Human Zombies ?

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While consciousness is a profound mystery, there are some reasonable speculations that can be made about it.

 

One of these speculations involves a model of consciousness in three dimensions.  The simplest form of consciousness is one-dimensional (linear).  This is the kind of consciousness possessed by nonhuman animals such as horses, tigers, mice and the like.  Such animals are aware of their surroundings, and to some extent, themselves (hunger, fear, pain, etc.).

 

The second dimension of consciousness is the awareness of being conscious.  This is a self-reflective dimension, which lower animals do not possess.  They are aware, but they are not aware that they are aware.

 

The third dimension of consciousness is the one in which a conscious person questions what consciousness is.  He examines and evaluates not only his own consciousness as he experiences it, but also, analyzes the general principles that apply to consciousness, his own and others’.

 

What arises from this speculation is the question of how many dimensions of consciousness the typical human being possesses (or exercises).  Having met and interacted with thousands of people in my seventy years, I was often struck by how many of them seem never to show even the mildest curiosity about their own inner life.  They seem to move from moment to moment, concerned only with their immediate needs and desires.  Their awareness is strictly limited to the most primitive aspects of their lives.

 

Indeed, in some persons, I have actually questioned whether they are conscious at all.  This may seem extreme, but out of curiosity, I have on occasion questioned some persons closely about whether they have a sense of self that goes beyond their physical bodies.  For example, don’t you feel that there is a “you” that is not just atoms and molecules?  Sometimes I got a blank stare.  After repeated questioning pushing the limits of civility, I concluded that the person had no concept that there was anything about himself to question, anything to wonder about, or to reflect upon.

 

Another way of saying this is to question whether it is possible for a human body to exist without a soul.  That raises the specter of an empty body, one that functions biologically, even socially, but in which (so to speak) the lights are on, but nobody is home.

 

That sounds a lot like a zombie, not the kind in the movies, but something very scary to contemplate.

 

One scary thought is that, if it could somehow be proved that there are human zombies, what would be their legal status?  What rules of morality would differentiate them from, say, a cleverly designed robot?  Would they have rights?

 

At the moment, these are just wild speculations.  But, as the study of consciousness advances, might the day come when it is necessary to distinguish humans from zombies?
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Consciousness and Time

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Two of the greatest mysteries are consciousness and time.  When combined together, they each have a lot to say about the other.  Indeed, in a sense, each is the other.

Just as it is impossible for us to imagine having no consciousness, so also is it impossible for us to imagine existing in a universe without time.  Therefore, consciousness of time is arguably at the heart of our sensations, along with consciousness of self, and consciousness of consciousness.

Thanks to Einstein, we now understand that space and time are one and the same.  Only our conscious experience separates space-time into two fundamentals.  Also, according to Einstein, energy and matter are one and the same, expressed in the iconic equation, E=MC²

Therefore, all of physical reality can be summarized into the apt acronym, STEM (space-time-energy-matter), the fundamental “stem.”

What this tells us is that our experience of reality is entirely (or mostly) subjective.  It is very unlike our physicalist mathematical models, such as those formulated by Einstein.  Add quantum mechanics (QM) to the mix, and our ordinary experience of reality makes QM seem the stuff of fairy tales by comparison.

Yet, the physicalist models wield enormous authority, thanks not only to abstract mathematics, but also, on the practical level of useful technologies.  Without Relativity and QM, none of our computerized communications systems, upon which modern civilization depends, would function.  That alone is enough to put the swagger into the objectivist, physicalist philosophy.

Despite all that, the physicalist models suffer one fatal defect.  They have been utterly unable to explain consciousness.  More specifically, they cannot explain our inward experience of consciousness—not only unable to explain it, but even to define it.  In the physicalist grand scheme, there is no place for inward awareness in the universe.  It is neither necessary nor predicted, and in physicalist science, if a phenomenon is not predictable according to the rules, then its existence is a nonfactor at least, a contradiction at most.

Any theory of consciousness must be inextricably intertwined with life and free will (volition).  Without life, consciousness would be static, and without free will, it would be passive, making us witnesses to our own lives, but not participants.

Physicalism fails to separate life from its chemical processes, equating them both to each other.  This equation fails to explain why all the physical constants of the universe seem intelligently designed to enable and support life, civilization and advanced technology, relegating this central feature of the universe to mere coincidence, or to an even less likely model, that of infinite universes.

More extremely, physicalism requires itself to rule out any possibility of free will.  In physicalism, every event is strictly determined by cause and effect.  Nothing is optional.  But the existence of free will, without which life and existence itself would be a meaningless farce, demolishes physicalism utterly.  Moreover, the existence of free will imparts accountability to our decisions.  While free will may not always be a factor (for example in reflexes), it is at the least the deciding factor in moral decisions.

Moral decision-making, in turn, requires the existence of moral standards—standards not set by fallible human reasoning, but by the infallible, supreme authority of the living God.

