Fig 1: A representative spectrum of prominent
mental states
Chris King Genotype 1.0.15 5-14 - 10-17 PDF
For significant updates, follow @dhushara on Twitter
Abstract: We explore the diversity of mental states, and
examine to what extent these are both a product of specific known brain
processes and yet may access a complementary aspect of existence to the
cosmology of the physical universe and its natural biosystems, potentially giving
mental states an existential cosmological status. The case is made that the
cosmology of mental states reflect a deeper physical principle connecting
quantum entanglement with the brain wave processing evolved in higher organisms
to solve the computational intractability of open environmental dilemmas, which
go beyond Bayesian statistics and causal prediction, into multiple nested
Schrdinger cat paradoxes, hinting at a meta-evolutionary paradigm of conscious
cosmological integration.
.
A Natural Classification of Mental States
Human conscious
experience involves a spectrum of mental states surrounding the everyday waking
condition experientially associated with intelligent volition or intent. Some of these are biological, associated with essential processes,
including reflection, reminiscence and daydreaming associated with the
so-called default network (see fig 2), the actual dreams and nightmares of REM sleep, and
'out of the body' (OBE) experiences associated with hypnagogic states. Others are
culturally-based associated with devotional practices, including meditation,
prayer, religious vision and spiritual contemplation. Still others are
pharmaceutical, associated with changes of subjective consciousness induced by
psychotropic substances, such as psychedelics and dissociatives, either
synthetic molecules, or associated with certain plants or fungi. Finally we
have a number of pathological states involving extreme medical conditions, from
schizophrenia and dementia to epileptic seizures, particularly in the temporal
lobes, and the near death experiences (NDE) associated with heart attacks,
drowning, and severe trauma, such as traffic accidents.
While some have a
natural origin in circadian rhythms, and others a cultural origin, others still
a chemical origin and yet others a medical origin, all of them arise from
specific brain states physiologically, which, despite their different origins,
fall into a natural classification.
However this
doesnt mean brain physiology is all there is to mental states. Indeed our
description of reality and the physical world is founded first and foremost on
our subjective conscious mental states, whose actual basis remains the most
confounding and unfathomed question facing the scientific description of the
natural world. We may thus find in the diversity of mental states clues to the
existential cosmology of the conscious universe - hence the title of this
article.
Fig
2: Dreaming is conventionally associated with periods of REM or rapid eye
movement sleep in which the EEG closely resembles waking brain waves, rather
than the slow, high amplitude waves of deep sleep, but the above EEG portraits
show that dreaming is more closely associated with high frequency activation of
key hotspots involving visual and other areas in a manner that can occur in
both REM and NREM sleep (Siclari et
al. 2017).
The Physiology of Mental States
All mental states,
from natural to cultural, are accompanied by specific physiological changes to
the brain, which are signature of the state concerned. This applies equally to
drug-induced states and states which people may associate with higher spiritual
practices or religious experiences, showing these too can be seen to have a
biological origin.
The transition
from wakefulness to the onset of light and deep non-dreaming (non-REM) sleep,
interspersed with phases of dreaming or REM sleep, occurs naturally in waves
over the nights slumber. While the electrical activity of the EEG of non-REM
sleep shows theta spindles and deep slow delta waves, different from the high
frequency, low amplitude, beta activity of waking attention, the beta EEG of
dreaming sleep is remarkably similar to the waking brain. Dreaming phases
lasting up to 30 minutes indicate phases of dreaming experience last a similar
time to their subjective experience. Brain scans of the metabolic activity of
the dreaming brain using PET and fMRI show an active brain with increased
activity in visual areas and reduced executive control in frontal areas,
consistent with the rich visual experiences and lack of full voluntary control
over the events in dreams.
These changes are
driven by major ascending neural pathways from the brain stem to the cerebral
cortex, and other descending pathways, which together mediate major changes in
alertness and attention, facilitated by specific neurotransmitters and
receptors. The reticular activating system contains pathways mediating full
arousal. In the waking condition, both the cholinergic acetylcholine and
adrenergic norepinephrine pathways are active. In non-REM sleep,
norepinepherine and serotonin ascending pathways are active. At the onset of
dreaming these go silent and acetylcholine pathways in the pons become active,
having the effect of shutting down brain stem centers facilitating motor
activity, putting the dreaming subject into a state of atonia, or sleep
paralysis, preventing them acting out their dreaming experiences, except for
the rapid eye movements for which REM is named. This also has the effect of
making the dreamer often feel transfixed in their dream, while at other times
feeling they are floating or flying. The exotic, intensely perceived and
bizarre mental states accompanying dreams and nightmares are thus clearly
related to fundamental physiological changes orchestrated by brain stem centers
in interaction with the entire cerebral cortex.
Fig 2: Physiological underpinnings of a variety
of brain states. (a,b) fMRI and PET
scans of REM (dreaming) sleep show
increased occipital (visual) activity and reduced prefrontal (executive)
function, with an EEG similar to the waking brain (Braun). (c)
Sleep phases of REM and non-REM sleep alternate in waves. The EEGs are on a time scale of seconds, the sleep waves in hours. (d) Sleep phases are driven by ascending serotonin and nor
epinephrine pathways from the Raphe nucleus and Locus coeruleus. (e) The default network associated with
worry and recollection of events to prepare for the future shows depression of
activity during task performance and increase during rest (Raichle et al,
Raichle & Snyder, Mason et al, Fox D, Horovitz et al, Buckner et al,
Marshall). (f) There are believed to be two
attention systems in the human brain (Fox et al.) a bilateral dorsal attention
system (blue) involved in top-down orienting of attention and a
right-lateralized ventral attention system (red) involved in reorienting
attention in response to salient sensory stimuli. (g) Zen meditation
studies (Pagnoni et al, Ritskes et al) in which subjects are asked to switch
from a verbal task to contemplation show transient activity consistent with the
default network which is more quickly suppressed by experienced meditators more
effectively inhibiting verbal thought. (h) Carmelite nuns entering
oneness with God show fMRI activations in areas in specific frontal, parietal,
temporal and basal areas consistent with directed control (Beauregard & Paquette). (i) Tibetan Buddhists
performing compassion meditation for other peoples suffering show specific
activation in limbic regions including cingulate cortex and insula, consistent
with an empathic response to anothers pain (Lutz et al 2008). (j) PET study of psilocybin taken
orally shows frontal activation by comparison with a resting state
(Vollenweider et al). (k) fMRI study
during the 12 minutes after intravenous administration of psilocybin shows
reduced activity in medial frontal cortex (mPFC), posterior cingulate cortex
(PCC) and other areas (Carhart-Harris et al 2012a, Lee & Roth) suggesting
suppression of the default network as the effects come on. (l) Increases in activity associated with autobiographical memories
on psilocybin right over placebo (left) (Carhart-Harris et al. 2012b). (m) Increases in fMRI in frontal and
paralimbic brain regions in an ayahuasca session (Riba et al 2006). (n) Above ketamine induces a decrease
in ventromedial frontal cortex (blue) and increased activity in mid-posterior
cingulate, thalamus and temporal cortical regions (yellow-red) consistent with
its dissociative effects. Below inhibition of ketamine activity by lamotrigine,
a sodium channel blocker that decreases glutamate release (Deakin et al). (k) Three areas involved in Theory of Mind and religious notions top to bottom (Kapogiannisa et al. 2009): (1) Experiential knowledge vs (2) Doctrinal knowledge. (3) God's love vs anger (4), God's lack of involvement (5,6).
While many
theories have been proposed for the function of dreams, particularly in
relation to the reencoding of hippocampal memories into compactified
strategically effective forms in the cortex, the extreme variation of REM and
of sleep duration in different mammal species and the ambiguity of studies of
sleep deprivation leave the purpose and existential status of dreaming still
awaiting a full explanation.
Key psychotropic
agents also act on specific neuroreceptors, inducing physiological changes in
brain dynamics by altering the receptor-mediated activation of excitatory or
inhibitory neurons. For example, psychedelics, are believed to act as
super-agonists of the 5HT2a serotonin receptor, setting off a different form of
activation from serotonin itself, in which a push-pull coupling with a second
receptor mGluR2, for the principal excitatory neurotransmitter glutamate,
alters the stability of excitation in such a way as to evoke the fractal
instabilities associated with the kaleidoscopic visions of the psychedelic
state. Both of these receptors are slow acting G-protein-linked metabotropic
receptors whose changes in dynamics are measured in hours – the life of
the drug effect. They do not directly cause changes in ion flow, but trigger a
protein cascade altering long term dynamics. Other psychotropics, from
cannabinoids to datura-containing deleriants such as scopolamine, are positive
agonists, or negative antagonists, of other key receptors, respectively the
anandamide CB1 cannabinoid receptor and the muscarinic acetylcholine receptor.
By contrast,
ketamine acts to block the pore in a fast acting glutamate NMDA ionotropic
receptor, directly altering ion flow and excitability in target neurons,
resulting in global changes in excitability which appear to dissociate the
subject from their bodily sensations, so that, while remaining technically
conscious, they become relatively oblivious to an operation being performed on
them and at the same time experience dislocated out of the body experiences,
some of which have profound impressions, similar to classic near death reports.
In fact the
situation is vastly more complicated than this description. Psychedelics, for
instance, activate a broad spectrum of many serotonin (5HT), norepinephrine and
other receptors, to varying degrees, in a manner similar to pressing a large
number of keys on a polyphonic keyboard, resulting in a variety of simultaneous
effects, from sensory hallucinations to anxiety reactions. Paradoxically agonism
of the 5HT1a receptor in the psychedelic tryptamines silences the Raphe nucleus
responsible for serotonin innervation of the cortex (Braden, Nichols 2011), as
occurs in REM sleep, resulting in a close parallel with the dreaming state. In
addition, a given receptor type can have differing actions depending whether it
is on an excitatory e.g. pyramidal cell, or an inhibitory interneuron, so a
psychotropic agent may have simultaneous excitatory and inhibitory effects on
different cells, or on distinct brain regions.
Still other
psychotropics such as the releasing agents methamphetamine and MDMA and
reuptake inhibitors such as fluoxetine (prozac), principally affect the
transporters that carry neurotransmitters to the synapse and remove any excess
after release, inhibiting re-uptake or causing reverse dumping, rather than
activating or de-activating receptors directly, as agonists and antagonists do.
Nevertheless
psychotropic drugs and sacramental species act on brain dynamics broadly
through the same receptors and some of the same pathways we saw driving natural
changes in the sleep wakefulness cycle. This involvement of sappy
neurotransmitter molecules in what would otherwise be electro-chemical
neurodynamics is very ancient, and key neurotransmitters, from serotonin to
cyclic-AMP, trace their evolutionary origin right back to chemical signaling in
single celled eucaryotes and have similar or parallel function in diverse
animal groups, from arthropods to vertebrates, acting on major modes to keep
neurodynamic function biologically attuned to the survival of the organism.
Many spiritual
practitioners and religious believers consider their experiences to be states
of attainment far beyond mere physiology, requiring devoted concentration and
higher forms of consciousness, as different from lowly dissipated drug
experiences as gold is to lead. However research exploring states of meditation
and religious devotion show that these states fall into a physiological
spectrum as clearly as natural and pharmaceutically induced states do.
When it comes to
the investigation of mental states associated with spiritual and religious
practice using brain scans, we find clear physiological indicators related to
the particular practice engaged by the subject. By contrast with the rich and
bizarre nature of dreaming, mental states associated with prayer and meditation
tend to involve focused control and suppression of the wandering mind through
limiting the verbal thought process, or one-pointed concentration. While these
mental states are highly varied, they share common features of intentional
control of the mental process. Zen meditators in fMRI studies show more rapid
and complete suppression of the mind-wandering of the default network (Pagnoni
et al), with increased activity in the prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia and
decreased activity in the occipital (visual) cortex and anterior cingulate
processing emotion (Ritskes et al). In EEG studies they showed a significant
increase in frontal alpha and occipital beta power, whereas an average increase
of theta power was observed in controls, indicating loss of concentration
(Huang et al). Consistent with one-pointed concentration, Zen meditators
recalled more subliminal messages than controls (Strick et al).
Tibetan Buddhist
meditators in PET and fMRI studies have increased blood flow in the cingulate,
inferior and orbital frontal cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and
thalamus (Newberg et al 2001, Hanky). EEG studies show greater activation in
attentional regions, including fronto-parietal, cerebellar, temporal, para-
hippocampal, and posterior occipital, possibly due to the attended spot
(Brefczynski-Lewis et al). They have also been found to enter high-amplitude
gamma-band oscillations with high phase-synchrony during meditation, consistent
with a one-pointed concentration with heightened attention (Lutz et al 2004).
By contrast, compassion meditators under PET show similar activations to a
person feeling empathy for a person in pain (Lutz et al 2008). In a more recent
fMRI study contrasting focus-based and breath-based
practice, in the first, blood flow increased in the medial prefrontal cortex
and left caudate, but decreased in parietal and occipital regions. The second
induced activation in several limbic structures and the left superior temporal
cortex (Wang et al).
Investigation of
Transcendental meditators by PET (Newberg et al 2006b) also found bilateral
prefrontal activation associated with relaxed attention on the mantra, other
increases in frontal, occipital and parietal areas and a decrease in the
thalamus and hippocampus. An fMRI study centered on the capacity of the relaxed
state to be helpful in dealing with an induced painful stimulus saw reductions
in the prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and thalamus (Orme-Johnson
et al), and has been suggested to be linked to hormonally induced increases in the
inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA (Elias et al). Catholics observing a Marian
image saw increases in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex and brain stem
leading up to the thalamus (Wiech et al).
Brain studies of
Carmelite (Beauregard & Paquette) and Franciscan nuns (Bielo) in professed
union with god, which they admitted was difficult to achieve in a noisy MRI
tunnel, show different structured activations, with increased activity in the
caudate nucleus associated with learning, memory and falling in love, the
insula processing body sensations and social emotions, the inferior parietal
processing spatial awareness in contradiction to the Zen studies, the medial
orbito-frontal and prefrontal cortices dealing with emotional and executive
decision-making, and the middle of the temporal lobe. Most prevalent brain
waves were long, slow alpha waves such as those produced by sleep, consistent
with a relaxed state.
By contrast with
the prefrontal control evidenced in Buddhist meditation, during speaking in
tongues, by Christian women who had practiced glossolalia for more than 5
years, there was a decreased blood flow in the frontal lobes bilaterally and in
the left caudate, indicating relaxation of executive controls (Newberg et al.
2006a).
In comparing these
highly varied and contradictory results, one can conclude that claimed states
of higher spirituality are varied products of different forms of concentration,
which share the feature of overall focused control, but otherwise look like
distinct humanly-generated states of mind, rather than convergence on the
divine. One thus needs to consider the possibility that the profound
transformations of the cortical dynamic induced both by dreaming and by psychotropic
entheogens may give rise to every bit as deep a potential for exploratory
existential processes, which might nevertheless be enhanced by contemplative
repose.
Moreover, certain pathological states, such as temporal epilepsy, are associated with states of religious fervor bordering on the mystical and become experiences which the patient, while suffering from the effects of such seizures, regards as having overwhelming significance, which they are reluctant to part from. In one subjects description Triple halos appeared around the sun. Suddenly the sunlight became intense. I experienced a revelation of God and of all creation glittering under the sun. The sun became bigger and engulfed me. My mind, my whole being was pervaded by a feeling of delight (Naito and Matsui).
