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you seem really squeamish with "supernatural" even though you freely use and benefit from the "supernatural."
do you consider prayer "supernatural"?
Short answer: No, I do not consider prayer to be "supernatural." But I doubt that we are all using the term 'supernatural' in the same way. 'Naturalism' and 'supernatural' are, frankly, not well-defined terms in philosophy or in everyday life. As a philosophical "naturalist," I think that everything other than the brute-fact fundamental elements of Reality can, in principle, be explained in terms of fundamental "laws of nature." I put the "laws of nature" in scare quotes because they are not inviolable "laws" in the way that most people think of them. Reality does not "follow laws" - rather, Reality is a spontaneously self-organizing system that consists of pattern or "habits" that are describable in law-like terms - i.e., rules that help us make short-term predictions about how things will go, with some success better than pure random chance.
Anyway, just because something is mysterious and unexplained, I don't see any reason to call it "supernatural" - as if, somehow, an event "violates the laws of nature." That's silly. I think Reality is a holistic system (borrowing the Buddhist notion of the "interdependence of all things") - There is fundamentally ONE Reality, even if (as I believe) Reality is a multiverse. Reality doesn't "violate itself." A helium balloon rises. Does it "violate the law of gravity?" No. There are simply other considerations, like air density, that have to be taken into consideration. I and others have often referenced Arthur C. Clarke's famous quote: "Magic is just science that we don't understand yet." There is nothing "above" or "beyond" nature that somehow reaches into the natural world and makes magical things happen.
Even if there is a God, I would still say that God is not "supernatural." God is just an intelligence that we do not yet account for in our theories of physics. If there actually is a God, then presumably our theories of physics will someday model His/Her/It's properties. Indeed, if there is a God, then physical theories probably are already starting to model the Mind of God, even though we don't recognize what we are doing in that context. What I'm calling the "habits of Reality" could be re-cast as "the personality of God" for those who prefer that way of thinking. Personally, I suspect it is mostly just metaphorical. In other words, I don't believe there actually is a literal God, but certain liberal concepts of God could, nevertheless, be useful guiding metaphors. Like "Mother Nature likes variety" - well, "Mother Nature" don't literally "like" anything, but the personification works reasonably well because Mother Nature certainly "acts as if" She likes variety.
Which brings me, finally, to prayer. Even though I don't believe there is a literal "Divine Person" who is "out there" being conscious of my existence and overlooking my affairs, I have made a conscious choice to personify Reality (or "Mother Nature") as a "She" - a "Goddess", if you will. It's a bit like naming your car "Betsy" or something, and saying "I gotta take her in for a tune-up." It's frankly just fun, and kinda comforting to personify things sometimes. That's the surface level.
Going a bit deeper, I could go back to the concept of holism and try to explain my view of the "Self" as an Aristotelian Universal. It's a long story, but in addition to the fun and comfort of personification, I see glimmers of literal truth in the idea of "One Mind" - not in the sense of a Divine Other "out there" paying attention to human affairs, but something more like this: Every moment of conscious experience is a moment in which Reality Itself is conscious via the limited conscious being. "I" am not conscious. "My brain" is not conscious. "My body" is not conscious. No particular physical system is conscious. "I" am a sort of illusion insofar as "I" think that "I" - this limited ego with a particular set of memories - am conscious. You could say that, in a sense, it is not "Mother Nature" who is "my" personification, but rather, it is "I" who am "Mother Nature's" personification - so to speak. Each conscious moment of my life is a moment in which Reality experiences "Herself" (my personification of "Her") though this particular embodied system (Her personification of "me"). Each conscious moment of my life is a moment of Reality experiencing "Herself" in the limited context of a particular embodied being. THAT, in fact, is what "physicality" is. Physicality is the means by which Reality experiences Being.
