Q&A: 'Consciousness is an aspect of life'Fritjof Capra is best known as the author of The Tao of Physics. Over the last 20 years, his work has evolved to include ecology and activism. He is the founding director of the Centre for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California. He spoke with Swati Chopra:
How did you come upon the metaphor of the dance of Shiva for quantum particles, used so vividly in The Tao of Physics?
I had a profound experience sitting at a beach in California, where the boundaries faded away and I belonged to this larger whole, a cosmos which was dynamic, alive, and in motion in a patterned order of a dance. I was a particle physicist and knew what was going on around me in terms of patterns and molecules, and i had also read of the dance of Shiva. I put the two together. But it didn't really come intellectually. It was an experience.
Honderich: the thinking man's unthinking man?
Ignoring all this piss and vinegar about Honderich, is On Consciousness a book worth reading? I can agree the book is not a joy to read. The following is a representative and randomly plucked quote as an example of the obliqueness awaiting Honderich's readership: 'It seems all too plausible that in speaking of unmediated awareness of a content we refer as effectively to the very same fact as we do by speaking of a subject and a subject-content relation. I am inclined to think that is true.' I have snatched that out of context, of course, but it is no more obvious in context what it is that Honderich is inclined to think is true.
Nevertheless, there is value in Honderich's work. He does, as even McGinn comes close to conceding, at least understand the limitations of a neural-only view of consciousness. Much of the first half of the book is concerned with dismissing various philosophical theories of mind that depend on identities between neural activation and mental experience. Theories of mind that equate neural and mental states run into all sorts of problems. For example, if a neural state really dictates a given mental state then creating that neural state will create the mental state even if it is completely unknown and alien to the person. Thus I can come to understand special relativity, tort law and what it is like to be a bat merely by rearranging my neural tissue even if I have never before even heard the relevant terms or been close to the relevant situations.
Honderich argues, more plausibly, that a certain pattern of neural activity can only result in a certain mental event in an individual with the suitable history and background of experience. Normal conscious experience is where neural activity is part of the activity of a pre-experienced whole subject within a living body. To suggest otherwise is to border on absurdity.
Honderich further points out, correctly, that neural theories of consciousness tend to dismiss precisely what it is that needs to be explained. An inherent problem of neural theories is that they 'explain' consciousness in terms that just don't feel like conscious subjective experience. Whatever conscious experience is, it certainly doesn't feel like the activity of neurons. Honderich explains: 'To linger a last time at this crux, real physicalism or materialism runs up against the most resilient proposition in the history of the philosophy of the mind. It is a simple one you know about, that the properties of conscious events aren't neural ones, or aren't only neural ones. Consciousness isn't cells.'
"Your belief system changes your DNA instantly."
The audience goes um-hum, and Vital explains how Vital Energetic Balancing and the Quantum Prayer System work.
"In Newtonian physics, everything runs in wires. But in the quantum world, there are no wires," Vital says. "I'm all energy, yet I don't have wires coming out of me." He slithers his hands down his chest and across his bottom. No wires.
The whole universe is one consciousness and at night we receive information from it, he says — instructions, if you will. These instructions regulate our life force. But sometimes they get garbled. The average life force number is shockingly low in the United States — only 56. Fifty six!
But Vital has discovered a way to fix your life force. It's right here on his laptop, a program called the Quantum Prayer System. It prays for you in "millions of frequencies of prayers — they're not religious, they're just prayers." And it channels and amplifies those prayers to you. "Imagine everyone in China chanting your name. That powerful."
But wait, you are saying, how can the Quantum Prayer System work for me?
Well, it is very simple. The program needs to ascertain your energy signature, for which it will need your date of birth, place of birth, home address, phone number and e-mail address. "Nobody else in the universe has this energy," Vital says.
He demonstrates the program using an audience member's energy signature. A series of bar graphs pops onto the screen. This woman is very judgmental and has fungus frequencies. Does she have fungus growing maybe someplace personal? No? Well, does she eat mushrooms? Yes? Ah. That is very bad.
