ambiguous because that is how reality itself is. Our knowledge of reality is always changing and always going in cycles because that is how reality is. In a sense, we already understand how reality works, only we don't think we can possibly be right.

That is, in a nutshell, what I think. Maybe some future, perfectly self-consistent theory will prove me wrong, but I don't expect to see the day when such a theory will become public, so I'll go with my ideas for the time being.

 

[spicerack]

Spicerack,

I think the difficulty, if any, that you and I have in understanding one another is simply due to semantics. I think we agree if you consider that the distinction you make between "instinct and intuition" and "logic and reason" is equivalent to my distinction between "the one consciousness" and "individual human beings".

I think that the aspects of mentality involving consciousness, such as the ability to know, free will, imagination, and "instinct and intuition" do not inhere in brains and thus are not attributes of human beings. Those things inhere only in the one consciousness.

On the other hand, some aspects of mentality, such as awareness, cognition, language, and "logic and reason" are inherent functions of the brain. So by interpreting what you wrote making these distinctions, I think what you said makes sense.

I understand your reasoning but to revert to the driver analogy is to say that in your physical vehicle/body the driver is somewhere else and alone and possibly not even you.

There is no concept of an individual if we are driven by a single consciousness, no mechanism for feedback given that the PC already knows what you are doing and going to do. In my reasoning I am the driver and I have a passenger who keeps me in check who I feedback to and that helps evolve any future drivers. The passenger has already written a road code to cover the basics of interaction with other drivers and it is constantly being updated.

What happens in your scenario if you remove the driver is not the same as what happens if i kick my passenger out. If you remove your driver there is only an empty vehicle a dead body if I remove my passenger then i am driving solo without the full benefit of an awareness of the pitfalls in life.

Yeah I can still get by but it makes things harder.

Take the Terri Schiavo case is there a driver or a passenger missing ?

I prefer duality of I and O, the self and the whole, the one and the zero. You would have us as just the one. We are each our own driver in that we choose where and how fast we want to go but we all share the same passenger and as i susppect so does any other sentient life form.

Another point of difference i see is that i would have the PC omniscient from the outset not limited and primitive. We in our early stages of development were the primitive limited ones not having developed the intellect of logic and reason to access the PC effectively so the passenger was doing most of the driving.

In the vehicle analogy we were driving clunky steam engines as to maclaren F1's now though some of us are still in the steam age and not all of us can handle an F1

please correct me where you see fit, thanks Paul

 

[olde drunk]

Perhaps an over-simplification, but most olde philosophers and prophets have said that we are 'one'. While we may have our unique qualities, we are still part of a universal consciousness. Our freewill allows us to explore areas of experience that expand the universal consciousness.

Is the tree 'aware' of the experience of each leaf?

love&peace,
olde drunk


'heaven was invented so that your clergy could charge for admission'

 

[Canute]

My problem here is that I partly agree and partly disagree with just about everything that's been posted.

We all seem to agree that both idealism and materialism give rise to paradoxes/contradictions. (After all, if they didn't we would have settled on one of them by now). Similarly dualism and monism give rise to paradoxes (Again, if they didn't one of them would have been found logically acceptable by now).

If materialism, idealism, monism and dualism are paradoxical then they are paradoxical regardless of the details, so any theory or hypothesis structured around one of these formats will be paradoxical. This is one of my problems with 'PC' as put forward by Paul, since it seems to entail both idealism and monism. Similarly, all strictly scientific or philosophical theories of consciousness contain contradictions arising from the same source (dualism, monism, pluralism etc) and therefore cannot be completed. This may seem like just an opinion, since I cannot know of every theory. However the evidence from the literature clearly shows that no scientific or logically consistent theory of consciousness yet devised is free of faults, for as yet there is no such theory to which there are not reasonable and unanswerable objections. And here we are in the 21st century!

There is only one metaphysic that avoids materialism, idealism, monism and dualism, and which survives all reasonable objections, and this is the non-dual metaphysical system of Taoism/Buddhism etc. The subtleties of this view make it difficult to discuss, although I do my amateurish best to fight its corner. This view is very close to the 'PC' hypothesis but is significantly different in that it does not give rise to metaphysical contradictions. In fact it doesn't even give rise to metaphysics. (It is physics and (strictly) analytical philosophising that gives rise to paradoxes and thus to metaphysics).

This view does not run foul of any of the logical or evidential objections raised here to the PC hypothesis, yet it has many of the important features of that hypothesis. I'm getting a bit exhausted fighting for the plausibility of this view all the time, but would suggest that for anyone seriously concerned with getting to the bottom of all these paradoxes and contradictions it is worth at least getting to know this view of reality and consciousness, or one of the equivalent views. It isn't all that easy to do this, but then it isn't easy to get to know the conceptual scheme of quantum mechanics.

In this view mind and matter arise from something else. This allows the reduction of mind and matter to something else in any reductionist explanation or ontological analysis of what exists. As it is has proved impossible so far to devise a reasonable reductionist explanation of mind or matter (or indeed anything at all) in which either mind or matter is fundamental I feel that this other approach has a lot going for it. If it were true then of course we would not be able to show that mind or matter is fundamental.

Yet if reductionism has any value in metaphysics as a means of analysis it can only be because ultimately it seems logical all things can be explained in terms of one thing. It seems then that mind and matter must reduce to something and this something must, at least in a sense, be one thing. In QM waves and particles reduce to one thing that cannot be conceived because it is not a wave or a particle, and is in this sense non-dual. So there is nothing novel in suggesting that mind and matter reduce to something that cannot be conceived because it is not mind or matter, and is in this sense non-dual.

 

[Pensador]

In this view mind and matter arise from something else. This allows the reduction of mind and matter to something else in any reductionist explanation or ontological analysis of what exists. As it is has proved impossible so far to devise a reasonable reductionist explanation of mind or matter (or indeed anything at all) in which either mind or matter is fundamental I feel that this other approach has a lot going for it. If it were true then of course we would not be able to show that mind or matter is fundamental.

