First, it was Joaquin Fusters "The Neuroscience of Freedom and Creativity", which, besides the very interesting concept of perception-action cycles between the environment and the organism, and a way of thinking about the brain that involves hierarchical feedbacks between different regions, his underlying mission - to convince his reader that consciousness is 'just' an epiphenomenon of physical organic matter to be too implausible to take seriously. At Amazon, I gave him 2 stars out of 5 - seems harsh right now (perhaps would of gave him a 3) but I trust my earlier perception, inasmuch as reading his words, and his cavalier way of presenting epiphenomenalism, got deeply under my skin.
Now I'm reading two books coming from 2 different perspectives. If Joaquin Fuster represents a conservative view (the mind as a non-causal epiphenomenon of organized matter), Christof Koch represents a moderate view, and Marjorie Hines Woollacott, a liberal view.
Fuster wont even allow consciousness any causative role, even though Roger Sperry's emergent interactionism makes it very clear that conscious, existential qualia guide neurnal processes - i.e. as the 'meanings', 'memories', and 'gestalts' of experiences. Fuster's view is an impossible one. Ugly, reprehensible, and sickening. It obviously strikes a negative chord in the human mind, because, well, the nature of human existence - the consciousness of our consciousness - itself generates the affects and forces that inspire concerted reactions to the world. The mind which demotes consciousness to an 'epiphenomenon', who sees all the psychodynamic complexity, representation, and meanings about self "not significant", or at least, not significant enough to change their orientation towards the world, one really can't help but wonder
Jokes aside, the issue must come down to developmental differences in life experiences. The rule probably is: 'what happens earlier has a large effect', although it isn't iron clad. Point is, I can not understand the person who wants to degrade life and the meanings that emerge within it to the dustbin. How can one inspire oneself, and be in the world, and live with others in a meaningfully alive way, if one harbors a suspicion that none of it ultimately 'means' anything beyond the luke-warm 'requirement' to be moral because epiphenomenal matter likes it.
Reflection upon the self, and the paradoxical 'gestalt', of knowing your own awareness, and being in awe of it is an emotional experience that speaks to me, and tells me: "this could not be unless consciousness amazes itself", that is, has causative influence in neuronal organization.
Next was the much more enjoyable
Christof Koch is a tall lanky German-American biologist, scientist, physicist, who believes that consciousness exists in all of matter, and in a certain organization, automatically becomes sentient. Koch, I must admit, does make clear the logical implications of "what" the world looks like when you want to explain how reality unfolds. The underlying assumption is: "mathematics is fundamental", and reflects ways of organization in the world. Koch therefore wonders (at one of his more extreme moments) that maybe one day the internet - itself a thousand times more powerful than the brain, could become sentient.
One part of me thinks "you're fucking insane". Something in me doesn't like the idea - doesn't like the degradation of the human mind, human self, and human meanings, to some arbitrary show of engineered "minds" - with no other proof to a 'mind' than the claim that the robot in question has been designed to organize vast amounts of information (though nowhere near a human brain).
I'm skeptical that silicon can ever match the complexity of carbon, so, unless we mimic the universe, it seems likely that silicon will never be a useful source material for creating complex sentient life-forms.
All in all, Kochs views are interesting; his theorizing and beliefs about the possibility seem far-fetched, inasmuch as the biochemist Nick Lane believes silicon to be a less efficient element for complex systems than carbon. I think I'll trust the biochemist.
Finally,
This book arouses different emotions in me. Her passion for her subject and her belief in an underlying meaning touches me. However, I don't think she is very rigorous in her argument, and, the psychoanalytical part in me can't help but wonder whether she promotes a simplistic spirituality, or what can almost be a fetishistic and naive commitment to views that inculcate narcissism and self-importance.
I am not at all saying that Marjorie is any kind of person, but some of her arguments, examples, and theories, really have little empirical justification. With 'bottom-up' approaches, we work not merely from biophysics, but also from academic psychology - that is, the steven pinker type, experimental approach that seeks to explain things in more 'parsimonious' ways.
I think this approach makes sense because humans have a very nasty habit of deceiving themselves. I feel Woollacotts approach contradicts important ideas about human evolution - such as our situatedness, sensitivity to immediate social context, and proclivity to unwittingly enact defenses, for example, by insisting on a certain view because one is 'in the throes' of an affective experience, partially dissociated, that prevents one from changing course in ones thought or speech. Experience is fundamentally psychodynamically organized, as different "meanings" interact to bring consciousness into a comfortable affective state. This means that a human organisms fundamental concern is "affect regulation", i.e. controlling feeling, which also entails having your mind pushed 'this' way and 'that' way by meanings that promise a certain response (in the other) or the 'self'.
I am basically saying that Marjories picture is overly certain-of-itself. Ontological statements can really screw up human thinking and acting by 'stereotyping' our thought to focus on the world in presumptuous ways, which of course dissociates potentially important information. Emotions, then, are 'rudders', that guide our cognitive awareness towards particular 'cognits', to borrow a term from Fuster.
I am very open to the idea of panpsychism. I am also open to the possibility of Psi, as if it exists, it indeed shows that there is a level of consciousness, ontologically unique to human experience, that allows consciousness to "skip" the space in between two objects. I like the idea, but I do not think Marjorie presented the idea in any meaningful mechanistic way. She assumed what must logically be assumed (that a 'mind' surrounds the mind within physical matter) and even drew a nifty diagram, with a big consciousness that swallows up a little consciousness. But this doesn't make any connections with known physical laws, thus, requires a lot of assumptions (i.e defying occams razor).
I am not saying she is wrong, but I do think it's presentation was simplistic, and so might offend people who are more interested in usable information, rather than "baseless theorizing".
From my own perspective, I think "strange attractors" have something to do with it. I think when two people connect on a deeply empathic level, and therefore share a similar empathic affect, that the "consciousness" which exists within them might 'supervene' upon the matter within and between them, leading to an 'entrainment' of sorts that, perhaps through quantum entanglement, allows the communication of awareness, mind, and selfhood, from one body to another.
Love, and consciousness, seem somehow very similar. If the Universe is diffuse consciousness, and the organic matter which arises within it, instantiations of an organized and directed being, then in social creatures, and later in humans, we find an organization that gives unique expression to an affect, and meaning, that speaks "goodness" and "peace". These two concepts entail human experience - as well as the paradoxical relationship between trauma, fear, and anxiety, and the pleasures of joy, peace, and wellbeing. That is, having suffered as I had, I found myself more easily motivated to find the "deeper meaning" in reality. Reality thus provides a 'way out', when the suffering being searches, explores, and begins to acquire meanings that almost 'draw' it toward some predestined purpose.
Could the universe have a purpose? Could ones suffering, have a purpose, that finds its place within the universes purpose? My life could have gone in many different directions, yet I was built with a basic need "to survive", and to survive, I came, almost inevitably, to the reality of compassion. This emotion at the center, it seems to be, and emanates, a power that draws the human heart towards it.
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