Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
There are different levels of awakeness. Yes, I know that’s not a word, but it should be. Perhaps I should just say awareness but I’m thinking of something a little different. Awareness suggests choice, a choosing of how aware we are. Awakeness is a level of consciousness, a state rather than a choice.
There are days we are barely awake. We go through the motions of the day, oblivious and blissfully unaware of our existence beyond the trivial requirements placed on us by society: good family member, good employee… in a body than needs food and liquid substance.
There are times when we are a little more awake, and we see beauty and feel love. We recognize the value of the life we live.
And then there are moments of being fully awake. They are the rare moments when we understand that we are part of a living earth, we are beings conscious of our own existence and of the existence of the universe. We are all at once beings of purpose and yet insignificant in the cosmos: Everything and nothing.
Are we aware of how awake we are? How often do we spend at these different levels of awakeness? Should we be spending a bit more time a little more awake? What can we do to stay more awake more often?
Have you ever wondered about that inner voice you hear? Who is speaking? And who is the voice speaking to?
Is the voice lifting you up or pushing you down?
Is the voice helping you make decisions or making your decisions difficult?
Is the voice convincing you to take action or has it convinced you not to?
There are times the voice listens to your body, telling you of hunger, thirst, or need of sleep. There are other times when it listens to your mind, telling you to question, to learn, to problem solve. These are times when the inner voice makes sense, it is a collaborator, an ally. There is congruence.
And then there are times it negotiates with you, telling you reasons you should or should not do something… it is indecisive or in conflict with your instincts. At these moments I wonder who is talking to who? When the scales tips and the decision is made, whose decision was it? Where does the incongruence come from?
Is there a path we can travel where we live in full congruence with ourselves? Can we find a path where our inner voice always acts in our best interest? Where we do not argue with ourselves? Is this a path worth seeking, or are we indecisive by nature and require internal conflict?
What does your inner voice think when it hears this question: Can our internal voice be harmonious?
Is that a realistic goal or an unrealistic expectation?
“What’s between our ears is the last frontier.” ~ Abraham Truss
Isn’t it amazing how much we know about the complexities of life, the universe and everything, but we don’t know where consciousness comes from? We still debate whether or not we have free will.
There is so much we still don’t know about the last frontier.
This is part 2 of my thoughts on Free Will and Consciousness. Part 1 assumed free will and looked at The Bell Curve of Free Will.
Part 3 will look at why I believe we have free will, but to get there I need to look first at consciousness.
Background
I’ve been reading, watching, and listening to ideas about what consciousness is. At the heart of this is the question, the Hard Problem of Consciousness.
We don’t know what creates consciousness, but we know that we integrate information from the physical world and that we are conscious of that world. We also know that the information we integrate from the physical world isn’t perfect.
I’ve said before that, “What we do know is that our perception of the world is based on models of the world and not actually the world itself. We have very faulty user interfaces, insufficient sensors, that warp our perception of reality…
Our user interface with the world is not accurate, we know this, but we also know that the world isn’t just an illusion. We know the sun emits light and heat, we can see the light on surfaces in our field of vision, and we can feel the heat on our faces. But I can’t know that my experience of the colour blue is exactly like yours, or that my comfort with the heat of the sun is similar to yours either. But I wonder how much our upbringing, and the culture we live in influence how we interpret the world around us?”
So we don’t see/hear/feel reality as it is. We have a faulty interface with reality. That relates to our senses, but what if our inner understanding of consciousness is even more faulty than our outer senses are, as they relate to our perception of our reality. What if we can’t grasp what our unconscious mind does because there is a faulty interface with our conscious mind. I think this is why it is so hard to understand free will, because we don’t understand how consciousness works and there is a black box of understanding that separates our conscious and unconscious minds. But I’ll delve into free will another time, for now, I want to look at what consciousness is?
Before I dig into this a little deeper, I’m going to take a stance that relates to the “Integrated information theory” of consciousness… the idea that consciousness comes along with integrated information. This Nova video, ‘Can we Measure Consciousness?‘ is the clearest look at this idea that I could find.
Here are my thoughts:
Increased consciousness beyond survival is not fundamental it is incidental. It’s an accident that is born out of intelligence having idle processing time, (in a way, think of this as smart systems being bored).
To begin with I will assume that every living thing has consciousness. The moment life enters into the equation, then the first ‘desire’ is reproduction. Procreation is hard-wired into living. From one-cell organisms to plants to mammals, the moment there is an opportunity to reproduce, then there is simple consciousness that drives a species to continue life, to avoid harm, and to continue the species. This is the simplest form of consciousness. I used the word ‘desire’ to suggest a form of choosing, or of wanting, that is fundamentally different than non-living things. This is my twist on panpsychism,
With more evolved brains, that have a greater amount of neurons firing, consciousness is greater than in un-evolved brains or entities. I think of this kind of like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Consciousness can be found within the smallest of organisms. Consciousness increases through evolution, when species develop and move up Maslow’s hierarchy because they have additional time to ‘think’ beyond basic primitive and primary/primal needs. Organisms only consciously worry about physiological and safety needs until their predecessors brains have enough neurons and/or time to ‘think’ beyond survival and reproduction. If a species has the capacity and time to think beyond basic survival then they can think of things like community. Communities in turn create efficiencies that create more time to think beyond survival, which then permits a higher level of consciousness. Look at how far humanity has advanced in the past few hundred years, only after farming and urban living have produced significantly more time for us to be idle, to be creative, and to think about thinking. Our consciousness now allows (most of) us to spend time higher up on Maslow’s Hierarchy.