I don't know if you read my reply to Paul, but I have my own view which is based on the reality of a paradox. I'm not as familiar with your view as you are, but I can see a lot in common, which is interesting since we're coming from seemingly unrelated starting points.

In my view mind and matter arise from the fact that they can only exist in mutual dependency. Destroying matter would make all minds disappear, but destroying all minds would also make all matter disappear (those claiming this to be false are challenged to prove me wrong - empirically!)

So your essential, unspeakable entity is what I call "the fact that they can only exist in mutual dependency". I like my view better because it has less mystery to it (or so it seems to me). By the way, my view explains why the universe came from nothing. Again, it's because nothing and something can only exist in mutual dependency. Without something, the nothing which preceded it could not have existed.

It seems then that mind and matter must reduce to something and this something must, at least in a sense, be one thing. In QM waves and particles reduce to one thing that cannot be conceived because it is not a wave or a particle, and is in this sense non-dual. So there is nothing novel in suggesting that mind and matter reduce to something that cannot be conceived because it is not mind or matter, and is in this sense non-dual.

I would not say that mind and matter reduce to one thing, because their mutual dependency is not a thing, in the sense that "things" must exist. The mutual dependency is what gives rise to matter out of mind and mind out of matter, as well as what gives rise to something out of nothing and nothing out of something, but the mutual dependency doesn't exist by itself.

In more westernized terms, my view shines light on the question of what created God. It becomes clear that the question, as commonly understood, is misleading, that the really meaningful question is "what was God doing before the world was created". And the answer is, "God was doing nothing". Deceptively simple. God spent an eternity doing nothing, and is now spending another eternity doing something.

(edited to avoid confusion)

 

[Steve Esser]

I don't propose a new entity. I propose the only thing I know for sure exists. My experience of consciousness is incorrigible and undeniable. It seems to me to be the best starting point. Whether it transcends nature is simply a matter of semantics. If 'nature' is defined to be the domain of physics, then I agree that consciousness transcends nature. But if 'nature' is taken to mean what is natural, then I think consciousness is natural.

Thanks for taking the time to respond, Paul.

You know that your first person experience exists. You do not know a PC exists. I am saying it is very reasonable to infer that experience exists elsewhere in nature, but it is a greater leap to say there is a PC, and all of nature is relegated to the thoughts or whims of this big guy. While your approach has the virtue of addressing the hard problem in its way, it comes at the great cost of devaluing the ontological status of natural laws and processes as uncovered by science.

 

[Tournesol]

In my view mind and matter arise from the fact that they can only exist in mutual dependency. Destroying matter would make all minds disappear, but destroying all minds would also make all matter disappear (those claiming this to be false are challenged to prove me wrong - empirically!)

The experiment has already been performed; there was matter, but no minds
for millions of years in the early universe.

 

[Tournesol]

If materialism, idealism, monism and dualism are paradoxical then they are paradoxical regardless of the details

There is only one metaphysic that avoids materialism, idealism, monism and dualism, and which survives all reasonable objections, and this is the non-dual metaphysical system of Taoism/Buddhism etc.

A non-dual system is surely a monism. What else could it be ?

In this view mind and matter arise from something else.

That is just the view of Spinoza...who was a monist.

Yet if reductionism has any value in metaphysics as a means of analysis it can only be because ultimately it seems logical all things can be explained in terms of one thing.

It has value because many things have already been subject to succesful
reductive explanation, and what they have been reduced to is physics.

In any case, saying "mind and matter are both aspects of the Ultimate ThingyWhatsit" isn't reductive epxlanaiton because it isn't explanation.

 

[Steve Esser]

We all seem to agree that both idealism and materialism give rise to paradoxes/contradictions. (After all, if they didn't we would have settled on one of them by now). Similarly dualism and monism give rise to paradoxes (Again, if they didn't one of them would have been found logically acceptable by now).

If materialism, idealism, monism and dualism are paradoxical then they are paradoxical regardless of the details, so any theory or hypothesis structured around one of these formats will be paradoxical. This is one of my problems with 'PC' as put forward by Paul, since it seems to entail both idealism and monism. Similarly, all strictly scientific or philosophical theories of consciousness contain contradictions arising from the same source (dualism, monism, pluralism etc) and therefore cannot be completed. This may seem like just an opinion, since I cannot know of every theory. However the evidence from the literature clearly shows that no scientific or logically consistent theory of consciousness yet devised is free of faults, for as yet there is no such theory to which there are not reasonable and unanswerable objections. And here we are in the 21st century!

I'm in agreement. But I don't think a naturalistic panexperientialism has been explored enough so far.

There is only one metaphysic that avoids materialism, idealism, monism and dualism, and which survives all reasonable objections, and this is the non-dual metaphysical system of Taoism/Buddhism etc. The subtleties of this view make it difficult to discuss, although I do my amateurish best to fight its corner. This view is very close to the 'PC' hypothesis but is significantly different in that it does not give rise to metaphysical contradictions. In fact it doesn't even give rise to metaphysics. (It is physics and (strictly) analytical philosophising that gives rise to paradoxes and thus to metaphysics).

This view does not run foul of any of the logical or evidential objections raised here to the PC hypothesis, yet it has many of the important features of that hypothesis. I'm getting a bit exhausted fighting for the plausibility of this view all the time, but would suggest that for anyone seriously concerned with getting to the bottom of all these paradoxes and contradictions it is worth at least getting to know this view of reality and consciousness, or one of the equivalent views. It isn't all that easy to do this, but then it isn't easy to get to know the conceptual scheme of quantum mechanics.

In this view mind and matter arise from something else. This allows the reduction of mind and matter to something else in any reductionist explanation or ontological analysis of what exists. As it is has proved impossible so far to devise a reasonable reductionist explanation of mind or matter (or indeed anything at all) in which either mind or matter is fundamental I feel that this other approach has a lot going for it. If it were true then of course we would not be able to show that mind or matter is fundamental.

Yet if reductionism has any value in metaphysics as a means of analysis it can only be because ultimately it seems logical all things can be explained in terms of one thing. It seems then that mind and matter must reduce to something and this something must, at least in a sense, be one thing. In QM waves and particles reduce to one thing that cannot be conceived because it is not a wave or a particle, and is in this sense non-dual. So there is nothing novel in suggesting that mind and matter reduce to something that cannot be conceived because it is not mind or matter, and is in this sense non-dual.

