Peter Fenner, Radiant Mind

Peter Fenner gives about as good, simple and natural an explanation to the space of consciousness as just about anyone I've come across.

A short dialogue, here.

Four Philosophical Questions on the BBC

This is a response to a piece on the BBC's website, containing four knotty philosophical questions. I can answer each of them to my satisfaction, so I'd like to put my answers out there.

It would be helpful to read the original piece, as I'm not going to put the whole, lengthy questions here.

1- Should we kill healthy people for their organs?

No. While, in all three cases, the phrase "saving five people by killing one" applies, in the first case, "Bill" is in no jeopardy. It would be wrong to kill someone healthy who is not in danger of death against his will. In the second case it is not immoral to kill the individual, because all six people are already in jeopardy. If you don't kill one of them yourself, that person will die anyway, whereas Bill is in no such danger.

Now, in the third case, while the choice of which track to set the train rolling down seems to be taking someone who is not in danger, the single person tied to the alternate track, and killing him/her, it is not equivalent to Bill's case because Bill isn't tied to any train tracks! So, although in both cases you appear to be making a deliberate choice sacrificing one person (kill Bill for his organs, flip the switch to kill the individual on the tracks) to spare five people, the fact that the individual in the train example is tied to active train tracks places him or her in a danger that Bill is not in. I think this is why most people intuitively answer that it is not okay to kill Bill, but okay to let the train kill the individual tied to the tracks, and okay to kill the one hostage to set the five free.

2- Are you the same person who started reading this article?


The dichotomy between the statements "everything is constantly changing" and "nothing changes" is false, as the two statements of truth are only apparently different. In reality, all of these concepts we think of as being fundamentally opposed (say, motion and stillness, or freewill and fate) are different ways of looking at the same phenomenon, "being." Concept and language view separate phenomena, and the mistake is to say that they are separate, and therefore NOT UNIFIED. The paradox in "everything is in constant change" is, of course, that that rule itself is not subject to change, but this paradox doesn't mean there's something wrong with the world, or that this truth itself is wrong, it's pointing to the inability of language to grasp the nature of reality as being constantly changing, continuously unchanging, both constantly changing and unchanging, and neither changing nor unchanging, and all necessarily so. There is no possibility of "being" being anyway other than this, a can of worms for another time.

Similarly, the dichotomy between the subject and the object is conceptual/ perceptual, and built into the structure of reality, but not itself ultimately real. Again, reality is neither subjective nor objective, it is both at the same time. Everything in the phenomenal world is in constant change and only a part of the whole, and also at the same time ultimately the same as what does not change, being itself. The sense of unchanging identity comes from this center of your unchanging being, and this does not change, though everything phenomenal is fluid and changing.

So, what you think you are is totally different from what it was at the beginning of the article, and even from moment to moment. What you actually are, everything, has not changed.

3- Is that really a computer screen in front of you?

Closely related to the above, this question hinges on the belief in some "thing" that is "real," as opposed to "things" that are not real.

There is no "independent" check on your senses because there is no true "independence." There is no "thing" in the universe with any reality separate from the reality of the rest of the universe, a sticking point of materialism. There's no getting outside the system, because everything conceivable in any time point in space or dimension is the system.

But it's not just that it's impossible to verify what's really really real (say, where exactly the buck stops,) it's that the idea of something being really really real independently is mistaken.

Basically, the sentence "There is a computer screen in front of me" loses any meaning if it is meant in an ultimate sense, and not a practical one. Practically, there is a computer screen in front of you, right now. Ultimately, reality doesn't work this way.

4-Did you really choose to read this article?

Again, closely related to the above two questions.

All of these "stickler" questions come at the logical conclusions of two seemingly obvious lines of thought.

Again, we're placing too much emphasis on the "really real, independently real, truly and ultimately real" nature of our concepts and what they refer to. Free will and determinism are not contradictory, they are two ways of looking at determination of process, and are each shortcuts.

All is the Universe, and you are this as well, so, whatever you do is determined, ultimately, by whatever it is that determines everything, and that is also what you are in any real sense, so, really, you have ultimate free will, enough to seriously frighten most people. Saying that all of your choices are pre-determined doesn't rule out that you determined them yourself, but, again, our concept of the free agent of choice is only a shorthand. On the other side of the coin, let's say that the result of a choice is one of two extreme possibilities, either at that moment the universe splits and BOTH happen, ultimately meaning that every infinitely small moment creates an infinite amount of second-moments, and so on (which, though it seems perhaps counter-intuitive that there could be infinite to the infinite worlds out there, is less so if you remember the fact of infinity), or only one thing happens, and all the other possibilities fall back into nothing. Either way is entirely handcuffing the very free will affirmed above. Either every choice is played out in every possible fashion, in which case who "you" are is just an accident of whichever line you happen to be watching, or you can never un-choose what has happened, and can't say whether (since there is only one universe) what happened ever actually had a choice option, both deterministic in their ways. At the end of the day all of this conjecture is meaningless, it all rests on the incorrect assumption that free-will and choice are different possibilities. Things happen. You are a part of what makes them happen, in fact what "you" are is also what this is, so you have free-will, and further, you are not different from what is happening. Even the idea of acting on something different from you is mistaken, it is practical. There is also never any real alternative to what is, so there is no free will. These are both true at the same time, and really, neither of them is true at all, they're only ways of talking, of wrapping words (though not fruitlessly) around something that cannot be corralled. The universe is not what it appears, and, it is. Everything is oneness, everything is nothingness, oneness is nothingness.

