My family is not committed to any particular organized religion. The one ritual that we do practice religiously is taking turns around the Thanksgiving table to express what it is that each of us are grateful for. Although I can't vouch for the others, I don't prepare what I am going to say. I have noticed that the things that I am grateful for have changed over the years. I am not as engaged as I once was in the world in a way that I am concerned about the outcome of events. Of course if I get sick and especially if a loved one gets sick, I hope and pray for their return to health. And I celebrate the successes and empathize with the failures of these loved ones. But for myself, my life has stabilized more and more over the years and the things that I am grateful for have less to do with how things turn out as they have to do simply with my ability to observe and remember events as they are unfolding. These abilities that I have gratitude for are not things that special luck or talents or opportunities have brought me beyond the immensely lucky opportunity to be born. They are abilities that I share with every living being.
I am grateful for life itself. What a remarkably wonderful thing life is. I am able to experience things. I do this at every moment. I can see. I can hear. I can feel fresh air on my skin. I can eat and drink and taste whatever it is that I am eating and drinking. Like everyone else, I have intentions; there are things that I want to do. But as I grow older, the things that I want to do are almost exclusively things that I am able to do, simply by intending them. I am not invested in a set of desires that are in competition with other people's sets of desires. If I want to go for a walk, miraculously, all the muscles that I need to constrict and relax in order for me to go for that walk automatically begin to constrict and relax the moment that I have that intention and they constrict and relax in precisely the sequence and timing that allows me not only to walk but to walk in the specific direction that I intend to walk in. That is wondrous. It is no less wondrous because I share that ability with every ambulatory creature on this planet. I can instantaneosly direct my body in the direction that I want to direct it and to do precisely what it is that I want it to do. And these activities are very precise : like typing this essay, or getting a glass of water or tying my shoes, activities that require remarkably precise cascades of firing neurons and contracting and expanding molecules within my musculature.
I am grateful for the sun, not as an object, but as an experience. I observe the light and experience the warmth that it brings every day. I feel that on my body. I observe how all my fellow creatures react to the arrival of light every day. I see the energy that it produces. The same with water. I walk the same trail at least a few days every week, and I live in an area that has a rainy season. Prior to that season, right now for instance, most of the plants along that trail are parched. They wait with eager anticipation for the arrival of the rains and when the rains do arrive they swell and grow and turn radiant colors in their happiness. This is a glory to behold and I am able to observe that any time I want, simply by directing my feet in that direction.
I can think. You may not agree with the way that I think, which is fine; and you will never know all the ways in which I think as I will never know all the ways in which you think; which is also fine. But I can still think, and I can think about the things that I want to think about, simply by focussing on whatever it is that I want to focus on. Again, this ability is something that I share with all my fellow humans, and with, I believe, a lot, lot more creatures that are generally not thought of as 'thinking.' And again, it is no less glorious, no less wondrous, that I am able to do that because I share that ability with everyone else. I may live in a nominally capitalist, competitive economy and I may live in a society that shares many beliefs about the inherently competitive nature of biology, but the things that I am grateful for are not things that I am in competition with you about. And it does not diminish, one iota, the miraculous nature of these abilities because they are shared by countless living creatures.
Life itself is truly wondrous and miraculous. If I wish for anything, I wish for more of my fellow creatures to stop wishing (at least once in a while) and really take stock of these wonderful abilities that we are each already able to do and experience. A lot more happiness, a lot more mutual respect, a lot more peace and joy would be generated if we did. Belated Happy Thanksgiving!
Sunday, November 26, 2017
Sunday, November 5, 2017
INTENTIONS
The basic thrust of modern theoretical science is to provide a framework to explain how the world, both animate and inanimate, came to be the way that we find it today without the intervention of any intelligence or guidance. In other words, a random world without intention. This is not only the thrust of modern theoretical science, but it is the unspoken context within which many of us experience our lives. And this random nature of our existence, that we are the result of countless trillions of random but fortuitous collisions ( fortuitous if we have any appreciation for our lives and the world around us) between particles of matter interacting at the mercy of blind forces, is something that we have accepted, not happily, but with resignation because, alas, scientists, people that know much more about the world than we do, have proven it to be so. Or have they?
The randomness of life troubles us at very deep levels. Many of us, for instance, pore over the details of how our parents met; all the little specific details that brought our mothers and fathers to be in the same exact place and time. Once our parents had discovered each other, it may be more plausible to think that "something just drew them to each other." Or that, "they knew immediately that they were meant to be together," but did all the little specific details, including ancestors coming to America at a certain moment in time, choosing a certain neighborhood to live in; our parents sharing the same interest or sharing the same particular schedule on a particular day, or sharing some common social connection, that brought them to the same place at the same time, so that that "pre-ordained" chemistry could be allowed to occur in the first place; could all of that, that whole litany of specific circumstances, could that possibly have been the result of anyone's intention? And, if so, whose intention was it?
