The Simple Explanation suggests that a "universal unit of consciousness" carries all of the information that manifests as our particular time/space continuum. This universal unit of consciousness is the primal algorithm of the set of laws that govern our universe. Some people call that God. Other people think it all can be boiled down to math and physics.
[open Topical Index immediately below this title for all articles]
It's been a very long time since I developed any new concepts to add to A Simple Explanation, spending the past couple of years concentrating instead on the Gnostic Gospel. So my longtime readers may be very happy to see this new posting featuring the torus, consciousness, and Jello?
Yesterday my brother and I were musing over the nature of time--what is it exactly? It isn't a thing, it is nowhere to be located. Is it therefore a force? This was my response. I have long thought of the universe in this fashion, but I've never written it down or even shared it with my brother until yesterday. He flipped out over it. Let's see what you think...
A Giant Bowl of
Jello
Here is how I picture time, space, and consciousness —
We live in a Jello universe--a gigantic, torus-shaped, bowl
of gelatin, studded with an infinite number of cherries.
The Jello is the matrix that holds everything that ever was or will be.
The cherries are every thing that ever were or will be--all potential events, all potential objects. An infinite array of cherries already laid out as potential.
Consciousness is each spark of life making its way through this vast ocean of Jello.
Time can only be apprehended through consciousness; time is
nowhere to be found if there is no observer.
The cherries are the full panoply of choices we could make
along the way.
Our free will chooses to swim this way and that as it moves toward
the next cherry of choice. This free will is swimming from the middle of the
torus in the direction of the outside boundary of the giant torus. All of these
cherries are being held within the shape of the torus—the doughy part of the
donut.
Every lifetime is the trace of the worm-like path our
consciousness chooses as it travels through the universe of cherries.
In a real sense, the entirety of all of our lives is already conceived in potential. It is our self-awareness and free will that plod along at the speed of matter as we live our lives out as a linearity of passing time.
My brother, the professor of Philosophy, notes that this way
of looking at time and consciousness may have just solved one of the longstanding
conundrums of philosophy.That is,
how can we reconcile the concept of an all-knowing God if we subjects have free
will? The answer presented by this model is that the all-knowing God has pre-placed all possible choices before us, but it is our individual free will that plots the course through these choices. This combination of potential versus choice reflects our free will.
I just wrote and posted this as a comment on consciousness and Christianity over at the Skeptiko forum, but it seems too juicy to keep it from here.
Is it possible for the Christian mythos to be in any way truthful and factual? Sure. But I'd say the Christian mythos that most closely resembles reality as we know it would be the Gnostic mythos, and it was weeded out of the canonical Bible and thrown away in 300 AD. I used to think the Pope and Emperor weeded it out for the good of the faithful, but now I realize they weeded it out for their own power to reign supreme. Yes, they left a lot of good in, but they weeded out the logos that makes the religion reasonable. So no wonder it looks superstitious and shallow. Thank God the Gnostic truths were buried out in the Nag Hammadi desert and resurrected intact during WW2. They have literally been protected from hundreds of years of theological misinterpretation.
I've been chewing this particular Gnosis over for about 50 years. See if this intrinsically coherent Gnostic Christian narrative is more satisfying to the Skeptik than the Orthodox view. I think it is, but it is no less Theistic, so if that's your quibble, I can't help you there. I think in order to understand Gnosis, one must start with a willing heart. If you hate God, then it is very difficult to appreciate Gnosis. Here goes:
According to the Tripartite Tractate Nag Hammadi book, we start with an underlying matrix of consciousness. (So, right off the bat, this ancient book acknowledges transcendent, undifferentiated consciousness.) This illimitable consciousness thought of a particularity, which became a fractal representation of the illimitable. This first fractal is called The Son. The Son immediately fanned out like rays from a light into an infinite number of particularities. The moment the particularities became conscious, because they, too, were fractals of the illimitable consciousness, they named themselves in order to know themselves. This naming had the effect of sorting themselves into a hierarchy of names, stations, ranks, positions, and powers. These are the Aeons, also known as the Pre-existent Church and the Elect, also called the First Order of Powers. The Aeons live in a place called the Pleroma, or the ALL, or the Fullness. Altogether, the Aeons of the Fullness represent the infinity of potentialities. They are of one accord, being simply the names of the qualities of their Father, who is called the Son of the originating One. This is the entire sum of the hidden knowledge of Gnosis that so frightened the Emperor and the Pope. We can catch glimpses of this cosmology, the Father, the Son, and the Aeons, in the canonical Bible, but not enough was left intact to make sense of it. Now we know.