I like a lot of what you say here. I want to have an explanation for both physical reality and first person experience, and I think it needs to be a reduction to an underlying framework which is explainable logically. Can pre-scientific eastern philosophies provide this in a way that would convince an open-minded but logically rigorous person? (i.e. no Zen koans allowed )

I guess what I mean is, if it isn't explainable analytically to someone who wants to expand but not replace the successful approach of the Western enlightenment, is it really an explanation at all?

 

[Pensador]

The experiment has already been performed; there was matter, but no minds for millions of years in the early universe.

That is what your mind says when it contemplates the past. Without human beings around today, how should those "millions of years" be described? "Millions of years in the early universe" sounds quite anthropocentric to me. If humans never existed would concepts such as "millions", "years", "early", "universe" still exist? Where would those concepts come from? And what concepts do exist to describe a universe filled with ? but devoid of concepts to describe it?

 

[Tournesol]

There would still have been *that* length of time. Things don't pop out of existence just because no-one is around to describe them. Or are you a solipsist after all ?

 

[Pensador]

There would still have been *that* length of time. Things don't pop out of existence just because no-one is around to describe them.

Actually, they do. But I'll borrow the answer from one of Canute's posts in "A Place for Consciousness":

" I didn't suggest that there was anything special about human observation. I suggested that there is something paradoxical about the idea that something can be observed before it has been rendered observable by being observed. "

Or are you a solipsist after all ?

How many times have I said I'm not a solipsist?

 

[Tournesol]

Actually, they do.

Is that a fact ? Are you referring to a consciousness-centered theory
of QM ? Aren't you always saying that consc. has no place in physics ?

How many times have I said I'm not a solipsist?

How else do you refute the idea that the universe was mindless for millions
of years ? What did you mean by: "That is what your mind says" ?

 

[Pensador]

Is that a fact ? Are you referring to a consciousness-centered theory of QM ? Aren't you always saying that consc. has no place in physics ?

You will not understand what I'm trying to say until you get out of this either-or kind of thinking. There is a third way.

I didn't say consciousness has no place in physics, I clearly stated physics can only exist as a product of conscious activity. You cannot have physics without consciousness. I don't even understand how anyone can refute that.

How else do you refute the idea that the universe was mindless for millions of years ?

By stepping outside of time and seeing the whole of reality as a single entity, where the past is as real as the present. Sort of like what is often referred to as "the spacetime monolith", with a minor but substantial difference: there's more to reality than the monolith.

What did you mean by: "That is what your mind says" ?

I said that as a reply to this:

"The experiment has already been performed; there was matter, but no minds for millions of years in the early universe"

Your statement is true, but only because there is consciousness now. If consciousness never existed, the statement would be neither true nor false, it would be meaningless.

This is the third way I'm talking about. You have to get out of this straightjacket of a true-false dichotomy and realize there is a more important element that is missing in your worldview: meaning. Without meaning there are no truths and no falsehoods. When you have no truths and no falsehoods you have less than nothing, you are left only with the unspeakable.

 

[Tournesol]

I didn't say consciousness has no place in physics, I clearly stated physics can only exist as a product of conscious activity. You cannot have physics without consciousness. I don't even understand how anyone can refute that.

So how do you get from that to a defence of the idea that "things do pop out of existence just because no-one is around to describe them. "

By stepping outside of time and seeing the whole of reality as a single entity, where the past is as real as the present. Sort of like what is often referred to as "the spacetime monolith", with a minor but substantial difference: there's more to reality than the monolith.

Uhh. Yeah, Right. [edges nervously away]

Your statement is true, but only because there is consciousness now. If consciousness never existed, the statement would be neither true nor false, it would be meaningless.

Maybe, but , again, that statement barely has metaphorical connection to the
statement it is supposed to be supporting:-

In my view mind and matter arise from the fact that they can only exist in mutual dependency. Destroying matter would make all minds disappear, but destroying all minds would also make all matter disappear

 

[Tournesol]

What is "existence"? How can we know if something "exists"?

evasion

What's making you nervous? You don't know what "spacetime monolith" means? May I suggest you read Einstein.

Been there. OC the problem is the standing outside bit.

I could also say that's another way of stating that there's more to languages than symbols and grammar. Would that also make you nervous?

Less stating, more explaining, please.

You don't see the connection, you conclude the connection is not there. You don't see "clouds of gas which existed millions of years ago", but you have no problem concluding they were there. Care to explain why?

Indirect evidence in the second case.

 

[Paul Martin]

I have no problem with those analogies, [of radio and remotely controlled vehicles,] as I happen to think along very similar lines. What I'm trying to understand is how you arrived at similar conclusions starting from completely different premises.

I arrived at those conclusions by pure guesswork and speculation over most of my life. It is only in the past few years that I have tried to come up with a logical explanation for everything starting with the premise of a single consciousness.

As far as I can tell, there's plenty of evidence that more than one person exists, and no evidence whatsoever to the contrary. Where did you get that idea from?

Of course you are right if you simply take the term 'person' to mean what we ordinarily do. But where I got the idea that there is only one person, was when I tried to pin down exactly what constitutes my identity. I went through this sort of analysis:

Am I the same person I was 50 years ago? Very few, if any, of the atoms comprising "my" body then are present in "my" body now. So it isn't a specific collection of atoms that defines my person or my identity. What is it then? It seems to be a combination of my personality, which I suppose includes my character, and my memories. But those, too have changed over the past 65 years. We could say that the changes were gradual and continuous, so the "thread" of those changes constitutes "me".

But that thread isn't continuous. Not only do I have short gaps in my consciousness during the day, but there is roughly a seven hour discontinuity each night that I get a good sleep. Am "I" really the same person I think I was yesterday? That sounds like a silly question that we should answer with a "yes" and give it no more thought. But if you are exploring every possibility it seems to me that the very phenomenon of sleep is a huge "in-your-face" piece of evidence that we shouldn't ignore. When I wake up, it is a common experience for me to feel disoriented at first, not knowing where, or when, or who I am. But in what is probably milliseconds, I remember things that put everything in place and I become fully conscious thinking that I am the same guy I was yesterday.