My parents met at a resort hotel where they were both attending a single's weekend. Did my mother frequent such places? Not at all. In fact, this was the first time she had ever gone to a single's weekend. Why did she feel compelled to attend on that particular weekend? I don't really know how frequently my father went to such events, and he is no longer around to ask, but even if he did go a number of times previously, why this particular weekend? Why this particular hotel? My mother went with a friend. Did they just simply decide to go or did they consider going for a while, considering different hotels and different dates until finally honing in on this particular one? My father, also, although he attended alone, must have certainly considered other weekends and other places. If either of them had made any other decision, they most probably would never have met; my father being from New York City and my mother from Scranton, Pennsylvania. The hotel just happened to be about half way between these two cities.
They met at a ping pong table. My mother was playing with her friend. My father asked if he could play the winner. What if her friend had won? What if my father had walked, that morning, over to the tennis courts rather than the ping pong tables? What if my mother did not play ping pong? Would I have ever been born? Or my sisters? Or our children and grandchildren, and their future children and grandchildren?
In an unfathomably vast and complex universe, we seem to be random and trivial accidents in the huge flux of physical and social forces. The idea of personal destiny, of being born to fulfill a purpose, of arriving on this planet with anything but a body filled with extremely complicated physical equipment, seems self-delusional and to fly in the face of everything that we have 'learned' in the twentieth century. If we have any sense of purpose, we think, it probably grew out of the particular circumstances that we were exposed to after we were first born and especially out of the particular psychological dynamics between our mothers and fathers and their relationships to us, or we can say to ourselves and others a phrase that is currently enjoying great populariy, "It's in our DNA."
We do know that DNA is part of a wondrously complex system for manufacturing proteins. DNA is that component of the system where the recipes for these proteins are stored. Each of us is born with a slightly different set of protein recipes and we do know that some sequences of these recipes are associated with certain behaviors and desires as opposed to others. For instance, organisms that contain the human genome are born with a craving for their mother's milk, seek out their mothers breast and already know how to suckle it. Newborn koalas, or centipedes, or termites, or dung beetles, each with their own unique sets of DNA sequences are also born with cravings, but with very different cravings, and seek out very different looking mothers to satisfy those cravings. Are these different inherent cravings caused by the different arrangements of DNA in each of these creatures, or are the different arrangements of DNA associated with these different cravings, and there may or may not be a causal relationship between them? Is there a deeper cause, some kind of over arching intention that caused a being to be born with a particular sequence of DNA because that being or some other being wanted that being to experience an existence with a certain set of desires; those desires being satisfied through a certain organism with certain characteristics and certain ways of satisfying those desires? Is the particular set of DNA sequences that an organism possesses, in other words, the particular set and sequence of manufacturing particular proteins in an organism, is this the root cause of the way an organism is, or are these particular proteins, the sequence in which they are manufactured and the system in which they are delivered, intentional? Is this the DNA sequence that corresponds to the kind of organism that we want to be; in the environment in which we want to experience the world, with a particular set of desires and particular biological ways of fulfilling those desires, that we somehow chose? Do we live the life that we want to live, facing the challenges that we want to face, and possessing the biological equipment that we want to possess to meet those challenges?
So much is made, in Darwinian evolutionary theory of random "mutations" resulting from reproduction errors, that cause, in combination with natural selection, all the DNA differences among organisms. What if these DNA differences were not caused by random variations and natural selection, but the result of an intention to design a being with a particular set of desires capable of functioning in a particular environment? And not just an external environment, but an internal mammalian or reptilian or avian environment? In other words, is the particular DNA sequences that we have another random accident, or is DNA, also, part of some kind of intention, some kind of choice that we or some other being has made prior to us being born?
What is an intention? An intention is a desire to somehow manipulate or even create something in the physical universe that provides an experience for ones self or for others that is preferable to the experience that is provided by the physical universe prior to this manipulation. We want ice cream because we prefer the experience of eating ice cream over the experience of not eating it. We want a sturdy house because we prefer the experience of the safety and security of a sturdy house over the experience of the insecurity and exposure of an unsturdy house. We want to scratch our foot because we prefer the experience of itchlessness over the experience of itchiness. We want world peace because we know enough about the discomfort of tension and the horrors of war to prefer the experience of calm and peace over the experience of tension and war.
To have an intention, a preference for one experience over the other, implies the capacity to experience. Inorganic material, clearly, has no such capacity. Inorganic material is passive. It moves or doesn't move, changes form from liquid to solid to gas, combines with other substances or separates from those substances, purely based upon the forces that impinge upon it. It has no preference to be stationary or to move at light speed, to be in great heat or in great cold, to be part of a huge conglomeration of matter like a star or to be an isolated atom floating through the universe. Having no capacity to experience, inorganic matter has no preferences at all. All the behavior of inorganic matter can be explained in terms of the forces that impinge upon it.
