Religion in a Scientific Age?
Posted by: droodzilla on 28 July 2007
I thought I'd rescue my post from "the other thread", which - to my mind - is in danger of becoming a fruitless exchange of entrenched opinions. I'm interested in what's salvageable, given that so many of religion's claims have been repudiated by modern science. I think that there is something valuable that we need to preserve, but that this is *not* a commitment to the existence of supernatural entities, or to any of the other "fairy stories" traditionally associated with religion. Rather, it is a way of viewing the one and only world described by modern science - a way of viewing that acknowledges the existence of ineffable experience, and sees value in cultivating it. According to this view, attaining the religious perspective is akin to experiencing a kind of global gestalt switch, which transforms your view of the world, and your place in it. An yway, here's my original post - anyone out there willing to engage with an open mind?
quote:The dogmatism of many religious believers bothers me, but I also dislike the crassness of strident atheists such as Dawkins and Hitchens. I believe that there is something essential at the core of the great religions, but that all too many believers become entangled in the superficial aspects of their chosen faith.
Rather than attempt a summary of my views from scratch, here's one I prepared earlier for a couple of friends, who had just read Dawkins' book. It's a little abstract, informed, as it is, by the sum total of my philosophical influences, but I hope that it will be of some use to those forum members who haven't already made their minds up.quote:
My thoughts so far...
All the interesting stuff (from my PoV) is out of the way by the end of the
first chapter, in which Dawkins contrasts Einsteinian "religion"
(E-religion) with the supernatural variety (S-religion).
He will focus on the latter for the rest of the book - fair enough, as this
is what most people see as religion, or adhere to, if they're believers. I
accept that S-religion is untenable, and expect to agree with much of what
he says. There are no supernatural facts.
However, I expect his tone will grate because:
a. he's a rather obnoxious fellow anyway; and
b. arguably, E-religious experiences are the root of S-religion
b. is one of the lines of thought explored by William James in "Varieties of
Religious Experience". Founders of religious sects often have dramatic
E-religious experiences: overwhelming feelings of awe and wonder at the
compexity and scale of the natural order; an inchoate sense of gratitude
that we are here at all to witness it. Often these are culturely mediated
(e.g. visions of the Second Coming); but not always. I think that James
views these as the living root of religion, and I'm inclined to agree. This
is why I have some residual sympathy for S-religion, even though many of its
fruits have fallen a long way from these roots. I certainly admire some of
its more moderate proponents.
The important thing about these experiences, which Dawkins doesn't take into
account is that they are, by their nature, mystical - i.e. they cannot be
adequately described in language, or otherwise conceptualised. I think that
this fact alone (if accepted) ought to make them anomalous in Dawkin's quite
hardcore positivist worldview - I'm sure he would dispute the idea that
there are any such ineffable experiences.
This ties in with Buddhism, which boiled down (i.e. stripping out the
S-religious stuff about reincarnation, etc.) amounts to:
a. It is possible to experience the world as it is in itself, unmediated by
conceptual baggage
b. It is desirable to do so, as it frees us from suffering (caused,
ultimately, by our perception of ourselves as isolated egos)
I'm not claiming to be enlightened - that really would be too much! - but my
experience of meditation (outside of any Buddhist community or organisation,
or any other religious context) supports the above claims.
In sum, religion/faith, stripped to its barest essentials, is the claim that
there is such a thing as ineffable experience, and that it is valuable. I
think this is probably true; I suspect that Dawkins doesn't. There is a
historical link between such experience, and organised religion, but this
gets more tenuous as the level of organisation increases, and the religion
is dumbed down to compete in the meme marketplace.
I doubt that I'll have much of interest to say about the rest of the book,
as this is the critical point, at which Dawkins and I diverge.
Hope that's understandable - and not entirely crazy! It's a fascinating
topic that I've thought hard about, and I'd be interested in some rational
critique!
quote:Originally posted by Andrew Randle:
[QUOTE]
[QUOTE] Something like that. I'm sure there's more to it too.
For a practicing Christian that uses the term and has no doubt heard it used by others countless times I am surprised (not)that you do not have a better definition.
quote:However, isn't it strange I always wake up as me in the morning and not in someone else's body.
Not for long Andrew, not for long.
Fredrik.
I could post the whole book but I will make do with just one chapter out of 12. If you want to learn to meditate you will have your 'testable proof' (and I repeat 'no faith required') in the meantime the following will give you a taste of what is involved in this area of study and debate - I'm afraid you are drowning in your own lack of precise understanding of the terms you are using.
Dancing in Emptiness by graham Smetham (soon to be published)research and other contributions by moi.
Chapter 6 The Matter of Consciousness
An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.
-Daniel Dennett
…many people find it disturbing that the richness of our mental life – all our thoughts, feelings, emotions, even what we regard as our intimate selves – arises entirely from the activity of little wisps of protoplasm in the brain. How is this possible? How could something as deeply mysterious as consciousness emerge from a chunk of meat inside the skull?
- V. S. Ramachandran
Therefore all these various appearances,
Do not exist as sensory objects which are other than consciousness.
Their arising is like the experience of self-knowledge.
All appearances, from indivisible particles to vast forms, are mind.
This means, that if nothing exists externally and separately,
Brahma and the rest, could not be creators.
- Third Karmapa
In this chapter we will resolve the matter of whether an ‘impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery’ could possibly be the agency that lies at the bottom of the development of consciousness. Dennett is probably one of the most pugilistic intellectual proponents of materialism around at the moment. As such he represents the pinnacle of an intellectual insanity that informs a great deal of Western thinking regarding the basic categories of existence, consciousness and matter. Dennett is quite right to reject an acceptance that there can be two basic, distinct and opposite ‘substances’ at the root of reality, but, as we shall see, his battle cry for an out and out materialism is hollow.
The seventeenth century philosopher John Locke was a contemporary of Descartes and, despite the fact that he is credited with establishing an opposing perspective to Descartes, empiricism as opposed to rationalism; he shared the fundamental worldview of the time. His philosophy is imbued with the fundamental Cartesian epistemological, and the implied ontological, gap between an external realm of material entities and the inner world of experience. As a consequence he faced the question which echoes down to the present: How can these two realms relate to each other?
Locke suggested that the situation could be clarified by using a division into primary and secondary qualities:
The ideas of primary qualities of bodies are direct resemblances of them, and the patterns do really exist in the bodies themselves; but the ideas, produced in us by those secondary qualities, have no resemblance of them at all.
According to Locke’s viewpoint the ‘primary’ qualities are those aspects of the object that we perceive that really do inhere in the object as a feature belonging to the object. ‘Secondary’ qualities, on the other hand, are qualities that are displayed only when the object in question meets a given sense organ. From this point of view a sugar cube, for example, really is a cube with a certain length of side but sweetness is not inherent in the cube. The sugar cube’s sweetness only becomes apparent when a human being tastes it. Therefore the shape of the cube is primary whilst its taste is secondary. The secondary qualities such as taste do not have an independent existence of their own. They result from an interaction of other aspects of reality, in the case of the sugar cube the meeting of the tongue and sugar.
This way of looking at the situation illustrates quite nicely the Madhyamika concept of ‘inherent existence’ as opposed to ‘dependent-origination’. Locke’s notion of a primary quality corresponds to the concept of inherent existence. The entity that is perceived is assumed to exist exactly as it is perceived in external reality. A secondary quality, on the other hand, depends upon the meeting of a primary, inherent, aspect of reality and a sense organ. As a consequence a secondary quality does not exist as it appears.
A secondary quality is a content of consciousness, which therefore must itself share the nature of consciousness. It is supposed to be caused by the meeting of sense faculty and object and is therefore not identical to any part of the object. It could not be identical to any aspect of the object precisely because consciousness is not material whilst the object is. We might wish to say that a secondary quality is a mental impression, or aspect, of the perceived object; although how such a thing could come about is not obvious. Locke, however, needed a starting point and this viewpoint served its purpose.
Locke’s division into primary and secondary qualities is paralleled within Buddhist thought by two non-Madhyamika schools, the Vaibhashikas and the Sautrantikas. The Vaibhashika position is that external objects do exist and that consciousness is able to directly grasp the nature of the object as it is ‘nakedly’ which is to say without an intervening mental aspect. The Sautrantikas on the other hand refute this position and assert that external entities can only be apprehended with a mental aspect which mediates, so to speak between consciousness and the outside world.
The position of the Vaibhashikas, which corresponds to Locke’s direct perception of primary qualities, is refuted by the Madhyamika on the ground that consciousness and matter are completely opposite, matter being nonmental:
The nature of mind is absent from nonmental things.
How the could self-cognizing consciousness
Know other things? For you have said
That the known and the knower are two different entities
It is very easy to read this kind of analysis without reflecting deeply upon what is being indicated so it sometimes useful to step back and really try to picture what is being pointed out. The division into the realms of consciousness and matter allocates very different natures to the results of its dissection. In particular the quality of consciousness always carries within it an aspect of self-cognition, an inner luminosity. This is a kind of interior self-illumination that is imparted to all its perceptions. This fact instantly means that my perceptions can never be veridical to whatever is ‘out there’ because external objects do not have this inner luminosity that my consciousness imparts to them.
The indication ‘For you have said that the known and the knower are two different entities’ is important. It indicates that the argument is not in terms of our own private definitions but that the argument is in terms with what is accepted by the interlocutor. For the Madhyamaka the usual definitions of consciousness and matter are those accepted in the West since Descartes time, they are defined to be opposite in nature. Not opposite in a vague and indeterminate manner; they are inherently, or ultimately, opposite, having no common natures.
Now if the two extremities of the perceptual configuration lack any commonalities whatsoever then the notion that they can effectively interact in any way is simply out of the question. For this reason the Madhyamika analysis rejects the Vaibhashika viewpoint:
For those who disallow that consciousness
Is modified by aspects of nonmental things-
There can be no perception
Of external objects.
