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Immortality, Part Two
Prisms, Zombies, and Occam's Razor (July 17th, 2008)
(Revised, February 3rd, 2010)
"We are all the same person trying to shake hands with our self."
Wavy Gravy
"How can you be in two places at once when you're not anywhere at all?"
The Firesign Theatre
In
Part One
, I suggested that you won't survive the next moment, let alone death. Some immortality! The paradox: if the Transporter duplicates your body perfectly, which "you" would embody your consciousness?
Naturally, my favorite resolution is a strange one: the question is absurd because, although consciousness exists, "your" consciousness does not! Your mind is local, creating an illusion that consciousness is local.
We sometimes talk about human brains as if they were machines that generate consciousness. Maybe our brains are more like prisms, blocking and refracting an undifferentiated consciousness that radiates like light throughout the universe, or that simply
is
the universe. This idea is disturbing, perhaps incomprehensible, as long as we identify with the prism rather than the light. But sometimes the illusion of separation falls away (for hippies, anyway), and what I'm trying to express becomes intuitively clear. Then death doesn't seem so encompassing or frightening.
Scientific thinkers may object that this is false comfort, magical thinking: I am resorting to an invisible agent (undifferentiated consciousness), making assertions that can't be tested, and ignoring
Occam's Razor
. If we posit forces that can't be observed to support unnecessarily complicated hypotheses that can't be falsified, we might as well believe that Jehovah created the universe 6000 years ago. But in this case, "common sense" explanations don't do any better.
What is consciousness for? Why didn't evolution result in complex meat robots, like humans and other animals in most observable ways, but without conscious experience? Meat robots could evolve to think, plan, form complex intentions, and evaluate the intentions of other meat robots, all without experiencing anything. How does a subjective world arise? Many scientific thinkers who ponder consciousness identify with thinking so completely that they think thinking accounts for consciousness. But recent neuroscience makes it pretty clear that any given cognitive function can occur without conscious awareness, prompting philosophers to brood about
zombies
! Todd Moody, for instance, wonders what
conversations with zombies
might reveal.
Big brains, learning, and thinking all help to enable complex behavior. But the great mystery contained in the tiny sentence "I am." is mostly in the "am." The complex brain functions creating the construct "I" might indeed be adaptive. But "I" could think about everything I can now think about without the
experience
of thinking, let alone the experience of joy, grief, love, fun. True, meat robots couldn't think about experience itself (joy, grief, etc.) without having any, but meat robots could think about anything adaptive that those subjective states might suggest. Yet somehow I actually experience life, and I presume you do, too. In fact, experience is the one thing that certainly exists,
a priori
, whereas the ego structure that calls itself "I" may be an illusion. Most wonderful, and, in my opinion, still a conundrum for science.
Back to Occam's Razor, then. The common sense view: life evolved, and consciousness somehow evolved with it (a mystery). My view: consciousness somehow exists (a mystery), and intelligent life differentiates it. William of Ockham might call it a draw.
And back, a little further, to the paradox. In a moment, the Star Trek transporter will beam you down to Organia. The transporter will also leave you where you are. What will your next moment of experience be? Will you find yourself on Organia, or will you still be on the transporter platform? Here is a strange answer: You will be on Organia, you will be on the transporter platform. You are the sublime hum of am-ness that peeks through every sentient being. Enjoy the prisms and kaleidoscopes, but don't get carried away! The being you imagine yourself to be at this moment is real enough, but your identification with that being, that history, that future, is an illusion. How can you be in two places at once? You were never here in the first place. You are immortal.
Denizens of Marin County might equate my perspective with a belief in a solicitous God, or a stake in the workings of astrology, psychic readings, crystal healing, and all manner of synchronicity. For all I know, every oracular system is perfectly sound. But my sense of a conscious universe doesn't lead me there. When I'm happiest, no God intervenes on my behalf, no esoteric knowledge shows the way. Quite the opposite: the prism is as ephemeral as a ripple on the pond, and none of its occlusions (none of "my" worries) could possibly trouble the dancing stars. Hallelujah!
Klatch of other Strange Thoughts:
2009-08-25 -- The Numinous Shore of Partial Understanding: A Scenic Ride with the Base of Natural Logarithms
2009-03-17 -- Background Food: A Modest Business Proposal
2009-02-07 -- A Defense of Massive Conspiracy Theories: ...from one of the few who doubts them all.
2008-06-07 -- Immortality, Part One: Identity, Continuity, and the Star Trek Transporter
2008-05-14 -- Tripping out of Trees
2008-05-08 -- Color Octaves: Sight, Sound, and Elegant Recurrence