The Evolution of the Quantum State

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Potters bake the molecules of earth together to reform as manmade rock. Any potter longs to deepen that connection with fire, and the energy of life.

Amateur making of ceramic ware has in the West almost universally been taken over by the electric kiln. It's a toaster, you switch it on. It controls the temperature. Exactly. The fire it gives is universal fire, ie. heat from it's 'elements'. But alas, the flame is gone. So is the smoke, and the crackle and roar. The electric kiln supplies heat,  but alas the love is gone.

But it need not be the case. For the electric kiln is an invitation to potters everywhere to deepen their understanding of fire, of energy, and where it comes from and how it's made. We must know that to get that kiln to heat up, a fire is burning somewhere, in boiler supplying steam to a giant turbine, which turns the generators powering our city, or a nuclear reactor, or even our own sun producing the rainfall that turns water pressure into electricity.

Fire must be sought out, in a civilization that is afraid of flame.

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At the other side of the world,
where light is a different color,
the sound of a bell may be larger,
than a giant submarine
Don't doubt that beings watched as each of us died.

You fall without complaining
past the skirts of something new,
and leak a bit of it as love,
radiation to feed my soul.

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Technology, mathematics, and science functions as reins of a slower moving coach, that of our social organizations, and the state.

We have seen how the digital revolution has inverted notions of privacy. Today the average person is happy to share personal photographs and data, with any person on the globe using Instagram.

We've noticed how the digital revolution has affected our system of elections, exposing them to electronic hacking from across the globe.

We've observed the digitization of money, and how the true value of trusted stores of wealth, the dollar, the pound and others, have endured runaway inflation, interest accrued digitally.

We know the wealthy retreat into fearful isolation, into the counting house of their personal computers, where they measure wealth in shares of companies, with a very abstract total in dollars. Yet the dollar, and the stock in corporations are all fictitious wealth, less real than trees or fresh air, or a drink of cold water when it is hot.

Despite these drawbacks, it is also clear there is no turning back, no readmission to a pre-digital world, despite our laments for a rosy hued era of manual typewriters, of quill pens and ink.

Each of these changes to our media, towards pen and paper after impressing information on clay tablets, has brought about a own corresponding stress and change to our systems of government, to our cherished philosophies, and art. In short change is just that, change, and it disrupts everything. The disruptions are difficult, but we long for progress.

The pre-digital age took us to the frontiers of space, it saw the birth of the most terrible weapons of mass destruction, and World Wars without precedent in which the death tolls were in the many tens of millions.

We've seen governments unable to comprehend protests of it's people. When fairly elected officials, such as Macron of France, is the object of ridicule and is promised to be overthrown by the very voters that put him in power months after he's taken office, despite a record faithful to the campaign platform that elected him.

I've spent my life interested in how new forms of thinking are ushered in by new technologies, and newfound knowledge of nature, and am going to propose in this essay that a series of radical, perhaps violent, perhaps not, revolutions are about to take place, because of one simple fact. The machinery of the state, of systems of rule in Western Democracies and former Socialist republics both, is broken, and beyond repair.

I hope with the observations made here to be able to offer an understanding of the forces facing modern man on the face of a very crowded, very polluted and seemingly overpopulated planet.

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For quite some time I've felt that my attraction to ceramics, actually an attraction to clay itself, was due to something fundamental and physical, as if all the physical laws governing matter have conspired to make it impossible to invent beauty.

Or soul.

The soul of mankind may be independent of our bodies, and similarly, the beauty we perceive in the natural world, and sometimes in objects of our own design, may not actually be something we ourselves invent at all.

It may exist, not necessarily pre-made, not necessarily in a Platonic, other invisible world sense, but in the very plausible sense that if nothing cannot exist, then all existence and all existences must exist also, and with it all manifestations of soul, light and beauty included.

We and what we make are there as a natural expansion to our exponents of having soul. That which accompanies our material bodies through life must by virtue of that exponential power, create things which are beautiful and independent of matter themselves. Soul begets soul.

This postulate I wish to test against several aspects which usually accompany such accolades as beauty, perfection, and life. To do this we will need to perform a number of thought experiments

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I'll have to sweep up the ashes
Can't you see?

Ribbons are on tour,
You see, mine his everyone's
There isn't a place where I could show you what's really happening?

Al these questions, so futile,

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Thoughts on 'Grassness' and Consciousness

 The Westerner defines life forms, in fact everything, with a materialist's boundaries and categories. A human being, a buffalo, a blade of grass. Books about nature display this preconception, the object of fascination, isolated on a white page. Horses, fish, or birds of the Andes, we regard them as defined iconoclastic entities, without reference to the world around them. We see stars separate from planets. Man separate from nature.

The Vedanta is ahead of us on this. Those ancient thinkers recognized no distinctions between the grazing bovid and the grass it ate. A cow was 'grassness', or the essence of grass. Grass included cows, and cows were grass. So humanity inhabits a film of life on this planet. We live as part of it. Bacteria and parasites live within us. The deer is the forest and we are the earth.

Could the subjective experience of intelligence, and sub-conscious forms of intelligence simply be ineffable cross products of material circumstances, for whose purposes our bodies have evolved? Look inside the brain, where there is seems to be little but nerves, flesh, and channels filled with fluid. Yet we intercept nervous impulses, and they do not explain themselves, or their contents. The act of searching for what is conscious is a lost quest, as difficult as locating an electron or computing the exact trajectory of a particular photon. The experimenter intervenes and destroys the experiment.

Other beings might see time much in the same way we look at a landscape. As earthlings we are possessed of three dimensions, aware conceptually of a fourth, time, which is not visible but is for our purposes, measurable. Surely there must exist life forms that directly perceive four, five or six dimensions with a kind of sight, and understand some final dimensionality, as a kind of fiction, much in the same way as we understand time.

We see space (1,2,3 dimensions), we think time (a 4th), but we feel conscious (the 5th)?

Or perhaps intelligence inhabits that fifth dimension, and the subjective self-awareness that intelligence has of itself, i.e. consciousness, could inhabit the 6th?

Asking 'where is consciousness?' is somewhat like looking for time within the three dimensional measurements of a cup of coffee. One may only perceive a cooling liquid if one admits time as a 4th dimension of study.

A 5th dimensional entity similarly cannot be measured by a 4 dimensional space. It can sit there, just as we in our 3 dimensions can park ourselves on a 2 dimensional carpet. Have we been looking for self-awareness in all the wrong places? Is consciousness, rather than a 'substance' which we can't see, is instead a dimension, from which other beings in turn see us?

Cause and effect? . . . Cause and effect are a temporal 'patch' over an eye that cannot see.

The notion of cause is a vestigial necessity for thinking about time, whilst being unable to see it. If consciousness is yet another dimension, then looking for it within 4 dimensions is as fruitless as looking for time within 3.

Suppose consciousness were everywhere and not contained within a 3 or 4 dimensional space-time continuum. It could be bound up within a 5th dimension. Once there, it might perceive us with the same clarity that we perceive a print on a museum wall.

The human mind/brain has no lock on consciousness. Water is conscious. Fire is conscious. Stones are conscious, and so is air. It all exhibits behaviors of consciousness. Infinite detail. Infinite complexity. Fire processes energy. Fire sorts out an infinite number of inputs and produces a result, computes a path, allocates resources etc. Water also. An ecosystem. An atmosphere.

We speak of 'light' from people who are uniquely intelligent A 'star'. But what of actual stars? The universe is a massive computer of possibilities, computing more conscious activity in just one bit of solar surface than all human life on earth.

Such a claim begs for clarification. What is consciousness? Isn't that the question we've been asking all along? Aren't we investigating where it occurs, how it occurs, what creates it, what are its thresholds, its behaviors, its realms?

I say this. . . The subjective "I" that is 'thinking'. . . . it's all real yes, but that's the only thing that is real. No other realities may be confirmed. The tags 'conscious', 'self-aware, or 'intelligent', may now be filed as endorsements by a lower set of vectors, that are aligning votes behind a power they cannot comprehend.

In other words language creates expression for quantities it does not fully understand to begin with. The word 'consciousness' is really only a sign, for an abstraction like 'God' or 'matter' or 'energy', useful only so far as we make them so.

The abstraction "God" has been useful to mankind, even though most in the current generation of scientists contend that the gods are dead, surprisingly the father of archetypal psychology would argue that they are more alive than ever. The most fundamental of man's technologies evolved when the prevalent paradigm of humanity was God fearing. Science was not even born. I'm making the point that paradigms of thought, whether dominated by gods or science, are complexes of behaviors, not self-evident truths.

Science, as the complete evolution of materialism, demands a return in practices and technologies that are useful for our survival. Viewed in this way the paradigm of science may be viewed as a set of conclusions from a thought process. Yet our science is hopelessly locked to the hip of materialistic assumptions. So we are unable to 'divine' higher concepts from our simplistic conceptions of matter and consciousness.

"Nothing is more vulnerable than scientific theory, which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts, not an everlasting truth in itself." C.G. Jung

Language, like Food, has Energy

I breathe air, you breathe air. . is the air we breathe the same? . . . The consciousness/identity issue is something like that . . . we have a 'lease' so to speak on consciousness, a lease granted when we took occupancy of our bodies, of our lives.

Wait, so that implies something that inhabits us, lives within us, is on sometimes, off at other times. It varies, with sleep, wakefulness, how much we're paying attention.

Or does it?  If consciousness is always 'on' what vacillates our subjective perception of it? We've hit some kind of circular argument, consciousness relying upon itself to know it is there. Like attributions to a divinity, could early concepts of "God' simply have been the projections of an elevated form of self-awareness in early man?