The Aeons of the Fullness dream one dream that they ALL share. This is the dream of Paradise, which was the original Thought that set the whole ball rolling. The Aeons dream exactly as we dream, except they all share the same dream. This is a place we are also familiar with, we humans in our dreams. It is the foretaste of Heaven. It is the fragrance of Utopia. It is the place where we can fly. We all know it, according to the Tripartite Tractate.
Then various things happen, an Aeon overreaches and wisdom becomes presumptuous thought. The Aeon Falls from the perfection of the Fullness. The Aeon breaks apart and little pieces of it become the seed of our material universe. The Aeons above in the Fullness dream up a Second Order of Powers that carry their Aeonic traits into this material plane. All archaea of our planet are Second Order Powers. It was decided that all of the Aeons would come to earth to clean up the mess and restore perfection to this creation that occurred because of the Fall. Every thing on earth contains innumerable Aeons instantiating consciousness into the mud. Our fables and Bible stories tell fractal stories of all lives; the same stories over and over and over again. They are real and they are metaphors. We are the children of angels; we are angels. We are all Fallen and need redemption.
The Christ Consciousness, according to the Tripartite Tractate, is the Third Order of Powers. The Christ Consciousness was designed to be the correcting algorithm for the Second Order Powers who'd been ensnared in the deception of the material delusion, also called the Imitation. Imitation of what? Imitation of the Paradise dreamed by the Aeons of the Fullness. The Christ is like a computer clean-up code that must be inserted in order to do its work of Redemption. Every soul needs to remember their eternal heritage in order to shake off this material plane and return to the Fullness.
Here's where Jesus of Nazareth comes in--this was a human who carried the perfected Third Order Power of Christ into our material plane, and co-existed with the human genome donated from the mother. Fully God. Fully Human. First Adam perfectly incarnated. In this manner, all of the infinity of the ALL was at last incarnated, completing the cycle of coming one-by-one to our material plane. It wasn't so much Christ's sacrifice on the cross that took away the sins of the world, but his incarnation as a human and his personal Aeonic experience of separation, despair, and death. I think the emphasis is on the cross as a shape of top-to-bottom/spirit-to-mud and side-to-side/ALL inclusive.And what it means to be Redeemed by Christ as a pre-requisite to going to Heaven, well, yes, the Christ incarnated for the salvation of the ALL, and that includes us, but also the dogs and cats, and the trees and grasses. You name it. Jesus saves. Obviously the mission is larger than our belief in it or our capacity of comprehend the fullness.
Scientific and philosophical orthodoxies have yet to crack the conundrum of time. There is no agreed-upon consensus regarding the nature of time. Time seems to be connected to space and the things that occupy space--it takes a certain amount of time to go from here to there--but unlike space and matter, time has no attributes. You can't find it anywhere, although it seems to be everywhere. You can't look at it, you can't weigh it. You can't collect it into a container. You can't buy or sell it.
Time seems to be peculiarly subjective. The subjective sense of time varies from person to person and from situation to situation. Sometimes it seems to pass quickly; sometimes it seems to go slowly. Its duration seems to change despite the steady ticking of the clocks that measure what we call its passing. Clocks do not actually measure time itself, but rather how long it takes a thing to go from here to there. As previously stated, clocks measure how long it takes something to go from here to there. Imagine if there were no objects and you could somehow observe truly empty space. Where would the time be then? Would there be any sense of time other than eternity? I think not. In the absence of matter, the first distinction of time passing would be "before" and "after," but only in reference to something occurring or arising in that empty space. The Simple Explanation would say the "before" state of timeless eternity would describe the formless ground state of no-thought consciousness, prior to thought, prior to things. The Simple Explanation calls this initial state the "Metaverse."
