Philosophy

Boundaries of Belief

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About a year into writing this blog, I lamented in a post that only a handful of my colleagues expressed even a passing interest in the subject of consciousness. What is to me not only the most profound unanswered area of inquiry, but also the only issue that impinges on all avenues of intellectual pursuit, does not rise to the level of relevancy for even highly intelligent people. I’ve come to appreciate what Alfred North Whitehead may have felt during the 1920s when his breakthrough concepts of consciousness based on quantum theory, that of process philosophy, was largely ignored. Part of the barrier to acceptance certainly had to do with his famously opaque and abstruse writing, off-putting perhaps to all but a few adherents who may have realized its implications. However, it seems increasingly obvious to me that blind acceptance of the doctrine of scientific materialism lies at its root. With widespread consensus, a veil of a priori beliefs prevents nonconforming data and observations from gaining traction. So clearly, the broader question of consciousness has been demystified for the ‘educated’ classes by the widespread acceptance of materialist dogma, leaving only a few details to fill in.

In support of this observation, I recently came across an article written by Susan Babbitt, an associate professor of philosophy, on the subject of thawing relations with Cuba—minimally to do with consciousness per se, but germane nonetheless. She writes:

…philosophers have argued for more than half a century that understanding is limited by expectations rooted in background beliefs. This means that when we don’t believe something is possible, we do not see the evidence suggesting it is possible. The upshot is that challenging accepted philosophical ideas, which people rely upon unself-consciously for day-to-day deliberation, is necessary for progressive politics.

Philosophers of science argue that we only find empirical evidence to support theories if we first, to some degree, believe such theories, even without sufficient evidence. This means that theoretical innovation, and commitment to such innovation, is a prerequisite for new discoveries, or even for the questions that might motivate such discoveries.

There you have it! A succinct but complete exposition of my quandary, and that of all others seeking to explore the broader questions of existence beyond the fortress-like boundaries enforced by scientific orthodoxy.

Almost everyone conflates consciousness with thinking, and thinking with mind. Obviously, at the root of this lie common word meanings such as that one is ‘conscious’ when in the waking state and ‘unconscious’ when passed out or asleep. However, common word meanings derive from our collective world view. When science teaches that consciousness is nothing more than electrochemical traces in the brain, these extrapolations—and the resultant conflation of mind and brain—are practically inevitable.

Ditto for causality. Orthodox science posits that all matter and energy were created at the Big Bang singularity (notwithstanding recent quantum corrections of general relativity), and that entropy—the gradual decline into disorder—circumscribes observable phenomena. Whitehead postulated that events in the present, which he called the “now moment”, do not occur as a result of past events, but are ‘created’ by future possibilities, in his words “pulled down” moment-by-moment. The appearance of cause and effect is entrenched in common culture because, as we observe the already-created past, we extrapolate effects from causes. This is constantly reinforced in shared beliefs—in fact it’s hard to find language in everyday life that does not hammer these notions home ad nauseam.

Finally, the Judeo-Christian-Islamic faiths, on which Western philosophy is broadly based, describe Creation as God did this, and then He did that, and when He was done He rested (capitalizing nonsense does not make it true). Small wonder, with the overwhelming preponderance of a priori assumptions undergirding this model, few question the widely accepted belief that humans are biological entities that happen to be self-aware as a product of evolution. Note again the asphyxiating past-to-future modality.

 

Metaphysics

Close, But No Cigar

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The scientific community continues to ponder the ever-growing evidence surrounding the ‘weird’ causal properties inherent in quantum theory. In a recent experiment at the Australian National University (ANU), researchers have shown that ‘reality’ does not exist until it is measured, at least in the terms of atomic scales, by employing John Archibald Wheeler’s delayed-choice thought experiment—a variation of the classic double-slit experiment where light is shown to exhibit characteristics of both waves and particles.

In order to isolate the key variables from interference, ANU trapped helium atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate (near absolute zero) and ejected atoms one at a time until only a single atom remained, on the assumption that atoms, which have mass, tend to interfere with one another, potentially influencing the results. Cutting to the chase, the team concluded that:

The atoms did not travel from A to B. It was only when they were measured at the end of their journey that their wave-like or particle-like behavior was brought into existence. It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it.

Quantum physics’ predictions about interference seem odd enough when applied to light, which seems more like a wave, but to have done the experiment with atoms, which are complicated things that have mass and interact with electrical fields and so on, adds to the weirdness.