Yet consciousness exists. But where? The question asks if there's materiality to something that doesn't possess a material dimension.

Egyptians regarded the heart as the organ responsible for consciousness. The brain, a reservoir of mucus, was removed and discarded before the rest of the body was embalmed for a journey to the stars.

We're looking for where consciousness lives! If consciousness resides somewhere, does it have a locus? A focus?

In an early anatomical drawing by Leonardo of a dissected brain, his note in cryptic Italian reads "Is this where the soul resides?". There's a small arrow pointing to a spot just above the pineal gland.

'Soul' doesn't mean 'consciousness' in the same way to modern psychologists seeking solutions to the hard problem, the subjective "I". Soul doesn't carry an ego-driven 'conscious' label with it; the soul isn't about itself.

Carl Jung and followers tried to caution against Western science's stampede into the conscious sphere claiming that the soul, or subconscious was being overlooked, misunderstood, and frankly ignored at the peril of our very left-brained society. Modern cognitive psychologists for the most part haven't even listened to the Jungian dialogue, representing it as 'artsy', based on myths, and not accessible to the neurologist's probing electrodes. Jung, Hillman and others countered that the greatest hazards posed to the modern world were almost entirely of man's conscious creation, resulting perhaps from his biggest tragedy, failing to know himself.

But whose soul is it? Should we take clues from Jung who introduced us to the collective unconscious? Heightened states of being attained by yogis and Buddhists practice at emptying the mind, clearing it of conscious thought. Doesn't this imply freedom is found away from the subjective conscious experience? Isn't the most powerful 'consciousness' one that is unencumbered, and doesn't require the serial tool of subjective identity?

As always, science has arrived late to a definition of the problem, and even more poignantly, has missed the solution entirely. The West chases a phantom machine, an apparatus lost somewhere in the body of matter.

It may be the soul is everywhere, but that 'consciousness' is fugitive, never setting up shop for more than a few microseconds in one place, characteristic of most illusions.

If we are speaking of a greater consciousness not centered on the ego, where does it disappear to after we die? Is it even ours to begin with? Can it be be possessed, or owned by some other being? These hands that are typing are 'my' hands, attached to me. Without the rest of me they can't work. Man has found ways to transplant body organs, eyes, hearts, kidneys, but not consciousness, not the soul, nor the contents of memory.

If this greater consciousness is fugitive does it elude attempts to locate or entrap it? A. Is the deer in the forest alive without the forest?

The natural root of language indeed produces something useful. Consciousness is language, and one byproduct of that language may be science itself. Science verifies the subjective conscious experience that created it, producing technology, enabling our economy of rising populations, that has made our civilization possible. The Gods are with us, or rather, the myth of science seems with us. For now.

Yet we are in neglect of a greater consciousness, that which we share with all nature. Is our subconscious, our soul, simply a victim of repression by a new sort of self-flattering parasite that has taken over the wheel? We're enamored of the subjective experience, the language using, category creating, diary writing effacer of the earth. Yet what we are, that is a question we do not like to ponder. Is western consciousness, if we dare call it such, a belief based mythos, an illusion, not a truth?

Think of This

Having come to the conclusion that all matter is to a degree conscious, we might ask isn’t all matter ultimately unconscious of its consciousness? If so, then a materialist dichotomy is preserved. Matter and consciousness are separate. If matter is the unconscious mother of consciousness, then can consciousness survive without matter?

Such an argument may at once seem tautological. Matter a vehicle for consciousness, if so, any bit of matter can aid in that process, all of it does or none of it does . . . or . . .  is matter itself conscious? Our notions about matter, and consciousness are completely primitive, limited as it were by the materialist thinkers of centuries ago.

Instead I argue matter without consciousness is the impossibility. All of it may be alive, and the conscious part preeminent, for a thing to exist the knowing of it must be there too.

Is our conscious mind the fisherman, who brings the fish from the deep?

Western philosophical investigations of human thought haven’t established anything. Philosophy at best has imagined a tour of the architecture, neurologists with their probes have poked around, taken voltage readings, mapped neural activity, without encountering any inhabitants. Consciousness remains as elusive as the unicorn.

What cognitive psychologists call ‘consciousness’ may only be a recently evolved and tiny subset of a much greater conscious awareness. In fact the stream of consciousness in language driven humans today may in reality be a distraction from a higher form of consciousness that is repressed.

To accept consciousness on a universal level, one must abandon the ego, the “I”, the self-referencing component to this entire dialogue. Consciousness is not about ‘me’. The notion that a self-divining root of language flits about the mind and pretends that ‘it’ is conscious, while the rest is ‘unaware’, ‘unknowing’ and obscured in darkness does more to persuade the enlightened that the busy mind may really be the least conscious mind of all.

Why do we assume the whole of the world around us, from weather patterns to flocks of communicating birds, to entire galaxies of massive energetic stars, is separate and inert. Only in recent years have we admitted that animals may possess forms of higher thought and might be ‘conscious’. Yet our view is that aside from animal life, consciousness is nowhere else to be found. Our civilization is locked in an infantile fantasy that it exists at the center. Having discovered our own self-awareness, and developed a language to document it, we believe in our own domination of conscious thought.

Such a fantasy may indeed be part of a necessary stage of development in the transition to a higher level of consciousness. When the ego is abandoned and a kind of universal consciousness is finally accepted as a universal property, when Western science has come to realize what the Vedanta has known for millennia, then perhaps our we can recognize consciousness as a universal phenomena, and not something belonging to the ‘I’.

As for sub-conscious intelligence let’s call sub-ego so that we don’t confuse ourselves. For how often have we heard from someone working on a difficult problem, “let me sleep on it”? Indeed solutions to complex problems without language are not the work of the most self-aware state of the mind. ‘Eureka’ moments seem to materialize out of thin air, indeed it is our ‘consciousness’ which has only become aware that the problem has been solved?  Let’s refer to that sub-conscious intelligence sub-ego so that we don’t confuse ourselves.  If you prefer another metaphor, consciousness resembles the mysterious cleverness of nature, the weather, birds, or the mind of a pet, which we can attempt to fathom but cannot necessarily read.

Yet I posit that this subconsciousness, the sub-ego, the sub-self-aware faculty, is the true consciousness that pervades the universe. Our self-aware thinking processes function more as an executive diary, the dashboard of instruments, the servo-mechanism, for executive action, and and the fulfilling of set goals. It believes that it is in control of a much vaster system, but as mankind may shortly learn, that executive in a Tolstoy-ish reversal, works for the greater consciousness without an ego, without the ‘I’. Self-awareness may not be such an advance as we imagine.

This essay has brought the topic of consciousness to a bifurcation, into a self-aware faculty, “I am thinking’, and the part that thinks, arrives with solutions, but hides its methods from the upstart.

What the Western ego has named its conscious faculties, on the other hand, may only be an illusion, an illustration as it were, posted and pictured by a much larger sub-ego operating system below it. What a perfect conclusion to a infantile illustration, a nascent self-conscious mind, operating with a tool called science, believes it has discovered something unique and precious when it becomes self aware.

Consciousness the Messenger

A friend asks, "Is this page alive?"

We notice a fundamental correspondence, instinctively, a correlation between matter, life, and consciousness.

The notion that consciousness has no definite boundaries, and thus is present wherever energy or information is processed is attractive. My friend said page but he could also have meant paper page, web page, or someone reading something aloud, or even words as remembered dimly after a passage of time. What about a bookmark?

Useable conscious product is not necessarily as conscious as the conscious process that creates it. The page is a messenger, yes it has conscious dimension. If a writer were to pass, and all his works locked up in a password protected computer, what happens if his relatives wipe the hard drive?

Does consciousness die?

We're talking about something not unlike the fundamental physics of heat, and entropy. There has to be an expression akin to the second law of thermodynamics, that embraces consciousness as a form of reverse entropy. An alternative to static or chemical order, say for instance the order present in a fully charged battery. Is a battery conscious? The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls after 2000 years represents a transference of consciousness - they were only pieces of rotting parchment were they not?

A new Paradigm for understanding Consciousness

To posit that consciousness is pervasive, might mean developing a theory for a new force field from within the corpus of modern physics. We might need to reexamine Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the existence of black holes, as a way of defining the limitations or interactions of a conscious field. While I feel that forays of consciousness theory into established physics will occur, I am skeptical of this approach.

David Chalmers has suggested that what is needed is a 'crazy idea', one that conjectures new groundwork, and possibly a new set of variables. Consciousness he argues simply cannot be modeled with the scientific vocabulary at hand.

A better theory of consciousness will provide an illusion of progress, but it also will keep us on the same side of the problem that we've been stuck in all along. We'll have more more variables and another field to experiment with. But our viewpoint will remain descriptive, and materialist. We'll have a belief system rooted in what we can see, touch and feel, and we'll have equations for everything else.

Rene Descartes dismissed consciousness with his quip, "I think therefor I am" and then devoted no more effort to the problem. Mathematics would penetrate the secrets of nature. Consciousness was a self-evident truth that needed no investigation at all.

There another way to approach Chalmers' 'hard problem'. Believe for a moment that matter is an illusion, that the material world, including sensory perceptions of it, sights, sounds and colors, buildings, rocks, bodies, and heavy pianos are notions made real by consciousness.

This is the Vedanta, the Eastern viewpoint. Matter is brought to life by consciousness. Without consciousness nothing would exist at all. Or put more simply, everything exists because of consciousness. Consciousness creates.