Okay, feel free to add your own thoughts.

God and Science, and Daniel Dennett

***10-9 See an update to the below (concerning visualizing Dennett's theory) here.

I am using as a jumping off point for this post this interview of Daniel Dennett in the Magazine "Search."

From the article:

"I claim that consciousness is not some extra glow or aura or "quale" caused by the activities made possible by the functional organization of the mature cortex; consciousness is those various activities. One is conscious of those contents whose representations briefly monopolize certain cortical resources, in competition with many other representations. The losers—lacking "political clout" in this competition—quickly fade leaving few if any traces, and that’s the only difference between being a conscious content and being an unconscious content."

Basically, there is no "little man" of consciousness sitting in your brain, editing what comes in and then sending it up to "you," a separate medium, to become conscious content. It is the sum total of the activities of the neurological system that is consciousness itself. This summary is unfairly short, as Dennett says, so for those of you interested in reading more, you can go here, a site at Tufts University with many articles by Dennett that make this point more clearly and more in depth.

I think that Dennett is 100% right here, and yet I think he makes the same mistake that everyone else makes when talking about religion (which, while the quote above doesn't directly deal with, the article does,) confusing religion with the existence of "God." In the non-dual view of being the idea of a separate "God" that is above and beyond the world, transcendent to it, is seen as laughably impossible in the face of the fact that separation is a conception, an appearance. This, substituting "God" for "consciousness" and "the events of the universe" for "the activities of the neural system" could well give a post-post-modern conception of God. This, I think, is an idea that is emerging, and I do not think it conflicts with anything that Dennett says in this article, or the scientific materialists, though they would all dislike the word "God."

When he says that everything is open to the investigations of science, he is perfectly right, and when he calls "Darwinism a 'universal acid,' cutting through every aspect of science, culture, religion, art and human thought," he is also right. But, I still claim that he is wrong in rejecting religion. The spirituality (a word I dislike) of the future does not reject science, nor its findings. The spirituality of the future does not rely on dogma or myth or literal interpretations.

"Consciousness has arisen from the unwilled, unordained algorithmic processes of natural selection," or, in other words, not from the hand of God. Again, there's nothing to disagree with here, it is the historicity of the dogmatic and literalist claim that God is a real "thing," like a toaster, that necessitates the high board of science. God does not perform magic, and any God worth believing in would not need to.

When God is viewed or understood as simply "being," the metaphors of religion make a lot more sense, even ones as clearly literalist as "God created the world." Well, yeah, the world is here, so, being created it. Of course, the wording of this favors the mythology of God, that some giant man like thing created the world in the way you or I would draw a picture. Created here could be understood better as "the flood created a problem for getting through the center of the city." It's not like the flood meant to do this. It's impersonal.

Is God impersonal? Yes. And no. You're a person, aren't you? So God is personal. But the totality of everything, this is impersonal.

The irony is that, in attacking the idea of a separate unitary self-center of consciousness, Dennett is affirming something that the world's esoteric religions have said since the time of the Buddha, and perhaps earlier in Vedanta: "you," do not exist. What you think you are is only a thought, and the reality is much simpler than that.

When Dennett says that there is no truth that religion can claim as its own without science, he is both right and wrong. In the exoteric sense, he is right. Science has domain over everything in the material world. But in the esoteric sense, science has nothing to do to prove or disprove being. It can do neither, being is self-evident. But what it is, what we are, is so obvious that we miss it constantly. As Einstein said, the fish will be the last one to discover water. In the way I think Dennett is using the term, as in "objectifiable exterior phenomenon," I think he is incorrect. No matter what science gets to about the happenings inside one's brain, you cannot experience what someone else experiences. Even if you could "see" what someone else were seeing, or "feel," it, it would be different, because "you" are doing it, with all the different history and the different system for experience you have. Experience is not falsifiable, nor is it provable. This is precisely beyond the realm of science, and something which religion has always dealt with, in both exoteric (mythological) and esoteric (contemplative) strains.

The problem is that anything "non-scientific" gets lumped in with "mythology," or, to put it slightly differently, any attempt at describing interiorality is seen as necessarily involving supernaturalism. There may be no "privleged center" in consciousness, something, again, esoteric branches of religion would be familiar with, but that doesn't discount subjectivism itself. The objectivist description of the world, perfectly legitimate at that, is not an explanation, and cannot exist without subjectivity. What is the sound of one hand clapping? If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? What's in a mirror when no one's looking?

