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Conclusion
Religious Implications
My objectives throughout this process have centered on the philosophical and religious, so I will now turn to what I see as the religious implications of the research discussed in this essay. To me, 20th century advances in physics and psychology profoundly undermine the notion of a self-existent individual Self (i.e. “Soul” or “Spirit”). By “self-existent,” I mean something which would be independent of its larger context, the way a “soul” can be imagined as sufficiently “free” and self-contained as to be responsible for its own thoughts and actions before God on Judgement Day. I find the evidence overwhelming that we as human are a part of something much larger, and in no way “self-existent.” I think consciousness as experienced by humans is fundamentally embodied, and inseparable from the biological system in which it perceives and processes and manifests itself. A human mind is thus necessarily and inescapably human. In other words, should there be some transcendent aspect of Self that can be disembodied (which I don’t discount), there is little reason to think that its nature would accord with human experience (sight, hearing, logical reasoning, etc). Modern physics and psychology paint a far different picture of reality than intuitively imagined by our perceptions. I have not addressed research and evidence of the paranormal, but there is no shortage, and this also suggests a reality that transcends the intuitions of material perception. To me, all of these perspectives undermine the notion of an self-existent and eternal individual Self that is a rational free-willed agent, bearing eternal moral responsibility for individual activity in linear time. The notion of eternal Judgement in mainstream Christianity (and other Abrahamic religions) is built on the premise that there is an individual and persisting Self that survives physical death to stand judgement. Evidence that physical changes in the brain change experience and behavior, strikes me as compelling evidence that an ephemeral spirit/mind cannot be solely ‘responsible’ for behavior, as Descartes imagined. Behavior seems guided, perhaps even deterministically, by factors outside the strict control of conscious agency. To me, this has profound implications for the notion of a self-existent “spiritual” Self that endures to be reincarnated or judged. Since the third or fourth essay, I have asserted that placing God in the role of judge seems anthropomorphic towards the concept of God, and myopic in its conception of the rules by which one imagines God would judge. To me, both of these issues contradict the very universality on which I think the concept of Monotheism is built. To me, the teachings of Jesus easily translate into a version of the perennial philosophy that can be found within virtually every religious and spiritual belief system: that everything is interconnected, God is manifest in that unity, that there is no self-existent individual Self, and that the negation of Self or Ego is essential to spiritual enlightenment. As we release our own Self-interest, the unity between our Self and others becomes increasingly accessible and even inevitable. We can experience the world with a greater sense of peace, both in how we relate to others and ourselves because there is no Self to advance or defend. It is the “peace that passes all understanding,” as the Apostle Paul put it. In Sermons of a Buddhist Monk [58], Shaku Shoyen says, “The so-called ‘I’ is possible only when it is thought of in connection with its fellow-selves. Indeed, this self and other selves are one in each other, I in you and you in me; and this sense of universal oneness breaks most effectually the barrier of egoism that glorifies the significance of individual existences. When we realize this exalted spirituality, we can truly say with the Gospel of John that ‘all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified in them’… Have your self-will removed and put in its place the divine will. ‘Not my will, but thy will,’ as Christians say, is that which is immortal in us.”
There is a deeply existential twist that emerges from a view that Self and even its embeddedness in time is an illusion. The interpretation of mainstream Christianity is that beliefs at the end of life matter most, but both Quantum Physics and Special Relativity suggest that time cannot be defined meaningfully in this way, and that ‘past,’ ‘present,’ and ‘future’ may be better understood as simultaneous. Similarly, the notion of eternity can be viewed as depth in time rather than length in time. As Ludwig Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, “Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.” I interpret Jesus as saying something similar in John 8:51, “Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps My word (‘logos’, which I interpret as ‘way of being’) he will never see death.” In the Part 4 essay, I asserted that Jesus may have taught that the individual Self is an illusion, and that we as sons of God are one with the Father. This teaching extends back centuries. The 8th century BCE Chandogya Upanishad of Hinduism asserts, “To him who sees, perceives, and understands this, the (Self) springs from (God)…He who sees this, does not see death.” One of the oldest Buddhist texts, the Dhammapada (also from the mid-first millennium BCE), says, “He who knows that this body is like froth, and has learnt that it is as unsubstantial as a mirage, will …never see the king of death.” To me, each of these teachings strip away the notion of Self-in-time, and assert instead a focus on existential experience. This strips away ‘I was’ and ‘I will be,’ leaving only ‘I am,’ the declaration of YHWH in Exodus 3:14. In From Science to God [26], Peter Russell writes, “What we then find is not a sense of ‘I am this’ or ‘I am that,’ but just ‘I am.’ In this state, you know the essence of self, and you know that essence to be pure consciousness. You know this to be what you really are. You are not a being who is conscious. You are consciousness. Period.” What Russell is suggesting is the very opposite of what Descartes proposed in First Meditations; Russell is combining the known and the knower, the subject and object. Physicist Erwin Schrodinger asserted similar nonduality in What is Life?, writing, “The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one.” The assertion that reality is but One, the Divine, is a well-worn religious idea found in Vedanta Hinduism, pre-Socratic Greek philosophy, and the Jewish Monotheism of Exodus 3:14. God is all Existence, and all Existence is (in) God, or as Acts 17:28 says, “in Him we live and breath and have our Being.”
