Consciousness?

[Marietta]

All that exists is consciousness/energy and the body is merely consciousness expressing itself. Matter is merely a holographic projection of our thoughts. Each dimension is created by the consciousness stationed on dimensional band above it.

[lunamoth]

So we are halographic projections (dreams) of a consciousness above us?

[Quahom1]

Originally Posted by Marietta

All that exists is consciousness/energy and the body is merely consciousness expressing itself. Matter is merely a holographic projection of our thoughts. Each dimension is created by the consciousness stationed on dimensional band above it.

Then, we are spatial in our very consciouness? And Einstein is wrong about matter being a lower frequency of energy? I ask, because you state that consciousness/energy exists, but that matter is a holographic projection of energy (if I read that you perceive thought to be energy, which I happen to agree with). Something has to give here. Either matter is energy, or it is a holograph (hollow 3D illusion, or visual manifestation that does not really exist).

What do you mean by "dimensional band above" concerning consciousness? And how does "consciousness" have anything to do with dimensional (space/time)?...? Or dimensional personality traits? Or?

You need to get a little deeper and spell things out a bit on this, If you have time.

v/r

Q

[flowperson]

There was an obscure book written in the late 1980's titled, The Holographic Universe, by Michael Talbott. It was thoroughly reviled by conservative science, which told me there was probably some truth in what was revealed in the book. The researchs of two scientists, Pribam and Bohm are extensively analyzed and described in it. The conclusions expounded and speculated upon by Talbott are suggested in Marietta's above post. But of course none of it is as yet proven, or if it has been, has not been made public because of its potential for profound disruption of accepted beliefs, IMHO.

In a book I'm reading now on quantum gravity by Lisa Randall, Warped Passages, she mentions holographic phenomena as a possible explanation for the basic latticeworks of the universe. She is one of the world's leaders in theoretical research regarding quantum phenomena. I have also purchased another copy of Talbott's book on holograms as a new paradigm to describe universal structures and plan to reread it after I digest Randall's work. Maybe I'll write a book report on the issue at some point in the future, but who's got the time for that stuff these days. Since I work a 50 hr week I have a hard time finding any spare time.

If any of you wish to read both books and beat me to it, please proceed. I'm really interested in this stuff.

By the way, welcome to CR Marietta ! I'm looking forward to more of your posts.

flow....

[DrFree]

Christine,

I was intrigued by your plea:

Originally Posted by christine.P

Can someone help me on this please.

If human beings are made up of body, mind,and spirit", does each of these have it's own consciousness; or is the mind the only part that carries consciousness?

Thanks Bow.

The words "human beings are made up of body, mind, and spirit" connote a (perhaps partial) list of ingredients used in a recipe by some super-chef. It implies that body, mind and spirit are different substances or elements which together compose a person. I suggest that this is probably not the right interpretation.

For comparison, consider the classical list of elements of matter -- earth, water, air and fire. Today, scientists don't regard these as constituents of matter; rather, they refer to the elements in the Periodic Table as the proper list of potential ingredients. Nonetheless, the ancient analysis remains true in the following sense, all of the ingredients of matter are in one of the following phases: solid (earth), liquid (water), gas (air), plasma (fire).

Another example, (US) states are made up of Congressional districts, counties, school districts, and fire districts. But this is not a partition of the state into distinct constituents, because the different types of districts overlap. The political behavior of any of these types of districting requires looking at the state from different perspectives, and taking into account different factors.

So while I agree that people have bodies, minds and spirits, I regard each of these as a different way of looking at a person.

One misconception often held by people who follow your analysis is that body (matter) is inert, inactive, requiring the action of mind, spirit or external force to do anything. This view of matter is strongly reinforced by the visual world in which we live. In that world things stay put unless someone acts on them. Nonetheless, that view is in error. Matter is active.

• Subatomic particles are in a constant flux of changing interactions.
• Except in temporary thermodynamically stable situations, atoms move around among molecules and structures following well known laws of behavior.
• Organic chemical interact with one another in living bodies in remarkab le ways.
• The various organs of the body perform their functions naturally, normally without our intervention.
• Ecological processes change the biosphere as various species refine their strategies for survival.
• Geological processes change the face of the planet.
• Astronomical processes change the universe in which the planet is located.