The fundamental idea that two entities that are completely lacking in common ground cannot interact is accepted by Dennett, he offers the example of Jasper the ghost to illustrate the point. If Jasper is pure non-material consciousness how can he move things around? Dennett, however, reaches the conclusion that there is no conscious perception, perception is purely mechanical. We shall return to this absurdity at a later point.
There is another, very subtle, reason why the Vaibhashika viewpoint must be rejected. If the view that material entities necessarily impress themselves upon consciousness and leave their mark is correct, then this must extend to all external material objects:
The experience of an object cannot be merely the effect of causation (exerted by the object upon the mind), for if it were, the simultaneously occurring visual organ ought also to be seen …
This kind of analysis will probably surprise some readers for it seems so obvious that this does not occur and we are used to the descriptions of how light enters the eye and is focused on the retina and so on. The point is, however, that we are concerned here with the fundamental analysis of interaction of consciousness and external matter proposed by the Vaibhashikas. The proposal is that material entities inherently possess the capacity to impress themselves on consciousness. If this were true then the sense organ would impress itself as well as the perceived object. The Madhyamaka style of analysis is a strictly no holds barred approach.
The Sautrantika viewpoint introduces the mental aspect into the equation:
According to the theory of mental aspect,
Mind and object are in fact distinct
But since the aspect is akin to a reflection,
It is by such means that things can be experienced.
Now this seems, on the face of it, to be a more acceptable view of things; for if consciousness cannot directly grasp what’s on the outside, so to speak, it can apprehend such inner reflections of the external world.
The advantage in this view is that it supplies a possibility of internal perception; consciousness can get hold of its mental aspects which share its own nature. Unfortunately, however, the relationship between the mental aspect and the object shares the same problem as the original Vaibhashika view. How does the mental aspect get reflected within consciousness; the mental aspect and the object are of opposite natures. An important point, however, is that the Sautrantika position does rescue a model of perception, therefore from the viewpoint of the Madhyamaka, it is considered to be a superior viewpoint.
The notion that there can be ‘superior’ mistaken views requires explication. The Madhyamaka pursues its philosophical analysis from various points of view according to the level of analysis. Whilst from with one context a viewpoint might be shown to be wanting, within its own context there may be validity. The notion of levels, of course, begins with the doctrine of the two truths; conventional truths are functional and correct on the level of the seeming but are voided by ultimate analysis. But it is also understood that within the conventional level there are levels of truth depending on the context of analysis. This is can be illustrated within Western thought by the contrast of the Newtonian worldview and the quantum. Is the Newtonian viewpoint shown to be completely false by the quantum viewpoint, of course not; when a satellite is launched the mathematical equations employed to set its course are basically Newtonian because in this context they are the ones that apply.
The Madhyamaka consists of a set of conceptual systems which each articulate different levels of understanding. The idea is that the different levels of analysis are appropriate to different levels of human understanding, or are appropriate with a certain set of hypotheses. The Tibetan word which is translated as ‘hypothetical’ actually means ‘holding an extreme for the sake of analysis’. This is an important point for the understanding of the use of conceptual systems within the Madhyamaka. The final goal of the Madhyamaka is to achieve a knowledge which is deeper than a knowledge which can be articulated in concepts. Conceptual formulations can be used to capture aspects of the final view but each viewpoint can only be partial, and in a sense the ultimate viewpoint is to see the way in which seemingly contradictory viewpoints coexist. The approach towards the ultimate view, therefore, is through a hierarchy of views of reality which form a natural progression towards the ultimate view of the emptiness of inherent existence in all phenomena. Each of these views can be considered to be a partial disclosure of the nature of reality, rather than a completely correct or incorrect one.
Locke’s notion of a primary quality is clearly problematic in a similar way to the Vaibhashika view. If primary qualities are aspects of an object which are really inherent in the object independent of human sensory cognition then they must be qualities which are forever beyond experience. This is because any cognition must also be an interaction and therefore can only produce a secondary quality, which corresponds to the Sautantrika mental aspect. Locke himself did not seem to be aware of this problem. For him aspects of external objects such as extension and hardness were considered to be incontrovertible aspects of an object that were completely and independently inherent in the object.
When Bishop Berkley looked at Locke’s determination of the realms of primary and secondary qualities he saw that the representational ‘ideas’ which were supposed to represent the attributes of external phenomena could only be secondary qualities. The primary qualities which were meant to really be ‘in’ the material objects were as unknowable and irrelevant as the notion of substance itself. Berkley’s logical detachment of the realm of ideas from the supposed realm of pure materiality did not take much effort because in essence the two entities were detached in the first place by the fact that they could not be identical because they inhabited antithetical realms. Ideas are mind stuff and the ‘real’ primary qualities are supposed to be matter stuff so they cannot be identical. Once this unavoidable consequence is clearly realised the notion that there are definite primary qualities inhering externally in the object exactly as represented by the idea becomes unviable.
The next step that Bishop Berkley made was dramatic. The only entities that an embodied perceiver could know for certain as viable are the ideas which carry the implication of an external world. The existence of an external world of matter, however, is an imputation which cannot be proved because we only have direct access to the ideas. In fact the whole imaginative construction of an external material world is redundant, the ‘ideas’ are the only entities we can claim to know about with certainty. Consequently the material world can be discounted as a true reality, only the ideas are truly existent. For Berkley reality was within perception itself and the notion of anything beyond was irrelevant and beyond proof. Berkley’s deconstruction of Locke’s analysis leads us directly to the primacy of mind.
Berkley argued that the experiences which we suppose indicate an external would are actually nothing but experiences, which is to say that they are creations within the mind. There is no independent world of physical substance or substances beyond the experiences. An immediate question which arises concerns the regularity of the world which appears as being beyond and independent of our minds. On the most simple level suppose it is accepted that the room I am in is kept in existence by my mind creating room-like experiences. Why does it remain in seeming existence, in a form at least similar to the way that my mind experienced it, for other people and for me when I return? In other words, if the entire fabric of reality is a creation of mind what gives it a coherence which is shared by the experiences within many different minds? True to his calling as priest and theologian Berkley resorted to the same cosmic glue as Descartes had used, according to Berkley the cause of consistency within the multitude of perceptions on the part of great numbers of minds was the overarching mind of God which maintained the experiential fabric of reality. All perceptions were ultimately in the mind of God.
The logical analysis that Berkley presented is actually, logically, irrefutable. Samuel Johnson’s companion and biographer, James Boswell, remarked to him that despite the fact that it seemed contrary to common sense Berkley’s idealism did seem to be beyond refutation. Dr Johnson, himself lacking any logical counter argument, kicked a stone and claimed that this constituted sufficient refutation:
After we came out of church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, that everything in the universe is merely ideal. I observed that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Dr. Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it – ‘I refute it thus.’
Note the use of the term ‘merely’ in this quote, its use clearly indicates that Boswell considers that if Berkley’s philosophy were to be true then ‘reality’ would have to be demoted in status. If it turned out to be ‘merely’ ‘consciousness’ masquerading as ‘matter’ then its inhabitants would have been severely short changed! This is an evaluation of the status of consciousness which, as we shall find, still reverberates around the arena of Western thinking today. Bishop Berkley’s argument still remains watertight, and it is important to understand exactly why it is watertight whereas materialism is not. The fact that it is logically watertight is certainly indicated by the fact that opponents like Dr. Johnson have to kick stones, and latter day opponents like Dennett are forced to resort to what the philosopher John Searle calls ‘intellectual pathology.’
The division of the epistemological structure of reality is clearly not symmetrical because the human mind, or consciousness, is, so to speak, at one end of it, not in the middle. It quite naturally follows that the only answer to the question ‘which are the entities that you have direct access to, your internal perceptions of material things or the material things themselves?’ can only be answered in one way. This was clearly seen by Kant who asserted that the ‘things in themselves’ were beyond knowledge. Locke also considered that the notion of ‘substance’ was equally illusive to direct knowledge. The configuration of our embodied situation weighs the scales for direct knowledge in favour of consciousness; it cannot be any other way.
However, the tendency to assume that the world we experience at the everyday level must be to all intents and purposes, or more or less, indicative of how reality ‘really’ is seems to be an innate predisposition of the human mind. It is a view of reality that is still deeply embedded in the discourse of contemporary physics. Michael Bitbol, in his essay A Cure for Metaphysical Illusions: Kant, Quantum Mechanics and the Madhyamaka, calls this stubborn view of reality the ‘Natural Ontological Attitude of everyday life’: which is the
"realist interpretation of physical theories (which) seems to be so unquestionably desirable in the framework of our Western view of the world … Everything, in the philosophical debate about modern physics, goes as if the following maxim were enforced: ‘Whenever a realist interpretation of a physical theory is available, you must adopt it come what may.’"
This realist predisposition which is solidly entrenched in the Western worldview means that the viewpoint that something other than ‘matter’ might be the fundamental source of reality is never seriously entertained. It is why most discussions of the implications of quantum theory for our understanding of the ultimate nature of reality simply brush aside ideas that consciousness is significant as if no reasoning on the matter is necessary.
In Bishop Berkley’s time Dr. Johnson’s act of abusing his foot against a stone actually carried more weight than it should today. The mechanical worldview had been newly established by Descartes and Newton and there was no scientific evidence to suggest that the assumption of an independent, external material world might be false. Today the situation is radically different however. As we have seen the theories of quantum mechanics indicate that consciousness appears to be highly significant in the creation of reality.
