Michael Prescott's Blog

Dream ticket

Now that Barack Obama has apparently secured the Democratic Party's nomination for president, there has been some speculation about an Obama/Hillary Clinton ticket. Maybe this will happen, maybe it won't. But there has also been speculation - some of it serious, most of it not - about another possible dream ticket that I find much more interesting:

McCain/Clinton.

Is this possible? In the practical world of politics, where the pols and their advisers rarely think outside the box, almost certainly not. But in theory there is no good reason why it couldn't happen. McCain and Hillary agree more than they disagree. Their only major point of contention is how to handle the waning months of the Iraq War - a rapid drawdown of US forces, or perseverance in the Surge for a little longer. That's a major issue, to be sure, but on most other things they are not that far apart. McCain is a relatively liberal Republican; Hillary has remade herself as a centrist Democrat. Their ideological differences are not any greater than those that divided Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in 1980, when they ran together and won overwhelmingly. Hillary has garnered a great deal of respect among conservatives for her gritty, never-say-die style of campaigning. McCain is admired by many liberals for his willingness to confront the GOP establishment. Both senators are experienced, tested, and tough. 

And a McCain/Hillary ticket would be a powerhouse. I believe it would sweep the nation, amass a gigantic tally of Electoral College votes, and help unify the country in a post-partisan administration that would determinedly seek the political center, eschewing the divisive radicalism of the far left and the far right.

Again, it will probably never come to pass. Politicians are not this creative or this bold. They have their party fiefdoms, which they jealously guard.

It would be cool, though. Really cool. It might even get people believing in politics again.

The bonfire

Last night, reading some notes I wrote last year, I noticed one in which I jotted down the idea that information can exist only in consciousness - so if information is the essence of the cosmos, then the cosmos must exist in consciousness. In other words, the information "2 + 2 = 4" can exist only in some mind. If the physical universe is organized around information - such as the gravitational coupling constant, the strong nuclear force coupling constant, the weak nuclear force coupling constant, and the electromagnetic coupling constant, among many other relationships - then it seems logically inescapable that the universe exists in consciousness.

Of course, it might be argued that these various constants do not exist as information until they are observed by us. Thus, as information, they exist only in our own minds. But this argument overlooks the fact that these constants are not arbitrary, but rather appear to be very precisely fine-tuned to produce a functioning, stable, complex universe. They are like ground rules laid down with a great deal of care, much like the instructions in a recipe. As such, they really do constitute information, no less than a recipe or a formula or a set of blueprints.

Again, one might quibble that the universe is a product of consciousness, rather than being in consciousness, just as a meal is the product of a recipe or a house is the product of a blueprint. But in this case, I wonder if the distinction is even meaningful. For someone to build a table, the thought of the table must first exist in consciousness. Then the thought is translated into physical form. The resulting table could not have come into existence apart from consciousness, and it only has a function, meaning, and identity within consciousness. So basically, the table is conceived within consciousness and, in its capacity as a table, it exists and functions only within consciousness.

The physical universe seemingly begins as a conception -- a mental conception -- and it has meaning, function, and identity only when viewed from the perspective of consciousness. Without consciousness, then, there could be no universe because there would be no organizing ideas (such as the constants mentioned above) and no purpose (teleology). In Aristotelian terms, there would be no formal cause and no final cause.

The long and short of it is that it doesn't matter very much if the universe is seen as pure Idea or as the manifestation or implementation of Idea in physical terms. The distinction is largely academic, although it is the issue at the heart of the debate between idealism and dualism. Either way, the universe begins with and embodies an idea (or set of ideas), and can be understood and appreciated only in terms of that idea(s). What matters is that Idea as such logically precedes the universe, and consciousness logically precedes (or at least it is coeval with) Idea.

At this point, the million-dollar question becomes: What is the relationship between this cosmic consciousness and our own? Are they one and the same? Or are our own minds a small offshoot of a larger whole? Or is there no connection at all, and do we merely flatter ourselves in imagining that there is?

I don't pretend to really know, but consider the following image as one possible illustration. Picture a blazing bonfire lighting a dark night. A procession of people pass by, each one holding a candle to the bonfire and tapping its flame. Each candle now burns with a light of its own, a much dimmer light, of which the bonfire is the ultimate source.

Cosmic consciousness is the bonfire that illuminates the physical world. Each individual consciousness is a candle lit from that bonfire, tapping that flame.

A possible weakness of this image is that it seems to suggest that the bonfire and the candles are separate from each other, when mystics and others who have pondered these matters deeply will tell us that all consciousness is ultimately connected or even indivisible. But this difficulty may be more apparent than real.

Here it may be relevant to glance at the "problem of universals" (perhaps more accurately characterized as the "problem of properties"). This old philosophical conundrum asks whether the same property observed in two different places is really the same thing or two different things. For instance, if we observe the property of whiteness in a picket fence and in a sheet of typing paper, is the whiteness the same in each case, or different? It is possible to argue that the property is always the same. In this particular case, we could argue that the fire of the candle is logically indistinguishable from the fire of the bonfire. They are actually the same fire, merely observed in two different places (or in two different respects).

