Rosenberg on Edelman's Theory of Consciousness

[fuzzyfelt]

Thank you Les Sleeth, that has been my understanding too, although, yes, I think you did guess that I was momentarily toying with the idea that there may be an even deeper, essential, relationship between physicality and union.

 

[Canute]

I think that no matter what explanation of anything anyone offers, you can quickly ask a series of questions leading to an ultimate one about how the fundamental entity involved in the explanation came to be. And, it seems that we must choose that either something-or-other always existed, or that the something-or-other came to be out of nothing. I don't see that my hypothesis suffers from this problem any more than each and every other hypothesis does.

Hi Paul - I feel you're right that this is the problem, but wrong in saying that we must make this either/or choice and that this is a problem in all cosmologies. The cosmology of Buddhism, Sufism, Taoism, the Upanishads etc. - does not suffer from this problem. In this cosmology the tertium non datur rule is modified, just as it has to be in QM and M-theory, and so the problem disappears. The avoidance of this false distinction, ("either that something-or-other always existed, or that the something-or-other came to be out of nothing") is one of the many meanings of the term 'nonduality' in these doctrines. Clearly neither choice makes sense so there must be this third option. (Consider the 'hypothesis of duality' in M-theory, or the concept of complementarity in QM).

 

[Paul Martin]

Hi Paul - I feel you're right that this is the problem, but wrong in saying that we must make this either/or choice and that this is a problem in all cosmologies. The cosmology of Buddhism, Sufism, Taoism, the Upanishads etc. - does not suffer from this problem. In this cosmology the tertium non datur rule is modified, just as it has to be in QM and M-theory, and so the problem disappears. The avoidance of this false distinction, ("either that something-or-other always existed, or that the something-or-other came to be out of nothing") is one of the many meanings of the term 'nonduality' in these doctrines. Clearly neither choice makes sense so there must be this third option. (Consider the 'hypothesis of duality' in M-theory, or the concept of complementarity in QM).

Hi Canute,

Yes, 'must' is too strong of a word. There are many alternative ways of dealing with this issue. I think my suggestion of just stepping over this stumbling block is essentially the same as the approach of the eastern cosmologies and of QM: avoid the problem by not talking about it and move on to something you can talk about. At least that's the way those other approaches sound to me.

Paul

 

[Canute]

Yes QM avoids the problem in this way, but 'Eastern' cosmologies do not avoid the problem at all, they address it head on and thus solve it. There is no unspoken of mystery in these cosmologies, no unanswerable metaphysical questions or other barriers to knowledge. But this nonduality of reality, at an absolute level, has to be understood on a personal basis, through experience, as Les keeps saying, not by third-person theorising or hypothesising, which, as we can easily see from the current state of the naturalised sciences and of analytical or 'western' philosophy (and the discussions on this forum) gets one absolutely nowhere.

 

[Paul Martin]

Yes QM avoids the problem in this way, but 'Eastern' cosmologies do not avoid the problem at all, they address it head on and thus solve it. There is no unspoken of mystery in these cosmologies, no unanswerable metaphysical questions or other barriers to knowledge. But this nonduality of reality, at an absolute level, has to be understood on a personal basis, through experience, as Les keeps saying, not by third-person theorising or hypothesising, which, as we can easily see from the current state of the naturalised sciences and of analytical or 'western' philosophy (and the discussions on this forum) gets one absolutely nowhere.

Hi Canute,

"Those who know don't tell; those who tell don't know."

I have heard that quote a few times over the years but I don't know if it has any official standing in any philosophy or religion. But it gets me to wondering just the same. I am quite convinced that some people have had personal experiences by which they came to know something, in the strongest sense of knowing, which they cannot express in language. So,... they not only don't tell anyone else, they can't tell anyone else.

I am also pretty well convinced that several times throughout history, someone has had such an experience, has attempted to explain it in language, and has convinced a number of followers that he was really on to something. What happens then is that the followers get it all messed up and come up with some doctrine that is very different from the knowledge attained by person who had the experience. And, thus, a religion or a sect is started. I think it is interesting that Parmenides, Socrates, Jesus, and Gautama didn't leave any personal written account. What we have are interpretations by their followers.

That preamble was to set the stage for a question to you, Canute: What do you mean by "solve a problem"? You said that there is no unspoken of mystery in the Eastern cosmologies.

If you mean that in Eastern cosmologies the problem is solved in the mind of an individual then that is one thing, and not too useful to others. But if you mean that a solution is available to be spoken, or otherwise expressed in language, then 1) it means that the impression I expressed in my preamble is wrong and I need to be corrected, and 2) for Heaven's sake, What is the solution? How can something exist without either starting or always existing?

Paul

 

[Canute]

Paul

My answers to such questions tend to come out horribly garbled but I'll have a shot at it.

I agree with what you say on how religions get started. It seems obvious from the evidence that our major religions are founded on misreadings of the prophets. This complaint is regularly made of Christianity, Islam and Hinduism. The problem does not really crop up in the mystical religions because these are religions in a different sense of the word, and in these one is not expected to believe the words of any prophet or master but rather to is expected to follow in their footsteps and thus attain their knowledge for oneself. Thus the criticism of Christianity, Islam and Hinduism, as these doctrines are so often taught, is, ironically, most often and most vociferously made by Christian mystics, Sufis and Advaita Vedantists. (This is the whole argument about the non-canonical gospels, for example, for in these Jesus gives the mystical view of cosmology, not a theist view).

The question "How can something exist without either starting or always existing?" can be addressed by asking what the words mean. For most people 'something' will mean a thing that exists in space and time. If it means this then the answer to the question is 'It cannot'. If something exists in time and space then it has a beginning and an end. (I know Hawking argues that time might have a beginning but not an end, but he hasn't yet shown that this idea is not absurd).

