FOREWORD
A foreword to the reader:
One thing I have always wanted to see in a work of literature and have yet to find is transparency. I do not mean this in any way to discredit the creativity or claims of any author, but rather the word transparency is used with regards to an author’s intentions. By intentions I mean one thing: the author’s agenda.
And despite any author’s sincerest intentions and boldest claims to the contrary, all authors have one because all authors have biases. While this may seem obvious to some, what may take some reflection is the fact that, while the topic of any given piece may seem to reflect an author’s views, this is not always the case.
Even given an op-ed or any sort of opinion piece, it may be difficult for a reader to gauge whether or not the given article is merely a product of someone else’s agenda, i.e. a publication for an organization. I believe this is an especially salient point as many an author have been accused of espousing ideas or rhetoric which do not accurately conform to their personal beliefs and this may do incredible disservice to their work(s) and/or future output. One example that comes to mind is Soren Kierkegaard and his discourse on subjectivity vs. objectivity. One clearly gets the impression that Mr. Kierkegaard is personally advocating for subjectivity as being the highest truth, yet he was so guarded in his own teachings that he chose to write under a pseudonym, lest his personal character be misinterpreted and besmirched. Alas, even this guise did not fulfill his wishes as he was severely criticized for having ‘unreasonable claims’ and for being ‘irrational’. While neither of these traits can necessarily be construed as deplorable qualities in themselves (for reasons I will touch on later), it is evident that K did not want others to think ill of his philosophies and, unfortunately, did not take the correct measures to vouchsafe against this. Of course one could argue that readers will always form a judgement regardless, given human nature, but I do not see this as any kind of hurtle a writer must overcome if they are transparent from the onset about their agenda. I equate this reasoning to “going to a sword fight with a sword as opposed to a spoon.” I am not serving anything here: I am purporting my thoughts, and there can be no argument as to their validity in my mind. For what that’s worth, there the reader can be the final arbiter, and there alone.
I do not wish to belabor this point further, only that I wish my work to be transparent in that it is clear what my views are, as I do not want my readers to ever be in doubt as to what the words mean expressed in this work herein. To be clear, I have an agenda, and it is just this: to show that to tackle consciousness as a subject of investigation, one must remain critical of their preconceived notions of reality, and to always, always question the ontology of one’s investigations—especially something as notoriously mercurial as consciousness—as well as the validity of their own experiences. This includes working outside of the convenience of functionalism, which will be touched on during the discussion of Pure Science.
Here is some information about me, which I believe will provide relative context to this paper:
I am markedly anti-religious. I italicize this to drive home the point that I am openly proud of my sentiment toward religion and do not wish to hide behind any kind of veil of propriety or etiquette with respect to my views of the subject. I am this way, not because of any notable personal encounters that would (or perhaps should) have put me off of it, but rather that I have had the privilege (and luxury) of being able to be a side-liner during its many debacles, watching from the outside in, as it tears itself apart limb by limb. While this may strike many as florid language and irrelevant to a discussion of consciousness, I cannot exclude my disdain of religion in my discussion of consciousness as this attitude has played a large part in forming my views of consciousness. That, and one cannot skirt around the topic when bringing up consciousness, since religion will surely wish to have a stake in it, as it is associated with the human spirit.
While I believe religion is detrimental to the world for all of the same reasons that any detractor would list, i.e. its treatment of women, human sexuality, backward-thinking etc., I may swing off to the Left more so than a garden varietal atheist in my unabashed, outspoken attitude about advocating against it. In other words: I am not a “closet detractor.” Yet, nor am I atheist. Well, perhaps by definition I am, in the most liberal sense of the word, for I do not believe in any kind of anthropomorphized ‘God’, but I will (for reasons I will elaborate on later) criticize that tough lot in the same kind of light that I do the zealot. All will ‘come under the gun’, as it were. This is not to be ‘fair’ to any one side, but because I deplore rote thought and Atheism is not immune to this label.
My personal beliefs resonate with a variety of schools of thought, from scientific empiricism, ancient mysticism, and a smattering of philosophical meandering; essentially, anything that gets the mind turning with respect to the nature of the universe. I also am a huge fan of the idea, corroborated by extensive psychological evidence, that humans are better off believing in something greater than themselves. Whatever this ends up being is central to the ideas that I will put forth in this paper, for while I have yet to discover where I sit on the cosmic roller-coaster, I do believe serious thought needs to be given to where humans stand with respect to the majesty of the universe. Whether this takes on the lenses of scientific empiricism, religious mysticism or philosophical introspection, I will heretofore encourage the idea that one cannot, as a conscious being, be neutral with respect to consciousness and their place in it. This is akin, in my mind, to denouncing sustenance hunting yet still being a meat eater—equally atrocious hypocrisies and irreconcilable behavior.
Given the above information, I don’t wish to give the impression that I am on the band wagon of avoiding band wagons; I too am not exempt from labels. Within a broad definition of the self, I reluctantly consider myself both a skeptic and a secularist, the former more so than the latter. Not a scientific skeptic, however, but a true skeptic, for I am just as skeptical of scientific inquiry as I am religious divination. In this paper I hope to show, among other things, that the mechanisms of our distinctions do not differ at all in any given belief medium, regardless of the outcome of our appropriations. Perhaps a better way to say this is that I am skeptical of humans and their relationship to understanding the physical world. I say ‘physical’ here to denote the possibility of something beyond the material, for within my skepticism a healthy dose of it falls upon physicalism. And while I do not rule out the positivist’s dream, nor do I fully embrace dualism, I think it apt to remain skeptical of any kind of objective arrogance. While to some this may smack of undue Socratic pedantry, I will say no more on this point other than that the notion of ‘unknowing’ will be pivotal in my discussions of the nature of consciousness, and there is no better archetype in my mind for this than Socrates. Thus, S will serve just fine to be a poster-boy for this centralized theme, and nothing more. I will disclose further in the paper what is meant by ‘unknowing’, namely in my discussions of spheres of knowledge.
As I am sure you, the reader, have already realized from the title of this paper, at the heart of the premise of my skepticism lies, among many other paradoxes—consciousness.
I need not outline my view of consciousness here as the entire paper will be doing just that, but I will say this: my aim in this paper is not to convince the reader of any one viewpoint, only to reassess how they think about the problem of consciousness, if it is indeed a problem. I also wish the reader to know that I am very open to feedback and criticism and encourage both, which can be related to me directly at supamichi@gmail.com. Beyond this, I do not believe any other information about me is necessary to belie my points, though I would like to add one further note—that I will attempt to refrain from namedropping as much as possible, as this is neither a scientific paper nor a philosophical manifesto of any kind and, frankly, I find the whole practice of doing so rather distasteful outside of the peer-review process. I’m not looking at rubbing elbows or patting any backs here, as I feel that would detract from the spirit of the propositions that I will put forward. However, if ever there is question as to where I garner outside thoughts, I am happy to clarify via correspondence.
For me, this is purely an exercise of putting thoughts upon paper. Hopefully they are worth the ink they have solicited!
M
I. SPHERES OF KNOWLEDGE
As this is a paper on the nature of consciousness, I do not wish to delve too deeply into other philosophical schools beyond what is necessary to clarify language that will be used going forward. Knowledge, in the broadest sense, will be used to refer to what I consider perspective knowledge, that is—knowledge within the spheres of our perception. Within this kind of knowledge, we may learn such things as how the universe works, i.e. physical systems, the rules of math etc. So far, this has been entirely consistent, meaning that perspective knowledge has seemed to be affixed. Of course as technology progresses we can interpolate this kind of knowledge and build the data pool, increasing the ‘fidelity’ or ‘resolution’ of our perceptions, but more or less the kernels of truth and laws that the universe provides us are relatively immutable beyond these ‘little tweaks’. In this regard, perspective knowledge seems to point at some kind of ultimate truth, as if one day we shall land on the distant planet of all that is good and true in the universe, shaking hands with Plato as he welcomes us to his world of perfect forms. An extreme proponent of perspective knowledge will advocate that there is no other kind of knowledge, and end the story there. While they may couch their views in some kind of noble martyrdom, i.e. that ‘facing the truth of the meaninglessness of the universe is a higher cause and takes great strength’, I hope to demonstrate that this is no less radical (and cowardly) of a viewpoint than the suicide bomber who throws away their life in the name of Islam. I hope this strikes the overt-rationalist as a brazen statement, for this is entirely the intention. I believe that extremists must be faced head-on, for it is the only communication that they understand. To quell this firefight I will say this: realize that when you believe that perspective knowledge can tell us all that there is to the universe, you are saying another thing: that humans can know everything there is about the universe. Ironically, this is actually contrary to scientific evidence, which is the very discipline that the overt-rationalist will often attempt to hide behind when they seek to corroborate their views. Let me explain what is meant here.
Take the Big-Bang, for example. Within perspective knowledge we know exactly how all of the natural elements and many of the subatomic particles came to be and understand much of the early universe to within fractions of a fraction of a fraction of a second after it began. Barring any kind of esoteric questions beyond the physical systems in place before then, physics can tell us more or less how everything began after the initial ka-boom. Even then, there are many valid theories in cosmogenesis that aren’t too sci-fi or ‘out there’, though all of them remain to be proven by humanity. Yet, any physicist will tell you today that one of the greatest mysteries of the universe remains resolving quantum gravity with general relativity which, in crude summary, is aligning the very small with the very large. And while the rationalist may argue that “we just haven’t discovered a way yet” or “we can develop new systems that match observation” (both valid points), this argument skirts around a fact which cannot be avoided: that perspective knowledge is contrived to fit within the framework of observation and that some of the most fundamental questions we have about the universe may have no immediate answer.
In other words: we say what we see, and can say no more. I am not arguing that there is anything wrong with this, only that one must accept that the universe truly doesn’t give a damn about what we think of it, as one prominent physicist put it, and that we must report and that’s it. The problem of quantum gravity may end up being only one of many that takes a paradigm shift in our thought processes if we wish to understand it, if it indeed can be understood by us.
Within that line of rationale also comes the premise that the universe contains unknowables by definition—unknowables that we (may) later define. Examples of this are the concept of infinity, or in math the non-terminating decimal pi, being perhaps some of the best-known cases. Neither of these exist in any kind of tangible sense, but their concepts are nonetheless imperative to our understanding of how much of the natural world works. Yet, inherent in these ideas is very much a context-dependent model in which they only makes sense under certain conditions. While one may argue that pi is pi, the cosmological constant is the cosmological constant etc., it does nothing to assuage the nagging urge that something is wrong when we try and appropriate infinity in any kind of real way. What is meant by real here is essentially applicable to our attention, i.e. the idea that infinity cannot be “attended”, only “intended”. In the very same way we embrace an asymptote (a virtual line that can only ever be infinitely approached but never reached), we attempt to attend these ideas but never quite get there. This is by definition the nature of something like infinity or pi. But they are no less ingrained into our definition of the universe. We say what we see, even if it’s not entirely real. This may be a (good?) example of another sphere of knowledge, even if it may be a subset of the first sphere—that which is both real and not real. Some may see these examples as some kind of straw man, but I assure you it is not; to be clear, the word unknowable simply refers to that which cannot be fully understood by us, and more: by us at any given moment. There are many things in quantum mechanics, for example, that are still not fully understood, and even if we were to write out some kind of systems theory or sum them up with pages and pages of math, it still does not mean that one understands it. It is merely a report that falls consistent with observations—pure science (more on this later). And yes, while this may lead down a path to infinite regress (ex. “well then we can say that nothing is truly understood, then”), this can simply be avoided by accepting that the entire nature of the universe is unknowable on at least one level, perhaps many. At least by us.
Or is it? Here, a perfect segue into the nature of consciousness, since perspective knowledge will be a linchpin in its discovery, if indeed it can be discovered.
I hope, after all of the above talk about perspective knowledge, you the reader, have asked “well, what other kinds of knowledge can there be?” Aha, there is the rub. Right-wing rationalists aside, I believe most readers so far will be wont to know more about the universe, as opposed to the cheap dismissal of the ultimate physicalist. But before I can elaborate further, I must ask the reader to pardon me while I side-step to clarify some more language; remember—transparency!
In an attempt to avoid Cartesian throwbacks, I will simply say that if you are reading this paper now, I believe (and I hope you do too!) that there is something going on right now. Whether or not you agree with thinking and therefore being is irrelevant for my purpose, as all you have to agree with is that there is something, hologram or otherwise. As one physicist put it: if we are truly talking about capital ‘N’ Nothing, then we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. In other words: there is no such thing as Nothing! Let me be clear here: nothing as it relates to empty space—there is a lot of that. This is not what is meant by Nothing. In fact, as I’m sure you already know, space is brimming full of stuff—quantum foam, vacuum energy, neutrinos, etc. The universe is pregnant with stuff, so quite the opposite. By Nothing we are simply referring to the idea of non-existence, which has come to conform to a very rigorous definition among humans: that if we are having a discussion about nothing or something, it is still a discussion. So, while one may easily argue the quality of experience of being, they may not argue against it entirely, for the reason that there is something. Thus, I have come to my definition of being, in that it is simply what we think of, pragmatically, as our day-to-day lives. Nothing more. I don’t wish to get all existential in this paper and appeal to any kind of glitch in the system or anything like that; merely that we are here, in some form, and that’s good enough for our discussion.
Sloughing off that dead skin, I hope we can now agree that being should not be a problem herein, any more than the fact that I’m writing in English. This brings me to my ultimate point: spheres of knowledge. What I mean by this is simply that, like the physical universe, I believe knowledge too has dimensions. The perspective knowledge level has already been covered and, like it or not, it is very much there. What one chooses to do with it is another story entirely. Some like to dwell on that lower level, perhaps even build a home and live out a life there, but others—like myself—are not entirely convinced that perspective knowledge is the endgame. Please note: this will not be a direct appeal to irrationalism, although it may seem heading that way. Rather, it will be an irrational framework to appeal to the rational thinker, as everything I am about to discuss can be corroborated in some way or another.
Beyond this first base level of knowledge, I see there as being other layers, perhaps infinite. The reason I say ‘perhaps’ is because it seems that the universe itself is filled with these kind of manifest patterns of infinitude, whether they are shapes, vibrations or otherwise. The scaffolding of the physical world, I believe, gives us clues to the inner working of some of the greatest questions we as monkeys in suits can conjure, such as: “is there an elementary particle” or “will life always happen given such and such…” These are hugely complicated issues, to be sure, and I dare not broach each and every one, for this is just one paper. But I do believe many of these larger questions are related to the questions we have about consciousness, i.e. “Is it special or not”, or “is it a phenomenon produced by the brain?”
Many will already be convinced that we have answers to these questions and, if that is you, feel free to walk away right now and live out your life in absolute certainty. You owe it to yourself to believe whatever you will and, if being this way makes you better for it, this paper will not try to pull you back. However, if you are like me and you are never quite satisfied by anything you read, discuss, or meditate on regarding the topic of consciousness, please find some solace in these words. And if not solace, at least some respite, for I will not be attempting to toot any horns, blow any whistles or arrest any ‘bad guys’ here: I am simply hoping to share. This will be a potluck with an open invitation. Please also keep in mind that psychology tells us time and time again that we are our own worst critics; you may actually be holding yourself back from exposing yourself to some new, beneficial ideas.
But I digress—the point here is that to accept that there are other spheres of knowledge beyond our sense perception may take some serious consideration. The reason for this is for the same reason that the “tree falling in the forest” question bungles up so many people and begets so many arguments: there is more than one way to consider the situation. This is entirely related to consciousness, for we must ask ourselves: has humanity ever had an example of knowledge without perception? I hope you answered a resounding ‘absolutely not’, or you know something that I don’t. While this sounds like I am arguing in favor of perspective knowledge being the be-all-end-all, you will see later that it’s quite the opposite. If you believe in God or something along those line then, sure, you may have a different stance; you may attempt the ‘George Berkley’, AKA “God’s always watching”, but I hope to show that this is somewhat of a cop out. By cop out I mean you’ve simply regurgitated an easy-out, without giving it any considerable thought. This is exactly akin to the “God works in mysterious ways” catchphrase, which—by the way—science has its own versions of (elaborate later in Pure Science). While they may be convincing to the devout mind, this paper is not written for that audience anyway (the assured); in my experience, the convinced spare no seats into the abyss, that is—the convicted mind is an immutable one, even if it ends up being its own undoing. Thus, if you are brainwashed (and unfortunately you probably don’t know you’re brainwashed by definition), this paper will not be for you, any more than it will be for the extreme rationalist.*
If you believe that knowledge is absolute, but a little more abstruse than just perspective knowledge, you’ll perhaps put an upper ceiling on the number of spheres that there are. One way you could envision this is to imagine that there is an incredibly advanced race out there somewhere whose consciousness has evolved to a point we could not even fathom. Perhaps they see it “all”, in the same way hawks see thermals and bats have ultrasound. But realize that this is not likely true, given that consciousness itself has no evidence of any kind ceiling, even given our small slice of an example—life on earth. And even within that, no one is to say whether or not anything outside of ourselves is conscious, extrapolation aside (more on this in the Slippery Solipsism section).
It is not clear to many of us what is really real or not, as if the universe made us with its hands over our eyes and stardust in our ears. While we may be comfortable at a base level sphere, many of us have had experiences that shake our understanding of what reality is (see Truth and Perception: What do you Consider Evidence?). But what does seem clear is that, assuming consciousness is universal among life (in whatever form that may take), that it does seem directed. And so, one stance you may take is that, if consciousness is like many other things in the universe—relative—that there is possibly no limit to the extent which it can be experienced. Think of a crank to a flow-gate that never stops turning, letting out more and more water, or perhaps a volume knob with no maximum level. What this would be like we cannot know until we are there, in theory. Perhaps one could call hallucinogenic experiences a kind of ephemeral knowledge, barring you accept they aren’t just illusions (more on this in Truth and Perception). This calls back into play the idea that the universe if full of unknowns, consciousness included. Yet, you may easily argue that consciousness is little more than sense perception and thus it can easily be equated to the totality of the senses available in a living system. I will contend that this is a very tenuous stance to take, and I will challenge this thought further in Consciousness and the Brain: You think you thought. For now, in the least I hope we can all agree that there are knowns (within perspective knowledge) and unknowns (somewhere else). If you are on the far right of the spectrum of spherical knowledge, you will agree at most there are only these two, and one shall become the other in time, so really there is a shady area where they merge and they can really be thought of as overlapping. I hope most readers find this unconvincing to the extreme, as this idea is ultimately premised upon the notion that humans can know everything, given enough time and technology. This just doesn’t click with me, as this is equivalent to objective arrogance.
ii. oBJECTIVE ARROGANCE – WHOSE TREE IS FALLING?
This question cannot be avoided when talking about consciousness, even if you are the most astute empirical scientist. Sure, you may argue that physical systems impact their environment and that there are measurable quantities and yadda, yadda, yadda, but this is entirely aside from the actual question being put forth—does the universe depend on consciousness? In a similar discussion with my cousin, he put it in a way that I thought was quite thought provoking: “consciousness is the universe looking in at itself from the eyes of others”. While this may seem a little too Wachowski (Sisters) to some, one must admit that there is good evidence that consciousness is ingrained into the fabric of the cosmos in some way. How far down this rabbit hole you wish to go is up to you. But take my hand, and let’s see.
At the most superficial level, you can argue that consciousness is the ultimate product of syntropy—Entropy’s more organized cousin. We now know that syntropy—organized pockets of energy systems—exist abundantly in the universe and wholeheartedly abide by the physical rules governing our universe. In fact, it’s more than that: entropy practically begets syntropy so that it itself can work within its own bounds. Note that this is very different than “organized chaos”; syntropy is by no means the same thing as throwing a deck of 52 cards on the floor and happening to find a pair or a straight, and thus arguing that the order is still random but merely an interpretation. Indeed, syntropy is much more akin to ‘the aligning of a lipid bi layer within a cell’, a well-known phenomenon to biochemists where fatty lipids align in a specific way as to maximize charge separation, that is—keeping the negatives away from the positives. Without getting overly semantic here, I will leave this point here: organization is embedded into the universe. Now, while clusters of energy or molecules may seem a far-cry off from something as (purportedly) complicated as consciousness, I aim to show this is actually not as far a stretch as one might think. I will do this by appealing to the origin of life—something that, as far as we understand it, is necessary for consciousness (though I will also argue against that later).
At base, chemical interactions determine every single physical thing we can see and measure. If consciousness is singularly a byproduct of the brain’s interfacing, then it is no different. So then the real question we should be asking is what is the probability of life? Now, enough has been written on this by many more established (and reputable!) authors than myself, so I won’t get into Drake’s Equation, endosymbionts or anything along those lines, as that is outside of the scope of my larger aim. However, it is worth noting that the general consensus among the scientific community is that all of the materials for life are likely abundant in the universe (and perhaps the interstellar medium too!), and the universe is likely ripe with the conditions for them to coalesce and form. On a side note: the extreme skeptic of extraterrestrial life will appeal to the sheer desolation of the universe and the fact that we have yet to find any other life in the universe. I believe that these people ignore the power of math when they make such claims, in that they totally disregard probabilities and time. Given the (known) size of the universe, not to mention the possibility of multiple universes, we can’t even begin to fathom the monstrous size of the universe. To put it into perspective: the best current guess (as of 2017) of the number of galaxies in the observable universe is around 100 billion, and within an average galaxy there are perhaps 100 million stars or more. That makes 10 quintillion—or 1000 trillion—stars in the universe we’ve actively measured, and this doesn’t account for galaxies being born all the time. To put that into perspective, even if 1 % of 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% of all star systems had planets that could harbor life as we know it, there would still be 10 million potentially habitable planets in the universe! Add in billions of years of creative space for the universe to work and—voila!—the masterpiece of life. If this still is unconvincing to you, please consider these facts: evolution can be viewed on small scales called microevolution, i.e. evolution that is observable in a group. We have seen this in the short-generation times of fruit flies. And while fruit flies don’t become starfish overnight, we do see drastic changes in their phenotypes (observable qualities) in very short order. Now scale this up over billions of years, and suddenly nature’s creative control makes sense. Keep in mind that the human brain is not even close to capable of considering a number even as large as a million, outside of any kind of abstract way. Even to count to a million would be a task very few humans would have the patience for. Multiply that by one thousand and…well, you get the point. The point is, the age and size of the current universe is inconceivably large; the only reason one may ix-nay the existence of life in the universe is because they just can’t grasp these numbers. In my mind, it is self-explanatory why we haven’t found life yet: the universe is just so damn big! That, or there is the perfectly valid theory that complex (eukaryotic?) life actually forms no-problemo, but intelligence is self-defeating by nature. In other words: we tend to blow ourselves up. So, in the end I don’t personally believe understanding the nature of consciousness is ultimately a question about the nature of life, since life isn’t (likely) as miraculous as we once thought. Yes, it is an incredibly complex series of events and has very specifically fine-tuned preferences—or so it seems—but by no means does it necessarily equate humans as being special. If biology and the Great Filter theories are right, then eukaryotic and intelligent, non-destructive life is most certainly quite the barrier to overcome, but I don’t honestly believe this is something we can sink our teeth into yet as we are very much in the infancy of exploring the universe and its potential for doing complicated, harmonious things. The fact alone that humans say “the brain is single-handedly the most complicated system we know of” is proof of this notion, in my mind. It is also a very dangerous thing to say, because that statement can be interpreted in one of two ways: that the brain is the most complicated thing we have observed so far, or that we’re likely not going to get more complicated than the human brain. I cringe when I read the latter half—not to any discredit of the brain as it is a truly an amazing organ—but that this is the biggest hand wave that we could do with regards to objective arrogance.
What is meant by this is that, as collective observers, humans somehow extrapolated this system of various viewpoints and correlations unto a kind of ‘map’ of the actual universe. Let me elaborate: it’s like saying you have one drop of red, then another, and another and another ad infinitum, and at some point you zoom out and say, “Aha! Yellow.”, and fold your arms in front of you, smiling as if you’ve discovered electricity for the first time. But I hope you are as skeptical reading this analogy as I am writing it—because that’s the point. This is exactly equivalent to what we do, in my mind, when we combine subjective viewpoints and call them something else when enough of them come together in agreement. Of course you can argue that the word objective refers to nothing more than this process, and is thus only a word, but this is a fragile stance to take as too many claims have been made about the nature of such-and-such with conviction put behind that very term, as if it had some other meaning.
Let’s be honest with ourselves: you must call a spade a spade. Subjectivity is not objectivity, by definition, so what are we actually talking about when we say objective? What I think we mean is that one person’s observations can be confirmed by anyone else with the same opportunities and biases (yes, biases matter, as they color our preconceptions!), as well as the exact same tools for measurement. Do you not see the glaring hypocrisy therein? First of all, how about the fact that objectivity is contingent upon there being perceivers to begin with, as well as the fact that the same measuring tools must be in place.
“But no,” you say, “we don’t actually mean eyes and brains, we mean actual physical measuring machines, like rulers, oscilloscopes, spectrometers etc.”
I hope that this response leaves as sour a taste in your mouth as it does mine. For this isn’t really an answer to our proposition at all—it merely distracts from the point that any kind of measuring device cannot be divorced from a measurer to record it. This is part and parcel of the measurement process, by definition. If anyone ever tries to tell you otherwise, please be convicted in knowing that that is entirely irrational, as we have never had an example of measurement without a measurer. In fact, has not all of science always had people to do it? I’ve never heard of the universe performing tests on itself. Have you?