At the moment I see no reason to think that there is any "Cosmic Mind" with a "God's-eye view". I think that every moment of conscious experience is a particular, limited, embodied moment that is grounded in the particular, limited physical processing of a particular material creature. I see no good reason to believe there are any "free floating" conscious experiences. This is not to say that particular, limited, embodied creatures cannot, possibly, experience consciousness on some deeper level that provides some profound feelings of insight into the underlying universal nature of experience - maybe something like MysticPhD's experience of "Universal Pure Love" etc.? I am suggesting, however, that the manifestation of all experience is still, nonetheless, fundamentally grounded particular embodied beings, and ultimately physics (perhaps some future version of physics) should be able to describe the manifestation in terms of "physical laws". Thus I end up back at naturalism. Everything that happens, including every conscious moment, is a physical process. Prayer is just one of my meditative ways of seeking a sense of connection to the bigger picture. And, if my theory of holism is correct, that "bigger picture" is an infinite multiverse of experiences.
In a previous post (many pages ago) I put it this way:
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Originally Posted by Gaylenwoof
First let me emphasize that I am agnostic concerning most spiritual concepts. I'm not convinced that prayer "works" in the sense of "getting toys from Santa", but I believe that an attitude of prayerfulness has psychological health benefits that translate into a somewhat better world.[...]The key point is that I am, as a matter of fact, "One" with the "best" that a mind can be, whatever it is. It probably doesn't have "power" in the sense of an independently conscious God performing miracles, but I suspect there is power in resonance. Here I am really drawing more on a Buddhist sense of meditation rather than a "asking God for stuff" sense of the term "prayer."
Bottom line: I sometimes try to get in sync with the "Best" that Reality is - whatever that might amount to - and I feel that this is possible given the fundamental holistic Unity of Reality. The "best" of Reality is not "out there" - my own experience are "It" in some deep sense - Reality is conscious via my physical body. The same for all of us. Ultimately there is really only one "Self". Sometimes - just for the fun of it, I personify the Self in my mind and "talk to Her". I guess you could either call that "prayer" or "psychosis" depending on your point of view.
I ultimately understand very little, so yes. I just go with the flow.
As you know, Gaylen, this post contains the very euphemisms that I decry because they themselves are indices of an underlying consciousness establishing our reality, IMO. That consciousness IS evidence of the "self" in self-organizing, etc. just as our consciousness is evidence of our self. Your use of the euphemisms, "emergence" or "self-ANYTHING," is an explicit acknowledgment of our ignorance of the actual source of what we see emerge or self-anything. As long as you need euphemisms for our ignorance to "explain" anything, you remain on thin ice.
I think we both agree - albeit with some very different ways of looking at it - that "proto-consciousness" is fundamental. I avoid "consciousness" and say "proto-consciousness" because I think the term "consciousness" is muddied to the point of uselessness unless it minimally targets the idea of there being "something it is like to be" and - here is where we differ - I don't think there is "anything it is like to be" Reality apart from the specific, momentary processes of embodied creatures. If it happens to be the case that physical embodied conscious creatures have existed forever, then it would be fair to say that Reality has been conscious forever. Indeed, I think that's true. I suspect that, on the scale of the multiverse, there was never any "first" embodied conscious creature, so there was never any "first" moment of consciousness for Reality, as such. But, in my view, this still doesn't imply that consciousness is fundamental. I think that every moment of consciousness is embodied, and every embodied moment of consciousness emerged from unconscious (or proto-conscious) physical precursors (e.g., something like a sperm/egg union, which I say was not a conscious event, nor was it an even that was, in any useful sense "guided by" consciousness).
I think that consciousness always, without any exception whatsoever, emerges from proto-conscious material systems (processes such that there is nothing "it is like to be" the process. One ways to think of this: Even if we suppose that the domain of conscious moments is infinite (no beginning or "first" conscious moment) it is still the case that the domain of unconscious (or proto-conscious) moments is an even bigger infinity because "prior to" each conscious moment is a vast number of proto-conscious events (eons of abiogenesis, pre-conscious organic evolution, etc.). It's as if every conscious moment is an integer, between which is an infinity of real numbers (unconscious moments of "consciousness-under-construction"). In this sense, "emergence" is not a euphemism - it is a mathematically precise concept that can be modeled and studied in great detail - even though, of course, we don't yet have all of the details. We don't have a good theory of exactly how the unconscious moments lead up to the conscious moments (How the "real numbers lead up to an integers," so to speak), but we have a fairly good understanding of how pattern emerge from chaos, and there are good reasons to think that this is a good first-approximation of the overall process of getting from unconscious to conscious moments.
