Another intriguing consequence of this line of thought is this: once returned to its boundless state, thereby regaining access to the universal memory of qualia, your consciousness will likely be able to come in more intimate contact with other individualized “fragments” of consciousness than ever possible when confined to a physical brain. These other individualized “fragments” of consciousness could be those of living people as well as of people who have already passed away. After all, we have inferred that all past is present at the level of universal memory of qualia. In fact, to describe this as “intimate contact” is an understatement: it must be more like being the other person, in every way that it means something to be another person while still being you. There can be no higher or more intense proximity or intimacy conceivable.
It is inescapable to conclude from our argument that nobody ever truly dies and nobody is ever truly lost to others. Life is not ephemeral, as feared by Kundera. In fact, Nietzsche’s “eternal return”, the idea that everything that ever happened will happen again, and again, seems to be true in the only way that really counts: the eternity of our subjective experiences.
Perhaps the most significant question in all this is the following: do you need to physically pass away in order to regain the state of boundless consciousness? The psychiatric investigations of Dr. Bucke, which we reviewed earlier, suggest that human beings can reach analogous states of consciousness while physically alive. These investigations, along with the reported experiences of people like Dr. Taylor during her brain stroke, also suggest that there are several degrees with which we can partially or fully reach that state of consciousness. To me, this is one of the most intriguing and fascinating topics of investigation and self-development.
Rationality and the pursuit of spirituality do not need to be mutually-exclusive. All one needs is an adherence to what is perhaps the most important, and most often forgotten, principle of science: know what you do not know and keep an open mind. Indeed, rationality and logic may be fundamental tools to spirituality, for they allow us to make inferences about things that we may not (yet) be able to verify either objectively or subjectively.
This book is not science. But it is, hopefully, logical, coherent in articulation, and not inconsistent with established scientific fact. All too often, rational people are put off from the pursuit of spirituality because their minds cannot tolerate the apparent inconsistencies and seemingly unfounded assumptions that are often associated with spirituality. Because of this huge and often justifiable mental barrier, these rational people are unable to complement their objective knowledge and assessment of nature with its crucial, complementary counterpart: a subjective knowledge and assessment of nature. They simply do not allow themselves the mental freedom to do it because their rationality forces them to dismiss crucial steps along the path of subjective exploration. That is a modern human tragedy, disproportionally affecting the most educated and intelligent segments of society.
Given that you were obviously attracted to the title of this book, you are probably one of the educated, intelligent, rational people I spoke of above. It is my sincere wish that this book has helped you break from your initial preconceptions, so that your rational mind can allow you a little more latitude to investigate spiritual ideas.
I want to leave you with a final thought in this chapter. As a rational, critical person, you may be keenly aware of how your mind can “play tricks” on you; anything from optical illusions to full-blown hallucinations. Because of that, you may often tend to question and doubt the reliability of your own conscious impressions, particularly when it comes to higher states of consciousness. This is a healthy attitude, as long as it does not make you throw away the baby with the bath water. For ultimately, whether you trust or mistrust the impressions in it, all you have is your own consciousness.
Chapter 15
Related concepts
In this book, I have tried to construct a coherent argument about the ultimate purpose of existence. The argument comprises a series of inferences connected by a logical thread. Many of these inferences, which arise naturally from the logic of the argument, entail aspects of reality not yet detected or understood by science. Yet, many of those aspects have already been proposed and debated since remote antiquity in philosophical and spiritual circles, and I make no claims of originality about them. It is the overall coherent argument that I hope to be the key contribution of this book. That said, the fact that much of what has been inferred in this book turns out to correspond well with philosophical and spiritual concepts proposed by many others, throughout history, provides a degree of reassurance and confidence about those inferences.
In what follows, I will briefly touch upon philosophical and spiritual concepts that find some correspondence with the conclusions of this book. You may do more research on those concepts yourself, so to gain more insight into whether and how they may fit within the logical framework we laid out in previous chapters. However, notice that I am not necessarily endorsing the concepts described below in the form that they may have been described elsewhere. In fact, often the coherent argument built in earlier chapters does not support many of the interpretations and elaborations of the concepts below, or features attributed to them. Whichever the case, my argument and position are limited to what has been discussed in the previous chapters, the references below being provided merely for further information. The list below is certainly not complete, which reflects gaps in my familiarity with spiritual literature rather than a veiled attempt to imply unwarranted originality for my work.
Having made the necessary disclaimers, let us get on with it. We have built our argument on the idea that consciousness is grounded on as-of-yet unknown aspects of nature. We have used the word “immaterial” to describe these unknown aspects because the known aspects of reality are usually referred to as “material” reality. This way, consciousness has been inferred to be an “immaterial” emanation that interacts with material reality but is not a result of material reality. This is related to the age-old concept of mind/body dualism, that is, the idea that mind and brain are made of different “stuff”. Ancient Iranian prophet and poet Zoroaster already wrote about dualism thousands of years ago. Later, Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle spoke of the existence of an immaterial soul, which is perhaps somewhat analogous to the immaterial consciousness of our argument. In the seventeenth century, the idea of dualism was elaborated upon by René Descartes, as alluded to in a previous chapter. To this day, dualism is a very influential idea in philosophical discourse, particularly in the field of philosophy of mind.
