You Are Fundamental: A Revolutionary New View of Consciousness E-Book

H Chris Ransford

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 116

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Most studies of consciousness proceed from a standpoint where external reality already pre-exists. As such, these studies would be inherently unable to recognize it if consciousness in fact arose at the same level where reality itself takes its source—at the level where wave functions collapse and thereby generate the fabric of material reality. At the same time, a number of compelling contemporary interpretations of physics strongly hint that consciousness must most likely be a fundamental constituent of reality, that it cannot be emergent, and that the role of the brain is limited to the harnessing, optimization, and deployment of consciousness within material reality—aka the realm of collapsed wave functions. This view seems to be also supported by a range of credible observations made by a number of credible professionals who operate at the margins of studies of consciousness, such as psychiatrists, who occasionally observe puzzling cases involving unusual phenomena related to consciousness. If we back-engineer the inevitable macroscopic consequences of a consciousness born at the same level as the building blocks of physical reality itself, we discover that such marginal phenomena become then fully explainable. The book offers readers new insights into interpretations of current research in physics and enables readers without a background in physics to understand the implications and their relevance to our understanding of consciousness.

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

Praise for H Chris Ransford’s books

“Chris Ransford’s book presents a very specific and original viewpoint”

Paul Marshall, author of The Living Mirror: Images of Reality in Science and Mysticism

A very interesting and enjoyable read for both experts and lay readers.

Christian Corda, Ph.D. (Physics), School of Research, Santa Rita, San Pietro Infine, Italy.

A great book that offers a fresh perspective. I strongly recommend it

Marco Piccinini, Ph.D. (Chemistry), Belgium.

I find this book fascinating and a worthy contribution to an understanding of reality

Sally K. Severino, Professor Emeritus of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center (USA)

This book makes us visit some really strange, sometimes even weird parts of our world; Alice's promenade in Wonderland appears as quite boring once the reading of the book is finished.

Charles Hirlimann, Ph.D. , (Physics) (France)

I found this book to be a tightly reasoned, very readable, and insightful discussion

Greg Matloff, Professor of astronomy & physics, City University of New York (USA)

H Chris Ransford’s bridging of mathematics and physics is quite compelling

Hal Puthoff, PhD, (Physics), EarthTech International (USA)

Fascinating

Cosmin Tudor CIOCAN, PhD, (Theology,) (Romania)

Note. Some paragraphs are indented. Their purpose is to provide further relevant background, and thereby address possible further questions that may arise within the context. These indented passages can however be skipped, without impairing comprehension of the rest of the text.

Table of Contents

Foreword

1 Who are you?

2 Different Realms

3 Unexpected Evidence?

4 Answering the Questions

5 Epilogue: An Experimental Clincher?

Further Reading

Acknowledgments

Author’s Bio

Foreword

The problem of consciousness is, as H. Chris Ransford notes in this excellent book, one of the few remaining wild frontiers of science. I’d go so far as to say that it’s THE biggest remaining challenge for science, bigger than where all the dark matter is or whether string theory describes the universe or is just a mathematical fancy. Until recently we didn’t even have a clue how to begin studying consciousness. In my final year as a psychology student at the University of Cambridge I was told that it wasn’t a proper subject of study for a gentleman.

What is “the problem of consciousness”? It’s how awareness and personal experience arise from the brain. How does our brain, a pink mass of brain cells, give rise to the feeling of being me? Why do the color red, the sensation of pain, the taste of a good dinner, all feel like something to me?

I could go on refining the problem but let the author of this fine book do the work for me. The attack on the subject involves many things—how is awareness related to perception, attention, and memory, for example, but the essence, what David Chalmers has famously called the “hard problem”, is why it feels like something to be you. Who, indeed, are you?

On occasion I despair whether the hard problem is indeed capable of being attacked any further by science. Mind and experience are such very different things from brain and matter that I wonder whether it even makes sense to talk about relating them. On a very bad day I am a new mysterian, believing that the hard problem cannot be solved by humans or our science. Our brains just aren’t equipped with the machinery necessary to make sense of it all. On a very, very bad day I think that no science is capable of providing a solution: there is no alien civilisation anywhere in the universe that even properly understands the problem, let alone has answered it, and there never will be.

