Knowing, Doing, and Being

Chris Clarke

Description

Between 1965 and 2002 several key lines of research emerged which, taken together, can potentially revolutionise our understanding of the place of consciousness in the universe. Two of these are crucial: first, the analyses of human mental processes by Barnard, and independently by McGilchrist, revealing two separate elements, one rational and one based on relationships; and, second, research by several workers linking quantum theory to consciousness in much greater detail then hitherto. Both of these investigations use an alternative logical system in order to make sense of the quantum/consciousness area. In this book the author explains the close connections between these new ingredients - connections which until now have barely been noticed. Using these insights the author set out a new foundation for consciousness studies in which consciousness is integrated with physics while retaining its qualitatively different character. Finally the book discusses how this affects our everyday approach to ecology, religion, and spiritual practice.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy of mind

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 20 mai 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781845404567
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title page
Knowing, Doing, and Being
New Foundations for Consciousness Studies
CHRIS CLARKE


imprint-academic.com



Publisher information
2015 digital version by Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2013, 2015 Chris Clarke
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
Originally published in the UK by
Imprint Academic, PO Box 200, Exeter EX5 5YX, UK
Originally distributed in the USA by
Ingram Book Company, One Ingram Blvd., La Vergne, TN 37086, USA



Introduction
Is there a connection between quantum theory and consciousness? There is a widespread feeling that, when it comes to basic principles, we do not understand either of these. They have mystery in common, so maybe they are somehow be connected! (A caricature, perhaps, of the response to this question.)
A more sophisticated response, which I take seriously, stems from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant: what we know about the world is conditioned by our capacity for knowing things, which establishes a connection at a fundamental level between knowing and what is known. Putting it very loosely indeed: when it comes to fundamentals, the basis of our knowing is consciousness, and so this will colour the basis of what is known.
My aim here is to explore this connection between quantum theory and consciousness. The exploration will disclose how we know about ourselves and the world, what we are, and how we act in the world - knowing, doing, and being.
Although most of this book concerns ideas and discoveries, their implications build a new story about our attitudes to the world and how we live in it, presented in the final chapter, which has practical consequences. I believe this new story is important for us and for our children: it is for lack of an inspiring, uplifting story that we are currently destroying ourselves and our planet.
Old stories, such as that “we are spiritual beings in a spiritual cosmos” may still at some level be true, but we can no longer relate to their language. Finding a new language will, in this book, take us on a long journey: to the earliest moments in the cosmos and back again. And for our equipment in travelling we will need the latest findings in cosmology, quantum physics, and psychology, along with more established ideas from philosophy.
My central concept will be “consciousness” - perhaps the most confusing term in academic discourse. Practically everyone who uses the term means something different. As the book proceeds I will be honing down this word into a concept that matches our need to understand the universe; but as a starting point I will be using it to refer to the essentially subjective aspect of our knowing, as distinct from the more formal part of our knowing that we can explicitly share with others through language.
One undercurrent flowing through the book is the idea (going back, in a different form, to the twelfth-century Hugh of St Victor) that most of the time we look at the world through one (metaphorical) “eye”. The modern version, based on recent research, is that our minds have multiple components, many of which we neglect. In the version I will be using, I will refer to the two most important components of the mind as the relational and the propositional , and will argue that both must be fully taken into account if we are to understand the universe as a whole. The dominant scientific view rests only on our propositional knowing but nonetheless it identifies our current scientific theories with “reality”. Here we will be seeking a wholeness of knowing greater than this.
While physicists investigating fundamental particles give the impression that the last details of our understanding are now being tidied up and completed, in reality it seems as though we are only just starting to approach the real challenge: that of integrating the physical with the spiritual.
The structure of this book inevitably reflects this fragmented state of our knowing, while at the same time endeavouring to heal it. The flow of the argument is given in the opening and closing notes to each chapter, while the sections between these present a series of interconnected topics drawing on consciousness studies, philosophy, spiritual teaching, and mathematical physics (quantum theory and quantum cosmology). While I have made my presentation of these subjects non-technical, as far as is possible, many of them will be more comprehensible to some readers than to others; so I have ensured that the thread of my argument will not be lost by the reader’s skipping some of the sections. Where possible, detailed deductions, quotes from original sources, and less important amplifications are in the endnotes.
This is a field where the “easy” (but often challenging) work has been done, only to open to view, as when gaining the crest of a mountain ridge, a new uncharted territory still unexplored. Many of its features became clearer in the course of writing this book. So the reader will find many signposts to the unknown, as much as solutions to old riddles.