A consideration of Berkley’s philosophy in the light of Descartes’ picture of a malevolent demon feeding misleading perceptions into human minds inevitably leads to the image of an orchestrated illusion of reality presented by the science fiction film The Matrix. This film, which to some degree was based on an understanding of the Madhyamaka, caused a stir amongst philosophically inclined filmgoers because of its presentation of Berkley’s philosophical ideas in the context of modern ideas of the possibility of controlling the human mind through the use of computer simulations. In the film Descartes’ demon is replaced by a computer generated reality which is fed into the brains/minds (the border between these realms is left necessarily vague in the film) of enslaved comatose human beings who are being farmed as a source of energy for advanced machines which have taken control. This film quite clearly raises the difficulty of refuting Berkley’s philosophical position, as Morpheus says in the film:
What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.
Even this quote is questionable from a thoroughgoing idealist perspective for even electrical signals in the brain are material phenomena.
Berkley did not question materialism from the basis of the fact that experiences were electrical impulses, a view which is materialist in the first place, he did so on the basis of a philosophical analysis of the nature of consciousness and matter and the necessary relationships between these concepts within the context of perception. His conclusion was that reality could only be of the nature of mind or consciousness. In other words all perceptions, even perceptions of electrical impulses in brains, if such were possible, are appearances within consciousness.
Despite this there is still an ingrained and stubborn resistance within Western thought to the notion of the primacy of consciousness. For instance in his work A Beginners Guide to Reality, the physicist Jim Baggott conducts a sustained search for something that he can definitely conclude is real. At the end of his quest he tells us that there is nothing we can ‘hang our hat on and say this is real’.’ At the atomic level he says that:
We have failed to find reality at the lowest physical level, the level of contemporary quantum physics. It seems we can never know what photons, or electrons, or protons, or neutrons really are. The objects that constitute everything we see and everything we are appear set to remain elusive and mysterious.
It seems that all concepts of an independent reality external to our minds have disappeared.
The hatchet job that Baggott beautifully executes on our notions of reality is remorseless. But Baggott does not seem to believe his own analysis:
… I’m going to restrict myself to a model in keeping with my own materialist predilections. From the perspective of materialism, mental activity is a higher order emergent property of electrical activity occurring in the brain. I would be the first to admit that, whilst it might read quite reasonably on paper, it is of course no explanation at all.
Despite his brilliant exposition of the lack of proof of an independent material common sense reality to be found anywhere ‘in the entire history of human thought’ he still maintains a belief that such an independent reality must exist:
Challenge me to defend this assumption and you may find me wanting, for I can do nothing more than declare my faith in an independently real world.
Unlike many other authors in this area of discourse Baggott is scrupulously honest; he is quite open about the fact that his investment in an ‘independently real world’ is a matter of faith. And after a careful reading of his rigorously argued work it is quite apparent that there is as much evidence for an independent world of reality which exists in total isolation from the human mind as there is for rabbits with horns!
The image of an independent world of materiality has an extraordinary grip upon the minds of the majority of scientists and philosophers; people in general in fact. But scientific evidence within the field of quantum theory now clearly rules it out and honest philosophical investigation points away from it. And yet, on the whole, the scientific and philosophical establishment resist the conclusions which are clearly indicated by the evidence. As the quantum physicist David Bohm wrote in 1980 concerning the search for ultimate independent particles:
…there appears to be an unshakable faith among physicists that either such particles, or some other kind yet to be discovered, will eventually make possible a complete and coherent explanation of everything.
Bohm pointed out that it is not just the failure to isolate any suitable particles at the level of quantum physics which suggests that the picture of self-enclosed separately existent particles is mistaken; Einstein’s theory of relativity also indicates that the existence of such particles was highly unlikely from a theoretical point of view:
“…no coherent concept of an independent particle was possible, neither one in which the particle would be an extended body, nor one in which it would be a dimensionless point. Thus a basic assumption underlying the generally accepted form of mechanism in physics has been shown to be untenable.”
This was written twenty years ago, but today, the situation has not changed. And yet great many physicists seem to remain desperate to avoid taking their own theories seriously. We have already seen that Roger Penrose, a brilliant theoretical physicist knighted for his contribution to physics, would prefer to ditch quantum physics if he could and Lee Smolin, another very significant physicist doesn’t believe it. But, nevertheless, at the moment the evidence is stacked up against the possibility that physicists will discover a dramatically new kind of particle, one which is stamped with the necessary hallmark of true independent ‘physical’ reality. The recent experiments performed by Aspelmeyer and his team (Nature April 2007) clearly indicate that reality cannot consist of completely independent particles.
The current state of quantum theory is such that the nature of material or physical reality, the stuff of the universe, is simply beyond description. Physicists use terms such as ‘matter’, ‘physical’ as place markers for something unknown. In reality we cannot grasp reality! We have a mathematical formulism but the nature of the ‘stuff’ at the quantum level is a kind of shimmering indefinable ocean of possibility which is given a structure by something unknown. What we do know that this field of possibility does interact with consciousness in some way, so it cannot be composed of some aspect of reality which is completely devoid of qualities of consciousness.
Models of reality emphasise the importance of consciousness, however, are generally considered to be extreme and are discounted by ‘respectable’ physicists. As Robert Oerter observes in connection with the faster than light interaction between entangled particles:
This view, or at least the connection with religious mysticism, is usually derided by physics writers today …
But while such views are widely ‘derided’ we shall find that reasoned arguments why such views should be derided are in very short supply.
The idea that consciousness is entangled at the quantum level is by no means a mere figment of mystically drunk physicists which has been made up on a whim. As we have seen the problem of the nature of the transition from the superposed probability wave function to a definite measured reality does pose the issue of what a ‘measurement’ consists of; and the necessity that consciousness is an essential ingredient in the quantum mix is a serious implication of the measurement problem. Roger Penrose seems to veer towards a similar conclusion in the following manner:
…at the large end of things, the place where ‘the buck stops’ is provided by our conscious perceptions. This is an awkward matter from the point of view of physical theory, because we really do not know what physical processes in the brain are associated with perception. Nevertheless, the physical nature of these processes would seem to provide a large end limit for any proposed theory …
However, it is clear that Penrose is at heart a materialist and because of this his position is a foregone conclusion. After telling us that the evidence indicates that consciousness is the end point in the chain of events which accounts for the collapse of the wave function, he then immediately undermines his assertion by reducing conscious perception to ‘processes in the brain’. This indicates that he is starting out as a materialist so he could never really take any other point of view seriously.
It is important to comprehend the inner contradiction that lies within the view that consciousness is somehow effective in the quantum process but consciousness itself is reducible to brain states, which is to say material states. The serious flaw in this view is highlighted by Goswami’s simple but devastating criticism of Bohr’s supposed ‘Copenhagen’ division of reality into a quantum level and a classical level. Jim Al-Khalili describes this subterfuge as follows:
Another tenet of the Copenhagen interpretation is that there has to be a clear demarcation between the (quantum) system being measured and the macroscopic measuring device (described by the laws of Newtonian, or classical mechanics). Thus while the latter is ultimately made up of atoms, it must not be treated as being subject to the quantum rules.
This means that although everyone knows that measuring devices are quantum systems themselves, it is only possible to make sense of the situation by treating them as if they really were ‘classical’, which is to say non-quantum systems. In other words the Copenhagen view, like all our models or reality, is a convenient falsification of reality.
What is the significance of this distinction? It enables the quantum physicist to visualise the quantum experimental situation as being comprised of two fundamentally separate aspects – the micro scale quantum level and the supposedly distinct macroscopic classical measuring equipment. It is now possible to consider that the macroscopic arrangement in some sense causes the collapse of the quantum probabilities into a definite reality. In this way the presence of consciousness can be minimised. This viewpoint is currently enshrined in the doctrine of decoherence which suggests that the macroscopic level is somehow a distinct taming influence upon the quantum level.
Goswami’s objection to this way of viewing the situation is that:
Any macro object … is ultimately a quantum object; there is no such thing as a classical body unless we are willing to admit a vicious quantum/classical dichotomy in physics.
When physicists invoke the Copenhagen view they usually do so as if the distinction, which should be no more than a convenient fiction, is in actuality a fundamental feature of reality. And this ‘vicious’ view of the distinction between the quantum and the macro-classical level has become what Wittgenstein referred to as a ‘notation’ which has been adopted by the physics community without much critical examination. A notation is a preferred practice of discourse which has no logical or evidential backing. It is simply what the practitioners do because it makes them feel comfortable.
So when Penrose refers to the buck stopping with conscious perceptions, which are said to be associated with ‘physical’ brain processes, he is implicitly adopting the distinction between the quantum and the macro realms which has its roots in the Copenhagen viewpoint. The ‘vicious’ nature of the dichotomy being made by Penrose is underscored by his reference to ‘the physical nature of these processes’, a formulation which clearly suggests that phenomena at the ‘large end of things’ take on a completely different nature to those at the quantum end i.e. they become macroscopically ‘physical’.
Now add into this formulation the view that consciousness is supposed to be associated with the large end ‘physical’ processes and it begins to look not only as if is there is a radical distinction between the quantum realm and the large scale physical environment but that also consciousness is separated from the quantum realm as well, apparently having an uncertain connection to the high level physical realm.
But once the fictitious division into the quantum and the macro-physical world is removed this picture simply dissolves into the more accurate formulation that the buck stops at the level of conscious perceptions which are associated with various quantum configurations which underlie the appearance of the physiology of the brain. There is absolutely no evidence or reasoning to support the contention that the quantum level must organise itself into the macro-physical level and then manifest consciousness. It may be true that the quantum level consciousness needs to manifest a physical brain in order to manifest individuated consciousness. However, whether this is true or not it is certainly far more coherent to suppose that consciousness is already inherent at the quantum level. It would therefore make sense to view the collapse of the wave function as a result of the quantum level acting upon itself through the agency of consciousness. For the moment this is only a suggestion for future consideration.