"How come the computer knew all this?" Vital says. "It is 97 percent accurate."
This essay identifies a new subgenre of narrative fiction, "neuronarratives," defined as works of fiction that incorporate advances in cognitive studies as a prominent theme, that compel novelists to struggle with consciousness as "content" and to reassess the value of narrative fiction. The opening chapter of David Lodge's 2001 novel, Thinks . . ., presents a self-conscious exercise in stream-of-consciousness narration. Ralph Messenger, Lodge's co-protagonist, is a cognitive scientist endeavouring to understand and describe the workings of the human mind. As the work begins, we encounter Ralph as he dictates his own thoughts into a tape recorder-a quaintly retrograde piece of equipment given his position as the head of a fictional British university's Centre for Cognitive Science. One of the aims of the exercise, he reveals, is "to try to describe the structure of, or rather to produce a specimen, that is to say raw data, on the basis of which one might infer the structure of . . . thought" (1). Ralph is acutely aware of the "artificiality" of his experiment, recognizing the fact that his consciousness of the exercise will inevitably change the nature of his thoughts and his thought process. He wants "random" thoughts, but his project necessarily imposes some kind of order on those thoughts; it is nearly impossible, it seems, to be aware of one's thinking without allowing that awareness to alter the process itself. As he admits later in the novel, "The brain does a lot of ordering and revising before the words come out of your mouth"
[ ... ]
The problem of explaining human consciousness, or at least of explaining what scientists know of human consciousness, within the framework of a literary text presents the novelist with some interesting and revealing narrative challenges. Chief among these, I believe, is the issue of how to convey to the lay reader scientific information that he or she likely lacks, but that is essential to the narrative itself.And Lodge is not alone in facing this dilemma; indeed, in 1995, Richard Powers published his own neuronarrative (the term I will use to describe a work of fiction that has cognitive science as a, or the, main theme), entitled Galatea 2.2, a work that poses narrative challenges similar to those we find in Thinks . . .. While my focus in this essay will be on the works of Lodge and Powers, a growing list of narrative works, including Powers's recent The Echo Maker, Ian McEwan's Saturday, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, and A.S. Byatt's A Whistling Woman, follows suit in foregrounding the emerging fields of neuroscience and neurobiology. These works, I propose, constitute an emerging subgenre of literature that can provide us with a glimpse of how authors are responding to scientific advances concerning the nature of human consciousness.
[ ... ]
We see in both of the novels the establishment, or at least the representation, of a classic binary opposition between scientific knowledge on the one hand and that ineffable something that the humanities purports to offer on the other. For lack of a better term, we might call that something "understanding," in a hermeneutic rather than an epistemological sense. And at the end of each neuronarrative, the fictionalized novelists seem to recognize the apparent marginality and relative impotence of such understanding vis-a-vis the concrete knowledge produced through scientific investigation.
[ ... ]
The problem of epistemology is the remainder at the end of these two novels and it is, I believe, what prevents the convergence of the two cultures that we see represented in the narratives from enduring. The novelists can tell the story of scientific advances in the field of cognition, but they are unable to abide by the implications of that narrative. If understanding inner reality as a hermeneutic enterprise gives way to understanding the reality of the inner (the mind) through purely scientific means, then the humanities would seem to have lost something, at least if we read the relatively somber endings of these two novels symbolically. The re-divergence of the two cultures at the end of each of our neuronarratives possibly reveals the extent to which the humanities are still threatened by the potential resolution of the problem of epistemology on scientific terms and the extent to which the scientific community is still skeptical about the knowledge value of literature and the humanities more generally.As I claimed at the outset of this essay, however, the distance between the two cultures does not seem to be as great in the contemporary real world as it appears to be in these novels. Columbia University alone, in fact, now has Oliver Sacks teaching creative writing students and literary scholars instructing future medical doctors.
