Let us explore this in more detail. We think of memory as a location where we can store information so we do not need to maintain our conscious attention on it; like writing something down so we can move our attention away from it. By committing something to memory we give ourselves the chance to shift our conscious focus towards something else, losing the conscious experience of what has been stored, but comfortable in the knowledge that we can replay that conscious experience at any time simply by recalling the original information. We do it every time we recall images of our last vacation trip, smiling at the fond experiences this recollection allows us to relive. Using the terminology we established earlier: we store some of the precursors of neural correlates of consciousness in memory. By recalling these precursors later on and causing the corresponding symbols to re-circulate in our brains, we re-expose them to consciousness according to the transceiver model. This re-exposure allows us to subjectively re-experience the objects in consciousness corresponding to the neural correlates. Therefore, physical information memory is just a limited and indirect mechanism for reliving certain subjective experiences.
But in unified memory of qualia, by definition, there can be no neural correlates. As a matter of fact, at the level of unified consciousness there is no “information” as such. So again, the unified memory of qualia can be inferred to entail the permanence in consciousness of accumulated subjective experience. Imagine it as if you could concurrently hold in your consciousness every single experience you have ever had in your life, without getting tired or losing attention. This way, you could never “forget” anything simply because nothing would ever leave your consciousness; you would need no information memory for it. You would be in a state of pure, continuous, and cumulative subjective experiencing. It would be as if you were continuously and concurrently living every single moment of your life at once; as if all impressions and feelings you have ever had were being experienced by you now. The concept of past would lose its significance, for everything would be present. There would be no need to “store” something somewhere in order to recall it later, because nothing would ever leave your consciousness to begin with.
Now take your visualization one step further and imagine that you could continuously and concurrently live every single moment of the lives of every conscious being that has ever lived in the universe, at once, in a timeless fashion. This would probably get you closer to the idea of unified memory of qualia.
Once confined to a physical brain, consciousness becomes limited to the brain’s ability to concurrently and continuously sustain multiple subjective experiences. This is quite logical: the apparent individualization of consciousness is achieved when conscious awareness becomes restricted to the symbol manipulations occurring in the brain; that is, when consciousness can have awareness of nothing but the symbols circulating in the brain at any moment in time. As a consequence, we cannot accumulate concurrent awareness beyond the point where the brain runs out of “room” to circulate extra symbols. Indeed, once the perceptual symbols corresponding to a certain subjective experience stop circulating in the brain to make room for other symbol manipulations, the original subjective experience is lost from conscious awareness. When consciousness is confined to a physical brain, it becomes limited by the capacity of that physical brain to concurrently circulate and process multiple perceptual symbols. The ability to experience unified memory of qualia is thereby lost, at least during normal conscious states.
As a consequence of this limitation, our physical brains have evolved the ability to store information in memory, as an indirect and constrained means for allowing the replay of certain subjective experiences. There certainly are major and obvious survival advantages to that. But, one should remember, physical information storage is only needed because an individualized consciousness becomes incapable, at least in regular conscious states, of accessing the unified memory of qualia. Otherwise, physical information storage would be utterly unnecessary: it would be just an indirect and constrained way to achieve an effect that could already be achieved directly and without constraints.
Unified memory of qualia, grounded on the aspects of reality where consciousness seems to emanate from, allows the universal process of enrichment to take place over time, in a staged, evolutionary manner. This is entirely consistent with our empirical observations of reality. After all, existence is clearly dynamic, and the universe seems to be “going somewhere”, “doing something”. If that “something” is purpose-driven, as assumed, there must be a mechanism for accumulating the “progress” made towards that purpose over time. Otherwise, the universe would never get anywhere. There seems to be no other logical way for there to be a universal process of enrichment other than through a form of universal memory of qualia.
Chapter 14
Interpretation and guidelines for
purposeful living
In what follows, I will not try to convey a message of hope, comfort, or inspiration, but simply to interpret the articulation we have built in the previous chapters. The goal is to extract rational, perhaps even inevitable conclusions from it. It so happens that these conclusions may turn out to be hopeful, comforting, and perhaps even inspiring. That, of course, cannot be a bad thing. From these hopeful conclusions, if so desired, we will be able to logically derive some guidelines for optimizing the way we live our lives along the lines of purpose and meaning.
There is much meaning to your life right now, independent of the lives of others, to the extent that the experiences you go through in your life expose you to new insights of understanding. Through your experiences, as an individualized consciousness, the universe goes a step further in understanding itself and becomes more self-aware. Even the feelings of confusion, disorientation, and loss are but logical precursors of greater understanding. Every minute you live, every experience you go through, pleasant or not, rewarding or not, painful or not, contributes to the ultimate universal goal of understanding and self-awareness. There is meaning in your life whether you see and understand it or not; whether you enjoy your life or not; whether you feel miserable or exultant; whether you are healthy or terminally ill; whether you live in community or alone; whether your life is long or short. The reason this rich meaning is often not obvious to you is the fact that your consciousness is confined to the indirect and limited reality of your brain. That necessary illusion aside, the meaning of your life is a constant, a certainty, regardless of the choices you make or the circumstances you face. All possible circumstances in your life are but vehicles of experience and understanding, favored in subtle ways by the law of insight.
