Analogismoi Nine: Consciousness Matters

“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”  -Mark Twain

 

In Genesis, and throughout the biblical stories, we are presented with a world in which human consciousness is of paramount importance. The modern world has seen its share of objections to the idea that human consciousness matters from the Club of Rome types and environmentalist thinkers and, fair enough. I will give credit where credit is due and admit that it is a valid question.

On one level of analysis it is very easy to see human beings as bacteria like entities inhabiting an ecosystem of a small spinning planet that is orbiting a moderately sized star which is one of two hundred million stars in our relatively small galaxy of no account which is one of two trillion galaxies in the known observable universe. So yes, whether or not our conscious awareness is something of any real importance is a question which deserves being asked. In fact, I believe we can assume it was a question for the biblical authors as well. If it wasn’t a question, why would they bother not just mentioning it but putting it into such sharp focus in such a privileged place.

Where the Club of Rome, materialists, rational athiests and environmentalists go wrong is in the suggestion that it is not in any way significant. The question was valid…but the answer leaves much to be desired.

For starters, as far as we can tell human beings are the most complicated thing that exists. Despite thousands of years of interdisciplinary research including disciplines created just to research this question, we are no closer to an answer today than the authors of Genesis were some three thousand years ago. We know next to nothing about consciousness and how it works and less yet about how it came to be. The idea that it can merely be written off as inconsequential is poor thinking.

It is important to understand just how little the physical sciences have figured out about the universe. When you are thinking that there is some kind of scientific consensus on things as complicated as consciousness I want to turn your attention to dark matter and dark energy. Observations such as cosmic microwave background and galaxy survey as well as data from the Planck satellite informs our current understanding of the cosmos. As far as the scientific community is concerned the universe we inhabit is made of 27% dark matter and 68% dark energy. Neither dark matter nor dark energy can interact with any of the spectrums humans beings can experience. What does this mean? Our absolute best scientific research to date suggests that only 5% of the entire universe is something which humans have any actual access to. Seeing as how 95% of the universe is mysterious matter and energy we know nothing about, let’s not be too quick to let atheists tell us that consciousness is insignificant.

This is a good start, but let’s get into something particularly cool. Renowned physicist John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008) proposed the concept of a “participatory universe” in his 1978 lecture titled “Genesis and Observership”  and later developed the idea in his 1983 paper “Law Without Law” published in the book Quantum Theory and Measurement edited by Wheeler and Wojciech Hubert Zurek.

Let’s talk a little about John Wheeler’s concept of a participatory universe and then we will bring it back up when we get deeper into the story of Adam. According to Wheeler, consciousness plays a fundamental role in the

universe by actively participating in its creation and manifestation through observation. This is going to get a bit tricky, so hold on. Wheeler argued that reality is not pre-existing and independent but emerges from acts of measurement or questioning by conscious observers, retroactively influencing even past events in the cosmos. (Author’s aside, if you aren’t scratching your head thinking “how the hell can that be” then this is not the website for you).

A quick note, since Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) there has been a general consensus that space and time are not things which exist apart from human consciousness but as cognitive preconditions to sense experience and almost all physics since Kant has worked, successfully, on that assumption.

Wheeler’s idea stems from quantum phenomena such as the delayed-choice experience . Owing to wave-partial duality (also take a look at Young’s double-slit experiment) we know that the path of a light particle (such as a photon)  remains indeterminate until observed. To put this in simple terms, photons can manifest themselves as either waves or particles and the manner in which of the two are required given the needs of the observer is what manifests the particle from the indeterminate to either wave or particle. So what?

Well, I will tell you so what. If you go outside and look at a star that is thirty million light years away then the light from that star which enters your eye is in the form of a particle rather than a wave because that is what your eye requires in order to see it despite that photon having left the star thirty million years ago. Moreover, the photon would not have left the star in an indeterminate manner meaning that when the photon left the star thirty million years ago it left because your eye was there to see it. How can that be? Well, to the photon there is no space and there is no time as space and time, as Kant first pointed out, are merely preconditions for sense experience in humans. Wheeler says that this suggests the observer as participating in the shaping of the observed universe.

Wheeler formally encapsulated this in his “it from bit” doctrine, positing that all physical entities (“it”) arise from binary yes/no questions answered via information (“bit”), with consciousness as the mechanism that extracts and integrates the information into coherent reality. Wheeler likens the universe to a self-excited circuit or loop where observers –us and potentially other conscious entities — close the cycle by perceiving and thus “bringing into being” the universe, including the distant past. In his words, “we are participators in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past,” implying no fully formed universe exists without the conscious element.

