Rationalist Spirituality

by Bernardo Kastrup

  On the basis of the logic of our articulation thus far, we inferred that human beings like you and me should, at least in principle, be capable of accessing both regular conscious states, confined to the physiology of the brain, as well as boundless conscious states akin to Dr. Bucke’s cosmic consciousness. The empirical and clinical evidence supporting the principles of transpersonal psychology lend extra empirical support to this idea. If we follow this logic, it is reasonable to infer, from an evolutionary perspective, just as Dr. Bucke did well over a hundred years ago, that our ability to reach the state of boundless consciousness will increase over time. Indeed, the “fragments” of consciousness in each individual conscious being accumulate insights from information over time and “seed” the underlying, unified field of consciousness with these insights. As that happens, the universe will march ever closer to its ultimate goal. Extrapolating this line of thought to its conclusion, we can infer that there will be a time in the cosmological future when there will no longer be a need for consciousness to be individualized; all insights of understanding and self-awareness necessary for the realization of all of consciousness’ potentials will be objects in that unified consciousness. At this ultimate moment of existence, the illusion of individualization will likely be lifted as a consequence of natural processes, and what Dr. Bucke calls “cosmic consciousness” may become the only state of consciousness in the universe.

  Chapter 11

  God

  We have inferred that nature is such that the apparent fragmentation and individualization of consciousness was a natural, perhaps inevitable, occurrence aiming at the accumulation of understanding and self-awareness. This entails that some kind of universal Force, driven by purpose, has had a causal effect in leading to the apparent fragmentation of consciousness. This Force must somehow have transcended the very state of boundless awareness originally present in nature, since Its purposeful action reflected an understanding that should not have been possible to the original unified consciousness. In simpler words: since the original unified consciousness knew nothing about itself, how could it know that, through the illusion of fragmentation, it could achieve self-awareness? And if it did not, how did the process play itself out in just the right way? This seems to require a form of “knowing without knowing” at the basis of the universe; a kind of purposeful intuition built right into the most fundamental fabric of nature, unfathomably transcending rational, linear, time-bound, causal analysis. Yet, the very fact that we are here, experiencing a dynamic, evolving universe every day, as individualized consciousnesses, is solid evidence, if you accept our argument thus far, that this Force of Purpose somehow did, and likely still does, exist. Because of the transcendent and purposeful nature of this Force, beyond rational thought and yet empirically inescapable (if one accepts our starting hypotheses), It is the closest thing to the subjective concept of “God” that we can derive from our line of thought so far. The illusory fragmentation of consciousness, and the origin of an information playing field in the form of material reality, can be considered Creation itself; the Force of Purpose inferred here, its Creator.

  Chapter 12

  A natural tendency towards insight

  Once you accept this Force of Purpose, it is consistent to postulate that the very same Force would have logically given rise to a continuing natural tendency in the universe for each individualized consciousness to be exposed to the experiences it needs in order to accumulate the necessary insights. Anything else would defeat the original purpose and be logically inconsistent with our argument thus far. Notice that this natural tendency is something we have alluded to in an earlier chapter, and which we will explore in a little more depth here.

  It is conceivable that we, as individualized consciousnesses, could choose to live our lives in a way that would shelter us from having the necessary quantitative and qualitative exposure to experience. That, naturally, would defeat the purpose of consciousness individualization in the first place. A subtle but inexorable tendency to expose each one of us to the information necessary for the appropriate accumulation of insight would ensure the correct dynamics in the universe. Again, if you accepted, based on our earlier argumentation, that a Force of Purpose could have caused the apparent fragmentation of consciousness to begin with, then you must logically accept the likelihood of this natural tendency to continue on during our lives as individuals, without the need for any extra assumptions.

  There is an easy, though again somewhat simplistic, analogy to help visualize this. Imagine that your existence is akin to a boat ride on a fast-flowing river. Stapp’s theory entails that the “fragment” of consciousness whose transceiver is your brain is able to make choices in your life through the collapse of the brain’s wave function. These choices correspond to your ability to paddle and steer the boat on the river. However, the direction of the river’s current entails a strong preferential course; in other words, an inherent and continuing natural tendency for your life to flow in certain general directions at different moments in time, exposing you to certain experiences and associated information.

  Since the ultimate purpose of existence is an accumulation of the entirety of insights necessary for the completeness of universal consciousness, the choices you have made earlier in your life may naturally influence what experiences the universe will tend to bring to you later. Indeed, past choices will have influenced the experiences and associated insights that an individualized consciousness has already had, thereby altering the information that still needs to be accessed through a corresponding set of future experiences.