The "self" in "self-organizing" is not a euphemism for ignorance. It points (with delicious irony) to the absence of any "outside self" who has to "do" the organizing. The "self" in self-organization points to spontaneity. Specifically, it points to the spontaneity of Reality. No external Divine Organizer is needed. No conscious mind has to plan what patterns will emerge, or chose patterns. The patterns emerge unpredictably, and yet "reasonably" - which is to say, in a law-like manner - without the need for anyone to plan the details ahead of time. I will say it again: If God exists, God is a gardener, not an engineer. Reality is fundamentally spontaneous. Period. Even if God exists, he doesn't have to plan every jot & tittle event. If God exists, he just is the spontaneous unfolding of Being, and chaotic systems are a good mathematical approximation of God's "unconscious" - a "way to map" the real numbers leading up to the integers, so to speak.
When all is said and done, the unconscious is still mysterious, of course. As I've emphasized repeatedly, we can't expect to explain the brute facts of Reality, so if you want to use this as an opportunity to insist that self-organization is a euphemism for ignorance because we can't really explain why math and logic work in this way, then I can't stop you. But evoking the word 'God' doesn't help explain the brute-fact mysteries of spontaneous physical-state evolution. If you want to insist that God plans the patterns and just makes them seem mysterious to us, then I am logically allowed to ask who planned the spontaneous patterns of God's thoughts? If you say "the buck stops at God" then I can ask "Why can't the buck stop at Reality Itself?" If spontaneity is good for the goose, it's good for the gander too.
You do explain very well and in a detailed and specific way, the idea of 'emergence' that I think is a better theory of consciousness (evolved0 than an 'always was there' consciousness. Except in the sense of the matter -actions that aggregate to allow consciousness to come about.
I think we both agree - albeit with some very different ways of looking at it - that "proto-consciousness" is fundamental. I avoid "consciousness" and say "proto-consciousness" because I think the term "consciousness" is muddied to the point of uselessness unless it minimally targets the idea of there being "something it is like to be" and - here is where we differ - I don't think there is "anything it is like to be" Reality apart from the specific, momentary processes of embodied creatures. If it happens to be the case that physical embodied conscious creatures have existed forever, then it would be fair to say that Reality has been conscious forever. Indeed, I think that's true. I suspect that, on the scale of the multiverse, there was never any "first" embodied conscious creature, so there was never any "first" moment of consciousness for Reality, as such. But, in my view, this still doesn't imply that consciousness is fundamental. I think that every moment of consciousness is embodied, and every embodied moment of consciousness emerged from unconscious (or proto-conscious) physical precursors (e.g., something like a sperm/egg union, which I say was not a conscious event, nor was it an even that was, in any useful sense "guided by" consciousness).
I think that consciousness always, without any exception whatsoever, emerges from proto-conscious material systems (processes such that there is nothing "it is like to be" the process. One ways to think of this: Even if we suppose that the domain of conscious moments is infinite (no beginning or "first" conscious moment) it is still the case that the domain of unconscious (or proto-conscious) moments is an even bigger infinity because "prior to" each conscious moment is a vast number of proto-conscious events (eons of abiogenesis, pre-conscious organic evolution, etc.). It's as if every conscious moment is an integer, between which is an infinity of real numbers (unconscious moments of "consciousness-under-construction"). In this sense, "emergence" is not a euphemism - it is a mathematically precise concept that can be modeled and studied in great detail - even though, of course, we don't yet have all of the details. We don't have a good theory of exactly how the unconscious moments lead up to the conscious moments (How the "real numbers lead up to an integers," so to speak), but we have a fairly good understanding of how pattern emerge from chaos, and there are good reasons to think that this is a good first-approximation of the overall process of getting from unconscious to conscious moments.
