Something happened Friday…
In the beginning
That Friday started like a lot of days. The sleep dragon tried unsuccessfully to drag me back into its lair. I brushed away her entreaties and sat up, got up. I suited up for the day ahead. Today: finishing drywall repair for a client. While in my bathroom, I read “The hunt for pure consciousness” by Alun Anderson in the April 27 to May 3 issue of New Scientist.
The article reviewed a new book by Thomas Metzinger, The Elephant and the Blind. I, somehow, had not encountered Metzinger’s work during the previous decade while reading a stack of books taller than me about consciousness.
I had even started drafting an essay using the same analogy. I think the story of the seven blind men and the elephant aptly describes how the scientific community at large examines consciousness, each describing some part, unable to see the whole. That is when I boarded my train of thought for the day. I would indulge myself in all the journey had to offer while observing and participating in the day ahead.
Catching the C train
That New Scientist article references another Metzinger book where he proposed “that no such thing as selves exist in the world.” I have come to the same conclusion having read numerous articles and interviews with people whose brain hemispheres had surgically been separated in a procedure called a Corpus Callosotomy. In those articles under scrupulous scientific circumstances, communicating with post-surgery patients revealed vastly different personalities presented by each half of their brains. None of those people were, reportedly, any longer ‘themselves’ post callosotomy.
This information seriously calls into question: Who is that person in my mirror?
The answer to that question lay in another conclusion I reached in my consciousness research – Every living cell on this planet is conscious. There are 37 trillion cells (human and not human) that make up the multicellular organism homo sapiens. That ‘person’ in the mirror is simply the ‘personality,’ synthesized by the brain from all those conscious cells, displayed for their common survival, procreation, and pleasure. A very simplified comparison would be New York City. Mayor Eric Adams is not New York City. He is simply the face the residents of New York collectively presents to the world.
Finally together, and out the door in/on that train while I drove across town to my job at Carla’s house. As I was backing my work van into her driveway, she and her dog, Milo, greeted me. Carla and Elise are, like most of my clients, warm, wonderful, outgoing, vibrant souls. Milo should have his picture in the dictionary next to ‘standard poodle.’ For years he would not let me near him. Lately, however, he greets me as if I am a sorely missed member of the family.
Once parked, I started dragging tools and materials out of my van for the task ahead. When I had tools inside the front door, Astro nuzzled me. He was beside himself with joy. I remarked to Carla that the unconditional love that dogs show us is remarkable. She countered with a story about her grandmother who loved her little dog dearly. Carla,’ quoting her grandmother, “That little dog would wag all over whenever I come through the door. At my age no one still wags all over when I enter a room.” We laughed. I said that not even my wife greets me like that. Then I wagged all over to demonstrate. We laughed again.
A?$x%-@”m/?
I headed back to the van for more tools and materials. When I opened the storm door and stepped out and down the one step… it happened. The thought train I was on derailed off a bridge over a deep ravine, engine, boxcars, and all.
I plunged into the immediacy all around me, as if a gong had sounded ushering in a clarity so loud it was deafening. Instantly my perception hit 10. Everything around me was bigger, closer, richer, brighter, louder…
and yet, silent.
For an instant everything stopped…
then began to shuffle
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The beauty was so overwhelming I almost cried. Every blade of grass was leaping toward the sky, every leaf fluttered seductively in the barely perceptible breeze, every cloud in the miraculously blue sky breathed silently, filling my attention. I could feel every hair on my body. Every motion of the dog across the street and its human friend was a scene in a two-character one act play of simplicity filled with purpose.
I have no idea how long it took to get to my AI enhanced van. What seemed like decades later, I was finally standing before the wall I was repairing. The patched area was swimming around the lake/wall as if I were staring down at it from a cliff high above.
Finishing and painting that wall felt like a dance so well-rehearsed it appears as easy as an improvisation. When I was done, I quietly left. I slowly, regrettably, returned from that infinity over the course of the day much like returning from a magic mushroom vacation.
In the brightness, during the intensity I could almost see…
What we sense is only a sliver of the bandwidth available to each of our five senses. What we cannot consciously see or hear or smell or taste or feel dwarfs even the most fertile of imaginations. Anyone who tells you that what our meagre senses pick up is all there is and then we die is mistaken. I do not know what lies beyond the beauty and enormity of all we experience with our consciousness but, on a really good day, when disparate branches of a moment snap into alignment, I can almost see what is on the other side of the veil of that which we call reality.
It is exhilarating.
Nothing is more important than anything else
A Footnote in a picture book
In 1978 I was working at the Nashville Public Library as a live character in four puppet shows a week for school children with Tom Tichenor who created the puppets for the Broadway show “Carnival”. On Saturdays, together, we performed marionette shows in the library auditorium for walk-in families.
The remainder of my time was spent making puppets and shelving books. At that time the Children’s Division had one of the largest collections of children’s books in America. It included every Caldecott Award and Newbery Award winner.
One afternoon I noticed a Caldecott winning picture book illustrated by Remy Charlip – The Seeing Stick (Yolen, 1977). The illustrations were remarkable. Standing there by the book cart between two sets of shelves I read through the pages. About halfway through there was an asterisk by one of the lines. It referred to a footnote. Footnote? In a children’s picture book? Unheard of.
Nothing is more important than anything else.