Another account adds
further features: Every time I have a gran mal
seizure I have a "vision/hallucination" of me walking with god. He's
showing me my city and everything is destroyed. He speaks, but after I come out
of my seizure I can't remember what he says. I feel like if I could only
remember I could save the world. When I have a partial it's a feeling of dj
vu about a dream I've had. But I don't remember ever having this dream if that
makes sense. I love the feeling I get from my seizures just not the convulsions
and the aftermath. In fact I wish I could touch someone while having my visions
and they could experience them. I guarantee you they would come out of it with
a tear in their eyes and thanking me for the experience (Mojeaux).
The incidence of these states caused the neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran to coin the term the god spot for the region of the temporal lobe bordering on the limbic
emotional system amygdala, suggesting that stimulation of this region could
cause both the intense significance and meaning of temporal excitation and the
ecstatic fulfillment of positive centers in the amygdala, whose function is to
do with orienting to intense emotional conditions, from flight and fight to peak
fulfillment. Neuroimaging studies of individuals suffering from schizophrenia with
religious delusions similarly found over-activation of the left temporal lobe
during religious delusions (Puri et al). Kapogiannisa et al. (2009) propose an integrative cognitive neuroscience framework for understanding the cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief. Their analysis reveals 3 psychological dimensions of religious belief (God's perceived level of involvement, God's perceived emotion, and doctrinal/experiential religious knowledge), which func- tional MRI localizes within networks processing Theory of Mind regarding intent and emotion, abstract semantics, and imagery, well-known brain networks, thus supporting theories that ground religious belief within evolutionary adaptive cognitive functions.
Dj vu is a common
feature of TLE episodes. I also have natural dj vu experiences of dreams,
some of which I have had, but others of which seem to be illusory. Such
impressions are also a prominent feature of my sacred mushroom experiences.
Another parallel is the flying dream paradox - levitating with great
intentional effort in deep dreaming and turning to others present to show off
my newly gained powers, only to find they cannot see, hear or touch me - having
suddenly become a kind of dreaming ghost.
However religious
conservatism, as opposed to the visionary state, may be a product of social
evolution, as the moral deity inhibits intra-social conflict through fear of an
omniscient gods or other believers punishment, combined with frank repression
of the infidel, resulting in inter-social dominance, permitting larger human
groups to remain stable and to become dominant over their neighbors - a far
from holy outcome!
On a slightly
different tack, several researchers have drawn attention to the idea that
genetic differences in neurotransmitter dynamics could underpin human
religiosity, in particular the generalized monoamine transporter VMAT2, which
is essential for carrying dopamine and serotonin to the synapse. Dean Hamer in
The God Gene suggested that genes expressing higher levels of the transporter
resulted in spiritual individuals favored by natural selection because they are
provided with an innate sense of optimism, the latter producing positive
effects at either a physical or psychological level. The dopamine receptor DRD4 (Comings et al) and various other
receptors have likewise been cited as enhancing a measure of spirituality
called self transcendence.
Intriguingly,
removal of tumors from two brain regions, the left inferior parietal lobe and the right angular gyrus, was also associated with immediate increases in self-transcendence (Weaver). Significantly these regions are involved in processing ones body image, so the loss of function could well evoke feelings
of spiritual merging. The questionnaire tapped into three main
components of self-transcendence: losing yourself in the moment, feeling
connected to other people and nature, and believing in a higher power. Examples
include: "I often become so fascinated with what I'm doing that I get lost
in the moment - like I'm detached from time and place" and "I
sometimes feel so connected to nature that everything seems to be part of one
living organism."
Out of body
experiences or OBEs also have direct physiological correlates. Many of the
reported experiences appear to arise from hypnagogic states, when a person is
on the borderline of sleep or partially awakening from REM sleep, but are still
in a state of sleep paralysis, leading to the impression of floating, while
perceiving they are able to witness their body from a distance.
My most classic OBE
was practicing for lucid dreaming by trying to look at the backs of my hands in
a dream. Many times I had awakened realizing I had seen my hands in a dream,
for example climbing ladders, and not registered. Eventually one night I looked
at my hands in a dream and made the connection. This set off an immediate and
powerful reaction. I found my consciousness split in three, one self was lucid
dreaming, but lost in the dream universe. I looked up at the deep blue sky and
realized it was not the ordinary sky of the waking world and no galaxy out
there was the one I had come from. I became desperate to find my way back to
life. I was standing in bright daylight on a promenade by the ocean. I saw a
woman with dark eyes staring at me. I walked up to her, grabbed her by both
shoulders and stared down deep into her dilated pupils, silently begging to
know how to find the way back, but she just stepped back and shook her head
smiling. No way back to Ixtlan! At the same moment a blast of sea breeze hit
me. I was wearing a light Indian shirt and I could feel every one of the
droplets of spray that hit me lucidly with crystal clarity. At the same time the
gust was a force like a levitating tornado sending me shooting up faster and
faster in some other space. However again at the same time, I realized I was
bumping on the ceiling of my bedroom, reassuringly witnessing my body asleep in
the bed below, saying to myself silently "It's all okay! You are down
there sleeping peacefully on the bed!" Afterwards I realized all these
experiences had started simultaneously and ended simultaneously. I had been in
three places at once!
The brain is richly
endowed with mirror neurons which are essential in our social function and
cause us for example to get shivers down our spine when we see someone else get
injured. Several studies, including under MRI brain scans, have confirmed that
the temporo-parietal junction, one of several regions involved in helping to
integrate visual, tactile and proprioceptive senses with the signals from the
inner ear that give us our sense of balance and spatial orientation has altered
function when experiments are performed to simulate out of body experiences
which are perceived to result in a full or partial OBE by the subject. Various
forms of experiment where the subject receives tactile stroking while watching
a mannequin which has camera-mounted eyes relayed to goggles worn by the
subject can cause such brain areas to integrate these perceptions into an OBE (Ananthaswamy 2013).
We finally come to the
physiology of NDEs or near death experiences. Many people undergoing cardiac
arrest, suffering extreme trauma, such as a car accident, in which they have
become comatose, or in drowning, report experiences involving one or more of a
spiraling tunnel, often with light at the end, a sense of telepathic
communication with a higher conscious being, who may at the same time be
themselves, a sense of leaving their body and perhaps seeing departed friends
or relatives or seeing their own body being resuscitated, and a sense of being
drawn back to life rather than departing to the realm of death, before coming
back to consciousness. These experiences are often reported as life-changing
and have become the subject of intense debate between people who believe it is
evidence of a conscious afterlife and skeptics who see it as an hallucinatory
physiological phenomenon. Some people have even reported seeing objects like
shoes in inaccessible places which later proved to be there, stoking ideas that
such experiences possess super-natural powers, however events of this type such
as Marias NDE are so rare that there remain only a handful of such accounts. British psychiatrist Peter Fenwick who set up messages in inaccessible places to test this hypothesis in such patients has found no confirmation of the effect (Ebbern et al), nor has a review of research studies into NDEs (Mobbs and Watt).
Beauregard (2012) describes
an iconic account concerning a woman who was operated on for a brain stem
aneurism by being chilled to the point of cardiac arrest, her blood drained
from her body to avoid a hemorrage, and her EEG going into flat line for a full
hour. She recalls floating out of the operating room and traveling down a tunnel
with a light. She saw deceased relatives and friends, including her long-dead
grandmother, waiting at the end of this tunnel. She entered the presence of a
brilliant, wonderfully warm and loving light, and sensed that her soul was part
of God and that everything in existence was created from the light (the
breathing of God). But this extraordinary experience ended abruptly, as
Reynoldss deceased uncle led her back to her body—a feeling she
described as plunging into a pool of ice.
The difficulty with assessing
NDE reports is that they only come to light after the person regains
consciousness, so we dont really know exactly when they occurred or whether
they occurred in the deepest phases of coma or in the transition zone back to
consciousness. Under cardiac arrest the loss of blood rapidly causes the EEG to
fall to a flat line. If consciousness is simply suspended at this point the
subject might experience a continuous transition from the onset phase to the
recovery phase accompanied by the NDE experience in transition, a little like
the rebirth process in the Bardo Thodol or Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Significantly, both psychedelics and dissociatives induce experiences sharing many common key features with NDEs, including the tunnel, experience of clear light communion, out of body perceptions and a sense of transformative meaning. The work of Griffiths et al shows the spiritual rejuvenation experienced by ordinary people under psilocybin is lasting and beneficial. Similar improvements have been found in the terminally ill. The fact that so many of the key elements are shared strongly indicates the NDE is a natural physiological manifestation of the way the brain processes consciousness under the kinds of close encounters with death we are dealing with, including any or all of deprivation of oxygen, or glucose, changes in neurotransmitters such as norepinephrine (Mobbs and Watt), and other stresses including those resulting in neuronal hyper-excitation.
.
Fig 2b: The active EEG continues for 30 sec in ketamine anesthetsized rats subjected to cardiac arrest. Gamma power (lover left) and coherence (lower right) become accentuated during this phase (Borjigin et al).
A key experiment in 2013 (Borjigin et al) studied rats with implanted electrodes placed under anesthesia using ketamine and then subjected to cardiac arrest intracardiac injection of potassium chloride solution. The recordings showed brain activity following cardiac arrest for around 30 secs with heightened gamma power and coherence implying the brain following cardiac arrest can indeed invoke the kind of active brain states humans claim to have experienced under such circumstances, laying to rest the notions that cardiac arrest is a flat-line state and that the NDE phenomenon is an artifact of other brain states during recovery. Of course the one compounding factor is that the rats were both on ketamine and under cardiac arrest adding insult to injury! In another study (Kroeger et al) after tiny bursts of activity we found in a heart patient put into flat-line to avoid brain damage in a heart attack, cats deeply anesthetized to flat line were found to have small spikes coming out of their hippocampal areas, suggesting low level decentralized brain activity (although not necessarily accompanied by consciousness persisted.
My most recent sacred
mushroom experience came on with a symphony of shrilling vibrations that, as
they overtake me, spiral me into the visions. It is a synesthesia, which is
sensitive to my mental awareness, listening and looking, so I can enter the
existential kaleidoscope and fall into the other reality beyond. Visions come
and go of impossible experiences I know I have had and witnessed first-hand yet
know I could never have happened. As Maria Sabina says: "And you also see
our past and our future, which are there together as a single thing already
achieved, already happened . . . I saw stolen horses and buried cities, the
existence of which was unknown, and they are going to be brought to
light." Mushrooms have given
me extraordinary visions whose significance I still ponder to this day. I had a
horrific vision that my firstborn daughter would be doomed to an obstruction to
her fertility. Then years later, her first offspring was born with Downs
syndrome. My impression from inside these experiences is that all conscious
life is interconnected across space-time and that the sacred mushroom brings us
closer to unraveling the bundle of life that locks us into our personal egos, so
that for a minute, or an hour or two, we can see, through the disembodied eye,
the way the universe perceives disincarnately and ever-compassionately of the
mortal coil. It is a feeling that gives great reassurance to the travails of
life. At the peak I feel as if I am suspended in a state of light-induced
electrocution, searingly high and at the same time utterly pure. As I sit
breathless in the living room, non-ordinary reality comes bursting out of my
sub-conscious and across my peripheral vision so I feel as if I am
simultaneously in about five places at once. Next morning I am fresh and clear
in the sparkling sunshine. A new man in a world reborn with the youthful freshness
of a new day, my creativity and sense of emergence rekindled. "But I, I am
lord of two ways. I am master of up and down. I am as a man who is a new man,
with new limbs and life, and the light of the Morning Star in his eyes." D
H Laurence The Plumed Serpent.
After the first few minutes of my ketamine experience struggling not to
swallow the bitter insufflated substance for fear of nausea, I realize I am
entering a state of peace. The anesthetic effect is taking me deep into a
reverie through what has become a kind of yogic breathing. I fall deeper into
the dissociated state and I realize that it is an experience of simply awesome
depth. A depth so inscrutable, you are touched by it, swept into silent
awestruck oblivion - but still conscious - still there - still aware -
somewhere in the aether, as the void breathes its delicate structured
emptiness. I continue to recognize the depth and mystery of what I am
witnessing. But then things take a more sinister turn. My mind is becoming
memory-less. It's as if all my brain and memory circuits are reprogramming
themselves and all the needles are beginning to point every which way. I know
it's going to be alright, but it sure feels as if I am going to be stark
staring mad forever. So I decide just to ride with the experience and then
suddenly its as if the dials have connected to the master index of all my life
experiences, and here they are, flashing before my eyes, just as they say about
someone who is drowning, but its not just my life experiences, but the very
peak experiences, like the chain of the Himalayas. I realize I am looking back
down on them in the same way Moses might look down on his life and the life of
everyone from the mountain top, and that all the experiences of my life are
coming into one cosmic focus of meaning and destiny. At this point I suddenly
realize that everything I have ever done and everything I will ever do has been
brought to this very moment of truth and this very experience, and it is 'God',
and my destiny coming to its true destination at this point, which is beyond
time and space, coming from the very beginning, and for ever. I have this
overpowering feeling of having been taken so far it is the full age of the
universe and I have so far to get back to the land of the living. It is the
same thing I have read about where one feels one is uniting with the universal
self and could go with it or return to the incarnate world of individuals. But
at the same time it is the universal mind coming to know and understand itself.
At this point it seemed almost as if my life was now over. I had made the
connection which gave my life its central meaning and though I might in future
do nothing else and maybe I would never be able to come to this point again, my
life had meaning in giving ultimate meaning to the totality witnessing and
knowing itself.
Even though NDEs may
be physiological, this does not mean these experiences are just hallucinatory,
or in any sense unreal. On the contrary, dreaming experiences, and many
psychedelic and dissociative experiences, as well as NDEs, share a fundamental
feature that the subject experiences them as veridical realities that they have
actually seen in the same way as a waking person experiences the real world
around them. They are not imagined, but perceived with the full integrity of
perception of existential reality and occasionally do subsequently appear to
correspond to physical events and realities.
We thus need to come
to terms with a fundamental question: What is the existential nature of conscious
experience? Is it merely an
internal model of reality constructed by the brain, having no status above an
epiphenomenon, a mere shadow constructed by a biological brain, or is it a
fundamental component of the cosmology of the conscious universe?
Subjective Consciousness – What are Mental States For?
Subjective
consciousness poses the deepest dilemma for the scientific description of
reality. While we have discovered the Higgs boson and are tantalizingly close
to decoding the theory of everything orchestrating both large-scale cosmology
and the fundamental forces of nature and have decoded the human genome and the
molecular basis of biological organisms, we still have no idea of how the brain
generates subjective consciousness, or even how or why such an elusive
phenomenon can come about from the physiology of brain dynamics.
The problem is
absolutely fundamental because, from birth to death, the sum total of all our
observations of the physical world and all our notions about it come
exclusively through our subjective conscious experiences. Although neuroscience
has produced many new exciting techniques for visualizing brain function, from
EEG and MEG to PET and fMRI scans, which show a deep parallel relationship
between mental states and specific modalities of brain processes, these go no
way in themselves to solving the so-called hard problem of consciousness
research – how these purely objective physiological processes give rise
to the subjective effects of our conscious experiences. Philosopher Jerry Fodor
famously complained that: Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material
could be conscious. Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the
slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious (Deacon).