Sleep not only falsifies the illusion that consciousness is continuous, but, IMHO, it should also falsify Darwinian Evolution as the sole explanation for animal life on earth. Since there is no known survival benefit, and a great many obvious survival costs and risks, associated with sleep, no species requiring it should have survived at all. Yet, all animals sleep.

Then to add to that, we have thousands of years of reporting by sages and holy people that everything is "one". (I heard that when the Dalai Lama ordered a hot dog, he said, "Make me one with everything".)

So it seemed to me that all of these things could be explained if you assumed that there were only one consciousness and it vicariously lived, or "drove" the life of each animal by attending to the animal's world line for intervals in some multiplexing or time-sharing way. Periods of sleep would be obvious intervals when the animal didn't happen to be being driven. While the "one" is driving a particular animal, it would be so preoccupied with the memories from that animal, and the sensory input, and demands of living, that it would seem to the "one" that it actually was that animal and nothing more. If that noise could be quieted, however, then the "one" could probably remember or be aware of an existence that transcended that of the animal's body. And that's the way things seem to be. (This would also provide a way to explain all the mysterious phenomena being investigated by Rupert Sheldrake and which are being ignored by most other scientists.)

Besides, if that one-and-only individual person can exist, what exactly prevents other persons from existing? To borrow from religious concepts, where does the idea that only one God can possibly exist came from? Why not two, or four, or six billion?

Occam's Razor. You could posit any number you like, but one is sufficient. As for religion, they have a history of quite a wide range of deities. Even those that claim to be monotheistic claim that there are entities such as saints, angels, devils, cherubims, etc. which, if not gods, are at least quite different kinds of beings from people. In my view, if there are such things, I would say that they, too, are driven by the "one" the same as we are.

Paul

 

[Paul Martin]

.All the evidence is *that* we do [act naturally in the world]. Consc. does not move things about without the intermediary of nerves and muscles.

I agree. While that might be possible, it isn't normal. Just as it might be possible for you to push your car down the freeway, you usually don't. Instead, you push a little on the key to get it started, you push a little on the pedals, levers, and steering wheel in such a way as to keep the car on the freeway as the inexorable laws of physics make the car move. Similarly, I think that consciousness can cause some sensitive quantum events to occur in such a way that the inexorable laws of physics amplify those events into cascades of neuronal activity which result in a pattern of muscle activity which results in deliberate action of the body. Now, whether you call this action "natural" I guess is up to you. A lot of human action is certainly unpredictable by the laws of physics, or any other laws for that matter. We also see a lot of people doing what we call "unnatural acts". That is why I questioned whether we know what "acting naturally" really means.

But the driver is in the car.

Then instead of a car, use the analogy of a Mars rover. In that case the driver is in a different world completely. The rofer is on Mars and the driver is in JPL.

And if consc. can add subtle 'tweeks' to the behaviour of such a sensitive and complex organ as the brain -- fair enough., That does not mean it can cause big bangs.

I agree. But when casting about looking for a candidate that can cause big bangs, that "one" sure seems like a likely one.

Redutionism, functionalism and identity theory can all answer that question [of the mind influencing the body] perfectly well. What they can't address is the gap between subjective experience and objecive description. It remains to be seen that your theory fares better.

Here's how I see it. I claim that subjective experience is equivalent to knowing. When I say "I know what green looks like", or "I know that is hurting me", that is the same as saying, "I remember having the subjective experience of greenness", or "I am having the subjective experience of pain".

So in my view, if the Primordial Consciousness, (PC) has the ability to know, then PC has subjective experiences. If PC is driving a brain/body, and if PC is the one having the experiences associated with the perceptions and feelings generated by the actions on and of the body, then the gap you identified is closed. The actions of and on the body can be objectively described, and the subjective experience is explained by PC.

Both theories are compatible with the evidence. You don't seem to have any positive reason for preferring your theory.

The fact that Reductionism, functionalism and identity theory can't address the gap between subjective experience and objective description and my theory does, seems to me to be a positive reason for preferring my theory.

I find if highly suspicious that, after creating the universe, consc. does nothing for billions of years until sutitable vehicles arose (and why did that take so long?)

Does nothing? In my view, PC cannot break the laws of physics and so can only interfere in the evolution of the universe within the narrow wiggle room provided by uncertain quantum events. Finding just the right clay sediments with just the right organic molecules, by chance, happening to lie on them in just the right places, (or insert your favorite explanation of chemical abiogenesis here instead of the clay thing.) allowing tweaks in the quantum behavior to assemble the molecules in a meaningful way, probably took billions of years. It is also obvious from the fossil record that it took billions of years of trial and error, occasionally punctuated by an asteroid hit, to tweak enough critical quantum events in just the right ways in order to produce the flora and fauna of today. I think it was a huge job and not surprising at all that it took so long.

(You might have noticed that I think Darwinian Evolution can explain the biological "hardware", like molecules, cells, etc. But I think it cannot explain the "software", i.e. the "meaning" as expressed in the apparent violation of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. In short, I think Darwinism can explain the origin of a DNA molecule, but not the encoded pattern of its bases.)

That is not at all obvious.

Sorry. It seems obvious to me so I probably didn't express it very well. You originally asked, "f there is a single Consciousness that doesn't need physical vehicles, why would it even seem that there are multiple consciousnesses?"

Given your premise, I would say that it wouldn't necessarily seem that there are multiple consciousnesses unless the single consciousness actually used physical vehicles (or some other method of fractionating the consciousness so that each fraction is somehow limited). But if the awareness of the single consciousness were limited to the environment of a vehicle, and part of that environment included the perception of other vehicles, then it seems obvious that it could seem that there are multiple consciousnesses: one for each vehicle.

Hang on, there is only one thing to which "seeming" can happen, the universal Consciousness. So nothing can seem to anyting else, including a brain.