That said, choices also have a meaning and a purpose. The choices you make can help increase the efficacy and efficiency of the universal journey towards insight and self-awareness. The articulation elaborated upon in this book cannot provide guidance regarding what kinds of insight or what kinds of experience each one of us needs to have; from a rational perspective, that remains a mystery. But your choices in life will logically define how effectively and efficiently you will have those necessary insights, thereby contributing to universal completeness.
By the same token, your choices may also slow down your path to insight. It is conceivable that your consciousness may register the natural consequences of this slowing down as pain and suffering, for pain and suffering have been empirically observed to be very effective in getting people to re-think their choices and open their minds to new thoughts and perspectives. From this point of view, pain and suffering likely are an intrinsic part of the material causal mechanisms leveraged by the law of insight.
As stated earlier, these interpretations lead us to the conclusion that our lives have meaning in and by themselves. In fact, regardless of how inert, sterile, senseless, and futile one’s life may feel like, there are always a few modest steps being contributed to the greater universal purpose, even if one is not at all aware of it. Indeed, the very feelings of stagnation and futility are experiences in themselves. Just by b
eing conscious and alive we must already be making a contribution.
What about the lives of others? One interesting consequence of our conclusions is that, at the most fundamental level of existence, other living beings are simply other “versions” of yourself; you and they are all but different manifestations of the same unified consciousness field. In a quite fundamental way, by observing others you are but learning about yourself; a nice thought to have next time somebody pisses you off. In a way, others mirror your own characteristics for the benefit of your observation and learning, while you mirror theirs for their learning.
Like us, each of our fellow human beings, and in fact each sentient entity in the universe, is contributing to the same universal goal. From a universal perspective, insights contributed to unified consciousness by you or by other conscious entities are equally necessary to the end purpose and, in that sense, equivalent. Therefore, reaching new insights yourself and helping other conscious entities to do so are equivalent contributions to the enrichment of the universe.
It is thus logical that, if you want to live as effective and efficient a life as possible, as far as contributing to the ultimate universal goal, you may do well not only to try and reach as many insights as possible yourself, but also to contribute to the ability of others to learn and reach their insights as well. Through helping others to reach understanding, you would be multiplying the efficacy and efficiency of your own life many fold. In this case, it is reasonable to expect that the postulated law of insight will causally influence the circumstances surrounding your life to optimize your ability to continue to do so. This natural tendency will lead to a re-arrangement of material reality around you, in conformity with the known laws of physics plus some other causal influences that we have not yet discovered scientifically.
Naturally, this is a complex optimization problem. Hypothetically, by trying to optimize your ability to help others the law of insight could end up reducing your ability to reach insights yourself. As a matter of fact, if everybody were busy helping others to reach insights, but neglecting their own need for understanding, nobody would ever get anywhere and all that help would be sterile. This way, the law of insight may be configured to hit a subtle “sweet spot” of maximum compound efficacy and efficiency, the sense of which may be incomprehensible to our brains’ limited capacity to build models of reality. In other words, it is reasonable to expect that you will often not understand why the universe is influencing your life the way it does.
Similarly, when your choices and actions interfere with the ability of others to arrive effectively and efficiently at the understandings they need, it is reasonable to expect that the postulated law of insight will causally influence the circumstances surrounding your life to minimize your ability to continue to do so. In addition, since the very action of negatively interfering with the path of others will likely reflect a gap in your understanding of nature, it is also reasonable to expect that the law of insight will favor certain, potentially painful, experiences in your life to help you cover that gap. Again, all of this would have to take place within the context of a large, compound optimization problem that will very likely exceed the capacity of the human brain to correctly model and interpret it.
This optimization problem is yet further compounded when one logically contemplates the possibility that our lives may also serve as tools for the learning of others. The way others perceive your behavior, experiences, emotions, and general situation may be a valuable instrument for their own insights. This is particularly so when it comes to people who care about you, or upon whom you hold influence. From this, one can imagine that even someone in a deep state of coma still serves the purpose of enabling certain experiences and insights for his or her loved ones, care-givers, etc., just by remaining alive. Insofar as there may be tendencies in our lives arising for the sake of the insights of others, we may indeed be living under the subtle influence of an astonishingly complex but ultimately natural, positive, meaningful, and ever-present optimization mechanism.
