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
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