The "self" in "self-organizing" is not a euphemism for ignorance. It points (with delicious irony) to the absence of any "outside self" who has to "do" the organizing. The "self" in self-organization points to spontaneity. Specifically, it points to the spontaneity of Reality. No external Divine Organizer is needed. No conscious mind has to plan what patterns will emerge, or chose patterns. The patterns emerge unpredictably, and yet "reasonably" - which is to say, in a law-like manner - without the need for anyone to plan the details ahead of time. I will say it again: If God exists, God is a gardener, not an engineer. Reality is fundamentally spontaneous. Period. Even if God exists, he doesn't have to plan every jot & tittle event. If God exists, he just is the spontaneous unfolding of Being, and chaotic systems are a good mathematical approximation of God's "unconscious" - a "way to map" the real numbers leading up to the integers, so to speak.
When all is said and done, the unconscious is still mysterious, of course. As I've emphasized repeatedly, we can't expect to explain the brute facts of Reality, so if you want to use this as an opportunity to insist that self-organization is a euphemism for ignorance because we can't really explain why math and logic work in this way, then I can't stop you. But evoking the word 'God' doesn't help explain the brute-fact mysteries of spontaneous physical-state evolution. If you want to insist that God plans the patterns and just makes them seem mysterious to us, then I am logically allowed to ask who planned the spontaneous patterns of God's thoughts? If you say "the buck stops at God" then I can ask "Why can't the buck stop at Reality Itself?" If spontaneity is good for the goose, it's good for the gander too.
Your posts always present a challenge, Gaylen. In trying to decide how to counter this one, I found myself wanting to use the ONLY referent that we have for consciousness and its function - us. As you sit there contemplating your responses to my posts, I am certain that there arise within your consciousness random thoughts that have nothing to do with your will or intent or choice or any plan about what will "emerge," right. That is not to suggest that we do not direct our thoughts, especially when faced with attempting to explain our views, but to suggest that our thoughts are ALL part of our plans or our controls or our choice is silly. Why would we expect the consciousness of God to function any differently (other than for its scope and scale)??? Spontaneity is inherent in our very own consciousness, why should it be any different for God.
To your point about a gardener, I would tend to agree and scripturally it is supported.
From Mark 4:26,
. . . Thus is the kingdom of God, as though a man should cast seed into the earth, then sleep and rise, night and day, and the seed should sprout without his knowing it. For of itself the earth bears the crop, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear.
As to your assertions about "what it is like to be Reality," I disagree that Reality does not experience that. We know that our experience of consciousness is NOT direct. It is a delayed replay of the recorded creation of our consciousness using the recorded impressions in the brain. So our experience of "what it is like to be" conscious that is dependent upon our physical body and brain is NOT indicative of an essential requirement of the experience. This reveals a faulty assumption in your premise that consciousness can only experience "what it is like to be" if it is embodied in a physical entity.
Bottom line, we agree about the need for consciousness to explain subjectivity and qualitative experience. We just disagree about what the implications of that are for the composition of our Reality and our role in perpetuating it.
... but to suggest that our thoughts are ALL part of our plans or our controls or our choice is silly. Why would we expect the consciousness of God to function any differently (other than for its scope and scale)??? Spontaneity is inherent in our very own consciousness, why should it be any different for God.
I agree. Spontaneity would presumably play the same role in God's thoughts as it does in our own. And if I said anything to suggest otherwise, please let me know so I can reconsider how I worded things. There could be some confusion because I refer to the "laws of nature" as "God's personality" - habits of thinking, etc. But keep in mind that I don't see the laws of nature as deterministic. At the macro-scale the laws seem deterministic because so much of the micro-indeterminism get's washed-out in averages, but in the long run the laws themselves can evolve, and even in the short term, indeterminism can slip in (largely due to the chaotic principle of "sensitivity to initial conditions"). So much activity happens in a brain during a single second that a quantum fluctuation in the behavior of a single molecule at a synapse could, in principle, lead to a macro-scale difference in overall brain activity over the course of just the next few seconds. (I.e., a "butterfly flapping its wings" at a single remote synapse in, say, the brainstem could, in principle, cause a "brainstorm" a second later, roaming over the entire cerebral cortex.) Luckily, in general, this "butterfly effect" has no significant effect due to the washing out/averaging process (otherwise we'd all be in a permanent state of grand mall seizures!), but my point is that some systems - like brains - are vastly more sensitive to indeterminism that other systems (like the crystalline structures of rocks). And, even more importantly, we can (roughly, in principle) model the spontaneous emergence of coherent patterns of activity. In a chaotic system, indeterminism isn't just a totally random free-for-all. Patterns mixing a great deal of determinism with indeterminism is the key. And with neural net modeling, we can even see the basis for associations (think of Freudian "free association" exercises). We are still a long ways from understanding the brain, but we also way beyond being clueless. We now have some incredible clues to work with.
