#conciosness

Arnold Schwarzenegger claims that his success was his ability to have a clear vision of what he wanted to achieve. He recounts his inspiration for becoming a body builder and a movie star seeing a picture of body builder Reg Park in Hercules. In a world of linear cause and effect it could be said that the picture caused Arnold to firstly win body builder competitions which allowed him to move into the movie industry and to become the phenomenon he became.

However, there are good reasons to consider our Universe which is not one of linear cause and effect but one on non-linearity - circular causality. Consider the Universe to be ineffable whole of interconnections. Within such a system emergent patterns appear called strange attractors. Think of the flock as the strange attractor of interacting starlings.

So what is Arnold Schwarzenegger in an interconnected Universe? Well let’s consider him as a pattern in the interconnected system labelled The Arnold Strange Attractor. Similarly then that the picture of Reg Park is the Picture Strange Attractor. The interaction of the Arnold Strange Attractor and the Picture Strange Attractor creates an imagining pattern which is once again is a strange attractor labelled here as The Success Strange Attractor.

An imagining seems very ethereal pattern compared to a very material thing like the Arnold pattern. However they are still both Strange Attractors, it is just one is more ‘tangible’ than the other.

Now instead of seeing Arnold striving towards his goal, the non-linear view is an attraction towards a convergence of The Arnold Strange Attractor and The Success Strange Attractor where the relationship making the Success Strange Attractor more tangible.

Arnold wins competitions and the image of The Success Strange Attractor is broadcast to spectators. A TV documentary is made about him and the Success Strange gains more tangibility through the replication process, not only through the show, marketing and word of mouth. The Success Strange Attractor paired with The Arnold Self Attractor is in a constant state of reinforcement until a very tangible Successful Arnold Strange Attractor is emergent.

Bizarrely, due to the nature of interconnected systems the Success Arnold Strange Attractor is simultaneously Arnold the movie star, Reg Park who was photographed and the future of politics. Arnold is just an atemporal pattern in a much larger pattern.

So, we are not always in charge of what we think and imagine, but sometimes we feel we have the capacity to will them. We may think that those wilful, intangible thoughts and imaginings are private and locked away from the Universe, but each one could actually be shaping our tangible Universe. If this is true should we question the very ethics of what we think, envision or sing about? What we put on social media?

Through direct empirical observation of awareness everything appears to be cast in one rich presentation of patterns in one medium. Experience itself appears to be made of one thing. This argument is Monism - if experience is one thing then awareness is universal. Alternatively though there is Dualism where a singular awareness appears to sits between the ears and behind the nose located in a mostly unaware Universe. This is often thought to be an awareness of self but without a reflection it cannot know this to be the case. The singular awarenesses, due to its ‘closeness’ to the pattern of body, is an awareness of body but not of itself.

Awareness of the pattern of body can arise from universal awareness. due to its capacity of experiencing, universe awareness can observe the uniqueness of the pattern of body within it. The awareness of body arises and consequently so does Dualism. However, the inability of the awareness of body to distinguish its pattern from otherwise unaware patterns, lessens Dualism and reinforces Monism. 

The tension between the questions of “what is that within?” And “what is different about that without?” Becomes “What is that within ‘me’ [the universal awareness]?” And “What is the different about that without ‘me’ [the awareness of body]?” With the arising of double-sided or reflective ‘me’, awareness of self is emergent.

The awareness of self is created in the relationship between the relationship of body and the universal awareness. However self-awareness is neither one nor other but a synergy of both. 

Given a Universe where energy is a constant, Hamiltonian mechanics (at any scale) does not depend on time in order to describe the Universe’s state. Instead the fundamental attributes are position and inertia. (Inertia is being used to distinguish it from the classical definition of momentum). Time and distance, therefore, become useful conceptions, relatives to respective baselines. Is it any wonder that the apparent absoluteness of these quantities break-down at the edges of our perception in relatively and quantum mechanics where the subjectivity of the observer plays a much more involved role in shaping our understanding?

It seems only fair then to question the reality of objective distance-time as the fundamental description of reality and accept that a timeless position-inertia frame as more appropriate. Unfortunately however, like Kant’s neumona, reality is inaccessible to our perception; without the time based concept of memory there is no observable change - a sort of frozen presentation at best. This is not to say there isn’t change, inertia by definition is the resistance of a physical object to change, but to experience change it is necessary to fabricate scalar time.

Time is inherent to perception or even existence of our subjective experience. The human nervous system must mould the position-inertia reference frame into the more useful space-time perspective as change is fundamental to driving our behaviour. Is it any wonder that subjective time is far from linear in comparison to objective time? Surely, with subjective time, it is more useful to perceive time in a way that is most effective to our current purpose or undertaking?

My cat however appears to be making conscious decisions because I empathise its behaviour with mine. Without an internal measure of my cat’s consciousness I can only use emphatic assessment to consider the likelihood of of my cat to understand its own thought (informational) processes. So if I don’t empathise that a drop of water is conscious when would I consider a body of water to be conscious?

Consider a vortex of water in a river, it persists because it is adapting to the flow of the water. I can anthropomorphise this as learning but I would hardly consider it to be understanding what it learns. However as the river becomes more turbulent and the vortex is still persisting, the vortex will not only seem to control the water flow, it will display similar behaviour to regulate its own internal flow. One may anthropomorphise this self-regulation as to have processes that have a rudimentary ‘understanding’ of its own behaviour. As the river becomes rougher and rougher higher and higher levels of a hierarchy of regulation emerge, each with a greater degree of ‘intelligence’ required to govern its structure. At some point this degree of control would start to look like a form of self-autonomy, a water sprite emerging from the water. If so have I any right to deny it consciousness without access to its internal experience of self-regulation? If it displays the intelligence equivalent to my cat should it be assigned equal likelihood of consciousness in spite of the difference in material form? We have no understanding why our own self-regulation takes place in the realm of subjective experience. Could we just be some equivalent form of a water sprite that has evolved the stabilising concepts of self, time and self-agency without which our physical brains would disperse? Does the natural formation of self-regulation become mistaken for the struggle of survival?

I think a good qualitative assessment of consciousness therefore would be an entity that has the capacity to learn heuristics and strategies for survival. This assessment may not be necessarily applicable to an ant but the colony itself may be considered conscious. If so then could we attribute a form of consciousness to human societies and cultures? Does life on earth create an even more sophisticated form of experiential regulation beyond our knowledge to grasp?

To model gravity is not to experience gravity.

Positive Thinking is a terrible advice.

I read this article a few years ago and it came in a moment when I was reconciling my positive side and my negative side, just when the Universe wanted me to find my inner Balance. I don’t own the authorship of this article, but reading it, is deligthful.

A Zen master explains why “positive thinking” is terrible advice

Have you ever been told to just “think positive” and your problems will…