Even a carefully constructed and rigorously executed experiment that demonstrates mind-bending results can be misinterpreted as weirdness when viewed through the lens of the Standard Model of Physics. However, it was acknowledged (by the writer from whom I quote, if not the ANU team) that”…the quantum weirdness represented by this experiment much more closely approaches the macro world in which humans perceive reality, which adds to the significance of the findings.” The writer also suggested parenthetically that an object traveling through space can exercise a choice to behave like a particle or wave [emphasis mine]. Additionally, according to Andrew Truscott of the ANU team, the results of the experiment demonstrate “that a future measurement is affecting the atom’s past”.

So close! It’s just one small step to acknowledge that quantum phenomena are consciousness, creating both the macro world and its human observers—in fact creating, at a minimum, everything that we perceive in space-time. Accordingly, in this context it would be a given that the quantum field does make ‘choices’. Ditto for the statement by the ANU team that “reality does not exist unless you are looking at it”, speaks volumes to the notion that our “looking at it” is a function of the very creation in which we are active participants.

And, in the context of Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, all future events, sourced by consciousness, not only affect an atom’s past, but create that past through the layering of countless ‘now moments’, drawn from possible futures, each moment superseding the one that precedes it.

We are reminded that in 1616, Galileo Galilei was accused of heresy for reinterpreting the Bible to underpin his experimental validation of Nicolaus Copernicus’s revival of heliocentrism. Although he was not then judged to have committed any offense, he was made to promise that he would abandon the concept.  When he later defended his views in a 1632 publication, he was tried by the Roman Inquisition, forced to recant and condemned to house arrest for the remainder of his life. Just decades prior, the Dominican friar Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for expressing theories not consonant with ‘Holy Scripture’. He postulated remarkable views far beyond the Copernican model, proposing that distant stars were also suns; that these could have planetary systems that support life; and, that the universe is infinite and could have no celestial body at its ‘center’.

It makes me wonder if the scientific establishment, clinging to an absurd notion that all matter and energy suddenly ‘appeared’—apparently without purpose—will finally make the leap and ‘discover’ the patently obvious before the impending Sixth Mass Extinction renders this question moot.

 

 

 

Metaphysics

Consciousness = Creation

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I most emphatically do not mean the ludicrous concept of Creationism, which attempts to hijack modern science to ‘prove’ the Biblical account of creation as set forth in Genesis; i.e. that the universe is six thousand years old and was ‘created’ in six ‘days’ by ‘the’ male deity (how was a day defined, I wonder, before a spinning Earth established this period through its diurnal rotation?).

I mean all creation. Allow me to explain. Creation is the manifestation of consciousness into ‘time’, and includes everything we experience about our four-dimensional universe. As Alfred North Whitehead correctly deduced, consciousness is a process. Consciousness manifests in time in countless ‘now moments’, each moment informing the next. These moments are drawn from possibilities (Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle), and consciousness ‘chooses’ one possibility (collapsing the quantum waveform). What we perceive as causation in the created world around us is in the past, which appears to progress from past to present—the arrow of time. We meet this past from possible futures in ‘now moments’ to form the present. All existence lies in this ‘omnipresence’, as I choose to define it. It can be thought of as spiritual, but not in the classical religious context, which insists on codifying this ‘process’ into a set of rules and commandments, asphyxiating its creativity. Remember that ‘sacred’ is a made-up word—as are thousands of similar words—intended to insulate dogma within a mantle of infallibility.

Creation certainly includes what we know as creativity, inspiration, intuition, instinct, and imagination. It was Albert Einstein who is famously quoted as saying that “I believe in inspiration and intuition. I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world”.

Ironically, Einstein’s imagination seemed to have failed him when he discounted the mathematical implications of quantum entanglement because, in his view of reality, this phenomenon violated a key attribute of relativity, namely the speed limit of light. Specifically, entangled particles, by interacting synchronously even when separated by arbitrarily large distances, appear to violate the realist view of local causation. Einstein went on record with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen in the EPR Paradox paper published in 1935, in which they stated that the predictions of quantum entanglement were flawed or incomplete. They were not. The Copenhagen interpretation, codified in 1927 by Niels Bohr, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg and others, remains the prevailing interpretation of quantum mechanics some ninety years later, largely because its predictions, including quantum entanglement, have been proved experimentally.

Ultimately, the proof for quantum entanglement created a whole new conundrum for science. Einstein’s issue was with the speed limit of light. Position and angular momentum are attributes of time. Without time, space—and all that space implies—cannot be measured or even defined to exist. However, in the case of quantum entanglement it was shown that no signal transfer takes place between entangled particles, and this discovery is what ultimately reconciled the problem of the realist view of local causation.

