Consciousness: Qualia to Collective
On Doors of Perception,
Thinking About Thinking and
Awareness Behind Awareness
Consciousness has become, in the words of the late Marvin Minsky, a suitcase term. Like blockchain, quantum and AI, consciousness is loosely thrown around discussions without being clearly defined. When a word has many definitions (especially evolving definitions) those who ‘think’ (as Descartes famously said) they’re having a constructive conversation, slip into each others’ mental blind spots. In the primordial blind men and the elephant parable, a group of blind men come across a strange animal. Since they are blind, they rely on touch to see the creature in their mind. Groping around, one man touches an ear and says the mysterious animal feels like a fan, another touches the side and says it feels smooth and solid like a wall, another touches the tail and says it feels like a rope, another touches a leg and says it feels like a tree, another touches the tusk and says it feels hard and pointed like a spear, another touches the trunk and recoils convinced that it feels like a giant snake. After their personal experiences, the blind men continued to argue about the features of the mysterious creature but now with added gusto—by reason of their direct encounters. Their personal sensory experiences—though partially true and persuading—did more to fragment their knowledge of the elephant than connect the separate parts into a holistic picture. Each of the six men could only experience one flat dimension of the six faced 3D cube. From their metaphysical subjective experiences and limited perspectives, all men are superficially right and all men are deeply wrong. When addressing a subject like consciousness, we begin by groping in the dark like the blind men of the elephant, and their philosophical cousins, the blind men of Plato’s cave. Each one of us has an isolated intuitive view and experiences the outside world differently. If we assign a class of teenagers equipped with different cameras and lenses, the task of taking pictures of an overactive cat, the images they collect will all be different. A 35mm Kodak film camera, an early 2000s Casio point & shoot, and a full frame Canon DSLR with a telephoto lens, will all display the same cat but in differing light, quality and colors. In the same way, our experiences depend on the capacity, clarity and cognition of our consciousness.
Consciousness has several definitions that take us down opaque modes of thinking. While working on this article I asked several people around me what consciousness means to them personally, and the answers were all different. They ranged from popular to precise to social to scientific to spiritual interpretations of what consciousness can represent. Syntax and explanations varied but definitions included: wakefulness, attentiveness, mindfulness, self-awareness, inner states, soul, clarity of mind, presence, first person experience, and the spark of recognition in mutual eye contact. These lax definitions are used interchangeably but are not clear if we want to discuss consciousness more precisely. If we take a word we think we understand, like awareness, we discover that there are many layers to what awareness can imply. Do we mean awareness of other? Self-awareness? Emotional awareness? Spacial awareness? Political awareness? Cultural awareness? Which culture and within which era? When we describe someone as aware, it means nothing unless we specify exactly what we mean and how we mean it. Even when we take all these linguistic precautions to avoid a misunderstanding, we cannot guarantee that our language awareness is on par with who we are speaking with.
Consciousness conferences, consciousness talks, consciousness articles, books on consciousness, but what does it all really mean? Consciousness is very hard to define because it can expand and contract, it can be light and dark, it can be fluid and crystalized, it can be dissected with the scalpel of science and it can be connected by the meeting of minds. As we grow, we develop different types of mental models to fit university grounds, corporate environments, and social settings. Our consciousness adjusts (automatically or deliberately) to the collective consciousness in the space we are in — with variability of base consciousness dependent on the receptivity and openness of the individual. Today we are growing biological consciousness in labs and trying to program consciousness into thinking machines to reach AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Scientists use the brain to study other brains, in the same frame, we can use consciousness to learn about other consciousness. Before we begin to prod at animal and machine consciousness in a reckless way, we must become more aware of the depth within our shifting qualia.
“We all start from “naive realism,” i.e., the doctrine that things are what they seem. We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow are not the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow that we know in our own experience, but something very different.” — Bertrand Russell
A brief background of the problems
Consciousness is far too broad to cover in one article so I will try my best to lay out the main roots and shoots without branching too far out or getting lost in the fractals. To start with, we need to draw divides between words loosely associated with consciousness. The brain, mind, thought, intelligence, and the often misread conscientiousness are not consciousness. Psychologists and researchers have tried to create a framework so we can approach the problem of consciousness on somewhat of an even structure but clashing ‘expert’ views blur the picture. On one hand, neuroscientists believe that consciousness is an emergent first-person epiphenomena born out of the tangible biological brain. On the other hand, some philosophers believe that an intangible ‘soul’ or personal consciousness is connected to the physical body through an intangible mind. In both cases the brain serves as a node that is emitting or receiving consciousness from a place that science still cannot identify. Respectable hard science fields and sub-fields feel more comfortable cutting consciousness completely out of their mental periphery to balance their theoretical equations. Since pre-Greco-Roman times consciousness has vexed and perplexed the world’s greatest minds. Dead and living authorities in phenomenology, philosophy, psychiatry, logic, mathematics, quantum physics, computational biology, cognitive science, neuroscience and artificial intelligence, still cannot agree on what consciousness is or how to start thinking about it.