To summarize the Vedantist Indian thinkers, the two 'hard problems' are 'what is the universe?' and 'what is consciousness?'. Science being a product of consciousness, can only fact check, and report back what it has 'observed'. Yet the conscious mind knows of more than science. So science cannot possibly come to terms with consciousness except through a radical manipulation of numbers which that are not real to begin with.

Infiltrate into the camp of the animating spirit, consciousness, and we suddenly become aware that we've set up opposing categories. Dualities, in science as in reality, have a way of crashing down.

So with what perambulation of art or philosophy, shall we approach the call for a new paradigm of consciousness?

Let us rephrase the question: Isn't that call for a new paradigm about consciousness, simply a call for new consciousness? Isn't science pointing out a numeric tool for fact checking certain beliefs about reality are useful for some forms of understanding? But as the child of consciousness, science is a tool; it could not understand what conceived of it in the first place.

For five hundred years, the West has regarded consciousness as a fragile commodity. No hard evidence has surfaced of it wherever we go digging. Consciousness, the subjective experience, has never been located as stuff, measurable 'reality' according to a materialists model for existence.

Suppose imagination and consciousness create matter, not the other way around. Suddenly it's all alive, it's all conscious, it's all aware. The universe is intelligent, our galaxy is intelligent. Photons act consistently and bear consciousness wherever they go. All atoms participate in the grand calculation of possibilities, displaying color, logically interacting with each other to form giant miasmas of consciousness throughout the universe. A galaxy is alive. It thinks. It is endlessly patient and watches a succession of intelligent life forms come and go.

Is there more 'consciousness' in our Sun than on earth? More in the earth than in any of it's life forms? Are we to be democratic and say consciousness is spread evenly about, present to some degree in all matter? Or shall we create rules and laws governing the interactions of consciousness with matter, not unlike the interactions of the basic forces as defined by modern physics.

The simplicity of this question has materialist roots, granting to each bit of matter consciousness according to its size. Yet even our instincts tell us that cannot be so. It's a complex commodity, and perhaps one that all of Western science simply can never come to describe adequately, but certainly not through a quantitative and descriptive scientific method.

Complex and unknowable except through self-knowledge. This is the answer that we receive from the Vedanta.

So consciousness much change, ebb flow, move about, and change lives within matter, its carrier. As the animator of matter it must be the field of all fields. It cannot simply exhibit inverse square relationships with all other conscious bodies, as gravity does with massive bodies. No, consciousness, whether pervasive or universal [Chalmers], is growing in our universe. It is not constant. Consciousness is breaking out all over.

Could consciousness be everywhere you look because it is making everything you see?

Prove to me that something unobserved exists. It can't be done. Yet science insists on a reality independent of the observer.

I don't insist on either answer. The duality itself is a fiction, a product of consciousness.

A very early belief of mine was that Earth as a rock, the Sun, the Galaxy, every body, and thus all rocks, as well as photons individually, are all absolutely conscious. Inexorably and with a very high degree of complexity in the case of the geology of the Earth, and immediately but very simply in the case of the photon, they all display a conscious element.

One of the arts I do is pottery, and when I fire a wood kiln, I'm always of the feeling that the firing of a kiln represents a life, not unlike the life of a candle flame, or a person. When the fire is very large and very hot and burns for a week it is a form of advanced consciousness. The fire seems to make conscious choices. I've written a lot about this in other places on this blog.

The quantum personality of a photon also displays rudimentary decision making and the appearance of consciousness, So do identical twins separated at birth. What is the 'stuff' that keeps them connected as they live their separate lives? As materialists we have measurements of both behaviors, though most psychologists and neurologists will probably continue to scoff at the introduction of a new conscious dimensionality to this study.

The most serious quantum physicists do admit that their mathematical descriptions are objective and limited. Richard Feynman admitted to the unsatisfactory solutions offered by quantum physics to optical phenomena, even complained about it, essentially calling it 'an ugly theory that works'.  Most others would probably express these gripes privately.

If we admit that all systems process energy to some degree, and by definition are not isolated from the rest of the universe, then they'll display some measurable level of a soon to be recognized variable, a 'field of consciousness', not unlike that of gravity or electromagnetism.

What is the universe, but matter and consciousness? Western science has been starved of answers, but it's researches take it closer to the door of psyche. We are creeping up on truths recognized by Shaivism and the Vedanta for thousands of years. The great success of science may be realized at the moment it gives up, in the same manner as Einstein gave up when in a conversation with Tagore with the conclusion, "Then I am more religious than you!"

If we were to formulate a scientific materialist description of consciousness, then we would be brought paradoxically no closer to answers for the current mysterium. Yes, we'll have turned to face the problem. We'll have acknowledged Chalmers' 'hard problem', but simply added more flesh to the bones of a mathematical and descriptive solution.

Describing consciousness such that it could be written on a T-shirt would just drop us at the same bus stop we were at previously, except now we'll have a field of abstractions devoted to describing consciousness, but lack the means, by way of science at least, of seizing and understanding that conscious field. The progress will mimic a Death of Science, and an ebbing of Western thought. At least when getting off the bus, we'd now be facing the palace with a locked door.

Those laws, which I'm sure will follow, will be written off the springboard of scientific materialism which we will have clung to since the early Islamic scientists of the 11th-13th Centuries. We'll have objectified the subject, but will still stand outside our new subject, as we did before David Chalmers gave his 1994 talk.

Is the approach to consciousness a boundary to be progressively fought back? Or to understand it mustn't one in some way infiltrate to the other side of the barrier that stands in our way? I absolutely see the latter approach. We need a top down revision in our philosophy of science that admits our current science as a viable laboratory for testing and verification, but not of understanding.

I believe that while we need to understand a new set of laws, we need to think of consciousness as a manifestation of all systems, ranging from the extremely simple to the universally large and massively complex.

These questions are inherently philosophical, but they ask for scientific verification. Aren't we looking for giant revisions to our scientific philosophy that can be corroborated by our older observational science?

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The Rise of the Book of Science

Part II of an essay about Science and Poetry

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Glimpses of truth or beauty however apparent, are not absolute, or lasting, and must be appreciated within a given context, time, and place.

Poetry and science both must observe rules about these contexts. There's a time and place for each type of explanation, even notions about behavior, conduct, for reflections on honesty, about meter and grammar, about frames of reference, about measurement. The languages of both are just that, languages, and so context is everything.

In short there are rules. Initiates to poesy and science both are educated in these behaviors as part of their training. However fashionable it would be to imagine a freedom without restrictions, such a reality does not exist and neither for the student of language or science. These codes of professional conduct, though for the most advanced of scientists, and poets, freedom is found in negotiating around 'rules', a perception that such constraints are non-existent, for a brief moment anyways.

Lets imagine these guides to conduct highlighted in an imaginary bibliothèque carried in the minds of scientists and poets alike. Conduct within the body of science, just as conduct within the body of the Church, is codified, set down as a list of standards, which all scientific adepts have memorized.

Poets also in ancient times, learned complex meters, developed an ability to compose extemporaneously, trained in the cannons of poetic tradition, ability to compose freely, but within previously established forms.

These established forms represent the 'academy' of poets, when all with even a hint of native genius know that great poetry is not created by adherence to these rules.

Indeed revolution revitalizes both the arts and science, and those that seek harmony and stability do just that, they harmonize and stabilize, but they do not create. The greatest of poets and scientists act by throwing the established order off balance.

And indeed when early science is confronted as an activity of Western Christianity, that examination shows it to be structured in the same manner as biblical myth. Most of the West now accepts science unquestioningly, even with a zeal that at times seems religious.

I'm not quarreling with what has been learned from science. Indeed the enormous endorsement of science is modern technology, which verifies the utility of scientific theory.

Note that technological advance has been steady throughout human history, and has not relied solely upon a scientific framework of thought. The best steels were produced by medieval Japanese, who had no scientific theories of metallurgy, or inorganic chemistry to inform their practice.

I'm simply observing modern minds accept the scientific method as a superior way of thinking without question.Scientists uniformly believe this manner of thought won out over all the others due to inherent superiority of method, and that it will not be superseded or followed by another system of thought,for a very long time. Science is not a passing phase, say as one might characterize Greek paganism, or it's predecessors alchemy, or astrology.

Yet the pagan myths of the Mediterranean ruled humanity without question for about ten thousand years, the monotheistic systems, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, have been around for just two thousand or so, whereas science as a system of thinking has been fully enthroned for just a few hundred.

So goes a myth, the structures of thought which we do not question.

How did this happen?

Middle Age Europe, deeply gripped by a pervasive Christian mythos found itself threatened by scientific and mathematical ideas emerging from the Islamic and Vedic East, and an illicit culture of domestic paganism in the form of astrology, and alchemical sorcery. Along with other pagan remnants, witchcraft, prognostication, and folk medicine these forces jostled and shook the regimented modern hierarchy of organized religion and were combined in a blender of civil strife that dominated Europe from the fall of Rome, until the rise of science.

So our textbooks would have us believe.

Not easily, not clearly, not all of a sudden with a capital S. No. It happened slowly, as theories to explain the growing 'evidence' of experiments by alchemists, doctors, naturalists and others compared notes on the natural world and slowly glued those observations together with a growing body of theory to produce a body of work called science.

The glue of theory, while it tries to explain the why, why, is of late begrudgingly admitted to be a model for reality, a conceptual model, that is no closer to the why than any of the earlier primitive modes of thought.

For example mercuric oxide when heated in a closed retort produces mercury and what later would be known as oxygen. A theory of atoms and molecules then postulated why this happens, and that successful theory proved itself by being able to predict additional experimental results.

