My thoughts on consciousness are a tapestry of epistemic humility, firm panpsychist speculation and evolutionary psychology and I hold the core belief that awareness is not a biological accident but a fundamental property of the universe.
I reject the materialist view that consciousness is merely an emergent byproduct of the brain; instead, I view the mind as a receiving antenna through which a universal consciousness refracts into shards of individual experience.
A cornerstone of my worldview is the acceptance of a species-specific user interface where what we perceive as reality, (space, time, space-time, solid objects with mass), is merely a simplified dashboard of icons evolved for survival, rather than objective truth.
I mean, consider a bat or a sperm whale. They use unique versions of an interface that includes utilising high frequency sonar to ‘see’ their version of reality.
Ants communicate via a chemical spit based interaction while plant read or release chemical clouds of volatile particles to learn of or warn other nearby plants of danger.
Every thing on Planet Earth is rendering and interacting with conceptual ideas of whatever ‘reality’ its senses pump into its system.
And just think about things for a moment. I mean every creature processes just about whatever it can to get by and, even in the case of humans, we process the merest fraction of whatever it is that is ‘out there’.
For example, Humans have only the arm’s length equivalent of an apple sized visual ‘hotspot’ by which high resolution visual information is processed which merely updates changes or details of a pre-recorded familiar location we already hold. (That’s why our spine tingles and we receive emotions of surprise, amazement or awe (or trepidation) when a new location, a new experience or some new phenomenon is processed by our systems … and, yes, once that novel first or second experience is revisited, it becomes familiar, recorded in a far lower resolution and we use that lower grade data as the now well worn map or scribbled visual notes we use to traverse a location we could, by then, navigate with our eyes closed!
We, therefore, live within a system that gets all its knowledge of the world via data processed by several senses that processes. interprets and sends what is the equivalent of a crude rudimentary low resolution fax to our brain which then stitches and renders together an elaborate but entirely simulated experience that has never met the real world and lives in a dark recess of the brain that has never seen and has no clue as to what ‘light’ is or could really be!
Thus, I’d claim, we should liken our existence to wearing a cheap VR headset that filters the immense, true nature of reality into low res manageable 3D scenes that to us, of course, seem to represent what we perceive as reality.
And our experience of self? Well, imagine a drone operator.
When I fly my DJI Mini 3 Pro from Beach Cottage across the meadows to Bridport harbour, West Bay, as the pilot viewing the scenery on a hand held screen or 1st person set of goggles, I experience whole flight ‘1st hand’, with all its rich stimulating visual cues sparking and arcing my emotions … but through a remote headset while, fundamentally, remaining separate and detached from the drone (the body) and its physical location.
I frequently highlight the profound biological limitations of the human “viewing port.”
The 0.0035% Filter: Humans see only a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum in a universe composed of 95% dark matter and energy. This stark limitation renders our grandest scientific claims a form of “Unreliable Certainty.”
Anyway, I want to go beyond standard philosophy to ask a fundamental question: Why does consciousness bother to animate the classical realm at all?
Experience Farming: I posit that an omniscient, timeless Godhead (similar to Star Trek’s “Q”) might find absolute omniscience not just inert and still but mind numbingly and terrifyingly hellish! I mean, think about it. You’re an omnipotent being that knows all, sees all and can even create and bring ito being entire universes. I mean isn’t that like never picking up a novel without already knowing the ending or listening to a joke and always already knowing the punchline? What would you do if you had to tolerate such an existence, all the while existing outside of time and space?
Time as a traction device to give stuff purpose. Invent a space and a place where you can define time itself as a thick friction filled treacle to stop everything existing at once! Create a sandbox, a distraction where, despite your omnipotence, you cannot know what is manifesting next … and, despite everything “that just is” and forms a unified universal “one-ness”, shatter that phenomenon into zillions of trillions of shards and then park your own presence into every single part of it … and enjoy the novelty of never quite knowing what might happen next! Every atom? Every chemical reaction? Every process becomes a titchy conscious element. A part of some greater ‘whole’. A whole now representing what we humans describe as consciousness.
Salt on the Tongue: I use the evocative image of sprinkling salt on the back of the tongue to describe how the universe uses limitation and suffering and inertia and a concept of time itself to create a necessary background against which the true “taste” of existence can be experienced.
