Altered State of Consciousness

"Let us review three cases from widely separated locations in the world. A Tungus shaman in Siberia agrees to the request of tribal hunters to locate game during a poor hunting season. Using a drumming technique, he enters an [altered state of consciousness] ASC and provides information to help his hunters. The Western interpretation—if it accepts at all the validity of this kind of information—would be that the shaman calculates the behavior of the game according to weather and well-known environmental conditions. In other words, his is information based on cognitive processing of sensory data. 

The explanation of the shaman himself is different: Guidance has been provided by forest spirits. On another continent, hunters of the Kalahari !Kung tribe leave the settlement to hunt for a period that may last anywhere from two days to two weeks. The tribe’s timely preparation for the return of successful hunters is necessary for processing the game. The people left behind make the appropriate steps long before the hunters’ reappearance. Their foreknowledge of the hunters’ return could be explained rationally by attributing it to a messenger sent ahead or the use of tam-tam drums or smoke signals. The tribesmen report, however, that it is the spirit of ancestors who informs them when the hunters will return. 

Next, we move to the Amazon basin. The Shuar shaman is facing a new disease in the community. An herbal remedy is sought by adding leaves of a candidate plant into the hallucinogenic beverage ayahuasca, a sacrament indigenous to the Upper Amazon region. The shaman drinks it and, upon return to ordinary consciousness, decides the usefulness of the plant in question. Is his decision based on accumulation of ethnobotanical knowledge of several generations in combination with trial and error? The headhunter Shuar are not likely to be merciful to an ineffective medicine man, and his techniques must be working. 

As Luis Eduardo Luna explained to me, according to ayahuasqueros, the spirit of a new plant reveals itself with the help of the spirits associated with the ayahuasca. Sometimes, they also tell which plant to use next. We can point to the following contradiction: Healers from different cultures are unequivocal in their interpretation of the source of knowledge, whereas rational thinkers use diverging, unsystematic explanations. Which side should be slashed with Occam’s razor? Also called the 'principle of parsimony,' Occam’s razor is usually interpreted to mean something like 'Do not multiply hypotheses unnecessarily' or 'Do not posit pluralities unnecessarily when generating explanatory models.' The principle of parsimony is used frequently by philosophers of science in an effort to establish criteria for choosing from theories with equal explanatory power. At first glance it is the 'primitives' who multiply causes unnecessarily by referring to the supernatural. Yet Occam’s razor may be applied easily to the rational view, if those arguments are less parsimonious."

- Rick Strassman (1952 - )
 Inner Paths to Outer Space

Mystagogic Objects

"If truth and reality can clearly come only from the subject and his consciousness, then illusion, which is the opposite of these, must necessarily come from elsewhere. From the world of the object, from some other thing than the subject. Illusion, like profusion, comes to us from the world.

...

The secret of theory is that truth does not exist.

...

The universe is mystagogic."

- Jean Baudrillard (1929 - 2007)
Fragments

Collective Field

"Intelligence ... is not something to be tested, but something to be recognized, in all the multiple forms that it takes. The task is to figure out how to become aware of it, to associate with it, to make it manifest. This process is itself one of entanglement, of opening ourselves to forms of communication and interaction with the totality of the more-than-human world, much deeper and more extensive than those which can be performed in the artificial constraints of the laboratory. It involves changing ourselves, and our own attitudes and behaviors, rather than altering the conditions of our non-human communicants.

...

Each thing organizes the space around it, rebuffing or sidling up against other things; each thing calls, gestures, beckons to other beings or battles them for our attention; things expose themselves to the sun or retreat among the shadows, shouting with their loud colors or whispering with their seeds; rocks snag lichen spores from the air and shelter spiders under their flanks; clouds converse with the fathomless blue and metamorphose into one another; they spill rain upon the land, which gathers in rivulets and carves out canyons.

...

The 'real world' in which we find ourselves, then—the very world our sciences strive to fathom—is not a sheer 'object,' not a fixed and finished 'datum' from which all subjects and subjective qualities could be pared away, but is rather an intertwined matrix of sensations and perceptions, a collective field of experience lived through from many different angles. The mutual inscription of others in my experience, and (as I must assume) of myself in their experiences, effects the interweaving of our individual phenomenal fields into a single, ever-shifting fabric, a single phenomenal world or 'reality.'"