Which brings us back to our original question of the tree in the forest—that oh, so lovely question that everyone loves to hate.
If you are of the opinion that the sound of the tree falling in the forest can be equated purely to the mechanical waves propagating through the air-medium, irrespective of one to hear them, please consider the craziness of your statement and consider that you:
1) Had to think of this scenario in your mind to explain it—which involved a hypothetical observer.
2) Completely negated the fact that sound is a process in the brain/ear interface as much as it is a process in nature. They cannot be divorced. This requires an observer.
3) Were trying to imagine a world without observers in which the universe interacts with itself irrespective of someone to view its goings-on. While I will indulge more into this line of thinking in Slippery Solipsism, for now focus on the fact that all we’ve ever talked about is our place in the universe. There is absolutely no precedent of the universe without us in it, outside of allegory. While this is not an appeal to the idea that the universe needs us to exist, it is a direct example of how we are dependent on ourselves to describe it. Thus, any description of any event in nature has always, will always, need an observer.
So in answer to your question: whose tree is falling?
iii. PINK LEMONADE
So you’ve come this far and made it to the tea party. Listen to what the Mad Hatter has to say before you question reality.
Consciousness, at face value, seems to be able to be explained away by neuroscience. Sort of. This really depends on what your take on phenomenology is—what it’s like to experience things. Here I am going to force the reader to take a bitter pill, as your preconceived notions of consciousness may become upended by what I have to say in this section. Any who are not familiar with ‘the hard problem of consciousness’ or the ‘Chinese Room thought experiment’ need not to muss their hair and lose sleep to play catch up here; just know that humans have long debated conscious thought and what’s it like to be conscious. These are very contentious topics that some feel are worth investigating and others poo-poo, dismissing it with a flick of the hand as unimportant over-complication of the matter-at-hand. Whatever the case may be, one cannot argue that they are conscious, whatever that ends up actually meaning. What they may argue are the following:
–Their consciousness is actually their brain’s link to some external property of the universe
–Their consciousness is merely a product of the brain’s interfacing, and thus an illusion
–Consciousness is real, but it’s a conflation of language due to our lack of understanding about the brain’s higher workings
I will now show (the bitter pill) that only one of these points can be valid at a time, and that two of them do little to nothing to explain the phenomenon of consciousness, thus driving home the point that there is likely a best choice. I also hope to show that, as a critical thinker, one will have to take an informed, introspective stance on which they believe; there can be no indecisiveness when considering oneself and their relationship to their consciousness.
***
First, anyone who thinks their consciousness is tethered to the universe in some way has to overcome the hurdle of proving that their consciousness is not unique, as this claim has the implication that such would be the case since one, as an individual with a brain interacting with some alleged universal property, should be no different than any another equipped with the same machinery and opportunities. In other words: all other humans. Thus, one must also take into account how else they are unique from others. If they are trying to appeal that their consciousness itself is all that is unique, irrespective of their brain, body and measurable thought impulses, then this can be cut off at the knees by simply acknowledging that is a circular argument—claiming consciousness is unique because it’s their consciousness. Nowhere in there did they define consciousness to begin with—a necessary condition for anyone to take their claims seriously. So, ruling out this first point, unless of course they claimant can explain how they differ (see The Origin of Differentiation), they have no sound cause to argue further about the uniqueness of their internal being. While this sounds like I am making a case against this stance, I will later show it’s actually quite the opposite. All I am attempting to illustrate here is that the panpsychist’s stance will likely beget a decentralized consciousness which cannot be claimed by any one individual. I will also show how this is not the same as a universal consciousness. Taking this stance, we embrace the notion that consciousness is not ours to begin with. This is a very powerful and, perhaps, hard-to-swallow idea. This may take on several forms such as consciousness as a force in nature, or consciousness as a global phenomenon. Regardless of the form it takes, in this line of thinking they all have the same feature in common: that consciousness is actually a part of the universe and not the brain. I like this idea, personally, because not only does it devalue humans as being at the top of the hierarchy of conscious animals, it actually aligns with some scientific observations*. In this regard, it is neat to see how mysticism and science may be correlated. I emphasize may because it is widely regarded that disinformation—spread in the form of pseudoscience—is rich within the lore of such seemingly innocuous stories which mysticism, unfortunately, is often rife with. For example: the oft cited ‘observer effect’ in quantum physics—where looking at a light beam can change the outcome of the experiment—is a great example of how consciousness is confounded among scientists and mystics alike. The mystic will claim that consciousness is affecting the light—causing a diffraction (wave interference) pattern on the screen—which is the only feasible explanation for the outcome. And while the scientist may not disagree, they would be loath to say that’s because consciousness is any kind of force or effect. Rather, in their mind it’s due to the measurement our brain makes in the optic nerve, or perhaps it’s some as-of-yet-to-be explained phenomenon with specific light waves that reflect off of our eyes, affecting the system in some quantitative way (ex. Waveform collapsing). Whatever the case may be, one thing is certain: the mystic would not deny the observer, but a scientist may try and chalk it up to just the measurement, not the observation of the measurement. But I hope I have already shown how ludicrous this statement is. Am I saying that I believe what the mystic believes? No, not necessarily. While I do believe that observation is necessary for the observer effect to occur, I do not believe it is sufficient to explain it away entirely. I believe a full explanation—if there is one that can be known to our feeble minds—will come with a deeper introspection into the nature of consciousness. But this will require one to embrace the idea that there are other spheres of knowledge beyond what we can know here-and-now, and perhaps, even then (the future). If you accept that brains are limited, then so too are minds, and perhaps—consciousness. At least in us
Next—that consciousness is an illusion. I believe that taking the physicalist stance will beget this conclusion. While this may be fine to fatalists, others will not like this bit at all as it forces one to concede that ‘you truly can’t have your cake and eat it too’. By illusion I refer to what popular science calls emergent properties, which doesn’t actually have any explanatory power at all, when you get down to it. This hearkens on a statement I once read in a physics text where the author said “science doesn’t deal with the why but the how.” This statement, as I will elaborate on in Pure Science, could not do more disservice to the whole of science as someone saying “God is here because it’s all that explains fine-tuning of the universe” or “dinosaurs were a test by God.” While I, as a reader, knew that the intentions were pure behind the ‘how not why’ statement, the statement couldn’t be more misleading, which is unfortunate as many fervent advocates of science will glom onto such statements and appropriate the misinformation. But I will elaborate on this point later. For now, back to how this relates to emergent properties. Just as science certainly can deal with the whys of nature, science has every right to investigate the whats of emergent properties. Yet, it doesn’t. At least those who claim to fly its banner do not. What a functionalist would tell you about emergent properties is that they are not things in themselves, but rather exactly what they are—just the only way an experience can happen. And so, we need not talk about them beyond this, in any kind of esoteric way, just knowing that emergent properties are all over the place and that they may give the impression of one thing but are nothing more than the sum of their parts. As I will demonstrate in The Origin of Differentiation, this is such a pathetically weak argument in favor of reality that you might as well as shrug when someone asks you if you exist. Know that, if you take this stance—that consciousness is no more than a sum of its parts, like a spider web—you have done nothing to explain what it is like to be a conscious creature. In other words—you have completely glossed over the hard problem of consciousness. Now, this is fine, so long as you accept that consciousness is a complete illusion. What I mean by illusion is that, just like a magnetic field, while its effects can be felt, it itself is not any one thing. We only talk about magnetic fields in vernacular so that we can write equations about the way they work or interact with their environment. Nothing more. So too then does consciousness only exist in language.
But you can see how this is a horribly abysmal place for the mind—the house of consciousness—to go! You are trying to convince yourself that you do not exist! And while neuroscience supports the idea the self is an illusion, is this truly the same thing as saying consciousness is an illusion? I don’t think so, and I’m willing to bet the neuroscientists wouldn’t either, considering the fact that removing the parts of the brain associated with the self would, while certainly having adverse side effects on the behavior of the individual, not be convincing enough to warrant a researcher to declaim that the subject was ‘non-conscious’. Or, perhaps the ‘identity complex’ created by the brain is tethered to consciousness in such a way they are non divorceable. However, if this were the case we should expect that all conscious creatures have a notion of the self. From what I have read on this topic, this is likely not the case as it is believed many animals with more basic brains would have no such concept of themselves and would be operating on instinctual thoughts only—the lizard brain, as it is popularly referred to. But I don’t expect that anyone, neuroscientists included, would ever say these animals are non-conscious; to declare this would bring up a whole host of issues, among which would be reconciling sense perception in a purportedly non-conscious life form. This brings up another interesting point—at which point do you consider the illusion to take hold in a physical system? Perhaps you claim the illusion—like consciousness—is on a spectrum, so the emergent property ‘part’ of consciousness begins to emerge slowly, hand-in-hand with the physical processes in the brain as it evolves and unfolds. Fair enough, but I hope you realize that along with this you must also explain away all emergent properties which, sorry to say, exist in everything as you have now defined them. What do I mean they exist in everything? This will be explained in the Origin of Differentiation. I will leave this with one final point: if you wish to denounce emergent properties as non-existent (and thus reduce consciousness), you must also denounce the idea that physical dimensions do not exist, nor does relativity, which is absurd considering the evidence in favor of them. If this does not seem like a fair comparison, consider the fact that all things appear different at some level, but never the same at all levels (congruent). How can a magnetic field and the (alleged) sum of neuronal activity be any different when they are written using the same source code, i.e. molecules? But more on this to come.
Lastly, on the idea that consciousness is real (i.e. not an illusion) but that it is simply our issue with not understanding the vastly complex nature of the brain. As will later be elucidated, I refer to this stance as the Cake-eater’s stance, for the very reason that any who take this stance wish to “have their cake and eat it too”, in that they want to say consciousness is “real” but that it isn’t anything special in-and-of-itself, beyond being complicated in some way. I hope to show that one cannot share both of these views, as if consciousness is not an illusion, then one must of necessity address the hard problem. If you don’t, then any explanation to try and do away with it, in my mind, is an abnegation of one’s entire internal states and by extension—a renunciation of their very being. How is this? Well, how else could one know that they are, without some kind of tool set to record and reflect back upon their experiences? This would be known to us in the form of awareness, aka ‘consciousness’. While one may justly argue there is more to consciousness than just awareness (a valid point I elaborate on later), all that need be addressed here is the idea that knowing one’s existence requires the ability to reflect on it, and consciousness seems to be the way we do this. Clearly these events happen internally, yet they themselves show no sign of being an internal physical instance. So if not an organ or a little man turning a crank, what exactly is consciousness then? If you accept that consciousness is real, as the cake-eater does, then it must be something. They may contend that of course it is—it’s the electrical connectivity in the brain! While this sounds reasonable, given what we know of neuroscience, believe it or not, this actually does not address the hard problem, and actually is a relabeling of the illusionist’s stance—that second stance discussed above which accept that consciousness is an emergent property. So you see, all the cake-eater does is deny the ‘illusion’ part of the illusionist’s stance, in that they (somehow) see a back door that they can take which gets around the elephant in the hallway, which is explaining away the hard problem. But that door is locked, and there is no other way around but through. Saying “consciousness is real, it is the electrical connectivity”, is another way of saying “consciousness is real, it is some (insert physical thing/process here) which also is a non-physical thing!” For you see, if you try and leave out that last part, “…also is a non-physical thing!”, you are just ignoring the hard problem itself—that consciousness has non-physical attributes! Either that, or it’s some other kind of physical attribute (covered later). Either way, it’s certainly non-physical in the sense that we have no idea what category it fits into. So the options for the cake-eater become either accept the illusionist’s stance, or maintain an incredibly weak, oxymoronic argument which no one should take seriously.
To be forthright, I don’t care if the above ends up being true or not, if such a distinction can ever be made by a human observer. My only hope here is that I impart the importance for one to be honest with themselves about the universe they live in. In my mind, embarking on a journey into the nature of consciousness with a serious, convicted tone in mind is counter-productive to the whole reason for investigating such things to begin with. A certain amount of levity might be necessary when exploring a question that may require thinking outside of the box. For sometimes it makes no sense to go exploring with a pen and paper in hand, when that can be saved for the expedition, if one can be had. If you are out to search for truths in such matters, it may be best to reassess your definition of such a word, just as we did for several others above, lest you be led onto a highly-ridiculed path that you may never be able to drag yourself off of. To be clear, I am not advocating pseudoscience—but I am scorning those who frown upon honest spiritual investigation. The fact of the matter is there is no ‘proper’ framework to do such things, despite what some hard-line scientists may say about ‘meditation being the only way’ or some such nonsense. Of course meditation is wonderful for the spirit, but a strict diet of meditation may be to some like eating only beans—it promotes spiritual diarrhea. For some of us to find what absorbs into the system, we may have to try a wide array of samples. I equate this to the idea that if you have to choose a religion, for whatever reason(s), sample as many as you can before you make a choice. Something like this should not be a rote decision or because ‘someone else told you to’. Of course, coming from a place of privilege, I realize that not everyone has these luxuries, and so you will do what you must do to survive. But if ever there is a chance to explore—explore!
You may just find yourself.
iv. SLIPPERY SOLIPSISM
Returning to the idea that the universe is an object of perception—we may say one of two things in this regard: that the universe either,
1) Exists independently from our perceptions, or
2) The universe’s existence depends on being perceived.
While there are many variations of these two lines of thought, solipsistic thought can be distilled into these two camps quite tidily. Let’s look at the first realm.
It stands to reason that the universe exists outside of perception since humans weren’t always around to observe it and we ‘know’ the universe is much older than us. It doesn’t take any kind of sleuth to put two and two together to connect these dots and come up with the idea that the universe was around for a long time and then we started gawking at it, nearly 14 billion years later. Or so it seems. But inherent in this viewpoint is the assumption that the universe existed as is before we came into the picture. Or put another way, it existed exactly then how we imagine it to have been then, now, based on current evidence. While this also stands to reason, people who take this kind of stance are forgetting something crucially important about the nature of the universe: everything is relative. That means, time, space, and—sorry to burst your empirical bubble—perception. We know this because it is no different than putting a person on a rocket traveling a fraction the speed of light and asking them what they see, to find their experiences vastly different than the ‘stationary’ observer. I emphasize ‘stationary’ to remind the reader that nothing is truly ‘not moving’, as motion too is relative, since it relies on all of time, space and perception. Don’t try to argue the latter—that motion does not rely on perception—because it takes no time to find a physics textbook, written by humans, to see that the definition of motion is movement through space using recorded metrics. Without measuring the motion (which is required to have a measurer), who’s to say what is moving? The objective universe? Where is that exactly?
To clarify once again, I am not saying I believe in solipsism—that the universe exists because of us—but I will push a hard argument that you can’t discuss anything without being able to discuss it, and physics is not exempt from this principle. What this means is, at heart, anything we observe and measure we are observing and measuring. Nothing more. If one purports to have ‘visions’ of a past universe, at best they are extrapolating a previous model of what they now believe makes the most sense to the logical mind—the ego. Now, I’m no psychologist (clearly), but I don’t need to be to remind the reader that the ego is the preservationist of the mind; it exists to save you. And what is more disconcerting than the thought that your mind actually matters when it comes to the universe? If I had an MRI right now and hooked up a critic of solipsism to it when a statement like that is made, I believe we would see those parts of the brain associated with defense and fear light up like fireworks. It would be an amygdala at Disney Land at midnight! While this doesn’t prove anything about the nature of the unobserved temporal universe, I do hope it at least furrows some brows as it evokes a more critical reception of perception. Need I also remind that many animals are likely color blind, and that baby humans might see upside-down for the first part of their life until their brains adjust? These would be entirely different worlds than what we as adults see. So which is right? Is the adult the ultimate adjudicator of reality? While the lines drawn between these analogies may seem thin, it is no less real to someone or something else in the moment. So we cannot say, based on the evidence, that adult human perception is the only true perception of the universe. This may seem unrelated to the idea that things outside of sense perception do not exist, but I assure you it is a very close relative. It is close for the reason that these examples serve to remind us that we really have no idea what anything other than our own views are like, and that the things they point to likely have no absolute form.
Some may be laughing out loud right now, holding the stitch in their side as they shake their head at my seemingly abhorrent crime of committing the anthropic principle. But as you’ll see in a moment, it’s actually quite the contrary.
For I do not wish to evince the idea that humans are special. While eukaryotic life may be, we already know that once life has been given whatever magical kick-start it needs to get going, from there it’s a total free-for-all. Life is incredibly prolific and takes on many forms, many of which are arguably better than humans, depending on the context. I do not wish to get misanthropic here or be any kind of Debbie Downer, bringing up the atrocities of mankind or our untenable relationship with our planet. To be sure—they have most certainly happened and are continuing to happen to this day—but man also does many beautiful and amazing things, art and science to name just a few. The real crux of what I am aiming at here is that consciousness is not special in humans. In fact, I feel this is one of the main misinterpretations that many people have towards Biocentrism (the idea that the universe exists because of life, and not the other way around), fueling some nasty vitriol against it. While the idea that perception of a thing creating it is in no way a new and novel idea, Biocentrism attempts to put a scientific spin on this age-old interpretation by including some examples of popular science that seem to conform with its principles. Yet nowhere in any of its language does it say human consciousness creates the universe. While this is implied for obvious reasons of context, we can extrapolate this idea much further unto all conscious—and potentially conscious—life forms.
While I will not take a stance here on whether or not Biocentrism is a load of bologna or not, I will say that I do not think detractors of it have the right to evoke the “unfalsifiable theory” rebuttal, as this simply carries no weight as an argument. While unfalsifiable theories are very much a thing, I don’t believe science itself—pure science—has any inclination away from this. The reason being is that science has nothing to do with what people think is possible to prove or not; it is merely a methodology, as I will elaborate on later. The problem actually lies in whether or not one is comfortable embracing an ideology that does not conform to their process of validation. I emphasize this to compound the fact that any process—whether mechanical or otherwise—will also be a relative process. It does not matter if a super computer, the brain, or an alien wizard is interpreting some bit of information—it will all be interpreted differently by each individual. In this regard, we can then admit that all an ‘unfalsifiable theory’ is, is a place-holder for an idea which makes no sense to us. Taking this into consideration, we may then proceed in one of two ways: we can either shrug it off as having no practical value, leaving it alone, or we may attempt to pursue any potential answer by formulating different methods of investigation. I am no guru, nor am I any more evolved than you average reader, so please do not think I can provide you these methods. The point here is that we use language that we actually have no relationship to, in attempt to preserve ourselves from perceived threats. And while Biocentrism may seem to be the homeopathy of philosophies at first blush, it may be worth reassessing for hidden values and investigating whether or not it has been “put on the ledge” by its detractors, and thus earning a bad name for no other reason than it was given one. I feel that it has earned its reputation for this very reason, akin to how Fashion tells us what is popular, only to dictate its own trends, and thus we follow like sheep. To be fair to the rationalist, Biocentrism seems incredibly hokey, so it is to no discredit of those shrewd minds that keep a vigilant watch for us. Yet, we must ask: if solipsism is not true, what is the alternative?
I could take a very mundane stance here and say what many readers are likely both thinking and wishing I would finally say: that the universe is exactly the way we’ve been told it is, and consciousness has nothing to do with it before the fact. Well, I am sorry to say that not only do I disagree with this ideology, I will use it to serve as the edifice of its own deconstruction. For I do not—cannot believe this statement, for the very reason that there is simply no evidence of anything outside of our sense perception.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I imagine you are thinking. This does seem like a bold statement, I admit, but you don’t actually have to be solipsist to acknowledge the truth in those words.
Think on it. What we call evidence is something that is:
- a) Reproducible
- b) Verifiable
- c) Objective
Without becoming a dictionary and going into definitions of the above words, all that need be acknowledged here is the trend among these terms—that someone else can see what you see. So, I purport we take this template and overlay it with the idea that we have evidence of a universe outside of sense perception, and you will see that it actually fails to pass any of these tests in any kind of coherent way. What we do have are suggestions that things happened outside of perception, i.e. carbon-dated rocks or gases, galaxies etc. In no way is this meant to devalue the hard work of scientists who have uncovered empirical artifacts of the history of our species and our universe, but only to shine light on the difference between empirical evidence and virtual evidence. A virtual system—if it can be said to be a thing which stands in for another thing—conforms nicely with this contrast. For virtual evidence is here a proxy for what we assume must have been happening in the past, yet we actually have no firsthand empirical evidence of those experiences—meaning no one was around to observe them. While this brings up a larger problem—that of our epistemology in general—I only wish to reiterate here that at best we only have knowledge of the first sphere. Whether or not this a problem with how we garner knowledge or how the universe provides it to us is not an issue I care to tackle. All that need be addressed is this epistemological flaw with regards to conscious experience—namely that we may know only that which has ever been perceived. And even then (as stated before), how much do we actually know about those perceptions? We are certainly not the “ultimate arbiter of universal knowledge”, or we wouldn’t be here right now arguing about consciousness in a 70+ page paper. However, it is not necessarily a fault of our own that our knowledge is incomplete in this regard. The mind-bending part of all of this is that we can extrapolate this philosophy—that we don’t know anything outside of sensory experience—onto every single moment of our lives, which seems at first to be proof of its fallacy. Yet, meditate further on this thought and you’ll realize you’ve actually come back to a well-known idea in physics—that time is relative. While we may slice up time into as many little pieces as we care to, there is, in theory, no limit to the number of slices we could take. Thus time itself only has a ‘moment’ insomuch as we can talk about experiencing one. The ‘moment’ then is no different than infinity or pi, in that it is only a concept. Whether or not this means ‘time doesn’t exist’ is not a claim I will make here, as I am also not a physicist, but being a living, thinking creature bathed in countless moments, I can speak from experience, and experience tells me that I have no evidence of any of my past moments beyond my memories. Take away my memories, I have no more moments. Unless of course my wife or my friends remind me of them. But take them away and…uh-oh. You can see where this is going.
So, what am I really saying here? It is difficult to encapsulate in words, but I believe the above should illustrate that no one should “go gentle into that good night”, for we have no right. Time is too fickle of a mistress to call her our lover, and experience is at best a moment-to-moment thing, like the wick of a candle, burning away constantly. So, if you wish to claim we have evidence of a physical past outside of experience, the burden would be on you to show how evidence stands outside of recollection, that is—how a claim can be corroborated without being able to go to the source. Since this source lies in time—relative, ephemeral time—you may require the aid of Michael J. Fox and the DeLorean if you wish to truly validate your claim to hard evidence, as opposed to the virtual system we live by every waking day. If you wish to play the hard-line, however, you may argue that the past is encoded in information, in the form of the measurable energies dispersed in the universe. But know that the universe is like an intractable child, always squirming and moving, never holding still. Any information you may find out there now was once likely vastly different, and will be again when you look back on it tomorrow. Thus, any extrapolations you may make now are merely approximations of past events; how accurate they are is something that no one may ever be able to determine, lest time could be bent in such a way as to allow us to re-experience them, over and over and over…
The one given rule of the universe, as far as I can tell, is that it is always in a state of flux. Even the idea of absolute zero (no molecular motion)—telling the universe to stand still for even a second—is unattainable (so far), and may always be so based on the hypothetical physical requirements to obtain such a state. So if we can say anything about how the universe was outside of perception, our best guess would be it would be entirely different outside of perception, if that’s even a thing in reality. To try and even speculate as to how that would be like, well…we might as well say consciousness is made of cotton candy and that the big bang was actually Vishnu farting again, etc. Anyone’s guess would be as good as the next. We wouldn’t need science at all! This theory—that the universe’s existence is relative—is straight out of the horse’s mouth of Biocentrism, which in turn draws upon ancient Hindu and Buddhist thought. It is not my idea, nor necessarily my belief, but you have to admit, it’s a very strange and oddly charming idea if you enjoy the notion that we don’t really get a say about the universe. It is counter-intuitive to everything we have been taught to think, yet it is exactly in line with our day-to-day existence and, so it happens, some of our physical theories of the universe. So, where does that leave consciousness in this whole mess?
Maybe it’s not a mess. Maybe we are the mess—our limited views, our self-proclaimed kingdoms. Is it actually so hard to believe that there are parts—very large parts—of the universe that we have yet to uncover? Parts that we may never uncover? Whether or not these are at all related to our topic, by direct association or distant correlation, remains to be seen. I do find it interesting to note here that Einstein believed that there were more forces to be discovered in nature and Schrodinger had no answer to his own posed riddle of the cat in the box. I only bring up these points to illustrate the fact that much greater minds than you or I played around with ideas that many would still consider fringe and it is this same miraculous wonder and adventurous spirit which, I believe, will likely bring us to the next phase of being. For example, if we can imagine for a moment that consciousness is something like a force, certain things begin to fall in place. Not only does it make sense why we can think of things we haven’t ever seen nor will ever see, it also explains how we can interact with the world with our thoughts alone, i.e. thinking of things without experiencing them directly, certain quantum effects, etc. And though there are of course those who will argue that there’s a natural explanation for everything, I say to them:
There is only a natural explanation for anything natural, and even that we shall find a need to define. What lies beyond the natural, if anything, may require something else entirely to surmise.
And there is no better place to discuss this than the brain.
V. CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE BRAIN: YOU THINK YOU THOUGHT
Perhaps one of greatest arguments against consciousness existing outside of the brain can be illustrated by the example of being put out under general anesthetic. If you have ever had this experience, well…you’ll probably agree you can’t be sure that you did have it. For all you knew, someone pulled the cord on the light bulb and everything went dark. When you come to, it’s like you lost hours of your life. I am told this is not an individualized phenomenon and that most if not all who go under the gas have similar recalls (or lack thereof). I will not speak to the mechanisms of how these drugs work in the brain as I do not fully understand them, but what I do know is that the reason we do not remember anything post-anesthetic is because specific regions of our brain—those that are ‘responsible’ for memory retention—are temporarily shut off. I will not argue this is or is not the case, but rather I will attack the mentalist’s stance—the stance that consciousness is purely a product of the brain—from another angle: that the brain ‘depends’ on consciousness and not the other way around.
As I mentioned in the foreword, language is a very powerful motivator; I want to be entirely clear about the intended meaning behind my language, as greater wars have been fought with words. I am not a fan of the textbook use of “responsible for” or “causes the” with regard to the brain’s relationship to consciousness, while I applaud the language “x suggests”, which is often used in pure science. To be clear, I will not be advocating for ‘hedging one’s language in obsequious terms to avoid upsetting the wrong people’, as this is an argument that is often leveled at those who take the stance that I am about to. I do agree that it is important to use clear, concise and strong language when making a point, but there is never an excuse to use misleading language, as the two examples above will be shown to be.
If a neuroscientist does research on a specific region of the brain, learning its biochemistry, neurochemistry, etc. the most they can say with regards to any part of the brain and consciousness is its apparent relationship to it. The reason for this is simple—no one knows what consciousness is. If you assume consciousness is an emergent property then all is happy and well when it comes to speaking in an assertive manner, but the problem therein is that you—as an assertive physicalist researcher—are impressing your own beliefs upon every listener, colleague, or student who either reads or attempts to reproduce your work. While this may seem entirely innocuous to those in the field, I can assure you this is no different than spreading misinformation, especially if you are a credible person, since others will likely admire you and propagate information in the same way that you relayed it to them, completely skirting the underlying fact that consciousness as a philosophical (and scientific!) problem has not been fully resolved. While I am not out to point fingers here, please note that I do see it as a very serious affront to science when someone claims one thing when science shows another. Let’s look at a similar, complicated emergent property to consciousness—addiction—to see this idea at work.
Researcher A, while probing part of a cadaver’s brain with a tool, says to their young, impressionable resident, “You see this here? This is the nucleus accumbens, which is in part responsible for creating addiction.”
While this seems harmless, let’s investigate the truth-value of this statement.
Researcher A clearly has some knowledge of the brain, which makes sense since that is their chosen field and they have been at it for many years. However, Researcher A is also operating on rote, as they have gone through many residents and are thus inclined more toward reiterated language, perhaps taught to them at one point or another (for who wants to be present for hundreds to thousands of residents?). While the outcome of their instruction will not likely result in any kind of misdeeds on the resident’s part—since the functionality of the Researchers statement is entirely accurate—the truth of their words is a whole other matter. For within the language they have chosen—
“…responsible for creating…”
–there is the assumption that the nucleus accumbens alone (or perhaps in conjunction with other regions of the brain) is enough to satisfy the state of ‘addiction’. While surely there is no question as to this region’s involvement in the ‘state’ of addiction, I need not tell any addict that addiction is a very horrible process, rife with misery and existential angst, and that it is an incredibly complicated matter. Indeed, addiction is more than just the electrochemical action within pieces of tissue; it is also a social matter, a psychological matter, and a spiritual matter. I need not attempt to quantify those terms to appease the utmost skeptic of my words, for the reason that one simply cannot argue that those dimensions of being do not exist, for they are a very real part of the addict’s every-day life, as well as anyone else affected by their behavior. In a way, these dimensions are very much like emergent properties, in that they exist and coexist on one and many levels respectively, so what they actually are is irrelevant to my point here; all that matters is that an accurate picture of addiction, like consciousness, cannot be elucidated by reducing it to its parts.
This is no novel epiphany on my part; functionalism itself was born out of this very idea. Many will not argue against functionalism as it provides a very coherent life philosophy that can be put easily to practice—that it doesn’t matter why something does what it does, just that it does it. The pat example of this is the carburetor—a device which regulates gasoline flow into an engine. If you try and argue that ‘metal, oxygen and gas’ make up a carburetor, you commit the fallacy of assuming all things with those properties equals ‘carburetor’, known as a categorical error. Clearly this is not true, and need not take an autistic savant to draw up a list for us to see all of the things that fit under that category. So functionalism discards the notion that we call a thing a thing for the little things that make it a thing, and instead looks at what it does—what its function is. While this may work well for simple machines, I daresay most wouldn’t consider the brain a simple machine in anyway. Perhaps some advanced alien race might, as everything is relative, but as I mentioned above—it is the single most complicated system we know of. And while this in itself isn’t an argument against functionalism, it does help to illustrate the point that there is a vast ocean of difference between molecules and metals, metals and machines, and machines and brains, and all of these have very different ‘types’ of emergent properties. So, when considering something like ‘addiction’, it does us no justice, when searching for hidden meanings within a physical component, to assess the process solely in terms of just the components. Thus, ‘the nucleus accumbens’ is to ‘addiction’ what the ‘carburetor’ is to ‘fuel combustion’—merely a vessel for its formation. Addiction itself is an entirely different matter. I feel we will discover this same kind of elucidation when looking at consciousness and its relationship to the brain.
I am sure you recall that I said before that ‘emergent properties are in everything’. While some who think they understand well what those words mean may scoff at this statement, I assure you that by definition no one understands emergent properties, for the very reason that part of the definition of an emergent property is their resemblance to phenomena. If one claims to have any magisterium regarding emergent properties, they might as well also boast to be able to see all dimensions and the basic vibrations of matter—as this is likely the kind of perspective you would have to have to fully appropriate their meaning. What I mean by this is that emergent properties are likely no different than dimensions in that they become something different at different levels. If one could truly embrace emergent properties with naught but their senses, we wouldn’t need microscopes, telescopes or other such machinery to aid us in our investigations into these foreign realms.
Think of quarks for example—the smallest integral part of an atom hypothesized thus far. As far as I know, we have yet to image quarks to any significant level, but with electron microscopy we have imaged the atom. Beyond the actual blurry mess that an atom is, we next go to the molecule—a vastly different species than its little brother. Then, if we are in a biological system, perhaps we go up to a protein, then a ribosome, or a cell etc. Even at the level of the cell, which is many, many, many orders of magnitude larger than the atom, we are still enormously far from understanding what it “belongs to”. Recall those puzzles you see online where they’ve zoomed in to some material and you are to guess what it is a part of. If you’re anything like me, you almost always get it wrong. “What? How the hell can that be a dog’s hair?”
This serves to remind that there is no ultimate perspective upon which we may gaze unto the universe, and thus we can only ever talk about dimensions as they apply. So if we return to the idea of emergent properties—which many would claim consciousness is—we must investigate the validity of this claim in the same way that we would investigate how components change given varying perspective, from themselves as parts, to the system as a whole. For we are told that very thing about the brain—that it is a system, a machine. And while I’m not inclined to disagree with this, I take a very guarded approach to the idea that brains create consciousness.
Back to the neuroscientist—Researcher A.
So, we now have uncovered several things about the statement previously made by the researcher:
-they believe addiction is a process caused by specific regions in the brain, at least in part (barring the biopsychosocial model which they are almost certainly aware of)
-they have shared this information with many others, likely teaching it in the same way
-they probably do not associate consciousness with anything beyond neural activity, if they view emergent properties like addiction as being non-unique
What’s wrong with any of this, you ask? Well, nothing, as far as popular science is concerned. We report what we see, and all of the above—for the most part—is consistent with observation. However, there is the glaring fact that no supplementary language was used to highlight what we don’t know about addiction. One example would be how electrical signals between neural synapses amounts to a crying, convulsing, struggling human being who fails to pay all of their bills and pushes everyone close to them away. Yes, this is a very slippery slope that one may easily assume could amount to an argument in the form of:
“Well, if that’s the case then the researcher would have to take undue time to describe everything they say in excruciating detail.”
There is also the stance that it is not the researcher’s job to deal with the mundane aspect of managing people’s addictions and explaining the entire complicated process when all they are doing is analyzing a brain region. But both of these arguments fail to hit the mark when considering the simple fact that the argument being put forth here has nothing to do how much the researcher be required to explain, only that they explain it, with however much language necessary to cover all of the bases.
Here’s an example of how, I believe, language could have been modified to be both pragmatic (as it already was) and have truth-value on all accords:
“You see this here? This is the nucleus accumbens, which is one of the parts of the brain associated with the addiction process.”
Do you see how this clears up any philosophical griping that one may have regarding the language used? “Many scientific texts use language like this already”, you may counter. Sure they do, but just as many do not. I don’t wish to nag on this point, but it is very important to me that entire disciplines (philosophy, linguistics, semiotics et cet.) not be glossed over for the sake of convenience on the part of the time-pressed scientist. Using the word ‘suggests’ is a brilliant way to illustrate the reality of many situations, namely that we cannot know every detail of every mechanism of everything, possibly any one thing. And while we do understand some things with incredible fidelity in the first sphere, it still stands that language should never be expropriated for the sake of convenience. The fact of the matter is that we don’t know if the brain causes consciousness, even if it seems that is the case. Here is why I believe this.
Occam’s razor (a tool perhaps yielded a little too frequently in a drunken manner for my comfort), states simply that ‘the simplest answer often proves the true one’. Do not misinterpret this statement to say that ‘nothing complicated is ever the right answer’, for this is obviously not in line with the universe, Ala quantum mechanics, biochemistry, string theory etc. Yet, how often is this premise a fallback when scientists (not science!) get lazy and don’t wish to pursue more challenging avenues of inquiry into alternatives to their claims? Consciousness is an infamous example of this, in my mind (no pun intended), as many a physicalist glom on to Occam and skip hand in hand with him in smiling certainty.
Hmm. I question how they arrive at that conclusion. For consciousness clearly has other attributes than electrical activity. This is why it’s the hard problem of consciousness—how you get from zaps and zings to the whole shebang of sensory processing that is our awareness of the world. For you see, the link between these two is not anywhere apparent in the parts that make it up. I don’t personally have any “molecule-ness” in my awareness, nor do I have “neuron-ness”. This is not to say these essential ingredients are not part of the recipe, but I question whether they are the authors of the book itself. Perhaps all of this is the wrong way to talk about it; maybe there is no such thing as “molecule-ness” or “neuron-ness”, and the experience of “consciousness” is what is meant by that. This is a valid argument but it
- a) Has no explanatory power, and
- b) Does not rule out the other option—the other option that consciousness exists external to the brain, since consciousness could be both external and still have emergent properties.
Addressing the ‘explanatory power’ part, there are two stances, as I see it, that one can take in this regard. You either feel that no explanatory power is needed, in which case you have now entered the infinite regression stage which you hoped to avoid, for you must explain away all explanatory power clauses in everything for the same reason that you wish to do away with in consciousness, and thereby rendering the entire universe as a giant “I dunno”. The other option is you can attempt to appeal to qualia or some other esoteric principle which, in my opinion, is just making up words to fit phenomena without actually describing them. So, the bolder option, I think, is to attempt to find explanatory power for your investigation, however that may be. If science is your only methodology for such things, you will be incredibly limited based on its narrow operating system, but perhaps you may discover something eventually. It may also come to you via meditation or hallucination, and if you don’t care about objective verification then these may be truths to you.
My personal stance—that consciousness may be a force outside of the brain—is reasoned from personal experience, i.e. ‘having consciousness’. And while I am fully aware of the multitude of texts trying to explain away all of the “illusions” that our brain tells us about the world, i.e. the self, identity, our emotions, thoughts before we perceive them etc., I simply feel that none of this bears any weight upon the fact that sense perception gives us all of the information we have ever accumulated as a species. This has to matter, and it also has to bear down upon the argument that there is any kind of tangible world without consciousness. The chicken and egg is very real, but so is the universe. And so is consciousness, whatever its progenitor. So to me it is not a far stretch to imagine consciousness being part of the universe—part of the molecules and quantum foam—all of it, and we just happen to have evolved a machine complicated enough to translate it into sensory experience. There is also good evidence of this idea inherent in the fact that (as I mentioned earlier) consciousness seems directed. While one may argue that this is nothing more than increasing complexity and power of a circuit, there is simply no way to know if we can write it off as such until we experience what it’s like to be super-conscious. What is that? I wish I could tell you! All I do know is that we cannot be the upper limit on ultimate sensory experience. This alone is enough to convince me that consciousness is likely infinitely approached, asymptotically in the least. And even if the circuit theory proves correct, what of it? All this explains is that circuits can become sufficiently complex to be involved with consciousness. In no way does this prove that they are it. It is also completely congruent with the idea that consciousness is directed, in that as circuits grow in complexity, so too do their abilities to interact with consciousness. We still see consciousness going somewhere.
So if there is some kind of upper limit, what is that? I personally believe that whatever consciousness itself is, if that is truly the case, is what humans meant thousands of years ago when they described God. I believe God is in everything, as the bible often quotes, but just not as some creepy old man dangling all of the universe’s particles by strings like some kind of perverted puppet master. Rather, the universe itself is made of this ‘godly’ substance and any lifeforms that are lucky enough to withstand the chaos and eke out a complicated living in the torrent of entropic madness, may get a glimpse of what the universe ‘sees’.
But if this still doesn’t sound convincing to you, here I will propose a thought experiment, to illustrate the conundrum of the alleged illusion of consciousness—the opposite stance which, I contend, you must take if you maintain the view of the mentalist.
Find a pen and hold it up in front of you. When you look at this pen, what does it tell you? Perhaps you have an ‘image’ of it in your mind, or perhaps your mind is clear and you just perceive the pen. Either way, there is no arguing that your brain is processing the information and you recognize the object now in your possession as ‘pen’, among many other categoricals buried deep within your subconscious (plastic, matter, ink, writing, brand etc.). However, despite our best guesses of what is actually happening neurologically, the most we can say for sure is the light reflecting off of some object in your version of space, is being mapped onto your retinas and interpreted by the optic nerve. From there, we know there is a complex cascade of neurological activity in the form of electro-chemical messengers and then somehow it all translates to the emergence of a conscious experience of the pen. While I don’t wish to belittle the hard work done by neuroscientists the world round and to simplify processes which deserve much more attention than this, I believe it is fair to say that despite the intricate level of knowledge we now have of the conscious processes in the brain at the physical level, nowhere in there does it grasp at anything like consciousness. Am I saying consciousness is not physical? Perhaps, perhaps not. I’m saying consciousness is what it’s like, and it seems to be like no other physical thing. Thus, what begins as an irrational framework is now appealing to the utmost reasonable claims—that if what we perceive seems to have other qualities that what we understand to be A, then it is probably not A. Either that or it is some other vastly different form of A, which is thus not A. Either way you have it, it begs explanation. So, back to the pen.
Looking at my pen, I believe that I must look further inward to understand what my relationship to this object is. While I don’t doubt my mind (in my mind) and its ‘location’ in my brain (all consistent with neuroscience), I do find issues with the idea that, should ‘I’ be removed from this equation, the ‘pen experience’ would remain. Thus I know that I am part of this pen in some way. But how could that be when I could simply leave the room and the pen would still be there? The problem with this line of thinking is that we are embracing an idea that is inconsistent with space-time, for we assume that space-time sits around as we imagine it, regardless of whether or not we are there to confirm our suspicions. While no one can truly ‘prove’ this is the case, we can prove that space and time are both relative, which means they are relative not only to the forces to which they are exposed to, but also the ways in which they are perceived. Expanding on this knowledge, it is then fair to say that if something in space-time takes on a specific form, it is exposed to specific conditions. But if the pen-unviewed is not exposed to our conditions, i.e. our observation of it, what is it exposed to? The rest of the universe. Thus, it is not fair to say nothing is there when we leave it, but it is entirely consistent with physics to say we have no idea what the universe’s take on the pen is. This is akin to Plato’s ideas of the forms—that objects have some kind of ‘ultimate’ state of being, though we can tweak this by saying that unobserved objects have an ultimate state of unbeing. Some mathematicians have hearkened this to probability theory and how wave forms collapse under certain conditions, though I cannot say much on this as the whole field of probability, at least at the quantum level, is incredibly difficult (if not impossible) to imprint upon a macroscopic scale of the universe. I am not saying that probabilities are not at play in this ‘unobserved universe’, but I think it apt to point out that probabilities seem to be tied to those who are assessing them, so they too appear be relative. So even if probability theory ends up being the lone and ultimate judge of an unobserved universe, new problems begin to arise in such a hypothetical universe, namely whether or not probabilities actually play out the same way when there are no players. If the universe is the only player, does it play by the rules we have observed, or are these just our rules? It seems this train of thought stumbles on to rough rails.
Yet, we know the pen will be there when we come back. How is this? Perhaps it is misplaced hope and someday the pen won’t be there. But I don’t think so, based on the countless times I’ve come back and, lo-and-behold, my pen remains. What I think explains this phenomenon well is the idea that consciousness never left the pen—we did. What does this mean? In the spirit of panpsychism, we can evoke the idea that consciousness is inherent in the fabric of the cosmos. The pen doesn’t need us to validate its existence, it only requires our observation of it to appear in the way that it does to us. To an advanced AI (more on this in The Ghost in Our Machine), a super-evolved extraterrestrial race, or even an ant, the pen is probably something else entirely. But which is correct?
All of them!
Do you see how this shows that space and time cannot be perceived as absolute? If all of these creatures and more are staring at your pen, and we somehow had a way to link up these minds to a machine to show what they were experiencing (which in my mind is merely an analogous representation of the experience and not the experience itself), I believe we would see immensely different worlds.
Thus to conclude: every single particle of the pen I hold is not only reflecting light back to my eyes but it is sharing a very special link with my brain—the engine and machine of conscious interpretation in my body—that allows me to perceive its extension in relative space-time. Without me—or it—there would be no conscious link. Following from this, I can see why some have believed that ‘all matter is thinking’, though I think this is a far stretch; consciousness is different than thinking, I propose, for the reason that consciousness is on its own level aside from signal processing (thought). This is evident in the surgery blackout example; thought stops but does consciousness? Who’s to say?
Don’t get me wrong—I can read too. I realized this sounds like psychedelically-induced rambling, but I assure you that I am clear-headed as write this. I scorn most New-Age thought just as much as the most skeptical of minds. However, where I do differ from a skeptic empiricist in this regard is that I will also be skeptical of them. And as I mentioned above, it is very dangerous to get comfortable in your own beliefs, for if you settle too comfortably in them, you may end up in dissonance with the great unknowing inherent at every level in Nature. Scientific belief is not exempt from this.
VI. THE ORIGIN OF DIFFERENTIATION
If we are truly to fully uncover any mysteries about consciousness that may exist, we will likely find answers the more we delve deeper into the nature of matter. As I mentioned previously, the quark is the smallest component of matter ascertained thus far with any kind of scientific credence, though things much, much smaller have certainly been postulated. While I know little to nothing about string theory, I will not call upon these ideas in this paper as I feel they may be unrelated to what I will put forth here. While there may be similarities, I think perhaps the only association ST may have to what I will say will be the fact that strings are very small and (might) pervade all of space-time. Yes, that is an understatement, but the language is merely relative.
So, looking inward on the pieces of the physical universe, what do we see? Well, we know that all matter comes down to energetics, whether we are talking about subatomic particles, force-carriers or electrons—all can be described using energy models. And while energy itself may not have the most explanatory power, it does serve as an incredibly practical model to fit what we see in the natural world. I imagine then that the deeper we are able to resolve images, as technology improves, we will continue to find that this model suits our needs. For this reason I enjoy the idea that, as we get smaller and smaller, we will find that energy prevails when describing the very small. But we must ask ourselves—even if every dimension can be described in terms of energy, will there be a kind of singularity? This is known as the ‘elementary’ or ‘fundamental’ particle—the smallest possible thing we could imagine as being part of something. While mathematical models such as the Planck’s distance exist to describe such states, depicting the stability of space-time at the smallest of levels, it is still at best a hypothesis. This is emphasized not to downplay the importance of a hypothesis, but to note that the Planck’s distance is just a placeholder (so far) for describing what we think would happen at that scale. While I do not understand the math involved to described this, I don’t believe that I need to, to make the statement that “it is entirely plausible that the universe has no elementary particle and that it extends infinitely inwards (or is it infinitely outwards the other way?)”. While I may be committing some mathematically-inaccurate atrocity here, I apologize to all of the number-crunchers and offer my condolences in the form of the burden of proof, something they will not be unfamiliar with.*
While I don’t rule out the option of the elementary particle—as it’s an entirely plausible concept—I don’t see this as being consistent with the suggestions the rest of the universe gives us. For example, consider what I call manifest patterns—those patterns which seem to recur over and over in nature on many different levels (these are also known as fractals). Whether by coincidence or design (oh no! Is he suggesting intelligent design?), no one can argue that they are there, whether in the form of the golden ratio of the spirals of a nautilus shell or the furls of a flower, or the constants described at the grandest and smallest scales. To be clear, I am not proposing that a philosophical notion countervails the laws of physics, for they too are there at the smallest levels. What I am suggesting is that, perhaps, if we can ever focus our lens to peer small enough, we may see physical evidence for an infinite progression. I believe this because I believe infinity is inscribed at every level in the universe. I believe that time never ‘began’ but rather, putting aside arguments of human contrivances for a moment, that time always was. And if time always was, then so too was the universe. Newton himself said it in his first law of thermodynamics—energy cannot be created or destroyed. The destruction part is well established experimentally, but how about the creation part? I think this is where physicists will get contentious and some may even step aside to avoid the ensuing bickering—that the universe was even created at all. Many scientists hate the word, as it suggests some kind of teleology about the universe—some kind of author to it all, which is entirely unnecessary to describe most if not all natural phenomena. I’ve already stated that I don’t subscribe to religious thought—all of which (to the best of my knowledge) believes in some kind of authorship, some kind of Deism. While I won’t spare any time assaulting this ideology here, I will extend an olive branch to Deists by stating that skepticism may work in their favor somewhat, considering the field of Noetic Science. *
Whatever the popular perception of NS is, for better or worse its cause is noble—delving into deeper truths and investigating alternative meanings outside of the intellect. Note that this is not tantamount to ‘unintelligent’ investigation, but rather inquiry driven by intuition rather than the ego. And while this may seem like a red flag to some—for the intuition does often mislead us about the nature of the world—intuitive investigation into the self is by no means the same as intuitive investigation of the outside world. The reason that these differ is that we are in ourselves, but we are merely a player—a part—of the universe. Thus, when one investigates something unto themselves, they are intuiting in a very different way than the ‘endless approximation’ (as Kierkegaard put it) that we do when intuiting the outside world using science or whatever other means one cares to appropriate when considering what observations dictate. How so? Well, just think on it and you will see that there is truth to the statement “no one knows you better than you.” And while you may have no awareness where you gall bladder is, how many cells are in your body, or even what you are really feeling emotionally right now, no one has a better idea of the condition you are in than you do, and that must mean something. What I think this means is that no one has the right to tell you are deluded about who you are, only that your brain may dictate one thing in your mind and tell a machine (or an interpreter of a machine) another. And while some may consider this the very definition of a delusion, I assure you it is not, for the reason that there is no arguing the experience one has in any given state.
For example, if you do a color test and the doctor determines you are color blind, all they have discovered is that there is something off with the eye mechanism—rods, cones, or otherwise—and have given you no feedback about how your interpretation of, say, yellow differs from one with everything intact. For all that you know, you see ‘yellow’ just fine. While one can easily point out that what the color blind patient sees is actually ‘green’ (or whatever it happens to be), suggested by the specific deficiency in their eye, the non-color blind critic is forgetting one thing: color is also, very likely, relative. How can I say such a thing in good faith, given how much we know about sight and the anatomy of the eye? Because I am also fully aware that other, much more complicated eye ‘analogs’ likely exist in the universe, coming fully equipped with their own arsenal of color-sensing machinery. In other words: a super-advanced vision system would likely see things you could not imagine in your incredibly limited color-perceiving brain. This may seem like a faux-pas with regards to vision, but it doesn’t take much consideration to see that what I am claiming here is not unreasonable at all. If color is truly only specific wavelengths of light, then one glance at the size of the known electromagnetic spectrum (the complete range of light wavelengths) shows us that visible light is only a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of all things one could see. Does this mean that an eye capable of seeing the entire electromagnetic spectrum, in theory, would have some kind of ‘absolute vision’ process? I don’t think so. Considering the bizarre nature of light, I don’t think it’s safe to say we could predict any kind of phenomena at that level. So in essence, the color blind person may have adjusted to adapt to their deficiency—either neurologically, mentally, or both—to see relatively more or less the same as any healthy ‘yellow-seer’ would see. Though this doesn’t sound promising, we cannot know if it’s true or not, unless we had both states of mind to contrast the two, and even then we would need that ‘ultimate seer’ of the EM spectrum with which to reference those two. Since neither of these conditions exist (to our knowledge), we are in a bit of a conundrum regarding what we can claim the color blind person is actually experiencing. We can guesstimate based on ‘physical evidence’, i.e. the anatomy of the eye, but all this can tell us via tests etc. is that the color blind person is operating different ‘software’ than their ‘complete vision’ correlate, and extrapolate from there. The reason we cannot simply state “if the machinery of X has shown to have the result of Y, then we should rightfully expect all other X to have Y.” A sound argument, but it does not take into account that this is assuming a linear function, i.e. that “eyesight” (in this case) is a linear process, i.e. you literally “see what you get”. But is this actually true? Think on it. Yes eyes are a type of machine, but is sight itself? While it appears to be the output of such a machine, the problem is that sight is, among its physical properties, also a phenomenon whether you like it or not. And by definition, the phenomenon of sight has some non-linear property, i.e. an attribute that cannot be easily quantified, and that is the experience of sight. So you see, a linear assumption for a process that may not necessarily be linear, doesn’t equate. So, a better statement might then be, “if the machinery of X has shown to have the result Y via a process Z, it is fair to say that under all conditions X via process Z, we should expect Y.” But in the case of the color blind person, there is a disconnect with “via process Z”, in that they are undergoing a different process than their non-color blind correlate. Thus, it is not fair to say we know what outcome to expect. What about the argument, “Well, why don’t we just ask all color blind people with the same deficiency what they see and compare from there? Would that not be the same as comparing some other X with another outcome Y?” Sure, but what is your “proper” reference point then? The whole question wasn’t establishing what it’s like to be color blind, but whether or not they compare to those who aren’t. Just relabeling “some other process” does nothing to explain what that process is and by extension—what outcome we should expect. So you see, while we could certainly establish a metric to compare color deficient eyes, there is still a deficit in the place we initially hoped to fill—the space where the color blind and the color able converge. Without actually being both of these states, it seems that it’s impossible to know what the qualitative difference is.