Fig 3: Existential reality presents as a
complementary paradox. While we acknowledge our subjective consciousness is
somehow a product of our biological brain, which is in turn a fragile product
of physical forces on a cosmological scale, all our experiences of reality, including
our perceptions of the physical world, as well as dreams memories and
reflections, come exclusively and totally from our subjective consciousness.
This suggests that existential cosmology is a complementarity between
subjective consciousness and the physical universe, in which both are
fundamental.
Although, from a
commonsense point of view, we are forced to acknowledge that our conscious life
is dependent on or fragile biological brain and that we will pass out and lose
consciousness if we are struck on the head or sever our blood supply, really
all our experiences of the physical world come as consensual subjective
conscious experiences of the world shared by sentient beings. Indian philosophy
declares that consciousness is more fundamental than the grosser accumulations
of physical matter, essentially because it is only through subjective
consciousness that the physical universe becomes manifest.
This leads to another
critical question: Why did nervous systems evolve subjective consciousness? If
nervous systems are able to fully provide adaptive solutions simply as
heuristic computers, there is no role for extraneous brain functions that
simply add a subjective shadow reality with no adaptive function and presumably
a physiological cost. A digital computer is a purely functional entity, even
when processing probabilistic optimizations, so has no role for a subjective
aspect, no matter how complex it becomes.
The fact that animals
share physiological properties, which, in humans, are accompanied by subjective
consciousness, implies that subjectivity is a critical survival attribute,
which has been reinforced by natural selection. Its key role has to be
anticipating threats to survival and key strategic advantages. Problems of
strategic decision-making in the open environment are notorious for being
computationally intractable because of super-exponential runaway in calculation
times, as exemplified in the traveling salesman problem, whose calculation time
grows with the factorial of the number of cities involved.
Fig 4: In the veridical way existential reality is generated, subjective experience is primary. In the consensual overlap of our subjective experiences we gain a common experience of the physical world, which we then interpret as containing biological brains, which may also be able to have subjective experiences. However, attempted construction of reality from the physical universe and its brains remains incomplete because there is no explanation of how the brains can also have subjective conscious experiences - the hard problem of consciousness research.
All animal nervous
systems appear to work on a common basis of edge-of-chaos excitation that arose
in excitable single cells before multi-celled organisms evolved Vertebrate
brains have a common mechanism of massive parallel processing using wave phase
coherence to distinguish ground noise from attended signal, accompanied by
transitions from the edge of chaos to an ordered outcome, in diametric
opposition to the ordered serial and digital processing of classical computers.
The organization of
the cerebral cortex and its underlying structures, consist of a series of
microcolumns acting as parallel processing units for an envelope of featural
characteristics, from the focal line orientation and binocular dominance of
visual processing and tonotopic processing of sounds through somato-sensory and
emotional representations, including those of the body, to abstract spatial,
temporal and semantic features, leading to the strategic executive modules of
the prefrontal cortex and our life aims and thought processes. Attempts to find
the functional locus of subjective consciousness in brain regions have arrived
at the conclusion that active conscious experiences are not generated in a
specific cortical region but are a product of integrated coherent activity of
global cortical dynamics, in which the cortical modules we see activated in
brain scans correspond to the salient features of conscious experience we
witness subjectively.
This implies that
the so called Cartesian theatre of consciousness is a product of the entire
active cortex and that the particular form of phase coherent, edge-of-chaos
processing adopted by the mammalian brain is responsible for the manifestation
of subjective experience. This
allows for a theory of consciousness in which preconscious processing e.g. of
sensory information can occur in specific brain areas which then reaches the
conscious only when these enter into a wave synchronous neuronal activity
integrating the processing. Three regions associated with global workspace have
been identified as key participants in these higher integrative functions, the
thalamus which is a critical set of relay centres underlying all cortical areas
and possibly driving the active EEG, the lateral prefrontal and the posterior
parietal (Bor).
Baars global workspace approach (1997, 2001) uggests that consciousness is
associated with the whole brain in integrated correlated activity and is thus a
property of the brain as a whole functioning entity rather than a product of
some specific area, or system, such as the supplementary motor cortex (Eccles, Fried et al, Haggard). Furthermore, the approach rather neatly identifies the
distinction between unconscious processing and conscious experience in terms of
whether the dynamic is confined to local or regional activity or is part of an
integrated coherent global response. It is also consistent with there being
broadly only one dominant stream of conscious thought and experience at a given
time, as diverse forms of local processing gives way to an integrated global
response. A series of experiments, many by teams working with Stanislas
Dehaene, involving perceptual masking of brief stimuli to inhibit their entry
into conscious perception (Sergent
et al, Sigman and Dehaene 2005, 2006, Dehaene and Changeux,De Cul et al 2007,
2009, Gaillard et al), studies of
pathological conditions such as multiple sclerosis (Reuter et al, Schnakers), and brief episodes in which direct cortical electrodes
are being used during operations for intractable epilepsy (Quiroga et al) have tended to confirm the overall features of Baars
model of consciousness based on the global work space (Ananthaswamy
2009, 2010). EEG studies also show
that under diverse anesthetics, as consciousness fades, there is a loss of
synchrony between different areas of the cortex (Alkire et al). The theory also
tallies with Tononis idea of phi, a function of integrated complexity used as
a measure of consciousness (Barras, Pagel).
.
Although subjective consciousness involves the entire cortex in coherent activation, brain scans highlight certain areas of pivotal importance, whose disruption can impede active consciousness. These include prefrontal cortex executive functions, spatial integration in the parietal, and the central information pathways of the thalamus.
.
The 'Self' our enigmatic Actor-Agent
.
When we turn to self-consciousness, and the ongoing notion of 'self', which is the shadowy actor-agent behind all the manifestations of conscious states, we find a close association between the default circuit activated in idle periods, believed to be adaptively envisaging future challenges, and brain regions involved in our sense of self.
Fig 5: Common regions involved in the self, the default network and alert consciousness. Above: regions in the self network (Zimmer). Lower right: the default network (Fox). Lower left disruptions of active consciousness (Bor). (a, a2) Medial/Lateral prefrontal (b,b2) Precuneus/ Posterior cingulate (c) Anterior insula (d,d2) Lateral/Posterior parietal running to the temporo-parietal junction (e) Thalamus.
These include the medial prefrontal cortex and the cingulate cortex and neighbouring precuneus. The default network encompasses posterior-cingulate/precuneus, anterior cingulate/mesiofrontal cortex and temporo-parietal junctions, several of which have key integrating functions.
The ventral medial prefrontal (Macrae et al.) is implicated in processing risk and fear. It also plays a role in the inhibition of emotional responses, and in the process of decision-making. It has been shown to be active when experimental subjects are shown experiences which they think apply to themselves. The changes in Phineas Gage when a tamping iron destroyed his left prefrontal lobe (O'Driscoll & Leach), leading to him becoming a side-show attraction, show how such damage can lead to subtle changes of personality and difficulty in making constructive life decisions, even when localized prefrontal damage does not significantly affect classical IQ tests.
The precuneus (Cavanna & Trimble) is involved with episodic memory, visuospatial processing, reflections upon self, and aspects of consciousness. Adolescents have the same activations as adults in the medial prefrontal when they think about themselves, but less in the precuneus than if they were thinking about a third party, suggesting their theory of mind/self is active but still under development (Zimmer).
The insulae are also believed to be involved in consciousness and play a role in diverse functions usually linked to emotion and the regulation of the body's homeostasis, including perception, motor control, self-awareness, cognitive functioning, and interpersonal experience. The anterior insula is activated in subjects who are shown pictures of their own faces, or who are identifying their own memories, and uniquely in a woman subject who experiences watching other people being touched, as if she herself is being touched, suggesting it plays a critical role in the sense of self. The temporo-parietal junction is known to play a crucial role in self-other distinction and theory of mind. Damage to this area, or electrical stimulation of it, has been implicated in producing OBEs.
.
The mind is naturally partitioned between features we usually assign to be external, such as visual and auditory, and those that usually function as part of our bodily sensations and reactions, such as somatosensory, emotional and motor - those we associate with 'self'. Self also has a specific relationship with voluntary motor activity. All intentional actions lead both to direct motor outputs and to systems that monitor these actions so we have an integrated sensory-motor experience of action.
.
Nevertheless the relationship of 'self' and our body image can become dissociated in bizarre and disquieting ways, which show us that the 'self' is very much a dynamic representation in the brain. Amputees sometimes suffer a phantom limb, feeling a limb is still sometimes painfully present, possibly due to new circuits invading the brain areas that previously served the limb. Conversely, people with body integrity identity disorder and xenomelia seek to cut their limbs off because of the oppressive feeling that one or more limbs of one's body do not belong to one's self. Again this may have a physiological basis in cerebral anomalies in the body image map. An even more convoluted form of 'self' dissociation, apotemnophilia, involves sexual arousal based on the fantasy of becoming an amputee. Schizophrenics likewise can become catatonic and refuse to move, believing their limbs are under the control of unseen forces and people with certain forms of cortical injury suffering hemispatial neglect refuse to recognize that one side of their body is their own and, depending on the extent of damage, may completely neglect the left-hand side of their entire sensory and attentional left field without even recognizing half of reality is missing.
.
.
We have seen already that OBEs are a function of changes in the way we integrate experiences and that OBEs can be induced by tricking the brain into perceiving an external sensation as being part of 'self', e.g. through combining visual experience of another person being touched with somatosensory impressions of being stroked.
.
In a more general way we can see that the nature of 'self' and hence of self-consciousness is both a function of social interactions with others (Bond), and is also a 'sense' we attribute to others, both in terms of our mirror neurons, which provide direct sensations of what others might be feeling, and in terms of our intuitive assessment of others 'self'-assumptions. Social emotions such as admiration or compassion, which result from a focus on the behaviour of others, tend to activate the posteromedial cortices, important in constructing our sense of self (Immordino-Yang et al.), something Antonio Damasio calls the "social self". One can thus see that our personal idea of self is part of a larger adaptive strategy - an intuitive 'theory of mind' to understand self-organized behavior in others, something essential for our social survival. People can sustain up to five or six successive layers of indirected attribution of mind - "I think that he believed she was intending to go to the movies with him" - similar to their digit span.
.
This social idea of 'self' also shows differences across cultures (Brealey). Researchers examining autobiographical memory, have found Chinese people's recollections are more likely to focus on moments of social or historical significance, whereas people in Western countries focus on personal interest and achievement. This is similar to the sex differences in response to an unpleasant experience in the amygdala, which differs between men, who respond in the right amygdala and are drawn to central features, and women who respond in the left amygdala and remember more of the context (Cahill). Both these show us that the 'geography of the self' varies from culture to culture just as it does between the sexes. Intriguingly, babies as young as seven to fifteen months appear to be able to intuitively sense false beliefs in others, suggesting this kind of circuitry has an innate basis (Onishi & Baillargeon, Kovacs et al.).
.
Research is now beginning to suggest there may be two forms of 'theory of mind', one fast and intuitive, developing almost from birth, and the other more complex and based on using experiences in life to provide more finely attuned adaptive responses (Weir). People diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism, show they have the explicit system, yet they fail at non-verbal tests of the kind that reveal implicit theory of mind (Senju et al.). Evidence for a social theory of mind is also reflected in the relationship between social network size, orbital-prefrontal cortex volume and theory of mind performance (Powell et al.). Studies using transcranial magnetic stimulation implicate the right temporo-parietal junction in enabling mental states perceived in others to participate in making moral judgments (Young et al.). A study of people with right parietal damage likewise found them to have enhanced spirituality consistent with a cortical lateralization notion of the right parietal dealing with self and the left with other, with decreased right function leading to
self-transcendence (Johnstone & Bodling).
.
.
We thus come full
circle to the dual problems of space-time anticipation and the notion of
free-will – can subjective conscious experiences through intent, actually lead to
changes in physical outcomes by affecting the outcome of our biological brain
states?
.
Many scientists
tend to a classical view of physics and a reductionistic assumption that all
human activity must be a product of brain function alone and that any notion of
free will, in which subjective consciousness can act to induce a change in
outcomes of objective brain states is delusory. This flies in direct contradiction
to our subjective feelings that we are autonomous beings with voluntary control
over our fates. To claim otherwise in all honesty leads to a catatonic outcome
where no purely conscious volition can lead in any way to an active brain state
of any form of behavior. It also contradicts the assumptions of legal
accountability, where we assume a person of sound mind is responsible for the
consequences of their consciously intentional actions.
The classical way
around this impasse is then to claim that the subjective impression of
voluntary autonomy is a kind of delusion necessary for an organism to maintain
an active life in adaptive survival, but this itself is a contradiction,
because it assumes subjective consciousness does have an adaptive advantage of
some kind.
Many physicists,
from Arthur Eddingtons citation of the uncertainty of position of a synaptic
vesicle in relation to the thickness of the membrane on, have drawn attention
to the fact that the quantum universe is not deterministic in the manner of
classical Laplacian causality and that quantum uncertainty provides a causal
loophole, which might make it possible for free will to coexist in the quantum
universe. This in turn has led to opposing pleas from classical reductionists
that the law of mass action would condemn any fluctuations at the quantum level
to become swamped and that no quantum effects can possibly interfere in the
cellular level processes of neurodynamics. This position is obtuse and
incorrect.
Biology is full of
phenomena at the quantum level, which, far from being swamped by mass action,
are essential to biological function.
Enzymes invoke quantum tunneling to enable transitions through their activation barrier. Protein folding is likewise an effective manifestation of quantum computation intractable by classical computing. When a photosynthetic active centre absorbs a photon, the wave function of the excitation is able to perform a quantum computation, which enables the excitation to travel down the most efficient route to reach the chemical reaction site (McAlpine, Hildne et al). Quantum entanglement is believed to be behind the way some birds navigate in the magnetic field. Light excites two electrons on one molecule and shunts one of them onto a second molecule. Their spins are linked through quantum entanglement. Before they relax into a decoherent state the, Earth's magnetic field can alter the relative alignment of the electrons' spins, which in turn alters the chemical properties of the molecules involved (Amit, Courtland). Quantum coherence is an established technique in tissue imaging, demonstrating an example of quantum entanglement in biological tissues at the molecular level (Samuel, Warren).
Although many processes in the brain need to be resilient to quantum noise, in the event of a critically poised dynamic in which there is no stable determining outcome, known brain processes, from chaotic sensitivity, through and the amplifying effects of chandelier cells, to stochastic resonance are able to amplify fluctuations at the quantum-molecular level to the neuronal and ultimately to a global change in the dynamics (King). Hence a change of a single ion channel can lead to threshold activation of a hippocampal neuron and in turn to a change in global brain activity.
Karl Pribram the
founder of the idea of the holographic brain has drawn attention to the
suggestive similarity between phase coherence processing of brain waves in the
gamma frequency range believed to be responsible for cognitive processes
and the wave amplitude basis of quantum uncertainty in reduction of the wave
packet and quantum measurements based on the uncertainty relation , where the relation is determined by the number of phase fronts to be counted (see fig 8). This raises an interesting spectre, that the evolution of nervous systems has arrived at a neurodynamic process forming a model of the quantum processes at the foundation of physics, suggesting that quantum entanglement in brain states may be a basis for active biological anticipation of immediate threats to survival through the forms of subjective consciousness the brain generates.