In his 2016 book The Mind-Body Problem, Jonathan Westphal likens the characteristics of the mind and body to oil and water. He describes the difficulties of how the mind and body can affect each other and be related while paradoxically not mixing. The mind-body problem has been one of the most famous head scratching problems in philosophy ever since René Descartes published his seminal work Meditations on First Philosophy in 1641. Descartes writes that matter is spatial because it has dimensional properties (length, height, depth) while the mind doesn’t exist in the spatial dimension at all. He goes on to say that the brain’s characteristic is that it’s made up of physical grey matter, while the mind’s characteristic is that it’s conscious. So asking where the mind is in the spatial dimension doesn’t make sense, let alone asking its shape or size. The question is invalid.
Centuries before Descartes, theologians and philosophers like Plato, debated the connection between the material body and the immaterial soul, the soul’s immortality, and what happens to the soul after death. Somewhere in the mess of Western thought, the mind devoured the soul at the scientific funeral of spirituality. The idea that there is something eternal in our nature that is beyond physical ephemeral existence, began to fall out of favor within the schools of the explicitly scientific minded. Growing reliance on manmade metric systems—that drove finance, engineering and technology—forged new mindsets that wouldn’t accept what couldn’t be measured. What we could feel but not measure with our limited tools was rationalized out of direct experience—to the wasteland of the unconscious—in the industrial, financial, material, and digital age. As we enter the fourth industrial revolution, Humanity majors are the least paid, least respected, and least likely to have a sustainable future. In the age of automation, hard science and algorithmic finance, humanity’s collective direction is empirically inhumane. The times are a clear reflection of who we—as globally merging societies of the last 100 years—have been slowly turning into. Cold, mechanistic, thinking machines that have lost touch with human nature and the immeasurable forces behind that nature. In our arrogance we also want to capitalize on electronically mapping the mind, detecting emotional states with smart cameras, and digitizing aspects of consciousness to somewhat aware machines. These are very hard problems and harder still if we ourselves don’t understand the depths of the mind and the human condition. Expressing the human condition is the domain of the humanities, the languages we use to communicate are part of culture, which fall under the humanities. It’s thus paradoxical to split the sciences and humanities since they share some of the same cultural connotations. Is science not after its theorizing and formulating trying to get to the root of nature? And in regard to consciousness, human nature?
Laymen often think of the non-physical mind and consciousness as fluid and contained in the physical brain. The preliminary problem for anybody entering this mental world is how to logically order and accurately define this trinity of organic hardware and software (brain-mind-consciousness). Is the mind part of consciousness or is consciousness part of the mind? Are they evenly distributed as systems or is there a cognitive order and process hierarchy to reach higher conscious states of awareness?
I tried thinking about consciousness from a computational point of view but current technology is a dimensionally limited thinking tool with preset frequency boundaries and logical limits. If we imagine the brain to be a CPU powering or running the mind (software application), then where does that leave consciousness? I think ON or OFF consciousness is the variable intelligence that is passively observing the output on the computer screen (like The Observer watching Netflix) or actively directing commands via an input controller (like directing a Player in a video game). Would the speed, skill and sensitivity of the conscious (or subconscious) input depend on the dexterity (neural links connectivity) of the brain-mind-body connection? Is this what’s behind pleasant or unpleasant conscious experience for The Observer or Player in the Consciousness Game? This complex brain-mind-consciousness system is localized in the biological body. Directing the body’s conscious awareness is what focus means in this context. Focusing on the words of a conversation amidst noise, a face of a person in a crowd, a subtle taste in a multilayered dish, a specific scene in a chaotic event, is the definition of consciously isolating a channel or in other words selecting a frequency to tune into. Like smartphones, we can overheat and drain our energy when we are not focused on sending or receiving data on one application at a time. Overclocking ourselves in today’s attention demanding scatterbrain world, leads to shorter attention spans, lack of deep focus, exhaustion, and burnout. All the above are creativity killers that distort our experience of the present reality found in conscious awareness. An extension of the computer metaphor for focused attention can be the contemporary mouse curser, if our mental mouse curser is rapidly shifting from window to window, no deep work can be done. Nothing worth while can emerge from a mental system that has a distorted and chaotic attention shifting pattern.
“If your mind carries a heavy burden of past, you will experience more of the same. The past perpetuates itself through lack of presence. The quality of your consciousness at this moment is what shapes the future.” — Eckhart Tolle
Before going too far into computer and consciousness metaphors let’s begin bottom-up by looking at existing definitions of consciousness.
