Consciousness All the Way Down

   Sometime before the walk, I had this 5 hour long, blindfolded meditation. I reached this point where it became so easy to parcel up my inner experience, and the resulting insight seemed to be dropped on me from above. Now, I think it might have actually come from below.

   Throughout most of our existence, we walk the earth witnessing this unified synthesis of experiences we consider to be “reality.” But through meditation, or various extracurricular methods, that experience can be divided into infinitesimal bites. 

   I wasn’t merely watching my inner monologue and letting go of my attachment to the narrative; I was giving my attention to one particular sound and dissolving into nothing but the experience of that sound, with no associated memory or concepts to apply to it. I wasn’t saying to myself, “that’s dripping water.” I was the reverberation itself (not literally, but experientially). 

   And this became true of the various sensations I was navigating within my awareness, be it sound, breeze, pressure, or pain. There is even this space where archetypal iconography reminiscent of a variety of religious traditions might manifest. But nothing miraculous was happening. I wasn’t “freeing my true spirit from egoic control,” or something like that. 

   No, I have no doubt that if you were able to sneak me under an MRI, you would see all the neural correlates associated with my inner activity, as surreal as it may have been. The default mode network would have been largely inactive compared to our typical waking state, the visual cortex flickering on and off in conjunction with the imagery, while my auditory and somatosensory cortex were lighting up like a Christmas tree as my attention touched sound or sensation. 

   Alarm goes off, and I suddenly exclaim, “consciousness is an emergent property!” I swear to God, I didn’t even know the nomenclature at that time. They were just the best words to put to what I meant. And… I was painfully wrong, though touching the periphery of something this world needs to hear. 

   “I” am the emergent property. “I” IS the emergent property, and so are “YOU.” But consciousness? THAT is foundational. 

   Do me a favor, and try to forget everything you’ve been told for a moment. You’ve been dropped into this world as a first-time experiencer. All you actually know is that EXPERIENCE is real, because, lo and behold, YOU are experiencing.

   On top of that, it seems like there’s physical stuff outside of you, and you need that stuff (food, water, shelter, etc.) to avoid a kind of suffering that seems like it could result in the end of your experience (think passing out from hunger, heat, or blood loss).

   Suddenly someone comes along with a description of the way all the “physical stuff” outside of your experience behaves. And it is breathtakingly precise, even predictive. They tell you how it moves, when it moves, and where it moves. When “this” interacts with “that,” it will DO this and that, all the way down to the relational web of mass, charge, and spin. 

   But what IS any of it? “Well, it’s matter!” they say. Okay, but what IS matter? You’re handed the vocabulary again. Mass, charge, fields, forces. Yeah, yeah. But those, again, are only descriptions of what things are in RELATION to one another. WHAT are they INTRINSICALLY? 

   Physics does not, cannot, and will not EVER answer this question. Why? For the same reason the MRI cannot tell you what it’s like to experience ego dissolution or “become the sound you hear,” while it CAN accurately map the neural correlates of those states of consciousness. 

   We have become drunk on physics, assuming it can answer all things. But this is presupposition of the worst kind. Physics, and science for that matter, are near-perfect tools… for a particular job. 

   Science can describe the mango from every angle. It can tell you about its molecular and atomic structure, pigment, lifecycle, sugar content, and maybe even one day turn that mango into an entirely different fruit with the kind of technology capable of atomizing, exchanging, and reconstituting all of its ingredient protons, neutrons, and so forth. It can never give you the experience of its flavor, or for that matter, what it is like to be the mango. 

   To make it really simple, physics cannot describe the inner experience of anything and assumes no inner experience of anything. Apply physics to the human condition and you will describe our behavior and composition, you will never FEEL HUMANITY. 

   Rather than starting with: there is no intrinsic nature, the lights are off, and nothing is experiencing, there is an alternative starting point.

   We can start with: there is certainly an intrinsic nature to some of the physical stuff, some of it is experiencing, because “I” am the intrinsic reality of this body, and “I” am experiencing. 

   If the stuff we touch and see is physically real (which we might INFER, since physics has such predictive, productive, and accurate descriptions) and conscious experience is a part of the physical world (which we KNOW, because we are experiencing as physical bodies) then consciousness and experience are a part of at least some of the physical world. FOR SURE. 

   The issue is, we can’t know where experience ends, because we can’t step outside of ourselves to experience as anything other than ourselves. If I can’t even know that your experience of red is the same as my experience of red, I certainly can’t know what it’s like to be a thing without a central nervous system. BUT I don’t need to be able to empathize with something to assume it's like something to be that thing. Here’s why. 

   Most hypotheses on the issue assume that at a certain level of complexity and structure the lights miraculously come on. But IF the intrinsic nature of physical matter were wholly non-experiential, no amount of rearranging it should produce experience. This isn’t simply presupposition and assumption; it’s painfully incoherent. 😵‍💫

   Structure, shuffle, and manipulate away! If none of the pieces have anything to do with “what-it’s-like”ness, their rearrangement won’t either. EXPERIENCE isn’t an emergent property, like liquidity from H2O, because you're describing the appearance of an ENTIRELY NEW substance from ENTIRELY DISSIMILAR substances. 

   Water still has hydrogen and oxygen, and you can still separate them and turn it back into either. But with experience? You're talking about deriving the subjective from the objective, immaterial experience from material non-experience. This would be a brute miracle, known as radical emergence. And if philosophy has taught us anything, it’s that when in doubt, we should favor the most parsimonious conclusion, rejecting the greater miracle. 

   Physicalism doesn’t allow this kind of miracle in any other situation; it just checks out in the doorway of consciousness. Physicalism literally says “new phenomena must arise from what was already there in some intelligible way.”

   Now we’re forced into a different conclusion. And I’m going to build a semi-sloppy, yet formal inductive argument for it. 

   If experience is both real and physical,

   And since physics only describes behavior, relation, and structure 

   And because you know the intrinsic nature in at least one instance of the physical as experience (since you are experiencing)

   And radical emergence from the wholly non-experiential stuff is off the table in favor of the most concise explanation with the fewest ad hoc hypotheses,

   The most reasonable conclusion is that the intrinsic nature of matter was never non-experiential to begin with.

   Consciousness doesn’t show up when physical stuff gets complicated. That’s… again, forget what everyone has told you… it’s ridiculous. But to be sure we understand each other, let’s clarify what consciousness IS NOT. From our own experience we can deduce that consciousness doesn’t require memory, concept, cognition, self-reference, thought, or anything like that. You can be reduced to the mere sensation of being. 

   Consciousness is not emergent.

   The self is emergent.

   Narrative is emergent.

   EGO is emergent.

   This unified perspective I currently experience is emergent. 

   The fact that there is something it’s like for physical processes to occur? THAT goes all the way down.👇This is the only way we can reconcile the self-preservation and reactions of those things which must certainly be experiencing, yet have no central nervous system, neurons, axons, or dendrites. It’s the only way we can make sense of clams, barnacles, venus fly traps, zooids, jellyfish, mycorrhizal networks, the communication between plants via pheromones when under attack by insects and the like, and so many more naturally occurring phenomena that we are all turning a blind eye to.

   Consciousness is not something that suddenly pops into existence. Consciousness goes all the way down to the minerals, molecules, and atoms which feed what we call life. Consciousness is simply what matter has been like from the start, viewed from inside. 

   CONSCIOUSNESS is the underlying substratum of all that is and will be.