Consciousness
What can we say about the nature of individual consciousness? I have expressed my doubts regarding the notion of a metaphysical individual Self that is separate from its surrounding, transcends the physical as self-existent, and retains its discrete identity even after death. I also doubt the premise that the cosmos is metaphysically “made of” unconscious, inert matter/energy. Rather, I suspect that consciousness is somehow woven into the fabric of the universe, or consciousness is itself the most fundamental aspect of the universe. Quantum experiments suggest a deep link between conscious awareness and the form ‘reality’ takes (the critical role of observation is fundamental to every theory of quantum mechanics). I suspect that a sense of Self may be shared by trillions of organisms and perhaps even non-organic systems. I suspect that a sense of awareness and the “physical” universe may be two sides of the same coin, co-arising and mutually reliant in some sense. This intuition is at the root of one of the oldest and most universal religious expressions: “I am” as a divine name, which equates the idea of “God” to consciousness, or Being, or Existence itself, or a placeholder than transcends both.
Practically speaking, I think systems of organization are constantly gathering and processing information, from the subatomic scale to the galactic scale. Atoms organize themselves in natural patterns, exchanging electrons, bonding, unbonding, in a never-ending process of recursive information responses. These atomic processes are the substrate of molecular processes, which underlie biological processes, which underlie environmental ecosystems, and so on. In Chaos, James Gleick writes, “Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern.” I suspect this recursive, fractal system of organization extends both up and down the scale, and maybe conscious ‘self-awareness’ appears at various levels in various forms. Steven Pinker describes this process in the human mind in How the Mind Works [67]: “Educated understanding is an enormous contraption of parts within parts. Each part is built out of basic mental models or ways of knowing that are copied, bleached of their original content, connected to other models, and packaged into larger parts, which can be packaged into still larger parts without limit. Because human thoughts are combinatorial (simple parts combine) and recursive (parts can be embedded within parts), breathtaking expanses of knowledge can be explored with a finite inventory of mental tools.” This recursive process adds up to a sense of ‘Self.’ As Hofstadter explained earlier in this essay, “The higher level takes perceptual precedence over the lower level, and in the process becomes the ‘more real’ of the two. The lower level gets forgotten, lost in the shuffle… The depth and complexity of human memory is staggeringly rich. Little wonder, then, that when a human being, possessed of such a rich armamentarium of concepts and memories with which to work, turns its attention to itself, as it inevitably must, it produces a self-model that is extraordinarily deep and tangled. That deep and tangled self-model is what ‘I’-ness is all about.”