Let me restate this another way: If particles are entangled over unimaginably vast ‘distances’, either consciousness is a phenomenon that ‘knows’ all and supersedes the limitations of space-time, or space is an illusion of consciousness. Either way, the resulting mind-blowing implications dwarf the familiar time-based biological existence we call home.

Unsurprisingly, phenomena that do not fit the Standard Model of Physics, when they’re acknowledged at all, or when overwhelming evidence renders them impossible to ignore, are relegated to the status of ‘mysteries’. The prevailing belief is that with enough new experimental data, these mysteries will be revealed to fit the Standard Model. Quantum entanglement is one such phenomenon. Initially dismissed as flawed, its subsequent experimental validation over a half century, compounded by the absence of a signal between entangled particles, has relegated it to the status of a mystery.

The materialist world view, dug in like a tick among the educated classes for more than a century, is constantly reinforced in mainstream scientific publications as well as in the popular culture. For those not specifically trained in science or technology, rafts of pundits that popularize scientific subjects abound to fill in the blanks. While this may make complex subjects accessible to more people, few truly controversial points of view that deviate from the Standard Model are tolerated. The system is aggressively policed, punishing apostates with marginalization or career suicide. Future posts will explore other such mysteries in the context of consciousness as creation. Viewed in this way, such mysteries fall away to reveal a reality even more beautiful and breathtaking than the version we’re spoon-fed on a daily basis.

 

Metaphysics

Quantum Entanglement is the Key

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The widely accepted Standard Model of Physics was codified pursuant to the near-simultaneous discoveries of quantum mechanics and relativity more than a century ago. These remarkable discoveries dramatically advanced our understanding of science beyond classical or Newtonian physics, leading to an almost universal belief that the basic framework of the universe had been unimpeachably established, with only a few blanks left to fill in. Even the then-radical postulation of the Big Bang in 1927 ultimately contributed a bookend to the Standard Model by establishing a ‘starting point’—described as a singularity—13.8 billion years ago, without seriously challenging any of its underlying suppositions.

However, there were chinks in the armor along the way pointing to phenomena that do not fit the Model. The most controversial appears to be the counterintuitive predictions of quantum mechanics concerning strongly correlated systems, known as quantum entanglement, a physical phenomenon that occurs when one particle of an entangled pair ‘knows’ what measurement has been performed on the other, seemingly instantaneously even across arbitrarily large distances. Because this violates the local realist view of causality established in the Theory of Special Relativity that nothing can exceed the speed of light, it was initially thought by many leading minds in physics to be impossible, that the quantum-mechanical description of physical reality given by wave functions was not complete. This renunciation was the subject of a 1935 paper by Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, known as the EPR paradox. Following publication of the paper, the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger coined the term ‘entanglement’ (Verschränkung in German). Schrödinger went on to describe the phenomenon as not one of, but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics that defined the radical departure from classical physics.

This profound observation bears rephrasing: Whereas Schrödinger initially agreed with Einstein that quantum theory was not complete, he came to realize that quantum entanglement supersedes space-time—that neither space nor time are constraints to interactions among quantum phenomena.

By 1964, quantum entanglement was experimentally proven through the work of Irish physicist John Stewart Bell. Recent experiments in fact have measured entangled particles within less than one part in ten thousand of the light travel time between them. In other words, in terms of quantum theory, such communication occurs instantaneously. Subsequent experiments have all shown agreement with quantum mechanics rather than the principle of local realism, but predictably, the issue is not finally settled. Each of these experiments has left open at least one loophole by which it is possible to invalidate the results. Dogma dies hard.

I’m not about to disparage the discipline or value of the scientific method per se. However, when it is forced to validate a so-called ‘Theory of Everything’, based on the presupposition that the observable universe is ‘All That Is’, it can and does retard the implications of a breakthrough discovery such as quantum entanglement from being accepted or exploited. In that context, it is entirely plausible that the Big Bang, if it was in fact the birth of our four-dimensional universe, is a creation of—or if you like, was spawned by—a quantum reality beyond the apparent limitations of space-time.

Thought of in this way, the concept of a singularity makes perfect sense as the ‘moment of conception’ of the universe within which we exist as time-based biological life forms. In the broadest sense, it appears that consciousness and quantum entanglement are one and the same—a framework so vast and all-encompassing that it can accommodate all of the ‘mysteries’ which currently defy explanation under the rules of the Standard Model.