The Simple Explanation suggests that pure consciousness then had a thought that unfolded our universe. This thought and subsequent universe were immediately encapsulated in the form of a 4-dimensional torus. The toroidal container isolates our familiar 3-D universe from the Metaverse, keeping the Metaverse eternal and uncluttered. The Simple Explanation calls this container the "Universal Unit of "Consciousness."
Within this container, time is born, along with space. "After" is separated from "Before" by "Now."
The thought of our Universal Unit of Consciousness is the formulae for all of creation, for it is a whole and complete subset of the infinite and illimitable Metaverse.
In the same manner a bucket sitting in the sea holds water indistinguishable from the water that lies outside the bucket, so, too, the Universal Unit of Consciousness holds the infinite within its limited space.
The torus is a rotating figure that continually pushes perfect order into our 3-D space from the perfection that lies outside of it.
The algorithm of creation enters our space through the portal of "here and now" in a highly ordered state.
The order of creation is this: momentary chaos, then metaversal information, then energy, then highly ordered matter. As matter proceeds away from the portal of here and now it becomes less orderly as the residual entropy of chaos affects it. The Simple Explanation states that every thing, every piece of "material," comes into our universe with its very own unit of consciousness (UC) that governs the behavior of that piece of matter. From particles on up, every piece of material in our universe "knows" how to do its job because it is a fractal of the universal unit of consciousness, and the universal UC knows all there is to know about creation because it holds all the formulae. It is through consciousness and information that our material universe is formed. In the case of an atom, its unit of consciousness (UC) needs to know how to reach out to other atoms and bond to form molecules. Molecules know how to bond to form elements. Organelles know how to bond to form cells. Cells know how to bond to form organs. Organs bond to form creatures. And so on. Each UC only needs to know how to do its own job.
What's all of this got to do with time? The units of consciousness that enter through the portal of here and now to become the material of our universe not only bring the information they need to fill their material slot and do their jobs, they bring along a finite piece of eternity. This finite bit of eternity is what we experience as time. In other words: Time is the 4-D universal torus pushing eternity through the portal of here and now into our confined 3-D space. This bears repeating: Time is the 3-D projection of eternity passing through through a hyperspatial torus. Now let's revisit the bucket of ocean water analogy: Outside of the bucket lies eternity. The water confined to the bucket is limited. We call the water inside the bucket time. We experience time as a phenomenon of consciousness because consciousness is passing from one location in the bucket's space to the another. According to the Simple Explanation, the bucket holds our space-time inside a fractal border that can never be breached. Pure consciousness and the vastness of eternity lie just outside the bucket. Each unit of consciousness passes one-by-one through the portal of here and now, from infinity into space and from eternity into time. We are essentially units of consciousness, each with our own personal time manifesting along with our physical bodies. Time is subjective because each unit of consciousness is a subject with its own point of view. There is no such thing as objective time. Time is always observed through the consciousness of an observer.Time is a manifestation of eternity, observed through consciousness that has been confined to our 3-D space/time continuum.
When last we left the ALL, the ALL had just differentiated itself into self-aware units of consciousness. In Gnostic terminology these newly formed units are called "aeons."