There is no single theory of consciousness that I am wed to. It is a subject I will continue to study for the rest of my life; I can’t think of a more interesting or important scientific, religious, and philosophical question. That said, there are some theories that appeal to my current understanding, and some that don’t. Most fundamentally, I reject the notion that matter/energy is the sole fundamental “stuff” of reality. The premise of reductionist materialism leads to the popular Computational Theory of Mind which is embraced by philosophers like Daniel Dennett and Steven Pinker. The Computational Theory posits that there is no metaphysical Self, however, it fundamentally embraces the premise that the universe is made of inert matter, and consciousness is a coincidentally emergent property that is in no way fundamental or essential to the appearance or nature of the universe. In this model, consciousness is considered an epiphenomenon that has no causal role in the deterministic physics of a material universe. I feel this model does not sufficiently account for the powerful influence that consciousness appears to have on the physical substrate, nor does it acknowledge that consciousness itself precedes and perceives the appearance of matter. In other words, ignores that “matter” is a conclusion drawn from within consciousness. This model also struggles to explain why consciousness should evolve at all given its energy demands if it has no causal role in the survival of a species. Cartesian Dualism adds a layer of “thinking” substance but does not sufficiently account for the primacy of consciousness, nor the massive body of evidence suggesting that unconscious processes far outweigh (and perhaps determine altogether) conscious ones. I am confident that what exists as part of ‘reality’ extends (far) beyond the matter and energy that is recognized by conventional physics. The role of observation in quantum mechanics, suggestive evidence of many-sigma differences over chance in various long-researched psi phenomena like telepathy, ‘sight sense,’ human emotion, the placebo effect, or any of the countless other mysterious phenomenon, also suggest that are fundamental mistakes in the physicalist premise. The notion that reality is fundamentally rooted in consciousness, moreso than matter/energy, remains very viable as a philosophical argument. Are there any substantial theories that suggest consciousness is somehow foundational, interwoven, or a routinely emergent property of the universe? Are there any reputable theories postulating panpsychism? Yes, strict Physicalism and Cartesian Dualism are being challenged by a variety of theories. I will quickly cycle through four interesting theories that I have already explored a bit (in order from from least to most compelling), stripped to their most essential concepts. I would suggest skipping ahead to “Final Thoughts” unless you are a sucker for particularly speculative drivel.
Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR)
Orch OR was first proposed in the late 1980’s by renowned cosmologist Roger Penrose along with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff [60]. The theory has two parts. The first is “Orchestrated Reduction” (OR), which basically proposes that quantum superpositions naturally collapse as the superpositioned particles pull too far apart. The second part relates to consciousness, suggesting that consciousness is “Orchestrated” (Orch) with this OR. The authors propose that “consciousness consists of a sequence of discrete events, each being a moment of ‘objective reduction’ (OR) of a quantum state, where it is taken that these quantum states exist as parts of a quantum computation carried on primarily in neuronal microtubules. Such OR events would have to be ‘orchestrated’ in an appropriate way (Orch OR), for genuine consciousness to arise. OR itself is taken to be ubiquitous in physical actions, representing the ‘bridge’ between the quantum and classical worlds.”
The theory has faced intense criticism from the start, but still seems viable to me. It was initially dismissed because quantum states were thought impossible in the warmth of a biological brain, but quantum states like superposition and entanglement have since been verified in a wide variety of biological processes. The theory still remains unlikely, but nonetheless very interesting to me because of the way it attempts to link consciousness to quantum states. The authors write, “The Orch OR proposal suggests conscious experience is intrinsically connected to the fine-scale structure of space–time geometry, and that consciousness could be deeply related to the operation of the laws of the universe.”
Integrated Information Theory (IIT)
Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory (IIT) is fundamentally materialistic. It views matter/energy as the root “stuff” of reality, but the theory is panpsychic in that it proposes psyche can emerge in any system given sufficiently integrated information. In Consciousness as Integrated Information [57], Tononi writes, “According to the IIT, consciousness is one and the same thing as integrated information.” Tonini uses the symbol Φ to indicate the amount of integrated information in a given system that exceeds the sum of the parts. He writes, “just as the quantity of consciousness generated by a complex of elements is determined by the amount of integrated information it generates above and beyond its parts, the quality of consciousness is determined by the set of all the informational relationships its mechanisms generate. That is, how integrated information is generated within a complex determines not only the amount of consciousness it has, but also what kind of consciousness.” One key concept in Tononi’s theory is that Φ is determined by the number of possible states a system is capable of, and thus how many states are excluded by a particular pattern. It is the rich theoretical framework of possibilities that determines the degree of consciousness a system can experience. “For the IIT, the informativeness of consciousness is not related to how many chunks of information a single experience might contain. Instead, it relates to how many different states are ruled out.”
Tononi writes, “I argue that such Φ-centric view is at least as valid as that of a universe dominated by mass, charge, and energy. In fact, it may be more valid, since to be highly conscious (to have high Φ) implies that there is something it is like to be you, whereas if you just have high mass, charge, or energy, there may be little or nothing it is like to be you. From this standpoint, it would seem that entities with high Φ exist in a stronger sense than entities of high mass. Intriguingly, it has been suggested, from a different perspective, that information may be, in an ontological sense, prior to conventional physical properties (the it from bit perspective; Wheeler and Ford, 1998). This may well be true but, according to the IIT, only if one substitutes “integrated information” for information.” Extending this paradigm, one might consider the greatest Φ (perhaps the entire universe is a self-aware system) akin to what we might call “God.” Tononi continues, “the same ‘information’ may produce very different consequences in different observers, so it only exists through them but not in and of itself…. meaning is truly in the eye of the beholder: an input string as such is meaningless, but becomes meaningful the moment it is ‘read’ by a complex with a rich conceptual structure (corresponding to high Φ). Moreover, a complex with many different concepts will ‘read’ meaning into anything, whether the meaning is there or not.”