 

 

Metaphysics

Life Happens

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As was the case in Descartes’ time, our collective view of reality has regressed into a form of dualism. In one corner we have the troglodytes of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic faiths, desperately clinging to an exhausted narrative that finds its ‘genesis’ in antediluvian mists; in the other corner we find scientific materialism’s smug champions of rational atheism, ignoring or belittling myriad inconvenient observations while defending the faith from the ramparts of the Standard Model of Physics. As for how carbon-based life forms got started in the first place, our choices careen between a male deity creating ‘man’ (women are mere subsets of one of ‘his’ ribs); and—no opinion. Darwin didn’t say anything about how life got started and Hawking doesn’t say anything about how all matter and energy suddenly emerged in the Big Bang—sort of the ultimate fudge factor. Apparently, if we don’t say anything, no one will notice.

Until now, that is. Leave it to the pantheon of materialist science, MIT, to spawn a science professor, Jeremy England, who has a theory, based in thermodynamics, showing that the emergence of life was not accidental (who said it was?), but necessary. “…under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life,” he was quoted as saying in an article in Quanta Magazine, since republished by Scientific American and Business Insider (emphasis mine), mainstream journals that quickly anointed this ‘breakthrough’ with the ultimate imprimaturs that can be bestowed upon materialist science’s patriots.

From the Quanta article:

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external heat source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath, like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

There are so many a priori assumptions in just that one paragraph, I will have to enumerate them for clarity.

  • There’s only one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon—apparently the ‘key’ attribute of life;
  • That it’s reducible to a mathematical formula;
  • That only clumps of carbon are incipient precursors to life;
  • That it’s intrinsically important for clumps of carbon to more efficiently capture energy and dissipate this energy as heat;
  • That matter is somehow ‘motivated’ to gradually restructure itself to achieve this dissipation of increasingly more energy; and,
  • That the process is inexorable if both a heat source and a heat bath are present.

In other words, every sentence in that quoted paragraph requires an article of materialist faith—primarily that inanimate matter, ‘needing’ to dissipate energy, has ‘evolved’ into countless species, developing consciousness in the process (the electrochemical trace kind). Unfortunately, one of these mutated species, Cro-Magnon, is now dissipating so much heat that it may inexorably destroy the planet’s capacity to support life itself. Does any of this make sense to you? Not to me either.

The article, written by Salon’s science writer, Paul Rosenberg, expands on England’s ‘breakthrough’ and triumphantly trashes the pseudo-scientific claims of Creationism, as though proponents of this flaccid fairytale are worthy of serious combat. Rosenberg even compares England’s status to that of Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth century Dominican friar, who was the first to grasp the significance of Copernican heliocentrism, and who was burned at the stake as a heretic for his prescience. A tad premature, I would hazard.

From his MIT website, one of England’s research interests is cited as “What are the physical conditions necessary for the emergence of self-replicating molecular forms capable of evolution?” I call this the aggregation viewpoint, that is to say, events pile up in causal chains until something ‘happens’—in this case, life. As I have repeated ad nauseam, this is the opposite viewpoint of Whitehead’s Process Philosophy, wherein events manifest from future potential, or ‘prehension’, resulting in causal chains being created by quantum energy emerging as ‘now moments’, or consciousness, if you will. Events are pulled from clusters of probabilities to serve the creative objectives of consciousness; not pushed, as it were, from the jostling and random collisions inherent in the redistribution of inanimate debris.

Life is created by consciousness, as are all other phenomena observable in our four-dimensional perceived reality. The arbitrary separation of ‘life’ from the apparent existence of matter and energy speaks to the paucity of the Standard Model’s insistence that the only pathway to knowledge is through the scientific method, rigidly aggregating and organizing the morass of time-based thoughts and emotions through which our human brains process the world around us. The foundation upon which this rests—the unexplained emergence of all matter and energy in the Big Bang—renders this pyramid of knowledge, at best, suspect.

 

 

Philosophy

An Alternate Theory of Everything

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After almost a year of publishing this blog, I continue to be stymied by the near-impossibility of cajoling a majority of my readers into reconceptualizing the way they think about reality—even as a game or thought experiment. Whether these readers do not possess an aptitude for abstract reasoning  or are unwilling to consider looking at the world around them from a different point of view, this conundrum guarantees continued incarceration in the prison of humanity’s near-universal self-concepts, alternating between the patent nonsense of an omniscient deity and a happenstance of self-awareness in an ‘evolved’ primate. It does not seem to matter whether one’s world view is founded on one of the mainstream religions or the canon of materialist science—for many the barrier remains obstinately impenetrable.