I agree. I didn't say anything "seemed" to the brain. I said it seemed, "from the point of view of any particular vehicle (i.e. human brain)". And as we agree, this "seeming" happens only to the universal Consciousness. This is the same as when you are driving a car, the world seems to be going past your car backwards on either side of the road from your car. It doesn't seem that way to an observer watching your car driving down the road.

But there is only one Consciouness and knowledge from all bodies is accessable to it.

I think that is an assumption that isn't necessarily true. I think accessibility to knowledge is tricky. Consider a race car driver in the middle of a tense race, where all of his/her attention is focused on the demands of the race. Suppose you had a cell phone, or some other way, of asking him/her a question, and you asked, "Do you know the name of your third grade teacher?" I think the response would be something like, "Don't bother me right now, can't you see I'm busy?", or "I can't think of it right now." or just "...". I think the operation of these human body vehicles generates the same kind of intense noise and demand for attention so that PC just isn't aware of the knowledge from any other bodies. If the noise is shut down, as it is in meditation, then I think more knowledge from beyond the body might be accessible.

Why can't it drive all bodies simultaneoulsy ?

Obviously I have to agree that it does. We see simultaneous activity by a huge number of animals, including all the people and all the nematodes.

If it "multiplexes" why does it forget from body to body ?

Good question. My answer is, first of all, that it obviously does; each body is not aware of what is going on in the others. Secondly, I suspect it is simply due to some kind of limitation. As you might have noticed, in my view PC is not unlimited (nor is he/she omnipotent, immutable, infinite, perfect, omniscient, or complete).

That all seems quite arbitrary. ... It seems that you need a lot of additional, arbitrary hypotheses to make your theory work.

It might seem that way to you, but to me it is all the consequence of inference and observation. Ad hoc, maybe, but not arbitrary.

And doesn't this external consciousness get any feedback from the brain/body ? If not -- what is it supposed to be consciousness OF ?

Yes, it gets feedback. I think the communication link between PC and brain is two-way. Conscious experience of perceptions and feelings go from brain to PC, and willful intentions go from PC to the brain to cause free-will induced actions.

Harder for whom ? Nature had 15billion years.

Ummm...I'm not sure what you're getting at here. My suggestion was that it would be harder to design a conscious robot than a car. Are you suggesting that nature really did design (or at least build) a conscious robot? And that nature built cars only after the conscious robots had walked the Earth for several millions of years?

I was trying to put the example in common human terms. My point is that we humans have built cars but we have not yet built a conscious robot. I think the latter is a harder problem, at least for us humans.

Historical emergence is not much of a problem for physicalists or panexperientialists to name but two.

I think it is a problem for both. I haven't heard an explanation for consciousness emergence by physicalists that didn't essentially deny the existence of conscious experience. And I think the panexperientialists have a lot of explaining to do to make sense of what seems to me to be an overkill explanation.

Didn't it create the universe ? While it was still 'primitve', to boot!

Now you're pushing me into a corner. Yes, I think there are some really hard problems here, and my suspicions are that the answers are going to be very complex. Just as the history of science shows that our view of reality and the universe has expanded in scope and complexity enormously from the pre-Socratic times, I think we are in for some more major incremental increases in scope and complexity.

Since you are prodding me into this corner, I'll tell you about my guesses about what might really be going on. I think there are extra, large, flat, finite dimensions of both space and time, and that these provide an enormous increase in the "places" available for real things to exist. I think the interactions between our 4D world and the rest of reality are limited to the extent that we can't access much if anything beyond our 4D world with our instruments or senses. I think this is completely consistent with the mathematical notion of manifolds and with the notion of the wall of Plato's cave.

So getting back to your question, I think PC started out extremely primitive. Not much more than a simple ability to know. But from this starting point, and the realization (take that in both senses) of some one fact, the rest of reality was constructed as nothing but patterns in sets of information known by PC.

Roger Penrose presented a diagram in a couple of his books which depicts a rock-paper-scissors sort of relationship between three different worlds: the physical world, the mental world, and the Platonic world. The physical world is our familiar universe. The mental world is the set of ideas, experiences, perceptions, feelings, etc. that is also familiar. People might disagree that it is anything other than a part of the physical world, but it is easy to take the position that it is a different kind of thing from physical matter and energy. The Platonic world is more controversial yet. Whether or not there is such a world containing a perfect triangle, Penrose points out that the Mandelbrot Set is a thing that has been discovered rather than invented. Certainly no human designed its intricate patterns. So if this thing was discovered, where does it reside if not in a Platonic world?

Anyway, he has this diagram showing that a miniscule portion of the physical world (live brains) give rise to the entire mental world. And a miniscule portion of the mental world gives rise to the ideas of mathematics and the concepts that might reside in the Platonic world. And a miniscule portion of the stuff in the Platonic world (the equations of Schroedinger, Einstein, Maxwell, etc.) seem to be able to explain, if not give rise to, the entire physical world.

His diagram shows a paradoxical loop with no clear starting point. In my view, I would break his loop open between the mental and Platonic worlds and extend it into a helix. It would have a starting point at the bottom, viz. PC. PC would then construct some very primitive mental world from which a primitive "physical world" would be constructed next. This "physical world" would have the capacity to store information from the preceding mental world in a more or less permanent way so that PC would have it available but not have to constantly attend to it. (Sort of equivalent to a computer and a hard drive).

To make the next turn of the helix, PC would use that "physical world - computer system" to automatically set up more complex patterns of information and be able to explore the consequences of, for example, running cellular automata on it to see what happens. Seeing the outcomes of these experiments would give PC a whole new level of ideas that would constitute the next level mental world. (Keep in mind that during all of this, PC is the only thinker, knower, experiencer, doer, etc.) With these ideas, some small subset of promising and workable ideas for an even better "physical world" would be instituted in the next level Platonic world, and from there, the second level "physical world" could be constructed. And so on.

I suspect that the helix has made its eleventh turn if each turn adds another spatial dimension to reality. That's only a wild guess, but both Plato and String Theory have suggested the number eleven.