Fig 7: Decision-making in the open environment involves computationally intractable problems, which cannot necessarily be solved by probabilities alone. Which path should we take to the water hole today? There could be a tiger on the shady path or a lion on the stony path. Both of these animals are also trying to out-manoeuvre us by changing their decision-making.
To get an idea of
what this advantage might be, we need to examine more closely the kinds of
survival situation that are pivotal to organisms in the open environment and
the sorts of computational dilemmas involved in decision-making processes on
which survival depends.
Several
researchers have highlighted various aspects of consciousness in an attempt to
understand how it evolved (Wilson). For example higher integrative processing
associated with global workspace has been extended to a few other animals such
as apes and dolphins. Another strand suggests that making integrative decisions
socially would have aided better environmental decision-making concerning hard
to discern situations involving the combined senses (Bahrami et al). However
both these ideas pertain to integrative capacities of brain processing and
dont provide any direct explanation of why consciousness also evokes the
Cartesian theatre of subjective experience. We need to try to unravel the much
harder problem of why subjective experience occurs at all, even in a parallel integrative
brain.
Open environment
problems of survival are intractable not just because they involve super-exponentiating
contingent factors which would leave a digital antelope stranded at the
crossroads until pounced upon by a predator, but because they are prone to irresolvable
structural instabilities, which defy a stable probabilistic outcome. Suppose a
gazelle is trying to get to the waterhole along various paths. On a probability
basis it is bound to choose the path, which, from its past experience, it
perceives to be the least likely to have a predator, i.e. the safest. But the
predator is likewise going to make a probabilistic calculation to choose the
path that the prey is most likely to be on i.e. the same one. Ultimately this
is an unstable problem that has no consistent computational solution.
There is a deeper issue in these types of situation. Probabilistic calculations, both in the real world and in quantum mechanics, require the context to be repeated to build up a statistical distribution. In an interference experiment we get the bands of light and dark color representing the wave amplitudes as probability distributions of photons on the photographic plate only when a significant number have passed through the apparatus in the same configuration (see fig 8). The same is true for estimating a probabilistically most viable route to the waterhole. But real life problems are plagued by the fact that both living organisms and evolution itself are processes in which the context is endlessly being changed by the decision-making processes. Repetition occurs only in the most abstract sense, which is one reason why the massively parallel brains we have are so good at such problems.
Finally, in many
real life situations, there is not one optimal outcome but a whole series of
possible choices any or all of which could lead either to death or survival and
reproduction. A central enigma of quantum reality is the Schrodinger cat
paradox, in which a cat set to be killed by a radioactive scintillation in quantum
reality is both alive and dead with differing probabilities, but in our
subjective experience, when we open the box the cat is either alive or dead
with certainty. This is the renowned problem of the causality-violating
reduction of the wave packet.
Come back for a
minute to the animal tracing a path to the waterhole. Animals and even people
are quite lousy computers with a digit span of only six or seven and a
calculation capacity little better than a pocket calculator. We all know what
we do and what conscious animals do in this situation. They look at the paths
forward. If they have had a bad experience on one they will probably avoid it,
but otherwise they will try to assess how risky each looks and make a decision
on intuitive hunch to follow one or the other, depending on how thirsty and
desperate, or distractedly oblivious they have become by the sunlight and green
shoots in the glade.
In a sense, all
their previous life experience is being neatly summed up in their parallel
processing awareness and their semantic and episodic memory, but the real role
of consciousness is to keep watch on the unfolding living environment, to be
paranoid to hair-trigger sensitivity for any hint of a movement or the signs or
sound of a pouncing predator. The absolutely critical point here is that their
consciousness is providing something completely different from a computational
algorithm, it is a form of real time anticipation of threats and survival that
is sensitively dependent on environmental perturbation and attuned to be
anticipatory in real time just sufficiently to jump out of the way and bolt for
it and survive. So the key role of subjective consciousness is an integrated
holographic form of space-time anticipation.
.
The Super-physics of Subjective Consciousness
How could this come about? One way is by quantum entanglement. In quantum mechanics, not only are all probability paths traced in the wave function, but past and future are interconnected in a time-symmetric hand-shaking relationship, so that the final states of an entangled pair on absorption are determining boundary conditions for the interaction just as the initial states that created them are. Thus when an entangled pair are created, each knows instantaneously the state of the other and if one is found to be in a given state, the other is immediately in the complementary state no matter how far away it is in space-time. This is the "spooky action at a distance", which Einstein feared because it violates local Einsteinian causality. The transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics expresses this relationship nicely in terms of offer waves from the past emitter and confirmation waves from the eventual absorbers, whose wave interference becomes the single or entangled particles passing between.
Fig 8: (1) Schrodinger cat experiment has a cat in a box with a radioactive scintillation counter, which works by quantum tunneling out of the nucleus triggering a hammer to smash a cyanide flask pronouncing a cat alive and dead with differing probabilities according to the tunneling wave function of the nucleus potential well. However we find the cat is either alive or dead with certainty. (2) The uncertainty relation is derived directly from the counting of wave
coherence beats, since energy is related to frequency by and . (3) Quantum
interference experiment shows wave-particle complementarity and reduction of
the wave packet occurs statistically (centre) according to the amplitude of the
wave function (right) although the wave-particle reduction of individual quanta
(left) is unpredictable. (4) Wheeler delayed choice shows time reversed
boundary condition. A cosmic scale version of the interference experiment using
galactic gravitational lensing can be adjusted at the detector after the
photons have traversed space to either sample a particle going one way round,
or a wave interference going both ways. (5) The transactional interpretation
visualizes an exchanged particle wave function as the interference of a
retarded usual time direction offer wave and a time-reversed advanced
confirmation wave. (6) Time symmetric interactions also occur in quantum field
theories where special relativity allows both advanced and retarded solutions
because of the energy relation . (a,b) Virtual photons and elecctron-positron pairs deflecting an electron in quantum electrodynamics. Since the photon is its own anti-particle, a negative energy photon traveling backwards in time is precisely a positive energy one traveling forwards. (c) weak force exchange (d) An electron scattering backwards in time is the same as positron creation-annihilation.
The brain explores
ongoing situations which have no deductive solution, by evoking an
edge-of-chaos global entangled state which, when it does collapse, results in
the aha of insight learning, but otherwise remains sensitively tuned for
anticipating any signs of danger. This is pretty much how we do experience
waking consciousness.
The key thing
about quantum entanglement is that it cannot be used to make classical causal
predictions, which would formally anticipate a future event, so the
hand-shaking is only good so long as we maintain an entangled state. This
suggests that the brain may use its brain waves and phase coherence to evoke
entangled states that carry quantum encrypted information about immediate
future states of expereince as well as immediately past states, in a kind of
quantum present which we witness as subjective experience encoded through the
parallel feature envelope of the cerebral cortex. The idea then is that his
provides an intuitive form of anticipation which cannot however be crystallized
into a fully causal classical prediction algorithm because it would collapse
the entanglement to do so.
But there is more
to this cat paradox situation. In the quantum universe we have multiverses.
Quantum mechanics appears to preserve all the conceivable outcomes in parallel
so that, not only is Schrodingers cat both alive and dead, but Napoleon has
both won and lost the battle of Waterloo. Many of these strategic outcomes,
indeed all the accidents of history, depend on uncertainties that go in
principle right down to the quantum level.
There is
continuing debate among physicists about how and where in the causal chain,
reduction of the wave packet actually occurs. While decoherence theories
suggest this may occur simply through interaction of single or entangled states
with other particles. e.g. in the experimental apparatus, in a fundamental
sense the wave function of the entire universe appears to one single
multi-particle entangled state and so the whole notion of a single line of
history unfolding seems to be something only our conscious awareness is able to
determine. Several of the founding quantum physicists adhered to this view.
John von Neumann suggested that quantum observation is the action of a
conscious mind. That argument relies on the view that there is
something special about consciousness, especially human consciousness. Von
Neumann argued that everything in the universe that is subject to the laws of
quantum physics creates one vast quantum superposition. But the conscious mind
is somehow different. It is thus able to select out one of the quantum
possibilities on offer, making it real - to that mind, at least. Max
Planck, the founder of quantum theory, said in 1931, "I regard
consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from
consciousness." Werner Heisenberg also maintained that wave function collapsethe destruction of quantum superpositionoccurs when the result of a measurement is registered in the mind of an observer. In Henry Stapps words we are
"participating observers" whose minds cause the collapse of
superpositions. Before human consciousness appeared, there existed a multiverse
of potential universes. The emergence of a conscious mind in one of these
potential universes, ours, gives it a special status: reality (Brooks). This is effectively a complement to the anthropic principle of physical cosmology in which conscious observers are selective boundary conditions on the laws of nature in the universe (Barrow and Tipler).
Thus another idea
of the role of subjective consciousness is that it is a way the universe can
solve the super-abundance of multiverses to bring about a natural universe in
which some things do happen and other things dont. One of the most central
experiences of our transient mortal lives is that there is a line of actual
history in which each of us, however small and insignificant our lives, are
participating in bringing the world into actual being, albeit sometimes
somewhat diabolically in times of selfishness and exploitation, but with some
reflection on our own transience, perhaps reaching towards a more enlightened
existence, in which the passage of the generations is able to reach towards a
blessed state where the universe comes to consciously understand itself ever
more deeply and completely.
This brings us to
a nub question: Can consciousness anticipate physical reality, let alone influence
it through will?
Can Consciousness Anticipate Physical Reality?
Many aspects of
brain function display dynamic features, which show the brain is focused on
attempting to anticipate ongoing events. When a cat is dropped into unfamiliar
territory the pyramidal cells in its hippocampus become desynchronized and hunt
chaotically, in what is called the orienting reaction, until the animal
discovers where it is or gains familiarity with its environment, when phase
synchronization ensues. In a similar manner the EEG will show a desynchronized
pattern when a subject is listening for a sound which is irregularly spaced,
but will fall into a synchronized pattern if the stimuli are regularly placed
in such a manner that the subject can confidently anticipate when the next
sound is going to occur.
This kind of
processing is consistent with a computational process involving transitions
from chaos to order. The chaotic regime acts both to provide sensitive
dependence on any changes in boundary conditions such as sensory or cognitive
inputs at the same time as preventing the dynamical system getting caught in a
suboptimal state, by providing sufficient energy to cause the process to fully
explore the space of dynamical solutions. Artificial neural net annealing and
quantum annealing both follow similar paradigms using random fluctuations and
uncertainty to achieve a similar global optimization. Such a dynamic also
allows for ordered deductive computation, but enables the system to evolve
chaotically when the ordered process fails to arrive at a computational
solution.
Closed quantum
systems display various forms of suppression of classical chaos, essentially
because spreading wave packets, unlike point particles are extended in space
and can overlap one another to form periodic solutions even when their
trajectories are divergently unstable, ultimately leading to regular periodic
outcomes. However open quantum systems are not subject to this kind of
suppression to the same degree. An indication of how quantum chaos might lead
to complex forms of quantum entanglement can be gleaned from an ingenious
experiment forming a quantum analogue of a chaotic kicked top, using an
ultra-cold cesium atom kicked by both a laser pulse and held in a magnetic
field. In configurations where the classical dynamic is ordered, entropy of the
system is reduced and there is no quantum entanglement between the orbital and
nuclear spin of the atom, however in the chaotic region, orbital and nuclear
spins have become entangled (Chaudry et al, Steck). Thus to the extent that
phase coherence in brain processing is modeled on quantum wave functions,
transitions into chaos correspond to the formation of more complex interactive
forms of entanglement and transitions out of chaos into order correspond to the
collapse of more complex entangled systems into a simpler coherent system. But
does any of this mean that such entanglement could be used in any form of
direct space-time anticipation?
Contrary to this
idea, a critical historical experiment suggested that, far from anticipating
reality in real time, conscious awareness of a decision may actually lag behind
unconscious brain processing which is already leading to the decision, although
being placed by subjective experience at the time the conscious decision was
made. In 1983, neuroscientist
Benjamin Libet asked volunteers wearing scalp electrodes to flex a finger or
wrist. When they did, the movements were preceded by a dip in the signals being
recorded, called the "readiness potential". Libet interpreted this RP
as the brain preparing for movement. Crucially, the RP came a few tenths of a
second before the volunteers said they had decided to move. Libet concluded
that unconscious neural processes determine our actions before we are ever
aware of making a decision. Since then, others have quoted the experiment as
evidence that free will is an illusion – a conclusion that was always
controversial, particularly as there is no proof the RP represents a decision
to move.
With contemporary
brain scanning technology, Soon et al in 2008 were able to predict with 60%
accuracy whether subjects would press a button with their left or right hand up
to 10 seconds before the subject became aware of having made that choice. This
doesn't of itself negate conscious willing because these prefrontal and
parietal patterns of activation merely indicate a process is in play, which may
become consciously invoked at the time of the decision, and clearly many
subjects (40% of trials) were in fact making a contrary decision. Neuroscientist
John-Dylan Haynes, who led the study, agrees: "I wouldn't interpret these
early signals as an 'unconscious decision'," he says. "I would think
of it more like an unconscious bias of a later decision" (Williams).
The assumption
that Libets RP is in fact a subconscious decision has been undermined by
subsequent studies. Instead of letting volunteers decide when to move, Miller
and Trevena asked them to wait for an audio tone before deciding whether to tap
a key. If Libet's interpretation were correct, the RP should be greater after
the tone when a person chose to tap the key. While there was an RP before
volunteers made their decision to move, the signal was the same whether or not
they elected to tap. Miller concludes that the RP may merely be a sign that the
brain is paying attention and does not indicate that a decision has been made.
They also failed to find evidence of subconscious decision-making in a second
experiment. This time they asked volunteers to press a key after the tone, but
to decide on the spot whether to use their left or right hand. As movement in
the right limb is related to the brain signals in the left hemisphere and vice
versa, they reasoned that if an unconscious process is driving this decision,
where it occurs in the brain should depend on which hand is chosen. But they
found no such correlation.
Schurger and
colleagues have elucidated an explanation. Previous studies have shown that
when we have to make a decision based on sensory input, assemblies of neurons
start accumulating evidence in favour of the various possible outcomes. A
decision is triggered when the evidence favouring one particular outcome
becomes strong enough to tip its associated assembly of neurons across a
threshold. The team hypothesized that a similar process happens in the brain
during the Libet experiment. They reasoned that movement is triggered when this
neural noise generated by random or chaotic activity accumulates and crosses a
threshold. The team repeated Libet's experiment, but this time if, while
waiting to act spontaneously, the volunteers heard a click they had to act
immediately. The researchers predicted that the fastest response to the click
would be seen in those in whom the accumulation of neural noise had neared the
threshold – something that would show up in their EEG as a readiness
potential. In those with slower responses to the click, the readiness potential
was indeed absent in the EEG recordings. "We argue that what looks like a
pre-conscious decision process may not in fact reflect a decision at all. It
only looks that way because of the nature of spontaneous brain activity."
Both these newer
studies thus cast serious doubt on Libets claim that a conscious decision is
made after the brain has already put the decision in motion, leaving open the
possibility that conscious decisions are actually made in real time.
