Quotes About Consciousness

Please remember that Dr. Mermin's position differs from my claim, which holds that the moon does not appear in our observed universe until somebody looks, but I do not assert we can make meaningful assertions about either existence or non-existence in the real universe and can only make meaningful utterances after somebody looks at the observed universe.

If you look at your watch, realize you still don't know the time, and look again, were you strictly speaking awake the first time you looked?

Such self-referential truths are valid for only one person at a time, or one group of persons, and do not refer to anything but the nervous system or nervous systems of those who espouse them. This does not mean that they are false, but only that they are even more relative (and subjective) than legal proofs, for instance, and that they are very, very different from scientific or mathematical truths.

Pure Reason, however, derives from axioms which can neither be proven nor disproven. These axioms appear in consciousness from a level of pre-logical apprehension in which we might as well be gesticulating and pointing — or waving sticks in the air like Zen Masters — instead of talking, because we are trying to indicate or invoke something that exists before words and categories.

Consciousness is not a given, or a fact. Our mode of consciousness seems historically to have been determined by neurological (unconscious) habits. When we become aware of this, and struggle against the inertia of habit, consciousness continually mutates, becomes less particle-like and fixed, spreads like a flowing wave. It can move between the poles of pure in-DIVIDE-ualism and pure in-UNITE-ualism, and between many other poles, and can become increasingly creative and self-chosen.

1. Thou shalt not force thy neighbor to alter his consciousness. 2. Thou shalt not prevent thy neighbor from altering his consciousness.

In the Real Universe we are re-active mechanisms; in the experienced world, we are creators, and The Real Universe is just another of our creations — a dangerous one, with a tendency to hypnotize us.

If we never describe anything as it is but only as it appears to our minds, we can never have a pure physics, but only neuro-physics — i.e., physics as known through the human nervous system. We can also never have pure philosophy, but only neuro-philosophy — philosophy as known through the human nervous system. And we can never have pure neurology but only neuro-neurology — neurology as known through the human nervous system . . .

The same super-synergy appears in Dr. Bohm's attempts to describe his implicate order in words. However clear his math, his words begin to sound Chinese when he says the implicate order does not consist of mind'' but that it has mind-like qualities.

A popular fallacy holds that there are no non-objective realities: that objective reality is the "only" reality. The error of this view can clearly be seen when one contemplates the range of non-objective realities encountered and endured by different people on ordinary days, without any occult operations being performed at all:

Once you have given up asking "what day is it?" you will soon find it easy to give up asking what anything really "is." Then, in Melville's fine phrase, you can strike through the mask — pierce the veil of cultural conditioning (emic tunnel-reality) and see and hear with your own eyes and ears. In the words of a great poet, Don't believe the human eye In sunlight or in shade: The shadow-show of sight and sense Is the Devil's masquerade.

In existential experienced life, we notice that we are making bets and choices all the time, and are responsible for being alert and aware enough to make them intelligently and to revise them when necessary. We cannot blame everything on The Real Universe, since it is only a model we have created to deal with experienced life. If the model is not good enough, we do not blame it but revise and improve it.

Since the mechanical bio-chemical reflexes on this level remain invisible (and cannot even reach translation onto the verbal level except in an altered state of consciousness, such as hypnosis, or under certain drugs), this hard-wired infantile information system controls all later information systems (or selves) without the knowledge of the conscious ego.

Whatever is going on around you, your experienced reality-tunnel is still a synergetic product of both internal and external environments (set and setting). You do not "create your own reality," as Pop Mysticism says, but you create the larger part of it by how you evaluate, respond and give "meaning" to what happens. Your freedom is much, much greater than you realize until you start experimenting with alternative reality-tunnels and rapid brain change.

Metaprogramming or neurological self-criticism, developed as a habit to replace the old habit of wandering off to Real Universes, creates that kind of ecstasy more and more frequently, and it appears that one has never been using one's brain before but only misusing it.

Of course, if consciousness consisted of nothing but this undifferentiated tapioca of timeless, spaceless software, we would have no individuality, no center, no Self.

Concretely, two people can be in the same existential situation but experience two very, very different reality-tunnels.

1) We cannot make meaningful statements about some assumed real universe, or some deep reality underlying this universe, or some true reality, etc., apart from ourselves and our nervous systems and other instruments.

2) Any meaningful scientific or existential or phenomenological statement reports on how our nervous systems or other instruments have recorded some event or events in space-time.

Once again, it appears that the materialist model of mechanical consciousness covers some but not all experience, and it excludes precisely that part of experience which makes us human, esthetic, moral and responsible beings. One may suspect that this is why the materialist age has become increasingly inhuman, ugly, amoral and blindly irresponsible.

Sigismundo Celine, in the woods of Ohio, meditated. To him all phenomena were real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense.

We have made a beautiful (we hope beautiful) model of consciousness in terms of brain hardware and software. Now we need to remember again that, while the brain can be modeled by a computer, the model is never the whole system. The model-maker or metaprogrammer is bigger than the model or program.

is both amusing and frightening. It reminds us that each of us sees the world through perceptual structures (biochemical- neurological) which were laid down accidentally in our earliest moments. It raises the uneasy suspicion that...we may be simply chasing the particular Ping-Pong balls which, at those sensitive shutter moments, had been imprinted on our cortical film.

Personally, I don't trust mystic experiences, including my own — although I seek them and enjoy them. I think Altered Consciousness offers new ways of perceiving/conceiving and should start philosophical investigation, not stop it.