Because we manifest as humans, our solipsistic bias logically prejudices us to experience four-dimensional reality from an anthropocentric perspective. To put it into everyday language, we insist that we are watching ourselves on television instead of realizing we create the signal. The word solipsism is commonly used as a pejorative, intended to denigrate self-absorption or narcissism. By definition it means nothing of the sort; it merely denotes the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist. Ask yourself how you experience reality as a confirmation of this idea. More to the point, I am suggesting that our experience of everyday reality from infancy shapes our world view in ways we never question, much less examine—the a priori dogmas I have referenced many times, and with which I started down this metaphysical path.

Consciousness creates all that exists in our four-dimensional reality, whether directly perceived or deduced. All matter and energy are manifestations of consciousness, at least from the time of the Big Bang. Individual humans are nodes of this consciousness, much as individual aspen poplars are nodes of a common root system that blankets an entire mountainside. Creation of this perceived reality is pulled from future possibilities, manifesting in humans as thoughts and emotions through a gateway of creativity, insight, instinct and direct knowing. These time-based thoughts and emotions are serially processed in the biological organ we call the brain—resulting in our experience of our environment. Thoughts and emotions decay quickly, and are refreshed in ‘now moments’ countless times each second, altering events around us as well as the way we think and feel about them but appear to our perceptions as causal chains. In other words, we experience the already-created past dynamically, as Alfred North Whitehead postulated in his Process Philosophy.

Now here’s the kicker. To hold reality in this way, even as a game or thought experiment, consider this: A commonly cited example of cause and effect posits that a butterfly flaps its wings in Peru and the effects amplify to spin into a hurricane. Alternatively, viewed through the lens of my thought experiment, consciousness decides that a hurricane will manifest and creates the conditions for its amplification via the moment-by-moment refreshing of reality cited above. However, viewed frame-by-frame by our serially-wired brains, it appears to result from a causal chain of events. You read this correctly: Hurricanes don’t ‘happen’; they are created, as are all other phenomena.

This is traditionally where I leave most of my fellow travelers behind. Even if one’s mind is sufficiently unfettered to consider the basic premise of reality creation by consciousness, it’s inherent in anthropocentric nature to accept that the good may be created, but insist that the bad ‘happens’. Unfortunately, operating in this framework requires total acceptance of its logical consequences, no matter how unsavory. Hence, in this context, the Holocaust was a created event. My friends who are outraged by this supposition and insist that no Jew would choose this wishfully conflate humans—as a group or as individuals—with consciousness. One can’t have it both ways.

The choice is obvious. If I ascribed to the commonly-held scientific world view (the religious view is utter anathema to me), I would have to accept that humans are flotsam in a purposeless universe floating among debris left over from a very large bang. Instead, I prefer to see myself as an avatar—not a manifestation of one of the deities in the Bhagavad Gita’s Trimurti or as a digital representation for online congress—but one endowed with a freedom of mind to express a powerful antidote to the pointlessness of humanity’s self-image. For me, the reward is the personal satisfaction and genuine joy I derive from sharing my creative endowment. If not for this, I would be grasping for significance via human ‘needs’, such as power, wealth, fame, recognition, sexual prowess and all the other common metrics of success. It would be important for me to be held in esteem in humanity’s collective memory, get my name on a building and have my remains decay in a prominent cemetery ensconced in a mausoleum. I am grateful that none of these things is important to me.

Metaphysics

Stephen Hawking’s AI Trope

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Unless one is mired in the magical realm of mainstream religions, a majority of educated people ascribe to a world view defined by the canon of materialist science. This view emerged during the eighteenth century Enlightenment, gathering momentum pursuant to the introduction of quantum physics by Max Planck and relativity by Albert Einstein. These two branches of theoretical physics describe subatomic phenomena and space-time, neatly wrapping the whole into the Standard Model of physics. No evidence, theoretical or experimental, that contradicts the Standard Model is given a shred of credence, notwithstanding that materialist science is founded on the Big Bang, wherein all matter and energy mysteriously came into being fourteen billion years ago. As Terrence McKenna acerbically observed, “Give us one free miracle, and we’ll explain the rest.” This is comparable to the inquisitions of past centuries, with the obvious difference that infidels are ridiculed and marginalized in lieu of being burned at the stake or drawn and quartered. For those whose careers are destroyed, the differences are mostly stylistic.

