There is something that feels

While most of us run out of words, poets caught amid impressions, feelings, and connections imagine “ what it is like” to unveil “what is”. The ontological status of consciousness is defined as follows:  There’s something that feels. That ‘something’ represents that which is, regardless of whether it is unseen and intangible. What is that which is? How much consciousness is out there? How is it for that which is to feel? Is an atom’s consciousness external to the Sun’s, of which it is a part? 

Without shared resonance, consciousness is confined to a single emergent layer. With shared resonance, it becomes layers upon layers of intertwined emergence. The Universe may be a composite subjectivity, formed of many individually conscious parts. How do those parts bind together? At the very least, they need to obey principles of reflexivity and transitivity.  If time is my common denominator, how to relate the experience of a star to that of a human being? 

While it appears to our mind and body that consciousness is grounded in natural science, it may be an element of the quantum Universe. A model of consciousness will need to prescribe a relation between states of experience on the one hand and the natural world or the quantum Universe, on the other.  If analogical terms and fractal representations are imaginative but reductionist to explain the Universe, how to remediate their insufficiencies? 

What it is like refers to how it is for the subject itself, whether it be the Universe as a whole or an electron. Although analogies refer to relations and similarities between aspects of experience, there is no conception that allows one to establish the identity of a ‘what it is like’ aspect of experience with a physical state. Since mathematics is considered essential to gain understanding into the Universe, could those relations be translated into a mathematical structure?  

In any scientific approach, writes Johannes Kleiner in his paper on mathematical models of consciousness, two fundamentally different methodological approaches allow one to gather information: a first-person perspective and a third-person perspective. A scientific model of consciousness addresses both. What is an act of consciousness? How does it unfold? In the case of the universal wavefunction, in which the Universe is as much the observer as it is the observed, the process starts during superposition and ends with collapse. What exactly happens during the intervals between events of collapse and what flows throughout these intervals might need to be taken into account in regard to the transfer of information, feeling, or consciousness. Could the idea of cosmic consciousness be addressed within a general mathematical framework?

No scientific methodology applied to date, writes Johannes Kleiner, can be used to address non-collatable aspects of experience.  A part, property, or feature of conscious experience is non-collatable if there are no reasonable means to identify this part, property, or feature over experimentation. Non-collatability implies limitations on how aspects of experience can be referenced in a theory or empirical investigation. How then do we define cosmic Consciousness that is ineffable and inaccessible? The observed is the experiencing subject. How experience reveals itself to the Universe, how it finds itself experiencing, defines cosmic consciousness. Its conscious experience constitutes the totality of feelings. 

One of the mathematical models of consciousness is the Integrated Information Theory. At the heart of the theory is an algorithm that aims to determine both the quality and quantity of a physical system’s conscious experience. It is constantly under development, with new and refined definitions being added every few years. Johannes Kleiner and Sean Tull published in a paper this year their mathematical analysis of the theory.

The idea that we can only talk about the consciousness of the self and not a universal consciousness feels limiting. For me, the thinking process unfolds internally as if I were conversing with other minds around a table. It is reminiscent of a fictional dialogue cleverly written in 2014 between Medard Boss, Heidegger, Freud, Sartre, Buddha, and Jung. The quotation at the beginning of this post is part of it. Words of Josiah Royce, Thomas Nagel, and others resonate in my head. 

If there is conscious life elsewhere in the Universe, Thomas Nagel states that it is likely that some of it will not be describable even in the most general experiential terms available to us. Even so, it does not mean, he observes, that we should deny all the possibles that come from what we can never describe or understand. It is not to say either that “such an understanding may be permanently denied to us by the limits of our nature”. There might be out there, agrees Josiah Royce, “a depth of meaning, a completeness of expression, a wealth of facts, a clearness of vision” to which we may not have access.

There appears to be a difference between self-consciousness and cosmic consciousness as if we need to access one to attain the other. Not everyone reaches such a level of symbiosis with the Universe. There is a transition, claims Richard Maurice Bucke, between self-consciousness and cosmic consciousness, that is when a person who was self-conscious enters into cosmic consciousness. As a result, one feels how the Universe is “not a dead machine but a living presence” and is motivated to “take on enormously greater capacity both for learning and initiating”. As we understand the Universe in more subtle ways, such a new aspect of ourselves will demonstrate an evolved behavior. When we discuss how we could benefit from being artificially augmented, I hope it includes a beneficial impact to our sense of empathy, sensitivity, and intuition.