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As to your assertions about "what it is like to be Reality," I disagree that Reality does not experience that.
I'm agnostic on that point. At the moment I simply see no reason to think that Reality-as-such is "God's-eye" style conscious. On the other hand, of course, I see some reasons to believe that Reality-as-such is "micro-conscious" via complex brain-like physical systems. The core concept I have in mind here is the notion of "self" as universal. (And I've made arguments for this in other threads - often referencing extensive work done by Arnold Zubott in his article "The Logic of Experience" and Daniel Kolak in his book "I Am You".) To convince me that Reality-as-a-whole has a "God's-eye" style consciousness, I would need some arguments and/or evidence in favor of it, and I'm just not seeing much along those lines. I'm perched on the edge of believing it. Sometimes when I think of quantum holism I can, so to speak, almost taste the arguments on the tip of my tongue, but I can't quite drag them into the full light of conscious awareness. I also flirt with the literature dealing with Near Death Experiences and assorted Psi phenomena hoping to find some coherent arguments/evidence that could link back to "higher levels" of consciousness, etc. But my core skepticism is so strong that I can't yet make the leap. I can see how brain activity coordinates well enough to serve as the basis for a limited-perspective experience rooted in the brain's individual history, etc., but I don't see how information exchange between planets, stars, interstellar dust, ecosystems, etc., can serves as the information-processing basis for a Cosmic Mind. I know you like dark matter as a potential player here, but that's just too vague for me at this point. All I can be fairly certain of, at the moment, is that if we can ever work out a good Cosmic Mind theory, it will depend on quantum holism (think "EPR paradox", quantum computing, etc.).
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We know that our experience of consciousness is NOT direct. It is a delayed replay of the recorded creation of our consciousness using the recorded impressions in the brain. So our experience of "what it is like to be" conscious that is dependent upon our physical body and brain is NOT indicative of an essential requirement of the experience. This reveals a faulty assumption in your premise that consciousness can only experience "what it is like to be" if it is embodied in a physical entity.
You lost me here. How does the "build up" or "delay" (what I would call pre-conscious processing) reveal a faulty assumption on my part?
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Bottom line, we agree about the need for consciousness to explain subjectivity and qualitative experience. We just disagree about what the implications of that are for the composition of our Reality and our role in perpetuating it.
Yes. You seem more comfortable with metaphysical idealism than I am.
Last edited by Gaylenwoof; 07-19-2017 at 08:09 AM..
I agree. Spontaneity would presumably play the same role in God's thoughts as it does in our own. And if I said anything to suggest otherwise, please let me know so I can reconsider how I worded things. There could be some confusion because I refer to the "laws of nature" as "God's personality" - habits of thinking, etc. But keep in mind that I don't see the laws of nature as deterministic. At the macro-scale the laws seem deterministic because so much of the micro-indeterminism get's washed-out in averages, but in the long run the laws themselves can evolve, and even in the short term, indeterminism can slip in (largely due to the chaotic principle of "sensitivity to initial conditions"). So much activity happens in a brain during a single second that a quantum fluctuation in the behavior of a single molecule at a synapse could, in principle, lead to a macro-scale difference in overall brain activity over the course of just the next few seconds. (I.e., a "butterfly flapping its wings" at a single remote synapse in, say, the brainstem could, in principle, cause a "brainstorm" a second later, roaming over the entire cerebral cortex.) Luckily, in general, this "butterfly effect" has no significant effect due to the washing out/averaging process (otherwise we'd all be in a permanent state of grand mall seizures!), but my point is that some systems - like brains - are vastly more sensitive to indeterminism that other systems (like the crystalline structures of rocks). And, even more importantly, we can (roughly, in principle) model the spontaneous emergence of coherent patterns of activity. In a chaotic system, indeterminism isn't just a totally random free-for-all. Patterns mixing a great deal of determinism with indeterminism is the key. And with neural net modeling, we can even see the basis for associations (think of Freudian "free association" exercises). We are still a long ways from understanding the brain, but we also way beyond being clueless. We now have some incredible clues to work with.
