This essay will investigate where and how egoic awareness arises in my philosophy of idealistic pancomputational panpsychism. The role of language in this process will be explored. The notions will further be investigated in the framework of local and non-local consciousness.
Background
Digital physics is a growing branch in contemporary physics. This theory postulates that the universe is computable and a manifestation of information. The physicist James Gates found a kind of "computer code" buried in the equations of supersymmetry. J.A.Wheeler presented his famous "It from Bit" article. Erik Verlinde and Van 't Hooft, Dutch physicists share the opinion that the universe is made up from information and have developed their "entropic gravity" and "holographic principle", respectively, as a consequence thereof.
But a pattern or a code is only really information if there is someone to decipher the code and if it has meaning to this receiver. These theories therefore imply that if information is foundational, then so is consciousness, as there must be a conscious entity to which the code makes sense.
Since DNA or RNA are a codes as well, which are a kind of physically embodied language in which the letters of the code are molecular building blocks, one could suppose that the living cell can be considered as a (proto)conscious reader. But RNA was there before cells had evolved and could be read by other RNA and other biomolecules (certain co-factors). In other words, this implies a minute form of awareness at the molecular level.
In my previous post I have argued that consciousness can express itself in the smallest localised entities that are observable (like atoms or even sub-atomic particles), leading to a fractal of consciousness, with at least a form of minute sentience at every level of existence.
I described this process of manifesting into localised material form as a process of self-involvement and self-reference. Conscious Energy (Conscienergy) as a singular omnipresent underlying ground of existence stretches out in a fractal of metaphorical tentacles, which fold upon themselves to create self-referential feedback loops, which explore every aspect of reality with at least a minute amount of sentience and individuality. However, this does not necessarily mean that the smallest entities are conscious of themselves, that they have a form of self-awareness like we do. It is even questionable whether animals have a sense of self-awareness. Only higher mammals like dogs and apes appeared to show an element of self-recognition when tests with mirrors were performed. However, such a self-recognition does not yet mean that they are aware of their own awareness; the form of egoic awareness we humans display.
In this article I will argue that language may play a role in the development of egoic awareness. Moreover, if reality is really a code, it is also a kind of language and implies a conscious observer as part of the equation. I will explore whether reality as a whole has also a sense of self.
From Buddhist or Advaita Vedanta non-dualist perspectives, representatives of the perennial philosophy, my ideas may seem highly heretic. I will try to shed light on the reason why this does not necessarily need be so.
Mind, Intellect, Contrast and Ontologies
Our analytical intellect is a comparison engine, which allows us to contrast localised items in our environment, to classify these in ontologies and to arrive at the (re-)cognition of the object of contemplation. The intellect divides our surroundings and experience up into objects, names and concepts. It discriminates this object from that object by making lists (ontologies) of structural and functional features of the objects and checking in which features they differ from each other. In other words the intellect allows us to see contrasts between objects and to see ourselves as separated from the objects in our environment. The intellect thus introduces a notion of duality in our observations and does so by giving names to objects and the features of which they consist.
A recent article showed that cultures, which did not have a word or name for the colour "blue", were not capable of distinguishing blue from green. One of these cultures on the other hand was capable of distinguishing many other hues of green, for which they had different terminologies, which we would be unable to distinguish one from another. Contrast also means that there must be at least two different features that can be compared. It is therefore said that every ontology (in the sense of descriptive list) is a so-called "di-density"; it has at least two elements.
This also shows that the ability to detect colour and form contrasts with the right-hemisphere is strongly linked to a linguistic name-giving aspect of the left-hemisphere. One can speculate that you can only teach a child to see a certain contrast between two closely related colours if you can give a name to it. Can an ape teach its offspring to distinguish blue from green in the abstract manner we can? I don't think so.
One can even speculate that without language, without giving names, without ontological classification schemes, it may well be impossible to teach contrasts, to teach concepts, to introduce any form of abstraction and generalisation allowing to split up the world into different objects.
Animals may instinctively live in a kind of non-dual nirvana, not being aware of the difference between themselves and the outside world, but naturally feeling one with everything they can observe in the universe. Even the dangerous presence of a predator may only be instinctively felt as a need to fly to preserve its own localised life form, but may not necessarily lead to a notion of "I" and the "other".
The evolution of language may thus have enabled the formulation of the contrast between the own body and objects and the bodies of others. I speculate that it is language itself which made us enter the world of the left-brain hemisphere mind-like experience of duality: Experiencing oneself as separate from all other things and beings. Thus language may have given rise to the notion of self-awareness. At the same time it took a form of proto-self-awareness in order to formulate the first word ever; it's almost a chicken and egg problem: you cannot name an object outside yourself unless you consider it as separate from yourself, but you cannot consider something separate from yourself unless you have a name for it; a catch-22 situation in a certain sense. One could perhaps speculate that egoic awareness and language bootstrapped themselves into existence; with a fuzzy sense of egoic awareness and a fuzzy terminology at the beginning, which slowly crystallised in ever more localised concrete forms. A kind of "dependent arising" to speak in Buddhist terms.