I do not wish to evoke the qualia argument here, even if the experience of color is a fertile ground to do so. Rather, I wish to make an example of this argument, and take it in a different direction—in a Noetic direction—meaning that we investigate any truth value that lies within either the language or the experience of the metaphysical claims made regarding consciousness and its relationship to the very small. But first, a side note on the Noetic.
Notwithstanding the view of the pious (who obviously believe in their books by self-proclamation), a Noetic, rational thinker can actually glean valuable information out of religious/ancient texts. Looking beyond the gospel and dogma, one may actually find another interesting artifact hidden among the weeds: the extant perspective of those who lived during the time of the writing. While this may be colored, romanticized and (perhaps) bastardized over time, it is entirely unfair to say that all of any one historical text is a lie. What I mean by this is that metaphor is, and always has been, a powerful writing tool. While religious authors are often quite explicit to their intended meanings, there is nothing stopping the rational reader (or thinker) from investigating other truth-values behind the words used in these texts. For example:
In the book of Genesis, the famous ‘then God said let there be light’ statement can be interpreted in multiple ways. If we are religious, we believe someone or something named ‘God’ flicked a switch somewhere and then light suddenly came into existence. These people will likely not question this allusion further as they put trust—faith—in the fact the words have either been written by some person credible and reputable (God?) and that they have been corroborated somehow, spiritually or otherwise. That is fine, so long as they don’t delude themselves about the nature of reality after the fact, i.e. that dinosaurs most certainly did exist and the earth cannot be six thousand years old (unless Gods are evil tricksters). And while the staunch atheist may rightly argue that pretty much everything else in the bible cascades into fallibility from accepting these premises, we need not go there to achieve the intended outcome—to show that multiple interpretations of the universe can actually be valid.
So, what is another interpretation of the ‘let there be light’ statement? How about the fact that, maybe, just maybe, if the book of Genesis was written by a human being and not God, that human being may have had some kind of astronomical inclination, i.e. they enjoyed thinking about space, the stars and the origin of the universe? Now, while it is not fair to say, based on the scant records we have of pre-biblical times, that there were telescopes (or anything like that) at that time, any human can think about the universe. So what if this author (authors?) saw the diffuse pattern of the stars and galaxies (though they likely didn’t know about galaxies then) and realized something had to have gone “boom!” to make the pattern they see. So you see, the Big-Bang could be a stand-in for ‘God’ in the statement, and suddenly we are consistent with science, all for swapping out one word. Yet, this one-word exchange actually has drastic implications to Christianity, since God can now no longer be the author of the universe, or Jesus Christ—the figure which is pivotal to essentially everything they believe. But if you really get down to brass tacks, if the universe is the ultimate author of itself and everyone in it—Jesus included—what is the problem? No one knew who ‘God’ was anyway, outside of alleged visions and ‘epiphanies’ of him/her/it. In fact, talk to any religious authority and they’ll tell you something along the lines of “God cannot be known, but only by name” or some such hackneyed riddle. Yet, now we see it is no longer a riddle, under the guise of ‘The Universe’. So if Noetics can lift a veil on the mystery of something as hotly debated as God, can it do the same to consciousness?
Now we will shrink down and take a Fantastic Voyage into the realm of the infinitely small, to see what we may uncover by investigating the meaning of what we will find there. Ultimately, the biggest issue with consciousness at any kind of microscopic level is whether or not we are looking for a specific thing. This is not to mention that quantum effects get very weird as one get smaller, and we’ve yet to see what happens when we get even smaller than the subatomic, though one may rightly consider everything smaller than the atom to be ‘subatomic’. Rather, what is meant by this is the effects of that realm since, at this point, it is just scientific speculation. If we can put aside that notion that consciousness is not just an emergent property (which, once again, has absolutely no explanatory value—if one is looking for that), then consciousness, like all other physical systems thus far, must also have something to do with energy.
The question remains then, are we looking for some kind of boson—the family of subatomic particles that are associated with the forces—or is it some kind of field or force? Well, reading that last sentence should appear to be self-explanatory as the redundancy implies that all subatomic forces are created by particles. So unless consciousness is some kind of Newtonian force, i.e. a force of motion, we should be looking for a particle.
Right?
Hmm, to me this seems dangerous as, if consciousness is associated with a particle, we might have already found it, considering the insane amount of subatomic particles already discovered and associated with the standard model. This would mean sifting through the subatomic debris and testing each individual one in some kind of novel way to see if it bears fruit with regards to our hypothesis. While this may seem to be legitimate, it is actually horribly impractical, considering the incredibly ephemeral nature of subatomic particles, that is—many of them don’t stick around long enough to be measured in any significant way. Sure, we can calculate mass, velocity, angular momentum etc. if present, and this would be fine assuming consciousness has its roots in one of these properties. But the problem remains: we have no idea where to begin to look.
Or do we?
I propose that, if there are subatomic answers to consciousness, we may elucidate this answer by looking at differentiation. By this I mean how things differ. And I’m not talking about a hippopotamus vs a blender, as this is on much too large of a scale and is strikingly obvious to any without mental inequities. But as we get smaller and smaller, it seems to me that, to our perspective at least, the world becomes a mess of blobs and blurs—vibrations of energy, perhaps on different wavelengths or amplitudes. But does there come a point where everything not only looks the same but is? This is a very difficult question, both to put forth and to answer. The obvious reason for this is that we’ve not come even close to how small we think the parts of matter can be, not to mention that we must differentiate ourselves within the process, making sure we are not committing any kind of anthropic principle and imprinting this on the universe. To tell the difference, we must first define what we mean by differentiation. To do this, I will appeal to the usage of a corollary—that is, I will define the anthropic version of differentiation and, establishing that, the gap may then be filled with the definition that we seek. Before we can do this, however, we will need to ascertain what is meant by objectivity.
It is difficult to say how much of what humans interpret can be called subjective or objective, considering we have defined both in terms of our relationship to nature, and that what we consider objective is a collection of trustworthy subjective views. While it is fair to say that such and such can be more objective than something to which it is compared, it is never fair to equate an objective assessment as being the highest kind of truth, unless it is being compared to lesser-known truths. Thus, objectivity is only ever in reference to itself and those things like it or lesser than it. Not to downplay the significance of objective assessment, this distinction is only brought up here as it will be important to understand the difference of the two terms when we attempt to reconcile an objective understanding of consciousness at its base level.
If the above sounds hokey to you, let’s take some extreme examples of objectivity that the utmost skeptic would consider as cannon fodder against my argument. How about we argue for gravity’s objectivity and then we will argue objectivity of the self.
As far we know now, gravity has something to do with a subatomic particle that is yet to be discovered. And while gravity as we know it is too weak to make sense in the standard model, we do know that its effects vary considerably given the massive bodies that interact with. This is not to say that gravity is inconstant, for we have evidence to the contrary. However, gravity is relative in that it depends where you are in the universe and what is around you. We know this because we have been to Earth’s moon (despite what tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorists may argue) and have sent probes to other heavenly bodies, and we have measured gravity’s effects to be quite varying in each place. It is also possible to extrapolate gravity’s effects by observing its second-hand effects via black holes, neutron stars, colliding galaxies, planets etc. So how is it then that we know so much about gravity but we don’t know what it is? Many things are like this, depending on your view of whether or not we know what anything is. We know gravity is a force, we predict it will be created (or at least affected) by a particle of some sort, and there are theories that it has something to do with another dimension, which would explain where the ‘rest’ of the missing quantity goes. Yet, we experience gravity every single day, in a pragmatic form nonetheless, known to us as “things fall down, not up”. But this isn’t really an objective view of gravity at all; the proof of this is that Newton didn’t “discover” gravity—he formulated it by being the first (known) to put it to paper. Thus gravity has a way that it is and a way that it appears to us.
For what it’s worth, one of my friends once told me he once did salvia divinorum and, while in the thrall of hallucinogenic inspiration, he saw gravity. I laughed at the idea as you may be now, but is it really that far-fetched? Perhaps it wasn’t the truth, but I’m sure an MRI would have told you he was seeing something out of the ordinary. This can be corroborated by the fact that certain psychotropic drugs shut off specific ‘filters’ in the brain that reason out extraneous stimulation that our psyche need not worry about in our day-to-day lives. And while it is difficult to say what it being allowed to pass by these deactivated filters, it is well known to science that there are many excluded physical phenomena that can be processed, however healthily, by the brain under certain conditions. Another example of this would be a victim of a car accident, where there head is jarred and afterwards they can suddenly “hear everything” around them. As tumultuous as this must be, it is bordering on superpowers—the fact that you could hear everyone in an airport! Though this would be maddening to the extreme, it serves to show a simple fact—that we are constantly bombarded by stimuli that we are not aware of, just as the Earth experiences cosmic rays, many of which are filtered out by the atmosphere.
So do we really know gravity? Barely. We experience it in a very limited way, from our perspective, and perhaps only a fragment of its full potential. While it goes without saying that gravity is consistent on Earth, and that it is in unchanging with every waking day, we cannot say much beyond that. So really, if we choose to call that objective, it is an incredibly narrow objectivity in that it is at best knowledge in the first sphere. Gravity is one of the greatest challenges to physicists and hard science as we know it and yet skeptics use its example every day as ‘proof of objective knowledge’. I hope I have now shown how childish and arrogant this assumption is.
Next—the self. I actually don’t feel that this is a very strong analogy at all as psychology (and neuroscience) tells us there isn’t really a self. And they aren’t talking about the homunculus—that ‘little man’ inside your head, nor are they talking about the soul; they mean that the self is literally an illusion. I find this easy to accept as this is actually no new information to Hindu and Buddhist mystics, albeit they may not have had the same kind of instrumentation that we have now to show it. Nonetheless, I choose the self because it seems to most to be one of the most given things that we know—that we exist. Now, let’s not split hairs here and say that to exist is not the same as to be conscious. While I feel that this is a very valid point, it is metaphysically way beyond what I hope to achieve, which is simply to discredit the self as an objective kind of knowledge. I need not appeal to consciousness to show that the self—that thing we think of when we consider our identity—is the very fabrication that science tells us it is. And it need not be science only, since mysticism—and meditation—will also illustrate this point. If you are in doubt of the doubting of yourself, first ask yourself this: where are you? It is entirely fair of you to say something like “here” or “in here” and point to your head, since this—functionally at least—tells us something about what you think. Yet, open up that melon of yours and probe away and you’ll find a totally different story—that the brain is a complicated mess when it comes to ‘the self’. From what I understand on the matter, the ‘self’ is a complex inter-working of many parts of the brain which serve us up an idea of a being so that we may perform functionally and carry out our ‘coding’. A better way to think about this is the alternative—would we be able to function properly without an identity?
While it’s hard to surmise what that would be like, your mind may go to the idea of a non-intelligent AI—artificial intelligence. If it does go there, you may find yourself easily answering, “Of course we would be functional—all those other AIs do it already.” But, unfortunately, that’s not entirely an accurate analogy for our case. For you see, the brain, irrespective of a ‘self’, is still so far beyond any kind of computer or machine that has been built that we cannot say with any kind of veracity that the AIs we build today are performing how a ‘selfless’ brain-like machine would perform tomorrow. In fact, many philosophers and computer scientists argue that coding is not necessarily equivalent to brain-processing. I will weigh in on this topic in The Ghost in Our Machine. Strong AI Theory aside, for all we know, the ‘self’ may be a necessary byproduct of such a hypothetically complicated machine; it may go part-and-parcel with it. Does this sound familiar? Emergent properties, anyone? Ah-ha, so that’s where he’s going with this.
Yes, I do believe the ‘self’ is an emergent property, just like consciousness is purported to be. However, I have already said I don’t think consciousness is an emergent property as, once again, I seek to find explanatory power for my condition. If you have already convinced yourself that emergent properties just ‘are what they are and require no further explanation’, then fine: you have taken what I will now call Fork A. For my ultimate goal in this paper wasn’t to dissuade you from that belief, but to force you to take a fork. The rest of this paper will be about where one shall go if they take the other road—Fork B—the road less traveled.
For now, my stance on emergent properties will remain thus: they are nothing more than an emergent system, no more so than how the strands of silk make up a spider’s web, and the spider’s web makes up a little white blob in the nook of a tree trunk, and the tree makes up one of many in a forest, etc. All this definition of phenomena shows us is something likely every human being knows already—that things are different at different levels. But it does nothing to describe how they differ, nor does it explain the quality of experience of these different levels. To accept emergent properties at face value is equivalent to saying “I care not to attend to experience; everything is just the way it is and no more.” I reiterate: this is not wrong, it is just entirely unimaginative, lazy, and in my view—unscientific. For if we balked at any kind of discreet physical phenomenon in this way—that is, any kind of outwardly-appearing first-order knowledge—we would do away entirely with theorizing and would never progress beyond what was immediately apparent to us. For this reason I cannot abide by an illusionist’s stance, nor I can abide the mentalist in the same way. The brain is necessary for our interpretation of consciousness, to be sure, but I don’t believe it is sufficient.
Here’s why.
Have you ever thrown a caterpillar at the ground and watched it go ‘splat’? As horrible as this sounds, in my deplorable ‘experimental’ phase as a child, I would often perform this very act, under the impression I was helping save my neighbor’s garden. (I should mention here, to those who might be thinking I’m somewhat of a psychopath, that I now go out of my way to save spiders). Not to bring up animal rights advocacy (which I do actually think is important), the point here is that I recall a day when I smashed a particular caterpillar and watched a green goo come out of it. Whether or not I knew what the stuff coming out of the insect’s body was at the time is irrelevant; I had an epiphany at that moment—how does this green goo make a caterpillar do what it does? Then I realized we are no different. Well, green goo becomes grey goo, but I’m sure that, were a giant caterpillar to smash us to the ground, it may come to a similar realization. And so, we can investigate how it is that the ‘goo’—the brain in this case—makes all of those wonderful and horrible human behaviors happen. But I don’t feel this needs explaining as psychology and neuroscience spend a large majority of their time doing just that. My focus will be thus be on consciousness, which I believe is outside behavior (although I will also contend that it is inextricably linked to it). I believe this because behavior is acting a certain way, consciousness is the observation of our actions. While it may stand to argue that the latter is also a behavior in itself, that line of rationale soon begets an infinite regression of behaviors that are behaviors that are behaviors that are behaviors etc. To avoid this nonsense, it is much easier to assess consciousness outside of behavior, and leave behavior to be defined in terms of biomechanical processes. This is not to say that behavior doesn’t have associated phenomena as, as I mentioned before, many (if not all) complex events can be seen to have more layers beyond their physical impressions, i.e. “what it’s like to be angry” or something of this nature. But I will not be arguing on the behalf of phenomenology in general, but only consciousness in specific. So, going back to the caterpillar example, as macabre as it may be, it begs the question: where in the goo does the ‘caterpillar’ begin? By this I mean “what is the smallest point where we see the emergence of a thing?” Zoom way in and perhaps you’ll find that things get a little weird. Quantum weirdness tells us that, the smaller you get, the more probability comes into play.
To me, this means, among other things, that relativity becomes increasingly more important. I will not get into quantum-relativistic effects here, as I will likely a do a great disservice to the craft with my blundering interpretation of its intimacies, however, I will say this much: it seems that relativity matters at all levels of the universe. Addressing the idea that consciousness may have some part to play in space-time, we can thus assess whether it too (assuming it’s an ‘it’) is relative. This may be illuminated by looking at whether or not anything is, at base, differentiated. So, now that we have cleared up objectivity and brushed aside the notion of consciousness as a subset of behavior (for the moment), we may further investigate this idea of differentiation.
As I have said before, the possibility that the universe progresses infinitely inwards on itself is, in my mind at least, still on the table. If this is truly the case, there would be infinite differentiation, meaning that the number of different dimensions of perspective would be both infinite and different and so we would never be afforded with any kind of singular view of the universe. This may be interpreted as the idea that there are emergent properties in all things that change with scale. And since all things known to us are composed of atoms, it follows that all things change with scale and thus all things have emergent properties. While some may argue that the term is specifically reserved for phenomena, they are overlooking the fact that all things are phenomenal, by definition, in that there is an element to all physical systems in which they are both congruent and not, given that they are contiguous at any instance but only given they are viewed from the same lens. Accepting this, it follows that consciousness—being a part of universe, in whatever way that is—may also be infinitely differentiated, assuming it is a part of the universe. As mentioned previously, if it is a field then is would likely have different properties, but the disparity between these two hypotheses could be fertile ground for one to go about ascertaining ways to test which it is.
Of course, this is our (anthropic) definition of consciousness, since this line of reasoning falls upon our observation that the universe has scale (different levels of perspective). However, when watching other conscious creatures go about their day, the evidence seems to point that there certainly are different ways of viewing the universe. While one may go out on a limb and attempt to extend the anthropic principle into some kind of biocentric principle, i.e. that “it’s a larger fallacy to assume the universe depends on the views of any conscious creature”, we would then be arguing something different entirely, namely that the universe depends on consciousness at all. I hope that I covered this in my chapter on solipsism, showing that if the universe doesn’t depend entirely on being perceived, it most certainly does have at least an aspect of this inherent in it. So, ruling out that argument as nonsense, we can then see it is most likely that the ‘anthropic’ view of the universe, i.e. that the universe appears to have scale, is not actually anthropic at all. In other words, the universe truly is infinitely (or at least seemingly so) differentiated. If this is true, it follows that consciousness (if integrated as a part) is part of that infinite differentiation and should also be relative since everything else in the universe plays by those rules. While it could be an outlier, we have no reason to believe this, given the conditions we see now and would see if the ‘infinite inward/outward-ness’ theory were true. If you really get down to it, if consciousness were an exception to the rule, the only other possibility that I can think of is that consciousness lies outside our universe, and merely interacts with it somehow. But that’s a little too sci-fi for me (even if it is a cool plot line). However, if we believe consciousness is some kind of field—a backdrop if you will—then we must approach the universe in a different manner. This may be more in line with there being something like an ‘elementary particle’, Planck’s space/distance/time etc., since it might be the only condition under which we could expect a limit on the physical bounds of the material universe—if consciousness were separate from it. However, there are issues with even this theory. While the field could, in theory, be tied to matter, the fact that matter clearly changes with perspective should convince that the field would break down if we attempted to go beyond the smallest possible (hypothetical) point—the elementary particle. The reason for this would be plain: if consciousness is tied to scale, and there is no more scale, there should be no more consciousness. Oh, how this doesn’t resolve in the mind! Thus, I purport that if consciousness is a field (or something like it), it would have to be independent of matter, enough so that the universe itself did not cease to exist at the elementary level. OR perhaps this is proof that there is indeed an elementary level for that very reason—that nothing beyond it can be perceived, because there is no perception beyond it since consciousness also ends there. The interesting thing with these theories is that they may actually be able to pan out as instrumentation becomes more advanced. If it were possible to collapse space-time using some kind of extreme energetic system (say, oh, a mini black hole for example), there is no telling what kind of results may come about from that. In the case of a hypothetical mini black hole, maybe our consciousness would become stretched out toward infinity, just as our physical forms would at the event horizon and thus momentarily, we approach an elementary form. Or maybe our brain gets smothered and we just die. Who knows? But if the true nature of space-time can be eked out with science, any kind of conscious field therein may just emerge along with the uncovering of other universal mysteries. As it stands now though, the more extreme our scale gets (in/out) the more things appear to get uniform, that is, all of the different ‘parts’ begin to resemble each other. Whether this is a manifest pattern remains to be seen, though it is looking like that since we see uniformity as we go macroscopically out into the universe, everything converging to a point, and likewise microscopically. I don’t know if I’m quite arguing that ‘going out infinitely is the same as going in infinitely’, but that is something we could play around with here. Is it so absurd to entertain the idea of an infinitely-dimensioned universe looping in (out?) on itself? Perhaps that is the infinity we seek to describe in conscious experience.
While this makes no sense at all to a human mind, I enjoy this premise for that very reason—some of the greatest truths were ideas born out of the incomprehensible, general relativity and quantum entanglement, to name a few. Whoever would have thought that space and time depended on a reference point, or that particles can affect a correlate across vast distances as if there were no space between them? The universe is full of bonkers ideas, and frankly—we just have to accept them as they come. So if uniformity is key to the nature of the understanding of the universe, consciousness too should be uniform. If that is the case, we should expect it to be more like a field than a particle, and it may give explorers a leg up in their search for any evidence that may lie therein. I hope that the above demonstrates how both keeping an open mind and using irrational premises may help us further investigate some of the biggest conundrums of mankind, consciousness being among the top. While I have not helped formulate a methodology for how to approach these kinds of investigations, my intentions are pure in that I merely wished to open the door to those who may not have wanted to be in the room to begin with. How you move about inside that space is entirely up to you.
VII. PURE SCIENCE
I have used this term a good (or perhaps misleadingly bad) number of times in this work thus far, and though I mean this in the most honest way possible, it may perhaps offend some, namely those who practice science professionally. Technically, everyone is a scientist in their own rite, although this bears explanation. What I mean by this is that everyone has access to tools for observation (their senses) and can perform analyses of varying degrees of veracity. ‘Veracity’ here distinguishes between those observations that are purely anecdotal—word of mouth—versus those that are empirical—recorded in such a way that they can be revisited with higher fidelity. While anecdotal evidence is not always suspect to misadventure, in the scientific world it bears little clout in the approval process of validating the claims that it purports to know. While I do not find this to be any kind of condemnation born out of science itself, I will point out that ‘anecdotal evidence’ may have a level of veracity beyond empirical evidence. But before I get there, let’s investigate first what I have been calling Pure Science.
To my mind, ‘science’ is not about the people who make it up. While it most certainly is performed by people and only people (so far), including the machines made by people, this does not constitute Pure Science. Pure science refers to that process which has come to be defined as a methodology above interpretations of the methodology. In other words: Pure Science is about observing, measuring the observations, and comparing the data with other known data, and that’s it. This is not to say that interpretation is not part of science—for surely it is—however, it is not a part of the model that I will call pure science. The reason for this is that I don’t believe we as human scientists can rightly fly the banner of ‘objectivity’ and at the same time color our scientific perceptions with our own views. And regardless of how ‘objective’ our interpretations of our findings may end up being, it is still our interpretation. So, you may ask, without our interpretations of our scientific research, what are we actually reporting? This is a valid criticism, since it does seem that what I am stating here is that science can be performed irrespective of people’s discernment. Well, the process of science certainly involves people, but this is not what Pure Science is aiming at doing away with. Rather, the goal of Pure Science is to divest language that detracts from the ‘purity’ of the scientific method. In other words: I wish to distinguish between those who practice honest science and those who practice their agenda using science as an instrument to do so. Let me be clear here, as I realize how loaded of a statement that is: I am not discriminating against scientists who have an opinion on the work that they do; I am discriminating against scientists who proselytize their opinions in the name of science.
But I can see how this can be considered oblique. Let’s take an example.
***
Your name is Mary, and among being a color scientist, you are also an atheist. More, you are also a physicist who specializes in cosmogony—the study of the beginning of the universe and its constituents. One day at work one of your colleagues, Raj, approaches you and asks you what you think of the bible. You shrug and explain that you don’t think much of it beyond its apparent value as a historical text—a “blurred window into the past”, as you put it. Raj, seemingly disgruntled at your noncommittal answer, presses further and asks what you think of ‘God’. You frown and feel your blood pressure rise.
“God is an unnecessary variable in an equation well understood.” You tell him. “The universe has done just fine without one for fourteen billion years, in the least. Why should it need one now?”
Raj, being the non-confrontational man that he is, just nods absently and makes his way back to his work station.
***
So, what do you think of the above allegory? Did you, as Mary, commit any kind of crime here?