Every one of these levels of matter is in constant flux, following its own laws, and affecting the environment of all the other levels. Isn't it strange that matter (body) is apparently so docile only at our level of perception? Maybe that simplicity was necessary for awareness of the world to evolve. If we had been inundated by stimuli of all of these changes at all of these levels, we (our brains) might not have been able to create a sufficiently simple model of the world for us to begin building a framework for understanding. Fortunately we are separated from the complexity at smaller and larger levels by radically different timescales. Smaller processes occur too fast; larger ones, too slow for us to notice until we are sophisticated enough to measure with instrumentation and clocks.

Once we recognize that matter is active, not inert, it is easy to conclude that life is a special kind of active matter, with very complex processes, in which multiple levels of organization interact. One consequence of those interactions is natural selection and its effect on species survival and evolution.

With this background, I assert that a person is a living organism (body), all of whose actions (activities, behavior, processes) involve the interaction of that person's physical and biological systems both among themselves and with other objects, living and otherwise, in the environment. All of those processes operate within the framework of natural laws that the systems and subsystems at all levels.

But this does not yet answer your question. Where do mind and/or spirit fit into this complex of systems? There are two classical answers:

1. Mind and/or spirit are distinct substances which in some way reside within our bodies and interact with the physical parts of ourselves to govern some higher parts of our behavior. This interpretation is often called dualism.
2. Mind and/or spirit are aspects of our living bodies, manifesting themselves in the way we behave within the framework of our normal, visual universe. This interpretation is often called materialism.

I myself have never seen a satisfactory argument for dualism. Spiritual substances have never cropped up in lists of the things found in scientific analyses of the body. Although absence of proof is not proof of absence, I find the difficulty of discussing how spiritual/mental substance interacts with physical substance utterly overwhelming in the absence of any science of the behavior or spiritual/mental substance.

I am therefore, provisionally, a materialist: I equate the person with his or her living body. But I reject the word "mere" that is often used to castigate that equation. The person is not mere matter, for as we have seen matter is not mere inactive stuff. People think, hope, start, stop, choose, talk and do a whole lot of other things, all of which involve complex interactions of systems and subsystems within their bodies, and some of which have significant ramifications within the social systems of which they are a part.

The worthwhile question to be asked is not whether our minds are matter, but whether our minds matter. If our bodies physical systems following physical laws, are we not mere machines following inexorable laws that determine precisely what we do? Materialists have often accepted, even embraced, this conclusion; they have become mechanists.

One who did not was Roderick Chisholm of Brown University. I did graduate work under Chisholm, but knew of him from undergraduate work when I encountered an article by him in Sydney Hook's Determinism and Freedom in the Age of Modern Science, a delightful book that remains in my collection after many decades. Chisholm was superb at precise articulation of philosophical issues. His formulation of this issue of materialism can be paraphrased as follows:

1. Either our actions are completely determined by the natural laws that apply to the situations in which we find ourselves (i.e., by their causes), or they are not.
2. If they are so determined, then what we do at any given point is not in our control unless we were in control of those causes. But since the same argument applies to the causes, we find ourselves in an infinite regression, leading ultimately to determining situations over which we are clearly not in control.
3. If they are not so determined, then what we do is not determined by the situations in which our actions take place, i.e., they are a matter of chance, and again we are not in control of our actions.
4. We are responsible for our actions only to the extent that we control what we do.
5. Therefore, whether determinism is true or false, we don't control our actions, and cannot legitimately be held responsible for them.

Chisholm's version of the argument is much more articulate, and deserves reading in full, as do many of the articles in Hook's volume.

Chisholm believed that the argument in the form he gave it was valid: if the premisses are true, the conclusion must be true. Since he could not accept the conclusion, he spent much of his career looking for ways to reject one or other of the premisses.

What he was working on at the time I knew him was agency theory: people control their behavior even though what they do is not strictly determined by what goes on in their brains or elsewhere in their bodies. Chisholm did not rely on any form of dualism (i.e., mental substance) to justify this claim. What he used was an epistemological argument, i.e., an argument based on what we can know about human decision.

(The form I will give that argument is my own extension of his work. Much of what I learned from him was said in class, and the years are too long to offer textual support for what I concluded from those teachings.)

