My Theory of Consciousness

gib · June 15, 2024, 2:30am

If existence is preparing a place for us, it would be part of existence, no?

Ecmandu:

There’s also a fifth job…. Which is to be the controller.

That job is to dominate people no matter what they do or say.[/quote]

I’d like to have a word with the controller.

He’s presenting an alternate theory (not very well, mind you).

In order to learn, one must ask questions… which I did… which you haven’t answered. Otherwise, what you are teaching me is coming across as nonsense.

If I’m not teaching you, it isn’t from a lack of trying.

First order of business is to understand what you’re saying. I ask my questions in this vein. Is there another question whose answer would better clarify what you’re saying?

But doesn’t change appear in order as well? Isn’t order just a predictable pattern of events? And don’t events imply change?

Is it? I would associate calm with simplicity if anything. And complexity sort of entails reducibility, doesn’t it?

Bob:

Contingency is what happens, but it is a representation of something that we can’t manipulate.

We are an expression of the infinite within a finite body, and consciousness extends throughout all we see, but our brains filter this consciousness in our restrictive sheath, allowing us to feel distinct for survival purposes. We have a split brain that allows us to concentrate on the food we are after and stay vigilant at the same time, and we have the ability to temporarily suspend the inhibitive functions of the brain to gain an even wider perspective and imagination to envision what we can’t see.

Artimas:

But I think what Felix is stating is that there is no real infinite because all things are ultimately a one thing, giving off the illusion of being different from each other or multiplicity. (Correct me if I am wrong Felix)

I can agree to this partially but just because it gives off a sort of an “illusory” image, does not make it any less real than the absolute of which we cannot see and this is the paradox, especially since we operate directly on this level of infinite/finite and not the absolute level.

The illusion is like this: we are on an island and we see nothing but sea all around us. We assume therefore that where the land meets the sea, the land ends–as if the island is floating on the water. But it’s not the island which is the illusion, it’s its separation from the ocean floor which continues under the water unseen which is the illusion (or rather, gives rise to the illusion). The island is like the human mind, and the ocean floor is like the rest of consciousness permeating the universe. We don’t see it beyond our minds because we lack epistemic awareness of the experiences therein. We have no knowledge of it. We know about our thoughts, our emotions, our sensations, but we don’t know about (say) the experience had by a flower blooming alone in some far-away field. The sea represents a lack of epistemic awareness, a lack of knowledge of experiences outside the human mind. We are in the dark with respect to these experiences. This creates the illusion that we are isolated, disconnected from the rest of universal consciousness–indeed, that there is no universal consciousness. But just as the island itself isn’t an illusion, neither is the self or its mind.

In regards to the singularity vs. multiplicity of the universe, this is a different distinction all together. This is a distinction between what the universe is as a whole and the many components it can be broken down into. There are no illusions here either, there are simply different ways of expressing the same thing–just as one can describe the universe as “one whole universe” or “billions and billions of galaxies”. ← It’s not like one is real and the other illusory; they are simply different ways of describing the same thing–like 1 being expressible as .25 + .25 + .25 + .25–one expression being simple, the other more complex–but both accurate at the same time. The reason we find ourselves at the particular level of complexity we find ourselves at is because that’s where our epistemic awareness resides. Think of it this way: if the universe as a whole can be represented by 1 then there is an infinite number of alternate ways to express the universe; you could express it as .5 + .5, .1 + .9, even 200 - 300 + 101. Out of all the different ways to express the universe, there happens to be one in which one of the ingredients, one of the terms in the equation, is epistemic awareness–experiences of knowing certain things–knowing about certain thoughts, certain emotions, certain sensations, etc. And where this epistemic awareness resides, so too will the experiences known–that is, so too will the thoughts, emotions, sensations–essentially the whole human mind. It’s like the anthropic principle–if you ask, “why are we here?” the answer is that out of all the possible phenomena that can occur in the universe, one of them is the evolution of human beings on an average sized planet orbiting an average star on the outskirts of an average galaxy who are capable of asking, “why are we here?” ← So long as these human beings exist somewhere in the fray, they will find themselves there, in existence, asking why they exist. Because the multiplicitous expression of the universe is no less accurate, no less real, than the singular expression, epistemic awareness indeed exists in the fray… and here we are.

