When we
see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness,
the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other
experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a
clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains
to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of
emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought.
Remarkable
as these subjective experiences are, most physicists and philosophers reject
the idea that consciousness itself must be something remarkable, something unlike
anything else, something fundamental.
On this blog, I‘ve been explaining that it’s a thought that thinks itself, that
creates itself, that exists necessarily.
“I think myself, therefore I exist.” Consciousness is existence. Consciousness
is mind.
Almost nobody can make sense of this because
we’ve never thought of consciousness or anything else in those terms. Like so
many “unsolvable” mysteries, the key to the solution is to eliminate everything
that’s obviously wrong and accept what’s left as the answer. I believe it was
Sherlock Holmes who used this rule. In the case of consciousness, the answer is
staring us in the face, but we reject it because there’s nothing else like it.
Well, DUH! We need to accept that consciousness is something unlike anything
else.
Consciousness/existence is not only a concept,
it is a concept that exists necessarily.
It creates itself. It is the only
thing that can create itself. It is a thought thinking itself. This is hard for
people to understand because they know that, while they are conscious, they did
not create themselves.
They don’t realize that there are two ways to
see consciousness/existence: 1) as the collection of all logical concepts or
ideas or thoughts, and 2) as the physical universe, with the logical hierarchy
of concepts seen as time and concepts seen as points of spacetime, as I explained
here.
In its first aspect, existence is atemporal,
aspatial, and immutable. This is how existence sees itself. In its second
aspect, existence is temporal and changeable. This is how we see it. Atemporal
existence can’t see itself this way and we can’t see ourselves as unchanging.
Different observers are required. The temporal universe is identical to the
logical except for a change of observers.
The observers (ourselves) required to see the
physical universe exist within it. The physical universe is derived from and
therefore exists within the logical. The logical universe is prior to the
physical, and atemporal existence can be said to create both universes.
In our own minds we sense the presence of the
atemporal aspect of consciousness because we are exactly the same person from
birth to death. This unchanging aspect of our consciousness is the same
identical concept in all humans, but has no relation to our individual
personalities. It is aware of them, just as we are aware of it.. Unlike our
individual consciousness, it never dies.
So, we and everything else are consciousness. We
are truly one with everything, so we directly experience everything we perceive.
Here, then, is the answer to David Chalmers’ hard problem. We experience
everything because we are one with everything.
On his blog, Cross-Check, John Horgan pleads, “Don’t
Make Me One with Everything” and laments our inability to solve the hard
problem.
Be careful what you ask for. You might get it.