Mechanism is commonly defended by using Occam's (or Ockham's) Razor: don't multiply objects beyond necessity. In other words, as long as competing theories account for the same phenomena, the simpler is to be preferred. Mechanists appeal to this principle in their claim that since materialism can account for the same behavior, it has pride of place over the more complex dualism. Chisholm's argument addresses this particular aspect of the mechanistic argument.

Given all we know about the brain and other parts of a person's body, we can predict and explain what that person can or might do, but we cannot with accuracy predict or explain when he or she will do it. If on the other hand we supplement our explanation with information about that person's psychological states (e.g., what he or she intended or wanted or hoped or feared), we can predict with far greater accuracy what he or she will do. In other words a theory of behavior that includes reference to psychological states is (currently) better at predicting behavior than any theory that does not, i.e., than any mechanist theory.

Psychological theories of the kind Chisholm referred to have a common thread: they explain behavior using evidence that essentially refers to people as the subjects of sentences about the world ("Smith tried to ...", "Brown asserted that ...", etc.) Such theories include people as objects that are essential to their explanations. Any attempt to reduce those evidentiary statements to statements solely about the bodies of those people immediately loses the predictive power of the theories.

Now, as I said, this is purely an epistemological argument. It follows the standard rules for comparing two proposed scientific theories, and concludes that by those rules psychological theories which refer essentially to people have better predictive power than theories that don't. Occam's Razor cannot be used to eliminate people from the list of essential entities in the universe, because our best theories of human behavior make essential reference to them.

Note however that Occam's Razor does at this time seem to justify excluding minds, spirits or souls as separate substances from the scientific explanation of human behavior: there is no cogent theory of behavior that explains behavior in those terms.

But this epistemological theory calls for an ontological explanation: what in the heck does it mean for people to perform actions that are not made to happen by underlying physical processes?

The general form of this ontology is emergentism. This is the theory that sometimes when new levels of organization arise, the behavior at the higher level, although consistent with the laws at the lower level, is not fully reducible to those laws. Events that are relatively improbable at the lower level, might be highly probably at the higher.

To put it another way, systems can take on a life, a pattern of behavior, of their own, making things happen that are essentially unpredictable in the chaos of the lower level. (Compare Doug Hofstadter's discussion of a conversation with an anthill, not with the ants, in his Godel, Escher, Bach.)

One interpretation of Chisholm's argument is that people are emergent systems, who bring things about that would be physically improbable.

I'm inclined to think that mechanistic rules were too strict for pre-humans to survive in competition with other life forms. Humans (and others) evolved with competing internal systems, each of which told them to do certain things in certain circumstances. All too often those internal systems conflicted with one another. (Do I keep the prey and eat, or do I run away from the predator that wants it?) Consciousness evolved principally as a way to resolve those conflicts by enabling choice among alternatives when there was no determining grounds for any one of them.

But what does that have to do with minds and spirits? They are not separate things with their own consciousness. The language of mind and spirit and consciousness is one of our ways of expressing those psychological attributes that are critical to our recognizing the person as an emergent entity. They refer not to elements or substances in the body, but to emergent characteristics of the body and its behavior. in that language mind and spirit and consciousness are subtly different but heavily overlapping.

What is remarkable about the current systems theoretic view of the universe is the concurrent and interacting evolution of systems at multiple levels. If an explanation of the relationship between mind and body is to be found, it is likely to be there.

Respectfully,
Jim

PS. It should occur to you that consciousness and choice might also emerge at higher levels than the one where people are agents. For example, Lovelock and Margolis assert that the earth (Gaia) is a living organism. Might not Gaia develop a form of consciousness. Some interesting issues would be involved in that discussion.

[Eudaimonist]

Dr Free, that was a truly excellent post from ontological naturalism. I tend to agree with you.

Originally Posted by flowperson

It was thoroughly reviled by conservative science, which told me there was probably some truth in what was revealed in the book.

Oh, please...

This specific book aside (which I haven't read and have no opinion on), pseudoscience is reviled because it is pseudoscience, not because there is some truth to it. That is reason enough.


eudaimonia,

Mark

[flowperson]

Oh Please...Copernicus', Newton's and Galileo's findings were viewed as "psuedoscience" until the light dawned upon the naysayers. The passage of time always proves the truth or falsehood of new ideas, not the verbal flagellations inflicted by those who fear and loath meaningful changes. That's the way that "real" science works.

flow....

[Quahom1]

Gee, I always thought "science" was experiment, observe the results, repeat the experiment, and observe if the results were the same as before...