While I am fairly well versed in theoretical physics and quantum mechanics, I am not of the caliber of people who get involved with this debate, merely one of the people who find it fascinating. However, while it is not a definitive proof I will say this — of the people of the caliber of physicist who can interact meaningfully at the level of John

Wheeler there has been no real evidence put forward that he is wrong. More than that, John Wheeler is a physicist who, along with Bohr and Einstein is on the Mt. Rushmore of physics meaning that if anyone who could do this level of physics had a way to prove Wheeler wrong it would mean international fame, fortune and a Nobel prize. The massive incentive and long span of time tell me a story of a very solid theory. That it has been almost forty-five years since Wheeler formalized his theory and no one has been able to do it despite all the motivation in the world to do so speaks volumes to me.

What I find most interesting here is that despite Wheeler’s not merely being fully ensconced in the scientific epistemological epoch but having played a massive role in its growth and stability and despite Wheeler using the language of quantum mechanics and information theory rather than, say narrative, his story aligns perfectly with what we are being presented in the oldest stories of Genesis.

For me this is the very heart of this project. Firstly, the foolish notion of the biblical wisdom being at odds with scientific theory which is something introduced by atheists who do not understand the theology or the science in order to lend credibility to atheistic philosophy by piggy-backing it off of science is just not going to go anywhere. For a very mind opening and, frankly, hilarious view on this you can take a look at Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (1997) Alan Sokal, Jean Bricmont. Building on Sokal’s essay which he wrote in total gibberish and then snuck past the editorial board and got published in a prominent postmodern philosophy journal the book details dozens of instances of the misappropriation of scientific ideas by atheist philosophers showing that not only did they apply the science incorrectly, but that they lack any actual understanding of the theories they were using.

That the scientific story is mirroring the biblical story is really the key to everything we are doing here. The tools were different, the way the material was explained was different but the conclusions are all concordant as we will start to see again and again as we make our way through Genesis. These are NOT competing ideas. They are people who exist at very different times in very different epistemological epochs with very different tools answering the same questions and getting the same answers.

The preliterate people who passed an oral tradition for ten thousand years up to the time of the earliest writing and then for thousands of years the people who wrote these stories and edited them were not stupid. Because they are coming out of a preliterate time their minds are simply organized differently. That cognitive organization is, in essence, what I mean when I talk about an epistemological epoch.

When we look for validity in the social sciences one of the things we use is the multi-trait multi-method matrix (MTMM). The idea is that for each level of analysis and for each independent discipline that you are able to show the same answer to the same question the likelihood of the next attempt will be increased.

For instance, if you draw conclusion X from question Y in, let’s say, 18th century German idealist philosophy and you find it’s validity matches that in Soviet Neuroscience (which is, for political and scientific reasons, materialist to the bone) and it also happens to remain valid when analyzed from 20th century behavioral psychology then the chances it will map onto early 20th century quantum mechanics is improved and, should that work, the chances are improved yet more that it will work when you try to analyze it with regard to 21st century anthropological studies and so on and so forth.

If you have two dozen fields which use two dozen methods to research the same question and get the same answer, the one or two fields that don’t are more than likely the result of bad methodology, flaws deep inside the field or miscalculation. To put it blunt, if every discipline comes to the same answer but a genocidal environmentalist moron like David Suzuki disagrees the problem has a much higher probability of being Suzuki’s.

Creationism as an alternative scientific explanation to Darwinian evolution just is not going to go anywhere. Creationism is not science. There were no scientists at the time of the writing of Genesis. Science will not exist until some three thousand years later. However, using MMMT you can see a much better way of looking at this. Rather than some absurd notion of competing scientific theories it is much easier to see it as the same results proving valid across wildly different methods of study which, in itself, lends credibility to both models simultaneoulsy.

In the end the question is: Does human consciousness matter? Modern quantum mechanics and the biblical accounts, despite being two of the most wildly different disciplines with the most wildly different methods, come to the conclusion that not only does it matter but that it is absolutely integral to the existence of the universe. As it turns out the psychologists, philosophers, anthropologists and evolutionary biologists have all come to the same conclusion.

Consciousness matters.