In Western thought the notion of ‘consciousness’ is virtually always viewed through the lens of the materialistic viewpoint that consciousness must be a product, or at least associated with, brains. This is an aspect of the lopsided view that has been enshrined with in the scientific worldview; ‘matter’ is supposed to be a ubiquitous feature of reality, the basic stuff of the universe, whereas consciousness is viewed as being only exemplified within specific and individual brains. The idea that consciousness could be ubiquitous in the same way as matter is thought to be and might be individuated in the same way as matter is supposed to be, which is to say that when a quantum field interacts with its environment in a certain manner an individual ‘particle’, of consciousness, emerges from a multitude of possibilities, is simply rejected as hopelessly mystical, as if the notion that a tiny ‘particle’ of matter suddenly emerges from a sea of unmanifest possibilities did not have its own ‘mystical’ overtones!
The Western suspicion of the concept of consciousness becomes a little more comprehensible when it is realised that, according to a significant cartel of academic ‘researchers’ in the subject, it is a totally incomprehensible feature of experience. The current state of Western academic discourse concerning the nature of consciousness is absurd in the extreme. In her book Consciousness an Introduction Susan Blackmore states that ‘consciousness is a mystery’ and in a more recent collection of interviews with various philosophers and neuroscientists she observes in the introduction that:
… I came more and more to appreciate why the conference can only be called Towards a Science of Consciousness. There is so little agreement.
To say that there is so little agreement is an understatement. Everyone involved seems to have their own pet metaphor, some of which go beyond the outlandish.
According to Blackmore consciousness:
“is not synonymous with ‘mind’, which has many other meanings and uses, and seems to have lost some of its mystery.”
Ominously, Blackmore has told us that the term ‘mind, which has lost its mystery, has ‘many meanings and uses’, and when we look at these meanings and uses our worst fears are confirmed:
“‘Minds are simply what brains do’ (Minsky, 1986, 287); ‘Mind is designer language for the functions that the brain carries out’ (Claxton,1994, 37); Mind is ‘the personalisation of the physical brain’ (Greenfield, 2000,14).”
Can any of these proposals remove the ‘mystery’ from the concept of ‘mind’? Blackmore, however, defends these bizarre formulations:
“Such descriptions make it possible to talk about mental activities and mental abilities without supposing that there is a separate mind. This is probably how most psychologists and neuroscientists think of ‘mind’ today …”
What do these definitions amount to? Exactly what is a ‘designer language’ for the functions of the brain? How can the mind possibly be a designer language, designed by who or what? Why is Claxton taken seriously when he is peddling absurdities? As for Greenfield’s offering: has anyone ever seen a ‘personalised brain’ as opposed to a depersonalised brain. What does a depersonalised brain look like? Perhaps it is a brain taken from a dead body. Do these people actually think about what they are saying? These definitions are totally absurd and irrelevant. They try to cover over the fact that it is an utter impossibility for a non-conscious, by definition, ontological principle such ‘matter’ to generate the world of awareness.
The pseudo definitions outlined by Blackmore are simply advertising slogans for an unexamined preference for a materialist worldview. Once again we are in the midst of a ‘notation’, an unsupported but mutually advantageous mode of discourse. This characterisation of the paucity of this viewpoint may seem excessively hard. However, it needs to be. It is time for the modern day tendency to import a vast scaffolding of unexamined prejudice for the primacy of materiality, as if it was established as a completely obvious and unquestionable fact, to be exposed for the intellectual fraud that it is.
Max Velmans characterises the current Western academic attitude to the ‘problem’ of consciousness as follows:
Consciousness is something ineffable and mysterious – we can’t fit it into a natural science view of the world, so we have to demonstrate in one way or another, by hook or by crook, that this ineffable conscious entity is nothing more than a state or function of the brain.
The reason why consciousness is considered to be ‘ineffable and mysterious’ is because it is not taken seriously as a fundamental aspect of reality on its own terms and it is therefore thought that it must be reducible to matter. But it resists all attempts to reduce it to a third party description. It is impossible to show someone else one’s own consciousness and it is impossible to demonstrate how physical arrangements ‘physically’ become, so to speak, the actual first hand inner awareness of experience. In fact consciousness seems to be completely different in quality to that which we imagine ‘matter’ to be. Matter is imagined as lifeless and inert whilst consciousness is vivid in its inner aspect. The problem of the ‘gap’ between the ‘physical’ realm of matter and the ‘non-physical’ realm of consciousness was labelled the ‘hard’ problem by David Chalmers:
How are we going to be able to explain subjective experiences in terms of the objective processes which are familiar from science?
The idea that consciousness must be matter performing some kind of amazing trick is endemic. Here’s John Searle:
Consciousness is an amazing product of certain kinds of human and animal brains, but it’s very local, very special.
And Vilayanur Ramachandran:
How can this vivid world of experience arise from a lump of jelly.
And Susan Greenfield:
The fact is that it’s a subjective phenomenon that we can’t really define properly. Everyone knows what it is, but we can’t use the normal operational definitions for defining it; and therefore it’s very hard to know how to even frame the question as to how a subjective inner state is associated with something physical.
Consciousness, then, is supposed to be the result of a remarkable transformation of non-conscious matter in order to produce something completely alien to its own material nature, a conjuring trick to end all conjuring tricks.
Another approach to the assassination of the concept of consciousness is offered by pugilistic and controversial philosopher Daniel Dennett who claims that the idea that consciousness is a significant aspect of reality is a mistake; it does not really exist, it only pretends to:
… consciousness is not some further phenomenon occurring in the brain, but is constituted by all the phenomena that individually do not count as instances of consciousness…
In other words if you throw together enough non conscious bits and pieces, bits and pieces completely devoid of consciousness, you can magically create consciousness. It is very tricky to get at exactly what Dennett considers consciousness to actually consist of; he asserts that anyone who thinks that there is anything extra, other than brain states, in the life of the mind is mistaken, so it appears that what most people mean by consciousness is not what Dennett means by it. However he continues to use the term as if it was connected in some significant manner to the term as used by the rest of the human race.
The notion that there is an audience of one for images presented within the mind, which is generally the way most people experience the perceptual situation, is called the ‘Cartesian Theatre’ by Dennett. And he says:
When you discard Cartesian dualism, you really must discard the show that would have gone on in the Cartesian Theatre, and the audience as well, for neither the show nor the audience is to be found in the brain, and the brain is the only real place there is to look for them.
Here Dennett is simply saying that if we reject the ultimate dualism of consciousness and matter then we must give up the idea that there is any inner experiential world – the Cartesian Theatre.
There are no arguments offered anywhere in Dennett’s work; what one is confronted with is a dogmatic and aggressive materialism which employs ridicule, rather than intellectual engagement, to undermine alternative viewpoints. A particular target for ridicule is what he terms the ‘quantum-physics-to-the-rescue squad.’ But he never offers any arguments in support of his ridicule. In a radio discussion he dismisses that suggestion that consciousness and the wave-function are connected:
… by wedding two bits of magic together you are going to say its not magic. By letting consciousness be a mysterious and magical property, in saying that quantum enlargement in effect depends on consciousness you nicely tie together two themes and I think its just magical thinking. There is no reason to believe either side of it.
This is typical Dennett; there is no reasoning to support his rejection, only the mildly insulting rebuke that his partner is engaging in ‘magical thinking’. It is not true that there is ‘no reason to believe either side of it’, in experiment after experiment, with increasingly subtlety, physicists have demonstrated the dependence of quantum properties on the conscious decisions of the experimenters.
Dennett’s intellectual brazenness is extraordinary and it leads him to unflinchingly indulge in obvious self-contradiction. It seems that he has got away with it so many times that he now seems immune to logical refutation. For instance he makes the following assertions on the same page:
I don’t deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties.
Far better, tactically, to declare that there simply are no qualia at all.
As there is no reason whatever why one cannot define ‘qualia’ as the properties of first order conscious experience, and Dennett does not give a specific new definition he wishes to refute, it is difficult not to observe a deep contradiction here. Dennett would probably argue that by ‘conscious experience’ he means brain states, but this is not what is generally meant by the term. This insidious overloading of terms, using them in a private manner whist pretending to keep a common meaning, is a key technique of his lack of philosophical analysis.
It is quite clear that philosophers, and other interested parties, do actually write (endlessly) about the problem of consciousness and in doing so the term consciousness crops up in their writings on many occasions. It is therefore quite obvious that something must be denoted by the term ‘consciousness’ or else such works would be unreadable; if the term really had no referent then everyone would stop in incomprehension on the first occasion the term occurred. And, of course, Susan Greenfield is quite correct to point out that ‘everyone knows what it is’, even if the ‘normal operational definitions for defining it’, whatever they may be, cannot be used! As Susan Blackmore writes in the introduction to her book:
… there is something that it is like to be you. This is what is meant by being conscious. Consciousness is our first-person view of the world.
In other words, despite the fact that consciousness ‘is a mystery’ (Blackmore), and consciousness ‘poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind’ (Chalmers) and ‘our intelligence is wrongly designed for understanding consciousness’ (McGinn) and so on, the word ‘consciousness’ in all these formulations of incomprehension refers to something of which it can be said that ‘everyone knows what it is’ (Greenfield) and ‘there is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience’ (Chalmers) and so on. As B. Alan Wallace points out:
To define consciousness, we need not engage in mental gymnastics, nor in abstract, philosophical speculation: it is that very event of knowing, with which we are all familiar. The mental gymnastics come in only when we try to define this firsthand event in terms of noncognitive physical processes, configurations of matter, abstract behavioural dispositions, emergent properties of the brain, and so on.
The nature of consciousness is not reliant on some abstruse technical definition achieved at huge intellectual effort by arduous scientific or philosophical investigation; the term ‘consciousness’ functions from the basis of our direct ‘subjective’ knowledge of what it is.