Which brings me to my post subject, a stellar example of the obfuscating effect of a priori assumptions lurking in the logical framework within which most educated humans position information imparted by apparently unimpeachable sources. None other than esteemed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, in a BBC interview, stated that developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have been very helpful, but further advances could prove dangerous to the human race. He went on to posit that “It would take off on its own, and redesign itself at an ever increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

There are so many a priori assumptions imbedded in that quote, I hardly know where to begin. Mister Theory of Everything conflates mind and brain as well as consciousness with the human race. He goes on to ascribe motivation to self-replicate into a machine environment and speaks about evolution as though it occurs independently of consciousness.

In my last post Catatonic Brain/Free Mind, the conflation of mind and brain is debunked. The brain is the biological organ created and employed by consciousness much as you or I would use a personal computer. Inasmuch as IQ primarily measures the speed and power of the brain, another conflation occurs—that of intelligence and mind. It appears that high-IQ adherents of artificial intelligence such as Marvin Minsky, Ray Kurzweil and Stephen Hawking are so enamored of their brains as to be trapped by them, obscuring the far more powerful steering forces of consciousness such as creativity, intuition, insight, instinct, direct knowing and morality. One can program a machine to play chess exceptionally well; however, one cannot endow a machine with the motivation to invent the game of chess. No matter how powerful and capable our systems of artificial intelligence become, they will never ‘cross over’ to assume the prerogatives of consciousness. Hence, the notion of machines taking over the planet and rendering humankind superfluous is both ridiculous and emblematic of the conceptual and intellectual simplisms inherent in the materialist framework.

This is nowhere more in evidence than what is incessantly reinforced in the popular culture. The movie trilogy The Matrix was for me fascinating and mind-expanding for about forty minutes, until the moment I realized that the underlying ‘reality’ was an enslavement of the human race by machines—exactly the kind of rogue artificial intelligence ‘feared’ by Hawking in his BBC interview. Its subsequent devolution to Zion as the last bastion of freedom served only to render the franchise totally risible.

The common meme of our era, reinforced by scientific orthodoxy, is that man evolved in a more or less linear fashion from primates, and that evolution is purely a biological process fueled by an exigency to adapt for survival in a hostile world. It’s instructive that common usage in English describes organisms as ‘having’ consciousness. This finds its genesis in the mainstream scientific notion that life ‘happened’—sort of like the Big Bang—and that consciousness is an illusion resulting from electrochemical traces in the biological brain. Small wonder that this mechanistic view of reality would lead inevitably to a reduction of man as machine, with its attendant paucity of imagination.

 

Metaphysics

Catatonic Brain; Free Mind

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As I’ve stressed in past posts, the mind is not the brain. They are not interchangeable, despite the prevailing scientific world view that we are merely self-aware living organisms that happened to ‘evolve’ to become the planet’s top predator in response to environmental stimuli over many generations. The resulting ‘survival of the fittest’ ethos explains the implacability of nature and justifies—to the point of glorification—acts committed by humans unconsciously driven by these evolutionary imperatives.

The brain can best be described as the biological organ created by consciousness to act as an on-board computational interface that facilitates our awareness of mind, which is pure consciousness. We experience our individual manifestation as human through this biological organ, but in no way does this circumscribe who or what we are. The prevailing self-aggrandizing delusion that our entire existence is defined by this singular human manifestation is primarily why my first rule of health mandates that one has to be in charge of one’s human—easier said than done in an era distorted between extremes of religious nonsense and condescending scientific paternalism.

The 1985 cult classic movie, Brazil, written and directed by Monte Python stalwart Terry Gilliam is a refreshing departure from the doctrinal suffocation imposed by the extremes of religion and science. Wittingly or unwittingly, in the distillation and ultimately the resolution of this movie’s plot in its final scene, Gilliam powerfully reveals the mind/brain paradox—that is, if one is watching with an open ‘mind’—unfortunately rare.

It is beyond the scope of this post to provide an in-depth analysis of this movie’s plot development; however, the bare outlines will suffice to make my point. Fundamentally, it is a dystopian satire with undertones of George Orwell’s 1984, but leavened with a humorous exposé of bureaucratic incompetence that provides a counterweight to state-sanctioned violence and corruption. The central love story between the protagonist Sam Lowry and Jill Layton ends badly, as Ms. Layton, mistakenly branded as a terrorist, is murdered by militarized police in a swat team raid (shades of our time!), and Sam, whose mother is a member of the elite, is spared death, but psychologically tortured to ‘rehabilitate’ him. Unlike Orwell’s Winston Smith, however, Sam’s spirit did not capitulate as he sank into complete catatonia. In the final scene, in Sam’s mind, he is with his love object in an idyllic setting far from the brutal reality of dystopian urban life, when in fact he is strapped in a chair, blissfully unaware, in the middle of a nuclear power plant concrete cooling tower.

