A Second Round of Musings

Date

2/24/19

This round of Musings fits into a natural place in the development of my life. To sketch out that development it started at age 4 or 5 when I first consciously realized that I was conscious. It was a startling and memorable event that I have documented in other places.

As a direct result of that experience, I began a life-long, although not-too-serious, effort to understand consciousness. I say it wasn't too serious because it didn't occupy much of my time and I didn't pursue any formal training in disciplines that might have promised to provide that understanding. Instead, my approach was to ask anybody who I thought might be able to help.

I started with my parents and have only a dim recollection of their response—that was more or less a flat-out acknowledgement that they had no idea and couldn't help me.

Similarly, my Sunday School teachers, and my Pastor admitted that they couldn't help me. I didn't ask anyone during grade school, high school, or even college. Instead I paid a lot of attention to what the textbook authors had to say on the subject and found that they were as much in the dark as anyone else.

All during these disappointments, I began thinking about the question myself and tried to work out an explanation.

After a full seven decades of working at it, I finally arrived at an explanation that I am ready to defend. My prior musings describe the final stages of that effort. The result was the submission of an essay to Max Tegmark's contest which challenged writers to explain how lifeless mathematics could give rise to aims and intentions. His premise is that reality is nothing but mathematics all the way down but yet he acknowledges the existence of aims and intentions in what we think of as consciousness. He wanted to explain that gap.

My essay summarized my answer to the question, as well as briefly outlined my views of cosmogony, the evolution of consciousness from an unconscious beginning, and the physics and physiology of the mechanism that endows human beings with the ability to experience consciousness.

In a way, I considered my work to be done. I had done my best to describe my theory of consciousness in 8 pages, I had gotten it before the eyes of some credentialed, high-powered academics (the judges in Max's contest), and I figured that was about all I felt like doing. I wanted, and took, a break from thinking about the question of consciousness.

But now, after a couple of years have passed, I sort of feel rejuvenated and I am inspired to expand the ideas so briefly summarized in those 8 pages and present them to any audience willing to look at them.

I thought about making a series of YouTube videos, but because of the work that would be involved, I decided against it, at least for the meantime. I decided to use my old method of musing instead. And here we are.

In case you are unfamiliar with my earlier musings, I'll explain my method. Whenever I have the time and the inspiration to write an addition to my musing, I sit down at the computer and compose a "stream of consciousness" account of what I am thinking. I try to keep my thoughts organized enough so that the stream is coherent and leads to the idea I want to convey. I do that until I am tired, hungry, am interrupted, or otherwise ready to stop with the intention to resume at the next opportunity when I am inspired and have the time.

I do not go back and edit what I wrote. As I said, it is a "stream of consciousness" and once it is written, it stays. However, in my first musing, I did sometimes go back and interject some new material, but it was clearly dated and marked off by brackets. If circumstances require it, I may do that in this musing as well.

So now that the preliminaries are nearly complete, let's get started. The only preliminary remaining is for me to thank you sincerely for having the interest to read these first two pages. It is, after all, you for whom I am writing. I hope I can make the reading worth it to you.

I am now poised at the keyboard with a cat on my lap wondering where and how to begin. I think I will start by summarizing my 8-page essay even further. I'll do my best to describe my theory of consciousness as succinctly as I can:

Consciousness is a process with inputs and outputs that allows conscious individuals to input information about their existence, to know and understand some aspects of their existence as a result, and to deliberately output some influences into the world in which they find themselves for the purpose of altering the evolution of that world.

That's a long and complicated sentence. Let's unpack it. As you follow along, realize that you are a conscious individual and as you contemplate my sentence, you can use yourself as an example of the processes I will describe.

The idea of a process with inputs and outputs is common in computer applications so it should be a familiar notion to you. It is also equivalent to the mathematical notion of a function. In mathematics, the inputs are called independent variables and the outputs are called dependent variables. The function itself is the process of transforming the inputs to produce the outputs.

In the case of consciousness, the inputs are perceptions and conceptions (or maybe it should be percepts and concepts), and the outputs are acts of free will, the acquisition of knowledge, and the acquisition of understanding.