Perhaps I misunderstood your spontaneity argument. I tend to agree with this. But the experience of the qualitative, subjective experience of "what it is like to be" is entirely dependent upon a "self" to DO the experiencing. I am hard-pressed to imagine a "proto-consciousness" devoid of that "self" necessary to experience "what it is like to be" that can serve as the basis of qualitative experience.
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I'm agnostic on that point. At the moment I simply see no reason to think that Reality-as-such is "God's-eye" style conscious. On the other hand, of course, I see some reasons to believe that Reality-as-such is "micro-conscious" via complex brain-like physical systems. The core concept I have in mind here is the notion of "self" as universal. (And I've made arguments for this in other threads - often referencing extensive work done by Arnold Zubott in his article "The Logic of Experience" and Daniel Kolak in his book "I Am You".) To convince me that Reality-as-a-whole has a "God's-eye" style consciousness, I would need some arguments and/or evidence in favor of it, and I'm just not seeing much along those lines. I'm perched on the edge of believing it. Sometimes when I think of quantum holism I can, so to speak, almost taste the arguments on the tip of my tongue, but I can't quite drag them into the full light of conscious awareness. I also flirt with the literature dealing with Near Death Experiences and assorted Psi phenomena hoping to find some coherent arguments/evidence that could link back to "higher levels" of consciousness, etc. But my core skepticism is so strong that I can't yet make the leap. I can see how brain activity coordinates well enough to serve as the basis for a limited-perspective experience rooted in the brain's individual history, etc., but I don't see how information exchange between planets, stars, interstellar dust, ecosystems, etc., can serves as the information-processing basis for a Cosmic Mind. I know you like dark matter as a potential player here, but that's just too vague for me at this point. All I can be fairly certain of, at the moment, is that if we can ever work out a good Cosmic Mind theory, it will depend on quantum holism (think "EPR paradox", quantum computing, etc.).
Belaboring my analogy to our body and its relationship to our brain cells, it would be equally vexing for a sentient brain cell to imagine the information processing purpose of our colon and similar cellular components and structures when viewed at the cellular level.
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You lost me here. How does the "build up" or "delay" (what I would call pre-conscious processing) reveal a faulty assumption on my part?
I assume (correct me if needed) that you are using the fact that our consciousness and its capability of experiencing "what it is like to be" is dependent upon its embodiment in our body and brain. Hence, you conclude that such embodiment is necessary for the experience. But our consciousness is NOT the actual consciousness produced. It is a delayed recording of the actual consciousness as it is created and making the decisions. We live in a time-delayed reality that is experienced first by our actual consciousness. Our experience of awareness is second-hand. Everything we decide has already been decided before we are even aware of it. This implies that consciousness is quite capable of experiencing "what it is like to be" without the embodiment needed to effect our delayed experience.
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Yes. You seem more comfortable with metaphysical idealism than I am.
It is more that I have experienced the reality of a consciousness encompassing everything, including me, that is NOT me.
But the experience of the qualitative, subjective experience of "what it is like to be" is entirely dependent upon a "self" to DO the experiencing.
That's where my notion of "self as a universal" comes into play. I think you are picturing a Platonic universal and I'm picturing an Aristotelian universal. Either one is a logical possibility, but the Aristotelian universal is an "ontologically minimalist" version, whereas Platonic universals are "ontologically extravagant."
The Aristotelian self is more like the "center of gravity" - so to speak - of a cluster of experiences that are all interpreted, more or less as "here and now." The feelings of "here and now" imply a center of perspective, around which there is a horizon of "otherness" - other times, other places, other things. Hume famously pointed out that whenever he tries to focus on the "me" or "self" that is supposedly at the center of this circular horizon, all he ever really finds is more "otherness". The "me" eludes direct observation because to "see it" is to objectify it (i.e., to see it "as that") and once objectified, it is, part of the "horizon" - no longer the center, as such. The self can't "step out of" the self to see the self. This, of course, is a variation of the infamous "self-reference paradox" which has been referenced in many different ways throughout the ages by various meditative traditions as well as modern philosophy.
