He was saying that we humans know we exist because we observe ourselves thinking. We would no doubt all agree with that. Actually, it’s almost right, but he went a little too far. We know we exist because we observe ourselves, period.
So, “I observe myself, therefore I am.” “I see myself,
therefore I am.” “I think myself, therefore I am.” “I experience myself,
therefore I am,” “I am self-aware, therefore I am.” “I am conscious, therefore
I am.” And by “conscious” here we of course mean self-aware in the way that we
believe is uniquely human and not just “awake” or the opposite of unconscious,
which can apply to all living things.
What is this “I” that observes itself? It’s a thought, isn’t
it? Scientists will tell you that “I” is generated by brain function and that’s
why we’re conscious. However, most admit that this answer does not solve what
David Chalmers called the “hard problem of consciousness,” the question of why
our inner lives are so rich—much richer, it seems, than what other animals
experience. Human consciousness, as far as we know, is unique.
The ability of a
thought (“I”) to think itself, to experience itself, is the very essence of
consciousness of the human kind. If you insist that “I” is generated only by
brain function, you have a “hard problem” understanding human consciousness.
“I” must be more than that. Let’s go deeper.
If “I” is generated by the brain, it must die when we do,
right? But wait! How can a thought that thinks itself ever die? It doesn’t need
any physical host to exist. It simply is.
Therefore, it must exist always and everywhere. On the other hand, when I die,
my brain stops functioning. If it generates “I”, how can “I” continue to exist?
Confusing.
To break through this confusion and achieve some degree of
understanding, one has to get comfortable with the concept of complementarity.
This is the idea that in this universe, there are some things that can be
looked at in more than one way and what one sees looking at such a thing in one
way may be completely incompatible with what one sees observing it another way,
and yet both views can be real and correct. In physics, cases where something
has two aspects that look completely incompatible are called dualities. The
best known is wave-particle duality. All elementary particles can behave like
either waves or particles, depending on how they’re observed. Now, particles
have semi-definite positions and waves do not—they’re completely incompatible
aspects of the same particle. Danish physicist Niels Bohr’s principle of complementarity allows such
dualities to exist. As long as no observer can see both views at the same time,
there’s no incompatibility.
The “I” that my brain generates sums up everything about
me—my body, my history, my personality. But if you stop and think about it,
although your body changes and things happen to you, at the center of your
being is this consciousness that doesn’t change from birth to death. We
experience constant change, so we can’t experience what it would be like to
actually be that unchanging
consciousness, but we know it’s there, and as a result we find it difficult to
imagine no longer existing after death. On the other hand, when we look at
everything that we are and everything that happens to us in life, then we see a
brain-dependent creature and feel very mortal indeed.
So “I” seems to have two aspects, that is, there are two
ways for it to look at itself, and what it sees depends on how it looks at
itself. The pure consciousness is the atemporal
aspect of “I”. It doesn’t change. Time doesn’t exist for it. It doesn’t need a
brain to exist. The other aspect of “I” is the temporal aspect. It lives in this temporal universe where time
flows and things are constantly changing. Being temporal creatures, we only experience
this temporal aspect. It’s impossible for us to imagine what the atemporal
aspect experiences, let alone experience it ourselves. To us, the atemporal
aspect, which doesn’t experience time, seems to exist for too short a time to
be observed (you can’t talk about zero time in a quantum mechanical universe). In
this respect, it’s like the physicists’ virtual particles, which are constantly
popping into and out of existence, but are never observed. You can see this by
watching what happens when you fall into a deep, dreamless sleep. Your brain is
unconscious and the temporal “I” disappears. The atemporal “I” continues to be
conscious, so when you wake up, you are the same person and you’re not aware of
having been nonexistent for a few hours. On the other hand those few hours seem
like just an instant because to the atemporal consciousness an instant is the same
as an eternity.
The atemporal, independently existing “I” has no temporal
attributes—no brain, no body, no personality, no history. Yet it’s the same thought
as the temporal “I”, just observing itself in a different way. What’s more,
it’s the same thought in me as it is in you, just observing itself through the
window of a different brain. These are all different, sometimes incompatible
views of the same thing, but since each view is seen by a different temporal
observer, the principle of complementarity says this is permitted; there is no
conflict. Reality itself, it seems, depends on who is looking at it, and how.
Because all of these different aspects of “I” are the same
thought seeing itself in different ways, they are all conscious in the same way.