Naturalistic Panpsychism
The idea that consciousness is interwoven with matter is closer to my own intuition. Modern philosopher Thomas Nagel (incidentally, an atheist), has long challenged reductionist Materialism as a paradigm that can explain consciousness. In Mind and Cosmos [61], he contends, “The inescapable fact that has to be accommodated in any complete conception of the universe is that the appearance of living organisms has eventually given rise to consciousness, perception, desire, action, and the formation of both beliefs and intentions on the basis of reasons. If all this has a natural explanation, the possibilities were inherent in the universe long before there was life, and inherent in early life long before the appearance of animals. A satisfying explanation would show that the realization of these possibilities was not vanishingly improbable but a significant likelihood given the laws of nature and the composition of the universe. It would reveal mind and reason as basic aspects of a non-materialistic natural order… since the conscious character of these organisms is one of their most important features, the explanation of the coming into existence of such creatures must include an explanation of the appearance of consciousness. That cannot be a separate question. An account of their biological evolution must explain the appearance of conscious organisms as such. Since a purely materialist explanation cannot do this, the materialist version of evolutionary theory cannot be the whole truth. Organisms such as ourselves do not just happen to be conscious… materialism is incomplete even as a theory of the physical world, since the physical world includes conscious organisms among its most striking occupants.” Without using the notion of God, Nagel proposes a view that is deeply similar to Hinduism and pantheistic conceptions of Monotheism, wherein consciousness and matter are interwoven as the root fabric of the universe. He writes, “Everything, living or not, is constituted from elements having a nature that is both physical and nonphysical—that is, capable of combining into mental wholes. So this reductive account can also be described as a form of panpsychism: all the elements of the physical world are also mental.”
Idealism
Idealism is the philosophical assertion that consciousness is primary, and ‘matter’ is a construct of consciousness. It is the metaphysical picture that has been asserted by many Eastern mystics and philosophers for thousands of years. It was perhaps most famously introduced to western philosophy by Anglican Bishop George Berkeley who contended, much like Vedanta Hinduism, that reality is essentially ‘the mind of God.’ This idea is powerfully rejected by our intuitions of individual experience, the consistency of the ‘physical’ world, and the obvious constraints that limit the power of our consciousness to affect the ‘physical’ world. To address these very powerful and valid arguments would take another 30 pages (or really, much more). I don’t care to dive into that rabbit hole at this point. But I do want to paint the rough outline for why it is more plausible than seems possible upon initial consideration.
Most simply, Idealism just inverts the entire causal structure as typically understood. It says instead of matter giving rise to consciousness, consciousness gives rise to matter. In What We Believe but Cannot Prove [66], Donald Hoffman, the evolutionary anthropologist quoted on page 6, speculates, “Consider for instance the quest for the neural correlates of consciousness. …if consciousness is fundamental, then its neural correlates are a feature of our interface, corresponding to, but never causally responsible for, alterations of consciousness. Damage the brain, destroy the neural correlates, and consciousness is, no doubt, impaired. Yet neither the brain nor the neural correlates cause consciousness; instead, consciousness constructs the brain.” To illustrate, Hoffman provides an analogy, “Drag a file’s icon to the recycle bin and the file is, no doubt, deleted. Yet neither the icon nor the recycle bin, each a mere pattern of pixels on a screen, causes its deletion. The icon is a simplification, a graphical correlate of the file’s contents, intended to hide, not to instantiate, the complex web of causal relations.”
