Hello all! I went off-line about 5 p.m. yesterday, and only checked my messages this morning, some of which were amazingly thought-provoking. Since then I’ve been running about doing my normal Saturday things, all the while composing in the background an essay under the working title, “Adventures in Consciousness.” Now I feel tasked to try to write that down.
What I want to address can be found in the above italics: The conceivability of something that has temporal, but not spatial extension, and what the ramifications of such a something would be. In particular, I think this question has the most urgent relevance for quantum theory. For the very thing that has temporal, but not physical extension, seems to me to be consciousness itself. Which to my mind seems to have direct relevance to the problem of the QM “observer.”
QM seems to want to reduce the “observer” to the status of some abstract measurement. Forgive me you physicists out there who hold with this view, but I can’t conceive what could possibly be the relevance of any measurement absent a conscious observer. (To put it another way: Absent a conscious observer, what is the point of making a measurement?)
Since it has been suggested in prior posts to this thread that whatever role consciousness has to play in the understanding of reality, nobody really knows what consciousness is – at least science has managed to elude this question so far.
I’ll be the first to tell you, I don’t know what consciousness is, as it is in itself. But I have had certain conscious experiences that seem germane to our present topic. I do not offer “conclusions” here; just want to record certain quite empirical (because actually experienced, first-hand) experiences into the record.
So let’s cut to the chase. Physicist, I’ll gladly take my opening text from you. You wrote: “what about when the song is in your head? That, of course, is the question upon which the discussion hangs, so we must stay agnostic on that...er, score.”
Well, all I can say to that is, not only can I play songs in my head, but I can play entire plays in my head.
Case in point: I used to participate in community theater. Early on in my “career”, I decided that the best way to prepare for a role was to memorize, not only my own character’s lines, music, and dance, but to memorize the whole play – that is, every other character’s lines, music, and dance, as well as the settings, the placement of props, and the position of every other character on stage in a given scene -- in sequence from opening curtain to final curtain. I chose this method of preparation because I felt that it would help me become so steeped in the play that I would never have to think about anything at all once I was on-stage (since the various contingencies had been effectively anticipated in advance) except “being” my character. (And I think I was right about this, looking at experience.) And there was a significant side benefit: If any of my fellow actors were to get in trouble – say, forget a line, or be in the wrong position on stage – then I would automatically be in a position to “draw them back into the play” in a way that was completely inside my own character. This meditative exercise gave me so much confidence, that I was completely free to just “be” my character.
To get to this point of “mastering the play” involved a meditative exercise of consciousness. Starting at least a week before opening night, every night I would “go to bed early,” then sit on my bed, and run through the entire play “in my head.” That is, in complete solitude and silence. In the case I have presently in mind (South Pacific), that would take roughly two hours each night.
Looking back at that experience, I can tell you two things: Those two hours of conscious experience do not seem to have had spatial extension; but it’s clear to me they did have temporal extension.
In the second place, even odder than that, the plays I did then are still recorded someplace “in me,” somewhere in unconscious mind (i.e., in “deep storage”), and retrievable (at least partially, given the passage of time) by active memory. Somewhere in the “deep storage” of my unconscious mind lurk in their entirety not only South Pacific, but also Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and perhaps a dozen other plays -- at least parts of any of which I can still play in my present consciousness, at will.
The immediately foregoing and other relevant things considered, I hypothesize: The scientific method is applicable to objects that have spatial extension. But it has no grip whatsoever on how to deal with “objects” that have only temporal extension.
But this is precisely where a “new kind of science is needed,” to break the cognitive impasse….
Let me give you another example from my “adventures in consciousness.” This one probably will appear not only bizarre, but insane in the minds of most readers of these lines. But I can only tell you what I’ve personally seen as truthfully as I can. The judgment is left to you.
Again, I will take my cue from Physicist, who wrote: “My view is rigidly Deistic, because for God to intervene in the universe would violate the laws of Nature, and thereby violate the Truth, clearly an impossibility.”
On the basis of my experience, I think it is possible that God may intervene in the universe in a manner that does not violate His physical laws of Nature at all. Here’s a case study:
I am fast asleep after an extraordinarily difficult and taxing day. I hear someone saying: Awake! And so I wake up, and find two “persons” standing beside me. One of them says, “You must come with us. You are expected.”
Instantly I am perplexed. For the speaker has not spoken verbally. He has spoken telepathically – “mind to mind”, so to speak. I am not afraid at all, because these unwonted strangers (only one of whom ever “speaks” to me in this entire episode) radiate love and peace and goodwill – and more than that, they implicitly convey the sense that they aren’t “there” on their own initiative.
So I get up, and let them take me wherever it is they are supposed to take me.
The next thing I know is I find myself, with my companions, in a vast, incredibly dark place. Somehow I feel that I am in an enclosed space; but I cannot see walls, or ceiling, or even floor for that matter – although assuredly I am standing on something.
I turn to the “guide” who “spoke” to me, and ask him by a look (verbal language seeming to be quite useless in this scenario): Why am I here? And he looks me in the eye, and then turns his head as if to indicate the direction in which I ought to be looking, to find my answer.
And so I follow his gaze.
I see an astounding vision: a graphical object suspended in the chamber, radiating light, pulsating with energy, with life…. I can’t adequately describe it to this day (this event happened in 1984). But it appeared to be spherical in form, consisting of innumerable bands of light, intertwined, mutually penetrating yet all the same discrete -- glowing, pulsing, corruscating, amazing to behold. I stood there, dumbfounded. I didn’t have a clue what I was looking at; all I knew was that it was extraordinarily beautiful….