Speculating on the next step, I would guess that, along the lines suggested by Teilhard de Chardin and Frank Tipler, humans (along with possibly other intelligent life forms) will harness the entire energy of the universe and turn it into a single computer system which can then be used to explore methods of constructing an even better set of ideas and plans for a new and better universe, thus starting a new turn on the helix.

So you asked me about PC: " Didn't it create the universe ?" and my answer is "yes". But you have to be clear about what you mean by "the universe". If you mean our 4D space-time continuum for the past 16 billion years or so, then, yes, that was constructed by a complex 11D system which arranged the initial conditions for the big bang and set it going. If, on the other hand, by 'universe' you mean everything that exists, then I would say that, yes, PC created everything in that cosmic helix except for the primordial ability to know that started everything else off.

Now, to polish it off with the really hard question, I would say it's the conscious ability to know ... all the way down.

Since every theory has that problem, including your own, you cannot justify the extra complexity of your theory on the basis that it answers the fundamental question.

I agree. But I think I can justify the extra complexity on the basis that it answers all other quesitons.

An all-embracing universal consciousness is simple ? Most people don't even think human consciousness is simple.

You saw through my subterfuge. I tried to cleverly distinguish between consciousness, which I agree is not simple at all, and PC, the Primordial Consciousness. In my view, PC has grown enormously in every respect since the humble beginnings of reality. Today, we should probably use a term like Cosmic Consciousness, (CC), to refer to the conscious driver of the modern physical vehicles of biological animals here on earth. It was misleading on my part not to make this point earlier. But I think you can now understand my reasons for not telling you what I see as the whole story from the outset.

I'm afraid I will be headed directly to the crackpot corner now, but at least I hope that these ideas have been seen by some pretty smart people as a result of this thread. I thank you all for reading and I would love to hear more comments, especially criticisms and knock-offs.

Paul

 

[Paul Martin]

Pensador,

Thank you for posting a summary of your personal views. I found it very interesting.

I think the problem with every single philosophy I know of is that they try to avoid paradoxes, yet they all fail.

After thinking about this for a while, I think you are right. I interpret 'paradox' to mean inconsistency, or a violation of the law of non-contradiction. And, I think failure comes in two ways: one is simply by stumbling into a paradox or an inconsistency; the other is to avoid inconsistency at the expense of completeness. The second is the lacking of adequate answers for some questions.

I also think you could extend the domain of "philosophy" to include mathematics. The usual claim is that the body of mathematics is consistent, but with the extensions brought on by Cantor at the beginning of the last century, paradoxes were introduced. These extensions were opposed by Kronecker, et. al. but to no avail. So the body of mathematics, as it is now generally accepted, contains paradoxes which are artfully avoided, but IMHO still contaminate the subject. Goedel, I think, summed up the situation with his famous theorem: If your mathematical system is robust enough to include the infinite set of natural numbers, then it is either inconsistent or incomplete, and you can't tell which.

I decide to take that historical fact as a premise: paradoxes cannot be avoided, period.

I think that I am not quite as pessimistic about prospects for philosophy (including mathematics) as you seem to be; I think that if we are careful, we can not only avoid almost all paradoxes, but also develop a complete understanding of reality within a consistent philosophy. Maybe not in our lifetimes, but I think it will happen.

Technically I agree with you, but I said "avoid almost all paradoxes" because, as I see it, we need only admit one paradox, viz. "How can (or did) X come to exist, where X is ontologically fundamental?" Even though we can't explain how X came to be, by choosing the right X, we may still be able to explain everything as a consequence of X and still remain consistent. At least that's my guess.

And since any possible explanation of reality will harbor a paradox, it follows that the paradox must have a counterpart in reality itself. Incidentally, that paradox is known as "time".

I agree with this after interpreting your paradox of "time" to mean the same as the mystery of how and when X came to exist. Having X "always" existing is just as paradoxical and nonsensical as having X magically appear out of nothing at some point in "time".

The universe, at any given point, is in a state that can't possibly be "true" (real). A state of ambiguity always exists, and it must be resolved, but it can only be resolved by creating another state of ambiguity.

Here, again, I can interpret this to match my own view almost exactly.

In my view, there are multiple, distinct, dimensions of time. In particular, there is one which I have called Cosmic Time, (CT), and another, we could call Universal Time, (UT), which is the familiar one we humans mark with clocks and calendars. CT is the dimension of time in which the magical appearance of X occurred, and in which the evolution of the helix of the periodic appearances of Penrose's three worlds occurs. The evolution of our particular physical universe since the Big Bang occurs in UT. (To talk about what happened before the Big Bang requires a shift out of the UT dimension into some more general temporal dimension, CT being the ultimate step in that shift.)

So, in my view, the very identification of any given point is ambiguous unless and until you identify which particular temporal dimension you mean. An analogy would be trying to identify the particular point in time represented by a single frame of a movie film. Do you mean the moment I happened to be viewing that frame being projected? Or do I mean the ordinal number of that frame on the reel? Or do I mean the point in time depicted by the events on that frame in the story line of the film? The point is ambiguous only until the particular temporal dimension you mean is identified.

That process gives rise to all the dynamics we observe in the universe.

I agree. To my way of thinking, all the dynamics of the universe, and indeed even those that transcend our physical universe, are a direct consequence of the evolution of that Penrosian helix.

How does that relate to materialism vs. idealism? Well, both views are necessary to account for the paradox which exists in reality. Materialism provides solutions to the paradoxes in idealism, but only by creating new paradoxes, which then idealism solves, and the cycle goes on and on.

I agree with everything here, too, except that I would augment your list of the two "isms" with a third one: consciousness. (To remain consistent with the other two and use a word ending in 'ism', we might call it 'mentalism'.) These, then, are the three "worlds" identified by Penrose and which form each complete cycle of my helix.

To paraphrase what you wrote here, I would say that in order to account for the paradoxes in physical reality, we must include the precursor "ideal world" which contains the laws of physics at least. But to explain the mystery of how such sterile formulas could not only give rise to the physical world, but even come into existence in the first place, we need to include the precursor "mental world", which, assuming a conscious agent of some sort, could not only have dreamed up those formulas, but figured out some way of instantiating them. But to explain the mystery of the existence of that "mental world" we need to include some sort of precursor "physical world" (or maybe a "proto-physical world" since it would likely be quite different from our familiar physical world.)