[flowperson]

Originally Posted by Quahom1

Gee, I always thought "science" was experiment, observe the results, repeat the experiment, and observe if the results were the same as before...

You're right to an extent, but before experimentation is undertaken to prove another's findings true or false, there are original theories which are sometimes proposed that have the ability to cause massive and ongoing paradigm shifts in the work of the experimenters, which may totally change the focus of entire fields of scientific progress over time. In the last century you could classify the theorizations of Einstein, Heizenberg, and Bohr in this category, IMHO.

flow....

[taijasi]

What about the fact that the act of observation itself changes conditions, and influences the experiment?

What about the insight, shared and confirmed by all of us, that as objective as this concrete, physical world appears to be, we all still experience it somewhat differently? That consciousness itself is subjective?

You know, two people can agree that `blue' is a certain range of light wavelengths on the visible spectrum, yet there is a different "feel" associated with that color, depending on who you ask, their various associations, and even their mood & time of day? Oh, come back later, I'm feeling blue right now. Don't disturb me, man, I've got the blues ... and I'm listening to BB King here. Or you know, just say the word, and notice that one person thinks of the sky (`Carolina' blue around here), while another thinks of deep, navy blue, and a third person calls to mind `true' blue!

Esotericists, such as myself, maintain that all of color as we know it is but a dim, pale, shadowy reflection of something vastly more beautiful, existing in the spiritual worlds. Nevertheless, a correlation exists, and blue in the visible spectrum does NOT match up arbitrarily with say, yellow, in the "spiritual" spectrum. No, gee, it just happens to correspond with BLUE.

But how would I begin to go about describing these `spiritual' or deeper, richer colors? If I said, "oh, they're so much richer, more wonderful, almost metallic & shiny, or shimmery - yet so obviously ALIVE .... truly LIVING substance," what sense would that make to the hard-nosed skeptic, the man of science who swears, lives and dies by ONLY what his 5 known senses can show & confirm for him?

What do we make of two people, standing side by side, who can both look at the same tree, and describe its very being and presence in utterly different language? The one is cold, detached, and purely visual, while the other is more vibrant, and full of feeling! Is the first description inaccurate, or inferior to the first? No. Is the second description any less helpful or realistic than the first? No.

My point is that if you add a third, then a fourth person, a fifth person, and so on to this picture, each person will behold the tree slightly differently - evidenced in their description. You would say that the scientific bunch among these people would stick to "the facts" - to purely physical characteristics, yes? And what about the ones who are more "touchy-feely?" The poets of the group. Are their descriptions less valid, less meaningful or helpful? I think you will find, Mr. Science, that among the poetic lot, there will be MUCH that they can agree on, quite readily. And while different associations may come to mind, they all know that they are perceiving the same tree, and that, if engaged in dialogue, they are also weaving together an understanding of that tree, equally valid as the scientific observation, classification and understanding - yet organized according to different principles, rules, or classification methodologies. Nevertheless, ORDER exists in their systemitization.

But let's reach beyond, and admit to this group of onlookers a few genuine clairvoyants. Let's take a few people who can all partake, even if in varying degrees, of the supra-physical wavelengths of light - perceiving the ultra-violet in the very least, and perhaps utterly beyond ... into the emotional and mental/intellectual, even spiritual, wavelengths of LIGHT. Just as you and I, the scientific or the poetic lot, these clairvoyants can SEE the tree, yet their refined and trained SENSES (physical and supra-physical) are able to gather MORE DATA. I would submit that, IF these clairvoyants apply the scientific method to their observations, discussions, and classifications/systemitizations, they can and will arrive at something utterly unlike pseudo-science. It will be SCIENCE plain and simple, and a noble one, which already has an established body of researchers, publishers, experimenters, and adherents.

Research into mediumship and/or the nature of life after death has proceeded in this way. So also research into all the many fields of supra-physical consciousness, as well as the subtler aspects of physical consciousness and activity itself. Even LIFE Itself, as something subtler still but no less objective, has been observed, catalogued & classified, and submitted to all the rigours of science - just as the form, or mechanism, and its subtler component, consciousness. Thus at the moment of death, many individuals can literally SEE the subtler counterpart(s) of the physical person ... separating from and leaving the inert body behind. And this is far more common than some might think.