Some aspects of
our conscious experience of the world make it possible for the brain to
sometimes construct a present that has never actually occurred. In the
"flash-lag" illusion, a screen displays a rotating disc with an arrow
on it, pointing outwards. Next to the disc is a spot of light that is
programmed to flash at the exact moment the spinning arrow passes it. Instead,
to our experience, the flash lags behind, apparently occurring after the arrow
has passed (Westerhoff). One explanation is that our brain extrapolates into
the future, making up for visual processing time by predicting where the arrow
will be, however rather than extrapolating into the future, our brain is actually
interpolating events in the past, assembling a story of what happened
retrospectively, as was shown by a subtle variant of the illusion (Eagleman and
Sejnowski). If the brain were predicting the spinning arrow's trajectory,
people would see the lag even if the arrow stopped at the exact moment it was
pointing at the spot. But in this case the lag does not occur. What's more, if
the arrow starts stationary and moves in either direction immediately after the
flash, the movement is perceived before the flash. How can the brain predict
the direction of movement if it doesn't start until after the flash? The
perception of what is happening at the moment of the flash is determined by
what happens to the disc after it. This seems paradoxical, but other tests have
confirmed that what is perceived to have occurred at a certain time can be
influenced by what happens later.
This again does
not show that the brain is unable to anticipate reality because it applies only
to very short time interval spatial reconstructions by the brain, which would
naturally be more accurate by retrospective interpolation.
To fathom
situations where real time anticipation may have occurred without any
prevailing causal implication leading up to it, we need to turn to rare
instances of prescience with no reasonable prior cause. These kinds of events
tend to be rare and often apocryphal and lack independent corroboration, like
stories of telepathic connection or the sense of foreboding that a relative has
died, which later receives confirmation. Paradoxically some of the most
outstanding examples can come from alleged precognitive dreaming rather than
the waking state, which tends to be more circumscribed by commonsense everyday
affairs.
As a student, I
picked up and read An Experiment with Time by J W Dunne, which outlined some
double blind experiments in which the author claimed that dream diaries led to
as many accounts linking to future events in the peoples lives as they did to
past experiences. Finding this less than convincing given my scientific
outlook, a few weeks later I had a horrific double nightmare that I was being
agonizingly stung. In the dream it was a spider which I couldnt remove because
it would leave poison fangs inside me and in the second dream it had returned
to sting me again when I was distracted as one often does in dreams. At eight
in the morning my wife awoke to breastfeed our infant daughter and I recounted
the nightmares in detail to her complaining about their painful intensity before
falling asleep again. About an hour later I was stung wide awake by a wasp
which had flown in the window my wife had opened after getting up and crawled
into the bed. Suddenly the dream I had not only experienced but had
emphatically recorded to my wife had become an unbearable reality. Now I know
that a skeptic would interpret this as a mere coincidence, whatever that means
in the quantum universe, merely an application of Bayes theorem of conditional
probabilities, but the power and pain of it drove home to me irreversibly that
dreaming, and by implication waking experiences too, have implications
violating Laplacian causality in just the way that reduction of the wave packet
does for quantum mechanics. The fact that it closely followed on reading the book
gave this prescience an added dimension, capped by the fact that the scientist
providing an introduction to the work was none other than Arthur Eddington who
had suggested quantum uncertainty of the synaptic vesicle as a basis for free
will.
This again raises
a series of questions about coincidence generally and Carl Jungs notion of
synchronicity, the idea that seemingly unrelated events and experiences may be
caught up in a deeper correspondence as reminiscent of quantum entanglement as
phase coherence brain processing appears to be. Again, just as quantum
entanglement, although making space-time correlations violating local
Einsteinian causality, does not allow us to make classical predictions about
future states, so this kind of event cannot be classically proved to be
prescient nor can one expect or hope to demonstrate it on a replicable basis,
nevertheless many peoples accounts attest to a currency of such prescience.
Fig 9: Above: Extracts from the lyrics posting of 20th July 2001. Below: Passing to the other side and falling in flames, The Mayor of New York saying "This is more than we can bear".
.
A month
before the twin towers fell in New York I wrote a song and fortuitously posted
the lyrics online. They contained several prescient lines, including Well fly
so high well pass right to the other side and never fall in flames again then I watched live in prescient horror as one of the two planes struck the tower and passed right through, coming out in a burst of flames on the other side (http://youtu.be/SPNTBa748Pg). My mother often used to say when I called her, I was just thinking of you and
the phone rang! Again a skeptic would say: Your mother is always thinking of
her son. But this fails to address the critical question all shamanic
practitioners have to answer. When curing a sick person, it is not to explain
why the person has contracted tuberculosis or leprosy i.e. that the respective
bacteria are infectious, but why did this person catch it at this particular
time. This is the kind of universal entanglement that may have resulted in the
evolution of brain entanglement and subjective consciousness to deal with it.
Scientific studies
of precognition have had mixed results. Darryl Bem and coworkers (2011)
reported precognitive effects in linked subjects, creating a stir in the
academic community, but four later studies, three of which were reported
together (French Ritchie, Wiseman, French 2012) failed to replicate these
results, emphasizing the ephemeral nature of scientific research in this area.
Telepathy, like
prescience, is a phenomenon that has an elusive presence in human anecdotal
accounts, which are difficult to replicate reliably at above chance levels,
leading some to conclude it is another example of Bayes theorem on conditional
probabilities where there is mental bias towards affirmation of a sporadic
phenomenon, due to counting only the wins. "I was just thinking of you when you called" as my mother used to say.
Many cultures
report accounts where individuals are intuitively aware of a relative for
example having passed away. The space and time-spanning nature of the
Aboriginal dreamtime and the shamanic world view generally, represent perspectives in which such mental
connections can be perceived as intrinsic.
On my first
sabbatical, while in London, I had a transient relationship with an ex-student
of mine. After a few weeks we parted ways, heading in different directions
around the planet - she heading East through Europe, while I flew West to the
US. Several months later, back in the antipodes, I was at an evening
performance and suddenly had the most uncanny sensation that she was somehow present right there in the room. This caused me
to turn around 180 degrees and there she was directly behind me. Key here is the
complete separation of two parties who have become intuitively acquainted and
make no further contact until the event occurs leaving the mind clear of
confounding stimuli, but it could also be regarded as a case of precognition
rather than telepathy.
Alexandra David-Neel, reported the technique of mutual meditation with implied telepathic contact, which she first witnessed in the communication between a disciple and his Lama guru (Foster & Foster 1998): "The Gomchen and Alexandra would sit together in silence in a darkened room, focused on the same object, the aspects of a deity for example. After a time the Gomchen would ask what she had seen and if it were the same as his projection. The goal was an entirely unified mental state. Later, camping in the wilds, Alexandra would record instances of the use of telepathy at great distances, of receiving messages the Tibetans termed "written on the wind."
The concept of telepathy has been repeatedly explored in various forms of experiment. Classic Psi experiments by J B Rhine, Pearce-Pratt were performed using symbolic flash cards (Radin 2009), and those of Upton Sinclair and Stanley Krippner et al. (1993) the latter using an entire Greatful Dead concert's attendees, involved the transmitter making drawings or the crowd watching an image which the receivers attempted to replicate.
Duane (1965)
reported an experiment in which spatially-separated identical twins had coupled
changes in their EEGs in which one twin closing their eyes elicited an alpha
rhythm in the other, consistent with some form of direct mental or physical
connection. A similar follow-up experiment (Giroldini et al. 2015) showed
slight changes in the filtered alpha rhythm of the 'receiving' twin which was deemed statistically significant on careful
Monte Carlo analysis.
Grau C et al.
(2014) have reported success at transferring information from a subject in France
to another in India, but here the EEG signal of the 'transmitter' was
transcribed into a digital code sent over the internet and transformed into
non-invasive stimulation the receiver succeeded in using to distinguish one of
two signals 'ciao' or 'hola', so this experiment says nothing about purely
spontaneous interactions.
The idea we are discussing is that, to model quantum entanglement in the physical universe and the critical effects it could have on survival, in a red-queen race with other sentient organisms, including predators, parasites and prey, the brain evolved to use entangled internal states in its own processing when deductive processes were at a tipping point, resulting in a quantum 'convergence' where the brain began to use the very entangled states it was modeling in such a way as to manifest the entangled space-time properties it had become sensitive to.
The notion of the brain using entanglement processing provides a useful paradigm for resolving many of the contradictory situations that arise when temporal causality is applied to anticipatory events. We can envisage the conscious brain as an entanglement anticipator in the following way. Memory is to model the past and subjective consciousness is to anticipate the future. Memory systems are used to form a model of the quantum collapsed history already experienced, which is first sequentially stored in the hippocampus but is then semantically re-encoded into the cortical feature envelope so that it can be interrogated from any semantic perspective. The conscious cerebral cortex contains a dynamical system of entangled states which together extend over a space-time region extending a limited distance into both the past and future - the quantum-delocalized present. Memory and the current situation set the context and the cortical dynamic seeks to anticipate the next move. The cortical envelope thus maintains a state of context-modulated sensitively-dependent dynamic excitation which generates our conscious sense of the present moment by encoding the immediate past and future together in a wave function representation. This would correspond to the entangled life-time of the coherent excitations taking place in the brain state and would mean that the brain is incorporating quantum-encrypted information about the immediate past and future of the organism into the current state of subjective experience. The quantum present provides the loophole in classical causality that permits intentional will to alter brain states as an effect of the entanglement. An external observer will simply see a brain process sensitively dependent on quantum uncertainty.
Let us look at how this treatment might shed new light on some of the time violating experiences we have noted. Precognitively dreaming about being stung can be described in the following way. While dreaming my brain becomes sensitively dependent on a population of entangled states reverberating in my cortex. These entangled states extend in space-time from the earliest experience of being stung to the future point in time I am stung wide awake. This is not so hard to understand because the brain was fixated on this experience during the dreaming night and I was stung wide awake from a further period of REM-rich morning sleep. In effect the quantum present of my brain state extended from the dream to the event, in terms of some ongoing wave coherence mode. Nevertheless some prescient experiences seem to occur over quite long time intervals, suggesting the brain can encode entangled states in a more permanent form which can still be referenced later. Intriguingly, highly active brain states have been shown in fMRI studies to elicit changes in cerebral activation
lasting over 24 hours (Heaven, Harmelech et al).
Long-term potentiation and memory processes are in principle permanent and may involve epigenetic changes (Levenson & Sweatt).
Prescient experience leads to a series of paradoxes and contradictions for classical causality, based on the arrow of time. Turning to the lyrics example before 9-11, the first skeptical response would be that it was just a coincidence that I wrote a prescient line. The application of Bayes theorem of conditional probabilities to this requires a reasonable probability that someone on Earth will write a line anticipating the plane flying through the tower because we are claiming that if I wrote a lyric there is a reasonable probability by chance that it will seem to anticipate 9-11. It is far from clear that there are any let alone many such cases, so we have technically only one event. To try to trace any connection causally leads to contradiction. One causal explanation is that I wrote the line because some information from the future made me sense the impending event. This is a contradiction because it involves classically time-reversed causality. A second causal explanation is that, because I wrote the line, an event showing similarities to it was more likely to happen. It is true that in sensitively dependent systems small differences can lead to much larger fluctuations, but the idea of small events in history driving unrelated major future events, even on a probability basis is causally unstable.
But there is more to this. I originally wrote the line thinking about the destruction of biodiversity, of burning forests and then inverting myth of Icarus, turning the foolhardy challenger melted by the sun into the valiant act against all odds of conflagration that leads to new life, in a manner uncannily similar to the terrorists believing they would see al-Llah in paradise through thier act. Hence it has taken a highly unlikely lateral metaphor to bring about this correspondence. Also the song had other hidden elements. It accused the U.S. under George Bush of being the one true rogue nation - the great American shaitan. Shaitan is a reference to the Muslim Satan, as in the eyes of the 9-11 terrorists. In the last line it closed with “Can we bear it all again? It thus presciently echoed the Mayor of New York’s words on TV “This is more than we can bear”. So how does Bayes theorem handle these nuances? That the song and event are just two obvious manifestations of an incendiary world in an apocalyptic age? This is very far from being a plausible counter-argument.
There is another type of solution possible. Suppose we incorporate all these elements into a quantum superposition of states involving space-time entanglement. The entanglement then contains all of these elements without contradiction, because within the entanglement, time is symmetric, and forward and reverse causalities are consistently encoded by the transactional space-time hand-shaking. There are many experiential threads semantically correlated between past and future, with no contradiction. The disquieting issue is not that prescience might have occurred, but that, if consciousness is here to protect us from the incipient future, maybe with a little more foresight, this tragedy could have been avoided - except that too many major players were acting too ignorantly and the ephemeral connection never got made until the event happened.
One can discern not just one, but three manifestations of the arrow of time bearing on the nature of consciousness and memory. The first is the one we have been considering in the brain - that the future is uncollapsed quantum states still in wave superposition and the past has been collapsed by conscious experience. This leads to some counter-intuitive conclusions, because it implies that the consciousness itself is resulting in the historicity that is causing my brain to have memory. The second arrow is the thermodynamic arrow of time - that entropy, or disorder is increasing overall, despite the negentropic nature of increasing biological complexity as an open thermodynamic system. However the second law of thermodynamics is a statistical consequence of the time direction in which real events are happening. All the massive positive mass-energy real particles in the universe are retarded particles that flow in the usual direction forwards in time. The time-reversed electron is an anti-electron flowing forwards in time, as shown in the Feynman quantum field theory diagrams in fig 8. One explanation of this real quantum arrow of time is that the origin of the universe is a phase reflecting transactional mirror, bringing the question back to quantum entanglement again.
Cultural Visions of the Cosmic Subjective
Cultures
throughout history have been representing the world of their subjective
experience in myth, fable, folklore and religious accounts. Creation myths are
commonly fabulous tales of heroes and supernatural entities, even when they
reflect historical realities and gender conflict in the subtleties of their
accounts, as the Eden story does of the Fall from nature in a sexual dysphoria
between women and men.
Even our major
current religions, while claiming to describe how God created the universe are
primarily dealing with the stream of subjective experience rather than physical
reality. Supernatural realms, from heaven and hell, to the apocalyptic end of
days and the imagined rapture all gain their intensity and meaning as
fantasized conscious experiences rather than realizable physical realities.
When we think of
the eternal hell fires of damnation, we do not seriously believe that it is our
molecular flesh, with its DNA and proteins that will froth and bubble in
Satans fiery pits, but rather a conscious torment in the realm of dreams and
visions. Likewise when we deal with the afterlife and the angels of heaven in
the clouds, we do not seriously think we are going to be gasping in the upper
atmosphere or freezing in outer space, but are invoking a subjectively
conscious realm of partially disembodied beings of light whose rules of
engagement are akin to NDEs and visionary hallucinations of mystics and
shamans.
Fig 10: A traditional spectrum of human cultural, spiritual and religious experiences of existence, all of which, including heaven and hell, exist on the plane of subjective conscious experience, although some lay claim to defining the creation of the physical universe. These include the Judeo-Christian notion of the sabbatical creation by the Elohim male and female in their likeness, despite creating the sun and moon after the plants, the Eden origin, and the final apocalypse invoking heaven and hell, the highly sexual Muslim paradise, Vishnu dreaming the word as Brahman in a lotus coming out of his navel, Kali standing over lifeless Shiva (Varanasi shrine), the cosmic Tao of yin and yang, each generating the other to engender the diversity of nature, the Tantric origin in deep coital fusion between Shiva as consciousness and Shakti as substance spawning the phenomena existence - Maya or illusion, its meditative expression in the Kundalini-charged experience of Yab-Yum enlightenment, the Buddhist wheel of life, including the worlds of devas, titans, humans, animals and hungry ghosts, with Buddhist flaming hell below it, the Aboriginal dreamtime (Colleen Wallace), the Bushman trance dancing experience, visions of Lascaux and the Venus of Laussel, the Nierika cosmic peyote portal of the Huichols, the ayahuasca spirits of the plants (Pablo Amaringo) and the Chenrizig mandala.