The one unequivocal argument in favor of Idealism is the observation that everything we experience is experienced within consciousness. We cannot experience anything outside of the constraints of human consciousness. Even the most mystical, transcendental, out-of-body experiences involve (perhaps later) conceiving and reporting on them within the constraints of human consciousness, thought and language. I believe mystical and paranormal experiences illustrate the profound limitations of materialism’s explanatory power. Idealism can find support in quantum physics, which tells us that there is no matter at the root of matter. The deeper we burrough, the less diverse and more simplistic the structures we find, until ultimately we can no longer discern things as things, but rather rely upon the analogy of universal ‘fields.’ A quantum field, an electron field, a proton field, so forth. We call small perturbations in this field things like ‘quark’ or ‘muon’ or ‘lepton.’ What if that ‘field’ is itself what we call ‘consciousness’? In the early twentieth century, after the discovery of quantum mechanics, Max Planck wrote, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” A century later, Donald Hoffman speculates, “I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. Spacetime, matter, and fields never were the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for their very being. The world of our daily experience—the world of tables, chairs, stars, and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels, and sounds—is a species-specific user interface between ourselves and a realm far more complex, whose essential character is conscious. It is unlikely that the contents of our interface in any way resemble that realm; indeed, the usefulness of an interface requires, in general, that they do not… if we assume that consciousness is fundamental, then the mind-body problem changes from an attempt to bootstrap consciousness from matter into an attempt to bootstrap matter from consciousness. The latter bootstrap is, in principle, elementary: Matter, fields, and spacetime are among the contents of consciousness.” He continues, “What we lose in this process are physical objects that exist independent of any observer. There is no sun or moon, unless a conscious mind perceives them; both are constructs of consciousness, icons in a species-specific user interface. To some this seems a reductio ad absurdum readily contradicted by experience and our best science. But our best science, which is our theory of the quantum, gives no such assurance, and experience once led us to believe that the earth was flat and the stars were near. Perhaps mind-independent objects will one day go the way of the flat earth… The heroic defense of physicalist ontology will, I suspect, not soon be abandoned, for the defenders doubt that a replacement grounded in consciousness could attain the mathematical precision or impressive scope of physicalist science.” A source of much confusion may be the ease with which Idealism can be confused with Solipsism, which is the idea that my personal subjective reality is the only reality. The difference is that Idealism does not assert that individual consciousness has any more freedom or control than imagined in standard materialism, but rather that individual conscious experience is constrained by a larger consciousness the same way as universal axiomatic ‘natural laws’ of ‘matter’ constrain personal physical movement. In Meaning in Absurdity, Bernardo Kastrup, a modern proponent of Idealism, writes, “since our consensus meta-reality is constructed coherently, then it is necessarily an interconnected and internally consistent whole. …This is a coherentist view of truth: truth and reality depend solely on a coherent fit within a context, not on strongly-objective facts lying ‘out there.’”
This view reflects the paradoxes and strange loops identified by Godel, Wittgenstein, Mandelbrot and others. Kastrup writes, “If realism is false, reality is fundamentally self-referential in the sense that subject and object are not distinct. When you look out at the world ‘out there,’ you may actually be looking at your own cognitive processes at work. When you defend truth propositions about reality, you may ultimately be defending propositions about the propositions themselves. Semantic paradoxes (like the “Liar’s Paradox”) may be built into the very fabric of reality, but the self-reference of this process may be so deeply buried in layer upon layer of indirection that we almost never become cognizant of it in our daily lives. It may have become nearly impossible to see where the ‘strange loop’ of reality closes.” Kastrup proposes that “Our consensus meta-reality is a metaphor of itself for itself; a self-referential ‘strange loop.’ Like an Escher drawing, it does not have one true explanation and meaning to the exclusion of all others. Instead, it is a collective story designed to evoke a journey through experience, emotion, and insight. In a way, it may be like a movie: When we watch a movie where, at the end, multiple explanations for the events of the plot are suggested but none is ever made explicit, we are content with the experience despite not knowing the ‘real’ explanation. We know full well that there is no such thing in a movie… it was never the point. Like actors who deeply internalize the experiences and emotions of their characters, we play our roles exceptionally well. So well, in fact, that it has become nearly impossible for us to transcend the characters.” I find Idealism interesting in part because of the skepticism I hold towards materialism, and in part because of the way that Idealism can tie together some of the observations and logical conundrums at the edges of science, psychology and religion.
Final Thoughts
I am non-dogmatic about my view of consciousness. It is all speculation. Even the views that I have ‘ruled out’ for now, (obviously) remain perfectly plausible possibilities that many more intelligent people than I still entertain and believe. It is a subject of research that I will continue to follow with great interest for the duration of my days. There is no part of my belief system that is not reliant upon all the other parts, so as my understanding of this subject changes, I expect it would trigger downstream changes in any number of areas. I remain confident in the premise I asserted in the Part 2 essay: that I can be certain of nothing except that something exists. Beyond that, I have only provisional and conditional beliefs. That includes my conclusion that there is no metaphysical individual self-existent “Self.” The idea of a “soul” remains useful to me, though perhaps only as a description or metaphor Like Wittgenstein, I have come to view all human knowledge and belief as dependent upon symbols of meaning (like language and math), and without any firm foundation beyond their own self-referential symbols.