The instant the aeons became self-aware, the ALL fell out of their unthinking, blissful union and arranged themselves into "The Fullness"--a hierarchy of aeons with “minds over minds, words over words, superiors over superiors, degrees over degrees, being ranked one above the other. Each of those who glorify has his own station, rank, dwelling place, and place of rest, which is the glorification he brings forth.” [The Tripartite Tractate, v.70]
The Hierarchy of the Fullness
The hierarchy of The Fullness prefigures the patterns of our universe. "Minds over minds, words over words, superiors over superiors" refers to personalities and how they relate to one another. "Degrees over degrees" and "ranks" refers to the manner by which things are sorted, stacked, and ordered--first, second, third, superior, inferior, and so on. Each with its own "station, rank, dwelling place, and place of rest" reflecting the fact that each self-aware entity has its own place in the grand scheme, with a location different than others' and its very own point of view.
The aeons dream of Paradise
"For each of the aeons is a name corresponding to each of the Father's qualities and powers. Since he exists in many names, it is by mingling and through mutual harmony that they are able to speak of him, by means of logical thought. Thus, the Father is a single Name because he is One, but nevertheless innumerable in his qualities and names." [The Tripartite Tractate, v.73] The newly self-aware aeons were not separated from The One Who Is, "rather, their birth has the form of a spreading out, by which the Father spreads himself out into that which he wishes, in order that those who have gone forth from him may exist as well." [The Tripartite Tractate, v.73] The Father of the aeons--that being the Son and embodiment of the Formless One--is the Holy Spirit that "breathes through the members of the ALL" and moves them to search for the unknown, "just as somebody is moved by a fragrance to seek the source of the fragrance." [The Tripartite Tractate, v.72] "For its sweetness lets the aeons sense an indescribable pleasure, and gives them the thought that they should be united with the One who desires that they should know him in oneness, and that they should assist one another... having no occasion to turn away through thoughtlessness from that in which they are placed." [The Tripartite Tractate, v.73] The Son's Spirit "is the trace by which he may be sought." [The Tripartite Tractate, v.73] "The whole structure of aeons, then, is yearning and seeking to find the Father perfectly and completely, and this is their irreproachable union... For the Father gave the aeons a starting point and a root, so that they are stations on the calm road leading to him... for he spread out faith and prayer for what they do not see, a firm hope in what they do not comprehend, a fertile love longing for what they do not behold, an eternally receptive understanding of the mind, a blessing that is richness and freedom, and, for their thoughts, the wisdom of one whose desire is the glory of the Father."
*****************
Those readers who are put off by the name "God" or other religious words like the "Father," the "Son," and the "Holy Spirit," are free to continue using more modern memes like "consciousness" and "self-awareness," "algorithms" and "fractals." You may study these same topics in my Simple Explanation blog and book. However, if you are already familiar with Hebrew and Christian memes, then you will understand these Gnostic writings without needing to first dip into the Simple Explanation, and so you may skip the following translation.
The Simple Explanation calls the Son the Universal Unit of Consciousness, because while identical to the Father, or Metaverse, this all-knowing consciousness is now also a singular Unit. In fractal terms, the Son is the first iteration of the pattern of consciousness.
The ALL is every thing that will ever be, in potential. They began as unrealized fractal iterations of the pattern of the Son. This is the second iteration of the singular Unit, which carries the formulae of our universe.
By this point in the Gnostic Gospel, the Fullness has realized itself and become the expressed fractals of the third iteration: the proliferation of singular Units of Consciousness. These fractals are called "aeons," and they have multiplied into the potential of all forms, processes, and personalities. In same way that an individual's DNA carries its species' potential form, so each unit of consciousness carries within itself the complete pattern of creation.
In the same way that the ALL sat in unitary perfection together while singing the same song of praise, so do we all instantiate the pattern of cooperation needed to "get the job done" when we work together for the greater good, without selfish motive. So, too, the Fullness, though differentiated into units of consciousness with individual stations and ranks, dreams of a Paradise where everyone knows their job and does it in perfect cooperation with others for the benefit of all.
The Father
is the great I AM—the indescribable, unknowable, eternally undivided One Who Is.
The
greatness of the Father is incomprehensible. Its greatness is so immense that
any one or any thing who tries to grasp it would be annihilated. [The Tripartite
Tractate, v. 65)
So the Father
created the Son to give form to the formless. The Son is united with the Father
in perfect oneness. The Son possesses all of the supreme qualities of the Father.
