Alternatives Perspectives on Consciousness and Spirituality

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Alternatives Perspectives on Consciousness and
Spirituality

• Jonathan W. Schooler
• UC Santa Barbara

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Assumptions of the Prevailing View in
Neurocognitive Science

• Material Reductionism
• Consciousness is completely and entirely a
  product of the brain.
• You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories
  and your ambitions, your sense of personal
  identity and free will, are in fact no more than
  the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells
  and their associated molecules. Who you are is
  nothing but a pack of neurons Francis Crick
• Consciousness can be explained within the
  framework of deterministic Newtonian physics
• Even consideration of the relevance of quantum
  physics and relativity is inappropriate
• All spiritual experiences and beliefs are
  illusory
• Any theory that challenges these assumptions is
  not worthy of discussion by serious scientists.
• Realm of crackpots

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How The Prevailing View Explains Subjective
Experience

• Two views
• Acknowledges this is a challenging problem
• Nevertheless assumes it will be explained within
  the same material reductionist framework as
  everything else (Searle)
• Believes it has already been largely explained.
• Subjective experience is simply equivalent to
  reportable information processing
• epiphenomenal
• Dennett, Churchlands

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How the Prevailing View Explains Free Will

• Two accepted approaches
• Hard determinism (Wegner, Crick)
• Free Will is simply an illusion
• Compatabilism (Dennett, Velmans)
• Although all behavior is necessarily determined
  by pre-existing causal chain, individuals
  nevertheless maintain a genuine kind of free will
• Make deliberate decisions
• Are responsible for their actions

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How the Prevailing View Explains Transcendental
Experiences

• Religious experiences are induced by activation
  of certain areas of the brain, and in particular
  the temporal lobes
• Related to temporal lobe epilepsy (Ramachandran)
• Magnetic stimulation produces similar experiences
  (Persinger)
• Near Death Experiences are induced by oxygen
  deprivation which leads to attentional narrowing
  (Blackmore)

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How the Prevailing View Explains Religiosity

• It is an evolutionarily adaptive illusory
  conviction
• Enhances group coherence
• Reduces fear of death
• A product of the brains tendency to impose a
  theory of mind
• Adaptive brain process to attribute mental states
  to other people
• Over generalized to the inanimate universe

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Core Themes of the Prevailing View

• Genuine spiritual convictions are incommensurate
  with science.
• Consciousness and spiritual beliefs can be
  explained within a material reductionist world
  view
• 1st person experience is not a valid source of
  evidence

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Towards an Alternative to the Prevailing View

• The Importance of Experiential Evidence
• Are Transcendental Experiences Necessarily
  Illusory?
• Lessons From Modern Physics
• Is Consciousness Fundamental?
• Consider Consciousness as Extending in an
  Additional Dimension of Reality
• Present a Preliminary Dynamic Graphic Depiction
  of this View

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The Importance of Experiential Evidence

• Thought experiment
• An illustrious panel of experts conclude you are
  not conscious.
• 1st person experience alone would be sufficient
  for many of us to discount this conclusion
• Example of the Magic Eye

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Implications of the Magic Eye Experience

• Qualities of the experience
• Until you experience it you dont know for sure
  whether you are seeing the object.
• Once you do experience it, although you may not
  be sure exactly what you saw, you know you have
  seen into another dimension
• For those who have not experienced it however,
  they could readily doubt your confidence
• Relevance to our discussion
• Some forms of knowledge may similarly involve
  subjective certainty that cannot be validated
  without recourse to 1st person perspective
• The experience of consciousness
• Transcendental experiences

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The Reality of the Transcendental
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Transcendental Experiences Experiencing is
Believing

• Through out history individuals have reported
  what were experienced as incontrovertible
  transcendental experiences
• Conversion experiences
• Mystical experiences
• Near Death Experiences
• transcendental experiences are as convincing
  to those who have them as any direct sensible
  experience can be, and they are as a rule much
  more convincing than results established by mere
  logic ever areif you do have them and have them
  at all strongly, the probability is that you
  cannot help regarding them as genuine perceptions
  of truth, as revelations of a kind of reality
  which no adverse arguments, however unanswerable
  by you in words, can expel from your belief.
  (William James, 1902)

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Should Transcendental Experiences Necessarily be
Dismissed as Illusions?

• Why not similarly dismiss people belief that they
  have conscious experience at all?
• Cant be explained by science
• No independent evidence for it
• William James
• The first thing to bear in mind (especially if we
  ourselves belong to the clerico-academic-scientifi
  c type, the officially and conventionally
  correct type, the deadly respectable type,
  for which to ignore others is a besetting
  temptation) is that nothing can be more stupid
  then to bar out phenomena from our notice merely
  because we are incapable of taking part in
  anything like them ourselves

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Conclusions About Transcendental Experiences

• 1st person knowledge is critical to our judgments
  of what is real
• Numerous people through out history have had
  similar transcendental experiences of presence of
  a higher consciousness which was as real as there
  experience of themselves
• Although clearly distortions of interpretation of
  these experiences would have to arise (much as
  people might differ about what exactly is in the
  the magic eye image) we should be cautious to
  dismiss such experiences out of hand

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Lessons from Modern Physics

• There is a lot we still do not understand
• Quantum mechanics is well described but remains
  unexplained
• Previously impossible supernatural claims now
  seem possible
• Time travel (worm holes)
• Action at a distance
• Parallel universes
• Additional dimensions of reality
• Importance of observation
• The manner of observation appears to influence
  outcomes
• Waves vs. particles

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Hard Problem of Consciousness

• Science is still completely unable to explain how
  experience emerges from matter (Chalmers)
• The existence of consciousness is ultimately more
  certain than the existence of the material world
• thus the biggest mystery is no longer
  consciousness but the objective physical world,
  which is never directly experienced but is only
  inferred on the basis of order and correlations
  within subjective experience (Hut and Shepard,
  1996)

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Is Consciousness Fundamental?