The notion of a
god in the sky purveying a realm of the afterlife is extremely ancient in
diverse human culture. The Bushmen refer to the great God in the Eastern sky
who has a village containing the spirits of the dead where he sits under a
great tree. Again this idea of the sky is the mind-sky – a purely
conscious realm, as in a dream.
Traditional
cultures, from the Bushmen to the Huichols, approach spiritual realms using the
very techniques used to induce non-ordinary mental states, such as trance
dancing and consumption of the psychedelic peyote.
One of
the most outstanding Huichol peyote shamans of modern times was don Jose Matsuwa
who at 1990 was the venerable age of 109. Besides walking in the sacred journey
to Wirikuta, 'don Jose spent many years living alone in the Huichol sierra
learning directly from the ancient ones who reside there in the caves and
mountains. In order to become a shaman in the Huichol tradition one must learn
to dream consciously and lucidly, for after a healing has been performed, that
night the shaman tries to dream about the patient and find out the reason for
the illness. Each day the Huichols tell their dreams to "Grandfather
fire". Dreams help to bring together the past, present and the future'
(Halifax 249).
Brant
Secunda became his apprentice after walking from Ixtlan into the mountains. 'On
the third day of my journey, I became completely lost after walking down a deer
trail. I became terrified and lay down to die, from sun exposure and
dehydration. I then began to have vivid visions of colourful circles filled
with deer and birds, but was suddenly awakened by Indians standing over me
sprinkling water over me. They told me the shaman of their village had had a
dream about me two days earlier and they had been sent out to rescue me'
(Rainbow Network Aug 90 4).
Peyote is said to
open the niérika, a visionary gateway between ordinary reality and the higher
spirit realm. "When the mara'akame passes
through the niérika, he moves just as the smoke moves; hidden
currents carry him up and in all directons at once ... as if upon waves,
flowing into and through other waves ... the urucate. As the mara'akame
descends and passes through the niérika on the return, his memory of the
urucate and their world fades; only a glimmer remains of the fantastic journey
that he has made (Halifax 242).
The curandero who
opened the secret of the sacred mushroom to Gordon Wasson was Maria Sabina. She
likewise had prescient visions. Shortly before his arrival in 1953, she had had
a vision while on the little saints,
that non-Mazatec strangers would come to seek nti-si-tho - the little one who springs forth. Her life was beset
by many tragedies including a macabre vision she had shortly afterward on the
little things, which foretold the murder of her son, possibly in vengeance for
opening the knowledge of the mushroom. Her house and little shop were also
burned (Estrada 71, 79).
Indian yogis
likewise claim elevated visionary powers. Paramhansa Yogananda described a
vision of Kali while meditating at Dakshineswar (Yogananda 79):
“First a delightful cold wave descended over my
back banishing all discomfort. Then to my amazement the temple became greatly
magnified, its large door slowly opened revealing a stone figure of the Goddess
Kali. Gradually it changed into a living form smiling nodding in greeting
thrilling me with joy indescribable. … An ecstatic enlargement of consciousness
followed. I could see clearly for several miles over the Ganges River to my left
and beyond the temple into the entire precincts. The wall of the buildings
glimmered transparently – trough them I observed people walking to and
fro over distant acres.”
These kinds of
visionary experience are common to both psychedelic experiences and lucid
dreaming, as Prem Dass notes during a peyote session:
My body had fallen asleep, yet my
mind was ascending on a breeze chant that had now turned into a jet stream upon
which I was ascending ... I could see my hut and the village below. I was free
and flying with such a feeling of exhiliration that I wanted to cry, for now I
was experiencing the true meaning of Don Jose's song ... various kinds of light
and form passed ... Each song lifted me higher to a warm, blissful and radiant
light. As I came closer to the great brilliant sphere, time was slowing to a
stop. Intuitively, I knew I was dead and had absolutely no knowledge of who and
where I came from. Yet I knew and felt totally at home, as if I had returned
from a journey in a far away land. - Prem Das (Halifax 239).
The
relationship between traditional religions and mystical vision is fraught with violence
and repression. Although religions are frequently founded by visionaries,
mystical vision tends to be repressed as heretical. The early gnostics were
suppressed by the orthodox and mystical vision was repressed by the
Inquisition. Although Meister Eckhart died before he was tried, Marguerite
Porete, author of The Mirror to the Simple Soul a work of Christian mysticism
dealing with agape (divine love) and cited as one the primary texts of the
medieval Heresy of the Free Spirit, was the first person to be burned to death
in the Auto de Fe in Paris. Notably the Free Spirit movement had several key
features consistent with open exploration of the cosmology of mind: (a) Denial
of the necessity of Christ, the church and its sacraments for salvation –
such that austerity and reliance on the Holy Spirit was believed to be sufficient. (b) They believed that they could communicate directly with God and
denied the necessity of Christ, the church and its sacraments. (c) They invoked
the language of erotic union with Christ, sometimes celebrated in rites of sexual
union in the metaphor of Jesus and Magdalene. (d) Antinomian attitudes rejecting moral, religious, or social laws and norms.
Muhammad
meets Gabriel on his night journey
(Mi'raj-nameh Turkey 15th cent).
Many of the key prophets and founders of major religions, were visionaries who were often rejected by the people of their day.
Muhammad for example claimed to have made a night journey to Jerusalem on the axis mundi and received his inspiration from visions of the angel Gabriel in his cave, but according to founding Islamic historians he at least once confused Gabriel with Satan, so his visions cannot be regarded as sacrosanct.
This occurred over whether female deities could be intermediaries of al-Llah, in the so-called satanic verses alleged to have been subsequently removed from the Quran. The historians Ibn Sa'd and al Tabari describe the origin of the 'Satanic Verses' that became notorious with the death fatwa cast on Salman Rushdie for his novel of the same name. The Quraysh of Mecca worshipped the astral goddesses al-Lat, al-Uzza and Manat. One day, Tabari says, while he was meditating in the Ka'aba, the answer seemed to come in a revelation that gave a place to the three 'goddesses' without compromising his monotheistic vision assimilated from Hebrew religion (Armstrong 113).
"Have you then considered the Lat and the
Uzza, And Manat, the third, the last?
these are the exalted birds [gharaniq] whose
intercession is approved"

It is said that Muhammad removed these verses because he was later told by the angel Gabriel they were "Satan inspired". The rejection of the Manat led to the historic conflict with the Qura'sh, which resulted in the flight to Medina and the later genocide of 700 Jewish men and the slavery of the women and children (Armstrong 206), for parleying with the Quraysh even though they hadn't opened their gates to the enemy, after Muhammad appointed a dying warrior as judge over their fates, although it was a wasted genocide, because the Quraysh had left without completing the siege, and no subsequent battle occurred. This
"Have you then considered the Lat and the
Uzza, And Manat, the third, the last?
What! for you the males and for Him the
females! This indeed is an unjust division!
They are naught but names which you have named,
you and your fathers;
Allah has not sent for them any authority.
They follow naught but conjecture and their low
desire." (53.19).
Gautama Buddha’s
enlightenment was more about the redeeming the psychology of the ego than
performing miraculous, or prescient, feats. Although he was alleged to possess
superhuman powers and abilities, due to an understanding of the skeptical mind
and how the display of miracles can be abused by unscrupulous people, he
reportedly responded to a request for miracles by saying, "I dislike,
reject and despise them," and refused to comply. However there is one
famous anecdotal miracle attributed to him in a contest with heretics, who
wished to perform their own miracles. Buddha proceeded to perform the
Yamaka-pātihāriya (Twin Miracle), which consisted of the appearance
of pairs of phenomena of opposite character e.g. flames from the upper part of
his body and a stream of water from the lower.
The case of Jesus,
whom Christianity has elevated from a religious founder to a divine figure, the
Son of God, is likewise fraught with contradictions. Although we know little of
Yeshua’s mental prescience, or visionary experiences, it is his nature miracles
in accounts by later writers decades after his demise, that play a critical
part in his assumed transcendence. Since miracles are also assumed to be a
manifestation of mental powers, we need to consider carefully their origin in
the heroic fertility religion surrounding Israel at the time, complementing Yeshua’s
messianic mission to Israel. In the light of this, we will have to regard these accounts as mythical anecdotes.
The January date
of Yeshua’s epiphany coincides with the advent of Dionysus in many regions. His
first miracle – the water into wine – at the behest of his mother, is
a classic miracle of Dionysus, the god of the grape harvest, winemaking and
wine, and of ritual madness and ecstasy in Greek mythology, feverishly sought after
by the maenads. In neighbouring Nabatea, in the time of Jesus, the original
Edomite god Dhushara, Lord of Seir, had taken a Dionysian form, including
wearing a tragic mask, which conferred immortality. Other miracles, including controlling
storms, walking on water and sending the evil spirits of insanity into a herd
of swine, causing them to drown, coincide with the Dionysian tradition of
miraculous dread, but lie completely outside Jewish religious world-views,
leading to Jesus being accused of being Ba’al Zebul – Lord of the Flies.
Yeshua’s status as
a messiah is also contradicted by his own words. While the synoptic gospels have
Peter saying “Thou art the Christ”, when Jesus asks “Whom do men say that I
am?”, the gnostic Gospel of Thomas of comparable age and validity, has Jesus saying:
"I am not your master. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated
from the bubbling spring which I have measured out" (13).
The Gospel of
Thomas, which gives the clearest intimations of Yeshua’s subjective world-view,
makes absolutely clear that he believes the kingdom to be realized in our
conscious experiences of the natural universe, not an apocalyptic rapture of
triage:
If those who lead you say to you, 'See,
the kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they
say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the
kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you (3).
His disciples said to him, "When will
the kingdom come?" Jesus said, "It will not come by waiting for it.
It will not be a matter of saying 'here it is' or 'there it is'.
Rather, the
kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it (113)."
The Hebrew
mashiach is a figure that brings about a long-term epoch of future goodness. David,
Solomon and even Cyrus were extolled in these terms. Unlike David and Solomon,
who were anointed by a high priest, Jesus is anointed to his doom by a woman. This
highlights Yeshua’s role transcending the beliefs of his time, as being both a
chaos messiah in Israel, leading to claims of blasphemy and a fertility hero in
the rural backdrop, who then enters into a triple crucifixion passion play
– insurrection to the Romans for turning the tables on the Roman currency,
blasphemy to the High Priests for reviving Lazarus and a sacrifice of the fertility
king after he rides into Jerusalem:
Took branches of palm trees, and went forth to
meet him, and cried, Hosanna: Blessed is the King of Israel that cometh in the
name of the Lord (John 12:13).
Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O
daughter of Jerusalem: behold, your King comes unto you: … l
owly, and riding upon a donkey, and upon
a colt the foal of a donkey (Zech 9:9).
Mary Magdalene is
described as “out of whom went seven devils”. These seven are known throughout
history as the guardians of the seven layers of hell, who later pursue
Dumuzi-Tammuz to his doom, after Inanna-Ishtar’s return from her descent into
the underworld, where she was stripped naked of her seven veils one by one.
Yeshua’s anointing
by a woman attests to the fertility tradition of neighbouring Nabatea at its
heyday in his lifetime, as are his intimations that this anointing is for his
sacrificial doom, inevitably to be betrayed by Judas as a result of its
profligate nature.
In the synoptics, a woman, variously a sinner, anoints his head with a box of spikenard, while in John it is his feet. In all four cases, he declares it is for his burial. The women of Galilee, who ministered unto him “of their substance”, attend his crucifixion, and they prime among them Magdalene, are first to witness his resurrection on the third day, completing the sacrificial cycle, just as Salome danced Inanna’s descent mightily pleasing Herod’s generals, at Machaerus on the border with Nabatea, and after being offered even half Herod’s kingdom, as in the Book of Esther, then claimed the head of John the Baptist on a plate, after John had cursed her mother Herodias for adultery. They were at Machaerus on the border with Nabatea becase of a conflict which arose when Herod divorced his previous wife the princess of Nabatea, sending her scurrying home in fear of her life.
Outside the
Dionysian nature miracles, the others are more equivocal. The loaves and fishes
episode was simply a forerunner for communion morsels spread between many to
keep the faith, which even the disciples didn’t see as a miracle at the time:
For
they considered not the miracle of the loaves: for their heart was hardened
(Mark 6:51).
Faith healing is a
common phenomenon that thrives on the placebo effect and anecdotal claims from a mythical distance:
A prophet is not without honour, but in his own
country, and among his own kin, and in his own house. And he could there do no
mighty work, save that he laid his hands upon a few sick folk, and healed them (Mark 6:4).
At Nazareth, Luke quotes the comment “physician heal thyself” (4:23), hinting that Jesus could not cure his own disability, as noted by the Lexicon Talmudicum and Talmud babli Sanhedrin calling Yeshu-ha-Notzri, hanged on a Passover eve, "Balaam the Lame", claiming he came from the wicked kingdom of Edom (Graves 1946 6, Graves & Podro 1953 23, 288).
Both polytheistic
and monotheistic religions are founded on a god, or deities, as third-party
agents. These agents are either in superhuman form, appearing as male and
female humanlike figures complete with human personalities, or they are more
abstract deities, as Yahweh and al-Llah are, but still possessing many features
of emotional personality. Moral deities are envisaged as functioning to
reinforce punishment and provide forgiveness to their compliant believers
through the same attributes of personality human beings express. We hear of
Gods anger, jealousy, compassion and mercy - all emotional attributes we
naturally associate with a mammalian emotional limbic system, but critically
the emotional experiences of a conscious person fearing another conscious
agent. God is above all conscious of His actions even as he is construed to be
omniscient and omnipotent even as we are subjectively conscious of Him –
to know even also as I am known.
No one would dream of worshipping a deity who was not even conscious of
their existence.
To accurately
judge religions as theories of mental states, and particularly as instruction
manuals for human choices and actions under threat of dire social or spiritual
punishment, we need to be honest enough to have caveats when their doctrines
and dogmas fly in frank violation of nature and of physics itself. There is no
evidence for an external agent with an all too human moral personality in any
phenomena of natural or physical cosmology. Nature has no moral law which
curses the predators or even the diseases. The notion of God creating the
universe is a false metaphor humans are projecting on to nature from their own
experience of being a dominant species shaping the world around them, often to
their own folly and the detriment of nature, creating the world in crude
analogy with human tool-making and manufacture. We will never develop a good
idea of the cosmological basis of subjective experience if we simply project a
human-like personality for which there is no evidence onto the entire universe
as an external agent and give that agent nave power to breathe life into clay
or surgically remove a rib to create a sexual partner.
To deny all the
evidence of evolution, in the genetic age, which attests to an almost divine
power of generative capacity of life to become ever more complex, sentient and
elegant and even explains how it can come about, and instead insist that a
clock-maker deity with a bad temper made a static fallible world in a nave
order in six days four thousand years ago is to doom any potential of this
theory of consciousness to be anything more than a dangerous and socially
destructive delusion. Neither can we afford to say nature is bestial, sinful,
or beneath spirituality, or that the Lion should lie down with the Lamb, for
the living diversity of plants and animals and of herbivores and carnivores is
central to the diversity of life, just as sexuality is not debased over
spirituality, but is the cosmological principle from which all complex
conscious life emerges in the immortal passage of the generations.
