The field of consciousness research seems to be coming into it's own. I've been interested in it for years, even before I took acid. (more than fifty years ago.) As a subject though, it is illusive. It always seems to be on the other side of the coin. Or underneath another layer. (Or under the rug.) But common sense seems to say that if you peel an onion for a hundred years, eventually you'll have to come to a point where you're done peeling, where the substance is no longer a peel but a central core. Use any metaphor you choose, you still aren't there.
I suppose it started with Freud, who in turn started with dreams. Dreams are little off-Broadway plays that we produce solely for
ourselves while we are asleep, supposedly resting. We are
conscious of these dreams while we're having them, but often they slip away as we wake. O.K. sometimes I have dreams that are more like movies than plays. Noir, Horror; even, my favorite, Westerns. Some people, from what I understand,
never dream; I dream alot, often dreams that are very similar to previous ones.
We construct these scenarios while we are asleep, which seems somewhat
paradoxical because the creation of a dream is a creative act, therefore
an energetic activity, and yet we are supposed to be unconscious. We
aren't conscious of the world around us; the bedroom, the park bench,
wherever we happen to be when we fall asleep. But we are engaged in the
activity of telling a story, often in color and with sound, and
utilizing various techniques; condensation, deletion, displacement,
considerations of representability or figurability; revision, (re-writing), recursion, division, copying, modeling, force, (ie; pushing an
idea aside), syntax. We are unconsciously conscious.
Being unconsciously conscious is, I suspect, the door we use when we
lift consciousness out of the sticky mass of the brain and externalize
it; place it in "inanimate" matter and/or in absolute vacuum space.
(In that absolute vacuum by the way, consciousness seems to have something in common with dreaming while you sleep.) This externalizing, it is interesting to know, is something we did long before we
discovered quantum mechanics, or at least before we put it in what we
refer to as scientific language. That was called Animism.
When quantum mechanics came along in the early 20th century, wise men had the courage to face it, so, before the century was over, its revolution of thought was trickling down to those of us who live comfortably in the middle-brow level of consciousness. I suppose it was about 1975 that I first read what for me was the first of several popularizations of quantum physics, or mechanics, (not sure how it's supposed to be referred to in the nominal sense); The Tao of Physics. Then, maybe a year or so later, I read The Dancing Wu Li Masters, a similar Quantum for Dummies. Around that time I also signed up for Transcendental Meditation, got my mantra, started meditating, and on weekends went to hear taped lectures of its Guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who, it was said, was a yogi and a nuclear physicist. At that point, of course, I was going around with a little knowledge in my head, and we know how that is.
No little thing. Now it's not just "What is consciousness?", but, "Why are there two realities?" While science has been using the quantum reality to create more and more stuff, and more and more proofs of its existence, the rest of us are still stuck with Science's empirical observations and measurements.
In fact in some cases we are not just stuck but imprisoned. To be unscientific is to be almost an outlaw, so we'd better review what science really is, in the vernacular as it were.........,
Science is structured in the scientific method, which goes like this;
Make an observation.
Ask a question.
Form a hypothesis, or testable explanation.
Make a prediction based on the hypothesis.
Test the prediction.
Iterate: use the results to make new hypotheses or predictions.
The problem here is that consciousness is always left outside, waiting to get in. Whether you say; I make an observation; or you make an observation, or one makes an observation; the I, you, or one is still not in the hypotheses or prediction, it's outside, like the horse you left tied up to the hitching post.
[Science thinks of the observer as an innocent bystander, but that way of thinking is in the process of being eroded by something like metaphysical creep, as in; many aspects of Lacan's thought, etc. etc. ...Wittgenstein, Hofstadter's Godel, Escher and Bach; all of whom imply that the observer can't be trusted!]
[Here is where I can't leave off mentioning Chris Langan. The problem is, or the problems are, that he speaks the language of higher mathematics and advanced logic, which I have absolutely no competency in. So, any reference I make to his theory has to be based only on that part of his thinking that I can understand, the simpler elucidations; statements that just seem right. [As for instance, what I "grok" concerning his ideas about the Scientific method. All I can do is share my understanding from my own intellectual level, one where I have, at least, more company than Mr. Langan has.]