We will be exploring this idea much deeper later on, but for now I simply wanted to define 'consciousness' so that we can use the term in my description of my theory of consciousness.

In my theory, in the beginning there was no consciousness. There wasn't much of anything else either. In most cosmogony stories, in the beginning there was something fantastically complex, powerful, unlikely, or otherwise hard to believe—an infinite stack of turtles for example. In my cosmogony, I want the beginning to be ultimately simple. Even simpler than the modern Western Cosmogonists. They posit a Big Bang occurring in an environment of fantastically improbable low entropy. Our starting point can't be anywhere near that improbable or complex.

The speculation gets very sketchy here, but our starting point can contain nothing but the equivalent of a mathematical point. We could call it the Primordial Point, but that's a little fancy. Let's instead simply call it the Starting Point.

The mathematical point has never been defined nor described, but it does have some attributes that we know. We know, for example, that it has zero dimensions and that it has zero size. Our Starting Point should have zero dimensions and zero size. There was no infinite, or even vast, space as the background for the Starting Point. There was just the point.

The alternative was nothing. Leibnitz suggested that between the two alternatives, i.e. something and nothing, there is the mystery of why there is something and not nothing. But it is clear that there is something, so we can rule out the "nothing" alternative and accept our Starting Point.

So, in the beginning there was one thing: The Starting Point. Was there anything else? Well, sort of. There was that alternative "nothing". This is where we need to step back and realize that we are speculating in an area where we have virtually nothing to go on. But if there were something in addition to the Starting Point, then we could label it "not the Starting Point".

Now what could that give us? Well, in my cosmogony, that is where George Spencer-Brown enters the discussion. He explored the basic rudiments of logic to see if there wasn't some necessity inherent in an ultimately simple starting point. We'll suppose it applies to our Starting Point.

I speculate that one of those necessities will turn out to be that if you have one point, you will have two. And of course, that leads to a lot more.

By now, we have already entered Never-Neverland and we are into the weakest part of my theory of consciousness. So, let's leave the related difficulties behind us and continue to describe my cosmogony and the following cosmology.

If a succession, or stream of points, somehow is generated, the notions of time and space will appear. If the succession of points is somehow arranged in the order they first appeared, we will have constructed one dimension. This dimension could be "seen" as a dimension of space or a dimension of time.

Let me get out of the quicksand here and sketch the process out at a high level. By forming space-filling fractals, extra dimensions could be constructed as the stream of points continues. Patterns of points could be considered to be information, and, by forming closed loops, patterns of points could form information that endures.

Information-bearing patterns of points could replicate and propagate, and by Darwinian Evolution, develop into more and more complex configurations.

Eventually, complex patterns at some stage could produce space-filling fractals introducing yet higher dimensions with their own complex patterns. The former could be seen as "creators" and the latter as "creatures".

If, as I think we can demonstrate, creators could create creatures that exceed the capability, or complexity, of the creators, then as the evolution proceeds reality could reach the stage we find ourselves in and which we can observe now. As an example, humans now fabricate computers that vastly exceed the capability of their creators in terms of speed and memory.

This leads us to my cosmology. As I see it, reality now consists of some number of spatial and temporal dimensions, which exceeds 4 and is probably in the range of 11 to 20. Our Big-Bang-generated universe is a 4-D space-time manifold embedded in a higher-dimensional space-time.

There may be many more "worlds" which are other manifolds existing in our hyperspace, or in other hyperspaces. These notions are now being talked about by credentialed scientists as "branes", many-worlds, and so on.

So where, you might ask, did consciousness show up in this cosmology? My answer is that it gradually accrued, starting with nothing at the Starting Point, and reaching the stage it is now with you, the reader of this, and me, the writer of this speculation.

If you consider the complex structure of points that make up a human body as being "created" by a complex structure in another dimension, then the question of whether that "creator" is/was conscious pops up. And then what about its creator? Those questions have occurred to many thinkers, but they are too often dismissed as implying "infinite regress" and therefore are not real questions. I see it differently.

In my view, nothing is infinite, so there is no infinite regress. Instead it is like a finite set of Matryoshka Dolls, say from 11 to 20 of them, with a last one that is really not a doll at all but simply a small speck of wood.