Clearly Mary is well informed in her discipline and has every right to denounce any nonsense that may encroach on her area of expertise, but does she have the right to denounce God? Non-overlapping magisterium aside, I think what is fair to say here is that Raj did not ask Mary the question “what does physics say about God” but rather what she thought about the subject. So you see, Mary’s answer is quite brazenly spurious when considering that the context of the question had nothing to do with science to begin with. Mary made it about science. In truth, physics itself would have nothing to say about God as it hasn’t observed any natural phenomena that indicate one’s presence. The job of physics isn’t to speculate about mystical ideas outside of its scope but to report just that—what is within its scope. Unless God is some physical quantity that can be measured, physics has yet to report on it and, if history is any indicator in that regard, it probably never will. However, what is equally as true about the nature of physics is the nature of God—that (he? she? It?) is unknowable by nature and can only be appropriated by faith. As much as I may find this a cop out, it does nothing to assuage the glaring fact that it might possibly be true. Speaking of cop outs, you may recall previously that I had mentioned that science had its own set of these. What I mean by this is that one can easily draw parallels to religious idiosyncratic arguments and those made by science, with regards to what each ‘magisterium’ may prove. In the case of religion the ‘God works in mysterious ways’ example was given. What this illustrates is an example of what I will call a non-caloric statement, i.e. it contains “no nutritional information.” In other words: it’s a garbage statement, just like junk food, and has no inherent meaning. In my mind, it is the same thing as saying “I hate the Democrats”. In fact, it’s even vaguer than that since at least the latter argument points at an internal state, even if it doesn’t accurately describe any of those states. Since “God” is only an object in allegory, the “mysterious ways” statement not only points at nothing, it gives us no new information since “mysterious ways” doesn’t specify what “ways” those might be. While it’s a statement which hopes to achieve some kind of “mystical appeal”, I feel that it falls very short of this and comes across as not only ignorant but insulting, considering it’s often pitched in the guise of a rebuttal to sound atheistic arguments. In other words—a cop out. So what is science’s version of this? Well, it has several, if we overlay the template of the non-caloric statement. One that I have already mentioned is the unfalsifiable theory rebuttal, which is another way of saying “you can’t prove X because no one can prove X by its nature”. Looking upon that statement, I find it humorous to observe how a statement can discuss a thing, even in theory, then in the same phrase denounce the thing as non-existent. Let’s spin it another way: “you can’t prove other realities because no one can prove other realities.” I hope this sounds as silly to you as it does to me, since clearly what is not being said here is that science cannot do such-and-such yet. There are plenty of theories out there which propose future experiments for things exactly like this, so why should consciousness as an external force be any different? There is this fact and the idea that we cannot discuss a thing that is truly nothing. While we may discuss ideas, theories or fantastical conjurations that we have never experienced, anything we can come up with has some grounding in reality, otherwise how did our minds construct it to begin with? Out of purely fabricated “thought particles”? Now that sounds like speculation to me.
Take a unicorn for example. There are many ways in which a unicorn is real. It is an animal with a horn—a horse to be exact—both conditions which exist on terra firma. And while it is possible that a unicorn could be discovered in the fossil record, we have no extant unicorns and so we deny them ever having been and write them off as pure fantasy. Yet, we can also consider that a unicorn is only “fantasy” in certain contexts and under certain pretexts, namely that it existed on earth and that it’s only in our minds. But do we truly know this? How about the fact that somewhere else in the universe, on another planet similar to our own, Darwin’s shovel unearthed the very beast which we once purported to be fiction? Yes, this is hypothetical but nonetheless a possibility. In other words: a unicorn is a very real possibility. So it is not entirely unreal, until we can prove otherwise. This a wonderful example of how “unfalsifiable theory” may be interpolated to show that even they can be considered in such a way as to be in the domain of science. In the case of the unicorn, all we have to do is explore every corner of the universe(s) and uncover nothing like our mythical beast. But until that time (which likely isn’t even a real life scenario) we can’t, in good faith, say “unicorns do not exist.” So while it stands to reason that unicorns probably don’t exist on earth, it is ludicrous to believe this couldn’t happen elsewhere. In fact, given the known size of the universe and all of the possibilities that exoplanetologists are uncovering every day, I’d say there’s a fair chance unicorns do exist somewhere!
“But no, we never meant that! What was meant is that unicorns don’t exist on earth and that that is pure nonsense.”
Well then bloody-well say it that way! Don’t you dare say science has nothing to do with unicorns, because clearly it very well could! It’s just pure, unimaginative, lazy thinking to claim such a thing, when it’s simply a personal issue with unicorns. Don’t make it about science unless you do your homework first. You wouldn’t leave your dirty dishes on the counter then blame your roommate for being a slob, would you? I hope you don’t, because that’s equivalent to pointing a finger at science and saying “it did it!” No, science did not tell you that. You told you that. It’s your story. Science has nothing to do with what you think about it. Do your own damned dishes.
“Speculation”—another word I’ve thrown around here. I think that’s another word that becomes a cop out since so many scientists love to use it to demean the allegedly irrational thoughts of others. While the word certainly has its place, I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss something as speculative in an offhand way until all due diligence is done. What I mean by this is that not only does scientific thought have to contradict what is being proposed, but so too does internal investigation. Going back to the unicorn example (because it’s fun to play with unicorns!), we have already shown that unicorns are only speculation within certain contexts—a conclusion we came to after simply meditating on a very tangible idea. But unicorns are not alone in their struggle to become real. So too is ‘God’ speculation in this sense, since God could certainly be evil and getting away with it while science runs on steadily in the background. Let me explain.
To any who are not familiar with ‘The Problem of Evil’, it is a logical deduction which forces a thinker to accept that God is either good and impotent, or omnipotent and evil. God cannot both be benevolent and omnipotent in this case, as the argument is contingent on the fact that evil exists and God does nothing to stop it. Whatever the mystical rebuttal to this is, the fact remains that “evil as we have defined it” most certainly exists, and God truly does not wave his forgiving wand at its every instance in the way the Bible would lead us to believe that he can, to disrupt our evil. Of course there are arguments against the POE that use free will as their crutch, but I believe this does not abate the glaring issue at the heart of the argument, since God also (supposedly) authored our will powers. Thus, God cannot absolve himself of his fatherly duties just by claiming his children are out of control. This would be to admit that either he does not have ultimate control, he cannot author a foolproof freewill insurance plan, or he just doesn’t care enough about us to do better by us. In other words: he is either impotent or evil, i.e. right back to where we started. Yet, considering the POE, one can easily be skeptical of any claims (scientific ones included) that the big G-man doesn’t exist, and simply say, “He very well may: he could be entirely insidious and testing us as we speak. He could have made all of the rules of physics, as well adherents of logic and skeptics of himself, just to see if we would see through the ruse.” While this is not at all what I personally believe, it is nonetheless unfalsifiable and thus can remain on the table as far as objective scientific inquiry is concerned. Another possibility is that we are actually all part of God’s dream, or perhaps a simulation. There is no way in which we could know how either of those conditions would feel as opposed to any kind of veritable reality; for all we know, this is that very condition.
So you see, any detractors to the idea that ‘science has nothing to do with religion’ can be nudged into considering the fact that science has nothing to do with your interpretations of the universe; it is merely a methodology—observe, report, compare. Nothing more. Where it begins to conflate with ideology is where adherents to it—named scientists—get passionate about those other ideologies than their own that seem to attach the good name of science to them. But as was previously defined, Pure Science cannot bear the burden of insult as it is entirely neutral to anyone’s interpretation of it. And this is not my definition by any means; I’m just assigning my own moniker to an idea that has long been around—that there is both good and bad science! Pure Science would thus be on the far end of that spectrum in that it is the ideal world in which a scientist—one who performs science—has absolutely no opinion on their findings and reports and shares only that which they observe. Once again, while there will be many who claim to already be pure in this sense, this shady claim is no different than the author who claims to have no agenda. If you are human you have both an opinion and an agenda and no matter how pure your intentions, you will likely not be the same.
So revisiting Mary’s case, we can now see that she has imprinted her knowledge of physics onto a question which may, as we already demonstrated, have absolutely nothing to do with physics. So indeed, it was her language not her intentions that were off here. For one could just as easily say “Mary was doing no disservice to science with her response, and acting according to the only information she has.”
Really? That’s what you would go with? How about the fact that Mary is a cosmogenesis physicist, one of the most intellectually demanding positions known to humanity. You can’t honestly believe that someone with a mind like Mary hasn’t “worked out” her own spiritual opinions. (Is it fair to jest here that there might actually be Something About Mary? Ha!). No, what is much more believable here is that Mary, like the many great minds before (and to come after) her is operating on rote-thought, like our Researcher A. It is truly unfortunate that Mary wouldn’t take the time to broaden her horizons and “cast a wider net”, as is often cited. So am I saying that one cannot have narrow-minded physicalist sentiments, based on a dearth of any evidence to the contrary? No, not all. You go right ahead and debase all other forms of irrational thought. But consider this when you do that:
- No one (other than people like you) will like you, if that matters. This may limit the amount of exposure you have to diversity and other cultures, not to mention that your “cheese pizza” attitude is unoriginal, i.e. ‘it’s not even really yours’.
- There is very much a thing that is “having high EQ”. Whether or not this matters is beside the point; if you consider yourself so intellectually superior that your ideas should obviously be others’, it is incredibly ironic that, in your superiority complex, you failed to realize that one with equivalent IQ to you AND an open mind is—wait for it—better than you. How so? Just think on this: if you could solve complex multi-variable calculus, run a marathon, AND be so endearing to your friends that you have been asked multiple times to be in their wedding parties, is not your life richer than one who has resolved General Relativity with quantum mechanics yet they don’t know how to clean their toilet and the only meaningful conversation they have ever had is with a moldy sandwich? While it may be hard for some to say which one they would prefer to be (perhaps you already are one of these), I think most would at least agree that they know what I mean when I say that one can always improve, and improving intellectually is not the only way to do so. There must always be a cost-benefit analysis with one’s own well-being and there place in the socio-sphere, and this is an economy that is all too often overlooked in the overtly cerebral.
- No one, no matter their credentials, truly knows anything about the universe outside of the first sphere of knowledge. While mystics may claim to transcend this sphere and obtain ‘higher knowledge’, unfortunately, by definition this is untestable and we can never be sure of this. Thus, in my books we are, most of us, stuck here in the first level. And that doesn’t put you in a good place to argue about the other levels which is exactly what those kinds of questions like “what do you think about God?” are pointing at.
So what should have Mary said? Well, there’s many ways she could have approached the situation such that, not only could she voice her opinion fully, she wouldn’t have pissed off Raj. Ex: “God is meaningless to me because I’ve seen no evidence for one, and evidence is paramount in how I consider veracity of a claim. I understand why people need faith though, but the ideology just doesn’t resonate with me.”
Note: I can see how one could argue that Mary sounds a little over conciliatory here, as if she has to explain herself. But this is only one of many examples boasting of an answer with higher EQ and a more functional outcome. Mary could have as easily said “God’s a prick, now *@#k off!”, and been justified, but I don’t think she’d be making any friends anytime soon.
As I mentioned previously, pure science has some explanatory power beyond what one may think of as just plain scientific thought. Some of the ideas I touched on were Whys vs. Hows, and unfalsifiable theories. I want to elaborate on these ideas now, as they will be entirely relevant to showing how pure science may be able to help us formulate a way to broach consciousness.
First, we must ask ourselves what do we mean when we ask ‘why’ and ‘how’? Both indicate inquiry into reality and both seek to find a mechanism. Yet, there is a very different connotation to these words, in that ‘why’ implies purpose whereas ‘how’ could be purely functional and we wouldn’t take a second glance. Thus, someone with a scientific background may balk at the idea that the methodologies laid out in the scientific method could tell us anything about the purpose of any natural phenomena, or perhaps they would agree science could tell us some of this but only on its own terms, i.e. that the ‘why’ is explained by the ‘how’. While I will not argue against this last notion, I do see that there is a difference in these two terms, not only in the language (the symbol) but also in the ideas that are attended by these words (the signs). And while we may not be able to find any difference between the two empirically, we certainly can appropriate the notion that we mean something different when we use the words. While this may seem like a red-herring to some, know that I will not lean on the etymology of “what we mean” vs “what actually is” as any kind of weapon or tool here; I simply wish to show that there is a possibility of difference between what is said and what the words point to. After all, in common use language, ‘why’ and ‘how’ do mean very different things in semiotics.
Example:
“Why do you steal that child’s lunch?” versus “How do you steal that child’s lunch?”
The first seems benevolent, almost reproachful and the last, well…you use your imagination. But clearly there is a difference in the responses they will elicit! So you see, if we ask something like “why is the universe such and such” versus “how is the universe such and such”, it is only natural that we would expect very different answers. While discerning the nature of the universe may or may not be at all similar to stealing the lunch of a youth, this is beside the point; the language applies just the same. For you see, if you somehow knew God did or didn’t exist, you would also likely know why the Universe exists. So if someone asked you those two questions about the universe, you may justly answer, among an infinite amount of other possible answers:
“The how of the universe is simple: it exists in a state of equilibrium, ultimately guided by the rules of entropy, energetics and chemistry, and by an entirely different set of rules at the quantum level. The why of the universe has been quantified to be based on the instability of absolute Nothingness, and the fact that something must exist for the stability to be in place. All chemical elements have been measured and finely attenuated to fit just within their thresholds for existence and based on these models, all other universes following the same physical laws should appear similar if not identical. Fields always exist and do not conform to our notion of time, thus the why is simply because ‘there is no other way’, as we have demonstrated.”
If God was known to exist, you could say something to the same effect, with a “…because of God” clause to wrap it all up.
Let me clarify something here: we have not demonstrated anything with regard to the above (very hypothetically) crafted claim(s). This is just serving as one of many examples some ‘infinitely knowledgeable’ individual could make with regard to differentiating the why and how of the universe. And they came to very different answers, as we should have expected them to. Note: it is entirely possible that ‘there could have been capital ‘N’ Nothing’, but the metaphysical meanderings that we would have to take to validate this statement are so far out of the scope of assessing consciousness that it is virtually irrelevant to our discussion.*
So, the only reason one would say “The why and how are the same” or that “We don’t deal with the why”, would be because they aren’t willing to take a gamble with language and investigate further the true power of their ontology, scientific or otherwise. There was nothing unscientific about the above example, so I hope you can see that the only reliable statement one could make to poo-poo ‘why’ questions is that science just doesn’t know why yet.
This may seem like a contradiction to my very first assertion that ‘the first sphere isn’t likely the only sphere of knowledge’, but it is hardly that. All I am saying here is that spheres are not static and that they can expand. The first sphere of knowledge likely will have to grow to understand esoteric principles of the universe, and this may or may not overlap with other spheres that make no sense to define in physical terms as-we-know-them. I am still, and will forever remain, a staunch advocate that humans cannot know everything about the universe, and thus it stands that I believe everything about the universe is probably not physical, or in the least, if it is all physical, there will be physical properties that cannot be known to us.
This brings me to unfalsifiable theories. As we have already covered, pure science does not care about what people do or don’t think about its explanatory power. Science is, at base, what we can do with its tools now. An unfalsifiable theory, in that light, is then only something we cannot apprehend in the moment. While it may end up being a dead-end path, there is no telling until we can embrace the information in a tangible kind of way and investigate it with better tools. And it is quite unscientific to preclude honest investigation into something just because a person thinks that science cannot handle the task. Science should be the ultimate arbiter of whether or not it can handle the task, and nothing more should be said in that respect. However, what is entirely fair of one to say is whether or not they care to go beyond the current science to try and theorize a way to push forward. If one chooses not to then they have every right to withhold from what they may consider as a ‘realm of speculation’. But once again—it’s all in the language. No one can honestly say “in the name of science, I declare such and such, and thus can’t be bothered to look further into this matter”, and rightfully call themselves a pure scientist. All they have done here is conflated the terms ‘science’ with ‘absolutism’. The two are most certainly not interchangeable. One may beget the other, but never both ways. What I mean by this is that one may do pure science and come to their own conclusions about what the universe is like, and thus form some kind of belief system around those conclusions, keeping careful to realize that they have come to this conclusion, not science. Conversely, surefire attitudes about reality will not eke out any kinds of truths, as reality is likely to “change”, and so too would you if you were there to see it happen. Thus, it does not go both ways in that only science can form opinions about it, not the other way around. I hope this illustrates what is meant by pure science, if ever it wasn’t clear before. So then we see that ‘unfalsifiable theories’ are no different than this fallacy—of ‘swinging the wrong way’. It is at heart, like most miscalculations human, a problem of language again. We want to say that science has no way to prove something, but we execute the ideology that science absolutely has no way. These are not the same thing, as science is in its own free-floating realm, clear of the abstractions of our beliefs. We defined it so, so it must remain that way.
A final note on Pure Science here: I have never claimed that every scientist falls prey to their own machinations that devalue their relationship to science, only that there seems to be a general milieu of this among the scientific community. While there are many, many excellent scientific papers and works out there, the cross-hairs are not aimed so much at those shining bodies of work as they are at the people behind them. This is meant to serve as a reminder that, no matter how studious and rigorous your work may be, you likely are not, for the reasons outlined above. Thus, this is not so much an attack on bad science as it is on bad attitudes within science. This is, by our own definition, what makes any of it bad to begin with; for science itself cannot be so, for it is only ever what it purported to be—pure.
VIII. TRUTH AND PERCEPTION: WHAT DO YOU CONSIDER EVIDENCE?
To me, one of the most intriguing facets of life is the ‘pursuit of truth’. Not because it implies any kind of noble cause or sets one on a path to be a hero of some sort, but because the metaphysical context of the word really pours grease on my fire. I often muse at any kind of body of work that claims to know ‘truth’ in some fashion, since I have yet to convince myself that humans can know anything beyond a superficial level. While I am fully aware this is appropriated through my filter, I just don’t see how anyone can sincerely believe we’ve got this universe thing figured out. I realize that that makes me sound no less ridiculous than a religious zealot—that I don’t see how someone can’t share my views—but I have never argued that humans understand anything outside of themselves. I am certainly not exempt from this. While I can sympathize with others in different states of mind, I think the idea of empathy is a bit of misleading term in humans since empathy can be construed as ‘sympathy that causes one to act in an apparent compassionate way, due to a similar (or exact) relationship to the experiences of another’. The reason I think that empathy here need be defined in terms of sympathy is because I believe that, at base, no human truly knows what it’s like to be another. So empathy—a term which inherently implies we have insider information—has no bearing on reality in this regard. Empathy merely serves as a convenient placeholder for ‘that which is a more personal kind of sympathy.’ While I’m sure many will disagree with me on this, I will point out the fact that this statement is equivalent to saying ‘I do not believe in altruism’—which I also hold to be true. Don’t get me wrong, I am no armchair cynic, nor do I consider myself a misanthrope; most who know me have more or less good things to say about me, and I take care of my own. But I also don’t like fakery, pageantry and bullshit, and I have no patience for facades—the idea of empathy and altruism being several of which, in my mind. Let me explain, as this will become relevant to my discussion on consciousness and truths in general.
If you believe that empathy exists, you probably also hold dear the idea that humans do benevolent acts without want of personal gain. While this makes me feel just as warm and fuzzy as you, I just don’t see evidence of this. Anywhere. Am I saying people are greedy, self-serving and manipulative? Not necessarily. While there are many of this lot in the world, to be certain, there are also many kind, caring and compassionate individuals out there who would give you the shirts off their back. My family and most of my close friends are among them. Yet, I see no reason to believe that anyone does anything without some kind of gratification, delayed or otherwise. The truth is in the chemicals—neurochemistry to be specific. Giving not only feels good, it evokes good; that is—it creates neurochemistry that makes us feel elated. We elevate ourselves on a different level by perhaps making sacrifices to better someone else. So you see, there is still a cost-benefit system at play. So altruism, it seems, is not without its gains, and thus is not really ‘altruism’ by definition. The word really just refers to an idea that we can perform selfless acts that are really just heavily weighed out of our favor (unless of course you really get off from helping others). Thus, empathy must be no different, since it is premised on the same cost-benefit system—that we can feel horrible for someone else when they’re down, to try and (perhaps) soften the blow of what they’re dealing with. But once again, by being empathetic we are also helping ourselves (feel good about ourselves), and thus this is exactly equivalent to the aforementioned definition of altruism, which has been shown to be false in any kind of ‘absolute’ sense.
Think of it this way: if you got an electric shock every time you did something nice for someone, or felt empathy for them, would you continue to do so? I’m sure there is a part of your mind saying “I’m pretty sure I would still help others under certain conditions”. But this is no different than the “Torture” thought experiment—where one is asked to imagine whether or not they would give in under extreme torture, even if their most endearing family was at risk. Most people (erroneously) believe that they could withstand torture to save their family from harm but the truth is that by definition most could not. The self-preservation mechanisms are much stronger than we give them credit for and, sorry to say to all of those hypothetical families out there, they hold much more sway when our own safety is on the line. In other words, no you would probably not resist torture and no you would likely not help others if you were electrocuted.
The only true argument one has isn’t even necessarily an argument, since it’s predicated around something we know nothing about—life after death—and that is that sacrificing one’s own life is an example of altruism. However, there are two possible ways to rebut even this:
- If there is an afterlife then you serve to gain there, so it’s still not altruistic, even if the gain is inter-planar.
- If there is no afterlife, in the moments before death, you experience the self-fulfilling prophecy of your neurochemistry so, as fleeting as it may be, the gain is still there.
So you see, unless you are much more creative than the slew of moral theorists that have come before us, there is likely no way to reason empathy off that very same ledge.
So what do the above examples have to do with consciousness?
Well, if we are investigating the truth-value of a claim such as “consciousness exists outside of a body”, we need to first understand what truth is, as we will not be able to define evidence with any kind of concordance without establishing an agreed-upon definition of what can be considered true. And, as I hoped the above examples will serve to show, truths are not always apparent on first assessment, and one might have to dig deeper if they wish to fully perpetuate the validity of their claims. If something as seemingly ironclad as altruism and empathy can be ripped to pieces, so too can evidence.
If truth can be said to be what is ultimately true in the universe, then truth likely doesn’t exist given we have no account of an ultimate reference point with which to gauge our own interpretations of the universe. This is especially potent if there is nothing like a God—an ultimate observer—since the universe would then have to be entirely dependent on relative views. So truth would then always be relative. However, if there is a truth in the sense of a universe unto itself, as in the mind’s-eye view of the universe (and the physicalist’s crutch for proving consciousness is only a mental phenomenon), how could we possibly ever know what this perfect world would look like, considering our lives are defined by both probability and relativity in every regard? More, what kind of systems would need to be in place to observe this flawless realm? Surely human anatomy is not equipped to deal with the kinds of things this world would contain. Or at best, we may gain access to higher truths through fleeting glimpses when in the thralls of hallucinogenic-induced experiences but even this, if not just merely a skewing of “real” reality would only truly be a kind of ephemeral knowledge. This idea was touched up on the “Spheres” section above but it begs elaboration. Just at the term ephemeral means “short-lived”, so too would this knowledge (or access to knowledge) be short-lived. I do not why this is the case, but it appears that either our brains are not well-equipped to deal with protracted or permanent bouts of hallucinatory experiences, or that Mother Nature herself has upper limits on what kind of substances she can produce, i.e. “self-limiting” drugs. Either way, the end result is that we only have access to this temporary condition and whatever information we gather there is gone almost as soon as it appears. Yet, many great things have come out of these trips, both anecdotal and actual, and if you take the stance that hallucinogens are “filtering out the filters”, i.e. they inhibit the inhibitors in our brains, then you may have a good case to argue that we are seeing is not false at all but rather a different kind of truth. An enticing idea to those with an open mind, ephemeral knowledge could be seen as a type of embedded knowledge in that it is embedded into the very molecules around us, visa vis the drugs within the organisms which we ultimately consume to get high. If it truly is knowledge, it is possible that this knowledge is also a knowledge on an evolutionary scale, in that the addling of our minds may allow us to think in different ways which may have been previously unavailable to us, which in turn may give us marked advantages in navigating our natural environments. This may be what is meant by “knowledge”. And the boat doesn’t stop there. It’s entirely possible this “quest” for knowledge has not ended, and that we have much more to learn from these sacred substances. While I myself do not generally indulge in hallucinogens (or any other drugs for that matter), many great minds have woven very intricate philosophies around hallucinogens and have written many interesting and dynamic works surrounding the nature of being and our place in the universe. So it begs the question: is truth merely relative or is it embedded within the very fabric of the cosmos? Either way you look at it, it’s sci-fi in both directions. But can we come to a definition of truth outside of an argument predicated on the unknown? Well, just look back to the spheres of knowledge to answer this question and I think you’ll find that there is easily a middle ground that can be obtained using concurrent experiences and knowledge from where we stand now.
In its most pragmatic sense, truth can be said to be ‘that which bears fruit in every soil’, meaning that the proposition upholds to every observer. But wait, what about the fact that people have opinions, biases and proclivities, as was thoroughly brought up before? This actually doesn’t matter for our cause here because what someone says and what someone believes are not always congruent. While religion is not the best example of this (as many people actually do believe the world is six thousand years old), we can find truths hidden in places we may never have once thought them to lie. For example, how about the fact that one can say “I exist.” While any human can deny this statement using language, no human can deny it using logic. Even if you have some complicated calculation to show that you are nothing more than a simulation, you are still you as you know it, and there need be no difference to any other you than may subsist somewhere else, since you clearly won’t be getting to know that you anytime soon. So, for all you are concerned, the simulated you is very real. The most real. So you exist. The state of you does not matter; all that weighs in here is the fact that something is true, and that is you, in whatever guise that may actually be. So our first truth:
You exist.