Eastern religious
philosophy is founded on the notion that the physical world is a gross illusion
of consciousness, or maya, in which Shiva has lost sight of in his own cosmic
conscious transcendence, in his dance with Shakti-Kali. Likewise Vishnu the
sustainer is seen as dreaming the universe, in Brahman emerging from a lotus in
his navel in deep contemplation, implying the entire physical universe is just
a thought in the mind of God.
Nevertheless two
deep and powerful Eastern currents found their existential cosmology on a
complementarity reminiscent of the wave-particle complementarity of quantum
physics and of sexual complementarity. The Tantric cosmic origin begins in deep
sexual coitus between Shiva and Shakti as mind and matter complete and replete.
It is only when this intimate loving embrace of the complementary principles
begins to come apart that we descend by degrees into the deluded realm of
individual egos witnessing the gross accumulations of the physical world,
ultimately ending in the Kali Yuga today. This notion is powerful in several
ways. It attests to the fundamental complementarity between the objective
phenomena of the physical universe and the subjective conscious experience we
all witness throughout life as sentient beings. It is also a cosmology founded
on biology and sexuality as primal generating principles. Likewise the Tao is a
cosmology of nature and conscious life founded on the complementarity of yang
and yin as creative and receptive principles, again founding existence on
sexual complementation and the fertilization of the receptive by the creative.
In the Eastern
mysticism of the Upanishads, the great journey to spiritual realization is a
journey of subjective consciousness backwards into the atman, or cosmic self
at the core of each persons subjective mind. The atman is thus the mental
state beyond all the conditioned mental states of the ego, very much in the
paradigm of the NDE. Buddhism took this description one step further and denied
the existence of the self as an objectification, claiming there is no self,
there is no god, but the round of birth and death of the suffering ego, which
can achieve enlightenment by escaping this cycle into the peaceful void of the
Buddha no-mind.
Hence Buddhism
stands out as a cosmology not requiring an external agent to create the
universe, as in the charming but nave seven day creation, where the Earth is
flat, surrounded above and below by dome-like firmaments in which the stars are
fixed, while the plants are created before the sun and moon, clearly a
fundamental violation of the generative sequence of the physical universe we
have come to know in the scientific era. Buddhism also has vehicles of
description based on the fractal geometries of Mandalas, coming a little closer
to our descriptions of the laws of nature based on symmetries and broken
symmetries. However in a striking parallel we find the Buddhist wheel of life
containing fantastic realms similar to Christian heavens and hells, of the worlds of devas, titans, humans, animals and hungry ghosts, and flaming hell with people simmering in fiery pots.
Notably Australian
aboriginals speak of the dreamtime as if their real world has itself emerged
from dreaming reality and the Huichols speak of the Nierika or cosmic portal
peyote reveals, connecting them to the world of spirits and the foundations of
existence, as if cosmology itself emerges from the visionary state. Animistic
and shamanistic cultures likewise imbue all of nature with subjectively
conscious dimensions, invoking spirits of wind, water, fire and the rain,
animals and plants as active conscious entities, turning the whole of nature
into one big subjective conscious experience.
In many belief
systems there is believed to be a direct psychic connection between conscious
experiences and attitudes in which thoughts can affect the physical world
around us in terms of karma, spirit influence, and natural calamity, again
implying the whole universe is in a kind of conscious causal reverberation,
which we must be very careful of for our own survival.
In the case of the
Bushmen and many shamanic cultures, this is simply an intuitive sense of not
bringing about negative circumstances through negative thinking, but in the
Buddhist karmic cosmology it becomes a huge moral causality, not only linking
to affairs of the world around us in this life, but a reincarnation cycle
spanning multiple lives. This is in frank violation of nature, claiming that a
human killer might be reborn as a cockroach as a setback on the path towards
enlightenment. This is a double violation of nature, both because a cockroach
has as valid an ecological niche as a human and because predation and killing
is intrinsic to the animal world, as species from the lion to the praying
mantis demonstrate. To assert a moral causality over nature based on human egos
is a tragic fallacy, just as the notion of a personal soul entering a chain of
incarnations, rather than dissolving back into the totality, is as self-serving
psychically as parthenogenesis is biologically in relation to sexuality.
We thus find that
pretty much all of human cosmological descriptions up to the scientific
revolution were not primarily about the physical universe, but of our
subjective conscious experience of it - theories of consciousness even when
they profess interest in astronomy, the creation of the world or the fertility
of the seasons. We can thus to a certain extent forgive spiritual traditions
for their deluded violation of natural principles we have come to discover
about the physical and natural world only recently through the skeptical
inquiry of the scientific method.
The lesson, as in
Tao and Tantra, lies in the complementation of the natural and experiential -
that each is sacred and an essential complement to the other. We thus need to
take onboard all the lessons nature can provide to examine what actually or at
least plausibly might be going on in the unfolding universe and what it
suggests about the meaning of conscious life, the universe and everything.
Towards a Meaningful Unfolding Universe
This leads to
several ultimate questions:
1. Is
there any intrinsic meaning to life, or is it we ourselves, as living beings,
who express the meaning by unfolding it in our creative lives as conscious
participants?
2. Is the
world heading for an apocalyptic falling out and a triage of nature caused by a
failure to protect our generations own futures, or is the entire universe evolving
towards a state of ever-deepening realization and enlightenment?
3. Is the
fulfillment of life in the universe found in some future ultimate state of
enlightenment, or is it expressed eternally across space-time in the
consciousness of all sentient beings who will come to witness or have witnessed
the ongoing existential condition, who together bring about the historical
evolution of the conscious universe?
The first is an
important lesson about life, particularly for people coming closer to the end
of life, or facing a terminal condition. If we are conscious participants in
the universe, meaning is not something we should necessarily seek to extract
from life but meaning is what we give to it, both in our compassionate actions
towards it and in the meaning we give to it in sharing with our family and
friends and in the creativity we bring to it in our love, music and works from
literature through science to the simple random acts of kindness, all of which
make the world a better and more bearable place. By sharing our existence
together across the generations, we find a sense of presence and meaning, which
goes deeper then the individual ego doomed to the mortal coil. This is
something more vital and creative than simply denying the suffering of the ego
that Buddhism conveys, because life is a creative force which gives rise to
sentient beings and to all of living diversity on which our biological
existence and that of those who will experience life after we are gone depends.
We need to
remember this is not just a dilemma for our own incarnation. Life emerged on
our planet from a hot young Earth and may again be annihilated when the sun
grows into a red giant, but this does not mean all the sentient life between is
made meaningless. Indeed life is victorious in that, on another planet in this
or another galaxy, life can spring forth anew.
As to the second
question, the notion of apocalypse may well come from a sense of prescience in
our collective consciousness that over the last few millennia we have fallen
out of gatherer-hunter innocence in paradise, in a falling out between woman
and man, into an accelerating state of culture shock, as nation has warred upon
nation, leading ultimately to the present state of cultural crisis amid nuclear
overkill, clash of the cultures, a mass extinction of biodiversity and the
threat of climate tipping point deleterious to the future of humanity.
Ultimately apocalypse means unveiling, the covers being thrown off reality,
so we can come to see it face-to-face, no longer through a glass darkly, just
as the scientific revolution is doing for the objective world. The crux of the
matter is that this is not a diabolical end of days ordained by God, but a
consequence of our own cultural becoming and population explosion, which we
need urgently to find a compassionate remedy for, in protecting the living
planet from the ravages of human impact, so that future generations can survive
and prosper. It doesnt take supernatural intervention to see and understand
this, it is simple commonsense.
Fig 11: Centre: Darwin, the hoopoe and the serpent in paradise on the cosmic equator. Conscious life is a cosmological consequence of the symmetry-breaking of the forces of nature resulting in fractal molecular interactions which ultimately give rise to tissues. Thus conscious life represents a sigma consummation on the cosmic equator of space-time mid-life in the universes history, just as the alpha and omega
represent cosmic poles. Right: Chardins view of cosmogenesis and evolution arriving
at the noosphere and the reemergence of the transcendent. Left: A modern
variant centered on the reintegration of human consciousness into the divine (http://www.noosphereforum.org/).
Hence we turn to
the other side of the coin. Is there some way in which the universe is coming
to fruition through an accumulating sense of our own immanent conscious
integration? The Noosphere, according to the thought of Vladimir Vernadsky, douard
Le Roy and Teilhard de Chardin, denotes the "sphere of human thought"
in a succession of phases of development of the Earth, after the geosphere and
the biosphere. Just as the emergence of life fundamentally transformed the
geosphere, the emergence of human cognition fundamentally transforms the
biosphere. Originally thought to ensue from the nuclear revolution, it is now
conceived more commonly in terms of the integration of human consciousness
through the internet and formation of a global village. Teilhard argued the
noosphere is growing towards an even greater integration and unification,
culminating in the Omega Point, which he saw as the goal of history in an apex
of thought/consciousness.
Some pictures of
the noosphere conceive the future almost in the manner of an ordained destiny,
effectively committing the same mistake of religious apocalyptists looking to
the parousia. If such a convergence phenomenon is happening, it is subtle and
cannot violate any natural law or process. For example the laws of nature
surrounding evolution, mutation and natural and sexual selection reach toward
climax diversity at the edge of chaos and are as inconsistent with a directed
divine destiny as they are with the sabbatical creation. The same goes for the
probability interpretation of quantum mechanics. Any tendency toward an
unfolding of cosmic consciousness is something that can happen only in the
quantum entanglement in the form of coincidence and synchronicity, without
perturbing any statistical measure of natural function. This means it is a
notion that it may be impossible to prove, so that we have to content ourselves
with being conscious participants in this unfolding process without making any
claims as to its verifiable existence, or certainty. The nature of free-will,
after all is to collectively participate in the unfolding history of the
universe by this very participatory process of living existence. That said, it
is clear that decisions we make which seek to protect the long-term diversity
of life and to cherish and replenish it for the future generations lay the
groundwork for such an unfolding, as do the creative expressions we make of our
engagement together in music, art literature and science and social and natural
justice, realizing the compassionate existence together and celebrating it.
Neither is it a
limitation on ourselves that this potential future is something we can merely
glimpse but not fully understand, for already as conscious beings we stand male
and female in the archetype of cosmic consciousness to witness the totality in
our visions and contemplations, and despite the tragedy of life in the mortal
coil, and the implicit violence of nature and entropy, we have the wonder of a
free lunch in this magical world to love and beget offspring through the sexual
mystery which spawned us and to appreciate the sheer magic of coexistence.
Neuroscientist Chris Koch (2012) echoes this view Throughout my quest to
understand consciousness, I never lost my sense of living in a magical
universe. I do believe some deep and elemental organising principle created the
universe and set it in motion for a purpose I cannot comprehend. But I do
believe the laws of physics overwhelmingly favoured the emergence of
consciousness, and that those laws will lead us to a more or less complete
knowledge of it.
Finally, in
relation to the third question, we need to realize it is the journey, not the
destination that is the key. Conscious life is an ongoing process, immortal in
the passage of the generations, despite our individual mortality as sexual
beings. In the completion of the universe as a conscious entity, it may not be
in its final apex that the reality is consummated, but eternally throughout
space-time, as a single thing already conceived already known from alpha to
omega. This is not an ordained destiny speaking, but our collective
participatory consciousness, throughout time and space together, bringing it
about in the uncertainty of the entanglement. In this sense it is our entire
life experience and what we leave behind for others to follow that is of
account, not any final meaning we think may come about in our imagined peak
fulfillment, or in our last moments of realization on our death bed. We need to
appreciate every moment and every act, good and bad, for its unique
preciousness, for life is all too short and transient and yet our consciousness
stands inscrutable in the eternal moment and there are so many of these moments
in a lifetime, they literally are enough to fill the entire history of the
universe.
References
Alkire M, Hudetz A, Tononi G (2008)
Consciousness and Anesthesia Science 322/5903 876-880.
Amit G (2012) 'Eye bath' to thank for quantum
vision in birds New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22199-eye-bath-to-thank-for-quantum-vision-in-birds.html
Ananthaswamy A (2010) Firing on all neurons:
Where consciousness comes from New Scientist 22 March. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527520.400-firing-on-all-neurons-where-consciousness-comes-
from.html
Ananthaswamy A (2009) 'Consciousness signature'
discovered spanning the brain New Scientist 17 March. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16775-consciousness-signature-discovered-spanning-the-brain.html
Ananthaswamy A (2009) Whole brain is in the
grip of consciousness New Scientist 18 March.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20127004.300-whole-brain-is-in-the-grip-of-consciousness.html
Ananthaswamy A (2013) The self: Trick yourself into an out-of-body experience New Scientist 20 Feb.
Armstrong, Karen 1991 Muhammad, Victor Gollancz, London.
Baars, B. (1997) In the Theatre of
Consciousness: Global Workspace Theory, A Rigorous Scientific Theory of
Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 4/4 292-309 8
Baars, Bernard J. (2001) In the Theater of
Consciousness Oxford University Press US,
Bahrami B, Olsen K, Latham P, Roepstorff A,
Rees G, Frith C (2010) Optimally Interacting Minds Science 329/5995 1081-5.
Barras C (2013) Mind maths: The sum of
consciousness New Scientist 6 February. http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729032.400-mind-maths-the-sum-of-consciousness.html
Barrow J, Tipler F (1988) The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Oxf. Univ. Pr., Oxford.
Bem D (2011) Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect Journal of Personality and Social Psychology doi:10.1037/a0021524.
Beauregard M (2012) Near death, explained http://www.salon.com/2012/04/21/near_death_explained/
Beauregard M. & Paquette V. (2006) Neural
correlates of a mystical experience in Carmelite nuns Neuroscience Letters 405
186-190.
Bielo D (2007) Searching for God in the brain
Scientific American Mind Oct 38-45.
Bond M (2013) The self: Why are you like you
are? New Scientist 28 Feb.
Bor D (2013) Consciousness: Watching your mind
in action New Scientist 20 May.
Borjigin J et al (2013) Surge of neurophysiological coherence
and connectivity in the dying brain PNAS http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1308285110
Braden M (2007) Towards a biophysical
understanding of hallucinogen action PhD Thesis
http://bitnest.ca/external.php?id=%1C%2B95%22%0D%19%18%05%06%06%7C%7D%7D%00%04
Braun A. et al. (1998) Dissociated Pattern of
Activity in Visual Cortices and Their Projections During Human Rapid Eye
Movement Sleep Science 279 91-95 DOI: 10.1126/science.279.5347.91
Brealey Nicholas (2003) The Geography of
Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently - And Why ISBN: 0-7432-5535-6 .
Brooks M (2012) Reality: How does consciousness
fit in? New Scientist 3 October.
Buckner R. et al. (2008) The brains default
network anatomy, function, and relevance to disease Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1124 1-38
doi: 10.1196/annals.1440.011.
Carhart-Harris, R. et al. (2012a) Neural
correlates of the psychedelic state as determined by fMRI studies with
psilocybin PNAS 109/56 2138-2143. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1119598109
Carhart-Harris R et al. (2012b) Implications
for psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy: functional magnetic resonance imaging
study with psilocybin British Journal of Psychiatry 200:238-244. DOI:
10.1192/bjp.bp.111.103309
Cahill L. 2005 His brain, her brain Scientific
American May 40-47.