There are three kinds of phenomena that cannot be predicted purely by the forces that impinge on them. Among living organisms there is biological activity and there is behavior. Both of these, biological activity and behavior, make sense in terms of forces, but the forces are generated, in both cases, by metabolism, by a system of gathering fuel and generating energy from that fuel, not to violate, but to overcome the natural forces that impinge upon the organism. A corpse is an organism with no self generating metabolism, therefore, no activity, biological or behavioral, which overcomes the natural forces impinging on it. Behavior is activity that is motivated by our preference to have a certain experience or to avoid a certain experience. It implies the capacity of living beings to experience and to prefer one experience over the other.
The third category of phenomena that cannot be predicted purely by the forces that impinge on them are the activities of machines. A machine is a way of using a source of energy to accomplish an activity. The activity that a machine accomplishes, if it works, provides an experience that is preferable to the experience provided by the physical universe prior to the use of the machine. This experience is preferable to the inventor of the machine, the builder of the machine and the user of the machine. It is not preferable to the machine itself. The machine itself, including our most sophisticated electronic machines and computers, is not capable of having an experience, therefore not capable of prefering one experience over the other; therefore the machine, itself, really has no self; the self being the nexus of the capacity to experience and the nexus of a set of preferences for one experience over the other.
A lot of idiotic science fiction movies notwithstanding, machines and all the components of machines, have no capacity to experience. They can do very complicated tasks, but they do so with no consciousness, no experience. Now we have many sophisticated machines in our current environment that use electricity. These machines are able to match patterns of electrons, but they do not know that they are matching patterns of electrons. They can switch to matching new patterns depending on which patterns had previously matched or not matched. Again, however, they do not know they are matching patterns or switching patterns. They know nothing. Knowing is a conscious activity and machines are not conscious. The machine, called Big Blue, that beat the great chess player Garry Kasparov and the machine, called Alpha Go, that beat the great go player Lee Seedol, did not know that they were playing chess or playing go. They did not know that they were in a competition. They did not know that they were called Big Blue or Alpha Go. Although they were referred to, affectionately, by their creators as 'she' or 'he' or even 'it,' they were not really a he or a she or an it, in the sense that we usually use those pronouns. If these pronouns are used in the case of computers or other machines that we are fond of, they do not refer to a unitary source of agency, intention and experience, that we usually think of when we say, "He went to work,' or "she doesn't like to be bothered"or "they are very busy at school." We usually use these pronouns simply because the machine enables us to satisfy intentions that are important to us and we have affection for these machines because they do that. These machines, of course, do not have any affection for us.
Because they have no capacity to experience, a machine does not seek out one experience over the other. A self driving car, thankfully, does not go where "it" wants to go. It takes you to where you want to go. Your computer doesn't write the emails that it wants to write to the people that it wants to get in contact with. It assists you in writing the emails that you want to write to the people that you want to get in contact with. It searches for the information that you are interested in, not for the information that it is interested in. It is purely and utterly the servant of your intentions, not its own intentions.
Our bodies are a conglomeration of organic machines that also, like inorganic machines, are the servants of our intentions. Now there are, also, within our bodies innumberable microbial creatures and viruses that are pursuing their own intentions, some of which are congruent with our intentions and some of which are in conflict with our intentions. And there may be cancer cells, which are behaving in their own interest, gathering fuel for their own growth and expansion at the expense of our continued growth and longevity. But our actual bodies are designed, miraculously, to do whatever it is that we want to do, the moment we want to do it. And we are born with a set of desires that align perfectly with the environment in which we find ourselves. As I said earlier, we are born with a craving for our mother's milk, an attraction to our mother's breast which is the source of that milk, and the knowhow to suckle that breast. All of this, of course, is wonderfully convenient, since we are born to a human mother that has the specific kind of breast with the specific kind of milk that we are craving and that we already know how to suckle. If we, with human desires and preferences, were born to a centipede mother or a koala mother or a termite mother, we would be in very serious trouble trying to satisfy human desires in a centipede environment. The same, of course, would be true of a newborn centipede, trying to satisfy its centipede desires in a human environment.
When I say that the equipment that we are born with, that we call our bodies, is miraculous, I am not referring to the staggering molecular complexity of this equipment, which is wondrous but not miraculous. I am referring to the way in which this equipment is put into motion. The precise neurons allowing the precise cascades of sequences to deliver the behavior that we want to do to assist us in fulfilling our intentions is initiated instantly simply by us having that intention. As I said, intention is part of our experience, and we, who we are, is that center of experience, intention and awareness, that is, in this life, connected to our bodies, but is not part of our bodies. We are that non-physical center of awareness, intention and experience, and we initiate the manifestation of our intentions simply by having them. This initiation of intention is a movement from the non-physical (us) to the physical: firing neurons and the cascades of molecular, and muscular activity that result. I call it miraculous because if fits the definition of miraculous, that is: physical activity resulting from a non-physical cause.