Believe it or not, we can now jump straight to consciousness on this premise alone. The reason is that consciousness has everything to do with your relationship to existing and your time doing so in the universe. For we could not be aware of our existence without awareness, which is often equated as being consciousness.*
So, knowing that awareness must be tied to existence for one to know that they exist, we can then investigate the quality of that awareness. While we could investigate the quantity of our awareness (as some scientists have already claimed to have done), I don’t believe this has any explanatory insight into the nature of consciousness any more than describing the mineral composition or weight of a rock tells us its true nature, i.e. where it came from, how it was formed etc. While surely such data contains trace information about these properties, we can ask other questions about the rock that would not be elucidated by just analyzing its makeup, i.e. ‘what structures has it been a part of’, ‘where did the minerals first come from’, etc. We may know many things about its immediate associations, but there will come a point where information about this hypothetical rock becomes hazy. Clearly there is much that goes into making a rock and knowing its parts is not the entire picture. So too is consciousness like this, I believe. So quantifying consciousness aside (which I will cover in further detail in Why Quantify?), there seems to be something about the state of our awareness that suddenly begets this feeling of “seeing yourself see”. This is likely what we mean when we say “self-aware”, and this kind of ‘feedback loop’ (being aware that you are aware that you are aware, perhaps ad infinitum) has been proposed to be one of the very mechanisms that may mechanically produce consciousness. While I wouldn’t go so far to say these mechanisms produce consciousness, I would contend that they certainly are a part of its process, in some way. Perhaps the loop is the mechanism in the brain necessary to interpret consciousness. If this proves to be the case, it is possible that this mechanistic approach could belie something of the nature of the consciousness, i.e. that it too has some kind of loop property. The hand fits into the glove.
So it seems this is the point where one may get hung up in what is true or not, i.e. what Nature is actually doing behind the scenes. We began by agreeing that we exist, then we could more or less agree that we are aware of ourselves existing (as that’s how we got there to begin with), but then suddenly when we try and say “we are aware because…” we falter at a crossroads. While there are knowingly many ways to finish this statement, there is actually no good evidence as to the best way to do so. While some may boast that there certainly is, drawing upon neuroscience or psychology perhaps, I hope I have already shown that there are equally valid (if not more so) ways to consider the nature of consciousness other than these stances, and therefore, even if you don’t agree with what fits into that ellipsis, you must agree that your way of finishing that sentence is not the only way. Thus, ironically the truth about Truth, is that it is probably relative. In other words: nothing is true in any kind of absolute sense, but everything is true at some level. While this statement sounds absurd and contradictory, it appears that’s just how the universe works. So how do we defuse this stalemate? Without a solid definition of truth how can we possibly hope to define evidence? Well, I think we shall see that evidence isn’t actually founded on truth per se, but something else entirely.
So now we must define evidence sans truth, for both the physicalist and any other viewpoint will be reliant on it to bolster their positions.
At heart, evidence and proof may serve the same meal, though the former likely carries more weight in academic circles. Whatever the distinction between them, these words are often the linchpin for credibility in one’s claims, and rightfully so, since so many people claim to have proof for something that turns out to be phony evidence. But, the problem with evidence is that it is contingent upon an established framework which is taken to be true under all conditions. At least, under all known conditions. But we have just shown that there isn’t really any such conditions of “all conditions”, since all conditions are drastically different, given varying viewpoints. An example would be the evidence that the earth is over 4 billion years old, the evidence for which comes from carbon dating, among other things. While carbon dating is a very well-accepted process for telling how old something is, the acceptance for carbon dating falls to our knowledge of the decay rate of a specific isotope of carbon. I will not appeal to the inaccuracy of carbon dating under certain circumstances, as I don’t need to rely on such a thing to help my claims of consciousness along. Carbon dating is a very useful tool and works incredibly well for very old things, so I need not stir up that pot any more than science already does. What I will do is show that, while the decay of a carbon isotope is a readily measurable quantity, the amount of information contained in the process is actually quite limited. All that the decay tells us is exactly that—what it tells us. Do you think time passes the same for an ant? Any argument trying to solidify the decay rate of a carbon-14 neutron on its own level outside of that process being conceived is missing the point: the world for the ant is probably much quicker than ours! Yes, the neutron does what it does, but this process only describes an outcome, not the perception of the outcome. These are two entirely different things. If they weren’t then space and time would have nothing to do with each other. I hope we don’t shame Einstein by trying to argue the opposite. So in the example of carbon dating geological structures/life forms, we can learn roughly how old something is in our terms, but we need to look to other disciplines to garner other information about the earth, i.e. geology, cosmology, meteorology etc. This matters because what we consider “evidence” for something has likely been gathered from many different places and built into an edifice that we consider somewhat impermeable. While there is nothing wrong with this per se, we must always remain vigilant of the fact that these are parts that we constructed and the universe could change at any moment. There is no saying whether constants will be constant tomorrow, or if another force will emerge out of seeming nothingness. We truly are walking blind in this universe, measuring as we go.
So is this to be the foundation for my argument—that “things could change and up-heave our evidence”? Of course not! This is as blatantly weak to me as it is to you. It is only brought up to remind that we have assumed thus far that the universe is consistent. But let’s play devil’s advocate and assume we’re right—that all our evidence is ironclad. Does consciousness play by the same rules? Let’s see.
Proving that the earth is a certain age involved performing a physical test and measurement to obtain evidence for that proof. If we are to perform a physical test and measurement on consciousness to obtain evidence of its true nature, we would first need a substance to measure. Carbon is in many things in nature and it so happened that it does a special thing over time that we could use to differentiate time. But we can’t grasp consciousness or plug it into a mass-spec machine to obliterate it into its parts. We can look at the brain, sure, but then you go from a physical thing to a non-physical thing, or at best an illusion (as described before). If you are a mentalist, you may wish to argue that all we mean by “consciousness” is the complex interactivity in the circuitry of the brain. In other words: consciousness is just a process. End of story. Once again, this is totally fine, so long as you accept that consciousness is an illusion. Thus, you are reducing consciousness to a purely metaphysical matter—an effect of the brain. Yet, the word effect is also just a word, and used alongside no other qualifying language it has as much explanatory power as its usage in a statement such as:
…“the effects of Hurricane Maria were devastating on the Puerto Rican nation.”
Do you see how the word provides absolutely no context whatsoever in to what the devastation was? Thus, we are required to either use our imagination or ask someone else to supplement the intended meaning. So you see, saying consciousness is merely an effect of the brain neither explains the conscious experience nor does it give us any new information beyond its involvement somehow with the brain’s wiring. So the only tangible conclusion the mentalist could have here is that either consciousness is a complete illusion, or it is non-physical if it isn’t (Cartesian dualism), which isn’t actually a claim a mentalist (physicalist) can honestly make. But we can neither measure a non-physical thing nor an illusion so how do we proceed? Well, perhaps consciousness is a different kind of physical thing. Whatever this is remains to be determined but if we begin to formulate what that could be, we might put ourselves on the path to proving it. But this may require us to shift our views of what we consider evidence since, so far, it has only ever come in the form of objective reproduceability.
But what about subjective reproduceability? Would that be a crime for me to suggest this? Interestingly enough, notice how both contain the term ‘reproduceability’ (not actually a word but it works just fine here), yet you—just as I—cringe a little when reading the ‘subjective’ part.
Why is that?
For the very same reason that women generally get paid less than men do for the same task and that racial profiling still exists—archetypes. We get so used to doing something a certain way that it persists in our thought processes and our lives. Yet most people are not bigots or racists (I hope) but they are all part of a system that allows this to happen. Is the system to blame then? Probably not since the ‘system’ is no more a thing than a ‘bank’ is a building. They are both the people that make them up and thus the problem is ultimately with human nature.
“But I thought we agreed that humans aren’t all that bad!”
No, they’re not, or you’d know a lot more tyrants and psychopaths. So what is going on? Change is very difficult to implement, especially if it involves changing an archetype—an ingrained model—in a society. As much as women don’t deserve to get paid less and African and Muslim Americans don’t want to be arrested any more than anyone else, these systems have been in place for some time and they are loath to change. This doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t, just that it may take more radical forces to get them do so, since it took radical forces to put them in place to begin with. I am not advocating violence, by the way; only that attitudes must become more radical. Thinking is very much a force and the more minds that are aligned with any one given idea, the more that idea is likely to move.
So what do archetypes have to do with consciousness? Simply put, subjectivity is scorned in the world of evidence seekers as it has a bad reputation for malfeasance with respect to truths. However, this reputation is also a stigma, i.e. it is a negative archetype which subjectivity must bear when considered seriously. But if we consider subjectivity in and of itself, i.e. outside of its validity with respect to an external topic, does it have value? This is worth investigating, namely because consciousness cannot be described objectively (outside of correlating brain activity) since it does not occur objectively. Or if it does, then we as individuals are seriously misled about our own awareness and could then rightfully declare that our ‘subjective’ experience, if truly objective, could not be differentiated from the latter and thus nothing else could honestly be discriminated as well. This would mean that either nothing was subjective or that everything was objective, though these appear to have the same outcome if not by different means. So, to avoid this mess let’s roll with the idea that consciousness has something to do with subjectivity, since we have defined subjectivity as our individual relationship to objectivity, and we need to see if appealing to subjective truths can ascertain anything about consciousness.
Despite the stigma that subjectivity has, there is also some great enlightenment to be found with the realm of the self, namely that one knows themselves better than anyone else can. This has to be worth something, looking in on it, for the very language “I know myself better than any other” is itself an objective statement since, by association, objectivity is the ‘best lens’ that one can have on a subject. So we can be objective about ourselves, with regards to the subject of the self, and have no better. What then, can we say about our own awareness? Do we know our awareness better than others? This is a bit of stretch to extrapolate self-knowledge unto self-awareness since many of us (myself included) are not always present with our own goings-on. That being said, does anyone else have a better awareness of your awareness than you, despite your intermittent attending to it? I don’t know if that would be a fair claim, since your attention—like your ‘self’—is yours, and yours alone. Though someone else may ‘have’ or ‘command’ your attention, they may never ‘keep’ it. Thus, at the end of the day, your attention is vouchsafed in much the same way that your self is.
So we can know two things thus far in a truthful way: the self and the awareness of the self, regardless of what they are actually pointing at. So the real question then becomes “is consciousness the same as awareness?”
As we have demonstrated before, this is immediately where our mind goes when we think of the very word “consciousness”, like a magnet to a piece of iron, so deduction tells me that they are. Though the word ‘awareness’ may not do all the justice that the grandeur of conscious experience deserves, if we consider it a placeholder or a kind of umbrella for ‘what we mean’ when we say “consciousness”, it will do just fine.*
So ‘knowing’ this we can then assess whether or not we have evidence for awareness and to do so we will see if we can first do this objectively.
As bizarre as this might sound, we actually have no objective evidence for consciousness. I say this because one cannot, by definition, define a term using the term itself. This is circular logic. If we attempt to define consciousness outside of consciousness, then we wouldn’t be allowed to use the term consciousness to do so. But how would that work, considering we (or someone/something else) would have to be conscious to perform such a task? Thus, the burden of proof cannot be surmounted due to the fact that a one or a thing to ultimately assess all of the evidence of consciousness would have to be ‘unconscious’, and this just doesn’t stand since anything that would be sophisticated enough to measure consciousness—neural output or otherwise—would itself, too, likely have to be conscious.** One may argue here that a sufficiently advanced machine could be used to measure consciousness objectively but there are two assumptions that go along with this that cannot be ignored:
- That this hypothetical machine was not built by any creature that could impart conscious tendencies into it, for if it were it could not avoid the follies of the conscious creature which built it, since it was manifested out of such. Therefore, it could be said to be merely just an extension of that consciousness, and would not really be “free” of consciousness, which would be necessary to be purely objective. This hearkens on (Heisenberg’s) indeterminacy in Quantum Mechanics, where an observer truly must be absent in all forms—extended, ancillary or otherwise, for the particle effects (the position or momentum) to be negligible and coordinated, lest we disrupt the outcome.
- That everyone agrees that this sophisticated machine itself is not conscious. This is hugely problematic and I will cover this point in more detail later on.
So you see, we may not actually have any good arguments for how to measure consciousness objectively, unless of course you want to say consciousness is nothing more than a manifestation of the brain’s circuitry. But even then, be careful! All have you done is said,
“I can be objective about consciousness because I can measure neural activity using my own neural activity.”
All that has happened here is a swapping of words—a categorical exchange: consciousness for neural output. There has still been no explanation of how to measure such a thing while avoiding the circular assessment of consciousness by consciousness, or neural assessment by neural assessment.
“But no,” you say, “we are conflating logical fallacies here! We are not trying to define consciousness, we are trying to measure it! While definitions surely can be circular, measurements cannot be. They are objective and stand the test of time.”
This is a weak parry of the sword which I can swiftly offer a riposte: if measuring something is not defining it, then what is measurement? After all, does not measurement beget the definition? Even the hardest science we have—mathematics—uses mathematical proofs to define functions, laws, etc. This is no different than using language to define something, since language points to specific events which, in the event of proving something, will directly relate to some information which is being assessed. Thus, the information properties inherent in linguistic and mathematical proofs are one and the same, if not achieved by different processes (though both numbers and letters are symbols!). So we must ask ourselves then, can we truly have something be completely measured and remain undefined? Give me an example of this and I’ll shake your hand for scoring a well-deserved point. No example you say? Well then.
Perhaps that was an unfair use of anecdote pitted against one who proposed a good counter-argument but I hope you see my point here: that if you wish to appeal to objectivity solely through measurement, you must also find a way to divorce both perspective and assessment, if measurement is to obtain a unique distinction; if measurement is to remain outside of consciousness—an absolute necessity if we ever hope to broach consciousness objectively. Some may see this as phony reasoning but I would ask them ‘what is the alternative?’ Are you imagining some world where non-conscious creatures make all of the decisions (isn’t that kind of any oxymoron)? Or perhaps you believe that consciousness doesn’t ‘come into play’ with regards to objectivity. Well, the first rebuttal is merely a fantasy so I won’t bother entertaining that and to the latter I ask, “How so?” Do you mean ‘consciousness is nothing more than a physical phenomenon and it is not involved in objective reasoning’? Or maybe you’re moving more toward ‘consciousness as being solely perspective’ and thus everything outside of it is what we mean by objectivity.
To the first, I have already addressed this, referring to it as the illusionist’s stance. To be clear, this is a valid stance and it’s one of the ‘forks’ in the road that I maintain one must take. Yet, once again, if you take this stance, what is it exactly that we are doing when are we doing what we are doing? If it’s an illusion, shouldn’t there be some part of it that’s not real, by definition? Which part is that—the illusion of the brain’s neural impulses, or the effects that it is purported to create? Surely not the first, since those are all measurable, so it must be the latter—the effects. But how can these be illusions when we are in them when we describe how they’re an illusion? This is quite the paradox, I hope you see. Perhaps you think it’s more of like “a dream within a dream”, metaphorically speaking. But then, how would one ever know when they were in the ‘waking’ world? There would be no precedent for it. But let’s play to the field here and say “we just know” when we’re awake, i.e. that we can easily accept it’s an illusion. This still does no justice towards explaining how reasoning happens outside of awareness. Did you not have to think about your words before you formulated them? Sure, we know that neural impulses happen in the brain before they are brought to our awareness, but this doesn’t bear down upon the notion that awareness itself can be abolished when considering rationalizing in the brain, since the functions of our processing—however fleet-footed they may be—are still ‘brought to the table’ before we serve them. In fact, if you believe in the neurochemical theories of consciousness, you must also adhere to the knowledge that if consciousness is solely a product of the brain it would have to be a complex inter-working of many different parts of it to create the illusion that we experience as our awareness. Thus, consciousness would be interlinked to other reasoning parts of the brain, linked hand in hand. If it were otherwise, we would suddenly “black out” when we had rational thoughts which, to my ears, sounds a little counterproductive. So whether or not you take the illusionist’s stance, it does not absolve you from accepting that consciousness is part of reasoning, or in the least aware of it, as should all other behaviors of the mind.
So if no objective evidence for consciousness can be apprehended, where do we go from here? Surely not in a subjective way, as that would not constitute evidence.
Would it?
This is where we may have to diverge from standard definitions of ‘evidence’, as inherent in that definition will surely be a clause on objectivity, which we need to shed, based on its lack of utility, as previously assessed. But this is very dangerous ground to tread, since the negative archetype of subjectivity will be an ever-looming specter over its every mentioned instance. However, I do not have biases against subjectivity beyond any historical wrongdoings performed in its name, so I will do my best to not provide a colored view of this topic and attempt to share my warm reception of it that many may not have already nurtured.
Revisiting the idea that the self is the thing that we may know best (for surely we do not know the universe outside of what science tells us about it), this provides a little clarity for what else we can know in a similar light. As the self is an internal process, it stands to reason that things that we may know as well as ourselves would likely also have ‘internalness’. So what else goes on inside? Well, among the many bodily functions (some of which we may or may not be proud of) it is fair to say consciousness goes on inside. Interestingly enough, I have yet to see any one view on the topic that would argue this point. Though some theories of mind do contend that consciousness has its roots in the external world, as far as I understand them, none of these schools of thought would be so bold to say that consciousness has no involvement in the internal world. So, all contenders in every corner can agree (so far at least) that consciousness in some way has its roots inside our minds—inside of our brain-body. Even a panpsychist probably wouldn’t argue that consciousness can be entirely divorced from the soma since even this view requires a machine—a brain—to interpret the consciousness (as we translate it) that exists abundantly in the fabric of matter. So regardless of where you think consciousness inevitably is, it at least has some hand in our minds/brains. Knowing this, can we then say that it is our consciousness? Not quite, since there is as of yet no way to prove if consciousness is connected to its other proponents—others who have it—as well. Whether or not you believe in any kind universality to consciousness doesn’t matter here, as it is an unfalsifiable theory whether you like it or not. Where we should focus our energy on is at our veracity to the claim—the claim that we own our own consciousness. Here, it falls upon language once more—“ownership” being the crux of this problem.
Ownership may imply a purchase or transaction but it may also imply a command of something. While surely we command our own consciousness when we want to, the question then becomes twofold: do we always command our consciousness better than anyone else and if so, have we always been this way? I think that, barring mental illness, most people can call up their attention to reality more or less on a whim, so it is fair to say we are the ultimate arbiters of our attention when our brains are in check. While you may argue that some evil genius is allowing us to do this, he or she has yet to show their face so this too is an unfalsifiable theory and need not confound the current evidence. So yes—all things being equal, we are the best at controlling our attention, when needed. But have we always been able to do so? This part becomes tricky because memory now comes into play—and this is part of behavior, which I have previously stated is independent of consciousness.
Let me explain.
Behaviors, as I will refer to them, will be ‘all of the neural processes in the brain that amount to thoughts or actions on any level, conscious or subconscious.’ Thus, where electronic signals amount to mechanical processes, consciousness may be thought of as being the backdrop on which these happen and not necessarily tethered (entirely) to those signals which it observes. While they are certainly linked, they are not irreconcilable, in my view, in that consciousness need not have a brain or any similar analog to exist, for reasons touched on previously. Taking this stance, I may rightly then say that memory—being a behavior—too will not be necessary to evoke to prove consciousness on any kind of evidential level. But this presents a challenge for us, as even subjective evidence will require some kind of way to show that we have always mastered our own consciousness to vouch as any kind of credible claim, and if we estrange memory from this picture, how can we then recall such an account? The funny thing is, memory is equally as unreliable as subjectivity. In fact, memory alone may be the sole culprit responsible for generating subjectivity’s bad rap sheet to begin with. So do we really want to rely on memory if we are attempting to approach subjectivity in any kind of respectable way? Probably not, but then how do we proceed?
Well, we can’t. Unless we redefine our views of memory. Let’s equate it to ‘information processing’, since that’s truly what the brain is, at base—a computer (and for now, a very powerful one!). So where does this information processing lead us astray? Data recall? Data input? If you were to quantify it, you would probably find it were both, as the game of ‘Telephone’ clearly illustrates. But why does this happen? Are people insidious and they want to confound our honest attempts at recording history? Some perhaps, but I think it’s a little more complicated than that. People all have different levels of awareness of their own behaviors and this leads to different mechanical processes. So one way to look at it is that information processing is not ‘faulty’ so much as it is ‘incredibly varied’. So the problem isn’t inevitably with the data in any way—it’s with the system we use to observe it. In other words: we have an idea of how the data should be which vastly differs from how it is. But if you really think about it, that’s our problem, not the data. So we need to then reassess how we view data recall (memory) such that we can have a pragmatic way to use it to help along our quest for consciousness.
Just like programs exist to root out detrimental malware, lets establish now that certain kinds of memory are better for the system than others. This is already well entrenched in psychological literature and often pops up in the form of ‘short-term memory is unreliable and long-term (committed) memory is much more steadfast.’ So then it makes sense to appeal to long-term memory of consciousness if we hope to even grace the edges of anything we hope to call ‘evidence’ for our command of our own consciousness. But…uh-oh, we don’t have any long-term recollection of consciousness before our early years of childhood.
Or do we?
This is very hard to say. To discover an answer here, if any are to be found, we must take another fork in the road: either memory is a necessary part of consciousness or it isn’t. I will take the fork of independence, simply for the reason that I have worked with individuals with Alzheimer’s disease and they are clearly still conscious to me. While I understand this is not a perfectly convincing argument (since memory is not entirely done away with—it is just addled), it is convincing enough to me that I feel strong enough to take another step forward down that path of rationale. So, if I lost you here at the memory fork then farewell, bon voyage! But it’s a shame, since the trip gets very fun from here (though it will not be without its turbulence).
Previous to remembered events, what can we safely say we ‘likely’ had? Well, there is much that we can say here that would not get us ridiculed, i.e. that we existed, we were younger than we are now, and that we (hopefully) had someone to care for us. But what about our consciousness? Can we say anything about that? We can’t rightfully say we remember being conscious, but it stands to reason that if an ant is conscious on some level (which most scientists would not disagree with) that a human baby was likely as well. While these two organisms do not even compare on many levels, this is beside the point; if an ant—a creature with a much, much simpler brain than a human baby—is conscious in some kind of way, a baby is probably much more so. We can also fairly say that, just as the baby, the ant too probably doesn’t recall much of what it does. But here’s the interesting thing: the ant does much, much more than the baby does! It builds nests, carries hugely heavy objects compared to its body mass, and is always part of a hive mind. Yet it might not recall any of this. So you see, consciousness shouldn’t be contingent on memory, since clearly much goes on consciously without having to recall it. But we are looking for evidence here, so extrapolation isn’t strong enough. Let’s keep digging.
Eventually, the ultimate deciding factor is whether or not the formulation of the brain in utero is the point where consciousness becomes a thing. If it is, then it likely begins to emerge the more and more the brain forms, forming what one physicist called ‘units’ of consciousness (more on this below). One scientific theory places the emergence of consciousness at the moment when the baby emerges from the womb (birth), when it gets its first huge kick of adrenaline (epinephrine) which then cascades into a kind of “on” switch for consciousness. In reality, all this proves about consciousness, if true, is that it is an “activation of the machine”, which need not necessarily equate to an “activation of consciousness.” I hearken this to pulling a ripcord on a generator; the pulling of the cord, while causing the engine to turn and thus generating power, is by no means the power itself. The power comes from the electrochemical potential within the battery of the generator, not from the cord. Alongside this theory comes the notion that the in utero infant is non-conscious, as the jarring zap of adrenaline that the infant experiences when they transition from the nurturing, hospitable environment of the mother’s womb into the hostile, unforgiving outside world, has yet to happen. I feel that this notion—that unborn infants are not conscious—is ridiculous and will be disproven in short order, for inherent in this idea is the idea that infants in utero have no internal states other than autonomous processes. How silly is this! We already know that infants in utero are able to hear sounds both inside and outside of the womb, and they very much respond to many other stimuli to which they are subjected. So to say that they are ‘non-conscious’ would be assuming that these events generate no corresponding mental states, which is counter to psychological (and philosophical) evidence—that it does not take much to stimulate an infant’s nervous system. While the data that supports this have been generated out of the womb, it is not unfair to say that a womb is no less a stimulating place than a barren nursery, the latter having shown to have more than enough contents to happily generate a healthy stimulation process in the growing baby. To adhere to the idea that the womb generates no internal states, or that the brain needs a “kick-start” to become conscious, flies in the face of both sensory processing theories of consciousness and early childhood development, for as long as a brain is sufficiently formed and functioning, and provided it has some stimulation from its immediate environment, it should be building synaptic connections and thus generating internal states of mind, however vague or mercurial they may be. Thus, this idea of a “Buddha baby”—one that has ‘nothing’ in its mind—is likely as farfetched as the idea that the earth is flat. While it may appear to be one way, I believe time (and experimentation) will show it to be another.
I hope the above shows that we must be careful how we equate different instances, lest we make poor judgments with our comparisons. For as appealing as ideas like these may be on a neuroscientific level, they are a linguistic mess, since we would then have to decide whether or not we are just calling one thing another, as in “1,024 bytes makes a kilobyte.” A ‘kilobyte’ is only a thing in so much as it is applied in reference to others like itself. If you call 4,000,000,000 neurological reactions “10 units of consciousness”, or what-have-you, do you see how nothing has really changed? All we have done is taken the domain of the brain and its connections and relabeled it as another domain, without explaining where the bridge occurs.* So in the case of the brain/consciousness relationship, an attempt at reducing consciousness has only really reduced the argument for it being encephalic since no actual equation was given on how the two are the same. If an in-utero infant appears to have 0 units of consciousness, when clearly there is a whole bucket of evidence to the contrary, one must reassess whether monitoring brain/chemical activity affords us the truest glimpse into the inner-workings of a conscious creature. Yet, consciousness does happen at some point, and it does seem to be tied to the brain. So what’s going on? Here’s what I think:
These ‘units’ of consciousness are more than just an emergent property correlated to large clusters of neurons; they’re inherent in the very molecules themselves, just as all molecules have a spin and a charge that compels them in some way. What this property is I dare not say but I augur that it’s there in some way. I reason this in the same way I view entropy as a guiding law—that both entropy and consciousness happen. Thus, if we can subjectively say “I know I am me and I know I am made of many, many molecules that have come from this universe”, we can extrapolate from that and add, “…and if consciousness is inherent in those molecules, then this is my consciousness and has always been since my inception, regardless of my recall of its arrangement in this body.”