It was then I got some “help” – which in retrospect I gather was the purpose of this “trip” in the first place. I heard a Voice, which said: “This is My creation.”
Time out. I need to characterize the nature of this Voice. My “guides” had been silent, communicating telepathically. This Voice was voiced -- I.e., physically audible, but in a way that set up an incredible cognitive dissonance in my perceptual apparatus, depending on which ear I was predominantly hearing the message through. Through one ear, I heard a Voice that thundered, in a way well beyond any thunder that any human person ever heard before or could possibly imagine. But through my other ear, I could hear a Voice speaking so softly, so clearly, so matter-of-factly. Somehow, I managed to receive the message.
Which was (to paraphrase in so many words): “This is My Creation. I so love My Creation and each and every created thing I ever made within it. But most of all, I love Man. And not just “Man” in the generic. I love each and every man, personally, by name. I love each and every human person, without regard to their standing in the world of created things. For each of them is the child of My Love.”
The next thing I knew, I was sitting bolt upright on my bed, crying my eyes out to relieve the sheer pain occasioned by the pressure of indescribable, ineffable, inexpressible joy….
On the basis of such “exploits,” I would tend to surmise that the problem science has with God has to do mainly with the problem of trying to “measure” or test an Entity which has temporal extension, but not spatial extension. For He certainly has had “temporal presence” in my lived reality for quite a while by now. (Not that I mean to set myself up as some kind of ultimate test of reality – I am just a part and participant of same.)
If science wants to integrate such experiences into its body of knowledge, it needs to figure out what to do with consciousness -–for that is precisely the “matrix” in which such “adventures” as I have adumbrated above occur.
If science doesn’t feel this is a question it needs to deal with, then it seems to me that the best science can do is to come up with only a partial picture of Reality. JMHO FWIW.
Strangely, I just posted a quote from this very article, but since it may have some bearing on the observer question – here we go again. The Physics of Symbols
By the 1970s, I believed I had some insight on Pearson's question. These ideas, which I will summarize below, were presented in the four volumes of Waddington's (1968-72) Bellagio conferences on theoretical biology. My first question then was: How can we describe in physical language the most elementary heritable symbols? It has turned out that for even the simplest known case, the gene, an adequate description requires the two irreducibly complementary concepts of dynamical laws and non-integrable constraints that are not derivable from the laws. This primeval distinction between the individual's local symbolic constraints that first appear at the origin of life and the objective universal laws, reappears in many forms at higher levels.6 From von Neumann (1955) I learned that this same epistemic cut occurs in physics in the measurement process, i.e., the fact that dynamical laws cannot describe the measurement function of determining initial conditions.
Later I saw these as special cases of the general epistemic problem: how to bridge the separation between the observer and the observed, the controller and the controlled, the knower and the known, and even the mind and the brain. This notorious epistemic cut has motivated philosophical disputes for millennia, especially the problem of consciousness that only recently has begun to be treated as possibly an empirically decidable problem (e.g., Shear, 1997; Taylor, 1999). My second question was whether bridging the epistemic cut could even be addressed in terms of physical laws.
I can truly relate to your personal experiences. I’ve had several myself over the years and they seem to be increasing exponentially.
Like yours, they usually they take the form of night travel; it is always about pure worship and love; there are no words but always music and both space and proportion collapse or expand as we travel, i.e. they mean nothing. I have had several experiences while wide awake, two of these are recorded on the thread when my sister graduated to heaven. I felt her spirit go through me when she slipped into a deep coma even though I was 4 floors away. It was the same feeling I had outside the emergency room when my mother slipped into a coma. In both cases, it was a calming, reassuring feeling of “I’m alive, I'm happy, see ‘ya later.”
Another one – the first I ever had – I want to mention here because some Freepers had been discussing how nobody had seen the empty tomb. Not so fast. In this one, I wasn’t quite asleep and saw a place, everything dark. In the distance was what looked like a bluff with a large hole, big enough to walk through. People were standing around. When it dawned on me what I had just seen, I sat straight up and praised God!
I write these things fully aware that some might think I’ve gone off the deep end. But to say anything else would be a lie and to not testify to it would be a loss.
I agree with you that science needs to be more open minded on the non-physical, both the temporal and the extra-temporal.
Cognitive science tells us that one hundred billion neurons connected by one trillion synapes, given the flexible combinatorial majesty of the recursive, modular programming of the mind, can account for every image and thought process, including all dream states, that are represented in the mind. The portfolio making that case has begun to bulge noticeably in recent decades as the reductionists earn their pay.
But to my mind the uncanny universality of the theme present in the story you relate tells us something astounding about the material world, something resistant to reductionism. What is it? Why are these archetypes so powerful across all cultures? Is it really a mere evolutionary mechanism?
There is a leak between the material and the non-material, somewhere under QM and near the bottom of Mandelbrots fractals. Spirit does not "exist" in the sense the hardcore materialists expect, but it connects us nonetheless to a beyond, and touches our mind in dreams.
Betty ... ya gotta have FAITH, baby!
After all, how else to know we're doing the right thing by offing the unconscious and those who've not yet lived long enough to prove their consciousness to us?
(I used to memorize the entire play too ... whether I was onstage or off. Working a play, I used to put myself to sleep by starting at Act I and going from there ... okay ... I'll keep reading, just great to see you, that's all.)
Science makes for a most excellent white-tipped cane with which to tap out the form of the universe.
(I'd still like to have a dog alongside me were I truly blind.)
Wonderful post, Betty ... I'm flagging monkey to it in case he didn't see it.