- Consciousness at its simplest refers to “sentience or awareness of internal or external existence.”[1] Despite centuries of analyses, definitions, explanations and debates by philosophers and scientists, consciousness remains puzzling and controversial,[2] being “at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives.”[3]
- 1a: the quality or state of being aware especially of something within oneself
- b: the state or fact of being conscious of an external object, state, or fact
- c: AWARENESS especially : concern for some social or political cause // The organization aims to raise the political consciousness of teenagers.
- 2: the state of being characterized by sensation, emotion, volition, and thought : MIND
- 3: the totality of conscious states of an individual
- 4: the normal state of conscious life // regained consciousness
- 5: the upper level of mental life of which the person is aware as contrasted with unconscious processes
“These terms had some sense within the mechanical philosophy, but what do they mean in a world based on Newton’s “mysterious force”, or still more mysterious notions of fields of force, curved space, infinite one-dimensional strings in ten-dimensional space, or what ever science concocts tomorrow? Lacking a concept of “matter”or “body” or “the physical”, we have no coherent way to formulate issues related to the “mind-body problem”. These were real problems of science in the days of the mechanical philosophy. Since its demise, the sciences postulate whatever finds a place in intelligible explanatory theory, however offensive that may be to common sense. Only on unjustified dualistic assumptions can such qualms be raised specifically about the domain of the mental, not other aspects of the world”. —Noam Chomsky, Language and Nature | Oxford University Press, Mind, Vol. 104, 1995
Consciousness researchers have questions they call ‘easy problems’ that address which kinds of brain activity are correlated with consciousness. Then they have the infamous ‘hard problem’ that questions why certain brain activity is correlated with consciousness. Statisticians would remind us that correlation doesn’t imply causation in this case—and in all cases that try to deduce cause-and-effect relationships.
Philosophers of the 20th century were mainly between two arguments:
1. Materialism: physical science can explain consciousness.
2. Dualism: consciousness exists outside the physical dimension.
Materialism is problematic because how can the physical scientific method test the validity of a non-physical subjective phenomena? And dualism is problematic because it throws out everything we know about the natural world and forces us to create a new framework.
“If you think about consciousness long enough, you either become a panpsychist or you go into administration.” — John Perry
After Thomas Nagel’s 1974 paper, ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’ Panpsychism came into view in the realm of philosophy as a third option to approach the consciousness problem. Once believed by Plato, Leibniz and Spinoza, panpsychism was revived after the hard problem left maverick philosophers scratching their heads. Panpsychism states — albeit very broadly — that everything in the universe is conscious (on some level) or has an aspect of mind. Everything in the panpsychist view would imply, living things like humans and animals, and fundamental matter like atoms and photons, but not rocks and inanimate matter. Which to me also seems like a half-baked argument for consciousness because it leaves out the middle and is not unified.
“Panpsychism avoids the problems of dualism because it does not postulate consciousness outside the physical world and hence avoids the challenge of accounting for the interaction between the nonphysical mind and the physical brain. The panpsychist places human consciousness exactly where the materialist places it: in the brain. And because it is not trying to explain consciousness in terms of nonconscious brain processes, panpsychism also avoids the problems of materialism. Rather than trying to account for consciousness in terms of nonconsciousness, the panpsychist aspires to explain the complex consciousness of human and animal brains in terms of simple forms of consciousness, simple forms of consciousness that are postulated to exist as fundamental aspects of matter.
Does this really count as an explanation of consciousness? Isn’t this just taking consciousness for granted rather than genuinely explaining it? To be sure, panpsychism does not offer a reductive explanation of consciousness, that is to say, it does not explain consciousness in terms of something more fundamental than consciousness.” —Philip Goff, Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (2019)
In 2004 yet another theory entered the consciousness arena, this time more refined than panpsychism, the Integrated Information Theory or IIT for short—proposed by Dr. Giulio Tononi and popularized by Dr. Christof Koch. IIT begins looking at consciousness by examining experience first. IIT postulates that we cannot account for consciousness out of matter but it is from consciousness that matter arises. IIT uses axioms to capture the essential properties of experience and tries to quantitatively and qualitatively measure the degrees of consciousness. Using these methods IIT tries to sort consciousness into criteria. Integrated Information Theory looks at experience as information, and consciousness as the information that’s integrated into the system (mind) of the experiencer. The IIT approach has been attacked, critiqued and supported, like all the other ways of looking at consciousness, the views are mixed and disjointed.
All disciplines and ways of thinking agree that there is consciousness. Feelings cannot simply float around without a conscious mind to experience them. The existence of an experience by de facto entangles an experiencer in the event. That is to say, an experiencing subjective consciousness, contained in a mind, viewing objective matter, creates the event. This reminds me of the mind twisting ‘If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?’ thought experiment, that recontextualizes the definition of sound if there is no hearer to experience what sound is.