The body of theory functions well as a model of reality. Science is very good at predicting. At mid-level phonemena while it appears to offer explanations, it does not, simply because if you dig deeply enough you note that the final frontiers of science are essentially a periphery of unanswered questions, for which there is no explanation at all, only models.

Theory, on it's own is just theory. It's a body of thought, yes some of it is written down, but it is nothing tangible or physical. There is so far as we know, no part of the galaxy where the 'settings' for atomic behavior or 'theories' are stored. We generate theory. Humans do. So long as our theories match observations of the natural world, all is well. If the observation of reality run counter to what a theory predicts, then the theory must be wrong.

So the scientific method burst into reality. And this method itself, was like a theory. Again, it is man-made fictitious stuff, seeking to explain what scientists do. You won't find that migrating whales discuss human theories, nor photons or black holes. They do what they do. And we do what we do, which part of the time anyway, is to theorize.

Let's review for a moment.

Christianity, under attack from foreign, pagan, and Eastern influences, begins to admit that some things were happening in the natural world that cannot be explained by the Bible.

If you are a designer of electric motors, you probably believe science to be the new and greatest system of thought, and you probably doubt that it has any flaws. But as one who needs a complete theory to accept only part of it, then electricity itself is without final explanation. Quantum electrodynamics, while it can predict behaviors in electric fields, offers nary a mote of a word about why.

An 'electrical field' is a theoretical concept. So is gravitation.

The 'Bible' didn't have all the answers, but neither does the new book of science.

So a new mythos rushed into life to take it's place. That new myth claims to have answers, but really what it has are approximations, mathematical models to describe and predict reality.

The myth is that science is a fount of answers, not a construct of models. The greatest scientists are the first to admit how shabby the models really are.

The reality is quite the opposite. Look at the number of times science itself has reversed position on the most fundamental phenomena.

In fact science is constantly working hardest in the areas where scientific evidence and scientific theory do not agree.

So if you're with me, and haven't hung up, let us then ask ourselves how a new dominant mythos might suddenly rear its head autonomously from within the bodies of much older parents?

Is it not logical to believe that the structure of a new thought system would be patterned after the DNA of its parents?

-:-

I'll continue this essay with an examination of how science is structured along lines of biblical myth. Perhaps I'll even compare it to Islamic myth. We'll see how the many systems of thought that compose science are actually a smooth continuum from many ancestors and many sources.

Of Truth and Beauty

There is a persistent modern myth that the beauty of poetry, the mysterium which poetry produces in the listener, is in some way a product of work, talent, or craft.

Explanations for natural phenomena seem existentially bound to material explanations. "What makes a plant grow?", The seed, the code of DNA, a set of reactions inside the cells? What makes a car steer? The wheel. What makes a car run? The motor.

Surrounded by ready answers, depictions of reality gloss over a thick coating of myth, an opaque polymer of material causes. The water soaks the paper. The rain wets the field. That drink quenched my thirst.

What makes the walker walk? His feet? Aristotle's final cause, 'the desire to get somewhere', is not at our lips.

Yet human endeavors in this second millennium are are ubiquitously propelled by understandings that only look to the walker's feet, the car's wheel, or the plant seed.

What makes these things happen? 

What fuels life? What runs the universe? Why does gravity work? What is gravity? What is an electromagnetic field? What causes light appear to bend objects placed partly in water?

Yes we have models that attempt explanation, but even while accurate predicting these behaviors no fundamental understandings are offered. As seekers we are left with our own constructs. Models are human made stuff. Moreover the models in use have changed significantly over time, and over the life of science and are likely to change again.

Our science, our methodology for seeking knowledge, whispers nothing, dry mouthed.

Poetry similar to science, has chewed up the lives of millions of devotees and seen imaginative minds toil under similar rules.

Science proceeds, so we believe, incrementally, towards truth, just as poets often deceive themselves that the object of their progress is beauty. Exceptions to all rules abound, and so with a few hundred years of science and many thousands of years of poetry at our backs, it appears that some progress has been made, though the mysteriums left to uncover seem infinite, and in the case of science, perhaps too costly to ever finally unmask.

Are Alien life forms here? If not how soon?

October 9, 2010

Have you ever looked down at a sparkling city from a nearby mountain, and wondered, 'What alien landed here?'

How briefly has Earth hosted human life. We're such a rapid force of change on this planet that anyone intelligent viewing Earth from a distance would think an alien life form had taken over.

The alien invasion has begun. Human aliens have landed on the moon!

Semantic similarities between humans and non-resident aliens aside, there is no chance that there is not an alien life form already out and about, exploring our galactic neighborhood, Moreover it is highly probable that they will contact this planet fairly soon, as the ever increasing sphere of our radio signature races away from Earth - the edge of it is now some 100 light years away. Our transmissions have already reached a huge possible number of planetary systems. The earth is no longer quiet . . . our electromagnetic communications could easily have given us away to an interested race of extraterrestrials.

Aliens will come here, and we will most likely go elsewhere. Either advanced life forms like ourselves, or spores from fungi that we've liberated through a convenient set of thermonuclear explosions, will float about the galaxy, as representatives of Earth, little time capsules of highly adaptable DNA, that can survive extreme environments.

It matters not whether a spore, or a human being is the vector that carries the message. The key evolution of life on this planet is DNA. The main text of what we have to offer is in DNA, and it matters not whether it moves abroad as a plant, a person, or a mushroom.

Human evolution may only serve to carry a Noah's ark of DNA to another world. Once transported, our mission might be finished.

The spores could do it alone with just a single strand of DNA in a hardy protein coat, humans might do it in complex engineered environment similar to the International Space Station, only much larger, and self-sustainable.

What spores lack in technology they make up for with sophistication and numbers. In fact if the earth were to explode, or we humans were to cause it to explode, or if a massive comet or another planetary body collided with the earth, the only surviving life might be fungal spores (cf. Terrence McKenna on this). And indeed they would survive by the quadrillions, floating about deep space, impervious to vacuum, high heat, and near absolute zero temperatures.

A snippet of DNA is all that is necessary to populate a receptive medium, or change the genes of an already existing species. Modern agricultural 'gene therapy' snips and adds genes almost at will. Commercially grown roses, for years interbred for their color, size and appearance, have lost their sense of smell. Why? Well they no longer needed to produce an odor to attract insects to move their pollen around - they had humans doing the job for them. But now science has found an easy way to restore the scent of a rose to domesticated roses.

Now that I've gotten you to admit that Earthlings, whether human sized or spore sized, will possibly pollinate, colonize, infect, other planets, how can we know when this has happened to us?

A spore, of sorts, from another galaxy, could easily have landed here on earth, changing the fate of its inhabitants. You and I might already be infected!

Alien means 'strange' and once we get over our view of ourselves as 'normal' we will then admit that we are strange, not as highly evolved as we think we are, and probably overdue for a lesson on the existence of  more advanced galactic brothers and sisters!

Mammals were probably viewed as alien by intelligent dinosaurs. Cro magnon was certainly seen as alien by Neanderthal (and vice-versa). Homo erectus in Europe and Asia, (the oldest skeletons are only tens of thousands of years old)  were called elves, fairies, demons by our ancestors - these 'people' must have been thought of as alien indeed!

The most probable source of alien life on this planet will probably be ourselves. A giant shift in human DNA, will lead to the evolution of a new species, more advanced than we are, and one that the rest of us may view as alien.

By the time that population is recognized, described, and feared, it will be too late to stop it. Homo sapiens will go the way of the dinosaurs, eventually. Yet we may leave 'children'. Evolution continues!

Oh the planet will most likely last long enough . . . and we will most definitely experience a collapse in population at some point or another - that will historically be perceived as dramatic, but which might even take dozens of lifetimes. Out of that crippling environment might come our successor(s). Genetics favors it. We have the numbers to create a new species. The only scenario I think that would make this impossible would be all out nuclear war, or an extra-terrestrial body colliding with and destroying our planet, not likely but possible.

And it is always possible that the species that takes us out never came from here at all. This is the one scary scenario, but one we have to consider particularly if we live on, peaceably increasing our technological abilities, and, our ability to refine raw materials, as well as our ability to live amongst ourselves.

I should refine these points . . that is if  a species does evolve from us, and survive, it is likely that many different variants will spring from us as well. We've populated the planet unlike any other large mammal. Looking back at evolutionary history, there are many other species that became numerous at different points in time. This is true of human ancestry as well. Many of those were not evolutionary dead-ends, but some like Homo erectus, were. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Humanevolutionchart.png )

A classic adaptive situation might be as follows: a nuclear winter descends on the planet, but one not so fierce as to eliminate all life. This creates a number of possible pathways to survival. Being able to live with less food is one, able to survive radioactive food is another (that might mean being able to procreate more rapidly and at a younger age), yet a third might involve being able to manipulate technology in a world of spare parts left by broken economies, and technological waste.

Similarly if no major crisis event hits us, we are certainly likely to continue to evolve physically, emotionally, and intellectually.

a) towards vegetarianism,
b) we'll become smaller physically, and use less energy.
c) we will continue to learn to exploit the sun's energy more efficiently and
d) we will probably learn to self-govern as a planet.

The alternative to 'c' is that we don't, and we already know the outcome of not learning to get along!

Assuming we do these things well, our lease on Planet Earth could be extended on for quite a long time! But in that event our piles of refined metals, may become too attractive for alien life forms to pass up.

Big towers when they fall, fall hardest. Same with stars. The big ones explode like flashbulbs in middles of their galaxies. . lighting everything around them. A star 27% larger than the sun can perish in a few weeks through a supernova collapse, and explosion. Little stars, such as our own, and smaller. . . live on, shriveling as they grow old. . . giving off less and less energy. White dwarfs are the old folk of galactic time, rocking away for billions of years, while the young hotshots grow big, wealthy, and then self destruct.

