how do you like your consciousness?

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.” Albert Einstein


Meditation: “Meditation is like being suspended by threads from a billion suns to the centre of your soul vibrating in harmony – a universe within a universe … like Russian dolls.”


Via Transformativa

unitive-consciousnessAfter Descartes set a cat amongst the pigeons with his deceptively simple and simply divisive ‘cogito ergo sum’ separating ‘mind stuff’ from ‘matter stuff’ modern philosophers responded with various approaches to explain consciousness. How can the chasm between a ‘thing that thinks’ (subject) and the thing that is doing the thinking (body object or specifically a brain) be bridged?

They came up with not one problem but two – the ‘hard problem’ and the ‘easy problem’. The ‘easy’ problem is to understand how the brain (and body) gives rise to perception, cognition, learning and behaviour. In other words how do the physiological mechanisms of an objective body get translated into a perceiving subjective ‘I’? The ‘hard’ problem is to understand why and how any of this should be associated with consciousness at all. As Anil Seth asks “why aren’t we just robots, or philosophical zombies, without any inner universe?” Beast-machines as he calls it.

The study of consciousness is the last great frontier as yet bamboozling reductionists. The standard view of scientists is that it is an ’emergent characteristic’ of the brain i.e. through the mechanism of evolution at some point the brain reaches a critical point of complexity and consciousness emerges. Consciousness is seen as one more adaptation for the survival of the species.

This ‘hey presto’ assumption that increasing complexity leads to a self reflective conscious ‘I’ seems as much a leap of faith as the Genesis 2:7 version: “Then the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground. He breathed the breath of life into the man’s nostrils, and the man became a living (i.e. conscious) person.”

Was the first Adam self conscious? Apparently not until after the apple incident since he wandered around the garden naked in mixed company without batting a fig leaf. “Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.” Genesis 2:25.

With self consciousness comes the sense of a separate ‘I’. This may be the original sin – the fall from sharing the same consciousness as union with the divine spark into the consciousness of a separate ember. How can this union be recovered? There are two schools of thought. Either the separation is real and you need a Saviour or Redeemer to bridge the gulf or the separation is an illusion and to recover union only requires that you dispel the illusion. To apply the solution you must correctly identify the problem. In a world of separate atoms and separate individuals you may lean towards a Redeemer – a Fixer.

But what if we aren’t ‘broken’ in that sense? What if we always were and always are fixed – we just forgot. Or we dropped out of united consciousness into separate consciousness. One of the most powerful words I ever heard was in one of my German girlfriend’s favourite recordings by an English spiritual teacher – unfortunately I can’t remember his name – where he said “you don’t need fixing.” And if we come from God how can we be separate from God unless by our own mis-perception?

Maybe we aren’t separate after all. In his article in Psychology Today ‘Connectedness – Are we really Separate Individuals?’ Steve Taylor PhD identifies three different types of interconnection. The first is ‘interconnectedness of feeling’, or ‘empathic connection.’  The second type of experience is ‘interconnectedness of being’ reported in many awakening experiences in which people experience a transcendence of separateness. The third type of experience he calls ‘interconnectedness of knowing’ famously documented by Rupert Sheldrake in his controversial experiments with the dog Jaytee who anticipates his master’s return.

Taylor suggests it is possible that what we know as consciousness is not produced by the brain at all but is a fundamental quality of consciousness like gravity is a fundamental quality of matter. “This is what is sometimes known as the ‘panpsychist’ view, and it is becoming increasingly popular amongst philosophers and psychologists who struggle to explain consciousness from a materialist perspective. According to panpsychism, consciousness is not dissimilar to mass or gravity – a fundamental, irreducible quality which has always been ‘built into’ the universe.”

In this view, consciousness is the fundamental reality underlying both mind and matter our brains being manifestations of consciousness. Philosopher Keith Frankish is not convinced. “It (consciousness) is a highly localised phenomenon that is specific not just to brains but to particular states of brains. It appears to be a specific state of certain highly complex information-processing systems, not a basic feature of the Universe.”

Can anyone save us from our fall from unitive consciousness? “Who can deliver me from this body of death (separation)?” pleads St Paul. (Romans 7:24)

Danah Zohar can. In her synthesis of quantum physics, philosophy and new age religion – ‘Quantum Self – Human Nature and Consciousness Defined by the New Physics’ – she claims that bosons are the basis for the conscious life, and fermions for the material life. The Bose-Einstein condensate is the extreme example of “bosonic” behavior (relationship, sharing of identities). Zohar imagines that such a condensate is the ideal candidate to provide the unity of consciousness.

I can see the t-shirt now: “Bose-Einstein condensates of the world unite”.

 

cogito ergo cogito sum

“But we have the mind of Christ.” 1 Corinthians 2.16


Meditation: “Meditation is like sinking up to your neck in quicksand with only a fistful of thought balloons to keep your ego afloat.”


Via Negativa

the-thinkerThere are few philosophical sayings that pass into everyday language. You might come up with ‘know thyself’ or in an exam if pushed ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ both from that gadly of Athens Socrates. There are even fewer popular sayings in Latin but ‘cogito ergo sum’ is universally recognised even if its author Descartes is not.

It is deceptively simple – one might say unarguable – yet simply deceptive and forms the cornerstone of modern philosophy and has a whole school of thought named after it – Cartesian duality.

Descartes strips away everything that we know with the paring knife of doubt to reduce knowledge to the core – I think therefore I am.

The senses are unreliable. The perceived material world can only be known through the senses. I may doubt everything but the one thing I cannot doubt is that I think and therefore I must exist – even as a doubting thinker. “He who doubts is a doubter” says St Paul helpfully.

In his ‘Discourse on Method’ and later in his ‘Meditations’ Descartes sought to apply the scientific method he derived from the geometry and algebra he learned at his Jesuit school at La Flèche to a universal method applicable to the whole tree of knowledge. His method is accessible to everyone:

  1. never accept anything as true that you do not know to be evidently so without prejudice
  2. divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as might be possible and necessary in order to solve it
  3. begin with the simplest and easiest to know building to the complex
  4. review everything to omit nothing

It was the rigour of his method that led him to two surprising ‘certainties’ – that I exist and that God exists. In fact, in an earlier publication ‘The Rules for the Direction of the Mind’ he formulates this as ‘Sum ergo deus est’ – I am therefore God is. I say surprising because one would have thought that the father of the modern scientific method would have dispensed with the notion of God. On the contrary. with audacious logic he argues that if, as an imperfect limited human being he can conceive of the idea of perfection then it must have been put there by the only prime cause of perfection – God himself. Slam dunk.

His other surprising conclusion is that mind is a separate substance from the body and indeed all material forms hence the term ‘Cartesian duality’. All that can be said about the
human state is that ‘I am a thinking thing’ with attributes that cannot be measured unlike the ‘extensions’ of the material world – length, width, motion.

He strides like a Colossus across modern thought but you could argue he was straddling the divide between body and mind without reconciling them. An uncomfortable stride – like each foot on a different log on the river of life.

In my book his thinking does not go far enough. Who is this ‘I’ doing the thinking? If you can observe your thoughts who is the observer? If he is nothing more than ‘a thinking thing’ all he can truly say is ‘cogito ergo cogito sum’ – I think therefore I think I am. But this doesn’t address the possibility that this thinking ‘I’ is nothing but an illusion – a construct of thought.

What would have resolved the duality and stopped the straddling is to allow himself the more audacious thought – I am that which thought appears in. Sum. Enough said.