Consciousness, Part II: The Plan in the Egg 


MY theory of consciousness, continued. 

There is some very advanced research on the nature of consciousness going on right now, and I am reading a bit of it. For right now, though, I continue to reflect philosophically and a bit informally on the problem of what is consciousness.

The hologram that leaps into existence when we wake up and collapses when we fall asleep is more than just a three dimensional array of color, sound, and other sensory qualities. Somehow, it also has embedded into it a plan. To be awake is to have a plan, or to have motives, and human beings are among the best examples we have of planning entities. We do things with the objects of our perception, just because we want them some ways rather than other ways. These plans of ours develop and evolve over a lifetime, and actually there is quite a bit of adopting and modifying plans set in motion by others, democracy and church, for example.

This is really what life is all about, developing and executing plans, so if we are going to understand what consciousness is, apart from developing a good model of perception, we are also going to have to develop a good model of what developing and executing plans amounts to.

Maybe an example would help. I am currently somewhat in charge of executing a plan to have an Agape Dinner at Trinity Episcopal Church on April 11, 2006 at 6:30. So how am I doing that? Well, I took the "customary," the outline of the plan for last year's Agape Meal, understood it as well as I could, talked to others that understood it, got commitments for help and attendance from various people. As the days roll by, I will monitor the committed people, depending upon them largely to show up and do the work they have agreed to, even if it's only eating the food provided and participating at some level in the liturgy. Then, because we all have done similar things before, when the time arrives, we will show up and interact together more or less cooperatively to get the plan executed.

In my opinion, we would be a lot further along with our job of understanding consciousness if we just accepted a simple fact. My plan is part of my consciousness: possible things to do to get to some imagined somewhere. I can convert a lot of it into language if I have to, but whether or not I do, this plan is there in my mind. As events emerge along the way, I make decisions and choices that modify the plan.

But where is my consciousness? Well, it is in the world, but not like a rock. My consciousness is not subject to the laws of gravity and momentum like a rock is. It is, in effect, a version of the Universe, my version. You can't have a little piece of the Universe bouncing off of a version of the Universe! Pieces are things that bounce within a version of the Universe. Consciousness—Christian or not—is IN the world, but not OF it.

So what about this idea? Physicists are always telling us that the Universe has way more dimensions than the usual 3 space and 1 time dimension. Maybe consciousness is in the world in at least one other dimension. Maybe there is a person dimension or two, and my consciousness is a point somewhere on that dimension, while your consciousness occupies a different point on the person dimension. I realize that this analogical way of talking is rough and crude. But the meat of the analogy is that techniques that were perfected to measure objects in four dimensional space will never yield fruit on things or phenomena which are extra-four dimensional.*

And this gets back to my earlier point of why not accept the fact that in reflecting on my own and others plans, there is a gold mine of commonsense information about the nature of consciousness, no matter where or in what way, exactly, the consciousness is. Then what we will be doing is trying to understand thinks like this: decision making, imagination, commitments, interacting with people, communicating, understanding, meaning, and so forth. When we get done with our analysis of these things, what we end up with may not look at all like a rock, or even be able to be struck by a rock.

A final provocative analogy: quantum theoretic notions about small particles have led us to understand that small particles have some very different properties than do rocks. For example, superposition, i.e. subatomic particles can be in TWO places at the same time. It's not just two possible places, it's two places. So can two outcomes for a plan be in mind at the same time. Not just two possibilities, but two versions of a plan? If consciousness is like a rock, then the answer is "no."
__________________________________________________
*Later today after I had written this, it occurred to me what the correlates in consciousness are of the 3 space and one time dimension. On this Earth, we have developed with a special awareness of the vertical. The force of gravity acting on our bodies has left us with several ways of sensing the vertical, up, in effect, the z-axis of our reality. Polar coordinates have a more natural relationship to our sensing of the other two dimensions, moreso than the x- and y-axis. You may recall that in the polar coordinate system, relative to a zero point, every point has a distance from the zero point and an angle deviation from the zero line. All of our senses give us a more or less accurate way to register distance from us, e.g. binocular vision. Also our heads and bodies rotate relative to the vertical and to our front. 

Posted: Thu - April 6, 2006 at 11:46 AM          

©