“As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent spirit (orig. geist). This spirit is the matrix of all matter.” — Max Planck
It’s hard to put complex personal experiences into words, let alone describe them to others in the same way and intensity. We are demanding of science to measure abstract experiences that are not located in the physical dimension. The problems I touched on so far — minus the mental gymnastics — take us back to the same question I asked in the second paragraph, what is consciousness?
“…We have rooms in ourselves. Most of them we have not visited yet. Forgotten rooms. From time to time we can find the passage. We find strange things … old phonographs, pictures, books … they belong to us, but it is the first time we have found them.” — Haruki Murakami
Changing consciousness through meditation
In Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, higher states of intense concentration is called Samadhi. Samadhi has different levels that can be reached though meditation by stilling the mind. In this section, I’m not talking about new-age ‘yogis’ that haven’t read the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, yet overcharge for mechanistic classes devoid of a deeper non-physical understanding. Even with the rise of commercial yoga studios and mindfulness workshops, there’s still an overwhelming number of people who dismiss the fact that meditation calms the mind and produces positive mental states. There are several famous experiments that document experienced and inexperienced meditators as they undergo brainwave pattern changes throughout the meditation process. Human brainwaves fluctuate between delta (0.5–4Hz), theta (4–7.5Hz), alpha (7.5–14Hz), beta (14–40Hz), and gamma (above 40Hz). The brain is an electrochemical organ and generates different brainwave frequencies according to arousal and engagement.
Next time you hear someone say that they don’t feel the vibe, recall that there is a lot of truth in that statement. The vibration they feel from other brain states may not be aligned with the state they’re in or want to be in. That’s why some people zone out or daydream when they don’t feel engaged or connected. They are literally in another mindset or tuned to different frequency. That’s why talking to switched-off people can feel mentally draining or socializing with very different but inclusive groups can feel expansive. Meditation is one of the oldest ways to realign our mind and body after a long demanding day of fluctuating frequencies. Deep meditators know how to consciously tap into reservoirs of inner energy and manage their brainwave activity. An electric car that’s always on, changing radio stations, speed and lanes, will not last long and is not very comfortable to travel in. The same applies to the more electrically sensitive brain and body, which houses our consciousness.
Neuroscientist, psychologist and author, Dr. Wendy Suzuki says: “We know a lot about the effects of meditation…we know that this completely changes the electrophysiological responses of brains…There are two categories of studies that have been done on meditation. One on these lifelong meditators, the monks, and the other category of studies on people like you and me that started out with no meditation experience and started to meditate…five years of meditation experience increased the size of white matter bundles in the prefrontal cortex. So there are substantial, physiological, anatomical changes that have been shown with meditation and there’s also effects on depressive symptoms. So decreased depressive symptoms, decreases of stress symptoms. Meditation is doing lots of very positive things.”
Consciousness in dreams
When we are in deep sleep, we are externally unconscious but internally watching a dream reel. The fact that we can experience dream states in sleep and remember them when we wake up, demonstrates how consciousness transcends our subjective base reality. Outside of simply watching a scripted sleep movie, some people can control their dreams (lucid dreaming), hear music, experience flight, release nocturnal emissions, and feel other intense sensations and emotions. In some cases, dream emotions and memories stay in mind long after the dream is over. To artists and creatives these dream fragments serve as muses for inspiration. To psychoanalysts and followers of Jung and Freud, dream symbols and archetypes are thought to contain clues to the deeper ravines of the unconscious. To the average person dreams hold psychological value and can be openers to abstract conversations.
Consciousness in frequency, music and culture
The mysteries of consciousness were once only the domain of those with heightened awareness: mystics, poets and artists. Today, physicists, neuroscientists and psychologists, want to tackle consciousness from how they understand the brain as a container for the mind. If we look at consciousness from the standpoint of theoretical physics, artificial intelligence, and data science, we can dare to hypothesize that the brain is not a container of consciousness but rather a receiver of consciousness. Quantum entanglement’s ‘spooky action at a distance’ is a phenomena where paired particles expresses mirrored behavior, no matter how separated by distance they are. Like two wireless devices sharing a private messaging channel, what is sent by one is received and reflected in the other’s screen from the furthest distances of the digital divide. Wireless communication is enabled by networks, and those networks carry information through frequency bands (AM, FM, 3G, LTE, 5G). Frequency bands are part of the electromagnetic spectrum (or radio spectrum), which means all frequency channels that carry information packets are different frequencies of light. Light that we can’t see with our naked eye is carrying substantially more information than the light we can detect on the color spectrum. This light is always around us, even when (especially when) we can’t see it.