Of course, what is referred to as Sam’s ‘spirit’ above is his mind. Until physical death of his human, Sam’s mind, or spirit if you prefer, will continue to inhabit his brain via the quantum energy of existence, but in Sam’s case can and does elude the state’s attempts at radical reprogramming.

Tellingly, Gilliam’s cut of the film was criticized by Universal as having a ‘dark ending’, and the studio pressured him to re-edit with a more ‘consumer-friendly’ ending, which is why it wasn’t released during 1984. To his credit, he refused to compromise his artistic vision and finally prevailed in releasing a version of his cut. Universal understood its audiences, however. The movie was a commercial failure in the United States, as it’s denizens have been become enculturated to a steady diet of feel-good pap extolling the romanticized myths of improbable happily-ever-after love stories or revenge fantasies of hypermasculine morons. As many have pointed out, Brazil bridges the dystopian visions of Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Given the creeping catatonia of consumerism and celebrity worship, Huxley appears to have been the more visionary prophet.

In future posts, I’ll highlight the myriad ways the extremes of religion and orthodox science are inculcated by popular culture in all media, especially in the entertainment industry.

Metaphysics

Sum ergo cogito

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René Descartes, considered by many to have been the father of modern post-Aristotelian philosophy, may be best known for his dictum cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), a foundation of his emphasis on reason to develop the natural sciences. He was a highly original thinker, and made significant contributions to philosophy, mathematics and the sciences, but my focus in this post is on his metaphysics, specifically that of mind-body dichotomy, more commonly termed dualism.

In his Passions of the Soul and The Description of the Human Body, Descartes suggested that the body has material properties, and is like a machine. Descartes described all matter as soulless and purposeless. In his view, the only non-mechanical entities in the physical universe were human minds, part of the spiritual realm that included God; hence, not subject to the laws of nature as they were understood in the mid-seventeenth century. Descartes even speculated that the pineal gland, nestled between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, was the link between the spiritual and material worlds. Variations on the concept of dualism held sway in various forms until the rise of militant atheism during the Enlightenment, pursuant to which science increasingly acknowledged only one reality—the material universe. The spiritual realm was demoted to a figment of the human imagination suitable only for the feeble of mind.

By now I’ve made it abundantly clear that I do not subscribe to either accepted magisteria—that of materialist science or religion. As postulated in the last post, “being” manifests for the purpose of “doing” in the time-space continuum we create in quantum “now moments”. Hence, expressing Descartes’ dictum as sum ergo cogito  (I am, therefore I think), more convincingly describes our experience of consciousness. Thinking during waking life is mostly experienced as serial blabber in the biological organ created by consciousness for this purpose—the human brain, but can and does occur as direct signal transfer emanating from the state of being I call the Collective. These transfers include creativity, intuition, instinct and direct knowing, as well as, to my mind, morality and integrity.

Speaking of serial blabber, I read about a series of experiments at the US Department of Energy’s Fermilab. “In what may be one of the most mind-bogglingly surreal experiments ever floated, scientists…will attempt to discover whether the universe is “real” or merely a holographic three-dimensional illusion that we just think is real…using high-powered lasers intended to determine whether space-time is a quantum system made up of countless bits of information”. It further states “the information about everything contained in our universe may somehow be embedded in tiny packets of information in two dimensions…at this subatomic scale, standard physics no longer applies and quantum theory dictates the rules.” They believe that the characteristic jitter that exists in matter is also found in “empty” space which will establish, “whether space-time is a quantum system just like matter is”. Using a device called a Holometer, a laser interferometer that superimposes one laser beam over another to look for anomalies in intensity or phase, they are attempting to demonstrate that there is quantum activity at or near absolute zero, theoretically incongruent with the standard model.

The irony here is that the Fermilab scientists could prove their hypothesis and still not be one iota closer to recognizing the vacuity of their materialist paradigm. Note their use of the word “merely”. If space-time is truly a holographic projection in two dimensions, then it’s a projection of consciousness, and the validation of that would go a long way towards explaining why quantum entanglement appears to be independent of space-time’s speed-of-light limit. It’s instructive to revisit Max Planck’s 1944 statement quoted in my post on quantum entanglement and realize that, seventy years later, the scientific community has utterly failed to grasp the metaphysical implications of Planck’s profound realizations.