Physicalism has utterly nothing whatsoever to say about morality, (right or wrong, good or evil) except to deny that there can be any objective moral standard at all.  While physicalists as individual persons may set moral standards for themselves, or have personal opinions regarding the morality of actions by others, the physicalist paradigm rejects all that as nonfactual.

Returning to the topic of consciousness and time, Relativity seems to picture the universe as a static “loaf” of space-time, in which the past, present and future are already established and unchangeable.  This is incompatible with free will, and seems also to be incompatible with QM.

With free will, the future is in the realm of uncertainty, and is therefore alterable by our decisions (to however slight a degree).  In QM there is even the strange suggestion that the past itself is uncertain, and therefore, alterable.  An alterable past seems very peculiar, but it may not be entirely impossible.

That is because time and consciousness are closely linked.  Time, unless it is experienced by conscious, living, volitional creatures, is not the same as mathematical time.  In mathematical time, the past can be reconstructed according to formulas.  However, until that past is experienced (albeit indirectly by computation), it does not truly exist in the realm of certainty.  It is an uncollapsed cloud of probability.

Therefore, the age of the universe is of two dimensions:  one calculated, one experienced (by humans).  The calculated age of the universe is about 13.7 billion years, the humanly experienced age is closer to 6,000 years, more in accord with Biblical texts.

Consciousness of time is one of the dominant characteristics of the human experience, and incorporates two profound mysteries.  It is not a mystery we can solve, but we need not solve every mystery.  Some of them are better savored than answered.

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Inside an Exo-Intelligent Mind (Space Alien) ?

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I recently developed an increased appreciation of what it might be like to communicate with beings from other planets.  Let me lower expectations before I begin.  My source for this was in a very unusual dream (okay, go ahead and have a good laugh).  But bear with me on this, you may be glad you did.

Science fiction movies (and illustrations) seem to do a fairly good job of depicting what space creatures may look like (if indeed there are any, which is not a given).  But after this dream, I question whether we can even approximate what exo-intelligent beings may think like.  Their thoughts may be as alien to us as is their variety of (supposed) shapes.  If so, the difficulty of communication with them may be vastly greater than merely translating from one dictionary to another.  Not only might the languages be exceedingly different, the very structure of their thoughts might be utterly unlike ours, or anything we imagine.

Now on to the dream concept.  Let me segue into this with a science fiction short story that I remember from decades ago (1950s?).  In that story, a man (Jim) is visited by a friend who brings along with him his new fiancée.  He invites them inside, and offers them drinks.  During the visit, Jim gets dizzy, and suddenly finds himself in a very strange world.  It is like a sort of cartoonish world, in which there is little detail.  The grass is green but mushy, like a sponge.  Trees are vague shapes with brown trunks and green tops, but as with the grass, there are no leaves, just mush.  However, every once in a while, among crowds of people, a man’s face comes into sharp contrast, always handsome.  A woman’s dress comes into focus, very stylish. Likewise, with shoes that some women are wearing.  Fortunately, Jim snaps out of it in time to bid his guests farewell.

Later on, Jim theorizes as to what happened.  He thinks that in some science-fictiony way, he briefly entered the mind of the fiancée.  He saw the world as does she, interested in only a very few things:  handsome men, stylish clothes and the like.  In her world, she never notices blades of grass, or birds, or any normal detail.  Jim feels sorry for his friend, who does not realize how shallow his fiancée is.

With that setup, humor me while I describe my own dream.  Well, that is just the point—I can’t.  Have you ever had a dream which seemed perfectly ordinary at the time, but when you awoke, you realized was silly—flying cats, ocean going railroad trains, buildings that transformed into mountains—you get the idea.  When you awoke, you could remember the dream, express it, and know how silly it was.

My dream was not silly, not at all.  It made perfectly good sense, so good in fact, that it made too much sense to be a dream.  When I awoke, I could remember the dream, but then, to my astonishment, I realized that I could not express it in words.  Sadly, as I struggled to find words, the dream soon faded—not, I think, because of a problem with remembering it, but because I had nothing to compare it to.  I still remember part of it, the sense that it was all ordinary and logical.  That part stays with me.

After some time, it occurred to me that I had had a glimpse—whether real or imaginary is for you to decide—of what it is like to be inside the mind of an intelligent creature on a faraway planet.

When (if ever) humans encounter intelligent space aliens, we may well find that decrypting their language (if we can even call it a language) will defy all our linguistic abilities.  If communication is at all possible, it may require something like direct brain-to-brain (oh, this is getting silly) interaction.

As a footnote, I saw a televised case history of a man who, through age-regression psychotherapy, believes he had experienced a transfer of thought—from an American sailor who died on a submarine in World War 2.  He supplied explicit details of names, places and dates, all of which were later confirmed, including details of the interior of the house in which the sailor had lived.