Can the same be said about culture? Culture in the sense of collective understanding attached to certain things, ideas and emotions. Sneakerheads respond to and acknowledge rare shoes that sneaker culture deems worthy of social credit. The same with art collectors, they appreciate the subtleties in a piece of art and value it based on a set of shared ideals within the art culture. Different communities develop cultural depth over time, experience and content, and they recognize who is within the depths of that culture and community. Can frequency also apply to the many cultures there are to choose from and be part of? Is the cultural consciousness switch as simple as changing your carrier settings on your smart phone? DJ culture is unique in a way that differentiates it from other cultures. The DJ has control over the crowd and syncs their separate consciousnesses through music — into one big collective consciousness. Live music uplifts because it magnifies and multiplies sensations. That’s why many people loosely say they are ‘touched’ by music or ‘feel’ concerts and art — they absorb the melodic sound waves and sync with them, radiating a shared sense of euphoria. ‘Soul’ music is also a name of an entire genre.
Consciousness in animals and plants
What is it like to be a bat? A bat lives in darkness and uses echolocation to navigate and sense the world. A bat is subjectively conscious of the world but cannot share that private experience of existence with us or with any other bats. If we look at simpler lifeforms like plants, we can observe that they have access to a spectrum of senses that are alien to us human beings. The most primitive plant displays complex awareness of gravity, temperature, light and even touch. Looking beneath plants’ photosensitivity to the sun, we come across an intricate canal of roots systems that can share nutrients with other plants through communication via mycorrhizal fungi — like a prehistoric flora internet or neural brain networks.
Anyone who still has doubts about animals being conscious should watch the cats and dogs compilation videos going viral on social media, that show the pets reacting to their owners digital mask filters. There is a clear moment of shock at the face in the screen, then an awareness that the face of the owner does not match the mirror image. This shows that some animals understand the concept of mirror images in regard to self-awareness and awareness of other. Of course consciousness in animals has levels just as consciousness in humans has levels too. Not all humans have empathy or the same capacity of empathy, and not all humans have self awareness in changing social dynamics and environments. Animals are conscious but lack the language to affectively communicate their consciousness, or maybe it is us who lack universal natural language processing.
“Looking at the world from other species’ points of view is a cure for the disease of human self-importance.” —Michael Pollan
Whales show melodic sophistication when communicating with each other through sound frequencies vibrating in the oceans. The sounds whales make are called whale songs and can evolve musically and spread to other whales over time—like a whale culture. Whale vocalization is a big topic of interest for marine researchers and has led to the search for 52-hertz whale, nicknamed “the loneliest whale in the world” since it sings on a higher frequency and cannot communicate with the others. The world’s loneliest whale is isolated in it’s own frequency channel and has been calling out and singing for more than 30 years.
The famous Rouge test shows how animals react when they recognize themselves in a mirror. The Rouge test shows us again and again the eureka moment as dolphins, elephants and chimpanzees become conscious of their reflections. Human babies recognize themselves from about 18 months old. Humans can behave worse than animals when they project their turbulent inner states out onto the social landscape without self-reflection or self awareness. Simply reacting to external circumstances mechanistically resembles unconscious behavior, which is the loop most of society lives in.
Consciousness in cells
All babies begin in the womb, by a sperm cell fusing with an egg cell. From a cellular perspective, we still don’t know how stem cells decide what phenotype they’ll differentiate into. We can argue that there’s a self-organized intelligence in stem cells that assigns them (cells) with specific roles, like: red blood cells, white blood cells, muscle cells, bone cells, cardiac cells, neural cells or fat cells. Could this mean that consciousness is also present in the microcosm of biological life? How else would cells orchestrate themselves to build an intricate, complex, architecture, that can sustain our natural existence? If consciousness can be observed in cell behavior through a microscope, can we observe the conscious behavior of suns with a telescope?
Grey matter
Neuroscientists think that to crack consciousness we need to deeper understand the biomechanics and synaptic processes of the brain. The majority of scientists believe that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, resulting from neuronal processing. We know that the brain has roughly 100 billion neurons (some estimates are in the 85 billion range), and nets of those neurons connect to 10,000 others, yielding some 10 trillion nerve connections. We also know that the brain consumes almost 20% of our body’s energy, while only weighing in at 2% of our mass. But we don’t know how the brain operates in connection with consciousness. In the mission to understand the most complex system in the known universe, scientists are mapping the brain in more detail to pinpoint the parts that are involved in the generation of consciousness. Until recently, the study of consciousness has been ignored by modern science because it lies outside the ridged scientific framework of thinking. Building a scientific consensus around consciousness is a priority if we are to unravel how and why the mind experiences the world in the flowing states it does.