Most people have an intuitive feeling that the self is real - it's just there - it's the feeling of being me, here, now. I'm not denying that the self exists; I'm just denying that it is an ontological permanent entity. At the "center of the circle" there does not have to be a Cartesian substance or a Platonic universal - there is no need for an ontological "solid core" that just sits there throughout all times and places of experience. Intuitively, we are inclined to think that there has to be a "carrier of properties," and my view is that, when it comes to mental properties of thoughts and feelings, there is ultimately only one "carrier," and this carrier is just Reality-Itself, which is (I say) fundamentally a chaotic qualitative process, rather than a quantitatively countable, ontologically substantial "thing" that endures through time.
You probably want to know: But WHAT is DOING the processing? A process implies "stuff" that "does stuff" - true - and given my holistic view of Reality, there is an implied Unity, so it is perfectly reasonable to think of Reality as a "Oneness" - thus I often say there is only one "self" who is the experiencer of every experience. But, technically, I should always put "one" in scare quotes because nothing in all of this talk of unity implies that the "one" experiencer who has all experiences is an ontologically substantial, quantitatively countable "thing" that remains unchanged at the core of every moment. The "core" is not a Cartesian substance that is in any sense "above", "beyond" or "other than" the eternal dynamics surrounding "it"; the core is more like a center of gravity" - a feeling (a process) - intuitively interpreted as a substantial core - felt as a solid core "me" - but it, in reality, is nothing other than the Whole Itself, which is an eternal process.
To put it another way: Reality is not a "Self" (or "God") like a star around which everything orbits because everything owes its dynamics to the gravity of the Divine Substance Star/God. Rather, reality is more like a nebula, or a whirlpool - a "holistic flowing" in which there is an intrinsic "pattern-ness" that, over any given span of time, seems to "orbit a star" because everything seems to be working together around a common core. But if you look long enough and deep enough you find (according to me) that there is no solid "thing" (Self/God) who is "doing" the processing or "making" the patterns, or "forming a gravity well" into which everything wants to fall in perfect coordination. The patterns within patterns within patterns flow in a more or less coherent and perhaps even "intelligent" way because the "stuff" of Reality that constitutes the "intrinsic-process" nature of Reality is all interdependent in the way that the elements of a mathematical chaos are interdependent. The seemingly "solid-core coordinated" activity is, in fact, spontaneous emergent patterning. And since the fundamental "stuff" that constitutes the dynamic-process nature of Reality is intrinsically qualitative, it (sorta) follows that some of the patterns within patterns could be fractal-like "map-makers" that "feel" the Whole (or coherent sub-sections of the Whole) and notice the seemingly coordinated nature of all that falls within their limited "map" of Reality.
What's still missing, of course, is an intuitively satisfying explanation of these "qualitative fundamental elements" of Reality that constitute the supposed chaos, but our lack of intuitive satisfaction could stem from the fact that these are, in fact, "brute-fact fundamentals" and, as such, cannot be further explained. Which brings us to this:
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I am hard-pressed to imagine a "proto-consciousness" devoid of that "self" necessary to experience "what it is like to be" that can serve as the basis of qualitative experience.
We are all hard-pressed on this point. But Reality is probably not limited to what we can imagine, or what we can find an intuitively satisfying explanation for (again due, if nothing else, to the fact that something always has to be left logically unexplained because it is the basis of explanation itself). But this frustrating epistemological situation does not prevent us from exploring the nature of the fundamental elements via mathematical modelling. If we can figure out the patterns of matter/energy constituting qualitative awareness (i.e., the "physical correlates of consciousness"), we may be able to devise or discover mathematical parameters for a chaotic system that spontaneously generates these types of patterns. If that happens, then we will have all that we can realistically expect to have as the basis for a genuine "Theory of Consciousness."