If a major crisis occurs, caused by man, or an outside force, cannibalism and vampires may indeed become a norm of survival for certain groups.

But think for a moment - vampirism has already started! Many of us give blood to others to restore their strength! Some of us fertilize 'in vitro' in to  order to bear young. Our hospitals are labs for extracting bodily fluids and moving them along to those that need them more. These mechanisms might prove key to our future survival! Fluids and body parts are very share-able these days!

Paranoia's aside, if the cataclysmic scenario does play out what might an individual life witness of such a catastrophe?

Let's put it in perspective by asking how many people today remember Hiroshima? Not many.

How many are alive today that lived through the event? Even less. Most were elsewhere and barely noticed the clouds move. Those that were having their tea in Hiroshima's center went to their maker in a blinding translation of light and energy. Others suffered terribly no doubt, as they have from every war, and every catastrophe. No matter what the crisis, or how large the conflagration it might cause, an individual's trauma is limited in scope, and is essentially similar to living through an airplane crash or getting hit while crossing the street, or losing a close relation through a freak accident.

We spend a lot of time writing stories and worrying about future frightening events, but fail to realize that we are very limited in our individual abilities to experience them once and when they occur.

We have mythologized negative change, decrease, catastrophe and collapse, by envisaging these things as a rapid events, when in reality most are not, Environments, populations, systems, economies, and governments often take as long to come apart as they did to come together originally.

The decline of the Roman empire was not immediate. Czarist Russia is still at work through Putin! England still has a Queen and future heir, Communism lives on (in China and North Korea. The Catholic Church is losing its grip but is still very potent.

Myths, those bedrocks of beliefs that we hold to our chest like the fabric of creation itself, die very slowly.We hold projections of the future before ourselves like prayers, that we don't have to shift or change our myths, come what may.

We pray that love remains a potent force. We hope that democracy lives. We hope that good triumphs over evil.

Crisis on large social scale, is much slower than on an individual one, inexorably slow, just as the death of a star takes longer than the death of a tree. This means we often fail to notice the crises that are already well in progress.

Do Numbers and Mathematics exist outside of Psyche?

This piece started as a response to one of those Facebook questions that asked: "Do Numbers and Mathematics exist outside of Psyche?

Where do the boundaries, and limits of intelligence and life exist? How might one distinguish that which lives from that which is supports life? A cow cannot live without grass, and fish cannot live outside water (some exceptions I realize exist).

Closed circles cannot be drawn around life, with labels that proclaim the balance 'dead' or inert. Consciousness, must be free roaming, or everywhere all at once, a force that life taps into.

Human beings are only one manifestations.

Would we recognize a more developed life form if one presented itself, and if not, does this mean we might be ignoring other aspects of the physical world that are living, alive, right now, that in our anthropocentric brains we currently assume are dead?

The question invites a re-evaluation of these categories. Please indulge me as I explore how this topic relates to Numbers and Psyche.
[I have written some other essays that deal with similar ideas, "Why the Fibrolatti Cut the Tail off a Squirrel", "The Perimeter of Consciousness", and "Conversation with Jeff Rosnik", and "Where is Consciousness?"]

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Numbers do not exist outside of Psyche, but, Psyche is everywhere. Even stones possess it.

What? Do you think me crazy?

Grant me a moment.

Without trying to exhaustively define what Psyche IS, if we might settle upon the notion that Psyche is a man-made concept used to describe phenomena exhibited by living creatures at the very least. Might we also agree that only a living entity can possesses Psyche (regardless of whether one believes only humans can can exhibit Psyche), then we may proceed to some other questions:

Regardless of whether we insist that psyche is solely a human quality, or restricted in some way to higher mammals, or present to a degree in all life forms, I think we might also agree amongst ourselves that numbers, counting, and mathematics are abstractions devised by language forming intelligence at some level since like Psyche they represent abstractions that are not connected. A set of two anything requires imagination, intelligence, hence a bowl of two oranges or two letters in a box cannot know of the intelligent being that is imagining them for illustrative purposes.

Numbers are signs, requiring a degree of intelligence to maintain them as as notions symbolic of, but separate from physical reality.

So I repeat: numbers cannot exist outside of Psyche, yet Psyche is everywhere. Even stones possess it.

First some grammar: I'll use Psyche, capitalized, to mean the word and construct for what psyche (un-capitalized) might be in an ontological sense.

In other words I'll capitalize the linguistic usage, and let the general usage stand.

Most mathematicians believe that an alien intelligence, even one that might think and act perhaps with greater dimensionality than human beings, must ultimately possess a mathematics that closely resembles our own.

This is because for our mathematics to work at all we must accept the precondition that 1+1=2. We must accept the notion of a 'set'. There are ideas fundamental to Western thought that rely upon a mathematics that builds through a historicity of hypothesis, and proof.

I'll state that I agree with the findings of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell (Principia Mathematica), within the following frame of reference: an Earth-bound intelligence consigned to a three-dimensional space, perceiving, but not able to sense accurately, a fourth dimension, time, but having no access (other than psychic access) to any other dimensionality.

My broad-based disagreement is not what I'm presenting here.  All I request is that you agree, mathematics is a symbolic language, of signs and statements that may be employed in the physical world, but that as a language, is separate, abstract, and distinct from it. The physical world cannot have direct meaningful access to language except through a language-devising intelligence such as ourselves.

This means that if one is to argue, that fire or stones, or water, possess the same qualities that we define as living, or intelligent, we must admit that in some fundamental way they employ a kind of mathematics that is parallel to the physical. Just as we do.

No matter what happens to a building or a bridge, or a rocket engine, mathematics will not be affected directly by any of these entities, except by humans who might re-evaluate some of the applied math that was used to construct them. The physics of everyday life rarely yeilds measureable results that correspond exactly to a mathematical construct.

Yet as the forms of nature observed are smaller, and simpler, such as molecules of water, or a perfect gas, or the behavior of fire or liquids, the mathematical models more closely approximate the reality at hand.

Except when the level of experimentation is minutely small. Beneath the computational level of a single molecule. It is well known that photons may react even before a 'cause' that will cause one to fire off of a nucleus.The correspondence between the real world and the abstract world of symbolic language, is an active process requiring a manipulative intelligence. That manipulation is language, and languages are usually specific to those that devise them.

Clearly at a subatomic level, reality and language are much the same, as if all reality in fact was constructed BY language, and OF language.

Why should mathematics or physics be different than spoken languages? Yes the spoken languages may seem far more complex, but in reality we understand them far more easily than the subtle language that governs the interactions of all matter.

Even discoveries in particle physics may not be related back into the advanced theoretical physics and mathematics that led to these discoveries without the intervention of mind. The world of matter and energy has it's reality, and intelligence spends some of that energy to keep alive a language that describes that reality. One of those languages is mathematics, and a system of numbers.

As mindful creators we are also the keepers of the language of mathematics, and of Psyche as well.

Psyche, is originally a Greek word, . . .

"pronounced /ˈsaɪkiː/; etymology: Greek ψυχή psykhe "soul, mind, breath, life", refers to the forces in an individual that influence thought, behavior and personality."  [Wikipedia]

Thank-you Wikipedia. Notice how the definition refers to 'forces in an individual'. Here immediately we notice the inability of our language to penetrate the soul; it resorts to metaphor even in a definition. Here is Wiki's own definition of force:

"Force is what causes mass to accelerate or become deformed."  [Wikipedia]

Statements in mathematics and psychology may only bear a resemblance to physical reality, a resemblance that is not pictorial, or descriptive, but rather predictive.

That is, the language of mathematics enables us to make manipulations that are useful. A prisoner counting footsteps outside his cell, may know if there's a guard in the hall. A farmer counting days since sowing his crop has a fair idea of his harvest. If math weren't useful, we wouldn't use it.

If I have six oranges on a table, I may also say that I have two oranges, or five oranges. But I cannot say truthfully that I have only two oranges on a table where six exist. The statement would be false. Yet whatever I say, since I could easily look at six oranges and say that I have nine elephants, and whatever conclusion I drew, true or false, requires a symbolic intelligence outside of the existence of the oranges themselves. The oranges exist, with or without the statement about them.

Do we agree so far? That statements about oranges or elephants on tables are fictions, creations of a language-possessing intelligence. That these statements can be true or false, but only we can determine whether they are true or false using the terms and conditions of that language itself. The oranges will never decide on their number for us.

So with Psyche. As inventors of the notion of Psyche and Number, we humans are comfortable with both as abstractions convenient for use by our symbolic minds for purposes of manipulation, thought and reflection.

But beneath the notion of Number, and also beneath the notion of Psyche there is also some thing 'real'. There IS number-ness.

Numbers are first and foremost signs, quantifiers assigning an aspect to a situation that a) must be perceivable or demonstrable, b) must be verifiable within the self-enclosed grammar of mathematics itself, and c) may be inherently independent of reality itself. The number sign enters the language of mathematics and is there used.

If '2' also meant '200' but without some kind of grammar to know when it meant two hundred instead of two, then the sign '2' would be useless.

The usefulness of language is maintained until it fails in purpose. When it fails, it evolves, by meeting the challenges offered by a new reality, or else some other more useful language is used in its place.

Astrology, until the time of Kepler's revolutionary work describing the motions of planets, was a predictive and interpretive language, considered in its day a subtle way to make predictions. Kepler himself, excelled as a graduate student with a brilliant prediction of a nobleman's death, using the 'science'/'art'/'practice', of astrology.

Yet that language, was not accurate enough for a species beginning to develop technologies, which required the precision of a new mathematics.

Since Kepler, astrology has been considered a back-room affair by most scientists, something amusing at best, but never to be relied upon.

I will not debate here, because my point is only that languages exist where languages are needed. Predictions about one's health, or success in war, were not as necessary then as predictions of tides, of where cannon shells would land, or of the physics of early engines.

The economic payoff, of a more precise, but less soulful language, was too great. History was led by the development of new languages, and old, very powerful languages, were trashed. This is history.

One mathematics gave way to another. Astronomy replaced astrology, Newtons's calculus replaced numerology. This is a gross simplification of a historical transformation that took place in man and have been taking place regularly with every advance in our abilities to wield consciousness, as truncheon, tool, or telescope (my three T's of conscious-nese)

Back to Psyche.

Indeed, Psyche takes it's place with-in a self-enclosed and self-reflecting language, and a grammar of character, of the human soul and spirit. It's a concept, not something we can lay our hands on. Yet it it describes something that is there. Using our concept, we know of it, through Pyche, within the language of Psyche, to describe it.

Psyche has been extraordinarily useful as a concept in the development of modern psychology.

Is Psyche the psyche? No. And here we come to the great mystery. The construct, the abstraction, only points in the direction of, the mystery. Psyche is a sign, the thing the sign refers to is . . .

     "If you read this here don't go this way,
      I know that she is there.
      I left this sign then went her way
      I'm no more, but I don't care."

The language is clearly defined, and makes careful use of definitions to show how various schools of thought disagree on certain points, and agree on others. The work through Freud, Jung, modern neuroscience, is carefully constructed. All theories are doggedly followed by an army of experimenters, seeking verification.

Our languages are maintained like systems of hedges, a classical garden in some parts, romantic in others. By far the greater part of the garden is wild, and not understood. We like to pretend that most of the garden is manicured, well described, managed, and sensible. But it isn't. We haven't got a clue. Man will begin to see once he realizes the thoughts he has are not in short supply.

Posted: Higher intelligence needed to appreciate greatest intelligence in Universe.

Furthermore, unlike precise experimental verification of mathematical concepts in physics and chemistry, data about the soul is problematic. The soul is not easily measured. Language about it must be complex, and metaphoric.

Show me a piece of 'psyche'. You can't.

This we also realize, but the wildness of the psyche must be explored. Theories will be offered for what is there, and why. And the language about it will perforce, continue to evolve.

So again with Mathematics. It has a boundary, of what is 'known' and accepted, and also recognizes huge regions for further exploration. Paradigm shifts occur, that may upset some of the previously agreed upon statements, but most doubt that it would ever be possible to unseat a statement such as 1+1=2. (More on that in a different essay.)

No matter what statistics we possess, statistics themselves are not the products of the reality they supposedly represent. Statistics, numbers, and mathematics are products of MIND.

So Psyche, and psychology, mythology, all of it. . . is a product of mind. They're languages. We use them all as a sets of symbolic tools to manipulate and try to understand the complex creatures that we are, and the complex universe that's around us, with varying degrees of success.

The scientific method also looks for results, that will confirm or unseat a hypothesis, and 'move on' as if life were a game, where previously discovered truths can't change.

That's child's logic!

Science also does this within categories laid out ahead of time, which are seldom questioned. A mouse is considered alive or dead, but it can't be both. A rock is dead, whereas you and I are alive. These categories are ubiquitous throughout all our systems of language. They are so pervasive as to be part of the myth that drives us, makes us who we are, and yet that we cannot see.

All that we've invented to conform to these initial starting conditions may break down at a later date. I'll present thought experiments later which will break them, but for now, what of mind.

What is mind? Again, it's a abstraction, referring to something we don't fully understand.

Might we agree that mind is only present where intelligence exists? That only intelligent entities possess mind?

We might be racing too fast in making this assumption. If we agree that intelligence has 'mind', might that intelligence be thought of as mindful, and conversely a complete lack of intelligence be thought of as having no mind, or being mindless?

Again we're just trimming the hedges of language, but this is necessary if I'm to open a gate to the wild areas beyond the garden.

If we agree here, then we come to the crux of the matter - what is intelligence?

For this I turn to any test that one can muster to determine if an entity is intelligent. Does water in its cascade from the tops of mountains 'forget' it's true nature and err in its calculation of how to pursue gravity? Never. Does it ever 'forget' its essence in the way that it flows, evaporates, boils, or seethes? Never. Doesn't it most intelligently, and massively, calculate the most efficient way to remove itself from a high spot to one that is lower, to boil, to freeze, or crystallize?

Water is always true to its inner nature, and so may be thought of as perfectly mindful. There is total mind in water. And so also in stones.

So when I say that stones possess psyche, I mean it absolutely. Stones are completely logical in their behavior. They yield to the grinding down of time. They obey the laws of physics, they react with light, chemical erosion, and other stones. They share photons with other atoms, with total mindfulness. It would take a quadrillion of our primitive computers to model the slow decay that occurs to a stone.

When worn down completely stones bond back together as sedimentary rock and become the foundations of the earth all over again. Mountains and sand are part of the same being. They exhibit a consistent inner nature - each atom within a stone interacts with it's neighbor according to a set of immutable laws of relationships between matter and energy.

Humans have quite naturally made the error of thinking mind and intelligence was theirs alone, as do children, since this is the prerequisite for any developing language. Begin speaking it. If no one else talks to you, assume you are alone.

The perfect behavior of water, stones, air, and fire are illustrative of a small point. Stones behave as stones should. Stones on earth are part of the earth, even though some are separated from the earth by erosion. They are products of energy, time, and evolution.

Here my detractors would argue, that humans do not always behave as humans should, and that it is next to impossible to accurately predict human behavior, and that this unpredictability is part of what makes us human.

I would comment back that while humans are difficult for humans to predict, chickens are easy. But this crude way of measuring intelligent 'contents' means very little. Try as we have, Homo sapiens has been forever been outsmarted by cold viruses since we evolved.

It's quite natural that find it easier to predict the actions of our pets than our parents. But 'prediction' is only a linguistic result. A series of observations taken within a linguistic context, allowing for measurement of a process.

Enter a game of tag with a crow, let's make that a hawk. You have a gun and can shoot the hawk whenever you like. (The hawk is already gun-shy). All the hawk has to do to win is touch the top of your head.

Who wins? The hawk, every time. Take your idea of intelligence and tear it up. It's meaningless. The human 'fire', our 'flame', is a language power that we've discovered. We've mistaken it for smarts. Language, intelligence and psyche, are all different, are not welded at the hip. Intelligence, even predictive intelligence, may evolve without a linguistic facility. Abstract thinking may exist without systems for setting it in language, hence manipulating independently of real action.

In fact there is every indication that language has the opposite effect. The burden of language is very great, and can have a paralyzing effect on intelligent action. Hesitation is a by product of a linguistic mind.

The so called laws governing interactions of matter and energy are a symbolic shorthand designed to approximate what we we are able to observe and know of nature. These 'laws' are forever being changed to fit the increasingly complex set of facts we uncover.

Homo sapiens, the language animal.

We can therefor agree at very least that there is no set of physical laws on this planet that have created humans that have not also created stones. An atom of iron, if it oxidizes, behaves perfectly in it's relationship with oxygen.

It breathes photons, and air. As do we.

If humanity was created, solely and uniquely out of a set of elements, principles and physics that are not earthly, or not bound by the same laws of chemistry and decay that the rest of our planet is bound by, then I could assert that the thoughts I am having are uniquely mine. But I cannot.

So I must conclude that I am no different than a temporary flame flicking from the surface of this cooling planet. No different than a rolling stone. What comes from me comes from it.

And my Psyche is but a symbol for characterizing, well, my character. My inner nature. Sometimes easier to predict than a rolling stone, sometimes not.

Psyche is an awareness, a phenomena that has no boundary. Our Psyche is as much made by iron (Mars) as it is by gold (Sun) and silver (Moon). We are Fire Air Earth and Water according to the Ancients, and by today's science we are a huge complex table of elements, and organic molecules each with intricate behaviors. We are DNA and Artemis, protein and Zeus. We are Id, and Ego, the Anima and Animus. We are as many languages that we can muster.

We are what we are... but what we think with and about ourselves are abstractions. Mind and Psyche are separate.

And remember that word help. Because in the end that psyche deep inside, is the thing that made the whole show happen, the thing that needs to be there to see everything else.

So who's to say water and stones don't have it? They have in excess.

We are indistinguishable from that of which we are made. So let me introduce you to the psyche of a stone - called planet Earth. We all carry within us Earth psyche.

Else where do we get our Psyche FROM?

The Perimeter of Consciousness

Euclid teaches us that a point along either a straight or curved line on a graph possesses location, but has no dimension. A point by definition, is dimensionless. Unless it is a 'hypothetical' point on a plane, in space, multidimensional space, or space time, a point must have an exact location.

A point may therefor exist in topologies of more than three dimensions. A speck of dust at the bottom of a teacup may exist at a single instant, but the moment its life extends longer than an instant, its space-time is not a point. It is a creature of four dimensions, a point of three, living along a line in a fourth.

I leap from this, as crazed as a man attempting to trace the origins of gossip - consciousness must have dimension!

Just as the shadow of a knitting needle upon a tabletop defines its flat space, or an apple floats in a barrel of water, so consciousness rests against the broad back of space-time, aware that its own dimension bulges, a tumescence growing from a limitless universe of dimension entirely unseen by us, unmeasured, unclaimed, and unconquered. We nibble at the fringes of a vast medium, from which we draw sustenance.