Of course, the modern thinking is that it is the brain that has these intentions, that we are simply the passive responders to what our brains want us to do. But if the brain is not a machine, if it is, itself, the center of intention and experience, where is that experiential center located? When we look at the brain we see neurons with dendrite extensions that connect to other body cells and axons that connect to other neurons, and electrical charges moving through those neurons and dendrites and axons. In what part of the brain are these intentions and experiences located? We can now map out different areas of the brain that are connected to different kinds of experiences; but the differences in those areas is location, not structure. We find the same neurons, the same axons, the same dendrites, delivering, depending on location, our visual experiences, aural experiences, thoughts, memories, touches, and tastes. Where is the consciousness that is translating these patterns of electrical charges into the actual experience that is the very moment to moment fabric (although a non-material fabric) of our lives?
We are not our bodies. We are the non-physical center of our experience and intentions, and we attempt to realize those intentions through the agency of our bodies. Our bodies and, yes, our brains and our DNA, are those systems that allow us to experience the kind of life that we want to experience and the fulfillment or frustration of those intentions that we want to pursue.
What about biological processes? Those processes that exist beyond our purview, including those that exist without any intrusion of our consciousness, and those that are initiated by our conscious desires, are all of those activities, which are metabolically energized activities, are all of them intentional? Yes. Their intention is to keep this entire organism functioning, so that we can experience this world from the perspective that our bodies and brains and DNA determine that we shall experience it, for as long as possible. So, whose intention is it to allow us to have this particular experience of life on this planet for the longest possible time? That would be the ultimate being, the being of whom we are all an aspect; that would be the Atman, Infinity, God, the Cosmic Consciousness, Allah, Hashem, the being that has been referred to by countless different names over the centuries, but always the same One being.
I asked a scientist once, a man who had been running a research lab at MIT for thirty years, "What is the difference between a firing neuron and the experience of a firing neuron?" He said, "I don't think there is a difference." Really? Is there a difference between an apple and the experience of eating an apple? Is there a difference between a CD and the experience of listening to a CD? The materialist scientist's blindspot regarding their own experience, the entire plane of experience, could not be more clearly dramatized. And all of modern scientific thinking and brain research rests on the totally unproven assumption that consciousness is the result of very complex electronics. This may comport with the general assumption in our modern society that matter is the ultimate bases of the universe and that forces and experience and our conscious life spring from matter; but it is totally unproven and is the exact opposite of the much older mystic tradition that the subtle creates the gross; that matter is the result of forces and that forces and the precise balances between forces are no more than ideas that spring from the Cosmic Consciousness and that allow us to have a material world in the first place.
We now know of many different areas of the brain which are dedicated to either thoughts, memories, visualizations, hearing, touch, heat sensations, etc. Each of these areas are distinguished by nothing much more than their location. The multitude of neurons in our brains allow us to make distinctions; the more neurons, the more distinctions. We can distinguish near from far, round from square, dangerous from friendly, attractive from repellent, beautiful from ugly, and many, many distinctions between those, depending on how many neurons are devoted to that area of our experience. Yet how can basically the same neurons, the same dendrites, the same axons, the same electrical current moving through all of these; how can this sameness be responsible for the inexhaustible richness and complexity of our moment to moment experience? When I see a sunset, I see a sunset. I don't see electrical patterns on my cerebral cortex, no matter how precise and complex that pattern is. I see the sun. Evidently scientists must first admit that there is a difference between electrical currents and consciousness. Then, they might want to explain how such a difference could exist, and how there could be this instant translation from current to consciousness when we are considering perception, and from consciousness to current when we are considering the translation of intention into action.
Creation, either the first creation of the physical universe or the first creation of life, began with intention. This intention implies a being that has the capacity to experience and to prefer one experience over the other; in this case the preference that there be a physical universe rather than no physical universe and that there be life rather than no life. A being has intention and preferences but no physicality. A living being, like a human being or a dog being or a maple tree being, is attached to an organism, experiences this life and has preferences in this life through the medium of the physical body that it finds itself attached to.
Intention preceding creation from a non-physical being that has no beginning, that is increate, may be a mysterious way of looking at creation, but what would be a non-mysterious way of looking at creation? Creation appears, in its essence, to be mysterious to a consciousness such as ours which is brain bound and organism bound to time and space. If you disagree and say there was creation without intention, then what are you left with? That there was literally nothing, and then suddenly there was something; that physical matter or energy or force, just appeared and appeared with precisely the right amount of force and ratio of forces and velocities and energy for everything to fall in place and make an entire, synchronous, coherent and stable universe with just the exact right balance of attraction and repulsion to make this universe coherent and stable, those pockets of instability (which supporters of the 'electric universe' make so much of) being necessary to maintain the stability of the whole?
Or do we say that there was something, some force field say, or some kind of radiation or some kind of conglomeration of particles that led to the Big Bang. In that case the Big Bang was not really the origin of the physical universe. Whatever you describe as preceding the Big Bang was the origin of the universe. And if that origin was physical, did that origin have a beginning? Do you see where I am going with this? Something either has to be eternal, or something just popped into being from absolutely nothing: no atoms, no molecules, no forces, no energy fields, no particles at all. There was literally and absolutely nothing and then, suddenly there was. This to me is far more mysterious than to say that creation began with an intention; an intention that belonged to a being that had no beginning and that will have no end, and has no physicality. Why is this explanation more satisfactory than the other one? Because I have discovered, as you can discover, that you are also a being that has the capacity to experience and a set of preferences and a desire to manipulate the physical universe in ways that satisfy those preferences; and that you are not your physical body, any part of your physical body, but you are the non-physical context within which you experience your physical body. You are consciousness.
A brain scientist trying to explain to me where that center of consciousness may be located in the brain, shared with me that we have begun to discover a specific place where the brain attempts to make coherence out of incoherent thoughts. Or is it, as I would suspect, the place in the brain where our attempts to find coherence from incoherence are recorded? But whether we describe this person as being coherent with a perceptual and thought framework that she is comfortable with, or incoherent, with a perceptual and thought framework that is torturous to her, we are still describing two different conditions of the same person. The context of consciousness is still there, it's just having two very different experiences. So if consciousness is the context of our very deepest thoughts, if it even encompasses our very sense of coherence and incoherence, then what, the brain scientist wanted to know, is this context of consciousness that you talk of? This context that we can neither see nor hear? The context is you, you, you! You are coherent or incoherent. You are lucid or impaired. Whatever the contents of your consciousness, whatever the strength or weaknesses of those contents, the good or evil of those contents, the coherence or incoherence of those contents, the context of those contents is still you. You are consciousness. Not what you experience, but the experiencer. Not what you desire, but the desirer. Not what you observe, but the observer. You are not a that, but a that which; that which experiences and desires. You are consciousness and consciousness is you.
Once again, the comment lamp is lit.
Matt Chait
The randomness of life troubles us at very deep levels. Many of us, for instance, pore over the details of how our parents met; all the little specific details that brought our mothers and fathers to be in the same exact place and time. Once our parents had discovered each other, it may be more plausible to think that "something just drew them to each other." Or that, "they knew immediately that they were meant to be together," but did all the little specific details, including ancestors coming to America at a certain moment in time, choosing a certain neighborhood to live in; our parents sharing the same interest or sharing the same particular schedule on a particular day, or sharing some common social connection, that brought them to the same place at the same time, so that that "pre-ordained" chemistry could be allowed to occur in the first place; could all of that, that whole litany of specific circumstances, could that possibly have been the result of anyone's intention? And, if so, whose intention was it?
My parents met at a resort hotel where they were both attending a single's weekend. Did my mother frequent such places? Not at all. In fact, this was the first time she had ever gone to a single's weekend. Why did she feel compelled to attend on that particular weekend? I don't really know how frequently my father went to such events, and he is no longer around to ask, but even if he did go a number of times previously, why this particular weekend? Why this particular hotel? My mother went with a friend. Did they just simply decide to go or did they consider going for a while, considering different hotels and different dates until finally honing in on this particular one? My father, also, although he attended alone, must have certainly considered other weekends and other places. If either of them had made any other decision, they most probably would never have met; my father being from New York City and my mother from Scranton, Pennsylvania. The hotel just happened to be about half way between these two cities.
They met at a ping pong table. My mother was playing with her friend. My father asked if he could play the winner. What if her friend had won? What if my father had walked, that morning, over to the tennis courts rather than the ping pong tables? What if my mother did not play ping pong? Would I have ever been born? Or my sisters? Or our children and grandchildren, and their future children and grandchildren?
In an unfathomably vast and complex universe, we seem to be random and trivial accidents in the huge flux of physical and social forces. The idea of personal destiny, of being born to fulfill a purpose, of arriving on this planet with anything but a body filled with extremely complicated physical equipment, seems self-delusional and to fly in the face of everything that we have 'learned' in the twentieth century. If we have any sense of purpose, we think, it probably grew out of the particular circumstances that we were exposed to after we were first born and especially out of the particular psychological dynamics between our mothers and fathers and their relationships to us, or we can say to ourselves and others a phrase that is currently enjoying great populariy, "It's in our DNA."