The Madhyamaka begins its investigation of the concepts of ‘consciousness’ and ‘matter’ from the basis of an examination of first order experience; the way that these aspects of experience naturally present themselves. The fundamental qualities of consciousness and matter can be immediately verified by direct examination of the nature of experience. Although from the deeply entrenched Western perspective it appears that the approach to definitions within the Madhyamaka is peculiarly ‘subjective’, the truth is that this is actually the only valid starting point. The concepts of ‘consciousness’ and ‘matter’ are defined by how they appear within immediate experience:
The definition of awareness is a knower. The definition of consciousness is that which is clear and knowing.
This first order approach to the definition of consciousness is completely counter to the Western attempts that cause such grievous confusion with their insistence that some kind of externalised ‘objective’ definition is possible.
The Madhyamaka defines consciousness for what it is: ‘clarity that cognises’ . Clarity is the fundamental nature of consciousness and cognition is its function. This is a definition of a first order directly experienced aspect of embodiment. Even if my experience can be shown at a later point to be nothing else than non-conscious ‘matter’ doing magical things, which we shall see is impossible, my direct experience of consciousness cannot be questioned as to its significance because it acts as the ground of analysis and discourse. As John Searle points out:
… where consciousness is concerned the existence of the appearance is the reality. If it seems to me exactly as if I am having conscious experiences, then I am having conscious experiences.
Furthermore the advanced meditative techniques of Madhyamika investigation of consciousness are able to produce a direct knowledge of consciousness in its ‘pure’ state in order to see directly into its nature.
I could post the whole book but I will make do with just one chapter out of 12. If you want to learn to meditate you will have your 'testable proof' (and I repeat 'no faith required') in the meantime the following will give you a taste of what is involved in this area of study and debate - I'm afraid you are drowning in your own lack of precise understanding of the terms you are using.
Dancing in Emptiness by graham Smetham (soon to be published)research and other contributions by moi.
Chapter 6 The Matter of Consciousness
An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery is the ultimate basis of all the agency, and hence meaning, and hence consciousness, in the universe.
-Daniel Dennett
…many people find it disturbing that the richness of our mental life – all our thoughts, feelings, emotions, even what we regard as our intimate selves – arises entirely from the activity of little wisps of protoplasm in the brain. How is this possible? How could something as deeply mysterious as consciousness emerge from a chunk of meat inside the skull?
- V. S. Ramachandran
Therefore all these various appearances,
Do not exist as sensory objects which are other than consciousness.
Their arising is like the experience of self-knowledge.
All appearances, from indivisible particles to vast forms, are mind.
This means, that if nothing exists externally and separately,
Brahma and the rest, could not be creators.
- Third Karmapa
In this chapter we will resolve the matter of whether an ‘impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little scrap of molecular machinery’ could possibly be the agency that lies at the bottom of the development of consciousness. Dennett is probably one of the most pugilistic intellectual proponents of materialism around at the moment. As such he represents the pinnacle of an intellectual insanity that informs a great deal of Western thinking regarding the basic categories of existence, consciousness and matter. Dennett is quite right to reject an acceptance that there can be two basic, distinct and opposite ‘substances’ at the root of reality, but, as we shall see, his battle cry for an out and out materialism is hollow.
The seventeenth century philosopher John Locke was a contemporary of Descartes and, despite the fact that he is credited with establishing an opposing perspective to Descartes, empiricism as opposed to rationalism; he shared the fundamental worldview of the time. His philosophy is imbued with the fundamental Cartesian epistemological, and the implied ontological, gap between an external realm of material entities and the inner world of experience. As a consequence he faced the question which echoes down to the present: How can these two realms relate to each other?
Locke suggested that the situation could be clarified by using a division into primary and secondary qualities:
The ideas of primary qualities of bodies are direct resemblances of them, and the patterns do really exist in the bodies themselves; but the ideas, produced in us by those secondary qualities, have no resemblance of them at all.
According to Locke’s viewpoint the ‘primary’ qualities are those aspects of the object that we perceive that really do inhere in the object as a feature belonging to the object. ‘Secondary’ qualities, on the other hand, are qualities that are displayed only when the object in question meets a given sense organ. From this point of view a sugar cube, for example, really is a cube with a certain length of side but sweetness is not inherent in the cube. The sugar cube’s sweetness only becomes apparent when a human being tastes it. Therefore the shape of the cube is primary whilst its taste is secondary. The secondary qualities such as taste do not have an independent existence of their own. They result from an interaction of other aspects of reality, in the case of the sugar cube the meeting of the tongue and sugar.
This way of looking at the situation illustrates quite nicely the Madhyamika concept of ‘inherent existence’ as opposed to ‘dependent-origination’. Locke’s notion of a primary quality corresponds to the concept of inherent existence. The entity that is perceived is assumed to exist exactly as it is perceived in external reality. A secondary quality, on the other hand, depends upon the meeting of a primary, inherent, aspect of reality and a sense organ. As a consequence a secondary quality does not exist as it appears.
A secondary quality is a content of consciousness, which therefore must itself share the nature of consciousness. It is supposed to be caused by the meeting of sense faculty and object and is therefore not identical to any part of the object. It could not be identical to any aspect of the object precisely because consciousness is not material whilst the object is. We might wish to say that a secondary quality is a mental impression, or aspect, of the perceived object; although how such a thing could come about is not obvious. Locke, however, needed a starting point and this viewpoint served its purpose.
Locke’s division into primary and secondary qualities is paralleled within Buddhist thought by two non-Madhyamika schools, the Vaibhashikas and the Sautrantikas. The Vaibhashika position is that external objects do exist and that consciousness is able to directly grasp the nature of the object as it is ‘nakedly’ which is to say without an intervening mental aspect. The Sautrantikas on the other hand refute this position and assert that external entities can only be apprehended with a mental aspect which mediates, so to speak between consciousness and the outside world.
The position of the Vaibhashikas, which corresponds to Locke’s direct perception of primary qualities, is refuted by the Madhyamika on the ground that consciousness and matter are completely opposite, matter being nonmental:
The nature of mind is absent from nonmental things.
How the could self-cognizing consciousness
Know other things? For you have said
That the known and the knower are two different entities
It is very easy to read this kind of analysis without reflecting deeply upon what is being indicated so it sometimes useful to step back and really try to picture what is being pointed out. The division into the realms of consciousness and matter allocates very different natures to the results of its dissection. In particular the quality of consciousness always carries within it an aspect of self-cognition, an inner luminosity. This is a kind of interior self-illumination that is imparted to all its perceptions. This fact instantly means that my perceptions can never be veridical to whatever is ‘out there’ because external objects do not have this inner luminosity that my consciousness imparts to them.
The indication ‘For you have said that the known and the knower are two different entities’ is important. It indicates that the argument is not in terms of our own private definitions but that the argument is in terms with what is accepted by the interlocutor. For the Madhyamaka the usual definitions of consciousness and matter are those accepted in the West since Descartes time, they are defined to be opposite in nature. Not opposite in a vague and indeterminate manner; they are inherently, or ultimately, opposite, having no common natures.
Now if the two extremities of the perceptual configuration lack any commonalities whatsoever then the notion that they can effectively interact in any way is simply out of the question. For this reason the Madhyamika analysis rejects the Vaibhashika viewpoint:
For those who disallow that consciousness
Is modified by aspects of nonmental things-
There can be no perception
Of external objects.
The fundamental idea that two entities that are completely lacking in common ground cannot interact is accepted by Dennett, he offers the example of Jasper the ghost to illustrate the point. If Jasper is pure non-material consciousness how can he move things around? Dennett, however, reaches the conclusion that there is no conscious perception, perception is purely mechanical. We shall return to this absurdity at a later point.
There is another, very subtle, reason why the Vaibhashika viewpoint must be rejected. If the view that material entities necessarily impress themselves upon consciousness and leave their mark is correct, then this must extend to all external material objects:
The experience of an object cannot be merely the effect of causation (exerted by the object upon the mind), for if it were, the simultaneously occurring visual organ ought also to be seen …
This kind of analysis will probably surprise some readers for it seems so obvious that this does not occur and we are used to the descriptions of how light enters the eye and is focused on the retina and so on. The point is, however, that we are concerned here with the fundamental analysis of interaction of consciousness and external matter proposed by the Vaibhashikas. The proposal is that material entities inherently possess the capacity to impress themselves on consciousness. If this were true then the sense organ would impress itself as well as the perceived object. The Madhyamaka style of analysis is a strictly no holds barred approach.
The Sautrantika viewpoint introduces the mental aspect into the equation:
According to the theory of mental aspect,
Mind and object are in fact distinct
But since the aspect is akin to a reflection,
It is by such means that things can be experienced.
Now this seems, on the face of it, to be a more acceptable view of things; for if consciousness cannot directly grasp what’s on the outside, so to speak, it can apprehend such inner reflections of the external world.
The advantage in this view is that it supplies a possibility of internal perception; consciousness can get hold of its mental aspects which share its own nature. Unfortunately, however, the relationship between the mental aspect and the object shares the same problem as the original Vaibhashika view. How does the mental aspect get reflected within consciousness; the mental aspect and the object are of opposite natures. An important point, however, is that the Sautrantika position does rescue a model of perception, therefore from the viewpoint of the Madhyamaka, it is considered to be a superior viewpoint.
The notion that there can be ‘superior’ mistaken views requires explication. The Madhyamaka pursues its philosophical analysis from various points of view according to the level of analysis. Whilst from with one context a viewpoint might be shown to be wanting, within its own context there may be validity. The notion of levels, of course, begins with the doctrine of the two truths; conventional truths are functional and correct on the level of the seeming but are voided by ultimate analysis. But it is also understood that within the conventional level there are levels of truth depending on the context of analysis. This is can be illustrated within Western thought by the contrast of the Newtonian worldview and the quantum. Is the Newtonian viewpoint shown to be completely false by the quantum viewpoint, of course not; when a satellite is launched the mathematical equations employed to set its course are basically Newtonian because in this context they are the ones that apply.
