Descartes to Whitehead

Path

Baxter and I are prone to the idea that Descartes was a real hit with the ladies. He lived from March 1596 to the February of 1650. It was a transitional period for Europe and like all transitional periods there was war, religious strife, hell on earth, Galileo got into trouble with the inquisitions, it was all happening. At a young age Descartes became a mercenary for the Dutch Free State, he became a military engineer, he was a mathematician, a philosopher who inherited property which he sold and converted into bonds which allowed him to concentrate on his studies. He became an interesting chap who changed his name a lot, he lived in a pub with one of his girlfriends, had a child with someone's maid, he accused someone of plagiarizing his work and on it went. Meanwhile in mathematics he made the connection between algebra and geometry which was the precursor to Calculus. In philosophy, with his I think therefore I am, he introduced us all to the duality of the mind/body problem and when a number of Princesses read his books he became a must have in the Salons of Europe and Scandinavia.  Baxter's question is, "What did we think consciousness was  before Descartes?" Part of the answer can be surmised in two books by a Doctor of the Church, Saint Teresa of Avila.  The Way of Perfection written in 1583 and The Castle written in 1577, both written before Descartes was born. The Way of Perfection is all about how to pray, the object of the exercise being to develop a relationship with prayer that put you in a position to talk to God, which Teresa believed was through silence, no words required. The inspiration for The Castle came to Teresa through a vision from God himself. It was an account of exactly what happened when you died, the varies processes you went through and your meeting with the almighty, or in Teresa's case her husband, Jesus. In those days, outside of Europe, where the process of centralization was a long way from even beginning to think about running a course, places like Nova Scotia or Central Africa, the sun, the moon, the stars, the distant hills were  conscious. If you winked at them, they'd wink back. Then on February the fifteenth 1861, Alfred North Whitehead was born in a seaside town called Ramsgate in Kent, England, to a remarkably well adjusted family well cared for by cooks, nannies and maids, a family that included polo players, teachers, madrigals and vicars.  

Der Individuationsprozess.

Cat in a Grump

In 1916, Karl Jung wrote an essay, called The Structure of the Unconscious, in which he discussed his version of a collective unconscious. This collective unconscious wasn't a field, like a Higgs Field, it was inherited through the genes and was lodged in the mind, it was common to all people, it contained the building blocks of Jung's universal unconscious archetypes which contributed to the totality of a human mind, or what Jung called the Psyche. Jung's psyche and its outer world connection engages the idea of a constant interaction, interpreting and reinterpreting, a self regulation which attempts to produce a balance between the conscious, the unconscious mind and the Ego. The Ego is the raw experience of being in the world, or more gently, the Ego is your sense of self, the thing that says what about me. Also, and worth keeping in mind, the archetypes from the inherited unconscious self are sources of patterns for what Jung calls the Persona, the social mask we wear, the Shadow, our repressed side as well as the Anima and the Animus, or the female and the male side of our psyche. So there's a whole set of invisible things happening in our minds and when it comes to something like a field such as the Higgs Field, Jung sees an underlying layer, the Collective Unconscious, which doesn't encompass the universe, we inherit and share this layer with all other people, nowhere else. Life for us people, Jung argued, was a life long process of achieving a balanced integration of the personal and collective unconscious with that self centered jackass Jung called the Ego.  This process of integration Jung called Individuation, a word that comes directly from the Jung's book 'Der Individuationsprozess.' Got to love German Language. With us people, especially in the Western World, the idea of a consciousness that encompasses the universe as well as us people, can sometimes produce psychic upset which can lead to delusional as well as unfortunate behaviors. 

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.