I see it a bit differently. I agree that consciousness is like a container and the mind (or it’s experiences) are like the content. But it’s not like content in a box (in the sense that you could empty out the box but still be left with the box), but more like the content in a bowl of soup. Dump out all the contents of the soup and you also dump out the soup.

Let’s pause for a sec and stop using terms like “consciousness”, “mind”, “self”, “God”, etc. as these obviously mean different things to different people. We’re making the assumption that what one person means by “mind” (for example) is the same as what others mean by it. Let’s instead try to describe the phenomena these words refer to.

I’ll start. For me, all there is is experience. Experience is, in my theory, the fundamental “substance” of existence. By “experience”, I mean the “feeling” of something–a sensation, an emotion, a thought, etc… Qualia! (And if you really want my formal definition, see the OP.) A mind is a collection or system of such experiences. Consciousness is a word for describing the same thing except with an emphasis on the fact that experiences project (take the form of something real) while at the same time are still grounded in feeling–that is to say, to experience X is to feel X as a real thing, which is to say to be aware of X, to be conscious of its existence (esse es percepi). God, to me, is the entire set of all experiences in a timeless context (all experiences through all time), which, if you follow my theory, corresponds to every physical event in the universe. God, in other words, is the consciousness (or mind, or experience) that comes along with the physical universe and everything within it (and includes everything physical insofar as they count as experiences in their own right–i.e. as sensory perceptions in the human subjective world).

And then there is the “self”. I have a rather convoluted definition of the self, but from my book it goes “The self is the point of view from which the world is experienced insofar as this point of view is identified with a body whose presence elicits the impression of consciousness.” In simpler terms, the self is the person you see in the mirror insofar as it strikes you as being alive. It is not the entire perceptual world, even when such perceptions are considered only as the experiences in the perceiver’s mind. You are not your entire mind, in other words. How is this the case? Because the “mind” as the layman understands it is an artificial mental construction; we have these mental models of our thoughts, our emotions, our sensations, etc. and we conceptualize these as quintessentially “mental”. It is these mental models which my theory of experience qua substance aims to replace. The mental models aren’t quite accurate. They are natural, of course, probably genetically hardwired, and perhaps the default way we think of our own minds, but the true form of our thoughts, emotions, sensations, etc. is their projected form–the form they take as real things in the world. Thoughts are really truths, facts, the essences of things (concepts), events from the past (memory), future events (anticipation), and so on. Emotions are the value of things, of situations, of people, their character, the goodness or badness of a state of affairs or a person. Sensations are objects, events, properties, their states, change, etc. ← None of these things are typically considered “mental” or a part of the self–in fact, they are usually considered independent from the self. The perceptual world is really the world around me, the world I find myself at the center of; it contrasts with me, it stands as all that is not me, as the “other”. This is what our minds really are, so I consider the self as that which is at the center of our minds, not one with our (whole) minds.

But that’s just me. I’m sure you all have your own definitions for terms like “consciousness”, “mind”, “self” but let’s lay out our definitions instead of assuming that everyone should just intuitively understand what we’re talking about.

Yes to the first part. Huh? to the second.

There are certainly parts of our brain that are not conscious, not associated that is with the conscious experiences we know we have. The cerebellum, for example, is said to be responsible for coordinating voluntary movement such that we behave effectively within our environment. A chief example would be the way Michael Jordan plays basket ball. His cerebellum is what allows him to make slam dunks. But there isn’t really an experience to go along with the brain activity of the cerebellum, at least none that we’re conscious off. For all intents and purposes, it processes information “unconsciously”. This is like the unconsciousness of the examples you brought up, the table or chair. They are unconscious simply because there is no conscious experience associated with them (or so we believe). So, yes, the unconsciousness of the inanimate matter of the universe is also in our brains.

But this is not to be confused with what psychoanalysts refer to when they talk about the “unconscious”. This is the Freudian unconscious, the dark parts of our minds where we quarantine thoughts and feelings we don’t want to experience–we “turn them off” so to speak, bar them from consciousness–but this is more like consciousness splitting parts of itself off–sort of into a separate consciousness, disconnected from the original, but in its own right still conscious–conscious only of the unwanted thought or feeling. ← This is not an example of the unconsciousness of the universe, like that seen with the cerebellum.