  Notice that I am not suggesting that each individualized consciousness has to have all particular experiences that are possible. That would, in a way, be as inflationary as the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics. The experiences are just vehicles of information (an objective property of the material world) and insight (the corresponding subjective experience). It is conceivable that the same information, and associated insight, can be acquired with myriad different experiences, varying both quantitatively and qualitatively. This could leave some “room for maneuver” as far as the operation of this universal tendency towards insight is concerned, as well as room for choice as far as the individualized consciousness is concerned.

  The natural tendency we are inferring here could be visualized as a law of nature that leads the material aspects of the universe to configure and arrange themselves so as to expose each individualized consciousness to the kind of experiences it needs in order to arrive at understanding. Let us thus call this tendency the “law of insight”, for lack of a better name. Naturally, postulating such a law entails assuming the existence of yet unidentified causal influences in the material aspects of reality, through which this law could operate. Indeed, there is no other way the material universe could “arrange itself” accordingly, as postulated above, other than through such yet unidentified causal influences. If our current scientific “theories of everything” were sufficient to explain all of material reality in a causally-closed manner, we could immediately discard these unidentified causal influences as fallacious. But, as we have seen in an earlier chapter, we cannot do that. In fact, there is much room for yet unknown causal influences in the material world: more dimensions of space-time than we can perceive with our senses; “dark matter” that is not made of atoms; “dark energy” that we cannot detect directly; and macroscopic causal influences that may emerge as the level of complexity of systems move from atoms, to molecules, to tissues, to living creatures, to societies, etc., and which cannot be reduced to the properties of subatomic particles. The postulated law of insight likely operates on the basis of very large “cell neighborhoods” and subtle “cell states”, if you recall our cellular automaton analogy of the universe. In other words, the law of insight should embody a level of subtlety and range of interaction perhaps unlike most of what we know today in physics.

  The subtle “re-arrangement” of the material world around us, as en
tailed by the law of insight, must logically occur in response to a gap in our understanding of nature or ourselves. A reasonable question then follows: what event leads to the unfolding of the re-arrangement? One possibility is that the law of insight operates in reaction to our manifested thoughts and actions; in other words, in reaction to things we actually do in material reality. On the other hand, how could a reaction to a mere thought or action represent a response to a fundamental gap in our subjective level of understanding about nature? The latter seems a lot more fundamental, subtle, and abstract than the former. To resolve this impasse, notice that our thoughts and actions are always, and only, a reflection of our current understanding of the universe. So if we say that the causal influences behind the law of insight react to our thoughts and actions, we are indirectly saying that they respond to our current understanding of nature, as originally inferred.

  By inferring that the operation of the law of insight is physically triggered at each moment a thought or action is materialized, we are saying that it requires physical events in the material world to be put in motion. This is actually consistent with our line of thought. Indeed, we inferred the law of insight to be, at least partly, a physical law, for it clearly needs to operate within the context of material reality. Therefore, whatever gap remains in our understanding of nature, it is manifested physically through our thoughts and actions. Those thoughts and actions must, in turn, trigger the unfolding of a subtle re-arrangement of the material order around us, creating suitable conditions for us to progressively eliminate that gap.

  We have to be careful though. If we submit that the law of insight somehow “knows” exactly what insights are still missing, then something in the universe would already have the corresponding understanding to begin with. In that case, existence would be an exercise in futility: why would you need to contribute certain insights to unified consciousness if that unified consciousness already had those insights all along? Instead, the whole point is that the necessary insights are not known in advance anywhere in the universe, not even by the causal mechanisms behind the law of insight. So how can these mechanisms then “blindly” favor the right material circumstances for the acquisition of those insights?

  In mathematics and computer science, the field of stochastic optimization provides a good analogy for how this can take place. Stochastic optimization algorithms are routinely developed that take progressive steps in the direction of finding a solution to a problem, without having any a priori knowledge of that solution. All that is required is the existence of a feedback mechanism that allows the algorithm to calculate whether a step taken has brought it closer, or further away, from the solution. In other words, all that is required is certain knowledge of the problem, not of the solution. If a step taken has brought the algorithm further away from the solution, it can backtrack and try a step in a different direction. If, instead, the step taken has brought it closer to the solution, the algorithm may try a next step in that same direction. The optimization algorithm does not need to know the solution in advance to take the correct steps towards it; it needs only to be able to iteratively evaluate the efficacy and efficiency of what it is doing at any given moment.

  I submit that the law of insight operates on an analogous manner. Our thoughts and actions must interact with the universe in a way that indicates, through some yet unknown natural mechanism, how effectively and efficiently we are progressing towards greater understanding. This may take place without any a priori knowledge of the necessary insights. If a certain course of action or thought leads to slow progress, the natural causal influences of the law of insight will operate to favor a change of course. Otherwise, they will operate to strengthen the current course of action or thought.