Last edited by Gaylenwoof; 07-20-2017 at 09:23 AM..
I assume (correct me if needed) that you are using the fact that our consciousness and its capability of experiencing "what it is like to be" is dependent upon its embodiment in our body and brain. Hence, you conclude that such embodiment is necessary for the experience.
True.
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But our consciousness is NOT the actual consciousness produced. It is a delayed recording of the actual consciousness as it is created and making the decisions. We live in a time-delayed reality that is experienced first by our actual consciousness. Our experience of awareness is second-hand. Everything we decide has already been decided before we are even aware of it.
Basically true, although I just refer to this as "preconscious" or "unconscious" processing. In my previous analogy between conscious moments and integers, the unconscious "consciousness-assembly" processes are like the real numbers "between" the integers.
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This implies that consciousness is quite capable of experiencing "what it is like to be" without the embodiment needed to effect our delayed experience.
Here you lost me again. I see no reason to think there is a "what it is like to be" the unconscious processing. Maybe there is, but I don't see why there would have to be - although I admit this does leave us with the sticky problem of figuring out the best way to characterize the relationship between the unconscious and conscious events. I hesitate to say that all processing has a "what it is like" aspect (this would be a sort of panpsychism or idealism). I think that certain kinds of processing (e.g., brain-like systems) have a "what it is like" feel, whereas other kinds of processes do not - although all processes are constituted by qualitative elements. This, again, brings us to the very sticky point of figuring out what "qualitative" means if it doesn't just mean "something it is like to be." At this point all I can do is suggest that "qualitative" targets a fundamentally hypothetical/potential nature. Logically, the actual existence of X implies the logically prior potential for the existence of X. If X was not primordially possible, then it could not become actual. You can get from "X is possible" to "X happened" but you can't get from "X is impossible" to "X happened". So I'm saying that logically prior to "This feeling of what it is like to be me" there was the possibility of "this feeling of what it is like to be me" and whatever it is that constitutes this possibility does not have to be, in itself, conscious. I am not convinced that that which constitutes the possibility of X has to be, itself, X. I've argued (endlessly, it seems, in some threads) that to understand the transition from the possibility of X to the actuality of X, we need to comprehend "the possibility of" in "proto-X" terms, which is why I insist that fundamental physics has to explicitly incorporate qualitative aspects if we ever want to understand how qualitative experiences emerge from the building blocks of Reality.
In any case, I don't see why "the real numbers" (going back to the metaphor) have to be, themselves, "conscious" in order to lead to the "integers" which (per the metaphor) are the conscious moments. There has to be "common units" (in this metaphor, integers and real number are all numbers), but I don't see why "being conscious" couldn't be (so to speak) a property of numbers that not all numbers share. (E.g., "Have a decimal expansion consisting only of zeros". Or perhaps mathematicians can list better properties?)
For the sake of a good theory of consciousness, what we need is a way to characterize matter/energy in such a way that dynamic patterns of matter/energy are like real numbers on a number line, and some subset of these are "mathematically special" in such a way that, once we understand this special nature, we get some intuitive grip on why these special "numbers" are "conscious" while the rest are not. Which brings me back, again, to the need for a "qualitative physics" that no one seems able to imagine at the moment.
Just a quick question for anyone. WHERE did this consciousness "emerge" FROM? What is it's source? Peace
The answer to that requires the missing "Theory of Consciousness" that I have been pursuing. My proposal at the moment is that the Primordial Source is a "Qualitative Chaos" - which, I admit, is still a bit vague at this point. It requires some sort of "qualitative physics" in order to identify the fundamental constituents of the chaos in such a way that we can intuitively grasp the emergence. My key point, in the context of this thread, is that the mere lack of such a theory at the moment does not warrant giving up and claiming that there can't be such a theory, therefore "God" has to be the explanation. And, furthermore, even if we do give up on theory, "God" still wouldn't be an explanation. The "God" proposal is just a brute-faith proclamation of "this is how it is" - it is not an explanation in any scientific or philosophically interesting way. "God" is just an emotionally comforting sort of mystery that some people point when confronted by a not-so-comforting mystery that seems too hard to solve.
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