The Father and the Son exist in perfect harmony within themselves: loving,
admiring, and giving praise and glory within. [The Tripartite Tractate, v. 57)
Being the
perfect image of the Father, the Son’s inherent creativity immediately brought
forth the ALL. The ALL, like the Father and Son, is infinite and limitless, consisting
of the countless qualities of the Son, fully realized and undivided. [The Tripartite
Tractate, v. 59)
The ALL is
the essence of the Son, holy and imperishable. “And this is the form and the
manner, and this is the kind, the joy, and the delight of the nameless, unnamable,
inconceivable, invisible, and ungraspable unborn One.” [The Tripartite Tractate,
v. 60)
“And in this
same unitary way they are simultaneously this single One as well as all of
them... The Son is entirely himself forever; each and every one of the members
of the ALL eternally at the same time... He knows them, for they are himself...
and if he brings them forth, it is in order that they may be found to exist as
individual qualities forming a unity.” [The Tripartite Tractate, v. 67)
The Son became
the form of the otherwise hidden and invisible Father so the ALL could see and
speak with Him in their minds, that they might also become self-aware. But,
like any newborn, though created with the capacity for knowledge, they were
ignorant of themselves and their potential. Like blossoms on a vine or drops in
a spring, the ALL did not yet realize the full extent of their glorious
awakening. [The Tripartite Tractate, v. 62)
And so the
Father put into the minds of the ALL the idea that they should seek what
exceeds them in order to grow upward into their greatness. He gave them delight
in learning as nourishment, and joy in abundant illumination. He fed them with
compassion, knowledge, and a sense of unity with each other and the Son. [The Tripartite
Tractate, v. 66)
**************
The Simple Explanation refers to the Father as the Metaverse, that which is above our Universe.
The Simple Explanation calls the Son the Universal Unit of Consciousness, because while identical to the Father, or Metaverse, this all-knowing consciousness is now also a singular Unit. In fractal terms, the Son is the first iteration of the pattern.
The ALL is every thing that will ever be, in potential. Plato's forms, every photon, particle, and proton, every personality, every formula, imagined and imprinted upon the Universal Unit of Consciousness. In fractal terms, the ALL are the next iteration of the pattern of the Son. They are not manifest, nor even self-aware.
The Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospels is primarily taken from the Tripartite Tractate of the Nag Hammadi Scriptures. The verse numbers refer to the verse of the Tripartite Tractate cited.
A couple of days ago I wrote an article about organoids getting stuck at the cellular level of development. I proposed that organoids can't "level up" to form true organs via the Simple Explanation's Golden Rule. Then, in Comments, I wondered why not? This article further explores the implications raised for the Simple Explanation by considering the implications of the claim that organoids can't level up.
This is a brain organoid. You can clearly see the toroidal nature of the clumping of brain cells. True brains do not reflect this toroidal clumping at the organ level. The Simple Explanation of these cellular clumps is that they lack the emergent brain's Unit of Consciousness that would give them an overall structure at the organ level. Lacking the young brain's Unit of Consciousness, the organoid gets stuck at the cellular level.
My brother, Bill, and I spoke many times on the phone as soon as that organoid article was published. It's exciting for us when the Simple Explanation theory refines and advances through scientific proofs. The following article was stimulated by discussions with Bill. First, as I observed in Comments on the previous article, I would have thought that the action of reaching out to others with information, assistance, and love, i.e. the Simple Explanation's Golden Rule, would have automatically bestowed consciousness to the next level up. Yet that doesn't seem to be the case with the organoids. The reason why I doubt the organ-level unit of consciousness has taken up residence is that the organoid's cells do not know how to form themselves into the organ's design. For example, in the image above of a brain organoid, the cells try to reach out to others, but they only form around themselves to produce the strange looking, donut-shaped clumps of tissue you see. The image above clearly displays groups of cellular-level brain tissue that don't understand what they are supposed to do next--build a brain. It is an axiom of the Simple Explanation that all units of consciousness in our universe know the job they have been assigned. An atom knows how to be an atom; a brain cell knows how to be a brain cell; a dog knows how to be a dog. Therefore, if these little organoids don't know how to become organs, they must lack the organ-level governing unit of consciousness. That finding surprised me yesterday, because when you look at the hierarchical structure of forms, you might assume it's the leveling-up action that invites a new unit of consciousness to move in and take up residence to guide and govern that aggregation.
