Consciousness, Part III: The Meaning in the Plan 


Already deep in doo-doo, Jim plunges ever deeper into his—developing even as we read—theory of consciousness. 

At this point in my spiel, I find it hard to muster faith in even possible readers of these blog entries. Well, I DO read them, too.

So we got a private dimension of our experience, a non-deterministic view of the Universe, and consciousness with a "perceptual hologram" aspect and an embedded plan. Human consciousness isn't just awareness, it's meaningful awareness—in the world, but not like a rock. Now we need an account of meaning.

One type of meaning is recognition. Recognition is matching instances of a thing to other instances of the "same" thing. Without recognition, we could never learn. Below the level of language, recognition amounts to a kind of associative bundling of past and present experience. Without language, the store of such bundlings would be unique to each individual.

Since we are active creatures (and it's hard to imagine a non-active, yet sentient creature evolving), we almost always do something in response to a recognition. These doings are also bundled past and present experiences tied to recognitions. Let's call them reactions, and recall that there are voluntary and involuntary reactions. The voluntary reactions of an individual are the foundation on which its plan rests.

Dewey spoke of trying and undergoing.

Natural language lets us move beyond our individual experiences, but we must beware hypostatizing the referents of any natural language. With the caveat that all language always involves negotiation of meaning, natural language adds a new layer to recognition, since language-assisted recognition is now structured with syntax, semantics and pragmatics.

There are language-assisted correlates of reaction such as law, moral codes, various forms of inquiry, including problem-solving, and directive language.

However, these things are really the external evidences of a powerful "internal" driving version of the universe. I will try to explain. First, I trust past essays have explained that consciousness is in the world but not like a rock, since it IS a version of the world, a point of view. The metaphor of a hologram for consciousness is apt precisely because holograms preserve perspective in a three dimensional grid. Part of consciousness is imagined transformations on a present grid. These transformations exist in mental space, and it is not at all clear that the reductionist's program to locate consciousness in the physical body is justifiably sanguine.

Here is a final try at saying this. There are countless possible worlds projected by each conscious human being, and only a few of the possible worlds will become actual worlds. Meaning makes this possible, and meaning as a phenomenon has an extra-dimensional character. The meaning-bearer is the knower in dialog with other knowers.

(Added Good Friday.) [That Plato saw a lot of this so long ago is amazing. Plato's theory of forms was his attempt to deal with the problem of the nature of meaning. So he hypothesized a realm of unchanging being in which ordinary experience "participated." What Heisenberg and Schroedinger saw was that the changing/unchanging polarity was a red herring. At base, true reality is uncertain, probabilities in a void. Out of these condense our ordinary experience, which could have been other than it was.

You may think that this is nuts or much ado about nothing, but I assure you, it is important. Consider this. The preceding paragraph really does describe what contemporary science is telling us. We still have not made it a part of our cultural common sense. However, the concept of experience as one out of many possibilities, rather than as the end of a causal chain could lead to the development of a technology of miracles. Think about it.]

Tomorrow will be the "seventh day" (six entries have been completed) since I started this blog category, and following a good precedent, having created a good world, I will rest. 

Posted: Fri - April 7, 2006 at 08:21 PM          

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