We do know that DNA is part of a wondrously complex system for manufacturing proteins. DNA is that component of the system where the recipes for these proteins are stored. Each of us is born with a slightly different set of protein recipes and we do know that some sequences of these recipes are associated with certain behaviors and desires as opposed to others. For instance, organisms that contain the human genome are born with a craving for their mother's milk, seek out their mothers breast and already know how to suckle it. Newborn koalas, or centipedes, or termites, or dung beetles, each with their own unique sets of DNA sequences are also born with cravings, but with very different cravings, and seek out very different looking mothers to satisfy those cravings. Are these different inherent cravings caused by the different arrangements of DNA in each of these creatures, or are the different arrangements of DNA associated with these different cravings, and there may or may not be a causal relationship between them? Is there a deeper cause, some kind of over arching intention that caused a being to be born with a particular sequence of DNA because that being or some other being wanted that being to experience an existence with a certain set of desires; those desires being satisfied through a certain organism with certain characteristics and certain ways of satisfying those desires? Is the particular set of DNA sequences that an organism possesses, in other words, the particular set and sequence of manufacturing particular proteins in an organism, is this the root cause of the way an organism is, or are these particular proteins, the sequence in which they are manufactured and the system in which they are delivered, intentional? Is this the DNA sequence that corresponds to the kind of organism that we want to be; in the environment in which we want to experience the world, with a particular set of desires and particular biological ways of fulfilling those desires, that we somehow chose? Do we live the life that we want to live, facing the challenges that we want to face, and possessing the biological equipment that we want to possess to meet those challenges?
So much is made, in Darwinian evolutionary theory of random "mutations" resulting from reproduction errors, that cause, in combination with natural selection, all the DNA differences among organisms. What if these DNA differences were not caused by random variations and natural selection, but the result of an intention to design a being with a particular set of desires capable of functioning in a particular environment? And not just an external environment, but an internal mammalian or reptilian or avian environment? In other words, is the particular DNA sequences that we have another random accident, or is DNA, also, part of some kind of intention, some kind of choice that we or some other being has made prior to us being born?
What is an intention? An intention is a desire to somehow manipulate or even create something in the physical universe that provides an experience for ones self or for others that is preferable to the experience that is provided by the physical universe prior to this manipulation. We want ice cream because we prefer the experience of eating ice cream over the experience of not eating it. We want a sturdy house because we prefer the experience of the safety and security of a sturdy house over the experience of the insecurity and exposure of an unsturdy house. We want to scratch our foot because we prefer the experience of itchlessness over the experience of itchiness. We want world peace because we know enough about the discomfort of tension and the horrors of war to prefer the experience of calm and peace over the experience of tension and war.
To have an intention, a preference for one experience over the other, implies the capacity to experience. Inorganic material, clearly, has no such capacity. Inorganic material is passive. It moves or doesn't move, changes form from liquid to solid to gas, combines with other substances or separates from those substances, purely based upon the forces that impinge upon it. It has no preference to be stationary or to move at light speed, to be in great heat or in great cold, to be part of a huge conglomeration of matter like a star or to be an isolated atom floating through the universe. Having no capacity to experience, inorganic matter has no preferences at all. All the behavior of inorganic matter can be explained in terms of the forces that impinge upon it.
There are three kinds of phenomena that cannot be predicted purely by the forces that impinge on them. Among living organisms there is biological activity and there is behavior. Both of these, biological activity and behavior, make sense in terms of forces, but the forces are generated, in both cases, by metabolism, by a system of gathering fuel and generating energy from that fuel, not to violate, but to overcome the natural forces that impinge upon the organism. A corpse is an organism with no self generating metabolism, therefore, no activity, biological or behavioral, which overcomes the natural forces impinging on it. Behavior is activity that is motivated by our preference to have a certain experience or to avoid a certain experience. It implies the capacity of living beings to experience and to prefer one experience over the other.
The third category of phenomena that cannot be predicted purely by the forces that impinge on them are the activities of machines. A machine is a way of using a source of energy to accomplish an activity. The activity that a machine accomplishes, if it works, provides an experience that is preferable to the experience provided by the physical universe prior to the use of the machine. This experience is preferable to the inventor of the machine, the builder of the machine and the user of the machine. It is not preferable to the machine itself. The machine itself, including our most sophisticated electronic machines and computers, is not capable of having an experience, therefore not capable of prefering one experience over the other; therefore the machine, itself, really has no self; the self being the nexus of the capacity to experience and the nexus of a set of preferences for one experience over the other.
A lot of idiotic science fiction movies notwithstanding, machines and all the components of machines, have no capacity to experience. They can do very complicated tasks, but they do so with no consciousness, no experience. Now we have many sophisticated machines in our current environment that use electricity. These machines are able to match patterns of electrons, but they do not know that they are matching patterns of electrons. They can switch to matching new patterns depending on which patterns had previously matched or not matched. Again, however, they do not know they are matching patterns or switching patterns. They know nothing. Knowing is a conscious activity and machines are not conscious. The machine, called Big Blue, that beat the great chess player Garry Kasparov and the machine, called Alpha Go, that beat the great go player Lee Seedol, did not know that they were playing chess or playing go. They did not know that they were in a competition. They did not know that they were called Big Blue or Alpha Go. Although they were referred to, affectionately, by their creators as 'she' or 'he' or even 'it,' they were not really a he or a she or an it, in the sense that we usually use those pronouns. If these pronouns are used in the case of computers or other machines that we are fond of, they do not refer to a unitary source of agency, intention and experience, that we usually think of when we say, "He went to work,' or "she doesn't like to be bothered"or "they are very busy at school." We usually use these pronouns simply because the machine enables us to satisfy intentions that are important to us and we have affection for these machines because they do that. These machines, of course, do not have any affection for us.
