1. It must be consistent with best practice in science and society;
2. It must take account of ontological differences, for example between the physical and biological;
3. Neuroscience, it is self-evident, cannot be simpler than the math reasoning that comprises our physical theories of the world;
4. In like vein, consciousness studies cannot be simpler than our total experience of reality
2. It must take account of ontological differences, for example between the physical and biological;
3. Neuroscience, it is self-evident, cannot be simpler than the math reasoning that comprises our physical theories of the world;
4. In like vein, consciousness studies cannot be simpler than our total experience of reality
We
were lead to certain radical conclusions; for example, causal
explanation must vary in nature between the physical and biological.
Theories of the brain must become several orders of magnitude more
complex in order to work. Our late member, Walter J Freeman,
demonstrated that the initial sensory stimulus has been lost by the time
the input is processed in the cortex and most experience is what he
terms “solipsistic”.
Thus,
to create a “science” of consciousness, we need a formalism that
distinguishes mere solipsistic “awakeness” from moments in which
experience is authentic. It seems to be the case that the game could not
be bigger; it is as if we have been compelled to view consciousness as
nothing less that the absolute becoming manifest in us.
If
that is the case, we can distinguish such moments from our normal
alienated, indeed subaltern experience. We can invoke quantum physics to
argue that the noetic products of such moments have permanent effects
on reality. Indeed, we can claim charter from 20th century physics to
argue that human beings are indeed part of a thing-less, entangled,
noetic reality that the best minds of the 21st century will spend their
careers trying to understand.
A
generation after the “end of history,” Western civilization faces twin
threats. The first, epitomized by the Bataclan attack, is that from
radical Islamic terrorism, the latest unpleasantness from the God of
Abraham. This is a fundamentalism that wishes to roll back the victory
of Charles Martel at Tours and finally conquer Europe. Indeed, for
French writers like Eric Zemmour, disapproval of such attacks by
mainstream Islam is because they are premature, and risk the longterm
project of taking over by stealth and force of numbers. As Zemmour puts
it, one refugee is a guest, to be welcomed, but a million is an
invasion, to be repelled.
The
second threat is the decay of values that has turned neoliberalism,
best thought of as a fringe economic theory, into a totalizing force.
The response by the western academy to both these threats has been at
best feeble. At worst, the relativism that has become dogmatic there
would insist that the impetus within Islam to turn back the clock on the
rights of speech, thought, assembly, property and reproduction that
epitomize the greatness of western culture is to be valued as simply
another perspective in a multicultural society.
For
all its arrogance, modern science is as timid about its ultimate quarry
as modern politics is about its purpose. Instead of pursuing the ground
of Being, an encompassing realization that will inform each act of
consciousness before its birth,
science
focuses on a reductive third-person instrumental description. This
makes it vulnerable on the one hand to the Semitic realization of the
Abrahamic god, and on the other to the instrumentalization continued to
the point that economics does a claim-jump into politics, to
neoliberalism as effectively a religion.
The
success of Western science in instrumentalizing nature has led to a
paradox; the fact that normative disciplines like morality cannot pass
muster in a scientistic worldview may lead in coldly logical steps to
concession to claims on truth arising from irrationality. Instead of an
articulate response to these twin threats, attacks on believers from a
scientistic perspective and refuge in a trivially incorrect version of
psychologism have become the norm.
Of
course the Church was assiduous in wiping out all traces of native
religions in Europe. Since then, the nearest the West has come to a
totalizing worldview attested by a “religious” personal conversion is
Marxist utopian socialism. While its roots are in emanationist thought
that can be traced from Plato’s Timaeus through Eriugena to Hegel, it is
ultimately a theory of consciousness. Geist/spirit manifests itself in
physical reality and human societies and we are seduced by false
consciousness until we realize within ourselves the paramount reality
that is class struggle and the unreality of Geist itself in a material
cosmos.
Timothy
Leary, before he became a byword, made what is for us a very essential
point; since the contents of our consciousness involve ever more
amplified political narratives, the beginning of enlightenment is to
find a way to “drop out” from this veil of Maya. His later solution–the
wise use of the internet–is also laudable. For the moment, it perhaps
suffices to argue that Marxist “false consciousness” is as useful a toll
to explore the contents of our psyche than anything from a “spiritual”
tradition.
Yet
Marxism is of course, in Koestler’s felicitous phrase, “The God that
failed,” perhaps due to its roots in the apocalyptic/historicist vision
of the book of Daniel. Moreover, in practice it sought to roll back
exactly those rights of rights of speech, thought, assembly, property
and reproduction that western society clawed away from the Abrahamic god
as manifest in the Church. This conference asks whether we can now do
better.
Yet
the failure of current neuroscience to generate a theory of brain
process even remotely powerful enough to explain how we speak, let alone
do physics, surely gives pause. From quantum mechanics (QM) and post
QM, we are converging on the idea that, for the conscious observer to
function, there must be in some ineluctable sense contact with the
infinite. That goes even for the most hard-boiled of skeptics like
Feynman. Surely there is space here for the cosmic to become manifest in
the quotidian, the core of any religious movement.
Perhaps
we are close to the endgame in how 21st century consciousness studies
will evolve. We as humans are intentional symbolic systems; the only
ones we know in the cosmos. Thinkers like Pradhan, argue that ultimate
reality is Uroboros, beyond subject and object. His use of Hilbert space
is perhaps a limit case of the PQM Sarfatti/Bohm/Hiley model.
Indeed,
perhaps a conscious moment is when Uroboros knows itself through an
obscure primate on a small planet. Thus, the pilot wave does not have
qualia; these manifest in the interaction. Both the Pradhan and
Sarfatti/Bohm/Hiley models involve connection to a transcendent and
ubiquitous Reality; that is essential to QM, and used even by the most
hard- nosed in their versions of QM.
As
a religion, then, we can perhaps hold as sacred human action that
connects us to the infinite and promote praxis that implements this
connection. The goal of human life is to act as a vehicle for the
Absolute to know itself and be through us in our individual unique
existence--and the goal of the human psyche is to act as a vehicle for
knowing Absolute Being in our individual unique existence. Part of the
authority of religion springs from its magisterium that delimits a
necessary profane/secular part of human existence along with the sacred,
which normally requires a premises.
We
can add to this core the ideas of code, community, and–above all–the
sense that religion is above all Immanuel, assertion of the sacred in
our experience. This holds whether the religion is secular, like
Marxism; atheistic, like some schools of Buddhism, or the religion of
the West that is only in the face of twin threats daring to speak its
name, the assertion of our freedoms as sacred. Therefore, this
conference proposes to debate what we should hold sacred, and how the
infinite is realized for us.
______________________________
About Foundations of Mind (FOM)
Foundations of Mind (FOM) is an independent secular research group. It offers the most generous copyright terms possible; you keep copyright of your paper, and do not pay. We have published 79 peer-reviewed papers in our 30 months of existence, including by greats like Walter Freeman, Stuart Kauffman, and Henry Stapp, We already have a contract for a book version of FOM4, which will be held in 2017 in conjunction with a celebration of what would have been the late Walter Freeman’s 90th birthday.
Please send a 5k words proposal to president@UniversityofIreland.
