Time and Consciousness

12. Where do I end and where does the outside world begin?

2009-12-17T19:20:00.000-08:00

12.1 Nowhere. There is no inside and outside.

12.2 Just purely physically, literally, I mean. There is no atom in my body that didn't originally come from somewhere else. And as I breathe in and breathe out, as I eat and eliminate wastes, as I drink and perspire, as I am invaded by pathogens and fight them off, as my skin cells slough off and grow back, as my eyes react to the brilliance of the sun, as I scratch myself on the brambles in the blooming buzzing meadow and bleed -- as I do all this, there is a constant interchange of matter and energy between "me" and "the world," "inside" and "outside," "self" and "other."

12. 3 So also as, in Time, I come into being, grow up, grow old, and die.

12.4 There is no "me" apart from the billions, trillions of patterns and rhythms that my body continually enacts and embodies and is. I am those patterns -- what else is there? Nothing. So, I am my body. And (see 11.2), there is no body apart from its mitochondria, microbes and environment. Therefore, I am my mitochondria, microbes and environment.

12.5 Which, I suppose, is just another way of saying "it's all one." But now I've proven it.

12.6 So, all this talk about "I" as something distinct from the rest of Nature is, strictly speaking, nonsense. But it's convenient. It's shorthand. It's pragmatic. It's workable, to a point.

12.7 And don't get me wrong -- there's no denying the reality of individual selves. Let's just not get all superstitious or metaphysical about them, OK? The glory of selves is the glory of Nature: they are the same.

11. It's Really Complex Out There ...

2009-11-10T20:38:00.000-08:00

11.1 Lest hubris set in, recall that where "life on Earth" is concerned, microbes run the show -- always have and probably always will. It's that simple.

11.2 Our bodies -- the fantastically complex machinery involved with being human (and its complexity is commonly underestimated) -- have no existence apart from complex networks of molecular metabolic pathways that link us directly to the microbial world -- the world of bacteria, viruses, and other "primitive" life forms that scientific taxonomists struggle to classify.

10. Life

2009-11-10T20:07:00.000-08:00

10.1 The title of this blog is Time and Consciousness. So, a definition of Life is a special bonus.

10.2 Definition of Life: if it replicates and evolves, it's alive. You need a population of things that not only create copies of themselves but whose self-copying "programs" or "instructions" evolve in the population as a whole based on what individuals are encountering in their environment. And, for really advanced evolution of living forms (like on planet Earth), you need many populations (millions of species) of interacting, sometimes competing, sometimes cooperating replicators.

10.3 When you put together the principles of replication and interacting populations of replicators, a suitable environment, natural selection, and a time scale of billions of years, you get evolution, you get Life, you get us.

10.4 But still: when, precisely, did Intentionality enter the universe?

9. Being and Nothingness

2009-11-10T19:51:00.000-08:00

9.1 Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, "Nothingness lies coiled like a worm in the heart of Being."

9.2 Is it possible that Sartre's Nothingness is what I have spoken of as Intentionality, and that his Being is my Nature?

9.3 Consider something complex and coiled, like the fern you see poking its fresh green head out of the decaying pine needles and growing, fractalizing into its full form. Consider the fern's coiled intentionality as dread nothingness, as "having to be" -- taking place against the backdrop, or "in the heart of" the pure unbroken oneness of Being (all that is, all at once), or of Nature (all that is, lives, evolves, endlessly differentiates and grows more complex in time as we know it).

8. Design, Intentionality, Life, Nature

2009-11-10T19:14:00.000-08:00

8.1 Nature (evolution) is a blind watchmaker and does not "consciously" "design" anything.

8.2 We (specimens of the homo sapiens species) have eyes to see, ears to hear, and minds to understand. We are percievers. And we do "consciously" "design" lots of things, from nice beds to go to sleep in to unspoken social contracts to supercomputers.

8.3 Nature's blind designs serve no purpose. No purpose that we can ever hope to discern, at any rate. (Compare 3.3: "... We suffer existence because of the biological imperative of replication ..." -- is replication its own "purpose"? We shall return to this ...)

8.4 Our intentional designs do serve a purpose: we wish them to do something to help us survive or to make our lives better. ("Survival" has at least two meanings: One, I survive as an individual organism, putting off death as long as I can; Two, the human race as a whole survives, putting off extinction of the species for as long as it can.)

8.5 Thus, something new has entered the universe: intentionality. Maybe that's a fancy way of saying that somebody or something now has a stake in it all: we do -- don't we? It "matters" to us whether we continue to exist or not -- both on an individual level and a larger group level.

8.6 We have our intentions; we have our understanding and design skills. Soon, we will be designing life forms from raw molecules and snippets of DNA both "found" in Nature and newly invented by us. Technically, we already are.