“I think we’re at a kind of impasse here, we’ve got this wonderful, great chain of explanation…where physics explains chemistry, chemistry explains biology, biology explains parts of psychology, but consciousness doesn’t seem to fit into this picture. On the one hand, it’s a datum that we’re conscious. On the other hand, we don’t know how to accommodate it into our scientific view of the world. So I think consciousness right now is a kind of anomaly, one that we need to integrate into our view of the world, but we don’t yet see how. Faced with an anomaly like this, radical ideas may be needed, I think that we may need one or two ideas that initially seem crazy before we can come to grips with consciousness scientifically…” — David Chalmers at TED
Producing a working unified theory of consciousness has been compared to producing a working unified field theory (UFT). They are both confusing, they are both up for debate, and they are both an open line for research. Using a bottom-up approach would be a good way to start probing the consciousness subject. By establishing the equivalent of the fundamental building blocks of consciousness (borrowing from the fundamental laws of physics) and rules of thumb, we can try to discover the laws that govern consciousness on all scales. But if this kind of reductionist thinking worked for consciousness, we would not be so divided on what consciousness is and how to approach it. For now, consciousness researchers need to keep an open mind and be willing to accept dynamic ideas. Computational science, the most logic driven field when it comes to complex problem solving, is progressing from classical computing into quantum computing. If the hard logic microprocessor industry is able to adopt crazy research ideas and innovate in quantum computing, the consciousness field has no excuse.
“Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.” — Erwin Schrödinger
Those still stumbling in the dogma of inherited ideologies, reject evolution as a proven scientific fact. It’s those same people who have negative reactions—and experience borderline existential anxiety—when listening to discussions on psychological evolution, consciousness and beyond. I feel we’re at a point — because of the spread of high quality information via the internet — where humanity’s psychological evolution has outgrown biological evolution. So it’s natural that we will disagree and be in conflict over topics we’re still growing into.
We credit scientific thinking for modern thought and inventing the world and quality of life we enjoy today. Once scientists and academics define consciousness, they can approach the subject in a more coherent way. As soon as a discovery is made we attach labels to it. Even if we use fancy words and complex terminology, the language we use to describe consciousness is limited and subject to misunderstanding. We then use the sharp knife of the intellect to dissect and reduce it to bite size pieces we feel more comfortable digesting separately. But nature doesn’t work in isolated boxes that are labeled and sorted in sterile lab conditions. That’s why it’s difficult to think about the systems of consciousness, define the different states of consciousness, and then proceed to write about consciousness. From this door, consciousness and science have be used together to describe a new science of consciousness, with a new framework.
“There’ve been about 20,000 or so papers written about consciousness and no consensus. Never in the history of science have so many people devoted so much time to produce so little.” — Michio Kaku on quantifying consciousness (2014)
The old way of doing isolated science may have worked for past problems but will not work for unsolved mysteries that blur the lines between fields. Interdisciplinary methods are bringing down the walls industrial academia constructed, that kept talented PhDs stuck in corners of specialized thinking. Personally, I’m interested in the limits of brain plasticity and the elasticity of the human mind. I think that unifying diverse talent to tackle the consciousness problem collectively should be a humanitarian priority—like the Human Genome Project and Genome Global Initiative (GGI).
“As Terence McKenna observed, “Modern science is based on the principle: ‘Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.’ The one free miracle is the appearance of all the mass and energy in the universe and all the laws that govern it in a single instant from nothing.” —Rupert Sheldrake
The highly criticized and controversial Cambridge biochemist, Rupert Sheldrake, postulated that there is inherent memory in nature. He coined the term morphic resonance to describe the “interconnections between organisms” through “fields of information.” In his banned TED talk, The Science Delusion, he tries to remind the audience that science cannot explain everything, let alone the nature of reality. It pays to be skeptical, use Occam’s razor and avoid confirmation biases. So why are Sheldrake’s ideas attractive, even after they have been proved scientifically wrong? If we look at personal subjective experiences like the feelings of love and parenthood, material science dismisses them as biochemical processes and illusions for mating. But we are conscious and can no longer ignore what’s in the scientific blindspots. Consciousness is an experience that can only be felt from the inside, so is it fair to say that consciousness doesn’t exists because science doesn’t yet possess the tools to measure, label, reduce, and reverse engineer it?
Attention analyzed
What we look at directly with our eyes we give our overt attention. We can also use covert attention to listen while not looking directly at someone. In both cases we are pinpointing our attention and absorbing what we are focused on in our mind’s eye. This is where humans and animals differ, animals use — to the most part — overt attention, meaning they can be observed directly focusing on a single moving point, like prey. Humans can use covert attention and indirectly observe something not at the center of their gaze, through their peripheral vision and selective listening by canceling out background noise. Overt attention is grasping information from an object through sense organs and covert attention is grasping information through the computational power of the brain. Covert attention can also move through different no-physical dimensions. Analyzing the deeper meaning behind a film or understanding abstract language requires covert attention. When we think of attention, we don’t think of it as being contained in a literal space. Attention feels more like an inner or outer spotlight moving over and absorbing what’s both physical and non-physical.