Because they have no capacity to experience, a machine does not seek out one experience over the other. A self driving car, thankfully, does not go where "it" wants to go. It takes you to where you want to go. Your computer doesn't write the emails that it wants to write to the people that it wants to get in contact with. It assists you in writing the emails that you want to write to the people that you want to get in contact with. It searches for the information that you are interested in, not for the information that it is interested in. It is purely and utterly the servant of your intentions, not its own intentions.
Our bodies are a conglomeration of organic machines that also, like inorganic machines, are the servants of our intentions. Now there are, also, within our bodies innumberable microbial creatures and viruses that are pursuing their own intentions, some of which are congruent with our intentions and some of which are in conflict with our intentions. And there may be cancer cells, which are behaving in their own interest, gathering fuel for their own growth and expansion at the expense of our continued growth and longevity. But our actual bodies are designed, miraculously, to do whatever it is that we want to do, the moment we want to do it. And we are born with a set of desires that align perfectly with the environment in which we find ourselves. As I said earlier, we are born with a craving for our mother's milk, an attraction to our mother's breast which is the source of that milk, and the knowhow to suckle that breast. All of this, of course, is wonderfully convenient, since we are born to a human mother that has the specific kind of breast with the specific kind of milk that we are craving and that we already know how to suckle. If we, with human desires and preferences, were born to a centipede mother or a koala mother or a termite mother, we would be in very serious trouble trying to satisfy human desires in a centipede environment. The same, of course, would be true of a newborn centipede, trying to satisfy its centipede desires in a human environment.
When I say that the equipment that we are born with, that we call our bodies, is miraculous, I am not referring to the staggering molecular complexity of this equipment, which is wondrous but not miraculous. I am referring to the way in which this equipment is put into motion. The precise neurons allowing the precise cascades of sequences to deliver the behavior that we want to do to assist us in fulfilling our intentions is initiated instantly simply by us having that intention. As I said, intention is part of our experience, and we, who we are, is that center of experience, intention and awareness, that is, in this life, connected to our bodies, but is not part of our bodies. We are that non-physical center of awareness, intention and experience, and we initiate the manifestation of our intentions simply by having them. This initiation of intention is a movement from the non-physical (us) to the physical: firing neurons and the cascades of molecular, and muscular activity that result. I call it miraculous because if fits the definition of miraculous, that is: physical activity resulting from a non-physical cause.
Of course, the modern thinking is that it is the brain that has these intentions, that we are simply the passive responders to what our brains want us to do. But if the brain is not a machine, if it is, itself, the center of intention and experience, where is that experiential center located? When we look at the brain we see neurons with dendrite extensions that connect to other body cells and axons that connect to other neurons, and electrical charges moving through those neurons and dendrites and axons. In what part of the brain are these intentions and experiences located? We can now map out different areas of the brain that are connected to different kinds of experiences; but the differences in those areas is location, not structure. We find the same neurons, the same axons, the same dendrites, delivering, depending on location, our visual experiences, aural experiences, thoughts, memories, touches, and tastes. Where is the consciousness that is translating these patterns of electrical charges into the actual experience that is the very moment to moment fabric (although a non-material fabric) of our lives?
We are not our bodies. We are the non-physical center of our experience and intentions, and we attempt to realize those intentions through the agency of our bodies. Our bodies and, yes, our brains and our DNA, are those systems that allow us to experience the kind of life that we want to experience and the fulfillment or frustration of those intentions that we want to pursue.
What about biological processes? Those processes that exist beyond our purview, including those that exist without any intrusion of our consciousness, and those that are initiated by our conscious desires, are all of those activities, which are metabolically energized activities, are all of them intentional? Yes. Their intention is to keep this entire organism functioning, so that we can experience this world from the perspective that our bodies and brains and DNA determine that we shall experience it, for as long as possible. So, whose intention is it to allow us to have this particular experience of life on this planet for the longest possible time? That would be the ultimate being, the being of whom we are all an aspect; that would be the Atman, Infinity, God, the Cosmic Consciousness, Allah, Hashem, the being that has been referred to by countless different names over the centuries, but always the same One being.
