Consciousness

I’m having an argument with a book. It’s really with the author Peter Russell (degrees in physics, experimental psychology, computer science) who wrote From Science to God -- 129 pages, capacious type. This is the kind of thought-provoking book I like to read at breakfast.

As it’s propped in front of my plate I read a few paragraphs and then seize my ballpoint to write WRONG at this place or that. He will never know I do it. Over against his degrees I can only put one, though I’ve lived a lot of life and I love to tussle with things that are hard to understand. Reading this book is fun. It’s like hearing an end-of-term lecture by a congenial and brilliant teacher who was thinking “Oh well, let’s throw this out there.”

Russell struggles with the concept of consciousness, quoting widely from west and east in distance and from centuries in time. What is it? Where does it come from? For instance, part of what we think of as our consciousness tells us the grass is green. No.The idea of the color we label as “green” comes from properties of light and the electrical impulses transmitted from the eye to the brain…” the green we see is a quality created in consciousness.”

Does the tree falling in the forest make a sound if no one is there to hear? No, he happily says. Ah-ha. I seize my pen to make a huge question mark. He is speaking entirely from the vantage of whether a “human” hears it. In the human-less forest, even if there were no larger animals nearby it’s almost impossible that there would not be ants, bugs, birds, turtles -- all of whom can hear. You get the point.

So that persistent question could be more appropriately rewritten, I think, this way: Is it possible for a tree, falling or not, to be in a forest that has no other life whatsoever except the tree? My answer to my question: No. Not even after a global nuclear explosion can there be a forest and a falling tree that makes no sound. Back to the original question: does the tree falling in the forest make a sound? Of course it does. Though humans may not be there to hear it, the motion of its falling will still emit waves which are a physical action.

One of the problems we all have, including Professor Russell (whom I like quite a bit), is that we are limited by placing ourselves at the center of everything there is. We used to do that with our globe, the earth. Now we do it with ourselves.

I love finding out about words. So here we go with “hubris.” From the Greek, hubris is hard to translate into English because it refers both to excessive self-pride and “hamartia,”a term Greek tragedy adopted from archery (meaning literally to miss the mark) and transformed in “hubris” to mean missing the mark because of a lack of some important perception or insight due to one’s pride.

Full disclosure: I have as much hubris as the professor. I like to dream that some of us may get a greater distance from hubris. Evolutionarily it probably was absolutely necessary. But could it not be that we are outgrowing it? Let he/she who is without hubris think of a new way to live?

Hm m m m. If a human being were ever able to regard “what-there-is” without hubris, the person probably would be killed or considered mad.

Return to “consciousness” for a moment. Russell said “As far as this world is concerned, everything is structured in consciousness.” Ah. He is both assuming as an entity and anthropomorphizing “world!” The word world is peculiarly a construct of language. Since every living being probably has a different concept of it, how can it ever accumulate enough consistency to be a useful word?

But if the concept world could exist how could it have the human faculty of “concern?” I know, I know. Cut the writer some slack. But MY point, if I were clever enough to make it, is that the very language we humans use is so muddled with archaic, incorrect, whimsical, comical, ridiculous, ruinous and absurd sub-contexts and layers that it is almost impossible to write or say a “free” or clear sentence. Yet what wonderful fun to play with sentences! What can ever be as much fun as the impossible?

Our language is so much closer than we think to the glyphs or pictograms that seem so quaint to us. Every single word is -- or can be -- a story. And in my own particular world stories are the gold -- and perhaps the goal -- of life. (Elie Wiesel said “God made human beings because he loves stories.”)

Stories teach, enchant, mislead, tantalize, captivate, enrich, condescend, lie, amuse…and so on. Ah, stories.

Let’s make a leap. I know from knowing that stories do not belong just to humanity. As even science -- ah, science -- is beginning to know: consciousness also does not belong only to humanity.

So, what about a meta-consciousness? Is that god? Well, wait a minute. These words are a runaway chariot. So far we can only conceive of a god who looks exactly like us but bigger and maybe see-through, a panoply of gods that look like us, an “animal” god (coyote?), or an unknowable mystery. If there is meta-consciousness doen't it make sense that we will have to go beyond ancient and present concepts to even see in the distance a direction that would point toward it? As yet we cannot begin to perceive, see, recognize, analyze, feel, comprehend or define it. If somehow we get a glimmering I hope we know. I hope we won't be misled, as in the past, by hubris.

Which brings me to another human trait I love. In spite of all we continue to learn about evolution we tend to act as if our human brains are now finished, that they have arrived at some evolutionary apex. Ha. We never even speculate about the idea our brains may still be evolving. Of course the respective scales of human life and evolutionary time make it highly unlikely if not impossible for us to evaluate or analyze the ongoing or future evolution of the human brain. But couldn't we dream, speculate? Could we consider that maybe our brains are now at a random point in climbing a mountain we don’t know the size of, that we’ve never seen the top of, that we don’t know if it’s a mountain? Is there a chance we could entertain the idea that we may not know where we are? Can we consider what that means? Surely that would help us with hubris?

Of course, our culture and our stories tell us we have always been seeking to know more. While on the way we say again and again that we are there, like when we announced the molecule was absolutely the smallest thing. But is there a possibility we can start beyond -- far beyond -- the restriction of what we think we absolutely know?

A friend writes what she calls jukejoint haiku. Here’s one of my favorites:

Good news: there is a god.

Bad news: he is you.