Notice that the only form of dualism that can be inferred from the argumentation in the previous chapters is a kind of epistemic dualism. In other words, what is dual about nature is our knowledge or interpretation of it, not nature itself at a fundamental level. This way, we can divide our knowledge of nature between aspects that we can directly observe, model, and understand, and things that we can perhaps only indirectly observe, or even only infer, but not yet model in scientific language. The boundary between these two epistemic classes moves over time, as our knowledge of nature evolves.
The justification we used to infer that consciousness is an immaterial emanation was two-fold: Wigner’s interpretation of quantum physics, and the philosophical argument that we have no direct perception of reality itself, but only of indirect brain models of reality. These arguments entail that consciousness, or “mentality”, has primacy over material existence, which is not a novel concept. Many authors, particularly since the early twentieth century, have argued that consciousness is the ground of all existence. Notable early work on this was done by Alfred North Whitehead.1 More modern authors include Peter Russell2 and Amit Goswami.3 Russell adopts a more philosophical perspective, while Goswami explores a more physics-oriented interpretation of the role of consciousness.
The law of insight postulated earlier is related to the “law of karma” of many Eastern spiritual traditions, as well
as to the Judeo-Christian concept of “reaping what you sow”. From this perspective, the so-called “karma” would, in principle, not be related to punishment/reward, debit/credit, or any other reflection of anthropomorphic morality. Instead, it would simply be a morally-neutral, natural tendency operating at a significantly high level of sophistication and subtlety.
Finally, the idea of a universal memory of qualia is somewhat related to the mystical concept of “Akashic records”. The Akashic records are postulated to be a non-physical, universal “filing system” of all human experience, as well as the experiences of other conscious entities. Mystics believe that humans can gain access to the Akashic records through altered states of consciousness, thereby gaining knowledge otherwise impossible to reach through normal physical means. In Judeo-Christian tradition, the idea of a universal memory of qualia may bear some resemblance to the “Book of Life”, where God records the lives of human beings.
When I set out to write this book, I knew that some of the ideas I would touch upon were very similar to concepts mystics and religious people have talked about for centuries. Epistemic dualism was one such idea. However, as I begun constructing the argument for a rationalist spirituality, a few other ideas begun to emerge that were remarkably close to yet other mystical and spiritual concepts. For instance, I had not conceived of all implications and nuances of the concept of “universal memory of qualia” until a relatively late stage of writing. Indeed, analyzing the partial argument I had written about until that point, it dawned on me that something with the full power of a universal memory of qualia was necessary to logically close the argument. Sure enough, there was something in religious and esoteric literature that was eerily similar to that. This experience recurred a few times, as I continued writing.
So I was left in a curious frame of mind. The old scriptures where those mystical and religious concepts appeared for the first time were not logically inferred, but cast as revelation. Could it be that there is a more direct and clearer way to gain access to the most profound truths about nature other than through logical, rational inquiry? Could it be that Dr. Bucke’s state of “cosmic consciousness” could reveal the way nature works in a manner that completely bypasses the often laborious and unreliable manipulation of mental symbols in the brain?
If these thoughts are true, this book has been merely the result of a tortuous, indirect mental exercise that would not have been necessary if you and I had achieved “cosmic consciousness”. Perhaps the conclusions extracted here are but partial, blurred, shimmering shadows of a much more complete and nuanced truth. Standing where I am now, with this book completed before me, I intuit that this is but the tentative beginning of a much longer journey.
Endnotes
Chapter 1:
Richard P. Feynman, “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out”, Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999, pp. 24-25.
Daniel Dennett, “Cute, sexy, sweet, funny”, a talk given at TED conference, February 2009.
Chapter 2:
Milan Kundera, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, Harper & Row, 1984, p. 8.
Chapter 3:
Some might argue that, instead, the universe might be comprised in the complete entity. That may be a valid assertion under a different definition of “universe” but, in this book, the word “universe” is meant to encompass both “Creation” and potential “Creator.” This is not, in any way, an attempt to diminish the power or importance of the concept of a Supreme Being, but simply a semantic necessity to keep my discourse short and consistent.
Chapter 4:
See, for instance: Ran R. Hassin, editor, “The New Unconscious”, Oxford Series in Social Cognition and Social Neuroscience, Oxford University Press, USA, October 2004.
David J. Chalmers, “The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory”, Oxford University Press, 1996.