- David Abram (1957 - )
The Spell of the Sensuous

Myo

D.T. Suzuki describes the Japanese word myo (for which there is no single-word equivalent in English) as a "certain artistic quality perceivable not only in works of art but in anything in Nature or life. The sword in the hands of the swordsman attains this quality when it is not a mere display of technical skill patiently learned under the tutorship of a good master...The hands may move according to the technique given out to every student, but there is a certain spontaneity and personal creativity when the technique, conceptualized, and universalized, is handled by the master hand. Myo may also be applied to the intelligence and the instinctive activities of various animals, for example the beaver building its nest, the spider spinning its web, the wasp or ant constructing its castles under the eaves or beneath the ground. They are the wonders of Nature. In fact, the whole universe is a miraculous exhibition of a master mind, and we humans who are one of its wonderful achievements have been straining our intellectual efforts ever since the awakening of consciousness and are daily being overwhelmed by Nature's demonstrations of its unfathomable and inexhaustible myo. The awakening of consciousness has been the greatest cosmological event in the course of evolution. We have been able by its practical application to probe into the secrets of nature and make use of them to serve our way of living, but at the same time we seem to be losing the many things we have otherwise been enjoying which Nature has been liberal enough to grant us. The function of human consciousness, as I see it, is to dive deeper and deeper into its source, the unconscious."

- D.T. Suzuki (1870 - 1966) 
Zen and Japanese Culture

Myconeurological Networks

"I believe that the mycelium operates at a level of complexity that exceeds the computational powers of our most advanced supercomputers. I see the mycelium as the Earth’s natural Internet, a consciousness with which we might be able to communicate. Through cross-species interfacing, we may one day exchange information with these sentient cellular networks. Because these externalized neurological nets sense any impression upon them, from footsteps to falling tree branches, they could relay enormous amounts of data regarding the movements of all organisms through the landscape. A new bioneering science could be born, dedicated to programming myconeurological networks to monitor and respond to threats to environments. Mycelial webs could be used as information platforms for mycoengineered ecosystems."

- Paul Stamets (1955 - )
Mycelium Running:
How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

Constructs of Imagination

 

"Perception is not a
window on objective reality.
It is an interface that hides objective
reality behind a veil of helpful icons.
...

Conscious realism makes a bold claim: consciousness, not spacetime and its objects, is fundamental reality and is properly described as a network of conscious agents. To earn its keep, conscious realism must do serious work ahead. It must ground a theory of quantum gravity, explain the emergence of our spacetime interface and its objects, explain the appearance of Darwinian evolution within that interface, and explain the evolutionary emergence of human psychology.

...

...
What we call ‘reality,’ consists of
an elaborate papier-mâché construction of
imagination and theory filled in between
a few iron posts of observation."

- Donald Hoffman (1955 - )

The Case Against Reality

The Function of Consciousness

"The function of consciousness is to represent information about what is happening outside and inside the organism in such a way that it can be evaluated and acted upon by the body. In this sense, it functions as a clearinghouse for sensations, perceptions, feelings, and ideas, establishing priorities among all the diverse information. Without consciousness we would still “know” what is going on, but we would have to react to it in a reflexive, instinctive way. With consciousness, we can deliberately weigh what the senses tell us, and respond accordingly. And we can also invent information that did not exist before: it is because we have consciousness that we can daydream, make up lies, and write beautiful poems and scientific theories."

- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1934 - 2021)
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Fungal States of Minds

"Fungal organisms can perceive the outer world in a way similar to what animals sense. Does that mean that they have full awareness of their environment and themselves? Is a fungus a conscious entity? In laboratory experiments we found that fungi produce patterns of electrical activity, similar to neurons. The new field of fungal consciousness is opening in front of us. Let us discuss directions of future studies. Do fungi have holistic states of mind? Do they combine/modify such states? How many fungal states of mind could be described? Do fungi create specific relational contexts? Or are they, on the contrary, not capable of having holistic states of mind, and are just following completely prefixed patterns? At which extent can we include fungi affects into such cognitive processing? Fungal chemotaxis could be part of such proto-emotional states. A deeper consciousness state allows us to understand and accept sacrificing our 'self' for higher purposes (martyrs, heroes).

...

Given the peculiarity of fungi morphology and degree of connection, we may imagine how radically different computational schemes are embedded into a fungal consciousness. For example, rather than 3-dimensional visual perception, holographic perception might be possible, considering the quasi-flat distribution of mycelia and its mechanoceptive reconstruction of moving objects (animals) at the upper boundary layer. Non-causal consciousness might arise from this specific perception framework, eventually hindering the time perception. All of these remain open questions for further investigations."