The Madhyamaka consists of a set of conceptual systems which each articulate different levels of understanding. The idea is that the different levels of analysis are appropriate to different levels of human understanding, or are appropriate with a certain set of hypotheses. The Tibetan word which is translated as ‘hypothetical’ actually means ‘holding an extreme for the sake of analysis’. This is an important point for the understanding of the use of conceptual systems within the Madhyamaka. The final goal of the Madhyamaka is to achieve a knowledge which is deeper than a knowledge which can be articulated in concepts. Conceptual formulations can be used to capture aspects of the final view but each viewpoint can only be partial, and in a sense the ultimate viewpoint is to see the way in which seemingly contradictory viewpoints coexist. The approach towards the ultimate view, therefore, is through a hierarchy of views of reality which form a natural progression towards the ultimate view of the emptiness of inherent existence in all phenomena. Each of these views can be considered to be a partial disclosure of the nature of reality, rather than a completely correct or incorrect one.
Locke’s notion of a primary quality is clearly problematic in a similar way to the Vaibhashika view. If primary qualities are aspects of an object which are really inherent in the object independent of human sensory cognition then they must be qualities which are forever beyond experience. This is because any cognition must also be an interaction and therefore can only produce a secondary quality, which corresponds to the Sautantrika mental aspect. Locke himself did not seem to be aware of this problem. For him aspects of external objects such as extension and hardness were considered to be incontrovertible aspects of an object that were completely and independently inherent in the object.
When Bishop Berkley looked at Locke’s determination of the realms of primary and secondary qualities he saw that the representational ‘ideas’ which were supposed to represent the attributes of external phenomena could only be secondary qualities. The primary qualities which were meant to really be ‘in’ the material objects were as unknowable and irrelevant as the notion of substance itself. Berkley’s logical detachment of the realm of ideas from the supposed realm of pure materiality did not take much effort because in essence the two entities were detached in the first place by the fact that they could not be identical because they inhabited antithetical realms. Ideas are mind stuff and the ‘real’ primary qualities are supposed to be matter stuff so they cannot be identical. Once this unavoidable consequence is clearly realised the notion that there are definite primary qualities inhering externally in the object exactly as represented by the idea becomes unviable.
The next step that Bishop Berkley made was dramatic. The only entities that an embodied perceiver could know for certain as viable are the ideas which carry the implication of an external world. The existence of an external world of matter, however, is an imputation which cannot be proved because we only have direct access to the ideas. In fact the whole imaginative construction of an external material world is redundant, the ‘ideas’ are the only entities we can claim to know about with certainty. Consequently the material world can be discounted as a true reality, only the ideas are truly existent. For Berkley reality was within perception itself and the notion of anything beyond was irrelevant and beyond proof. Berkley’s deconstruction of Locke’s analysis leads us directly to the primacy of mind.
Berkley argued that the experiences which we suppose indicate an external would are actually nothing but experiences, which is to say that they are creations within the mind. There is no independent world of physical substance or substances beyond the experiences. An immediate question which arises concerns the regularity of the world which appears as being beyond and independent of our minds. On the most simple level suppose it is accepted that the room I am in is kept in existence by my mind creating room-like experiences. Why does it remain in seeming existence, in a form at least similar to the way that my mind experienced it, for other people and for me when I return? In other words, if the entire fabric of reality is a creation of mind what gives it a coherence which is shared by the experiences within many different minds? True to his calling as priest and theologian Berkley resorted to the same cosmic glue as Descartes had used, according to Berkley the cause of consistency within the multitude of perceptions on the part of great numbers of minds was the overarching mind of God which maintained the experiential fabric of reality. All perceptions were ultimately in the mind of God.
The logical analysis that Berkley presented is actually, logically, irrefutable. Samuel Johnson’s companion and biographer, James Boswell, remarked to him that despite the fact that it seemed contrary to common sense Berkley’s idealism did seem to be beyond refutation. Dr Johnson, himself lacking any logical counter argument, kicked a stone and claimed that this constituted sufficient refutation:
After we came out of church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, that everything in the universe is merely ideal. I observed that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Dr. Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it – ‘I refute it thus.’
Note the use of the term ‘merely’ in this quote, its use clearly indicates that Boswell considers that if Berkley’s philosophy were to be true then ‘reality’ would have to be demoted in status. If it turned out to be ‘merely’ ‘consciousness’ masquerading as ‘matter’ then its inhabitants would have been severely short changed! This is an evaluation of the status of consciousness which, as we shall find, still reverberates around the arena of Western thinking today. Bishop Berkley’s argument still remains watertight, and it is important to understand exactly why it is watertight whereas materialism is not. The fact that it is logically watertight is certainly indicated by the fact that opponents like Dr. Johnson have to kick stones, and latter day opponents like Dennett are forced to resort to what the philosopher John Searle calls ‘intellectual pathology.’
The division of the epistemological structure of reality is clearly not symmetrical because the human mind, or consciousness, is, so to speak, at one end of it, not in the middle. It quite naturally follows that the only answer to the question ‘which are the entities that you have direct access to, your internal perceptions of material things or the material things themselves?’ can only be answered in one way. This was clearly seen by Kant who asserted that the ‘things in themselves’ were beyond knowledge. Locke also considered that the notion of ‘substance’ was equally illusive to direct knowledge. The configuration of our embodied situation weighs the scales for direct knowledge in favour of consciousness; it cannot be any other way.
However, the tendency to assume that the world we experience at the everyday level must be to all intents and purposes, or more or less, indicative of how reality ‘really’ is seems to be an innate predisposition of the human mind. It is a view of reality that is still deeply embedded in the discourse of contemporary physics. Michael Bitbol, in his essay A Cure for Metaphysical Illusions: Kant, Quantum Mechanics and the Madhyamaka, calls this stubborn view of reality the ‘Natural Ontological Attitude of everyday life’: which is the
"realist interpretation of physical theories (which) seems to be so unquestionably desirable in the framework of our Western view of the world … Everything, in the philosophical debate about modern physics, goes as if the following maxim were enforced: ‘Whenever a realist interpretation of a physical theory is available, you must adopt it come what may.’"
This realist predisposition which is solidly entrenched in the Western worldview means that the viewpoint that something other than ‘matter’ might be the fundamental source of reality is never seriously entertained. It is why most discussions of the implications of quantum theory for our understanding of the ultimate nature of reality simply brush aside ideas that consciousness is significant as if no reasoning on the matter is necessary.
In Bishop Berkley’s time Dr. Johnson’s act of abusing his foot against a stone actually carried more weight than it should today. The mechanical worldview had been newly established by Descartes and Newton and there was no scientific evidence to suggest that the assumption of an independent, external material world might be false. Today the situation is radically different however. As we have seen the theories of quantum mechanics indicate that consciousness appears to be highly significant in the creation of reality.
A consideration of Berkley’s philosophy in the light of Descartes’ picture of a malevolent demon feeding misleading perceptions into human minds inevitably leads to the image of an orchestrated illusion of reality presented by the science fiction film The Matrix. This film, which to some degree was based on an understanding of the Madhyamaka, caused a stir amongst philosophically inclined filmgoers because of its presentation of Berkley’s philosophical ideas in the context of modern ideas of the possibility of controlling the human mind through the use of computer simulations. In the film Descartes’ demon is replaced by a computer generated reality which is fed into the brains/minds (the border between these realms is left necessarily vague in the film) of enslaved comatose human beings who are being farmed as a source of energy for advanced machines which have taken control. This film quite clearly raises the difficulty of refuting Berkley’s philosophical position, as Morpheus says in the film:
What is real? How do you define real? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.
Even this quote is questionable from a thoroughgoing idealist perspective for even electrical signals in the brain are material phenomena.
Berkley did not question materialism from the basis of the fact that experiences were electrical impulses, a view which is materialist in the first place, he did so on the basis of a philosophical analysis of the nature of consciousness and matter and the necessary relationships between these concepts within the context of perception. His conclusion was that reality could only be of the nature of mind or consciousness. In other words all perceptions, even perceptions of electrical impulses in brains, if such were possible, are appearances within consciousness.
Despite this there is still an ingrained and stubborn resistance within Western thought to the notion of the primacy of consciousness. For instance in his work A Beginners Guide to Reality, the physicist Jim Baggott conducts a sustained search for something that he can definitely conclude is real. At the end of his quest he tells us that there is nothing we can ‘hang our hat on and say this is real’.’ At the atomic level he says that:
We have failed to find reality at the lowest physical level, the level of contemporary quantum physics. It seems we can never know what photons, or electrons, or protons, or neutrons really are. The objects that constitute everything we see and everything we are appear set to remain elusive and mysterious.
It seems that all concepts of an independent reality external to our minds have disappeared.
The hatchet job that Baggott beautifully executes on our notions of reality is remorseless. But Baggott does not seem to believe his own analysis:
… I’m going to restrict myself to a model in keeping with my own materialist predilections. From the perspective of materialism, mental activity is a higher order emergent property of electrical activity occurring in the brain. I would be the first to admit that, whilst it might read quite reasonably on paper, it is of course no explanation at all.
Despite his brilliant exposition of the lack of proof of an independent material common sense reality to be found anywhere ‘in the entire history of human thought’ he still maintains a belief that such an independent reality must exist:
Challenge me to defend this assumption and you may find me wanting, for I can do nothing more than declare my faith in an independently real world.
Unlike many other authors in this area of discourse Baggott is scrupulously honest; he is quite open about the fact that his investment in an ‘independently real world’ is a matter of faith. And after a careful reading of his rigorously argued work it is quite apparent that there is as much evidence for an independent world of reality which exists in total isolation from the human mind as there is for rabbits with horns!