I mention Langan because he has in his possession a Theory of the Universe, and it's the only one I know anything about, and that is, again, taking into consideration my limited academic and intellectual resources. I've read as much as I can of The Portable Chris Langan and find his simpler explanation of his theory just amazingly intellectually seductive and will probably spend the rest of my golden years struggling to further my understanding. Since I don't feel qualified to "select out" any quotes of his, I'll leave it to you to listen to one of his many interviews on-line. I'll just say this; that I'm a believer that the universe is an intelligent entity.
Is that entity the same as God? Well, there are still multitudes of intellectuals that would shoot down that idea quickly, but then, as we head in to this new millennium that group seems more and more vulnerable. My money is on Langan. ...O.K., I'm going to cheat; here's a little quote;
"By the Principle of Linguistic Reducibility, reality is a language. Because it is self-contained with respect to processing as well as configuration, it is a Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language or SCSPL whose general spatio-temporal structure is hologically replicated everywhere within it as self-transductive syntax."
That's from a chapter almost all of which is clearly, distinctly over my head; [though the beauty of his thinking is revealed repeatedly.] So, why do I have so much faith in him? I throw myself on the mercy of the court. All I can say is that I have a long history of working with faith and belief to the occasional benefit of myself and my friends.
There are lots, potentially an infinite number of languages. There are sign languages, smoke signals, body languages, pidgens of various ilk, complex broad-based languages like English and German that have lots of words and meanings; languages that have more borrowed words than some, like Serbo-Croatian; and of course there are the language aspects of Math..., and computer languages. And to some extent, we might say, the languages of animals; like horses and African Grey Parrots.
There are also, they tell me, meta-languages, as in below, from Wikipedia:
In logic and linguistics, a metalanguage is a language used to
describe another language, often called the object language. Expressions
in a metalanguage are often distinguished from those in the object
language by the use of italics, quotation marks, or writing on a
separate line. The structure of sentences and phrases in a metalanguage can be described by a metasyntax. Wikipedia
A meta-language can refer to the mental version of a sentence you have in your mind when you see a sentence that is grammatically incorrect; as in, "I saw you at the mall last Tuesday." When you are reading, "I seen youz at the mall las Tuesday."
The following is lifted from Wikipedia with all do credit:
There are a variety of recognized metalanguages, including embedded, ordered, and nested (or hierarchical) metalanguages.
An embedded metalanguage is a language formally, naturally and firmly fixed in an object language. This idea is found in Douglas Hofstadter's book, Gödel, Escher, Bach, in a discussion of the relationship between formal languages and number theory: "... it is in the nature of any formalization of number theory that its metalanguage is embedded within it."[3]
It occurs in natural, or informal, languages, as well—such as in English, where words such as noun, verb, or even word describe features and concepts pertaining to the English language itself.
Ordered
An ordered metalanguage is analogous to an ordered logic.
An example of an ordered metalanguage is the construction of one
metalanguage to discuss an object language, followed by the creation of
another metalanguage to discuss the first, etc.
Nested
A nested (or hierarchical) metalanguage
is similar to an ordered metalanguage in that each level represents a
greater degree of abstraction. However, a nested metalanguage differs
from an ordered one in that each level includes the one below.
The paradigmatic example of a nested metalanguage comes from the Linnean taxonomic system
in biology. Each level in the system incorporates the one below it. The
language used to discuss genus is also used to discuss species; the one
used to discuss orders is also used to discuss genera, etc., up to
kingdoms.
Having established that meta-language exists, what about mega? Is the SPSCL The mega language? Maybe it is for Earthlings, but not for other beings who might exist elsewhere? I don't know. I do believe though, that Langan is right that reality is the metalanguage for humans.
* The Hard Problem is "What is consciousness?".
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P.S. Below is what Chris Langan has to say about metalanguage:
Question:
"Syndiffeonesis stratifies language (perception + cognition), but is
the relationship between telesis and language syndiffeonic?"
Answer:
Language is relational on the syntactic, semantic, and interpretational
levels. Syndiffeonesis is the structure of all coherent relations.
Hence, languages are syndiffeonic on the syntactic, semantic, and
model-theoretic levels.
Telesis
is synetic with respect to reality in general. That is, whereas we see
reality as profoundly variegated, all of the variety and even the
identities thereby distinguished come from telesis. Thus, telesis is
synetic in the vast syndiffeonic relationship called "reality".
Because
reality is the most general language of all, namely the Metaformal
System in which all coherent natural and formal languages and formal
systems are necessarily embedded, telesis is synetic with respect to all
languages and all of their diffeonic distinctions.
Equivalently, all of the distinctions are "factorizations of telesis".