I asked a scientist once, a man who had been running a research lab at MIT for thirty years, "What is the difference between a firing neuron and the experience of a firing neuron?" He said, "I don't think there is a difference." Really? Is there a difference between an apple and the experience of eating an apple? Is there a difference between a CD and the experience of listening to a CD? The materialist scientist's blindspot regarding their own experience, the entire plane of experience, could not be more clearly dramatized. And all of modern scientific thinking and brain research rests on the totally unproven assumption that consciousness is the result of very complex electronics. This may comport with the general assumption in our modern society that matter is the ultimate bases of the universe and that forces and experience and our conscious life spring from matter; but it is totally unproven and is the exact opposite of the much older mystic tradition that the subtle creates the gross; that matter is the result of forces and that forces and the precise balances between forces are no more than ideas that spring from the Cosmic Consciousness and that allow us to have a material world in the first place.
We now know of many different areas of the brain which are dedicated to either thoughts, memories, visualizations, hearing, touch, heat sensations, etc. Each of these areas are distinguished by nothing much more than their location. The multitude of neurons in our brains allow us to make distinctions; the more neurons, the more distinctions. We can distinguish near from far, round from square, dangerous from friendly, attractive from repellent, beautiful from ugly, and many, many distinctions between those, depending on how many neurons are devoted to that area of our experience. Yet how can basically the same neurons, the same dendrites, the same axons, the same electrical current moving through all of these; how can this sameness be responsible for the inexhaustible richness and complexity of our moment to moment experience? When I see a sunset, I see a sunset. I don't see electrical patterns on my cerebral cortex, no matter how precise and complex that pattern is. I see the sun. Evidently scientists must first admit that there is a difference between electrical currents and consciousness. Then, they might want to explain how such a difference could exist, and how there could be this instant translation from current to consciousness when we are considering perception, and from consciousness to current when we are considering the translation of intention into action.
Creation, either the first creation of the physical universe or the first creation of life, began with intention. This intention implies a being that has the capacity to experience and to prefer one experience over the other; in this case the preference that there be a physical universe rather than no physical universe and that there be life rather than no life. A being has intention and preferences but no physicality. A living being, like a human being or a dog being or a maple tree being, is attached to an organism, experiences this life and has preferences in this life through the medium of the physical body that it finds itself attached to.
Intention preceding creation from a non-physical being that has no beginning, that is increate, may be a mysterious way of looking at creation, but what would be a non-mysterious way of looking at creation? Creation appears, in its essence, to be mysterious to a consciousness such as ours which is brain bound and organism bound to time and space. If you disagree and say there was creation without intention, then what are you left with? That there was literally nothing, and then suddenly there was something; that physical matter or energy or force, just appeared and appeared with precisely the right amount of force and ratio of forces and velocities and energy for everything to fall in place and make an entire, synchronous, coherent and stable universe with just the exact right balance of attraction and repulsion to make this universe coherent and stable, those pockets of instability (which supporters of the 'electric universe' make so much of) being necessary to maintain the stability of the whole?
Or do we say that there was something, some force field say, or some kind of radiation or some kind of conglomeration of particles that led to the Big Bang. In that case the Big Bang was not really the origin of the physical universe. Whatever you describe as preceding the Big Bang was the origin of the universe. And if that origin was physical, did that origin have a beginning? Do you see where I am going with this? Something either has to be eternal, or something just popped into being from absolutely nothing: no atoms, no molecules, no forces, no energy fields, no particles at all. There was literally and absolutely nothing and then, suddenly there was. This to me is far more mysterious than to say that creation began with an intention; an intention that belonged to a being that had no beginning and that will have no end, and has no physicality. Why is this explanation more satisfactory than the other one? Because I have discovered, as you can discover, that you are also a being that has the capacity to experience and a set of preferences and a desire to manipulate the physical universe in ways that satisfy those preferences; and that you are not your physical body, any part of your physical body, but you are the non-physical context within which you experience your physical body. You are consciousness.
A brain scientist trying to explain to me where that center of consciousness may be located in the brain, shared with me that we have begun to discover a specific place where the brain attempts to make coherence out of incoherent thoughts. Or is it, as I would suspect, the place in the brain where our attempts to find coherence from incoherence are recorded? But whether we describe this person as being coherent with a perceptual and thought framework that she is comfortable with, or incoherent, with a perceptual and thought framework that is torturous to her, we are still describing two different conditions of the same person. The context of consciousness is still there, it's just having two very different experiences. So if consciousness is the context of our very deepest thoughts, if it even encompasses our very sense of coherence and incoherence, then what, the brain scientist wanted to know, is this context of consciousness that you talk of? This context that we can neither see nor hear? The context is you, you, you! You are coherent or incoherent. You are lucid or impaired. Whatever the contents of your consciousness, whatever the strength or weaknesses of those contents, the good or evil of those contents, the coherence or incoherence of those contents, the context of those contents is still you. You are consciousness. Not what you experience, but the experiencer. Not what you desire, but the desirer. Not what you observe, but the observer. You are not a that, but a that which; that which experiences and desires. You are consciousness and consciousness is you.
Once again, the comment lamp is lit.
Matt Chait
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