Non-duality
The evolution of language probably involved the ability to compare. When a new object was to be named, it was probably compared with a known object which had the most features in common. This also led to the ability to express objects in terms of other objects by virtue of their similarities. In Indo-European languages this led to the strange invention of the verb "to be" which is absent from many other language families. As all things are actually in a continuous process of change, in fact no object really "is", but rather temporarily appears to be. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus summarised this by the notion that you cannot step twice in the same river. "Panta rhei, ouden menei" Everything flows, nothing remains. The verb "to be" has a kind of Aristotelian essence to it, a kind of eternal intrinsic value. Buddhism denounced such intrinsic essences as exemplified by the notion of "anatman".
We often use the verb "to be" to indicate a similarity, "this is like that". But in fact we are implicitly stating that this is unlike that, otherwise there would be no point in mentioning the two different objects.
Like the Aristotelian essences, the Vedic world was also full of atmic essences, leading to an almost animistic experience of the world. Funny enough, it was the development of the same language (Sanskrit in this case), which allowed for the transcendence of the verb "to be" and the transcendence of the notions of duality. Bothe the Buddhist heresy and the later attempt to reconcile Buddhism with Hinduism in the form of Advaita Vedanta, declare that the ultimate nature of reality is unified and monistic. That the objects of mind are the products of mind. That we have developed a certain grid of mental left-brain hemisphere interpretation and now we see everything through that grid. But also that we can quiet the mind and realise that ultimately everything is reductively the same! Namely everything is a manifestation of the underlying ground of conscienergy.
Language and information as intrinsic aspects of reality
This notion, that ultimately everything is reductively the same, can also be arrived at via logic. Chris Langan introduced the so-called process of "syndiffeonesis" in his Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU). In “syndiffeonic analysis” it is realised, that the differences between phenomena must be expressed in a medium that is common to both. If you do this recursively as regards the differences between differences, you finally come to the conclusion that everything is reductively the same, namely the infocognitive process called consciousness.
For instance the difference between an apple and a pear (which have the quality of being a fruit in common) can be expressed in terms of form and taste. Form and taste are here the common medium. Form and taste differ from each other that they relate to different experiential patterns of neurotransmitter activity in the brain, but have in common that they are both patterns of neurotransmitter activity as common medium. Etc.
According to Chris Langan, but also according to Thomas Campbell, Steve Kaufman, Klee Irvin, Terence McKenna and many others, reality is an expression of a code, a language. Not necessarily a language of words as we know it, but a mathematical interplay of conscious energies, a process of generating ever more complexity in form and of informational content. A game of forms as words which follow rules, a syntax.
Semiotics according to Wikipedia is the study of meaning-making, the study of sign processes and meaningful communication. In analogy Tim Gross calls this process by which conscienergy explores itself "Cosmosemiosis".
Is this the deeper meaning of the religious notion that "In the beginning was the "word" and the Word was with God and the word was God"? Is this the deeper meaning that all forms were born from the sound/word AUM in the Vedas? Is this the evolution of form from the dot beneath the Bab in the first verse of the Qur'an? Does this mean that reality is a self-processing, self-generating meta-algorithm of self-reflective self-replication and self-re-unification? An effort of Conscienergy to discover itself by generating representations of itself because it is impossible for conscienergy to go out of itself to see itself? Is this meta-algorithm the Ouroboros chasing and biting its own tail to discover that what it chases and bites is itself; a metaphor for consciousness trying to know itself?
And if there this circular attempt to know oneself is an indispensable and inextricable aspect and activity of consciousness, leading to the egoic awareness of oneself, is then not consciousness the knower, knowing and known at the same time? Does not consciousness require an object of contemplation to be aware of as the known? Is not the fourth state of consciousness exactly this union of knower, knowing and known at the same time? The realisation that none of these can exist independently of the other?
Algorithmic heresy
Don't let my Buddhist and Vedantist friends hear these heretic words! The philosopher Wittgenstein, when discussing consciousness stated: "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen" or "That what you cannot speak about, you must remain silent about". In a certain sense he was right. If consciousness (or conscienergy) is the ground of everything and cannot be reduced further, there is no point in using words, which only pertain to aggregates of consciousness to describe consciousness. But that does not mean that we cannot discuss the ways consciousness manifests itself in this world, that we cannot develop notions which transcend "aggregation". If the rishis were right, then there is a knower, knowing and known and they are ultimately different metaphorical sides of the same consciousness. This does not mean that I am stating that consciousness arises or emerges from information, as my Buddhist and Vedantist friends are accusing me of. Rather Consciousness involves a knowing process of generating information, to be read and understood by itself in order to know itself as knower. But my friends keep claiming that I am attributing mechanistic and object notions to describe something which cannot be expressed in words. I stand by my heresy. Not that I claim that consciousness IS only what I put in words, but that it involves a kind of non-deterministic meta-algorithm to explore itself and that that non-deterministic meta-algorithm generates the egoic awareness of being aware of oneself!