More metaphors
We believe that we have a firm understanding of time because we are accustomed to wearing accurate heart monitoring digital watches. But time behaves like a river, speeding up and slowing down around different bodies of mass. All living things experience the mystery of time differently, plant cycles, animal cycles, and human cycles, may intersect but are conscious on different speeds and exist in different pockets in the stretching fabric of reality.
There are tears in the details of reality and we all know it. They’re the things less talked about, less thought about and we’re all less informed about. When given deep thought consciousness shares the same angst we feel about topics we still don’t understand, like quantum mechanics, dark matter and dark energy.
“Consciousness is a mystery that faces the mystery of potential and transforms it into actuality. We do that with every choice we make. Our choices determine the destiny of the world. By making a choice, you alter the structure of reality.” — Jordan Peterson
In the past, we used oil lamps which shone forth flickering light. The light emitted from fire is more or less evenly distributed around the radiance of the flame. We now use strong LED powered electric torches, with tremendous luminosity instead of oil lamps. Greater still are the high intensity lasers that are so energetically focused on a single point that they can burn through matter or create artificial stars. Our conscious self-directed attention can be likened to these three types of manmade lights. Power of focus, precision of focus, and length of focus varies from person to person. Some naturally have strong attention spans while others have to develop it by pressing through mental exercises.
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” — Carl Jung
Holy books are riddled with ‘light’ metaphors to embed the idea of spreading consciousness to the dark areas of ignorance. Consciousness is part of our unseen body but like our physical body it needs to be exercised and stretched. Those with a diminished consciousness feel heavy to be around because they are in a state of mental impotence. Like a slothful body, their consciousness is dormant and needs to be nudged back into awareness—only then can it be powerfully directed and focused on internal and external spaces. Attention is the currency of the mind and by building our attention capacity and focusing it on a point, we can get a deeper look at our inner nature or a more detailed observation of our external surroundings. Looking both inward and outward expands our conscious geography and creates new connections by treading down dark neural pathways. Taking intellectual risks, struggling with new ideas, and being wrong, helps expand our consciousness and rewire our brain.
Qualia conclusion
Looking at things deeply has proved that the popular common sense way of viewing the world is mostly incorrect. Neuroscience showed us that demon possession does not exist, and physics showed us that solid matter is mostly empty space. But looking at things too deeply can spiral us downward where there is no bottom. After drifting in and out of consciousness one discovers and rediscovers the center, where things can be viewed more clearly. The reoccurring metaphor in all trialed ways of life is to live in the present moment — where different layers of reality are at equilibrium and other present people can be found. As for the confusion of what consciousness is, it cannot be an ‘emergent phenomena’ as science describes, since it cannot be measured by empirical methods. Consciousness is not biological to be probed and dissected nor is it a machine to be taken apart and put together to work. The closest conclusion we can arrive at, is that consciousness is an epistemological and ontological relationship with a reality whose nature we cannot fully see. We don’t have the capacity to look consciousness in the eye in all its luminance, we can only experience it through the cracks.
“It is a very recent disease to mistake the unobserved for the nonexistent; but some are plagued with the worse disease of mistaking the unobserved for the unobservable.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Collective conclusion
Humans are social by nature and have a need to connect. Suffocated groups, isolated people and the emotionally switched off, lose access to collective consciousness due to unexercised empathy and severed connections. These mental blocks hinder social survival in all environments. Culture always wins because culture organically networks information and experience through intangible bonds. Culture bridges people, both consciously and unconsciously, adding to collective intelligence and a reservoir of team energy, resulting in that mysterious feeling of knowing, safety and faith. We cannot measure the insight a co-worker’s company brings or the comfort a loved one’s presence provides—but we can doubtlessly feel it. Genuine bonds between people expand consciousness and take us deeper into the human experience.
To understand a part of the consciousness puzzle, we have to enter a minefield of minds that feel. We cannot solve the consciousness problem without considering changing emotions, shifting mind-states, fluctuating energy planes and bioelectrical patterns in the brain (brain waves). Like hard science theoreticians, dualists, materialists, and panpsychists are all arguing for their version of a fundamental consciousness theory. As in the blind men and elephant parable, there is a facet of truth in all their arguments. I think remaining agnostic about the dynamism and mechanisms of consciousness is the most reasonable stance to take until interdisciplinary research reveals more in depth insight. Until then, we must remember that not everything can be sliced with Occam’s razor and that the complexity of consciousness cannot be described by only one language. And if we journey down the line of the circle of consciousness, alone or with others, we can never reach the end.