So, if like bergs floating in an Arctic sea we are part below the surface, part above, what medium does our consciousness float within?

As a worker (of a previous age) who pauses and leans his back against a giant oak at midday, looking out upon fields upon which he has labored, consciousness focuses its perceptions upon the realm of the senses, through which it receives knowledge and information about the world. The front of our consciousness so to speak, is the world that we perceive.

And what is the broad trunk of the oak upon which we rest our backs? Is it akin to the part of the iceberg that plunges deep into the water unseen by anyone? Is it the same as the spine of the needle stuck into something that protrudes above its own narrow shadow?

The rear unseen edge of consciousness must be super-consciousness, a part of something greater to which we all belong. All conscious being float in the same universe, and while our senses provide different sets of facts about different parts of that universe, the part to which our conscious clod clings, is a whole-earth of awareness, a multi-dimensional super-volume of space-time-that may not be characterized by our senses at all, and consults instead with us through our dreams.

We act upon the world. Our dreams act upon us.

Why our dreams?

Because just as we receive news of the immediate universe through the senses (the apple senses the water that it floats within), so the back of our awareness must interact with the super conscious body of which it is an outgrowth. We are but mycellia, our existence really is more of our dreams than of our senses. More of the earth than of the air where the fruited body pokes its head. And the language of our eternal darkness is lit brighter than midday by the power of dreams, and myth.

For purposes of this model there is a 'conscious' dimension, just as there is a height to the knitting needle above the table, or, just as there is a fractal dimension for all topological forms.

Pursuing this argument for the sake of play only, if the conscious dimension of the universe that we perceive with our senses is 4, then the conscious dimension of our own consciousness is at least 5, and the conscious dimension of that which our consciousness backs against, i.e. super-consciousness is greater than 6.

Therefor our conscious 'body' has a perimeter, and that 'edge' may be described in part by all numbers greater than 5 but less than 6.

Edge effect, where birds and deer come out of the forest to feed. Why is it that sunlit places in nature are always the most dangerous for small creatures . . . . and forest is safety?

The fierceness of a prairie storm. Cormack McCarthy's pilgrims, whirled like dervishes into tornadoes which dropped like angry fingers of God, and cast them across the mountains, dashed to bits along with their words.

There is always some vortex or leak, connecting separate topologies. Each universe has the means of supplying material to another.

While it may seem frivolous to pursue such a rigid topology to something we cannot apply measurement to, bear with me while I list the advantages of such an exercise.

a) Once we admit to a perimeter to a conscious set, we can allow that consciousness has no limit in dimensional size, so long as the perimeter 'recognizes' itself. That defines consciousness AS a recognition of a border, between itself and something 'else' of another dimension. Consciousness if you like is the edge of where four dimensions meet five. It's where forest and prairie meet.

b) Self-recognition is a feature of consciousness. That we know. Reducing it to mathematics makes it easy to discuss just as the numbers 1 and 2 will be forever different. Is death therefor simply a relinquishing of one's grip upon all dimensions of four or less, and returning the contents of fivefold dimensionality to the subconsciousness of six or more?

c) Though we may not measure consciousness as easily as we may measure a piece of plywood, measurements of space and time may only be performed by beings of a higher dimensionality.

So alas we come to the perimeter of this exercise. The teacup we live within is paper thin.

It broadens to the sky. It contains hot liquid. The forces of nature clench its contents tightly within its boundaries, but it may be upended at any time. . . . and though the contents will be lost, the teacup remains . . . a shell . . . a memory.

And when the teacup breaks, its shards will scatter. But some being will perceive them as whole.

And when the shards return their atoms into the realm of lost teacups?

The fish looses itself within the body of another. The tea you spilled yesterday joins the tea of all time. And I breath Thomas Jefferson's air as do you.

Where IS Consciousness? What MAKES us Conscious?

Turn over any stone, molecule, cell, or anthill, open the cover of a book, or the backplate of a computer, and you will not find a bit of consciousness anywhere. You will be rewarded for your efforts as much, perhaps more, if you remove a man hole cover from a city street.

Go looking inside the brain of a human being and you will only see stuff. Probe around with an electrode and you may get a response, but you'll not notice to what particularly, or why the response occurs.

Is this a bias? Are these futile searches simply proof that we don't understand consciousness at all?

You will notice a generalized electrochemical activity in areas of the brain in response to certain stimuli. We have mapped 'locations' where the brain seems to do its processing. The Frontal Lobe is associated with reasoning, planning, parts of speech, movement, emotions, and problem solving, the Parietal Lobe associated with movement, orientation, recognition, perception of stimuli, and so forth.

The purpose of this essay is not to review where modern psychologists have mapped responses to familiar faces, colors, sights, thoughts, or memories 'occurring' in the brain. Rather I'm observing that our mappings of consciousness, are for the most part self-serving. Having observed activity in the human brain while we think, and also experienced subjective consciousness simultaneously, we won't admit for instance, that worms might be also be conscious, albeit on a different level. Since we've assumed consciousness is a product of the mind/brain, it is located in the brain and therefor it cannot exist elsewhere.

Consciousness as an activity, i.e. thinking about something other than what one is seeing, is proof of subjective consciousness. Consciousness for a Western thinker, is a materialist concept. It's the one quantity that has no matter, needs no further investigation, since it is proof of itself. [Descartes, "I think therefor I am".] Since Decartes and Newton, materialists confined their energies to investigations of nature as matter exhibiting behaviors, that can be described via mathematics.

But have we given the consciousness of animals a fair shot? Certainly not, and while advances in psychology have postulated levels of consciousness in other creatures our scholarly culture is fairly dismissive of consciousness outside the human realm. Yet is is known ravens reason extremely well, they devise games to amuse themselves. Cobras remember faces. Our materialist Homo sapiens centered philosophy is slowly having to admit to faults in our paradigm.

If definitions of consciousness are thus ever expanding, and so long as they expand continuously and continue to embarrass the current generation of science, one can be assured that whatever our definition of consciousness, it is inadequate. The fundamental assumptions of science change continuously, this means by definition, the picture provided by science at any moment is incomplete.

The act of sight involves many levels of information filtration, suppression, and conformation to images rooted in experience. We do not see images the same way as a camera image supplied by the eye at all. That's just the sensory organ that does bear some similarities to a camera. But for human sight, the powerful organ is the brain, run by a highly subjective and complicated process, as unique and creative as remembering or replaying a powerful experience.

We do imagine that our mental perambulations occur in our head, within our brains. This indeed is what our science has taught us. And I agree. But I raise this obvious point simply to be able to counter that the Ancient Egyptians did not believe this at all. These were advanced human beings capable of elegant technologies, to whom the essence of a man was not located in the head or brains at all, but rather the liver stomach, lungs, and intestines. The Sons of Horus as they were called, were protected by four Gods assigned to their care after death, Imsety, Duamutef, Hapi, and Qebehsenuef. A dead pharaoh's four essential organs would have been put in jars resembling each of these gods for reassembly and rebirth.

The pharaoh's brain though, thought to be the origin of mucus, was discarded.

I raise this point to stress our notion that consciousness resides in the brain, is first and foremost a learned concept, proceeding from a science that has taught us that the brain is the body's computer. Had we been taught that our imaginings reside or originated in the heart, (still assumed by many to be the origins of love) we'd probably believe it.

So while we may sincerely believe that consciousness is a product of the brain, we also know that some brains may be technically alive, but cease to produce the signals of consciousness that modern science looks for with electroencephalograms, CAT scans and other forms of non-invasive monitoring of brain activity. I point to instances of the so called 'brain dead' victims of accidents, or the 'near dead' from disease, or even monks who are so deep in mediation they can't be aroused by outside stimuli.

Consciousness has no substance, quantity. We not isolated bits of it in a jar, and haven't produced means of storing it. It we define it as energy it seems refuses to play to the rules of electromagnetism and defies description by advanced mathematics.

Wait? Is this disconnect with matter really true? When I replay a video on YouTube am I not engaging in correspondence with an inert form of stored memory? No consciousness there right?

So what are the boundaries of consciousness? If we cut the mind away from all exterior stimuli, eventually it will cease to function. Does this mean that consciousness is to a degree reliant upon a semi-conscious exterior world?

It might be we have to enlarge the notion of consciousness to any system that processes information and energy. Yet this leaves a ton of unanswered questions.

No science has yet revealed where consciousness goes after death, or even after brain death, when the other organs may continue to function. It's as mysterious to our 21st Century science as it would have been to 17th Century materialists. But pagan Native Americans did not have doubts about this issue. Neither did the Ancient Greeks. Mythos and religion provided a structure for knowing. It seems where we are in the unfortunate position of knowing we don't know.

Consciousness might be described as distinctly subjective experience. So if a tree falls in a forest, does not the rest of the forest take note of this trees demise? Don't the birds hear it? Doesn't the ground give birth to new trees to take its place. Don't funghi rush in to decompose the dead limbs?

Is this not a display of consciousness by a system, by an ecology?

A dichotomy of matter and spirit has long divided the philosophies of East and West. Whereas Western scientific materialism has studied the universe from the vantage point of matter, its behaviors, mass, and interactions with fields that are hidden from human view such as electromagnetism, and gravity, doesn't mean that we discount the existence of gravity.

Could it be that our refuge, home base of 'safe thought' has always been decidedly and profoundly materialist? We see an inanimate universe. But yes we believe in matter. We sense, or at least believe that our senses tell us of of matter's existential being. We do not accord the same belief to consciousness. We refuse to grant it the same reality as a lump of rock.