Chris Ransford is much more optimistic than me and is definitely not a mysterian. Chris, a physicist, is a knowledgeable an enthusiastic author who argues that physics, particularly quantum mechanics, provides the answers to the hard problem of consciousness—and provides them now.

I enjoyed reading this book immensely, learned a great deal from it, and was provoked to think about many of the issues touched upon in a way I hadn’t before. As is the case with most books outside one’s area of expertise, I can’t say I understood all of the maths and physics behind every point, or agree with everything, but it’s obvious to me that the book makes a significant contribution to the area. Some of the conclusions about the nature of consciousness and what is possible in the universe may be surprising, but they follow from the argument. Understanding physics properly of course depends on understanding mathematics, and Chris does an admirable job of presenting complex ideas in physics without giving a single equation. The ideas are difficult and complex—how could the solution to the problem of consciousness be otherwise?—but the book does a great job of explaining them

In the end I must admit I still have nagging doubts, mostly because to be convinced of the argument would depend on understanding the underlying mathematics, and this book is aimed at the lay reader. I don’t believe the philosopher Daniel Dennett and others are right to say that the hard problem is a non-problem, or has already been solved, and I am certain that psychology alone is incapable of solving it. Solving the hard problem of consciousness will involve a radical restructuring of the way we think about science and the universe. Connecting physics, psychology, and neuroscience, while avoiding thinking about science in a completely reductionist way, is my opinion the only way forward, and this significant book makes a major contribution towards progress.

Trevor Harley

Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University of Dundee, UK, and Fellow of the British Psychological Society

Author of “The Science of Consciousness”

www.trevorharley.com

1Who are you?

The most cursory survey of available published studies on consciousness throws up tens of thousands of books with the word ‘consciousness’ in their title, with more on the way, not to mention other non-fiction books featuring words like ‘brain’ or ‘mind’ in their title, along with reams of academic papers and articles on the theme. Yet, none of the many proffered answers to the age-old question of what consciousness is, ever seems to quite jell with the ring of truth. As biologist Richard Dawkins once observed, “Nobody writes books about Newtonian mechanics anymore, because it’s all well-understood by now. Everybody writes books about consciousness, which just goes to show that we don’t understand it yet.” But as we’ll see, the answer to the question might be both simpler and slightly more complicated than has typically been suspected so far.

The ‘simpler’ side is readily perceivable by everyone. It is deeply personal and, as such, subjective. Should there exist broad statistical agreement between the lived experiences and resulting ideas as to the nature of consciousness by most, then this subjective side could still take on a measure of objective value in answering some of the basic questions related to consciousness, especially the hotly-debated question of whether there exists such a thing as selfhood, i.e. an identifiable consciousness, continuous over time, affected by but ultimately independent of the environment, or, as some insist, is everyone rather just the collective upshot of cells responding at every instant to their ever-changing environment, and a core, recognizable continuity of being does not exist? The slightly more complicated side will consist in a wholly new hard science-based approach.

For various reasons, we seem to have been looking for consciousness in all the wrong places. A measure of cognitive bias may have played a part—i.e., hidden or implicit assumptions which may have colored our studies of consciousness, some of which we will encounter as we examine consciousness more in-depth. Another reason may be that until recently we either overlooked or even lacked the proper scientific toolbox to investigate consciousness properly.

In the resulting absence of alternatives, consciousness has often been mistaken for its consequences, or even been willfully defined by them—the lived experience of perceiving inputs and stimuli from the outside world, without further heed being paid to the core thing, the very thing that perceives inputs from its environment in the first place. Selfhood cannot be mixed up, at least not without further analysis, with the operation of the peripherals with which the body, the brain, and consciousness itself live a life experience—i.e., the input processing tools through which external stimuli come in and are processed, consisting both of sensors, such as eyes for vision, skin for touch, etc., and of processing utilities, i.e. the dedicated circuits inside the brain that make sense of the stream of inputs coming in from the various sensors, and use them to help the body navigate its material environment as efficiently and safely as possible.