Cavanna A & Trimble M (2006) The precuneus:
a review of its functional anatomy and behavioural correlates Brain 129 564-583
doi:10.1093/brain/awl004.
Chaudhury S, Smith A, Anderson B, Ghose S,
Jessen P (2009) Quantum signatures of chaos in a kicked top Nature 461 768-771.
Comings DE, Gonzales N, Saucier G, Johnson JP,
MacMurray JP. (2000) The DRD4 gene and the spiritual transcendence scale of the
character temperament index Psychiatr. Genet. 10/4 185-9.
Courtland R (2011) Quantum states last longer
in birds' eyes New Scientist http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20927963.000-quantum-states-last-longer-in-birds-eyes.html
Deacon T (2012) Consciousness is a matter of
constraint 30 November.
Deakin JFW et al. (2008) Glutamate and the
neural basis of the subjective effects of ketamine Arch Gen Psychiatry 65/2
154-164.
de Chardin,
Pierre Teilhard 1955 The Phenomenon of Man, William Collins & Sons.,
London.
Dehaene S, Changeux JP (2005) Ongoing
spontaneous activity controls access to consciousness: A neuronal model for
inattentional blindness. PLoS Biol 3(5) e141.
Del Cul A, Baillet S, Dehaene S (2007) Brain
dynamics underlying the nonlinear threshold for access to consciousness. PLoS
Biol 5(10) e260. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050260
Del Cul A, Dehaene S, Reyes P, Bravo E, Slachevsky A (2009) Causal role of prefrontal cortex in the threshold for access to consciousness Brain 132 2531–2540.
Duane T, & Behrendt T (1965) Extrasensory electroencephalographic induction between identical twins Science 150/3694 367 doi:10.1126/science.150.3694.367.
Eagleman, D.M. & Sejnowski, T.J. (2000)
Motion integration and postdiction in visual awareness. Science. 287/5460
2036-8.
Eagleman, D.M., Sejnowski, T.J. (2000) Flash
Lag Effect: Differential latency, not postdiction: Response. Science. 290/5494
1051a
Ebbern H, Mulligan S, Beyerstein B (1996)
Maria's Near Death Experience: Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop The Skeptical
Inquirer 20/4. http://records.viu.ca/www/ipp/pdf/NDE.pdf
Eccles J C (1982) The Initiation of Voluntary Movements by the Supplementary Motor Area Arch Psychiatr Nervenkr 231 423-441.
Estrada, Alvaro 1981 Maria Sabina : Her Life and Chants Ross Erickson Santa Barbara.
Foster B & Foster M (1998) The Secret Lives of Alexandra David-Neel Overlook Press, NY.
Fox D. (2008) The secret life of the brain New
Scientist 5 Nov.
Fried I, Katz A, McCarthy G, Sass K, Williamson
P, Spencer S (1991) Functional Organization of Human Supplementary Motor Cortex
Studied by Electrical Stimulation The Journal of Neuroscience, 1(11) 3656-3666.
Gaillard R, Dehaene S, Adam C, Clemenceau S, Hasboun D, et al. (2009) Converging intracranial markers of conscious access. PLoS Biol 7(3) e1000061. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000061
Graves, Robert 1946 King Jesus Cassel, London.
Graves R., Podro J. 1953 The Nazarene Gospel Restored, Cassel, London.
Giroldini W et al. (2015) EEG correlates of social interaction at distance F1000 doi:10.12688/f1000research.6755.5.
Grau C et al. (2014) Conscious Brain-to-Brain Communication in Humans Using Non-Invasive Technologies PLoS ONE 9/8 e105225. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0105225.
Griffiths R et al. (2006) Psilocybin can
occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal
meaning and spiritual significance Psychopharmacology DOI
10.1007/s00213-006-0457-5
Griffiths R et al. (2008) Mystical-type
experiences occasioned by psilocybin mediate the attribution of personal
meaning and spiritual significance 14 months later J Psychopharmacol 22:621-632
doi:10.1177/0269881108094300
Griffiths R et al. (2011) Psilocybin occasioned
mystical-type experiences: immediate and persisting dose-related effects
Psychopharmacology 218 649-665 DOI 10.1007/s00213-011-2358-5
Haggard P (2005) Conscious intention and motor cognition TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences 9/6 290-5
Halifax, Joan 1979 Shamanic Voices Penguin Arkana NY.
Hamer, Dean (2005) The God Gene: How Faith Is
Hankey A (2006) Studies of Advanced Stages of
Meditation in the Tibetan Buddhist and Vedic Traditions. I: A Comparison of
General Changes eCAM 3/4 513-521 doi:10.1093/ecam/nel040
Harmelech T et al. (2013) Journal of Neuroscience 33/22 9488–97 doi: 10.1523/jneurosci.5911-12.2013
Heaven D (2013) Echoes in the brain open a window on yesterday New Scientist 27 Jun.
Heisenberg, Werner (1958). Physics and
Philosophy. Harper & Row, 28.
Hildne R et al (2013) Quantum Coherent Energy
Transfer over Varying Pathways in Single Light-Harvesting Complexes Science 340
1448-51 doi: 10.1126/science.1235820
Horovitz S. et al. (2008) Low frequency BOLD
fluctuations during resting wakefulness and light sleep: A simultaneous
EEG-fMRI Study Human Brain Mapping 29 671-682.
Huang H (2009) EEG dynamics of experienced Zen
meditation practitioners probed by complexity index and spectral measure
Journal of Medical Engineering & Technology 33/4 314-321.
Iacoboni M. et al. (1999) Cortical Mechanisms
of Human Imitation Science 286 2526.
Immordino-Yang, M. H., McColl, A., Damasio, H.,
Damasio, A. (2009) Neural correlates of admiration and compassion. Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences 106/19 8021-26.
Johnstone B & Bodling A (2012) The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 22 267-284.
Kapogiannisa D et al. (2009) Cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief PNAS 106/12 4876–4881.
King C (2008) The Central Enigma of
Consciousness Nature Precedings 5 November 2008 JCER Jan 2011 http://www.dhushara.com/enigma/enigma.htm
King C. (2012) Entheogens, the Conscious Brain
and Existential Reality http://www.dhushara.com/psyconcs/psychconsc8.htm
Koch C. (2012) We're closing in on
consciousness in the brain New Scientist 20 April.
Kovcs A et al. (2010) The Social Sense: Susceptibility to Others' Beliefs in Human Infants and Adults Science 330 1830 doi: 10.1126/science.1190792.
Krippner S, Honorton C, Ullman M (1973) An experiment in dream telepathy with "The Grateful Dead." J. Am. Soc. of Psychosomatic Dentistry and Medicine 20 9-17.
Kroeger D et al (2013) Human Brain Activity Patterns
beyond the Isoelectric Line of Extreme Deep Coma PLoS ONE, DOI:
Lee H. & Roth B. (2012) Hallucinogen
actions on human brain revealed PNAS 109/6 1820-1821.
doi/10.1073/pnas.1121358109
Levenson J & Sweatt D (2005) Epigenetic Mechanisms In Memory Formation
Nature Reviews Neuroscience 6 108.
Libet B. et. al. (1983) Time of Conscious
Intention to Act in Relation to Onset of Cerebral Activity
(Readiness-Potential) Brain, 106, 623-642
Libet B. (1989) The timing of a subjective
experience Behavioral Brain Sciences 12 183-5 See also Libet, B. et al. Behav.
Brain Sci. 8, 529-566 (1985)
Lutz A et al. (2004) Long-term meditators
self-induce high-amplitude gamma synchrony during mental practice PNAS 101/46
16369-16373.
Lutz A. et al. (2008) Regulation of the neural
circuitry of emotion by compassion meditation: Effects of meditative expertise
PLoS ONE 3/3 e1897.
Macrae C, Heatherton T & Kelley W (2004) A
Self Less Ordinary: The Medial Prefrontal Cortex and You.in Cognitive
Neurosciences III. Ed Michael S. Gazzaniga. MIT Press. http://dartmouth.edu/~thlab/pubs/04_Macrae_etal_CogNeuroIII.pdf
Marshall J. (2007) Future recall: your mind can
slip through time New Scientist 24 Mar.
Mason M et al. (2007) Wandering minds: The
default network and stimulus-independent thought Science 315 393-5.
McAlpine K (2010) Nature's hot green quantum
computers revealed New Scientist 3 February http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527464.000-natures-hot-green-quantum-computers-revealed.html
Mobbs D, Watt C (2011) There is nothing
paranormal about near-death experiences: how neuroscience can explain seeing
bright lights, meeting the dead, or being convinced you are one of them Trends
in Cognitive Sciences 15/10 447-9.
Mojeaux86 (2013) 18 Mar http://www.experienceproject.com/stories/Think-Temporal-Lobe-Epilepsy-Is-Fascinating/3036845
Motluk Alison 2001 Read my mind New Scientist
27 Jan 22.
Naito, H. and Matsui, N. Temporal lobe
epilepsy with ictal ecstatic state and interictal behavior of hypergraphia.
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. 1988, 176/2 123-4.
Newberg A. et al. (2001) The measurement of
regional cerebral blood flow during the complex cognitive task of meditation: A
preliminary SPECT study Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging 106 113-122.
Newberg A. et al. (2006a) The measurement of
regional cerebral blood flow during glossolalia: A preliminary SPECT study
Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging 148/1 67-71.
Newberg A. et al. (2006b) Cerebral glucose
metabolic changes associated with a meditation based relaxation technique J
Nucl Med. 47 (Supp 1) 314P
Nichols D (2011) Advances In Understanding How
Psychedelics Work In The Brain http://www.maps.org/videos/source2/video4.html
ODriscoll K & Leach J (1998) No longer
Gage: an iron bar through the head BMJ 317/7174 1673-4.
Onishi K & Baillargeon R (2005) Do
15-Month-Old Infants Understand False Beliefs? Science 308 255 doi:
10.1126/science.1107621
Orme-Johnson D et al. (2006) Neuroimaging of
meditation␣s effect on brain reactivity to pain NeuroReport 12/17 1359-63.
Pagel M (2012) How to measure consciousness New
Scientist 1 August http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528762.000-how-to-measure-consciousness.html
Pagnoni G et al. (2008) "Thinking about
not-thinking": Neural correlates of conceptual processing during Zen
meditation PLoS ONE 3/9 e3083.
Persinger Michael (1987) Neuropsychological
Bases of God Beliefs Praeger.
Powell J, Lewis P, Roberts N, Garcia_Finana M,
Dunbar R (2012) Orbital prefrontal cortex volume predicts social network size:
an imaging study of individual differences in humans Proc. R. Soc. B 279 2157-62
doi:10.1098/rspb.2011.2574
Puri B, Lekh S, Nijranc K, Bagary M, Richardson
A (2001) SPECT neuroimaging in schizophrenia with religious delusions
International J. Psychophys. 40 143-148.
Quiroga R, Mukamel R, Isham E, Malach R, Fried I (2008) Human single-neuron responses at the threshold of conscious recognition PNAS 105/9 3599-3604.
Radin, Dean (2009) Entangled Minds; Extrasensory Experiences In Quantum Reality Pocket Books.
Raichle M. et al. (2001) A default mode of
brain function PNAS 98/2 676-682.
Raichle M. & Snyder A. (2007) A default
mode of brain function: A brief history of an evolving idea NeuroImage 37
1083-1090.
Ramachandran V. & Blakeslee S. (1998)
Phantoms in the Brain William Morrow.
Reuter F et. al. (2009) White matter damage
impairs access to consciousness in multiple sclerosis NeuroImage 44 590-599.
Riba J. et al. (2006) Increased frontal and paralimbic activation following ayahuasca, the pan-amazonian inebriant Psychopharmacology (2006) 186 93-98 DOI 10.1007/s00213-006-0358-7.
Ritchie S, Wiseman R, French C (2012) Failing the Future: Three Unsuccessful Attempts to Replicate Bem's 'Retroactive Facilitation of Recall' Effect PLoS ONE 7/3 e33423. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0033423.
Ritskes R. et al. (2003) MRI scanning during
Zen meditation: The picture of enlightenment Constructivism in the Human Sciences
8/1 85-89.
Samuel E. (2001) Seeing the seeds of cancer New
Scientist 24 Mar 42-45. 137
Schnakers C (2009) Detecting consciousness in a
total locked-in syndrome: An active event-related paradigm Neurocase 15/4
271-7.
Schurger A, Sitt J, Dehaene S (2012) An
accumulator model for spontaneous neural activity prior to self-initiated
movement PNAS DOI: 10.1073.pnas.1210467109
Senju A et al. (2009) Mindblind Eyes: An
Absence of Spontaneous Theory of Mind in Asperger Syndrome Science 325 883 doi:
10.1126/science.1176170
Sergent C, Baillet S, Dehaene S (2005) Timing of the brain events underlying access to consciousness during the attentional blink Nature Neuroscience 8/10 1391-1400.
Siclari F et al. (2017) The neural correlates of dreaming Nature Neuroscience doi:10.1038/nn.4545
Sigman M, Dehaene S (2005) Parsing a cognitive
task: A characterization of the mind␣s bottleneck. PLoS Biol 3(2) e37.
Sigman M, Dehaene S (2006) Dynamics of the
central bottleneck: Dual-task and task uncertainty. PLoS Biol 4(7) e220. DOI:
10.1371/journal.pbio.0040220
Soon, C.; Brass, M.; Heinze, H.; Haynes, J.
(2008) "Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human
brain.". Nature Neuroscience 11 (5): 543–545. doi:10.1038/nn.2112.
PMID 18408715
Steck D (2009) Passage through chaos Nature 461
736-7.
Strick M. et al. (2012) Zen meditation and
access to information in the unconscious Consciousness and Cognition 21
1476-1481.
Trevena J & Miller J (2010) Brain preparation before a voluntary action: Evidence against unconscious movement initiation Consciousness and Cognition, 19/1, 447-456 DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2009.08.006
Vollenweider F, et al. (1997) Positron emission tomography and fluorodeoxyglucose studies of metabolic hyperfrontality and psychopathology in the psilocybin model of psychosis. Neuropsychopharmacology 16 357-372.
Wang D. et al. (2011) Cerebral blood flow changes
associated with different meditation practices and perceived depth of
meditation Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging 191/1 60-67.
Warren W (1998) MR Imaging contrast enhancement
based on intermolecular zero quantum coherences Science 281 247.
Weaver, Janelle (2010) Brain surgery boosts spirituality Nature 10 Feb doi:10.1038/news.2010.66
Weir K (2013) Mind readers: How we get inside
other people's heads New Scientist 10 Jun
Westerhoff J (2013) The self: You think you
live in the present? New Scientist 20 February.
Wiech, K.et al. (2008) An fMRI study measuring
analgesia enhanced by religion as a belief system Pain 139 467-476.
Williams C (2013) Consciousness: Our silent
partner, the unconscious New Scientist 15 May.
Wilson C (2013) Consciousness: Why aren't we
all zombies? New Scientist 15 May.
Young L et al. (2010) Disruption of the right
temporoparietal junction with transcranial magnetic stimulation reduces the
role of beliefs in moral judgments PNAS 107/15 6753-8.
Zimmer C (2005) The Neurobiology of the Self
Scientific American Nov 93.