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Allan's Perspective is NOT recommended for the politically correct, or the overly religious. Some people have opinions. Some people have convictions......... What we offer is PERSPECTIVE!




Saturday 7 July 2018

On the Nature of Us! (Consciousness and Reality)

Dear Friends: “Consciousness is not a phenomenon of the observable Universe. It is that which makes the Universe observable.
Consciousness is the manifestation of God within us!”

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We have to start with the premise that the Universe is a duality, or to put it more succinctly, that the Universe is binary!

Evidence for this exists wherever we look due to the nature of reality being composed of two parts, e. g., positive - negative, male-female, matter-antimatter, light – dark and so on!

So what has this to do with the nature of reality you ask?

Reality can be looked upon the same way we look at a television set. This can best be described  by thinking of what Menas Kafatos calls the actual operation of a modern television where there is the box with its rather complicated electronic parts but is by itself an inert thing with no function what-so-ever. (This can be compared to the physical Universe.)

But, feed a program (consciousness) into it and we have an entirely new ballgame folks! (Sorry about the pun!)

Suddenly this object with no discernible function by itself becomes the window to an entire world and the repository of endless entertainment and knowledge. It combines the physical and the mental to form a duality and an example of the nature of reality. (Consciousness can exist without the Universe, but the Universe cannot exist without consciousness.  Consciousness is the underlying awareness.)

Consciousness is there, outside of space and time……... our bodies live in this physical reality, but there are aspects of us outside of this realm as well. (Ab extra?)

Only in recent years has the science necessary for answering the question about the nature of consciousness become accessible, enabling a string of experimental results—including startling ones reported in 2007 and 2010, and culminating now with a remarkable test reported in May—that show that key predictions of QM (quantum mechanics) are indeed looking like they might be correct.  (Taken together, these experiments indicate that the everyday world we perceive does not exist until observed, which in turn suggests a primary role for mind in nature.)

To make a connection between the physical (objective) and the mental (subjective) we need to go by the assumption that normal matter is totally inert and dead while living tissue is a conduit for a type of awareness we refer to as consciousness. (It is entirely possible that this reality, being two dimensional in nature, is seen as being a three-dimensional hologram by our Quantum Consciousness.)

It is thus high time the scientific community at large, not only those involved in foundations of QM, faced up to the counter-intuitive implications of QM’s most controversial predictions.  (This is where the Latin ‘ab extra’ or "from outside" comes in.)

Over the years, scientists have written extensively about why QM seems to imply that the world is essentially mental.  (Quantum consciousness research is considered a “pseudoscience” by the main scientific community, but I think they will lead to forms of transhumanist studies once a few more scientists get on board).

It is often misinterpreted as espousing solipsism or some form of “quantum mysticism,” so let's be clear: The argument for a mental world does not imply that the world is merely one’s own personal hallucination or act of imagination.

My view is entirely naturalistic: The mind that underlies the world is a transpersonal mind behaving according to natural laws. It comprises but far transcends any individual psyche, hence my conjecture that “consciousness is the manifestation of God within us.”

The core idea of quantum consciousness research is that subtle quantum effects could play a key role in how the conscious mind emerges from or is focused through the physical brain. (That’s only borderline fringe, almost respectably mainstream.)

This hypothesis (quantum consciousness) was put forward in the early 1990s by theoretical physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist and psychologist Stuart Hameroff. (Quantum mysticism, meanwhile, steps beyond that line to explore ultimate reality, mind-over-matter, frontier theology and all that weird stuff we associate with the pseudosciences!)




According to Hameroff and Penrose, the recent discovery of quantum vibrations in microtubules inside brain neurons corroborates their theory. The discovery was made by a research group led by Anirban Bandyopadhyay at the National Institute of Material Sciences in Tsukuba, Japan (and now at MIT).


In addition, work from the laboratory of Roderick G. Eckenhoff at the University of Pennsylvania suggests that anesthesia, which selectively erases consciousness while sparing non-conscious brain activities, acts via microtubules in brain neurons.

Hameroff and Penrose claim that of “20 testable predictions of Orch OR published in 1998,” six are currently confirmed and none are refuted.

In “Consciousness in the Universe: A review of the ‘Orch OR’ theory” (2014) Penrose and Hameroff noted the parallels between their theory of quantum consciousness and “spiritual approaches" that assume consciousness has been in the universe all along, e.g. as the ‘ground of being’, ‘creator’ or component of an omnipresent ‘God.’

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The problem that immediately presents itself is how this ‘cosmic consciousness’ is expressed in our material world and even though I wouldn’t put all my eggs in one basket, ‘orchestrated objective reduction’ (Orch-OR) is a hypothesis that consciousness in the brain originates from an influence inside neurons, rather than from the conventional view of connections between neurons.
The mechanism is held to be a quantum physics process that is orchestrated inside molecular structures called microtubules. (The basis of Orch-OR has been criticized from its inception by mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers,  prompting the authors to revise and elaborate many of the theory's peripheral assumptions while retaining the core hypothesis. The criticism concentrated on three issues: Penrose's interpretation of Gödel's theorem; Penrose's abductive reasoning linking non-computability to quantum processes, and the brain's unsuitability to host the quantum phenomena required by the theory since it is considered too "warm, wet and noisy" to avoid decoherence.)