You may quite legitimately prefer to think that who you are deep down has nothing to do with the sum total of the ceaseless stream of ‘qualia’—of stimuli and experiences—coming in, with whether or not you ever experienced, say, the color orange or just about any other stimulus, and that what we’d call your ‘consciousness’ is something different, a core essence of you, and that that essence exists of and in itself. For example, in the theoretical case of someone who would be affected from birth by a Korsakoff-like condition of memory loss, we can surmise that there is still somebody there, a core consciousness living this experience of absence of memory, rather than simply no one—a hypothesis which we’ll soon investigate from the vantage point of the laws of the science best able to probe deep-down reality: physics.

Since the worst way to do science is to put out statements without proof, no matter whether they appear self-evident or, alternatively, counterintuitive, let us for the time being assume a disconnect between experience and consciousness, and view this disconnect for the assumption it is, until we manage to prove it a bit further on—mathematically, no less, but bear with me here. At this point it’s worth noting that US Psychiatrist Bruce Perry and others have dealt with severely ill-treated children, including some exposed to virtually zero stimuli during their abused childhoods (1), a circumstance that can hardly begin to mean that such children were somehow not fully people, endowed with full-fledged human consciousnesses.

A first rough-and-ready way to try and get a sense of the deep core of you is to pause and reflect back to your earliest memory or memories (assuming that you do not suffer from some memory ailment, and the special case of childhood trauma-induced memory loss will be examined later). Maybe you still remember a very first memory, or perhaps the passage of time has blurred out the details of some of your deeper past and you may only recall a few early impressions, no longer sure which one is the very first memory of your life ̶ perhaps walking in the park with your parents, playing in a sandbox, or something else. But no matter: looking back across all those years, there is one thing you almost certainly feel deep down, to wit that the person that lived through and experienced that very first and fading memory, was one hundred percent, incontrovertibly you, the selfsame person who is right now reading these lines. As British rapper and celebrity Nzube Olisaebuka Udezue (better known by his stage name Zuby) once put it, posting side by side on social media pictures of him as a toddler and now, ‘still the exact same dude’.

Time, measured in decades, has passed since your first remembered experience. Since those first, innocent days, you have taken in and assimilated an immense volume of life experience and information of which you did not have, back then, the faintest inkling. In volume terms, you have multiplied the volume of knowledge, information and data you have absorbed and become intimately familiar with, by millions. You have immensely grown and evolved, perhaps ‘changed your mind’ on important issues a few times, shed some ideas and notions you once held dear (you may have been politically left- or right-leaning once, and may have since then changed some of those views, perhaps you used to support some sports club at some point you which no longer care for, your musical and other tastes may have drastically evolved), and you may have changed in myriad other ways.

Very few (some 0.2% or less) of the cells that made up your body then are still around inside your current body. These holdout cells are mostly found in a few privileged locations in your body—your heart muscle, the retinas of your eyes, your brain.

In your brain, all of these cells have undergone such radical transformations that they might just as well be new—they have all been entirely repurposed many times, as they continuously adapt to keep up with their task of meeting the evolving challenges of life in the material world. Since the earliest days of your existence, they have profoundly altered physically, mainly by growing far many more dendrites than they possessed back then, by establishing slews of new connections with neighboring neurons, by becoming enrolled into different neuron clusters dedicated to empowering certain learned tasks, some of which have become second nature—such as riding a bicycle or speaking a new tongue, and they have also eliminated and indeed sometimes cannibalized some of the cells that were present then but which have since not been put to fruitful use, and which have then been ruthlessly eliminated, in the permanent competition for relevance that characterizes the life of brain cells (2). At the same time as your brain keeps shedding cells it no longer uses, it also keeps making new ones (3).

All of the manifold and ever-shifting stimuli that have accompanied the evolving you since you lived the instant of your earliest memory—all that you have learnt and experienced, the character traits that have at least temporarily jelled, the ideas that you once held dear and then turned your back on—all this does not change a thing: