Month: June 2019

Definition (abridged) from the Oxford Dictionary

“MIRACLE (noun):

An extraordinary and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws …

Middle English via Old French from Latin miraculum ‘object of wonder’, from mirari ‘to wonder’, from mirus ‘wonderful’.

***

     An Apple, a Raging Sea, a Moonlit Path, a Baby, these are all extraordinary and (at least potentially) welcome events ; but none of them are miracles.

     Consciousness, however, fully satisfies the conditions stipulated.

     This is a most momentous fact, I submit, and one which has received nothing like the attention that it deserves.

     But what sort of attention can we usefully give, one might ask, to something which we have actually defined as immune to any explanation of a natural or scientific sort  ?

     Dare I respond ? : We might bring an attention (contemplation) infused with a proper sense of awe.

     Consciousness, I might add, positively invites such contemplation. In fact, contemplation, the very nature of consciousness in the act of contemplating itself, produces such a strong and pleasurable feed-back loop in experience, that countless generations of our best and brightest have attempted to seek asylum therein, entirely forsaking the natural and scientific, in the hopes of acceding to a “higher” plane of reality where consciousness defines nature, not the other way around.

     It would be impossible, I believe, to overestimate the loss sustained by human society through the voluntary withdrawal of such a high percentage of our natural leadership from the cares, and responsibilities of active life. There has been, however, this benefit from the constant presence among us of such mystically oriented drones : that we are at least reminded of the awesome power of consciousness, even if we are also reminded of the infinite dangers therein, just as we are aware of those concerning alcohol, pornography and drug addiction.

     We should not, however, be unwilling to fall in love, simply because we have come to despise pornography. Nor should we be afraid to explore the implications of consciousness, simply because we have seen (or experienced), the ravages produced through misplaced enthusiasm.

     It is frequently stated, moreover, that modern man is constantly searching for some meaning, to life, beyond the simple imperatives of our brutish animal existence. And consciousness, at the root of all experience, speculation, desire, memory — artistic exploration and expression — would appear central to any such discovery.

     But let us not burden ourselves, for the time being, with questions of what consciousness is or does. Let us permit ourselves, for a brief moment, to savor the mere fact that consciousness IS (at all), which is to say, the mere fact that consciousness exists.

    And to do that, let us return to the definition quoted above : We know that consciousness exists, because our experience is conscious — because we experience the conscious state.

And yet we also know that our consciousness is invisible to anybody else, possessing only natural and scientific means of enquiry to test us. And that is because consciousness has no physical product ; no physical signature ; no physical trace of its passage ; nothing detectable whatsoever.

Actually, the only test yet proposed for identifying the presence of consciousness is based on verbal reports, meaning, as Alan Turing expressed the problem : Can someone, or something convince me (knowing that I am conscious), that he, she, (or it) is conscious ?

But unfortunately, in answer to this question, we now have the evidence of a half century of evolution in artificial intelligence, notably demonstrated in the creation of IBM’s super platform Big Blue (roundly defeating all human competitors at the game of chess) which might lead us to doubt our ability to avoid being fooled by a mindless program during such an interview.

     Therefore, as defined : consciousness exists ; consciousness is (usually) experienced as a wonderful thing ; consciousness has no scientific explanation.

And that, in a nutshell, is the Miracle of Consciousness.

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     The thing about scientific knowledge, and discovery, is that they have real effects on what we believe, and how we behave. As people say, “Elections have consequences !” Well, so do scientific facts.

     But there is a great difference between the facts themselves and the ways we interpret those facts, which are the theories we devise to make sense of them.

     The legacy commonly associated with Isaac Newton allows us to predict the behavior of ordinary objects at our everyday scale. Knowing the dimensions of billiard balls, for example, and the force and direction with which the cue strikes the ball (plus resistance of the table-surface, angles, distances etc. etc.), we can in fact predict which shots will sink and which will not. And this knowledge brought on a wonderful change in human thinking : no more gremlins ; no more magic ; only reliable Laws of Nature. It is impossible to overestimate the benefits gained in that first Golden Age of Science.

     But over time, a new problem arose concerning the nature of the human mind, because, if the operation of the mind is dependent upon the brain (as it does appear to be), then our thoughts and actions would, in theory, be just as predictable as Newtonian billiard balls. In fact, they would not only be predicable, but “determined” : rolling reliably in harmony with present and past conditions — cause-and-effect — all the way back to the first whack of the Great Celestial Pool Cue.

     Unfortunately, as we shall see elsewhere, this view of reality has some very uncomfortable moral and philosophical implications which run counter to all that the human species has always assumed to be true. For as mentioned: what is believed to be fact has great consequences. And in this case, by a strict reading of the “facts”, the human being — and all the universe as well — was seemingly reduced to something akin to a giant wind-up toy.

