dharma blues

Some hard-core scientists want you to believe that the notion of being conscious is pure trickery from a sophisticated network of synapses and firing neurons that produce thought. From a materialist’s perspective, we are essentially our own pattern of firing neurons. You probably know that research is carried on with fever and argumentative competition in this quest for the Holy Grail.

Alas, if we stand back a little, we are witnessing  here the elimination of humanity’s hope, salvation and freedom. Resting upon the still smoking ruins of beliefs, morals and joys, you have some nobelists and guests clinking their glasses, and patting themselves on the back for having destroyed the enchantment of the world. And after that, those people —you and me included— will be thrown into garbage bins like old computers. Amen.

Hello Houston, tumultuous dharma approaching here!

Rescue on the way

Like eager kids wrestling for the last few kernels of popcorn while glued to the screen, confidence is building up that an happy ending may still be conceivable in this historical odyssey.

With the demeanor of old faithfull Doc Brown, some physicists and philosophers do believe that these ongoing materialistic inquisitions are paving the way to a dead end. For be asssured that decoding the very source of consciousness is yet on the to-do list of those Dr. Strangelove’s pundits.

A layman’s view of the arguments made known by materialists are listed below:

Hard-core materialists’ dogmas:

• The immaterial character of the mind is denied
• Most of the mysteries of the mind are reducible to biochemical mechanisms
• According to some, specific neurons do subserve consciousness
• There is no homunculus of a self sitting in the theater of the brain and observing, or even directing, the ongoing show [1]
• Consciousness is like hardware

You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. [2]

This is what I’ve meant over the years when I’ve said that the brain is a syntactic engine mimicking a semantic engine. [3]

Behind the wall of illusion

As science made its headway in modernity, it became increasily clear that the elementary components of the material universe were much smaller than the atoms prefigured by the Indian and Greek philosophers of the past.

Ironically, the word atom derives from the Greek átomos for uncuttable, something that cannot be divided further. But as of today, we know that:

• an atom is made of a positive nucleus surrounded by a cloud of negative electrons
• the nucleus is made of positively charged protons, and neutrally charged neutrons
• protons and neutrons are composed of even smaller particles called quarks
• …and these quarks could be strings —provided the String Theory is correct
• basically, the whole universe would be made of vibrating strings that can be closed, like loops, or open, like a hair
• most peculiar, String Theory entails a space-time that has at least ten dimensions

The following illustration (a modified version of the work of MissMJ) sums up the different levels of magnification of matter:

To that point, we’re not even sure if strings are material. The further we go down in physical reality, the more things appear evanescent and seem, ultimately, to consist of nonmaterial information. At the small end of this spectrum, we enter a sea of microscopic weirdness, warps and ripples of abstract objects. This is not science-fiction but the very edge of real science.

While I’m not a scientist, it feels obvious to me that this rarefaction of matter points to an emptiness quite evocative of the central Buddhist philosophy. For such emptiness is not a nihilistic view of the world but a vibrant fabric of potentialities, not alike the world presented by quantum mechanics.

Hard-core scientists may get what they want — but they may not want what they get. That is, confronted with a wall of complexity that may take many years or decades to decipher, they could discover that consciousness is the very fabric of the whole universe! In a top-down fashion, they could realize that it’s from consciousness that the physical universe emerges.

Many soft-core scientists and humanists have close affinity with that view and do support such an approach that reconciles our dignity with hard facts. At stake in this epic showdown:

Humanists’ dogmas:

• Fully embracing quantum physics means that we accept that the observer affects that which is observed. This also implies accepting that everything exists as superpositions of waves of probabilities until observed, that the universe is non local and that we are not separate from our environment.
• Also, consciousness is not simply the result of underlying brain activities but an interactive event where intention and attention of the observing mind also have effects on the brain
• Consciousness may be the interface between the quantum fabric of the universe and the Newtonian mechanics (classical physical world) 
• To some extent, German Idealism (philosophical movement of the 18th and 19th centuries)  views the attributes we find in things around us as the result of our observing act (how they appear to us) and not as fixed attributes in an outside objective world.
• Information embedded at the Plank scale would be the fundamental level of the universe
• Quantum physics has essentially demolished material realism through overwhelming evidence

Reconciling traditional belief systems with the above points becomes, suddenly, a funny adventure where the main ideas and concepts of established religions converge to the same ultimate reality; missing puzzle pieces being, quite often, the artefacts of obsolete mythologies still entrenched in those religions.  

On that fondamental conscious fabric of the universe, intuition tells me that the ultimate ground of being would then be an omniscient and everlasting energy.

But omniscient entails a connotation of a personal god. But again if I can enjoy personal relationships on a meaningful and emotional basis with my family and friends, I suspect I can enjoy at least the same kind of relationship with that ultimate ground of being. But that’s an introspection for a further post where pantheism and panentheism could be analysed.

Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. [4]

Refresher course

Emerging intuition of the psychedelia did provide some clues as to our relation with the cosmos. The following is presented as a refresher course of insights glimpsed through meditation techniques practiced for millennia…

…and life flows on within you and without you

 References

1

Dennett, Daniel (1991), Consciousness Explained, retrieved on December 31, 2008.

2

Crick, Francis (1994), The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search For The Soul. Scribner reprint edition. 1995. ISBN 0-684-80158-2.

3

Dennett, Daniel (2006), who is cited in Jay Tolson’s article “Is There Room for the Soul?” posted 2006-10-15, U.S.News.com. Retrieved on December 31, 2008.

4

Chalmers, David J. (1995), Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, (Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1995, pages 200-219), retrieved on December 31, 2008.

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