On a final note here, I do acknowledge that the brain is constantly being altered and modified by its environment and these alterations/modifications do often change who we perceive ourselves to be. In fact, we are constantly reassessing ourselves, perhaps as often as every 10 minutes or less, neuroscience tells us, akin to how the body replenishes all of its cells every decade or so. But I do not believe that any of these behaviors have anything to do with any kind of flux that may be imparted on consciousness. I see consciousness as more of the ‘unadorned eye’ that watches us through us. In this respect, I can see how so many people have believed in God or something like it, since consciousness bears so many of the properties that we associate with the divine. I also realize that this is just one of likely many scenarios you could imagine where consciousness could be subjectively appropriated to form a new kind of ‘evidence’.
Ultimately, the question will become: what do you consider evidence?
IX. THE GHOST IN OUR MACHINE
It may come as a surprise to the reader that I am not against machine consciousness. While this may at first seem to be a kind of double-standard on my part due to my apparent stance against physicalism, I assure you I am not anti-physicalist. In fact, go back and read some of my previous statements regarding knowledge and you’ll see I argue in favor of physical knowledge, just not as the be-all-end-all. That being said, I am quite averse to the idea that consciousness is purely physical or at least physical as we know it. I need not reiterate why I believe this, as the last eight chapters have already covered my thoughts on this matter. Instead, I will turn my attention towards the idea of complicated systems and machine learning to assess whether or not this can validate or disprove my supposition that consciousness is something other than a property of a brain-device.
To understand if there are hints of the nature of consciousness within machines, we need to first establish two things:
- What is consciousness, and
- What is the nature of an analogous system?
The first we have already covered and equated to being awareness of one’s inner workings. While this may or may not be the entire picture of consciousness, at a folk level it at least refers to what we mean when we think of the word, and for this reason it shall suffice to carry our inquiry forward. So if we accept this definition—that consciousness is that state of being self-aware, for better or worse—then we have a particle to manipulate.
Analogous systems are incredibly important to functionalism, for the very reason that it has its roots so well entrenched in them—because they work to describe complicated, real-world issues such that we can live a practical life. It’s why we have math to describe insanely complex phenomena in the universe and elaborate art to relay our multitude of complicated emotions. Functionalism works because it allows us to circumvent philosophical hamstringing that comes about from inherently convoluted language as well as avoiding metaphysical rationale that need not be broached if a simple fix is all that is required.* While this, too, may strike some as a hypocrisy on my part, please note that I also did not denounce functionalism as a whole but rather just in its merits (or lack thereof) toward explaining consciousness and its experience. And neither will I here draw upon functionalist arguments to eke out explanatory power for consciousness; I will only be using this tool to show how systems like the brain may be associated with it. So, going forward, we may then ask ourselves, do we have any systems like the brain? Not quite yet but it seems we are heading that way. In fact, neural interfacing—mixing computers with our brains—has shown great promise on paper and may end up being the sci-fier’s dream realized in the not too distant future. Big Brother mind-jacking conspiracy theories aside, it seems mankind has been continually and simultaneously obsessed and flummoxed when it comes to quantifying the vastly intricate nature of the brain. As of 2017, we’ve yet to come up with a ‘hard’ analog of it. Does this mean that we won’t in the future? I wouldn’t go that far, since a general rule of thumb is ‘don’t bother predicting technological powers outside of your immediate neighborhood, since you’ll likely be way off.’ I will not fall prey to this, as I both don’t have the kind of background to professionally assess what we may or may not have in 100 years or 1000 years and nor do I care to speculate here, anyway, since that is beyond my aim. But I will say this: current evidence strongly suggests that ‘true AI’ (as in what we think of when we think of equally intelligent and capable AI), is probably not more than 100 years away. In what form that will be remains to be seen, but the current trend among computational growth indicates that our computers will likely be able to do quite amazing things in the not-too-distant future, sequencing the epigenome and (perhaps) mapping the entire earth’s weather patterns, to name a few. Surely if computational power can achieve outcomes such as these, sequencing the human brain in its entirety is likely around the corner. I am a bit of an optimist and believe that, barring massive biohazardous outbreaks or all out nuclear war, mankind will eventually be able to perform unfathomable tasks with computers. One such thing I have imagined is a mapping of entropic outcomes in a closed system, i.e. how an entire situation could unfold thermodynamically. While this may be a pipe-dream, if I can imagine it now, someone will surely do it later. At least those are my hopes. But regardless of what computers of the future can and cannot do, what can be said for sure is that humans are very eager to make a brain analog, so it is not for a lack of wanting that we have yet to achieve it.
When I say ‘analog’ I mean ‘any kind of machine that simulates another.’ For the brain is just that—a machine. While it is made of different materials than what we would think of as a standard machine, i.e. metal, plastic, silicone etc. (though the brain does have trace minerals of course), the stuff of the machine need not necessarily beget the operation of it. While sometimes this may be the case, i.e. conducting or magnetic materials, in the case of a ‘brain’ analog, all we would need in theory is any kind of material that can transmit a signal of some sort, electricity or otherwise. While electrical signals so far seem to be the way to go as far as making a ‘brain-like thing’, there is no reason (that I can think of) why other signals wouldn’t get the job done, such as, say, using light. And though different mediums have different properties, to be sure, we already have many different types of signal processors so the evidence that these machines could become much more is strongly in favor of this prediction. So accepting that machines will likely one day be near or equivalent to the complexity of a brain organ, what can we then say about the consciousness in those machines? Would it be different? Would it even be there?
The cool thing about this question is that, no matter what your stance on consciousness—illusionist or otherwise—the opinions on both sides will probably converge into agreement and admit: consciousness surely exists in these systems! Why is that? Well, for the illusionist/physicalist that’s easily answerable by stating that “complicated brain-like systems of necessity beget consciousness.” If this weren’t the case then they would have no argument for emergent properties and indeed all of consciousness as a whole. How else would consciousness “emerge” if not from the complexity of the system, according to this line of reasoning? It couldn’t. It would be entirely illogical and would not follow at all to say that “consciousness is an emergent property of the physical complexity of the brain” and then in the same breath denounce other material systems of sufficient design as being “non-conscious”. Where would the reasoning for this come from? That the complexity can only be “neuron-like”? Now I’m no neuroscientist but forgive me for asking: is not a neuron essentially a transducer, i.e. a device that changes one signal type into another? Would not the chemical cascade leading up to an action potential (nerve firing) be the same as ‘input’, and the nervous response—the electrical charge across the synapse—the ‘output’? I don’t see how it could be seen as being otherwise. So where in this input/output system is there anything special about nerves? Is it inherent in their matter, perhaps? So then you are arguing that nervous tissue has some magical property that begets consciousness that other material systems would not? This would then require proof at the atomic level (or beyond) which brings us right to the same place that a panpsychist would end up—proving consciousness at a quantum level. This brings up another salient point: is it then just programming that is creating the consciousness analog? This would be congruent with the idea that any type of signal processor, when sufficiently constructed, could function as a conscious machine. Yet, some still contend that “neurological activity” is not the same as “programming”. This brings to mind the “Chinese Room” thought experiment, which is used to evince the idea that our consciousness somehow interprets the symbols (internal states) in our minds in a different way than, say, a linear processor would. I don’t personally see the need to add in this homunculus-like step, but it is a fair argument to say that neural complexity does appear to map out differently than other circuitry. Whether that is a result of the totality of the system or some special property of the neurons themselves remains to be seen, but regardless of the actual answer to that, there should still be no reason one could not recreate this system, in whatever form, given we knew enough about the original—the human brain. So you see, if you take a physicalist stance about consciousness in any form, you are likely going to come to the same conclusion as this: that consciousness would not be a unique property to the brain. In other words: yes, machines of sufficient complexity would absolutely be conscious. Along with this comes a whole host of moral and ethical issues and, perhaps, a need for an entirely new facet of law, i.e. Machine Law. But that would also be an entirely different paper.
Let’s move on.
So the physicalist must accept consciousness in many forms. What does this mean? That consciousness has multiple realizability. What is that? In short, multiple realizability refers to a state of being that may have many instances of its kind. The pat example of this is identity, i.e. who a person (or thinking creature) is. This becomes a very important concept when considering topics such as cloning and exact genetic replication, so that one may attempt to differentiate seemingly identical instances of a thing, to show uniqueness on any one part. This is known as token identity, which essentially translates to “the unique state of being a separate thing among other things like it.” While this seems a bit circular, it is entirely pragmatic when you get down to brass tacks, since all this token identity is referring to is an instance of consciousness. Without token identity, all clones might as well be one consciousness. This flies in the face of both physicalism and panpsychism since both rely on individual machines (brains in our case) to process consciousness. Where they differ, as stated before, is merely only where consciousness is; it was never an issue of whether or not the brain was involved. Thus, a universal or “global” consciousness, while not off the table (for reasons I will cover shortly), can be argued against by the very fact that it seems our conscious experiences are ours and ours alone. But more on this in a moment.
Embracing the idea of multiple realizability, and now accepting the fact that consciousness would likely happen in many situations “brain-like”, where does that leave us with respect to our original questions about consciousness? Well, addressing ‘what it would be like’ is an important matter at hand, as it stands to reason that, although consciousness would likely be present in machine AI, it may have slightly different properties. The reason for this is plain: different molecular systems often have different properties, acids and bases being a good example of this. While this may not always be the case, there is no reason to believe it should be entirely identical, although the operations may appear the same. An example of this could be demonstrated by revisiting the rote carburetor idea that functionalism uses as its slogan.
While a carburetor made of industrial-grade plastic and one made of some kind of metal would surely perform the same task—regulating gasoline/air mixture into the engine—there are other considerations that are important to take account for, different heat tolerances being one that I could think of. While this may not affect the outcome in any significant way, I am sure an engineer wouldn’t overlook this fact when taking into account the lifetime of the component and how it affects the system as a whole. Thus there is a very real difference, operational or otherwise, that affects the system by changing the properties of a part. How much does it change then should be the appropriate question in this regard. So, while it is not fair to say that consciousness may change in any noticeable way when transcribing from a brain to an analogous system, it is fair to say that there may be considerations about how the system fairs over time. In other words, does consciousness evolve differently in these systems?
So, let’s recap quickly. Machine consciousness would likely appear the same as ours (given all of the components are similar enough in function), but it is possible that it varies with how it is experienced over time. This would be in line with the theory that consciousness is on a spectrum, i.e. that there are different ways that it can be experienced. While this theory in itself has little to no explanatory power (as it only describes the possibility or likelihood of multiple states of consciousness and not their properties themselves), it does give us a glimpse into the potential world of machine consciousness. So what would we expect to see there?
To answer this question with any degree of reputability, we would need to first assess how we may compare to a higher form of consciousness. You may recall that previously I proclaimed that consciousness seemed directed—that it was ‘pointing’ at some ultimate goal. While I personally believe that what it is pointing “at” is more of an allusion to the full force of consciousness, it actually doesn’t matter what target we assign here, only that there is something greater than our conscious experience. And while this is no different than speculating what a bat’s ultrasound is like or even another’s perspective, I believe we can look back to see how to look forward. In other words, we have a pretty good idea of what consciousness is like, at least on a functional level, in “lesser” creatures, and so we might be able to extrapolate the emerging properties of consciousness based on comparing ourselves to such lifeforms. So what is the difference between us? I cannot speak from their experiences, since I am not all other lifeforms, however, it appears that these creatures operate more on an instinctive level than we do. That being said, this drives me to distinguish again between behaviors and consciousness—the overall experience of all states, behaviors among them. So perhaps consciousness is no different on a behavioral level, and that these creatures just act differently in their environment. But this begs the question of whether or not the things that drive us affect our awareness of ourselves and our environments. I can’t see how it wouldn’t, unless you equate consciousness to being only our awareness. But even then, ‘awareness’ implies a reflection of our inner states and if the ‘original’ states are different then so too should the reflection of their image. Assuming of course consciousness is the feedback loop that it is proposed to be. But I won’t argue that here because there is no good cause or ground upon which I could, as evidence weighs too far in favor of this loop. Rather, I’d like to call back attention to the idea that behaviors and consciousness may be linked somehow, but not necessarily dependent on each other. How could this be? Well, if consciousness is anything like a part or a component, it can easily be said that behaviors “fit inside” of it. Thus, if it is a ‘package’ of sorts, perhaps we can assess to what degree it is wrapped up in behaviors. Is it layer upon layer, like a Ukrainian Egg, or is it simply one ‘item’ to be removed? If anything like this is the case, then it is fair to say removing the contents of the package does not detract from the ‘gift’, for the behaviors—the packaging—were merely a way to help contain the true prize. While these behaviors would certainly be necessary to present the package in a tangible way, they would not be necessary for the contents to exist, i.e. we could rightfully “give” the present unadorned. This would be equivalent to saying “a brain-like machine merely processes the contents of consciousness.” This is not so far-fetched, given all the evidence we have for consciousness is consistent with either this theory or the illusionist’s. So then it is just a matter of choosing, not proving at this point. Following from this, one could then say that behaviors could function outside of consciousness. This is completely consistent with life, as all machines function in just that very way; their ‘behaviors’ are nothing more than their proclivities toward some action, otherwise known as their operations. So accepting this, we can then say that if a machine’s behaviors change over time, i.e. it becomes sufficiently more complex and calculating than we as humans could ever hope to be, it is still not a solid case for the evolution of consciousness, since behaviors can operate autonomously from a state of being aware of them. So what’s with all of this talk about consciousness evolving then?
Well, if my theory stands the test of time (and preferably the test of science, when and if it can), we discover that it’s actually not consciousness itself evolving at all but rather the devices associated with it which become more adept at interpreting it. In other words: the direction to which I refer is not born out of an emerging property but a developing set of tools. To put it another way: we will begin to interpolate consciousness with higher and higher resolution, either as we evolve (or rather our brains evolve) or our machines evolve. Perhaps this is the heart of why so many are terrified of true AI—that they will beat us to that punch. If we fall back in the races, there is no telling if we would ever be able to catch up. This is why some are now looking at ‘hybridizing’ AI; that is—attempting to merge humans with it. I think this is an excellent approach to avoiding ‘Skynet doomsday’ prophecies since, if it ever did go down that way, it would really just be us killing us. And this is no new story so hopefully we would be better equipped to deal with such a scenario as opposed to fighting an enemy we knew little to nothing about. At least in theory.
A more daring theory of consciousness, which is in some ways more settling when considering the emergence of a totalitarian AI, is universal consciousness. I equate this to the idea of a ‘hive mind’, i.e. many perspectives linking together to become one. While we already see this on a utilitarian level in language, such as “society, community, city” etc., it is easily arguable this idea exists only in language. But this is a notion that may be challenged simply by equating perspectives as being information and thus transfer of information most certainly amounts to a system. Yet, global conscious may be trying to hint at something above this, namely that consciousness itself is not only multiply realizable but that its individual instances are somehow connected, as in a network or grid—a universal consciousness. The burden of proof here falls upon being able to ascertain what the connection would be. Would it be some kind of time-space connectivity or perhaps an energetic one? If so, both of these should be measurable and it would fall to this Universalist to establish a methodology for determining either of these hypotheses. However, if this connection is within the consciousness itself, there are many problems with this theory, chief among them that consciousness has yet to be defined. Without this definition, how could we then go about describing its inner workings and intricate connectivity if any are even there? This is predicated on the assumption that consciousness is non-physical and then we must start entertaining dualist ideals, meaning we would have to start looking for substances that are non-physical.
While I also don’t see dualism as any kind of foul smell that should be avoided, I do believe that dualism—like any other theory to be validated—should ‘come under the gun’, as it were, if we are to take that inquiry at all seriously. So how do you investigate an internal substance-that-is-not-a-substance? Why, internally of course! Think on it: we investigate physical, mechanical claims in the same way that we hope to prove them—physically, mechanically—so why would internal claims be any different? We have already shown that subjective evidence could very well be defined, regardless of anyone’s opinions of its validity, so if we are aiming at defining consciousness in purely non-physical terms, the only way I can think of on how to do this would be to investigate our own states of being. This is not very different than meditation, if not with an agenda. But does not meditation also have its own agendas, i.e. “clearing the mind” or “grounding one’s self”? Perhaps that is all we really mean when we want to investigate our “spirituality” (despite its all-too-often religious connotations). So if consciousness has nothing to do with the physical world (which I don’t necessarily believe) then the only truths we may hope to find are inward, not outward. Whatever this means to you need not detract from any objective statement, as there is no objective statement; it is just that—whatever it means to you. In other words, subjective evidence may vary in its properties as the subjects will likely vary. Though this may sound like it countermands the very definition of evidence (objective), recall from the previous chapter that ‘evidence’ can be seen as ‘that which can be realized and tested repeatedly’, and thus inner states are not exempt from this. In fact, in some ways they are more valid that objective verification, in that we can verify our internal states with higher fidelity than we can using outside sources, since anything outside of ourselves requires us to put trust in its performance. One cannot trust themselves, for they just are the way they are.* We must cast aside the stigma of subjectivity if we are to approach any kind of dualist notion of consciousness. This is paramount in determining whether or not we find any truths, for an ‘objective predisposition’ is a bias, in this case, that will serve to work against us.
So, regardless of whatever truths you may discover about your own consciousness, you may rightfully declare you have evidence for your theory of non-physical consciousness as your consciousness is the very proof thereof. However, there is a glaring problem with a dualist notion of consciousness and this must be addressed for any wishing to embrace this notion: that appropriating a non-physical attitude toward consciousness may lead you down the path to infinite regression, i.e. “anything like consciousness may become subject to your non-physical framework.” Is this really that big of a deal? I think so. Look at it this way: we have already talked about dimensional analysis of the physical world (known as scale in physics), and how the universal truths therein seem to be that everything is relative, i.e. a thing may only appear as that thing on any one level, and not all. So if you believe consciousness is non-physical, you must also take into account other emergent properties that you wish to reduce (which you actually are doing, just the other way—non-physical, as opposed to the usual physical), such as magnetic fields, vision, sound etc. One could also argue that all physical things are emergent properties when considering how they differ to the senses, given the frame of reference. Either way, this is a large barrier for the dualist to overcome as you now start to overlap into an inverse monism, i.e. “everything is non-physical”. If this is the case, there are two outcomes to this that I can surmise: either everything is an illusion and our ideas of existing are only relative insofar as the illusion has defined them, or we are committing a “swapping fallacy”, that is, we have just relabeled the ‘physical universe’ as the ‘non-physical universe’, and not changed anything on a practical level. Both of these ideas are deplorably impractical and warrant no spent time in my mind. The reason I say this is because if the world and all its belongings are an illusion, all we have said is that this is not some other that, but never did we define either of those terms. It is an abstraction that bears no relevance to what we call reality, and implies that what we call reality—that these words I am writing now—does/do not exist at all. This is silly as, clearly, I just wrote those words and you read them. What isn’t silly is the idea that existence is otherwise to our perceptions, which is entirely reasonable. Pure Nihilism has no weight when considering the moment; all we can say for sure is that existence means something, and nothing more need to be said about it to live our lives happily ever after. And as for the latter—that everything is non-physical…what does this even mean? While I’m no hard-ass physicalist, I do appreciate that there is a sphere of knowledge in which physics prevails and events happen consistently, so to rule this out would be perhaps the biggest burden of proof ever placed on the shoulders of one individual. I am not saying that it isn’t possible, just that it’s so improbable that it borders on mental illness to believe otherwise. Either that or you’d have to be a genius of the kind the world has never seen, to disprove the last several millennia of corroborated experience. As you can see, both of these conditions are quite extreme, illustrating that there truly is a fine line between madness and brilliance. However fine that line may be, it does nothing to alleviate the challenge of disproving the first sphere. Thus, I purport that global (universal) consciousness, in the sense that it is a shared experience, leads to too many seemingly insurmountable problems for it to be a valid theory. This does not rule out consciousness as having universal properties, however, as consciousness could easily be a thing itself with such traits, without actually being global, by the simple analogy of it being something like a force, as mentioned previously. If this force/field were anything like, say, gravity, then it would be inherent in any system that could become associated with it; mass in the case of gravity, brain-like systems in the case of consciousness.
So in other words: we would be fine not to worry about machines developing any kind of ‘hive mind’, outside of some kind of signaling process, i.e. pheromones or radio waves. That being said, we should expect their mind states to be very similar to our own, considering both the fact that we would (in theory) model their mind-engines off of the human brain, and that the properties of such a machine, functionally speaking, would most likely be operationally equivalent to the brain. As such, our AI would be expected to have conscious, emerging properties akin to our own.
On a last note here: just because emergent properties seem to be agreeable to both humans and machines on a theoretical level, it is not a golden-ticket statement for proof that consciousness is an illusion. Emergent properties could just as easily be an illustrative model, describing merely what seems to be as opposed to what is. In other words, both the emergent property theory and the extra-conscious theory could be reconciled by stating that “emergent properties describe nothing more than dimensional relativity”, viz. “things have different properties at different perspectives.” This is entirely consistent with consciousness being an external force as the ‘emergent properties’ would be simply describing how the force manifests when the brain (or something like it) interacts with it. Think of how a magnetic field is perturbed when an electric current is introduced—it could change its properties entirely. Whatever the truth of the matter, the argument is sound and it provides explanatory power, something the illusionist’s emergent properties do not. Thus, substituting the type of mental machine, while illustrating that conscious should (and likely would) happen, it does little to nothing to prove its isolation in the components of such a machine.
X. WHY QUANTIFY?
We as humans seek to differentiate ourselves into two different camps, it seems: those who can be trusted and everyone else. While this applies on many levels including politics, law, academia and our personal lives, science is our tool to determine trust in reality. At least, reality as we perceive it. While nowhere in pure science does it state that quantification is explicit in its execution, it is a necessary corollary for the process of scientific proof. So if we hope to prove consciousness, and if consciousness can be said to be in the domain of science, then we should expect consciousness to be quantifiable. I will not argue that this isn’t the case, but rather I will reassess whether or not everything need be quantified for a holistic understanding of it. For, I believe if there are any answers to consciousness, and especially if they end up pointing at some absurdity, then we will likely find that our mundane definitions of ‘quantification’ will not fit the bill in our quest to define consciousness.
For consciousness has shown to be something special—something seemingly outside of the physical world. While this may be a complete illusion (as elaborated on previously), I will no longer pursue this line of reasoning as that fork has been shown to lead to a dead-end path of passive existence—a life of no explanatory power—as well as the potential for infinite regress. While this may be the truth—that the universe requires no explanation and that infinite regresses are reality—I will call this the Middle Path going forward, and later show how this is absolutely not an option. So, continuing on our journey of consciousness unknown, we investigate the need to quantify such a thing, as this is surely the easiest and time-tested route to proving anything. Yet, if we look at what quantification is, we see a reduction of sorts, leading to an analysis and further taxonomy of the all the processes involved in a system. For example, if we wish to know how water-ice forms, we must first understand the components—hydrogen and oxygen—as well as the conditions under which water becomes solid, i.e. temperature, pressure etc. All of these are hard numbers which can be measured and put to paper, then that information can be retrieved by another and either recalibrated or recreated. Whatever the intentions of future experimenters, the data should be belied in a fashion that the only experimental error that arises is through the experimenter, not the experiment itself. At least this is the hope. To achieve this ultimate goal, scientists take painstaking amounts of time to describe their processes and equipment and to record everything in excruciating detail so that nothing is lost in translation. While this process, like most things human, is rarely perfect, many consider it the best we have when considering our attempts at understanding universal truths. Yet, would this same model hold if we were to imprint it upon consciousness?
To do this, we would have to see if consciousness:
- a) Provides any hard numbers
- b) Is a consistent process
- c) Is not an elusive property (the middle path)
For consciousness to provide us with hard, empirical data, it would itself have to be a quantity, meaning it is something that has extension in space, or rather—it occupies the physical realm. There are some quandaries that arise, in my mind, when considering this point, as consciousness could be both extended and non-temporal, i.e. it could have a place in the fabric of reality but not a stake in time. How is this when space and time have shown to be inseparable? Simply put, if consciousness is anything like a field or a force, we should expect it to be able to affect matter, and while all known matter is extended in space-time, the only bearing the “time” component has on matter is when matter is in flux, i.e. it is changing (this is not the same as being stationary, by the way). If consciousness is a uniform field, like a backdrop, then we could easily imagine it as some kind of ‘veil’ that is draped over all things, but that itself need not be perceived or affected to qualify its existence. Thus the ‘tree falling in the forest’ question could be answered: yes, something happens when we’re not there, but only consciousness (the rest of the universe) knows what that is. Please do not equate this to any kind of teleology, i.e. argument for design, because there need not be an author to a universal field, by definition. Do not forget that our notions of time may be entirely different than the Universe’s; for all we know, time never began—it always was. Time may also ‘not exist’ in the sense that what we call the ‘arrow’ is a heavily contrived idea used to appropriate our relationship to time. The Universe could, in all honesty, have an entirely different take on time sine spectatores. The fact that we cannot comprehend this notion tells me it is likely information in a higher sphere of knowledge, and hints at some fact that would be an excellent challenge for thinkers (and potentially scientists) to pursue. Embracing this idea for a moment, we may then see that this field of consciousness is no more bound to time than time is to our definitions of it—time and consciousness could have always existed as universal components. This is not to say that consciousness could not change if time were affected in some way; it is entirely possible that one at the event horizon of a black hole would not only be perceiving images (light) and mass (weight) differently, but their conscious experience could also become entirely skewed. Thus, it makes sense to me that consciousness could be outside of time but not estranged from it, in that vast perturbations to space-time could have unforeseen effects on consciousness, were it any kind of field or energy density.