As a side note, the quantum physicists' idea of non-locality may be useful in suggesting how two properties can actually be one and the same, even when apparently separated by space; in a non-local universe, space and separation are an illusion (or at least they are not an aspect of fundamental reality).

We could say, then, that the property (or quality) of consciousness is always the same, and that its apparent dispersal among many separate entities is no more real than the apparent dispersal of whiteness among the various entities possessing that property.

So what are we left with? The universe is organized around information; information exists only within consciousness; so the universe is logically dependent on consciousness to exist. Our own consciousness may be thought of as a small flame lit from a larger fire, but just as the property of fire is the same in all cases, so the property of consciousness is always and everywhere the same.

A man in full

Though I hesitate to link to this, because I fear it may make some people's heads explode a la David Cronenberg's Scanners, I'll do it anyway. It's the last installment of a five-part interview with Tom Wolfe, whose Bonfire of the Vanities is the definitive American novel of the 1980s. Wolfe is a national treasure, always refreshingly unpretentious and optimistic, and never more so than when he sums up his thoughts on the next 800 years (!) of "American centuries."

As Wolfe puts it, "Be happy."   

Windbridge redux

FYI: My blog post "Words, Words, Words," a list of recommended titles on evidence for the afterlife, has been reprinted in the Windbridge Institute's newsletter, Winds of Change. If you'd like to take a look at the newsletter, please click here and then open the PDF file linked on that page.

The tree

My last post has inspired many interesting and helpful comments, one of which spurred me to a burst of poetic eloquence. I like it, so I'm putting it up as a separate blog entry. Be warned that, because of a sinus infection, I am currently taking prescription cough medicine laced with codeine; thus, what follows may be only the ravings of a fatigued and drug-addled brain.

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My best guess - which is only a guess - is that Mind does give rise to the physical cosmos, and that in some mysterious way our own individual minds are minuscule offshoots of this larger Mind.

Here's an image: There is a tree deeply rooted in good soil, with a profusion of leaves on its branches. Soil, roots, trunk, branches, and leaves are all one system, and when the leaves drop off they will return to the soil as nutrients. The soil is Universal Consciousness, the ground of being. The roots the means of translating the soil's stored energy into the form of a growing tree (i.e., translating Mind into physicality). The tree trunk and branches are the physical world. The leaves are our own individual consciousnesses, separate from each other, but grouped together, and fed by the same root system that supports the whole tree. And our ultimate fate is to drop from the branch, lose our form, rejoin the soil, and merge with the ground of being.

The trouble with idealism

I sort of want to be an idealist. Philosophically speaking, that is. I certainly don't want to be a materialist, and idealism is the main alternative to materialism (though dualism and neutral monism are other options).

The problem I have with idealism, though, is that it doesn't quite make sense to me. It doesn't quite click into place. According to idealism, consciousness creates the world. All the physical things around us, even our own bodies, are actually manifestations of consciousness.

This means, of course, that our brains are created by consciousness. After all, brains are part of the physical world, and idealism ascribes all of the physical world to consciousness.

But here's the rub. Clearly our own particular consciousness is tied to our own particular brain in very obvious ways. We see only through our own eyes, smell only through our own noses. We cannot see what someone in China is seeing, and he can't see what we see.

Our brains, then, seem to constrain our consciousness. They provide sharp limits to what we can know and perceive. These limits may not be absolute; remote viewers apparently can see places that their physical eyes have not gazed on; but such exceptions are rare and still controversial. For most of us, most of the time, our consciousness functions in lockstep with our brain.

But if the brain is only an illusion created by consciousness, then how can this be?

How can a mere appearance (the brain) constrain a fundamental reality (consciousness)? How can an object within consciousness constrain and delimit consciousness itself?

If this is too abstract, consider a slightly more "scientific" version of this idea. Karl Pribram and David Bohm developed the theory that the physical world is a holographic illusion projected out of a substrate of wave patterns. Only the wave patterns are real; everything else is appearance, a mere image. What projects this complex illusion? What makes wave patterns look like tables and chairs and palm trees and Sno-Cones? Well, it's the brain, we're told. The brain is the projector that transforms the wave-pattern substrate into the illusion of physical reality.

But wait. The brain is itself a physical object - which means, according to the theory, that it's a holographic illusion. So do we have one holographic illusion (the brain) projecting the rest of reality as a holographic illusion?

In actual holography, the image may be unreal (in the sense that it is only the appearance of the object portrayed), but the projecting beam of laser light that reconstructs the image is quite real. But in the holographic brain theory, we seem to have unreal brains producing (how?) an equally unreal cosmos.

In either case - whether the purely philosophical argument or the somewhat more scientific argument offered by Pribram and Bohm - there seems to be a fallacy at the heart of the story. Essentially, it's circular reasoning (or begging the question). There doesn't seem to be any place to start, which means there is no solid ground to stand on. Or at least that's how it's always seemed to me.

Any thoughts?