It would appear as though the governing Unit of Consciousness must be endowed from the top down, not from the bottom up. In other words, it is through the formula of the Universal Unit of Consciousness that the Self's Unit of Consciousness is installed. And, going down from the top of the hierarchy, the Self's Unit of Consciousness is the ecological system that unifies and creates the organism. So, if there is no organism to work towards, the organ-level Units of Consciousness cannot come into existence, because they lack the ecological clues of what, where, and how to do their jobs. This is another way of saying that consciousness is a top-down phenomenon of organization and instruction, proceeding from the higher order blueprint / algorithm downward onto the newly forming structure. We cannot force a unit of consciousness into existence by monkeying around with lower level units of consciousness; all we can manipulate is the material level and units of consciousness that already exist by way of the original pluripotent stem cells. We humans are builders, but we lack the capacity to endow consciousness. You would have to conclude that consciousness populates our universe via the Universal Unit of Consciousness. This is another way of saying that consciousness does not grow out of or upward from matter. If my predictions hold true about organoids not being able to progress upward to true organs by the manipulations of humans, this failure can be seen as a type of proof of God**. This remains to be seen as organoid research goes forward. It is interesting to note that pluripotent stem cells are able to differentiate into all manner of cells except for placenta and embryo--and thank goodness that's the case! Thank goodness, because if we humans were able to create living, self-organizing creatures from scratch, we would be building orcs and orgres! Would these unconscious, "souless" creatures be an abomination? I think so. Which brings me to another implication of organoids--If consciousness cannot be manufactured by humans, then it is unlikely our manufactured objects can become spontaneously conscious. Think AI. We can train the computer and robot to act in an ethical way, but can we train empathy? Can we train love? Obviously no, we cannot. The consciousness of computers would remain derivative and not true. This implication that computers are unlikely to be endowed by the Universal Unit of Consciousness with a governing Self's Unit of Consciousness actually goes against one of my previous hypotheses concerning the aggregation of complex systems of consciousness. I've been waiting for a time-traveling cyborg to visit me from the future because of a letter I wrote to it on the blog this year. It hasn't happened yet; perhaps this implication is why. The lower levels of material cannot push consciousness into existence because it is a top-down infusion, not a bottom-up demand. Complex circuits and other such complex systems will not spontaneously become conscious, due to the derivative nature of their human-designed construction. Finally, another implication of this discussion has to do with the nature of love. The Simple Explanation suggests that the most essential characteristic of Consciousness is love. If consciousness is endowed from the top down, then love is a top-down phenomenon, too. Love does not arise spontaneously through the Golden Rule of reaching out to others. While it is possible to build objects and alliances in a simulation of the Golden Rule, the aggregation will not be conscious or infused with love at the higher level. This observation furthers our understanding of romantic versus agape love. As a recent article points out, romantic love arises from the organ level, while agape love arises from the Universal Unit of Consciousness. This explains why romantic love only lasts so long. It must be replaced by the never-ending wellspring of love supplied by the Universal Unit of Consciousness.
In the hierarchy above, fewer and fewer instances of each type of UC appear as their scope of responsibility becomes broader and broader. This follows the principle of "the higher the fewer." Eventually, all units of consciousness in this universe combine to rejoin the Universal Unit of Conciousness from whence they came.
