Being a Higgs Boson

Oxalis Triangularis

Let's talk to ourselves about the Higgs Field and the Higgs Boson. What are they? The Higgs Field is everywhere. It permeates all of space, which would be the entire universe. The Higgs Boson is a particle that gambols around the Higgs Field causing the field to ripple. When innocent little free particles, unencumbered and  travelling at the speed of light encounter the Higgs ripple they slow down, and by doing so they gather mass, and that's it, they're doomed. So, if you and I were young, free particles heading south for the grape harvest or whatever, the Higgs Boson is like a hot chick or a billionaire on a bar stool. We slow down to give them a sniff, and as a result of temptation we stop being free particles. The point about the Higgs Boson is this: it's not just some idle after hours moment in the back room, the ripple the Higgs Boson makes in the Higgs Field is observable and has been observed. In 2013, a year after the Higgs phenomena was observed, Higgs and Englert were recognized for a contribution they'd made to physics almost fifty years early in 1964 when they first proposed the existence of the Higgs Field and the Higgs Boson. Mathematicians and physicists, including Max Plank (died 1947), Erwin Schrödinger (died 1961), David Bohm (died 1992) and Roger Penrose (94 years old) have all cast their genius into the suggestion that consciousness is, in one way or another, as ubiquitous as the Higgs Field. Whether by consciousness they mean the raw experience of being alive, the Hard Problem, remains uncertain.

What Might it be Like to be a Bat?

 

Sassafras

Of the theories addressing consciousness an American student of nonviolence called Michael Nagler proposed that consciousness,  Chalmers' Hard Problem, didn't come from inside each one of us, it came from outside us and we tuned into it. In Michael's view consciousness is very much the primary presence in the universe. A substrate, a fundamental layer. So for Micheal the call is for a new story, a rewriting of our understanding that incorporates a universal that includes the stars and planets, everything, we all share.  Another chap, a man called Thomas Nagel, like Chalmers agreed that the Hard Problem was well outside the realm of science, and if it was a shared substrate of some sort it would still remain subject to the gap between subjective and objective. Thomas asked us to imagine what it might be like to be a bat. Here we can understand the objective science, we might imagine the world of a bat, but we'd never share the subjective experience of being a bat. And for that matter, although I might want to, I can never experience being you.

Definitions of Consciousness

Here we go

One of the finer points about being in the final lap there's no need to tread lightly on subjects such as the Definition of Consciousness. A simple definition goes something like: "Aware of self and one's surroundings." Pretty much a Being in Time and Place. There's an Australian who addresses consciousness by considering a definition of consciousness in terms of two problems. Easy Problems and The Hard Problem. The Easy Problems can theoretically be solved by using science. These Easy Problems include functional aspects and how they work, such as being able to react to the environment, an exploration of  cognitive systems, ability to control behavior. You know, simple stuff that so many of us struggle with. The Hard Problem is an explanation for the subjective experience of, for example, eating a hard boiled egg, or deciding to acquire a red beaky cap. Our Australian suggests there is no scientific answer to the Hard Problem. 

The Inadequacy of Rapture as an Ending

A rendering of a black hole in the Magellanic Cloud

You can think of it as a shadow cast by the subconscious over consciousness or as the shadow cast by the conscious over subconsciousness. Either way we all die, either way there's a polarity or a duality and either way consciousness requires a borrowed understanding and a shared definition. A man called Robert Lawrence Kuhn, not that nice man Thomas 'paradigm' Kuhn, but Robert 'I'm fabulous' Kuhn who amongst other things is an Investment Banker, a television personality and an expert on China, concluded that a world taxonomy of consciousness would have to include nearly three hundred theories of consciousness. The majority of those theories suggest a duality. Why bother? I'll tell you. Jung, in a very Immanuel 'let's not bother to prove this' Kantian way, decided we people shared a collective unconsciousness out of which it was possible to extract archetypes. As a result Jung was able to see a polarity between the conscious and subconscious, and out of this polarity he was able to usefully address neurosis, which I, without any evidence, suspect Jung preferred to think of as hysteria. Strictly speaking a monist theory of consciousness would be obliged to posit a universal consciousness, that would include plants, galaxies, the universe, everything. A monist theory would consider the end of the universe as the completion of the whole and the return to unity. So, as it stands, the big bang was our moment of birth, then when the universe reaches a limit to expansion, gravity pulls us back to our beginning and we end in the belly of a massive black hole. As a dying man I'm coming to the end of my ability to tolerate living in a shadow and I'm pretty damn sure my subconscious is too which is basically why neither of us gives a hoot for straight lines any longer.