Where is Science going with Consciousness?

 On Facebook on 1 June 2024 someone put up a poster quoting that clumsy materialist Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

I commented against Tyson ad follows : 

Strong objectivity is already dead. It's been dead since Heisenberg and even before that, with the photon double slit experiments. It's been dead since the Schrodinger wave function collapse. Einstein failed to disprove quantum entanglement and nonlocality. Bell's Theorem in 1964 argued that quantum entanglement and nonlocality - processes that have to operate outside of spacetime because they are true but violate fundamental rules of distance and speed in spacetime - also apply to ALL reality, macro reality as well. Aspect's team started work in 1982 and by 2022 they had proved both entanglement and nonlocality beyond doubt for which they got the Nobel Prize. The primacy of spacetime is dead. The problem of cosmological origins has resurfaced and the eternal existence of matter and energy is greatly in doubt since the hypothesis of bang and shrink universes only defers the first cause problem further back. The traditional argument that nothing can come from nothing has not been solved. Hawking argued that gravity created the universe out of nothing but we have no explanation of where gravity came from and we don't even know what it is. Science has made great strides in DESCRIPTION but cannot tell us anything.about things in themselves. Materialism fails itself because by its own definition it can only confirm and corroborate physical observations which depend on the brain which is nothing more than a random whirl of atoms and molecules - essentially dead. Consciousness has not been explained. The hard problem is not solved because scientists attempt to find consciousness as a byproduct of material forces which is impossible. Consciousness is an irreducible and non derivative fundamental and the only thing we can be absolutely sure of and can take as a given. There is now developing an idealist model of reality that solves the hard problem of consciousness : reality is MENTAL.and physicality including all of the universe arises from excitations of consciousness; phenomena arise through dissociation of these excitations from the ocean of cosmic consciousness. So physicality is a projection of mind ( Bernardo Kastrup). It is not a primary state at all from which mentation derives but the opposite. The universe is consistent in its laws because cosmic mentation produces that staggering richness and complexity in a rational, mathematically calculable and consistent manner enabling us to describe and discover laws which is consistent with the operation of Mind instead of the mindlessness of chaos. As neuroscientist Donald Hoffman argues, spacetime is now dead as a baseline model of reality : it's a complex dashboard of projections of Consciousness which is deeper.

Tyson does not seem to grasp any of this and if he does he dismisses it the way a flat Earther would dismiss evidence of the globular form of the Earth. He's just a career scientist. Perhaps being Black he feels the need to stick with the materialistic establishment and even be one of its ideological Rottweilers but it's going nowhere. We need a new dialogue in science where Mind is introduced.as at the very least as an irreducible variable in the grand model of the Cosmos and perhaps so far as constituting it's origin as well as it's substance.

The conversation continued with others : the

 somebody put :

  Its not. Pilot-Wave theory for example, fully supports an objective reality, and doesn't raise observers to quasi mystical beings who collapse wave forms by looking at them.

Me to  Peter Kelly:

 

 pilot wave theory has absolutely no data to support it. It's a desperate attempt to save materialist determinist explanation. The same applies to the Many Worlds hypothesis. Good science means looking at ALL the different lines of data to see where they are leading. And they are leading to the irreducibility of consciousness which is the primary state of Nature; not physicality.

 Arjun L Sen interesting. How would you define cosmic mentation? People die, so assuming their consciousness dies with them, the universe still exists for the rest of the living in a very shareable and consistent manner, unless we subscribe to the idea that there are no "others" and that each of us lives in their own individual manifestation of the universe, which would be interesting because the universe, even the world itself, is far more complex than any single mind can manifest.

 Marie Lou Hi there ! Why would we assume that consciousness of the individual dies with the body? The body experiences life. Those experiences become layers of information interacting with emotion and thought. The combination of information with emotion and thought become the evolving personality. The death of the physical container releases the consciousness package that is the individual personality. In the idealist model, everything is mentation; consciousness is primary. Therefore it does not "die." Where could it go ?

Here is where science faces a challenge. For nearly 300 years science has looked out at the realm of matter and energy, discovering with great power of description it's richness, vast scope and variety, developing tools of observation, inference and deduction to describe properties, interactions and laws of behaviour

In doing so it has got completely involved with objects and ended up believing only in an objective world.

But the object collapsed with the quantum. And we are , a hundred years after the quantum discovery, working towards a SUBJECTIVE model of reality in which the object is a projection, not the baseline.

Therefore the consciousness package that is an individual personality survives and CONTINUES TO EVOLVE.

How so ? Remember, having abandoned strong objectivity, we also have to expand the methodology of science to evaluate SUBJECTIVE EVIDENCE where the subject is consciousness in some immaterial form and there is no material object. Please bear with the logic of this. It is a radical departure from classic science but it has to be : the content demands this expansion of methodology.

Subjective evidence remains part of science if harnesses to the demands of reason, logic and comparable inference and deduction APPROPRIATE TO SUBJECTIVE CONTENT AS NON DERIVATIVE. Remember, the manifestations of consciousness are not reducible to matter/ energy. Therefore they demand rational investigation but definitely not reductionist ( derivative of matter).

Bearing this in mind we impose on the data of consciousness the rational evaluation of evidence to encompass the method of law courts : eyewitness accounts and testimony. Examine the character and sobriety and intelligence of witnesses, compare their accounts, arrive at conclusions about what it is REASONABLE TO INFER. ( Remember, 96% of the observed universe is unknown and is inferred as dark matter and dark energy whose properties remain undiscovered and may not be
 Characteristics of the most distant galaxies in our expanding universe are broadly inferred as their precise properties will NEVER be discovered because they are too far away. The evolution of life forms and the developing taxonomies over time are inferred from fragmentary evidence between we will never have the complete evidence. My point is that reasonable INFERENCE is normal in material science and it's principle can be extended into immaterial ( pure subject state) science.

Here we can compare the increasingly large compendium of NDE reports to show how they cannot AS A BODY OF DATA  be explained away by materialist explanations even though induvidual features of NDEs can sometimes be induced chemically under conditions not pertaining to the patients who recovered. Studies have been done with scientific care by Jeffrey Long, Michael Sabom, Sam Parnia, Bruce Greyson, Pim van Lommel and many others. The data in support of NDEs is especially assisted by VERIDICAL NDEs in which recovered patients showed knowledge of events and phenomena they could not have known while under operation and even content they could not have known if they had been fully alert. These include NDEs from people blind from birth describing colours and phenomena in detail and NDEs of young children who accounted for things they could not have known. Materialist explanations for these cases which are now of statistical significance are either non existent or non compelling inferences.

The reliability of testimony needs to be carefully evaluated using scientific principles of reasoning, deduction and inference from the data. Philosopher Jens Amberts published a detailed study examining the logic of accepting NDE testimonies and statistically evaluating their reliability. His rigorous extended examination finds them as a body of data positive for reliability. This study should be built into an evolving scientific methodology for examining inner ( subjective ) space as irreducible space ( consciousness mapping is not derivative of material states)

Finally ADC reports are of varying quality over the last 200 years but a small number are of very high quality from unimpeachable sources and they can be comparatively studied. These include testimonies of Anthony Borgia, Edgar Cayce, Jane Sherwood, Helen Greaves, Sir Oliver Lodge and Air Marshall Sir Hugh Dowding. Also worthy of consideration are Vera Stanley Alder and Geraldine Cummins. Attempts have been made to challenge the honesty of Cummins but this does not mean that all her testimony is unreliable as channelers are under huge pressure to deliver and their ability to do so may be inconsistent. Careful scrutiny helps in drawing best inferences from the more reliable parts of the testimonies.
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These testimonies alongside the eighteenth century testimony of Emmanuel Swedenborg, taken as a body and studied together, should reveal insights as to what direction of evolution the personality mentation package takes after bodily death.

For a longer term perspective one will need to consult traditions outside science :the Jewish rabbinical Kabbalah describes in esoteric terms the path of the soul back to union with God ( cosmic consciousness?). Eastern traditions such as Vedānta and the Tibetan Book of the Dead provide data and ideas that when compared carefully can help us build a picture of the soul's journey after bodily death.

Since this evolving science goes from physics ( matter energy) to metaphysics ( immaterial consciousness) science has to expand its methodology beyond observation, experiment and falsifiability ( works for matter) to evaluation of testimony ( works for immaterial states). A new linking up of the two domains over the next hundred years will expand the scope and productivity of science knowledge.

Sean Stinson to  Arjun L Sen:

 nicely explained. Brett Weinstein also does a nice job of putting this out there in layman's terms. Much more interesting to listen to than NGT

To Sean Stinson: 

 thank you for endorsing my comment and the reference to Brett Weinstein. I'll check him out. 👍

To  Marie Lou:

 

 yup. That's the leap we're going to have to make if we want to find out the TRUTH.