As for the subconscious, I only vaguely understand what you mean by that term, but based on this: “As a conscious branch we can look back and view all states of consciousness in a way that the subconscious or unconscious facets can’t,” it sounds as if you’re saying the subconscious is just consciousness that can’t self-reflect. ← That to me is just consciousness. It is consciousness without epistemic awareness of its own states/content, but if it is at least conscious of something (the world, maybe?), it’s consciousness. I see consciousness as any collection or system of subjective experiences whatsoever, and if one or more of those subjective experiences happens to be epistemic awareness of its own states, then great! It’s self-reflective! It “knows” about itself. But in any case, yes, this too can be found in the human brain (a great deal of it as a matter of fact) and is a part of nature. But then what bridges the gap between universal unconsciousness and subconsciousness? ← This is the hard problem of consciousness.

Of course, I would say, according to my theory, that there is no such thing as universal unconsciousness, that everything is conscious of something or other, having one or another kind of experience, and that human consciousness evolved to have epistemic awareness on top of just general experiential awareness.

I’ll leave your statement about chaos and order for another time.

Artimas:

Consciousness now as we have it evolves on its own because we have the choice due to the consciousness to learn and grow, I am talking about the precursor to consciousness in reality for consciousness to spawn in the first place.

And I’m saying that’s the wrong way to think of consciousness. My whole thesis (my OP) is that consciousness is being–it is existence itself, as a whole and as the existence of individual things. My car engine has a mind when I turn it on (it even has a mind when it’s off, but different in quality from the one it has when turned on). You can’t have existence without some conscious experience, and visa-versa.

Consciousness is a staircase without humans existing, which is how we grew into being conscious in the first place, there is a set of precursors to us getting to this state of where we are now Oh, sure, there are precursors, but those precursors are just different forms of consciousness., similarly to how there was in genealogy and species for the body to grow complex enough to host it in its higher form. Our becoming conscious is our ability to look back at the chain of which we evolved from both in conscious being and physically. If by “our becoming conscious” you mean our acquiring epistemic awareness, then yes. Just consciousness overall as a one thing, perceiving itself as multiplicity.

I can agree with that under a certain construal, but it does require construal.

I am stating that if consciousness formed solely in the brain then there would be a lot of issues with the model due to the fact that there would have been no evolutionary state, which an evolutionary state presents itself by observing nature with the very conscious being we got from that state of evolving.

I don’t follow. Why would consciousness forming solely in the brain mean that evolution could not happen?

I view everything as living just on different levels of conscious being and I define those different layers. We do have an unconscious and a subconscious, how would those come into play if they do not exist as facets in reality already?

Sure, but that’s like saying how could trees evolve unless “tree-ness” exists as a facet of reality already? Do you mean, as in, reality would have to possess the potential to evolve trees? I’m also still unclear on what exactly you mean by “unconscious”, “subconscious”, and “conscious”. Am I right that the subconscious to you is just consciousness without the ability to self-reflect? And I’m especially confused by your treatment of the unconscious as the same thing tables and chairs have yet it is still, in some way, conscious. Are you thinking of the unconscious as the processing of information (which you could say the universe is always doing) but without any feeling of that information? Like information processing is just an unconscious natural phenomenon like wind or rain?

Sure, but this speaks more to our epistemic awareness of ourselves and our inner states. We can have inner states that we don’t know about (and indeed get expressed to others via our behavior). But if those things are there within us, sneaking out into our behavior unbeknownst to us, then they are felt. Maybe not by us (because we cut them off from us) but they continue to be felt.

This part has always confused me. What do people mean when they say they are other people? Does it mean other people are images in my dream state (or objects in my perceptual world since we’re only talking about dreams metaphorically), and thus are a part of my mind? A part of me? Because, at least in the waking state, there has to be more to other people than just their images in my perceptual field. They have minds of their own, points of view of their own, which constitute their own perceptual worlds, and thus their own realities outside mine. This is where we come dangerously close to solipsism. How does one avoid falling into solipsism here? And if they do, what do they think of other people existing as mere images in the individual’s consciousness, which itself is more than just an image and in fact contains all images? ← That would make me pretty special!

Meno4:

How many turtles must take to underscore a dream within, then to prove that such need for grounding them could prove they really exist?

Countless. Just guessing, absurdly countless.

Indeed! This is the infamous infinite regress of the question of existence. What causes existence? Another turtle? A creator God? Will that finally hammer the last nail in the philosophical coffin? Of course not! Because the same question rears its ugly head in response to the answer, and the next iteration ensues. So what is that turtle based on? Who created that God? What’s needed with questions like this is an answer that not only explains its consequences but itself… a self-explaining explanation. I believe consciousness, when defined in terms of my theory, fits the bill.

felix dakat:

But, is AI self conscious? Is it conscious of being conscious? Meta-conscious? Apparently not.