This essay concludes the research-intensive portion of this project that has motivated me over the last few years. The goal was to establish for myself a ‘theory of everything’ that combines cohesive views about physics, philosophy, psychology and religion. I wanted to see if I could integrate these diverse fields into a single cohesive worldview that would hold up under cross-disciplinary scrutiny. I feel content with the extent and degree to which I have found common ground between these fields of interest. The journey itself, involving intensive reading, studying, self-examination, and perhaps most importantly forced articulation through writing, has been the most intellectually and religiously satisfying of my life. I am both deeply surprised by the content of the results, and pleased by the cohesive confluence of religious and scientific ideas into a single paradigm. It is a paradigm that is unlike anything I conceived when starting this process. I will write one final essay to summarize the philosophical and religious insights that I take away from this project.
REFERENCES:
My highlights from each source:
[1] Rene Descartes, Meditations of First Philosophy
[2] Jill Bolte Taylor. My Stroke of Insight
[3] Alan Watts, The Book: On the Tabook of Knowing Who you are
[4] Douglas Hofstadter, I am a Strange Loop
[5] Michael Gazzininga (et al), A Divided Mind
[6] David Eagleman, Incognito:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xFrMnDFBhyVs6umIVZMVcLT2QbgxmxQ44sHPmCCQ5RY/pub
[7] Evan Thompson. Waking, Dreaming, Being:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/14LOx4il15BgyFTLy03IuiT8rBXOXa8HrbnZLCUjVGtI/pub
[8] Erwin Schrodinger, What is Life?
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1M2H87hveIVvVrNAzMVi-VTPmFtleKUX0sEnZdGR0wa8/pub
[9] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time,
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aDlf4it4Z0SweHPBjeymZyw_jM_5t7GDgRC2RiLbKBQ/pub
[10] Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1llMP1Af03nw289HsDOQ7cmH3Js-FCGEighvnkwQVMaI/pub
[11] Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YOR2FlPITu_QdcXPfbTe2VRl58l8H7kX7Op1ARL5qVo/pub
[12] Michael Green, Quantum Physics and Ultimate Reality:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A401SACrH_j4ajOxUEjjWBJW0jN8dW2hgTICgcC-kNw/pub
[13] Daniel Dennett, Self as the Narrative Center of Gravity,
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fkAyuWMWtqma_Dy-JcKNLTjwtLUxZkrhPlXmVnYnIpA/pub
[14] Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TuHTjNXrU8A8bwQy9sn9Or_SHxm4sJva64632Ym9clg/pub
[15] Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BIMK-xOojnX0dYziL9DZvH2eT80fnPAyrFkD8LTtj7U/pub
[16] Albert Einstein, Relativity: Special and General Theory:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FCsNn8RZm-fxUWA54ZG6TxMdwolb3NeFuHTOarCfGm0/pub
[17] Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UHj73pvQWn61h77GO238DQUtXzBblqKcHHgF6Ftp13w/pub
[18] Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gl0Nq15JxtYxWPpUYzoP1OCgdAxHFkZuxa328BXo9gc/pub
[19] Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1S9gh0FEjiIg0acTjWMuG2pT3TFLEIH08DlhQlIqgSGU/pub
[20] Fritjof Capra, The Systems View of Life:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kNZwng_zhaGZ3WbyslkAKUrOS_hKXbIV69bxedOetlI/pub
[21] James Gleick, Chaos:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OFUSuJ6Zs3m66HN_Rques6sKfMn-E_QDx6QHwyFz8VU/pub
[22] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EF-d2m8k2vdPigZ1bOnZl4oJ25q4aS44nlUX9BM1nE4/pub
[23] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DIMwzAJwqYx0zUjXNdFgHau6jFeOt8iMDiYlJ0YAM68/pub
[24] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lMWWX19vGQNBaJ9HD_ID01JNS_2XI7SxfY0MpGAO-3M/pub
[25] John Dylan-Haynes et.al, Unconscious Determinants of Free Decisions:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fe2CxScUGkVdgBjaD7Y5TkDBuloTls-mRACDef_WYK0/pub
[28] David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vdzS7Kw9TfcqkgvtgPAJ0c49yAJ5LqGG_55p3bGVYvM/pub
[26] Peter Russell, From Science to God:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UfHnoOE0ghVtOQWUYvd3SjMSQcfMw28jNExpGihB5tw/pub
[27] Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kKFUcVKz2cdn7AxdhEuJlUj0dU3QxVAcz2ZevLCcnG8/pub
[28]: Memory Overview in summary: http://www.human-memory.net/index.html
[29]: Phineas Gage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage
[30]: Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman on experiencing vs remembering ‘self'
[31]: 80 millisecond lag in perception of experience
[32]: Time lag in perception
[33] Different species experience the same natural phenomena in different ways.