"and the cycle goes on and on" until we reach the bottom of the helix, which in my view is a very simple mentality - X.

The bottom line is that both materialism and idealism are real, though not necessarily true if we require that any true idea must be free of paradoxes. The perceived incompatibility between them is the result of their mutual interdependency.

Again I agree if you allow me to paraphrase:

The bottom line is that all three worlds, the material world, the ideal world, and the conscious world, are real though not necessarily true if we require that any true idea must be free of paradoxes and expressed in terms confined to that world only. The perceived incompatibility between them is the result of their mutual rock-paper-scissors type interdependencies.

Our knowledge of reality will always be ambiguous because that is how reality itself is.

I agree here only to the extent that the notion of X will always remain ambiguous. Otherwise, I think it is possible in principle for our knowledge of reality to be complete and consistent.

Our knowledge of reality is always changing and always going in cycles because that is how reality is.

I agree that reality is always going in cycles (climbing the turns of the helix) but I don't think that is what has caused the persistent change in our knowledge of reality. Our knowledge has been changing simply because we have been on a long learning curve. I think that once we begin to analyze the entire picture of that helix, complete and consistent answers will be forthcoming. (I have always considered myself to be the world's greatest optimist.)

In a sense, we already understand how reality works, only we don't think we can possibly be right.

I would agree if you also throw in Socrates' reason. Not only do we doubt our understanding of how reality works, but we have forgotten how it works and we need to be reminded.

That is, in a nutshell, what I think.

Thank you very much for telling us.

Maybe some future, perfectly self-consistent theory will prove me wrong, but I don't expect to see the day when such a theory will become public, so I'll go with my ideas for the time being.

I encourage you to take heart. Your ideas are a very good starting point. I have high hopes for a very revealing outcome.

Paul

 

[Pensador]

Hi Paul,

I greatly appreciate your thoughtful posts, and agree with a lot of what you say. Since I don't have much time these days, I'd like to focus on two issues:

1) "The one primordial consciousness": I try hard to understand your explanations, but I still fail to see how this "primordial consciousness" is essentially different from any "primordial" entity postulated by physicists, such as "quantum vacuum fluctuation", "logical necessity", or anything else thought to be behind reality. My main difficulty is that I tend to associate "consciousness" with will, aesthetics, morals, and above all, individuality. I see nothing of that in your usage of consciousness, and therefore I see no reason to call your primordial entity by that name. Why not "primordial energy", for instance?

2) "Paradox as the essence of reality": I think this idea is really difficult to convey. It's not so much that I'm pessimistic, as you said, about the possibility of coming up with a nice, clean explanation of reality, it's rather that I realize people accept as true everything their theories tell them, except the theory's own inconsistency. For instance, we accept that photons and gravity are real, but we do not accept the inconsistencies between quantum mechanics and relativity (if we happen to perceive any). All I'm saying is that, just as the abstract notions of "photon" and "gravity" have counterparts in reality, so does the inconsistency itself. This idea came to me one day when I asked myself, "if I know nothing about reality, what is the only thing I can be absolutely sure about it?"; then an answer suggested itself "I can always be sure that reality is free of paradoxes (or ambiguities)". It took me a few years to suspect not only that assertion is unwarranted, it's not known to be true as every single theory we know has paradoxes or ambiguities and, as I said, we trust those theories as reliable descriptions of reality except for their "problems". Which wouldn't be problems at all if reality were, in fact, paradoxical or ambiguous. The bottom line is, what reason do we have to think reality is not paradoxical or ambiguous?

 

[Canute]

Good question. My view is that it is paradoxical when analysed by reason as we know it (i.e. by Boolean-like yes/no or on/off logic). Hence metaphysics and the paradoxes of Zeno, Russell etc. and maybe, as you say, many of the paradoxes found in our scientific theories. However, I agree with you that it would be strange indeed if reality/existence really was paradoxical. It seems more likely that it is not at all paradoxical, but that we are thinking about it in the wrong way, as has invariably been asserted by mystics throughout recorded history.

 

[Paul Martin]

Belated answers to Pensador

1) "The one primordial consciousness": I try hard to understand your explanations, but I still fail to see how this "primordial consciousness" is essentially different from any "primordial" entity postulated by physicists, such as "quantum vacuum fluctuation", "logical necessity", or anything else thought to be behind reality. My main difficulty is that I tend to associate "consciousness" with will, aesthetics, morals, and above all, individuality. I see nothing of that in your usage of consciousness, and therefore I see no reason to call your primordial entity by that name. Why not "primordial energy", for instance?

Thank you for the attention you have given to my ideas.

The term 'Primordial Consciousness' is perhaps a bad choice because, in my view, it is no longer "primordial". That is, I think that the entity present at the very beginning of reality, which at that time was primordial by definition, has changed, evolved, learned, grown, and developed into something vastly more complex by now. Instead, I should use a term like 'Cosmic Consciousness', or 'CC' to refer to the "driver" of modern-day organisms.

But that is a small problem. Your concern is with the term 'Consciousness' and why I chose that instead of, say, 'energy'. Here are two reasons:

1. My candidate for the ontologically fundamental entity is the only thing I know exists with absolute certainty. That is the experience of consciousness. I can reasonably doubt the existence of everything else. All other candidates for the fundamental entity, whether they are forms of matter, or energy, false vacuum, fields, principles, information, rules, equations, or laws, end up ultimately seeming to be objects of consciousness. "It from bit". Bits are units of information, but in my opinion, a bare difference is insufficient to describe information. The difference must have "meaning" and meaning accrues only to consciousness. So if we posit consciousness as being primordial, everything else can be seen to logically follow.