An excellent thought experiment to help along this idea can be seen in comparing our everyday views to the Holodeck on Star Trek. While I am not a Trekkie by any means, I do appreciate the writing of the show and there are many great lessons that I think we can glean from it. For all those not familiar with the Holodeck, it is a simulated world in which one may interact as if they were in another reality. The Holodeck can not only appear as if it is another place, but one can interact with it too, via touch, smell, sound etc. How does this relate to consciousness? Immediately! What if your mind was the Holodeck and everything that is brought to your senses is ‘programmed’ by the universe to appear a certain way? While this does seem to be consistent with our current theories of reality—that the universe does just that: provide information that feeds back into our brains—this is not what is meant with the Holographic Principle. Rather, the information being fed to you is not reality—it is a complete Hologram, i.e. an illusion. How would you be able to tell the difference when you’ve never had a “real” reality to compare it to? You couldn’t, and this was, among other things, the reason the Matrix became such a cult smash. While the idea was in no way original at that point, it was popularized because it presented a take on an idea that people could easily relate to: that their minds were not their own. Or at least, their realities weren’t. This is the premise upon which Solipsism is built—that the universe is just an image in one’s head. For what that’s worth, it’s a hard argument to disprove if you add in all of the ‘sensory illusions’ that could be programmed in. Mix all that up with an Evil Genius (or Geniuses) and you basically reduce all of human experience to that of a side-show.
While this argument sounds absurd, its premises are not—that we cannot prove or disprove that consciousness is in us. This becomes a burden to any wishing to quantify it since it forces one’s hand with regards to the approach they must take; either they accept consciousness is an illusion and measure neural attributes, garnering whatever information they wish about the brain, or you disagree with this notion—that the brain signals don’t equate to consciousness (either partially or fully)—and you search for some other quantity. But this is where the quest gets a little blurred since we don’t really know what we are looking for outside of the brain. So you see, if we wish to quantify anything, it first must be presented to us in a way in which we can quantify it. And consciousness doesn’t seem to have the ‘hard’ properties that quantifiable things do, at least on an experiential level. What do I mean by this? Well, if we were to try to quantify consciousness on an experiential level, I think we would find that each individual person (and any other creature that we could communicate with) would likely have varying experiences given any one situation, so this would be incredibly hard to work with. This would be very unlike a mechanical/physical system where, given a set of parameters, it goes down the same way every time. This is not to say that consciousness is not consistent; the point is that any consistency within consciousness and its (alleged) interpretations seem to be something other than hard numbers, namely that is consistent only within its experience. But do not let this detract you! In fact, the whole field of Psychology exists for this very reason—to attempt to qualify our mental experiences which seem to be tough to quantify. But the psychology of consciousness is a whole other matter than its definition, since psychology primarily focuses on the assumption that consciousness would be a product of the brain and thus it would define a narrow window which it may look out of. There is nothing wrong with this, as psychology is a science, but by definition science has constraints. Looking for a different definition of consciousness outside of those constraints would mean using a different set of tools. It is only natural then that psychology would have little to say about an external consciousness since it does not deal in non-brain language. So in sum, consciousness can either be quantified as neural signals or, if there comes a time when we can correlate it to another substance, we can measure that. But since we have yet to find that other substance, the brain quantification remains on the leading edge of (scientific) explanation. Yet, there is a larger problem at stake here; beyond even the issue of the lack of explanatory power that the Brain-Mind theory has, there is also the question, “Why do we quantify at all?”
Within the first sphere of knowledge, this question is easily addressed by the statement “because it works.” In other words, we quantify because it provides us with the most information about a system. However, as noted above, quantification only works when you have a physical system, so anything in a higher sphere of knowledge may not conform appropriately to our methodologies of quantification. If consciousness is either non-physical or some other “kind” of physical, what can we say then about quantification? This reflection brings up the idea that perhaps, just perhaps, there are other way to garner information than reducing them to their basest parts or processes. If we are seeking truth outside of quantification, where better to look than tangible examples that we already have? One instance of this could be considered in language; if you attempt to reduce language to its parts, then you would have to argue that language is merely the sum of organized sounds and vocalizations which serve to relay information, which we call communication. Yet, nowhere in these sounds (really just perturbed air waves) do we see any inkling of ‘language-ness’, just mechanical vibrations. Perhaps, then, ‘language’ only exists…in language! If we try and reduce it to its parts we don’t see properties of the system it will become, only bits of information that eventually amount to a much more complicated system. What if one tries to say “language is the interpretation of specific sounds.” So it is the process of sounds then? How is it then, that there are many things “language-like”, that do not constitute a language, for the fact alone that no one speaks it? This shows the injustice of this argument, as language is clearly something beyond its parts and processes. What is it then? Well, barring the ‘emergent property’ fallback argument, there is a way in which we can discriminate language from other phenomena of its kind by distinguishing between that which is created and that which is constructed. Language is very much created by us as it much more than the sum of its constituent sounds. You also need a brain trained in the ways of listening to it as well as an articulate speaker to enunciate the sounds clearly enough so that the listener can make sense of the information. More, you also need to make sure that both understand the dialect of the language—that is, that the way in which the language is spoken makes sense to both. If any of these parameters are not met there will likely be a communication breakdown. So you see, language is more of an interface than it is a single property of sound, so standard quantification does not bear fruit in this example. While one could argue that you can still quantify this system, it is not quantifiable in the same way that a molecule or wave is; rather, it is qualifiable. The difference between the two is plain: quantity puts a number to something, quality puts a state to it. Language is best explained in conditions over numbers so this likely means it is not quantifiable, if you are getting down to hard definitions. Yet, we know much about language. So how can this be? Are not all things in the first sphere quantifiable? Not quite, as we just explored. They are, rather, describable in some way.
“But language is not consciousness,” you say.
Aha! This is true but language and consciousness are both phenomena and thus we may attempt to qualify consciousness in a similar way. We may find, however, that there is a glaring difference between the two (despite their obvious differing properties): that consciousness is constructed, not created. Note that creation implies “a new type of system whose properties are not observable at the level of its parts.” While we need not define “new” or “properties” here to get to the point, I will say this: language only need be functional to prove the point; everyone knows what “new” and “properties” mean, without having to draw lines to a metaphysical placeholder. That being said, the construction process can be contrasted to the creation process by stating that the parts of the system are evident in the system, i.e. we did not have to “define” anything about the parts to have the system make sense. Construction is an apt analogy, I think, for the very reason that a building constructed out of wood beams ends up being…a wood building. Thus, the particles or fields or forces (or whatever) of consciousness should be the same as the system—the conscious experience. While I do not think that the brain shows us the only conscious experience (just like one building does not belie all architectural design in history), I do think we can describe consciousness at its basest levels and thus we could build up from there. This is very different than something that is created as, as was previously shown with the case of language, there is no clear concept of the system at its lower levels. While yes, language often does use sounds, sounds need not necessarily use language. In fact, looking back on that I hope you see what I see: that sentence makes absolutely no sense! In my mind, this may serve as some kind of superficial proof that our suspicions about language being a created phenomenon are correct. But what about consciousness? Let’s swap terms and see what we get:
“While yes, consciousness does use neurons, there is no clear concept of the system at is lower levels.”
Hmm. I bet one could do a study just on people’s reactions to this statement. While I find absolutely no problem at all with the last statement, I am sure many would try to argue something along the lines of “but we do see consciousness traits at the neuron level; neurons are electrical and consciousness very much has electrical properties—in the brain.”
But this is a weak rebuttal, for it is predicated on the notion that those ‘electrical properties’ are consciousness. There is a huge difference between measuring blood flow or electrical conductivity in the brain and the states that are associated with those measurements, unless consciousness is blood flow and electro-conductivity. One may also try and argue that the statement has nothing to do with consciousness. As much as this seems like a bizarre argument, it actually has validity in that the arguer could be making a bigger claim—that not all systems have evidence of their properties at lower levels. In fact, most systems do not, considering that molecules make up anything that is matter, and larger systems do not generally look like molecules. Yet, this is not what the construction argument is meant to relate; it is not a rebuttal to dimensional differences but rather that all systems have some relation to their parts, where consciousness does not seem to at all, when viewed from this same lens. You need look no further than the brain—the very instrument deemed to create consciousness—to see this reasoning at work. Where in the spongy, gray or white matter of the brain is there anything ‘like’ consciousness? The brain is the last bastion as a system, so where does the quantum leap from that physical object to the immensely ‘unbrainly’ world of consciousness happen? Emergent properties happen on a spectrum, by definition; consciousness doesn’t just begin to “show up” as the brain is built. Its effects might, but to argue that consciousness’s effects are consciousness is the same as trying to argue that deaths are guns. Clearly there is always a mechanism or perpetrator of an event, and consciousness does very much seem to be an event—the event of awareness. So where is the “gun” of consciousness? Well, it’s a smoking gun, I think, so you need not bother with all the “brain talk”, outside of its correlations with consciousness.
Yet, maybe you still maintain that “consciousness is those very brain states, but it is not an illusion; complex neural activity amounts to a state in which we gain self-awareness and that is consciousness.”
I will call this “Middle Path”, as mentioned previously, and those who attempt to forge it, “Cake-Eaters”, for soon-to-be obvious eponymous reasons. I hope to dismantle this through rigorous analysis, showing that you cannot abide by this ideology—that you must take a fork. What I mean by this is that you cannot denounce consciousness as a thing in itself AND claim it is not an illusion. It is the philosophical version of “you can’t have your cake and eat it too” and it is logical suicide.
Why is this? Well, I need not reiterate here why consciousness can be seen as an illusion, but perhaps I should address this new idea—that consciousness just is what we perceive it to be, and it’s very real.
Aside from also not having any explanatory power to subvert the hard problem of consciousness (what it’s like to be conscious), this statement also leans on the idea that systems manifest at high enough levels of complexity. Ironically, my path to deconstructing this rationale will lie in the very systems in which it would purport to support it. And that system can be found in Computational Theory of Mind.
Computational Theory of Mind, or CTM short, is the idea that a ‘mind’ can be constructed from hard analogs, namely—from computer-like machines. The problem herein is not whether or not this can be done—for surely we will eventually build a computer that is brain-like—it is whether or not this ‘Mind’ will be conscious. Actually, to disprove the Middle Path, we can still abide by CTM and agree that these hypothetical computer-minds would be conscious (recall that I agree with Strong AI theory!). The ‘disproof’ in CTM will not actually come from reasoning that consciousness emerges in all complicated systems, but in the fact that a brain could—in theory—be built! To me, the fact that it happened once (well it happened many more times than that in evolution, but the Homo Sapiens brain has happened “once” insofar as it is the only thing like it now that we know of) means that it can happen again. Computer science hints at this being true and I think it very much is. Technology will catch up to Mother Nature and it will eventually not be an issue. However, looking upon the Middle Path argument—that consciousness just is because of neural complexity—we find that consciousness is thus viewed upon as an emergent property that has very unique traits, possibly the only of its kind. Yet, in CTM the ‘consciousness’ that would be expected to ‘emerge’ would be the product of ‘programming’, i.e. a mass network of signals and wiring that amounts to analogous experiences to our own. But are they just analogous or are they actual? There is a very big difference between these two, considering the fact that you could build a model of something which is not the thing. While I am not arguing that these machines would not be conscious, I am arguing that there is no case to claim consciousness has any unique properties that emerge out of the mess of “programming” that we have now equated the system to being. Yet, consciousness does have very special, unique traits. So something smells funny here. Well, keeping to the Middle, you could argue that machine consciousness would have the same unique traits, regardless of the quality of its components, but you have yet to explain away how electronic circuitry begets a thing like consciousness. At best, we should expect a conscious simulation based on this reasoning but it stands to reason that actual consciousness should emerge in a sufficiently advanced machine mind. So either we accept that a conscious simulation is the same as our consciousness, or we delve back into the idea that machine minds interpret consciousness just as we do, or thereabouts. So you see, drawing upon CTM shows us that there is no hard link between the “consciousness-ness” and sufficiently complex machinery, yet it does suggest that this very event would happen. Fill in the blanks and here is what you get: consciousness exists outside of any mind but a machine may evolve, organically or otherwise, to become sufficiently complex enough to interpret it. Why is this so hard to believe? We’ve already developed many “simple machines” based on this very principle, the valve and the dam to name a few. Conscious properties could be inherent at the basest of levels—at the level of the field—and thus entirely explain the conscious experience. Instead of saying “everything is conscious” we may instead say, “Consciousness is everything.”
In my mind of minds, this seems the most true to me. I cannot see how this can be otherwise as too many obstacles lie in the path of the illusionist or the Cake-Eater that need surmounting before any kind of credible claim can be made to their advantage. If the ultimatum of the Middle is that consciousness—or something nearly identical to it—can be programmed, the burden of proof lies in showing how that very programming constitutes anything outside of behavior, and therefore is not just a simulation—a ruse—in the guise of being self-aware. Not only this, but the Cake-Eater must also be the judge, jury and executioner in the case of whether or not consciousness is only self-awareness. Even in the best case scenario—where programming does create a perfect consciousness analog AND consciousness is (somehow) equated to be only self-awareness—still remains the overarching question: how do you tell the difference between programming a program that performs X and programming a program that interprets X? These are not necessarily the same thing, as has been demonstrated multiple times in this paper.
So I ask you, dear reader, which is it: is consciousness nothing at all?
Or is it…everything?
AFTERWORD
First, I would like to thank you—the reader—for taking the time to indulge in my thoughts. If at any point I came across as brusque or offensive, please forgive any attitude that may have percolated through the language I used. While I fully intended to strongly voice my opinions, I only ever meant to share my thought processes, however radical they may be, with the hope of continuing to be open-minded. I would like to reiterate here that I am very open to reception and encourage feedback in any form; I realize I may have “thrown a punch” in this paper, so I am most willing to take a hit in turn.
To summarize the ideas in this paper:
-Human beings can know a great deal about the physical universe, and this knowledge is found within the First Sphere of Knowledge. Beyond that, any other spheres that may exist would either be knowledge outside of our current understanding, perhaps outside of understanding altogether. This idea is premised on the notion that humans cannot everything about the universe. Understanding the nature of consciousness may require knowledge beyond the first sphere.
-We have no objective evidence for a world outside of sense perception. It is unscientific to believe otherwise. What we do have is virtual evidence of a very old universe and its goings-on. These are very different kinds of evidence. One possibility for our preconceived ideas outside of immediate perception is that consciousness always existed as a force, and thus the idea of understanding perception outside of perception comes to us from the fact that perception has always been there. This is not an argument for design, but rather an attempt at reconciling ontological contradictions regarding the universe and our place in it.
-For consciousness to be an emergent property and only a product of the brain’s complexity, any who take this stance (physicalists) must accept that consciousness is a complete illusion. Accepting this, they must also explain away all emergent properties which could be argued to be in everything. This can lead to infinite regressions and a whole lot of mess. There is no “Middle Path” that one can take with regards to their stance on consciousness. This means that one cannot maintain that consciousness is both a product of the brain solely and not an illusion. The reason for this is that, to admit that there is a state of conscious experience and that that state is ‘exactly the way it is because that’s how it is’, is equivalent to saying “there is no hard problem of consciousness but there is a state of consciousness.” This a contradictory statement as the hard problem is just that—that there is a state of conscious experience, very different from any other physical process, and it needs explaining. The Middle Path attempts to force a futility of explanation, while in the same breath agreeing there is a conscious state. Therefore, they are really just relabeling the “illusion” of consciousness, claiming the illusion is “consciousness as consciousness should be.” I hope this demonstrates how the Middle Path is a very weak stance to take.
-The language we use is incredibly important when describing the physical world. Consciousness and its apparent relationship to the brain should be no different. No one has any right to claim the brain creates consciousness, only that research strongly suggests it is associated with it. This is an important distinction to be made, and scientists are not exempt from this distinction, as future research may show that consciousness is something else entirely, and then it may fall within the realm of science. Pure Science guards against these errors in judgment by defining a process outside of human opinions, and reducing the scientific method to observing, reporting, and testing. There is nothing else. There cannot be, for one’s opinions of their science do not matter to the universe, so they should not matter when seeking any kind of purity or proof.
-“Evidence” may not only be seen as objective but also subjective, if our definitions of it conform to a broader notion of infallibility. In other words, subjective evidence could be “those inner truths which never waver in their experience, and are known to maintain consistently so that the observer (the self) may report them to be true in any circumstance in which the original clarity of introspection was present. This kind of evidence may be the only kind that is available to prove something such as consciousness, and whether or not our conscious states provide evidence of their true nature, i.e. whether or not they are an illusion, they belong to us, or if they are a “part” of something greater. There may be many reasons why objective evidence of consciousness may not be immediately appropriate, namely if consciousness is non-physical or it is some other kind of physical. That is—consciousness may be knowledge in a higher sphere. How to “prove” something on that level may require innovation.
-We should expect AI with sufficient enough machinery to have consciousness, as any system analogous to the brain provides no reason why it should be otherwise. However, Strong AI does not “disprove” panpscychist notions of consciousness; all it does is show that different kinds of machinery may “interpret” consciousness. Strong AI also may be seen to demonstrate a proof of fallibility in the Middle Path, as we shouldn’t expect “programming” to create something “like” consciousness, but rather a programmed “analog” of it. Where the sensory qualities of consciousness comes from still remains a mystery in Strong AI (the hard problem), and so this suggests that while the machinery becomes sufficiently adept at interpreting consciousness, and thus consciousness is there, there is still the quandary of how it arose to begin with. An easy way to explain this away is to say that it never “arose” but became available once the machine was able to tap into it. While one may still persist with the Middle Path and argue the contrary—that Strong AI proves the Cake-Eaters theory—they still have the burden of explaining away the differentiation problem—that is, why emergent properties are different and at what level do they become so? This is another infinite regression and can easily be avoided by taking a fork: either the illusionist’s path or the other.
-Quantification can only be trusted insofar as describing phenomena in the first sphere. If you begin to look beyond, i.e. how language differs from “organized sound”, one may find a whole host of problems, namely the difference between created phenomena and constructed phenomena, that is—which experiences are appropriated for our conveniences, politically, socially, psychologically etc., or which experiences have inherent properties. This is an important distinction to apprehend as consciousness may very well be an inherent property in matter, yet to be discovered. If that is the case, it would be very hard to quantify if it provides no “hard numbers”, i.e. it is not a quantity to begin with.
I will close with just this: like Kierkegaard, I too believe that philosophy is something better shared than written about, for reasons of misinterpretation and the inability to properly belay my tone. That, and the fact that it’s a bit of a one-sided process (writing) dealing with a two-sided topic (philosophical discourse). While the tone of this paper was mainly philosophical in nature, I also hoped to incorporate some of my other interests in this paper, i.e. spirituality/religion and science. I apologize for any errors that I may have committed in referencing real-world topics, and will revise where necessary. Many of my points merely serve as thought plots, and may not actually be my own opinion. I hope it was obvious where that was the case.
Please treat this paper as discourse-turned-writing, and not as any kind of dissertation or something equivalent. It is my honest attempt at seeing if something like this could work, and whether or not I could transcribe my thoughts into words. While I do not believe I fully achieved this, I had a lot of fun writing this and I hope it is as much fun and thought-provoking to read as it was to create!
M
End Notes
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* Please note that I am not saying that you should abort your personal religious beliefs or anything like that; what I am getting at is more to the effect of thinking critically, as your life may be more important than other prescribed beliefs tell you it is. This is not meant to evoke any kind of remnant of Pascale’s wager or the likes, but rather that the key to understanding spheres of knowledge lies in being receptive to begin with. There are many frameworks that one can have prior to accepting the spheres that are compatible with them, and religious thought is not off the table in this regard. Spheres of knowledge simply refer to the different ways that we can know something, if at all.
* Though “Science” need not be any kind of ultimate executor of our beliefs as, in my mind, it too falls prey to many of the same follies that any dogmatic school of thought does since, as religion, it follows a strict code to which it must adhere.
* This is, in no way, meant to devalue the explanatory power of maths. This statement is merely meant to show that a ‘proof’ in the mathematical sense may not be equivalent to a proof in the universal sense, i.e. how the universe actually is. Remember, what looks right on a page of paper may not be the same case when overlaid with reality. This paper—my paper—is not exempt from this ruling! I could totally be wrong and math may prevail when describing the very small. We shall see.
* Going back to religion for a moment, while many if not most of the religious texts are riddled with hypocrisies, scientific fallacies and historical inaccuracies, people still tend to cherry-pick their way through their book to find what suits them. While this in nothing more than human nature—Darwinistic self-preservation—it does beg the question of how much any one religious gospel can be taken at face value. Not to argue the semantics of religious denomination, it is my personal belief that one may not rightly call themselves a follower of any one doctrine if they don’t fully subscribe to their book, lest they be ripping out and burning page after page after page in their book until all that remains is the cover. For example, if the Pope wishes to claim that dinosaurs weren’t actually a ‘trick’ by God, or that women have equal rights, I can think of a good number of books in the Bible that must now be entirely disregarded. Yet the Vatican wishes to have its mysterious cake and eat it too, so they will mumble their way through certain recited passages and vehemently proselytize others. That is, until those passages aren’t socially acceptable anymore. Of course Catholicism is not the only perpetrator of such behaviors, but this is actually aside from my point; can we trust anything these religious texts talk about? Noesis may help us answer this question.
* Though I will say this: the idea of Nothing—which is unperceivable—almost points at the fact there is some inherent “ness” to the universe, i.e. “universe-ness”, as opposed to “non-universe-ness”. This may suggest that there is some level of self-expression, and thus inherent awareness to a thing, or in the case of the universe—all things. For is not a thing unaware also a thing unavailable? So you see, solipsism may be tied to the idea of Nothing, but only insofar as the inconceivability of Nothing provides us with a kind of logic that there must always be something. This is not to say that inconceivable ideas do not exist, but there is a very big difference between something being inconceivable and something being non-existent; everything that exists must be able to be perceived on some level, it just may take higher spheres of knowledge to appropriate.
* I will not debate the semantics of what consciousness ‘is’ beyond an experiential level in this section, as that is not chief among my goals. All I aim to do here is investigate claims of its whereabouts, whether they are based on any kind of valid prepositions, and if they have any truth value at all.
* On a side note here, I understand that an analogous computational model of awareness could be programmed to have an equivalent ‘awareness’, in that it can self-rectify mistakes and/or errors in its programming, and still be very much not equivalent to a conscious system. If we call this ‘level one awareness’, as opposed to the kind of ‘self-awareness’ loop (level two awareness) that consciousness has been purported to be, we can then differentiate between an ‘awareness outside of the purview of consciousness’ vs. the other.
** While one may attempt to argue that an MRI of CT already does this without being conscious, this is not the same as ‘measuring consciousness’ as all these machines do is measure blood flow to specific regions of the brain, thus denoting ‘brain activity’ which is not necessarily tantamount to ‘conscious activity’. Of course there is measurable correlation between brain activity and conscious experience, but “correlation is not necessarily causation”, as the all-too-frequently-used maxim goes, in science. Thus, all one may rightfully say is that medical imaging shows us the brain’s relationship to conscious experience, and not necessarily consciousness itself, depending on what you believe of course.
* This reminds me of that funny story (that remains to be corroborated) where McDonald’s got in trouble years back for not having up-to-standard-guidelines for their meat quality control. In a sneaky attempt at reconciling this, they labelled their hamburger packages as “100% all beef”. This was later found out to be simply the name of the manufacturer for the container. It had nothing to do with the contents themselves.
* I am guessing this statement sounds a little hypocritical on my part since some of my own language in this paper has veered toward what looks suspiciously like metaphysical meandering. Please note, this is just how I think, honestly, and it is not meant to detract from the points I am trying to make. To the contrary, I feel that if I didn’t use such language that I wouldn’t be able to accurately relate my points. The point here is that functionalism works well for life, but discourse—what I am attempting in this work—is fair game when it comes to propositional language.
* Note: this is not to say that one cannot be wrong about a subjective claim. Saying that one has misplaced trust in their behaviours (everything else internal other than consciousness) is very valid, as humans make poor judgement-calls all the time. Rather, having trust in one’s being is a whole other matter. In this, one cannot be lead astray, and following the subjective truth of the self is the strongest form of evidence. It is, I argue here, even more solid than evidence outside of one’s immediate awareness—which is all other forms of “objective” or “empirical” evidence. The reason for this is, as mentioned previously, that objective evidence must continue to improve as our equipment improves and thus it is in an eternal state of flux. This suggest that we may likely never know the “truth” about the objective universe. I contend that this is the case because the universe is either unknowable by definition or it is infinitely approached (approximated). Contrasted against subjective knowledge of the self, there is no approximation; it is an absolute form, perhaps the only of its kind.
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