The image of an independent world of materiality has an extraordinary grip upon the minds of the majority of scientists and philosophers; people in general in fact. But scientific evidence within the field of quantum theory now clearly rules it out and honest philosophical investigation points away from it. And yet, on the whole, the scientific and philosophical establishment resist the conclusions which are clearly indicated by the evidence. As the quantum physicist David Bohm wrote in 1980 concerning the search for ultimate independent particles:
…there appears to be an unshakable faith among physicists that either such particles, or some other kind yet to be discovered, will eventually make possible a complete and coherent explanation of everything.
Bohm pointed out that it is not just the failure to isolate any suitable particles at the level of quantum physics which suggests that the picture of self-enclosed separately existent particles is mistaken; Einstein’s theory of relativity also indicates that the existence of such particles was highly unlikely from a theoretical point of view:
“…no coherent concept of an independent particle was possible, neither one in which the particle would be an extended body, nor one in which it would be a dimensionless point. Thus a basic assumption underlying the generally accepted form of mechanism in physics has been shown to be untenable.”
This was written twenty years ago, but today, the situation has not changed. And yet great many physicists seem to remain desperate to avoid taking their own theories seriously. We have already seen that Roger Penrose, a brilliant theoretical physicist knighted for his contribution to physics, would prefer to ditch quantum physics if he could and Lee Smolin, another very significant physicist doesn’t believe it. But, nevertheless, at the moment the evidence is stacked up against the possibility that physicists will discover a dramatically new kind of particle, one which is stamped with the necessary hallmark of true independent ‘physical’ reality. The recent experiments performed by Aspelmeyer and his team (Nature April 2007) clearly indicate that reality cannot consist of completely independent particles.
The current state of quantum theory is such that the nature of material or physical reality, the stuff of the universe, is simply beyond description. Physicists use terms such as ‘matter’, ‘physical’ as place markers for something unknown. In reality we cannot grasp reality! We have a mathematical formulism but the nature of the ‘stuff’ at the quantum level is a kind of shimmering indefinable ocean of possibility which is given a structure by something unknown. What we do know that this field of possibility does interact with consciousness in some way, so it cannot be composed of some aspect of reality which is completely devoid of qualities of consciousness.
Models of reality emphasise the importance of consciousness, however, are generally considered to be extreme and are discounted by ‘respectable’ physicists. As Robert Oerter observes in connection with the faster than light interaction between entangled particles:
This view, or at least the connection with religious mysticism, is usually derided by physics writers today …
But while such views are widely ‘derided’ we shall find that reasoned arguments why such views should be derided are in very short supply.
The idea that consciousness is entangled at the quantum level is by no means a mere figment of mystically drunk physicists which has been made up on a whim. As we have seen the problem of the nature of the transition from the superposed probability wave function to a definite measured reality does pose the issue of what a ‘measurement’ consists of; and the necessity that consciousness is an essential ingredient in the quantum mix is a serious implication of the measurement problem. Roger Penrose seems to veer towards a similar conclusion in the following manner:
…at the large end of things, the place where ‘the buck stops’ is provided by our conscious perceptions. This is an awkward matter from the point of view of physical theory, because we really do not know what physical processes in the brain are associated with perception. Nevertheless, the physical nature of these processes would seem to provide a large end limit for any proposed theory …
However, it is clear that Penrose is at heart a materialist and because of this his position is a foregone conclusion. After telling us that the evidence indicates that consciousness is the end point in the chain of events which accounts for the collapse of the wave function, he then immediately undermines his assertion by reducing conscious perception to ‘processes in the brain’. This indicates that he is starting out as a materialist so he could never really take any other point of view seriously.
It is important to comprehend the inner contradiction that lies within the view that consciousness is somehow effective in the quantum process but consciousness itself is reducible to brain states, which is to say material states. The serious flaw in this view is highlighted by Goswami’s simple but devastating criticism of Bohr’s supposed ‘Copenhagen’ division of reality into a quantum level and a classical level. Jim Al-Khalili describes this subterfuge as follows:
Another tenet of the Copenhagen interpretation is that there has to be a clear demarcation between the (quantum) system being measured and the macroscopic measuring device (described by the laws of Newtonian, or classical mechanics). Thus while the latter is ultimately made up of atoms, it must not be treated as being subject to the quantum rules.
This means that although everyone knows that measuring devices are quantum systems themselves, it is only possible to make sense of the situation by treating them as if they really were ‘classical’, which is to say non-quantum systems. In other words the Copenhagen view, like all our models or reality, is a convenient falsification of reality.
What is the significance of this distinction? It enables the quantum physicist to visualise the quantum experimental situation as being comprised of two fundamentally separate aspects – the micro scale quantum level and the supposedly distinct macroscopic classical measuring equipment. It is now possible to consider that the macroscopic arrangement in some sense causes the collapse of the quantum probabilities into a definite reality. In this way the presence of consciousness can be minimised. This viewpoint is currently enshrined in the doctrine of decoherence which suggests that the macroscopic level is somehow a distinct taming influence upon the quantum level.
Goswami’s objection to this way of viewing the situation is that:
Any macro object … is ultimately a quantum object; there is no such thing as a classical body unless we are willing to admit a vicious quantum/classical dichotomy in physics.
When physicists invoke the Copenhagen view they usually do so as if the distinction, which should be no more than a convenient fiction, is in actuality a fundamental feature of reality. And this ‘vicious’ view of the distinction between the quantum and the macro-classical level has become what Wittgenstein referred to as a ‘notation’ which has been adopted by the physics community without much critical examination. A notation is a preferred practice of discourse which has no logical or evidential backing. It is simply what the practitioners do because it makes them feel comfortable.
So when Penrose refers to the buck stopping with conscious perceptions, which are said to be associated with ‘physical’ brain processes, he is implicitly adopting the distinction between the quantum and the macro realms which has its roots in the Copenhagen viewpoint. The ‘vicious’ nature of the dichotomy being made by Penrose is underscored by his reference to ‘the physical nature of these processes’, a formulation which clearly suggests that phenomena at the ‘large end of things’ take on a completely different nature to those at the quantum end i.e. they become macroscopically ‘physical’.
Now add into this formulation the view that consciousness is supposed to be associated with the large end ‘physical’ processes and it begins to look not only as if is there is a radical distinction between the quantum realm and the large scale physical environment but that also consciousness is separated from the quantum realm as well, apparently having an uncertain connection to the high level physical realm.
But once the fictitious division into the quantum and the macro-physical world is removed this picture simply dissolves into the more accurate formulation that the buck stops at the level of conscious perceptions which are associated with various quantum configurations which underlie the appearance of the physiology of the brain. There is absolutely no evidence or reasoning to support the contention that the quantum level must organise itself into the macro-physical level and then manifest consciousness. It may be true that the quantum level consciousness needs to manifest a physical brain in order to manifest individuated consciousness. However, whether this is true or not it is certainly far more coherent to suppose that consciousness is already inherent at the quantum level. It would therefore make sense to view the collapse of the wave function as a result of the quantum level acting upon itself through the agency of consciousness. For the moment this is only a suggestion for future consideration.
In Western thought the notion of ‘consciousness’ is virtually always viewed through the lens of the materialistic viewpoint that consciousness must be a product, or at least associated with, brains. This is an aspect of the lopsided view that has been enshrined with in the scientific worldview; ‘matter’ is supposed to be a ubiquitous feature of reality, the basic stuff of the universe, whereas consciousness is viewed as being only exemplified within specific and individual brains. The idea that consciousness could be ubiquitous in the same way as matter is thought to be and might be individuated in the same way as matter is supposed to be, which is to say that when a quantum field interacts with its environment in a certain manner an individual ‘particle’, of consciousness, emerges from a multitude of possibilities, is simply rejected as hopelessly mystical, as if the notion that a tiny ‘particle’ of matter suddenly emerges from a sea of unmanifest possibilities did not have its own ‘mystical’ overtones!
The Western suspicion of the concept of consciousness becomes a little more comprehensible when it is realised that, according to a significant cartel of academic ‘researchers’ in the subject, it is a totally incomprehensible feature of experience. The current state of Western academic discourse concerning the nature of consciousness is absurd in the extreme. In her book Consciousness an Introduction Susan Blackmore states that ‘consciousness is a mystery’ and in a more recent collection of interviews with various philosophers and neuroscientists she observes in the introduction that:
… I came more and more to appreciate why the conference can only be called Towards a Science of Consciousness. There is so little agreement.
To say that there is so little agreement is an understatement. Everyone involved seems to have their own pet metaphor, some of which go beyond the outlandish.
According to Blackmore consciousness:
“is not synonymous with ‘mind’, which has many other meanings and uses, and seems to have lost some of its mystery.”
Ominously, Blackmore has told us that the term ‘mind, which has lost its mystery, has ‘many meanings and uses’, and when we look at these meanings and uses our worst fears are confirmed:
“‘Minds are simply what brains do’ (Minsky, 1986, 287); ‘Mind is designer language for the functions that the brain carries out’ (Claxton,1994, 37); Mind is ‘the personalisation of the physical brain’ (Greenfield, 2000,14).”
Can any of these proposals remove the ‘mystery’ from the concept of ‘mind’? Blackmore, however, defends these bizarre formulations:
“Such descriptions make it possible to talk about mental activities and mental abilities without supposing that there is a separate mind. This is probably how most psychologists and neuroscientists think of ‘mind’ today …”
What do these definitions amount to? Exactly what is a ‘designer language’ for the functions of the brain? How can the mind possibly be a designer language, designed by who or what? Why is Claxton taken seriously when he is peddling absurdities? As for Greenfield’s offering: has anyone ever seen a ‘personalised brain’ as opposed to a depersonalised brain. What does a depersonalised brain look like? Perhaps it is a brain taken from a dead body. Do these people actually think about what they are saying? These definitions are totally absurd and irrelevant. They try to cover over the fact that it is an utter impossibility for a non-conscious, by definition, ontological principle such ‘matter’ to generate the world of awareness.