Apparently, the canon of materialist science that relegates consciousness to chemical traces in the brain is so pervasive, few readers bother to question the absurdity of separating “thinking” about reality and reality itself, despite that the article references Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which demonstrates, among other things, that an observer ineluctably interacts with phenomena being observed. More to the point, trying to set apart standard physics from quantum theory lays bare the incredulous—that humans are standing around looking at stuff, describing it, categorizing it, measuring it and extrapolating what “it” is from these data, instead of recognizing and reconceptualizing the whole as our creation. And, by “our”, I don’t mean humans—I mean consciousness. Just as the observed is inextricably intertwined with its observers, creation can’t be separated from its creators.

I can accept that almost four centuries ago Descartes and other Dualists thought of the observable universe as a creation of God, and the human soul as its spiritual agent. These ideas certainly accounted for the phenomena of “being” and “thinking” in a world that appeared to their rudimentary science to be made of matter. Unfortunately, with the rise of militant atheism, spiritual agency got thrown out with the bath water, and what’s left is a notion that stuff “is” and life “happens” in an otherwise dead and purposeless collection of debris left over from a very large bang.

Sum ergo creavi—I am, therefore I create.

 

Philosophy

Human Doings

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There’s no such thing as a human being; there are only human doings. The conflation of ‘human’ and ‘being’ central to almost all systems of philosophy erects a formidable barrier to any comprehension of reality. Consciousness—a state of being—manifests as energy and matter in a time and space continuum. Comprehension of our existence—what we experience—actualizes through the process of quantum energy emerging in ‘time’ in countless ‘now moments’, where each moment informs the next such that our observable world lies in the already-created past.

All self-replicating life forms manifest in this manner, however only humans appear to be endowed with individual wills to choose the vector of their ‘now moments’. Unfortunately, a vanishingly small subset of humans optimizes the potential of this endowment, resulting largely from the miasma of misconceptions with which we are enculturated as we grow and mature. In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic faiths, each individual human is defined as having been created by an omniscient deity. At the conclusion of earthly life, each human’s ‘soul’ returns to the abode of its respective deity to be judged. Pursuant to judgment, each soul is duly rewarded or punished based on its obedient execution of the deity’s codified rules and regulations. In the countervailing dogma of materialist science, each human is defined as an end game, a biological entity that is born, lives and dies; and, with decay of the remains, ceases to exist except in living memory or in other stored records. in neither religious nor scientific dogma is the human entity defined as a temporal state of doing.

Doing is by definition action in time. Doing is why we manifest as human. In an idealized state, ‘doing’ is informed by ‘being’ in a continual stream of consciousness. Unfortunately, the reality of dealing with the pervasive cacophany of ‘noise’ of the modern world, steeped as it is in a suffocating framework of religious and scientific myths, interferes with this natural flow of energy. Our health and well-being are entirely dependent on the ‘signal-to-noise’ ratio of this connection, a phenomenon co-opted and corrupted by established systems of power and their respective institutions which undergird the Rule of Lies. Stated simply, the dismal state of the modern world can be attributed to the codification, propagation and inculcation of these religious and scientific myths in order to channel societal energies for the benefit of the few at the apex of the power pyramid. When soft forces of coercion don’t produce the desired result, enforcement, enslavement or eradication by violence ensures compliance.

Among the myriad soft forces are those resulting from propaganda defining modern advertising, which seeks to create demand or desire divorced from any real need or benefit. As a result, most humans define their lives in terms of ‘having’. It’s by now well understood that ‘having’ rarely results in long-term satisfaction, leading instead to an addiction of wanting or needing more. Since wealth translates in this realm to power, abuse of power is not only rampant but by definition inevitable. Adages such as ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely’ exist because they are true. As just one example among countless examples, in our time the parasitic ruling class, through outright manipulation and theft of public assets, artificially drives up the price of things, such as works of art or rare automobiles. They find their expression in the pathetic bragging rights of their ‘success’,  pegging their relevance to ‘dying with the most toys’—behaviors that typically contribute very little of value to the commons or perform any useful function in society.

Almost anyone that can read can also understand the dictionary definitions of the words being, doing and having. However, only a minority will ever grasp the implications of these words in terms of viewing themselves as consciousness manifesting in human form for the purpose of ‘doing’. This seminal truth is so powerful and overarchingly important, I will be devoting a series of posts to exploring its roots in the prevailing culture, and the steps that must be considered if we are to salvage what’s left of our fragile ecosystems.

Being and Somethingness