The Ouroboric tailbiting is the visual representation of how non-local consciousness forms a metaphorical vortex to get to know itself and thereby creates an instance of localised consciousness, which can be expressed in a living being (including self-sustaining non-biological life forms). This forms an proto-egoic entity, or if you prefer esoteric language a "soul" or an "atma". "God's Alters of God's Dissociative Identity Disorder" as the philosopher Bernardo Kastrup would call us.
The degree wherein such a soul can generate information, from which it can understand that it is aware of itself, is decisive in the matter whether the entity is capable of egoic awareness as we are. It is my thesis that this involves the ability to use a coding language, which is in principle medium invariant. A language in which the representative symbol or word or code is an "indirect representation" of the object it represents. Our human languages can ultimately be coded in many media and even be reduced to a digital code; otherwise I wouldn't be typing these words on my computer.
Whereas natural codes such as DNA and RNA are in fact medium bound due to a specific chemical and topological morphology, these languages are not languages which give rise to "egoic self-awareness". The semiotic type of language Langan, McKenna and others speak about as the language by which reality is generated as a means of self-representation by consciousness might not necessarily result in an egoic awareness of universal consciousness as a whole. The words of this language would appear to be mathematical energetic and material forms using a syntax we call the laws of nature and form "self-representations"; the code IS the object itself in a certain sense. But here the concept of level comes into play: Conscienergy appears to manifest as a fractal of sentient entities: subatomic particles form aggregates of atoms, atoms form aggregates of molecules, molecules form aggregates of macro-molecules, macro- molecules form aggregates of cells, cells build organs and organisms and organisms organise into a global webmind. At the lowest level, where particles form this code is digital though as I explained in previous article. A digital code is the most universal code. It is also a computational code, so that every self-sustaining form arising in existence is both sentient and computational. So ultimately, we do see an medium-invariant code in the mind of universal consciousness. Therefore it is not excluded that egoic awareness could arise at this level. However, as soon as this egoic aspect would arise, would it still be universal? Is not the arising of a vortex in the infinity of conscienergy a limitation? Therefore even the highest Transcendent egoic entity ("a God?", if you'd like to name such an entity in that way), would by virtue of this ego not experience oneness with its non-dual nature whenever involved in egoic awareness. Therefore whatever egoic awareness arises, it is always a relative entity in the sea of absoluteness, unless that entity has the ability to shut down its mental processes at will and experience unity.
The mystic traditions state that even we can experience that state, so even when being involved in egoic awareness, it seems possible to shut down the mental machinery after the realisation that knower, knowing and known are one and experience the infinity of absolute unity.
In Hinduism, the God Brahma thinks he is the ultimate reality and creator, until he meets Krishna, who shows him that many Brahmas from parallel universes bow at his (Krishna's) feet. Krishna calls the ego "the false ego". In Gnosticism, the world is not created by the ultimate Goddess of wisdom Sophia, but by her creation the Demiurge. Were Brahma and the Demiurge mythological representations of the entities who simulated this world in a digital substrate?
Conclusion
Egoic awareness is dependent on the ability to name objects, to use a medium invariant language of indirect representations, but this ability is also dependent on egoic awareness, so that language and egoic awareness must have arisen in a co-dependent bootstrapping manner. As animals and other life forms do not appear to use a medium invariant language of indirect representations, it seems that they are not capable of egoic awareness as far as we can judge with our limited understanding.
Reality appears at its most fundamental level expressed in code (as evidenced by digital physics) requiring a consciousness to interpret the meaning of this code. This points to consciousness as ultimate ground of existence. Reality arises as a process of consciousness trying to get to know itself and thereby generating self-reflective loops of self-observation, which results in a fractal of pansentient entities. The information, as a self-representing language is cybernetically fed back, so that the knower can know via the process of knowing that the knower, knowing and known are one and the same expression of consciousness. This has been visualised in the form of the alchemical symbol of an Ouroboros.
Image from https://giphy.com/search/ouroboros
If you liked this post, please upvote. You can find my book "Transcendental Metaphysics" dealing with similar topics in paperback or as an ebook.
Awesome post!
Thank you!
I really enjoy your stuff. Your reasoning is clear and well articulated.
Thank you Sean-King. Seems we have a lot in common. Followed you back.
Thank you. You will also like the one I just posted: https://steemit.com/philosophy/@technovedanta/is-structure-fossilised-sense
I'm not really into panpsychism, so I was a bit worried from the start, but the rest of the article was really well written. A treat. Thank you!
Thanks for the compliment.
This is as far as I needed to read. Of course I'm absolutely going to read the rest. It just got me excited, as I've been writing about this same idea in my fiction. Here's a quote from an unreleased rough draft of a chapter from Merwin In The Multiverse:
If you don't mind, I'd like to put in a link to this article in this chapter when I post it.
Only consciousness exists, for sure. Without awareness, there is 'nothing' to be aware of. If awareness/consciousness/knowing is not present -there is no experience, therefore there can only be conscious-awareness, all experience is this.