  The ones among you familiar with optimization algorithms will have noticed that I alluded above to one of the simplest optimization strategies: a kind of “lazy search” algorithm. There are many other, more sophisticated, effective optimization strategies in mathematics and computer science.1 Therefore, it is conceivable, and likely, that the law of insight leverages a much more effective and subtle optimization strategy than the one suggested above. But it will not know a priori what the particular experiences and insights are that an individualized consciousness needs. After all, facilitating the discovery of what those insights are is the very point of the law of insight to begin with. Yet, the law of insight, like an optimization algorithm, will “know” the right “directions” towards that discovery.

  From this we can infer that, unlike its origin, the operation of the law of insight does not necessarily entail intelligent or intentional action by some “arbitration agent” endowed with purpose. It could conceivably be a mechanistic, predictable, natural tendency analogous, for instance, to magnetic attraction. It may also be more than that, but we cannot infer it on the basis of the current argumentation. As we have seen in an earlier chapter, there is indeed “room” for such a tendency in the causal framework of material reality, at least as far as our current scientific knowledge is concerned.

  Chapter 13

  A universal memory of qualia

  All life we know is limited in duration. Countless generations of presumably conscious beings have lived and died since the beginning of time. However, given that the universe is still clearly dynamic and in “movement”, we can safely infer that the process of universal enrichment is still underway. Therefore, countless conscious beings have passed away before the ultimate goal of existence has been achieved. From this, there is an inevitable conclusion: there must be a form of “memory of objects in consciousness” at the level of unified consciousness. Otherwise, the insights contributed by those conscious beings that have already passed away would have been lost together with the information in the physical memory of their brains. So to remain consistent with our articulation, we must postulate a form of “memory” associated to the aspects of reality where consciousness emanates from.

  As we have seen earlier, the brain operates by learning correlations between perceptual symbols and modeling those correlations in the form of neural associations. Our physical memory is an electrochemical record of those associations, the coherence of which is lost when the brain begins to decompose. The information in the record then becomes diffused, inaccessible and, for all practical purposes, lost. But understanding, as our extended Chinese Room argument illustrated, is different from mere symbol associations, residing in consciousness, not in physical memory. The inference we are making here is that there is a form of memory in unified consciousness that is independent of the recording of symbols and symbol associations in the brain. This postulated memory is then necessarily unrelated to information recording as we understand it, for there is no information as such at the level of unified consciousness. Instead, it must be a direct record of the ineffable way things seem to us in consciousness, which philosophers refer to as “qualia”, without mediation through symbols and information. Therefore, let us call it “memory of qualia”. Since consciousness is fundamentally boundless and unified, such memory of qualia must be a collective, universally-accessible memory. Indeed, Jungian psychology, when alluding to universal archetypes in a collective unconscious, entails something analogous. According to Jung, all of us have subconscious access to a collective “memory” of these primitive archetypes.

  The universal process of enrichment may then proceed as follows: each conscious being, throughout its existence, contributes certain insights of understanding to the universal memory of qualia. A record of those contributed insights survives the lifetime of any individual entity. It grows over time, becoming richer and richer in impressions, insights, understanding, and self-awareness. Eventually, in a cosmological future, it may conceivably become complete. What will happen to the dance of existence at that point may be completely beyond human understanding.

  Notice that our physical memory is merely a memory of information, not insight. We may re-live the experience of understanding by recalling information s
tored in memory. When the information is recalled, that triggers a repetition of the conscious experience. This way, there are two separate processes at play: the first process is a mere access to information, whereby stored perceptual symbols are made to circulate again across our neurons; the second process is the conscious experience that accompanies the re-circulation of those symbols. So we only relive the conscious experience at discrete times, when we choose to recall and re-circulate the corresponding information stored in memory. But in the realm of the postulated unified memory of qualia there can be but one process: that of conscious experience. So how can there be anything analogous to memory in it?

  Imagine the subjective experience you had the last time you had a major insight of understanding. Try to recall the “Aha!” feeling you had. When you do it, you will momentarily live that experience again, but then it will go away once you shift your attention to other things. It is your brain’s information storage that allows you to occasionally relive the “Aha!” experience by recalling the corresponding information. It is the fact that our brains have the capability to store information that allows us to “drop” certain objects in consciousness and recover them later through re-circulating the corresponding mental symbols. But in unified consciousness there is no information storage, so the only way to not lose a conscious experience is to maintain it indefinitely in conscious awareness. Therefore, in unified consciousness, the “Aha!” feeling must be continuous, uninterrupted, and permanent; it must never go away; it is never “stored somewhere offline” to be recalled later but, instead, must remain ad infinitum in conscious awareness. This way, “memory” of qualia is not really memory as we normally define it, but simply an open-ended and cumulative permanence in conscious awareness of every object in consciousness that ever existed. Every new insight brought into unified consciousness will just add to the continuous experiencing already in it.