- Andy Adamatzky, et al., "Fungal States of Minds"

Consciousness

"I regard consciousness as fundamental.
I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.
We cannot get behind consciousness.
Everything that we talk about,
everything that we regard as existing,
postulates consciousness."

- Max Planck (1858 - 1947)

Atoms with Consciousness

"I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think.
There are the rushing waves…
mountains of molecules, each stupidly
minding its own business… trillions apart…
yet forming white surf in unison.

Ages on ages…
before any eyes could see…
year after year…
thunderously pounding the shore as now.
For whom, for what?…
on a dead planet,
with no life to entertain.

Never at rest…
tortured by energy…
wasted prodigiously by the sun…
poured into space.
A mite makes the sea roar.

Deep in the sea, all molecules
 repeat the patterns of one another
 till complex new ones are formed.
They make others like themselves…
and a new dance starts.

Growing in size and complexity… living things,
masses of atoms, DNA, protein… dancing
a pattern ever more intricate.

Out of the cradle onto the dry land…
here it is standing…
atoms with consciousness…
matter with curiosity.

Stands at the sea…
wonders at wondering…
...I…
a universe of atoms…
an atom in the universe."

- Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)
Untitled Ode to the Wonder of Life,
Quoted by Maria Popova (1984 - ), The Marginalian

Hatching of Self

"As an object prone to fertilization, the egg is an appropriate symbol and metaphor for the idea of potentiality. It is pre-creation chaos waiting to become cosmos. In psychological terms, it is the preconsciousness of the given culture – the collective being waiting to be made conscious of itself. To quote psychologist Marie Louise von Franz, 'we can easily recognize in it the motif of preconscious totality. It is psychic wholeness conceived as the thing which came before the rise of ego consciousness, or any kind of dividing consciousness'. In short, the egg is a symbol of pre-differentiation, differentiation being the essence of the creation of anything. The egg contains within itself male and female, light and dark, all opposites in a state of union. It is perfect entropy and signals the existence of creative power from the very beginning. By extension, the cosmic egg is a symbol of the individual’s preconscious state before the process of individuation allows for the hatching of Self."

- David A. Leeming (1937 - )
Cosmic Egg

The Matrix of All Matter

"I regard consciousness as fundamental, matter is derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness. There is no matter as such; it exists only by virtue of a force bringing the particle to vibration and holding it together in a minute solar system; we must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. The mind is the matrix of all matter."

- Max Planck (1858 - 1947)

Focal Points

"...there seems to be at least two distinct forms of identity that consciousness can take on, both of which we recognize as the 'I.' The first, and the one usually experienced during ordinary states of consciousness, is the 'I' of the ego; the 'I' of the cognitive models constructed by the brain. The second is an 'I' that seems to be independent of the ego and of life in linear time; a transcendent 'I' that seems to exist entirely beyond time, space, and life itself, and whose identity is more profoundly recognized as the true 'I' than the relatively provincial and flattened notions of the ego. The implication of this is that a hypothetical, universal field of consciousness must somehow 'clot' into multiple, separate 'focal points' in a realm of reality beyond that of the physical brain. Each of these focal points must then correspond to a transcendent 'I' that is coupled, in awareness, to the electrochemical signals of an individual brain and its ego constructs."

- Bernardo Kastrup
Dreamed Up Reality

Postscript. As I alluded to a few blog posts ago, owing to this will-it-ever-end-pandemic, my photo-safari opportunities are - as for most of you - few-and-far-between. Thus, quality "photography time" nowadays amounts to either immersing myself in an unfathomably deep gorge of unprocessed raw files or looking to make this gorge even more unfathomably deep by saving an endless stream of impromptu "experiments" with light and form in my home studio (i.e.,  my day-job work desk after I clear it of my day-job notes and scribbles). The diptych above (as well as the one from yesterday) combines these two practices; i.e., they are "experiments in abstraction" captured a few years ago with my iPhone. Yesterday's images are of two ceilings, one in a local grocery store, the other at a local department of motor vehicles (where I sat, bored, one day in 2017, while waiting for one of my sons to test for his driver's permit). Today's images come courtesy of a local mall. There is appreciable comfort (from my otherwise omnipresent angst over few-and-far-between photo opportunities) in knowing that there are always wonders to be discovered, even if such "discoveries" are of discoveries made long ago!