I have no fricken idea! But if you take Searle’s Chinese Room argument to heart, the answer would be no. If you ask an AI system “Are you self-aware?” it will surely answer “Why, yes I am.” But according to Searle, the only thing the system is aware of is that when I get asked the question “Are you self-aware?” I’m supposed to respond “Yes” (whatever “yes” means). So long as it is programmed to mimic human behavior, it will only ever be aware that when X happens, I respond Y. Where does “I am conscious” fit into that?

This reminds me of Carl Jung’s “collective unconscious”. The thing is the collective unconscious is conscious. If we had a handle on that fact synchronicity wouldn’t be surprising. It’s all synchronous, the ego just isn’t always aware of it.

Ah, but would this mean that the universe can violate the laws of nature? Synchronicity, to me, implies that the universe can make things happen despite what the laws of nature would allow. If it was all purely the laws of nature, you would think things would happen randomly (or at least accidentally). There would be no reason the universe would favor one outcome (because it communicates something or forms connections between otherwise unrelated events) over another. But if the universe is intent on showing one or another individual that there is some connection between certain events, or life circumstances, or whatnot, then how does it yield the laws of nature to serve that purpose? The only thing I can think of is that the laws of nature are setup, from the beginning, to lead to all possible synchronicity events that have and will occur–either intentionally or by amazing coincidence.

So, if AI is conscious, where is the disconnect between its intelligence and itself as consciousness? Having conceived the possibility of self consciousness AI what would be the first step toward producing it?

I think the first step would be to take a break from designing AI to serve human purposes. So long as that’s all we’re working towards, there will never be a need to make AI self-aware. It wouldn’t be enough for the AI system to compute that there is an object in its environment it could call “me” for that needn’t be anything more unique than other beings in its environment. It would somehow have to link this particular object to its particular experiences. So for example, if it’s programmed to respond Y when it gets X, then X will sometimes be an object in its environment (or stimulus, or state, or change, or disturbance, or something it can identify and label X). That makes X one of its experiences. If it could then compute that this object in its environment called “me” is the one who has this experience of X, then you might have the rudimentary underpinnings of self-awareness (I think it would still require a lot more, but this would be a start).

This makes sense, but does that mean I am you and you are me? We can say, for sure, that I am the same kind of thing you are (a self) but an extra step is needed to say you are me and I am you.

Well, I think for sure we can say that if the universe is infinite, it is not bound by any contours–like a box which has a front, a back, sides, a top, and a bottom. As soon as we start thinking of the universe as a whole (with contours), we begin to see what could lie beyond it… but then in what sense is it infinite? In essence, we can’t imagine an infinite entity, not as a thing (though we can understand what it means for something to be infinite), so we cannot image an infinite entity as “whole” or as “complete”. Yet we feel compelled to say the universe must be whole/complete because, well, here it is. I think you’re right that the universe is not arrived at (not in a continual process of completing itself) but I think the state it does exist in is incomprehensible and this puts into question whether we can say of it the ordinary things we say of finite things.

felix dakat:

When I say “Self” with a capital S, I’m not talking about the ego, the separate self. I’m referring to consciousness in which everything appears. The word “we” refers to the ego assuming that some such entity appears to you as well.

Fair enough, but do you think the label of “Self” is warranted when it comes to universal consciousness? Maybe it is. It makes sense if you consider universal consciousness to be an extension of personal consciousness, but this may be committing the fallacy of composition, the fallacy of assuming that characteristics of the parts are characteristics of the whole. It would be like a wart on your hand recognizing that it’s part of a whole human body and applying the label “wart” to the body. ← But this is just me playing devil’s advocate; I really have no qualms with using the word “Self” to describe universal consciousness.

We usually use visual terms to refer awareness. Awareness is like an invisible eye that “sees” through the eye. So we refer to “point of view”.

Yes, and that kind of implies that the Self (universal self) has its own point of view, a different one to mine or yours. Do you think this is the case?

The limitations you refer to are objects appearing in consciousness as well. The body is usually present when awake, but it disappears when we are lost in thought. When dreaming the waking body is absent. In deep sleep both mind and body are absent.