This is not to say that reality needs intelligent aware and conscious beings, far from it, it is just to say that without subjectivity, there is no objectivity. Obviously this uses the word slightly differently than the conscious subjectivity we're used to , but it's none the less valid.

The direct experience of being without an object, the experience pointed at by the esoteric traditions, is shrugged off by science as being equivalent to boogeymen.

There is this fundamental problem between duality and what Dennett argues, that there is no Cartesian duality, and yet I would say that they are only two metaphors for looking at the same thing, like the heads and tails of a coin are actually still both only parts of the coin. There is an interiority in consciousness. But this does not make it dual, since it is entirely inseperable from the exterior occurances of consciousness. They do not arise separately, and they are not independent.

In a Vedantic sense of enquiry (or, for that matter, Cartesian,) the only thing that cannot be doubted, that can actually be proved and believed, because self-evident, is being itself, or, in the human mind, awareness of being. What was before the big bang? Whatever it was was the only thing real, the only thing unchanging, the only thing not subject to the laws of impermanence. What was it? Nothing. Nothingness. This is simultaneously everything, it is all that is real. And, the world is this as well. In the Hindu formulation, the world is illusory, Brahma alone is real, the world is Brahma. The argument between Cartesian duality and materialism is missing the point. Against the Cartesians, there is nothing special and separate, no "privliged center." There are not two things. But, against the materialists, that nothingness is not different from existence, is existence itself, and is the consciousness, the open space within which all else happens, and, it is not material.

There is a new world view emerging, one that believes as strictly as Dennett does in the rigorousness of science, and yet makes room equally for the interior experience of consciousness, the subjectivity that is impossible to describe or prove or disprove, except in the first-person perspective, where it is self-evident. I am. I have no proof that you have an interior, but at the very least, I am, or, rather, am-ness.

This worldview, as Dennett says, must pass through the tests of Darwinism, and science. The Religions of the future cannot be ones that believe in the things science shows are impossible. Oddly enough, believers of one mythological system find others absolutely ridiculous, and yet this does not shake their faith in their own ridiculous stories in the least bit. Lao Zi was not 900 years old when he was born. Mary was not a virgin when she gave birth. There is no Garden of Eden, especially not one that looks exactly like a 17th century English manor's garden.

The myths are beautiful, but they are not true. They are stories, rife with meaning, and are as such not exactly fiction, but they are not true.

The worry about science is not really that it can explain God, but that it can explain God away, and it has explained away quite a few things that believers in former times thought of as being sacrosanct, that is, they thought of as providing a pillar for belief of God, but it can never explain away being itself, which is the ground for all of the mythological religions, and the contemplative. The myths arose because there is no rational explanation for any of this, and again, science is really describing things more than explaining them, at least at the deepest levels. But there's no need for words in the contemplative experience. There's no room for them. Whatever form religion takes in the future, to be legitimate, will be centered on the contemplative.

This, it should be noted, is a far cry from what is called "new-aged spirituality" (a term from which my prickling disgust for the word "spirituality" likely comes.) New-aged "spirituality" is a reversion to beliefs in magic, more or less.

Another article, by Sandra Blakeslee, in the magazine "Science and Spirit," on the neurological basis for spiritual experience, highlights what I have been talking about.

There is still an over-reliance on the external viewpoint, and the point of view (I believe mistaken) that these external and objective interactions cause the experiences rather than correlate with them, but it is an improvement on several things. The structures of one's internal consciousness certainly impact your spiritual experience, so, where a Muslim will see Mohammed, a Christian may see Christ, even though what is happening to them is, at its base, and neurologically speaking, the same.

Of course, the science which crows so loudly (and correctly) as it trumpets, say, the fossil record, also trumpets when it sees neurological signs of meditative activity, as if the experiences undergone can be explained away by science. Yes, breakdowns happen, and this is what the meditative traditions have always asserted. The fact that there's a biological basis for this should have been obvious except for those that thought the literal hand of god reached down from his (likely rather large) throne in the sky and touched one's forehead with a golden finger. Of course, I am downplaying that this viewpoint may be prevalent, but still, the main idea is that the scientific proof of different and abnormal brain states during these activities certainly does not reduce them to being no more than "fireworks in the brain." But, it is not that the biological activity creates this, it is that the release of the constraints and constrictions of one's mind unveils this ever-present experience of reality. It is the same as the Buddhist tradition has always maintained; you're not reaching enlightenment, you're getting rid of everything else. Or, if your mind is a room, you don't need to add furniture to get what you want, you need to throw it all out of the room. Or, as Meister Eckhart wrote, "If you empty yourself, God has no choice but to fill you."

And, of course, there is no "God," as such.