The pseudo definitions outlined by Blackmore are simply advertising slogans for an unexamined preference for a materialist worldview. Once again we are in the midst of a ‘notation’, an unsupported but mutually advantageous mode of discourse. This characterisation of the paucity of this viewpoint may seem excessively hard. However, it needs to be. It is time for the modern day tendency to import a vast scaffolding of unexamined prejudice for the primacy of materiality, as if it was established as a completely obvious and unquestionable fact, to be exposed for the intellectual fraud that it is.
Max Velmans characterises the current Western academic attitude to the ‘problem’ of consciousness as follows:
Consciousness is something ineffable and mysterious – we can’t fit it into a natural science view of the world, so we have to demonstrate in one way or another, by hook or by crook, that this ineffable conscious entity is nothing more than a state or function of the brain.
The reason why consciousness is considered to be ‘ineffable and mysterious’ is because it is not taken seriously as a fundamental aspect of reality on its own terms and it is therefore thought that it must be reducible to matter. But it resists all attempts to reduce it to a third party description. It is impossible to show someone else one’s own consciousness and it is impossible to demonstrate how physical arrangements ‘physically’ become, so to speak, the actual first hand inner awareness of experience. In fact consciousness seems to be completely different in quality to that which we imagine ‘matter’ to be. Matter is imagined as lifeless and inert whilst consciousness is vivid in its inner aspect. The problem of the ‘gap’ between the ‘physical’ realm of matter and the ‘non-physical’ realm of consciousness was labelled the ‘hard’ problem by David Chalmers:
How are we going to be able to explain subjective experiences in terms of the objective processes which are familiar from science?
The idea that consciousness must be matter performing some kind of amazing trick is endemic. Here’s John Searle:
Consciousness is an amazing product of certain kinds of human and animal brains, but it’s very local, very special.
And Vilayanur Ramachandran:
How can this vivid world of experience arise from a lump of jelly.
And Susan Greenfield:
The fact is that it’s a subjective phenomenon that we can’t really define properly. Everyone knows what it is, but we can’t use the normal operational definitions for defining it; and therefore it’s very hard to know how to even frame the question as to how a subjective inner state is associated with something physical.
Consciousness, then, is supposed to be the result of a remarkable transformation of non-conscious matter in order to produce something completely alien to its own material nature, a conjuring trick to end all conjuring tricks.
Another approach to the assassination of the concept of consciousness is offered by pugilistic and controversial philosopher Daniel Dennett who claims that the idea that consciousness is a significant aspect of reality is a mistake; it does not really exist, it only pretends to:
… consciousness is not some further phenomenon occurring in the brain, but is constituted by all the phenomena that individually do not count as instances of consciousness…
In other words if you throw together enough non conscious bits and pieces, bits and pieces completely devoid of consciousness, you can magically create consciousness. It is very tricky to get at exactly what Dennett considers consciousness to actually consist of; he asserts that anyone who thinks that there is anything extra, other than brain states, in the life of the mind is mistaken, so it appears that what most people mean by consciousness is not what Dennett means by it. However he continues to use the term as if it was connected in some significant manner to the term as used by the rest of the human race.
The notion that there is an audience of one for images presented within the mind, which is generally the way most people experience the perceptual situation, is called the ‘Cartesian Theatre’ by Dennett. And he says:
When you discard Cartesian dualism, you really must discard the show that would have gone on in the Cartesian Theatre, and the audience as well, for neither the show nor the audience is to be found in the brain, and the brain is the only real place there is to look for them.
Here Dennett is simply saying that if we reject the ultimate dualism of consciousness and matter then we must give up the idea that there is any inner experiential world – the Cartesian Theatre.
There are no arguments offered anywhere in Dennett’s work; what one is confronted with is a dogmatic and aggressive materialism which employs ridicule, rather than intellectual engagement, to undermine alternative viewpoints. A particular target for ridicule is what he terms the ‘quantum-physics-to-the-rescue squad.’ But he never offers any arguments in support of his ridicule. In a radio discussion he dismisses that suggestion that consciousness and the wave-function are connected:
… by wedding two bits of magic together you are going to say its not magic. By letting consciousness be a mysterious and magical property, in saying that quantum enlargement in effect depends on consciousness you nicely tie together two themes and I think its just magical thinking. There is no reason to believe either side of it.
This is typical Dennett; there is no reasoning to support his rejection, only the mildly insulting rebuke that his partner is engaging in ‘magical thinking’. It is not true that there is ‘no reason to believe either side of it’, in experiment after experiment, with increasingly subtlety, physicists have demonstrated the dependence of quantum properties on the conscious decisions of the experimenters.
Dennett’s intellectual brazenness is extraordinary and it leads him to unflinchingly indulge in obvious self-contradiction. It seems that he has got away with it so many times that he now seems immune to logical refutation. For instance he makes the following assertions on the same page:
I don’t deny the reality of conscious experience, I grant that conscious experience has properties.
Far better, tactically, to declare that there simply are no qualia at all.
As there is no reason whatever why one cannot define ‘qualia’ as the properties of first order conscious experience, and Dennett does not give a specific new definition he wishes to refute, it is difficult not to observe a deep contradiction here. Dennett would probably argue that by ‘conscious experience’ he means brain states, but this is not what is generally meant by the term. This insidious overloading of terms, using them in a private manner whist pretending to keep a common meaning, is a key technique of his lack of philosophical analysis.
It is quite clear that philosophers, and other interested parties, do actually write (endlessly) about the problem of consciousness and in doing so the term consciousness crops up in their writings on many occasions. It is therefore quite obvious that something must be denoted by the term ‘consciousness’ or else such works would be unreadable; if the term really had no referent then everyone would stop in incomprehension on the first occasion the term occurred. And, of course, Susan Greenfield is quite correct to point out that ‘everyone knows what it is’, even if the ‘normal operational definitions for defining it’, whatever they may be, cannot be used! As Susan Blackmore writes in the introduction to her book:
… there is something that it is like to be you. This is what is meant by being conscious. Consciousness is our first-person view of the world.
In other words, despite the fact that consciousness ‘is a mystery’ (Blackmore), and consciousness ‘poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind’ (Chalmers) and ‘our intelligence is wrongly designed for understanding consciousness’ (McGinn) and so on, the word ‘consciousness’ in all these formulations of incomprehension refers to something of which it can be said that ‘everyone knows what it is’ (Greenfield) and ‘there is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience’ (Chalmers) and so on. As B. Alan Wallace points out:
To define consciousness, we need not engage in mental gymnastics, nor in abstract, philosophical speculation: it is that very event of knowing, with which we are all familiar. The mental gymnastics come in only when we try to define this firsthand event in terms of noncognitive physical processes, configurations of matter, abstract behavioural dispositions, emergent properties of the brain, and so on.
The nature of consciousness is not reliant on some abstruse technical definition achieved at huge intellectual effort by arduous scientific or philosophical investigation; the term ‘consciousness’ functions from the basis of our direct ‘subjective’ knowledge of what it is.
The Madhyamaka begins its investigation of the concepts of ‘consciousness’ and ‘matter’ from the basis of an examination of first order experience; the way that these aspects of experience naturally present themselves. The fundamental qualities of consciousness and matter can be immediately verified by direct examination of the nature of experience. Although from the deeply entrenched Western perspective it appears that the approach to definitions within the Madhyamaka is peculiarly ‘subjective’, the truth is that this is actually the only valid starting point. The concepts of ‘consciousness’ and ‘matter’ are defined by how they appear within immediate experience:
The definition of awareness is a knower. The definition of consciousness is that which is clear and knowing.
This first order approach to the definition of consciousness is completely counter to the Western attempts that cause such grievous confusion with their insistence that some kind of externalised ‘objective’ definition is possible.
The Madhyamaka defines consciousness for what it is: ‘clarity that cognises’ . Clarity is the fundamental nature of consciousness and cognition is its function. This is a definition of a first order directly experienced aspect of embodiment. Even if my experience can be shown at a later point to be nothing else than non-conscious ‘matter’ doing magical things, which we shall see is impossible, my direct experience of consciousness cannot be questioned as to its significance because it acts as the ground of analysis and discourse. As John Searle points out:
… where consciousness is concerned the existence of the appearance is the reality. If it seems to me exactly as if I am having conscious experiences, then I am having conscious experiences.
Furthermore the advanced meditative techniques of Madhyamika investigation of consciousness are able to produce a direct knowledge of consciousness in its ‘pure’ state in order to see directly into its nature.
quote:
quote:However, isn't it strange I always wake up as me in the morning and not in someone else's body.
Not for long Andrew, not for long.
It's a fallacy to think that the Bible doesn't cover reincarnation at all.
There is a strong argument that John the Baptist was the reincarnation of Elijah. Jesus confirms it in Matt 11:13-14. John the Baptist dimisses it by saying that he is not Elijah in order not to steal the limelight - in a way he is correct, but it seems that he used to be Elijah.
Thus reincarnation is fact, but is up to God's choosing.
BTW, I freely admit to being unable to fully characterise the soul. No-one of earthly origin would ever be able to do so, not even you Acad (or anything you may "cut-&-paste").
Andrew
quote:Originally posted by Chillkram:
Could this be the record for the longest ever post?!!
Fredrik? Can you answer this?
quote:Originally posted by Chillkram:
Could this be the record for the longest ever post?!!
Well you wanted to know why there is something as opposed to nothing didn't you?
quote:Originally posted by acad tsunami:
Well you wanted to know why there is something as opposed to nothing didn't you?
Still do, luvvy!
quote:Originally posted by Deane F:quote:Originally posted by Chillkram:
Could this be the record for the longest ever post?!!
Fredrik? Can you answer this?
Apart from Fredrik's catalogue!