But yes, the hard-nosed skeptic will have none of it. Just as, equally, a man of certain religious opinion will maintain his beliefs no matter what his objective observations seem to indicate to the contrary. Both will rationalize and explain everything away, as suits the moment.

But Consciousness Itself, the Soul resident within {every} person, the One Who Observes ... always does so without qualification or conditioning. It is the layer upon layer of the human mind, the filters of fears & expectation of human emotion, and the limitations & varying abilities of the human brain itself - which ADD TO or, more accurately, LIMIT, what reaches our wordly awareness ... until the latter is FREED (through discipline, training, purification & expansion), and restored to its pristine, original state. But even this is a bit of a conundrum, a chicken & the egg type of question. The Platonists, at least, have got a leg up, inasmuch as they ask, "Did the Soul exist prior to physical birth?" Oh, but did it ever!

Namaskar,

taijasi

[Eudaimonist]

Originally Posted by flowperson

Oh Please...Copernicus', Newton's and Galileo's findings were viewed as "psuedoscience" until the light dawned upon the naysayers.

No, those findings were not. They were considered contrary to church dogma, which had become fixated on Aristotle's views (which were quite brilliant for his day).

The problem with pseudoscience is that it's not using scientific method, and yet making "scientific" claims. Its truth or falsity is not the issue.


eudaimonia,

Mark

[Vajradhara]

Originally Posted by Marietta

All that exists is consciousness/energy and the body is merely consciousness expressing itself. Matter is merely a holographic projection of our thoughts. Each dimension is created by the consciousness stationed on dimensional band above it.

Namaste Marietta,

thank you for the post.

this particular view, by and large, is known as Yogachara or Mind Only in the Buddhist tradition and is one of the philosophical schools within the overall Buddhist paradigm.

metta,

~v

[flowperson]

Originally Posted by Eudaimonist

No, those findings were not. They were considered contrary to church dogma, which had become fixated on Aristotle's views (which were quite brilliant for his day).

The problem with pseudoscience is that it's not using scientific method, and yet making "scientific" claims. Its truth or falsity is not the issue.


eudaimonia,

Mark

Mark:
But in Europe in those times the Church controlled EVERYTHING. Scientific methodology was virtually unknown until these people and others like them came along and created scientific methods, which were, in large part, adaptations of/to the rituals of Alchemists. (If you don't believe me read the Science Times front page in last tuesday's NYTimes.) The Church opposed anything that had the possibility of altering its world view and hence control, whether it was based upon the musings of Aristotle or not, or whether it was scientifically correct or not.

I submit that if the word "pseudoscience" existed in the middle ages, the church would have probably used it to describe the work of these people. Aristotle was correct, and then these people became "correct" over time. By the way, the Church didn't apologise to Galileo for its actions until just a few years ago. And of course the Church these days, to its great credit, fully participates in the pursuit and dissemination of new scientific knowledge.

The term "pseudoscience is pretty much a 20th century slang term to describe "pie in the sky by and by" theories which are unproven through rigorous testing and replication of results by others. I submit again that proposed theories are not accepted until they are proven through the scientific methods of testing and replication. But original insights are just that. They start new and original threads of scientific understanding which have not yet been examined under the scientific method. And until they are, they are simply plausible and untested theories. But they still possess the possibility of causing paradigm shifts in scientific understanding in the future if and when they are proven.

flow....

[soma]

The physical, mental and spiritual are in consciousness so are consciousness, when they are transparent we see clearly the unity of one ocean of pure consciousness. When not transparent we see images separate and not in unity. To do this we must slow down the destructive pace of modern life so we can get a solitary glimpse of the inner life of consciousness and the awesome power of clear thought. I feel this one conscousness or pure consciousness is an infinite ocean, but in it is the finite water or ice; thus, we have the word infinite, (in-the-finite). Pure transparent consciousness is in the unit and the ocean. The physical consciousness, mental consciousness ect of everything including inanimate objects are in this one consciousness. Ice in the ocean both made of H2O, this is the science part. The Christian part would be Jesus said, "I and the Father are one." One pure consciousness.

http://thinkunity.com

[soma]

What is the proof of pie in the sky philosophy? Experience.............

Experience the state above the mind, above the arguement and if not experienced don't believe it. The arguement is only to quiet the mind, answer pseudo questions, the direct experience is all that matters. Enjoy........