A question that arises at this point is: if you want to multiply the efficacy and efficiency of your existence by helping others accumulate understanding, how can you go about it? After all, as noted earlier, we have no rational guidelines for guessing which experiences we or other individuals require. We just do not know; nobody knows. The best we can hope for is that the law of insight will help bring the necessary experiences to us and others, while maintaining an attitude of openness for the results of its operation. So if I cannot know what my neighbors need to experience, how can I help them? As a matter of fact, if I do not know what I need, how can I help myself to lead an effective and efficient life? There are a few reasonable inferences we can still make here.
Even though we cannot know what experiences we or others require, we know that we all require a variety of experiences. After all, that is the whole point of existing. There are a few basic conditions that surely help us all have as many experiences as possible: healthy bodies and minds to go places and do things; education to aid true understanding of the things we experience; communion with others, so we can exchange and debate ideas and feelings, observing one another, thereby enriching our understanding of ourselves and others; etc. Helping others achieve these basic conditions seems like a safe and solid way to help universal enrichment along.
Regarding your own self, the greatest potential impediments to the efficacy and efficiency of your own existence seem to be lack of curiosity or critical thinking, apathy, procrastination, and a type of unreasonable fear that may stop you from chasing after the experiences you aspire to have. Even failure, disaster, and disease that happen upon you without your choosing may give you intense and immensely worthwhile experiences. They may ultimately end your life but not before giving you, and others who care about you, powerful new perspectives the universe may have needed to experience. While procrastination is perhaps mostly a waste of time and energy, a life proactively devoted to exploration, investigation, (self-) discovery, intense and varied experiences, adventure, communion with others, charity, contribution, constructive achievements, self-development, etc., would very likely be in profound harmony with the ultimate universal purpose.
We briefly touched above on the subject of disease and physical death. What conclusions regarding death can we extract from our articulation? Before addressing this, we need to briefly define what it means to be “you”, since death is supposedly about the end of “you”. As we have inferred earlier, all you have ever felt, thought, or perceived in your entire life has been no more than subjective objects in your consciousness. Even your perception of your own body has been but an object in your consciousness. Your physical brain and body have been just tools of your consciousness: a highly-sophisticated, semi-autonomous transceiver with sensors and actuators, so to speak. They could be interpreted, according to our articulation, as somewhat analogous to your clothes, car, spectacles, or any other tool you may have used to interact with the material aspects of reality. From this perspective, your body is not you; you are just its user. With your body and brain outside of the picture, what you recognize as being you is basically a collection of experiences, that is, feelings, insights, and impressions. There is nothing more that could be you. These experiences have a coherent history, which gives you a coherent notion of who or what you are, as well as of who or what you are not.
Since you are a manifestation of a unified consciousness, this entire collection of experiences with which you identify yourself must be, by default, forever preserved in the universal memory of qualia. Therefore, there is nothing about who or what you are that is lost upon the loss of coherence of your physical body; at least nothing fundamentally more than what is lost if you, for instance, throw some old clothes away.
If this idea does not sink in at first, think about it for a moment. There is nothing you can identify yourself with other than objects in your own consciousness, whatever these objects are. Whatever else there may exist in the un
iverse that has never been an object in your consciousness might as well never have existed, as far as you are concerned. So you cannot possibly identify yourself with that. Now, since every object that has ever been in your consciousness is inferred to stay in the unified consciousness as a permanent experience, which we called memory of qualia, then there can never be anything about you, any aspect or property of you, that can ever be lost at a universal scale. The very subjective experience of being you, with all that it entails, including all the feelings, impressions, and insights that you are having right now, as you read this, can never be lost.
Even if you rationally accept the above, you may still have a nagging feeling that something will change or be lost; that you will somehow not be quite yourself upon physical death. However, if you accept our argumentation up to this point, the very opposite must the true. Indeed, can you remember what it was like to be you when you were a baby, or a toddler? Can you relive in your mind, with all its richness, textures, and nuances, the sweetness and lightness of being a child? Can you remember and subjectively relive every intense experience you ever had in your life? Every moment, every person that made a mark on you as an individual? Probably not. Yet, all those feelings and perceptions are an inherent part of what it is to be you. In a certain way, you are not quite a complete version of yourself right now. But if your consciousness were to reach a state where all of those feelings and perceptions would return and be relived at once, concurrently and continuously, you would be more you than ever before.
If your consciousness returns fully, in awareness, to its underlying boundless state, you will also be everybody else to the same extent that you will be more yourself. So there is no loss, but only an addition; and what an addition. Yet, you will obviously part with your ego, for without the constraints imposed by a physical brain your consciousness will lose the foreground/background framework that gives you a separate identity. From this perspective, it is entirely logical to state, without any contradiction, that physical death may entail the lifting of the illusion of your individuality, or ego, without the loss of anything that has something to do with the experience of being you.
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