Yes, and this is a difficult concept to wrap one’s head around, yours truly being no exception. The layman would simply object: of course my body exists when I’m asleep, I’m just not aware of it when asleep. It’s a philosophical problem of language, of how to articular the state of existence (or lack thereof) of things that only appear to exist while in some state of consciousness (like one’s body when awake) and not in other states (asleep). It seems blatantly counter-intuitive (if not false) to say the body ceases to exist when asleep. Now, I could get around this with my relativistic talk (see my post on relativism) saying that my body exists relative to the waking world but not to the dream world (though a different body may exist in the dream world), but there are other examples of this problem that aren’t so easily solved: timeless truths for example. We think of 1 + 1 = 2, for example, as a timeless truth in the sense that it is true at all times. But if truth is a projection of thought and belief, then what do we say of 1 + 1 = 2 when we’re not thinking about it? Is it false? Is it inapplicable? I honestly don’t have a satisfactory solution to this except that I think it must have something to do with truth not being an object. Objects we expect to persist even when we aren’t looking, but since truths aren’t objects, I don’t know if we have the same right to say the same here, that truths are somehow “there” even when we aren’t thinking about them. I think we have to stop thinking about truth as like a property of an object that persists even when we’re not experiencing it, but maybe just what can be said about a particular reality.

BTW, the limitations I was talking about are the limited number of things we can be epistemically aware of; epistemic awareness is a precursor to the “I”. True, this too is just another image in consciousness (the idea thereof) but in that sense, everything is an image in consciousness, including the idea that we aren’t limited.

When I play guitar with a band I get so involved in what I’m doing that I forget myself. This is the phenomenon referred to as “flow”. It’s the opposite of meta consciousness which is being aware of being aware.

I know the feeling. And it’s plagued by the same problems. Someone watching you play, for example, would object: you didn’t lose yourself, I saw you on stage! You were there! What makes the problem so mind boggling is that one can’t conduct the thought experiment to verify the self’s existence or lack thereof. As soon as you say, “Ok, I’m going to imagine being lost in the music and look to see if my self is still there” you’ve already sabotaged the experiment. If you’re looking for your self, you’re gonna be aware of it, and thus you’re gonna find it. So it seems impossible to imagine a scenario in which your self disappears because you lose yourself in the moment.

In meditation there is an experience where all objects disappear and theres just pure consciousness. Its different than deep sleep because you’re conscious of being conscious and nothing else. It is because of that experience that the idea of absolute consciousness makes sense to me.

Do you think this state of consciousness being aware of consciousness (and nothing else) is equivalent to universal consciousness? The consciousness of everything, the whole universe? I imagine that whatever the universe is conscious of, it’s incomprehensible to human beings. I don’t think it’s something that can “fit” in the human mind.

felix dakat:

Even the phenomena of there being an inside and outside of you are fictions. Where do thoughts occur to you? People usually imagine they occur in the head behind the eyes. But, this is a learned convention which you can change. Thoughts have no spatial dimension or location in space whatsoever. They don’t really occur anywhere.

Agreed. Thoughts have their own mode of existence. They’re not objects occupying some position in space and time, they are truths, facts, possibilities, and so on. I think the idea that thoughts can be imagined as abstract objects is a consequence of what I call objectification. I won’t go into detail about this, but I’ll just say it’s a natural outcome of thinking. But in any case, the idea that everything is an illusion makes no sense to me (philosophically), so you’ve exposed my intellectual limits. My whole theory of consciousness, though very similar to Eastern philosophy and religion, differs from the latter on this one point: it emphasizes the reality of experience rather than the illusion.

And surely I don’t need to explain that all sensory phenomena are relative. Science teaches us this. Now we have virtual reality technology that shows us how easily are senses are deceived.

True, but I think it requires more than sensory experiences to make a reality. I think one has to be tricked (or maybe not tricked) into thinking it’s reality.

So, we can say without hesitation that the ordinary experience is not real. What is real is you, the one to whom all this is appearing.

Well, that’s gonna be difficult for a guy like me to accept given my theory of consciousness. Experience carries the seeds of reality within it (according to my theory) and this accounts for projection, the revelation of being through experience. In other words, though I agree that it’s all mental, I don’t think that makes it unreal. ← That’s part and parcel of my redefining of “substance”. Maybe we’ll agree to disagree on this point.

Artimas, I’ll reply to your post next.