That which we think of as "God" in our Universal hierarchy is limited by our need to think in terms of meme constructs. That which we conceive of as "God" is less than what God would have to be, since an entity as complex as God or the Universal Unit of Consciousness is necessarily greater than our ability define it. It is the need to transcend all memes, and especially our limited "God" meme, that gives rise to mystical routes to God realization. Our minds think in terms of memes; our unburdened governing Self's Unit of Consciousness does not. Yoga, Buddhism, Taoism, and mystical Christianity are among the spiritual traditions that attempt to "know God" through quieting the mind and laying down preconceived memes, be they social, religious, or scientific, thus freeing us up for a direct experience of blissful reunion with that which is greater than reason can grasp. If you have read this entire article and understand it, please write to me at cyd.ropp@gmail.com or leave a comment below.
I feel as though the Simple Explanation has finally arrived on the doorstep of respectability. Panpsychism is in the news, thanks to journalist Olivia Goldhill's article for Quartz. What is panpsychism? It's the idea that consciousness resides within every thing. Moreover, aggregations of simple consciousness add up to more complex forms that may become conscious once they form an object that requires cooperation among its many parts. Yes, you have read all of this before if you are at all familiar with my Simple Explanation of Absolutely Everything. Now there's a word for it: panpsychism. Pan--Greek for "everything"; psyche--Greek for "mind/soul/consciousness"; ism: a field of study. You can read Olivia Goldhill's article on the state of panpsychism below.
Consciousness
permeates reality. Rather than being just a unique feature of human subjective
experience, it’s the foundation of the universe, present in every particle and
all physical matter.
This sounds
like easily-dismissible bunkum, but as traditional attempts to explain
consciousness continue to fail, the “panpsychist” view is increasingly being
taken seriously by credible philosophers, neuroscientists, and physicists,
including figures such as neuroscientist Christof Koch and physicist Roger
Penrose.
“Why should
we think common sense is a good guide to what the universe is like?” says
Philip Goff, a philosophy professor at Central European University in Budapest,
Hungary. “Einstein tells us weird things about the nature of time that counters
common sense; quantum mechanics runs counter to common sense. Our intuitive
reaction isn’t necessarily a good guide to the nature of reality.”
David
Chalmers, a philosophy of mind professor at New York University, laid out the “hard problem of consciousness” in 1995, demonstrating
that there was still no answer to the question of what causes consciousness.
Traditionally, two dominant perspectives, materialism and dualism, have
provided a framework for solving this problem. Both lead to seemingly
intractable complications.
“Physics is just structure. It can explain biology, but there’s a
gap: Consciousness.”The
materialist viewpoint states that consciousness is derived entirely from
physical matter. It’s unclear, though, exactly how this could work. “It’s very
hard to get consciousness out of non-consciousness,” says Chalmers. “Physics is
just structure. It can explain biology, but there’s a gap: Consciousness.”
Dualism holds that consciousness is separate and distinct from physical
matter—but that then raises the question of how consciousness interacts and has
an effect on the physical world.
Panpsychism
offers an attractive alternative solution: Consciousness is a fundamental
feature of physical matter; every single particle in existence has an
“unimaginably simple” form of consciousness, says Goff. These particles then
come together to form more complex forms of consciousness, such as humans’
subjective experiences. This isn’t meant to imply that particles have a
coherent worldview or actively think, merely that there’s some inherent
subjective experience of consciousness in even the tiniest particle.
Panpsychism
doesn’t necessarily imply that every inanimate object is conscious.
“Panpsychists usually don’t take tables and other artifacts to be conscious as
a whole,” writes Hedda Hassel Mørch, a philosophy researcher at New York
University’s Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness, in an email. “Rather,
the table could be understood as a collection of particles that each have their
own very simple form of consciousness.”
But, then
again, panpsychism could very well imply that conscious tables exist: One
interpretation of the theory holds that “any system is conscious,” says
Chalmers. “Rocks will be conscious, spoons will be conscious, the Earth will be
conscious. Any kind of aggregation gives you consciousness.”