While mainstream theories assert that consciousness emerges as the complexity of the computations performed by cerebral neurons increases, Orch-OR posits that consciousness is based on quantum processing performed by qubits formed collectively on all cellular microtubules.  In other words, there is a missing link between physics and neuroscience and to date it is premature to claim that the Orch-OR hypothesis is right or wrong….. But it bears watching!
The hypothesis attempts to refute reductionism (the philosophical position that a complex system is nothing more than the sum of its parts). For example, a physicalist reductionist's approach to the mind-body problem holds that the mental process humans experience as consciousness can be fully described via physical processes in the brain and body. 

This is NOT the case!

From Wikipedia: What Is it Like to Be a Bat?

"What is it like to be a bat?" is a paper by American philosopher Thomas Nagel, first published in The Philosophical Review in October 1974, and later in Nagel's Mortal Questions (1979). In it, Nagel argues that materialist theories of mind omit the essential component of consciousness, namely that there is something that it is (or feels) like to be a particular, conscious thing. 

He argues that an organism has conscious mental states, "if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism — something it is like for the organism to be itself." (Daniel Dennett, a critic of Nagel's argument, nevertheless called this paper "the most widely cited and influential thought experiment about consciousness.")

The paper argues that the subjective nature of consciousness undermines any attempt to explain consciousness via objective, reductionist means. 


Nagel uses the metaphor of bats to clarify the distinction between subjective and objective concepts. Bats are mammals, so they are assumed to have conscious experience.

 Nagel used bats for his argument because of their highly evolved and active use of a biological sensory apparatus that is significantly different from that of many other organisms. 


While it is possible to imagine what it would be like to fly, navigate by sonar, hang upside down and eat insects like a bat that is not the same as a bat's perspective. 

Nagel claims that even if humans were able to metamorphose gradually into bats, their brains would not have been wired as a bat's from birth; therefore, they would only be able to experience the life and behaviors of a bat, rather than the mindset. 

Such is the difference between subjective and objective points of view. According to Nagel, “our own mental activity is the only unquestionable fact of our experience”, meaning that each individual only knows what it is like to be them (Subjectivism). 

Objectivity requires an unbiased, non-subjective state of perception. For Nagel, the objective perspective is not feasible, because humans are limited to subjective experience.

Physicalism claims that states and events are physical, but those physical states and events are only imperfectly characterized.  Nevertheless, he holds that physicalism cannot be understood without characterizing objective and subjective experience. 

That is a necessary precondition for understanding the mind-body problem.

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Consciousness is not “emergent” from the brain, but is rather focused through it! (Is our sub-conscious the conduit that is the connection with Cosmic Consciousness?)

Information philosophy shows that there is nothing like reflective awareness in passive information structures like the galaxies, stars, planets or even rocks. (In the old days this was reffered to as the "Firmament!")

This presents itself as being solely within the purview of living things. (Since mind is a property of living things we can see the first proto-mind developing in the earliest macromolecules that could replicate their information structures.)

It is only living things that use information processing to manage the flow of energy through their information structures and that have the awareness and the (sometimes emotional) reactions to their environments that can be called consciousness in higher beings.

Information philosophy and the experience recorder and reproducer (ERR) explain "subjective experiences" and Thomas Nagel's question "what it is like to be a living thing." (This accounts for the first-person, "subjective" nature of experience that David Chalmers calls the "hard problem" of consciousness.)

Material objects react "objectively" in their interactions with other objects. Living things, with their immaterial minds, react "subjectively" to events in the world. They have "behaviours," which are the products of their individual life experiences as well as the past experiences of their species, which are transmitted genetically and of course with whatever quantum connection we have with a “Cosmic Consciousness!” (God, Mother Nature, Supreme Being, First Cause or Prime Mover.)

Since we seem to be in some way a part of God we have to ask the question: “What is the Nature of Nature.” (We use rules to explain Nature, but where did the rules come from?)

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For life to exist, it must follow certain rules, and since the religions of the West are not to be blindly followed since they were designed only to further the agenda of the people who spread that particular dogma, we have to look for other possible explanations!

To do this, after much internal debate and conjecture, I find this brings us to the philosophy of either Alan Watts or Baruch Spinoza.

Alan Watts might have been on the right track until he fell into the trap of Metaphysical Solipsism which is based on subjective idealism and maintains that the self is the only existing reality and that all other realities, including the external world and other persons, are representations of that self and have no independent existence. (In other words he is discounting the material side of Natures duality!)

BUT, on the other hand, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's works was not fully realized until many years after his death. (When Einstein said "I believe in Spinoza's God," what did he mean?)

By laying the groundwork for the 18th-century Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism, including modern conceptions of the self and the universe,  he came to be considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy. (Note: This essay takes a middle path that body and spirit is separate, as Descartes said, but the spirit is a part of an all-encompassing divine presence!)

The universal laws of nature, according to which all things exist and are determined, are only another name for the eternal decrees of God, which always involve eternal truth and necessity.  So to say that everything happens according to natural laws, and to say that everything is ordained by the decree and ordinance of God is the same thing.

If Spinoza is speaking of nature itself it’s not that God's presence is found within nature. God appears to be indistinguishable from nature.

Was his aim to free people from superstition without asking them to entirely renounce their belief in God?  Is he meeting his audience halfway, speaking their language, obscuring the radical gulf between his views and theirs? 

Or did he really envision the natural world as divine?
The way I see it anyway!
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Taken from my book: “An Exploration of Religion and the Meaning of Life!”

https://www.amazon.com/Exploration-Religion-Meaning-Life/dp/1537597698/ref=sr_1_14?ie=UTF8&qid=1520876942&sr=8-14&keywords=allan+Janssen

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