1. Defining Consciousness
Everything that we know depends on consciousness: without it there would be no I and so no we; without it there would be no knowing and so no known world. And yet “consciousness” is hard to define. Different authors use the word in different ways and so they say different things about it. Confusion is rife. In this chapter I explain how the various concepts to do with consciousness have changed over time; I compare the different meanings of the word as used historically and by recent authors; and I clarify what I am going to mean by the word in this book. I also map out some of the main ideas that have emerged from different traditions within the study of consciousness.
1.1 The idea of consciousness
The word “consciousness” is an abstraction, attempting to grasp at the reality of being human. That reality is our world, which we build up through a succession of experiences. As we develop through childhood this swirling, buzzing world takes on progressively more shape, containing things : people, animals, trees... And the world contains “Me”, and all the distinct activities that I recognise, such as sleeping, waking, talking, inner talking... the ground of humanness on which we can build lives that can be creative and fulfilling.
There is an activity about this knowing; it is not just a stream flowing over us, but we are involved. Sometimes we notice things in a distinct succession - the sound of the wind in the trees, the scent of roses - and sometimes we may be focussed away from these particular things and we are unconscious of them. There are the radical shifts of our sleep and our dreaming. And then our curiosity starts asking “why” about all this structure. We might wonder, for instance, if there is a mental device that turns on and off our noticing. So we are starting to invent “consciousness”.
The basic thread running through this book is a rethinking of the nature of the world. But weaving a counterpoint around this thread like a labyrinth is the idea of consciousness. The trouble with “consciousness” is that it has many meanings and most of them are subtle and intangible. The study of consciousness, however, embraces so many vitally important ideas that we need to survey it at the outset.
1.2 The origins of consciousness studies
Intellectual theories as to how our awareness works (in whole or in part) have abounded at least from Democritus (fl. 400 BCE) with ideas about how vision worked (see Park, 1997), to the present day. Alongside proto-scientific approaches like that of Democritus there were many traditional ways of visualising the human person as made up of several components: in the West, these were body, soul, and spirit. This strand of Western ideas reached its climax in 1637 with Descartes’ very detailed theory of how human beings worked. He carried out many careful dissections of (often rather mangled) animal and human bodies, and came to the conclusion that the body worked rather like the pneumatically controlled moving puppets popular in Descartes’ time, with “spirits” flowing down the nerves from the brain to the muscles which they activated into movement.
On this basis, Descartes saw human life as a two-component process in which activity was divided up between a mechanical body combined with a non-material soul. The body processed data from the senses of smelling, seeing, pain, and so on; it transmitted these into the third ventricle, a fluid-filled cavity in the brain; the soul then homed in on this combined data set, experienced it, and decided on any appropriate action; the soul then finally moved the pineal gland (which Descartes erroneously thought was inside the third ventricle) so as to direct the activating “spirits” into the right nerves so as to generate the appropriate movements of the body.
Considering the primitive state of science at that time, this was in essence a remarkable achievement. The anatomical details were revised and improved in due course, but the fundamental weakness of the approach remained untouched: all the difficult aspects - consciousness, will, the sense of self, language - were bundled together into the “soul” which was supposed to take care of them as if by magic. Descartes’ legacy was to hang over philosophy and consciousness studies for the next three centuries.
The concept in Descartes’ work that is closest to our present idea of consciousness is “apperception” (Descartes, 1649). This was a particular sort of perception involving not only the body receiving information through the senses, but also the soul in