At the bottom of the page next to a quantum entangled asterisk were the words, “Nothing is more important than anything else.” A Separate Reality (Castaneda, 1974). I immediately went downstairs to the main library, located, and checked out the book.
I read it. Then I read all Castaneda’s books.
I have passed 75 years in this place called earth. I have pondered that phrase for decades, while I experienced a varied and colorful life, some good, some not so good. That statement is unassailably true. By any measure what we say and do here means little to the universe where we live. All that lay before us will be swept away by the winds of time and forgotten. One seemingly enduring thing, the earth, will one day, too distant for us to fathom, be consumed by the dying star that conspired with earth and water and air to breathe life into all that surrounds us. Everything within our purview is unimportant. It is folly.
If everything in our domain is folly, what is one to do?
I see a different truth in that statement now than when I first read it. Now that I see ‘more than anything else’ more clearly, I continue to keep a running list of the ‘important’ things in my life which have only as much significance as I choose to give them. I act on what I have given meaning to as if my life depended on it, knowing full well that it means nothing. That is my controlled folly.
I live surrounded by the incredible beauty of life that springs from the ground as if it cannot be contained, where some living creatures fly through the air, others burrow in the soil, swim in the water, or roam the earth. I have chosen nurturing and caring for this place and its inhabitants to the best of my ability as important. What you are reading now and in the rest of my blog are expressions of the essence I have given to this task. My political merch site is another. My family, my friends, my modest garden, my bird feeder are among my momentous list conveying aspects of my ‘path with heart’ too long to name here.
If I could go back in time and change anything in my life, I would not. Every single moment of my life, every decision I have made, has led me to this instant, writing these words. Even when I am in pain or frustrated or having a ‘bad day’, I am learning how to be better, make better on my meaningless quest. There is joy in all of that. If one iota of my past changed, I might not arrive here, now. I would not trade this moment for anything in the world.
Preface to “Personal Experience: What it is and why we have it”
Personal Experience: What it is and why we have it (a treatise on consciousness)
By J Thomas Crowne
A non-fiction book that solves some of the hard problems of consciousness
150 pages
Preface
I am not qualified to write this book… on paper. I am not a scientist, do not have the right letters behind my name. There are only two… from the beginning of the alphabet. However, I have been conscious all my life. I have wondered about this since I was a child. I could read at a 12th grade level when I was 8 and since fiction was emotionally outside my ability to grasp, I read books with limited emotional and social content: nonfiction. That is what I have read ever since.
The journey to writing this book began in 2014 when my stepdaughter gave me a copy of Nick Bostrom’s “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.” I have always been interested in science and technology following threads about advances in the study of the brain, artificial intelligence, and how we, the human animal, came out on top. The thing that impressed me most about the book was his insistence on the dangers of a neurotic, conscious, Strong Artificial Intelligence. Why would a manmade AI be neurotic in the first place, let alone neurotic enough to continue, for instance, unabatedly manufacturing paper clips until the world was overwhelmed by the drain on materials and the consumption of living space?1 This made no sense to me, but I did not know why. I followed that book with Kurzweil’s “The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology”.
Since then, I have read all the major contributors to the subject of consciousness from panpsychism—consciousness is in everything (The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory by David J. Chalmers) to brain centric consciousness (The Case Against Reality: How evolution hid the truth from our eyes by Donald D. Hoffman) to consciousness being an illusion we all share (Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett).
The single difference between the legion of philosophers and scientists that have expounded about consciousness and me is the number of letters behind our names. They have no better clue about consciousness than I do, than any of us do, if we are paying attention. They are so flummoxed by personal, subjective experience they have dubbed it one of the hard problems of consciousness. They have no definition for it, nor any idea why we have it. One of the reasons the scientific community is so perplexed, simply put, is century after century of wondering about consciousness and personal experience, there is no provable scientific evidence that either exists.
I am, however, convinced that those philosophers of consciousness have accurately recorded what they observed. What I do not agree with is how they interpreted their observations.
Because I am a generalist, not a specialist, I have read and still read in many fields of study, spending a great portion of my time on this planet digging into what exactly consciousness is. I have researched the fields of evolution, biology, haptics, epigenetics, and physics because each field addresses consciousness peripherally.
My research has led me to the conclusion that consciousness is a feature of life, that every single living cell on this planet and in this human organism is conscious, that awareness and volition are aspects of consciousness. Those aspects have transformed earth from a barren, poisonous rock without an atmosphere to a biosphere that supports at least one living species capable of questioning its consciousness. Those aspects have driven evolution forward, producing the diversity we see around us and in us. Without consciousness there would be no life and we would not exist.
We are all conscious. We all personally experience consciousness and are mystified. Therein lies the caveat. What we experience is ours alone and cannot be shared no matter how hard we try. Language is not up to the task. When we die, all that experience will leave with us. No one will have really known us or experienced anything in exactly the same way we have.
In the chapters that follow I will set forth a theory of consciousness that allows us to see the exact definition of Personal Experience. Having that definition makes plain why we have it. The what and why solves the hard problem(s) of consciousness as well as most of the easy ones. Along the way we will discover the origin of the 5 senses and the beginnings of the ego and tweak Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.
- Bostrom, Nick, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies; (Oxford; Oxford University Press 2016) 150-153