See, for instance: Joseph Levine, “Conceivability, Identity, and the Explanatory Gap”, in: Stuart R. Hameroff, Alfred W. Kaszniak, and David J. Chalmers, editors, “Toward a Science of Consciousness III, The Third Tucson Discussions and Debates”, October 1999. See also: Joseph Levine, “Materialism and Qualia: The Explanatory Gap”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64, 1983, pp. 354-361.
See, for instance: Francis Crick and Christof Koch, “Towards a neurobiological theory of consciousness”, Seminars in Neuroscience 2, 1990, pp. 263–275.
Kurzweil’s position is extensively elaborated upon in: Ray Kurzweil, “The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology”, Viking, 2005, pp. 458-469, where Kurzweil counters John Searle’s “Chinese Room” argument with the complexity and emergentist hypothesis.
Rodney Brooks, Ray Kurzweil, and David Gelernter, “Will Machines Become Conscious? Gelernter, Kurzweil debate machine consciousness”, a debate held at MIT in November 2006, with an online transcript available at http://www.kurzweilai.net.
Steve Kotler, interviewer, “The Neurology of Spiritual Experience”, h+ magazine, digital edition, fall of 2009, p. 45.
Erich Joos, “The Emergence of Classicality from Quantum Theory”, in: Philips Clayton and Paul Davies, editors, “The Re-Emergence of Emergence: The Emergentist Hypothesis from Science to Religion”, Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 53-78.
Chapter 5:
See, for instance: Thomas Metzinger, editor, “Neural Correlates of Consciousness: Empirical and Conceptual Questions”, The MIT Press, September 2000.
See, for instance: Ray B. Smith, “Cranial Electrotherapy Stimulation: Its First Fifty Years, Plus Three: A Monograph”, Tate Publishing & Enterprises, March 2008.
See, for instance: M.T. Alkire and J. Miller, “General anesthesia and the neural correlates of consciousness”, Progress in Brain Research 150, 2005, pp. 229-244.
See, for instance: Steve Squyres, “Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet”, Hyperion, January 2007.
For an extensive review of related studies, see: Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Sharon Begley, “The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force”, Harper Collins, New York, 2002.
Jeffrey M. Schwartz, Henry P. Stapp, and Mario Beauregard, “Quantum physics in neuroscience and psychology: a neuro-physical model of mind–brain interaction”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, doi:10.1098/rstb.2004.1598, 2005, p. 3.
Penrose’s original work on this is: Roger Penrose, “The Emperor’s New Mind”, Oxford University Press, 1989. He elaborated further in: Roger Penrose, “Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness”, Vintage, 1995. His ideas were summarized and debated with other scientists in: Roger Penrose, Abner Shimony, Nancy Cartwright, and Stephen Hawking, “The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind”, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
See, for instance: Stuart Hameroff, “Consciousness, neurobiology and quantum mechanics: The case for a connection”, in: Jack A. Tuszynski, editor, “The Emerging Physics of Consciousness” (The Frontiers Collection), Springer, 2006, pp. 193-242.
An excellent and accessible volume elaborating on Stapp’s ideas is: Henry P. Stapp, “Mindful Universe: Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer” (The Frontiers Collection), Springer, 2007. A more technical one is: Henry P. Stapp, “Mind, Matter and Quantum Mechanics” (The Frontiers Collection), Springer, 2003.
Chapter 6:
For an extensive and accessible overview, see: Iain Nicolson, “Dark Side of the Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Fate of the Universe”, Canopus Publishing Limited, 2007.
An excellent and accessible resource about string theories and M-theory is: Brian Greene, “The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory”, Vintage, 2005.
Mile Gu, Christian Weedbrook, Alvaro Perales, and Michael A. Nielsen, “More Really is Different”, arXiv:0809.0151v1 [cond-mat.other], August 2008, p. 1.
Robert B. Laughlin and David Pines, “The Theory of Everything”, Proceedings of the National Academy o
f Sciences 97(1), January 2000, p. 28.
See Zuse’s seminal book: Konrad Zuse,“Rechnender Raum”, Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn, 1969.
One of the first and best known experiments showing instantaneous interaction at a distance has been reported in: Alain Aspect et al., “Experimental Tests of Realistic Local Theories via Bell’s Theorem”, Physical Review Letters 47, 460, 1981. Since then, many other experiments have been performed, confirming Aspect’s conclusions. The most recent experiment, at the time this book was written, had been reported in: D. Salart et al., “Space-like Separation in a Bell Test Assuming Gravitationally Induced Collapses”, Physical Review Letters 100, 220404, 2008.
P.W. Anderson, “More Is Different”, Science, New Series, Vol. 177, No. 4047, August 4, 1972, pp. 393-396.
Mile Gu et al., op. cit. .
Chapter 7:
The thought experiment has been described here: John R. Searle, “Minds, brains, and programs”, Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (3), 1980, pp. 417-457.
John R. Searle, op. cit., p. 419.
Their project has been described in the following article: Henry Markram, “The Blue Brain Project”, Nature Reviews Neuroscience 7, February 2006, pp. 153-160.
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