New Evidence Proves James Bond was Based on Occult KnowledgeA remarkable new discovery by international best selling author, Philip Gardiner, has revealed that Ian Fleming based his fictional character on occult knowledge he had accumulated over the course of his life.
The new book, The Bond Code, reveals how Fleming included special etymological and numerological codes within his Bond novels to re-create ancient sacred tales of deep psychological importance. Drawing upon esoteric knowledge and an understanding of alchemy, Ian Fleming produced a work no different to the tales of the Holy Grail or dragon slaying fairy tales, within which lay the ancient understanding of human wisdom.
The author, Philip Gardiner, is an expert on esoteric philosophy and etymology and realised there was a code at play when watching the film, Live and Let Die. For two years he researched Ian Fleming and read his novels, discovering vast amounts of information previously unrealised.
Using his knowledge of codes from his time in Naval Intelligence, Ian Fleming also drew around him a conclave of mystically inclined individuals, created his own sacred retreat and embarked upon a quest to deal with his own personal issues.
The Bond Code reveals some stark facts: that Ian Fleming utilised Tantric sexual rites in-order to raise his consciousness; that he understood the process of subliminal writing; that alchemy was an ancient form of psychology; that man's mind was divided and needed reunification.
The author, Philip Gardiner, is an expert on esoteric philosophy and etymology and realised there was a code at play when watching the film, Live and Let Die. For two years he researched Ian Fleming and read his novels, discovering vast amounts of information previously unrealised.
Using his knowledge of codes from his time in Naval Intelligence, Ian Fleming also drew around him a conclave of mystically inclined individuals, created his own sacred retreat and embarked upon a quest to deal with his own personal issues.
The Bond Code reveals some stark facts: that Ian Fleming utilised Tantric sexual rites in-order to raise his consciousness; that he understood the process of subliminal writing; that alchemy was an ancient form of psychology; that man's mind was divided and needed reunification.
Released on April 15th, The Bond Code has already drawn the attention of many Freemasons following a three hour National American Radio Show. Many have revealed that they had wondered whether Fleming was in fact a Mason himself, due to the rituals they had seen within the films.
Minds matter as much as matterMany years ago in the 17th century the French philosopher and mathematician, Rene Descartes, once and forever famously "thought" and, for that reason alone, declared that he must "be". Cogito ergo sum; I think, therefore I am. But Descartes was the last person in science for a long time to argue so positively that ideas had an autonomous existence which were not dependent on any material structure. However, as far as the whole mind was concerned, he didn't disengage it from the brain altogether and postulated that they mutually networked at the pineal gland. It was a kind of interactive dualism that science was to reject for more than 350 years.
Mainly because, thereafter, the mainstream materialist view came to be that solidity and matter on the one hand and mind-like entities on the other, constitute not only two different realms of ontological being but that mind by itself probably doesn't even exist — being at most a tenuous epiphenomenon; something unable to cast a shadow on reality; the ghost in the machine.
Then Einstein happened and he managed to irrevocably demonstrate the equivalence of matter and energy with e = mc squared. The equation showed that something considered insubstantial, ethereal and subtle could, indeed, be reduced to tangible stuff like rocks and material substances. Still, energy was not the same thing as, say, consciousness. But quantum theory came along next and this finally required the actual active participation of human awareness in psychophysical events.
Interestingly, neither the content nor the timing of these events is determined, even statistically, by any known law because the theory considers such events to be instigated by choices made by conscious agents.
Or as physicist Henry Stapp of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US puts it: "This quantum conception of the mind-brain connection allows many neuropsychological findings associated with the apparent physical effectiveness. According to this quantum approach, conscious human beings are invested with degrees of freedom denied to the mechanistic automatons to which classical physics reduced us."
In other words, a completely deterministic account of the physically described properties of nature is no longer viable. The mind and our consciousnesses play as big a part as our brains in resolving matters of existence.