2. As Penrose has suggested, reality can be partitioned into three separate "worlds": Physical, Mental, and Ideal. Few would doubt the existence of a physical world. Most would agree that the mental world of perceptions, feelings, will, knowing, experiencing, etc. -- all aspects of consciousness -- not only exist, but that those are quite a different type of thing from physical things. The ideal world of Plato is more contentious, but in Penrose's example of the Mandelbrot Set it seems hard to deny that that intricate structure exists somehow even though it wasn't designed or predicted by anyone prior to its "discovery", and in fact it still hasn't been explored in its entirety. So there seems to be an Ideal World with at least something in it. Maybe it also contains a perfect triangle, or Schroedinger's Equation.

So, now we ask in which of these three worlds might our ontologically fundamental entity be found. We examine each in turn and consider the implications.

If physicality is fundamental, then as the body of science has shown so far, it seems that there is an ideal world of at least some fundamental laws behind it. Moreover, it does not seem that physicality can give rise to, or an explanation for, conscious experience.

If idealism is fundamental, then we can sort of see how the physical world can emerge at least in principle. But a couple of things are missing. Laws of physics can determine the behavior of some "objects", thus making them physical, but it seems that there must be some kind of substrate or carrier for the objects. For example, the "objects" might be quantum numbers, but doesn't there need to be an abacus, or a RAM, or a signal of some sort to "hold" the numbers? Moreover, there is the puzzle of how those Laws came to exist. And finally, the problem of the emergence of consciousness is just as hard to explain with or without the existence of an ideal world.

If consciousness is fundamental, then it is straightforward to explain the ideal world. The consciousness could imagine and dream up the ideal world just as our conscious mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers construct their respective bodies of work. The physical world, in principle, is also easy to explain. The consciousness could not only dream up and choose some rules, or laws for the behavior, but the objects themselves could be conjured up by pure imagination. And, finally, the evolution of the patterns of those objects could be played out simply by the attention and "thought" of that consciousness. Granted, it would take a prodigious feat of imagination and memory to keep track of the structure and evolution of the visible universe, but in principle, it is no different from one of us playing a game of tic-tac-toe strictly in our conscious mind.

So it seems logical to me that some (probably very rudimentary) form of consciousness was primordial. That consciousness should have been able to produce an ideal world simply by thinking. From that, by consciously choosing appropriate ideas, and constructs and by choosing and applying appropriate rules, and by imagining how the constructs would evolve according to those rules, a(n imaginary) physical world could be built.

I don't see how this physical world (or any other physical world for that matter) could give rise to an additional consciousness. But if the memory available to the consciousness (however that is attained) is prodigious enough, then some of the constructs of that physical world could serve as memory devices in their own right, computation and signaling devices, and vehicles (in essence making up a virtual reality game) which the consciousness entity could operate vicariously giving the illusion that certain physical "individuals" were actually conscious entities. These, in turn, could dream up their own ideal worlds of plans and formulas, and construct their own virtual physical worlds. This may continue for several turns, all operated by the single consciousness.

In my view, the only hard problem in this picture is how to explain that prodigious memory.

2) "Paradox as the essence of reality": I think this idea is really difficult to convey. It's not so much that I'm pessimistic, as you said, about the possibility of coming up with a nice, clean explanation of reality, it's rather that I realize people accept as true everything their theories tell them, except the theory's own inconsistency. For instance, we accept that photons and gravity are real, but we do not accept the inconsistencies between quantum mechanics and relativity (if we happen to perceive any). All I'm saying is that, just as the abstract notions of "photon" and "gravity" have counterparts in reality, so does the inconsistency itself. This idea came to me one day when I asked myself, "if I know nothing about reality, what is the only thing I can be absolutely sure about it?"; then an answer suggested itself "I can always be sure that reality is free of paradoxes (or ambiguities)". It took me a few years to suspect not only that assertion is unwarranted, it's not known to be true as every single theory we know has paradoxes or ambiguities and, as I said, we trust those theories as reliable descriptions of reality except for their "problems". Which wouldn't be problems at all if reality were, in fact, paradoxical or ambiguous.

First I would say that the prevalence of paradoxes in theories is not a good reason to suppose "Paradox as the essence of reality". Instead, I would say that the prevalence simply shows that we do not yet have adequate theories. Second, I would say that if we posit "Paradox as the essence of reality", then we need to ask what sort of thing is a paradox. I think it is clear that a paradox is a concept or an idea. And I don't think a concept or idea can exist in the absence of something like a conscious mind. So the mind must be more ontologically fundamental than the paradox.

Now, as for the paradoxes that appear in our theories, I think there are two primary causes or sources of them. First is simply error in the theory. We got it wrong.

But secondly, I think the fundamental source is that rock-paper-scissors relationship among the three Penrosian worlds. The mistake is thinking that physicality gives rise to consciousness. If we make that mistake, then we have, physicality causes consciousness, which causes ideas (laws and formulas), which cause physicality.

If we deny that physicality can cause consciousness, then we get a finite chain, which I think could be consistently explain all of reality:

Consciousness ==> Ideas ==> Physicality ==>Conscious-seeming vehicles ==> Ideas ==> Physicality ==>Conscious-seeming vehicles ==> Ideas ==> Physicality ==>Conscious-seeming vehicles ... ==> Ideas ==> Physicality ==>Conscious-seeming vehicles.

The bottom line is, what reason do we have to think reality is not paradoxical or ambiguous?

We have no such reason. Some, or all, of reality may be paradoxical or ambiguous. But, in the physical world we see, there is an enormous amount of regularity.

I think this situation is easily explained in my model. The critical point is the operation of Consciousness choosing a set of constructs and a set of rules for the evolution of a new physicality. Since this is a conscious choice, consistent rules may be chosen and the evolution may be allowed to proceed according to these rules without violation. Just the same as if I decided to play a game of solitaire according to the rules of the game. But nothing in my model would prevent the consciousness from choosing an ambiguous set of rules, or of interfering in the evolution in violation of the rules. I could do the same while I play solitaire if I want (maybe not in the computer version but I could with a deck of cards).

Neither does anything in my model preclude Many Worlds at any of the "Ideas ==> Physicality" operations, each having the same or different rules.

I think the key notion here is that the investigation of "Reality" is a much more general and comprehensive problem than the investigation of "Physical Reality". I suggest and hope that Science will begin turning their attention from the latter to the former.

Paul