8.7 When did intentionality enter the universe?

7. The Mystical Tradition

2009-11-05T19:29:00.000-08:00

7.1 A reader of this blog sends this gem from the 13th-century German mystic Meister Eckhart:

"Time is the worst obstacle to union with the Infinite."

6. What it's like ...

2009-09-10T19:28:00.000-07:00

6.1 Thomas Nagel, professor of philosophy and law at New York University, argues that it is impossible to know what it's like to be a bat.

6.2 Tom Petty, rock musician, writes, "You don't know how it feels / You don't know how it feels / No, you don't know how it feels / To be me."

6.3 Can one know "what it's like" to be another person -- or animal? I say: of course you can. But within certain limits.

5. What is consciousness?

2009-09-02T20:15:00.001-07:00

5.1 Consciousness appears to be an "irreducible phenomenon." What I mean is that consciousness is a "bare fact": because we experience it, we all know what "it is like" to be a conscious human being.

5.2 One way of looking at the question: Consciousness is a "sensation." Don't get too hung up on the word "sensation" -- I'm not being technical here. What I mean is simply this. Consciousness is the sensation, feeling, or act of being aware. Consciousness is the existence and experience of a perceiver. Consciousness is the representation of the universe as it appears to a localized perceiver (you or me). Consciousness is the "sense" that your brain is making of the world, the map it is continuously making of the world, your way of negotiating the world.

5.3 Consciousness is a mirror that reflects the universe back to itself, for the survival benefit of the perceiver.

5.4 Sometimes we are more conscious than other times. When we are "running on automatic," we are still survival machines, but we are not conscious in the special human sense. (See G.I. Gurdjieff, Life is Real Only Then, When I Am.)

5.5 "I" is the perceiver. But that's a riddle that bears some thinking about.

4. A general principle ...

2009-09-02T19:51:00.000-07:00

4.1 Any philosophy worth its salt must be expressible in plain language, reasonably easy to understand, and not require undue leaps of faith. To the degree that they indulge in needless intricacy, opacity, and magical thinking, traditional Western and Eastern traditional philosophical thought-systems stray from the truth.

3. So, what do we know?

2009-09-02T18:29:00.000-07:00

3.1 First principles. For Descartes, it was "I think, therefore I am." That is OK as far as it goes, but it only goes so far, because people do a lot more than think. I'd go further: I feel, therefore I am; I see, therefore I am; I dream and create, therefore I am; I am hungry, therefore I am; I hurt, therefore I am.

3.2 "Hurt" by Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails)
   I hurt myself today
   To see if I still feel
   I focus on the pain
   The only thing that's real

3.3 What do humans exist "for"? We exist for our genes; our bodies are survival machines built by our genes for the purpose of making more copies of themselves. Our thirst for life, our drive to survive, all of our pain and all of our striving to avoid pain -- these things are all "for" our genes. We suffer existence because of the biological imperative of replication. (See Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion.)

3.4 So: I hurt, therefore I am. There's something fundamental, something primal, about the way our entire lives are spent scratching one itch after another. This is also the Buddhist "All existence is suffering."

2. What we don't know ...

2009-09-02T17:36:00.000-07:00

2.1 It's important to acknowledge what we don't know or understand. Time is one of those things. Not only do we not understand time, but quite possibly we cannot understand time.

1. In the beginning ...

2009-09-02T12:13:00.000-07:00

1.1 Time is a mystery, pure and simple. There is no way to get one's head around it.

1.2 I can get my head around the future: I can conceive of time going on forever. But I cannot get my head around the past. There are two options, and neither one makes intuitive sense:

Option 1: Time had a beginning, and therefore "before" the beginning there was nothing, not even a "before." But how can this be? How can there be "nothing," not even time itself, and "then," something, a universe with a beginning and a history?

Option 2: Time has no beginning -- rather, it has been going on "forever." But how can this be? Things have been happening -- forever? Past time is infinite? That's a mystery.

1.3 When I was a boy of perhaps ten years or so, these matters troubled me. So I explained the dilemma to my mother and asked her for the answer. She said, "Maybe time is not like a line, but more like a circle." And she took a pencil and drew a circle on a piece of paper. I contemplated time as a circle, and new questions arose: Well, what happens when you go all the way around the circle? How long does that take? And then does everything start repeating itself over again? And just how and when did this "circle of time" come into being, anyway? And so on. My mother's diagram did not help, because our actual day-to-day experience of time is not like a circle, it's like a line or arrow.

1.4 So, time is a mystery. It makes sense only "locally": for the past we can remember or reconstruct, the present we live in, and the future we can to some extent forecast. At time spans greater than "local" -- potentially infinite past, potentially infinite future -- our little causal reasoning dissolves into mystery.