     Einstein also, with his portrayal of time as a dimension equivalent to those of physical space, likewise encouraged the determinist view. The Universe, he suggested, could be described as a sort of eternal, multi-dimensional object, through which an ideal observer could progress, at will, backwards or forwards in time, just as we move back and forth in the three spatial dimensions ; that our experience of time, as an evolving narrative, was nothing more than a particularity of our mode of perception. In the end, then, popular interpretation of Newton, powerfully reinforced by Einstein, became a sort of intellectual bible (at or around the first quarter of the last century), and has not ceased to percolate into the public mind ever since, with often disastrous effects on the human psyche.

      For a long time, in fact, only the existence of consciousness, which has no physical signature – though largely ignored – remained to dispute this theory.

     Happily though, into this dismal circumstance, came the discovery that physical events on a smaller scale — that is the quantum scale populated by sub-atomic particles and their associated waves — can not be demonstrated to behave like Newtonian billiard balls, and therefore, do not conform (or at least do not necessarily conform), to Einstein’s idea of a perfect static whole.

     Now naturally, at this point, there has been a great temptation to cry “Aha ! the universe is not just physical after all” and all sorts of wild speculation has ensued. But we do not actually “know” these things. These, also, are only interpretations of fact, and not facts themselves.

     What we actually see, today, is a theoretical stand-off. On the one hand, we have people who would like to introduce (or re-introduce) all sorts of claims regarding the role of consciousness in the Universe (of which the present author represents a very cautious example), and on the other, we have a massive scientific consensus based mostly on prejudice, inertia — and fear of the unknown — many of whose proponents are extremely loath to abandon a (once) dominant world view which they were led to swallow uncritically with their first milk of knowledge, and which they have been encouraged to repeat (with the utmost confidence) ever since. Nonetheless, all must now evolve in an environment of competing — yet unverified — theories. It is therefore crucial to distinguish that which we know (observable fact) from that which we do not (theory)

     First, we know that real billiard balls will reliably fall into (or miss) pockets, on real tables, when they are propelled over short distances under known conditions.

     Secondly, we know that the sub-atomic wave-particles of which all our common objects are constituted, do not follow such rules : They are absolutely predictable in the aggregate, according to the probabilistic math of quantum mechanics, but, as far as anybody has been able to tell, individual quantum events have no explanation. Apparently, according to simple observation, reality is capriciously evolving as a series of tiny, statistically reasonable, chance events.

     And thirdly, beginning in the 1960’s with the mathematical descriptions of Edward Lorenz (and subsequent) it is becoming clear that inexplicable, individual, sub-atomic events will hugely influence even billiard balls over long distances (and whole solar systems over planetary stretches of time), not to mention hyper-complex processes in the human mind – and thus human behavior – right here, and right now.

     Therefore, as concerns the deterministic dimension of the intellectual stand-off described above, the debate is no longer equal : For, suddenly, after at least a hundred years of confident condescension, the burden is now upon the determinist, to tell us why he believes as he does !

     When Bell’s Theorem, for instance, reveals that reality is either non-local, or that information must be travelling faster than the speed of light (upsetting Einstein) – and when theorists arrive to speculate that an “absolutely determined” universe would explain these uncomfortable facts ; their adversaries may now respond in the same way that scientific opponents of unverifiable dogmas have always done : “Why should we believe this particular unsupported proposition rather than any other ?”

      Or, as common traditional wisdom would respond (to the claim that quantum entanglement could be explained IF the Universe were absolutely determinate) :

“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride ;

And if turnips were watches, I’d wear one by my side !”   — anonymous 17^th

     Seriously, this is not a small thing. The role of consciousness has not been vindicated. Physical determinism has not been chased from the field. But these two interpretations are now at an equal disadvantage with regards to verified fact. And that, to use the sensational vocabulary of the twenty-first century, is a paradigm shift.

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     A free, indeterminate, future means that nothing has been definitely decided. We always have the benefit of the doubt. We can always make things better. We can always hope, and that hope will never be irrational.

     It is possible that we will not get the job, nor get the girl, nor live through the next 24 hours, but none of these negative outcomes is a certainty (assuming that we are not actually dying, or unsuited, to the one or to the other).

     An indeterminate future means that at one and the same time it is possible that we will get the job ; it is possible that the beloved will accept our suit ; it is possible that we will succeed in bringing the damaged sailboat safely back to land ; and it is also possible that we will fail, dismally or fatally, in any of these endeavors.

     I do not mean by this that the future is merely unknown, or even unknowable. It is not a question of being unable to predict the future.

     I mean, rather, that the future itself does not “know” what it will be. The future itself is multiple and in flux, without any but the ghostly being of probability, until all of those probabilities collapse into one real moment, which WE experience as a continuous narrative : our life, and the life of the world around us.

     This eternal moment of now, is the only “real” state of the universe ; while the past has the reality of present memory and forensic evidence ; but the future has no distinct reality at all.

     To live in a world where the future is irrevocably fixed – or to believe we live in such a world — is to live in anguish (or passive resignation) while waiting to “find out” what the future will bring.

     To live in a world where the future is undetermined, or to believe we live in such a world, is to leave a narrow dark cell to live in fresh air and light ; to breath freely ; to hope ; to plan ; to achieve ; to fail, certainly ; but always to begin again.

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