Consciousness and Other Topics
On Consciousness
An integration of unitary and baseline primary epistemic states must necessarily play itself out in language and so is subject to the limitations of language and concepts. Unitary experience is by definition a unity, or rather a total awareness of unity, with an ineffable and unspeakable constant that underpins and so transcends perception. Awareness of this union remains convincing in any given state of mind because it is a reflection of something that quite evidently underpins baseline as well as unitary perception. This unitary experience is something of a universal solvent; dissolving the categories of experience. In baseline perception one is able to itemize this no self, no space, no time experience by signifying it, labeling it, systematizing it. Self, when distinguished from Other, likewise distinguishes a state of total unitary awareness from the baseline on the basis of perceptions which indicate “that was then but this is now.” That unqualifiable absolute that transcends the duality of experience and nonexperience itself goes unquestioned. There is plenty of space for the infinite resolution of nonexistence in this world of perception, and when our frame of mind comes to an awareness of this comfortable coexistence of experience and non experience, the present and the infinite, the two do not appear separate in any way. In short, we are able to engage with this ‘no thing’ as though it were a concept, though it is not, because we have no other representable form by definition. All of our efforts to express it, though being it, do not convey it in and of itself. They are all the flickering of shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave. Even in referring to it we are only capable of describing it by what it is not. What we would do by integrating these two primary epistemic states then would not be to identify baseline reality with an idea or an image of itself but rather equate reality to itself.
On God
We can introduce one common definition of the divine as that from which we derive our being, either God is existence itself, the act of existing, or otherwise imparts being onto us, equating the existence of God with existence itself. If we say that God is unknowable, that an observer cannot find God because that God is the reality in which we exist in its truest and subtlest form, we cannot perceive it anymore than our pupils can see themselves. While not definite proof of God’s existence, it explains the lack of direct evidence in a way that opens up the door for a rational belief in God.
Some philosophers have identified God as a kind of timeless ultimate reality beyond all appearance and all seeming to be, where there is no observer and so nothing to observe. This is not a nihilistic view so much as it is one that describes a deity that is not an object of its own knowledge. A common illustration of this is the Big Bang. Before the Big Bang there was no time and no space, so there was no moment preceding the Big Bang. That timeless, spaceless, immaterial condition is less the cause of reality than it is reality itself in its unmanifest state, beyond all illusions because it is beyond all perceptions. Rather than saying that state of existence ended with the Big Bang, we can say that rather the Big Bang, and so all of reality, is still contained within (or branching out from) this more simple and fundamental reality, making it something that pervades all of existence.
Our difficulties in disproving the divine come from our inability to exactly define it. ‘Divine’ is a word, a generalization we use for a mosaic of images of the transcendent that may individually come under the scrutiny of inquisition and doubt, from an indescribable essence of being as evoked in some of the Upanishads to a word made flesh in the New Testament to an imageless intelligence that informs all matter stemming from Plato and Neoplatonic thinkers. Were I to say the divine is existence itself I would see it as more real than my own transient, ill-defined, porous self.
Self, like God is a term which refers to something we cannot definitively encounter in and of itself anywhere in the world. We cannot precisely sever ‘God’ from reality as we might extract ice from a glacier for analysis. Thinkers trying to describe the transcendent variously speak of an indivisible being, like Plotinus, or as an inscrutable mystery, as evasive as our understanding of ourselves, like Lao Tzu’s idea of Tao. If we say the divine is transcendent we realize there are many ways to be transcendent. Were we to dispose of the term ‘God’ and coin a new sign for the unseen we will soon realize nothing has changed. The mystery of consciousness, of the beginning of the distinction between the observer and the observed, are deeply intertwined with explaining why we thinking, feeling beings are here, whether there’s an epiphenomenal intelligence shaping reality, and whether or not life is an accident. These are religious issues as well as philosophical ones. They are at the heart of our basic understanding of reality, and they are many. This is an issue of labeling a total mystery. As long as there is something unseen, or unfathomable there will be the concept of the divine.
Pythagoras felt that the existence of an irrational, transcendental number was a basic threat to his vision of the transcendent order of things. Georg Cantor, millennia later, saw God in the infinities of math that would have broken Pythagoras’ notion. If we prove that physical laws can be described perfectly by mathematical systems free of self contradiction, we describe a kind of Platonic universe where a cosmic mind orders the world. If someone like Kurt Godel were to prove that no such system can ever be free of contradictions, that would suggest a God that forever escapes description. Despite our inability to encounter God in reality, David Hume could not rule out the possibility of deity. These are only hints, implying one thing or another about a shared existence we still don’t understand and may never understand. And even in case it’s all incomprehensible there are some who find room for the word ‘God.’ We label liberally as people, and arguing about the labels we use for reality is a game of abstractions in which we are ensnared in this debate. If we stop labeling we find only an unexplainable, persistent awareness and all the phenomena it can contain. Our observations of the of the very small are limited if Heisenberg is to be believed. In learning more about how fast a particle is going, we sacrifice knowing where it is. Our inability to see into black holes are related to mysteries about the Big Bang, both concepts involve singularities. The emergence of space from singularities is as inscrutable as the emergence of something from nothing, time from timelessness, and consciousness from dirt.
The Neurotheology perspective refers to primary epistemic states, ways of transcending the self and achieving an awareness of objective reality. However, total unity as a primary epistemic state does not lend itself to description in our divided, individuated, subjective state. This issue is slightly more fraught than finding evidence of God because God, according to our haziest and most general description of the word, transcends all categories. How can we know if something beyond all categories gets angry, has human features, has thoughts, or has knowledge of itself? How can we know if something beyond all categories is our higher self, a category that we cannot seem to adequately isolate from the rest of reality? Our predicament is profound, we have only labels attached to myseries. The thing about this debate is that the term fits the thing it refers to. God is if anything beyond comprehension, and so are all mysteries given that name. Aquinas believed God’s nature could not be probed. Ibn Rushd believed that inquiry and intelligence could show us the nature of God. For that Aquinas called Rushd an atheist. Today’s atheists are so called because of their unbelief in supernatural intelligence. All gaps in observable reality may close and the divine would have all the space it needs in the unknown origin of awareness.