They all observe themselves and they all feel immortal in some ineffable way.
Of course, while the atemporal aspect really is immortal, the temporal aspects
aren’t, and we know we aren’t.
The atemporal “I” existed “before” us and exists “after” we
die, although these temporal words mean nothing to it. It can be given other
names. We’ve already seen that the atemporal “I” is pure consciousness. Because
its other defining characteristic is that it exists necessarily, it is also
pure existence. Thus, it is identical to the atemporal aspects of both
existence and consciousness.. These thoughts also have temporal aspects, which
are different from the temporal “I”. But
atemporally, there is no difference.
The atemporal aspect of existence is the only thing in the
universe that exists independently of anything else. It is the source of
everything else, including space and time, matter, and us. Our brains then
create the temporal “I”, which by observing itself, allows existence to observe
itself temporally, that is, in this temporal universe. Because it is just a
different aspect of the same thought, the temporal “I” inherits its
consciousness from the atemporal “I”, the source of everything, which we have
seen is consciousness itself and existence itself. So this is the answer to the
“hard problem.” While our temporal selves are generated by brain function,
atemporal consciousness is the source
of everything, including brains, and is not something that emerges from brains.
David Chalmers has speculated that something nonphysical
must exist and be the source of our consciousness. He thought it might be conscious experience. We see that it is consciousness
itself.
But is it nonphysical? Notice what I’ve been doing here. I’m
talking about a thought as something that exists in itself. That makes it physical. It’s a thing (and it’s
conscious, so it’s also a person). Are all thoughts physical things? No,
thoughts that are generated in our brains certainly aren’t. But atemporal
existence, as well as all of the thoughts that exist within it—or all of the
thoughts directly implied by it
(thoughts are logical entities)—should be thought of as physical things, the
stuff the universe is made of. The temporal universe itself, to use a word
popular with physicists these days, is emergent
from the collective behavior of these primordial thoughts, in the same way that
chemical reactions are emergent from the collective behavior of elementary
particles. My physics
model shows exactly how this temporal universe arises from atemporal
existence.
How an atemporal being comes to have a temporal aspect is
covered in my metaphysics
paper, where I start by analyzing the logical structure of the thought
existence. When we say it observes itself, we mean it’s really three thoughts
in one. There’s observing existence, observed existence, and the
relationship—identity—between these two. Once we have three thoughts, we can
get a lot more. Combining thoughts always results in another thought. Just by
taking the nonempty subsets of a set of three thoughts we get seven thoughts,
from seven we get 127, and so on. Therefore, within existence—implied by it—are
an infinite number of thoughts that occur in steps, with the total number
increasing with each step. This is a purely logical progression and has nothing
to do with time, but it’s not hard to see that the steps do sort of look like
time and the number of thoughts, larger at each step, looks like an expanding
space. If there were a way for existence to observe the thoughts within it as
time and space, existence would have a temporal way of observing itself. That
turns out to be our role. (In my physics paper, these thoughts are called spacetime points.) Our bodies are
created from the collective behavior of all of these thoughts so that we depend
on time for our existence, and our brains then generate the temporal “I” as a
window for existence to observe itself temporally. This simply happens because
it’s possible. No designer needed.
Why not? It’s a consequence of a thought that exists
necessarily. We call this thought existence (or consciousness, or “I”)—I’m
speaking atemporally now). Existence exists and observes itself. What does it
see? The only possible answer is that it sees everything that can possibly
exist, that is, everything that isn’t impossible, exactly as predicted by
quantum mechanics. That turns out to include this time-dependent universe, with
us in it.
The atemporal aspect of existence is what we call “God”.
Since it’s easier to write than “atemporal existence, I’ll use “God” a lot. We
can think of existence observing itself outside of time as God, and existence
observing itself within time as our brain-generated selves.
Why is the universe so riddled with dualities? You might
prefer to call them contradictions or paradoxes or inconsistencies or something
else, but ultimately, they all stem from the self-referential nature of
atemporal existence, which creates itself. Existence is a concept that can only
be defined in terms of itself, and logically, self-reference always results in
contradictions. We have to keep in mind that what is real is relative to each
observer, It’s the principle of complementarity again. We only get into trouble
with contradictions when we try to make every observer’s view consistent with
every other observer’s view. That’s impossible. As long as we think we need
complete consistency, we’ll never find that “theory of everything.”