Mind at Large

"To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funnelled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet. To formulate and express the contents of this reduced awareness, man has invented and endlessly elaborated those symbol-systems and implicit philosophies which we call languages. Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he or she has been born -- the beneficiary inasmuch as language gives access to he accumulated records of other people's experience, the victim in so far as it confirms him in the belief that reduced awareness is the only awareness and as it be-devils his sense of reality, so that he is all too apt to take his concepts for data, his words for actual things."

- Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)

Wonder about Wonder

"How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light-years until gravity and change brought them together here, now. These atoms now form a conglomerate- your brain- that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder. With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, it the greatest mystery of all."

- V. S. Ramachandran (1951 - )
The Tell-Tale Brain

Creative Consciousness

"I believe that we need to learn from natural process about how to be appropriately creative ourselves, meaning that our activities should be appropriate to whatever is the context within which we are acting. This of course applies to everything we do, not just to art or architecture. The process of bringing something into being is what we and the rest of nature are engaged in all the time, but we have a tendency to assume that what emerges from our looking or feeling or doing was there to begin with and we just became aware of it. However just as quarks and mesons, organisms and galaxies are dynamically generated continuously, from we know not what, to become the natural kinds that we call in the generic language of dynamics, attractors, so we and the world we inhabit are generated continuously. The individual properties of these natural kinds reflect the context in which they arise by their particularities. It is this type of process that I believe we need to understand by participating in it, not just by looking at it.

...

The latest problem to appear clearly on the scientific agenda is how consciousness (and feeling) could emerge in a cosmos that is made up of totally inert, insentient components. Complexity theory always requires that there be some precursor of whatever property is observed to emerge in a system, such as superconductivity or the properties of water or the cooperative behavior of bees in a hive. The dilemma now is to account for the evolutionary emergence of feeling from a system that has no qualitative precursor of such a property. This would be a scientific miracle, and scientists don’t like miracles. So some other solution needs to be found. My own preference, to save the unity of scientific understanding, is to adopt some position like that of Whitehead or Bergson, so that consciousness and feelings are grounded in reality and not some ghostly epiphenomena that are not quite real. However, this will be very firmly resisted by the majority of scientists, and for perfectly good reasons. You do not lightly abandon a position that has been so phenomenally successful at explaining so much of nature. I don’t intend to abandon it either, but I believe that science has to be extended in some way to accommodate the reality of qualities."

- Brian Goodwin (1931 - 2009)

Self-Sustaining Agents

"… long before we were conscious, thinking beings, our cells were reading data from the environment and working together to mold us into robust, self-sustaining agents. What we take as intelligence, then, is not simply about using symbols to represent the world as it objectively is. Rather, we only have the world as it is revealed to us, which is rooted in our evolved, embodied needs as an organism. Nature ‘has built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it and with it’, … we think with our whole body, not just with the brain."

- Ben Medlock
The body is the missing link for truly intelligent machines

Ontological Autometamorphosis

"For some time, there was a widely held notion (zealously fostered by the daily press) to the effect that the 'thinking ocean' of Solaris was a gigantic brain, prodigiously well-developed and several million years in advance of our own civilization, a sort of 'cosmic yogi,' a sage, a symbol of omniscience, which had long ago understood the vanity of all action and for this reason had retreated into an unbreakable silence. The notion was incorrect, for the living ocean was active. Not, it is true, according to human ideas — it did not build cities or bridges, nor did it manufacture flying machines. It did not try to reduce distances, nor was it concerned with the conquest of Space (the ultimate criterion, some people thought, of man's superiority). But it was engaged in a never-ending process of transformation, an 'ontological autometamorphosis.'"

- Stanislaw Lem (1921 - 2006)

Solaris

Shadow World

"We have learnt that the exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating. Feeling that there must be more behind, we return to our starting point in human consciousness - the one centre where more might become known. There we find other stirrings, other revelations than those conditioned by the world of symbols... Physics most strongly insists that its methods do not penetrate behind the symbolism. Surely then that mental and spiritual nature of ourselves, known in our minds by an intimate contact transcending the methods of physics, supplies just that... which science is admittedly unable to give."

- Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882 - 1944)

The Content of Cognition

"In a sense it has been my way to transcendental experience: to the discovery that matter metaphorically speaking, is the creation of the spirit (the mode of existence of the observer in a domain of discourse), and that the spirit is the creation of the matter it creates. This is not a paradox, but it is the expression of our existence in a domain of cognition in which the content of cognition is cognition itself. Beyond that nothing can be said."

- Humberto R. Maturana (1928 - )