The same argument applies to the term 'exists' - what most people mean by 'exists', certainly what most scientists mean, is 'exists in space and time'. Given this meaning then anything that exists must have a beginning, and again the answer would be 'It cannot'.

But the question can be interpreted differently. In the nondual cosmology what is fundamental, the ultimate phenomenon, transcends the distinction between existing and not-existing and between some-thing and no-thing. In fact it transcends all such 'dual' distinctions so, for instance, this 'thing' has no properties and all properties, is both extended and not extended, is differentiated and undifferentiated, both a void and a plenum and so on ad infinitum. (cf Spencer Brown's mathematical model of cosmogenesis, in which forms arise in the void by the reification of these false distinctions).

This seems a strange idea but if it were true it would very straighforwardly explain why metaphysical question are undecidable, and no other explanation has yet been proposed.

The easiest way to conceive of the nonduality of the ultimate phenomenon, it seems to me, is in terms of superposition and complementarity. But this is just a helpful device, and there is complete agreement among mystics and meditators that in fact it is impossible to conceive of it.

All those who propound this view assert that this strange property or state of ultimate reality cannot be understood except by direct experience. However, now that physics has progressed sufficiently the assertions that space and time are not fundamental, and that something can be in many states at the same time and so on, begin to seem less odd than they used to, and we can speculate that this 'something' is inconceivable for the same reason that wavicles are inconceivable, which is that according to reason a thing must be either a particle or a wave, must be local or non-local, must exist against a spacetime background or not and so forth.

In the mystical view what is fundamental to existence is not a corporeal or mental phenomenon. It does not exist in the way that other phenomena exist, and it is in a sense beyond spacetime, beyond temporality and extension. The Nibbana of Buddhism, for example, is, metaphorically at least, rather like another dimension, in contact with every point in the physical universe but itself unextended, like a curled-up or compacted fifth dimension in M-theory, or like the hyperspace of science fiction. This is reminiscent of Neo's Matrix-world, in which spatial extension is an illusion, since all points in Neo's universe are the same point, the point at which his self-consciousness exists, in a brain in a vat in a machine somewhere entirely outside of his phenomenal universe. Non-locality would be easy to explain in the Matrix, where naive realism is about as wrong as it could be.

This problem with how to define 'something' and 'exist' in your question is avoided by various methods in mystical writings. In Taoist philosophy, for instance, the ultimate is often referred to as 'something', the scare quotes signifying that it should not be thought of as a thing or object. Likewise, it is said that the Tao (Allah, Nibbana, Unicity etc) is, not that it exists, because the term 'exists' implies the notion of spacetime, and this 'something' is beyond spacetime.

Actually what I've said here is not quite right. One reason for this, in addition to my ignorance, is that it's very difficult to talk about this 'something' in everyday terms for the same reason it is very difficult to talk about wavicles in mathematical terms. One must take a wavicle to be a wave or a particle in mathematics, while in fact it not a wave, not a particle, not neither a wave nor a particle and not both a wave and a particle. I'm not suggesting that Nibbana, the Tao etc. is a wavicle, (although to me this would make scientific sense) but rather that some of the concepts that have had to be developed in QM are useful when thinking about the idea of 'nonduality', and that the dual nature of its explandum causes the same epistemilogical and linguistic problems in Taoism as it does in QM and quantum cosmology.

It is important to say that this 'nondual' cosmological view is not speculative, but based on 'knowledge by identity', on first-person empirical evidence. It can be argued that it is built on a delusion, or a series of self-delusions, but this can only be decided by first-person research.

Does that make any sense at all? I doubt it. If not I'll post a couple of links to much better answers.

Canute

 

[Paul Martin]

Hi Canute,

What an excellent response! It made a lot of sense to me and I think I understand what you are saying. I think it helps, though, that I am currently about half-way through a course in Buddhism that I am taking (yes, I decided to take it because of your suggestions. Thank you for that.). For example, I learned that 'Nibbana' is the Pali word for the Sanskrit 'Nirvana'.

Another thing I learned is that you should probably include Buddhism in your list of religions in which the prophets have been misread. Such misreadings, IMHO, lead to the diffusion of the Dharma and the resulting schools of The Nyingma, The Sakya School, The Kagyu School, and the Geluk School.

It was great for me to learn about the philosophy of each of these schools because each time, I thought I knew what they were talking about and each time I identified it with my own philosophical beliefs. Then when I learned about the next one, I realized that it was really a refinement or an improvement on the prior one. The net of it is, at least in my opinion, each one is correct but none of them can be expressed in a precise way. It's the same old story of the necessity of parable, poetry, and allegory in describing religious doctrine of any kind. As soon as you try to be specific and linguistically accurate, you head right into error.

Thanks for your post. Gotta go.

Paul

 

[Canute]

Yeah, there have been disagreements over some of the deeper aspects of reality between different schools of Buddhism. I suspect that these have all but disappeared today, but you probably know more about this than I do. For me most of the disagreements were more apparent than real, more about what should be taught and how rather than about what is true, since no school of Buddhhism argues that the Buddha was incorrect in anything he said, but I haven't really looked into the details.

It's great to hear that you're looking into all this though. I'll be genuinely interested to know what you make of it. In case you've got the time can I recommend a book? You may find the Penguin edition of the Bhagavad Gita well worth a read. The main text is worth reading in itself of course. But the edition also includes two introductions, a brilliant one by Juan Mascaro, the translator, and a more general but even more brilliant one by Simon Broderick. The writers of the Gita expounded the same doctrine as the Buddha, albeit they presented it very differently. Because of this the two introductions to the text of the Gita are also explanations of Buddhist doctrine, and they are both exceptionally good in my opinion. Just a thought.

Canute