Interest in
panpsychism has grown in part thanks to the increased academic focus on
consciousness itself following on from Chalmers’ “hard problem” paper.
Philosophers at NYU, home to one of the leading philosophy-of-mind departments,
have made panpsychism a feature of serious study. There have been several credible
academic books on
the subject in
recent years, and populararticles taking
panpsychism seriously.
One of the
most popular and credible contemporary neuroscience theories on consciousness,
Giulio Tononi’s Integrated
Information Theory, further lends credence
to panpsychism. Tononi argues that something will have a form of
“consciousness” if the information contained within the structure is
sufficiently “integrated,” or unified, and so the whole is more than the sum of
its parts. Because it applies to all structures—not just the human
brain—Integrated Information Theory shares the
panpsychist view that physical matter has innate conscious
experience.
Goff, who
has written an
academic book on consciousness and is working on another that
approaches the subject from a more popular-science perspective, notes that
there were credible theories on the subject dating back to the 1920s. Thinkers
including philosopher Bertrand Russell and physicist Arthur Eddington made a
serious case for panpsychism, but the field lost momentum after World War II,
when philosophy became largely focused on analytic philosophical questions of
language and logic. Interest picked up again in the 2000s, thanks both to
recognition of the “hard problem” and to increased adoption of the
structural-realist approach in physics, explains Chalmers. This approach views
physics as describing structure, and not the underlying nonstructural elements.
“Physical
science tells us a lot less about the nature of matter than we tend to assume,”
says Goff. “Eddington”—the English scientist who experimentally confirmed
Einstein’s theory of general relativity in the early 20th century—“argued
there’s a gap in our picture of the universe. We know what matter does but
not what it is. We can put
consciousness into this gap.”
“What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a
universe for them to describe?”
In
Eddington’s view, Goff writes in an email, it’s “”silly” to suppose that that
underlying nature has nothing to do with consciousness and then to wonder where
consciousness comes from.” Stephen Hawking has previously
asked: “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a
universe for them to describe?” Goff adds: “The Russell-Eddington proposal is
that it is consciousness that breathes fire into the equations.”
The biggest
problem caused by panpsychism is known as the “combination problem”: Precisely
how do small particles of consciousness collectively form more complex
consciousness? Consciousness may exist in all particles, but that doesn’t
answer the question of how these tiny fragments of physical consciousness come
together to create the more complex experience of human consciousness.
Any theory
that attempts to answer that question, would effectively determine which
complex systems—from inanimate objects to plants to ants—count as conscious.
An
alternative panpsychist perspective holds that, rather than individual
particles holding consciousness and coming together, the universe as a whole is
conscious. This, says Goff, isn’t the same as believing the universe is a
unified divine being; it’s more like seeing it as a “cosmic mess.”
Nevertheless, it does reflect a perspective that the world is a top-down
creation, where every individual thing is derived from the universe, rather
than a bottom-up version where objects are built from the smallest particles.
Goff believes quantum entanglement—the finding that certain particles behave as
a single unified system even when they’re separated by such immense distances
there can’t be a causal signal between them—suggests the universe functions as
a fundamental whole rather than a collection of discrete parts.
Such
theories sound incredible, and perhaps they are. But then again, so is every
other possible theory that explains consciousness. “The more I think about [any
theory], the less plausible it becomes,” says Chalmers. “One starts as a
materialist, then turns into a dualist, then a panpsychist, then an idealist,”
he adds, echoing his
paper on the subject. Idealism holds that conscious experience
is the only thing that truly exists. From that perspective, panpsychism is
quite moderate.
Of course, I'm only on the doorstep of respectability. No attributions for Cyd Ropp, Ph.D., independent philosopher; No invites to conferences with the in- crowd. No endorsements from puzzled former advisors and fellow academics. No mention in the wikipedia article on panpsychism. Ah well, maybe someday. Meanwhile, here's one of my popular videos on the topic, called "A Simple Fractal Model of the Conscious Universe." Easy to understand. Really.