Put another way, life requires consciousness, and it starts with the desire to reproduce. From there, consciousness coincidentally builds with an organism’s complexity and boredom, or idle processing time, when brains do not have to worry about basic survival. Our consciousness is created by the number of connections in our brains, and the amount of freedom we have to think beyond our basic survival.
But we are not the only conscious animals. To me, an animal or a tree showing some compassion to another species suggests consciousness beyond what is normally attributed to other living things. Whether it is a bear saving a crow,
there appears to be a level of consciousness, thinking, understanding, or intelligence that all living things have. Why else would a bear, a cat, or a tree have compassion for another species if they were not conscious?
I started by saying, “Increased consciousness beyond survival is not fundamental it is incidental. It’s an accident that is born out of intelligence having idle processing time.” I don’t really have an argument to suggest that consciousness is incidental or accidental. Maybe I should state, “Higher consciousness is fundamental, it is a by-product of processing ability and excess time to process.” This would give life itself more reason to exist, but my hunch is that intelligence was not intentional, it is a by-product of abilities exceeding needs. However if I changed my mind, I wouldn’t have an argument for consciousness being fundamental any more than it being incidental and accidental.
Final thoughts:
What prevents us from getting to full actualization of self? The story about the tree above might be a hint. It would seem that trees are interconnected by a symbiotic relationship with microbial fungus to create a greater consciousness of the entire forest. Maybe the challenge we have is that of letting go of the self and connecting our consciousness to other humans or other species in a profound way? What is the next level of consciousness that we can achieve? Maybe I’m wrong and consciousness is truly fundamental. Maybe it is the reason for life, and we are on a journey to understand how all consciousness is connected.
My second bullet below is intentionally (un)bolded to suggest both of these ideas… either way the concepts each fit with my other conclusions.
Conclusions:
Every living thing has consciousness.
Higher consciousness is not fundamental, it is incidental or accidental, (a by-product of processing ability and boredom).
Consciousness increases in relation to two things:
More neurons or more processing ability.
More idle time.
When basic physiological and safety needs are met by an organism they develop higher order consciousness if they have the processing ability and the time to use their consciousness.
We know that bees can see ultraviolet light that humans can not see. We know that dogs and other animals can hear sounds that humans can not hear. Scientists understand Newton’s laws, until the laws fall apart when studying the smallest of particles and objects traveling at very fast speeds. When we look for light to act light a particle it acts like a particle and when we look for light to act like a wave it acts like a wave… we still don’t really understand all there is to know about light.
And yet somehow we think we have a grasp on reality. We don’t. We do not yet have a full scientific grasp of our universe, we don’t even understand what consciousness is. What we do know is that our perception of the world is based on models of the world and not actually the world itself. We have very faulty user interfaces, insufficient sensors, that warp our perception of reality.
Think about the diversity of human perception for a moment. We know that there are people who can not see colour. There are even people who see colours that are not present, like Daniel Tammet, ‘The Boy With The Incredible Brain‘.
Watching this video makes me think about how my user interface differs from someone with autism, someone who might be overloaded with stimulus (information) in the environment that does not overwhelm me, and who might at the same time be blind (or at least unaware) of facial expressions that I find easy to read or interpret. Even for those that can interpret facial expressions, this is not an exact science and so we are each noticing different things with some people being far more perceptive than others.
Take this another step further and think of the incompleteness of the memories that we have. We make lousy eyewitnesses, and we reconstruct memories slightly differently over time. This is even more exaggerated when we add heightened emotions to an event. Have you ever heard someone talking about an experience from an emotional standpoint arguing with someone talking about the same experience from a logical standpoint? It’s like they are living in two different realities. In fact, each and every one of us perceive the world in drastically different ways, and our emotional state influences our perception, and our ability to recall our experience.
Our user interface with the world is not accurate, we know this, but we also know that the world isn’t just an illusion. We know the sun emits light and heat, we can see the light on surfaces in our field of vision, and we can feel the heat on our faces. But I can’t know that my experience of the colour blue is exactly like yours, or that my comfort with the heat of the sun is similar to yours either. But I wonder how much our upbringing, and the culture we live in influence how we interpret the world around us?
I remember learning in an anthropology class that some tribes that live in the dense forest struggle with the idea of seeing an image of an animal in the distance as an animal that is far way, instead thinking of them as tiny animals. Their model of the world does not include a full-sized tiger that can be seen a hundred meters away. Their visual perception of the world is different than someone raised in a desert.
How else does our environment that we live in influence what we can and do perceive? How does our politics, our ethics, and our beliefs influence our perception?
How different is my world from your world? And what consensuses can we come to in order to make it a better world for everyone?