References
Extended consciousness topics:
- Qualia
- Solipsism
- The mind–body problem
- The hard problem
- Panpsychism
- Hylomorphism
- Russellian monism
- Theory of mind
- Meta-problem
- Computational theory of mind (CTM)
- Integrated information theory (IIT)
- Combination problem
- Neural binding
- Default mode Network
- Free will
- Dualism
- Materialism
- Trancendental illusion
- Presentism
- Externalism
- Epiphenomenalism
- Eliminativism
- Psychophysics
- Phenomenalism
- Panprotopsychism
- Problem of other minds
- Neural correlates of consciousness (NCC)
- Double-aspect theory
- Pantheism
- Panentheism
- Hylozoism
Thought experiments: Mary’s Room, The Chinese Room Argument, The Philosophical Zombie
Mind stretching books: Conscious by Annaka Harris, Consciousness by Christof Koch, Rethinking Consciousness by Michael S.A. Graziano, The Consciousness Instinct by Michael S. Gazzaniga, Galileo’s Error by Philip Goff, The River of Consciousness by Oliver Sacks, The Conscious Mind by Zoltan Torey, The Mind-Body Problem by Jonathan Westphal, Neuroplasticity by Moheb Castandi, Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett, Elastic by Leonard Mlodinow, Something Deeply Hidden by Sean Carroll, The Case Against Reality by Donald D. Hoffman, The Strange Order of Things by António R. Damásio, Descartes’ Baby by Paul Bloom, How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett, You Are the Placebo by Joe Dispenza, What Is Life? by Erwin Schrödinger, I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter, The Over-Soul by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith, The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, Machines that Think by New Scientist, Superminds by Thomas W. Malone
Essays & articles: The Consciousness Deniers by Galen Strawson, Minding Matter by Adam Frank, Conscious spoons, really? Pushing back against panpsychism by Anil K. Seth, David Chalmers Thinks the Hard Problem Is Really Hard by John Horgan | Scientific American, Quantum Consciousness — The Emperor’s new Mind and the Implications of the Incompleteness Theorems by Diana Darie, A New Spin on the Quantum Brain, A Fundamental Theory to Model the Mind by Jennifer Ouellette, The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness
Podscasts & talks: Christof Koch: Consciousness with Lex Fridman| MIT Artificial Intelligence (AI), Marvin Minsky Interviews| Closer to Truth series, Philip Goff on Consciousness Everywhere with Sean Carroll | Mindscape, The Neuroscience of Consciousness with Anil Seth, Can You Explain Consciousness? by David Chalmers | TED, Sadhguru: Developing an Inclusive Consciousness | Talks at Google, Michael Pollan: A plant’s-eye view | TED:
“As an intellectual matter, looking at the world from other species’ points of view helps us deal with this weird anomaly, which is — and this is in the realm of intellectual history — which is that we have this Darwinian revolution 150 years ago in which, thanks to Darwin, we figured out we are just one species among many. Evolution is working on us the same way it’s working on all the others. We are acted upon as well as acting. We are really in the fiber, the fabric of life. But the weird thing is, we don’t — we have not absorbed this lesson 150 years later. None of us really believes this. We are still Cartesians — the children of Descartes — who believe that subjectivity, consciousness, sets us apart. That the world is divided into subjects and objects. That there is nature on one side, culture on another. As soon as you start seeing things from the plant’s point of view or the animal’s point of view, you realize that the real literary conceit is that. Is the idea that nature is opposed to culture. The idea that consciousness is everything.
Looking at the world from other species’ points of view is a cure for the disease of human self-importance. You suddenly realize that consciousness, which we value and we consider the crowning achievement of nature, human consciousness is really just another set of tools for getting along in the world. And it’s kind of natural that we would think it was the best tool. But, you know, as — there’s a comedian who said, “Well, who’s telling me that consciousness is so good and so important? Well, consciousness.” So when you look at the plants, you realize that they’re other tools, and they’re just as interesting.”
- Mind in Indian Buddhist Philosophy (2012), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
“This imaginary self, usually conceived in substantial terms as an unchanging reality behind the changing phenomenal world, is in effect the root cause of the pervasive ignorance which afflicts the human condition. From a metaphysical point of view, however, the not-self doctrine extends beyond the domain of subjective experience, to characterize all phenomena. Indeed, it is not just persons that are said to be selfless but all the elements of existence as well. To appreciate the uniqueness of the Buddhist not-self doctrine scholars sometimes contrast it with the two most common alternatives: eternalism and annihilationism (or physicalism). The eternalist, usually the Upaniṣadic philosopher, claims that the innermost part of ourselves, the subtle and abiding self, sometimes equated with pure consciousness, exists for all eternity even as the ordinary person undergoes constant change, ultimately resulting in his or her demise. At the opposite end of the spectrum we find the physicalist who sees human nature as contingent and finite. The Buddhist perspective, called the ‘middle path between extremes’ or simply the ‘middle way’ (madhyamā-pratipad) offers a very different account of human existence: what we routinely call ego, self, soul, individual personality, are merely conventional terms that do not apply to anything real.”