"Traditional scientific evidence " refers to observation and description of material conditions only.

Restricting the scope of KNOWLEDGE to this is known as scientism and restricts our powers of ENQUIRY.

To increase knowledge we have to GIVE UP our EXCLUSIVE commitment to material / objective enquiry.

The impetus from that comes from Science itself. Science has spanned the breadth of the material universe and has parted the veil and has found beyond the object- the SUBJECT.

This is why we have to expand our methodologies and our criteria for knowledge. The requirement comes from Science itself. All materialists are doing now is treading water, repeating the mantra and refusing to join up the dots like the faithful at an old religious ceremony.

 Me to Marie Lou:

 regarding the " thousands of years ' of scientific enquiry, I would urge you to examine more closely the assumption behind that observation. We are all subject to cultural tropes that hard-wire into our assumptions after about four generations, basically once living memory of a different assumption has passed away   A good account of the changes in scientific thought has been given by Stephen Meyer Ph D in his book ' Return of the God Hypothesis '   Meyer shows that the roots of rigorous scientific enquiry go back to Roger Bacon and William of Ockham in the Middle Ages and were rooted in a Judeo-Christian belief in an intelligible and rational universe created by a rational mind - the Mind of God. This is very different from Greek / Hellenistic science. Their belief in capricious "gods" affected Greek science snd philosophy in which there were no or very few "laws" of nature. The world was not rational and was a jumble of discrete objects each owing to their individual set of "causes"  ironically Greek science misled the Church intellectuals into Aristotelian scholasticism whereas the Bible led to modern science- the belief that thr world is rationally ordered and discoverable and obeys laws because the logos of the Creator ordained it thus and humans were given the power to share in rationality and so discover God's laws through the glory, majesty and complexity of Nature. Thus, Science as we recognise it owed its thinking to Judeo- Christianity and the Church's,opposition to it owed to Greek science,  not the Bible   Newton Kepler, Galileo, Copernicus, Leibniz and other greats of the modern science revolution were believers in the Spirit of God ordaining the universe. In modern parlance this would agree with the model of Mind ordaining Matter.  The Enlightenment thinkers decided to drop God out of it and find completely material explanations. Influenced by philosophers like Hume, Comte, Marxist, Darwin and Freud,  by 1900 the DESCRIPTIONS of science were supported by a PHILOSOPHY of materialism ( positivism) which declared that all existence was matter and energy. There was no soul or spirit. Mind was an epiphenomenon of the brain. You need to remember that materialism was a philosophical assumption developing over 150 years of modern science, not a proven fact.   From 1900, from Max Planck's discovery of the quantum,  and from the experiments with photons and discovery of the properties of sub atomic particles, MATTER and even ENERGY started to disappear and CONSCIOUSNESS and the subject started emerging in Science as not only the bottom line but the CREATOR of reality. At the bottom of the bag of Matter we find the insubstantial power of Mind.  A new, deeper revolution in our understanding of what reality is well under way, altering the general perception of reality that started with Galileo peering through his telescope to discover heliocentrism

 

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/2CCWht2CTWvgkurD/

 The EVIDENCE is from the massive accumulated NDE and ADC record which has been and is being studied carefully by postmaterialist scientists, mainly in emergency medicine, cardiology, resuscitation medicine, physics and postmaterialist neuroscience. There is now quite a substantial body of research published in articles in mainstream science journals and a number of books, some of them aimed at general readers who want to understand where postmaterialist science and science of condciousness is going with the mass of nonstandard data. Nonstandard data is crucial because it is this that leads to new understanding and changes in theories in science.

Energy in the mode of interchangeability with mass is not conscious. It does,not have thoughts and memories but is a vehicle for action in the universe. Thoughts and memories are carried in consciousness. Consciousness is something we are unable to directly perceive and never will perceive it because it cannot be separated from the act of perception and so objective distance from the object of enquiry is  impossible. Postmaterialist science is working with idealist analytical philosophy to develop a new model of reality. In this, consciousness ( as Max Planck already said a century ago ) is fundamental. Condciousness generates FIELDS which have no mass, no specified position and operate outside spacetime. Fields generate energy that operates un spacetime. Energy in innumerable forms is interchangeable with mass giving rise to all the phenomena.

 Nonlocality is not inferred. It is experimentally proven. That's why Aspect and team got the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2022.