As an evangelical Christian, I cannot relate any of this to my religious beliefs, but as I said in other posts, my search for truth is open minded.

I will, however, note that according to Jewish tradition, some very few angels, but apparently not all of them, are able to communicate with humans.  This might possibly be because most of the angelic beings do not have what we humans would recognize as anything we could call a language with structure like our own.

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Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis

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Decades ago, I attended a lecture by a visiting speaker at the University of South Florida, who repeatedly used the phrase, thesis, antithesis and synthesis.  His context was political, but there is a cosmological and philosophical implication to those words.

The principle I propose is that, you cannot have just one thing.  In order for any one thing to exist, there must be something else as well.  The two must interact, in order for either to exist.

Thus, the phrase:  thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

To help clarify this principle, imagine one of the most elementary particles known to science.  Let us say, an electron.  As far as science knows, electrons cannot be broken into parts, because the electron is fundamental.

Try to imagine that single electron, existing all by itself.  There is nothing else, only that one electron.  It has a mass of 1/1836 compared to a proton, but that is meaningless if there are no protons.  It has a charge of negative one, but again, that is meaningless in the absence of a positive charge.

Such an electron cannot move.  There is nothing to move toward or away from.  There is nothing to orbit.   In short, the electron has no existence by itself.

Another illustration involves a simple ruler.  A ruler is a measuring stick, let us say, one meter long.  But the ruler cannot measure itself.  It can only measure something else, something that is not the ruler.

When two or more things exist, they can interact, and this interaction is a third thing, something which clearly cannot exist alone.  That interaction is the synthesis.

A common expression is that, the eye cannot see itself.  If one includes not only the eye, but the entire complex of ocule, neuro-transmission, and brain, one can ask whether this complex can perceive itself.  The principle here is not anatomical, but conceptual.  Just as the ruler cannot measure itself, so also, a person cannot truly perceive himself—we need mirrors.  We need something that is not us.

In terms of monist idealism, what this exercise does is, in my view, not to prove or disprove monism, but rather it is to show that thinking in terms of monism or dualism is not a useful way to understand ourselves or the greater reality in which we live.

Perhaps in the final analysis, reality is the only thing that can interact with itself.  It is its own thesis, its own antithesis, and therefore, the ultimate synthesis.  This proposal is not dogmatic, but just food for thought.

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Mega-Reality

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Albert Einstein once said, "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible."  Was he correct?

Mega-Reality is a philosophical consideration that poses the question, is the scope of reality so far beyond human comprehension that our minds are utterly and forever incapable of even beginning to imagine it, much less understand it?

When one reflects on Einstein’s statement, one may begin to appreciate just how profound, how awesome, it is.  Why should the human intellect be able to work out, understand, and explain the atom, the galaxies, and the vast cosmos?  Of all the creatures in nature, why should our species have discerned that the world is round, and that it orbits the sun?  Why should we have sent men to the moon and back?  Why should we have sent unmanned missions to Mars, and photographed not only it, but also the surface of Titan, one of the moons of distant Saturn?  And Pluto!

Why is the human brain such that, some few of them, are capable of such wonders?  Even for those of us who cannot fathom such things, even our ordinary brains are enormously complex, potentially capable of farming, building large structures, and making complex music, or writing the great novel?

Are there any limits to what we can do?

Or is there a mega-reality, one which is so all-encompassing, so utterly unlike anything we can imagine, that our greatest potential to understand it is less than the ability of an ant to understand the deepest depths of the ocean?

We tend to think in terms of the familiar.  That is what makes quantum theory and relativity so perplexing.  They step beyond the familiar.  Yet, even these, strange as they are, are descriptions of a familiar universe, one that has space and time and energy and matter. 

But what of other universes?  Physicists have seriously proposed that there are untolled numbers of them, perhaps infinities of them.  Yet, even here, the physicists are drawing upon the familiar, speculating that other universes might be unlike ours in appearance, but in principle, universes nonetheless. 

An ostrich and a hummingbird are both birds, however unlike each other they are.  A humming bird and a whale are both animals.  A hummingbird and a rock are both physical objects.  Universes are universes.

But mega-reality poses the question, are there realities that are not universes at all?  Are there realities in which space and time and energy and matter do not exist?  We have no familiar experience in which to even begin to imagine such a reality. 

Scientists propose that our one universe may extend infinitely in all directions, with no limits, no end.  That alone is mind-boggling, but it is also possible that infinite numbers of infinitely large universes may exist.  And those are just the universes.  Might the span and scope of reality include things that are not universes?  And might there be infinite numbers of such realities?  Infinite varieties?

Finally, are all these proposed realities part of one mega-reality?

Einstein may have been correct about the comprehensibility of our universe, but one must wonder, are there also incomprehensible realities beyond ours, beyond imagining?

Yes, or no, either answer has profound implications.

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