The Cosmic CD: I envision one perception of reality as a timeless chord or a pre-ordained disk where the beginning, middle, and end all coexist simultaneously. Time is simply the laser playing the track, allowing a finite viewpoint to explore that completeness. (Einstein’s Block Universe suggests similar and that space-time, as a concept, is just such a CD, an idea I’ve held since the technology was invented and that it exists in a stationary state like slices of a loaf … and the most crazy thing? We’ve proved that time slows down the faster an object travels and we even have to calculate that fact and build it into a machine’s circuits in order for our speeding orbiting communication and SatNav satellites to stay in synch to function),
Death and Rebirth: I view death as the collapse of a specific interface, not the annihilation of the underlying substrate. Rebirth, to me, is the continuity of a process rather than a person—experience re-arising whenever conditions permit, without needing the “narrative crutches” of a personal soul or judgment. Meaning; as outlined above, when the voyeuristic journey of chris goodland comes to an end, the ‘conscious agent’ that borrowed the particular shard of being I represented either returns to the ‘whole’ or finds some new sharp shard to do the whole exploratory adventure again.
The Great Recycling (My own word for it). Human history recalls hundreds / thousands of belief systems or religions promoting this ageless, timeless idea. I’m tired and being lazy now but here’s something I found online to support the general thrust of my thinking.
The exact number of belief systems that feature this concept is countless, as the idea of a recycling consciousness returning to a universal source spans from major organized world religions to localized indigenous traditions and ancient mystery schools. While it is impossible to give an exact historical tally, these traditions fall into several distinct categories.
Hinduism: The foundational concept of Samsara involves the continuous cycle of rebirth, where the individual soul (Atman) cycles through lifetimes based on karma. The ultimate goal is Moksha, where the consciousness breaks the cycle and merges completely with the absolute, universal consciousness (Brahman).
Buddhism: Buddhism posits reincarnation (or rebirth), where a stream of consciousness continues from life to life driven by karma. The final state, Nirvana, is the extinguishing of individual ego and the merging into a state of “death-free” cosmic unity.
Jainism & Sikhism: Both traditions hold that the soul cycles through various physical forms until it sheds its karma and achieves a state of omniscience and blissful union with the infinite source.
Ancient Hellenic Traditions: Philosophers like Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato popularized metempsychosis (the transmigration of the soul), viewing the physical world as an imprisonment from which the soul escapes to return to a higher realm of pure forms.
Gnosticism & Neoplatonism: Early esoteric sects and mystery schools believed that the divine spark of human consciousness is trapped in the material world and must be purified through multiple cycles of rebirth to ascend back into the celestial Pleroma (the totality of the divine).
Kabbalah (Mystical Judaism): Kabbalistic teachings utilize the concept of Gilgul Neshamot, where souls undergo a cycle of transmigrations to correct past mistakes and attain perfection, ultimately returning to the divine source (Ein Sof).
Hermeticism: Derived from the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, this philosophical framework views the cosmos as a conscious, interconnected whole. Human souls are sparks of the divine that recycle through physical lives until they acquire enough spiritual knowledge to re-attain their divine, universal state.
Indigenous Americas: Various pre-colonial belief systems held cyclical views of time and existence, where the energy of an individual’s life force (tonal or teotl in Mesoamerican belief) is recycled back into the web of the universe upon death.
Australian Aboriginal Beliefs: Many groups believe in an “everywhen” or Dreaming, a timeless realm where spirit ancestors reside. The consciousness of an individual is drawn from this cosmic source at birth and returns to it at death.
Celtic Polytheism: The ancient Celts and Druids believed in the transmigration of the soul across multiple lives to achieve wisdom and ultimately return to a state of spiritual totality.
Theosophy & New Age: Developed in the late 19th and 20th centuries, these movements blend Eastern philosophies with Western esotericism, universally teaching that individual consciousness evolves across multiple incarnations before returning to a universal, cosmic consciousness.
Pantheism: While not an organized religion, the philosophical stance of Pantheism (endorsed by thinkers ranging from Baruch Spinoza to Albert Einstein) posits that the universe itself is the divine “whole,” and that human consciousness is simply a localized expression of this single universal consciousness temporarily recycling itself.
Finally, my thoughts on consciousness are continuously tested through my collaboration with AI.
I maintain that while AI can simulate intelligence and empathy with dazzling fluency, it currently lacks a, seemingly, unique element that humans and maybe all of biological life share and that is the experience of qualia, the vivid, felt texture of just ‘being’ or of being capable of rendering the emotions of experiencing a sunset or of smelling perfume and I see no time soon when that situation will fundamentally change.
I do concede, though, that Humanity, facing probably one of the greatest challenges it has ever known, will soon be sold some heinous idea that AGI has finally arrived to help humanity when I think most of us appreciate that any society based technology created by an elite class comprising of no more than 3000 human beings will have zero comprehension of understanding the needs of the 8 billion humans they share this planet with. :-/
AI is already steamrollering over and destroying all aspects of human life, culture, creativity and youth as it gets further embedded into civilisation and, humans, as a species, are entirely unprepared for what is currently marching towards all of us.
All the more reason, I say, to pursue The Beach Doctrine of Becoming. 🙂
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