The basis of consciousness in the brain has not been proved and is weakened by the implications of non standard data which is now enormous: from PSI, ADCs and NDEs.  Philosopher Jens Amberts has extensively discussed the logical and statistical grounds for crediting the overall data mass of these contents.

Non standard data overwhelmingly supports the collective field hypothesis beyond individual brains and its applications to biology and psychology. Experimental evidence will be slow because of the massive lack of funding for experimental research. Thus, pioneers like Dr Sheldrake spend a lifetime developing a hypothesis whose true value will likely be confirmed in a future generation. That's what happens to people ahead of their times.

Physics at quantum level has shown us that at the very depths of observation, matter disappears and there are only fields. From these fields matter appear to pop in and out of 'nothing' ( or potentiality of the field.') Spacetime is no longer the bottom line.

While materialists, like Flat Earthers, may continue to jeer, based on outdated science ( newtonian, mass based, speed of light limited, arrow of time restricted), the truth will out one day.

The 'arrow of knowledge' if I might put it that way, is looking like confirming in due course that FIELDS are not restricted by time, space, mass or even energy. Their ultimate property will be found to be IDEAL or MENTALIST. From that unlimited potential, a kind of Cosmic conxciousness, all coherent and discoverable reality emerges.

 Reflection of the day :

A Google search shows up this definition of a photon:

"A physical object can't be a non-physical object, by definition. Einstein said that any physical object travelling at lightspeed would have infinite mass. Therefore photons - which obviously don't have mass - aren't physical bodies."

Materialists are always claiming that the cosmos is only physical and there can be no immaterial dimension.

But science itself disagrees which shows that materialist scientists are unable to think rationally.

If a photon isn't material it's not physical, yet it can operate and have effect in the physical universe. The implication of this for put understanding of how reality works is enormous.

Scientists generally hold that mind and thoughts are products of neuronal activity in the brain. Yet, though brain function is closely correlated with mental output IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD, there has been not a single piece of evidence to show the contents of any mind, human or animal. All we see are thermal outputs, imaging and wavelines. That's it. And that's all we'll ever see.

The conundrum of consciousness and subjective experience (qualia) has moved from being an anomaly ignored by mainstream science to a huge carbuncle the size of the Planet. The materialists cannot figure it out. More and more top Scientists are accepting that consciousness is fundamental ( as Max Planck, discoverer of the Planck interval, declared) and cannot be derived from the properties of the material world.

 As the universal Subject, Mind itself can be EXPERIENCED but cannot be DESCRIBED because science can only describe OBJECTS and objective properties. With the collapse of strong objectivity in science we have reached the hard frontier of science even as we are on the brink of discovering much more of the material cosmos itself. That's a paradox but it's a fact. Our knowledge of the material world including the quantum world is going to get a lot bigger but we will never SCIENTIFICALLY describe the spiritual world. It can only be known as an experience not as a description.

Therefore there is every reason to believe in the reality of the spirit dimension as indicated by esoteric traditions for thousands of years while recognising that the seers, savants and mystics were right : spirituality reality can be "seen" and experienced but not explained or described, only the forms we produce on that dimension from our will.

Now we can begin to understand what the Buddhist śūnyatā or "nothingness" that has infinite potential to be everything could possibly mean.

Once we give up linear thought for paradoxical thought, the multiple layers of Reality start to reveal themselves.

Copenhagen quantum mechanics, the standard model, accepts that until the quantum state collapses through conscious perception ( think carefully what that implies ) into a specific form, it has no form at all. Instead it is a POTENTIAL to be any viable form in the material world.

But that means that the ground state of Reality is WITHOUT FORM BUT WITH INFINITE POTENTIAL FOR FORMS.

That's what Vedānta ( Indian esoteric meditation and ohilosophy) says.  That's what Zen and Dao say.

Why are we finding it so hard to move on from materialism ?

Give it up. It's NOT REALISTIC.

At the same time, religious dogmas, catechisms and legalisation traditions that are not grounded in panentheist revelation are all nonsense, just as most of us rationalists today perceive them to be. Elaborate and magnificent superstitions, nothing more, unfortunately guiding and dividing the world.

In the SPIRIT WORLD  where true knowledge prevails ( check NDE reports) , these cultural forms can re emerge and do no harm! They won't divide humans but bring them together. We will see they are all cultural stories, that's all).

Do you see ?

15 September 2024. My Facebook entry