• Toward this end, I propose that conscious
  experience be considered a fundamental feature,
  irreducible to anything more basic In the 19th
  century it turned out that electromagnetic
  phenomena could not be explained in terms of
  previously known principles. As a consequence,
  scientists introduced electromagnetic charge as a
  new fundamental entitysimilar reasoning should
  be applied to consciousness. If existing
  fundamental theories cannot encompass it, then
  some- thing new is required. (Chalmers, 2002)
• Nothing in physics prevents us from adding a
  space of elements of consciousness to the
  natural world consisting of mass-energy, space
  time, and informational states. This hypothesis
  would open the possibility that consciousness may
  exist by itself, even in the absence of matter,
  just like gravitational waves, excitation of
  space, may exist in the absence of protons and
  electrons (Wallace, 2007)
• Is it possible that consciousness, like space
  time, has its own intrinsic degree of freedom,
  and that neglecting these will lead to a
  description of the universe that is fundamentally
  incomplete. What if our perceptions are real
  as (or maybe, in a certain sense, are even more
  real) than material objects? Stanford Physicist
  Andrei Linde

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If Consciousness Is Fundamental, Then What Is It?

• You are entering another dimension. A dimension
  not of space or of time but of mind
• Rod Serling

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The Power of Additional Dimensions

• 1884 Edwin A. Abbott

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A 3 Dimensional Sphere Visits 2 Dimension Flatland
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Since Flatland

• Science has repeatedly found that postulating
  additional dimensions can (potentially) resolve
  anomalies
• Relativity theory
• Treats time as a 4th dimension of space
• Later introduced a 5th dimension
• we ascribe physical reality to the fifth
  dimension. Einstein and Bergmann (1938).
• String theory
• Postulated an additional 6 micro-dimensions
• Recently Whitten postulated an additional 11th
  dimension in order to reconcile five different
  competing theories.
• Concept of Branes introduces large scale
  additional physical dimensions and parallel
  universes

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Might Consciousness Extend in an Additional
Dimension of Reality?

• It is therefore quite in keeping with these
  trends in physics to suggest that consciousness
  is located in its own brane further external to
  the dimensions of the physical world. (Smithies,
  2005)
• Physics itself recognizes no special moment
  called nowthe moment that acts as the focus of
  becoming and divides the past from the
  future. In four-dimensional space-time nothing
  changes, there is no flow of time, everything
  simply is . . . It is only in consciousness that
  we come across the particular time known as now
  . . . It is only in the context of mental time
  that it makes sense to say that all of physical
  space-time is. One might even go so far as to say
  that it is unfortunate that such dissimilar
  entities as physical time and mental time should
  carry the same name! (Stannard , 1987)
• if we assume one additional spatial dimension
  beside the three we can observe, and if we
  suppose that our field of observation at any one
  moment is confined to the content of a 3,4-fold
  which moves uniformly at right angles to itself
  along a straight line in the 3,4-fold, then
  there is no need to assume any other motion in
  the universe. This one uniform rectilinear motion
  of the observers field of observation, together
  with the purely geometrical properties of the
  stationary material threads in the four-fold,
  will account for all the various observed motions
  (Brane, 1953)

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Block Universe and Mental Time

• Could consciousness be a wave through a dimension
  of mental time in a block universe

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Depicting Consciousness as Moving Through a
Dimension of Mental Time
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Depicting Consciousness as Moving Through a
Dimension of Mental Time
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Just the Beginning of a Dynamic Visual Model of
Consciousness

• Future versions could incorporate
• Branching
• Enabling multiple possible futures
• Multiple trails
• Enabling depiction of paths of individuals
• Multiple levels of zooming
• Enabling ability to see individual paths or
  relationship between paths
• Individuals controlling direction by where they
  look
• Enabling model of free will
• Implementation in virtual reality environments

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Implications of a Dimensional Theory of
Consciousness

• Provides framework for integrating a non-material
  view of consciousness within a scientifically
  grounded framework
• Potentially offers way to conceptualize
• The nature of time
• Impact of observation
• Entanglements
• Pre-cognition
• Free will
• The impact of intention
• May lead to empirically testable predictions
• Or may simply represent an ultimately ill fated
  attempt to illustrate the type of bolder models
  we need to consider

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The Last Word

• William James
• Thus the divorce between scientists and religious
  facts may not necessarily be as eternal as first
  sight seemsthe final human opinion may, in
  short, now impossible to foresee, revert to the
  more personal style, just as any path of progress
  may follow a spiral rather then a straight line,
  the impersonal view of science might one day
  appear as having been a temporarily useful
  eccentricity rather than a definitively
  triumphant position which the sectarian scientist
  at present confidently announces it to be.