Thoughts on reality
I have a sore throat and my whole body smells like chlorine... But I guess none of that gets in the way of thinking. I was reading 'A Theory of Everything' by Ken Wilber, and one of his examples sent me off on a train of thought.
How real is science? How fundamental? How well can it answer questions about the world? After all, science is objective. That gives it a huge power to cut through bullshit, but it's a limitation in a way. In order for any phenomenon to be investigated "scientifically," it has to be repeatable under control circumstances and it has to look the same to all observers. The photoelectric effect is repeatable and it doesn't change based on who's looking. That's not true of everything. Most importantly, I think, it's not true of consciousness.
There was a study recently, imaging the brains of Christians praying in tongues. Cool. But what can you prove? You can say that brain activity correlates with certain other states, like meditation maybe. (I have no idea. Apparently in this particular study there was surprisingly little brain activity. But again, what does that prove about anything?)
You can make graphs and write scientific articles on this kind of research, but can you reduce spiritual experience to bits of the brain lighting up? I don't think so, because it doesn't convey the experience in any way. No matter how many spiritually-aware brains a scientist looks at, she can never turn over the 1000th slide and say "Eureka! So that's what praying in tongues is like!"
It's not the same. It's subjective. No two people have the same conscious experience. You can share consciousness subjectively, with conversation and poetry and music and theatre, but it isn't reproducible. It isn't objective. No two people have the same experience when they look at a painting or read a poem.
I think that's important. I don't think that consciousness is any less valid or real just because the scientific method doesn't apply. And I don't think scientific concepts are any less valid just because no one ever derived quantum mechanics through meditation and introspection. Of course they overlap. In order for science to exist, there had to be thinking beings walking around, and I'm not sure it's possible for rationality to evolve before consciousness.
(Interesting concept: maybe we could create a computer today that could understand science and derive theories without having our kind of self-awareness. Would it be conscious? It wouldn't have our kind of consciousness. It'd be hard to have a conversation with it. Still I think it would have to have some kind of thought-consciousness to really understand science as opposed to just storing symbols and data on its hard drive).
Is it possible to have a 'Theory of Everything' that shows us how consciousness and science are related? I'm not a fan of irreducible dualities, but I don't really like the reductionist approach either. Yes, you could say that consciousness depends on patterns of firing neurons, made of proteins, made of atoms, made of quarks... But you can't say consciousness is quarks. It's meaningless because it conveys no information. You can't predict what a spiritual experience is like by modeling the movement of atoms in a giant computer simulation. I don't think that's possible even in theory.
And I don't think you can ignore the issue by saying "Whatever subjective experience is, it's unimportant compared to the objective universe." How can consciousness be unimportant when we're trapped in it? We're stuck on the inside looking out. Anything we observe and study "scientifically" we see and understand from inside this thing called self-awareness. I think that we ignore that at our peril.
How real is science? How fundamental? How well can it answer questions about the world? After all, science is objective. That gives it a huge power to cut through bullshit, but it's a limitation in a way. In order for any phenomenon to be investigated "scientifically," it has to be repeatable under control circumstances and it has to look the same to all observers. The photoelectric effect is repeatable and it doesn't change based on who's looking. That's not true of everything. Most importantly, I think, it's not true of consciousness.
There was a study recently, imaging the brains of Christians praying in tongues. Cool. But what can you prove? You can say that brain activity correlates with certain other states, like meditation maybe. (I have no idea. Apparently in this particular study there was surprisingly little brain activity. But again, what does that prove about anything?)
You can make graphs and write scientific articles on this kind of research, but can you reduce spiritual experience to bits of the brain lighting up? I don't think so, because it doesn't convey the experience in any way. No matter how many spiritually-aware brains a scientist looks at, she can never turn over the 1000th slide and say "Eureka! So that's what praying in tongues is like!"
It's not the same. It's subjective. No two people have the same conscious experience. You can share consciousness subjectively, with conversation and poetry and music and theatre, but it isn't reproducible. It isn't objective. No two people have the same experience when they look at a painting or read a poem.
I think that's important. I don't think that consciousness is any less valid or real just because the scientific method doesn't apply. And I don't think scientific concepts are any less valid just because no one ever derived quantum mechanics through meditation and introspection. Of course they overlap. In order for science to exist, there had to be thinking beings walking around, and I'm not sure it's possible for rationality to evolve before consciousness.
(Interesting concept: maybe we could create a computer today that could understand science and derive theories without having our kind of self-awareness. Would it be conscious? It wouldn't have our kind of consciousness. It'd be hard to have a conversation with it. Still I think it would have to have some kind of thought-consciousness to really understand science as opposed to just storing symbols and data on its hard drive).
Is it possible to have a 'Theory of Everything' that shows us how consciousness and science are related? I'm not a fan of irreducible dualities, but I don't really like the reductionist approach either. Yes, you could say that consciousness depends on patterns of firing neurons, made of proteins, made of atoms, made of quarks... But you can't say consciousness is quarks. It's meaningless because it conveys no information. You can't predict what a spiritual experience is like by modeling the movement of atoms in a giant computer simulation. I don't think that's possible even in theory.
And I don't think you can ignore the issue by saying "Whatever subjective experience is, it's unimportant compared to the objective universe." How can consciousness be unimportant when we're trapped in it? We're stuck on the inside looking out. Anything we observe and study "scientifically" we see and understand from inside this thing called self-awareness. I think that we ignore that at our peril.