So, to locate consciousness, you have to look not only at the human body/brain, but at the succession of "creators" above. And in my view, consciousness diminishes as you go up this hierarchy so that it makes no appearance at the top—the Starting Point.

Gregg Rosenberg in his book, A Place for Consciousness, describes just such a hierarchy although he makes no comment on where the hierarchy might exist. He also describes each node of the hierarchy as embodying two principles: a receptive principle and an effective principle. Those are the "inputs" and "outputs" respectively that we described at the beginning of this work.

The "smearing" of the various aspects of consciousness has not been worked out and it is one of the major objectives of this musing to begin working it out.

The "smearing" goes up Rosenberg's hierarchy from creature to creator until it reaches a level at which it vanishes. The first link in that chain is between a human brain and the creator at one level higher. Since we have access to the manifold in which the brain exists, we are in a position to look for evidence of our end of the mind/brain interface. Descartes thought along these lines and speculated that the pineal gland might be the transponder in the brain to connect it with the mind, which exists somewhere else.

In our system, the "somewhere else" is identified as a functioning structure in a higher-dimensional space which embeds our 4-D space-time as a manifold. And instead of the pineal gland, it is more likely that the transponder is the claustrum. The transmission link to the mind is probably very similar to the communication links among our many artifacts, such as between JPL and a Mars Rover.

With the addition of extra dimensions, the possibility exists for new forces, undetectable to us in our manifold because the force acts normal, i.e. perpendicular, to our manifold. This means that all component vectors of the force accessible to us would be zero. Just as in electromagnetic wave communication, the new force could be coupled with another force (just like the electric and magnetic forces are coupled) that may or may not be known to us. For example, it might couple with gravity, or even with one of the EM forces.

Our explanation as we will show, demolishes the reasons and excuses for the historical rejection of Cartesian Dualism. It explains the mind/brain communication link; we have already explained away the supposedly infinite regress of the homunculus problem; and we will explain later how the mind can influence the body without breaking the laws of physics by using quantum actions, as explained by Penrose and Hameroff, which stay under the threshold of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

So, there you have it. That is a sketch of my view of Cosmogony and Cosmology that explains the nature of consciousness and the structures involved in its functioning.

The next order of business is to investigate the smearing of the aspects of consciousness up and down Rosenberg's hierarchy of creators.

We begin by analyzing the structure of consciousness. Here is a list of some, perhaps not all, of the features or components:

Awareness, experience, perception, the ability to notice, the self, thought, feelings, intentionality, attention, free will, purpose, imagination, conception, pattern recognition, memory, self-reflection, logical ability (reason), knowledge, comprehension, understanding, meaning, value, morality, wisdom.

The list is arranged in the order the components would appear in a narrative I might deliver to answer the question, "What is consciousness like for you?" I might say,

"I am aware that I have experiences, I perceive a world around me which just asked me a question about consciousness, and I notice that I need to use the word "I" frequently just to respond to the question. That "I" is my self.

"I experience thought happening and among the thoughts I experience are many feelings ranging from pain to various other sensations and urges. My attention seems to be focused on one mental aspect at a time. Among the feelings are intentions, which somehow urge me to take some action. I take those actions by exercising my free will to redirect my attention so that I may achieve some purpose.

"I can imagine counterfactuals by an exercise of will. I can recognize patterns and concepts among those counterfactuals. I can relegate those concepts, along with perceptions and other experiences to my memory and retrieve them later. I have the ability to consider concepts and infer new and different concepts as logical implications of the ones I am considering. I can reason.

"In my memory, I have accumulated quite a store of concepts along with myriad percepts which, taken together, I count as knowledge. I comprehend many of the interrelationships among the percepts and concepts that I know. Thus, I understand much of what I know. I seem to understand some of the relationships between what I know and the world around me, which gives that knowledge some meaning. Some of those relationships are more important than others, which gives them value. Applying those values to the world constitutes morality. And understanding morality constitutes wisdom." (The preceding was taken from my essay "A Proposal for a New Paradigm".)

I have reached my limit for one sitting so I will close this off until next time. See you then.



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