https://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/amaze.html
[34] A list of the frequency ranges that different animals are believed to hear:
http://www.lsu.edu/deafness/HearingRange.html
[35]: Plant seed sibling growth patterns: http://www.udel.edu/udaily/2010/oct/plantsiblings101409.html
[36] Donald Hoffman, survival over reality.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4060643/
http://www.cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/ConsciousRealism2.pdf
[37]: List of mental disorders: http://psychcentral.com/disorders/
[38] Phantom limbs: when someone feels pain in a limb that they no longer possess. For example, their left arm feel painful even though their left arm was amputated years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_limb
[39] BIID: When a person feels like a part of their body is alien, that it doesn’t truly belong to their body. People have asked to have body parts amputated, and been perfectly happy after the operation to have removed what seemed to be a perfectly healthy and functioning body part.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_identity_disorder
[40] Cotard’s Syndrome:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotard_delusion
[41]: Synesthesia: http://www.eagleman.com/synesthesia/q-a-a-with-david
[42] In Matthew Botvinick and Jonathan Cohen’s study, subjects were asked to close their eyes and point to their concealed left hand; they tended to point in the direction of the rubber one, with the degree of mispointing dependent on the reported duration of the illusion. In a similar experiment, conducted by K. C. Armel and V. S. Ramachandran at UCSD’s Brain and Perception Laboratory, if one of the rubber fingers was bent backward into a physiologically impossible position, subjects not only experienced their phenomenal finger as being bent but also exhibited a significant skin-conductance reaction, indicating that unconscious autonomous mechanisms, which cannot be controlled at will, were also reacting to the assumption that the rubber hand was part of the self. Only two out of one hundred and twenty subjects reported feeling actual pain, but many pulled back their real hands and widened their eyes in alarm or laughed nervously.”
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16809-body-illusions-rubber-hand-illusion/
[43] This article demonstrates the sound-reconstruction technology: http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/08/04/using_cameras_and_bag_of_chips_mit_researchers_recreate_sound.html.
[44]: Tracking the Unconscious Generation of Free Decisions:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fe2CxScUGkVdgBjaD7Y5TkDBuloTls-mRACDef_WYK0/pub
[45]: Divided Mind research: http://superfacts.org/dividedmind.pdf
[46]: More bacterial DNA than human DNA. Scientific American citing research from the University of Idaho: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-humans-carry-more-bacterial-cells-than-human-ones/
Microbial ecosystem: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129862107
https://www.acatoday.org/content_css.cfm?CID=5014
[47]: There is a lot of research on how gut bacteria impact and alter brain function, and how thought (stress, as a concrete example) can also alter the microbial makeup of our gut. There are many articles. This is one example from the American Psychological Association: http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/09/gut-feeling.aspx
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080603085914.htm
[48] Theory of Special Relativity:observer-dependant time. Depending upon observer location in spacetime, A can come before B, or B before A. Altered order is not only an appearance, but an actually. Past, present and future are more like a singularity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity
[49]: Quantum Entanglement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement
[50]: Delayed choice quantum eraser: In very short:
‘A quantum mechanically entangled pair of one photon and one atom is created. The atom can take two paths, emitting the photon in the process. By measuring the photon, it can now be determined which of the two paths the atom has taken. If we now measure the photon in such a way that it becomes fundamentally impossible to determine the atom’s path, as a consequence, the information about which path the atom has taken is, so to speak, erased. The atom then exhibits phenomena which can only be explained by its taking both paths, as a wave.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler%27s_delayed_choice_experiment
http://grad.physics.sunysb.edu/~amarch/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_eraser_experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_choice_quantum_eraser
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130109105932.htm