Most modern cognitive psychologists shirk from the problem of consciousness. Those that face it head on, do so with an elaborate chimera . . claiming that it's entirely 'illusion'. But the 'illusion' they speak of smells more of 'delusion' because essentially they seek to deprive consciousness of essence, of fundamental reality, not material reality, but a permanence, a pervasiveness that may be as common in the universe as matter itself.

Fields of gravity, strong, weak forces, and electromagnetism are not as accessible to our senses as say the weight or imagined permanence of a stone. Our belief system extends to edges of forces and fields which are invisible, and we use physics, mathematics, to create the bridge of understanding of what we can't see. Laws of gravity, magnetism, and optics connect a world that can be sensed with the world that cannot.

Indian philosophy on the other hand views matter and consciousness as equal and opposite forces, yin and yang as it were, one not being able to exist without the other. Without consciousness no matter. Without matter no consciousness. Matter is 'enlivened' by spirit. Without consciousness matter has no meaning.

This leave Western physics in a quandary, left hoping to discover proof of consciousness such as might be written in equations. David Chalmers calls for a new set of ideas that can simplify the dimension of consciousness, and describe perhaps with a new set of variables, as matter and energy are described simply by modern physics. Most certainly our understanding of the cosmos has come against a 'Hard Problem' as Chalmers puts it. We can explain most things, but not the consciousness we possess as living beings.

And indeed it may be we cannot explain consciousness because possibly we incorrectly assume, or have assumed historically, that we Homo sapiens are the only ones that possess it. Only recently have we admitted with modern psychology that other mammals dream, think and are perhaps conscious.

Should we not think of consciousness as a dimension that is spread throughout the universe, varies in intensity, just as light and gravity vary in intensity. Shouldn't we extend the aspects of consciousness to beings greater than man as well as all beings smaller.

And, should we not consider what the fundamental units of consciousness are? A photon does exhibit semi-conscious behavior when subjected to twin photon experiments in a quantum  mechanical analysis. If the photon, or all leptons which are universal exhibit perplexing behavior that seems to mirror human action, then can we not extend a field of consciousness right down to the sub-atomic level?

Consciousness seems to break the back of modern physics, which is hopelessly materialist in origin. Our belief system took legs with the materialism of Descartes and Voltaire thru Isaac Newton who endowed modern science with a notion that God was the architect of all things, but that to understand God one needed to study nature.

God as the unseen element, the misunderstood dimension, persists in Western science up through Einstein, who said when face with the prospect of quantum mechanics, "God does not play dice."

Belief systems persist.

Forget all you know or think you know about consciousness - it's a topic that may not fully be understood by earth organisms. We believe we know consciousness exists, but as I shall show you, the converse of that statement is not knowable; the 'knowledge' of a 'state' of self-awareness may only be an illusion.

But the illusion, for the living, is what is most real. Here I don't speak of illusion as a psychosomatic phenomena, or a electro-biological bit of chimera, a phantom-scope within the brain. Rather I think of illusion as meaning something much more profound. The extreme product of thought, of mental activity, of consciousness itself.

Consciousness manifests itself through illusion. It produces illusion. It produces dreams. It produces movies, equations, novels, short stories.

Philosophers may tell you that consciousness is the product of a process that has no dimension, . . . that consciousness may reflect on what is not conscious, but what is not conscious may not reflect upon what is.

I argue that stones and pools of distilled water are as conscious as we are, but not in the way we are and believe that what is missing from this discussion is an admission that human thought processes are extremely limited, that most of our picture of the world that we carry about us is there to save us from the emergency of not knowing.

Certainty is comforting. All beings must possess a quantity of it.

Most human knowledge at its periphery, is in fact a bunch of blank pages where just about anyone's guess is as good as anyone else's.

Do physicists fully understand matter and energy? They do not. They have equations that model and describe matter and energy, but this is not understanding.

The Ancient Greeks possessed a number of cosmologies radically different from our own today, but those ancient philosophers were no less certain of what they felt they knew.

Are we getting closer to a complete understanding of the mysteries of the universe? Of creation, of dark matter? Yes on some matters, but within a frame of reference that is decidedly human. This leaves a universe full of mystery, with much left to be discovered.

I may stub my toe and see evidence of physical damage. Knock me on the head - if I black out one may argue that consciousness is a 'product' of the brain. Maybe so. Does this mean consciousness is 'in' the brain. Or that consciousness was 'made' by the brain? This is difficult. Go looking in the brain and you will find activity, yes, the cells there are doing something, burning energy, communicating with electro-chemical signals . . . but I want more than that. Find me the part that says: “I am, and I know that I am!”

This you shall not find.

Proving the lack of existence of Consciousness may be near impossible. 'Prove to me that a pebble is NOT self-aware!' . . . This IS a problem.

Go looking inside a pebble, and you will find atoms, in slow rates of decay. They behave perfectly. Our physics admits that within their bodies, laws of energy are conserved. The atoms decay slowly, emitting photons. Look inside a heap of garden soil being struck by the midday sun, and you will find activity of a much more lively nature.

Photons come and go, molecules break down, recombine, give off electrons, fuse with other atoms, et cetera. Bacteria live, die multiply. It's a massive supercomputer at work. . . take ten pounds of garden soil and you have a computer the size of the human brain.

That soil is not designed to do the same things that a human brain can do. But it can rear a corn plant better than the human brain could.

Probe a portion of the human brain with an electrode, and you may elicit a response from the owner, a memory perhaps. The patient may experience a smell, a lost love, or a deja vu.

Now go there with a knife, and remove that diseased section of the brain. This has been done with patients suffering from malignant tumors.

And upon doing that you will find the memory is still there. Only some other function, interest or aptitude may be lost.

Now take the same patients and let them smell a rose and some will experience much the same result.

In other words how, in the absence of proof of where consciousness resides, can we not be sure that some of that consciousness is in the stimulus, as much as what has been stimulated?

Does this mean consciousness is partly in the rose?

Consciousness is clearly not what we think it is. . nor where we think it is.

We believe it resides in the brain. . but can we be sure? And what makes consciousness happen?

Surely self-awareness is more than a badge earned when one's computational power achieves critical size. Whatever the mass, of a Chihuahua . . (small brain, very intelligent by human measurement) or a Great Dane (larger brain, not so intelligent), a meerkat, or a giant ball of herring in the sea, consciousness and intelligence are not a quantities that one can locate, covet, or keep.

Some worms may be divided in two pieces and completely regenerate, and insofar as a worm may be admitted to having some degreee of consciousness, one may argue that by dividing a worm in two pieces one has produced two 'pieces' of consciousness, where one existed previously. As soon as one relates the consciousness to the mass one is in trouble. Does such an act obey a law of Conservation of Consciousness . . . two bits where one existed previously, does each bit have half as much consciousness? Surely I am not thinking that a worm is conscious in the same way that a human is. . . but it has nerves, that function in much the same way.

Remove a worm-sized bit of brain from a human being and there will be little change. Surprisingly, data from accident victims who have lost large portions of their brain suggest a bizarre kind of resilience to consciousness itself. . . while psychological trauma may do far greater damage.

A holographic effect, where the contents of our 'minds' seems to be spread and conserved throughout the whole seems to be at work.

And what of the modern mind, which makes use of computers, digital assistants, iPhones, and vast arrays of servers to extend the reach of his consciousness. Without these 'lifeless' entities, we would indeed perish in a kind of conscious death. We need these things to think what we do. Our consciousness has extended into libraries, museums, Google, Facebook all part of our modern consciousness.

All of this seems to suggest that consciousness is in some way a by-product of the physical and electro-chemical activities of the human body, a fragile, and ethereal quantity that has little direct connection to any specific locus in the body, but seems, on the whole, to be associated with the brain.

While consciousness may seem to obey laws similar to that of holography - two identical holograms with half the resolution result when an original is cut in two with a pair of scissors. Consciousness is hardly so simple. Studies of psychiatric patients whose Corpus callosum (the nervous tissue separating the two hemispheres of the brain) was severed by a primitive surgical practice administered by doctors in the West during the 1950's and '60s hardly puts the issue to rest. Such patients continue to converse, walk, and talk. Specific behaviors however were affected negatively. Consciousness was present, but in two places - the patient had in essence two 'brains'. Whereas the operations may have been indicated to relieve schizophrenia, evidence of a 'split' personality persisted.

Networking science may provide analogies most useful for understanding consciousness and self-awareness as shared systems. The human beings behind a PC at each 'node' of the Internet, are at least from a human perspective, the only conscious or self-aware components of the internet that we know of.. Humans are in charge. As of yet, no massive computer system has conspired for ideological reasons, against man its creator. Massive amounts of computational power dominate the the internet, far from the remove of individual minds. . . . yet the Internet is an extension of the human nervous system, and that is all that it is.

And so is partly conscious?

With biological death we'll note that consciousness seems to disappear once and for all. Yet few traditional cultures would admit this. All mythologies point to the immortality of the soul. Evidence of 'transference' after death, where the contents of the psyche of the departed seem to rush into the living are well documented.

Rituals of death worldwide are remarkably similar in this respect - procedures designed to provide a safe journey of the 'conscious remains' to another world. Paranormal experiences, ghosts, contact with previous 'lives' further leavens the notion that consciousness, the soul, the Self, all are part of a quantity that flows, body to body, mind to mind, animating matter, without being material at all.

For all our science we seem to be rattling around the doors of the Vedanta, and Shivaism. Matter and spirit.

-:)(:-