[51] The left hemisphere of the brain is more strongly associated with language the “narrative” role of self-identity. In general, the left hemisphere controls the right part of the body and vise versa. About 95% of humans are right-handed (whereas research currently suggests almost all other species are 50/50). The human predisposition to right-handedness may be tied to the development of motor control in the left hemisphere that resulted from language. This also may suggest that the human worldview of independent selves who place great importance on their own narrative is unique for reasons that don’t equate to deeper or better understanding of the world; instead, it is just a particular kind of understanding determined by a certain kind of thinking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateralization_of_brain_function
[52]: Autopoiesis definition and explanation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis
[53]: Our place and scale in timespace determines our view of it. A taste of scalar differences: http://scaleofuniverse.com/
As humans, our concepts of spacetime are tightly bound to our particular scale of experience [17]. The smallest thing the naked eye can see is about 4 orders of magnitude smaller than a human being. -4 orders of magnitude smaller than the smallest thing the naked eye can see (-8 from human) is roughly the size of a strand of double-helix DNA. At -10 from the human scale (or smaller than the smallest thing we could see, could see) is a hydrogen atom. Down another -4 orders of magnitude from a hydrogen atom is a classical electron at -14. Various quarks are around -18, and we are still finding quarks at -22. The Planck length, the smallest spatial distance conceived by humans, is -35. Most of that range is well beyond human imagination, much less perception. An electron, at -14, has never actually been “observed,” it is strictly a reliable abstraction. We find the same profound incapacity to conceive as we expand outward. Mount Everest (from sea level) is about +4 orders of magnitude larger than a human being. The Earth is 7.1, Saturn is 8, and our Sun in 9.2. Wow, that happened fast, huh? +12 orders of magnitude are some much larger stars. +16 is about the size of various Nebulas. +20 is various galaxies. +24 is superclusters of galaxies. +27 is entire observable universe (at present). We as humans can comprehend just a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of this spatio-temporal universe. If we zoom in about 12 orders of magnitude, or zoom out about 12 orders of magnitude, the notion of a human form is reduced to little more than a theoretical abstraction.
[54]: Block Universe and Temporality: http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/special_relativity.html
[55]: Role of “mother” trees in communicating and feeding smaller trees
[56]: Research at Johns Hopkins comparing effects of psilocybin mushrooms to mystical experiences
[57]: Giulio Tononi: Consciousness as Integrated Information (a):
[58]: Shoyen Shaku: Sermons of a Buddhist Abbot:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yLyneSOqIBObqMm2Dj-ai_OvKj85y3qAimafQCQ29Iw/pub
[59]: Block Universe (sometimes called ‘Eternalism’): Implied nature of spacetime imagined by Einstein, wherein spacetime is a block. This is contrasted with ‘Growing Block’ (gives causal precedent to present), and ‘Presentism’ which suggest all time coexists in a simultaneous ‘now.’
http://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/special_relativity.html
[60] Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose: Orchestrated Object Reduction (Orch OR)
Original paper: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1571064513001188
My notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JOy7B8_1V-AD5n0nAAwwQEKDD1MNpUcftdmZU3iy4OY/pub
[61] Thomas Nagle: Mind and Cosmos:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KXaishpSLw5C8v72_y-NQiHjEBukXRo0BaHQOTRiBZM/pub
[62] A useful summary from RationalWiki regarding the big picture problem posed by Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems: “Gödel shows that it is impossible to be completely truthful and completely universal; you can never say every true statement without saying some false ones, or, alternatively, you can never say only true things without being forced to withhold some true statements.”
Ernest Nagle – Godel’s Proof:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d1MozYwlfCMElgLhJR39KUwzyEHTIlLFD-psTXO_ejo/pub
[63] A little blog post I wrote that I think gets at a very simple challenge to logic:
https://perennialmystery.wordpress.com/2015/04/03/the-law-of-identity/
[64] “The Butterfly Effect”: the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect
[65]: Panpsychism:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-consciousness-universal/
[66]: What We Believe But Cannot Prove, John Brockman, includes the Panpsychic speculation of Donald Hoffman:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nZ36_aBoqJFhd0RkdXFEDH70kVCnjOEhUl-w__iG9Xc/pub
[67 ]: StevenPinker: How The Mind Works:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/10Fu-C6EhO-2hBBII0voxJuoohnseL4wt5FxoYZUmKV8/pub
[68]: DNA similarities across carbon-based life forms on Earth:
http://www.genome.gov/11509542
https://www.koshland-science-museum.org/sites/all/exhibits/exhibitdna/intro03.jsp